The Forgiven (27 page)

He slept. The usual nightmares arrived, then departed. He woke to the color of the cliff burning in the first moments of a Sahara dusk, the ropes and little caves exposed to a light that seemed oxidized. For a while he didn’t move. He wanted to just absorb the dread pouring out of that wall of bitter, luminous redness. He was sure the burial was already over.

IN FACT, IT HAD PASSED QUICKLY. THE WIND WAS HIGH AND
the plot of gravestones carved into the desert was unendurable even as the sun went down. Driss’s mother had died years before; it was the aunts and cousins who wept and cursed. The men had already absorbed their grief into themselves and stood silent and unmoving as the wind hurled debris around them and made them feel their desolation.

They were lost in their own thoughts as the bandaged body was lowered into its slot and the prayers were said. Abdellah thought of his son’s young face as a ten-year-old when he had taken him prospecting across the mountain by himself. A face like an apple, with the burnished freckles of young boys. He remembered it as if it were yesterday, and the Dicranurus they had picked up by the trenches. Driss still had it in his room. Abdellah bit his lip. His tears were all expended and nothing more would come out of his eyes, nothing, in fact, but vision itself.

AS NIGHT WAS FALLING AND THE MASS OF ISSOMOUR WAS
losing its sparkling definition against an indigo sky, he went to the edge of the village where the dried
oued
was full of majestic boulders
and waited for Anouar to arrive back on foot from Tabrikt. Almost as soon as the sun disappeared, the air cooled considerably and he drew his
chech
around his head. His mind was empty, numbed with horror, and no violent words passed through it, not even as his anger rose and fell and rose again, because, after all, life was not words and neither was reality and they changed nothing. Many times during the journey from Azna, he had considered what he should do to the Englishman, but in reality he didn’t know; his mind was as yet unresolved. There was only one thing that mattered to him and that was whether, when confronted with the most painful necessity of telling the truth, David would do so. To tell him the truth about how Driss died: it was the only thing that now obsessed him. Upon the question of that truthfulness, everything would be decided from now on. If David lied, it was one thing; if he had the courage to tell Abdellah truthfully what had happened that night, the ending would be of a different nature. There it was. There was nothing more that a father could ask of a man who had killed his son. The question of vengeance in itself was merely vulgar and had no force. He was therefore waiting before he made any decision. He had had to wait until Driss had been buried and until he had talked to Ismael. But a lie from David could not be forgiven, that much was clear. The lie would be far worse than the original accident. Far worse, he decided. For whereas an accident is no one’s fault, a lie is an individual man’s specific fault because it is deliberate. It’s a real act, something willed, and it is more difficult to forgive than anything.

After thirty minutes Anouar came out of the dark, picking his way along the
oued
, and behind him came the boy, swaddled in black rags to conceal his identity. Abdellah stirred himself; he beckoned the boy forward impatiently, and Anouar threw off his
chech
for a moment and got his breath back. The boy was tall, thin, very like Driss. He had been in the house countless occasions, since he and Driss had been apparently inseparable at times. They walked along the
oued
, finding a place where the wind was tamer. Ismael was extremely nervous, and his shoulders rolled as if their owner wished them to disappear, and his
eyes had that wild, vacillating look that you see in the faces of minor criminals as they are being led away by the police.

“Calm down,” Abdellah said sternly. “It’s not you who has done anything wrong.” And his voice made itself respected, so that Ismael crouched down, as if this would make it more inaudible in the grand scheme of things, and his face was long and birdlike, his eyelashes like a girl’s.

“Tell him,” Anouar said in a friendly way. “He wants to know what happened, that’s all.”

“It’s a terrible thing to ask you, Ismael. But I have to know everything.”

Anouar sat down, and for a while they all waited for the moon to appear over the edge of the Issomour cliffs. Anouar passed out cigarettes and lit them one by one, so that gradually the mood became more serene, more affable, and more conducive to talk. Ismael sighed theatrically and asked how the funeral had gone. He was greatly sorry he hadn’t been able to attend. He apologized. Then he said:

“I was with Driss all the way. We left here together with the Psychopyge specimens wrapped in paper. You remember?”

“I do. Where were you headed?”

“To Midelt. We thought we’d sell them there. There’s a German dealer there, you know. He would buy them.”

“Ah, Meissner,” Abdellah nodded. “He is a crook.”

“But you were alone on the road together, so late?” Anouar asked.

The boy shifted, and his face became a little petulant.

“We were hitching rides. And sometimes we could sell from the road. We heard there was going to be a big party up at the faggots’ house. Lots of rich foreigners driving by. It was common sense.”

“So you were waiting for cars?”

The boy said nothing, staring down at his own ankles. Abdellah lit the oil lamp he had brought with him and made a merciless study of Ismael’s shifty, twitchingly evasive face. The boy was a notorious liar, and he had many times suspected him of being a minor thief as well.
One of those who roamed the trenches at night looking for places he could dig himself. One couldn’t trust him. He wasn’t afraid enough to tell the truth now, but Abdellah would hear him out, because there was no one else. No one else had been there but David.

“The foreigners drove up in their car,” he said to Ismael. “And then?”

“We ran toward them. They slowed down.”

“It’s not possible,” Anouar said.

“They slowed down
a little
. There was a European man driving. He clearly saw us and that we were holding up boxes of fossils for sale. When we saw him slowed, we thought they were interested. We sprang forward with joy. They pay anything when they are in a car.”

“It’s true.” Abdellah nodded again. “They’re very stupid when they’re behind a wheel.”

“That’s what we thought. We thought, aha, he is going to roll down his window and pay us ten times what he should.”

“You held up the Psychopyges?”

“We did. But we made a mistake. The man didn’t stop.”

“They knew it was a demon.”

“Whatever they knew, they didn’t stop.”

“That much we know,” Anouar interjected.

“But he saw you both?” Abdellah insisted.

“By God, he did.”

“What happened then?”

They boy had tears in his eyes.

“I admit it. I ran away. I was too scared.”

“Where did you run to?”

“I ran into the hills. Up and up until I couldn’t run anymore.”

“You little shit. You pathetic fool.”

There was nothing to say; the boy hung his head.

“You ran while Driss was lying there?”

Ismael stammered. “He was already dead. I watched the man turn him over.”

“What did the European do?”

“He—he—went through his pockets and took out the ID.”

Of course, Abdellah thought. It was so obvious. Men always act in this way. They think God is blind. As if they won’t be found out.

“When you ran, did you turn back to watch?”

“I saw them arguing, the man and the woman. The woman was screaming at the man. The man wanted to find me.”

Anouar and Abdellah laughed, though it was not really laughter—it was a pained sneer. They thought of David running after Ismael and it simply made them laugh. It was comical enough.

“Well, well.”

Abdellah got up and strolled in a circle around the crouching boy. He wanted to kill him, and yet Ismael had only acted out of self-preservation. He was a petty thief, and he acted accordingly. For all he knew, Driss had been a petty thief, too, and he was not quite convinced that they had been standing by the road just to sell fossils. Ismael was a devious boy. His word was nothing. He would lie at the drop of a hat to exonerate himself.

Suddenly Abdellah rose and lurched toward Ismael, laying about him with his hands, smacking him on the head and then beating him with the flats of his hands until he couldn’t thrash anymore. But there was something halfhearted about it all, the hands not really connecting, the anger half feigned, so that the boy knew it and didn’t react unduly, merely rolling back on his heels and turning his face away.

“You fucking wretch!” the father cried, but again a little forcedly. “You worthless scum! What will you do for me when I ask you? When the time comes, what will you do?”

“Anything,” the boy cried.

“You’re a liar and a thief. I should kill you right now. Anouar, where is my pistol?”

Anouar said nothing while the boy flinched, and Abdellah’s arms ran out of energy.

“You say anything, you little shit. Would you do anything I asked you?”

The boy nodded.

“Well, I didn’t ask you. But you owe it to me.”

For a long while, none of them spoke. The moon continued its languid rise and the innumerable man-made caves punched into the vertical surface of the mountain became visible. Abdellah sat down again and lost himself in thought. Anouar lit another cigarette. Furtively, Ismael glanced back over his shoulder down the
oued
. Perhaps he could just run back to Tabrikt and have done with it. He was thinking of running away to Casablanca anyway. He and Driss had spoken of it many times. Anything was better than this shit-hole. He clenched his fists but didn’t move. Abdellah stopped watching him after a while and looked up at the ladders suspended across the face of the cliff. He stroked his chin. Really, it was difficult to think. The moon was in the way. It was too bright, too penetrating.

He let the boy cover his face again and felt his anxiety fragmenting, dissipating. Why not let fate take over? It would anyway. Ismael, for his part, thought incessantly of that day at the quarry when Driss had told him all about his past life in Paris.

FINALLY HE DISMISSED ISMAEL AND STRODE OFF BACK TO
Tafal’aalt, with Anouar at his heels. He pounded on the metal door. The women had prepared a goat
tagine;
the men who had come with him on the journey to Azna were gathered in the main room, smoking and drinking tea. They looked up as he entered, and there was a storm cloud on his face that made them put down their glasses and wipe their lips. He didn’t like this reaction and immediately tried to put them at their ease.

“Relax, my friends. It’s a sad day, but there it is.”

Invoking the One True God, He Who Is Merciful at All Times, they murmured into their glasses again and uttered words of comfort to the father. Abdellah sat with Anouar beside him and began drinking with them. The normal jokes and sexual innuendos were left to
one side this time, and silence was allowed to pervade the reunion. When the
tagine
was brought in, Anouar leaned over to Abdellah and whispered, “Shall I bring in the foreigner?” But the old man shook his head.

“Take something to him instead. I am too tired to think about him now. And eating with us is out of the question.”

“Very well.”

Abdellah stretched out his creaking, aching body on the oil-stained carpet and tore into the communal bread. And to think that the wind was already scouring Driss’s grave not a hundred meters from here. He dipped the bread into his mint tea and found that his hand shook so obviously that everyone else was aware of it. He could not stop it, and after a while he ceased feeling ashamed of it. He let it shake. Why should it not shake? His whole body and mind shook. When you go mad, he thought to himself, this is what it is like. You begin to shake first. Then all of you shakes. You shake until pieces of you begin to fall off. You become a wolf, a bear. You no longer hear the world. You curl into a ball and Satan begins to talk to you. Your hand goes on shaking and you eat your bread like a fool. You think, “I am poor, and nothing else.” And then you realize that no one is listening to you or your thoughts. You are alone with facts.

Nineteen

HEN ANOUAR KNOCKED ON HIS DOOR, DAVID FLICKED
open the bolt quickly and yanked the heavy door open. His face was ashen, with big glass eyes like a doll’s—or so Anouar thought. Perhaps he had been praying to his dreadful, ridiculous God, whom the infidels held in such exaggerated and futile regard. “It’s you,” the Englishman blurted out, and stepped aside to let Anouar with a large metal dish of goat
tagine
enter. As he passed, Anouar caught a whiff of curious aftershave that smelled like apricot stones, and yet David had not shaved and indeed he was looking a bit shabby.