Stewart, Angus (19 page)

When eventually he willed himself to look up, both the youth and the proprietor were still laughing uncontrollably. In the stable yard men sat up and asked what was happening. A trussed bundle of market-bound hens came alive like a pillow struck by a hurricane, and a stark-naked child appeared in a doorway, sleep wonderingly wrenched from its eyes, and with a forefinger nervously immobilised in its nostril.

Lom found himself staring at his tea glass. Syrup had spilled, making the outside tacky, and his fingers stuck to it. Inside, the leaves of mint looked like nettles battered by a rainstorm. The wakened men began to settle again. Lom freed his hand, raised the camera, and took some exposures quickly, without thinking. Surprisingly there was no protest as the blitz device flashed at ten-second intervals.

'Very good!' the youth said, commending something he evidently supposed profound.

Slumping into dejection once more, Lom scarcely heard him at first. He accepted the pipe the young man offered; at the same time determining to align his mind with physical immediacy. 'What is good?' he asked coldly. He looked carefully at the youth for the first time. Hair enclosed his skull tightly as a bathing cap. His eyes were sleepy, yet watchful. There was an attractive bathos about the curvature of his lips. He had a
slow, free-wheeling sort of smile.

The young man shrugged the question away. 'That woman,' he said, gesturing towards the street door. The cripple.' He felt towards his suspiciously good English with care. 'Not from birth!
Istiqulal
.
She helped the French. But it looks real, no? After crippling her the Istiqulal moved her five hundred miles. No one in Tanja would know she hadn't been here all time. Is clever, no? She poor woman. No have money get back to village where she was known before she was crippled.' He offered the pipe to the proprietor, explaining to Lom, 'No worry. Is Berber. Speak only Chleugh. Lil' bit Arabic, maybe.'

'Why are you telling me this? About your politics?'

The youth gave his coasting smile again. 'Take photo is your work. Useful maybe.'

'To whom?'

'Republic.' The youth said it with the magical solemnity of a word newly learned from a textbook.

Sighing, Lom reached for the pipe. 'Morocco is a monarchy.'

'Which is why we must kill our brothers on the Algerian border. To keep Algerian freedom from spreading to
Maroc
.
To keep
El Malik
Hassan in power.'

'And to retain recently discovered phosphate mines,' Lom said mildly.

'Take good photos?' The youth's aggressive intensity of innocence moved Lom.
'Paris Match
?'

'I've done assignments for
Paris Match
.'
He was thinking that, if nothing else, he was being real. What had made him so unreal the night before? With so little time, why had he played a part? Pretended to regard a street boy as if he had been the last descendant of the Mayas? Perhaps illness acted perversely on the mind. Certainly
kif
could.
Had he been somehow trying to prick the smug sophistication of Caroline Adam? This time Lom blew the ball of ash expertly into his palm.

'Who are you?' he asked aloud. 'What do you want? And what makes you think an ageing Polish photographer would want to help whatever your cause may be? Old men don't have causes.'

The youth didn't look at Lom. Instead, he quietly addressed the
sebsi
balanced between his fingers. 'You are unhappy, you are sick, and you want a cause.' He lit the pipe expertly and handed it back

Lom drew on it deeply. 'And you are a communist, your English was learned in the only country in the world that can teach languages—the Soviet Union—and its perfection becomes more difficult to disguise the more
kif
you smoke.'

The young man slapped Lom resoundingly on the shoulder, signalling at the same time for more tea. 'Abdslem ben Abdullah Kerim.' He held out his hand.

' "Slave of God, son of Allah's slave, the slave of the Merciful",' Lom murmured, impressed. 'What do the
Politburo
make of a name like that?'

Abdslem slapped the shabby table in his delight 'Sometimes I think the great thinkers Marx and Lenin must have smoked
kif
.'

'If they did, their latter-day adherents can be shot for it. At least in the Soviet.'

Abdslem's brow had clouded. From his tattered clothes he produced a neat little notebook and pencil. 'Word,' he asked earnestly. 'You said "latter-day ad . . . ad . . .?" '

' "Adherents"—"followers".'

The boy scribbled busily; but his scowl didn't lift. 'There are many stupid prejudices and tabus in Russia,' he said. 'Here we are different.'

'Peoples' Democracy of Poland—your home?' It had taken the youth a moment to think.

'It was.' Lom nodded. 'And how did the Russians get there?'

After a second's suspicion Abdslem grinned ingenuously. 'I don't know!'

'Then I'll tell you. In 1939 the city was occupied by the
Germans. The Red Army was advancing. There was a rising of the entire Polish people against the Germans. But the Red Army stopped at the gates of the city. They waited deliberately for the Germans to kill nearly half the population of Warsaw; so that when the Germans retreated they were able to walk into a ruined city, without leaders, without organisation.'

'Nazi fascists invaded Russia—not German people,' Abdslem seemed to be dredging the memory of half-remembered lessons. But his historical ignorance made the intuitive spontaneity of his next remark the more impressive. 'If what you say is true, then the capitalists were only destroying the capitalists,' he said.

'How did you get to Russia? Where did you study?'

'I studied at Kiev. I got there with other students through
Algerie
.'

'So you're not a pimp? Would you really have found me a woman tonight, had I wanted one?'

Abdslem looked offended. 'Of course I am a pimp!'

'And you'd have pumped precious sterling out of your country by exchanging money for me illegally?'

'Why not?'

'These are trivialities beside the inevitable processes of revolution?' Lom asked with some irony.

'Exactly.'

'And what made you accost me in the first place? Was it accident?'

The relaxed, overdrive smile played again on the boy's face. 'If you had wanted someone to sleep with, or to buy
kif
,
then I would have had a little money, that is all. But currency
exchange
,
that is different. You exchange legally at the bank; the money goes to the rich bankers. You exchange illegally on the streets; the money leaves the country—through Indian traders mostly. But you exchange illegally with
me
—with
my party—and not only does the money stay in the country, but it goes to the people. And of course we give a twenty per cent better rate than anyone else. There, my friend, is a concession from an Arab that should impress a Jew! Jews, they say, love money. So do we Arabs. It is paradox perhaps! But you asked why I stopped you. It was not for any of these things. I thought you must want some thing more. That maybe you help us.'

'How?'

'Just taking good pictures—like
Life
magazine.'

'Where?'

'You said you wanted to travel in
Maroc
,'
Abdslem parried him at a tangent.

'Where?'

Studiously, the boy filled and lit the
sebsi
again. 'Take mortar bombs and land mines,' he said. 'The campaign in the Sahara is confused—and complicated by hundreds of women. They collect the shrapnel to sell for scrap.'

Lom's eyes narrowed sceptically. 'Hasn't the government and military sealed the area from civilians?'

'You can't legislate against the peasantry gathering and selling whatever harvest is to be had when they are hungry,' Abdslem said drily.

It was a slip. Alternatively, perhaps it wasn't. At best, Lom had been casting the youth in the role of simple field worker, whatever his linguistic fluency. Now this second flash of irony made him wonder. Playing the open game the
kif
encouraged, he said, 'You were
lycée
educated under the French, weren't you?'

Abdslem gave him only a quick look. 'Then there are three hundred thousand land mines in the battle area. The Algerians seized them during the French evacuation. They work—only their triggers are a little rusty. Most, not all, will withstand six or seven stones weight in pressure.' Abdslem gestured towards the portrait of the king. 'So he's using children from our gaols to clear the minefields.'

Lom's, mind had ceased being drily speculative. It had lost sophistication. His eyes still looked at the youth with incredulity; but his consciousness had retreated far behind them. There had been a crack in the rough brick wall. At its widest point it measured perhaps a third of a metre, and the Germans hadn't bothered to seal it. Pini and Sanya squeezed through the gap one night to search for food. They never came back.

'What happens to the photographs?' Lom asked mechanically.

'They become ours.'

'I never sell negatives.'

'It's a detail,' Abdslem said.

'And salary?'

'That is not for me to say.'

'You report back to your boss?'

' "Boss", my friend is what the American negros must call their warmongering masters. There must be discussion, yes.'

'Quite. But what you want, broadly, is propaganda material on poverty in general, and the Saharan war in particular. I press the button, and you write the words. How long do you expect the assignment to take—after you've had discussions, of course?'

'Maybe two, three weeks.'

Lom was decided. 'Then I accept on two conditions. That nobody in your organisation tries to tell me where to point my camera and when to shoot. And that nobody in your organisation bothers me with talk about causes, or tries to pretend that I can have any say or interest in whatever you may want to do with the finished work. I'll get you pictures. But that's where my interest ends.'

They both stood up. Abdslem had stopped smiling. 'I can promise both things,' he said.

'After discussion, yes. Then contact me. I'll be ready.'

The slow smile returned as Abdslem said, 'But I don't know your hotel.'

Lom looked at him for a moment. 'Minza.'

'Ah! Then I can do so.' Abdslem had assumed a sterner persona. At least he hardly acknowledged the
'
L'ha'nik
!'
of
the proprietor as they stepped into the street.

'How do you know I won't go straight to the police?' Lom asked suddenly.

'Would they believe an old man full of
kif
?'
the youth said. 'You have reputation, so perhaps they might listen. But by then I'd no longer be in Tanja. No, you won't go to the police, my friend!' Conversationally he went
on, 'You have taken many photos in Tanja?'

'Only an English queer's little Spanish boy friend. Pussycat calendar stuff.'

'
Spanish
boy?'

Lom looked up sharply. 'Yes.'

'Manolo!' Abdslem exclaimed. 'And Simon Brown. I know about them!'

Why shouldn't I slander a stranger when I'm dying, Lom thought dully.

They began to descend through the empty Medina, and Abdslem spoke again. 'I will tell you something. Yesterday I met a strong man, a young man. He was leaving Tanja after a year here to go back to the country. I asked him why he was returning to his village. He told me, 'In the country I have only the one pain of being hungry. But, in the city, I have another pain because people laugh at me and say, "Look! Driss is starving!" '

'You've already broken one of the rules of our agreement,' Lom said, unmoved.

The youth's face broke into a wild grin as he stopped in his tracks, and slapped Lom heartily on the back. It seemed to be a violence to which he was addicted. 'I'll contact you at the Minza,' he said. 'Go carefully! Many bad men in Tangier!'

For a moment, fancifully, Lom wondered about concealed microphones. He lay on his hotel bed. Had he talked in his sleep the previous night? The youth been detailed to recruit him? It didn't matter. Before sleeping, Lom cast through some photographs. He might, he supposed, make five hundred more. He doubted whether he would be allowed to retain so much as a single print of one of them.

  *  *  *  *  *

Naima's friend was right. The card on Brown's letter box acclaimed him as a Master of Arts. The door was opened by a Spanish confirmation candidate. Although he was a little old for the Catholic ceremony, Jay would have supposed, that this satin sailor suit was immaculate. Simon Brown got up from a day bed, switching off a tape-recorder as he did so.

'Mr. Gadston, this is Manolo,' Brown said. 'Ice and the Vat 69, I think, Manolo.'

'You've two sons,' Jay began, conversationally, as the boy disappeared. It was outrageous, but he saw no point in being circumspect. There was also something ingenuous about Brown.

'Manolo is simply my guest.'

'He's been confirmed?'

'Just the soup of the day.' With this Brown addressed himself to pouring the whisky, which the boy had now brought. 'You know about my child then.'

'I learnt of him half an hour ago. Quite by chance.'

'From?'

'From his mother.' Jay had hesitated a second.

'You've been up at Mrs. Diergardt's

'No. Naima's been sacked. We met outside her father's house.'

'Sacked, you say?' Brown was looking at him intently now, 'Did you gather why?'

'Only that them had been some sort of row. In fact she said she'd walked out.'

'Ah!' Brown motioned Jay to a chair, and sank down upon the divan again himself. 'Larger one's for Mr. Gadston, Manolito,' he said absently then to Jay, 'The old woman's a lesbian, you know. I suppose most of the European women here are queer.'

Jay accepted the drink from the solemn Spaniard and said nothing.

'So,' Brown went on, arranging more cushions beneath his shoulder blades, 'we've known each other three minutes, and you're confronting me with my bastard child—reproaching me, I might say. What's your interest in the matter?'