I put my hand on the cool dark rock. ‘You live in a tomb in the earth. Maybe what you see is a mirage of death.’
‘You’ll see it too,’ she says. ‘You will see lions in the desert. An eagle hovering overhead, protecting you like its young.’
‘The only thing I’m likely to see is Mitch in his helicopter with machine-gun blazing.’
‘You don’t believe.’
‘I – look, I’m sorry, but there are no lions in the desert. Wolves, I can believe.’
‘You will see them.’
I heft the backpack but I don’t put it on.
‘You don’t want to go out there,’ she says.
‘I may be a drunk but I’m not stupid.’
She watches me carefully.
I say, ‘I don’t know how much Laforche knows . . . ’
She places her hands in her wide sleeves and stands, still and listening, in that way she has. I feel compelled to go on.
‘There were incidents,’ I say. ‘Failures. One with my father, another in Borneo.’ I find it hard to speak. ‘There were deaths involved.’
‘You drank firewater.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘It burned you up.’
‘Yes.’
‘You want to make amends.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you should go out into the vanishing point of absolute poverty,’ she says. ‘There will be pain. At first your body will be defiled. You will be alone. The desert will look on. It will not help you but it will not stand in your way.’
She hands me a square object; it slides through my hands like moon water. I catch it, remove the ivory silk. It takes me a moment to realise what it is.
‘Rimbaud’s book.’ I visualise the bold inked writing. ‘You can’t give this away.’
‘Yes. When you find Madeleine you will take her to the caves under the Kabir Massif. Use the caves that run under the plain to the Massif. She knows the way. You will give the book to a Moroccan woman called . . . ’ There is a long pause before she says the name:
‘Betsoul.’
‘Isn’t this part of your plan to save Abu N’af?’
‘My plan was wrong.’ Her face is shadowed. ‘It is my fault,’ she says and for the first time I see uncertainty in her face, anxiety in the hands clenching the cross. ‘I needed to pay penance and I had given everything else away. Don’t you understand? I had nothing else to give.’
‘Why must sacrifice always come into it?’ I say. ‘What is it with you women?’
But she isn’t listening to me. She has an expression of horror, seeing some horizon I can only imagine. ‘I think I have done a terrible thing.’ Her voice is a whisper. ‘I saw a chance to wipe away my father’s sins. My sins. Madeleine came to me for sanctuary. She needed to be hidden – ’
‘From me.’ I can barely say it.
‘When Stefano told her about me, she brought me what she thought was the real book, the book with the red cover that Pietr took from me in Casablanca. But that book was a copy I had made. Madeleine brought me the book to stop Rosza using its desert maps for looting.’
‘Why didn’t you put fake maps in the copy?’
‘All I cared about was being left alone, with the real book.’ She shivered. ‘I betrayed Madeleine. I stole from her.’
‘Stole what?’
‘A new book – ’ Her voice cracks and she opens and closes her mouth as if she can no longer talk.
‘Too many books,’ I say, impatient. ‘Too many lootings.’
She bows her head.
Sister Antony watches me as I place Rimbaud’s book in my deep pocket. She says, ‘Give the book to Betsoul. Tell her it is payment for the past week. Tell her she must give back what she stole from the woman.’
She holds out a dark wooden object. ‘Give Betsoul this also.’ It looks like a painted fang.
‘I told her a lie,’ says the Sister, ‘because it was the only way to start a new community in the desert.’
‘Lied to who?’ I ask, not thinking, focused instead on what is ahead of me. ‘This Betsoul?’
Sister Antony shakes her head. She says, ‘First you dream, then you die.’ She opens her hand. On her palm is a small wooden hair comb shaped like a butterfly. As I thrust it deep into my pocket, my fingers brush the torn-up fragments of the note the woman had left me. She had written,
When I look at you, I know the people I loved
are gone. Five deaths are too much for one person to endure.
And she had fled into the desert.
I am drowning in desolation; I can barely hear what the Sister is saying.
‘I was right about the book,’ says the Sister. ‘It is God’s word. It created a community. I brought the book to the desert and people came and the desert flowered.’ She closes her eyes. ‘But I am not God.’
The sun sidles upwards. I am on the last stony piece of ground before the red dunes. Sand clumps around tough tufts of grass and dry squares of low-slung plants and squat bushes so faded they seem to lack all sap. I nudge a crouching cactus and white fluid spurts out from its thorny spine. The liquid disappears into the ground; within moments there is nothing but a white shadow on the rocks.
I walk on. Scorpions back away from me, their tails up. The further I walk the slower they are to move. A small dust-coloured lizard raises itself on stubby back legs and hisses at me. Its mouth is black as coal and its eyes are blood-red. It flicks its tail and disappears into a dust cloud of its own making.
My lips burn; I taste salt. I drink the water Sister Antony has given me and look back. There are no footprints yet I sense the ground has been altered, rocks moved, the air displaced. Those capable of reading such signs can follow me. But not Mitch. Not even Sister Antony, I think.
The land changes again. The rocks shrink to gravel, the plants descend into the ground. An occasional sand viper skitters in front of me but all life is disappearing. The dunes are tantalisingly close. For some reason, I am convinced that when she reaches the beginning of the dunes proper, she will stop. She will climb to the top of the first dune, to see the light on the horizon. All the paintings she loves have light on the horizon.
Sand is rising. An eddy dances on the same spot, turning and turning. The hot wind swings through the sandy mist, hitting my face, heavy with grit and salt.
A peculiar sighing rushes past me; the ground is breathing out. A long silence follows yet I feel rhythm in the silence, as though a pulse trapped in an invisible body is rapidly approaching.
I think: Now I am hearing the real silence of the desert. A silence filled with a thousand echoes: everything from the wind’s idle stirring of a few grains on the top of the dunes to the distant whine eating up the side of the Massif. I hear the click of the beetle’s barbed legs as it dives down through the sand. I hear drums, and yearning notes from a gramophone on the peaks. Is it Beethoven? Yes, poor Beethoven, trapped in his well of silence and trying to speak to God through his music. More voices, some from caves, some from tombs. Streamers of sound which float over the desert. And bells, I am sure I hear bells. And Laforche’s voice: Mapmakers, criminals, suicidal poets, he is saying. Desert travellers are never city dwellers but nomads, ascetics. Behind him, Edith Piaf turns in mourning circles. And other voices:
In the dark, I wake on the white page of the
desert
. . .
Laforche is saying, The desert is peopled with madmen, loners.
The lost and those seeking to be lost.
I am all of those, I say to him.
You’re a romantic with a streak of masochism, says Laforche. You always take the hardest way.
I am driven by self-disgust, I say. I refused her call and now all I have is the void.
First you dream and then you die, says Laforche.
I see clues: a smear in the dust between the rocks, a footprint pressing down the gravel. I am sure I am beginning to read the traces of the desert.
The voices, the sound of the beetles, fade into the great bell of silence. It seems that hour after hour I walk and the dunes are always the same distance ahead of me. Only the sky is changing: turning the colour of ash, tinged with the sickly yellow of the sun dying on the horizon, smelling of salt and smoke and dead flesh.
I am walking through a region of broken bones and crushed shells. The ground is growing lighter; the black rocks crumbling into grit are flecked by white and pink slivers of bone. I see a crab’s claw, the chafed mosaic of a turtle’s shell, cradled in camel skulls. Splinters of bone are caught between my toes.
I sit down to take off my sandal. The distance rustles as though a giant bush is being shaken. A yellow cloud detaches from the sickly sun and wheels back and forth across the sky. It turns towards me and blots out the light. The rustling grows into an endless whirring, the beating of a million tiny wings, the winds catching in barbed joints and searching antennae. The dark mass flies straight at me. A hot wind hits me, I feel drained and withered. I crouch on the ground, pulling the hood of the robe as far over my face as I can.
The whirring grows louder. It is a beating inside my head; my eardrums vibrate. Under the hood, the light has almost disappeared. Thunder booms. I peer through the dark grey light. The sky is the colour of coal seamed by silver; lightning flashes like the blinking of an eye. The ground is lit up and ahead, where the dunes rise like sculpted red waves, I see her walking away from me.
I release the backpack and stand up and the locusts hit me. I am knocked sideways, hurled along the ground, half dragged half pushed. My hood is no protection: the creatures fly in, scratching at my eyes, my cheeks, trying to climb into my mouth, my ears. They are climbing up my legs, under the sleeves of my robe, down my neck. The whirring is unbearably loud. I fling off the robe and run, naked, my hands over my face, into the dunes. When I feel real sand, not just grit, I hurl myself down and start digging. The booming increases behind me and there is the sound of a giant wave rising and rising. I grab handfuls of sand and pour them over me, I reach deep into the ground and pull myself forward. I dive into the sand.
I am in darkness. I roll and roll, corkscrewing into the sand, crushing the insects. The scratching and rustling on my body stops. Far away there is the sound of dogs barking then they too stop; the hammer blows of thunder recede. It is very quiet. I press my watch to illuminate it but when the light comes on, the panels are grey. I press and press. The panel flickers, the light goes out. I take the watch off and push it away from me. The silence and the sand fill my ears.
When I climb out of the sand, the sun is a spreading stain on the grey sky. Dunes rise on either side of me; it is as if an entire landscape has been created in moments. The crushed and stony ground is completely covered in sand.
My sandals have gone but I find my robe nearby. The book is still in the pocket, and something which jabs me between my fingers.
It is the wooden hair comb. I am tempted to throw it away but I shove it back.
I walk in circles, digging in, trying to feel with my feet. I walk and dig but I know the backpack is gone.
When I climb to the top of the next dune, I am sure I will see Abu N’af but there is nothing: no plateau, no Kabir Massif, no blue mountains. Just endless sand stretching through the vast empty to Algeria.
I don’t know how long I have been walking. The desert stretches ahead of me. I walk and all I can think is, I am so angry.
The sandy mist envelops me, red clouds roll over me, the dunes rear up shadowless, constantly shifting in the wind which wraps my robe around me. I do not know if I am walking up hills or down. My feet sink into the sand. The glazed and crumbling fragments of clay jars are scattered between rusting cutlasses, useless pistols, abandoned compasses, empty water bottles. Occasionally I think I see monks on the horizon moving slowly in a centipede line under a hunch-backed and pockmarked yellow moon. Sometimes I see lions, sometimes wolves. Sometimes a hot breath snorts behind me, there is a shuddering on the back of my neck. Objects which glint metal, statuettes made of mud, float around me, their sharp edges dissolving in the gritty air. I ignore them all. The huge silence cloaks me. I plod on.
The wind comes again. It is a lupine wind. Wolves howl within it. The sky dogs. My skin hurts but I no longer feel thirsty or tired. Images from my past keep appearing and disappearing, rolling away like the white crests turning over in rough seas against the shore.
I can remember saying to her, What you do to your body is insane.
The light seeps away. I see windmills dark in a landscape of tormented rocks and boulders. Lacking water, lacking hope. Lacking the ability to cry, she had said to me.
In the wasted light, the earth falls away from all the other stars into silence. Day is reversed. I see the dying gardens of the star isle. Night slides into me; the breath from the moon’s gaping mouth trails across the black sky.
Time goes by, the stars wheel across the sky. I am on my knees in the sand. Dark birds circle overhead. I know this barren landscape, I have been here for years. I know those serrated peaks, those curtains of clouds that hum in the air, that lightning which looks like flares over a battlefield, which turns the smallest plant into the huge shadows of monsters moving between the stubby peaks and the milky blue boulders. Wings beat above me and in the next lightning flash I see a bird in flames, spiralling into the dark clouds.
A grain of sand hits my cheek. I kneel and look for a footprint. There is nothing but a pool of black water.
I don’t want to see but I must. There is a shape there. I am hoping beyond hope that it is her face – just to see her one last time. But of course it is not. I think, I am so angry.
I lean forward. I see my reflection.
I surrender, I say. I know you are indifferent to me. Borneo taught me that. You are beautiful in your sheer awful indifference, in your unattainability.
I take off my mask.
I am nothing now but sand and water.
Reveal the hard implacable truth to me, I say.
In the black pool the man who is me reaches out and writes a name in the water. Her name. And then he turns his back on me and walks away into a light which is so bright that it blinds me and the world turns to black.
I am on my back, drowning in light. The hovering birds beat their wings above me. A shadow moves across me, rain falls on me. There is a voice filled with silence and with light saying my name.