Tangier

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.

The rabies scare blew over in a week. The saliva tests proved negative, and the animals were returned to loving homes. But though the alarm proved false, the bitterness did not subside. People swore they'd get even no matter how long it took.

There was no logic, he knew, to these European feuds, yet the city seemed riddled with them-hatreds and vendettas that possessed the foreigners, a form of sustenance by which they renewed themselves and by which, he sometimes felt, they'd be devoured.

When he described the dog-and-servant feud to Kalinka, she shook her head and laughed.

'I know you think it's funny,' he said, 'but it took three days to straighten out.'

'Oh, Hamid, I'm sorry,' she said. 'It's just so ridiculous-that you have to spend your time on such silly things.'

'Yes, it is ridiculous. I know. All my work. All of it.'

'Oh, Hamid-' She edged closer to him, took hold of his hand. 'Poor Hamid, so much trouble you have, so many troubling affairs.'

'What can I do? I'm supposed to police these people.'

'Can you transfer to another section, get away from them for a while?'

He shrugged. It had taken him years to get where he was. He'd always wanted to be chief of the foreign section. Now he had the job, and all the misery of it too.

'Listen,' she said, 'please don't be angry with me, Hamid. You've helped me so much, freeing me from hashish, talking with me, helping me so I could face the world and discover who I am. Well, maybe now I can help you a little too. Because you're a prisoner, Hamid-a prisoner of the Mountain. There're so many more important things than the things that happen there. Injustice, cruelty-I see it so clearly now, and you must free yourself so you can deal with them.'

Injustice, cruelty. She was speaking of Dradeb, of course, and in the same words used so often by Achar. Had the surgeon put her up to this? Were he and Bennani using her to get him to help them in Dradeb? He dismissed the notion as absurd, but it set him to thinking about his life.

He had thought that if he could understand Zvegintzov and Kalinka, get to the bottom of their past, then the mystery of all the foreigners would be revealed, and the motives for all their curious actions would become clear to him at last. It hadn't happened. He was still confused, and now Kalinka was implying that he had a narrow vision of the world. A prisoner of the Mountain-was she right about that? He wondered. Could she by some intuitive route have come in a few weeks to a comprehensive grasp of the city while he'd become lost in a sideshow, the foreign colony, so many years? This notion-that for years he'd been missing Tangier's essential point-was too terrible to face.

It's the fast, he thought, that's clouding up my mind. He'd begun to get headaches from lack of food and interrupted sleep, could hardly bear any longer the deprivation of water in the day. Even his meetings with Robin at Haifa Cafe seemed boring and irrelevant now. While his favorite informer spieled out gossip, he stared in agony across the Straits.

'— Percy Bainbridge, you know, Hamid, the failed inventor, the sycophant-well, he just won a fortune at the Casino Municipal. Amazing! And, oh dear! I nearly forgot-Inigo's broken off with Pumpkin Pie. Yes, it's finally happened. He's gotten rid of that crazy lad. Now he's secluded himself to work on an enormous canvas, a double portrait, erotic to be sure, of Tessa and David Hawkins, our incestuously involved brother-and-sister horseback riding act-'

Who were these people? Did he know them? How many years had he wasted caring about their pointless lives?

'— Anyway, let me tell you, I've great plans for little Pie. Now that he's 'wild chicken,' out of Inigo's sphere, I'm going to put him together with Herve Beaumont, who keeps telling me he wants to become a full-time queen. Pie's a little dangerous, but Herve can handle that. There's no better hustler around, I think, to teach a boy all the tricks-'

Hamid turned away. Robin's mention of Herve Beaumont brought back sad thoughts of Farid. He'd seen his brother many times since his intrusion in the rug room, but neither of them had spoken of the incident, as if it hadn't happened and Hamid hadn't seen what he had seen. It didn't matter anyway, he supposed. They were brothers and loved each other as brothers should. Farid was entitled to live his life as he liked. And yet it seemed to Hamid that in that moment in the rug room he had stood between opposing worlds which he could not put together in his mind.

Could Kalinka help him reconcile the foreigners' Tangier which he policed with the Arab city in which he lived? Could she give him a vision of Tangier in which all its facets would finally be clearly joined? She'd said he'd liberated her from hashish, and now she would free him from the Mountain. Was that possible? Was she right? Could she really have become so strong?

He had a dream. He was lost in a medina-not the medina of Tangier, for he knew his way through that, but a new and strange medina, a maze of alleyways and buildings, narrow streets that turned at odd angles, filled with people crying out in European tongues. Yes, that was what was strange-there were no Arabs in these streets. It was a medina for Europeans, which was impossible of course, a European labyrinth in which he was caught and