The Forgiven (16 page)

“She’ll understand. I’ll talk to her if you want.”

David raised an abrupt but unconvincing hand. “No, no more interventions, please. I’ll do it myself. Well, what a jolly weekend.” He beamed horribly at the old man. “I say, Mr. Deep Villager, when do we leave?”

Outraged, Hamid provided him with the real name, but David couldn’t get his tongue around it.

“Just say Monsieur Taheri,” Richard snapped finally, letting all his accumulated irritation burst out at last. “Or just Monsieur.”

“
Monsieur
,” David said to the old man, who did not even look at him.
“Quand voulez-vous partir?
”

“
Tout de suite
,” the old man replied without missing a beat.

David felt the condensation of his own glands growing cold all over his body, the sticky coolness of a thousand bumps of sweat. He
steadied the sudden giddiness that overcame him and he did this by using his closed fists as ballast. This made the overhead light, which had been swinging wildly, become still again. He blinked. Richard wanted to disengage, to leave it at that. He was being cut off, abandoned. It was damage control. It’s your circus,
old boy
, Richard was thinking. Go dance in it.

“I have to talk to my wife,” David said to Abdellah, as Hamid translated. “She’ll be extremely unhappy.”

“She might be,” Richard agreed sadly.

“A gazelle is a gazelle,” the old man said, as if this needed no further explanation, and Hamid smiled, and if it had been polite, he would have laughed.
“Ghanchoufou achno mkhebilina ghedda,”
he murmured—we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

JO WAITED FOR HIM ON THE PORCH OF THEIR CHALET. AS
the light faded, the staff came by to light tall mosquito tapers, though she had the impression that the air was so scorching that even mosquitoes couldn’t survive in it. They brought with them painted plates of melon and Italian prosciutto, stemmed glasses with a pricked peach in each one submerged in champagne. It was the German cocktail
Kullerpfirsich
, the peaches rolling as the bubbles entered the fork grooves and made the fruit turn. The Moroccan boys were highly startled by this invention, which might have seemed to them like a sleight of witchcraft, and they set down her drink as if they were dying to be rid of it. They wore
tarbouches
that night, and she felt for them.

“Why do the peaches turn?” they asked with big eyes.

“Because Monsieur Richard made them,” she replied.

Out of nowhere, a firework rocket shot up into the sky, narrowly missing the moon. Silver sparks floated back down, and by their light, she saw the edges of the outdoor disco and its seething mass of heads and arms. They had set up fake silver palm trees around it ribboned with rose-colored lights, and between them were narrow silk tents
with high-pitched roofs, inside which there were probably refreshments or dope. Richard and Dally made a point of making naughty stuff available to their guests in insouciant ways that obviously gave them a good laugh. There were plates of
majoun
crackers in the library at all hours, reefers expertly made up stacked in cedarwood boxes on the hallway tables. You’d see some elderly
roué
pause as he swept by on his way to dinner, sniff the goods, and pick one up with a mincing elegance. The idea was to get them all stoned all the time, and it had worked because they were all stoned now, she was sure, all except for David and her. A collective mood had come upon them. A couple staggered by trailing fallen olives and cocktail sticks, very young, the girl incredibly glamorous and the boy soaking wet. They cast a quick look at her and the girl said “Coming?” Their faces were like young wolves. The girl looked like Isadora Duncan just before the strangulation. Jo shook her head and raised her spinning peach. See, no need for anything else.

“It was what I was saying about the Americans in Iraq …”

The girl’s voice trailed off, and she lost her balance, falling to one side, but held up. Another rocket zoomed up and expired in a shower of special effects. She looked at her watch. Where was David? A large plastic beach ball appeared over the heads of the dancers, kept aloft by successive pokes and slaps, rolling around just like her peach. A wave of laughter. Her anxiety would not relent, however. It was an exhausting guilt that had no issue, no resolution. Who could she beg to be forgiven? There was not a soul to beg, if not the old man at the gates, and David was dealing with him. And she hadn’t begged anything from anyone her whole life. How did you do it?

She felt herself losing distinctness. Though her body remained still, her mind whirled round and round on an increasingly unstable axis. The body can turn to sand, dissolving at its extremities and mixing with its surroundings, gradually disappearing, merging into other things. The moon rose, thank God. And then the familiar form came hunkering down the strange repaved paths that crisscrossed Dally and
Richard’s fantasia like so many black snakes. She tensed. David was grim, as always.

She sometimes wondered if she really hated him. You know, she’d say to herself, that jittery hatred that is a perfect counterfeit for an exhausted, dissolving love. You can hate a man simply because you
let him in
, and then he didn’t do what he was supposed to do. It was insulted feminine egotism in some ways, but other than that, she thought primly, the sacrilege was all his. He blustered and bullied. His pride was insurmountable. Men are the sinners, not us. She believed she had minor faults, not sins.

She gulped down the whole glass of fizzy and then took a wet bite out of the alcoholic peach.

“They’re dancing like babies,” he said coldly as he came up, searching at once for a towel with which to wipe his hands. “I’m so glad I can’t dance.”

HE SLUMPED DOWN NEXT TO HER, AND HIS FACE WAS
grainily damp and sickly looking. The resignation in his voice now was startling, and she waited to see what it might be. One never knew with him. Disasters broke over him like dust storms and were gone before you knew it, leaving behind them his rugged, obstinate form that reminded her of a great pile of boulders.

He sat back, and his bitterness made no bones about itself.

“Dicky and the Arab servant have cooked up a perfectly wonderful plan for me. I’m to go back with the old crone to his village in the middle of nowhere and do some atonement. I have no idea what they have in mind. I have to take all the cash. Dicky says he’ll lend you whatever you need here, which is nothing. I agreed to go. Everyone seems to think it’s the only thing to do. The nomads might get nasty.”

“They’re not nomads, darling.”

“Well, whatever they are. I am being hauled back to a place I can’t pronounce. Still, at least there’ll be no dancing.”

“That’s what
you
think.”

He groaned, and they managed a moment of black humor.

“When are you leaving?”

“Right now. He wants to leave in an hour. The body …”

“I am coming, too,” she announced after a dead silence.

“Out of the question.
Pas de gazelles
, the old geezer said. No women, which means no you. You are staying. You would be an insufferable complication.”

She tried to make a faint argument out of it, but it was like rolling a ball uphill, and soon enough the struggle fizzled out. She didn’t want to go, after all, and no amount of rhetoric could hide the fact. She felt a sadistic triumph. It was right that he went, and somehow she didn’t think it was dangerous at all, merely worrying. For the following few minutes she packed a shaving bag for him, taking care to do it well. She stowed away his toiletries and toothbrush, his aftershave and razors, his vitamin pills and his cotton balls. She folded a few clothes into his sports bag and zipped both bags up. It was like packing a kid off to school. Her mind raced ahead. It never occurred to her that they might harm him. But for a moment, she stuffed a knuckle into her mouth and felt the tears surge. They weren’t for him. They were for their past, which had suddenly disappeared. When she came back outside, he was drinking heavily, staring fixedly at the gold outline of the house and its filigree windows.

“You shouldn’t,” was all she said.

“I don’t care about offending them. I am an infidel. I am
allowed
to drink.”

“But you shouldn’t … for yourself.”

She cupped his neck in her hand, leaned down, and kissed the wet forehead.

“That’s precisely the reason I drink,” he murmured.

She didn’t know what to say to him. Come back safe? Don’t mortgage the house?

“Have you seen the place on a map?” was what she did say.

He shook his head. He said he didn’t much care where it was.

“I’m sure Richard wouldn’t let you go if there was a risk. It’s not that big a country.”

He took her hand for a while, and in some sick way he was also quite relieved to be going. One wanted to cross the bridge and have done with a lot of things. He stared glumly down at the two ice cubes at the bottom of his glass swimming about in a diluted Johnny Walker, and his mind clouded. It’s all my fault, he wanted to say, so it’s for the best. Stay and have fun.

“I order you to have a good time.” He smiled. “I’ll be fine.
Tutto bene
. Think of it as a jaunt in the desert. Tea in the Sahara. The whole thing will be silly and I’ll probably enjoy myself in the end.” He almost snarled. “I think they just want closure. A gesture of solidarity. They want me to say I’m sorry. That’s what people always want. It’s like being on
Oprah
.”

“And will you say sorry?”

“I’ll say sorry, yes. I
am
sorry.”

“That’s a relief to hear. For a while I thought you weren’t sorry.”

He rolled his eyes, and her fingers went through his heat-coarsened hair, springy with salt and pepper curls. He was sulking, feeling like a victim. His hand trembled as it gripped the drink that was gradually poisoning him. They were playing Lucio Dalla in the disco, pop of the Italian seventies. He wouldn’t miss that, would he? He turned to her, caressing the knuckles of her hand as it pressed against his shoulder, and there was the unspeakable thing passing between them, the dribs and drabs of the old complicity. Laugh at the world together. Enjoy the same wine. Remember the little hotel in Rome? But the bag was packed in the other room, and up at the gate the men of the Aït Kebbash were waiting for him. Their mood was not grim, but they were anxious to perform a legitimate burial. When they got there, the car was already running; the body had been scrupulously wrapped like a mummy and had been loaded into the back of the jeep, its awkward length bent in the middle slightly. Abdellah waited impatiently for the
murderer of his son to appear with his traveling bags. His mood was indescribable, even to himself. But, then, he would never have tried to describe it to himself.

His soul was in darkness, just as his mind was. He licked his lips and cast a dry, scornful look at the pitiful Source des Poissons. But deep down, he was envious of it, bitterly covetous.

Eleven

T WAS AUGUST NOW, DRISS SAID, AND ROGER MADE
him coffee every morning in the outbuilding when there were guests in the rooms, and he would see human visions in slippers and gowns come down to the pool with bowls of strawberries and halfhearted cigarettes like delicate animals coming down to a watering hole. The European guests. French couples and families from London and Dublin. Some of them kept yachts at Sotogrande for the summer. Roger kept him away from them, closing the door of the outbuilding while he sipped his coffee and making sure no one saw him until he was dressed up in his straw hat and gardening jacket, an anonymous scarecrow they would not ask questions about. Then, disguised, he ventured out into the sunlight with his pruning shears and pail.

Roger showed him the gardens he and Angela had built since they had moved to Spain eleven years earlier. They were English gardens by inspiration, but given “new blood” by a better climate. Driss had to learn every shrub and petal. He had to learn to trowel and seed and trim as carefully as you would trim your nails.