The Blue Hour (5 page)

“We'll survive,” I said, though after ten minutes on the road my clothes were drenched.

“We always survive,” he said, tightening his arms around me and kissing my head. Nearby the young guy caught a glimpse of this moment of marital affection and rolled his eyes while simultaneously singing that same toneless lyric over and over again. I peered out the window. North African–style urban sprawl. Chipped white apartment blocks. Chipped white stretches of congested houses. Car dealerships. Warehouses. Congealed traffic. Chipped white strip malls. Chipped white villages. And then . . .

Sleep.

Or an approximation thereof.

I passed out.

Then there was a jolt. The bus had hit a pothole or something akin to that. We were in open country, stony, empty, bleak. Low-lying hills on the horizon. The world vanished again, then woke up when . . .

A baby was screaming. The mother—young, in a multicolored head scarf, sitting in front of us, looking sleep deprived and fearful—kept trying to calm the child. He couldn't have been more than three weeks old. And he was miserable. Understandably so. What little oxygen there was in the bus had been sucked away by the reek of communal sweat and malodorous exhaust fumes, the heat curdled so that it actually felt tactile, weighty and doughy like four-day-old bread.

Shifting around in the space between Paul's legs where I had parked myself, I could feel his limp penis. I suddenly had a huge stab of desire—not just for the sensation of abandonment making love with my husband, but also with an overwhelming need to have a baby.

There had, of course, been women in Paul's past. One was a colleague at the university, with whom he'd lived for around two years. He talked little about her, except to say that it didn't end well. Otherwise he made it known that he didn't want to talk much about his romantic past. He did tell me one crucial detail: I was the first woman with whom he could imagine having a child.

As the bus hit another bump my husband jumped awake, finding my hand on his crotch.

“You trying to tell me something?” he asked.

“Maybe I am,” I said, leaning up to kiss him on the lips.

“Where are we?”

“No idea.”

“How long have we been on the bus?”

“Too long.”

“And the AC?”

“Never showed up. It's not your fault.”

He reached over and touched my face.

“How did I get so lucky?” he asked.

“We're both lucky.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Even though I've driven you mad sometimes?”

“Paul . . . I love you. I want this marriage to work.”

“If we can get through this fucking bus trip together we can get through anything.”

I laughed—and gave him such a full and deep kiss that, when the bus hit another bump and disengaged me from my husband's lips, I saw that everyone around us was either embarrassed or disapproving.

“Sorry, sorry,” I whispered to the elderly man sitting just in front of us. He turned away, showing me his back. Paul whispered to me, “They'll be a little more open in Essaouira, as they're far more used to hippie-dippie foreigners.”

“We are hardly hippie-dippie.”

“Correction:
you
are hardly hippie-dippie.”

I found myself laughing again and causing more disapproving glances by kissing my husband once more. A moment like this—when all seemed right between us—was so pleasing, wondrous, reassuring. Paul was right: if we could get through this bus ride we could get through anything.

Around ten minutes after Paul snapped back into consciousness, the bus pulled into a tiny concrete depot off the side of the road. The landscape here was rocky, scrubby, flat, uninspiring.

“You think there's a toilet here?” I asked Paul.

“No idea—but that line over there looks huge.”

He nodded toward a group of about a dozen women, all but three hidden by niqabs, lined up in front of a single hut.

“Maybe I should just try and hold it,” I said.

“But there's at least another hour and a half to go. We should try to slip around the back of the depot.”

Which is exactly what we did—finding a patch of ground festooned with trash, broken bottles, two burned-out fires, even a dead mouse charred by the sun.

“You expect me to pee here?” I asked Paul.

“There is the toilet option.”

The stench enveloping us was nothing short of toxic; an aroma of fecal matter and festering rubbish. But I was desperate to empty my bladder. So, finding a patch of ground that was free of glass shards and trash, I undid my loose-fitting cargo pants, squatted down, and let go. Paul meanwhile was standing some feet away, peeing against a wall, laughing.

“Gracious living, eh?” he said.

The driver began to beep his horn. We had to get back on the bus. But as we came aboard we discovered that two young men—they must have been around twenty years old, both scowling and menacing, both wearing nylon bomber jackets and black plastic sunglasses—had taken our seats. They saw us heading toward them as we negotiated the tiny aisle, sidestepping all the bags and two very parched dogs (German shepherds, rendered inert by the heat). When we reached our places, Paul informed them in French that they were sitting where we had been sitting. Their response was to ignore us. I glanced around. Every other seat on the bus was taken. Paul quietly asked them to move. Their response again was to act as if we didn't exist.

“
Vous êtes assis à nos places,
” Paul said, his tone getting edgier. “
Vous devriez en chercher d'autres
.”

Again, nothing. Paul tried again, adding, “
S'il vous plaît
.”

The two guys exchanged a cool, amused glance. They continued to say nothing.

At this point the other young guy, who'd been singing along tonelessly to his iPod all the way south, turned around and said something in Arabic to the two toughs. One of them shot back a short response—which, from its menacing vehemence, was a warning to stay out of this. The young guy remained cool in the wake of this exchange. He just quietly shook his head, then popped his earphones back on his head.

Meanwhile, the elderly man seated nearby heard this exchange and suddenly erupted in an angry flow of Arabic; so angry that all eyes in the bus were on us, the two foreigners standing in the aisle. The same one who had hissed at our friend with the headphones now said something so unpleasant to the elderly man that several people nearby—including a large woman whose face was completely covered by a niqab—began to shout back at the pair. Again they sat there silently, refusing to budge, refusing to listen to reason, determined to play out this scenario to some sort of unpleasant conclusion.

“I'm getting the driver,” Paul said to me.

But the driver—a harassed, constricted man with sunken eyes and a pencil-thin moustache—was already en route toward us, looking less than pleased. He walked into a sea of raised voices, as the elderly man, the woman with the niqab, and three others began to tell him what had just transpired. The driver asked Paul something in fast French. Paul responded equally fast, indicating that he had politely asked these two boys (they couldn't have been more than seventeen) to vacate the seats that we'd had since Casablanca. Now the driver got vehement, yelling at them, staring into their menacing black sunglasses, which made them appear even more sinister. But, as before, they refused to respond. The driver's voice now ticked up another angry octave. As he put his face close to them, the more verbal of the pair—the one who had spoken back to the young guy and the elderly man—did something startling: he spat at the driver, catching him directly in one eye.

The driver looked beyond stunned. To his credit he didn't lash out, didn't explode into understandable fury. Rather, with immense quiet dignity, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the spittle from his eye, then hurried down the aisle, leaving the bus and heading into the depot building opposite where we were parked.

Immediately the young dude with the headphones stood up. Gently touching my shoulder, he motioned that I should take his seat.

“
Ce n'est pas nécessaire,
” I said.

“
J'insiste,
” he said. The man seated next to him—a quiet businessman-type in his forties, bespectacled, wearing a light-blue striped suit—also slid out of his seat.

“
J'insiste
.”

“
Mille mercis,
” Paul said, as he gently directed me toward the window seat, then positioned himself next to me, ensuring that I was out of range of the aisle should anything violent happen.

“You okay?” Paul whispered as I reached for his hand.

“What's this about?”

“Macho bullshit. Showing they can stand up to a Western woman.”

“But I said nothing to them.”

“Doesn't matter. They're idiots. Fortunately everyone else around us thinks that too.”

At that moment two policemen entered the bus, both looking as hot as the rest of us. The driver was right behind them. Seeing us now seated he explained something to the officers in rapid-fire Arabic. One of the officers turned and actually saluted us. The elderly man now began to get angry, pointing an accusatory finger at the two toughs, expressing his outrage at what had transpired with the driver. The second officer picked up the nastiest of the pair by his shirt, whipped off the kid's sunglasses, threw them to the floor, and stamped on them with his foot. With his eyes exposed, the boy's gangster image suddenly vanished. He was just a sallow adolescent. The other officer did likewise with his cohort, only this time, when the dark glasses were pulled from his face, all I could see was fear.

Within moments they were both being frog-marched down the aisle and out of the bus. As soon as they were clear of the front door, the driver was back in his seat, revving the engine, wanting to put immediate distance between himself and all the events that had just transpired. Paul and I stood up, offering to move back to our previous seats. But the businessman and the young headphone dude insisted we stay put. I glanced out the window and regretted doing so. Because I saw the tougher of the tough guys trying to break free of the grasp of one of the officers. Immediately the cop had his baton out and slammed it directly in the boy's face. As soon as he fell to his knees the cop responded with a direct blow to the head. The other tough began to cry out, but was slapped across the mouth with an open hand by the officer holding him. The bus picked up speed, shrouding this brutal tableau in a cloud of dust. Behind me the young headphones dude began to sing his toneless song again. I buried my head in Paul's shoulder, feeling profound guilt. As if my presence here had caused it all. Sensing my distress, Paul tightened his arm around me.

“It's all in the past now,” he said.

And the bus sped off into the future.

IF THE CAT
could talk, she would have said: How did this happen? She looked dusty, grubby, world-weary; a cat who lived on the streets and had no human home to which to retreat. And tonight she was hanging off a wall. The way her claws were digging into the chalky texture of the brickwork made it appear as though she had been glued into place, her back in perfect parallel with the wall. There was something spectral and unsettling about the way she seemed to be frozen. I was reminded of images I'd once seen of wildlife that had been caught in volcanic lava flow and had fossilized into place; their final steps as sentient creatures frozen in time. I must have spent a good minute looking at the cat and the place in which she now found herself. How was she able to sustain this absurd, improbable physical position? And what fear or apprehension had forced her to take refuge on a crumbling bit of whitewashed stone down a dark alleyway within the labyrinthine confines of a walled city?

How did this happen?

And what was I doing down this black passageway in the middle of the night?

To jump back around twelve hours . . .

The bus deposited us at its terminus—the depot at Essaouira—just before two p.m. As we staggered off that motorized steambath, the headphones dude—still singing that wonderful ludicrous tune (was that the only song on his iPod?)—gave us an amused wave goodbye. The bus driver, smoking what was evidently a much-needed cigarette, also nodded farewell as we grabbed our luggage and fended off several touts who were trying to convince us to take up their offer of cheap accommodation.

“You want room . . . very clean . . . good price.”

“
Nous avons déjà une chambre,
” Paul replied, steering me toward a line of beat-up taxis nearby.

“But I have better room . . . you come with me I show you everything in Essaouira.”

Paul waved him away while I sidestepped several women holding up woven shirts and multicolored shawls and cheap beaded necklaces. The afternoon sun was still punishing. This concrete plaza was thick with gas fumes and dust. I grabbed my scrunched-up field hat out of my shoulder bag, then pulled it down so squarely over my head that it shielded my eyes. The crowd of hawkers followed us as we moved toward the taxis. They were relentless in their need to hound us. They wouldn't take no for an answer.