Notorious (49 page)

Years later, when she had discovered what Father Thomas had done to Betsoul, she had taken the car Jürgen gave her – a small Renault so buckled with rust that the floor hit every large stone – and she drove east through twilight like a half-erased dream. When the car had inevitably sputtered to a stop, she had put the book and a canteen of water in her backpack and walked away into the desert, so busy looking up at the stars that she stumbled and fell over a small rock. Near her, a low-slung cactus sensed movement and wept white poison. She thought, Liquid can be a weapon in the desert.

She had walked through the spiralling heat. A yellow cloud passed across the broken-faced moon: a wheeling bowl of locusts. She saw the night trapped in hollows, felt every grain of sand beneath her. I have been blinded all my life, she thought. First by the counterfeit columns of my family. Then by the silk couches of the opium dens. And now by the hypocrisies in the Church I thought would save me. No God left even in a city of churches and mosques.

But here, a hundred other tribes surround me. I walk through an alphabet of sand, the vast silence of the desert cloaks me. The silence beyond the silence of death. She touched the scar on her left cheek. I see my way home between the dark marks left by the Mammon sun on my flesh. On the purity of the page. She kneeled by the pool in front of her, heat biting into her bones.

I see my way home.

Agnieska waited by the fountain, her hand in the cold water. She moved her fingers to try to encourage the turtle to come out. But it stayed, a shadow near the seashells which lined the white plaster. As she walked her hand over the tiled bottom, the blue crosses moving like pitchforks, she heard the front door open and close.

Footsteps – a man’s boots – came across the tiles.

There was a pause. She knew why. He was smoothing his hair, straightening his tie. Then, the sound of whistling. The familiar notes: Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’.

A shadow in the doorway. Laforche winked at her and went to his chair and picked up his hat. ‘Yes, my dear Capitaine, I did not work hard to stay where I belong.’ He flourished the hat at her. ‘Especially not as a mere assistant director at an obscure Catholic outpost.’

She said, ‘Will I get Abu N’af?’

Laforche sat down, took out a white handkerchief and wiped the dust off his shoes. ‘The Monsignor would make you Pope to be rid of you. As we predicted.’

He looked at his shoes but again, she thought that he was looking up at her under his lashes. ‘Your family must be influential. It would be easy enough for the irate priests to make you disappear into one of the brothels in Quartier Rouge.’

She said, ‘My family has always ensured that in troubled times the Church’s possessions are returned.’

‘Blackmail,’ said Laforche without surprise. ‘Useful.’ He put away his handkerchief and took a pearl necklace and a painted headband from his pocket. ‘And they pay you to pay me to steal these objects?’

‘The objects are always returned,’ she said sharply.

‘And your reputation enhanced.’

‘For the greater good. No-one suffers.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘My family pays, for this.’ She touched the scar on her left cheek.

‘And they’ll keep sending money to you, out in the desert?’

‘They don’t care where I go. The further the better.’

Laforche said, ‘What a shame you won’t listen to Piaf with me. What is good enough to be the anthem of the French Foreign Legion should be good enough for all. It is the message of the hours and the times: we must regret nothing.’

‘You don’t regret helping me?’

‘I would have helped you just to see the look on the Monsignor’s fat face,’ said Laforche.

‘He’s a fool.’

‘Even the broken clock is right twice a day.’ He frowned. ‘The Monsignor may be furious enough to go ahead with an exorcism. There is hatred there – ’

‘Hatred of women.’

‘Or hatred of the future, his shrinking influence.’

‘He knows the Church has always been a business first.’

‘Even more so,’ said Laforche, ‘now the Americans have set up shop on Hafid Street. Casa is becoming a garrison town. Again.’

‘And you spend your time dicing with legionnaires who look like criminals.’

‘At least the legionnaires are too drunk to smoke kif. They don’t hallucinate like madmen. Besides,’ he saw he had creased the hat slightly in his hands and smoothed it out, ‘I never realised how much I loved my country until I left it.’ He laughed but the notes almost immediately collapsed.

‘At 3 am when your heart is breaking loose, you surround yourself with the sounds of France,’ said Agnieska softly, watching him.

He shrugged. ‘All speech before
l’heure bleue
is lying. I still wake every morning in Rimbaud’s city of black roses.’

‘You would find your true self in the desert,’ said Agnieska. ‘All your false identities are erased.’

‘The desert always smells of old rope to me.’ He flicked a speck of dust from his hat. ‘I have no desire to go beyond the south gate of Medina Ancienne.’ He caught Agnieska’s sharp look. ‘Don’t worry. I can still send your stores each week.’

He stood. ‘Well . . . ’ For the first time since she had met him, she saw he was uncertain what to say next. ‘As a Moroccan I must tell you that it has been Allah’s will we have conducted such good business. But it is my duty as a Frenchman to be gallant. So,’ he bowed, with unusual awkwardness, ‘I must say that if I was allowed a second wife . . . ’

‘Or could afford it.’

He smiled. ‘Yes. Far more to the point.’ His face settled. ‘I’m sure the Monsignor is not serious about exorcism. But the Sahara is a chess board with everything painted white. To be out there in the vast empty – ’

‘The sacred empty.’

‘
Le désert absolu
,’ he said.

‘Isabelle Eberhardt went into the desert when she was eighteen. She dived into it, without ropes, without maps, like the ancient well-divers.’

‘Yes – but . . . ’ He moved his hand aimlessly. ‘What will you do out there?’

‘I will begin a community.’ She wanted to say, I will leave the technological marvels of the world and walk into the sacred empty. There is no danger, I will be watched over, the way the eagle hovers over her young. But she knew he wouldn’t understand. So she stretched out her hands: the slightly bent fingers, the enlarged knuckles, the bone showing white under the tanned skin. ‘I have crystals in my joints. Yet the pain vanishes in the desert.’

‘It is the heat,’ said Laforche.

‘It is a miracle.’

‘The dry air is good for arthritis.’

‘I see the desert blossoming like the blossoming of Jesus’s love for his people.’

She could feel him withdrawing. This was a border he would never cross. He said, ‘
Le désert est monothéiste
. The desert is his own god. Whether we live or die is of profound indifference to the desert.’

‘The desert is a place of wanderings,’ said Agnieska. ‘It knows we go there to find a home, a memory, a name. We take on other lives in the desert. Other identities.’

‘New identities . . . ’ said Laforche. ‘The Church won’t like that. The Americans on Hafid Street won’t like it.’

Agnieska considered him. ‘Are you working for them?’

He met her gaze openly. ‘I already have one mistress.’

‘Two,’ she said. ‘If you count the Church. Three if you include your wife.’

‘Six if I include my children,’ he said. ‘You see? To avoid confusion, a man with so many masters must be honest.’

‘Or exhausted,’ she said.

He smiled, turned the hat in his hands. ‘I will miss our conversations.’ His voice was louder, rougher. She imagined him throwing out a rope, unwillingly. ‘It is a pity you couldn’t stay in Casablanca and start your own community like other women, by marrying and having children.’

‘I will never marry,’ she said. ‘I want my family line to die out.’

As he turned to go, she said, ‘Have you heard anything about a new arrival – a Sicilian? A man this tall, with brown hair, to here.’ She gestured to her shoulders.

Laforche seemed genuinely surprised.

‘Would your contacts know?’ They both knew she meant the other players in the 2 am dice games in Quartier Rouge.

‘I can make enquiries.’ He said, looking down at his hat, ‘Will you visit Betsoul before you leave?’

She kneaded the pain in her knuckles, pressing down on the blue crosses. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Your intentions were good,’ he said. ‘It seemed a worthy thing, to be educated, to work in Father Thomas’s house.’

She saw Betsoul’s contorted face. ‘To be taken from your family at the age of twelve, to be – ’ She couldn’t say the word. ‘Your life ruined by a meddling Westerner. She hates us all. Rightly. She is reminded of it every day.’ Agnieska saw herself walking through the labyrinth of narrow alleys to Rue Farouk, visualised placing the butterfly comb in Meersun’s childish fingers. She saw the dark room with its low ceilings, the silent women endlessly sitting, Betsoul’s remorseless eyes.

Agnieska shivered. ‘You won’t tell anyone when I am leaving? Especially Betsoul.’

‘You can trust me.’

She stared at him.

His face twisted. ‘
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
.’

‘Just let me get away,’ she said. ‘Into the desert.’

She left by the back entrance, a narrow passage which ran past the tiled bath-room. The house next door was so close that tiny flowers had managed to grow in the almost perpetual shade at the base of the wall.

She circled the block and came up beside the café, peered around the corner. The pavement tables were empty. The Sicilian had gone. She looked through the strips of beaded leather hanging in the doorway. She saw only a local standing at the bar, foot hooked up on the brass railing, bent over his espresso. The doorway light caught the mirror opposite him; rings of light were thrown across his face as he raised the cup.

She remembered the first time they had holidayed in Vienna. Her brother was fascinated by the white gloves of the traffic conductors, how the sun was caught in the silver buttons sewn on the inner cuff. Who would wear a button where no-one could see it? her brother kept asking.
Fools
, her father had said but her brother had a faraway look. Later she had asked him what he was thinking and he said, When the conductor raised his hand, hoops of light rose in the cloudy air, so the conductor would see himself reflected in the silver, in the eyes of the man in the button, and back to himself, again reflected, endlessly, in silver hoops of light across the city.

She thought the answer was an excuse, or only partly true. But they were close enough that she knew not to ask him, to respect the change that was coming over him which explained his frequent absences, when her father would shout with rage to know where her brother was and she could have said, but didn’t, In the church at Przyznka.

Later, she would feel she knew the exact moment Czeslaw died. Crystals started growing in her hands, there was constant pain in her joints. Crystals in her heart.

She liked to walk around the city in the heat of the day. During the lunch hours, the crowds almost disappeared. The stalls closed up: their cigarettes and soft drinks and T-shirts and caps and elephants with sequinned eyes, all gone.

Now the old town was revealed in all its straight-backed defiance. Strange, she thought, walking through the zebra light of the narrow alleys, stepping across the gutter running down the middle, that in a land so changeable, so filled with the shifting curves of the desert, the occupiers felt compelled – or threatened – to build in squares, block upon block rising out of the sand, hunched into each other, back to back. Why not live in domes dug into the ground? Why not in caves like the miners in the Australian desert towns? The true desert dwellers adjusted their shapes, bent into the landscape. Bedouin tents swelled and billowed with the wind. Only shape-shifters survived in the desert.

People talk about the desert being barren, she thought as she walked the streets, seeing the children with staring eyes slumped by damp walls, the beggars curled on their sides, knees drawn up like shrivelled seahorses in the shadows. The dope addicts were the ones lying on their backs, their empty faces brushed by the tails of the hungry, ceaselessly roaming cats.

She thought, What is the difference between this – this wasteland of mazes and blocked walls and women sitting, their minds filled with fog, the fatalism of the poor – and the wastelands of the modern city, its hard lines, its neon, its empty parking lots, its bare rooms? The inner mind is lost in both, buried beneath sand.

She stepped back to allow the water man with his pony to pass, the bent tin cans clanking over the coat rubbed raw. This country is hard on animals, she thought. Hard on its people. She remembered Laforche teaching her how to apply pressure on her knuckles, to relieve the pain, releasing the pressure only when she heard the tell-tale crack. He had said, smiling his sardonic smile, If you’re poor in Casa, the only thing you’re allowed to make an art of is dying.

Before she reached the Kabir Massif, before Jürgen’s car had failed, she had been stopped by a roadblock. Soldiers in white uniforms and sand goggles, the flaps of their caps hanging over their necks, had surrounded the car, opened the boot. They were suspicious to find so little; just a woman, a canteen of water, an old book with a black leather cover.

The sky had been darkening, swelling like plums along the horizon. The soldiers weren’t unkind; they told her to turn back. She looked at the landscape as it reared away in gritty planes. Symmetry in nature, a geometry imposed on man no matter how much he liked to think he was the one imposing the lines. Even a nearby road turned out to be the sharp curve of a sand dune, not a man-made thing at all.

The soldiers pointed to where dark purple-grey was soaking up the pale blue sky. The sun teetered uncertainly, the light breaking out in radiant lines from behind the Massif – lines reaching out from heaven. To her.

In Poland, she would have nodded, agreed to turn back. But now, looking at the desert, she thought, Entering the desert is like entering a book in which the story is narrated by your radical other. The deeper we go into the desert, everything that used to guide us is stripped away by the winds. We must go deeper into the hidden landscape, where black is white, night is solace, water is poison, love is hate. Deeper into subversion. Deeper into ourselves.