Notorious (50 page)

The soldiers stepped back. If you must go on, they shrugged.

You know there is no well until Tagherez? one said, waving at flies.

She nodded. But she remembered the book with the black leather cover and she thought, There is another well.

You should be careful, said the soldier. This route is used by smugglers and brigands. Make sure you are not mistaken for one.

I hardly think –

The government is interested in all approaches to Casablanca these days. You know Algerian Pour La Combat has been tracked over the border. They move at night through the desert and slip into the city and hide in the back alleys. Anyone arriving by truck, plane, ship, is searched now.

He stared at her with flat indifferent eyes. He said, During the day, they add twigs and branches to their clothes, they change their outline. They merge with the desert. They sleep dug in under boulders, grit in their mouths, the sun burning down. They survive on sheer will. Like tough desert plants. He squinted across the unyielding page of the desert. He said, Everyone is looking for an oasis.

Everyone who is not the government, she said.

Every Arab makes his garden an oasis, he said. Yet it is also the place of betrayal. He put up a hand to block the sun, opened his eyes wide at her in the shadow across his face. He studied her Western clothes and said, They have a new name for the brigands. Le terroriste. Born out of fire in l’Algérie. Maybe they will use Nazarenes or nuns to do their work.

She said, The nuns work for God.

Do they? he said. He looked her up and down. He said,
Do you?
The words hung in the air, like grains of sand. She wasn’t sure whether he said the next words or she only imagined them.

He said, I think not.

Now, in the city where she had never found her true vocation, she turned down Hafid Street, past a man shouting into a phone in the wooden booth nailed to the wall, past another man sitting cross-legged in the shreds of clothes. He was eating couscous and dates from a blue-glazed bowl. In the shadow of his knee, a scrawny cat drank from a saucer of milk. She put coins next to him. He pointed at his small pyramid of rolled cigarettes for sale. She shook her head, saw the Sicilian coming out of the American building on the corner. The CIA building.

She squatted, drew her scarf around her face. In this position she looked like any Arab woman. My disguise, she thought. My protection. Safe in the loss of identity.

A man came out behind Stefano: a tall man with the greyish pallor of the businessman. He was followed by two children: a boy with pale hair, aged about twelve she thought, who stayed close by, looking around uncertainly while a younger child, a dark-haired girl, was drifting across the pavement. The men stood, talking.

The Arabs seated in wicker chairs behind the grille of the café opposite were glaring at her. She hunched her shoulders: shapeless, ineffectual, requesting mercy, insisting to be ignored.

For a time, after she arrived, she had tried to take on an Arab identity: she wore the burqa, she sequestered herself at home, she tried to be dutiful. Jürgen lay on the couch and smoked kif and looked up at her through a cloud of brown smoke and said, Your life is an extended suicide. He laughed at the posturing of the men in the marketplace, derided them for blaming their problems on the West, for controlling their women because their own lives were so beyond their control. Nothing is valued here, he said, unless it has value to someone else. Unless it is coveted.

She had tried to argue with him. Told him they had spent six years travelling the world: Asia, America. Didn’t he want to know where he stood, what the rules were? If you behaved in the right way you’d be protected. He said, You’re at the mercy of someone else’s rules. When they change the rules or they discover you’re a foreigner, you’ll get raped. You’re wrong, she had shouted. But of course he had been right.

The girl child was by the man huddled in his rags on the pavement. She stared at him, then she took the butterfly clip from her hair and kneeled and put the yellow plastic carefully next to the bowl. She extended her forefinger to gently touch the man’s nose. The tall stranger looked over his shoulder and said roughly, ‘Don’t touch that,’ in a loud voice. It took Agnieska a moment to place the flattened vowels: an Australian. By then, the man had picked up the hair clip, grasped the girl by the wrist and dragged her away.

The Sicilian strolled a few feet along the pavement, sat on a stone pillar, his foot swinging. He took out an apricot, began to eat it.

She had found it impossible to walk when she first tried on the burqa. She could barely see through the eyehole. Her sense of direction was gone, the material wrapped around her legs, tripping her. All she saw now was the ground: hard and stony.

Jürgen had told her about Michel Vieuchange, the Frenchman who disguised himself as a woman in a time when the French were much hated and who travelled in 1930 to the ghostly ruins of Smara.

Jürgen said, You could carry anything under a woman’s robes.

Books, make-up, guns.

The ability to take on different personas frees you, she said.

He looked at the blue robe, at the veiled and meshed eyehole. But this makes every woman the same.

Like the desert, she said. Everything real is beneath the surface.

You’ll need to put corks in your ears to survive here, said Jürgen. For the dust. For the abuse.

Venturing outside the city she had met women who lived all their lives in the fields with their goats, only coming in for winter. Others walked for hours over the pale dusty stones each day to milk their animals, gather the fine hair. Some were veiled, some not. Yet, walking along with their milk pails, they had a status that made them untouchable, they had a job. They walked in clusters, they seemed united. Free. A ridiculous country, she thought, when women had to have a symbol, some article of clothing, to be protected. They had to be covered or they were just meat for ravaging dogs. A country of dogs.

The Sicilian was getting up. He spat out the apricot stone and came towards her.

She hunched into her robe. He went past, whistling under his breath, in short hollow-tinned bursts. She risked a glance. He was darker up close – something there, she thought, some trace of Africa – and stockier, with big hands, big knuckles. Peasant knuckles. There was a tattoo of a knife above his wrist; another – three crosses – on the veined muscle below his T-shirt sleeve. She saw comb marks in the shiny dark hair above the ponytail.

She waited until he turned into King Mohammed Boulevard. She followed him, keeping her head down, looking out from the shadow of her clothing. He wasn’t hurrying but he wasn’t shopping either. He didn’t glance at the stalls on either side or at the hawkers who descended on him in small waves and trailed him for a few steps before they fell back. As though they were tethered to some invisible zone and could only graze for a few feet.

She remembered when she had emerged from the Massif, still shaking from what she had found in the caves. She had looked across the plain and seen Abu N’af on top of the hill, a light in the nearest tower. She had walked towards it through the sheet of dawn grey as the sun teetered on the edge of the horizon. The sky had been a growing quarrel but now it softened and wrapped around her. Scorpions moved away from her, the stony pebbles crumbled beneath her. She looked at the fortress on the hill, dark against the milk of the early morning. She was convinced she would reach Abu N’af, would find people, a way back to Casa.

The Sicilian turned, disappeared down an alley. She knew that alley. It led to a small square, enclosed nothing but a few silk shops, cafés. She would be in plain sight the minute she entered it.

She waited until a group of camel riders, angled in their long striped robes, also turned. She followed them through the shadows and slowed when she glimpsed the sleek ponytail ahead of her. The camel riders stepped into the sunlight. She pressed herself against the wall.

Far away, the first of the afternoon prayers climbed the air. The alley was airless; even the wall behind her pulsed with heat. Her hands were hurting, her elbows, her knees. Her heart.

She had a clear view across the square. The Sicilian stopped at a table. A man was seated there: tall, slender, in his mid-twenties. He wore a hat, was impeccably dressed in a white linen suit. A Viennese tailor; she knew the label. He wore sunglasses, it was hard to tell his features from here. He nodded at something the Sicilian was saying, not looking at him. After a moment, he took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. Even from this distance the colour was striking.

She turned and ran down the alley, blundering past a line of monks who stopped, recoiling as she ran past, the air full of nothing but the image of the man. Nothing but platinum silver filling the air.

The first thing she did when she reached her room was check the book. It was there in the recess, under the rug, in its ivory silk cloth. It wasn’t enough for her distress but it would have to do. Her mirror image. She pulled off the cloth, held the book in her hands, ran her fingers reverentially over the cracked wooden cover, the painstaking lines of spidery French writing, the maps of the broken hills, the snippets of poetry, the diary entries.
1890. On Sitting With The Polish
Traveller At Abu N’af.

She had abandoned the car within sight of the Kabir Massif. On the other side, across the plain and the old road, was the shallow hill that rose to house Abu N’af. If the maps in the book were correct.

She had hoisted her backpack and walked through the warm blanket of late afternoon. She walked through soft sand and over hard earth, a mile of nothing but jagged stones which slid treacherously beneath her, a mile where humped sand trailed away from the south side of the trunks of pale green bushes with yellow flowers. Another mile filled with small black scorpions that raised their tails and circled her.

When she reached the base of the Massif, she looked for the boulders that marked the entrance. After nearly an hour, she was thirsty, her water was running low and she worried she wouldn’t make it back to the car before dark. The maps in the book didn’t seem to correlate. She wondered if the author had written in code. It would suit his subversiveness, she thought.

She saw two boulders set a man’s width apart in front of a fissure in the rock wall. Behind one boulder, chipped low into the red-brown rock almost at the level of the dusty ground, was a tiny fleur-de-lis.

She went to the other boulder, crouched down. The light was slipping away, the temperature was dropping. She saw another carving.

She ran her fingers over the two letters etched there.

AR
.

She looked at the empty desert and squeezed herself through the fissure.

By the fountain, Agnieska held the book with the red cover. The ripples aged her reflection and she saw what Abu N’af would do to her. Her hair would be rusted iron, her eyes would sink into her face, her hands would become permanently curled. She would have crystals in her joints, in her heart. She thought of the ulcers on her father’s shins, the sores on his face, the froth like champagne foam falling from his open mouth. Anything but that, she thought.

She stood on the chair in her courtyard and peered over the wall. On the flat roof above the café she saw a woman rolling sheets by hand through a wooden mangle. Beyond her, the marbled sky slid down past the last scribblings of clouds. The afternoon prayers folded into themselves. There was a banging of metal poles and shouts as the night market was set up. She imagined the fish being unloaded and set on the hot stone in their wooden boxes: the long and silvery perch, the small bream, the chunky mullet.

A thin man with eyes too young for his lined face wheeled himself awkwardly down the street on crutches – two planks of wood – dragging his legs behind him. The sight reminded her that she should see Betsoul. She cracked her knuckles. After today, after the foreigners came to see her, as she knew they would, she would have to go to Quartier Negro. She cracked again; the pain was still in her hands.

She waved and the thin man’s smile came up like the dawn of a new day.

There were some things she would miss. In the steel cities in Europe passers-by would look away from the crippled, flinch from the raving, the disoriented. Here, people considered mad or unwanted or an embarrassment in Europe were allowed to wander with respect, could sit in the sun, would be given coins by the locals. The ability to share wealth was regarded as the first step to holiness. She knew that only giving away her possessions had secured her place here.

When she thought of what she had seen in the caves near Abu N’af, she never ate more than she needed, never drank more than minimal. She lost weight. Before then, she imagined herself as stocky: square shoulders, big stomach. With her hands on her hips, her legs planted wide, she had been the true Polish housewife. Now, her body was withdrawing into itself: stretch marks where she had lost weight on her stomach, her upper thighs. Where she was eroded by what she had seen.

A chain of bubbles turned over on the surface of the fountain. The turtle climbed up the statue, half floating, half clinging to the bare feet of the cherub. The turtle’s eyes closed, it swayed, held by the water. The wet mosaics of its shell were the colour of the desert at dusk.

She dragged the chair into the corner and sat in the shade. As always she had to hold the book for a few moments before she opened it. And this was a book she dared to open. She ran her hand over the red cracked boards which made up the cover. It didn’t suit the words inside but its disguise was protection of a sort. This copy she had made of Rimbaud’s book; this decoy to lure the thieves away from the real book.

Je suis un autre
, she thought. I am another.

She opened the book.

At the beginning of the book, the traveller had written,
This is a story
about maps
. When he steps onto land at Tangier, he is obsessed with maps, with keeping his bearings. Later that first night, he writes:
It
is 3 am and my heart is breaking. I see arrows loosed into the sky. I never
thought I would miss my country until I left it.