Desert (39 page)

Then once again, Radicz vaguely feels the threat hanging over it all, here, in the parking lot of the buildings, the danger that is prowling. It’s a gaze, or perhaps a light, that the boy can’t see, can’t understand. The threat is hidden under the tires of the stopped automobiles, in the reflections on their windows, in the wan glow of the streetlamps that are still lit in spite of the daylight. It makes a shudder run over his skin, and the boy feels his heart slowing down, then speeding up, and the palms of his hands grow moist with cold sweat.

The birds have disappeared now, except some flights of swifts that go rushing by at top speed, twittering. The blackbirds have fled over to the other side of the huge blocks of concrete, and the air has grown silent. Even the wind is gradually letting up. Dawn doesn’t last very long over the big city; it shows its miracle for an instant, then fades away. Now day is coming. The sky is no longer gray and pink, the dull color is invading it. There’s a sort of haze in the west, over where the tall chimneys of the storage tanks have undoubtedly begun spitting out their poisonous fumes.

Radicz sees all of that, everything that’s happening, and his throat tightens. Soon the men and the women will open their shutters and doors, they’ll roll up their shades and come out on the balconies; they’ll walk through the streets of the city, and start the motors of their cars and trucks, and drive around looking at everything with their mean eyes. That’s why there’s that gaze, that threat. Radicz doesn’t like the daytime. He only likes the night, and the dawn, when everything is silent, uninhabited, when there’s nothing but bats and stray cats.

So, he keeps walking up the alleys of the big parking lot, looking a little more closely at the interiors of the parked cars. From time to time, he sees something that might be interesting, and he tries the door handles, just like that, rapidly in passing, just in case they should open. He’s run across three cars whose doors aren’t locked, but hasn’t touched them yet, because he’s not sure it’s worth the trouble. He tells himself he’ll come back a little later, when he’s gone around the whole lot, because unlocked cars are a quick job.

The light of day is broadening rapidly up above the trees, but you still can’t see the sun. All you can see is the lovely, warm light opening out, spreading through the sky. Radicz doesn’t like the daytime, but he quite likes the sun, and he’s happy at the idea of seeing it appear. It finally comes, an incandescent disk that shoots a glint deep into his eyes, and Radicz stops walking for a second, blinded.

He waits, listening to the sound of his heart beating in his arteries. The threat is all around, without his being able to say where it’s coming from. The light increases, and fear weighs down all the more heavily, from atop the high white walls with hundreds of blue shades, from atop the flat roofs bristling with antennae, from atop the cement pylons, from atop the tall palm trees with smooth trunks. It’s the silence that is most frightening. The silence of the day and the electric lights of the streetlamps that continue to shine with a shrill humming sound. It’s as if the ordinary sounds of humans and their motors could never come back, as if sleep had stopped them short, locked them in stone, motors jammed, throats tight, faces with closed eyes.

“Okay, let’s go.”

It’s Radicz talking out loud, to muster his courage. His hand tries the door handles again, his eyes search the cold interiors of the cabs. The sunlight is glittering on the drops of dew clinging to the hulls and the windshields.

“Nothing ... nothing.”

Haste now somewhat overrides his anxiety. The day is spread taut, white, the sun will soon be above the roofs of the tall buildings. It’s undoubtedly already shining on the sea, lighting up sparkling reflections on the crests of the waves. Radicz is walking along not paying attention to his surroundings.

“Good, thanks.”

A car door has opened. Without a sound, the boy slips his body into the car; his hands feel everywhere, under the seats, in the corners, in the door pockets, open the glove compartment. His hands feel quickly, agilely, like the hands of the blind.

“Nothing!”

Nothing: the inside of the car is empty, cold and damp as a cave.

“Bastards!”

Anxiety is followed by anger, and the boy goes back up the alley, alongside the building, searching inside each car. Suddenly a noise makes him start, the roaring of a motor and the crashing of metal. Hidden behind a green station wagon, Radicz watches the garbage truck pass and the collectors who are emptying the bins. The truck makes its way around the buildings, without entering the parking lot. It goes off, half hidden by the hedges of oleander and the palm trunks, and Radicz thinks it looks like a funny metallic insect, a dung beetle maybe, with its big rounded back lurching along.

When everything has fallen silent again, Radicz sees some shapes that could be interesting in the bed of the station wagon. He moves closer to the back window and can distinguish clothing, lots of clothing piled up in the back, in orange plastic sacks. There are also clothes in the front, shoe boxes and, on the floor, right next to the seat, difficult for someone with no experience to make out, the corner of a transistor radio set. The doors of the station wagon are locked, but the front window is cracked open; Radicz pulls with all his might, hangs on the edge of the window to enlarge the opening. Millimeter by millimeter, the window gives way, and soon Radicz can pass his long skinny arm through until his fingertips touch the door lock and pull it up. He opens the door and slips into the front of the car.

The station wagon is very spacious, with deep seats, covered in dark green vinyl. Radicz is glad to be inside the vehicle. He remains sitting on the cold seat for a minute, his hands resting on the steering wheel, and looks at the parking lot and the trees through the large windshield. The top part of the windshield is tinted emerald green, and it casts a strange hue on the white sky when you move your head. To the right of the steering wheel, there’s a radio. Radicz turns the knobs, but the radio doesn’t come on. His hand pushes the button on the glove compartment, and it opens; in the compartment there are papers, a ballpoint pen, and a pair of sunglasses.

Radicz passes over the back of the front seat to the rear. He examines the garments rapidly. They are new clothes, suits, shirts, women’s suits and pants, sweaters, all folded up in their plastic sacks. Next to himself, Radicz makes a pile of clothing, then piles of shoe boxes, ties, scarves. He stuffs the clothes into the pants, knotting the legs to make bundles. Suddenly, he remembers the transistor radio. He slips onto the front seat, his head on the floor, and his hands feel the object, lift it a little. He turns a knob, and this time music blares out, guitar notes that glide and flow like the song of birds at dawn.

That’s when he hears the sound of the police coming. He didn’t see them coming, maybe he didn’t even really hear them coming, the soft sound of tires on the tarred gravel of the circular alley, the rustling of a shade going up somewhere on the immense silent façade of the building, white with light; maybe it’s something else that alerted him, while he was there with his head down listening to the transistor radio’s bird music. Inside his body, behind his eyes, or else in his guts, something knotted up, clenched, and the void filled the body of the station wagon like a cold chill. So then he rose up and saw it.

The black police car is racing toward the alley of the parking lot. Its tires are making a wet sound on the tar and on the gravel, and Radicz can clearly see the faces of the policemen, their black uniforms. At the same time he feels the hard murderous look observing him from up on one of the balconies of the building, up where the shade has just gone quickly up.

Should he remain hidden in the large car, holed up like an animal? But he’s the one the police are coming after, he knows it, he’s sure of it. So his body suddenly uncoils, springs out of the front door of the station wagon, and he starts running on the sidewalk, in the direction of the wall surrounding the parking lot.

All at once, the black car accelerates, because the policemen have seen him. There’s the sound of voices, brief shouts that echo through the park, bounce off the tall white walls. Radicz hears the whistle blowing shrilly, and he hunches his shoulder up, as if it were bullets. His heart is pounding so hard he can barely hear anything else, as if the whole surface of the parking lot, the buildings, the trees in the park, and the asphalt alleys were all throbbing, quivering, and aching fitfully along with it.

His legs are running, running, beating on the asphalt, beating on the loose earth of the flower beds. His legs are leaping over the planted shrubs, over the low walls around the lawns. They are tearing along as fast as they can, frantic, shaking with panic, not knowing where they’re going, not knowing where they’ll stop. Now there is the high wall separating the parking lot, and the legs can’t take flight. They run along the wall, they zigzag between the still cars. The boy doesn’t need to turn around to see that the black police car is still there, that it’s very near, that it’s taking the curves at top speed, making its tires screech and its motor race. Then it’s behind him on a long straight stretch, at the end of which is the open avenue, and Radicz’s tiny body is bolting like a flushed rabbit. The black police car grows larger, approaches, its wheels are devouring the tar and gravel alley. As he’s running, Radicz hears the sound of shades going up, everywhere, on the façade of the building, and he thinks all the people are now out on their balconies to watch him run. And suddenly, there is an opening in the wall, a door maybe, and Radicz’s body leaps through the opening. Now he’s on the other side of the wall, all alone on the main avenue that leads to the sea, with maybe a three- , four-minute head start, the time it will take for the black police car to get to the parking lot exit, do a U-turn on the avenue. That too the boy knows without thinking about it, as if it were his frantic heart and his legs that were thinking for him. But where can he go? At the end of the avenue, less than a hundred yards away, is the sea, the rocks. That’s the direction the young man is instinctively running in, so fast that the hot air of the day is making tears run from his eyes. His ears can’t hear the sound of the wind, and he can’t see anything but the black ribbon of the road where the sunlight is shining brightly, and, at the very end, above the wall of the coastal road, the milky color of the sea and the sky mingling together. He is running so fast he can’t hear the tires of the black police car on the pavement anymore, or the two terrifying horn blasts that are filling up all of the space between the buildings.

Just a few more leaps, keep going, legs, a few more beats, heart, keep going, for the sea isn’t very far now, the sea and the sky mingling together, where there are no more houses, or people, or cars. So in the same instant that the body of the young man bounds onto the pavement of the coastal road, heading straight for the sea and the sky mingling together, like a deer the pack hounds are catching up with, at that very instant, a large blue city bus with its headlights still lit arrives, and the rising sun hits its curved windshield like a flash of lightning when Radicz’s body smashes up against the hood and the headlights with a terrific crash of metal and screeching brakes. Not far from there, on the edge of the palm tree park, stands a very somber young woman, still as a shadow, watching intently. She doesn’t move, she just watches as people approach from all sides, gathering on the road around the bus, around the black car, around the blanket covering the thief’s broken body.

O
UT WHERE THE city melts in with the red earth of the desert, old drystone walls, ruins of houses made of adobe in amongst acacias, some of which have burned, out where the dusty winds blow freely, far from the wells, from the shade of the palm trees, that is where the old sheik is in the process of dying.

He arrived here, in the city of Tiznit, at the end of his long pointless march. To the north, in the land of the defeated king, the foreign soldiers are advancing, from city to city, destroying everything that resists them. To the south, the soldiers of the Christians have entered the holy valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra, they are even going to occupy Ma al-Aïnine’s empty palace. The wind of ill-fortune has begun to blow on the stone walls, through the narrow loopholes, the wind that wears everything away, that empties everything out.

It’s blowing here now, the malevolent wind, the warm wind that comes from the north, that brings the mist in from the sea. Scattered around Tiznit like lost animals, the blue men are waiting, sheltered by their huts of branches.

Throughout the entire camp, no other sound can be heard but that of the wind clicking in the acacia branches, and from time to time the complaint of a hobbled animal. There is a vast silence, a terrible silence that hasn’t let up since the attack of the Senegalese soldiers, in the valley of the Oued Tadla. The voices of the warriors have been stilled now; the chants have fallen silent. No one speaks about what will happen anymore, maybe because nothing else will happen.

It’s the wind of death that is blowing over the dried earth, the malevolent wind coming from the lands occupied by the foreigners, in Mogador, in Rabat, in Fez, in Tangiers. The warm wind, bearing with it the murmur of the sea, and even beyond, the humming of the big white cities where the bankers, the merchants rule.

In the mud house with the half-caved-in roof, the old sheik is lying on his cloak on the bare mud floor. The heat is stifling; the sound of flies and wasps fills the air. Does he know that all is lost, that it’s all over now? Yesterday, day before yesterday, the messengers from the South came to bring him news, but he didn’t want to listen to them. The messengers had kept their news of the South to themselves, the surrender of Smara, the flight of Hassena and Larhdaf, Ma al-Aïnine’s youngest sons, in the direction of the plateau of Tagant, the flight of Moulay Hiba in the direction of the Atlas Mountains. But now they are taking away with them the news they will give to those who are awaiting them down there: “The great sheik Ma al-Aïnine will soon be dead. Already, his eyes can see no more, and his lips can speak no more.” They will say that the great sheik is dying in the poorest house in Tiznit, like a beggar, far from his sons, far from his people.