When he spoke again he was calmer. ‘Of course we are told that Arabs are not fit to run their own countries. We are … what are we? I don’t remember. Are we feckless? I think feckless and also chaotic, and tribal and dirty and lazy. Perhaps you think this also?’
‘I don’t,’ Will said, wondering if there wasn’t a grain of truth there, if allowing them to run their own affairs might not end in a mess.
Another sound from outside: the long tapering wail of the call to prayer. Will loved that sound, so passionately forsaken and faithful. There was emptiness in the sound, empty space that the soul had traversed, a nomad sound. Will also liked the way that people accepted it, registered it without amazement, ignored it, going about their business, or stirred themselves towards the mosque. That outflung spiritual grandeur was natural to them; they lived half in that dimension all the time.
‘I have to go to the masjid,’ Dr Zakaria said. ‘As you can hear, it is time.’
‘Can I come with you?’
Dr Zakaria looked at Will, revising his opinion again, Will thought, elevating it. ‘If you wish. No one will stop you.’
Will walked with the smaller man through the streets to a little square. By a line of taps, the worshippers crouched, washing themselves like cats, looped inside their fluid gestures, rinsing hands, feet and heads, breathing water into their nostrils and blasting it out.
At the entrance, Will removed his shoes. He was noticed by the faithful but they made no comment nor seemed to care, strolling towards their more important business. They found squares of the carpet patterned with these geometric cells on which to place themselves. Again Will felt that rich, assuaging sensation of carpet underfoot, the opposite of desert harshness, a great relief. With no pews or screens to baffle the view, the space was wide. Above was a dome that rested on a ring of small windows. Perhaps, if he could have chosen, Will wouldn’t have included those great brass circles of lamps hanging down on such long chains. They were the one thing that slightly impaired the open effect. Will faded to the back of the mosque and watched as prayers got underway. He watched the men stand and hug themselves and look left and right and read from the book of their empty hands. He watched them kneel, all at once sinking down to the carpet and bending forwards, the vulnerable, human soles of their feet all peeling up towards him.
Will turned away from the worshippers, leaving them to finish their business. He walked quietly along the back wall, admiring the beautiful patterning of the tiles, regular, mathematical but sinuously growing out in all directions from any point so that the eye raced and rested, raced and rested. It was very cleverly done. Will felt he understood its endless elaboration. Its meaning was divine.
20
Ray was kept from George, travelling in a caravan of the half destroyed. At the back of the advance while the delicate membrane of his hearing healed, Ray got used to medical smells, of bandages and alcohol, sometimes also the smell of burning flesh that could be surprisingly similar to the smell of bacon. There were psychological cases also, the shell-shocked, staring and shaking, repeating precise gestures or clawing at themselves. At night he could see them struggling in their dreams but, being deaf, he couldn’t always hear their cries. Deafness made things distant. They looked like figures struggling underwater.
George was distant. Ray yearned towards him, to protect him. Surely he wouldn’t survive on his own, a secret pacifist in the middle of a war, in the damned infantry for Christ’s sake. Ray wrote letters to him in his head, arguing with him. My friend, they began, my friend. Ray would assert how important this war was and how the killing was necessary, the lesser of two evils in the world. George didn’t realise how valuable his own life was, so valuable compared to some useless Nazi. His life was precious and he should defend it. Ray imagined these letters — that he never wrote or sent — convincing George on the night before a decisive battle and saving him. At the same time, Ray imagined George protected by his goodness, a slight shimmer in the air around him, coming through the battle unharmed. George could be the hero of a new kind of war movie, about a man whose goodness triumphed.
All of these thoughts were repeatedly burned up and destroyed in the sudden certainty that George had just been or was just about to be killed, in that moment just gone or coming right now. Confirmation of this came with each new wounded or maddened soldier brought in from the fury of battle to be dragged along behind with Ray, drugged and repaired enough to be returned and properly killed next time.
At night, Ray cried out towards George, his own voice through his deafness high and weightless and weak.
21
‘Is it possible, do you think,’ Will asked Dr Zakaria, ‘that Alloula is a French informant?’ It was a mischievous question, a little flashing out of the excitement that Will felt at these meetings, the dense buzzing in his belly as he leaned forwards, smoking, listening. He asked the question with a hint of a smile.
‘No,’ Dr Zakaria answered, eyebrows raised and eyelids drooping, an expression of serene disdain. ‘Not only do I know Alloula thoroughly but you make the mistake of assuming that the French are interested in us. They aren’t. They don’t think we are capable of anything. We are invisible as far as they are concerned. The Bey is a pet. No one else has any authority.’
‘But now that I’m here and I’ve been meeting with you, their interest might have been piqued.’
Zakaria shook his head. ‘Because you are here, all of you British and others, the French withdraw entirely. They are on vacation. They are waiting for you to go away again and then life will return to normal.’
Alloula was the first of the others to arrive. Tall and sloping, his long heavy belly abbreviated by a tight belt, he looked, as ever, tired. His eyes were vague with worry. He flattened his thick black hair to his head and with the same hand summoned the waiter.
He sat and before he’d made eye contact with Will or Zakaria, he said, ‘My wife is very unhappy about me coming here.’
‘I see,’ Zakaria answered. ‘She likes the French too much.’
Will rose slightly in his seat as he considered attempting a joke about a French lover but decided against it and sank back.
‘No,’ Alloula answered. ‘But she thinks it might be dangerous, that the French are watching us.’
‘That’s precisely what I was just saying,’ Will said.
‘Not precisely,’ Zakaria corrected. ‘They aren’t,’ he went on. ‘They like different kinds of gossip and they’re too busy considering their positions when the Allies go. The Free French supporters will want to take control. As far as they are concerned, we’ll still be their niggers.’
‘Until you commit your first outrage. Anyway, you’re repeating yourself.’
‘To someone else. Repetition. Perseverance. Doing the same thing again and again before it gives way. It’s boring, trying to change things. Boring and difficult.’
‘I’m not bored.’
‘Until you do something, until we all do something, my good friend, you are still a spectator.’
Mr Ammar arrived next, sudden through the hanging beads at the door, shaking hands with his right hand, holding a match flame to a cigarette with his left. Ammar was angry. Ammar was always angry. He had weapons in his cellar. He abused waiters, clenched and unclenched his fists during conversation. He was a powerful man, compact and raging. Will liked observing him, feeling him seethe. Ammar was trivially powerful at the moment, powerful conversationally, personally, but Will could see how as events changed he might darkly blossom. He was the one. He could be a great force at the right moment.