Alexandra Singer (20 page)

She forced out her words through a tight throat, “I’m fine. I think I am going to get another drink.”

Beside Armand and Cassandra, she felt small, inadequate. She was no competition. When she looked at him, Maia was stricken. Until this point she had not realised the full extent of his
indifference to her. She tried to smile at them gently, with all the benevolence that she was able to summon. “Where have you two been?”

She was accusing him now, and Armand ignored her and joined in the conversation, while Cassandra left their company. She resented Armand for this ability to change her opinion of him from moment
to moment.

Irrevocably now, Maia was a participant in her own destruction. Armand did not want her, but still she wanted him. Any slight kindness that he showed her, she took as a sign that his feelings
might be changing. But Cassandra was invincible. The most attractive woman that Maia had ever met, Cassandra was able to slink in and out of clandestine involvements and freely participate in them
without ever being spoiled by them.

Cassandra surveyed Maia, but Maia met her straight in the eye. She was quite aware of her own magnetism; it was her lack of power that troubled her.

As the conversation developed, Maia stared about her abstractedly; at the curving bar and the guests milling around it, each struggling for the limelight amongst the pitiless clamour. She felt
thousands of miles away from London, from the clean lines and the neat rows, Sunday afternoons, rain and freshness, familiarity. Then there were her neatly folded clothes and the jackets packed
away at the back of her wardrobe in her flat, now rented out to a stranger who would be cooking in her kitchen, sleeping in her bed. She thought of the huge art galleries where she often spent
hours alone considering the different types of brushstrokes made by other artists. She had left it all behind, but she still had not found what she was searching for.

These men were overly concerned with her view of the city, and they all wanted to give her their own interpretation of it. They competed viciously with one another. The Historian wanted her to
see it as a city of ancient battlegrounds, of tribes, of historic references, a place between east and west where the desert caravans came to rest. Konstantin needed her to view the city as an
expatriate refuge, as if here she too could join him in hiding something. Armand, she could barely understand. He reminded her of the Tuareg warriors who emerge out of the desert draped in white
with only their kohl rimmed eyes left uncovered. His suit was his armour, yet he too was another European who came here to take advantage of what the city could offer him. Armand was simply
conducting himself with his customary arrogance.

Maia was suddenly tired of them all, and wished now to meet more Moroccan women, coy and aloof, not these men who were only interested in foisting their own opinions on her. These men wanted to
break her down, and diminish her. They were, all of them, caught fast in the Historian’s net, and all three of his disciples were irrevocably tangled.

She decided to try loneliness over subservience. The longer she spent here, the less anything surprised her.

“There are so many gay men here,” Maia said. “Yet the men harass women terribly. Perhaps if relations between the sexes were a little more liberal…”

The Historian laughed bitterly. This was a legendary gay destination in a place were homosexuality was illegal.

Maia scrutinised the Historian carefully. At first he seemed so sensitive, discerning. Now his change was like that of a chameleon that hides, shudders and crawls from the light. This evening,
the Historian was unusually talkative. When Maia complained about the incessant, unwanted attention she received from the men in the street, she was told to be grateful. She had never imagined he
might be so garrulous. As she watched him, she imagined that she was watching a strange transformation, that of a spider emerging from its chrysalis. A sudden irritation at his quick change of
character pricked at her.

Maia went outside into the street, and bumped straight into Cassandra again, who was just leaving. “He went to look for you. I have an early flight tomorrow. Well, goodbye. It has been
fun, hasn’t it?” Cassandra smiled, with a slight wave of her hand, where Maia noticed the faint, jagged trace of a tattoo.

“So much fun,” agreed Maia, almost snarling at her, but she managed to restrain herself and the taxi took Cassandra away.

Maia went back inside and there was Armand still at the table. The light appeared to fall only upon her companions, giving her the sensation of being pushed out further and alone. The beautiful
cut of their clothes hid all of their ugliness and the honest human traits, which would have made them up into real people. She longed for their masks to at last slip.

Occasionally Armand’s eyes caught hers across the room. He wanted to check that she was watching him. And as she looked at him, the strength of her venom, her hatred and her desperation
grew. Yet still she continued to smile, a smile that started to resemble more of a grimace.

Later, Maia was sitting alone at the bar when there was a terrible crash. She turned in the direction of the sound and she saw that the grotesque, leering Priapus, the chief piece of
Mahmoud’s garden furniture had fallen into the pool, along with de Farcas, who rose to the surface, spluttering. He had been sitting on it just a few moments earlier, and she covered her hand
with her mouth to hide her laughter.

“Isn’t that rather dangerous? Have you ever fallen in here?” de Farcas was shouting frantically at Mahmoud. The entire bar was amused, and de Farcas looked furious.

Mahmoud was nonplussed, he held out his hand to help de Farcas to his feet as he climbed out of the pool.

“Oh they are falling in all the time,” he said, and began on one of his incessant courses of laughter.

That night when she returned to the house, she painted the belly dancers as she recalled them before she forgot their fluidity. She painted them in swirls of white and bright energetic colours,
and their unlimited movement and flexibility reverberated across the canvas. For a few hours, as she stood alone and stared at the coloured surface she was creating, she revelled in the broad
canvas that stared back at her, the twisted tubes beside it, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared along the hands of her brushes and the turpentine stench filling the room. She thought that she
might once again learn the meaning of joy.

Maia woke early one morning to a dull ache that had plagued her for days. The fan whirred soullessly, and out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a small cockroach scurrying
along the cracks of the skirting board. She caught sight of her face in the mirror directly opposite her. Her eyes beneath the dark, almost purple grey lids, swollen from sleep stared back at
her.

Her sleep was fitful and erratic and her painting had reached another low point. Nothing came out as she intended. She painted with agitation. Every day, her incompetence screamed at her. She
worked herself into a trance, crying and swearing as she staggered in front of each canvas.

As the dust of the changing season came swirling up the streets, Maia seemed to have lost her ability to see in colour. The light eluded her, and the paintings were finished in shades of grey,
in tones of sepia and muddy browns, like an old photograph that for many years has been hidden away in a drawer. Maia had sought light and the bright sun for her art, but the Historian had brought
only darkness. The Historian’s austerity, his absolute control, drained her of all vibrancy and hope. Full only of apprehension for her future, she breathed the stifled air of oppression. In
her imagination, she approached the canvas aggressively and flung down the paint, using jagged brushed strokes of violent crimson to depict the sky. She dreamt in colour, in purples, violets and
crimsons, painted in thick, broad streaks, which enveloped the viewer, but the work she produced depicted only stagnant dim shadows moving lethargically across the canvas. She had arrived in a city
full of mental vigour, only to be confronted by a growing sleeplessness. When she remembered her experiences, they made her recoil in disgust. Her life had become so thoroughly dependent upon the
conscious whims of others, the imposing presence elicited by the people who now surrounded her. She saw her future as bleak.

For several days Armand had neglected to visit and she was becoming frantic with the need that had taken over. She began to wander the streets alone after dark, meeting visitors both fluid and
mysterious, slipping through the opening and closing of the city gates. She knew that in one way or another, Armand would begin to expect payment. She wondered if Mahmoud could help her, but even
her addled mind could remember his involvement in Atlas.

By wandering the streets alone, Maia was able to see sights that she would otherwise not have seen. Sights that fascinated and appalled her, reminding her of the otherness in this society, in
which she had no place.

She came upon a small, quiet square, where a few men were gathered around a wizened looking young man, long haired and filthy, sitting upon a rug. Despite the thick layers of dirt that encased
the young man’s body and the dark, matted hair that hung around his face, his beauty was marred only by the slightly simian quality of his face.

Having edged through the crowd, Maia was now close enough to see that the marks he wore upon his arms revealed him to be a member of the fellowship to which she too belonged.

He conveyed an exuberant charisma that enraptured the crowd, who were listening intently as he began his story. His long pink tongue darted lizard-like across each side of his mouth as he spoke
in French. Maia nudged a small, insipid looking woman who was standing by her.

“What is his name?”

“Larbi. Women are not supposed to listen to the stories he tells.”

“But you do?”

The woman said nothing but inclined her head towards Larbi. Men leaned their rusting bicycles against the walls to stop and listen. One man whispered something unintelligible to her in Arabic
and made a gesture with his hand, as if to send her away.

Larbi was flinging his arms around, making strange patterns in the night air. His English was surprisingly good, and Maia wondered if he had lived a very different life before the one that stood
before her.

“This is the story of the girl who married a snake.” The crowd seemed to shudder in horror and Maia realised that she had arrived just in time.

The storyteller’s voice grew alternately low and sad, then rising, his eyes narrowing and widening.

“Once there was a woman who married a rich merchant and lived on the very edge of the desert. He had two beautiful young children, a boy and a girl, but the man had lost his wife when she
was a young woman. She died of a snake bite. But even in death she was a threat to his new wife, who hated the children. In turn, the children detested the stepmother, for she was a cruel and evil
woman. She punished them and sought useless tasks for them to do. She beat them and scalded their tiny hands. In what little free time they had, the children would run freely in the land close to
the house. But the boy was very stupid, whilst the girl was extraordinarily clever, and the stepmother saw this, which made her detest the girl even more.

“One afternoon, the children went for a walk, but became lost. For hours they walked around, unable to find their way. Several times they found themselves back in the desert, and try as
they might, they couldn’t find their way home.

“A huge, strange creature appeared before them, grimacing. I cannot go into too much detail for you all, for it is shocking, but let it suffice to say that the creature’s skin was
raw, as if it had shed its previous skin, its hair was sparse and it seemed as if all the brutality of the world was etched upon its face. They saw that the creature was a woman, and she took out
from behind her back the huge net which she used for catching butterflies. The beautiful butterflies fluttered away from her, hiding from her net, but she used many tricks to recapture them.
Forsaken in the shifting sands, which barred their way, hidden within the deep density of the palm trees, their stepmother had succeeded in finding them and she brought them back to the house where
she committed horrendous cruelties towards the children which I am unable to relate.

“The children had long suspected that their stepmother was an ogress, and now she revealed herself to them. The father was often away a great deal, and the ogress was an expert in the art
of witchcraft, so that he believed his wife was beautiful, kind, and loving to his children.”

Something about the man compelled Maia to stay and listen, pressed among the crowd in the saffron glow of the fading light.

“The father was away so often that the cruelty of the stepmother was never exposed, and indeed he was so enchanted by her, that had he learnt about her cruelty he never would have believed
it. The ogress had all sorts of unnatural relations with animals, and one evening she found herself to be pregnant, and not by her usual partner, but by a serpent.”

A muted sound of collective horror flickered through the audience, and Maia saw them shift forward to listen even more intently.

“Soon afterwards, the father died on his travels, captured by thieves and left for dead in the desert. The children mourned for him, but they wept too for fear of the future that awaited
them. With their last hope gone, the children, now slightly older, succeeded in escaping. They built a shelter so deep inside the oasis that the ogress was unable to find them. They spent evenings
huddled together listening to her tread the paths nearby their shelter, calling out their names with a kindness that they had not known since their mother had been alive.

“One evening, as the sun set, the girl decided to leave the hut and her sleeping brother to see what had happened to the ogress, as they had not heard her shouting for quite some time. The
girl knew that at this hour the ogress was often asleep, from the late afternoons until the sky was black and the stars could be glimpsed, in preparation for all her nightly exertions. The girl
walked up the pathway to the house of sandstone where she had once known such cruelty, and now it was even more dilapidated than in the days when her father had been alive. Insects of all kinds
scurried in and out of the windows. The shutters were broken and hanging loose, and the girl was able to see inside as she crept up to the window.”