Notorious (54 page)

‘Las Vegas.’ She remembered seeing the tall buildings, the hotel that was a pyramid of glass and steel, all trying to reach heaven. She remembered driving down the main street, the endless blaze of light, the smell of money, the sound of the slot machines. The desperation.

‘I would go to this Las Vegas,’ said Laforche. ‘As long as camels don’t come into it. It is too undignified to ride a camel.’

He straightened the papers on his desk, wiped a curl of ash from the blotter. He said, not meeting her eyes, ‘I must tell you, I may not be here for much longer.’

‘You have paid off your debts?’

‘Nearly.’ Then, because he found he could rarely lie to her, ‘One or two lucky dice will do it. And then I will return . . . ’

‘To Paris.’

She considered him. He had told her about his childhood: his father, the Paris banker, prosperous, with businesses in Casablanca and Rabat. ‘A nice house in a respectable arrondissement,’ Laforche had said, ‘a pretty wife, a healthy son.’ The family’s life was ordered: every day the father returned at precisely six o’clock and went into his study for a whisky and soda or an aperitif before dinner. A pleasant routine.

Laforche had been a pampered child, allowed to play-act, have fantasies. He had been given an elaborate dolls’ house, a mansion really, with stables and gardens and even a private zoo and a small lake. He stocked the zoo with beetles and ants, and the lake with tadpoles. The beetles often died and the tadpoles turned into frogs and hopped away but it had been his own little kingdom. Then, one day, his father returned home very late and spent a long time in his study. Dinner was delayed, the family waited. ‘But when my father emerged,’ Laforche said, ‘he looked entirely normal. He assured us nothing was wrong and we ate and drank as usual.’ The next night the father came home exactly on time. And the next. And the next. But that night, five minutes after closing the door, a gunshot rang out. ‘Very odd,’ Laforche told her. ‘It sounded like a book falling. I smelled gunpowder for weeks.’

The family was bankrupt of course: a question of impropriety. Nothing proven but the suspicion lingered. Laforche had to leave school and go into the public service to pay off the family’s debts. He had asked for a transfer as far away from Paris as possible.

She said, ‘It is very respectable, to be the assistant director of the Catholic Mission in Casablanca.’

He grimaced. ‘The desert is a tomb.’

She looked around the small office, the desk, the framed photo of King Hassan II on the wall. She said, ‘For some.’

She thought that if she were in the desert now she would see the sun’s beats gradually weaken until the misted air was the colour of a soap bubble. The wind would undulate across the pale earth in transparent eddies. The way she had seen the wind rising from the dunes beyond Abu N’af when she climbed to Rimbaud’s tower.

She said, ‘Do you hear the wind?’

‘There is no wind in the walled city.’

But she had heard it. It would reach the city the next day. She would be travelling into the wind.

‘I have a vision,’ she said. ‘Of a scarred and unrecognisable body. On it would be printed a text containing the ultimate answer, the way the desert is unreadable and yet contains the key to the restoration of shattered lives.’

‘A man’s body,’ said Laforche.

‘No, it will be a woman.’ She looked at the inkings on the backs of her hands. She thought, It will be the reincarnation of the mad scullery girl who disappeared into the desert. Someone whose life created a text to be read the way the desert is a text. She touched her cheek – the old scar made by her father – and felt the throb of the newer marks on her back. The ones she had made.

‘You are the key,’ said Laforche.

‘Not me but someone who marked herself in humility, not anger. Someone who knows that the desert is only as much a wasteland as the inner mind. She will come out of the desert the same way that Rimbaud came out of the desert.’

Laforche took her down to the first floor where two locals, watched by a black-browed nun, were sorting through the donation bins. Agnieska kneeled by the pile of shoes in the corner. She had persuaded a cobbler in Quartier Negro to donate an hour each week to fix the worst: to glue wood over the holes, remake the tongues with camel leather, plug the seams with tar. She found these abandoned shoes poignant: life reduced to a remnant of that part of a person most in direct touch with the earth. A man without shoes is a vulnerable thing. He will be cast out by the herd, left behind in the dust. The desert will defeat him. She thought of Rimbaud on his quest: trying to become a seer by entering into the sacred empty, risking madness by giving himself to the great silence. But when his leg ulcerated, he had to return to Europe. Without his feet he was defeated.

Laforche watched her as she turned over the shoes. He said, ‘There is another irritant in the pearl that is our lives in Casablanca. Your nephew’s servant – the Sicilian.’

She looked up at him, holding a child’s ballet slipper, the pink satin tip smeared with red.

Laforche said, ‘The CIA are so touching in their faith that their files will not be opened by illiterate cleaners.’ He leaned against the window sill, looking down into the street. The shouts of the boys playing soccer floated up to them.

He said, ‘The Sicilian has been buying brown opium. He likes to try it himself but these are large quantities. For business.’

‘With Pietr?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘With an Australian. Do you know him?’

‘No.’

‘The Australian has two children with him.’

She put her hand over the point of the ballet shoe, felt the comforting strength of the wood inside. Maybe it evoked her childhood: the factory always in the background, the villagers walking to work, the smell of tanning leather. What she thought for years was the family business, until she discovered what the real business was. She wondered if Pietr had businesses within businesses, what his disguise was.

She looked at the shoes. Something hardy for the boy; big enough to grow into but not so big that he would trip and fall. She wanted him to have something formal that said: You are a man now. You have dignity. You have weight on this earth.

She chose a pair of lace-up shoes: British, black, the shoes to wear for work. The leather was stiff and smooth. Like Polish leather. She had refused to believe Czeslaw was dead until the young priest had shown her the shoes with the broken laces.

Laforche threw his cigarette out the window. ‘What surprises me,’ he said slowly, ‘is the malevolence. There are rumours that you smoke kif and eat majoun. That you are mad.’

She looked at him. ‘Because of my history.’

He said, ‘Because a young fool got drunk while playing dice with the legionnaires and spoke about finding you eight years ago, curled up like a seahorse, bruises on your arms, brown powder around your mouth.’

‘I relapsed,’ said Agnieska, ‘when I found out what Father Thomas did to Betsoul.’ All that faith, she thought, gone: the time spent in the church’s drug clinic after Jürgen left, the volunteer work at the Mission, the taking of her vows, the conviction that she had found a solution to the curse of her family. All erased by a few words. By the return of demons. ‘I found out,’ she said, ‘and I returned to the opium dens in Quartier Rouge.’

‘Your head fell back as I lifted you,’ said Laforche. ‘I saw tremors running up your neck. I wiped the powder off with my finger.’

‘And the next day, I went into the desert. I found Abu N’af.’

She stood beside him. The last of the muezzin’s calls began washing over the flat roofs and pink walls. As always when the voice lapped the city, disembodied, remote and unjudging, she felt calmed. As when she looked into bowls of water, the fountain.

‘Drugs, alcohol, religion, poetry,’ she said. ‘All to obliterate the pain. Slow suicides.’

‘Betsoul would say it is the words that kill,’ he said.

She pressed her thumb into the blade in her pocket. ‘Maybe asylums are all I’m good for.’

Laforche said, ‘I think you should go tomorrow. There is a very good chance that they are embarrassed beyond civility. Beyond reason.’

They stood on the Mission’s front step. A dog was barking nearby, a woman sobbing. Agnieska thought, Sobbing in her small sea of robes.

He said, ‘You shouldn’t walk alone, tonight of all nights.’

‘I like to walk.’ At night she could walk down alleyways as cool as streams and see into the small courtyards, the wooden benches with their high carved backs and their embroidered cushions lined neatly against the wall, the small brown finches in cages. Gardens shaped out of nothing but rocks and stones. Anything that changes its form has power.

He held her hand for a long moment and released it. ‘I won’t say goodbye.’

She said, ‘
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
.’

‘A throw of the dice,’ he said, grimacing, ‘will never abolish chance. I will try to remember.’

When she left the Mission, the moon lay in the darkening blanket: broken-faced, a jagged fragment of light, as though seen through a cracked cup.

She remembered the inky blackness of the cave in the desert, the rock pressing down over her, the silence like a falling cloak and, as her ears adjusted, the small breathings, the displacing of air by small bodies. The seam of light which grew stronger the more she looked.

The cats were out, stalking the market, leaving bent and elongated shadows on the walls. She smelt fried eggs and onions, saw a man cooking on a steel platter over a kerosene flame.

She walked past the stalls, the men standing behind the racks of T-shirts with
Greetings From Casablanca
unevenly printed below the stamped silhouettes of a lone camel under a palm tree.

Occasionally, a woman sat there: small, hunched, light glinting on the stud in her nose. Frowning. All the women frowned in public. Frowns undercut by puzzlement, at the very now of their life, like the look on a horse she once saw being swept down a flooded river.

A beggar on the corner was selling paper flowers, the thin cardboard badly dyed and streaked. For a moment she saw the streets strewn with broken flowers, people crushed by falling stone and collapsed buildings. The future rose in front of her as a shrieking city of sounds, babble in the tower of Babel. There was no future for her among those for whom empty space was meaningless. She could see her life in the city going on and on, in a night which was always the same night. I am already alone, she thought. I’ve known that since the desert. She thought, Tomorrow I will go. No matter what happens tonight.

She stopped under a light strung from a wooden pole. Moths were dying in small tearless sparks against the bulb. She should turn here to take the boulevard to Pietr’s hotel.

A group of shouting youths went past. She recognised the ben Asoub boy. He saw her and hesitated but he was with his friends; he didn’t want to stop.

‘I have your gift,’ she called out.

He couldn’t resist, he slowed.

‘Tomorrow at the Mission,’ she said.

He stopped, was drifting back.

She said, ‘You can’t give it to your family.’

His eyebrows shot up. It was a gift for him alone. He was pleased, she could tell by the way he leaned towards her.

‘You can’t sell it,’ she said. He looked outraged, as though even to be accused of an impure thought was to be belittled. He was already trying on the adult masks of representation. No-one has a proper childhood in this country, she thought.

‘I have a vision.’ She saw Betsoul, like a flash of black fire in her eye. Maybe she was doomed to repeat her mistakes. She said, ‘This gift will get you a job, do you hear me? You will support your family. Everyone will be proud of you.’ Pride, she thought. Useless in itself but still a recognised commodity in the walled city. ‘You can’t betray the vision,’ she said.

He nodded solemnly.

She could hear Laforche’s voice.
Unscrupulous
, he was saying. His tone admiring.

There were birds perched on the telegraph wires. Night like water, the colour of the octopus eye, was stepping off into more night down the hill. A yellow tongue rolled up into the dark air. A pause then another flare further on. In the flash of light she saw the shape beneath, the tilted head. The flame-eater was practising as he walked to the night market.

She thought there was a fountain nearby, in a small square. She needed the sound of running water.

She entered the next alley. Night corkscrewed away from her. It was that peculiar moment of absolute stillness when every person vanished from the street. Deserted. Desert-ed. She thought of the cities she had known, the times when they were revealed as nothing but flickering neon and empty streets. That was the real barren mind, not the desert with its secret life growing beneath the sand. The city was bound by its lines and walls. But the desert was able to be transformed, the way Saint Antony built his community; the way a poet built a poem from the desert of the empty page. Conviction and faith transforming desolation, turning it into mystery and revelation. The barren wasteland inside the mind becomes a sacred place, she thought, the way that Saint John of the Cross transformed his own small cell into a marvellous garden of hope and optimism. She heard Betsoul laugh, a hard jeering sound, as she laid the scarf over the horns of the goat and raised her knife. You are deluded, she heard Betsoul say.

She walked through the falling cloak of night. At times, she wasn’t sure if she was walking through the city or she was back in the desert. She thought – or was she reciting the words of the poet in the desert? –
It was a dream at times
.

I didn’t know who I was. I heard His voice – I sang to myself – I recited poetry – I shouted into the wilderness – the sound echoed off the rocks. She was inside the cave yet the sky pressed down on her. There was nothing beneath her yet the stars in the map on the ground glowed fiery in their splendour. She was alone and not alone. A figure was ahead of her in the darkness, guiding her. But she knew that, in the end, the guide must be replaced by the follower.