I say, ‘The book.’
‘What book?’ Devlin is behind me. ‘Your diary?’ He grasps my arm. I feel his wariness, I admire him for his bravery but it doesn’t change what I am going to do. His grip tightens as if he already knows. ‘It doesn’t matter what you wrote. We’re here.’
‘I have to get the book with the red cover.’
‘No.’ Devlin drags me around to face him. ‘This is our chance.’
‘The book makes up for all the failures. It is the only pure thing.’ I wrench myself away. ‘I have to do something. I have to choose something.’
Minute chips of heat hit my cheek, burning cinders fall around me like confetti. I rub my skin. My fingertip is smeared black.
I say, ‘I’m pregnant,’ ashes in my mouth.
Orange flames are in his pupils. ‘You’re not pregnant. You’re being poisoned.
‘Stefano told me,’ he says. ‘Rosza’s been poisoning you. Almost from the start.’
‘Why would Stefano tell you?’
‘He cut a deal to save Pietr.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘You’re sick.
You know it’s true.’
Ashes are in my eyes. ‘You want it to be true,’ I say. ‘All you want is your own story. You never see the other stories around you.’
‘For God’s sake. After all the damage we’ve done to ourselves.’
‘Why can’t you comfort me?’ I say. ‘Just once.’
The hot air blurs. He is disappearing into a blizzard of ash. I taste dead buildings on my tongue, dead books.
He tries to put an arm around me. ‘Be realistic,’ he says. ‘With people like us, do you really think – ?’
I shove him away. ‘You’re leaving me again.’ His arms go slack.
I shout, ‘Why do you assume it is yours?’ ‘There’s no baby,’ he shouts. ‘It’s all in your mind.’
I put out my hands. I fill them with the falling fragments and rub ash all over my face. There is one last moment when I could have said the right thing. I could have said, It was always you. Right from the start.
Instead, I let myself drown in the bitterness. ‘How can I ever trust you?’
I pull away and run up the slope and through the melting snow. I run across the burning ground and into the fire.
VI
THE
JEWELLED CASKET
OF
RUE SIDI HMAD
T
here is no weather inside the walled city, thought Agnieska Walenzska as she stared down over the flat rooftops baking in the early morning sun. There are only temperatures of extremes, following their narrow track every day.
She sipped her mint tea and tried not to look for the stranger. The second round of morning prayers had just finished; an interim chant rose and fell in the distance. She rested against the window in the jeweller’s shop; the wooden cross hanging on its camel-hair plait around her neck tapped against the sill.
On the next rooftop, men were up to their knees in the giant pots of dyes laid out in rows of red, yellow and blue. They walked in slow circles, mixing the colours in the pearl light, talking, gesturing. Nearby were their rolled prayer rugs, the tassels spilling like scarlet tears on the white stone. The voices travelled up to her; she could see lines connecting them to her, faint and wavering on the warming air. Beams of light, scrolled at the end.
In the corner of the market the grains and onions spilled out of their sacks next to the big earthenware bowls of chickpeas, the red and brown spices in their tall glass jars, the baby turtles pivoting around their own unsteady necks, sniffing the air, the snakes twisting in their wicker cages, the camels’ eyelashes fanning across the bright blue glazed plates. The smell of dung and sweat and old fur and sour hard tobacco with the earth still in it. The thin skeins of flies rising and falling from the blood-stained goats’ hooves hung on hooks; the antelope heads nodding in a line across the hot stone.
I won’t look for him, she thought.
But still she scanned the crowds eddying between the canvas awnings and drifting along the stone arcade, all eager to shop before the heat set in: men in white cotton robes, rhythmically waving away flies with their plaited whips, poorer fellows in rough brown weave, women shuffling in their robes of black, viewing the world through the slit in the material which enveloped them. The bare-headed others were the foreigners: the hippies, the backpackers, the fair Scandinavians, the stocky tattooed British, the talkative Americans.
She always recognised her own kind, no matter how dark their tan, the way that every Arab knew what she was despite her dyed hair and the inked designs on her hands. This was the time the Europeans emerged, spilling out from dark rooms at the back of the shops after all-night sessions smoking kif. She knew those rooms: the low couches, the velvet cushions, the beads hanging on strings across the doorway. The charcoal would glow under the ornate chafing dish, there would be the smell of mint and goats’ milk, and yellow dates still on the stem. The water pipe would sit in the middle of the room on its ornate silver stand, an octopus extending its black rubber arms. There would be nougat on the trays, rolled cigarettes, candles burning, the small deadly dark brown cubes on the silver platter. She could almost smell the lavender water. The bad memories.
She flexed her fingers so the tiny blue crosses tattooed on her knuckles swung through the warm air. She pushed back the black scarf around her head and put her hand to her left cheek, pressing in so the knotted flesh there was forced against a nerve. The real pain chased away the pretend pain and she flinched so convulsively that her long black robe dipped and swayed like a bell over the unpolished wooden floor of the jeweller’s shop. A bell at God’s bidding, she thought. She watched the crowds, standing in her pool of black light. But there was no-one who looked like the man who had followed her this morning.
The jewellery maker coughed behind her. He was a thin man, hollowed by age. She had known him for twenty years. When she first came to him, she had been strung out and shaking, scratching the pinpricks in her arms, trying to sell the first of her jewels. He avoided looking at her then and he avoided looking at her now.
He held a silver box studded with small rubies. The hinged lid was etched with triangles and spheres which looked elaborate but she knew were commonplace, a design to be had by anyone, dismissed by the craftsmen. She put down her silver and glass teacup and examined the casket carefully.
‘To your specifications,’ said the jeweller in French. He raised the casket on tented fingers, careful not to touch or be touched by her. Unlike the others. When she first arrived, the local men had no compunction about touching her. They all had the same expression: a curious, wary, waiting look. The look, she thought, that comes before the pounce. Their hands were cool as though night remained in their bodies but she thought the desert sun was so fierce that it had erased all emotion from their faces. When she walked through the market in those early days, with her blonde hair, her Western clothes, they looked at her from some quicklime hole, shouting up at her from some ditch of fire,
You want to make sex with me, Nazarene?
Your husband is no good, ai? Weak benis. Many, many husbands is gay.
Too weak benises. You make sex with me.
Men, everywhere, all with the same watching expression, sitting in cafés side by side, not looking at each other, not talking to each other. A country with no women in its consciousness, with no care for its surroundings, the countryside filled with scrub and barbed wire, decrepit buildings. The ramparts like teeth, yawning over the huge wooden doors which separated the neighbourhoods. The trees gone long ago from all but the richest suburbs. The gardens reduced to small courtyards, tiny secret oases; a few palm trees and rocks creating shade on white stone, an unexpected nurturing constructed in small and humble shadows.
‘It is because no one wants to look prosperous,’ Jürgen had said, passing the opium pipe across. He had run his hand slowly against the nap of the purple velvet couch, spreading his fingers wide, leaving a smeared arc like an angel’s wing. ‘In case their neighbour becomes envious and tries to come and hurt them.’
A country where you had to fear your neighbour.
She took a square of paper from the deep pocket of her habit and placed it inside the casket. It fitted exactly.
‘This is the shape of the book?’ the jeweller asked.
She nodded. ‘I attach the chain, where?’
He pointed to the hooks on the outside corners. He brought out a thick chain ending in a heavy cuff made of bronze. She clipped the cuff over her wrist and snapped it shut, and tried to pull it off. It slid down to the top of her hand but no further. When she tried to pull harder, it cut into her skin, leaving a red mark.
‘Good.’ She pulled again. The pain at her wrist chased away the pain inside her fingers. ‘And the second box?’
He took the casket, his fingers arched, and disappeared into the shadows behind the shelves of leather goods and cheap coats. She thought, No man can afford to be the master of one trade in Casablanca. No woman.
She drifted back to the window, looked for the European. A donkey piled high with rolled-up carpets was sidling through the east entrance. The carpets were catching on the stone archway. The donkey’s owner was shouting at two blonde women, sunburnt under their backpacks and singlets, who had stopped to take photographs; his curses had drawn the usual crowd of scrawny barefoot boys. She saw several she recognised, cheeky urchins who loitered outside the Mission. She ran her fingers absent-mindedly over the scar on her cheek, thinking.
The jeweller was back with a small plain wooden box. The lid sat unevenly above its brass clasps and she could see at once that it was too small. The book would not fit.
She shook her head.
‘Why do you need this?’ said the jeweller. ‘To keep trinkets, your crosses?’
‘I have only one cross,’ she said.
He shrugged.
She picked up her glass and poured the mint tea into the box. Within a moment dark water began leaking from one corner. She thought, Why does it always come to this? She longed to be back in the desert, to be a speck of black in the eye of God. She dropped the box on the floor.
‘Next week,’ said the jeweller hastily.
‘No.’
He raised his hands, palms upwards.
She shook her head. ‘I need both. One is no good without the other.’
‘Friday.’
‘Tomorrow. I’m leaving for the desert.’
He drew away from her. ‘The desert. Well, I will see.’
She pulled her scarf around her head. She had not dyed her hair recently and she knew that the pale blonde was showing along her hairline, enough to attract attention.
She went down the steps, past the dozen small staircases that ran off this main passage, up, down, haphazardly.
In the first months after her arrival, she was constantly lost. She was unable to visualise the streets which ran at cross purposes, the rooms which led off each other, stairs which ended in blocked doorways or narrow balconies opening onto walls. All she remembered of those days was the smell of lavender water.
She went into the market. Above her, the soft grey marbled sky was settling and hardening into a sheet of pale blue. The moon still hung, a half-eaten ghost, above the stone ramparts; the wooden door which closed off this section of the neighbourhood was drawn back against the wall, its heavy brass knocker shaped like a fist hanging sullenly in the morning light. The houses on either side were windowless squares. There was faint music nearby, from another world:
She was a topsy turvy super curvy mega groovy love machine
. . . .
On the corner, she pressed coins into the creased brown palm of the thin woman who sat in the gutter with her packets of dusty paper handkerchiefs. A crowd of small boys streamed past her, making kissing noises, but when she straightened they saw the black robes and they fell silent. Across the road a group of men watched her with impassive faces. Poverty or desperation was no excuse for a woman to be on the street. She should be sitting at home, with her children, her relatives. Sitting behind tiled walls, behind her veils. Behind her markings of ink.
Agnieska was in the market, selecting hair combs, when she saw the tanned European again. He was at a stall across from her, pulling at a rack of clothes, holding up a T-shirt with the Camel cigarettes logo, pretending to look at it but looking over it, at her. She scanned the square. Decorated leather goods, brass trays, camel-hair mats, wooden bowls and coloured stone bracelets were laid out on rugs around the perimeter. Behind them, in the stone arcade, were the bread shops, the meat shops, the greengrocer with his wooden boxes of vegetables stacked around the doorway. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and spiralling wisps of mint. Beyond were more tourist stalls with their roughly stitched leather camels, mouths gaping at the twine suturing their bellies, sunglasses strung along wire, warm cans of soft drinks, boxes of cigarettes, some with water-stained corners, shawls from Kashmir. The first snake charmers were setting out their baskets, hissing at each other and their sleeping animals. The pigeon man, the boy selling cowry shells, the man who walked on glass, the thin child acrobats, were arriving. A drummer with matted black hair, naked to the waist, sat down and began beating a wild rhythm. The few women moved through, many with babies in slings across their backs. The fish would be sold later that night when it was cooler.
Her hands were hurting again. She held a butterfly-shaped hair comb up to the light, looked through the black teeth at the European. He had shiny dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. A beard or heavy five o’clock shadow – she couldn’t tell from here. He was in his early forties, she thought, a few years younger than she. He wore a black T-shirt with jeans. She sensed he wasn’t Polish: Albanian, Turkish maybe. Not Arabic. Or at least, not wholly Arabic.
The hair comb was made of oiled wood, she saw now. The spreading butterfly wings concealed the wooden teeth underneath. The colours and pattern on one wing did not match the colours and pattern on the other but the painted wood still had great vibrancy in its jumbles of reds and greens and blues and purples. It was small, with narrow teeth for fine hair. It was a child’s comb. Maybe she could give it to Betsoul, to give to Meersun.