As I pulled the curtains, I glanced down into the street below. A movement caught my eyes. There was somebody standing down there in the shadow of a doorway on the opposite side of the street, standing quite still, staring up at the window. I could see the pale circle of a face, nothing more. And then the figure moved, walking quickly away, keeping to the shadows of the buildings. It was a European girl and where an alley entered the street, she crossed a patch of moonlight.
It was Kavan’s wife.
She was in the shadows again now, walking quickly. I watched her until she turned at the end of the street, up towards the Boulevard Pasteur. I could have been mistaken, of course. But I knew I wasn’t — the suede jacket and the crumpled skirt, the way she walked, the shape of the face with its high, bony forehead as she had stared up at me from the shadows. What had she wanted? She hadn’t come into the hotel. She hadn’t asked to see him. The natural thing …
‘What is it? What are you staring at?’
I swung away from the window and saw that his eyes were watching me, and there was the same fearful-ness in them that I had seen in his wife’s eyes when she asked me who I was. ‘I’ve just seen your wife,’ I said. ‘She was out there, looking up at the hotel.’
‘My wife?’
‘The girl who was on the beach.’
He stared at me. ‘How do you know she is my wife?’ For the first time I noticed the trace of a foreign accent.
‘She told me,’ I said.
He started to get out of bed then, but I stopped him. ‘She’s gone now.’ And then I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were Kavan down there on the beach? Surely you must have guessed who I was?’
‘How should I? Besides — ‘ He hesitated and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is not the moment to say who I am.’
‘Because of the police?’ I asked. ‘And then, when you saw your wife …’ I hesitated, wondering how best to put it. ‘She loves you,’ I said. ‘Surely you must know that? Somehow she got out of Czechoslovakia and came here to meet you, and when you saw her you turned your back on her. Surely you could have — ‘
His eyes suddenly blazed at me. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop it!’ he cried out. ‘Stop it! Do you hear? How do I know they don’t arrange for her to come here to Tangier? They may be watching her, trying to follow me. They are there in the background always.’ The words tumbled wildly out of his mouth, and then he steadied himself and pushed his hands up over his face and through his hair. ‘I have not seen Karen for more than four years.’ His voice was gentle, but with a note of bitterness in it. ‘And then suddenly we meet…’ He stared at me. ‘Do you think I like to have to turn my back on her?’ He shrugged his shoulders angrily. ‘I have had too much of this — during the German occupation and after, when the Russians walk in. You don’t understand. You were born British. You don’t understand what it is to be a middle-European — always to be escaping from something, always to go in fear — the knock on the door, the unopened envelope, the glance of a stranger in the street — to have people checking on you, spying on you, coming between you and your work, never to be trusted or to trust anybody. God! If only I’d been born British.’ There were tears of anger and frustration in his eyes and he lay back, exhausted.
‘Why did you leave England then?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you become naturalised?’
‘Naturalised!’ He laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, for there was a note of hysteria in it. ‘How can I become naturalised when they…’ He closed his mouth abruptly, his eyes suddenly watchful. ‘Don’t ask me any more questions,’ he said. ‘You want a doctor for your Mission. All right, you have one. I am here. But don’t ask me any questions. I don’t want any questions.’ His voice shook with the violence of his feeling.
I stood for a moment staring at him. I didn’t like it. I knew too little about the man. I’d been prepared for a failure. What else could I expect of a qualified doctor who was willing to come out to North Africa and bury himself in a village in the Atlas? But I hadn’t been prepared for this.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I won’t ask any more questions.’ And then to ease the tension between us I asked him if he’d like some food.
‘No. No, thank you. A little cognac. That’s all.’
I got some dry clothes from my suitcase, put them on and went down to the Cypriot cafe at the corner. When I returned I found he had been sick. His face was ghastly white and he was sweating and shivering. I poured him a little cognac, added some water and handed it to him. His hands were trembling uncontrollably as he took the tumbler from me. ‘Shall I get a doctor?’ I asked.
He shook his head, quickly and emphatically. ‘No. I’ll be all right in a minute.’ He sipped at the cognac. ‘I’m just exhausted physically.’
But it was more than that. It was nervous exhaustion.
‘Can I have a cigarette please?’
I gave him one and when I had lit it for him, he drew on it, quickly, eagerly, like a man whose nerves are crying out for a sedative. I stayed with him whilst he smoked. He didn’t talk and a heavy silence lay over the room. I watched him covertly, wondering how this odd, excitable man would settle into the quiet, lonely life that I had become accustomed to. It wasn’t lonely, of course. There was too much to do, too many demands on one’s time and energy. But for a man who wasn’t accustomed to it, who wasn’t accepting the life voluntarily … I had been so engrossed in the idea of getting a doctor out there that I hadn’t really given much thought to the fact that he would also be a man, with a personality of his own, a past and all the inevitable human complications and peculiarities. I had thought about it only as it would affect me, not as I and the conditions of life down at Enfida would affect him.
‘Have you ever been to Morocco before?’ I asked him.
He shook his head. ‘No. Never.’
I gave him a little more cognac and then I began to talk about Enfida. I told him how the olives were just being gathered and piled in heaps in the open space outside the auberge and how we would soon be thrashing our own trees to harvest the crop that was part of the tiny income of the Mission. I described the mountain villages to him; how they were flat-roofed, like Tibetan villages, and clung precariously to the sides of great ravines that cut back to the base of the peaks that rose twelve and thirteen thousand feet to form the backbone of the Atlas Mountains. And I tried to give him an idea of what it was like, travelling every day from village to village, sometimes on foot, sometimes by mule, living in the Berber huts and sitting around at night, drinking mint tea and listening to their stories and the gossip of the village.
And then, suddenly, his hand fell limp at the edge of the bed and he was asleep. I got up and took the cigarette from between his fingers and picked up the empty tumbler which lay on his chest. His face had more colour in it now, and it was relaxed. The nerve at the corner of his mouth no longer twitched and his features were smoothed out as though his mind were at rest.
I put his arms inside the bedclothes and then I switched out the light and went out to the cafe for some food. When I returned he was still lying exactly as I had left him. His mouth was slightly open and he was snoring gently. I went to bed by the moon’s light that filtered in through the half-drawn curtains and lay there, wondering about him and about his wife and whether I had bitten off more than I could chew financially, for I would have to get her to join us at the Mission.
In thinking about the Mission, I forgot to some extent the strangeness of his arrival and drifted quietly off to sleep.
I awoke to a tap on the door and a shaft of sunlight cutting across my face. ‘Entrez!’ I sat up and rubbed my eyes. It was one of the hotel boys to say that the police and the douane had arrived. ‘All right. Show them up.’ I got out of bed and slipped my dressing gown on. Kavan was still fast asleep. He didn’t seem to have moved all night. He still lay on his back, quite motionless, his mouth slightly open and his breathing regular and easy. I looked at my watch. It was almost ten o’clock. He had had more than a dozen hours’ sleep. He should be fit enough now to cope with the immigration formalities.