They were quiet at dinner, excessively polite, then afterward moved about the apartment trying to stay out of each other's way. Finally, just before they went to bed, she broke the tension, for which he was grateful and relieved. She offered him a compromise which he immediately accepted. She'd be willing to stay out of the clinic, she said, but wanted to continue working on the census in the slum.
Census. It sounded more like a petition of grievances to him, something Bennani had organized, a door-to-door survey of what people thought, what they wanted in Dradeb, their sorrows, their complaints.
She cared about it, he could see, and that touched him, to his surprise. He remembered, months before, fearing she might change if she could give up her hashish. He'd wondered then if she'd become a different person, and, if she did, whether he'd still love her as much.
Well, he thought, she has become different, a quite extraordinary person, and there is no question about how I feel-I love her now even more than before.
Sometimes it was just little things that moved him, such as her insistence on participating in the fast. She didn't have to, wasn't a Moslem, but she couldn't bear the idea of everyone suffering except herself. It was hard not to admire her for that, her compassion, her empathy with anyone deprived.
As always, he'd found, the first few days of Ramadan weren't so bad, but having her as his companion in the misery made them even easier to endure. He was proud of her discipline, her ability to suffer all day without food or drink, until the moment when the cannon sounded and the mosques announced the night's release. Then he and Kalinka drank their full of soup and stuffed themselves with honey-cakes. Afterward he swept her in his arms and carried her to their bed.
Here they fondled each other for hours to the music of the city's flutes, soaring out of the pain of self-denial into realms of ecstasy and desire. Tangier seemed different then, so different from the dour city of the fast. They listened to their neighbors celebrating and agreed the nights were charmed.
Yes, she was a different person now, had actually grown, it seemed. Ever since he'd raised the veil from her past she'd become strong, incisive, and direct. Before, he'd seen no way to connect her to the world which he policed. She'd always been separate from the city, his private mystery, but now he felt there was a relationship between his public life and his life with her.
It wasn't just her work, this grievance census she was taking in Dradeb. It was something more, another kind of link. She mentioned it to him that night they fought and made up, an idea she had about the meaning of her mother's life.
"I think," she said after they'd made love and were in bed listening to the flutes, "that all those years that Peter was pretending, trying to duplicate his comradeship with mama-oh, you know, Hamid, starting a store here, arranging the beds the same, even making me pretend to be his wife-that all that time he was smothering me with rituals and lies. I couldn't breathe then, find myself, find out who I was. But now I'm free, thanks to you. I've stopped smoking. I've read books on Vietnam. Now, finally, I understand what mother did. And, listen Hamid, there's a connection too between Hanoi and Tangier, between what happened there and what I feel here."
He sat up abruptly when she said that. He was astounded, unsettled, even shocked. "No, no," he said, "it's not the same. Oh, in superficial ways, yes. But we're not a colony anymore."
"But it is the same, Hamid, at least to me. Mama wanted much more than to put out the French. She wanted to change the country. Change the way people lived."
"Where do you get these ideas, Kalinka? From Achar, of course-"
She slapped him playfully. "I have my own ideas. Where do I get them? From using my eyes, like you." She raised her body and grasped his face between her hands. "You should know, Hamid. You, of all people, should know. You were born down there. No water. The degradation. Surely you remember what Dradeb is like. What difference does it make to the people down there if they're ruled by the French or a Moroccan king?" She paused, shook her head. "It doesn't make any difference. None at all. All they care about is that someone care for them and that no one trample them-that they aren't hurt by life."
He turned away. She was right, he knew it, could remember his feelings as he'd gazed up at the Mountain as a boy. But he'd put them aside, replacing his hurt at the indifference of the Europeans by a fascination with their styles of life. He wanted to tell her about that, and about all the hurt he'd once felt, but he was afraid that if he started he would talk too much, say things that would not become him, appear less of a man, and by that risk losing her respect.
"Tell me, Kalinka," he asked, "what did you do? In the old days, I mean-all those years, those twenty years or so you wandered around Tangier? What did you feel then? What did you think?"
She smiled. "Lost in smoke," she said. "I walked the streets, went about my errands, looked at the sea, picked flowers, sat around the shop. I didn't feel anything then. I didn't understand. Thank you, Hamid, for rescuing me."
It was a miracle, they both decided, that they'd found each other in Tangier. He felt grateful to Peter Zvegintzov for having brought her to the town.
Now, when he saw the Russian on the street or bustling about behind his counter through the window of his shop, Hamid felt no anger against him, no need to hound him or confront him anymore. All the old tension was gone, replaced now by pity. He'd made a resolve never to bother Peter again, not even to use him as an informant despite his access to the European world. And he'd told Aziz to forget about him too.
After that night when he and Peter had talked he had felt a softening, an erosion of the toughness that had seized him in July. After that night he felt more strongly than ever the loneliness of the foreigners, the awful, isolated loneliness in which they seemed to live. Zvegintzov, Luscombe, Inigo, the Freys; even the philanderers, Lake, Baldeschi, Fufu; the active homosexuals, men like Robin Scott and Patrick Wax-they evoked his pity, for he felt they lived in cages, separated from life, cut off from it by lack of love. And he felt an almost tragic stillness on the Mountain that fit in with this feeling too. He was stirred by sadness when he drove up there. The Mountain was so distant, so passionless, as opposed to Tangier, a cauldron of tension and rage, an Arab city, his town, his home. He couldn't explain this difference, and, unable to reconcile the Mountain and the city, he took refuge in his love for Kalinka, the warmth of her beside him in the night.
Yet every so often a feud would erupt among the foreigners, and then this new, sad sympathy he felt would shift quickly to contempt. Such a change occurred on the eighth day of the fast. Suddenly his office was filled with shrieking people. Angry name calling and recriminations filled the air.
Within the space of twenty-four hours Colonel Brown's Dalmatian attacked the Ashton Codds' teenage maid, Peter Barclay's schnauzer tore open the leg of Skiddy de Bayonne's gardener, Vanessa Bolton's Alsatian bitch set upon the Hawkins' groom, and Katie Manchester's cocker spaniel bit the buttocks of Camilla Weltonwhist's chauffeur.
There was a common element in these events, Europeans' pets attacking Moroccan flesh. But it was not a simple case of Europeans against Moroccans-the feud developed another way. It became a matter of employers of bitten servants versus the owners of attacking beasts. The Codds, for instance, were adamant in their demand that Colonel Brown's Dalmatian be put to death.
Hamid tried, as best he could, to sort the matter out. He called the province veterinarian, who agreed to take the dogs away for observation at a kennel near the crumbling corrida de toros on the eastern edge of town. Here they were visited daily by incensed owners bearing platters of ground-up meat, while each morning the injured servants were accompanied by their masters to the anti-rabies injection line at the Institute Pasteur.