Read Online The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne - Free Book Online Page B

You understand that, mec ?”
    Ismael could only nod dejectedly. True, he had done nothing, nothing at all, and he never would do anything.
    Driss rolled a joint of fresh sweet green weed and they shared it as a way of sealing themselves off from the heat.
    “Once you cross the sea,” he went on, “everything in your head changes. Everything falls apart. You look at everything differently. Some French broad said to me, ‘Travel broadens the mind.’ ”
    “What?”
    “Ah, never mind. French broads are always talking. It just stayed with me, that one.”
    He smiled at the younger boy’s naïveté, because Ismael could only take his word for everything.
    “The French broads,” the latter said. “Do they go with us?”
    “The scabby ones do.”
    But the others? Ismael thought.
    “As for the fine ones, forget it.”
    A shame, the younger boy thought.
    They lay still, smoking.
    “When you have some dough,” Driss said, “they will consider it.”
    “How much?”
    “Two hands’ full.”
    “Ah, les salopes.”
    “Leurs salopes sont comme les notres.”
    “I knew it, by God.”
    The lit joint flared up and showed Driss’s face tautened by pessimistic pride, but not by the disdain suggested by his phrases. He was never obvious. Even his toughness was not obvious; it was not like the toughness of other boys. You would never guess he was barely twenty-one. He could lie on bare stone without moving for hours, unmoved, consumed by thoughts that seemed to come and go inside him like wild animals, and nothing showed on his face but the vibrations of those “animals.” He had learned to not show anything, and to Ismael he revealed only his experiences, not his emotions.
    SOMETIMES DRISS SLEPT IN THE QUARRY, IN THE GEOMETRICAL trenches, wrapped in a piece of tarpaulin. It didn’t seem to affect him. He came and went and no one knew anything about him. He wore a chech wound tightly around his head and his eyes darted out with their gentle ferocity and you were left guessing by their mildness and coldness. He was eager to talk after the sun had gone down and the stars brought out his volubility.
    They made a fire when the nights were chilly, and Driss talked about the arguments with his father, that narrow-minded bumpkin, and how he had hitched a ride to Midelt and then Azrou and then down to Fez, a city like no other, a city he would have stayed in if there had been any work other than in the stinking tanneries.
    He asked Ismael if he had ever been farther than Midelt, and the boy shook his head.
    “You’re all the same,” Driss snorted. “You never go anywhere.”
    “It’s the money. How can one live?”
    “If one wants to live, one finds a way. The world is made for living in. Why are you so scared of it?”
    “One never knows.”
    “Ismael, you have no instinct. That’s why you’re always afraid of the unknown. I thought to myself, All men are the same everywhere. They can be used, exploited, befriended.”
    Ismael crouched on the rock and looked into the fire. They were roasting goat from the Erfoud market; the bread lay in the open under a stone. Down in the road, the lamps of the fossil diggers on their bikes floated slowly past in the clouds of moonlit sand, edging their way back to the perimeters of the town where pale lights stood guard and the trees had not yet died. He couldn’t imagine them, let alone Spaniards and Frenchmen. The world, when he considered it, was not a place where instinct could carve out a safe passage.
    “Still,” he muttered defensively, “you need a bit of cash for the road.”
    “I left with nothing. My father refused to give me a single dirham . He couldn’t have cared less and he said that if I went to France, I would die there.”
    “Ah, le salaud.”
    “They are beaten-down slaves. I told him so to his face.”
    Well, Ismael thought, I am only eighteen. When I am Driss’s age, I will have gone beyond Midelt. I will have done something.
    And he promised himself