Gorgeous East (5 page)

But thirty-odd years of fighting hadn’t been long enough for Polisario to drive out the powerful Moroccans in the north—who were, at long last, winning. Not through guns and bombs—as Dr. Milhauz might say—but through economic policy. The Moroccan government had poured millions of dirhams into developing the territory stolen from the Saharouis they now called the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Morocco. They had irrigated fields, beefed up fishing fleets, built soccer stadiums and office buildings, and paved over Laayoune’s parched, dusty plazas with blinding white flagstones.

And so the SADR existed now more as an idea than a genuine nation. The unfortunate Saharouis—450,000 of them, one of the largest refugee population in the world—waited for an increasingly elusive victory, for the order to return home to Laayoune, no longer their capital; waited to bring their boats back to the rich fishing grounds off Cape Juby, now trawled by fleets of Moroccan vessels. Hopeful, angry, deluded, living on UN protein crackers and logs of tasteless UN cheese and vats of distilled water in the squalor of a dozen camps strewn around the Algerian town of Tindouf like a handful of
crottes
—camel droppings—tossed into the desert sand.

2.

A
n hour later, they still hadn’t landed. They were in a holding pattern, waiting for a signal from the ground crew—sometimes camels or a herd of goats wandered across the airstrip—the Antonov C-160 circling the vast tent city fifteen kilometers out as dusk came on, a dim blue flush in the sky from the east. Or maybe the air-traffic controller was merely taking his siesta in the sweltering heat. Phillipe closed his eyes. His sleep had been troubled lately, uneasy—as if there were, generally speaking, something he’d forgotten to do, or something he’d done that he shouldn’t have—though he couldn’t say now what these things might be, and not knowing gnawed away at his subconscious.

Just two days ago, he’d been in Paris with Louise, going out to dinner for their anniversary. The hard pavement of the boulevard Raspail shining in a spring rain, the crowds coming out of the cinemas in the Place de Clichy, limousines three deep to the curb at Trebuchet in Montparnasse. Reservations on Trebuchet’s trendy back terrace had been made weeks in advance, but Louise decided she wasn’t in the mood for a scene and they ended up at Chez Manon in their usual corner booth. They ate lightly and exchanged gifts: a beautiful necklace of eighteenth-century Venetian glass flowers for her; for him a pair of black velvet Hermès slippers stitched with his monogram in gold thread. Then back early to the house in Neuilly. There they pulled at each other’s clothes in the entrance hall with startling avidity, eager as a couple of teenagers, even after seven years of marriage: The taxi idling at the bottom of the steps, the driver counting his tip on the front seat just visible through the pebbled glass of the street door, and Phillipe tugging up his wife’s tight skirt as she bent over the heavy Directoire table, the shadowy pattern of the ironwork grille falling across her bare back in sinuous arabesques.

Later, in bed, they made love, gently, face-to-face. Afterwards, Louise shuddered in his arms and admitted she was very worried. She’d had a disturbing dream like Caesar’s wife before the Ides. In it she was falling from a great height, perhaps from the walls of a massive fortress, into complete darkness. Western Sahara—where the hell was this place? Hot as hell and dangerous, no doubt. The ass-end of the earth!

“Africa is here”—Phillipe drew an outline in the air with his finger—“Western Sahara’s here”—jabbing the South Atlantic coast about halfway down. “Mauritania’s here, Morocco here. All this is mostly unpopulated desert, except for a few tribes of Berber nomads. That’s the Sahara part. The Western part—”

“Oh, shut up.” Louise made a face. “What if you get taken hostage by terrorists?
C’est possible, non?
”

“No,” he said. “Al Qaeda’s got nothing to do with it. This isn’t jihad, this is Moroccans versus Saharouis. Muslim versus Muslim, an old-fashioned battle over access to natural resources. The UN’s on the ground there only as a negotiator—respected by all parties—with a couple of thousand troops to keep order until a deal can be worked out.”

“And how long have they been there working out their deal, your UN?”

Phillipe grinned. “About thirty-five years.”

“Idiots!” Louise exclaimed. “So they take you away from me for a puppet show!”

“You can’t blame the UN, I’m afraid,” Phillipe said. “This is a French affair. I’m being sent at the request of Madame de la République.”

“To hell with that bitch!”

“Spoken like an aristocrat. Congratulations. But if you could only see the condition of the refugees—”

“Enough!” Louise cried. “They’re boring, your refugees! Send someone else! Send your adjutant. What’s his name—Pinard.”

Phillipe laughed at this.

“If you knew Pinard . . .”

“Why not?”

“He’s a great hulking Canadian, a hard-luck type. Uncomfortable in his own skin. He plays the oboe in the Musique Principale. A good oboe player, even very good, but let’s be honest, the oboe is a ridiculous instrument. I can’t say what kind of officer he’d make, he’s never been under fire. But I can tell you one thing—he’s definitely not diplomatic material.”

Traffic boomed from beyond their bedroom balcony, racing madly around the circle at the rue de Rennes. Now, Louise indulged herself in a few tears and held him close.

“I really wish you’d quit, Phillipe,” she whispered, sniffling. “You’re away from home too much. Afghanistan in February and Iraq last fall and Aubagne half the year and now this terrible place. It’s difficult for me, being alone so much. And you know”—she kissed him—“maybe it’s time for us.”

Phillipe swallowed hard. “You think so?”

“What do you think?”

He paused, considering his answer: They’d had seven good, busy years alone with each other, dividing their time between Paris and Brittany and Béziers (they went for the bullfights twice a year) with frequent side trips to England, where Phillipe had aristocratic friends vaguely connected to the royal family. Louise gardened and listened carefully to music and took Russian and Italian lessons at the Sorbonne and read the classics—she was particularly fond of Flaubert’s
L’Éducation sentimentale
, which she’d read to Phillipe twice out loud—and made sheep’s cheese from her own little flock of six sheep each spring at the château, playing at country life like Marie Antoinette in her mock-rustic village at the Petit Trianon. Louise had also learned the viola passably and could accompany Phillipe on simple pieces. They had many friends, a busy social life: Happiness attracts others—to paraphrase the
Maxims
of La Rochefoucauld—as a rose the hummingbird.

But Phillipe was over fifty now, Louise over thirty. She was right, it was definitely time.

“Children . . .” Phillipe’s courage faltered at the word. What would it be like? Was he fit to be a parent—or too selfish?

“Child. Let’s start with one.”

He smiled at her in the darkness. New life, new hope. “
Bien.
I’m ready.”

She pressed herself against him and they embraced.

“It’s the damned pill,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get off it. It takes about a month for my body to adjust.”

“When I get back, then . . .”

“
Oui
. When you get back.”

3.

T
hey landed at last in the boiling red light, the sun a hard vermillion orb falling to the west. Great clouds of dust billowed up as the Antonov’s four prop-jets spun to a halt. The rear gangway lowered on its hydraulics and Phillipe descended into the stifling air with a small flight bag slung over his shoulder; the extent of his luggage, it contained a couple of changes of clothing, the usual toiletries, and a draft of his monograph on Erik Satie, still unfinished after all these years.

He was closely followed by Dr. Milhauz, juggling two large bags destined to join his trunk and other odds and ends on the tarmac. The man traveled like a nineteenth-century naturalist, like Charles Darwin circling the world on the
Beagle
with brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. These bags were piled to one side and this seemed like a natural place to congregate. A Quonset hut hangar on the other side, apparently abandoned, loomed like the mouth of a robbers’ cave, filled with shadows.

Phillipe didn’t like the look of the place. His reaction was immediate and felt like a premonition. The desert wind blew steadily in the red dusk; the stench of nearby refuse piles assailed their nostrils. Soon night would drop temperatures fifty degrees, but for now the heat lingered. Dr. Milhauz collapsed on one of his crates, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. The red light of the dying sun shone in his face.

“This isn’t good,” the little man murmured uneasily. “Where are the Pakistani troops?”

“Did you tell them we were coming?”

Dr. Milhauz looked up at Phillipe through his owl-glasses. “There’s supposed to be a UN transport waiting. The Pakistani contingent of our forces have been assigned to this camp. Sixty-five men, not counting medical personnel.”

Phillipe didn’t say anything.

Besides the flight crew of the Antonov, hurriedly preparing for the return flight to Dahkla, they were alone. The dunes loomed all around; the tent city, about thirty-five kilometers off, couldn’t be seen from the airstrip. It seemed they were as good as abandoned in the absolute middle of nowhere. Soon, the big Russian plane taxied down the runway, its takeoff lights blinking, gathering speed for the assault on the night sky. As the prop-jets screamed into full power, Dr. Milhauz put his hands over his ears. Then the plane was gone, its wheels folded into the fuselage, the sound of its engines fading into nothing.

“By the way, let me do the talking,” Milhauz said presently.

“There’s no one to talk to,” Phillipe said.

“I mean tomorrow. When we meet the Saharoui Camp Committee. As a gesture of respect, I like to speak to them in the Hassaniya dialect and not Spanish or French. Do you speak Saharoui, Colonel?”

“I speak only French and English,” Phillipe said. “And also Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, and a little Russian.”

“Aha!” The UN representative raised a finger. “You do not speak Hassaniya! I do!” But this moment of triumph instantly dissipated. He took a step closer to the colonel, his shadow elongating. A fenec fox, its ears trembling, watched him from the darkness of its burrow beneath the lip of the dune.

“I shouldn’t tell you any of this,” he said in a low voice. “I mean you’re not one of us, are you?”

“Aren’t we all engaged in the same cause, Herr Dr. Milhauz,” Phillipe replied, “world peace?”

“Yes, yes”—the little man wagged his head impatiently—“as are all beauty queens and socialists and children under ten. But let’s be realistic. The United Nations is a country unto itself, with its own laws, it’s own hierarchy and chain of command. In some sense, it’s like a perpetual motion machine, feeding on self-generating energy and rarely going forward. It responds to a crisis, but inevitably becomes part of the crisis by refusing to act, by maintaining its own status quo. Understand me, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—merely the way things are.”

Phillipe looked at the little man, astonished. “Well, that’s deeply enlightening, Herr Dr. Milhauz!”

“We negotiate endlessly, we produce reams of paperwork, just to produce reams of paperwork,” the little man continued. “As I say, our interest is in the status quo. If we keep things the same, they can’t get worse, don’t you see?” He licked his dry lips. “But now, I think events are getting ahead of us. There have been odd rumblings. Conversations overheard in the bazaar at Dahkla, rumors from the Saharoui souk in Laayoune, a place all but impenetrable to Westerners. Even the Moroccans can’t get in. And there’s this symbol—”

He inscribed a crude hieroglyph in the sand with the heel of his boot: an eye shape, with a sharp point at one end and crossed over the middle by three parallel lines:

“It has appeared everywhere very suddenly. On walls, on street corners.”

Phillipe leaned over to study the odd marking.

“Some say it’s an eye, others”—Dr. Milhauz swallowed—“a bee.”

“I don’t see that at all.” Phillipe frowned. “Looks more like a fish to me.”

“This part”—Dr. Milhauz indicated the sharp point coming out one end—“is supposed to be the stinger.”

“But what’s it a symbol of?”

Dr. Milhauz shrugged. “A secret society, a conspiracy, who knows. Perhaps an uprising—”

“Against whom?” Phillipe said, perplexed.

“Against the Moroccans. Or against Polisario. Or perhaps against us, against the West. Against reason, you might say, against the sciences. Against”—his voice descended to a frightened whisper—“economics.”

“
Du calme, mon ami
,” Phillipe said, smiling to himself. “There will always be economics.”

“Or it may be nothing,” Dr. Milhauz continued. “Maybe just a kind of joke. In any case, I urge caution. Watchfulness. Can you be watchful, Colonel?”

“Yes, I think so,” Phillipe said. He studied the little man critically in the red light. Perhaps he was insane.