Less than an hour later the woman was at the comisaría waving her arms as she denounced the boy. The police listened attentively, feeling certain that they were on their way to collecting some fines.
When they had fished the goats out of the water and dumped them in a back room at the police station, the woman led them to the house of the boy’s father.
The boy was indignant. Deep water’s the best place to throw them, he protested. The man paid me to take them away. Ask him.
On the adjoining plot of land they found Abdallah sitting dejectedly with his eight remaining goats. Come on, they said. We’ve got something to show you. And they made him go with them to the comisaría, where they confronted him with the two wet carcasses, and demanded an immediate payment of forty thousand francs.
Abdallah was shocked. I haven’t even got ten, he said.
That’s all right, they told him. We’ll take four of your goats.
At this Abdallah set up an outcry. How can two goats be worth four? he kept shouting. They laughed and pushed him out, but the scene had been so noisy that people had gathered outside the entrance, trying to see in through the front door. Zohra, who was waiting for a bus on the other side of the road, quickly got the story from others who stood nearby.
Ah, so he has goats, she said to herself, and as she rode up the hill in the bus all her rancor against Abdallah returned. He could never even pay for a loaf of bread, but he has goats.
She set about spreading the news around the neighborhood that Abdallah, contrary to what everyone thought, had not left Tangier at all, but lived below Vasco da Gama with a flock of goats. She was certain that this would get to Abdallah’s wife, which it very soon did.
Abdallah’s wife had never bothered to file a complaint against him for having abandoned her and the children, since she knew she would get nothing out of it. Now however she determined to go and claim support. If Abdallah had goats, he had them only because of her spoons; of that she was certain. He must not be allowed to keep them.
The following day, instead of reporting to work at the Nazarenes’, she went to declare that her husband had left her. After a long wait, she was allowed into an office. As he filled out a paper, the official asked her where Abdallah worked.
He doesn’t work. He has no money.
The man raised his arms. Then what do you expect us to do? If he has no money, why did you come here?
He has goats, she said.
A few weeks later a message from the government arrived for her, telling her to go to the comisaría of her quarter. There a policeman was assigned to her, and together they started to walk to the shack where Abdallah lived.
Ever since the police had gone away with half his flock, Abdallah had not taken the trouble to drive the four remaining goats out to the fields where they could graze. He merely sat in the doorway of his shack, watching the starving animals wander around the small enclosure. Once in a while he brought in an armful of weeds for them.
The policeman told the woman to wait in the road while he went in and got the goats. She peered through the gate and saw the four bony, dried-up creatures. The policeman was talking, and then he came out through the gate, driving the goats ahead of him.
As he shut the gate she stole another glance inside and saw Abdallah sitting by the door of the shack, his face buried in his hands. At that moment, if only he had looked up, she would have called out something to him, to make him understand that it was all right, that he could return to her. But he did not move. The gate cut across her view of him, and she was in the road, walking with the policeman and the goats.
For an instant she regretted not having spoken to him: he looked so solitary and hopeless. Then she remembered the shawl. Three days earlier, after months of planning, she had managed to avail herself of a huge soft cashmere shawl which she intended to keep. She thought she had done well to hold her tongue.
In this world it’s not possible to have everything, she told herself.
(1980)
At the Krungthep Plaza
IT WAS THE DAY when the President of the United States was due to arrive with his wife on a visit to the King and Queen. Throughout the preceding afternoon squads of men had been running up and down the boulevard, dragging with them heavy iron stands to be used as barricades along the curbs. Mang Huat rose from his bed sweaty and itching, having slept very little during the night. Ever since he had been advised that the procession would be passing in front of the hotel he had been awaiting the day with mounting dread. The smallest incident could jeopardize his career. It needed only one lunatic with a hand grenade.
With distaste he pulled aside the curtains near his bed and peered out into the light of the inauspicious day. Later, when he had showered, he returned to the window and stood for a long time. Above the city the grey sky was ahum with helicopters; so far none had hit the tops of the highest chedis towering above the temples, but people in the street watched with interest each time an object clattered overhead in the direction of a nearby spire. At times, when a police car was on its way through the quarter, all traffic was suspended, and there would follow an unusual, disturbing hush in which he could hear only the whir of the insects in the trees. Then there would come other sounds of life, farther away: the cries of children and the barking of dogs, and they too were disturbing, these naked noises in place of the unceasing roar of motors.
No one seemed to know when the royal cortege would go by. The radio had announced the time as ten o’clock, but gossip in the lobby downstairs, reportedly straight from police headquarters, fixed the starting hour as noon. Mang Huat decided not to have breakfast, nor indeed to eat at all until the danger had passed and he was free from tension.
He sat behind his desk tapping the point of an eyetooth with his fingernail, and looking thoughtfully across at Miss Pakun as she typed. The magenta silk curtains at his office windows stirred slightly with the breath of an oscillating fan. They gave the room a boudoir glow in which a motion or a posture sometimes could seem strangely ambivalent. Today the phenomenon, rather than stimulating him, merely increased the distrust he had been feeling with regard to his secretary. She was unusually attractive and efficient, but he had to tell himself that this was not the point. He had engaged her in what he considered good faith, assuming that the information she had written on her application form was true. He had chosen her from among several other equally presentable applicants because she bore the stamp of a good bourgeois upbringing.
His equivocal feelings about Miss Pakun dated from the previous week, when his cashier, Udom by name, had reported seeing her walking along the street in an unsanitary and disreputable quarter of Thonburi on the other side of the river. Udom knew the area well; it was a neighborhood of shacks, mounds of garbage, opium houses and brothels. If she lived over there, why had she given the Sukhumvit address? And if not, what legitimate excuse could she have for visiting this unsavory part of the city? He had even wondered if Pakun were her true name.
Mang Huat was proud of his three-room suite at the Krungthep Plaza. At thirty-two he was manager of the hotel, and that pleased him. Through a small window in the wall of his salon he could, if he felt so inclined, look down into the lobby and see what was happening in almost every corner of it. He never used the peephole. It was enough that the staff knew of its existence.
From where he sat he could hear the trickle of the fountain in the next room. A friend, recently moved to Hong Kong, had left it with him, and he had spent a good deal of money getting it installed. Miss Pakun coughed, probably to remind him that he was smoking. She always coughed when he smoked. On a few occasions when she had first come to work for him he had put out his cigarette. Today he was not much concerned with the state of her throat. Nor, he thought, did he care whether she lived at the elegant address in Sukhumvit or in a slum alley of Thonburi. He no longer had any intention of forging an intimate friendship with her.
Late in the morning Udom knocked on his door. Udom was a friend
from university days, down on his luck, who had begged for work at the hotel. Mang Huat, persuaded that it was unrealistic to expect any man to possess more than one good quality, had given the job of cashier to Udom, who was unreliable but honest.
Ever since his uncle’s partner had placed him in his present exalted position, Mang Huat had experienced the bliss of feeling sheltered from the outside world. Today for the first time that delicious peace of mind was being threatened. It was absurd, he knew; there was little likelihood of an accident, but any situation beyond his control caused him undue anxiety.
Udom came over to the desk and murmured gloomily that the American Security men were downstairs asking for a passkey to the rooms. I told them I’d have to speak to you, he went on. It’s not obligatory, you know. Only the keys of certain specific rooms, if they ask for them.
I know that, said Mang Huat. Give them a passkey.
The guests are going to object.
Mang Huat bridled. What difference does that make? Give them whatever keys they ask for. Just be sure you get them all back.
It scandalized him that anyone should hesitate to accept this added protection, but then Udom could be counted on to create complications and find objections. Mang Huat suspected that he had not entirely outgrown his youthful Marxist sympathies, and sometimes he wondered if it had been wise to take him on to the staff.
Pangs of hunger were making his nervousness more acute. It was twenty-five minutes past one. Miss Pakun had not yet returned from lunch. All at once he realized that a new sound which filled the air outside had been going on for some time. He stepped to the window. The big official cars were rolling past, and at a surprising speed. His eye suddenly caught the two white Bentleys from the palace, enclosed by their escort of motorcycles. He held his breath until they were gone. Even then he listened for a minute before he telephoned to order his lunch.
Late in the afternoon the receptionist rang his office to say that a guest was demanding to see him. Suddenly the threat was there again. I can’t see anyone, he said, and hung up.
Five minutes later Udom was on the wire. I was afraid this would happen, he said. An Englishman is complaining that the police searched his room.
Tell him I’m not in my office, said Mang Huat. And to Miss Pakun: No incoming calls. You hear?
Twilight had come down all at once, brought on by a great black cloud that swelled above the city. The thought occurred to him that he could let Miss Pakun go now, before the rain came. He stood at the window staring out. The city sparkled with millions of extra lights; they were looped in fanciful designs through the branches of the trees across the canal. A triumphal arch had been built over the entrance to the bridge, spectacularly floodlighted in red and blue to show a thirty-foot-high face of the visiting president, with appropriate words of welcome beneath, in English and Thai.
The buzzer in the antechamber sounded. Miss Pakun answered it, and a bellboy in scarlet uniform came in with a note on a tray. He’s had smallpox, Mang Huat said to himself. Who can have hired him? On his pad he scribbled a reminder to have the boy discharged in the morning, and took the note from him. Udom had written: The man is in the bar getting the guests to sign a petition. I think you should see him.
Mang Huat read the note twice in disbelief. Then he pounded the desk once with his fist, and Miss Pakun glanced up. Because he was angry, he reminded himself that above all he must keep his composure. With such malcontents it was imperative to be adamant, and not to allow oneself to be drawn into discussion, much less argument.
The buzzer sounded. Tell him I’ll be free in five minutes, he said to Miss Pakun.
There was no longer any question of letting her go before the storm broke. She would simply have to take her shoes off, like other people in that squalid quarter where she surely lived, and wade barefoot through the puddles and ponds, to the end of the alley where a taxi could not take her. In a moment she came back in and sat down, patting her hair and smoothing her skirt. At that moment a police car must have been in the neighborhood, for there was one of the sudden ominous silences outside. While Miss Pakun carefully applied a whole series of cosmetics to her features, he sat in the stillness and heard a gecko chatter just beyond the air-conditioning box behind him; the tentative chirruping pierced the slight whir of the motor. And the insects in the trees still droned. He was sorry he had made a time limit. The five minutes of silence seemed like twenty. When the time was up Miss Pakun, resplendent, rose once more and turned to go out. Mang Huat stopped her.
No typing, please, while the man is here, he said crisply. Only shorthand. You can do it. (Her face had begun to change its expression.) This is an agitator, he stressed. We must have a record of everything he says.
Miss Pakun always grew timid and claimed insufficient knowledge of English if he asked her to transcribe a conversation in that language. The results of her work, however, were generally successful. Mang Huat glowered. You must get every word. He may threaten me.
The visitor came in, followed by Miss Pakun. He was young, and looked like a university student. With a brief smile he sat down in a chair facing Mang Huat, and said: Thank you for letting me in.
Mang Huat took this as sarcasm. You came to complain?
You see, the young man began, I’m trying to get an extension of my tourist visa without leaving the country.
Mang Huat slapped the desk hard with the flat of his hand. Someone has made a mistake. You are looking for the Immigration Department. My secretary will give you the address.
The young man raised his voice. I was trying to lead up to my complaint. But I’ll make it now. It’s an affront to your guests to allow the Americans into the rooms.
Ah! Perhaps you should complain to the Thai police, Mang Huat suggested, standing up to show that the meeting was at an end. My secretary can also give you that address.
The young Englishman stared at him for an instant with patent disgust. You’re the perfect manager for this abject institution, he muttered. Then, seeing that Miss Pakun had risen and was holding the door open for him, he got up and stalked out, doing his best to slam the outer door of the antechamber behind him. Equipped against such rough treatment, the door merely gave its usual cushioned hiss. Coming at that moment, the sound, which to Mang Huat represented the very soul of luxury, caused him to heave a sigh of pure sensuous pleasure.
That will be all, he told Miss Pakun. She took up her handbag, showed him her most luscious smile for the fraction of a second, and shut the door behind her.
It was now night, and the rain was falling heavily. Miss Pakun would get very wet, he thought, a twinge of pity spicing his satisfaction. He went into the next room and lay back on the divan to watch television for a few minutes. Then he got up. It was the moment to make his evening excursion to the kitchen and, having examined the food, order his dinner. He lighted a cigarette and took the elevator down to the lobby.
In front of the reception desk he frowned with disapproval at the spots left on the carpet by the wet luggage being brought in. At that moment he happened to glance across the crowded lobby, and saw Miss Pakun emerge from the bar, accompanied by the young Englishman. They went directly out into the street. By the time Mang Huat was able to get over to the door, walking at a normal pace, they were climbing into a taxi. He stepped outside, and, sheltered by the marquee, stood watching the cab disappear into the downpour.
On his way to the kitchen he stopped at the cashier’s desk, where he recounted to Udom what he had just seen. He also told him to give Miss Pakun her final paycheck in the morning and to see that under no circumstances was she to get upstairs to his office.
A prostitute, he said with bitter indignation. A common prostitute, masquerading as an intelligent, educated girl.
(1980)
Bouayad and the Money
THE AID EL KEBIR would be arriving in a month or so. Each year sheep cost more, Bouayad told Chaouni. This year they’re going to be higher than ever. Why don’t we buy twenty and
split the cost? When the holiday comes we’ll split the proceeds.
Chaouni always had some ready cash. He agreed. They went out to Sidi Yamani and bought the animals cheap from a friend of Bouayad’s. They hired a truck to carry them to Tangier. There they put them into a shed at Bouayad’s and went together every day, driving them to graze in the country. The sheep had to be fat and beautiful before the Aid.
One day some soldiers came across the meadow where Bouayad and Chaouni sat watching the sheep. The colonel stopped and looked. Then he went over to Bouayad and asked him if he wanted to sell the sheep.
Maybe, Bouayad said.
The price the colonel offered was exactly what they had been planning to ask in the market. They both thought it would be a good idea to sell them all at once and save themselves the bother of taking them out to pasture every day. The colonel told them to go to his office at the qachla the next morning and he would give them the money. Because he was well-known they did not question his word. The soldiers drove the sheep ahead of them, and Bouayad and Chaouni were left alone in the meadow.
The next day when Bouayad went to the qachla he discovered that the colonel had been called to Rabat. This news made Chaouni decide to go himself the next day. The colonel was still in Rabat. They took turns going to the qachla.
This continued for several weeks. Finally they learned that the colonel was back in Tangier. Now when they went he was not in his office. They were convinced that the colonel had no intention of paying them.
Bouayad was the kind of man who would not admit to having lost. He went to Chaouni and said: Are you with me? Whatever happens? We get that money or we put him out of commission. Are you with me?
No, Chaouni said. I’ve got a wife and children to think of.
You say good-bye to all that money?
It’s gone. I’m sorry I ever listened to you.
That means whatever I get is mine, said Bouayad.