Tangier (49 page)

For a while Hamid stared at him, then finally he spoke. "You think I'm shocked by what you've said? Believe me—I'm not. I'm only amazed by your arrogance. And your righteous certainty, which makes me sick."

Achar laughed. "Well, Hamid—perhaps you're right. I try not to be arrogant, at least not in the Dr. Schweitzer sense. But yes, I am certain that I'm right. How else can I sustain myself? However, let's lower the level of abstraction. I know that politics isn't your game. So let's talk about you. Let's see where you fit in."

"I don't fit into any of this."

"Maybe, but don't be too sure. I said you were observed by my friends during the burning of Peter's shop. You're well known in Dradeb. You're from our quarter. Most of the people here know you're an inspector of police. All right, there you were, standing up there on that ledge with a revolver in your hand. You were threatening the people down on the bridge, making it quite clear you didn't like what they were doing and were going to shoot them if they didn't stop. Well, they did stop. There was a little pause, the sort of moment that even a single man can use to turn a mob around. So, there you were, prepared to shoot, but then you lowered your gun, and suddenly they felt released. Yes, Hamid! That's what your action meant to them. It was a signal. It told them you wouldn't shoot. You, a policeman, releasing them to go on, an even more powerful trigger than the one on your gun."

"What are you talking about? They'd burned the shop! Peter was already dead!"

"Yes! And a few of them were already on the Mountain. But not the mob that ran up there later on."

"You're crazy!"

"Why didn't you shoot them, then?"

"I don't know. I couldn't do it. I don't have the heart for things like that."

"Ah! There you are! You didn't have the heart. It was your duty to do what you could to protect the Mountain. When you chose not to do your duty, you showed your heart was with the mob."

"Well, Mohammed, it isn't as clear as that. You're simplifying everything, trying to catch me in a trap."

"It is simple, Hamid. The people on that bridge were quite certain what they saw. At that moment you were the regime. You held a gun on them, and when you lowered it you announced that you stood with them."

"I don't think so."

"Well, I do. By the way, I hope this doesn't land you in trouble. It shouldn't if you brazen it out when you're called up to explain."

"You're crazy, making me out as a collaborator. Anyone who knows me knows I could never be that."

"All right, Hamid. Have it that way if you like. But think about it just the same. Maybe you'll change your mind."

Hamid glared at him. He was angry now. "What do you want from me?" he asked. "What are you trying to do?"

"There's no trap, Hamid, but I do want something. I want you. You could be such a help. Listen—there's a new era ahead, a new Morocco, a new society to be forged. You could have a place in it, play an important role. It isn't enough merely to understand the rage. One must feel it, and I know you do. I've seen you change over the last few months. I've seen you grow impatient with your work. Forget the foreigners. The logic is with us. I need you, Hamid. I want you to join me in this thing."

L
ate that afternoon he and Kalinka stood alone in a corner of the European cemetery at Bourbana watching four Moroccan gravediggers lower the body of Peter Zvegintzov into the ground. Hamid had bought the coffin; Kalinka had commissioned a little granite marker on Hassan II. The text was simple and written in French: "Peter Zvegintzov, entrepreneur," it said, and then the date of his birth in Hanoi, and of his death in Tangier.

"Poor Peter," Kalinka said when the grave was finally covered. "He had no friends here. No one at all."

"Still he'll be missed," said Hamid. "He once told me that the Europeans on the Mountain couldn't survive here without his help. He was a cushion, he said, between us and them. Perhaps now they'll find it a harder town."

"But still," she said, "they never liked him. He was not a sympathetic man."

He glanced at her—they were walking between long narrow rows of graves. Peter had been her last connection with the past, but now to Hamid she seemed strong, perhaps stronger than she'd ever been.

"They had a service for Luscombe at the British church," he said. " 'A good turnout,' as the British say. The new vicar, they tell me, speaks very well. As for the Freys—no one has come to claim them yet. I suppose we'll have to bury them at government expense."

They walked on in silence, down the long rows where Europeans who had lived in Tangier were laid to rest. The cemetery was crowded; there was little room left in it now. Perhaps, he thought, this was a sign that the European presence was nearly at its end.

"I keep asking myself," he said, starting up the car, "why I didn't shoot at those people, the real reason I lowered my gun. Achar says I was with them, but I'm not sure he's correct. It was just impossible for me to do it, even though I was furious. Watching Peter die—it was too terrible. I didn't care then about property or law."

She gazed at him, and he saw admiration in her eyes. "You're gentle, Hamid, just and humane. You did what you did because of who you are."

He drove to Ramon y Cahal, accompanied her to the flat. Then while she prepared their dinner he stared out across his terrace at Dradeb and the Mountain beyond.

Achar was right, he thought. I've wasted my life on foreigners. It's no longer important that I understand them. Now I must understand myself.

There came to him then the revelation that what had happened on the Mountain and his own role in it were things that would forever change his life. In that moment when he had stood there, faced with lawlessness and disorder beyond his wildest dreams, he had discovered something important about himself and the sort of man he might become.

He didn't speak much at dinner, instead listened to Kalinka talk of Peter and her memories of him years before.

"Hanoi was beautiful in the spring," she said, "the blossoms on the fruit trees, the laughter on the streets. On Sundays Peter took me for walks around the Petit Lac. Sometimes we'd enter the little Buddhist shrine on the island to take refuge from the rains. We'd stand in there, he'd hold my hand, we'd look at people running from the storm, turn to each other and smile."

She smiled then herself, as Hamid met her eyes—the sad smile that he loved. In that smile was her refusal to ask for pity, her commitment to survive, whatever the shocks that touched her life.

"Oh, Hamid," she said suddenly, "you must go and help Achar. You must keep your job with the police, of course, but you must help him too—you must. He needs you, your qualities, your sense of justice. He's too cold, and he knows it. He needs a warm man beside him like yourself."

Yes, she was right, he knew, and her clarity amazed him—that she, once so confused, so befuddled, now saw things more clearly than himself. She'd said his vision of Tangier had been too narrow, and then she had helped him to see the city in a different way. Was it the example of her mother, he wondered, that extraordinary woman who'd fought so hard for what she thought was right, or was it simply an innate sense Kalinka had of the inequities of the world? He wasn't sure, but knew one thing: that it was her intuitive sense of life, and not the logic of Achar, that now made him want to change.

Yes, somehow she had come to understand the city, had grasped its needs and mood, and now she understood him too, he felt, and the role that he should play. That was what was so marvelous about her—her mysterious grasp of things—and why her presence, no matter how quiet, had always been so good.

He looked up, saw that she was watching him.

"Hamid, I need you too." She smiled and very gently nodded her head.

He knew then what she was going to say, and he wanted to say it first. He took her hand. "What do you think, Kalinka—a traditional Moroccan wedding, with lots of dancing and beating drums all night?"

They made love.

Later, falling asleep, wrapped in her arms, he felt serene at last. His tensions unwound, and with them his old conception of Tangier. He began to dream his way through the city's labyrinth, seeking a way out of its trap, its maze. He wanted to soar about the town, look down upon it, understand it as a place where he could act, no longer as a mere observer but as a player in the struggle he knew must come.

Early one afternoon in late October the American writer Martin Townes arranged his packed suitcases near the entrance to his villa and climbed up to his roof. Here he sat for hours in the glass-walled studio he'd constructed years before, looking down upon the city which he would leave before the sun was due to set. Tangier shimmered as it always had, but there was a different aura about it. Armed men with close-cropped hair, dark desert men with cruel eyes, were patrolling everywhere in pairs.

Townes had sold his villa. Many others had done the same. Rich Moroccans from the south, Casablanca and Rabat, were taking advantage of the Europeans' fear and buying up the Mountain for a song. Townes didn't envy them, these wealthy Arabs, these new lords of the hill. He knew that when the next rampage took place they'd be the object of Dradeb's wrath.

Townes, like most of the European community, had used Tangier as a shelter from the storm. Often, sitting in his tower, looking across the city at the rising sun, he'd felt that he was cheating his way out of a fair share of the world's misery and pain. But now everything was changed. The refuge had collapsed. The city had been revealed, and now he felt shaken out of voyeurism and ennui.

Yet even though he was leaving Tangier, Martin Townes knew he would never escape the city's spell. He'd decided to write a novel about Tangier and some things he'd imagined there, and though he knew there would be those who would say his characters and scenes were based on real people and events, this would not be true. Everything in his novel, he'd decided, would take place only in his mind. He would attempt nothing more than to chronicle the fantasy which he dreamed while staring down upon Tangier that final afternoon.

TANGIER
: Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER:

Q
. You lived in Tangier?

A
.
Yes, from 1972-1977. Great years! Paula Wolfert and I decided to go there, rent a house for a year, work on our respective writing projects (my novel,
Visions Of Isabelle
, based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, and Paula's cookbook
Couscous & Other Good Food From Morocco
) then move on to some other equally exotic and inexpensive Mediterranean locale. But because we liked living there and Tangier real estate was undervalued, we started to look around for a good property and ended up buying a house on what they call “La Nouvelle Montagne” overlooking the city and the Rif Mountains beyond. So we ended up staying six years.

Q
. Was the expatriate colony there as decadent as depicted in the novel?

A.
It was. And, from what I hear, although the cast of characters has changed, there is still considerable decadence in the expat crowd, though at a far lower level of intensity.

Q.
Did you know Paul Bowles?

A.
We knew him well, visited him regularly, entertained him many times at our house. He was quite the gentleman, always well-dressed, always polite, not the hippy character a lot of people imagine. But I think it's safe to say that he was mildly stoned most every afternoon.

Q.
Did he read
Tangier
?

A. It was published after Paula and I left the city so I was never able to discuss it with him, but I was pleased to hear that he did read it and thought quite highly of it too. In fact, his only objection, from what I was told, was that he felt my fictional characters were too close to the original models.

Q.
Were they?

A.
Some were, some were totally made up. The Peter Zvegintsov character, for instance: there was a Russian guy who ran a little shop that catered to the foreign colony. Some folks thought he might be a Russian agent. I took his nationality and situation and made up an elaborate back-story that had nothing to do with him. If I were writing the book today, I'd probably turn him into a Hungarian who ran an upholstery shop. Of course none of this would matter if I'd set out to write a roman a clef...and there's certainly a long and mostly honorable tradition for that. But that wasn't my intention. I wanted to write a serious expatriate novel, and so in cases where my characters are too close to their models I have to agree with Paul that that's probably a flaw.

Q.
I'd imagine some of the folks on whom the characters were based were pretty annoyed?

A.
Some were. I heard there were several dinner parties at which people heatedly discussed my book. They felt I'd betrayed them. The model for the Peter Barclay character even composed a letter to me in which he accused me of betrayal: “We invited you into our homes, and this is how you repay us!” That sort of thing. I believe his friends persuaded him not to send it. But you see, we weren't really very close to those people, and, anyway, fiction writers use what they know and observe. As Truman Capote put it in another context: “They knew I was a writer. What did they expect I was doing with them all those years?” In fact, the decadent expat crowd could never quite figure us out. We weren't gay, we didn't smoke kif, we arrived with two young kids and led a normal family life, working hard all day on our writing and going to bed fairly early. Many of them, on the other hand, mostly lounged around and gossiped, were obsessed with the interior decoration of their villas and their pursuit of Moroccan boys and/or each other, and in the evening entertained at dinner parties at which they exchanged what they thought were brilliant ripostes. So far as I was concerned, their ridiculous and sometimes mean antics made for excellent literary fuel. My main character, Moroccan police inspector Hamid Ouazzani, studies them much the way I did.