Thirst Read Free Page B

afternoon?” Elizabeth asked Nula.
    “Marvelous,” Nula said.
    It was then that Elizabeth noticed the flowers, still in Nula’s hands, unwilted and fragrant despite the crush of the metro. Elizabeth raised her eyebrows in an expression of curious amusement. But Nula, surprised by her own reply, didn’t wish to answer any more questions. She pushed past her, hurriedly explaining, “I must put these in some water.”
    Nula found a blue cut glass vase in the kitchen cabinet and ran the tap. She removed the cellotape and unfurled the newspaper. As the flowers shifted, an object fell from between their stalks and onto the tiled floor. It was a key chain, without keys, and attached to it was a small tag with a phone number written on it in a very tight, careful print, and a charm: an anatomically correct, dusky plastic phallus.

    Nula put her hands to her chest and shrieked, and she was sure the shriek reached every flat in the building, and into the concierge’s office, and onto the street, frightening passersby and perhaps even stopping traffic. But when Madame Reynourd came into the kitchen, it was with an unalarmed step and, when she saw what lay on the floor, it raised a soft, pleased smile.

Thirst
    I n hesitant, ungrammatical English occasionally swept clean by a gust of fluency, he told her that once while traveling across the desert, he had lost his way, and then his water. He nearly died, or perhaps he did die, and Paris was heaven. If so, he had first passed through hell, on the back of a rasping, worn-out camel. He told her that his lips had become puffy and cracked, his throat burned, he could hardly breathe. He was so dehydrated he had stopped perspiring. He passed in and out of delirium: He thought that he had entered a great but waterless city. Its people lined its unshaded boulevards, their stares reproaching him for his empty canteen. He rode further into the desert, no longer recalling his direction. When he dismounted he discovered that he could barely stand. He pulled his prayer mat from his pack, laid it on the baked sand in front of the animal, and wrapped his hand with a piece of cloth from his headdress. Then he shoved his fist between the camel’s jaws. As he pushed his fingers against the back of its tongue, the camel bucked and tried to bite, but he held on to the beast with all that was left of his life. Finally, throwing its long, mournful head forward and furiously stamping the ground, and with a strangled, almost human cry, the camel vomited. Henri drank the vomit off the mat.
    “You’re revolting,” Nula said, jarred fully awake. She
had been gazing through the skylight and had lost herself in the desolate afternoon sky. She turned to him and lifted her head onto the heel of her hand.
    He said, “A day later I reached a wadi.”
     
    They had met the day before at a bistro. His name was Henri, a French name, but his surname was Tatahouine. She had asked him to spell it. He was Moroccan. Nula didn’t tell Madame Reynourd that she had phoned him, nor that she was going to see him, but she left his name and the name of the bistro on a note pad in a prominent position on her dresser. Just in case.
    Just in case what? That she’d be abducted? Attacked? What? All week the twenty-year-old au pair had been in a peculiar state of mind, some species of happy dread. She knew she would eventually sleep with the Arab, and thereby lose that nearly abstract quality, or condition, that had seemed to have become her most tangible characteristic, but she had expected Paris to be its undoing anyway, and the waiting was worse than anything that might in fact happen. The Arab was her fate; so be it. She was not afraid. She had already proved that by leaving Ireland. And even as she was made dizzy by the thought of what she was doing, she was telling herself she would keep her head. If he wanted her, he would have to court her. She had nearly rung off when he suggested that she come directly to his flat. No,