They walked on in silence, down the long rows where Europeans who had lived in Tangier were laid to rest. The cemetery was crowded; there was little room left in it now. Perhaps, he thought, this was a sign that the European presence was nearly at its end.
"I keep asking myself," he said, starting up the car, "why I didn't shoot at those people, the real reason I lowered my gun. Achar says I was with them, but I'm not sure he's correct. It was just impossible for me to do it, even though I was furious. Watching Peter die-it was too terrible. I didn't care then about property or law."
She gazed at him, and he saw admiration in her eyes. "You're gentle, Hamid, just and humane. You did what you did because of who you are."
He drove to Ramon y Cahal, accompanied her to the flat. Then while she prepared their dinner he stared out across his terrace at Dradeb and the Mountain beyond.
Achar was right, he thought. I've wasted my life on foreigners. It's no longer important that I understand them. Now I must understand myself.
There came to him then the revelation that what had happened on the Mountain and his own role in it were things that would forever change his life. In that moment when he had stood there, faced with lawlessness and disorder beyond his wildest dreams, he had discovered something important about himself and the sort of man he might become.
He didn't speak much at dinner, instead listened to Kalinka talk of Peter and her memories of him years before.
"Hanoi was beautiful in the spring," she said, "the blossoms on the fruit trees, the laughter on the streets. On Sundays Peter took me for walks around the Petit Lac. Sometimes we'd enter the little Buddhist shrine on the island to take refuge from the rains. We'd stand in there, he'd hold my hand, we'd look at people running from the storm, turn to each other and smile."
She smiled then herself, as Hamid met her eyes-the sad smile that he loved. In that smile was her refusal to ask for pity, her commitment to survive, whatever the shocks that touched her life.
"Oh, Hamid," she said suddenly, "you must go and help Achar. You must keep your job with the police, of course, but you must help him too-you must. He needs you, your qualities, your sense of justice. He's too cold, and he knows it. He needs a warm man beside him like yourself."
Yes, she was right, he knew, and her clarity amazed him-that she, once so confused, so befuddled, now saw things more clearly than himself. She'd said his vision of Tangier had been too narrow, and then she had helped him to see the city in a different way. Was it the example of her mother, he wondered, that extraordinary woman who'd fought so hard for what she thought was right, or was it simply an innate sense Kalinka had of the inequities of the world? He wasn't sure, but knew one thing: that it was her intuitive sense of life, and not the logic of Achar, that now made him want to change.
Yes, somehow she had come to understand the city, had grasped its needs and mood, and now she understood him too, he felt, and the role that he should play. That was what was so marvelous about her-her mysterious grasp of things-and why her presence, no matter how quiet, had always been so good.
He looked up, saw that she was watching him.
"Hamid, I need you too." She smiled and very gently nodded her head.
He knew then what she was going to say, and he wanted to say it first. He took her hand. "What do you think, Kalinka-a traditional Moroccan wedding, with lots of dancing and beating drums all night?"
They made love.
Later, falling asleep, wrapped in her arms, he felt serene at last. His tensions unwound, and with them his old conception of Tangier. He began to dream his way through the city's labyrinth, seeking a way out of its trap, its maze. He wanted to soar about the town, look down upon it, understand it as a place where he could act, no longer as a mere observer but as a player in the struggle he knew must come.
Martin Townes Leaves Tangier
Early one afternoon in late October the American writer Martin Townes arranged his packed suitcases near the entrance to his villa and climbed up to his roof. Here he sat for hours in the glass-walled studio he'd constructed years before, looking down upon the city which he would leave before the sun was due to set. Tangier shimmered as it always had, but there was a different aura about it. Armed men with close-cropped hair, dark desert men with cruel eyes, were patrolling everywhere in pairs.
Townes had sold his villa. Many others had done the same. Rich Moroccans from the south, Casablanca and Rabat, were taking advantage of the Europeans' fear and buying up the Mountain for a song. Townes didn't envy them, these wealthy Arabs, these new lords of the hill. He knew that when the next rampage took place they'd be the object of Dradeb's wrath.
Townes, like most of the European community, had used Tangier as a shelter from the storm. Often, sitting in his tower, looking across the city at the rising sun, he'd felt that he was cheating his way out of a fair share of the world's misery and pain. But now everything was changed. The refuge had collapsed. The city had been revealed, and now he felt shaken out of voyeurism and ennui.
Yet even though he was leaving Tangier, Martin Townes knew he would never escape the city's spell. He'd decided to write a novel about Tangier and some things he'd imagined there, and though he knew there would be those who would say his characters and scenes were based on real people and events, this would not be true. Everything in his novel, he'd decided, would take place only in his mind. He would attempt nothing more than to chronicle the fantasy which he dreamed while staring down upon Tangier that final afternoon.