Gorgeous East (7 page)

“Courage, Doctor. You’re safe with me. I’m going to get a couple hours sleep inside. We leave at moonrise.”

And he went into the tent and lay down on the carpet and fell asleep instantly, to the sound of a Satiesque piano pleasantly tinkling from a pleasantly appointed room, its tall window overlooking a charming private garden somewhere off the Place des Vosges in the Paris that existed always at the back of his mind.

Phillipe woke up long past moonrise. Doctor Milhauz was gone. He walked around the tent, calling the doctor’s name, and was answered only by the wind. He climbed the nearest dune and stared into the gloom of the desert but couldn’t make out any sign of the man, not even a trail of footsteps in the sand. A cold, queasy feeling began to spread in his gut, that might have been the result of days of eating nothing but UN survival crackers and drinking stale water, but wasn’t.

He hurried back to the tent, made a sling for two plastic gallon jugs of water out of his blazer, stuffed his pockets with more crackers. But when he stepped out of the tent, compass in hand, to orient himself to the bleak horizon, he found them there waiting for him, as if they had sprung up, fully formed, from the cooling sands: six dark figures, dressed in the long hooded robes called djellahs—dark blue or black, hard to tell. Their faces were veiled. Only their eyes gleamed in the darkness like the yellow eyes of desert cats.

8.

T
hey went by Toyota Land Cruiser, fast, slamming painfully over the rough terrain, the remaining twenty-kilometers to Awsard. Blindfolded, Phillipe sensed the evil presence of the camp hanging in the air—a spiritual pressure that was the weight of despair, a thick brown stench that was the odor of the waste pits, of thousands of hopeless human beings densely packed into a couple dozen square kilometers of corrugated shacks and ragged tents with no sewage facilities or running water and nothing to do except wait for a salvation that would not come. Phillipe’s hands, tightly tied with abrasive nylon cord, went numb.

The Toyota stopped abruptly. Phillipe, shoved out of the back, was forced to trot along at a quick pace through the warren of alleys between the hovels. They had fixed the rag around his eyes carelessly and he was able to wiggle it loose by moving his ears up and down—an ability inherited from his father, a natural comedian, who used ear wiggling to great comic effect at the stuffy Sunday dinners of Phillipe’s childhood. But, even without this blindfold, the darkness was such that Phillipe couldn’t see much of anything: only the faint green glow of a kerosene lamp burning from an open tent flap; the white bones of an animal left to rot in the middle of the sandy path; the dark shapes of the hovels like termite mounds. Veiled faces peered out at him once or twice from the shadows—uncurious, hollow-eyed—then fell away. A dog whimpered from somewhere.

At last, they reached the central area, a sandy plaza the size of a soccer field set behind a perimeter of barbed wire. This was the nucleus of the slowly expanding amoeba that was the Awsard refugee camp. Here stood the UN administrative buildings, square, ugly cinder block constructions; the supply depots; the communal showers. Banks of electric lights glared down on UN food reserves left out in rotting mounds in the open air.

More veiled men in long, hooded djellahs—clearly blue, Phillipe saw now—guarded the gates with Kalashnikov assault rifles. A few words were spoken, the gates slid apart, then one of the men noticed Phillipe’s blindfold had come loose. He tied it around his captive’s head, this time very tightly, and Phillipe was led through the gates and across the plaza and into one of the buildings. He could sense the closeness of walls, the presence of a ceiling. Someone forced him to his knees and removed his blindfold. He was in a low, featureless room, staring up at a trio of blue djellah-wearing veiled men. They stared down at him as if in judgment.

“What have you done with my colleague, Herr Dr. Milhauz?” Phillipe demanded in French.

When no one responded, he repeated the question in Spanish, then in English.

“That odious nonbeliever has been dealt with,” one of them responded in Arabic-inflected English. “He has been judged according to our laws. He was a known drinker of alcohol, which is an abomination to God.”

The veiled man in the middle removed something from his robe—an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red—and threw it hard at Phillipe, who ducked out of the way as best he could, but not before a corner of the square bottle caught him sharply on the forehead. Phillipe saw a painful flash of light, felt the welt rising on his skull; then his vision cleared and he got a better look at his attacker: The one who had thrown the bottle was shorter and stockier than the other two but clearly held authority over them. His hands and the only other visible square of flesh—the narrow margin between veil and hood—showed the intricate, spidery webbing of a design done with henna. This surprised Phillipe, as such decorations were usually reserved for young women, especially brides. On his feet, just visible beneath the hem of his robes, the blunt toes of ugly orthopedic shoes—also unusual among men who usually went booted or barefoot.

“You mean you’ve killed him,” Phillipe said quietly. “You’ve murdered poor Milhauz. He was harmless, he was afraid.”

The hennaed one turned to his companions and spoke a few rapid words in the Hassaniya dialect. Phillipe was blindfolded again and a dry wadding stuffed into his mouth so he couldn’t speak and they dragged him back out of the house none too tenderly, over stones and around corners. At last, they stopped and Phillipe’s blindfold was removed: A heap of severed heads, crawling with flies, the skin stretched blue and rotting, the eyeballs gone, rose before him. Phillipe nearly vomited, but such a reaction with the gag in his mouth would have proved fatal. To stifle his revulsion, he counted the heads. He reached thirty-five before the nausea subsided.

These were the heads of the Pakistani soldiers Milhauz had been expecting. This, clearly, was why they hadn’t arrived on time. Phillipe rolled his eyes toward the sky, but couldn’t see a moon. He was now in a sandbagged enclosure, flanked by the burnt-out husks of several off-road vehicles bearing charred blue paint and UN markings. Then he saw that the flies swarming around the heads weren’t flies at all, but bees—odd, because bees were generally not indigenous to this part of the desert. In the absence of flowering plants, these industrious insects were busy gathering their sugars from congealing blood and rotting flesh. Off to one side lay a mound of packed earth taller than a man and twice as much in diameter—which Phillipe suddenly recognized as a hive of monstrous proportions. The sound that came from this hive was unmistakable, like the metallic grumbling of a powerful electrical dynamo that would never be turned off. From a small opening at the base of the hive extended the legs of a man perhaps stung to death, his exposed flesh covered with bees.

A bee landed on Phillipe’s wrist and stung him. He gagged, choking—he was mildly allergic to bee stings—as the histamines from the sting caused his sinuses to fill. In a moment he couldn’t breathe at all. When it became clear that he was suffocating, one of the blue-robed guards pulled the gag from his mouth. Phillipe doubled over gasping and released the contents of his stomach on the bloody ground. The hennaed one had been watching from a safe distance. Now he hove into view, stepping carefully over the blood and vomit with his clunky orthopedic shoes.

“I will tell you who I am,” he said in French, spoken with a hard accent—perhaps English or German. “I am the Anointed One, the Arch-Beloved. My first name is I Am. My second name is Most Beneficent. My third name is He in Whom There Is No Harm to the Blessed.”

“No,” Phillipe gasped. “Your name is
putain de merde
. And you are a ridiculous lunatic!”

“To the infidel, the unbeliever, I am He Who Is to Be Feared,” the hennaed one continued, his voice rising. “To them, I bring death and destruction. I remove their heads and feed their bones to the unclean beasts of the desert. This is the uprising, the jihad that has been foretold! I ride the wind at the head of an army of Marabouts, magic-working warriors of God, who will sweep this land clean so that fruit trees might grow where there are now only rocks and stones and sand, flowers bloom where the ant and the scorpion now find their home. This army will be called the Holy Marabout Army of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam. I offer as my frontline soldiers the bees of Paradise”—he gestured to the hive—“to scour the unclean land. The Saharoui people have suffered too long in captivity. I will redeem their exile. I will lead them out of the wilderness of sand to the sea. I am the enemy of all who are unclean. I am the enemy of the Moroccans, who shall fear my wrath. I am the enemy of the Algerians, who have given us this miserable patch of ground as you would give a dog a corner of earth. I am the enemy of the SADR and of Polisario, who are lukewarm, I spit them out! I am the enemy of the United Nations liars who give us tasteless crackers to eat and terrible cheese and endless years of waiting. I am the enemy of MINURSO, who will do nothing to alleviate the sufferings of my people. I am the enemy of all in the West who are unclean, of men who lie with men and the women who lie with women and the women who do not cover their faces and who are whores!” He rose and spread his arms wide, as if to include the entire desert in his grasp, the world itself. “My fourth and final name is Al Bab”—shouting now at the top of his lungs—“the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam!” Then, after a pause, in a normal tone: “That’s my speech. I’m still working on the details. What do you think?”

“I understand completely,” Phillipe said. “You are a fraud”—once he said this, he knew it to be the truth—“you are an imposter. You—”

He was not allowed to complete this statement. One of the veiled guards stepped up behind him and struck his shoulder with the stock of a Kalashnikov so hard it dislocated the joint. Phillipe felt the pain of this dislocation like an electric shock. He fell to the ground and tried to keep himself from screaming, but couldn’t. The guard stepped forward now and kicked him in the gut, which had the effect of jarring his dislocated shoulder. The pain from this final blow was so acute, it drove him over the edge into the dark, merciful state of unreason and he passed out.

9.

P
hillipe awoke some time later in a rickety prison cell dug into the desert sand, with a corrugated tin roof and scrap-wood walls. The pain from his dislocated shoulder blotted out everything—courage, honor, love—and he lay on the sandy ground in the grips of this blackness, moaning weakly. He felt himself becoming unmoored, he felt something inside his head tearing off and falling away. He knew now he was going mad as his ancestors had gone mad; and he lay there for a long time, completely out of his head, riding with them over endless plains covered with asphodel on one of the huge piebald war horses of Brittany, but riding toward a blankness, a vacancy—as night gave way to dawn and gray slivers of morning light showed through chinks in the walls of his cell.

Then, something pierced the clouds swaddling his brain. A few hesitant, plaintive notes like brilliant rays of light, interspersed with long, melancholy silences. It was the opening section of a piece by Satie; the
Gymnopédie No. 1
, which the composer had written in 1887 after wriggling his way out of mandatory National Service in the French army. The notes sounded again, stridently, and soon the whole piece followed, unfolding like a rose in sunlight, and Phillipe found himself able to shake off the shadows and rise to his feet.

He leaned against the wall and forced his shoulder into it and rolled back and forth—the sharp, stabbing sensation nearly causing him to faint again—until he heard a kind of popping sound, and the shoulder joint snapped back into its socket with LEGOlike precision and the pain lifted in an instant and was gone. A sense of euphoria filled him now as he worked himself out of his bonds, though every bit as crazy in its extremity as the radical unmooring he’d felt earlier. But this was not the time to think of such things: Phillipe saw now that he’d been sharing his cell with a pitiful round something like a soccer ball that was Milhauz’s head. The little man’s Corbusier glasses were gone; his eyes, half open, showed a kind of surprised look, while his mouth and lower jaw were frozen in an exclamation of terror.

Phillipe examined this sad object. No longer revolted by the sight of a severed head, he took it gently by the ears and held it up.

“I’m very sorry about this, Herr Dr. Milhauz,” Phillipe whispered. “I’m afraid I’ll be leaving you behind, contrary to article seven, section two of the Code of the Foreign Legion. But I’ll be back, I swear it. And I’ll take your head to your mother in Zurich for a proper burial. You have my word as a soldier of France. I also swear on the tombs of my ancestors, the lords of la Tour Grise, that I will seek out the archimposter Al Bab, I will find him and I will cut off his head. You will be avenged!”

Not surprisingly, poor Milhauz didn’t respond to this bellicose declaration. Phillipe set Milhauz’s head down in the sand and looked around. His cell was hardly secure. A bit of the corrugated roofing, missing in one corner, made a narrow opening to the outside. By wedging himself into the angle of the walls, Phillipe managed to shinny himself out and onto the roof. His prison turned out to be nothing more than a kind of store house in the middle of a densely packed neighborhood of tents and hovels. The camp spread away on all sides, looking almost exactly like a garbage dump. Goats foraged for trash in the alleys. It was just after dawn; night still held sway in the east. No one stirred. Below, guarding the door, one of the Marabouts slept, Kalashnikov cradled in his lap.