Miss Webster and Chérif (9 page)

Abdou stepped out in front of the store, pretended to rush the children, who began screaming delightedly, and then commenced yelling in a language that might have been Arabic. The children mobbed the taxi. A big man in a tatty brown djellaba surged out of the shop and bundled them out of the way. He loomed in at the back window.

‘Madame Webster! Welcome. I am Saïda’s brother-in-law. She told me that you were coming.’

He proudly produced a cellphone from his pocket and made it play the theme tune from
The Lord of the Rings
. Elizabeth Webster, now completely drenched in the great I AM, had decided that nothing would surprise her. He kissed her hand and she descended from the taxi like a queen. All the children backed off, tantalised and impressed.

‘Enchanté, Madame. My name is Massoud.’

‘Ravie de vous connaître.’

The children gawped at the veiled old lady, open-mouthed. A small crowd of boys gathered to watch her sweep past the outlandish bazaar, through the dark shrouded shop and into a cloistered, irrigated courtyard. Flecked blue paint peeled from the concrete arches, but beneath them lurked a cool swept space, equipped with low seats ripped from defunct vehicles and decorated with carpets and cushions. The garden blossomed scents and colours. After the vast monochrome austerity of the desert she gazed into a living kaleidoscope. She realised that everything rising from the tended earth was edible: aubergines, peppers, carrots, chillies, pumpkins and two magnificent lemon trees. Irrigation channels built of packed earth glistened between the rows. There was a stone well at the centre and a fine modern diesel pump set up beside it.

‘We acquired this from the World Food Programme,’ said Massoud proudly, indicating the pump and making the process of acquisition sound like an excessively clever theft. He settled Miss Webster on one of the car seats and presented her with a range of soft drinks, from Coke to Orangina, in real glass bottles. Don’t drink it if it isn’t bottled. Miss Webster knew that these particular Orangina bottles had been discontinued in France years before. Massoud also proposed a draught of water from the well in an authentic pot-bellied pottery carafe. Abdou assured her that it was safe to drink, as it had been drawn directly from the rocky entrails of the earth.

‘It is very sweet and clean. The water here is famous.’

‘Thank you, Abdou. Thank you, Monsieur. I will have a mug of this water.’

The two men bent double under the burden of their own copious hospitality. She wondered where they hid the women. So far, woman appeared to be a species either rare or extinct. Yet, these children must have surged out of a human womb. They cannot have reared up from the sand like earthworms. She looked at the suggestive swelling purple of a well-watered aubergine and saw, just beyond the plants, an olive face surrounded by jewellery, a woman’s face which resembled Saïda’s – rounder, fuller, older, but just as beautiful. The other woman squatted before her and clasped both her hands in her own.

‘Welcome, Madame Webster. My sister has told me so much about you.’

Yes, this was the other sister who had remained in the desert. The French was not as confident, the eyes less fiery and more speculative, and the voice had the soft insistent trickle of the sands. Elizabeth read the face shrewdly and she was not wrong. That servile cunning, never far from the surface of Saïda’s glance, could not be detected in the face of this desert woman. Saïda had been contaminated by the habits of service, her polite smile purchased so many times that it stared back fixed, like a mask stitched to her face. This woman retained the freedom to meet anyone’s gaze. Yet she was watching, waiting for her husband’s gesture of permission to remain beside her guest. She presented a tray with an ornate silver teapot, several glasses painted in different colours and a plate of dates. When she set it down Elizabeth noticed a tiny pool of fine white sand collected beneath the stubby little feet of the pot.

‘I am called Fatima.’

The men melted away. The tea tasted very sweet. The conversation came straight out of
Alice in Wonderland
.

‘You are alone, Madame.’

‘What do you mean, alone?’

‘You travel alone.’

‘Yes. Is that odd?’

‘Here it is odd for a woman to travel without her husband and her children.’

‘I have no husband and no children.’

Fatima bowed, but expressed no indication of pity or surprise. She had expected that answer. The entire exchange evolved as an elaborate charade. Elizabeth Webster drank some more very sweet
thé à la menthe
and waited to see what would happen next. She became fascinated by the devious shiftiness of the people amongst whom she had been sent. She sensed the existence of a hidden agenda, and waited for Fatima to declare her hand.

‘My sister wishes for you to meet her son. She wants him to study abroad. He is a very brilliant young man, but he loves the desert. He will miss the heat and the light if he travels to Europe. I have seen pictures of England and it is a green place of perpetual rain.’

‘This is perfectly true.’

Elizabeth wondered how to ask for the lavatory without appearing to lose interest in the family descriptions.

‘I too have a son. I have four daughters and one son. My son is called Mohammed. My sister’s son is called Chérif. They have grown up here together. I shout for them and still expect to see two dirty children come running out of the dust. But no, they are young men now. They are both more than twenty. Mohammed is just as brilliant as his cousin. But we cannot offer him the things that Saïda can offer to her son. Saïda has a good job and no other children. She can save money. Our lives here are more precarious. We depend on desert people, who are often poor, and passing trade. We would like our son to study. Mais nous, nous n’avons pas les moyens.’

Elizabeth listened to this speech carefully. She understood at once that she had been chosen, picked out as the recipient of a careful, subtle sales pitch, an obscure discourse of demand and expectation. A market in clever young Arab men was being proposed to her, but she was not interested. It would have been easier to sell her shares in the Hôtel des Voyageurs or a Bedouin carpet which she didn’t like and didn’t need. She went on to the offensive.

‘What do you want from me, Madame?’

Fatima looked startled and not a little shocked. The question could not be answered because the manner in which it had been posed was too ungraciously direct.

‘My sister would like you to meet her son.’

‘Then I should be delighted to meet him. Send for him at once.’

She had been settling the hash of other people’s sons for many years, ever since the convent ceased to be Girls Only. She settled deeper and more comfortably into the recycled seat of a defunct Renault and attacked the dates. Elizabeth Webster had decided, unbeknown to herself, for this process had taken place deep in her unconscious mind, to live at risk. Safety does not come first. All her life she had been wary, suspicious and cold. She had spent sixty years frozen into a posture of refusal and denial. Now she decided to open the doors and allow herself the entertainment of unsolicited adventures. Why not? I’ve saved up so much money that I actually count as rich. I may be retired, but I still pay tax. There are no tricky situations which money can’t solve. Let me see your sons. And then I shall be able to work out what it is that you have brought me here to witness and to do. And then, only then, can I decide.

‘Massoud!’

Fatima clapped her hands and her husband answered from the dark shop behind them. Elizabeth shifted her feet and discovered an outline of sand had appeared around each stout white walking shoe, into which her soles had melted. A rapid exchange between husband and wife in the local dialect concluded the business: someone was despatched to find Mohammed and Chérif.

But this proved to be no simple task. In an oasis village containing thirty dwellings they were nowhere to be found. They had been seen cleaning buckets in a neighbour’s house. No, they had been looking at a camel one of them wanted to purchase. They had been sent out into the desert by the
garagiste
with his mechanic to help with a lorry that was leaking brake fluid. They were asleep in a nearby grove of date palms. They were digging a new irrigation channel in their cousin’s herb garden. They were watching CNN in the saloon bar of the Hôtel des Voyageurs with two German tourists. They were teasing their sisters behind a grain store. They were working in the Frenchman’s
lotissement
for a disgracefully low wage. They were far away from the oasis tending goats that were all perched in trees. They were sought in every house along the street. Their names rebounded in the sand. Mohammed! Chérif! But they could not be traced. Search parties were sent out, the children were enlisted. Then others were sent to find the ambassadors that had already gone and also vanished. Every doubtful trail and false lead was followed up. They had been seen playing dice, or updating the website’s weather map at the hotel. They were sweeping sand from the window sills at their uncle’s residence. Wherever they had been seen they were not there now. They were certainly together, but nowhere to be found.

Abdou grew impatient.

‘If we don’t leave now it will be by moonlight that I drive that road.’

Elizabeth Webster began to think about dinner at the hotel and a long foaming bath. Fatima erupted, distraught at the failure to locate these errant sons, and proceeded to suspect a conspiracy. Her paranoid anxiety overflowed in an unintelligible dialect and ended in a desperate prayer. Elizabeth paid no attention to the chaos. She did not belong here and refused to feel responsible. The lost boys remained irretrievable. They were gone. Abdou finally hustled her back into the taxi just as the light changed to evening. Rested and refreshed, she promised to view both missing sons should they reappear within a fortnight and could make it into town. The taxi and its occupants were waved off like royalty by the massed search parties in the excited street. Abdou’s dusty Citroën banged away into the desert with the crackling radio switched to maximum.

The desert appeared to change shape and volume in the sharpening shadows. The dunes rose up, humpbacked, like gigantic dolphins negotiating an unearthly element, their backs flexed and supple, rippling with shadows. The hamada opened out like a nomad’s veil, huge, spreading, indigo. She saw the half moon unfold, yellow and vast, lightening their road. The void increased dramatically in size as the darkness above and below stretched out into infinity, like an immense black hand. The temperature plunged. She retrieved her shawl from her basket and peered out into the fabulous, luminous dark. The shadows darkened. Each rock nurtured an eerie double, which lurked beneath, mirroring its shape. The world before her, now completely alien, to which she had neither maps nor compass, proclaimed itself a savage place, without paths, landmarks or hope of rescue. She was in the hands of her guide, who was himself unknown, a figure from fairy tale. But the risks now represented no terrors for her. She sat back in the chariot seat of her dark taxi and gazed out, content, at this miraculous and inexplicable world. Abdou drove the dark horses faster, faster. She asked no more questions. She had learned how to trust him.

They saw the lights up ahead from a great distance. Abdou immediately slowed down.

‘Something’s happening. There’s nothing to be seen on this side of town.’

She leaned forward and they both peered out at the unintelligible leaping shapes far ahead. As they approached they saw several trucks lined up along the road like wrecked hulks washed ashore. Several men standing on the roadside were gesticulating at one another. They heard shouting.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

The taxi crawled forwards and was suddenly in the midst of a mass of uniformed police and armed soldiers swarming over the vehicles. A battered car was being emptied out under torchlights, the driver protesting with excessive gestures. Two soldiers, one with his machine gun trained directly upon them, stopped the taxi. Abdou put his hands in the air and surrendered at once. Elizabeth was unable to follow the exchange, but she did not like the warm smell of oil that exuded from the sleek black barrel.

‘Do they want us to get out, Abdou?’

‘Yes. Quick. Leave the basket.’

A slight wind, now cooling fast, tugged at her shawl. Her knees felt stiff and she was unable to stand up easily, but neither of the two armed men bent to help her. Abdou and Elizabeth Webster stood together, silent and bewildered, beside the black Citroën. Elizabeth realised that Abdou was trembling. She stood up straight at last, unafraid but very puzzled.

‘Vos papiers, Madame.’

‘What is going on? Please explain.’

‘Vos papiers.’

‘I don’t have them in the taxi. My passport is at my hotel. The Hôtel du Désert.’

This caused some confusion and irritation. They concentrated upon Abdou instead and began to ransack his boxes of papers and tapes. The taxi’s documents were spread out all over the bonnet and examined with a large square beam, powerful as a searchlight. The soldier shone the beam directly into Abdou’s face whenever he came across a document with an official photograph. Elizabeth Webster tried to wander up the line of trucks with the intention of finding out why a roadblock was there in the first place. There were no ambulances or recovery vehicles, no carts overturned or groaning squashed camels, no signs of an accident and no cars or trucks coming from the direction of the town. All the traffic had been stopped. She was unable to see very far into the dark, as the headlights were confusing; then she was briskly dragged back to the taxi by one of the soldiers.