The Forgiven (29 page)

“I see.”

But David didn’t see anything at all.

“Well, David, it is all a mystery. He took my Elvis and ran. The next person he met was you, unfortunately.”

He pulled the lamp closer and turned it down. They ate the last segments of the apples, and the wind battered the house, making it sing like a whistle as air flowed through its cracks and glassless windows. The sobbing stopped. David looked down at the Elvis, which seemed to be moving. If it sprang to life, he would have to run. Its eyes glistened. Abdellah took out a long white clay pipe and lit it from the oil lamp.

“Tell me,” he asked, “what cereal do you eat in the morning? I prefer cornflakes myself. I prefer it to cooked goat kid. It’s the one good thing you have given us, apart from ice.”

He chuckled and rolled back on his haunches.

“I’m glad you like ice,” David sneered.

“I like everything that is cool and cold and fresh. You people seem to think we like living in this furnace. You think we like the camels and the sand palm trees and the one hundred and four degrees in the morning? Ah, not at all. I dream of Sweden most of the time. I have seen it in the color magazines. A fantastic place, by the looks of it. It’s the place I would most like to live. How wonderful it would be to go to Sweden and stay there. It must be so deliciously cold there.”

The old man raised one hand and made a strange gesture, as of evoking icicles. Then his face changed.

“Tell me,” he went on. “Was my son alone that night when you struck him with your car?”

David replied automatically:

“As far as we could see, he was alone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, there we are, then.”

Abdellah wiped his hands and scraped together the split pips from the apple and they sat awkwardly listening to the wind picking up, and Abdellah tapped out the contents of his pipe prior to refilling it. He did this as slowly as a man can, indifferent to the infidel’s boredom. But then, it had occurred to him, David was not even an infidel in the strict sense of the word, because he was sure David did not even believe in his own God, let alone Abdellah’s. It was darkness, pure darkness, and a civilized man couldn’t imagine it. And yet he rather liked the guy. He wondered if he should offer him a puff of his pipe instead of cutting his throat, as he had originally intended to do. Come to think of it, he could always do both. There was an idea.

He got up and flung the end of his unraveled
chech
over his shoulder, taking the lamp with him and leaving David sitting on his piece of cardboard.

“Monsieur David,” he said, as he was about to close the door behind himself. “I would bolt the door when you sleep, if I were you. Anouar will bring you some tea later on. You have been very helpful.”

“You’re welcome,” the atheist said, a little idiotically.

“By the way, you are perfectly free to go wherever you like. None of the doors is locked. If you want to go outside, please do so. Just don’t walk to La’gaaft. As you know, that is where the blacks live.” His voice became spirited. “You’ll regret it.”

BUT DAVID DIDN
’
T BOLT THE DOOR STRAIGHTAWAY. HE
wrapped himself in his sleeping bag and turned off his own lamp. He
was aware of the possibility that he had made a mistake, but it was a mistake that revealed itself only in the demeanor and half-conscious body language of Abdellah: he was too friendly. And why the tirade against La’gaaft, which looked identical to Tafal’aalt? And the hatred of the
haratin
, who had been neighbors presumably for centuries? The room gradually became cold, and he began to shiver. He took a banana from his bag and ate it savagely. “Here I am,” he accused himself, “eating a fucking banana in a pillbox. Is it me or is it because I’m white?”

A little later he took an Ambien but didn’t sleep. He locked the door, then unlocked it. He couldn’t decide which was worse, confinement or protection. A woman was walking up and down the corridor, in the dark, talking to herself. He decided to daydream. Where was Jo? Sitting by herself wondering why her phone didn’t work? He knew her. She wasn’t enough of a party animal to make the time go by swiftly. She would be killing every minute with a hammer, as her mother used to say. She’d be standing on the wall at night with a pair of binoculars. It was terrible for him to take this for granted, but her unhappiness didn’t make her faithless. It merely made her repetitive.

But still, it was this same repetitiveness that made him love her more the more he considered all her qualities rationally—and he was thinking more rationally now than he had in years. Would he love her less, for example, if she was snorting cocaine at that moment? Of course he would. It would mean that she had forgotten him for a while, at a time when forgetting was out of the question. When it was a crime. Her repetitiveness was her fidelity, which was the knot at the heart of her mutinous unhappiness. But neither of them would cut that knot. They had made a profound decision.

Twenty

N THE LARGE GLASS TABLE THAT DOMINATED THE
salon of the second floor, the servants had set down dark chocolate—colored terracotta plates of figs and segmented oranges with vases of white orchids between them. Since the windows had been opened and the curtains drawn back all the way, the desert air came in and it was not nearly as hot as it had been the previous night. A change in the weather, a momentary cooling: it was enough to loosen her mental hinges, to open the hatches (she thought of herself as a warren of hatches, like an old cargo ship), and let her bend down to put her nose to the lines of cocaine that Richard had carefully cut with a paper knife.

“No, honey, not with your nose. We have
the tube
.”

The tube was like a thin pencil made of engraved Arab silver with one end shaped like a cat’s mouth. He handed it to her and watched
her try to use it, sucking up half a line with one nostril. Her profile from his angle was beautiful: precise, aquiline, wonderfully edged. She wasn’t smiling like everyone else. Though he had no interest in women, he could not help trying to admire her heterosexually. Did men fall in love with her, coming to a moment when they
had
to look past her dowdiness, her scholarly affect? Because there was no quickness in her, no vividness of reaction. She was always old, in the noblest sense of that word. Even when she snorted a line of coke through a silver tube, her profile never decomposed. It was like someone studying a rare nematode in a lab, every nerve devoted to the task. It must take a very particular kind of man, he thought as he watched her inhale his exactly cut line, and it was not David or Day. It was likely that she had not found him, and never would. There are women like that. One sees them everywhere.

When she had finished, she sat up again and quickly wiped her nostril.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “I haven’t done it in years. Maybe never. I can’t remember.”

“Take your time. It’s quite a boring drug anyway. I only do it because Dally insists. What about you, Tom?”

Day refused the offer. “It’s a bit eighties for me. These days, it just makes me fall asleep with aching nostrils. I can do without aching nostrils.”

The French girl was at the table, snorting away feverishly. Her Moroccan lover looked at her aghast but didn’t interfere. Her face had gone pink and shiny and her eyes seemed to be bleeding in some way.

“Mohammed, the whole place is full of reptiles. You’re a reptile, too. A sweet little reptile.”

“She had a zoo as a kid,” Mohammed explained to the table. “She had a pet lizard called Mohammed. I think she ought to be decapitated for that.”

Jo held herself still so that this alien force could surge through her at its own speed. She took a small ham sandwich from the table and
crammed it into her mouth. Everyone laughed. Day caressed her foot under the low table, where they were all barefoot. And then the cool air struck her face and she was aware of the light film of sweat that clung to it.

“Usually,” Dally chimed, “they can’t eat a thing. Especially not with my A-Force snow from Marseilles.”

Richard purred to Jo directly. “I’m glad you’re feeling a bit better. David’ll be back tomorrow. But personally, I’m glad you got to have a day and a night by yourself. I think you needed it.”

She wanted to reply by blurting “What?” but she knew he was right. A marriage is a stifling affair much of the time.

“It would be great if I wasn’t worried,” she said dutifully.

The staff came around with hot napkins as Swann grew belligerent. He was more left wing than he looked.

“Are you sure they don’t hate you, Dicky? I think you’re being complacent. They’d never accept you as an infidel. I don’t care what you say.”

“Why should they accept him?” the French girl wailed. “They have every reason to hate Americans.”

“Is that so?” Richard felt a headache coming on with this one. “I would have thought they had more reason to hate you.”

She looked genuinely astonished.

“But we have excellent relations with the Arabs. We share the Mediterranean with them. But you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand. You mean you have them in your ghettos, so you feel close to them. Do you feel close to them when they’re burning cars in the suburbs and ransacking your synagogues?”

“That’s a—how you say—
problème sociale
.”

“No. They dislike you for the same reason they dislike us. We’re not Muslims and we lord it over them. It’s against what they regard as the natural order of things, which would be them lording it over us. I understand them, though. They are rival imperialists. I don’t hold it against them.” By now he did not have the heart to tell her that he was
not American, and she probably would not have cared. “Besides, in America the Muslims are prosperous and peaceful. They don’t spend their time rioting in the suburbs and pelting police cars with trash cans.” Richard put on a sickly voice. “Why do they do that in France only? It must be—how you say—
solidarité
.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she shouted. “We’re not killing hundreds of thousands in Iraq!”

“No, darling, the local
mujahideen
are. But I am not arguing with you about Iraq. I was a protester against, after all.”

“Then you know how they feel. I can hear them talking in the kitchen. All the Arabs feel that way. You’d have to be stupid not to feel that.”

Richard took out his nutcracker and turned his attention to a large bowl of walnuts.

“You’re bitter because of 9/11,” the tiresome one droned on. “As if you didn’t have anything to do with it …”

“There were these beautiful statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan,” Richard said, as if to himself, very quietly, “and one day the rulers of that happy land came to them with a pile of demolition bombs and destroyed them. I suppose, if you were high on coke, that you could argue that poor old Buddha had it coming to him. Perhaps the statues said something offensive or there was something lewd in their complicated hand gestures. I know how it is. One gets so
hotheaded
about Buddha and his ways. It sometimes seems that the only way to respond to it is by …”

Jo suddenly found herself laughing out loud.

“It’s the coke,” Mohammed drawled, giving her a wink.

“Mohammed,” the French girl protested, “back me up against these babbling Americans. They’re arguing …”

“No, we understand that when in doubt, we Americans must be blamed. I would miss it if you didn’t blame us. I’d feel less important somehow. Believe me, we’re masochists. We enjoy it, and it makes us feel bigger than we actually are. It makes us insufferably arrogant. I
wish I could make the Arabs understand that. I wish I could make
you
understand that. They’d be amazed. Blame us less and we’d be a lot more humble. We wouldn’t think we were the center of the world.”

“Excellent speech,” Day said, slow-clapping. “Why can’t we put you on Al Jazeera?”

“I don’t believe you,” the girl snapped. “You’d think you were the center of the world anyway.”

Richard gave her a shelled nut. “It’s an understandable delusion. We
were
for a fairly long time. Now I think you should go back to being stoned. You’re very cute when you think you’re surrounded by reptiles.”