The Heat of Betrayal (33 page)

I thought of my husband, spending the equivalent $230 on a bottle of wine he could hardly afford. Or how I took a potential corporate client out to dinner a few weeks before leaving for Morocco and insisted on picking up the $300 tab at Buffalo's best steakhouse. And how 2,000 dirhams (at best) was keeping these five people alive for a month. From what Idir had indicated, this was more than twice what they were used to. I could see Titrit and Naima beaming as he said this – because, with Maika, they were the labour force at the loom.

It was exactly that – an old-style loom, located beneath a sheet of canvas that had been attached to four poles embedded in the ground. I wandered over one morning to see the women at work. Wearing a burqa and djellaba was like being encased in a sauna. But the three women didn't seem at all fazed by the crazy heat. Watching Maika work the loom, barking orders, stitching with fiendish precision, I couldn't help but wonder how she managed this in the long garment and severe mask that hid all but her eyes. Titrit favoured lighter materials in cream or off-white – but she too was imprisoned in fabrics that covered every inch of her body. Only Naima – still too young to wear the burqa – got away with a headscarf and djellaba. Like her mother and grandmother she never seemed to succumb to the ocean of perspiration that overtook me every time I stepped outside, hidden from worldly view, my eyes and hands the only parts of my anatomy visible.

When I offered to help at the loom, Maika tried to teach me some basic techniques. But the heat overcame me after a few minutes and I was ordered inside.

Water was an issue out here. There was, I discovered, a small water hole within the oasis – and an old-style pump garnered this essential fluid up from the ground. It was rationed by Maika. I was handed an old plastic litre bottle four times a day – and had to make do with that. Which also meant that spending much time outdoors before nightfall was tricky. I was given a large pail of water twice a day for washing. There was a bucket and a rag in the toilet tent to clean myself.

Titrit was home-schooling Naima. Every afternoon they spent several hours on reading and writing and basic mathematics. One morning, Naima came into my tent hugely excited as her father and grandfather had returned from selling their produce at the market and Papa had brought her back a large book.
Tintin
. In Arabic. She showed me its large glossy cover, a little battered in places. I too had read Hergé's books when I was Naima's age, and tried to explain to her that, yes, I knew all about the intrepid Belgian journalist Tintin and his faithful wire-haired terrier Snowy. I asked Naima to read me some of the text. She actually climbed up on my lap to do so, and proceeded to read me the entire book, even sometimes acting out the voices of Tintin, his dog, and the highly egotistical Captain Haddock. Having Naima on my lap, listening to her wondrous singsong voice, feeling the way she snuggled in against me, my longing for a child was immense. So too was my sadness that this would now never be.

I was so engrossed in listening to Naima read to me that I didn't notice Titrit enter the tent, watching us with a smile. When I caught sight of her I was just a little thrown, thinking that she might not like me having her daughter in my lap. Seeing my concern she indicated that this was hardly a problem – and in fact said something to Naima that made her return to her reading.

Later that day, when she returned alone to change my bandages, she touched the engagement and wedding rings on my finger and made a hugging gesture, followed by a touch to her head. It was her way of posing the question:
Where is your husband?
In reply I made an outward flapping motion with my hands, saying:
‘
He's gone.' She looked at me with great pity. Then touching my stomach and making a curving motion with her hand, she indicated pregnancy. I shook my head. And said:

‘I want a baby. But . . .'

Even though she might not have understood English she certainly grasped what I was saying. Her reply was:

‘
Insha'Allah
.'

Allah willing.

The days passed slowly. As I was still unsteady both physically and psychologically, the languidness of my current existence didn't bother me. Apart from the nightly meals with the family, the arrival of breakfast and lunch in the tent, and Maika and Titrit spending a good hour on my wounds, the highlight of the day was the hour or so I had every late afternoon with Naima. After a morning spent helping her mother and grandmother on the loom, and several hours of tutoring by her mother, she would race over to my tent to spend time with me. Early on, Naima said one word to me while pointing to her mouth:

‘English.'

In reply I said one word while pointing to mine:

‘
Arabie.
' Which I knew from Essaouira was the word for Arabic.

We spent the next ten days or so teaching each other words, expressions, numbers. I learned how to count to ten in Arabic. Naima got very proficient at English pronouns: I, me, you, he, she, it. I picked up phrases like: ‘
Shukran min fadocik
' (
Thank you for dinner
), or ‘
Min fir shreb
' (
I need water
), or ‘
Fin wan mfouk
' (
You are my friend
). Naima delighted in being able to do the alphabet as far as M – with my promise that we would add two more letters a day.

When the hour was up, Titrit would arrive, Naima would give me a kiss goodbye, and I would have another two hours alone until dinner. I wish I could report that, during the many hours a day I was alone with nothing but my thoughts, I achieved some sort of resolution about the state of my life; resolving somehow to follow Maika's directive and move forward. But what happened frequently was panic attacks on a major level. A desperate sense of falling into a vortex. The agonising replay of everything that had happened in the desert. The barbarous image of my assailant after I had fought back. My sense of horror at what I had been forced to do. Had I truly killed someone? The accompanying terror of discovering that facet within me.

I knew I was still in shock. Whenever I thought of the world outside of this nowhere place to which I had been transported, I knew I couldn't stay here indefinitely. Just as I also knew that the thought of returning to life beyond the oasis seemed out of my reach right now.

I was pleased that the days passed at a languid pace. Just as I could see that, though Idir could actually communicate with me in the basic French we both shared, he kept his distance from me. He never indicated that I was a burden to him or his family. But I was a woman. Apart from the evening meal I was kept out of his life, and I accepted this polite isolation, just as I accepted the burqa when outside. He spoke little to me during dinner, though that was frequently due to the fact that, in the tent where we all ate, there was a small television with a wire antenna that brought in one Moroccan channel. The fact that our encampment had no electricity meant the television was powered by a car battery which they charged using jump cables from the small and ancient truck in which they took their produce to market.

One evening I came in for dinner to discover the five members of the family huddled around the glowing set, watching the evening news. Out of nowhere a photograph appeared behind the newsreader. A photograph of a Western woman. As the broadcast was in Arabic, and as the reception wasn't exactly brilliant, it took me a moment to realise that the photo onscreen was of . . .

But Naima beat me there. Craning her neck towards me, she pointed to the screen. Mouthing one of the English pronouns I'd taught her she said:

‘You.'

THE NEWS REPORT:
a mugshot of me. A mugshot of Paul. Footage of a crime scene in the desert, with police tape around an area showing scorched earth. And then – oh God, this was beyond bad – footage of Police Inspector Moufad from Essaouira, giving a news conference, holding up the same photograph of me, shaking it vehemently, as if to say:
Here is our prime suspect
.

You.

Me. Now wanted by the police.

Me. Now revealed to these good Samaritans as someone who was on the run. Wanted not just for the disappearance of her husband, but for the death of another man in the desert.

My mind began to race. How were they tying the burnt corpse in the desert to me? Did the goon who'd assisted in my rape drive back to Tata? In his panic did he concoct a story which he fed to the police? He was worried about the welfare of his friend who'd met an American woman last night and invited her on a romantic drive at dawn into the Sahara in her hired car. The discovery by the cops of his pal's charred body – and no sign of me – would lead them to presume that I had turned on him at some juncture, things got out of hand, and I immolated his body before driving off into . . .

No, that's ridiculous. You arrived by bus. You didn't hire a car in Tata. The guy from the hotel would remember, under police questioning, that the two little shits were loitering by the stairs as we headed up to the hotel.
So how, why, were they bringing the desert corpse into Paul's disappearance . . . and the fact that I too had now vanished? What incriminated me even further was that I had fled virtual house arrest in Essaouira, much to the fury of Inspector Moufad. He was stabbing my photograph on television with his index finger, as if I was a public health hazard or an escaped war criminal. Apparently they had some sort of evidence to link me to the incinerated body in the Sahara.

Another possibility: the goon got back to Tata, tried to work all day, was in a state of escalating panic as he had my backpack hidden away somewhere, and then suddenly came up with an ingenious solution to his problem. He drove back into the desert, tossed my backpack out near the corpse, returned to Tata, reported his friend missing, said he was cruising an American woman . . . and didn't fill in any further details. How we ended up in that nowhere spot in the Sahara . . . would that truly matter when compared to the smoking-gun evidence of my backpack near the corpse? It would directly link me to the events that culminated in a young man being torched alive in the desert. That had to be why I was now being pursued for the disappearance of my husband, and my link with that gruesome find amidst all that empty sand.

‘What are they saying?' I asked Idir. He waved away my question, keeping his attention riveted on the screen. This was worrying. So was the even more hardened look of Maika and her husband. Titrit, meanwhile, was betraying all emotions, appearing both shocked and distressed. When she actually put her hands over Naima's ears, so she could hear nothing more of the broadcast, I sensed trouble.

The news item ended. There was an immediate heated exchange between Immeldine and Idir. When Titrit tried to say something she was shouted down by both her husband and her mother. Naima started crying. I began to panic.

‘Please tell me what they said,' I asked Idir.

Out of nowhere Immeldine barked something so fierce at me that Naima hid herself behind her mother.

Then Idir said to me:

‘You go. We bring the food to you.'

‘If I could just explain—'

‘Go!'

I wrapped my face in the burqa and crossed the few steps back to my tent. Once inside, my fear turned into a crazed panic attack, in which I found myself pacing manically around the tiny space, all sorts of extreme scenarios taking over, including Idir and Immeldine deciding that they had to turn me over to the police, and me being thrown into a squalid cell in which I would be repeatedly abused by the guards, and Inspector Moufad from Essaouira conducting an all-night interrogation designed to break me, and me signing a confession that yes, I had killed Paul in a fit of rage on the beach and dumped his body in the Atlantic, and yes, I had agreed to go on an all-night joyride with those two monsters, and when the little shit got a bit fresh with me I lashed out and . . .

Stop this insanity
, I hissed at myself. But my brain was on overload. In moments of lucidity I told myself that all the repressed mental trauma of the rape was now finally coming to the surface. But those nanoseconds of clarity were soon subsumed by a full-scale sobbing. All those terrible childhood moments of our family being evicted from a series of houses and apartments came flooding back, with the realisation:
It's happening again. I am being forced out from a place of safety; a family who have given me more love and acceptance and sense of shelter than I've ever had. Now this new family is about to reject me, turning me out into a malevolent world that will engulf me as soon as I am beyond this little oasis
.

My sobs became so convulsive, so out of control, that I felt as if I might become unhinged. My pacing was so frantic that I was literally crashing into corners of the tent, endangering its stability. Suddenly Maika and Titrit rushed in. Titrit had me in her arms in a moment, firmly settling me down on the cot, cradling me, whispering consoling words that had no meaning for me except that they were soothing. She held me as I buried my head in her shoulder, and Maika kept her distance as the grief came cascading forth. Perhaps she knew – given what I had been put through – that this was long overdue. Perhaps she also understood my fear of the world beyond. Whatever the reason she let me cry myself into exhaustion. When I briefly subsided she stepped in, helped Titrit to undress me and get me into the white nightshirt I'd been sleeping in. Laying me down on the cot she rubbed a different kind of balm (it smelled of patchouli and chamomile) across my forehead and into my temples, then massaged the same substance deep into my feet before sitting me up and making me drink an extra-large dosage of the nightly tisane.

Just before surrendering I grasped Maika and Titrit's hands and said one word:

‘
Shukran
.'

When I came to I glanced at my watch and was shocked to discover it was almost eleven a.m. Had I really been out for over thirteen hours? When I got off the cot and changed out of the nightshirt and back into the djellaba, I noticed a certain physical stability that had been absent for a long time. Then I started wondering again what would happen if Idir turned me over to the cops and the shakiness began to reassert itself. But I managed to get dressed, wrap the burqa around my face and make it to the toilet without succumbing to another panic attack.