Tibetan Cross Read online

  COLD SEA AIR washed the open bridge. Next to Andrev stood a bearded giant. “This Isom,” Andrev stated. “He show you work.”

  Isom, wordless like Dmitri, hurried Cohen through a rusty labyrinth of passageways back to the mop closet. With hand motions Isom indicated each passageway to be cleaned, the galley, the mess, and, on the deck above, the crew quarters.

  He scrubbed furiously, dragging the agonized knee behind him. By the noon bell he had finished everything but the crew quarters. These he completed after lunch, reporting to Isom. Isom went down on one knee and ran a finger over the floor. He indicated the portholes along the crew deck, the stinking lavatories, and the walls of the mess. These Cohen completed by dinner.

  “Good work,” Andrev mumbled. “Isom give you berth. Tomorrow, new work.”

  “Good,” Cohen said. His knee and shoulder ached unbearably, but his stomach was near bursting with Dmitri's rough stew, his heart felt eased. For a whole day I've been too busy to fear. Fourteen more days. CIA's lost me now. I'll make it, Paul. He sat drowsy in the humid mess while sailors played cards and drank coffee. They invited him in but he could not grasp the game. He left them and limped onto the forward deck.

  The air was sharp and clean after the congested mess. Seagulls coasted alongside the boat through the rushing darkness. How hungry they must be, he thought, to have followed all the way from Heraklion. A sweet pine odor emanated from the forward hold. At the bow rail the wind struck him fair in the face. The moon was still down, the Milky Way a clear band of white belting the sky, its powdery stars reflected in tilted sheets of glistening sea.

  THE FOLLOWING day passed quickly, jammed with work. At dinner Andrev said, “Tomorrow this time, Algiers. You see you girl. Where is?”

  Cohen cleared his thoughts. “Morocco.”

  “Serdenyi droog, ti nezdorova,” Andrev sang, “Ostav menya, ya vleeblenya.” Isom guffawed, glancing at Cohen, who reddened, not knowing why. Andrev smiled gently, patted Cohen's arm. “Love is good thing. If all the world love, good world.”

  “But it doesn't. There is no peace.”

  “In my language, one word, mir, means both peace and world. But Russia no more my country. I carry Turkish passport.” Andrev puffed. “I have no love for Russia, but it is America will end the world. One dollar from every three, in whole world, one third of all money, spent now on war, things to kill people.” He sneered. “That good? Some day now – Hah! – last war of all!”

  “Do you think it can be stopped – the last war of all?”

  “Stopped? No chance. No chance for mir – peace or world.”

  Cohen shrugged. “Would you go back?”

  “To Russia? My father, he go back, after Nazi war. We live in Stamboul then, but he want some things buried when family leave Petrograd.”

  “Things buried?”

  “It is rich, my family, before Civil War, with castle in birch forest named Tanistveniye Zavesa, Mysterious Veil. These words are Vyazemski's: ‘Where my eyes seek deeply, world is covered by mysterious veil.’ But Bolsheviks burn it to ground.”

  “He got the buried jewels?”

  “He never come back. They shoot him or send to Sibír. To jail for life.” He patted Cohen's hand. “Is why, when I say Algiers jail, I fool only. I not ever send person in jail. Not even you.” He grinned. “But if you not work good, we throw you over.”

  Cohen smiled. “Tell me one thing?”

  “What is?”

  “How did you find me?”

  “We not. You find us, remember?”

  “No. In the lifeboat.”

  “Ah. You give you away.”

  “How?”

  “How you say, schnarchen?” Andrev made a loud snorting sound.

  “Sneeze?”

  “No. Schnarchen.” He snorted again, closing his eyes.

  “Snore!”

  “Yes,” Andrev laughed. “You schnarchen so loud, they hear you on Crete.”

  WHILE the sailors played cards he went to the stern and watched the wake vee out and immerse itself in the star-struck, wavering sea. Thirteen days more. He retrieved the Tibetan's pipe from his pocket, thumbed in a pinch of hash and lit it, hiding the glow with his back. Its smoke trailed after the wake. The stars danced on the sea. The ship rumbled contentedly, a friendly old man mumbling. Above the eastern wavetops waxed the faint crimson-yellow pall of a soon-rising moon. A great bulk leaned over the rail at his elbow. He contained a startled impulse to drop the pipe into the sea.

  Isom held out his hand. Cohen handed him the pipe. He gestured for the matches, lit the pipe, and breathed a long sigh into the darkness. He poked Cohen's arm and pointed to port. Far to the south the regular flicker of a beacon masked itself as a star shuttered by wavetops. “Bizerte.”

  He finished the pipe and knocked it empty against the rail. Cohen refilled it and they smoked in silence.

  Isom chuckled. Cohen peered up at him, got no response. Isom began to laugh. He shook his head, as if to say, don't mind.

  He laughed harder. Cohen pocketed the pipe. Isom's laughs were surfacing in great guttural bursts, like tears, racking his body over the rail.

  Cohen patted Isom's quivering shoulder and stepped away across the deck. The shuddering laugh receded; from the back of the bridge it was inaudible and Isom's hunched form barely discernible against the sparkling black horizon.

  Cohen leaned against the lifeboat, remembering his hours within it. So many wrong turns. But I've survived – I'll reach Paris. Once it was home, all I loved, espresso under leafy plane trees in sidewalk cafés, red wine and fresh bread, darkeyed girls with slender hungry thighs on the Champs Elysées.

  Now all I love is death. Paul, too. Planning our enemies’ deaths.

  ALGIERS thundered in the day's last reddened light with its diesel belches, barge rumblings, truck backfires, ceaseless klaxons, sirens, whistles, catcalls, radios, and the rumpled ardor of sea on stone. Traffic banged along the boulevards beside the docks. Above them the city lay on the hills, lights winking, pale facades tesselated vertically in a random mosaic. With the port pass and handful of dinars Andrev had given him, Cohen passed easily through customs, ate couscous in a café with blue tablecloths, found a room, and dove into dreamless sleep.

  A wail erupted outside his window. He leaped from bed and dove behind the door. The corridor was silent. Beyond his cobwebbed window dawn lit the sea with iris greens and purples. The cry returned, above and behind him, quavering, imploring. In the street, a bearded man in a gray djellabah knelt with bowed head. Grinning at his own simplemindedness, Cohen sat listening on the bed as from their minarets the muezzins called the city to its first prayer of the day.

  He shuffled down the hall, scratching his head, to the W.C. It was a hole in the floor with a white porcelain foot imprint on each side. With a last squirt of pee he knocked a cockroach off the left side of the hole and into the odiferous Styx below. Going to be a good day.

  HIS CAFÉ TABLE abutted the sidewalk; beyond the thin cobbled street of scuttling white-robed, white-veiled women, donkeys, and braying trucks the city fell away sharply to the sea. With some effort he located the diminutive reddish presence of the Petr Vyazemski among her larger shinier cohorts, the black mantis of a crane tugging pine logs like white entrails from her belly.

  Maybe I'm disemboweled too. Gutted. Dead, but don't notice. Numb. Death lacks awareness, being – I still have that. Though I wouldn't mind the nothingness. Not afraid, almost insouciant.

  Twelve days. A boat to France? Am I safer here, sticking out in a place my enemies don't expect me? Or in France, where I fit in but where they'll be looking?

  Rather than fear, anger, or regret, in the morning's surging warmth, with its lemon and diesel odors, whitewashed luminosity, and clash of foreign voices, he felt pursued only by a cool, exquisite freedom. I'm not dead – I'm happy to be alive. Even if those I love have died. A tattered, pocked woman held out arthritic hands, grinning widely as he dug a few dinars from his pocket. Brown
-legged boys were kicking an old ball through an alley; he hobbled after them and stole it, dribbling it over the stones as they pursued laughing and yelling. He let them catch him and then feinted it away, they screaming with glee at his skill, grabbing his elbow finally to get the ball back, then showering him with recriminations when he moved painfully to one side and would play no more. Another boy, legless, pushed himself by on a board with wheels. A calico cat rounded the corner and the boys left the ball to stone it, the cat darting to cover, the boys switching their attention to a starved dog nosing trash, who fled yelping, tail between bony legs. A man pushing a refrigerator on a bicycle inclined his head and blew his nose on the pavement, a lovely dark-eyed woman in a diaphanous veil stepping round him. An ancient lady carrying planks of wood wrapped in a blanket on her back bent to snatch a soggy heel of bread from the gutter.

  Another world. Maybe safer here. To Morocco to Spain to Paris. Not expecting me that way. Christ, why did I ever tell Claire about Paul?

  Traversing yammering markets and arm-wide alleys hung with wash and scented with myriad unknown spices, he gained the main avenue westward toward Oran, hitched a ride in a potato-laden, cranky Peugeot van that gasped up the first coastal hills and roller-coasted down their backs.

  His knuckles whitened on the door handle as the vehicle caromed discordantly through lizardlike twists in the narrow, undulating road, and as he stared through the paneless window at the whirring Algerian landscape he was forced to wonder, wryly, if perhaps his foes had not finally captured him, and his companion planned to execute them both in a roadside catastrophe.

  But the driver did not look the suicidal type: jowly, chuckling, his comfortable body draped over his stool like a sack of tubers. He spoke rudimentary French with a harsh accent, conveying his meaning primarily by gesticulations that involved removal of both hands from the wheel and revolution of his torso and head toward his listener. This behavior Cohen found profoundly agitating during periods of plunging descent, and so their conversation became limited to uphills, where the rumble of readjusting potatoes cut out many of its finer points.

  At a place called Tipasa the truck turned south toward distant furrowed fields, leaving him by a broken villa with pockmarked viny walls, where dusty chickens, dogs, and children watched from a back street. In a store he bought a bottle of Algerian red, a chunk of white cheese, a stick of bread. Books were racked among faded postcards on one counter; he read a title mechanically. “What did Camus have to do with weddings?” he asked the shopkeeper.

  “It is not solely of weddings,” the man replied in careful French. “It is of this place,… sa qualité ancienne. Les ruines…”

  “Where?”

  “Going down to the sea.”

  Cohen tugged the book from the rack and patted dust from its cover. “I am going to Morocco to be married – perhaps I should read it?”

  “For some things it does little good to be prepared.” The corners of the man's mouth dropped. “To see the ruins, take the path through the villa gardens.”

  “No one lives in the villa?”

  “Not since the revolution. They were all machine-gunned, against that wall.”

  “The whole family?”

  The man held out change. “Pieds noirs.”

  “Children, also?”

  “To be sure.” He inspected Cohen through old, dark eyes. “It seems sad now. But then? My son too, he died in that war. He was fourteen. You do not want it, your Noces?”

  “I must save my money to get married.”

  “You are the first to look at it in years.” The shopkeeper slid the book across the counter. “Take it.”

  A SMALL BURR-EARED dog followed Cohen across the road, under the leafy villa gate and through the overgrown garden. Corners of glass peeped from broken windows. He ducked under incandescent purple bougainvillea, their trunks writhing like serpents over caved-in walls, their overflung boughs and mottled, mamba-green snakeskin leaves a canopy of coolness and shade above him, and took a path over a meadow leaning down to the sea. Bone columns towered over yellow trees. The air, charged with the aromas of absinthe and sage, clogged his lungs. Trails bordered by wild roses and studded with goat droppings twisted among piles of broken marble.

  He picked up a palm-size piece. It had four inch-wide grooves, smooth as glass. The flat surfaces between were slightly rougher; in places their white sheen had decayed to the darker, unfinished marble beneath. A crack ran half way down one groove like a river through a wide, U-shaped valley, fed by tributary cracks half way up the groove.

  Fingering the grooves, he tried to invoke a breath of the past, tried to imagine who had chiseled them. I can taste the olive oil he ate, the wheaten bread from the slopes of the Djebel Atlas, can feel the cool kiss of the sea on his body as if it were mine. What was his fate? His children, lovers, hopes? Did he love his work or was he a slave – a Sisyphus? What did his struggle matter, what does it matter now?

  Limping to a sunny section of entablature presided over by a large, humped shrub with involute aqua leaves, he sat where the sea breeze carried wildflower and salt smells, the rustle of bees, susurration of leaves on stone. Solitary columns jutted like dinosaur ribs against the black volcanic beach and the blue sea with its white boundaries of surf and cloud. The blue, cool wind off the sea rippled the pages of Noces and feathered the hair over his forehead. “C'est dans la mesure ou je me sépare du monde,” the book said, “que j'ai peur de la mort…” Only as I separate myself from the world do I fear death: death, then, is part of the world. Without death, life is nothing.

  And the bomb? It's Kali, Death. To ignore it is to separate ourselves from the world, to hide trembling like Nepali villagers while the man-eater stalks them. Better to go out and hunt it down. But the villagers don't believe there is a man-eater, a bomb, and when I tell them that there is they'll laugh at me, call me a fool, have me killed. While the maneater stalks closer and closer.

  He drank the tanniny wine. So long without peace. Here, in vitro, in this moment, though, I'm happy. I declare to the sun and to you, blue sea, that I'm happy. Only in this moment. Not in what went before nor in what will come.

  The dog came from foraging in the brush and wagged its knotted tail. Cohen scratched behind its ears, tugging at burrs; it whimpered and pulled back. “I'm not like you, mon vieux, content to be. What d'you care about the world invented by people?” He gave it bread and cheese; it ate the cheese and carried the bread away.

  A distant thrum of engine. Car on the road? Fishing boat? Getting leary of everything. Relax. Far glint in the eastern sky, closer, above the purple cliffs, the windtossed bougainvillea. A plane, paralleling the coast, angled against the wind.

  Don't move. Hide, and they'll see me. Act natural. Coming closer. He dove behind a cornice as the plane slid overhead, low, banking, a throttled-down turn past the western rocky headland. Returning. Can see me this side. He bellied under a flat bush. The plane banked, circling now, the pilot's sunglasses flashing, the copilot peering down.

  The plane climbed away, going east toward Algiers. He crawled quickly from the bush and stood massaging his knee. An old Arab, face darkened by a white djellabah, sat eyeing him from the back of an ass. The Arab kneed the ass and they trotted away through the scrub, shadows of the columns drifting down his back.

  Run. Where? Run, run, anywhere. Who'd hide me? He stumbled breathlessly toward the villa, shoes crunching glass. Not here.

  By the store four men were gassing an old Peugeot 403. He limped to them. “Vous parlez français?”

  They stared at him. Finally one grinned. “P'tit peu.”

  “J'ai tombé, je suis blessé – ne peut pas marcher – Je peux aller avec vous?”

  An embarrassed smile. “Je ne comprends.”

  He repeated it, slower – Fell and injured my leg. Can I go with you? One understood. “Oran – Nous allons à Oran.”

  Going to Oran. “Je peux y aller – avec vous?”

  A shrug, a moment of
Arabic, a smile. “Pourquoi pas?”

  They drove westward to Ténès, then inland through verdant hills to Chlef. They were young, exuberant, and uncaring, striving to share their few words of French with him, singing bawdy Arabic songs and laughing, each new song or dialogue leading to more laughter. At sunset they halted by the roadside and knelt praying to Mecca, stopping again a few minutes later in a palm-shrouded town before a low building with an unlit gate.

  “La femme,” one of them said, holding up five fingers. “Cinquante dinars.”

  He answered no and curled up on the back seat. They returned in half an hour, their chatter and song soon louder and more cheerful than before. One turned to him, tears of merriment glistening with dashboard glimmer in the corners of his eyes. “Sad you are étranger,” he sighed. “Sad you not understand.”

  Cohen watched the desert pallor of a single passing window. “I wish I could.”

  12

  “WE SEE FEW STRANGERS in Les Champs Elysées.” The Algerian colonel raised his glass. “We are not like our namesake.”

  “Food's good,” Cohen answered deadpan, glancing past his rickety table with his plate of beef toward the door filling with soldiers.

  “American?” The colonel gave a humorous lift to his eyebrows.

  “Irish.”

  “You speak French well. But with the American accent.”

  “I studied in Grenoble.”

  “Ah! I would have thought Paris.”

  More soldiers moved toward the back of the bar, some eyeing him curiously, others watching their commander. “You like him?” the colonel said, jerking his glass at Noces lying open on the table.

  “Yes.”

  “A half-friend. We Arabs had few half-friends, even in those days.”

  Cohen surveyed the soldiers for a way out. Too many, too tight. The back door? He did not dare turn to look. “Have you read it?”

  “No, but I have La Peste, that takes place here.” He eased into the chair opposite Cohen, put down his glass. “A vast pestilence consumes Oran. Everyone will die. Perhaps justly. There is a doctor who battles the plague until the end, not acceding to his fear. Justement, perhaps, he lives.”