Flashback (4 page)

Conscious of my footsteps in the new snow, I crossed the lawn toward the chapel. I drew a pack of wooden matches from a niche in the stone church wall, lit one of the votives, and said a quick prayer.
Keep us safe, Lord. And keep them safe, Heloise and the thirty-four souls who had given me harbor for so long.
Then, following what little remained of my own faint trail, I headed for the woods and the road beyond.

FOUR

What can you really expect from a place? A homecoming welcome, banners in the streets, flags in the windows? Or the shuttered indifference of a town that's forgotten you, that maybe never knew you? After twenty-seven hours on trains and another thirteen waiting for connections, I probably expected too much from Algeciras.

It was after midnight when I finished the last leg of my journey and stepped onto the platform with Sister Theresa's rucksack, almost two days since I'd left the convent. I'd hitched a ride into Lyon and taken the train to Perpignan and on to Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, and finally, this port town on the far southern tip of Spain.

Aside from room and board, the sisters had paid me a small wage for my work at the priory. In the year I'd been with them I'd managed to save a few thousand euros. I'd cleaned out my bank account before leaving Lyon, and I figured if I lived on the cheap I could stretch what I had for a month or maybe two. I could always get a job cooking once the money ran out.

The train from Bobadilla was crowded with young tourists, dreadlocked backpackers on their way to Morocco. I followed the crush of bodies out of the station and down toward the waterfront and the cheap hostels. If I was going to do something with my hair, I told myself, I needed a room of my own and a private bath.

I found what I was looking for in a little one-star hotel just two blocks from the ferry terminal. Twenty euros bought me a view of the crumbling apartment building next door, a window that opened partway to let in the piss-and-flotsam stink of the port, a bed, a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub with a faint gray ring.

Kicking my shoes off, I set the rucksack on the bed next to the pillow and lay down on top of the covers. I'd slept some on the trip, but not enough. I stretched out on my back and closed my eyes, my body rocking and swaying to the ghost motion of the train.

*   *   *

I woke early, my sleep still tuned to the Benedictine schedule. It was raining, a dull and persistent drizzle. The sky and the rooftops of Algeciras were all various shades of the same dull gray, a monochrome broken here and there by the tousled green of palms. I got up, put on some fresh clothes, washed my face, and, taking the rucksack with me, went out, hoping beyond hope to find whatever it was I had come for, a person or place like a spark on dry tinder, that one thing that would make everything else fall into place.

I stopped for coffee, then wended my way to the train station and back to the waterfront, detouring down side streets. What had been unfamiliar in the dark remained so in the wan morning light. There was nothing recognizable about the bland tourist cafés and utilitarian port. The ferry terminal itself was absolutely foreign, a hulking modern structure made of glass and steel. If I had been here, I had no memory of it.

I went into the terminal and got a ticket on the afternoon boat to Tangier, then backtracked to a drugstore I'd passed earlier. I bought a hair-coloring kit, a pair of weak reading glasses, and an assortment of cheap makeup, then returned to my hotel.

Marie and I were by no means twins. Her lips were slightly fuller than mine, her face narrower, her nose rounder. There's a limit to what can be accomplished with eyeliner, a lip pencil, and a little bit of blush, but with the makeup and the glasses and my new hair, even I almost believed the picture in Marie's passport was me.

I left my hotel at two-thirty, and by two-forty-five I was at the terminal, a good forty-five minutes early for my boat. I'd checked out the Spanish passport controls when I'd bought my ticket. There were three lines, and I wanted to get a good look at the three officials manning them before I chose one.

At around three o'clock the ferry started boarding. The passengers were a strange hodgepodge, half tourist, half local. Djellabas and head scarves mingled with tie-dye and jeans. There were two men and one woman manning the glassed-in booths. I ruled out the woman right away. She was fast but thorough, carefully scanning each face that passed, her little pinched eyes glancing from passport to person and back before she pressed her stamp to paper.

In the middle booth was a young man. Too young, I thought, a twenty-year-old bully hiding behind acne scars. His shirt was stiffly ironed, his uniform neat as a pin. I watched him questioning an elderly Moroccan woman with plastic bags for luggage. When she was unable to understand, he shook his head and gave her a look of exasperation, then stamped her passport and waved her off impatiently.

The second man seemed to be my best bet. He was older than his colleagues and more relaxed. His tie was loose around his neck, his hat slightly askew. He smiled briefly at each passenger.

It was the height of the boarding crush, and I wanted to get on before the crowd thinned and things slowed down. My heart hammering in my chest, I fished out my passport, hooked the rucksack over my shoulders, and headed for the back of the older man's line.

I hadn't given much thought to the possibility of not getting through, but as I watched the man mark each passport for transit I began to wonder what would happen if they questioned my papers. How would I explain the fact that I was traveling under the identity of a dead nun?

The last of a group of young German girls in line in front of me stepped up to the booth, and my stomach fluttered into my throat. The man smiled and nodded. Have a nice trip, he said to the girl in Spanish, then waved me forward.

Smiling, I slid my passport through the slot at the bottom of the glass. The man opened the cover and looked down at the picture, his gray eyebrows furrowing slightly. I could see him squinting to read the information; then his eyes shifted upward to my face and back down toward the photograph.

“Just a moment,” he said in pleasant but firm Spanish. Closing my passport, he stepped away from the window.

This is it, I thought, watching his back disappear through an unmarked door, the passport in his hand. Someone grumbled in the stalled line behind me. Should I run? I wondered, glancing back toward the stairs that led down to the main terminal. A pair of policemen lingered on the landing. Maybe I could just walk away, I told myself, slip out unnoticed. I was half turning to go when the door opened and the man reappeared.

“Is there a problem?” I asked, trying to force my rusty Spanish to sound relaxed.

He laid the passport on the little counter and slid it toward me. “No problem,
mi hermana,
” he said, shaking his head. “Just a mix-up.”

A mix-up.
I smiled and took the passport. “Thank you.”

He smiled back. “
Bon voyage
.”

Steadying my legs, I forced myself to move forward. There were two swinging doors just beyond the immigration booths, and on the other side of the doors, a long glass walkway that led out to the ferry's gangplank. I made my way with the other passengers, my stomach slowly calming, my pulse easing down toward normal. Halfway there, I told myself, conscious of the fact that I still had to get past the Moroccan officials.

We boarded the boat on the deserted lower car deck, then climbed up to the passenger deck. It was raining still, the dark bay dotted with gleaming whitecaps. Out the salt-rimed windows I could see the rocky flanks of Gibraltar and the geometric lines of the Algeciras waterfront. I found a free chair and settled in for the ride.

I opened Marie's passport to the photo page and read down through the typed information: name, place and date of birth, identity number. No, there was nothing about a profession, nothing to give away the fact that Marie was a nun. Yet the man had known.
No problem, mi hermana,
I had heard him say.
No problem, my sister.
Somehow, he had known.

FIVE

Nothing can prepare you for Tangier. Nothing can ready you for the crush of men, the hands grabbing for your bags, the taxi drivers fistfighting for your fare, the poverty and hopelessness of the place. The city assaults you with the stench of desperation: the sweat of illegals from Senegal or the Ivory Coast waiting listlessly in cheap cafés for a night crossing to Spain, the wool-and-saffron reek of the black-market money changers outside the medina, the gunmetal tang of the soldiers in the Grand Socco. Everywhere, the pervasive stink of colonialism gone to rot.

It was just before sundown when we docked in Tangier. I'd gotten a visa on the boat, a rubber stamp from a young Moroccan official who hadn't even bothered to look at my passport photo. He'd added my transit slip to a growing heap of identical scraps of white paper, some littering the ground at his feet, then waved me on my way.

The passenger deck was thick with too much humanity in too small a space, damp clothes and diapers and fried food. I was grateful when news of our imminent arrival crackled over the intercom, and we could make our way down to the car deck to wait to offload. Someone opened the chain-link cage that served as a baggage hold, and the crowd rushed recklessly forward, scrambling over the open top of the cage, fighting their way to backpacks and battered suitcases.

After a few minutes the gangway door swung open. The gangplank was lowered into place, and one by one we funneled onto the African continent, passports once again out. I had a brief moment of anxiety before I handed mine over, but there was no reason to worry. With the hundreds of bodies pressed behind me, there was time for little more than a cursory glance and a nod.

When I emerged from the terminal onto the long crumbling pier, I was immediately surrounded by some dozen local men, some in long hooded burnooses and pointy-toed babouches, others wearing Calvin Klein knockoffs and dark sunglasses, all clamoring to be of service in one way or another. I shook my head and kept walking, hands tight on the straps of my rucksack, moving forward with the crowd.

Through all the shouting and confusion, the dullest ache of recognition was beginning to form in my mind. Some part of my consciousness knew this place, the shape of the port, the rhythm of the language. I looked ahead toward the distant end of the pier, and somehow I knew there was a large gate there, and a square. Northwest of the square, where the land sloped upward, lay the labyrinth of the medina. I was certain of it.

One of the would-be guides stepped in front of me, blocking my way, and put his hand on my arm.

“This way,” he said forcefully in thickly accented English. “My taxi,” he insisted, yanking my arm, pulling me after him.

I shook him off. “No. Leave me alone.”

He stepped closer, his finger wagging in my face. “No need to be rude.” He spat as he said the words, and a droplet of saliva landed on my cheek.

“I don't need a taxi,” I said, trying to smooth things over, but it was too late. I'd offended him, and there was no getting around it.

I moved forward, trying to get past him, but he blocked my way again. “Why so rude?” he asked, aggressively.

Shaking my head, I tried to guess at the best answer. With the crowd of passengers flowing past us, I hardly imagined I could be in danger, but still, there seemed to be no way to shake the man, and I could feel a wave of panic moving up into my chest.

I opened my mouth to say something when a voice spoke up in Arabic behind me. Sneering, my harasser spat out a response.

“Leave her alone,” the voice said, in French now.

I craned my head to see a funny little man in a long woolen overcoat and wraparound sunglasses with yellow lenses.

Reluctantly, the guide stepped aside.

“Thank you,” I said to the overcoated man.

“Of course.”

I started forward again, and my strange savior fell in step beside me.

“They're harmless,” he said, “but a nuisance. Especially during Ramadan. I don't think it's the food they miss so much as the cigarettes. People tend to get a little cranky by this time of day. Is this your first trip to Tangier?”

I thought about the question for a moment. “Yes,” I said, taking in the man's incongruous attire. The curved wooden handle of an umbrella was hooked over his right arm. His shoes were Nikes, bright orange with a metallic sheen. His features were Asian, but his English had an almost perfect British accent. “And you?”

The little man shook his head. “I live here,” he said. “I've just been up to Spain for a few days.” He nodded toward his suitcase, a battered leather bag. “Stocking up on paints.”

“You're an artist?”

“Yes. I've come from Japan. It's my experiment, to find cultural isolation.” He had a delicate way of speaking, an air of intense deliberation to everything he said and did.

I smiled. There was something childlike and vulnerable about the little man, something entirely unthreatening, amusing even. “Could you recommend a hotel?” I asked as we neared the port entrance. “Something relatively reasonable.”

He thought for a moment. “There's the Continental, of course. Abdesselom will take extremely good care of you.”

“Abdesselom?”

“The manager,” the man explained. He looked down at his watch and furrowed his brow. “Of course the sun's about to set. There's not much to be done for the next hour or so.”

“I can wait,” I said. “If you just point me in the right direction.”

“It's not far.” He pointed toward the jumbled hillside of the Old City. “You see that pink building?”

“Yes,” I said, picking out the rose-colored facade.

He wrinkled his nose and stopped walking for a moment. “I'm going for some dinner, if you'd like to join me. Then I can take you up there myself. I live just around the corner.”