Notorious by Roberta Lowing Page A

you?’
    ‘For her.’ I hesitate. ‘For both of us.’
    She still has her hand on my wrist.
    ‘You won’t allow it,’ I say. ‘Like last night.’
    ‘Last night, it was 3 am when you tried to talk to her. That is the devil’s hour, when Christ died on the cross. 3 pm is the opposite; 3 pm is when Christ was born.’ She releases me. ‘Today is your last chance to speak to her.’
    I take a step and tremble. ‘How long was I out here for?’
    ‘Twenty minutes. You were out in the desert for twenty minutes.’
    ‘Who would want this land?’ I say as we walk.
    ‘You would be surprised, Monsieur. The Saudis come weekly for their hawking – ’
    ‘But the land is dead.’
    Sister Antony points. ‘See the life around you.’ She digs her fingers into the sand and comes up with a small shrivelled date the colour of faded parchment. ‘This is still sweet next to the stone. You can grind it into flour. And that small plant – ’ she touches the tip of a straggly thistle of a green so faded that it looks almost white – ‘can be used for headaches, but only in the right doses. Anything bigger and it becomes a poison.’ She picks up a tiny black seed with her fingernail. ‘This helps digestion but in small portions or you hallucinate.’ She lets the seed drop. ‘Everything must be judged to proportion in the desert. Take too much and you die.’
    Instead of leading me up the hill she turns off the road and walks east, away from the Massif and Casablanca. She points across the flat country. The grey stony ground gives way to the sand dunes rising and falling to the horizon in waves of burnt sand, the flames showing even in the fierce noon light. She points to the most desolate spot in the middle. ‘That is where we found Madeleine.’
    I can’t believe it. There is nothing there.
    ‘Laforche thinks she had maps,’ I say, ‘of some system of old wells.’
    Sister Antony shakes her head.
    ‘If Madel – the woman told us of a way across,’ I say, ‘that would make it better for her.’
    ‘She didn’t have maps,’ says Sister Antony.
    ‘No water? No protection?’
    ‘No.’
    I look down at my dirty hands: the small cuts on my palms, the skin already turning a dull red.
    ‘That’s impossible,’ I say. ‘She must have had help.’
    ‘She did.’
    ‘Who – oh, no. I’m sorry. I can’t believe in divine intervention.’
    ‘What other explanation is there?’
    ‘There must have been someone else with her.’ I try not to think of Pietr. Pietr is dead.
    Sister Antony says, ‘There were no camels, no cars. She was alone.’
    ‘What did she look like,’ I ask, ‘when you found her in the desert?’
    ‘She was hunched over,’ says Sister Antony, ‘as though in great pain. She was trembling, there were stains across her tunic, across her heart.’ She gestured across her chest. ‘But there was not a mark on her. No sunburn, no cuts on her feet, although the ground between the dunes and Abu N’af is harsh, filled with small stones, cactus, old shells, bleached bones. When I put a hand on her shoulder and asked her what she was doing, she said, “I am eating my heart. It is bitter but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart”.’
    I stare at the dunes falling away into Algeria: no trees, no roads, no shade.
    ‘Imagine the first people here,’ says Sister Antony. ‘Even the hardiest must have quailed at what was before them, those black people from the south. The drought would have weakened them. After them, invaders who rode horses and had weapons made of iron: the Berbers. Then, centuries of fighting with clans, the Masmouda in the Rif, the Sanhaja. The Vandals controlling everything until the time of Idris. More clans until the Alaouit ruler Moulay al-Rashid. No real enemies but each other until the French came and divided it all up with the Spanish. And so it goes on. We ousted the colonists. Now we fight, to annexe the Western Sahara, with help from Algeria, of