Sentimental Journey Read Free

hand.
    He was still a few feet away.
    Faster! Faster! Faster! I can make it! I can!
    Bullets suddenly ate the ground behind him.
    Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
    The bullets sounded like popcorn. Firecrackers. Cap guns. They never sounded real. They never sounded like they could kill you.

PART TWO
     
    RABAT , MOROCCO
     
    1941
     

“I WONDER WHAT’S BECOME OF SALLY”
     
    Someone was following her. She’d been listening to those footsteps for a while, a cadence that was resolute and determined—the way men walked. Along the restless edges of the market district, the streets were a terrain of silent sandals, soft-soled babouches and dusty bare feet. His hard leather boots sounded heavy and bellicose.
    To test him, she shifted left.
    He shifted left.
    She sped up, so did he.
    She passed a vendor’s booth where the air was filled with the acrid scent of tannin. A leather seller with newly dyed goods from Fez .
    She stopped suddenly, turned back as if something had caught her eye.
    His footsteps stopped, too, a silent echo of her motion that was a mere second off. She turned and stepped out of the cool morning shadows of the buildings along the Rue Souika. She forced herself to walk casually while still weaving in and out of the growing crowd.
    Under the shadow of a mosque, a wall fountain at the Attarine spilled into a copper basin that made a deep tonal sound like water spilling into a sea cave. About a hundred feet away the newer dirt street changed to old flat stone paving, and once there, she moved between people, walking faster than anyone around her, moving farther into the center of the crowd.
    The moment the man stepped from the dirt street to the stone paving, she heard him. His feet slipped; the sound was gritty, a scraping, chalkboard noise, the kind you felt in the back of your teeth.
    She couldn’t seem to shake him. She sped up, but from behind her came the sharp, angry voices of those he shoved aside. Her fear grew cold and chilly, a live thing. It did more than scare her silly. It did more than send eerie sensations down her arms and spine. Fear made her suddenly aware that she had done a stupid thing.
    Fool . . . fool . . . fool . . . You weren’t free until the plane was in the air. Until the boat was on the sea. Until the train crossed the border. You weren’t home until you walked through the door.
    She did not look back. It would do no good. At the corner she turned onto a narrow street. Slatted awnings hung protectively over the fruit-and-vegetable sellers and cast shade down on her head. With each breath she took she could smell the ripe casaba melons displayed on wooden tables made of old crates. It was like running through a sweet, invisible fog.
    The crowd moved in the same direction, toward an open area where the harsh tropical sun once again beat down from overhead. Within moments she was hot and sweaty and running past the fragrant strawberry trees, into the zenana of the henna souk: the women’s domain, where they chattered like desert larks. Here, antimony sulfide from eye kohl filled the hot, dry air, along with the stench of ghassoul from bath soap made of clay.
    From nearby came the nasal voice of a woman singing a song about a lost nightingale. A goat brayed. She wanted to cry out for help herself. But the women here were worse than the men. No one in the women’s souk would help the foolish American who was not wearing the anonymity of a haik.
    Because she was finally going home, because the papers she carried would finally give her freedom, she wore a smart felt hat over her black hair, a hat she hadn’t worn in months. A frivolous thing, wearing the hat, wearing her hair down. Just that morning she had finger-waved it, then rolled it under into a pageboy, a style that brushed her shoulders and made her feel feminine in a place where femininity was hidden away as if it were shameful to be a woman.
    Her arrogant, self-important intention to prove a point for all of womankind