A fat black police dog waddled in and out of the rooms, sniffing shoes; it was the object of everyone’s admiration. “The most beautiful dog in Ain Krorfa,” said Mohammed as it appeared panting in the doorway near them. “It belongs to Colonel Lefilleul; he must be here tonight.”
When the boy returned with the tea he was accompanied by another, not more than ten years old, but with an ancient, soft face. Port pointed him out to Mohammed and whispered that he looked ill.
“Oh, no! He’s a singer.” He signaled to the child, who began to clap his hands in a syncopated rhythm and utter a long repetitious lament built on three notes. To Port it seemed utterly incongruous and a little scandalous, hearing this recent addition to humanity produce a music so un-childlike and weary. While he was still singing, two girls came over and greeted Mohammed. Without any formalities he made them sit down and pour the tea. One was thin with a salient nose, and the other, somewhat younger, had the apple-like cheeks of a peasant; both bore blue tattoo marks on the foreheads and chins. Like all the women, their heavy robes were weighted down with an assortment of even heavier silver jewelry. For no particular reason neither one appealed to Port’s fancy. There was something vaguely workaday about both of them; they were very much present. He could appreciate now what a find Marhnia had been, her treachery notwithstanding. He had not seen anyone here with half her beauty or style. When the child stopped singing Mohammed gave him some coins; he looked at Port expectantly as well, but Mohammed shouted at him, and he ran out. There was music in the next room: the sharp reedy rhiata and the dry drums beneath. Since the two girls bored him, Port excused himself and went into the courtyard to listen.
In front of the musicians in the middle of the floor a girl was dancing, if indeed the motions she made could properly be called a dance. She held a cane in her two hands, behind her head, and her movements were confined to her agile neck and shoulders. The motions, graceful and of an impudence verging on the comic, were a perfect translation into visual terms of the strident and wily sounds of the music. What moved him, however, was not the dance itself so much as the strangely detached, somnambulistic expression of the girl. Her smile was fixed, and, one might have added, her mind as well, as if upon some object so remote that only she knew of its existence. There was a supremely impersonal disdain in the unseeing eyes and the curve of the placid lips. The longer he watched, the more fascinating the face became; it was a mask of perfect proportions, whose beauty accrued less from the configuration of features than from the meaning that was implicit in their expression-meaning, or the withholding of it. For what emotion lay behind the face it was impossible to tell. It was as if she were saying: “A dance is being done. I do not dance because I am not here. But it is my dance.” When the piece drew to its conclusion and the music had stopped, she stood still for a moment, then slowly lowered the cane from behind her head, and tapping vaguely on the floor a few times, turned and spoke to one of the musicians. Her remarkable expression had not changed in any respect. The musician rose and made room for her on the floor beside him. The way he helped her to sit down struck Port as peculiar, and all at once the realization came to him that the girl was blind. The knowledge hit him like an electric shock; he felt his heart leap ahead and his head grow suddenly hot.
Quickly he went back into the other room and told Mohammed he must speak with him alone. He hoped to get him into the courtyard so as not to be obliged to go through his explanation in front of the girls, even though they spoke no French. But Mohammed was disinclined to move. “Sit down, my dear friend,” he said, pulling at Port’s sleeve. Port, however, was far too concerned lest his prey escape him to bother being civil. “Non, non, non!” he cried. “Viens vite!” Mohammed shrugged his shoulders in deference to the two girls, rose and accompanied him into the courtyard, where they stood by the wall under the light. Port asked him first if the dancing girls were available, and felt his spirits fall when Mohammed told him that many of them had lovers, and that in such cases they merely lived in the house as registered prostitutes, using it only as a home, and without engaging in the profession at all. Naturally those with lovers were given a wide berth by everyone else. “Bsif Forcement! Throats are sliced for that,” he laughed, his brilliant red gums gleaming like a dentist’s model in wax. This was an angle Port had not considered. Still, the case merited a determined effort. He drew Mo. hammed over near the door of the adjacent cubicle, in which she sat, and pointed her out to him.
“Find out for me about that one there,” he said. “Do you know her?”
Mohammed looked. “No,” he said at length. “I will find out. If it can be arranged, I myself will arrange it and you pay me a thousand francs. That will be for her, and enough for me to buy coffee and breakfast.”
The price was too high for Aln Krorfa, and Port knew it. But this seemed to him a poor time to begin bargaining, and he accepted the arrangement, going back, as Mohammed bade him do, into the first room and sitting down again with the two dull girls. They were now engaged in a very serious conversation with each other, and scarcely noticed his arrival. The room buzzed with talk and laughter; he sat back and listened to the sound of it; even though he could not understand a word of what was being said he enjoyed studying the inflections of the language.
Mohammed was out of the room for quite a while. It began to be late, the number of people sitting about gradually diminished as the customers either retired to inner chambers or went home. The two girls sat on, talking, interspersing their words now with occasional fits of laughter in which they held onto one another for mutual support. He wondered if he ought to go in search of Mohammed. He tried to sit quietly and be part of the timelessness of the place, but the occasion scarcely lent itself to that kind of imaginative play. When he finally did go into the courtyard to look for him, he immediately caught sight of him in an opposite room, reclining on a couch smoking a hashish pipe with some friends. He went across and called to him, remaining outside because he did not know the etiquette of the hashish chamber. It appeared, however, that there was none.
“Come in,” said Mohammed from the cloud of pungent smoke. “Have a pipe.”
He went in, greeted the others, and said in a low voice to Mohammed: “And the girl?”
Mohammed looked momentarily blank. Then he laughed: “Ah, that one? You have bad luck, my friend. You know what she has? She is blind, the poor thing.”
“I know, I know,” he said impatiently, and with mounting apprehension.
“Well, you don’t want her, do you? She is blind!”
Port forgot himself. “Mais bien sur que je la veux!” he shouted. “Of course I do! Where is she?”
Mohammed raised himself a little on one elbow. “Ah!” he grunted. “By now, I wonder! Sit down here and have a pipe. It’s among friends.”
Port turned on his heel in a rage and strode out into the court, where he made a systematic search of the cubicles from one side of the entrance to the other. But the girl was gone. Furious with disappointment, he walked through the gate into the dark street. An Arab soldier and a girl stood just outside the portal, talking in low tones. As he went past them he stared intently into her face. The soldier glared at him, but that was all. It was not she. Looking up and down the ill-lit street, he could discern two or three white-robed figures in the distance to the left and to the right. He started walking, viciously kicking stones out of his path. Now that she was gone, he was persuaded, not that a bit of enjoyment had been denied him, but that he had lost love itself. He climbed the hill and sat down beside the fort, leaning against the old walls. Below him were the few lights of the town, and beyond was the inevitable horizon of the desert. She would have put her hands up to his coat lapels, touched his face tentatively, run her sensitive fingers slowly along his lips. She would have sniffed the brilliantine in his hair and examined his garments with care. And in bed, without eyes to see beyond the bed, she would have been completely there, a prisoner. He thought of the little games he would have played with her, pretending to have disappeared when he was really still there; he thought of the countless ways he could have made her grateful to him. And always in conjunction with his fantasies he saw the imperturbable, faintly questioning face in its mask-like symmetry. He felt a sudden shudder of self pity that was almost pleasurable, it was such a complete expression of his mood. It was a physical shudder; he was alone, abandoned, lost, hopeless, cold. Cold especially—a deep interior cold nothing could change. Although it was the basis of his unhappiness, this glacial deadness, he would cling to it always, because it was also the core of his being, he had built the being around it.