“Come on, Mother! Get in.” This was said despairingly
“What do you mean, get in?” Her voice went very high. “Fancy talking to me like that! You need a good slap in the face. That might help you.” She climbed into the front of the car. “I’ve never had such talk from anyone.”
“We shall all three sit in front,” said Eric. “Do you mind, Mr. Moresby?”
“I’m delighted. I prefer the front,” said Port. He was determined to remain wholly on the periphery of this family pattern; the best way of assuring that, he thought, would be to have no visible personality whatever, merely to be civil, to listen. It was likely that this ludicrous wrangling was the only form of conversation these two had ever managed to devise for themselves.
They started up, Eric at the wheel, racing the motor first. The porters shouted: “Bon voyage!”
“I noticed several people staring at me when I left,” said Mrs. Lyle, settling back. “Those filthy Arabs have done their work here, the same as everywhere else.”
“Work? What do you mean?” said Port.
“Why, their spying. They spy on you all the time here, you know. That’s the way they make their living. You think you can do anything without their knowing it?” She laughed unpleasantly. “Within an hour all the miserable little touts and undersecretaries at the consulates know everything.”
“You mean the British Consulate?”
“All the consulates, the police, the banks, everyone,” she said firmly.
Port looked at Eric expectantly. “But—”
“Oh, yes,” said Eric, apparently happy to reinforce his mother’s statement. “It’s a frightful mess. We never have a moment’s peace. Wherever we go, they hold back our letters, they try to keep us out of hotels by saying they have no rooms, and when we do get rooms they search them while we’re out and steal our things, they get the porters and chambermaids to eavesdrop—”
“But who? Who does all this? And why?”
“The Arabs!” cried Mrs. Lyle. “They’re a stinking, low race of people with nothing to do in life but spy on others. How else do you think they live?”
“It seems incredible,” Port ventured timidly, hoping in this way to call forth more of the same, for it amused him.
“Hah!” she said in a tone of triumph. “It may seem incredible to you because you don’t know them, but look out for them. They hate us all. And so do the French. Oh, they loathe us!”
“I’ve always found the Arabs very sympathetic,” said Port.
“Of course. That’s because they’re servile, they flatter you and fawn on you. And the moment your back is turned, off they rush to the consulate.”
Said Eric: “Once in Mogador—” His mother cut him short.
“Oh, shut up! Let someone else talk. Do you think anyone wants to hear about your blundering stupidities? If you’d had a little sense you’d not have got into that business. What right did you have to go to Mogador, when I was dying in Fez? Mr. Moresby, I was dying! In the hospital, on my back, with a terrible Arab nurse who couldn’t even give a proper injection—”
“She could!” said Eric stoutly. “She gave me at least twenty. You just happened to get infected because your resistance was low.”
“Resistance!” shrieked Mrs. Lyle. “I refuse to talk any more. Look, Mr. Moresby, at the colors of the hills. Have you ever tried infra-red on landscapes? I took some exceptionally fine ones in Rhodesia, but they were stolen from me by an editor in Johannesburg.”
“Mr. Moresby’s not a photographer, Mother.”
“Oh, be quiet. Would that keep him from knowing about infra-red photography?”
“I’ve seen samples of it,” said Port.
“Well, of course you have. You see, Eric, you simply don’t know what you’re saying, ever. It all comes from lack of discipline. I only wish you had to earn your living for one day. It would teach you to think before you speak. At this point you’re no better than an imbecile.”
A particularly arid argument ensued, in which Eric, apparently for Port’s benefit, enumerated a list of unlikely sounding jobs he claimed to have held during the past four years, while the mother systematically challenged each item with what seemed convincing proof of its falsity. At each new claim she cried: “What lies! What a liar! You don’t even know what the truth is!” Finally Eric replied in an aggrieved tone, as if capitulating: “You’d never let me stick at any work, anyway. You’re terrified that I might become independent.”
Mrs. Lyle cried: “Look, look! Mr. Moresby! That sweet burro! It reminds me of Spain. We just spent two months there. It’s a horrible country,” (she pronounced it hawibble) “all soldiers and priests and Jews.”
“Jews?” echoed Port incredulously.
“Of course. Didn’t you know? The hotels are full of them. They run the country. From behind the scenes, of course. The same as everywhere else. Only in Spain they’re very clever about it. They will not admit to being Jewish. In Cordoba—this will show you how wily and deceitful they are. In Cordoba I went through a street called Juderia. It’s where the synagogue is. Naturally it’s positively teeming with Jews—a typical ghetto. But do you think one of them would admit it? Certainly not! They all shook their fingers back and forth in front of my face, and shouted: ‘Catolico! Catohco!’ at me. But fancy that, Mr. Moresby, their claiming to be Roman Catholics. And when I went through the synagogue the guide kept insisting that no services had been held in it since the fifteenth century! I’m afraid I was dreadfully rude to him. I burst out laughing in his face.”
“What did he say?” Port inquired.
“Oh, he merely went on with his lecture. He’d learned it by rote, of course. He did stare. They all do. But I think he respected me for not being afraid. The ruder you are to them the more they admire you. I showed him I knew he was telling me the most fearful lot of lies. Catholics! I daresay they think that makes them superior. It was too funny, when they were all most Jewy; one had only to look at them. Oh, I know Jews. I’ve had too many vile experiences with them not to know them.”
The novelty of the caricature was wearing off. Port was beginning to feel smothered sitting there between them; their obsessions depressed him. Mrs. Lyle was even more objectionable than her son. Unlike him, she had no exploits, imaginary or real, to recount; her entire conversation consisted of descriptions in detail of the persecutions to which she believed she had been subjected, and of word-byword accounts of the bitter quarrels in which she had been engaged with those who harassed her. As she spoke, her character took shape before him, although already he was far less inclined to be interested in it. Her life had been devoid of personal contacts, and she needed them. Thus she manufactured them as best she could; each fight was an abortive attempt at establishing some kind of human relationship. Even with Eric, she had come to accept the dispute as the natural mode of talking. He decided that she was the loneliest woman he had ever seen, but he could not care very much.
He ceased listening. They had left the town, traversed the valley, and were climbing a large, bare hill on the other side. As they swung around one of the many S-curves, he realized with a start that he was looking straight at the Turkish fortress, small and perfect as a toy at this distance, on the opposite side of the valley. Under the wall, scattered about on the yellow earth, were several tiny black tents; which one he had been in, which one was Marhnia’s, he could not say, for the staircase was not visible from here.
And there she was, doubtless, somewhere below in the valley, having her noonday sleep in the airless heat of a tent, alone or with a lucky Arab friend—not Smail, he thought. They turned again, mounting ever higher; there were cliffs above them. By the road sometimes were high clumps of dead thistle plants, coated with white dust, and from the plants the locusts called, a high, unceasing scream like the sound of heat itself. Again and again the valley came into view, always a little smaller, a little farther away, a little less real. The Mercedes roared like a plane; there was no muffler on the exhaust pipe. The mountains were there ahead, the sebkha was spread out below. He turned to get a last look at the valley; the shape of each tent was still discernible, and he realized that the tents looked like the mountain peaks behind them on the horizon.
As he watched the heat-covered landscape unfold, his thoughts took an inward turn, dwelt briefly on the dream that still preoccupied him. At the end of a moment, he smiled; now he had it. The train that went always faster was merely an epitome of life itself. The unsureness about the no and theyes was the inevitable attitude one had if one tried to consider the value of that life, and the hesitation was automatically resolved by one’s involuntary decision to refuse participation in it. He wondered why it had upset him; it was a simple, classic dream. The connections were all clear in his head. Their particular meaning with regard to his own life scarcely mattered. For in order to avoid having to deal with relative values, he had long since come to deny all purpose to the phenomenon of existence—it was more expedient and comforting.
He was pleased to have solved his little problem. He looked around the countryside; they were still climbing, but they had gone over the first crest. About them now were barren, rounded hills, without details to give them scale. And on every side was the same uneven, hard line of the horizon, with the blinding white sky behind. Mrs. Lyle was saying: “Oh, they’re a foul tribe. A rotten lot, I can tell you.” “I’ll kill this woman yet,” he thought savagely. As the gradient lessened and the car added speed, the fleeting illusion of a breeze was created, but when the road curved upward again and they resumed the slow ascent, he realized that the air was motionless.
“There’s a sort of belvedere up ahead, according to the map,” said Eric. “We ought to have a superb view.”
“Do you think we should stop?” Mrs. Lyle inquired anxiously. “We must be at Boussif for tea.”
The vantage point proved to be a slightly perceptible widening of the road at a spot where the latter made a hairpin curve. Some boulders which had rolled down from the cliff on the inner side made the passage even more hazardous. The drop from the edge was sheer, and the view inland was spectacular and hostile.
Eric stopped the car for a moment, but no one got out. The rest of the drive was through stony territory, too parched to shelter even the locusts, yet now and then Port caught a glimpse in the distance of a mud-walled hamlet, the color of the hills, fenced round about with cactus and thorny shrubs. A silence fell upon the three, and there was nothing to hear but the steady roaring of the motor.
When they came in sight of Boussif with its modern white concrete minaret, Mrs. Lyle said: “Eric, I want you to attend to the rooms. I shall go directly to the kitchen and set about showing them how to make tea.” To Port she said, holding up her handbag: “I always carry the tea here in my bag with me when we’re on a voyage. Otherwise I should have to wait forever while that wretched boy attended to the automobile and the luggage. I believe there’s nothing at all to see in Boussif, so we shall be spared going into the streets.”
“Derb Ech Chergui,” said Port. And as she turned to look at him in astonishment, “I was just reading a sign,” he said reassuringly. The long main street was empty, cooking in the afternoon sun, whose strength seemed doubled by the fact that over the mountains ahead to the south still hung the massive dark clouds that had been there since the early morning.
It was a very old train. From the low ceiling in the corridor of their carriage hung a row of kerosene lamps that swung violently back and forth in unison as the ancient vehicle rocked along. When they had been about to pull out of the station, Kit, in the usual desperation she felt at the beginning of a train ride, had jumped down, run over to the newsstand, and bought several French magazines, getting back aboard just as they were starting up. Now, in the indistinct mixture of fading daylight and the yellow glow cast by the dim lamps, she held them on her lap and opened one after the other, trying to see what was in them. The only one she could see at all was full of photographs: Cine Pour Tous.
They had the compartment to themselves. Tunner sat opposite her.
“You can’t read in this light,” he said.
“I’m just looking at pictures.”
“Oh.”
“You’ll excuse me, won’t you? In a minute I won’t even be able to do this much. I’m a little nervous on trains.”