Miss Webster and Chérif Read online

  ‘Welcome, welcome. Please let me carry that. Come in, come in ...’

  The costumed woman plumped her down amidst embroidered cushions and offered her a tall clean glass filled with sparkling mineral water.

  Don’t drink anything if it isn’t bottled.

  ‘C’est de la Badoit.’

  The receptionist spoke fluent French and had eyes ringed with kohl like an Egyptian deity. Her skin was pale olive and her forehead high and domed. All the wealth of the desert smothered her in gold. She smelt of cinnamon and rose water.

  ‘My name is Saïda, Madame Webster. You must come to me whenever there is anything you need.’

  It was like having a personal djinn. Miss Webster’s luggage vanished and soft hands ushered her upstairs. Rose petals floated across the bed and her bathroom, paved in blue and white tiles, equipped with large bath, power shower, bidet and hair dryer, glowed with comforting, luxurious modernity. The sheets were ironed white and the light cream covers had been turned back. A tiny jewelled lamp lit up the carved wooden screen and a bowl of exotic fruit – figs, dates, apricots – stood on a small table of inlaid cedar and mother-of-pearl. Somewhere at a little distance she could hear water falling in the fountains. Her anxiety ebbed away. Someone else was looking after her. Someone else was in charge. Someone else was pointing out the way.

  In the days that followed the hotel staff approached her mouthing concerned clichés.

  ‘Ah Madame Webster, you look so much less tired. You looked very strained and exhausted when you first arrived.’

  ‘Madame Webster, voulez-vous prendre votre café au lait ici ou dans le jardin?’

  ‘Mees Webster? Is the music disturbing you? I will ask the young people to turn it down.’

  ‘May I bring you a glass of mint tea, Miss Webster? If you sit outside in the gardens then you must drink a lot because of the heat.’

  The garden was a miracle of colours, sustained entirely by a network of irrigation channels and humming electric pumps. The hotel was built on a deep well, barely fifteen feet beneath her feet. The water rose up from the dark earth, ancient, cold and sweet. It smelt of riches and prosperity. Palm trees, neatly pruned into symmetrical rows, lined the walkways and the old walls; roses with magnificent peeling faces loomed white and red in well-turned beds of imported soil. A huge hibiscus, now well past its best, some flowers still hanging limp and bleak upon their stems, stood up to the bougainvillea. But the place she preferred was a hidden stone bench in front of a mountainous wall of jasmine that oozed a strange dismal perfume into the afternoon heat. A sequence of exotic tiled fountains in ochre, red, blue and the subtle green of Islam punctuated the gardens, imposing as medieval fonts. One of these stood in the midst of a pond whose cool waters were protected by a surface of pale, scented water lilies. The flowers appeared to darken to a deep rose in the evenings. At night the temperature fell by over twenty degrees; every surface, patterned, paved and tiled, cooled at a different pace. Every opening or entrance seemed curtained, veiled, shuttered or screened. It was as if she were under constant surveillance. Someone watched her, constantly, from behind the silenced windows.

  During the days Saïda appeared and disappeared in hushed slippers. The woman stalked the arcades and staircases like a beautiful giant cat, padding between guests. At night she burst forth in high heels and phoney Oriental chiffon. She chatted, merry and brisk, with the young people and lavished cocktails upon them; her manner was formal with the staff. She inspected their work – each detail was checked, from the measures of alcohol in the Desert Rendezvous to the arrangements for collecting guests from the airport. She clearly suspected all her employees of being skivers, profiteers and thieves. Everything was locked up. She carried the keys. She checked the mini-bars herself. Her tone with Elizabeth Webster was always careful, respectful and apprehensive. A cardiac crisis would be bad publicity for the hotel. The old woman must be humoured and cherished. The hotel was full: many French people, mostly older couples on autumn breaks, and a young Dutch crowd who stuck together and roared out on quad bike adventure trips across the desert. Yet the sounds of laughter from the swimming pool and the bar always seemed to be in the distance. Miss Webster noticed that she was being protected from intrusive disturbance. Everyone seemed to know that she had been very, very ill.

  On the third day Saïda greeted her in the gardens beneath the wall drenched in jasmine. The old woman was reading Laclos. Saïda looked at the book.

  ‘Ah, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Mais c’est choquant, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘It was at the time. Do you read the classics?’ The receptionist suddenly struck her as interesting.

  ‘A great deal. I was never sent to college. My father did not think that girls were worth educating. If I had daughters I would send them to school, to university. I would not let them marry until they were educated. I would insist on that. An education is as good as a rich dowry.’

  ‘Then you have no children?’ Elizabeth Webster enquired politely. She was under the impression that Muslim women were summarily executed or cast into outer darkness if they failed to produce infants. But no, the other woman lit up from within with pride at her biological achievements.

  ‘J’ai un fils,’ she said, as if her entire existence was justified by this revelation.

  ‘How nice.’

  Elizabeth Webster delivered this arrow with careful contempt. But both women were speaking in their second language. Saïda failed to notice the shift in register.

  ‘He is young, he is handsome, he is very clever. He will study at the university. And it is my dream that he will study abroad – in France or America or in your country. He will rise in the world and be someone to reckon with. You see, Madame Webster, we are poor people. We come from the desert tribes. We have only just begun to live in houses and to eat from tables. We are a long way behind you. It is my dream that my son should have a better and an easier life than his father or his grandfather before him. I want him to do more than drive camels and goats.’

  She checked herself. The speech had been delivered with inappropriate vehemence. She pulled herself up short. Elizabeth Webster came to the erroneous conclusion that Saïda had remembered that she was staff and that the English woman was a wealthy guest. Private lives should not be discussed. No such thought had entered the other woman’s head. Saïda gazed at the old English lady, stricken and contrite. She had said too much. She had boasted of her child to a woman who had no husband and no sons.

  ‘Pardonnez-moi, Madame. I spoke without thinking.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ Elizabeth could afford to be gracious. She was here on a very temporary basis. ‘I would like to hear about your family. You must tell me more about your people and your son.’

  Saïda misunderstood this too. She did not hear a polite confirmation of permission granted with minimal interest expressed, but an intimate request, a gesture of connection and friendship. She was delighted and confused.

  ‘I will bring you some photographs of our village and my son,’ she promised. She wanted to give something in return. The English lady was too solitary, too isolated. She had never ventured outside the hotel. She was unaccompanied. She ought to visit the film studios and see where the grand producers had made The Jewel of the Nile, Gladiator and The Mummy Returns.

  ‘You must see the town and the desert. It is, comment dire?, un endroit sauvage, but very, very beautiful. I will arrange a tour and a guide.’

  ‘Not too expensive.’

  Elizabeth Webster was being cautious with her money.

  ‘The price will be arranged and agreed in advance.’

  And so, much against her better judgement, Miss Webster procured a yellow hat and a muslin veil, a fine shawl and a pair of dark glasses. She dressed for battle with the local sights and presented herself, armed with sticks, basket and parasol, in the foyer shortly after dawn.

  The taxi lurked by the gates, a battered, unmarked black Citroën with slanting headlights like a mons
ter’s eyes. The roof rack was roped up with unspecified sporting tackle, four long planks that looked like skateboards or windsurfing equipment. She peered at them while the driver held the door. Each plank glimmered in the blue light, closely decorated with perforated bottle caps, nailed in patterned lines. Hers was not to reason why. She climbed in among the worn leather and tacky orange cushions. The rear-view mirror had grown a tail, swinging with prayer beads and a golem, its lids barely open. The radio played belly-dancing music and the whole thing smelt of carpet cleaner and cigarettes. The driver dipped and bowed, his head encased in an impeccable white turban. The turban added a little height and majesty, for his entire form was swathed in white – the djellaba was clearly a costume and a little too big for him; he shrank, diminished in its ironed white folds. Even the embroidered hem gleamed clean and uncreased. She noticed a very old pair of trainers poking out beneath the theatrical draperies. But I know you – surely this was the same taxi driver that had driven her from the airport?

  ‘Bonjour. Je m’appelle Abdou,’ grinned the creature, revealing a sinister row of blackened teeth with many gaps. ‘I am your guide. I speak French, English, Arabic and German. What is your language of choice?’

  ‘French,’ snapped Elizabeth. ‘And we’ve already met. You ticked me off for being sharp with the children. Remember? So you also speak German?’

  ‘I achieve a lot of Germans,’ smirked Abdou, as if he had eaten them all. He didn’t acknowledge the fact that he had seen her before.

  ‘Please turn off the radio.’ She decided to assert herself at once.

  ‘No can do,’ Abdou produced an authentic Gallic shrug. ‘It gives me the weather forecast and my instructions.’

  ‘From whom do you take your instructions? I’m paying you.’

  Abdou ignored her, turned up the volume and cruised away down the atrocious, dissolving stony road, nodding to the palm trees and the crouching children who all seemed to be old friends.

  ‘Town with rare library, ancient kasbah and pots, or desert with magnificent oasis and date palms? Desert first, before it is too hot. Town tomorrow with souk and exhibition with carpets.’ He decided for her, and swung the old car on to the path that led beyond the seven palms and into nothingness.

  There was a road of sorts, uneven but stable. Far in the distance, now clearly visible, now merely a black outline, roamed another moving truck. It could have been the same one she had seen on her first night. They neither lost sight of the truck, nor gained upon it. The faint black square and the dusty cloud in its wake were still there as the light gained ground across the alien landscape. Elizabeth Webster looked out into the void. There was no sand to be seen. She had imagined giant dunes and strange patterns, rippled like the sea, changing with the wind across endless slopes of radiant gold. Instead, as the light strengthened, she saw an endless flat gravel plain interrupted by boulders. The deep purple shadows unfolding across the emptiness before her began to lift, leaving her jolting across a frozen ocean of bare rock, settling into grey, a visionary dreariness bereft of all life, all green, all human habitations. The only human point before them remained the truck, receding into endlessness.

  ‘Why is there no sand?’ yelled Miss Webster above the wriggling thump of Abdou’s music.

  ‘We see sand later,’ Abdou shouted back. ‘The desert is mostly not sand. It is mountains and it is like this. This is hamada.’

  Hamada. She found it in the glossary. These great plains of gravel and rock are the desert pavements across which the caravans have always preferred to pick their way. Travellers who understand the risks will avoid the uncertain banks of unstable sand. Sometimes the dunes will bear the weight of a jeep, but you must be familiar with the prevailing winds. There will be soft sand on the windward slope, which is being constantly exposed ...

  ‘No, no. I don’t trust the sand,’ roared Abdou from the front seat of the Citroën. ‘I show it to you. But we stay on this good road.’

  The good road shuddered and bumped beneath them. The taxi reached a steady speed of fifty kilometres per hour and sputtered onwards into the waste. She grew accustomed to the light and to the fact that there was no end to the horizon and nothing to see. The colours before her never varied: black and grey, lit by a dusty white glaze as the sun climbed. The landscape gleamed, featureless, endless, blank. The hamada extended on into infinite distance, utterly barren; there were no palm trees, no bushes, no animals, no people. There was no water.

  ‘I will show you water,’ Abdou announced, as if predicting a miracle. ‘In two hours’ time you will see water.’

  Two hours. She contemplated the grim, unchanging endlessness before her. Elizabeth Webster had been an adventurous woman, used to travelling. She loved to see new places, new countries. She enjoyed remarking the subtle differences between all the rich worlds of Europe: the tilt of a roof, the fashion in shutters, decorated facades, gardens with gnomes, chateaux whose gracious lawns and gravel paths sported peacocks, the shift from slate to tile as she drove south, the grazing cows gradually yielding the fields to sunflowers and olive trees. She liked to observe the public buildings, each nation’s pompous little gestures, the town halls, the arts centres, the grotesque civic sculptures installed on roundabouts. And she adored movement, change. But what confronted her in this abandoned place of frozen violence was unchangingness. The car moved ever onwards, into nothing. Even the appalling music reproduced itself with a steady monotonous sequence of pounding wails and howls. Infinity unfolded before her.

  The cumulative effect of this unaltered endlessness proved most peculiar. At first she was angry and bored. An hour passed. She fidgeted uncomfortably amidst the orange satin cushions, watching the reds and blacks of the boulders and rocks becoming grey. The palette of colour by mid-morning had evened out into a desperate, unyielding grey waste. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. Nothing appeared over the edge of the landscape before her. She closed her eyes in rage and horror. Why had she come to this desolate place of futile heat and eerie nothingness? Who had sent her here? It was inconceivable that she would ever choose to make this journey of her own free will. Rage and frustration gave way to a terrible sensation of misery. She sank, wretched, into herself.

  Abdou, who had been silent for a long time, followed her disturbed and baffled gaze. Suddenly he said, ‘There is an old desert saying that Allah removed all surplus human and animal life from the desert so that there might be one place where He could walk in peace, and so the great desert is called the Garden of Allah.’

  Elizabeth Webster listened to this declaration, incredulous. Islam was clearly a religion invented by madmen. Before her stretched the level plains of emptiness, hostile and austere. But Abdou had hit upon a rich vein of sententiousness and would not give it up.

  ‘We have another saying, Madame. We say that Allah, the Almighty, Lord of the Creation, the Compassionate, the Merciful, King of Judgement Day, is as far as the stars, and as close as the pulse in your jugular vein.’

  At this point he caught her eye in the mirror, grinned, displaying all his decrepit teeth, and then sliced his throat cheerfully with his hand. Elizabeth Webster caressed her own carotid artery with a sensation of real alarm. Allah, the All-Knowing, the All-Powerful, the mysterious sharer of all secrets, was suddenly present in the taxi. The light became a cauldron of flame, and the desert had produced an ominous line of grey spikes, as if the army of dragon’s teeth was beginning to rise. There was nothing near at hand or far away. Distance did not exist. Abdou had begun to speak.

  ‘Hamada is not always good desert surface. Sometimes it is evil, very evil. It rises in sharp pointed stones that tear up the tyres and the camels’ feet. A whole Roman army had their sandals ruptured by hamada. They perished, every one – soldiers, servants, baggage train. The whole caravan. Their polished skeletons are still out there in the sand.’

  Abdou abandoned the wheel, looked out upon the desert and rubbed his hands as if greeting a cherished collaborator who supported all h
is endeavours.

  ‘Are you from somewhere in the desert?’ asked Elizabeth, now deeply wary of the taxi driver.

  ‘Oh no. I am from a tiny village in the Valley of a Thousand Kasbahs. The desert people are very different. We watch them coming into town. If they come with camels, the camels are exhausted. If they come in jeeps and trucks they will be about to break down. They cannot see us clearly and the sand is in their bones.’

  ‘Will I see where Saïda comes from?’

  ‘Yes and no. Saïda is born of the desert people. They were once nomad. But she is Berber and she comes from a settled family. Her husband is from the desert. He is Imohagh. The French say Tuareg. It was a bad marriage which brought ill luck to her. Avec les hommes comme son mari, tu joues avec la vie et la mort. They are a ferocious people. They are all over the desert now. They are the camel masters. The wilderness is in them. The men wear the tagelmoust, the dark veil of indigo. The French call them ‘les hommes bleus’. The women do not wear this. So Saïda does not. But her husband did not stay with her. He went away, back into the desert. No one knows where he is; some say he is in Mali. So she is neither widow nor wife. And she works in a hotel.’

  Abdou made the hotel sound like a third sexual option. He chewed on the end of his turban for a moment, his eyes glassy, staring at the depths of endlessness before him. Then he said, ‘She should take another husband.’ This did and did not explain Saïda’s interesting situation.

  ‘She mentioned a son –’

  ‘Ah, Chérif. Ha! He has his father inside him and she will not believe it.’ Abdou glared at the desert’s fixed face and then increased his speed. Elizabeth sank back, puzzled. Then she lowered her veil, and pushed her dark glasses higher up her nose.

  ‘We’ve been driving for well over two hours,’ she declared.