Stewart, Angus (9 page)

'I thought you loved these people. You've lived here twenty years,' Jay said at a tangent.

‘Maybe I do. I suppose I must know than a bit too.'

'But okay. He works for me—then he's my servant. So what?'

'Nothing much—except no one's going to believe you,'

'Achmed would never say anything false.'

'Oh, now you're on dangerous ground! Possibly not. Possibly not even if they beat him up—the French were here you know. Even then you'd be forgetting something—under the
Code Napoleon
you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent'

'
Encore du thé
,' Jay said on some reflex.

'Sorry?'

'Just the waiter.'

'Oh.'

'How the hell does one prove lack of carnal knowledge?'

'You can't,' Chalmers said,

Jay wanted to say, something ironical about the pleasure Chalmers must derive from dead pan. It would have been inappropriate. Instead he washed mint tea between his teeth like some secret childhood sea smashing stones.

'But I don't see any problem,' Chalmers went on. 'Did you speak to him?'

'No.'

'Well maybe this bundle you say he had with him was washing for the laundrette, They're all over town.'

'Perhaps. We'll hope so,' Jay said. There was no laundrette in Tangier, 'And I hope Sally finds the stone all right.'

'Sure,' Chalmers said. On that they hung up.

  *  *  *  *  *

Achmed sat on a little longer in the forecourt of the café. He ordered coffee, telling the waiter to bring at least six double sugar lumps. He had often sat here with Frederick either before or after going to any of those cinemas that were in the Medina rather than the European town. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was only half past nine, and decided to go to a cinema now. In fact he left the café just moments before Jay Gadston returned to it in search of him. He chose the
Gran
Theatro Cervantes
somewhat arbitrarily, for although he knew one of the men who sold sweets in its bleak, peeling foyer, he didn't particularly want to speak to anyone.

He arrived during an interval, taking a seat in the more expensive downstairs stalls from habit, and without reflecting that he was now living on the four thousand francs capital which he carried with him. He bought a paper twist of hot peanuts, and five boiled sweets, each of different colour. The converted theatre was fairly full. Some boys in the gallery were throwing newspaper dart. high into
the auditorium. Watching the flight of one of these, Achmed marvelled at the great vaulted building with its grubby pastel, and dust-tinted reliefs. On moulded plaster panels, high above a tortuous classical frieze, the names of Aeschylus, Euripides, Goethe, Schiller, Cervantes, and many more, remained stern and angular, though their gilding had faded. Achmed could not read them.

The show began with the news, and as always the news began with the king. Achmed watched Sidi Hassan signing papers at shiny tables, shaking hands, climbing into a railway engine wearing white gloves, and cutting a ribbon in front of a block of flats in Casablanca with a pair of scissors which, the commentary said, were made of solid gold. Later the audience were shown a new school in Rabat and there was a picture of Sidi Hassan on the wall. The newsreel ended by covering a flower show, and a framed photo of Sidi Hassan had been placed in the middle of a bed of prize orchids. This did not strike Achmed as strange. It simply represented the order of things as they were. Still, he was impatient for the feature to begin, and popped peanuts into his mouth from their papery sheaths with increasing regularity.

The main film was about Bhola, the Indian Tarzan. The dialogue was in Hindi, though there were Arabic subtitles which flickered like weak lightning across the bottom of the screen. In the circumstances Achmed could concentrate entirely on the action. It was he alone who cried out in derision when the one-eyed ape as big as a mosque whom Bhola was killing fleetingly revealed a human heel. Some sequences were in colour. This happened when the safari party in the jungle, aided by Bhola, had thrown most of the cannibals into stone coffers of boiling oil, and the action changed abruptly to a motor race. Achmed became too excited by the spectacle of the brightly painted cars slithering, crashing, and bursting into flames on the track, that he snatched at the
djellaba
of an old man sitting next to him and began chattering. With patient dignity the Arab discussed the awesome scene with him. Achmed was still talking when the picture reverted to black and white, and the safari party, which now numbered one less, as the handsome young man who had carried two revolvers and two wrist-watches had been killed in the motor race.

The love scenes were also in colour. Bhola and the Indian girl swam in a pool and sang songs to each other. Achmed slid down the wooden seat on to his shoulders to whistle sternly at the flower-girt girl dancing beside the waterfall. She bound flowers about Bhola's head too, and ran her fingers over his muscles with her eyes turned away. At first Bhola didn't know how to kiss. Beneath his breath Achmed encouraged him in amazement. When Bhola did learn to kiss, he clasped the girl too hard, because his muscles were so strong, and she squealed.

Achmed would have watched the programme round again, but it was the last showing of the evening. Carrying his bundle, he assiduously began to search beneath the rows of most expensive seats for bottles, working carefully back up the stalls while the theatre was still emptying, before the sweepers came. Finding three, he took them out into the Medina, sold them, and spent two-thirds of the proceeds on a slab of custard and a packet of American chewing gum.

While he ate his custard, Achmed gazed into a shop window, which was filled with coloured inks, plastic pens, typewriters, and other bright office equipment he couldn't identify. He began to feel resentment against Frederick. Everything in the bookshop and the apartment above it were surely now his; yet he had shut himself out, leaving the key inside, and taking nothing, not even the money, which Frederick had not given him as his own. If he went to the Police they would not believe that what had been Frederick's was now his. He had no passport to show who he was, and he didn't think it said anything about him in Frederick's passport The police would remember he had been in prison, and so might take away the things he now had. Frederick had no assistant in the shop except himself. The shop would stay closed until someone of Frederick's family came. The police might go there first, but two, three, or even ten of them would go together, so probably none of them would steal anything.

Achmed began walking towards the Petit Socco. Frederick's wife was not of his family because he had divorced her. There was his sister who had sent him the gold he was now wearing about his neck. Frederick had said that she was mad, and that also, to visit her, they would have to have driven all day and all night for two weeks in a car. He had shown him in an atlas that although she too lived in Africa, she was as many kilometres away as America was over the sea. It was too far for the police to telephone. They would probably send her a letter—by aeroplane. Then she wouldn't come driving a car because she was only a woman and had no husband. She would probably come on an aeroplane.

By the time he reached the Socco Achmed had somewhat arbitrarily calculated that it would be at least a week before he need hang around outside the shop, waiting for the arrival of Frederick's sister. There were of course Frederick's customers, some of whom he had delivered books to, but for the most part these had treated him as a mere servant.

In the narrow wedge-shaped square he had left two hours before, Achmed noticed that a man was watching him from one of the cafe tables. Accordingly, he wandered up and down for some time, his bundle occasionally snagging against one of the many people who were still about, although it was after eleven o'clock. He bought some more chewing pun and added it to the now tasteless mass in his mouth. He passed nearer to the open front of the café. This time he stopped and looked at the man. Moving on once more, he watched the man paying his bill, rising from the table, then coming towards him.

Achmed smiled. Although not young, the man seemed by no means sure what to do. 'Hotel? Achmed prompted him politely.

'
C'impossible
,'
the Frenchman said, after considering for a moment.

It wasn't. In fact Achmed had begun to count on a comfortable bed in one of several possible small hotels, where board was paid in advance, and coffee in the morning came only as far as the outside of the room door.

'
Douche?
'
Achmed suggested, a trifle disappointed.

The Frenchman agreed with this, and together they began so walk deeper into the tortuous alleys of the Medina. Achmed stopped once to exchange greetings with a small child who carried a deflated pouf of raw dough on a wooden board balanced on his head. They shook hands and covered their hearts. '
Labbès
,'
Achmed said. The Frenchman watched the curios scene without impatience. The faintly paternal attitude of Achmed both amused and touched him. '
Familia,
'
the boy explained briefly as they went on again.

Leading the stranger, Achmed felt something of the pride he had known when walking about the town with Frederick. The Frenchman was well dressed. He kept his hands deeply buried in the pockets of a blue raincoat. Achmed stopped before a heavy door, which a faded sign proclaimed to be the entrance to the Hotel Indiana. '
Savon
,'
he observed suddenly.
'Douche
—this
one here. No
savon
.'
It had occurred to him that the Frenchman might want soap.

The Frenchman provided money, and then waited while Achmed disappeared into a nearby shop that was still open. He came back and led the way into the Hotel Indiana. Rising three storeys, and built about a patio, whose roof had been formed haphazardly with sheets of filthy glass and cardboard, the structure no longer afforded accommodation. Only the ground floor appeared to function. A row of shower cubicles had been built along one wall. At a wooden table a woman sat collecting money and hiring towels, while two others, stooped, and more menial, were engaged in ferrying charcoal out from one door, across the patio, and in through another door. Achmed gave the woman at the table specific instructions for the guarding of his bundle. It was true that they were the only people taking showers, but at any moment others might come who could steal the bundle, he explained.

The encounter was brief and
formless beneath streaming water. Afterwards, the Frenchman sat on a wooden bench the colour of old bone, smoking a Disque Bleu while he dried his toes. Achmed, whom any process of washing excited, drenched and extinguished the cigarette with cupped handfuls of water. Logically, the Frenchman simply made use of the boy's drier towel, and added fresh Gauloises smoke to the white steam that filled the cubicle.

There had been dichotomy in Achmed's performance. Like a shoot in spring soil, his sexuality lay beneath the achievement of light. Impatience gave a self-conscious aggression to what was scarcely recognisable as mimicry in the motions of his body. But the truer passion of his arms and lips confused the lost with the as yet unfound.

Achmed stayed on in the shower after the Frenchman had gone. He was now enriched by 300 francs, over which he had not argued, but merely made a dissatisfied face. He remained so long, drawing warmth from the uncertain cascade the shower released, that the Arab woman eventually took the unprecedented action of beating on the door and shouting that he had taken more hot water than had been paid for. Remembering that she had charge of his bundle, Achmed got dressed. He took ten minutes more combing his hair in a broken fragment of mirror that was nailed to the wall. When eventually he was satisfied it swept back in a shining black dome that was carefully moulded about his ears. It looked very like the hair of Bhola the Indian Tarzan.

  *  *  *  *  *

In his hotel room Harold Lom emptied filter-tipped cigarettes by rolling the barrel gently between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and plucking out the strands of tobacco with the thumb and forefinger of the other. When the tobacco was collected on a sheet of notepaper, he carried this out on to his balcony and scattered its contents into the night. Then, quite as fastidiously, he began to fill the flimsy paper tubes with
kif
.

Steadily he began to smoke the hashish. He had not done so for many years. Tonight the identical hallucinatory pictures came back to him. At first this was disconcerting, and seemed to suggest that, together with his failing body, his mind also had little room to offer. The sequence of the pictures had altered. He found he could choose from amongst them as he might have done from a film archive. Their common denominator was colour and motion, and although he was denied any active participation, the people and creatures sometimes communicated their awareness of his existence. A ballerina came prancing, on her points, and with a high step, from a postcard-like thatched cottage. As the crossed a flagged yard with an antique pump, she became a celluloid doll, both her form and her motion changing, until she became stylised as an orange-brown window dummy, yet strangely more trivial, while her own, spinning frenzy caused her to wither away. There were many such sequences, beginning with a person or thing haying rich textural properties, and degenerating, usually by mean. of gyration, into barren substances related to hardboard, polythene, or sausage membrane. The bacon advertisement pig emphasised the critical nature of the division. Lom saw him first for what he simply was: the shiny, moulded, laughing creature in any butcher's shop. Is was when he began to spin, and the thin blue lines that were not the lips of the original, began to twitch, that the creature's physical texture became positively threatening by virtue of its negation. Inanity was revealed complete, and it was dangerous. Like the doll, the pig's own motion brought it to dissolution. But it was fixed, being viciously spun on a turntable, and made no protest at all.