Less(44)

Zohra fixes her dazzling eyes on him. “You know, I’m a big fan of your books.”

“Oh!” he says.

They are walking along beside a low wall of ancient bricks, and, below, a series of whitewashed houses rises from a river. “I really loved Kalipso. Really, really loved it. You motherfucker, you made me cry at the end.”

“I guess I’m glad to hear that.”

“It was so sad, Arthur. So fucking sad. What’s your next one?” She flips her hair over her shoulder, and it moves in a long fluid line.

He finds himself clenching his teeth. Below, two boys on horseback are moving slowly up the river shallows.

Zohra frowns. “I’m freaking you out. I shouldn’t have asked. None of my fucking business.”

“No, no,” Arthur says. “It’s okay. I wrote a new novel, and my publisher hates it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they turned it down. Declined to publish it. I remember when I sold my first book, the head of the publishing house sat me down in his office, and he gave me this long speech about how he knew they didn’t pay very much, but they were a family, and I was now part of that family, they were investing in me not for this book but for my entire career. That was only fifteen years ago. And bam—I’m out. Some family.”

“Sounds like my family. What was your new novel about?” Catching his expression, she quickly adds, “Arthur, I hope you know you can tell me to bugger off.”

He has a rule, which is never to describe his books until after they are published. People are so careless with their responses, and even a skeptical expression can feel akin to someone saying about your new lover: Don’t tell me you’re dating him? But for some reason, he trusts her.

“It was…,” he starts, stumbling on a rock in the path, then starts again: “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his…his sorrows…” Her face has begun to fold inward in a dubious expression, and he finds himself trailing off. From the front of the group, the journalists are shouting in Arabic.

Zohra asks, “Is it a white middle-aged man?”

“Yes.”

“A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?”

“Jesus, I guess so.”

“Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.”

“Even gay?”

“Even gay.”

“Bugger off.” He did not know he was going to say this.

She stops walking, points at his chest, and grins. “Good for you,” she says.

And then he notices, before them, a crenellated castle on a hill. It seems to be made of sun-baked mud. It seems impossible. Why did he not expect this? Why did he not expect Jericho?

“This,” Mohammed announces, “is the ancient walled city of the tribe of Haddou. Ait means a Berber tribe, Ben means “from,” and Haddou is the family. And so, Ait Ben Haddou. There are eight families still living within the walls of the city.”

Why did he not expect Nineveh, Sidon, Tyre?

“I’m sorry,” says the tech-whiz nightclub owner. “You say there are eight families? Or Ait families?”

“Ait families.”

“The number eight?”

“Once it was a village, but now only a few families remain. Eight.”

Babylon? Ur?

“Once again. The number eight? Or the name Ait?”

“Yes, Ait families. Ait Ben Haddou.”

It is at this point that the female war reporter leans over the ancient wall and commences vomiting. The miracle before them is forgotten; her husband runs to her side and holds back her beautiful hair. The setting sun puts the adobe scene in blue shadows, and somehow Less is taken back to the color scheme of his childhood home, when his mother went mad for the Southwest. From across the river, a cry comes up like an air raid siren: the evening call to prayer. The castle, or ksar, Ait Ben Haddou rises, unfeeling, before them. The husband tries, at first, a furious exchange in German with the guide, then one in Arabic with the driver, followed by French, ending in an incomprehensible tirade meant only for the gods. His command of English curses goes untested. His wife clutches her head and tries to stand but collapses into the driver’s arms, and they are all taken quickly back to the bus. “Migraine,” Lewis whispers to him. “Booze, the altitude. I bet she’s down for the count.” Less takes one last look at the ancient castle of mud and straw, remade every year or so as the rains erode the walls, plastered and replastered so that nothing remains of the old ksar except its former pattern. Something like a living creature of which not a cell is left of the original. Something like an Arthur Less. And what is the plan? Will they just keep rebuilding forever? Or one day will someone say, Hey, what the hell? Let it fall, bugger off. And that will be the end of Ait Ben Haddou. Less feels on the verge of an understanding about life and death and the passage of time, an ancient and perfectly obvious understanding, when a British voice intervenes: “Okay, sorry to be a bother, just want to make sure. Once again. It’s Ait…”



“Prayer is better than sleep,” comes the morning cry from the mosque, but travel is better than prayer, for as the muezzin chants, they are all already packed into the bus and waiting for the guide to return with the war reporters. Their hotel—a dark stone labyrinth at night—reveals itself, at sunrise, to be a palace in a valley of lush palms. By the front door, two little boys giggle over a chick they hold in their hands. Colored a bright orange (either artificially or supernaturally), the chick chirps at them ceaselessly, furiously, indignantly, but they only laugh and show the creature to luggage-burdened Arthur Less. On the bus, he seats himself beside the Korean violinist and her male-model boyfriend; the young man looks over at Less with a blank blue stare. What does a male model love? Lewis and Zohra sit together, laughing. The guide returns; the war reporters are still recovering, he reports, and will join them on a later camel. So the bus guffaws to life. Good to know there is always a later camel.