Notorious (53 page)

The book my mother used against my grandfather to get the estate.’

‘The magic book,’ said Agnieska.

He waved a hand irritably. ‘The book of secrets.’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the shadow growing through the doorway.

‘The book of God,’ she said. ‘But your mother has it.’

He shook his head. ‘It is gone from where she hid it. But she doesn’t know yet.’

‘She didn’t send you here?’

‘Stefano told me that you must have the book,’ said Pietr.

Stefano came into the room, a black shape against the light. Nothing shuts out the light in the walled city, she thought, except for men.

‘You should know,’ she said. ‘Your father didn’t leave. He escaped.’

Outside, the flat planes of the sky were smudged, the haze soaking up the colour. She saw tracings of light through the grey, reminding her of that time she had walked through the caves, following the silver ribbon.

‘My father ran away,’ said Pietr. ‘From his responsibilities. His name.’ He picked up his tea, his shoulders rigid. The shadow that was Stefano slid along the wall.

‘He was haunted,’ said Agnieska. ‘By what had been done in his name.’

‘He had too much imagination.’

‘We’re all haunted. Everyone who reads the book.’

Stefano stopped. He crossed his arms.

She said, ‘The book is no good to you.’

‘I need it,’ Pietr said, so low she could barely hear him.

‘You think it is a weapon. But it is a weapon to be used against you.’

A black rage – a feeling from the old days – rose in her: sap spreading through tree roots, oil seeping across dry ground, lava spilling out of fissures; the air turned to smoke, heat, sulfur. She wondered what he would think if he saw the photo, if he knew what the book represented. Of how far people would go to get it. How far she would go against this stranger who came to take the one thing she had of value. This man with Sicilian diluting his Polish blood. A foreigner: easily made to disappear, no-one except the bodyguard to ask questions. Easy to pay a few dirham to certain men in the old medina. There were wells in cracked earth beyond the old town, dried black mouths which held piles of bodies.

She was back in the cave, the spear of light falling through the fissure behind her; the high cave roof rearing away into the gloom like a cathedral vault. She was following the butterfly markings on the wall by this time, drifting, letting her instinct guide her. The dark wrapped around her like a shroud. This was the only place, she had thought, where her father could not harm her. Ironic, really, considering what she would find.

Now she said, ‘The book took me into the desert. I walked through an underground network of caves until I found a thin ribbon of water in the night.’

Stefano was watching her. Pietr looked impatient.

‘In a dream?’ he said.

‘I was lost in the desert,’ she said. ‘I read the book by – ’ she almost said the name – ‘I read the book and it showed me the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams. There were shapes drawn on the walls. Prehistoric elephants and giraffes crossing the Sahara, when it was a savanna. Lions, tigers. And animals with human faces. Then nothing for a millennium. It was only when I saw the butterflies that I saw the dates: 1886, 1897, 1910, 1921, 1944. 1960.’ She closed her eyes, remembering. ‘Butterflies drawn on the black walls. Drawn with rocks. Or fingernails.’

‘The desert.’ He stirred restlessly, muttered under his breath, the English shot through with raw Polish.
Vot the fok ist this?
Her father’s phrase, when buyers of the African cargo lost their nerve or failed to pay.

She looked at his signet ring, the pressed clothes. She thought, We all veil ourselves in different ways. We’re all caught between two worlds. She remembered Betsoul laughing at her, taunting her: You’ll always be an outsider.

She was overcome by a sense of hopelessness so strong that it was almost like fainting. She thought, In Arabic there is a whole world of language just to do with the desert. The desert nurtures and cherishes its languages as a possession in its own right.

She said to Pietr, ‘How could you ever think the writings of a desert poet would help you?’

‘I can sell it,’ he said. ‘All those rock stars quoting Arthur Rimbaud, philosophers as gods, self-destruction as fashion. Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, they’ve all made him the new seer, the man who started modern poetry. A book from him would be beyond price. The French alone would pay a fortune to get it back.’

She touched her cross. ‘So you think the book is by Rimbaud?’

For the first time he looked unsure of himself. ‘It has to be. Why else would my grandfather value it? My mother says it is so.’

She was silent.

‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Is it not?’

The cross was cool and reassuring in her fingers. ‘You should know it is an evil book.’ She thought then said, ‘No, it is a book which records evil.’

‘It’s mine,’ said Pietr. ‘It was my father’s.’

Over by the wall, Stefano stirred.

‘It was stolen,’ said Agnieska, ‘by your grandfather. Your father was taking it to France. To return it to the writer’s family.’

‘It’s my inheritance. Mine.’

She touched the scar on her left cheek. ‘I am owed something.’

‘I thought you received an allowance from the estate.’

‘It’s hardly enough, is it?’ He wouldn’t meet her eye. She said, ‘All the books in the world become sand in the desert. This book is by a poet. It would be justice to return it to the white page of the desert.’ She was aware of Stefano wandering casually along the wall, sliding his feet over the tiles, stepping slowly on the rugs.

She said, ‘Jesus walked into the desert, reduced himself to nothing. He made himself as blank as the desert. From the blank page you construct the poem, the way you make a garden in the desert. An oasis, a fragile tent of words. The dwelling place of the desert traveller, of the poet.’

Stefano spoke to Pietr. He had a deep voice in Italian, surprisingly melodious. There was no trace of the cracked hesitations evident when he spoke Polish. This was like the tolling of a bell. It was a voice a woman could fall in love with. She wondered about the photo of Rosza in his wallet. Was it given to him or did he take it?

Pietr said, ‘Stefano says that whether we live or die is of profound indifference to the desert. It is like the sea.’

‘You are a fisherman,’ said Agnieska. ‘You distrust anything to do with fire.’

Stefano muttered under his breath.

Pietr stood, adjusted his cuffs. ‘I need to change. Come and have dinner with me.’

‘And bring you the book?’

The shadow at the corner of her eye receded. Stefano was walking towards the window, across the rug in the corner. She could see by the way he moved that he was feeling the floor with his feet. He was approaching the recess where the book was hidden. The join was barely noticeable; it would be almost impossible to feel it through his boots. But he was moving more slowly. Somehow he had sensed something different in the floor.

She said, ‘Once you read the book you’ll want what I want.’

‘What’s that?’ said Pietr.

She thrust her hand into her pocket, pressed her thumb against the knife blade. ‘For the rottenness my father carried to stop spreading.’

He stared at her. His eyes were an odd colour: not Czeslaw’s stormy grey but an ice blue muddied with shadows. Rosita’s shadows.

Stefano hesitated as he passed over the recess in the floor. But he came and stood silent behind Pietr who, as though signalled, put down his mint tea. He flicked a speck of dust from his cuffs. Again, he reminded her of a younger Laforche, the man Laforche would have liked to have been, with enough money and a mansion in the country and a more welcoming climate. She could almost hear Laforche saying that he would have made a much better job of being an aristocrat than the aristocrats did.

Pietr said, ‘So you won’t give me the book?’

She said, ‘What you will find there will horrify your sense of yourself.’

But he was already shaking his head. He wouldn’t listen to her. She saw herself as he would: a dumpy scarred woman, old enough to be his mother but more easily dismissed. Maybe dismissed because she could be his mother. She was tired suddenly. She wanted to leave the city, all this pushing and pulling. She wanted open spaces and winds which caressed the skin, not the cuts from horsewhips held by syphilitic drunkards.

Pietr had forced a smile onto his face and was half bowing, a relic of some gallantry he felt obliged to make. She glanced at Stefano, expecting to see a smirk, some class-driven derision, but he wore an unexpectedly tender look.

She asked Pietr where he was staying. He named a hotel, one of the new foreign chains, in which every room was exactly as it would be in America. It had air-conditioning, he said; the bungalows in the gardens used the new Beani dome structure. She made herself look impressed and he said that Stefano had negotiated a very good rate. His tone was slightly defensive, as though he admired the bargaining but resented the need for it.

They went down the stairs without looking back and she thought how much she would have liked Laforche to have been there, hidden, watching. Deciphering the ways of men.

Early evening. The sky was a roughened blue-grey curtain, heavy and trembling over Rue Sidi Hmad. Women, their heads bare, were unpegging the laundry strung on lines across the flat roofs. This was the only place they could take off their veils, in their own small kingdom of air and light.

A red petticoat pinned at one end reminded her of Betsoul: rebellion hidden under black robes like the seeds of desert plants. The real world of women hidden.

The café was empty. As she turned away from the market, she heard the siren notes of the snake charmer’s pipe. She imagined the animal being roused reluctantly from its sleep, beginning to sway. It wouldn’t be able to resist. The pipe was like the call of the desert.

She found Laforche, smoking, his tie askew, in his cubicle. His desk was littered with papers. A magazine lay open, a picture of the desert with icebergs superimposed over it:
L’Afrique elle fait l’iceberg
. It half obscured a book cover. Camus, she saw,
L étranger
.

Laforche stood, tugging at his tie, but she motioned him down.

She said, ‘If the image of the modern Arab is the Koran in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other, what is the modern Frenchman?’

He sat down opposite her. ‘Egoists with enough time to go mad on the beach,’ he said. She put her hand on the icebergs. Even the photo cooled her.

‘More ice marks found in the desert,’ said Laforche. ‘Strange to think all this once stood in Antarctica’s place.’

‘Fire and ice,’ she said. ‘Only a few degrees’ difference changes one into the other.’

She sat up straight. ‘I’ve come about shoes for one of the ben Asoub boys.’

Laforche cocked his head. She said, ‘The mother with ten children in Quartier Rouge. The crippled one.’

He looked puzzled.

‘The pickpocket,’ she said.

‘Ah, I know. Well . . . ’ He spread his hands. ‘The minute you go the Church will reverse everything you’ve done.’

‘I rely on you then.’

‘Desperate woman.’

‘Maybe I’ll leave insurance. One of Betsoul’s curses. Bury a pocket-knife clasped shut on a piece of paper with the Monsignor’s name on it. Make him impotent. I’ll bury it near a leaking well so that the water dissolves the words. The curse will remain, even if he opens the knife.’

‘Sometimes I don’t think you believe in religion at all.’

‘Organised religion,’ she said, emphasising the first word, ‘interferes with discussions with God. I have never seen a dictatorship or corrupt society that didn’t use organised religion to justify its possession.’

‘
Mon Dieu
.’ Laforche went to the door, closed it. ‘Don’t let the Monsignor hear you.’

She looked at him with amusement. ‘Isn’t he five miles away, in Quartier Nouvelle? The Western sector.’

‘That’s no protection anymore.’ He kicked at the wall. Small spurts of dust and a crusted pebble fell out. ‘Easy enough to insert listening devices from our new friends in Hafid Street.’

‘The lizards and small creatures,’ said Agnieska, ‘they make tunnels between the loose stones.’

‘Either way we are exposed.’

‘You seem irritable. Or depressed.’

‘Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.’ There was sweat in the grooves beside his nose. The small room was airless, facing a hot bare courtyard. He sat and unfolded his handkerchief, dipped it into the bowl of lavender water on the desk blotter and dabbed his throat, his forehead.

‘You need plants,’ she said. ‘You need a garden.’

His fingers touched the water. ‘You know drownings are the preferred torture of the CIA,’ he said. ‘So typical of the Americans.

Even in the desert they must have the one thing that is the most valuable. Not ropes, not knives. Water.’

‘So you still plan to leave tomorrow,’ said Laforche. ‘With nothing but your book of secrets.’

‘Most women would call it a book of fears,’ said Agnieska. ‘A record of men’s fears about women, fears about themselves. What they see in the night because they are so disconnected from nature.’

Laforche took out his cigarette case, offered her one. When she shook her head, he lit a small gold-tipped cigarette and blew a slow smoke ring, tilting his head back to watch it rise to the ceiling.

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I don’t see lambs in the desert. I see monsters. Sumerian beasts, the chaos monster from Assyria. It is a wasteland for me.’

‘You treat nature as fallen, the desert as a mistake,’ said Agnieska. ‘It is only when man loves the desert for what it is that the earth will be saved.’

Laforche said, ‘Once they figure out how to mine the phosphates and iron ore in the Sahara the desert will become a strip mall. Like the icefields, like the jungles.’

‘They’ll never conquer the desert. The sandstorms will defeat them, the shifting ground. God will defeat them.’

‘God?’

‘Nature.’

Laforche said, ‘Haven’t the Americans made what they call a paradise in the desert?’