The Tremor of Forgery Page 12

  … He had travelled far in the Old and New Worlds; in him I recognized once again that simple mind of the sailor or wanderer who learns, as he goes along, to talk and think decently; who, instead of gathering fresh encumbrances on Life’s journey, wisely discards even those he set out with. [Fountains in the Sand by Norman Douglas. 1912]

  That appealed very much to Ingham now. Miss Darby was certainly not one of his encumbrances, but Ina might be. A terrible thought, in a way, because he had considered her—for a year at least—a part of his life. He had counted on her. And knowing himself, Ingham knew he had not had the whole reaction he would have, a little later, from her letter. The curious thing, the comforting thing was that Africa would help him to bear it better—if he was going to have any bad reaction. It was strange, he couldn’t explain it, to be floating like a foreign particle (which he was) in the vastness of Africa, but to be absolutely sure that Africa would enable him to bear things better.

  He decided not to think about his letter to Ina, the letter he would write in a few days. Let her wait, say, five or six days, ten including the time the letter would take to get there. She had made him wait a month.

  Ingham went over to say good-bye to OWL.

  OWL was washing his flippers in the kitchen sink. He shook his flippers neatly, like a woman shaking out a dishcloth, and stood them upside down on the draining-board. They looked seal-like, but somehow as repellent as Adams’s feet.

  ‘I’m going away for a couple of days,’ Ingham said.

  ‘Going away where?’

  Ingham told him. He did not mention Jensen.

  ‘Are you giving up your bungalow?’

  ‘No. I wasn’t sure I could get it back.’

  ‘No, you’re right. Would you like a drink?’

  1 wouldn’t mind a beer, if you have one.’

  ‘Got six, ice cold,’ Adams said cheerfully, and got a can from the refrigerator. Adams made himself a Scotch. ‘You know, I found out a little something today,’ he said as they went into the living-room. ‘I think—I’m pretty sure —’ Adams looked around at the windows, as if for eavesdroppers, but because of the air-conditioning, his windows were all shut, even all the shutters closed except the one behind Ingham’s chair where there was no sun. ‘I think I know who the prowler was the other night. ‘Abdullah. The old Arab with the cane. The one you said stole your jacket or something.’

  “Oh. One of the boys told you?’

  ‘No, I heard it in town.’ Adams said with a faintly satisfied air, as if he were in the secret service and had ferreted out something.

  Ingham’s heart had tripped. He hoped he did not look pale, because he felt pale.

  ‘At the Plage.’ Adams continued, ‘they were talking about “Abdull”, a couple of Arabs at the bar. There’re lots of Abdullahs, but I saw the barman give the fellows a sign to pipe down, because of me. They know I’m at the Reine. I understood enough of what they said to know he was “gone” or “disappeared”. I wanted to ask them about him, because something had just made a connection in my mind. I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to butt in. But I remembered seeing Abdullah by the curio shop near the hotel here Friday night. It was a night I drove into Hammamet around eight to have dinner. I’d never seen the old fellow around here before, so I remembered it. And I noticed yesterday and today, he wasn’t around town. I was in Hammamet three times lately, and he wasn’t around, not since Friday. It’s strange? Adams looked at Ingham, his head a little cocked.

  Silence for a few seconds.

  ‘Well, won’t somebody report him missing?’ Ingham asked. ‘Won’t the police do something?’

  ‘Oh—his neighbours might miss him. I presume he’s got a room to sleep somewhere, probably with six other people. I doubt if he’s got a wife and family. Would a neighbour go to the police?’ Adams pondered this. ‘I doubt that. They’re fatalistic. Mekioubl It is the will of Allah that Abdullah should disappear! Voilà! It’s a far cry from the American Way, isn’t it?’

  13

  JENSEN was punctual the next morning, standing on the road near the narrow alley, with a brown suitcase at his feet. He wore pale green cotton trousers, neatly pressed. Ingham pulled up a bit past Melik’s on the other side of the road, and Jensen walked over. Ingham helped him stow the suitcase in the back of the car. They had plenty of room, even with Jensen’s knapsack and dangling gear of cooking-stove and pots.

  €You know, Anders, you ought to put on shorts.’ Ingham said. ‘It’s going to be a hot drive. You ought to save those good pants.’ He spoke gently, always afraid somehow to hurt Jensen’s feelings.

  ‘All right.’ Jensen said, like a willing, polite little boy. ‘I’ll change up in Melik’s loo.’ Jensen opened his suitcase and dragged out a pair of shorts made from old levis. He went up the steps to Melik’s.

  Ingham stood outside his car and lit a cigarette.

  Jensen was back in a moment. He had lean brown legs with golden hairs. He put his trousers away carefully in his suitcase.

  Ingham took the road southward, along the sea. The morning was still cool. The emptiness of the clear blue sky seemed to promise a reward, or pleasure, ahead of them. In a quarter of an hour they reached Bou Ficha, a village, and in about the same time something larger called Enfidaville. Jensen held the map. The road was good to Sousse. They did not stop at Sousse even for a coffee, but went on southward on the shorter inland route towards Sfax, where they intended to have a late lunch. Jensen reeled off the names:

  ‘Msaken next… Bourdjine ... Amphitheatre! Weill No, that’s not a town, it’s a fact. They have one. Probably Roman.’

  ‘I find it amazing,’ Ingham said, ‘there’s so little remains of the Romans, Greeks, Turks and so forth. Carthage was a disappointment. I expected it to be so much bigger.’

  ‘No doubt it has been pillaged a thousand times,’ Jensen said with resignation.

  In Sfax, where they lunched at a very decent restaurant with pavement tables, Jensen was of great interest to a boy of about twelve. At least that was the way Ingham saw it. He hadn’t seen Jensen make a single inviting move. The boy hung around, smiling broadly, rolling big dark eyes, leaning against a metal pole some six feet away. At last the boy spoke to Jensen, and Jensen murmured something that sounded bored in Arabic. The boy giggled.

  ‘I asked him,’ said Jensen, ‘do I look like I have a millime? Scram!’

  Ingham laughed. The boy was rather handsome, but dirty.

  ‘They don’t bother you?’ Jensen asked.

  One had approached him in Tunis, but he said, ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Little bores. Little nuisances,’ Jensen said, as if he spoke of a minor vice of his own which he could not shake.

  Ingham anticipated that Jensen might find a boy or two on this trip. He thought it might pick Jensen up. ‘How much money do they want, usually?’

  ‘Oh!’ Jensen laughed. ‘You can get them for a packet of cigarettes. Half a packet.’

  They made it easily to Gabes by 6 p.m., even stopping for half an hour at a town called Cekhira for a swim. It was the hottest time of the afternoon, just after three o’clock. They stepped out of the already oven-like car, which had been lumbering over sandy soil towards the beach, into something worse, a bigger oven. Ingham changed as fast as possible into swimming trunks, while standing at one side of the car. There was no living thing in sight. What could have stood the heat? They ran down to the sea and jumped in. The water was refreshing to Ingham, though Jensen said the water was not cold enough. Jensen was an excellent swimmer, and could stay under water for so long that Ingham grew alarmed at one point. Jensen swam in his shorts. When they came back to the car, the door handles were too hot to touch. Ingham had to take off his trunks and use them to grip the handle. In the car, Jensen sat in his wet shorts on a towel.

  Gabes was Ingham’s first view of the desert, stretching inland to the west behind the town, flat and yellow-orange in the light of the setting sun. The town was quite big, but the buildings were
not all jammed together as at Sousse or Sf ax. There were spaces through which one could see distant palm trees with fronds stirring in the breeze. It was not so warm as Ingham had feared. They found a second-class hotel, which was respectable enough to be listed in Ingham’s Guide Bleu, however. Jensen was a little proud about paying his way, and Ingham did not want to let him in for much expense. It would be odd, Ingham thought, if Jensen were really quite well off, and had simply decided to rough it for a while. That could go, Ingham supposed, as far as buying a cheap brown suitcase to begin with, and if one roughed it long enough, the suitcase could look like Jensen’s at this moment. Ingham didn’t care one way or the other. He found Jensen a good travelling companion, uncomplaining, interested in everything, and willing to do anything Ingham proposed.

  Only Ingham’s room had a toilet and shower. Jensen took a shower in Ingham’s room. Then they both went out to walk around the town. The jasmine sellers were here, too. The oversweet scent had become the scent of Tunisia to Ingham—its cosmetic scent, at any rate—as certain scents evoked certain women. Lotte’s had been Le Dandy. Ingham could not think of the name of Ina’s now, though he had bought some for her once or twice in New York. He certainly could not recollect how it smelt. The olfactory memory might be long and primitive, ante-dating words, but it seemed one couldn’t call up a smell in memory as one could call up a word or a line of poetry.

  They went into a bar and stood. Boukhab again. Then Ingham had a Scotch. The transistor, though tiny on the bar shelf, was blaring, and made talking difficult. The song whined on with no end in sight, and there was off and on singing, by a male or female voice, it was impossible to tell. When the voice stopped for a bit, the twanging, insinuating stringed instruments whammed in, as if to back up the griping vocalist with a ‘Yeah! That’s what I’ve been saying all along!’ And what were they complaining about? Ingham wanted to laugh.

  ‘Good God.’ he said to Jensen, shaking his head.

  Jensen smiled slightly, apparently able to shut out the noise.

  At their feet was a swill of cigarette butts, sawdust, and spit. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ Ingham said.

  Jensen was willing.

  Eventually they found a restaurant for dinner. Ingham could not eat his squid, or whatever it was, which he had ordered through a mistake of his own in the language, but at least he had the satisfaction of giving it to a grateful cat.

  The next morning they paid their bill, and asked the hotel manager about camels.

  ‘Ah, bien sûr, messieurs !’ He quoted prices. He knew a camel-driver and where to find him.

  They went off with their luggage to find the camel-drivers. The business took some time, because Jensen decided to wait for a driver due at ten or ten-thirty, according to the other camel-drivers. The drivers leaned casually, their pointed sandals crossed, against the round bodies of their camels, which were all lying around on the sand with their feet tucked in like cats. The camels looked more intelligent than their drivers, Ingham thought. It was a disturbing intelligence in their faces, a look of knowledge that could not be acquired by going to any school. All the camels regarded him and Jensen with an amused curiosity, as if to say, ‘Well, well, two more suckers!’ Ingham was vaguely ashamed of his unromantic thoughts.

  The awaited driver arrived on one camel, leading three others. Jensen struck the bargain. Six dinars each for overnight.

  ‘They always make a big thing about having to feed the camels,’ Jensen explained to Ingham, ‘but the price isn’t bad.’

  Ingham hadn’t been on a camel since a certain trip to the 200 when he was a boy. He rather dreaded the lurching ride, and tried to anticipate falling off- nine feet down to the sand—so that it wouldn’t hurt so much if he did. The camel jolted him up, and they were off. After a few hundred yards, it was not as bad as Ingham had feared, but the undulant movement imposed by the camel’s gait made him feel silly. He would have preferred to gallop, leaning forward, in the manner of Lawrence of Arabia.

  ‘Hey, Anders!’ Ingham yelled. ‘What’s our destination?’

  ‘We’re going towards Chenini. That little town we looked up last night.’ Jensen was on the camel ahead.

  ‘Wasn’t it ten kilometres away?’

  ‘I think so.’ Jensen spoke to the driver, who was on the lead camel, then turned back to Ingham. ‘We can’t walk in the desert all day, you know. We’ll have to have shelter from eleven to four somewhere.’

  The desert was widening about them. ‘Where?’ Ingham asked, unalarmed.

  ‘Oh, trust him. He’s no doubt making a bee-line for a shelter.’

  This was true, but it was eleven-forty before they reached a tiny town, or cluster of houses, and Ingham was glad to stop. He had covered his head with a handkerchief. Jensen had an old canvas cap. The place had a name, but it slipped from Ingham’s mind as soon as he heard it. There was a grocery store-restaurant which sold bottled drinks from a Pepsi-Cola dispenser tank, but there was no ice in the tank, only tepid water. A lunch was produced by the proprietor of the place, chick peas with lumps of inedible sausage, Jensen and Ingham ate at a tiny round table, their metal chairs slanting crazily in the sand. Ingham could not imagine why, or how, people lived here, though there was a road of sorts leading to and from the place, a ghostly trail in the sand which a jeep or a Land-Rover could use, he supposed. They drank some boukhab after their lunch. Jensen had picked up a bottle somewhere. Jensen said the only thing to do was sleep for an hour or so.

  ‘Unless you want to read. I might make a sketch.’ Jensen got a drawing pad from his suitcase.

  There were two more stops in the course of the day. Jensen had quite a conversation with the driver, which he said was on the subject of where they would spend the night. The driver knew of a grove of palms, though it was not an oasis. They arrived there just before seven o’clock. The sun had just set. The horizon was orange, the landscape empty, but there was a cardboard carton, some old tins under the trees, which suggested that this spot might be a favourite for camel-drivers to bring their customers to. Ingham was not fussy. He thought it all quite wonderful. Venus was shining.

  Jensen had bought tins of beans and sardines en route from the hotel to the camels this morning. Ingham did not care if the food was hot or cold, but Jensen set up his cooking-stove. He invited the driver to partake, but he declined politely, and produced his own food from somewhere. He also declined Jensen’s offer of a boukhab.

  Before he ate, the driver read in the failing light from a little book.

  Jensen glanced at the driver and said to Ingham, ‘It takes imagination to enjoy a drink. There he is with the Koran, no doubt. You know, they either drink like maniacs or they’re stubborn—dries. What do you call them?’

  ‘Teetotallers.’ Ingham said. ‘He’s not very friendly, is he?’

  ‘Maybe he thinks he can’t do me, because I know some Arabic. But I have the feeling he has just had a sadness of some kind.’

  ‘Really?’ Ingham imagined that Arabs were more or less always the same from one day to the next, that no external event could much affect them.

  After their dinner out of a mutual pot, eaten with spoons, Jensen and Ingham lay on their blankets and smoked, facing the direction in which the sun had gone down. A palm tree half sheltered them. The boukhah bottle was between them, pushed into the sand so it would stand upright. Ingham drank mostly from Jensen’s canteen of water. The stars came out more and more, and became powdery with profusion. There was no sound except an occasional swish of breeze in the palm leaves.

  Just as he was about to speak, Ingham saw a shooting star. It went on a long way downward in the sky—seven inches, he thought, if the sky had been a canvas and had been of a certain nearness. ‘Remember the night,’ Ingham said, ‘about three weeks ago, when I went to your house the first time? As I was leaving, walking towards the road, I came across a dead man. In that second stretch, after the turn. Lying in the alley.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Jensen without to
o much surprise.

  Ingham was speaking softly. ‘I stumbled over him. Then I lit a match. The fellow’d had his throat cut. The body was even cold. You didn’t hear anything about it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘What do you think happens to the body? Somebody has to remove it.’

  Jensen paused for a swig from the bottle. ‘Oh, first somebody would cover it up to hide it. Then a couple of Arabs would haul it away on a donkey, bury it in the sand somewhere. That is, if there’s some reason to hide it and there usually is if a man’s murdered. Excuse me a minute.’ Jensen got up and disappeared somewhere in the palm grove.

  Ingham put his head down on his forearms. The camel-driver had settled himself under robes next to one of his camels, and might be asleep by now. He was out of hearing, and probably could not understand English, but Ingham disliked his closeness. Ingham stood up as Jensen came back. ‘Let’s walk a little bit away.’ Ingham said.

  Jensen took his flashlight. It was very dark when they left the cooking-stove. The flashlight’s beam bobbed on the irregular ripples of sand before them. Ingham imagined the ripples mountains, hundreds of feet high, imagined that he and Jensen were giants walking on the moon; or perhaps their actual size, walking on a new planet populated by tiny people to whom these ripples were mountains. They walked slowly, and both glanced behind to see how far they had gone from the palm trees. The trees were not visible, but the stove glowed like a spark.

  Ingham plunged in. ‘I had an attempted robbery at my bungalow a few nights ago.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Jensen, sounding English as he did sometimes, weaving a little in the soft sand. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was asleep and I woke up when the door was being opened. I’d forgotten to lock my door. Someone started to come in. I picked up my typewriter and threw it as hard as I could. I hit the man right in the forehead.’ Ingham came to a stop, and so did Jensen. They faced each other without seeing each other. Jensen’s torch pointed at their feet. ‘The thing is—I think I might’ve killed the man. I think he was the one they call Abdullah. You know, the old fellow with the turban and the red pants? The one who stole something out of my car?’