The Sheltering Sky (23 page)

“Against the vermin,” he explained, pointing at the hen.

“Vermin?” echoed Kit.

“If a scorpion shows its head anywhere along the floor—
tac!
She eats it!”

“Ah!” She fabricated a yawn.

“I know madame is nervous. With our friend here she will feel better.”

“This evening,” she said, “I am so sleepy that nothing could make me nervous.”

They shook hands solemnly, Daoud Zozeph pushed his wife out of the room and shut the door. The hen scratched a minute in the dust, then scrambled up onto the rung of the washstand and remained motionless. Kit sat on the bed looking into the uneven flame of the lamp; the room was full of its smoke. She felt no anxiety—only an overwhelming impatience to put all this ludicrous décor behind her, out of her consciousness. Rising, she stood with her ear against the door. She heard the sound of voices, now and then a distant thud. She put on her coat, filled the pockets with pieces of bread, and sat down again to wait.

From time to time she sighed deeply. Once she got up to turn down the wick of the lamp. When her watch said ten o’clock, she went again to the door and listened. She opened it: the court glowed with reflected moonlight. Stepping back inside, she picked up Tunner’s burnous and flung it under the bed. The resultant swirl of dust almost made her sneeze. She took her handbag and the valise and went out, taking care to shut the door after her. On her way through the inner room of the shop she stumbled over something and nearly lost her balance. Going more slowly, she moved ahead into the shop, around the end of the counter, feeling lightly along its top with the fingers of her left hand as she went. The door had a simple bolt which she drew back with difficulty; eventually it made a heavy metallic noise. Quickly she swung the door open and went out.

The light of the moon was violent-walking along the white street in it was like being in the sunlight. “Anyone could see me.” But there was no one. She walked straight to the edge of town, where the oasis straggled over into the courtyards of the houses. Below, in the wide black mass formed by the tops of the palms, the drums were still going. The sound came from the direction of the ksar, the Negro village in the middle of the oasis.

She turned into a long, straight alley bordered by high walls. On the other side of them the palms rustled and the running water gurgled. Occasionally there was a white pile of dried palm branches stacked against the wall; each time she thought it was a man sitting in the moonlight. The alley swerved toward the sound of the drums, and she came out upon a square, full of little channels and aqueducts running paradoxically in all directions; it looked like a very complex toy railway. Several walks led off into the oasis from here. She chose the narrowest, which she thought might skirt the ksar rather than lead to it, and went on ahead between the walls. The path turned this way and that.

The sound of the drums was louder: now she could hear voices repeating a rhythmical refrain, always the same. They were men’s voices, and there seemed to be a great many of them. Sometimes, when she reached the heavy shadows, she stopped and listened, an inscrutable smile on her lips.

The little bag was growing heavy. More and more frequently she shifted it from one hand to the other. But she did not want to stop and rest. At each instant she was ready to turn around and go back to look for another alley, in case she should come out all at once from between the walls into the middle of the ksar. The music seemed quite nearby at times, but it was hard to tell with all the twisting walls and trees in between. Occasionally it sounded almost at hand, as if only a wall and a few hundred feet of garden separated her from it, and then it retreated into the distance and was nearly covered by the dry sound of the wind blowing through the palm leaves.

And the liquid sound of the rivulets on all sides had their effect without her knowing it: she suddenly felt dry. The cool moonlight and the softly moving shadows through which she passed did much to dispel the sensation, but it seemed to her that she would be completely content only if she could have water all around her. All at once she was looking through a wide break in the wall into a garden; the graceful palm trunks rose high into the air from the sides of a wide pool. She stood staring at the calm dark surface of water; straightway she found it impossible to know whether she had thought of bathing just before or just after seeing the pool. Whichever it was, there was the pool. She reached through the aperture in the crumbling wall and set down her bag before climbing across the pile of dirt that lay in her way. Once in the garden she found herself pulling off her clothes. She felt a vague surprise that her actions should go on so far ahead of her consciousness of them. Every movement she made seemed the perfect expression of lightness and grace. “Look out,” said a part of her, “Go carefully.” But it was the same part of her that sent out the warning when she was drinking too much. At this point it was meaningless. “Habit,” she thought. “Whenever I’m about to be happy I hang on instead of letting go.” She kicked off her sandals and stood naked in the shadows. She felt a strange intensity being born within her. As she looked about the quiet garden she had the impression that for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it. The dignity that came from feeling a part of its power and grandeur, that was a familiar sensation, but it was years ago that she had last known it. She stepped out into the moonlight and waded slowly toward the center of the pool. Its floor was slippery with clay; in the middle the water came to her waist. As she immersed herself completely, the thought came to her: “I shall never be hysterical again.” That kind of tension, that degree of caring about herself, she felt she would never attain them any more in her life.

She bathed lengthily; the cool water on her skin awakened an impulse to sing. Each time she bent to get water between her cupped palms she uttered a burst of wordless song. Suddenly she stopped and listened. She no longer heard the drums—only the drops of water falling from her body into the pool. She finished her bath in silence, her excess of high spirits gone; but life did not recede from her. “It’s here to stay,” she murmured aloud, as she walked toward the bank. She used her coat as a towel, hopping up and down with cold as she dried herself. While she dressed she whistled under her breath. Every so often she stopped and listened for a second, to see if she could hear the sound of voices, or the drums starting up again. The wind came by, up there above her head, in the tops of the trees, and there was the faint trickle of water somewhere nearby. Nothing more. All at once she was seized with the suspicion that something had happened behind her back, that time had played a trick on her: she had spent hours in the pool instead of minutes, and never realized it. The festivities in the ksar had come to an end, the people had dispersed, and she had not even been conscious of the cessation of the drums. Absurd things like that did happen, sometimes. She bent to take her wrist watch from the stone where she had laid it. It was not there; she could not verify the hour. She searched a bit, already convinced that she would never find it: its disappearance was a part of the trick. She walked lightly over to the wall and picked up her valise, flung her coat over her arm, and said aloud to the garden: “You think it matters to me?” And she laughed before climbing back across the broken wall.

Swiftly she walked along, focusing her mind on that feeling of solid delight she had recaptured. She had always known it was there, just behind things, but long ago she had accepted not having it as a natural condition of life. Because she had found it again, the joy of being, she said to herself that she would hang on to it no matter what the effort entailed. She pulled a piece of bread from the pocket of her coat and ate it voraciously.

The alley grew wide, its wall receding to follow the line of vegetation. She had reached the oued, at this point a flat open valley dotted with small dunes. Here and there a weeping tamarisk tree lay like a mass of gray smoke along the sand. Without hesitating she made for the nearest tree and set her bag down. The feathery branches swept the sand on all sides of the trunk—it was like a tent. She put on her coat, crawled in, and pulled the valise in after her. In no time at all she was asleep.

Lieutenant d’Armagnac stood in his garden supervising Ahmed and several native masons in the work of topping the high enclosing wall with a crown of broken glass. A hundred times his wife had suggested this added protection for their dwelling, and he like a good colonial had promised but not performed; now that she was returning from France he would have it ready for her as one more pleasant surprise. Everything was going well: the baby was healthy, Mme. d’Armagnac was happy, and he would go up to Algiers at the end of the month to meet them. At the same time they would spend a happy few days in some good little hotel there—a sort of second honeymoon—before returning to Bou Noura.

It was true that things were going well only in his own little cosmos; he pitied Captain Broussard down in Sba and thought with an inward shudder that but for the grace of God all that trouble would have fallen upon him. He had even urged the travelers to stay on in Bou Noura; at least he was able to feel blameless on that score. He had not known the American was ill, so that it was not his fault the man had gone on and died in Broussard’s territory. But of course death from typhoid was one thing and the disappearance of a white woman into the desert was another; it was the latter which was making all the trouble. The terrain around Sba was not favorable to the success of searching parties conducted in jeeps; besides, there were only two such vehicles in the region, and the expeditions had not been inaugurated immediately because of the more pressing business of the dead American at the fort. And everyone had imagined that she would be found somewhere in the town. He regretted not having met the wife. She sounded amusing—a typical, high-spirited American girl. Only an American could do anything so unheard—of as to lock her sick husband into a room and run off into the desert, leaving him behind to die alone. It was inexcusable, of course, but he could not be really horrified at the idea, as it seemed Broussard was. But Broussard was a puritan. He was easily scandalized, and unpleasantly irreproachable in his own behavior. He had probably hated the girl because she was attractive and had disturbed his poise; that would be difficult for Broussard to forgive.

He wished again that he could have seen the girl before she had so successfully vanished from the face of the earth. At the same time he felt mixed emotions regarding the recent return of the third American to Bou Noura: he liked the man personally, but he hoped to avoid involvement in the affair, he wanted no part of it. Above all he prayed that the wife would not turn up in his territory, now that she was practically a cause célèbre. There was the likelihood that she, too, would be ill, and the curiosity he felt to see her was outweighed by the dreaded prospect of complications in his work and reports to be made out.
“Pourvu qu’ils la trouvent là-bas!”
he thought ardently.

There was a knock at the gate. Ahmed swung it open. The American stood there; he came each day in the hope of getting news, and each day he looked more despondent at hearing that none had been received. “I knew the other one was having trouble with his wife, and this was the trouble,” said the lieutenant to himself when he glanced up and saw Tunner’s unhappy face.

“Bonjour, monsieur,”
he said jovially, advancing upon his guest. “Same news as always. But that can’t continue forever.”

Tunner greeted him, nodding his head understandingly on hearing what he had expected to hear. The lieutenant allowed the intervention of a silence proper to the occasion, then he suggested that they repair to the salon for their usual cognac. In the short while he had been waiting here at Bou Noura, Tunner had come to rely on these morning visits to the lieutenant’s house as a necessary stimulus for his morale. The lieutenant was sanguine by nature, his conversation was light and his choice of words such that he was easily understandable. It was agreeable to sit in the bright salon, and the cognac fused these elements into a pleasant experience whose regular recurrence prevented his spirits from sinking all the way into the well of despair.

His host called to Ahmed, and led the way into the house. They sat facing each other.

“Two weeks more and I shall be a married man again,” said the lieutenant, beaming at him, and thinking that perhaps he might yet show the Ouled Naïl girls to an American.

“Very good, very good.” Tunner was distraught. God help poor Madame d’Armagnac, he thought gloomily, if she had to spend the rest of her life here. Since Port’s death and Kit’s disappearance he hated the desert: in an obscure fashion he felt that it had deprived him of his friends. It was too powerful an entity not to lend itself to personification. The desert—its very silence was like a tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored. (Captain Broussard had told him, one night when he was in a talkative mood, that even the Frenchmen who accompanied the peloton into the wilderness there managed to see djnoun, even though out of pride they refused to believe in them.) And what did this mean, save that such things were the imagination’s simple way of interpreting that presence?

Ahmed brought in the bottle and the glasses. They drank for a moment in silence; then the lieutenant remarked, as much to break the silence as for any other reason: “Ah, yes. Life is amazing. Nothing ever happens the way one imagines it is going to. One realizes that most clearly here; all your philosophic systems crumble. At every turn one finds the unexpected. When your friend came here without his passport and accused poor Abdelkader, who ever would have thought that this short time later such a thing would have happened to him?” Then, thinking that his sequence of logic might be misinterpreted, he added: “Abdelkader was very sorry to hear of his death. He bore him no grudge, you know.”

Tunner seemed not to be listening. The lieutenant’s mind ambled off in another direction. “Tell me,” he said, curiosity coloring his voice, “did you ever manage to convince Captain Broussard that his suspicions about the lady were unfounded? Or does he still think they were not married? In his letter to me he said some very unkind things about her. You showed him Monsieur Moresby’s passport?”

“What?” said Tunner, knowing he was going to have trouble with his French. “Oh, yes. I gave it to him to send to the Consul in Algiers with his report. But he never believed they were married, because Mrs. Moresby promised to give him her passport, and in place of that, ran away. So he had no idea who she really was.”

“But they were husband and wife,” pursued the lieutenant softly.

“Of course. Of course,” said Tunner with impatience, feeling that for him even to engage in such a conversation was disloyal.

“And even if they had not been, what difference?” He poured them each another drink, and seeing that his guest was disinclined to continue that conversation, he went on to another which might be less painful in its associations. Tunner, however, followed the new one with almost as little enthusiasm. At the back of his mind he kept reliving the day of the burial in Sba. Port’s death had been the only truly unacceptable fact in his life. Even now he knew that he had lost a great deal, that Port really had been his closest friend (how had he failed to recognize that before?), but he felt that it would be only later, when he had come to the full acceptance of the fact of his death, that he would be able to begin reckoning his loss in detail.

Tunner was sentimental, and in accordance with this trait, his conscience troubled him for not having offered more vigorous opposition to Captain Broussard’s insistence upon a certain amount of religious ceremony during the burial. He had the feeling that he had been cowardly about it; he was certain that Port would have despised the inclusion of such nonsense on that occasion and would have relied upon his friend to see that it was not carried through. To be sure, he had protested beforehand that Port was not a Catholic—was not even, strictly speaking, a Christian, and consequently had the right to be spared such goings-on at his own funeral. But Captain Broussard had replied with heat: “I have only your word for all this, monsieur. And you were not with him when he died. You have no idea what his last thoughts were, what his final wishes may have been. Even if you were willing to take upon yourself such an enormous responsibility as to pretend to know such a thing, I could not let you do it. I am a Catholic, monsieur, and I am also in command here.” And Tunner had given in. So that instead of being buried anonymously and in silence out on the hammada or in the ereg, where surely he would have wished to be put, Port had been laid to rest officially in the tiny Christian cemetery behind the fort, while phrases in Latin were spoken. To Tunner’s sentimental mind it had seemed grossly unfair, but he had seen no way of preventing it. Now he felt that he had been weak and somehow unfaithful. At night when he lay awake thinking about it, it had even occurred to him that he might go all the way back to Sba and, waiting for the right moment, break into the cemetery and destroy the absurd little cross they had put over the grave. It was the sort of gesture which would have made him happier, but he knew he never would make it.

Instead, he told himself, he would be practical, and the important thing now was to find Kit and get her back to New York. In the beginning he had felt that in some way the whole business of her vanishing was a nightmarish practical joke, that at the end of a week or so she would surely have reappeared, just as she had on the train ride to Boussif. And so he had determined to wait until she did. Now that time had elapsed and there was still no sign of her, he understood that he would wait much longer—indefinitely if necessary.

He put his glass on the coffee table beside him. Giving voice to his thoughts, he said: “I’m going to stay here until Mrs. Moresby is found.” And he asked himself why he was being so stubborn about it, why Kit’s return obsessed him so utterly. Assuredly he was not in love with the poor girl. His overtures to her had been made out of pity (because she was a woman) and out of vanity (because he was a man), and the two feelings together had awakened the acquisitive desire of the trophy collector, nothing more. In fact, at this point, he realized that unless he thought carefully he was inclined to pass over the entire episode of intimacy between them, and to consider Kit purely in terms of their first meeting, when she and Port had impressed him so deeply as being the two people in the world he had wanted to know. It was less of a strain on his conscience that way; for more than once he had asked himself what had happened that crazy day at Sba when she had refused to open the door of the sick chamber, and whether or not she had told Port of her infidelity. Fervently he hoped not; he did not want to think of it.

“Yes,” said Lieutenant d’Armagnac. “You can’t very well go back to New York and have all your friends ask: ‘What have you done with Mrs. Moresby?’ That would be very embarrassing.”

Inwardly Tunner winced. He definitely could not. Those who knew the two families might already be asking it of each other (since he had sent Port’s mother both items of unfortunate news in two cables separated in time by three days, in the hope that Kit would turn up), but they were there and he was here, and he did not have to face them when they said: “So both Port and Kit are gone!” It was the sort of thing that never did, couldn’t, happen, and if he remained here in Bou Noura long enough he knew she would be unearthed.

“Very embarrassing,” he agreed, laughing uncomfortably. Even Port’s death by itself would be difficult enough to account for. There would be those who would say: “For God’s sake, couldn’t you have gotten him into a plane and up to a hospital somewhere, at least as far as Algiers? Typhoid’s not that quick, you know.” And he would have to admit that he had left them and gone off by himself, that he hadn’t been able to “take” the desert. Still, he could envisage all that without too much misery; Port had neglected to be immunized against any sort of disease before leaving. But to go back leaving Kit lost was unthinkable from every point of view.

“Of course,” ventured the lieutenant, again remembering the possible complications should the lost American lady turn up in anything but perfect condition, and then be moved to Bou Noura because of Tunner’s presence there, “your staying or not staying will have nothing to do with her being found.” He felt ashamed as soon as he heard the words come out of his mouth, but it was too late; they had been spoken.

“I know, I know,” said Tunner vehemently. “But I’m going to stay.” There was no more to be said about it; Lieutenant d’Armagnac would not raise the question again.

They talked on a little while. The lieutenant brought up the possibility of a visit some evening to the quartier reserve. “One of these days,” said Tunner dispassionately.

“You need a little relaxation. Too much brooding is bad, I know just the girl—” He stopped, remembering from experience that explicit suggestions of that nature generally destroy the very interest they are meant to arouse. No hunter wants his prey chosen and run to earth for him, even if it means the only assurance of a kill.

“Good. Good,” said Tunner absently.

Soon he rose and took his leave. He would return tomorrow morning and the next, and every morning after that, until one day Lieutenant D’Armagnac would meet him at the door with a new light in his eyes, and say to him:
“Enfin, mon ami!
Good news at last!”

In the garden he looked down at the bare, baked earth. The huge red ants were rushing along the ground waving their front legs and mandibles belligerently in the air. Ahmed shut the gate behind him, and he walked moodily back to the pension.

He would have his lunch in the hot little dining room next to the kitchen, making the meal more digestible by drinking a whole bottle of vin rose. Then stupefied by the wine and the heat he would go upstairs to his room, undress, and throw himself on his bed, to sleep until the sun’s rays were more oblique and the countryside had lost some of the poisonous light that came out of its stones that midday. Walks to towns round about were pleasant: there were bright Igherm on the hill, the larger community of Beni Isguen down the valley, Tadjmout with its terraced pink and blue houses, and there was always the vast palmeraie where the town dwellers had built their toy-like country palaces of red mud and pale palm thatch, where the creak of the wells was constant, and the sound of the water gurgling in the narrow aqueducts belied the awful dryness of the earth and air. Sometimes he would merely walk to the great market place in Bou Noura itself, and sit along the side under the arcades, following the progress of some interminable purchase; both buyer and seller employed every histrionic device short of actual tears, in their struggle to lower and raise the price. There were days when he felt contempt for these absurd people; they were unreal, not to be counted seriously among the earth’s inhabitants. These were the same days he was so infuriated by the soft hands of the little children when they unconsciously clutched at his clothing and pushed against him in a street full of people. At first he had thought they were pickpockets, and then he had realized they were merely using him for leverage to propel themselves along more quickly in the crowd, as if he had been a tree or a wall. He was even more annoyed then, and pushed them away violently; there was not one among them who was free of scrofula, and most were completely bald, their dark skulls covered with a crust of sores and an outer layer of flies.