The Bigness of the World

The Children Beneath the Seat

They had not expected the desert to be like this — just like the stereotypical images of it that they brought to Morocco with them — but, ironically (and disappointingly), it was. There were camels, one of which had chased them up the side of a gorge in a fit of misplaced anger, and the occasional oasis in the midst of kilometer after kilometer of rock and sand and dryness. The only thing that had really shocked them was the unwavering brownness of it all, consuming entire villages so that houses rose like intermittent lumps in a bedspread of brownness. Intellectually, of course, they had expected it, but the intellect cannot always sufficiently inform the senses, which was the reason that they had decided to travel in the first place. Brownness has thus become their new word, for there seemed no other way to express it except by giving it the weight, the concreteness, of nounhood — not just brown, but the state of being brown. Needless to say, they are from a lush place, Minnesota, a land with so many lakes that it feels compelled to brag about them on its license plates.

They are well into their forties, Bernadette older by thirteen months, but only now have they concluded, grudgingly, that there are things one cannot know except by seeing them. This realization has hit them hard, for they are English professors, both of them, women who have spent their entire lives reading, engaged in the world of heroes and plots, foreshadowing and epiphanies, and, perhaps without even realizing it, they had come to expect that life would follow literary extremes, would be either dazzlingly uplifting or stultifyingly tragic, but that was not the case at all. It did swerve occasionally toward one or the other, of course, but most of the time it occupied a vast middle ground, boring and relentless, a state of affairs that the world of literature had neither taught them to expect nor given them the tools with which to contend. Trapped within this vast middle ground, they graded papers and paid bills and slept, as did those around them, but it struck them, increasingly, that something was amiss.

It might have helped if they were religious by nature, but they were not, were, in fact, quite the opposite: their disinclination toward religion grew stronger, became more entrenched, as the years passed. Furthermore, in the nearly twenty years that they have been together, they have acquired a tendency to reflect, and thus intensify, certain traits in each other — cynicism and didacticism specifically. Finally, under the weight of their combined cynicism, each woman had begun to turn inward, away from the other, until there were times — increasingly more of them — that they crept into bed at night without having exchanged a single word all day. Then, when a simple “good night” or “sleep well” would have done much toward slowing this mutual sprint toward the end of their relationship, even then, or perhaps especially then, they could not speak, for the more language was required of them, the less each felt capable of producing it. Instead, they lay side by side, the silence between them like the pounding of waves, which is thought to be conducive to sleep but rarely is.

Thus, there is a subtext to this trip, unacknowledged but with the potential to rise up and overwhelm all others: in short, they hope to subject themselves to something so beyond the scope of what their lives have thus far encompassed that they will find themselves, in the face of it, free of pretense — able to rescue themselves and, in turn, their flagging relationship. The trip will be like an electric jolt to the heart, thinks Bernadette, for as English professors, they are enamored of metaphors and not always able to recognize trite ones, particularly those of their own making.

* * *

The desert has been introduced to them largely through the windows of various buses, which they don’t mind, for there is something comforting about being on the move in this country. At the moment, for example, they are headed for Tafraoute, having spent two sweaty, interminable days in Agadir, the most depressing place they have visited thus far, its beach overflowing with Europeans and beer gardens and restaurants with signs outside all proclaiming, via a diversity of spellings: smorgasbord.

“We could have stayed home if we had wanted a smorgasbord,” Bernadette had complained bitterly.

This was true. For nearly fifteen years, the two women have lived in Fergus Falls, a stagnant town along I-94, nearly an hour from Fargo-Moorhead. When they first moved here, colleagues at the community college where they are both employed had presented this proximity to the interstate as some obvious asset, the value of which remained unquantifiable because nobody required that it be quantified, but they eventually came to understand that the highway’s presence was neutral — it brought nothing in, but neither did it take much out. Beyond the community college, the town is known for its small shopping mall and a park with a large statue of an otter in honor of the fact that Fergus Falls is the county seat for Otter Tail County.

Only in the last few years have they discovered that another world exists just beyond the Fergus Falls town limits and that, in this world, it is often possible to locate a smorgasbord (or a potluck or a meatball dinner) on a Sunday morning. Such events are generally affiliated with local churches, but the women did not let this bother them. They wore their teaching garb, which blended in well enough with the Sunday-morning attire favored by the locals, particularly as neither woman was prone toward drama or excess, but, still, they attracted attention. Two or three parishioners would approach them during the course of a meal under the pretense of welcoming them, each inevitably inquiring, “So, where are you girls from?” They were always girls in these settings — despite their ages and professions, neither of which they mentioned — because they were two women alone together on a day reserved for family.

Bernadette was the more talkative at these events, partly because the presence of food made her so, but she was excited also by the sense of adventure that these outings brought to their lives. As long as she could remember, they had awakened each Sunday morning at seven and dressed for the day in their standard casual wear, button-down shirts with sweatpants, a combination favored by both, for they agreed that a matching sweat suit was monotonous and neither liked T-shirts, Bernadette because they encroached on her neck and Sheila because she believed they made her forearms, which were unusually short, appear even more so. Together, they prepared coffee and a plate of liberally buttered toast, which they consumed over the course of the morning while reading; precisely at noon, they closed their books, opened a can of salmon, and made salmon melts, the last bite of which marked the end of their weekend. There were dishes to be done, of course, but on Sundays they completed this chore without any of their usual bickering, Bernadette accusing Sheila of daydreaming as she washed and Sheila complaining that Bernadette only dried the outsides of things. As they faced the remains of the greasiest meal of the week, they interacted more like colleagues than lovers, observing the other’s work with professional detachment. Then, they retreated to their respective studies and began the business of preparing for the coming week’s classes.

And so, it was no overstatement to say that the smorgasbords and potlucks had changed everything, turning Sunday from a day of predictable introspection into one of intrigue and hastily graded papers, certainly as far as Bernadette was concerned; Sheila, who had spent every Sunday of her childhood in church, did not share Bernadette’s enthusiasm but enjoyed observing it. She sat beside Bernadette at these outings, quietly troubled by an uneasiness for which she could not fully account, though she understood it to be rooted in distrust, which bothered her, for she did not consider herself an arbitrarily distrustful person. Certainly, she was routinely skeptical in her dealings with students, but that was only because she had witnessed numerous dishonesties over the years; thus, her reasoning went, it would be imprudent as well as professionally remiss to attend to her duties without a measured degree of vigilance. She prided herself, however, on never counting change in stores or asking workmen to put estimates into writing.

More unsettling for her was the fact that she believed this distrust to be mutual, believed that these strangers whose hotdishes and pies she consumed shared her misgivings, though in more generous moments, she understood that it was barely possible to know the workings of one’s own mind, let alone those of a group of strangers, even strangers who, when considered as an abstraction, made up the all-too-familiar backdrop of her Iowan youth. That youth has, by design, become a detached memory — she gave up corn when she was twenty and lost her faith shortly thereafter, and then her parents had died, which made visiting unnecessary. She now thought of her young self as a character whom she had once encountered in a book: she looked back upon her with fondness and a degree of pride, but she felt also that this character, her younger self, had simply ceased to be, had not died but merely ended, the way a book did, with obstacles overcome and lessons learned, the turning of the final page, and then the cover closing.

Perhaps because of the literary overtones with which she has imbued her small-town upbringing, she is fond of assigning the works of Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, though her semesterly staple is a short story titled “The Lottery,” in which a group of villagers gathers together each year to draw lots, with the loser, the one drawing the shortest lot, being stoned to death by the others, for no reason other than to fulfill this particular tradition.

“What, exactly, does this story imply about traditions?” she would begin the conversation each semester, thinking the answer both obvious yet necessary to the formation of her students’ worldview, but the students, masters at commandeering the question and leading the discussion safely away from the text at hand, would invariably counter with listings of their favorite traditions, each of which began the same way: “My family always…” They would discuss their way through the major holidays without her, comparing notes, a friendly rivalry developing between those whose families always opened gifts on Christmas Eve and those who held out for the actual day. She would go home that evening, shattered, and fall into bed at nine o’clock, but she could not help herself — she felt that her students, most of them from the very communities whose potlucks and smorgasbords she partook of each Sunday, needed to be taught the story’s lesson, and so she was willing to ignore the fact that her teaching of it had become its own tradition.

“They need to learn to examine themselves — their milieu, their beliefs — critically,” she would defend herself to Bernadette. “ ‘The Lottery’ is a parable, and that’s what they’re used to after all — parables.” This was the way that the two of them spoke with each other, with the fervency of two middle-aged academics perpetually engaged in defending the obsolete theories of their youth. They used grammatically complete sentences, always, and when others inquired how they were, they refused to go along with the current convention of purporting to be good. “I’m well,” they would reply in precise tones to anyone who cared to ask — grocery store cashiers and telemarketers as well as students and colleagues. Sometimes their students giggled at this response, and they suspected that the students, subjected to years of careless language, believed the two of them were the ones guilty of grammatical indiscretion.

“Of course it sounds funny to them,” Bernadette grumbled. “How are they supposed to know any better when even their other professors claim to be good?”

So had begun their brief campaign to correct what they perceived as a grave injustice against the English language. “You’re good?” they would query when presented with this response. “Have you been engaged in philanthropic activities?”

It was not in their natures to press the point, however, and so they generally stopped there, with this rather bewildering question hanging in the air, making further small talk unlikely. Thus, the campaign had been short-lived, though they continued to be “well” with all who still dared to ask.

“Even if we are the last two people in the country using well, we shall refuse to cave in. Actions speak louder than words, after all,” Bernadette rallied, though she rarely employed clichés.

“But well is also a word,” Sheila had reminded her, though she rarely began sentences with coordinate conjunctions.

“In this instance, however, the speaking of it is an action,” Bernadette had countered, and their fretfulness had been abandoned as they debated whether well, in this particular case, constituted a word or an action.

So, of course, they did not blend in at potlucks and smorgasbords, despite their stolid dress, for they carried about them, in gesture and speech, the look of women who confronted daily the signs of steady, incontrovertible decay in the world around them.

Then, at a potluck last spring, they had been approached by a woman with large bones and an authoritative bearing, the latter established, in part, by the former. Unlike most people who approached them at these events, people who enjoyed their meal first, nestled among family and friends, before turning their prying attention to the two strange women in their midst, the big-boned woman approached them with a full plate, settling between them like a colleague who hoped to complain about a new departmental policy.

“Hello, ladies,” she announced. She turned her plate carefully clockwise, stopping when the meager helping of three-bean salad sat precisely at twelve o’clock, and then, perhaps feeling that the unusually large mound of scalloped potatoes and ham on her plate required comment, she said, “Clara Johansson makes the best scalloped potatoes,” adding, by way of clarification or maybe enticement, “All cream.”

“I missed those,” replied Bernadette apologetically, though technically she had avoided them, for she disliked foods that grew underground. “I shall have none of Eliot’s ‘dried tubers,’ ” she generally declared when potatoes were mentioned, to the bafflement of those around her, and Sheila looked at her, waiting for it, but Bernadette merely turned to the big-boned woman and explained, “There’s so much to choose from at potlucks.”

“Yes, that’s the truth, isn’t it,” said the woman. Then, after a pause that, in retrospect, they both agreed had been an “artful pause,” she added, “Anyhow, this is the church’s last potluck.”

“The last potluck! What a shame,” Bernadette had cried out, not at all disingenuously though certainly with greater audible enthusiasm than she normally displayed. “It seems to be a popular event,” she observed in quieter tones.

“Oh no, it’s not the event we’ll be changing,” said the big-boned woman. “Just the name. From now on, it will be called a pot God’s will. We want to make it clear, especially to some of the younger parishioners, that there is no such thing as luck, not when God is in charge.”

Because the woman spoke without a trace of irony, Bernadette was nervous to make eye contact, fearful that such intimacy might provoke a response that she had no way of predicting and therefore suppressing; she was not a giggler nor the sort to weep publicly, but she felt that either reaction was possible, and so she smiled cautiously at the woman’s scalloped potatoes instead. Writing well, Bernadette heard herself telling her students monotonously, semester after semester, requires the ability to become your audience — knowing what they know, seeing as they see, feeling what they feel. She looked up at the big-boned woman, who sat regarding the two of them, potatoes growing cold in front of her, and she understood what terrifying and ridiculous advice she had been meting out all these years. She recalled a joke that she had made once as they approached the front doors of one of these churches. “I’m so hungry I could eat the Eucharist,” she had told Sheila, and they had laughed together smugly, glancing around to make sure that nobody stood within earshot. She almost wished that the big-boned woman would stand and publicly denounce them, swinging her big-boned fists like wrecking balls in their direction. How much easier and nobler, she thought, to depart amid cries of “Heretics!” or calls to be burned at the stake.

Instead, they left quietly.

“You knew it was a church,” Sheila pointed out once they were in the car.

“Yes, but we were just there to eat,” Bernadette answered sorrowfully, and Sheila did not reply, for despite her feelings of unease, she too had believed that they were welcome, at least for the time it took to eat a plate of hotdish and Jell-O.

“It’s not as though we didn’t pay for what we ate,” Bernadette said a moment later, indignantly this time, but this position was problematic as well, for it made of them contributors, contributors to the promotion of the belief that God oversaw everything, guiding one’s hand through the cookbook of life to stop at just the right hotdish recipe. When Bernadette offered this analogy, it sounded like a thesis straight out of the freshman composition papers that they graded day after day, and so they were able to laugh about it, but there was no ignoring the fact that the conversation with the big-boned woman had changed everything. They thought back over every potluck and meatball dinner and smorgasbord that they had ever attended, and in doing so, they were overcome with self-consciousness, as though it had suddenly occurred to them that they had attended each of these events unclothed, but unclothed the way that one is in a dream, where one is aware of one’s nakedness not as the person sitting there naked but as the viewer of the dream, those two one in the same except for an overwhelming difference — the inability to act, to change one’s nakedness.

“Which would you rather have if you had to choose — knowledge or the ability to act?” Sheila asked, trying to change the mood in the car to a more philosophical one, but it had not worked, for they understood immediately how futile one was without the other. Then, because the mood in the car still needed changing, they had tried irony next, laughing at the fact that they now understood how Adam and Eve must have felt, naked and suddenly ashamed of it.

In the midst of this bit of levity, Bernadette had broken in, anguished, asking, “But how can they believe such a thing?” and this question, rhetorical though it was, had demanded a bit of thoughtful silence. They had not really acknowledged it then, but that had been the beginning of things: this sudden feeling that books were no longer enough, that the world was vastly different than they believed it to be, which is why Agadir, with its beer gardens and smorgasbords, had galled them so, for they found that now that they had finally done it, broken away from the lakes and their teaching and the routine of their days, they expected nothing to be familiar and, in fact, took great offense when it was.

* * *

Agadir had been filled with overpriced tourist hotels, its streets lined with tour buses, air-conditioned and fumeless, shocks and springs obsessively intact, nothing like the decrepit buses that the women have become used to, buses whose only virtues are cheapness and the ability to teach patience. In fact, because Agadir fell several weeks into their trip, they felt qualified to scoff at these tour buses with their two-people-to-a-seat, keep-the-aisles-clear policies. They have come to enjoy rolling through this landscape with people who are going about their daily business, hauling chickens and goats to market, people who seem thoroughly unmoved by the harsh brownness outside their windows. They are particularly enamored of the fact that the drivers of these buses have assistants—henchmen, they have taken to calling them, part carnival barkers, part airline stewards — whose job it is to hang from the bus calling out destinations, to settle luggage and riders, to pump gas and fetch cigarettes for the driver, and, finally, to doze off, crouched in the small stairwell of the bus, during the brief moments when one round of duties is finished and the next, yet to begin.

They had stopped in Agadir, in fact, only because their guidebook claimed it had an English bookstore, which they never found, and now they are fleeing Agadir as well, its smorgasbords and carefully queued buses. They are going to Tafraoute because they have read in this same guidebook that Tafraoute is a place run by women, the men having gone off to work elsewhere and returning only when they are old enough, or wealthy enough, to retire. The book also had presented it as a place with color, pink granite and flowering almond trees (albeit not at this time of year) and, somewhere outside of town, a series of gigantic rocks painted blue and red and purple by a Belgian who had felt compelled — by the overwhelming brownness they suspect — to alter the desert in some basic but significant way. Their desire to leave Agadir propels them onto the first available bus, which is neither the fastest nor the cheapest, and while there will be ample opportunity during the trip to regret their haste, at first they are simply relieved.

Somewhere after Tiznit, in the tiny market of a village where they stop to take on passengers, an old man climbs onto the bus before it has fully stopped and makes his way back to them as though he has been awaiting their specific arrival. He looks from Sheila’s face to Bernadette’s, back and forth, confused, as though he expected to recognize them but does not. Then, he raises his fist in the air and lets it spring open, revealing a flimsy watch, which he swings like a pendulum in front of them.

“Is he trying to hypnotize us?” Sheila asks worriedly, for, in fact, she cannot take her eyes off the watch.

“He wants us to buy it,” says Bernadette.

“How much?” asks the old man suddenly, in English.

Sheila shakes her head vehemently, but the man continues to dangle the watch with a confidence that they both find alarming.

“Where are we?” Bernadette asks him in English in order to assess his fluency but also because she would like to know. “What town is this?”

“How much?” he says again, patiently, and they cannot tell whether his response indicates a lack of English skills or an unwillingness to be distracted from commerce. In the midst of this comes a tapping at their half-open window, which they turn toward and then pull immediately back from, for directly on the other side of the glass, pressed up against it, is a retarded boy of an indeterminate age. He has an abnormally fleshy face that spreads out in strange, fat waves against the glass, and behind his ears are thick, lumpy growths that resemble wads of gum piled on top of one another. When he pulls back from the window, his lips leave behind snail-like tracks on the glass. Their fellow riders, who have been watching their interactions carefully, chuckle at their reaction to the boy while behind him a group of vendors has gathered, no doubt egging him on so that they might enjoy a bit of fun in the midst of the heat and the tedium of selling the same wares day after day.

“I love you!” the boy calls out to them in a deep, unformed voice, and they do not realize at first that he is speaking English. “I love you!” He begins to dance then, frantically, while the men behind him cheer and clap their hands in some vague semblance of rhythm. Even as the bus pulls out of the market, the boy is still dancing; he pulls off his shirt, either in response to the heat or the coaxing of the men, and dances, and their last glimpse of him is of a large white mound twisting and writhing, the final, energetic gasps of a fish set down in the desert.

* * *

They do not speak until the bus is well outside of town, allowing the dexterity of the henchman, who hangs from the bus with one hand, to command their attention. “I was just so… so… taken back,” Sheila says at last, weakly, testing this position aloud, sensing that their claim to indignation on the retarded boy’s behalf is compromised by the fact that everyone had witnessed their repulsion.

“An odd place,” Bernadette agrees, feeling safest with small, inconsequential commentary, and then they are quiet again, aware of the continuing stares of their fellow passengers and the increasingly tortuous nature of the road.

Perhaps an hour later, although they are seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the bus stops, and a family climbs on board, the parents, plodding and silent, accompanied by three children of varying heights but with a uniformly androgynous appearance — dull, sunken eyes and shaven heads covered with scabs and even a number of open sores to which red slashes of Mercurochrome have been applied, giving them the appearance of strange, colorful warriors from some remote tribe that is not in the habit of taking the bus. The parents settle heavily into the seat in front of the women, the only empty seat, while the children pause mutely in the aisle until the father makes a gesture, a downward slice with his hand, and the children drop obediently to their knees and crawl beneath the seats, the two youngest curling together under the parents’ seat like twins waiting side by side to be born, while the other, the tallest of the three, huddles beneath the women’s seat.

Before the family’s arrival, the women were quite aware of being the oddest thing that the other riders had expected to encounter on this trip, but now they are fairly sure that they have acquired competition, a fact that relieves them greatly, for it is a tiring thing already, this trip through winding mountain roads in 115-degree heat with the smell of diesel fuel and vomit everywhere. An occasional, vomit-ripe plastic bag rolls past their feet on inclines, like a water balloon in search of a target, but most of the riders have given up on bags and are simply emptying their stomachs directly onto the floor. At several particularly curvy points, Sheila thinks that she might be forced to join them, but she concentrates on restraint, mindful of the attention that her particular nausea is sure to attract. Each time the bus begins a steep climb, Sheila and Bernadette pull their feet up, holding them off the floor while vomit flows beneath them like an incoming tide, and then again on the downward grade as the tide goes out. They have only backpacks with them, cradled in their laps. Early on, they had removed the packs from beneath their seats, and it is this vacated space that the boy occupies, for, though still unsure of his gender, that is how they have decided to think of him — as a boy, or more specifically, and purely for ease of reference, as a pronoun: he.

“What do you think he’s doing down there?” Sheila asks.

“Nothing, I imagine. He’s probably just staring at our ankles.” For some reason, this thought — of the small, strange boy fixated for hours on their ankles — unsettles both of them, and they begin to fidget, keeping their legs in restless motion.

“What if he bites us?” asks Sheila, who has unusually fleshy calves.

“Why would he bite us?” Bernadette responds, but sharply, in a way that suggests that she too has entertained such thoughts.

“It must be so hot down there,” Sheila says eventually. “And they’ll be covered with vomit.”

“Well,” says Bernadette, whose practical nature often gets misread as apathetic. “What can we do really?” She looks out the window, finding the barrenness consoling. Many of the other passengers are still watching them, some turned fully around in their seats, apparently unconcerned about the havoc that this may wreak on their already compromised stomachs. It is too soon to tell whether their interest has shifted to this strange family, three-fifths of which has taken up quarters under the seats, or whether people simply wish to see how the two women will respond to them.

“Why does everybody feel the need to stare at us?” complains Sheila. “Why don’t they say something if they think it’s so awful?”

“Maybe they don’t think it’s so awful,” says Bernadette reflexively.

“Then why are they staring like that?”

“Like what?” Bernadette asks, more loudly than necessary despite the breeze from the open windows, which she knows she will later blame for her elevated tone. Her voice contains a surprising level of irritation, and their immediate neighbors look quickly at Sheila, expecting a response, the way that spectators follow a tennis ball that has been sent, with some force, back into an opponent’s court.

“Like they’re just waiting for us to do something,” Sheila says.

“You know what I think?” Bernadette says tiredly. “I think they’re just testing us. I don’t think that anyone really cares whether something gets done or not. I think they’re just wondering what we think about it all, whether we find it wrong or important or”—and here she pauses, searching for one last adjective—“or worthy,” she says at last, unconvinced and disappointed by the vagueness of these options.

“Well,” replies Sheila after a moment, “maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just close our eyes right now and go to sleep, and when we wake up everybody else will be sleeping also.” Sheila is calling her bluff. Bernadette understands this, just as she understands that she has put herself in a position to have it called.

“And we just leave them under there like little caged animals?” she asks, underscoring her words with an outrage that she does not really feel. Logic, for which she possesses a great and natural capacity, has deserted her; she notes its absence distantly, by attempting to catalog the things that have replaced it — the heat, of course, and the stench of diesel, which has created a ringing in her ears. “Well,” she says dully, “there are probably worse things than riding under the seat of a bus.”

“Of course there are worse things,” Sheila explodes. “What are you suggesting? That we determine the absolute worst thing in the world and fix only that?”

As this discussion is taking place, the parents of the children have begun to devour a packet of fried fish, dropping the heads and bones onto the floor between their legs. They eat without speaking, though both are unusually loud chewers, and without offering anything to their children, who must surely be watching the steady rain of scraps. At last one of the children pops up between them — fish bones and greasy smudges of breading across the left side of his forehead — and extends his hand, urchin style, but the father pushes him back beneath the seat with a greasy hand of his own. A man leans over and says something to the parents in Arabic, something loud and unmistakably angry, and then another man adds to it, gesturing to the children beneath the seat for emphasis. The parents continue to eat without acknowledging any of them, and finally a third man rises and calls out to the driver, who pulls obediently to the side of the road. He and the henchman come back and stand in the aisle while various passengers offer statements, and in the end, it is the couple’s passivity — they continue to eat without showing any interest in the proceedings against them — even more than their actions that seems to turn everyone against them. The henchman kneels and extricates the children, and because there are still no seats available, the three of them crouch together in the aisle, lined up like tiny members of a chain gang.

* * *

Bernadette and Sheila settle in at the only decent hotel in Tafraoute, a clean, unusually quiet place run by a graceful man in his sixties who never leaves the premises, relying, he explains, on a nephew to bring him everything he needs. They have seen the nephew only once, the first evening, when they arrived so exhausted from the trip that Bernadette had been unable to carry her backpack the half mile from the market, where the bus had left them, to the hotel. Instead, much to her embarrassment, she had been obliged to pay a boy to carry the pack for her, and he had served as their guide also, leading them through the dark streets with a backpack slung over each shoulder, for he had insisted on carrying Sheila’s as well. When they arrived at the hotel, however, the boy had refused to accompany them inside, and they had paused just outside the door to hand him four dirhams and, for good measure, a handful of pennies that they were tired of carrying. He held the door for them, and even as it swung closed, they could hear him running away in the darkness — bare feet thudding, coins clinking reassuringly in his pocket.

“Welcome,” the hotelier cried out warmly when they stepped into the foyer, rising effortlessly to greet them from where he knelt in front of an extremely hairy man who was seated, trouser legs rolled, bare feet soaking in a basin of water. “Rest your bags,” said the hotelier, as though the bags were the ones exhausted from the trip, but they set their backpacks down and then stood awkwardly nearby as the hotelier knelt once again and continued with his task, washing the hairy man’s feet, which were also hairy and looked like two spiders resting in the basin of water.

The hairy man was in his forties perhaps, though his excessive hairiness had a way of obscuring his age, making him appear older at first glance and then, perhaps because hair suggested a certain vitality, younger. In any case, he was a good deal younger than the hotelier, and he smoked with elaborate disinterest as the hotelier lifted his feet from the basin and dried them tenderly with a white towel that hung down from his shoulder, handling them as one would delicate china at the end of a very long dinner party. As he worked, the hotelier asked the women polite questions about where they were from and whether they had become ill on the bus, and he chuckled pleasantly at their descriptions of people vomiting all around them.

“My nephew,” he said suddenly in the midst of this discussion, indicating the hairy man with an elegant inclination of his head, and they had both stared at the nephew, waiting, for it seemed as though the hotelier had been planning to tell them something, perhaps about the nephew and vomiting, but after a lengthy silence it occurred to them that the hotelier had simply been introducing his nephew, and he, coming to the same realization, grunted belatedly in their direction.

Later, once they had filled in the register, shown their passports, and paid for the night, the hotelier escorted them to their room, gliding along ahead of them in his ghostly white djellaba. The nephew had not moved from his chair as the three of them completed the paperwork, though he did rise as they left the room, in what they had imagined was a gentlemanly gesture, but in fact, he was simply moving himself nearer the desk, upon which sat a bell that he began to tap impatiently even as they made their way down the hallway to their room. Each time they admired some aspect of their room — the tightness with which the sheets had been tucked, the coolness of the tiles, the way that sparseness translated into beauty — the hotelier bowed slightly in their direction while the bell punctuated their comments like a series of exclamation marks, lending urgency and falseness to everything they said.

“My nephew,” the hotelier said at last. “He requires my assistance.” And with a final bow, he was gone.

Each morning when they go out, the hotelier waves at them from the courtyard, where he can always be found hanging sheets and towels to dry, and when they return in the afternoon, he insists in his gently assertive way that they drink tea with him in his quarters, which they do, the three of them stumbling along in French while he shows them, day after day, the same collection of six or seven magazine photographs of Richard Chamberlain, whose face he strokes absentmindedly with his thumb as they converse. Beyond these photographs, there is nothing about his room that suggests an individual presence, but it is beautiful nonetheless, with a bed in one corner, prayer mat tucked beneath it, and a living area to the other side, which is where they drink their tea, sitting close together on cushions made from old saddlebags around a brass table, round like an oversized plate, with spindly wooden legs that hold it several feet off the ground.

“Please stay tomorrow,” the hotelier urges them each day as they are backing toward the door, having finished their sweet mint tea and finished looking at the photos of Richard Chamberlain and discussing his performance in The Thorn Birds, which neither woman has seen and the hotelier has seen only in English, a language he does not understand. And they do stay. They had planned to spend just two days in Tafraoute, two days in which to view the Belgian’s rocks and the pink homes, but they have been here seven, a full week, and still they have no plan to leave. It is not the hotelier’s daily invitation that holds them but an overwhelming lethargy unlike anything they have ever experienced and to which both women have succumbed, blaming it on the bus trip with its endless curves and vomiting. But they both know that it is more than that.

They stay even though they have run out of tourist activities — or perhaps because they have run out of them. Sometimes, they begin a game of dominoes with their breakfast and play through the morning until lunchtime, looking around the café in wonder to realize that hours have passed, that customers have come and gone, that bread and jam have given way to brochettes and soup. Other days, lying side by side on the twin beds in their room, they read books that the hotelier has given them, no doubt to keep them here, books left behind by other travelers, the sorts of books that they privately scoffed at their colleagues for reading back home, books about espionage and romance and mystery novels that pulled one along out of a simple need to know who had committed the murder and why — neatly answerable questions that did not beget other questions, which meant that once the book was finished, it stayed finished. They read quickly, skimming the pages for relevant facts, though neither of them has ever read in this way before, without regard to style or details, to the nuances of description. They finish two or three books a day, but after several days of this, they find themselves shocked at how easily they have been drawn back into a routine, as though routine were an addiction that their bodies held fast to even as their minds plotted an escape.

When they return to the hotel on the eighth afternoon, the hotelier is not waiting for them with tea, and though they have made a point to complain to each other about his presumptuousness and the sickly sweetness of the tea, they feel strangely offended by his absence, offended and disappointed. When he still has not made an appearance by the time they return from dinner, they are worried as well, for he can always be found washing out the bathroom sinks or rinsing down the foyer tiles or, once these tasks are completed, sitting quietly at his window seat, watching the world outside, the world from which he has exiled himself. Bernadette and Sheila have wondered aloud what it is he thinks as he sits there — whether he is thinking regretfully about his decision to leave the world or feeling vindicated by it. Never has it occurred to them that he still considers himself a part of it, considers himself the one whose job it is to sit and watch.

Because they have grown to expect his presence, they do not know how to respond to his absence, and they stand uncertainly in the foyer for several minutes, talking more loudly than usual in hopes that he will hear them and appear, but finally they decide that they better check on him, so they rap quietly at the door to his quarters, quietly because they are from Minnesota and this act goes against all they believe in. They can hear activity inside — the swish of fabric and voices, low and urgent — but when the hotelier finally comes to the door and peers out, they see that he is crying, and neither of them knows what to say.

“Yes?” he asks finally, and Sheila blurts out something about missing their afternoon tea. He studies them impassively for a moment and says, “Fine, I shall make tea. Please wait in the foyer.” Though they both try to explain that that is not what Sheila had meant, he closes the door, and they have no choice but to go to the foyer and wait. When he enters carrying a tray and bends to place it on the table in front of them, they see first that he has brought only two cups and then that his right eye, which he had made an effort to turn away from them before, is puffy with the first traces of bruising.

“What happened to your eye?” asks Bernadette before she can think better of it.

“Please do not study my eye,” replies the hotelier, and neither woman can decide whether he has used the word study accidentally, because his French is limited, or intentionally, a purposeful attempt to infuse the conversation with a formality that would preclude further discussion. In any case, it achieves the latter effect, and the two sit drinking their tea, which is so sweet that their teeth and tongues thicken with sugar and feel too large for their mouths. As they walk down the hallway to their room, they pause beside the hotelier, who has settled in at his window seat, and though they call out a mumbled good evening, he does not return their greeting, does not even turn toward them, and once they are back in their room and changing into their nightshirts, they do not discuss the hotelier because they are both too overcome by sadness.

They awaken early the next morning, and though they have slept well, the sadness has only intensified, has become so powerful that each woman feels the room cannot accommodate the two of them and it, and so they dress quickly and, without speaking about it first, pack their bags and set them by the door.

“Well,” says Bernadette, “I guess this is it.”

“Yes,” Sheila agrees, “I guess it is.”

“Ladies,” the hotelier sings out when they appear in the foyer with their backpacks. His eye is in full color now, but he makes no attempt to hide it as he had done the night before. “Please, let us have some tea together.” He gestures toward his quarters, and, because they are leaving, they feel that they cannot say no. They find his low table set with three teacups as well as a loaf of bread, jam, and a small plate of olives, the three cushions arranged neatly around it, and he allows them to survey it for a moment before urging them, with a graceful sweep of his arm, in the direction of it all.

“I am sorry, ladies, about the difficulties,” he tells them once they are seated, his voice strangely animated. “My nephew, you see. He came for a visit.” He turns his attention to pouring the tea, and the women look around the room one last time, trying not to fidget, though they are anxious to leave, to make a first step toward departure, even one that will mean sitting in the market for another two hours awaiting the arrival of the bus. Nearby, so close, in fact, that they wonder how they could not have noticed them immediately, are the Richard Chamberlain photographs, in shreds, laid out on the open prayer rug. Somebody, presumably the hotelier, has attempted to mend them, but with limited success, the resulting composites bringing together features of the actor from conflicting decades, drastically differing hairstyles and clothing, a facial topography of wrinkles that appear and disappear and then appear again.

The hotelier acknowledges the damage with a shrug. “My nephew,” he says sadly but then, perhaps because they both look guiltily away from the photographs, he adds almost cheerfully, “There is nothing that can be done, but he will bring me others. Better ones. He is sorry for what he has done.” Giving a small, authoritative clap of his hands first in Bernadette’s direction and then in Sheila’s, he orders them, “Eat, please,” and they both take up their bread, on which he has spread jam, and begin the process of chewing and swallowing.

Nothing more is said as they finish eating, drink one cup of tea, and accept, though do not drink, a second, but when they stretch their legs in anticipation of leaving, the hotelier rises first and prepares to speak. He stands before them for perhaps forty seconds, clearing his throat repeatedly until both women fear that he might have a piece of bread lodged in it, but at last he stops, gasps once, and his hands, twin birds that generally flutter about excitedly when he speaks, dart inside the sleeves of his djellaba and are still.

“You see, I love him, and that must be considered,” he announces, ceremoniously and with great finality, and only now do the women understand how much they have come to rely on his hands, their fluttering, distracting lightness. He smiles at them both then, sweetly, and in the awkward silence that ensues, the women begin to move away from each other, distractedly, their buttocks rotating on the scratchy woolen cushions until they are sitting with their backs nearly touching, faces cast in opposite directions, as though they can no longer bear the thought of their eyes resting on the same things. To a third party, not the hotelier but a casual observer, one able to take in, from a measured remove, both women at once, they might resemble a pair of matching bookends that have drawn more closely together in order to accommodate the steadily depleting collection of books that they once held between them.