Gorgeous East Read Online Free Page B

staring out the scratchy window. “Living in the middle of all that filth for generations.”
    “Since 1973, Colonel de Noyer”—came a voice at his shoulder—“during the first Polisario war. That’s when the Moroccans drove them out of the coastal districts.”
    The voice—nasal, self-important—belonged to Dr. Hanz Milhauz, the man from MINURSO, a befuddling acronym that somehow described the UN Mission to the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara, to which Phillipe had just been sent as an observer by the French government. French military observers are almost always drawn from the officer corps of the Foreign Legion; Phillipe had observed multinational peacekeeping forces at work all over the world in the last five or six years: Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus and the Comoros, Somalia, Kosovo again, Afghanistan, Iraq.
    “It was the necessity of fighting on two fronts that brought Polisario to their knees,” Dr. Milhauz continued. “With half their forces besieging Nouakchott, they couldn’t hold Laayoune against the Moroccans. The evacuation was terrible, a botched job. Thousands died of starvation, the trail of bodies stretched from the Atlantic to the mountains.”
    “Yes, I know all the history—” Phillipe began, but Dr. Milhauz made an impatient gesture. The little man acted as if Phillipe had stepped onto the plane at the UN Mission Compound in Dahkla that morning with a copy of Paris Match under his arm and nothing but the latest celebrity gossip in his head.
    “You may know,” Dr. Milhauz said, “but you don’t truly understand. How could you? No one in Europe understands. They see refugees and say ‘Well, let’s find a way to send them home.’ But in this case, the home in question does not exist. The Saharoui Arab Democratic Republic is a fiction. It has been eroded, wiped off the map, not by wind and rain but by international politics. This is a very intricate situation. Extremely complex. One must first take into consideration the web of tribal affiliations, then the influence of the mullahs—they’re called Marabouts out here, and they’re more like magicians or miracle workers than holy men”—a breathy pause—“simply put, we’ve got to do our best to avoid the kind of disastrous mistakes the Americans are making in Iraq.”
    “Which mistakes are you referring to exactly?” Phillipe stifled a yawn. “I was there, you know.”
    “Oh, well—” Dr. Milhauz frowned. “Everything they’ve done has been a mistake, hasn’t it? A direct result of unilateralist arrogance!”
    Dr. Milhauz was Swiss-German, a doctor, not the medical variety, only a Ph.D., one of those self-important economists who infest the UN and insist on introducing themselves to everyone as Dr. So-and-So. He had nervous hands, constantly in motion, and was as round as a person could be, like a walking egg—which somehow made his imperious conversational style all the more ridiculous. His black round-framed eyeglasses—in the style of Le Corbusier—only emphasized his general roundness. He wore the kind of great-white-hunter khaki outfit favored by UN functionaries and television journalists in desert places, the vest and pants covered with inexplicable flaps and pockets, some zippered, others buttoned, all filled with nothing in particular.
    “Look—over there, to the west.” Dr. Milhauz poked an insistent finger at the window. “You can just see the Moroccan Berm. You’ve heard of the Berm, haven’t you?”
    “Yes, I’ve heard of the Berm.”
    “Well there it is, take a good look. The enormity of the thing can only be appreciated from up here.”
    Phillipe squinted into the yellow light and saw two parallel lines inscribed on the desert in the distance as if by a giant hand. The Berm was a defensive wall of sand sixty feet high and two thousand kilometers long, backed by a corresponding sixty-foot-deep trench, undulating over dune and guelb and dry wadi, side by side across the desert floor