Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

Hand, magazine in hand, stepped into the bathroom. "I'm goin in," he said, meaning half an hour at least – twenty minutes for the bowel movement, ten for the after-shower. Hand has to shower every time he dumps; I have no idea why.

I called my mom.

"So who got it today?" she asked "More basketball players?"

"No, now we're asking for directions."

"Where?"

"To wherever we're going."

"Don't you have maps?"

"Of course."

"So you know where you're going."

"Oh yeah, always."

"And they give you directions, and you give them money."

"Yeah. The way we're supposed to go is always pretty obvious. We're heading that way, we stop and make sure, unload some money, and keep moving."

"And they don't know you know?"

"We don't know. They might."

"I think they do. They know you know the way."

"Maybe."

"And then you give them money."

"Right."

"So it's all pretend."

Hand burst from the bathroom like he'd been feeding bears and they'd turned on him. His own stink had overtaken him and now threw itself around the room.

"I don't know," I said.

We had a beer in the hotel bar, called Timofey's. The bartender was a young woman who looked at my face and gave me a commiserative pout. I accepted this and smiled. We were alone in the room, except a very old woman, white with hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, at a table overlooking the lobby, with a glass of something clear before her, her small hands cupped around it.

"We should sit down with her," Hand said.

I knew he was right. But I didn't know people of her age. She could hate us. She was easily seventy-five.

Hand was already halfway there. I followed. By the time I made it to her table, Hand was sitting, leg crossed, ankle on his knee. I don't know what he'd used as an opening line. She held her hand to me. I shook its fingers, which were cold and the skin loose, a small leather bag full of delicate tools. She was French. We introduced ourselves; her last name (she gave us both) sounded like Ingres. Hand sat to her right and I across from her. She was a beautiful woman. Up close she looked younger, maybe sixty. Her nose was still aquiline, her eyes beaming. She sipped her drink through its tiny red straw.

"You two are lovers," she said.

Hand laughed. My eyebrows skimmed my hairline.

"Well, thank you," Hand said. "We take that as a compliment. But no."

She cocked her head and looked between us.

"You are brothers. One is adopted."

"No," I said. I realized I was grinning. I wanted her to keep guessing.

"I know nothing anymore," she said, pursing her lips in a dissatisfied sort of way. "I pretend at wisdom."

She was the oldest person I'd spoken to in probably five or six years, since my Mom's uncle Jarvis died, who she loved because he'd taught her to ride horses and tan hides. But Jarvis had never spoken like this. She was scanning my face now, her head pivoting like she was trying to see around me.

"Accident," I said.

"I think so," she said. "Something to forget, I think."

"I'm trying," I said. "Maybe, yes."

Hand asked why she was here. She said she'd come here with her husband just after they were married, and had come back with him every so often thereafter. He was dead five years now.

"This is our fiftieth anniversary," she said, smiling in an exhausted way. Her sentences trailed off, the last words like hats taken by a sudden gust? "What brings you to Marrakesh?" she asked. "Golf?" She looked at our clothes. "You do not look like golfers."

"We're botanists," said Hand.

God Almighty.

"You're lying," she said, then sipped her drink with her eyes still upon him. Ella Fitzgerald was singing from a small speaker over our heads. Maybe Sarah Vaughn. I worried briefly that they, Sarah and Ella, knew I didn't know the difference, and were angry.

"You lived through WWII," Hand said.

She laughed.

"Where were you?" he asked.

"Cernay," she said.

And they were off, together.

"Was that Occupied or Vichy?"

"Occupied."

He was leaning in. The more I watched her the more I thought she might be younger. Her cheeks were tight and full of color. Her features were delicate but strong, like a face of blown glass.

"We helped," she said. "My mother and I ran the farm."

"You helped the maquis."

"How do you know all this?"

"Am I right? You were near Switzerland maybe?"

"You're a fan of the war," she said, pointing at him with her tiny finger, wrapped in skin as with a loose bandage.

"I've studied it," Hand said. "Not a fan, a student."

"Me too," I said, thinking that my current reading of Churchill somehow qualified.

"Did your father fight?" Hand asked.

"He was killed in the first month of the war," she said. "He wasn't army. He was a truck driver, killed near Abbeville."

"Sorry," I said.

"His brother, my uncle, went to the hills," she said. "There was a forest above our farm, in a valley. He stayed there for years. With three Hungarians."

"Anti-fascists."

"Yes."

"Was your uncle a Communist?"

"No. Not at that time. No."

"How old were you?" I asked.

"When?"

"When what?"

"When they invaded France." I could never say the word Nazi.

"Nineteen," she said.

She and her mother had sheltered escaped POWs crossing over to Switzerland. They'd underreported farm production to the Germans and gave the surplus to those passing through and fighting from the hills. She had married one of the Hungarian soldiers.

"We're not botanists," I said. "We're just here."

"He's on a lightbulb," Hand said. She looked at me, smiling politely.

"He was the Number Two swimmer in all of Wisconsin," I said. We were such jerks.

"What did you two do after the war?" Hand asked.

"We left," she said. "We left France. My uncle was killed in the town square by French Nazis. He had poisoned their food, had killed six, so they flayed him and then shot him. It was a time… It was not very real after some time. Or perhaps it was.

She was trailing off again.

"You don't have to, you know," I said.

"I know," she said. "But it is so rare to be able to…" she laughed a little and wiped her mouth with her napkin. "To educate a few young Americans."

She sipped her drink. She was something.

"I remember it like a week… it was like you remember a time in bed, sick. When your head is…" She was throwing her hands around her head as if directing tiny winds, or weaving.

"The next year," she continued, "my mother died in 1944 of complications during labor," she said, and, registering our surprise, said, "she was forty-two and it was a priest, of all things. But that is another story. We had to leave the town. We could not stay."

They had moved to Amsterdam, where her husband, who she was calling Pipi, I think, resumed his work as an engineer. They never had children. Hand was staring at her watch, a simple gold trimmed piece held by a wide black band. A man's watch.

It was getting late and we had to go. We told her where.

"You should come with us," Hand said, in his magnanimous host sort of way. Then, realizing the quality of his notion, he blurted: "You should!"

"You won't find the people you want up there," she said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Maybe you will. I shouldn't discourage you."

"Come with us!" Hand repeated.

"To the mountains? It's 9:30."

"We're going to the Djemaa el-Fna first."

"Oh please," she said, her hand resting on Hand's. "You two will do your adventure without me. I've seen the mountains during the day. I can't imagine that could be improved upon."

– Hand, we should stay here with her. We will be her companions on this night. And her stories! They will be worth more than anything we could find in the mountains.