Tangier (13 page)

"Oh, no! He's harmless. Please, Hamid. It doesn't mean anything. You mustn't hurt him. Please."

"But it's not right. He can't follow you—"

"He loves me, Hamid. There's no crime—I don't see any crime in that."

No crime
. Why couldn't she understand, why couldn't she see that it was intolerable for him that the man people thought was her husband now openly followed her on the street?

Love!
he thought—
he has no right to love her anymore
. But then he stopped himself, contained his fury. He would not burden her. He would settle this himself.

So now he was waiting outside the shop for the second time in ten days—the second time in all the months since he and Kalinka had fallen in love and he had brought her here and waited for her to fetch her clothes—and he wondered:
What can I say to him except to warn him that he must never follow her again? What can I say beyond that, since I know nothing of what went on between them all those years?

For months now, he realized, he'd been resisting his policeman's instincts. The memory of the previous winter, the intense, unspoken way they'd fallen in love, the way they'd discovered their love for one another amidst the chaos of Tangier—he'd treasured that time so much he'd been afraid to tarnish it by exploring what had gone on with her before. And then, after she'd moved in, he didn't want to disrupt the quiet of their lives, the special calm with which she surrounded him, the vagueness which was as much a part of her as the aroma of hashish that forever filled their fiat.
Better,
he'd thought,
not to disturb this calm. Kalinka is my refuge. In her stillness I have an oasis in Tangier.

But there was more than this stillness that he savored and feared to disrupt. There was her passion too, which burst out unpredictably, causing her to grasp him, crush her body against his. And, too, there were those times when they loved each other subtly, when she seemed to be still and yet moved, caressing him, drawing him in, extending their lovemaking for hours until he became lost in her body, her embrace. At those times she drew him into a world which he explored in an intoxicated state, a dazed sensuality in which he reveled, her strange world of subtlety and dreams.

And yet, more and more often lately, he'd asked himself how long this magic of theirs could last. It worried him, for he could see no end to her dreaminess, could find no fixed points by which he could relate her to Tangier. And he knew too that the disconnection between their love and his public life must, somehow, be resolved.

He'd begun to ask her questions, but the more he asked, sensitive to her resistance, her unwillingness to talk and to reveal, the more he found himself disturbed by her refusal to respond with facts. She would turn away, busy herself with sketching or cooking or housework, rearrange flowers in a bowl, water the plants she was growing on the balcony, fold laundry, or else take his hand, bring it to her lips, stare back at him with her large, glazed eyes, smiling as if to tell him that she did not want to doubt his love, and then shake her head and dismiss his query from her mind.

What could he do in the face of that? He was not a man accustomed to being evaded. Could there be something terrible hidden behind her smile, something criminal, some awful crime? He knew so little about her, had such a sketchy notion of her life. He knew only that she'd been born in Hanoi and orphaned at a young age, and that Peter Zvegintzov had adopted her, taken her to Poland to escape some cataclysm of Asian politics, and then finally to Tangier where he'd imposed the pretense that she act as if she were his wife.

She was adamant on one point: that she and Peter had never been married; that Peter had never touched her as a man might touch a wife. And yet, despite her assurances, the thought of Zvegintzov living with her so many years, in some strange relationship he could neither define nor understand, preyed upon Hamid. The thought of this obsequious man, this second-rate tattered little man with his vague past and his frayed cuffs and his formless, odorous suits, whose face announced to the world that he was ready to be trampled upon and used, that this awful man had invented the pretense that he'd been a husband to Kalinka, had slept with her—he could hardly bear the thought. It was almost worse than if Peter's claim had been true, for there was no logic to it and something disgusting, something awful, that made his stomach turn. Now all his work at the S
û
ret
é
, his confrontations with smugglers and drunkards and men who'd come to Tangier to misbehave—all of that seemed meaningless in the face of the mystery of Peter and Kalinka and their past.

He thought about it all the time now, tried to recall details, hints from Kalinka, little things Zvegintzov might once have said. He realized, thinking back, that he'd never actually heard Peter say that Kalinka was his wife, not in all the years he had frequented the shop, seen Kalinka there, hardly noticed her, thought of her as a fixture or a pet. Yet everyone in Tangier knew that they were married—it was something that had always been assumed. And then there had come that strange night the previous January when the hailstones had rained down upon a cold and damp Tangier, that night when Zvegintzov had come to his flat on Rue Dante with a riding crop hidden in his sleeve and said: "My wife tells me she's leaving. I am the husband. I have certain rights." It was only then, that one time, that Hamid had actually heard Zvegintzov make the claim. And the next day, when Hamid met her at Farid's shop, when they'd kissed and touched and held each other for the first time—that day she'd looked steadily into his eyes, told him that she loved him, and swore to him she had never been married to Zvegintzov, had never been his wife.

He'd accepted that—another mystery, he'd thought—and yet he knew now he would never have accepted such a statement from any person he suspected of a crime. He would have probed the claim, asked questions, cross-examined, insisted on dates and facts. But after she moved in with him it didn't seem to matter—though, if he were to marry her, it would matter very much.

But now he wondered, waiting outside Zvegintzov's shop, trying to formulate what he would say to him, the cold words which must not reveal the heat of his fury, the warning which would leave no doubt in Peter's mind that he must never follow her again. Yes, now he wondered: Who was she? What mystery lay behind her smile? What strange childhood had she had? Why had Zvegintzov brought her to Tangier?

Her passport told him so little, her old Polish passport, listing the name of her mother, someone called Pham Thi Nha, her father "unknown," and the fact that she'd been born in Hanoi in November 1943. Were there other documents? Adoption papers? Certificates from schools? When he'd asked her she'd shaken her head, perhaps to say she didn't know, or that Peter had them and would never give them up.

Now he would have to find out, no matter how great the risk. If she could not give information like other people, if she was able to communicate with him only by signs and gestures and nods and looks, then he would have to learn to decode these signals too. He thought about her then, the way she watered a plant and fried a fish, the way she undressed, cast aside her clothes, the way she smiled, turned when he called her, kissed him, or lay slightly curled on their bed waiting for him to come home with the late afternoon light, the intense blue light of a Tangier afternoon cutting through the blinds on their bedroom window, striping her body with diagonals, and her hashish pipe set on the bedside table, perfectly angled as if for a photograph in a book about the mysteries of the East—just the thought of her like that stabbed at him with love.

Yes, he loved her, adored her, could not imagine life without her now, and yet he could not help himself, could not hold himself back any longer, even at the risk of destroying this spell of hers, this sense of refuge by which she held him in such thrall.

He looked back into La Colombe. There still were customers inside and he could see Peter too, in silhouette, making those too hasty movements by which he brought requested merchandise to the counter, or used the long stick with the pincers at its end to extract large boxes from the shelves above his reach, and he thought:
I can't go in there now and threaten him, tell him not to follow Kalinha on the street. I'll become too angry, ask too many questions, appear too jealous, and lose my dignity as an inspector of police.

He shook his head then and started up his car. He would not go in, and he was amazed at himself for that—that he, Hamid Ouazzani, a chief of section at the Tangier Sûreté, so cool in his dealings with foreigners, so dignified, such a smooth practitioner of an inspector's manner, that he could not now find the words or the poise to deal with a man who, he knew, could only gape at him in fear.

Driving back toward his apartment through the main street of Dradeb, he thought of the words of Mohammed Achar when he'd come to him with his worries the afternoon before.

"I don't think I can help you, Hamid. I'm a surgeon—not a psychiatrist. But I think maybe this is good for you, to have something in your life you can't easily understand. You look for rationality in foreigners where only irrationality exists. What harm is there in just living with Kalinka, accepting her as she is? You must learn to live with mystery and ambiguity, put aside your compulsion to analyze. . . ."

Achar had brushed his thick fingers across his mustache and had smiled at Hamid. It was an old issue between them: Hamid's hope that he would someday come to understand the foreigners, and Achar's insistence that there was no logic to their acts. And it amused him to hear Achar promote the virtues of mystery and ambiguity, since he was a man who prided himself on the rigor of his analysis of justice and politics and power. Still, after their conversation, he'd asked himself:
Why can't I just accept her as she is?

He knew now why he could not. He loved her too much, wanted to marry her, and yet could not marry a woman he did not understand. It was his life's work to understand people, had been since he'd been a boy and become infatuated with the foreigners who owned and ruled Tangier—those rich men with the fine villas and automobiles whose women went about with uncovered faces and lay nearly naked on the beach. Boulevard Pasteur had been their street then—the medina belonged to the Moroccans, but the European city and the Mountain belonged to the people with the golden hair. They were the ones who bought the bodies of his friends, who'd corrupted Farid, the brother he loved but on whose behalf he'd felt such shame. (He had not been ashamed
of
Farid, but
for
him.) And when the time had come for him to decide what he would do, the old cherif who'd coached him so he could enter the Lycée Regnault had talked to him, after Achar had gone off to Cairo to study medicine, and suggested that since he was so interested in people's motives he take the examination for the police.

He'd liked the idea of that, especially when he foresaw the possibility of policing the foreigners of Tangier. Understanding them had become his work, and now, many years later, he was living with Kalinka, a foreigner, who contained all the mystery of all the foreigners he'd stared at and wondered about so long. He lived with her, but holding her in his arms, covering her with his body, kissing her and being kissed by her, loving her and being loved by her, he felt in her the mystery of all of them, close to him, closer than any foreigner had ever been to him, yet apart from him, illogical, incomprehensible—foreign.

It's because of that
, he thought, parking his car, walking into his building on Ramon y Cahal,
that I must finally understand who and what she is. For if I can unravel her, I shall come to understand them all, their whole world, which has baffled me and repelled me and attracted me so long. And then the mystery will be solved. I will be free of it. I will marry Kalinka. We will be happy. I will be a happy man.

He rode the elevator to his floor, stepped out, walked the corridor to the doorway of his flat. He paused outside, knowing that in a few seconds he would find her waiting for him, lying on the bed, the afternoon light painting her curled body, her pipe set at an angle on the table, a cloud of smoke above her head.

H
arsh insistent knocking woke Robin from his dream—of a boy flying a kite in a meadow, of dazzling sunlight catching his gray woolen shorts, causing them to glow like lustrous pewter.

"
Entrez
," he growled, semi-comatose. "Come in, whoever you are."

The form of a man appeared at the door. Robin recognized the catlike step. "Inspector Ouazzani. Come in. Come in." He brushed some newspapers off the stool by his bed.

The Inspector advanced through the gloom, then stopped. A moment later he was at the window throwing open the shutters.

"Christ, no, Hamid! You'll wake me up!"

"Can't stand the smell of hash."

He came then and sat down, his black leather jacket gleaming in the light.

"You don't usually call so early. I hope there's nothing wrong."

"There's always something wrong, Robin. You ought to know that." He put his feet up against the side of the bed. "This morning, fortunately, it doesn't have to do with you."

"Well, I'm glad of that." Robin sighed, then pulled up his naked body and arranged a decaying pillow behind his head.

"How can you live in such filth? The poorest Moroccan wouldn't put up with this."