Free The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne

without uttering a word.
    “He laughed,” Driss went on bitterly. “He said I’d end up as a janitor if I was lucky.”
    “It is what fathers say to keep us safe.”
    “He is jealous of me, like all fathers. That’s all.”
    Insulting their fathers made Ismael nervous, and he said nothing. He scratched his ear and waited for the conversation to move on, and he felt the coiled tension inside the older boy.
    “But you came back,” he said at length.
    Driss admitted that it was inevitable.
    “I didn’t like the food over there. Unbelievers are unbelievers.”
    Yes, so much was unpleasantly undeniable, and Ismael said so.
    “But still,” he added, “we have to make money here.”
    “I have a plan,” Driss said. “Don’t you worry about making money. There’s money everywhere here. Look around you.”
    But it’s not for us, Ismael thought. It’s for Norway.
    Driss lay on his back and stared up at the constellations, none of which he knew.
    “I know what you think, Ismael. You are not bold.”
    “I think too …”
    “You think that you don’t want to spend the rest of your life hammering at fossils in a trench. But you are vague. You do not have a plan.”
    “No,” the other conceded.
    When they were a little stoned, Ismael asked him about France. Did he remember the pictures of Sweden that Driss’s father so treasured that he stuck to the walls of his house? A land green and wet, with wonderful, fearsome pornography and hotels with fireplaces. A land protected by clouds. A land blessed by someone else’s god.
    “It is not green,” Driss corrected him. “The clouds make it gray.”
    They laughed.
    “Truly,” Ismael said.
    “I wouldn’t exchange it for my desert. The tar of my country is better than the honey of others.” It was a good proverb.
    “You would exchange it.”
    “I was there, you fool. Everything there deceived me. It is not what you think, what you all think. You have it all wrong, you suckers. There is nothing there for us.”
    “Nothing at all?”
    Driss shook his head.
    “Nothing at all. Even the sex is not for us.”
    “It’s a shame.”
    “Perhaps, perhaps not.”
    Driss reached over and opened the can of Red Bull they had brought for the morning. Ismael’s burning curiosity irritated him, and yet it was an audience at least. His nightmares had been coming back, andwhen he slept out at Mirzan, he had visions. The foreman’s little children used to throw stones at him until their father intervened. He let them torment him—it probably did them good. It was a favor the foreman would return later. That night, he would dream of the motorway from Málaga to the French border, which he had traversed on the back of a vegetable truck driven by a maghrébin . An endless road worthy of a nightmare.
    Ismael lit his second joint and they braced themselves against the wind blowing up from the road, where nothing could be seen.
    “But tell me,” he said. “How did you get to Spain? And you with no money and no papers. How did you do it?”
    “It’s a long story, and the truth is, I made it up as I went along. I had no real plans.”
    “You went to Spain on an illegal boat, the preppers say.”
    “True. I landed on the other side, but it was not as you all think. There was no trouble. I landed next to a luxury marina and swam in.”
    “God be thanked.”
    “It wasn’t even luck. The traffickers waited until the coast guard were away. It made me laugh.”
    So that’s how it was, Ismael thought. Anyone could do the same.
    “You paid them,” he said to Driss.
    The older boy began to talk. He didn’t care if Ismael was even there; he only wanted to talk about himself.
    “It was July,” he said, “and the heat had come. I walked through the marina at three in the morning, the marina called Sotogrande. No one even noticed me. I had nothing, not even a bag. Not even a watch. Nothing stopped me.”

Six
    N HOUR PAST DAWN A FEW GUESTS WERE SEEN WANDERING about the ksour in