David Henniger’s guilt over Driss’s death

David Henniger’s guilt over Driss’s death takes shape as a struggle between wanting forgiveness and resisting the full weight of responsibility. David anticipates that Driss’s family will insist he return to the village, and he imagines their demand through a prejudiced language of extortion; yet he also recognizes that no legal acquittal can provide the forgiveness he seeks from Abdellah. Across the funeral and the hours that follow, his account of himself shifts from resignation to remorse to self-protection, without reaching certainty.

The demand for forgiveness and the bargain

Hamid tells David that the invitation to return is polite in form but likely to become an insistence. David is stupefied for a few minutes, though he has expected something of the kind. He assumes the family will hold him in the village until he agrees, and labels their imagined demand with a bandit mentality and an extort-the-infidel ethic. That language reveals his suspicion and his readiness to interpret their actions through a hostile generalization. At the same time, he knows that Richard Galloway would argue that returning for a night and paying his respects is easier than resisting. A handout would be affordable to a man with David’s income; the money itself is not the real obstacle.

What David finds difficult, and then strangely relieving, is the prospect of being judged by the people directly affected. He believes everyone tacitly considers him guilty and thinks that accepting the return might let him be forgiven. In his mind, Abdellah is the one person whose forgiveness could matter: if this grieving father does not forgive him, no one can. David distinguishes that personal absolution from being exonerated by the authorities. The difference, as he understands it, is precisely why he feels compelled to do what Abdellah asks. The village journey becomes both an obligation and a way out of the impasse. His fear that he will remain marked if unforgiven makes clear that he wants more than to escape a practical inconvenience; he wants the moral status of the death to be settled, though he cannot settle it himself.

Remorse in the marriage

Before leaving, David takes Jo Henniger’s hand and admits, inwardly, that he is relieved to be going. He looks down at two ice cubes in diluted Johnny Walker and thinks that the fault is his, making his departure seem best for Jo as well as for himself. The small, visible remainder of the drink accompanies a thought he cannot bring himself to say directly: stay and have fun. His attempt to present the trip as a desert jaunt, even invoking the idea of tea in the Sahara, is undercut by his strained manner and the bitterness with which he describes the expected apology as a demand for closure or solidarity.

Jo asks whether he will say he is sorry. David says that he will, and that he is sorry; Jo replies that it is a relief, because for a while she thought he was not. The exchange shows that his remorse is not only a private feeling but something his wife has doubted and needs to hear expressed. Yet the conversation does not demonstrate that the doubt has been resolved. David offers the words and accepts the journey, while the gap between his outward promise and his unsettled inward account remains. His relief at leaving and his claim of sorrow coexist rather than cancel each other.

Accidents, error, and responsibility

At Tafal’aalt, David’s thoughts connect Driss’s death to an earlier professional failure. He recalls losing an agonizing lawsuit after an old woman in Chiswick Park died with a tumor he had misdiagnosed. He wonders whether he failed to concentrate or whether his medical instincts had become less sensitive than usual; he also considers that some part of his unconscious may have led him astray. The memory gives his present ordeal a disturbing pattern: in both cases, he sees an error with irreversible consequences, followed by blame that falls on him. He calls the earlier mistake human error—his error—while also dwelling on how the fury of the injured medical consumer landed on his lone head.

Rather than treating the resemblance as coincidence, David suspects that his unconscious is at work again, tightening around him like a noose. He has felt a doom approaching and wonders whether Jo noticed it, though he believes their dwindling intimacy leaves her too far away to sense it. What she can perceive, in his view, is his irritability and withdrawal, which he imagines as another fault for which he will eventually need forgiveness. He nevertheless insists to himself that he has done nothing wicked. His proposed account is cumulative: one accident after another. But he cannot keep that account closed. He asks whether people produce their own accidents through the sum of small neglects. The question unsettles the distinction he wants to preserve between an unintended outcome and responsibility for the conditions that made it possible.

The burial and unresolved guilt

After sleeping through his usual nightmares, David wakes to the reddish light on the cliff and is sure the burial is already over. It has, in fact, passed quickly. Driss’s mother died years earlier; aunts and cousins weep and curse at the desert graveyard, while the men stand silent, having absorbed their grief inwardly. David’s certainty that the funeral has ended, followed by the plain report that it did, gives the burial a starkly compressed place in his consciousness. The family’s grief is not an abstract judgment waiting to be answered: it is present in the bereaved relatives and in the men’s silence. David’s desire for forgiveness takes place against a loss that his private language of accident cannot undo.

Later, as night falls, David watches the moonlit cliff and the buckets hanging on ropes, hears men singing mournfully around a dead goat, and becomes afraid when he senses Abdellah approaching. The fear sharpens his unresolved question about what he regrets: he is not sure whether he is more sorry for what he did or for himself. As the door begins to open, he mutters that the boy by the road had been going to rob him, kill them, and take the car. The claim returns him to the danger he believes he faced, but it also serves as a defense at the very moment he confronts the dead boy’s father. His guilt therefore remains divided: he acknowledges sorrow and seeks Abdellah’s forgiveness, yet still reaches for the threat at the roadside to explain his own conduct. The movement between those positions, rather than a clean confession or absolution, defines the state.