A Riffians Tune (20 page)

Hearing the shouts, the lorry slowed and ground to a halt. The driver and his helper rolled back the tarpaulin, and everyone drank in the fresh air, filling his lungs to the point of bursting. Tahar was limp, weak, and asked for water. We melted into the loose wheat while breathing in the precious air.

‘You nearly suffocated us!' I complained to the driver.

‘No,' said his assistant a few metres away. ‘Pigs don't die,' he guffawed.

‘We paid to be on the top of the lorry, but not under a tarpaulin,' I retorted, nervously.

As the lorry moved on, we endured the cold wind rather than lack of air. An hour later, we stopped again. The driver came to the back and said, ‘We need the tarpaulin back on. The highway patrol is only a few miles away.'

‘No tarpaulin!' we all shouted.

‘I will come back to pick you up if you stay here until the patrol is gone,' yelled the driver.

I felt his real intention was to dump us on the road in the dark, in the middle of nowhere. We quickly bonded against his suggestion. Looking nervous, frustrated and irritated, the driver took a side road and stayed off the main road until dawn. We spent the night under the sky.

The lorry rejoined the main road just as the sun was rising enough to leave a haze. Feeling life coming back, I asked Tahar, ‘What were you singing?'

‘My own song,' he answered.

I thought I could sing much better than he. ‘I play the flute,' I told him.

‘Can you play now?' he asked me.

‘I have no breath!' I answered.

We arrived safely in Nador, but felt worse than boars. With no immediate coach to Arkmane, I slept in the station and waited for the afternoon coach.

I bought a ticket and secured a seat, but beside a man who stank. Travelling east, sandwiched in a small seat, I looked out from the coach, where the Mediterranean Sea looked still, quiet and sky-blue. I wished I were on the other side, Spain or anywhere else in Europe. The bumpy road and rocking coach reminded me of playing my flute in the same coach on my first journey. I recalled the snake charmer tapping his snake beside me and terrifying the travellers. Now, I couldn't play. I wondered what had happened to me, what had changed me. I had become wary, too anxious, and suspicious of people, but still carried my flute like a talisman.

I arrived in Kariat Arkmane about eight o'clock, but life there died at four; I could see neither man nor donkey; just one policeman remained, patrolling the village and the prisoners confined to the low-ceilinged jailhouse.

My sister Zina (meaning ‘beautiful') lived one and a half hours' walk from the village, and her two eldest children were older than I was. I decided to stay the night with her, though I anticipated her boys would tease me, as their father had taught them to do from an early age. I was very glad to spend the night with Zina, but more so to leave in the morning.

Before lunchtime, I was at home. Dargan, the family dog, black and handsome, jumped and ran around me until I bent down to pet him. Dargan's memory of me seemed to be strong as ever, as if I had never been absent. He bounded up the walkway in front of me, but I found the house empty when I arrived. The main door was open, anyone could get in, and the house was full of silence.

Not knowing in which field my mother was, I kept asking the dog. Dargan shot straight out the door, but soon he returned, dancing and bouncing in front of my mother as she walked toward the house.

Standing outside, I watched her put her hand to her brow to shield her eyes to get a better look at me. Her dim vision required glasses, but she had never had them.

‘Wait!' I shouted, as she was carrying two bundles of wheat.

She stopped, dropped her parcels, and I ran to meet her in the middle of the field; she hugged me and I kissed her head. She looked at me as if trying to discern the exact changes in me, as if it weren't me, and I the same with her. She looked different: smaller, thinner and more wrinkled than I remembered. She leaned over to pick up a heavy bundle of wheat, and I saw her breasts, strikingly, very long, very thin and dangling. I felt sorry for her. I grabbed her bundles, and we walked back home together.

‘Where are Amina and Rabbia?' I asked.

‘Amina is somewhere in the mountain,' she answered. ‘Rabbia is in a field cutting crops.'

Tired and hungry, Rabbia came home. She looked sad, wrinkled, shabbily dressed and not wanting to talk. I wished I could change her life. Impatiently, I went to find Amina, but my search failed. She wasn't where I thought she might be. There were several mountains and many valleys, and she could have been in any one of them. Having my flute with me, I played as loudly as I could. She must have recognised the flute and the tune, as peering into the very end of the valley, I saw a few sheep coming down toward me. As I kept looking, I saw my sister with a small stick in her hand as though she were a witch or living in Biblical times. She was chasing sheep and cows as fast as she could. We met in the middle of the valley and with an exchange of hugs, shepherded the animals home. Now coming from two different worlds, I from school and she from shepherding, I felt the difference between us, and we kept silent.

Dinner was ready when we arrived home. Mrs Malani joined the family for a jumbo couscous dinner. She looked at me again and again and said nothing. It was a reunion with an empty seat in the middle. My father was no longer there.

I gorged on couscous, enjoyed being with my family and talking to Mrs Malani. I had left nine months before. Since then, the face of everything had changed. The summer had brought the best of nature: a variety of figs (black and white), peaches, apricots, but mainly prickly pear for those with big appetites and strong tummies to digest the seeds. It had been a prosperous summer; it had rained enough and in time. My family owned several small fields, scattered here and there; they had managed to plough them, but my mother, with no skills, no physical strength and no labourers, was now stuck. With the sun pouring its heat on the parched fields, the barley and wheat were wilting; soon they would become food for birds to pick and ants to carry.

The family's burden fell on me, and my mother wasted no time. She quickly handed me all the problems: crops to take care of, disputes with uncles and cousins, three of my sisters' marriages had become hell on earth, and she herself was tormented. I learned all that on my first night home.

The night was sweet but brief, and I woke up ready to go to the field. I picked the biggest, sharpest sickle and looked for four thimbles to protect my fingertips and enlarge my grasp, but there weren't any. Luckily, there were a few reeds scattered around, from which I made eight thimbles: four for me and four for Rabbia.

It was early dawn, and my mother was already dancing on her toes. ‘Go to Tishibi,' she told me. ‘The barley is crumbling,' she added. The field, Tishibi, was two hours' walk away. ‘Do you want to ride the donkey?' she asked.

‘No, leave it for Rabbia,' I responded, knowing how Rabbia hated walking.

‘I hope she won't be too late. Otherwise, she will be fried,' my mother said.

The air was fresh, crisp, and my lungs felt full when I left in a rush. The sky was blue, and a slice of the sun was beginning to peek above the horizon. It looked bizarre and beautiful at the same time. I had to hurry to beat the oppressive power of the sun and wished I had a sombrero with a large brim.

On my way, I passed the beautiful complex, farm and factory, of a German capitalist rumoured to be an ex-Nazi. The factory with many acres of land was built halfway up a hill, fort-like, and was surrounded by a wall topped with broken glass so that no one would dare climb over. The factory had two connected swimming pools bordered with trees and grass. Passing by, I heard the gurgling of the water behind the wall. While shepherding on the neighbouring hill the previous summer, I had seen two naked girls playing and splashing in the pool, their father playing whack-a-mole with them, and I had wished I could be one of them.

Once I arrived, the barley field filled my eyes. It stretched forever and cutting it could only be a daunting task. I turned my back to the sun and started to cut the barley, but soon discovered how clumsy and unskilled I was. I grasped either too much or too little. The thimbles collided or simply fell off. I didn't know how to tie the barley into sheaves to keep the wind from blowing away everything I had cut. The higher the sun rose, the thirstier I grew.

One mile away, ten men were sickling barley, but they were too far away for me to copy their skill.
To cut and tie, that's what I need to learn
, I thought to myself
.
I trotted across the fields to the men and stood in front of two farmers while they were bent down.

‘I will give you a job, if you are worth it,' the foreman teased. ‘I will pay you one dirham per day,' he added, smirking.

‘I own field thirteen across the way. I thought I might learn from you how to tie,' I said, smiling.

‘He owns the field and doesn't know how to tie!' guffawed the foreman to the others.

‘The man has a wife and doesn't know …!' laughed another.

It was vulgar and personal. I swallowed the jokes and went back to my field, my skill no better than before. To my dismay, whatever I cut and piled was ferociously attacked by birds or stolen away by ants. Thousands, if not millions, of ants climbed over the stalks, energetically split away the seeds and carry them away. I toyed with them, disturbed their path, and delayed them, but they could not be deterred. Their speed, their precision and their vice-like grip amazed me. Some of them were light brown and others jet-black. The black ants, with big heads, long and sharp pincers, were to be feared. If they bit, their pincers got stuck in the skin. One of them crept over my legs, my thigh and reached my testicles. It bit and I jumped; the pain was quick and sharp.

‘Yeoooooow!' I shouted.

I pulled my trousers down and yanked the black culprit off my privates. In my hand was half an ant, but the other half, the head and pincers, were lodged in my testicle. I scratched to remove the pincers, but they remained to torment me.

Rabbia and my mother arrived later in the day with water. My mother spoke in choppy phrases and looked emotionally and mentally absent. I thought she hadn't fathomed the scale of the job: sickling the stalks, tying them and taking them home, ten miles away, to be threshed and winnowed. She left in a hurry, and I asked Rabbia, ‘Why is she so distracted?'

‘There is a problem at home,' answered Rabbia.

Salwa had decided that day to take her eight children and leave her husband. She was beaten on a daily, if not hourly, basis, and despite her multiple injuries, my mother was against her leaving her husband.

I had thought, for many years, that all my sisters had wanted was a man, for I had hardly heard them talking about anything other than sex and men. Knowledge of the penis passed down from grandmother to mother, from mother to daughter, surpassed the best sexologist's. Rabbia was the exception. She didn't associate the penis, ‘the dragon', with a husband. I had never heard her talking about the dragon's size, thickness and shape.

‘A husband, for me, means the master of a slave,' she had told me. ‘I would prefer to be slave to nature, the sun, rain, wind and stars, rather than be kissed by a pig, my skull disfigured with a head scarf, my face veiled.'

Rabbia and I stopped cutting the barley when we ran out of light. At sunset, night descended quickly, and the moon took over. Before leaving, we looked behind. ‘We've made a dent in it,' said Rabbia. ‘But it will take a week to harvest it all.'

‘We don't have a week. There will be nothing to cut,' I said.

‘The heat will crumble the stalks,' she agreed.

‘Why don't we hire a few men to help us with the harvest?' I suggested.

‘How would we pay them?' she asked.

‘We could sell our two billy goats to pay for a couple of sicklers,' I said.

‘Mother is sentimental about her billy goats,' she said. ‘She argued fiercely with Father whenever he wanted to sell an animal. She has no farming sense. She preferred advance sale of the wheat at a rock-bottom price rather than see a billy goat going to the butcher. And you know what, whenever the drought hit, it took all the animals with it, so we were left with neither animals nor wheat. Mother loves her animals. Sadly, for her, they're all pets.'

Walking in the middle of the road, we had to give way to the German to pass. His white Mercedes left a huge tornado of dust. The road, made of compacted soil, was barely wide enough for a car. We had to dart off the road to escape the swirling dust.

Still walking, disturbed by the moon and a shooting star, Rabbia's legs started to fail her. She got slower and slower, and asked me to stop now and again. She was young in age but old in flesh.

As I expected, Salwa's brood, six boys and two girls, were at home when we arrived. The children shouted, cried, leapfrogged over each other, climbed the trees, jumped over the wall and ran all over the place. My mother, exhausted from kneading dough, looked sad and anxious. Rabbia disappeared the moment we entered the house. Amina was trying to bring the chaos to order among the shouting and scuffling boys with mayhem everywhere, but their mother was absent.

‘Where is Salwa?' I asked my mother.

‘Hiding,' she said.

‘Hiding?' I asked.

‘She left her husband … and has some nasty bruises,' she remarked.

Curious, I ran to find Salwa. I hadn't seen her for over nine months. My curiosity turned to horror when I saw her swollen head with old and new bruises all over, mainly on the face. With swollen eyes, bruised cheeks, she could hardly see from her right eye. She welcomed me as though she were in her own home. Acting as though her bruises were invisible, she asked me, ‘How was your school year? Mother told me you did well.'

I felt that she tried to avoid the question I wanted to ask.
How can a man beat a woman, never mind his wife and the mother of his six boys and two girls?
Salwa's face said it all.