The Forgiven (35 page)

“
WHAT DID THEY WANT WITH YOU, THEN?
”

“The father wanted to talk with me, that was all. I didn’t understand anything. But I understand that.”

“Did they ask you for money?”

“Not a penny.”

“Then where are the two thousand euros?”

“I gave it to them anyway.”

“You did?”

“I did. Do you find that hard to believe?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I guess I’m a little surprised.”

“Well, I gave it to them. Not because I was forced to.”

She lowered her head. She didn’t know what to say. Did her skin smell of Day? She looked at him piercingly. It was not something they could ever talk about again, but the implication in her tone was clear. She had understood everything he had done. He, too, sensed that while he had been away, she had not been on his planet, as it were. And while it could not be mentioned again, it could not be forgotten either. It had altered forever the relation between them, and they both knew it. “It’s all right, Stumblebum,” she whispered into his chest. “We can go home now. It’s all over.”

“Home,” he echoed.

The early-afternoon sun struck their faces, and their words dried up. The staff ventured out from the welcoming shade of the gate with cold wet towels, and soon the festive atmosphere of Azna was upon them again. It enveloped them with music and agitation and yapping western voices and the bustle of cars and jeeps being loaded for guests who were about to depart for the airport. The ends of weekends are often a relief.

RICHARD WAS HORSE RIDING WITH LORD SWANN NEAR
Tafnet as the Hennigers reunited. He had not experienced much anxiety as a result of David’s foray, because he knew that the impoverished diggers of the ergs were sufficiently afraid of the Moroccan police not to pull any xenophobic stunts. Besides, the weather had turned milder for some reason, and all his old love of riding had suddenly resurfaced. His nag was called Britney, and he liked murmuring her name into her ear as he patted the long, silky neck colored like young chestnuts
and reminding her that she was named after a mad, declining pop star. Between sunshine and horse smells and the baffling Lord Swann, his anxieties and concerns evaporated nicely and his meticulous mind returned to its usual preoccupation with improvements to the house and the upgrading of its electrical systems. His carefully planned weekend, moreover, having partially unraveled, was now winding down entirely and he was frankly looking forward to getting rid of this uncontrollable mass of guests who were continually plying him with unanswerable questions. He was disgusted with them. They brought all their
idées fixes
with them, dragging them around on leashes like the corpses of so many dead poodles. Why did so few people have the gift of travel, of subtle displacement and simple curiosity? Which was, in the end, merely a question of imagination. Try imagining where you are, and not lumbering around with your festering discomforts and dissatisfactions. And yet almost nobody did. Take Lord Swann. He was a perfect parasite, but amusing enough in his way, and he had been around the block. Investments in Hong Kong, and all that. But he never asked anything about the Berbers, who seemed to him to be elements of an immoveable
décor
and nothing else. A form of statuary. Of course, he affected to be concerned about them, because that is what everyone nowadays was taught to do. But he really detested wasting any breath on them. They were a source of terrorism, of course; that made them interesting during heated debates.

As they plodded through a meadow of garish, parched wildflowers with silver-coated leaves and a color of wet mustard, Swann was saying, “I knew Henniger a while back from the club. He used to treat my aunt’s carbuncles. I am sure he has since moved on from carbuncles. Never liked him much, though. Shifty.”

“How do you mean?”

“Not really one of us. He played cards with Darcy and always won. I hate a man who always wins.”

“I went to school with him, you know.”

“Really? How traumatic for you. Did he lurk about?”

“He used to put out a little school paper called
England without Darkies
. It was sort of a spoof to make us feel ashamed of our racism.”

“Was he a lefty then?”

“I can’t remember. I always thought he was a bit of an idiot myself. I still think he is an idiot. Come to think of it, he
is
an idiot.”

“Many people say that about me, Dicky, and I have always admitted that they are, by and large, correct.”

“There was just something
off
about him,” Richard said, daydreaming. “I always thought that his father beat him or something. There was that look in his eye, the beaten-dog look.”

“A beaten dog always looks for revenge. Perhaps that’s why he always had to win at cards.”

“Perhaps.”

“I was surprised to see him here with that stick-insect wife of his.”

“She’s hardly a stick-insect, old man.”

“She’s pretty enough, but not my type. No curve on her.”

And Swann implied that Richard was in no position to judge these things. They laughed. Now they were at the top of the little hill where the shepherds passed in summer. They looked down at Azna, suddenly revealed in its entirety as in a military map. The restoration was so lavish that it now appeared, Richard thought proudly, as it might have a century ago in its heyday. It was a personal triumph, a vindication, and it seemed to him that he had never seen anything as beautiful. Since he would never have children, it was the next best thing. It was a genuinely personal creation.

Then, in a darker mood, he thought of his emotions when Abdellah had appeared outside his gates on Saturday morning. Out of nowhere, the desert had asserted itself. It was as if these men could call on you at any moment, knock on your door when they felt like it. They could extort you, terrify you, and at a moment entirely of their choosing. And now, because of David’s unforgivable blunder, they knew where he lived.

“Are you off now?” he said carelessly to Swann as they trotted back.

“I’m taking the girl to Tinerhir to the Hôtel du Sud, or whatever it’s called. She wants to get a bit of desert. Myself, I’d like to go to Málaga and play the tables.”

“One is always so exhausted after these weekends.”

Swann nodded ruefully. He would never give them himself, unless orgies could be organized. Alas, the age of orgies appeared to have ended.

“Did they bury the Arab boy all right?” he asked Richard brightly as they swung onto the path above the gates, where the palms were not yet diseased.

“I assume so. That’s the way they do things here. They brush them under the carpet. No one wants any trouble in the end. I expect our unfortunate Englishman bribed them up to the hilt.”

Swann sneered. “Quite right, too. Silly bugger. Cars do have brake pedals, you know.”

“That’s been my attitude all along.”

“I wonder how much he paid?”

“That’s one of those things a gentleman doesn’t ask.”

DAVID AND JO LAY BY THE POOL ALL AFTERNOON. CICADAS
purred in the walls and David slept, though his nightmares were mild. He imagined he was inside a giant Boeing turbine armed with a toothbrush with which he was cleaning the blades. Sometimes these sorts of nightmares made him laugh in his sleep, and he did this now. “Shredded,” he said aloud, as the turbines began to turn and the dwarves inside them were mashed up. Jo smiled. In the main courtyard of the
ksour
, the expensive cars assembled and departed, the Mercedes convertibles and the Land Rovers with three extra tires, the Peugeot 605’s rented from the Casablanca airport, and the Alfa Spiders with Spanish plates.

The staff milled around hauling luggage and complimentary
picnic hampers for the road while people snapped their last pictures of the weekend, exchanged e-mail addresses and numbers, and then screamed their excessive good-byes. It seemed to have nothing to do with them, Jo thought. And indeed, no one came to the pool to take their leave. The Hennigers were apparently pariahs, though no one among the guests had actually thought about it consciously. No one even thought about them at all. The bad taste left by the accident had to be expunged as soon as possible, and people were now in a hurry to leave, to get back to the European Union.

“We’ll see you at Azrou for dinner. The Hotel Panorama?”

“No, the Hotel Amros. We’ll order trout.”

Rendezvous along the roads back to Casa were arranged in this way, and as each car revved its engine by the gate, Richard and Dally stood in the shade passing out small garlands of flowers, sometimes dropping them into the passenger seats of the convertibles with a blown kiss. Come back next year!

To Jo, they were nothing. She lay very quietly, waiting for hummingbirds that never came. Her eyes were fixed on the distant mountains that grew paler as the day wore on. A quiet, hysterical panic simmered inside her. She had not seen Day since the early morning. He had vanished into the crowd, knowing that David was returning. She supposed that he’d wanted to spare her an embarrassing moment. It was considerate of him, but it left all the threads of the previous night hanging loose. His presence was still inside her, like warm and quick stickiness; she realized that she had to be patient. She would have to let it subside away from her with time. But it was not easy. She was grateful that that night they would be driving, not sharing a bed in a hotel. For the rest of her life, she would not have the excuse of being coked up to explain her night of aberration. But then, doesn’t everyone have a night of aberration somewhere along the line? It was a spurious rationalization, but it would do. She got up and went for a swim.

After three, the house seemed silent. Most of the weekend’s partygoers
had now left, anxious not to drive at night. Whereas she and David were anxious to drive at night, and they didn’t know why. To leave unnoticed, she supposed, as undetected as thieves.

She breaststroked her away across the dark blue pool. When she rested, she heard dogs barking in the valley, their echoes reaching far and wide. There was the retort of a hunter’s shotgun and one of the cooks calling across the field behind the south wall. A little later, as she dried off, she leaned over David’s sleeping face. It was colorless and masklike, and the chin twitched with the probably insalubrious dreams that so often disturbed him and which she was never curious about. In this sun-drenched corner of paradise, with the heliconia and honeysuckle bursting around them, it was like a window into a subterranean world that she could never enter and which she knew was always starved of beauty. A sleeping face can be as terrifying as a flight of steps leading down from a trapdoor and disappearing like a rope cast into a well. She wondered if years from now during a bitter argument she might ever tell David to his face what had happened. But he had made her lie, and in a way they were quits. She passed her hand over his eyes as if he were dead, closing lids that were already closed.

The desert night swept in, with its taste of distant salt. She sat up on her elbows and her heart was wild with hatred and foreboding. Where now? She saw nothing ahead but confusion, dire liberation. If only she could stop now, in this moment, for a dozen years. She listened to the birds settling into the grassy eaves of the house, a flock of cold mouths gathering in the twilight—dinosaurs with red eyes.

“
I FIND IT ODD THAT YOU WON
’
T STAY THE NIGHT
,”
RICHARD
said over their early supper on the terrace as they lay on silk cushions and agitated starlings flapped about in the sultry dusk air. Hamid served them a salted lemon
tagine
with cinnamon-sweetened
couscous
dotted with steamed prunes and lines of sugar that melted as they watched. “It would make far more sense to start out early and
get to Azrou by early afternoon and then chill out there. I would have thought, after your experience with driving here at night …”

“I see what you’re saying”—David interrupted him brusquely—“but we’ve thought it through and we are anxious to get back as soon as we can. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“Naturally I can. After what you’ve been through. I just don’t want you to get into another accident!”

“Oh, lightning doesn’t strike twice,” Jo said nervously, unsure if this was true.

“It’s your choice. I am more than happy for you to stay on an extra night and set off in the normal way.”

“I had a sleep all afternoon by the pool,” David countered. “I feel fit as a fiddle. I think we’ll drive through the night and just get back to Tangier in a single leap.”

“That’s one way of doing it. We’ll give you a better map. Why don’t you stay a night or two in Tangier and recover a bit? There are some boutique hotels there now. You don’t have to stay at the Angleterre.”

David shook his head. He had refused to say anything about Tafal’aalt and nobody had asked; and now he had no intention of playing it “normal” and pretending he’d do this and do that just because Richard wanted him to. He wanted to get back to England, that was all. He’d relax when he was in that plane in the Málaga airport.

“The whole country feels jinxed now,” he said.

“It’s certainly
not
jinxed,” Dally retorted, giving him a cool stare.

“Not for you, maybe. But for me. For Jo and me. Nothing like this has ever happened to us.” His hand was shaking.

“Yes, I see,” Richard muttered. “I can see why you’d want to get out of here as soon as possible. In any case, your car has already been loaded. There’s a picnic hamper in the backseat. The bottle is nonalcoholic cider.”

It was a cruel jab, and Richard almost regretted it as soon as he had uttered it. But, in another sense, he was speaking his mind honestly. Morocco wasn’t jinxed; David was just an incorrigible boozer.

“Anyway,” Jo said in conciliatory spirit, “it has all ended peacefully at least. Not for that boy, I know. But for everyone else. It could have been a lot worse.”

Very much so, Richard thought tersely.

“Did they have interesting carpets out there?” Dally suddenly asked, changing the subject. “I’ve never seen anything from that far out.”