Around the airport was a park, dirt and small trees, where dozens of families were picnicking, kids playing some version of duck-duck-goose.
Inside, in the cool white linoleum airport and at the airline desk: “What flights do you have leaving tonight?” Hand asked.
A friendly and smooth man in a blue uniform: “Sir, where do you want to go?”
“We’ll know once you tell us where your planes are going.”
“Sir, we first need to know where you want to go.”
“Just tell us where you’re going.”
“Just tell me where you are going.”
The man had quickly jumped from amusement to something approaching rage.
“I asked you first,” Hand added.
This went on for a while. It hasn’t worked anywhere and never will. We learned that a plane is leaving for Moscow, via Paris, in three hours. If we could get to Moscow we could get to Irktusk, Siberia—we checked before, on the web with Raymond in Dakar, and those flights were constant and affordable—and if we could get to Siberia we can get to Mongolia, because surely there were shuttles between Irkusk and Ulan Bator!
We decided we’d be on the flight to Moscow. By morning we’d be there. The airline desk wanted cash, almost $1,100 for the two tickets. We were grinning. Flying! We would do this!
At the currency exchange desk, I added my name, swooping like mad, to twelve $100 traveler’s checks and handed them under the glass wall to a glowering man with a thick and uncompromising moustache, a brush to sweep a pool table. The man, squat and angry about the wrongness of his flesh, the things he’s seen, all the air in the world, wouldn’t take them; my signature did not, he said, match my passport. He pushed them back under the window and grunted and waved us away.
I said please. I told him, yes, I changed my signature not that long ago, thus the mismatch. But he wasn’t listening.
“I am allowed to change my signature!” I said.
He spoke no English. Hand tried French, without success.
Hand lost it.
“You can not do that! You must change the money!”
The currency man sat behind the glass, completely satisfied.
“You take these checks and you cash them!” Hand was now spitting on the glass. People were watching us. The man said nothing. Hand started again, now in French. Then reverted to his other English. “You are bad man!” he yells. “We have flight! Flight to Russia! We need this! You are bad man!”
Hand’s eruption was sudden, bizarre, and not productive. Another man, behind us, told us to go to a bank, in the center of town—that they’d cash the checks. We had no choice and just enough time. As we were leaving, Hand yelled, pointing, shaking: “We come back to get you, bad man! You will see Americans again!”
We sped through the city, slowing, stopping, jumping, continuing. All the banks were closed. I got $500 from an ATM—all I could retrieve at one time—and then remembered another $800, in American cash, taped inside my backpack.
We now had twenty-five minutes to catch the flight; all we had to do was change the U.S. bills.
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“We’ll have to go back to that squat fucker.”
“Right. But this’ll show him. We’ve won!”
I agreed. He’d have to change the cash, and we’d beat him, we’d roll over his body, laid in our path, and he’d have to go home to his wife, he slump-shouldered and weak, unable as he was to make us unhappy—unable, today, to thwart the plans of innocents abroad. We had seven minutes to get there.
We drove around a turnabout in the center of town, almost cut off a scooter and were immediately stopped by a foot-cop in a yellow raincoat. He waved us to park on the side of the street. He was tall and also wore a thick black mustache. His skin was olive but cheeks ruddy from the sun. He was like the other man; he would thwart us.
He took my license and examined it.
“Chicago!” he said.
“Right,” I said. He was different.
“Nice?” he asked.
“Very nice.”
“Tommy Lloyd Wright!”
“Very pretty there,” I said. “Big buildings. Lots of Tommy Lloyd Wright, right.”
“I study architecture. Like Wright very much. You see?”
“Yes, much. The Robie house? Very nice it is.” Now I was doing the Hand talk. “Very pretty there,” I added. “Also very pretty in Morocco.” I smiled confidently, strong in my love for his country and my belief in its future.
—If you stand in our way you’re our enemy.
—See it as you will.
—It’s inhuman to impede another’s progress.
Leaning over me, Hand tried to tell him about the plane we wanted to catch.
“Sir, we must to catch a plane! At airport! We can go?”
Hand was making airplane gestures, his hand flying around the interior of the car, with sound effects. While Hand was having the plane take off amid various whooshes, the officer rolled his eyes and waved us off. We loved him.
At the airport, we abandoned the rental in the lot—we’d call the agency from Paris—and ran to the check-in desk, which was empty. In the airline office, adjoining, they were surprised to see us again.
“You’re back! Where are you going?”
“Moscow! We have the money now.”
I spread the money on the counter. It was obscene.
“Oh no, no,” he said. “It’s too late. See?” The agent pointed to window. The plane, a large AirFrance jet, was on the runway, visible, right there. People were still walking up the rolling stairway.
“Can you call them?” Hand asked.
They did. They wouldn’t let us on. We were fifteen minutes early, but ten minutes too late.
“I am sorry,” said the Moroccan man helping us. “They don’t want you. Security reasons, they say.”
“Call them!” yelled Hand.
“I cannot. They are French,” the man said.
We paused long enough to realize we didn’t understand.
We were stunned. Two hours we’d rushed around and now we would have to stay in Marrakesh for the night. It broke us. We couldn’t get on the plane, which was right there, not two hundred feet away. There were people still climbing the staircase, from tarmac to jet, people still turning and waving to loved ones inside. One man had three golf clubs with him in one hand, a stuffed Goofy in the other. But we couldn’t get on. This was an abomination. We couldn’t stay in Marrakesh! We’d already seen it, and we’d been in Morocco for a full day, in Africa two days already, almost three, and here we were, grounded, stagnant. There were seven continents and we’d spent almost half our time on one.
I sat on the smooth cold airport floor outside the office as Hand continued to argue inside. He whined, and pretended to cry, then offered them vodka that he didn’t have, Cuban cigars he’d never possessed or even seen—“I assure you sir these are of the highest quality, made by Castro’s personal tobacconists”—and finally, having failed completely, asked about flights the next day. The floor beneath me was cold but it was still and clean. The airport was immaculate. I tilted my head and squinted across the floor, thinking I could make my sight travel the floor like a low-flying bird. The floor shone in a dull lifeless way. I had a brief sensation that I was at O’Hare again, trying to leave for Senegal. I was alternately enraged and spread wide with great peace. Any thwarted movement was an affront, was almost impossible to understand. It was so hard to understand No. But with every untaken step a part of the soul sighs in relief.
Mo & Thor—
Everyone’s got their own money. It’s the first thing a new country does, it prints money. The money here’s beautiful, as almost all money is everywhere outside the U.S.—even Canada’s is better than ours. Hand (you remember Hand. He told you how the hunters trap meercats, and demonstrated on you, Thor) says that in New Zealand, the money has little plastic see-through windows. Money is really the only tangible
communication device we have, if you
“Let’s go, dipshit.”
Hand had emerged, laughing with the Moroccan airline man, who was dressed like a pilot and carried a similar suitcase. I put away the postcard and while outside our plane rolled away to Paris, we passed through the hissing airport doors and into the darkened clear cool night of Marrakesh.
We regained our car, feeling like we were stealing it—it was still there, we had the keys, but it was so odd—and drove back to the city to find a hotel. We’d check in and then head to the mountains, where we planned to find people, dwelling in the hills, living in huts, and to them we would come in the night—in the blackening sky there were already stars and a low moon climbing—and we would throw small bundles of bills through their open glassless windows and then drive off.
First, though, we would see the Djemaa el-Fna; we’d driven past it on the way to the bank and it was already insanity, thousands massing and growing, countless locals and tourists milling around outdoor shops and food kiosks in dashikis and Dockers, all eyes overwhelmed and ears dulled by the roaring murmurs. We checked into a bland hotel of glass and silver and for ten minutes watched, again, the Paris to Dakar race on TV. They now had a camera in one of the cars, and the driver passed village after village, all blurry homes and faces, leaving all behind, very literally, in his dust.
Hand, magazine in hand, stepped into the bathroom. “I’m goin’ in,” he said, meaning half an hour at least—twenty minutes for the bowel movement, ten for the after-shower. Hand has to shower every time he dumps; I have no idea why.
I called my mom.
“So who got it today?” she asked. “More basketball players?”
“No, now we’re asking for directions.”
“Where?”
“To wherever we’re going.”
“Don’t you have maps?”
“Of course.”
“So you know where you’re going.”
“Oh yeah, always.”
“So it’s all pretend.”
Hand burst from the bathroom like he’d been feeding bears and they’d turned on him. His own stink had overtaken him and now threw itself around the room.
“I don’t know,” I said.
We had a beer in the hotel bar, called Timofey’s. The bartender was a young woman who looked at my face and gave me a commiserative pout. I accepted this and smiled. We were alone in the room, except a very old woman, white with hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, at a table overlooking the lobby, with a glass of something clear before her, her small hands cupped around it.
“We should sit down with her,” Hand said.
I knew he was right. But I didn’t know people of her age. She could hate us. She was easily seventy-five.
Hand was already halfway there. I followed. By the time I made it to her table, Hand was sitting, leg crossed, ankle on his knee. I don’t know what he’d used as an opening line. She held her hand to me. I shook its fingers, which were cold and the skin loose, a small leather bag full of delicate tools. She was French. We introduced ourselves; her last name (she gave us both) sounded like Ingres. Hand sat to her right and I across from her. She was a beautiful woman. Up close she looked younger, maybe sixty. Her nose was still aquiline, her eyes beaming. She sipped her drink through its tiny red straw.
“You two are lovers,” she said.
Hand laughed. My eyebrows skimmed my hairline.
“Well, thank you,” Hand said. “We take that as a compliment. But no.”
She cocked her head and looked between us.
“You are brothers. One is adopted.”
“No,” I said. I realized I was grinning. I wanted her to keep guessing.
“I know nothing anymore,” she said, pursing her lips in a dissatisfied sort of way. “I pretend at wisdom.”
She was the oldest person I’d spoken to in probably five or six years, since my Mom’s uncle Jarvis died, who she loved because he’d taught her to ride horses and tan hides. But Jarvis had never spoken like this. She was scanning my face now, her head pivoting like she was trying to see around me.
“Accident,” I said.
“I think so,” she said. “Something to forget, I think.”
“I’m trying,” I said. “Maybe, yes.”
Hand asked why she was here. She said she’d come here with her husband just after they were married, and had come back with him every so often thereafter. He was dead five years now.
“This is our fiftieth anniversary,” she said, smiling in an exhausted way. Her sentences trailed off, the last words like hats taken by a sudden gust. “What brings you to Marrakesh?” she asked. “Golf?” She looked at our clothes. “You do not look like golfers.”
“We’re botanists,” said Hand. God Almighty.
“You’re lying,” she said, then sipped her drink with her eyes still upon him. Ella Fitzgerald was singing from a small speaker over our heads. Maybe Sarah Vaughan. I worried briefly that they, Sarah and Ella, knew I didn’t know the difference, and were angry.
“You lived through WWII,” Hand said.
She laughed.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Cernay,” she said. And they were off, together.
“Was that Occupied or Vichy?”
“Occupied.”
He was leaning in. The more I watched her the more I thought she might be younger. Her cheeks were tight and full of color. Her features were delicate but strong, like a face of blown glass.
“We helped,” she said. “My mother and I ran the farm.”
“You helped the maquis.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Am I right? You were near Switzerland maybe?”
“You’re a fan of the war,” she said, pointing at him with her tiny finger, wrapped in skin as with a loose bandage.
“I’ve studied it,” Hand said. “Not a fan, a student.”
“Me too,” I said, thinking that my current reading of Churchill somehow qualified.
“Did your father fight?” Hand asked.
“He was killed in the first month of the war,” she said. “He wasn’t army. He was a truck driver, killed near Abbeville.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“His brother, my uncle, went to the hills,” she said. “There was a forest above our farm, in a valley. He stayed there for years. With three Hungarians.”
“Anti-fascists.”
“Yes.”
“Was your uncle a Communist?”
“No. Not at that time. No.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“When?”
“When what?”
“When they invaded France.”
I could never say the word Nazi.
“Nineteen,” she said.
She and her mother had sheltered escaped POWs crossing over to Switzerland. They’d underreported farm production to the Germans and gave the surplus to those passing through and fighting from the hills. She had married one of the Hungarian soldiers.
“We’re not botanists,” I said. “We’re just here.”
“He’s on a lightbulb,” Hand said.
She looked at me, smiling politely.
“He was the Number Two swimmer in all of Wisconsin,” I said. We were such jerks.
“What did you two do after the war?” Hand asked.
“We left,” she said. “We left France. My uncle was killed in the town square by French Nazis. He had poisoned their food, had killed six, so they flayed him and then shot him. It was a time … It was not very real after some time. Or perhaps it was …”
She was trailing off again.
“You don’t have to, you know.” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But it is so rare to be able to …” she laughed a little and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “To educate a few young Americans.”
She sipped her drink.
“I remember it like a week … it was like you remember a time in bed, sick. When your
head is …” She was throwing her hands around her head as if directing tiny winds, or weaving.
“The next year,” she continued, “my mother died in 1944 of complications during labor,” she said, and, registering our surprise, said, “she was forty-two and it was a priest, of all things. But that is another story. We had to leave the town. We could not stay.”
They had moved to Amsterdam, where her husband, who she was calling Pipi, I think, resumed his work as an engineer. They never had children. Hand was staring at her watch, a simple gold-trimmed piece held by a wide black band. A man’s watch.
It was getting late and we had to go. We told her where.
“You should come with us,” Hand said, in his magnanimous host sort of way. Then, realizing the quality of his notion, he blurted: “You should!”
“You won’t find the people you want up there,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Maybe you will. I shouldn’t discourage you.”
“Come with us!” Hand repeated.
“To the mountains? It’s 9:30.”
“We’re going to the Djemaa el-Fna first.”
“Oh please,” she said, her hand resting on Hand’s. “You two will do your adventure without me. I’ve seen the mountains during the day. I can’t imagine that could be improved upon.”
—Hand, we should stay here with her. We will be her companions on this night. And her stories! They will be worth more than anything we could find in the mountains.
—But this is history.
—Exactly.
—This is not what you were talking about. We had agreed on speeding, not sitting and listening.
—I thought you would want to stay.
—I’ve heard enough.
“We need you, though,” I found myself saying to her. “We really want you to come.”
She looked taken aback. My urgency had reminded her of something else. We were no longer harmless.
“No,” she said. “Say hello to the mountains for me.” Her last words trailed off again, in a way that sounded like we were hearing them from far away, downriver and upwind.
We stood.
“Can we buy you another drink before we go?” Hand asked.