Water and coolness: life and longing in the desert

Water and coolness: life and longing in the desert links physical relief to intimacy, social arrangements, and the desire to live elsewhere. Across the pool at a party, the linked waters of an oasis, and Abdellah’s preference for ice and imagined Swedish cold, water is neither a simple emblem of escape nor a single, stable comfort. It is a resource people arrange and use, a setting for shifting relationships, and a measure of how they understand the place they inhabit.

Water as amenity and environment

At the party, Jo Henniger finds the pool after midnight amid the remains of an evening gathering: a martini glass, used plates, and towels left by the deck chairs. The pool belongs to a carefully hosted setting, but its surroundings resist a clean division between the natural and the made. Frogs call from ditches beyond the wall, and Jo wonders what has been arranged for effect and what belongs there. The water itself is so warm that she finds it almost distasteful. A pool, ordinarily associated with refreshment, does not automatically provide it; its temperature frustrates the expectation that water must mean coolness.

This scene also gives the pool a private use apart from its role in entertaining guests. Jo enters it alone, away from the party, at a moment when she is reflecting on her abandoned writing and the possibility of becoming silent. The water provides a setting in which she can pause and register that change in herself. Its warmth does not resolve her thoughts or restore her former ambitions. Instead, the scene places physical immersion alongside an inward recognition: a familiar amenity can remain present even when its expected comfort, or the old pleasure associated with it, has diminished.

The oasis as shared space

At the outing to the waterfall, water appears in a different form. The cars stop beside a broad pool where the river widens; the waterfall and the surrounding rocks make a small amphitheater. Hamid organizes the picnic arrangements, including carpets, ice chests, and hampers, while some of the guests enter the water. Refreshment here is both part of the landscape and part of a social occasion planned by its hosts. The ice chests also connect the oasis scene to the practical work of making coolness available during a gathering.

Jo and Day move away from the party to another pool, a long oval basin among low palms. Unripe dates hang near the water, and water boatmen move across its surface. Water from this pool flows into irrigation channels, placing the scene’s leisure within a working landscape. The same water that offers the pair a place to float and withdraw from the others also carries on beyond them toward cultivation. Its meaning is therefore not limited to the private encounter developing there: it belongs to a network of use that continues outside their immediate experience.

The sequence of pools gives the pair’s movement a gradual shape. They are separated from the group, climb down to the next pool, and spend time together in the water. Jo is uncertain about being there with Day, yet experiences herself as lighthearted. Their attraction develops over the preceding day and continues in this setting; Day uses a dead palm frond to tease her, and she does not object when he touches her shoulder. The water does not create their desire on its own, but it mediates the encounter, giving their growing intimacy a secluded, unhurried setting. In contrast with the abandoned pool at night, this water belongs to a shared outing, yet the pair make a private space within it.

Coolness and the wish to leave

The conversation between Abdellah and David Henniger makes the longing for coolness explicit. Abdellah asks David what cereal he eats in the morning and says he prefers cornflakes to cooked goat kid. He counts ice among the good things David has brought, treating it as a real benefit rather than a decorative luxury. Their exchange moves from breakfast and imported convenience to a broader disagreement about what outsiders assume people want.

Abdellah rejects the idea that those who live in the desert must enjoy its heat, camels, and palm trees. He describes the morning temperature as 104 degrees and says that he likes what is cool, cold, and fresh. His preferred alternative is Sweden, known to him through color magazines: he imagines it as a place cold enough to live in. The contrast is strikingly specific. The desert is his immediate reality, while Sweden is an imagined destination assembled from printed images and the promise of a different climate. His longing does not establish that he can or will go there; it gives voice to a desire that the assumptions of outsiders have overlooked.

Abdellah accompanies this wish with a gesture as though summoning icicles. Then his expression changes, and he asks David whether his son was alone when David struck him with the car. The movement from imagined cold to the question about Driss binds ordinary conversation to grief and responsibility without equating them. Coolness offers Abdellah a moment to articulate what he wants for himself; it does not divert the conversation from the death that remains between the two men.

A motif of practical relief and imagined elsewhere

Together, these episodes resist treating water as an uncomplicated symbol of renewal. The party pool is warm rather than refreshing; the oasis pools support leisure but also feed irrigation channels; ice is a valued practical comfort; and Sweden exists for Abdellah as a faraway possibility glimpsed in magazines. Each instance gives coolness a different status, from a physical condition to a hosted amenity, a resource, and a dream.

The motif also places distinct experiences of the desert side by side without making them interchangeable. Jo’s solitary pause at the pool and her developing intimacy with Day occur within spaces made available to party guests. Abdellah’s remarks instead expose the limits of an outsider’s picturesque assumptions about desert life. His wish for cold complicates the image of a person naturally at home among heat and sand: he is entitled to find the climate oppressive and to imagine somewhere else. Water and coolness thus connect bodily comfort with the unequal ability to arrange, access, or merely imagine relief.