Alexandra Singer Read online

  ‘I can’t pretend I am not pleased to see you, but I don’t understand why you are here.’

  No answer came, just emotionless eyes blinking at her in the dark.

  On their last afternoon together, she felt that she was making love with a demon; he bit her so hard he drew blood. He was unusually energetic, as he pushed her down onto the bed. Maia drew back from him in an instinctive act of self preservation, but then in a surge of pure hatred threw herself towards him. The late June heat glared through the shuttered windows into the apartment, so that she imagined herself free from George’s hold of her. She blinked away her tears of disappointment.

  They parted on the corner just as dusk was falling. From an old, misplaced duty, he accompanied her to the Metro. Maia thought that she imagined the old companionship was still there; their arms brushed together, but he then became conscious of it and suddenly uncomfortable.

  ‘Good luck with everything,’ said George.

  ‘Good luck? What do you mean? What an odd thing to say.’

  He looked at her and he knew that this was not what she had been expecting. But with those words he conveniently and effortlessly closed the shutters on their relationship.

  Now when she saw the distance between them, Maia could barely believe how they had passed the afternoon. Maia watched George retreat; the last reminder of a false idealism now on his way to his own form of normality, through the flashing lights and the advertisements for cheap and perverse sex. He never looked back, and eventually, Maia turned and walked away. At Pigalle, two hard faced policemen were frisking an African at the entrance to the Metro. His carved wooden animals were scattered forlornly over the pavement. As she went underground, her Carte Orange irritated her by sticking in the barrier.

  She hoped that she could forget about George. Maia was astonished at how the years of involvement with one man might be destroyed in one amicable afternoon. Now, in the heat of a foreign city, his face came up again and again before her in the darkness. She was ashamed at how she had crumbled before him; now she wished that she might have been able to salvage at least some dignity. But there was no point. He had been successfully making a fool of her for years.

  Now she wanted to be out of touch, and Morocco was the perfect place to go. For her it was a sort of revenge; a revenge for always being kept waiting, a symptom of an underlying, deeper dissatisfaction. Under the pretext of needing space to paint, Maia’s plan was to become unobtainable.

  In the bed, she wept, why she wept she didn’t know. She sensed the light change in the room, telling her that outside it was moving seamlessly from morning to dusk. As she settled back down into the shadows, the day slipped on and the sun sank ever lower over the city. In between her bouts of unconsciousness and wakeful lucidity, her dreams were still rotten. In the courtyard below the maggots fell from the orange trees and dropped into the shallow pool as outside the people teemed into the city streets and came awake for the night.

  Chapter 2

  The moment Maia stepped outside the house, the hassle in the narrow streets was tremendous. So overwhelming was the noise that she was barely able to think, barely able to understand where she was going. From the labyrinthine alleys the Arabs seethed into the streets, and above the wailing of the muezzin a relentless drumming could be heard which seemed to take her by the hips and shake her. Everywhere she turned, men were there blocking her way, hands grabbing and faces sneering at her. She composed herself; surely it was better to appear impassive and resolute, but somehow the men perceived her as ever more provocative. They intercepted her as she walked, and one man stuck out his foot before her and defiantly met her eyes as she stopped suddenly short before it. The crowd pulled her in one direction, pushed her in another, towards their shops, to a café, to meet their brothers, to help her find her way, caving in upon her as she desperately pushed her way through.

  “Gazelle, gazelle, come with me! I am Berber, real Berber!”

  The young man who was shouting at her stepped out from his position at the entrance to a store, its windows so heaped with spices that it was impossible to see inside. As she continued to force her way up the street his mocking shouts followed her for a few paces, and then he seemed to give up. She allowed herself to look back and saw him give his waiting friends a pathetic little shrug. Maia moved on quickly, past the men decaying in the smoke of their hazy enclaves, and the dirt that seemed to be everywhere. The heat rose from the earth and crackled along the pavements as the people and the buildings surrounding her emerged as if through a fog, moving towards her like phantoms. Her legs shook and her head spun. Maia sat down upon a low step in an attempt to regain some control. A few moments later, she felt calmer and rose up to meet the narrow streets. Now she walked at random through the twisting maze, the heavy aroma of spices, of sumac and cinnamon drifting from the stalls. As she walked, her mind continued to wander and she sank back down so deep into the heat that the city was warped once more before her eyes. Men were hawking ill formed packages in the streets as shrill women beckoned and children ran wildly through the crowd. A young woman was sitting on the ground, scrabbling at dust, as a wizened man crawled on by. Swathed only from the waist down in his filthy rags, his skin missing and one leg curling beneath him, no-one in the crowd noticed him in his shame. Donkeys brushed past Maia, burdened down with their packages and Berber women sat cross-legged upon woven, multi-coloured rugs.

  Car horns blared and strangers shouted to one another, in friendship and in hate, in old enemies and new acquaintances. Men were indolently standing outside their shops to talk; selling handcrafted items, intricately decorated bags, huge wrought iron lamps and furniture, Arabesque art, complexly patterned wall hangings, the variety of colour throughout the woven material. In large baskets, vegetables were being sold next to foreign electronics and stolen goods. Maia stumbled upon a courtyard, lit by a bright beam of sunlight, and in a moment the air filled with the scent of sweet perfume. A heavy door opened, offering a glimpse of the house within, before slamming shut behind the entering visitor. As she walked on and entered the pulsating heart of the city, the streets narrowed and wound more tightly around one another.

  Through the climbing alleyways she walked in perpetual night, passing dank squares where she found only dead ends. Behind these commercial streets there lay small, private courtyards where water fountains coursed into small pools, and cool silences pervaded. But now as Maia retreated through an uninterrupted darkness amongst beggars who stretched out to her their gnarled hands, moaning in the dirt as they eked out their lives. A hunched man sat on the ground, almost prostrated, and Maia shuddered at his right eye, protruding lazily from its socket. The city mirrored the discarded geography of her mind, and it unfolded itself to her like a story without structure, a sinister repetitive tale with neither beginning nor end.

  Maia began to suspect she was being followed, but when she turned to look, no-one was there. She passed corners where no light penetrated, and she feared to wonder what was lying there in the gloom. Only an occasional ruin allowed light and space and the odd glimpse of foliage. She could not understand where she might be, not expecting such difficulty in understanding the city’s layout. Slums replicated themselves in every area. Hearing voices behind her, Maia turned suddenly on the small Arab boys who were following her so incessantly. She approached them and their small faces looked up at her with hopeful eyes. She smiled at them. “Do you know the Grand Tazi Hotel?”

  The boys began to chatter unintelligibly. She stood there, in the centre of the street, uneasy and stiff. The smallest child held out his hand to her. Maia went to take it, but she felt another hand brush the side of her leg. She whirled round and met the eyes of another boy.

  “I’m too fast for you!” Excitedly they began to chatter to one another again in Arabic. She realised that even if she were able to understand them, they would undoubtedly be giving her the wrong directions. When she looked at them again, they cackled hysterically and ran away. She cont
inued walking, feeling hopeless, and as the alleyways sloped down towards the woodworking area, she stopped and watched men carving furniture.

  High pitched voices were trailing her and now the boys were once again behind her. They knew they could get money from foreigners by their sheer persistence. A cloying scent streamed into Maia’s nostrils; the fetid stench of the unwashed inhabitants of this part of the city, of the spices and the people crammed in so closely together. Heaped before shops lay raw meat, and spices spilling over in the sacks. The scent of turmeric, cinnamon, cumin coming together in one single, heady fragrance. By the spices lay cartons of oranges and lemons, the dismembered parts of slaughtered animals accompanied by swarms of enormous black flies, as grossly enthusiastic as the gatecrashers at a wedding feast.

  As always there was the dust and the dirt, as inescapable as the faces which stared at her so curiously, even the hordes of covered women, who threw at her their strange, knowing looks. Some women jeered at her; she was uncovered and white. A woman came out of nowhere and gleefully thrust a tortoise into Maia’s face, forcing her to rush away, stumbling. A woman beside Maia hissed and she swung around to meet her eyes. For a single moment they both stood entirely still, locked in an intensely pleasurable moment of hatred. Then the world intruded as the crowd surged along and the catcalls started up once more, the men blowing kisses and shouting to one another in a guttural language, which followed her through the streets.

  Maia sensed only a sort of interested hostility that might take little to burst into open aggression. At a junction she almost walked directly into the head of a camel which had been stuck upright on the edge of a stick, a sickly sneer on a face. In horror she jumped back from the eyes looking at her. In the deep eye sockets, tiny maggots were wriggling frantically. At the entrance to the shop beside the camel’s head a small, bent man watched her. The meager skin that covered his bones was dark and translucent, and he smiled at her sardonically. She began to wonder why she had come to this medieval place. A heavy wave of nausea gripped her and she shuddered away into the crowd.

  One of the small boys was back. His huge grey eyes watched Maia, his tiny hand gripped at her sleeve. “Bisous, Mademoiselle, bisous!” He was running alongside her. He could not, she thought, have been more than eight-years-old. Then she felt another hand on her, pinching her from behind, and then yet another child stood beside her. Suddenly they darted off laughing to sit with more boys who were perched upon rusting bicycles. The men in the café opposite were consumed with laughter at the scene.

  “Let them laugh at me,” Maia muttered to herself as she walked along. Down here, marginalised by their grinding poverty, all that the boys could do was to scrape by in competition with the other urchins, forcing an acquaintance with whoever they found susceptible.

  She found herself disturbed by yet another man with jagged, filthy teeth tinged the colour of strong tea. He reached out and clutched her arm tightly. He was disturbingly cheerful. “I am student. You come for tea with myself and friend!”

  He waved to a boy with greased black hair, so wet it shone, who waved back at them enthusiastically from the rooftop of a café. In huge black lettering, its name announced, ‘Café Nadoor.’ From a distance, although the man on the roof was attractive, Maia could sense that there was something repulsive about him. Their enthusiasm appalled her and she wrenched her arm away from the man.

  “I am with a friend!”

  “I see no-one.” He looked about him in mock confusion. He jumped backwards, and as she was trying to rush away, he grabbed hold of her again. “Oh, there you are! What is your name? Come with me!”

  He had her about the waist and was attempting to pull her closer still. Maia was engorged with fury, and her panic made her strong. Successfully she pushed him away.

  “Va t’en!” she shouted at him. “Go away!”

  He followed her for a few moments but she managed to lose him when she entered another alley. Here the streets began to narrow even further, the houses were no longer so tall and narrow, and the streets were lined with overflowing bougainvillea and obscenely young prostitutes. The girls gazed surreptitiously at her, nonchalantly leaning against the foliage and creeping along by the side of the walls.

  As she walked on searching for the Grand Tazi hotel, the crowd eventually fell away and she found herself standing on the edge of a small square. It was twilight and the light danced upon the buildings of ochre and sandstone playing upon the faces of the men milling there as if they too had been carved in stone, but by a sculptor who had left them unfinished.

  She came across men bowing upon the ground in their eternal rendition of subservience. Maia pitied them. She despised religion. To her, it was merely a social construction, the need of mankind to constantly prostrate himself before a higher being and to relinquish all individual control. She considered that religion’s sole benefit was to offer people the opportunity to eradicate all personal responsibility. Too often, she noted how many people so adored being told what to do. Maia preferred freedom without encumbrances, but there were always people who wanted to tie her in. She must have stood for a while in a daze, for as she looked again, it seemed as if almost in the same moment the lowering sun was forming long shadows over the square, and acrobats, young men made up to look like women, their already strong features now grossly exaggerated, began to jump. Recalling the Historian’s instructions, she crossed the square and made for the walls, keeping her eyes to the ground, hoping not to attract any further unwelcome attention and still despising herself for her feigned subservience.

  On the very edge of the old part of the city, as Maia followed the twisting street to its conclusion, she found the hotel. Standing just outside the walls, large lettering in a faded bronze announced the hotel’s name: Grand Tazi. The building appeared neglected, like a disused film set.

  Next to the hotel was a small clothing stall where the extras thronged, a swarm of women swooning over the dingy fabric. As Maia stepped over the threshold into the hotel, she saw how simple it was to pass from utter poverty to comfort. Inside the hotel the foyer was arranged with deceptive precision, betrayed only by a perspiring queue of tourists who stood waiting for the only receptionist on the desk to allocate them their rooms. The floor was laid with the sort of marble coating which might have once lent the place a lavish air, but now it was covered in a thin film of filth, its decades of glory long since past. In the stifling heat of the foyer the ambushed male receptionist was smiling nervously as he desperately searched through his book for the reservations list. In the background the telephone rang shrilly, but the receptionist ignored its incessant nagging; in any case, nobody else was there to answer it.

  Maia watched him as he tried to placate the tourists, who appeared to be Nordic. They attempted to speak to him in English, but it seemed that other than Arabic he spoke only French, so all that he was able to say in reply was ‘Sorry, sorry,’ in English, which he kept repeating in a strange sort of rolling way. He did not look at all sorry, and in fact he continued to mutter angrily to himself even as he stood being assaulted by the torrent of demands. Indeed, the size of his apologetic grin increased as the confusion over the reservations and names mounted.

  Maia busied herself in studying the hotel’s faded interior. The ceiling was high and airy, decorated by a mosaic of minuscule, emerald tiles, but the desks and pieces of furniture which lay scattered around the foyer had all seen better days. The place did hold a certain louche charm. In one far corner of the room, a sign which enthusiastically advertised, ‘Tourists: A Night of Psychic Phenomena!’ had fallen on its side, while across the way, a crudely drawn arrow pointed up the stairs next to a handwritten sign which proclaimed itself, ‘Restaurant Gastromonique’.

  As the group of tourists inched forward and then finally dispersed, Maia found herself at the front of the queue, but by that time the receptionist had fled. She rang the old fashioned bell on the desk and waited. Eventually he reappeared, flustered.

 
“Hello.” She said, clawing on her knowledge of French.

  “I am sorry, I in break now,” he said with unflinching finality.

  “I thought you were the receptionist. Or is that your brother?” smiled Maia. She was brittle, speaking with a confidence she did not feel.

  “No. I do all. Same, same. Sorry.”

  “You are not really sorry at all, are you?”

  He grinned at her and she saw how deeply his face was pitted with the scars of a greasy skinned youth. He stretched out his clammy hand to her.

  “I am Tariq,” he said, with great self importance, and her hand slipped from his. “Now I in break.”

  “Wait – I don’t need a room. I’m here to meet somebody.”

  “Who are you?” Tariq’s eyes narrowed.

  “My name is Maia. I’m staying at Mihai Farcu’s house.” She wondered at his questioning. Did everyone receive this treatment? It was an unusual vetting from an inept receptionist. Tariq was visibily delighted.

  “Ah, the Historian. Welcome, welcome to the Grand Tazi, my friend! You are welcome guest.” Tariq came out from behind the desk to grasp her hand again. “Par ici, mademoiselle.” He ran his eyes over her. “You go there.” He pointed to a spiraling iron staircase and she followed it up until she arrived at the restaurant on the rooftop terrace, over which a blue and white striped canopy was fluttering tawdrily in the early evening breeze.

  The place was busy, but only with other Europeans and Americans who were well rehearsed in making this transition to comfort. Maia breathed out a sigh of relief at having entered a place where women left their hair uncovered and men did not look at her as if she were a curious object placed down in front of them. Her eyes were drawn across the room where she saw who she presumed to be the Historian. He was flaunting a plum silk scarf which was wound twice around his neck and then flung nonchalantly over the back of his chair where he had left it to trail pitifully on the floor.