The Forgiven (3 page)

“We should turn toward Tafnet,” he said calmly, folding the map. “I don’t see any other roads that might fit.”

“They didn’t say anything about Tafnet.”

“I know, darling. But they may have assumed Azna would be marked along with Tafnet on the sign.”

“And what if it isn’t?”

“Then we’ll take a chance.”

“A
chance
, David?”

“Let’s not have another scene. I’m as lost as you are.”

His hand was shaking.

“It’s the booze,” she said acidly.

“Get in. We’ll get an inspiration. We’ll find them.”

As he put on his seat belt, he said, “It’s not the booze, I can assure you. It’s the worry. The booze never gets to me.”

A mile farther on, the headlights picked out a camel standing by the road picking leaves from an acacia. Sand drifted over the road, and there were pieces of broken glass. The road turned around an outcrop of boulders covered with prickly pear and dropped a little, smoothing out.

Far ahead was a sign with several place names stacked on top of each other in Arabic and French. They made out the word
Tafnet
, and she said quietly, emphatically, “No.”

“We have to turn,” he insisted.

She caught his arm and there was almost a tussle. They screamed at each other, and he missed the brake pedal, then found it. He didn’t stop; he just wanted to clear the issue before they reached the sign. A gust of wind blew sand across the road and everything dimmed, and he said, “Don’t be so bloody stupid.” But her voice suddenly went calm.

“Turn on the high beam.”

The sand darkened the moon, and the outline of the road disappeared for a few moments. And then, as her eyes relaxed, she saw two men standing to the left side of the road. They were running toward the car, holding up their hands, and one of them also held up a cardboard sign that read
Fossiles
, with an exclamation point. It seemed like such a ridiculous scam. “Stop,” she said very calmly to her husband, but something in him seemed to have decided otherwise, and their dreamlike momentum continued. The sign flew into the air, and there was a crash of opposing wills. At least, that was how she thought of it. But in reality, it was too quick for any thought to occur. The car’s metal struck human bone, and the sound it made was like a single blow
on a large, tautened drum—a
boom
that seemed to deafen and stun for a second, a sound she was sure she had heard before but which was at the same time wholly new and fresh and derived from nothing previously known. It was a detonation of some kind that lasted for only a split second but seemed to last for minutes, in the course of which her confidence in the future broke apart and died.

Two

T WAS TEN O
’
CLOCK. SET WITHIN THE RUINED WALLS
of the Azna
ksour
, the main mansion of dark brown pisé cast its square silhouette against the skies. The old mud walls still stood, and the
ghorfas
, or granaries, were four hundred years old, melted down with time and connected by erratic adobe staircases. The
ksour
lay high up on the hillside past Tafnet, and it had been abandoned since independence in 1956. It was built close to a natural spring that the Foreign Legion had dubbed La Source des Poissons; its water was said to make sterile women pregnant. The river flowed around the cliffs where the houses perched, half of them abandoned, and from them a flight of steps plunged down to the pool where the women of the Aït Atta floated in secret to recuperate their powers.

Then the foreigners came.
Les visiteurs
, as they were called. Tall, golden men with bright eyes and fussy, incomprehensible tastes. They
could have stepped off a ladder dropped from the sky for all the people of Azna knew. The term
visitor
also implied that at some point in the merciful future they would depart just as suddenly as they had arrived. It was admitted that they were wealthy and that they spent their money in an exceedingly unwise and profligate way, and that this was much to the advantage of the people. They hired many servants and staff and did not work them very hard. Once again, this was to the advantage of the people. But by the same token it could not be denied that there was something unquestionably demonic about them. It was not just their alcoholic habits, which were extreme even by the abject standards of Europeans. Nor was it just their distasteful sexual habits, though there was much to say about those. It was the way they sat at night on their roof with binoculars looking at stars, the way they sometimes slept all day until dusk, and the way they walked along the old trails at twilight with garlands of flowers and ice buckets. Moreover, they could not drink local water; they swam naked in their own swimming pool and sometimes, God forbid it, in the pools of the Source des Poissons, contaminating the source.
“Li jayin men lkharij gharab”
—foreigners are strange.

The few old people left in the habitable houses by the cliffs talked about the homosexuality of Dally Margolis and Richard Galloway with a dry, noncommital disgust. But secretly, despite their horror, they also admired the visitors’ wealth and their cosmopolitan style. Oranges flown in from Spain! Butter from a single store in the 8th arrondissement in Paris! Drinking water shipped all the way from Meknes! They appreciated the influx of cash, the extravagant wages, and the beautification of the
ksour
itself. It was said that Dally was the submissive one and Richard, with his slightly more austere tone, the dominant. They laughed. The jinns in the
ksar
and in the granaries, they whispered, were outraged by the presence of infidels in a place built expressly for Muslims, and at night everyone could hear the clash of pots and pans in the kitchens, victims of supernatural rages.

The jinns were right. There were scandalous goings-on in the main
house, but no one ever saw inside it until the morning after. People said there were naked boys asleep on the floors—boys everywhere, and some of them Moroccans.

EARLIER THAT DAY, AS THE SUN DROPPED, THE SHADOW
cast eastward by the crenellated walls, the lopsided rectangular towers, and the half-melted
ghorfas
had formed a single menacing shape upon the shelves of rocks, an impression of decayed massivity. The yellow-throated tanagers went quiet and stood still on the roofs of the buildings, which were still hot from the sun, and from the river came a sound of aroused swallows. Rabbits could be seen waiting behind cacti, their ears completely erect. A shepherd walked languidly toward Tafnet a mile behind his near-invisible gaggle of goats, swinging a stick as if he wanted to decapitate someone. A swirl of dust rose from the far-off road that led eventually to the Tafilalet. The sound of chattering voices and a Natacha Atlas song coming from the
ksar
was not enough to make the old people sitting on the river wall turn their heads. They had heard it dozens of times before. There were always parties going on up at the house. “Once,” they would say, “we saw an infidel whore lying on her back in the Source des Poissons. Their men cannot get them pregnant!”

But when a Christian in a dinner suit stumbled down one starry night to say hello and admire the view, they smiled with mechanical courtesy. They raised their hands and cried
“Salaam aleikum”
and then “
La bess!
”, “No evil!”

THE MIDDLE-AGED AMERICAN WAS WALKING ALONG THE
ruined section of the
ksour
wall that had not yet been repaired. He was in a Huntsman suit with a poppy and held a paper plate with some pieces of chocolate cherry cake, his shoes dusted from his walk. For the men of Azna, he was a sight. He was about forty-five, with Italian
features, and no one knew who he was. Tom Day was a private investor in Dally’s business, though he never asked questions about it and rarely showed his face at the latter’s incessant “happenings.” He was too old, he felt, and moreover he had already burned his candle at both ends, as ancient libertines are fond of admitting. The remaining piece of wax in the middle, he felt, was too precious to melt at parties, and his foremost interest was in merely making it last until the end without evaporating in the furnace of fun. No one knew how he made his money, and he never offered the information. It was beyond civilized discussion. He had retired at thirty-eight—that was all one needed to know. He lived alone in New York and kept a house in Ubud, in Bali. A few years earlier, his wife had run off with a hedge fund manager. Nothing was known of her. Women run off and they fade mercifully from the mind.

The wall looked over the head of the valley, the road, and, beyond that, the white edge of the Sahara. Day smoked a cigar, enjoying the puffery and swagger all around him and the way it was taking shape minute by minute, like some monstrous cartoon being drawn in front of his eyes. Something inflating. The staff were hanging fairy lights in tamarisk trees nearby. They made a fuss, cursing in Tamazight and making it clear that the boss had asked them to spell out specific designs with the lights. As they struggled, noisy cattle egrets chattered around them, as if humans and birds were at war for a moment, and the staff beat them off with sticks with many a
tsk tsk
. The electricity was tried and failed. Allah was mentioned, but he did not intervene.

The generator was turned off and then on again, and the men in the topmost branches wove yet more bulbs around twigs. Who was it for? They were also hanging small tangerines with the stems wrapped in silver foil, which reminded him of the oranges hung on good-luck trees at Chinese New Year. A yapping of fennec foxes came over the little ravine where the old men sat smoking in the gloom.
La bess!

He walked on top of the wall until he could see the main gate. It was hard not to feel disdain for the way they had done it up in lights
and flowers. It was vulgar, but not vulgar enough. Cars roared up the dirt road, greeted at the entrance by extra hired hands in silly turbans and sashes, which the irrepressible Dally had designed himself. Out of them poured dozens of fab people, all of them laughing about the hardships of the Moroccan road. The women were already in their dresses and they had been drinking in the cars. It was like a ball in nineteenth-century Russia: the rushing up to the venue in carriages was part of the fun, part of the sex. He himself had driven a rental car from Meknes.

The floodlights were finally turned on and the lacework facade of the
ksar
became a brilliant image. A staff member came up to him with a tray held at the shoulder, and seemed to wonder what he was doing there all by himself when there were so many beautiful women to enjoy.

“Vous désirez un cocktail, Monsieur? Un petit sandwich?”

He walked through the
ksour
with his stub, sucking the last smoke out of it, and as he passed by the wall again, the tamarisk trees came alight and the staff applauded themselves. Allah was again mentioned, but this time even more emphatically. There was a pulsing celebration suddenly upon the air. He enjoyed the rushing and clapping and the way the servants sank their teeth into the oranges on the sly and caught his eye. Dally and Richard expected around forty people for the weekend, and the tiny houses were filling up. He almost admired it, this talent for weekends, which are usually forgettable—this talent, that is, for making them unforgettable. Dally, he thought, must be a man of meticulous inner workings, a man who is half clock, half ballerina, with a genius for orchestrations and appearances. He ran a number of e-commerce sites in the United States specializing in European fashion, one of the few areas of the economy to avoid the latest difficulties. What kind of name was Dally, anyway? A nickname someone had given him, an insult turned endearment?

He watched the guests spilling out of the main house’s open doors into the courtyard, where trestle tables had been set up with bowls of
fruit punch and iced rose water. There were plates of figs split down the middle and opened out. There was going to be a musical performance. A Gnawa group had arrived, hoisting their instruments. There was something a little urban about them, as if they had come from the city and not from the mountains, which was perhaps a sign of the times, and the tall European and American girls in their locally acquired pieces of ethnic clothing mingled among them with knowing looks of studied cool. One had to stop and watch that. The long, emaciated figures with their eyes ticking over like meters, taking in everything that “world culture” threw their way. They were quite beautiful, but in a way that was far ahead of its time and which left him high and dry. “Well, these are your people,” he thought, and he didn’t mean their shared race. They were the people of the megalopolises, and they were new. They moved like giraffes among the musicians, uttering friendly comments that were no doubt insolent to other ears. They made him remember that he was almost old, in that phase of pre-oldness that was curiously more alive that the preceding stages, but alive because it was ending. He clucked and rolled back on his expensive heels, which were already gathering white dust. What a figure you are, Old Day. Invited by accident to other people’s fun and unwilling even to put a good face on it. You should stay at home.