Alexandra Singer Read Free

received the Historian’s unexpected offer, she accepted immediately.
    But she was not due to arrive before the summer, and in the meantime she found that she was unable to relinquish George completely. Occasionally she encountered him at some place they had once
frequented together, but he was elusive and refused to be engaged in conversation. Maia fled to Paris, where several weeks later George decided to follow her. She let him into her tiny apartment
and he stayed for a week.
    ‘I can’t pretend I am not pleased to see you, but I don’t understand why you are here.’
    No answer came, just emotionless eyes blinking at her in the dark.
    On their last afternoon together, she felt that she was making love with a demon; he bit her so hard he drew blood. He was unusually energetic, as he pushed her down onto the bed. Maia drew back
from him in an instinctive act of self preservation, but then in a surge of pure hatred threw herself towards him. The late June heat glared through the shuttered windows into the apartment, so
that she imagined herself free from George’s hold of her. She blinked away her tears of disappointment.
    They parted on the corner just as dusk was falling. From an old, misplaced duty, he accompanied her to the Metro. Maia thought that she imagined the old companionship was still there; their arms
brushed together, but he then became conscious of it and suddenly uncomfortable.
    ‘Good luck with everything,’ said George.
    ‘Good luck? What do you mean? What an odd thing to say.’
    He looked at her and he knew that this was not what she had been expecting. But with those words he conveniently and effortlessly closed the shutters on their relationship.
    Now when she saw the distance between them, Maia could barely believe how they had passed the afternoon. Maia watched George retreat; the last reminder of a false idealism now on his way to his
own form of normality, through the flashing lights and the advertisements for cheap and perverse sex. He never looked back, and eventually, Maia turned and walked away. At Pigalle, two hard faced
policemen were frisking an African at the entrance to the Metro. His carved wooden animals were scattered forlornly over the pavement. As she went underground, her Carte Orange irritated her by
sticking in the barrier.
    She hoped that she could forget about George. Maia was astonished at how the years of involvement with one man might be destroyed in one amicable afternoon. Now, in the heat of a foreign city,
his face came up again and again before her in the darkness. She was ashamed at how she had crumbled before him; now she wished that she might have been able to salvage at least some dignity. But
there was no point. He had been successfully making a fool of her for years.
    Now she wanted to be out of touch, and Morocco was the perfect place to go. For her it was a sort of revenge; a revenge for always being kept waiting, a symptom of an underlying, deeper
dissatisfaction. Under the pretext of needing space to paint, Maia’s plan was to become unobtainable.
    In the bed, she wept, why she wept she didn’t know. She sensed the light change in the room, telling her that outside it was moving seamlessly from morning to dusk. As she settled back
down into the shadows, the day slipped on and the sun sank ever lower over the city. In between her bouts of unconsciousness and wakeful lucidity, her dreams were still rotten. In the courtyard
below the maggots fell from the orange trees and dropped into the shallow pool as outside the people teemed into the city streets and came awake for the night.

 
Chapter 2
    The moment Maia stepped outside the house, the hassle in the narrow streets was tremendous. So overwhelming was the noise that she was barely able to think, barely able to
understand where she was going. From the labyrinthine alleys the Arabs seethed into the streets, and above the wailing of the muezzin a relentless drumming could be heard which