Visions of Isabelle by William Bayer Page A

with tears.
    "Who in Moscow could have known," she asks, "that at the age of fifty-nine I would find God again?"
    As they kneel in proud submission, Isabelle looks at her mother and feels moved and sad. She prays that what she's heard is true: that those who come by choice to rest in Islam's warm shade are dearer to God even than those born to His faith.
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    I n October Old Nathalie falls ill–chest pains, soreness in her bosom, headaches, lack of energy. She stays out on the terrace nearly all the time, absorbing the autumnal sun. Isabelle does the shopping by herself, then spends as much time with her mother as she can. But the pressure she has known all her life–the need to move, to explore, to lose herself in strange quarters–this pressure is redoubled under the duress of the illness, and the moment the old woman slips into sleep, Isabelle flees the house.
    She wanders and marches, peering into people's faces, sitting down in cafés, smoking her pipe. Sometimes she does not return until dawn, and then, after looking into Old Nathalie's room, hearing the labored breathing of her sleep, she flings herself upon her bed, and dreams of adventures she knows will come.
    She is waiting for something, a release perhaps–some trigger that will be pulled and will propel her into life. For the moment she is content in Bône, though she senses that in time she will want to move away from the shore. There are things in the south: people, places, ways of life awaiting her discovery. But for now Old Nathalie must be cared for; a return to Geneva and all the madness there is impossible.

    O n the evening of November 27 she goes out before the sun is down. The light is crisp, the trees green. It has been raining for several days and, as always after a shower, the sky is clear and the air has taken on an extraordinary glow.
    She walks down the hill into the medina toward the port, choosing a long and tortuous route that leads her to a notorious café. This is a place where the kif is alleged to be the very best–cut with chira with belladonna added, a mixture guaranteed to dilate the pupils even as the vision is enlarged.
    She lies here on mats made of rushes strewn over bales of hay. In the corner, behind a screen of candles, an Arab plays a flute. She stares about at the faces of the men, but as her lungs absorb the smoke, she loses her ability to concentrate and fixes her eyes upon one of the flickering flames, thinking of night and shade and death. She does not understand why she feels depressed. She has escaped, after all, and to a place she loves. But she senses that her life is soon to change–that something in it is flickering and will soon go dark.
    The shadows of the other men, settled, immobile, reposed, seem stained upon the walls. It seems to her that they are, all of them, timeless and lost in the corner of an enormous cave. After a long while of being immersed in sadness, she falls into intoxicated sleep.
    At dawn she wakes to find herself in a room of sleeping men. They lie, like cattle, in heaps covered by dark burnooses that give off an odor of cold damp wool. All the candles have decomposed to pools of wax, and outside, on the narrow cobbled lanes, she can hear the patter of rain, and somewhere farther off, the slamming of a shutter before the wind.
    Slowly she pulls herself to her feet, checks to see that nothing has troubled her in the night. Then she makes her way to the streets. Rain runs in gutters toward the port; the cobbles are slick with mud and donkey dung. Few people walk the medina: some old women with heaps of twigs piled on their backs, some men in shabby skullcaps pushing wagons filled with fruit. She pulls up her woolen hood, and shivering, weary, aching in her bones, hunches her shoulders and begins to climb.
    When she emerges at the top of the hill, an enormous gust twirls her against a wall. As she enters Rue Bugeaud the rain slashes down from all angles; she cannot