The Forgiven: A Novel by Lawrence Osborne

Author:Lawrence Osborne [Osborne, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88905-8
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2012-09-25T07:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

S THE TOYOTA ROLLED DOWN THE HILL TOWARD THE road, the tall Kebbash who had opened the door for him leaned forward and asked David in perfect French, almost unaccented, and with a distinct politeness, if he would like a cigarette for the road. The old man, he said gaily, always insisted on driving and, by God, he could not be dissuaded from this sad duty, though it was unendurable for all concerned. David reluctantly accepted the cigarette, though he disapproved of the habit, naturally. But now, he reasoned, it would help him get through the hours. He therefore took the crumpled Gitane without a word and let the man, Anouar, light it for him. Their eyes met and they did not duel. Anouar seemed quite courteous and intelligent. There was something boyish and calm in his manner and voice, a lilt and a skip and a small murderous humor. He talked with his head on his side, like a large inquisitive parrot. “Your wife,” he said sincerely, “is very pretty. I will one day have a gazelle like that, God willing.” But would He be willing?

All six men were smoking by the time the car bumped its way onto the road, which was plunged in porous darkness and empty of traffic. They tore along it at a clip nearing eighty miles an hour, the wheels whining loudly, the windows vibrating as the nuts and screws shook. The engine shuddered. To David, the road suddenly looked like something intimately known. The white box-shaped guardhouses standing next to ditches and the straggling thorn trees were burned into his recent memory. Only the slopes of loose rocks looked higher than they had, less regular, and between them the groovelike ravines where the darkness seemed to collect like a fluid. It was now heavy in some way, this landscape, ominously saturated with its own inner gravity. Bones, marrow, but no skin, no external sheen.

Abdellah drove with his foot rammed into the accelerator and nothing else. He looked at the road and never at David. The men said nothing except when the cigarettes were lit. Only Anouar leaned forward to say a few things close to David’s ear.

“We are driving straight through. We will stop in Erfoud to see some people and have a drink. And a nap.”

Before long they passed into the outskirts of Errachidia. The city rectilinear, with wide avenues thronged with thousands of male students, and a soft light covering it, turning everything a dark gold. They shot over a bridge spanning a surprising river, the waters lit up by rows of lamps, and then rumbled along the flat, hard boulevards of what had once been a French military town. The buildings were uniformly white and so were the robes and hats of the innumerable students. There was still something of the desert barracks about the place, the departed Foreign Legion, and in the great spaces between the apartment blocks, one could see—or sense—the flat line of the desert that was close enough to smell.

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