The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (16 page)

Everybody ordered beer. And that, of course, was what all the cloak-and-dagger stuff was about. It was a drinking expedition. Azrou was officially dry and the Amrhos was the one place in town – or, rather, out of town – where you could drink alcohol. And it was a lot of fun. As our beers arrived, I watched the three young men on stage: one a singer, the other two playing Berber hand-drums. These are big deep tambourines without jingles, which you hold with your thumb through a hole in the rim and attack with your fingers; as you approach the centre, the boom is deep like a marching band’s bass drum, while closer to the edge there is an endless variety of tones.

These drummers knew their stuff, creating a gutsy
excitement
with their complex rhythms and, as they drummed, three young women in floor-length dresses, belted at the waist with scarves and glittering with jewellery, walked onto the stage. The crowd applauded and the singer, a stocky man with fists the size of small barrels, burst into song. The song seemed to have no melody but employed the guttural sounds of Berber to harmonise with the drummers. It was exciting but also slick and disciplined, with a tight pace. Some of the songs that followed were question and answer, with the dancers wailing and ululating in response, setting their necklaces, bangles and ankle jewellery jingling. Even without amplification, the singer and drummers filled the large room and held the audience entranced.

The dancers swayed at first to the music, but little by little they started to echo the complexities of the rhythms
with their feet and arms, and hips. It was the hip
movements
that got the crowd going – and it was hard not to sit with your eyes glued to those lubricious hips that swivelled and writhed with such speed and grace. The dancer nearest our table seemed to be putting on a special show just for me, fixing me with her deep, dark eyes and gyrating her hips with absolute confidence in her allure. Mourad and my table companions kept nudging me and giving me looks, as if I were supposed to play some part. Which, of course, I was. For every now and then one of the men in the audience would leave his table, walk over to the stage and insert a note into the cleavage of his favourite dancer.

Mourad leaned across to me with a grin: ‘You, too, must give – she is dancing for you and it is how they earn money.’

I’d never done this sort of thing before. I fumbled about in my pocket and pulled out a fifty dirham note. Those eyes continued boring into me as I stumbled across the floor and inexpertly slid the note into the dancer’s dress. It wasn’t so tricky a manoeuvre, but failure would have been deeply humiliating – imagine the note sticking to my sweaty palm or fluttering off into the crowd. The note, anyway, found its home, and it must have been one of the better tips, as for the rest of the performance the dancer remained near our table and kept her eyes fixed on me, triggering pokes and sniggers from Mourad and his cronies. As for me, it seemed somehow rude to look away, but exhausting to keep up the rapt appreciation of a fan.

Eventually, the last number came to an end and my dancer cast a meaningful look at me over her shoulder as she left the stage.

‘I think she likes you, that dancer,’ said Mourad gaily.

‘Oh don’t be so foolish, Mourad. That’s her job – she dances for money.’

He looked hurt at the thought. ‘Fifty dirhams is a not a large amount of money to give to a dancer. It is generous but no more. At these dances some men go crazy and give them really big money. No, she is interested in you because you are different.’

I hung back a little, but Mourad had me by the hand and was not going to let me get out of this. He moved to the next room, where a disco was starting up, and keeping hold of my hand, steered me towards the dancer. ‘But I can’t speak any Berber…’ I hissed ‘Only 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and…’ – I racked my brains for another word that I knew how to say – ‘…Ah, yes. Donkey.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Mourad hissed back, ‘I’ll translate.’

We reached the dancer, who clamped her eyes back onto my face as if she’d been raking the crowd looking for it. ‘Um.. you danced really beautifully, thank you,’ I said in English, looking between her and Mourad. Mourad then translated this, at great length, into an impassioned outpouring of Berber. The scene reminded me rather of Cyrano de Bergerac, when the big-nosed hero supplies sweet words of courtship to the friendly moron that the heroine has taken a shine to. Perhaps Mourad was reciting stanzas from the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, or maybe even a choice passage of Graham Greene. When he finally drew to a close, the dancer smiled at me, slightly condescendingly, as one would to a flirtatious adolescent, said a few words to Mourad and moved away.

‘I’m afraid she has to leave now, Chris,’ he translated. ‘Her husband, you see. He is waiting for her.’ And he
indicated
a large man standing beside the door. I turned and
he nodded at me, holding up a huge fist in a gesture of farewell. It was the singer. I returned the gesture, grateful we were communing at a distance, and retreated to a seat in a poorly lit corner where I could wait while Mourad and his friends had their fill of the disco and the novelties of the bar.

As Aziz had promised, the next day was Azrou’s market. A slope of waste ground near the centre of town had been transformed overnight into a medieval encampment, a labyrinth of stalls and huts and booths, or sales pitches marked simply with a sheet spread on the ground. It was already mid-morning by the time we arrived and great vats of dye were bubbling and steaming away, overseen by Berber women in full regalia. Mourad, proud of his local
souk
, assured me that they were natural dyes, rather than the common chemicals. You could buy the wool nearby – hot, smelly, tangled mounds of it, raw from the shearing. Beyond it, the smoke from cooking fires rose and hung in a thin blue cloud, at times giving a scanty brown shade from the full intensity of the sun.

We had arrived amongst the aisles searching for sacks but I was sidetracked by a thousand things. And then, among the storytellers and the often unidentifiable stalls, we heard a wild reedy music, soaring above the general noise and the Berber hand-drums again. ‘Come,’ said Mourad, his hand on my arm. ‘This is something we should see.’

A current had been created amongst the crowd by the insistent wail of the music. Mourad and I joined it and were propelled into a clearing, where a trio of snake
charmers
were at work, belting away on their trumpets. They were playing in the shade of an awning, rigged up to their battered white van, and one of their colleagues was
placing
boxes and baskets around them on the floor. A furious thundering of Berber hand-drums told us that the show was about to begin. Then, with an energy at odds with the blistering torpor of a late morning, the principal player launched into a chant and began striding about and drawing lines and circles with a stick in the dust.

‘What’s he on about, Mourad?’ I asked.

As I spoke, the head man spotted Mourad and me, and insisted that we move to join those squatting in the dust in the front row. I wasn’t keen, preferring to blend in with the crowd; however, blending in wasn’t really an option that morning as I was the only foreigner there, with sunburnt ears and nose. Fearing the worst, I allowed Mourad to lead me through the parting crowd to the place normally reserved at a public spectacle, for children. I squatted on my hunkers like everybody else – not so easy to get away if things cut up rough.

Then suddenly from somewhere there was a snake. God knows what it was but it was as thick as my upper arm, as long as my leg, and covered in the sort of markings that nature uses to proclaim ‘Danger!’ – and it was slithering through the dust towards us. I breathed deep and watched it philosophically as it approached. Just before it got to us, one of the assistants – who had been pretending he hadn’t noticed it – snuck up behind and, catching the snake gently round the neck and supporting its huge body with his arms, slipped it neatly inside his shirt. My heart was thumping fast, the crowd was spellbound. Another snake, thick as a slender wrist, long and grey, slipped out of a
basket and moved across the dust towards the semicircle of wary onlookers. It was caught neatly with a stick, and into that same shirt it went. It was a voluminous shirt. The man strolled around for a minute and then nonchalantly slipped each snake back into its box or basket. More snakes appeared and lay quietly in the sun – more frenetic music. The excitement grew and grew.

The head man was explaining something to the crowd, and a number of men were coming forward and standing rather apprehensively in a smaller semicircle. ‘Come,’ said Mourad. ‘We will join them.’  

‘What? I asked. ‘Are you crazy?’

But Mourad had already volunteered us both. ‘We must do this, Chris. It is for our protection in the forest. Come.’  

There were about twelve of us. The head man, with a rather episcopal look, bade us all kneel. Oh Lord… I knew what was coming next… and, sure enough, the assistants started to move among us with boxes and baskets of snakes and things. I watched as they approached me, distributing various denominations of snake and draping them around the necks of the men kneeling in the dust. There was no way out of this.  

My knowledge of herpetology is not extensive – you don’t need it much in the temperate climes of Sussex. I can identify with a fair degree of certainty the difference between vipers and grass snakes; I have a hazy idea as to the morphology of anacondas and boa constrictors, but that’s about as far as it goes. I had no idea at all of the name of the snake that was being coiled twice around my neck by the grubbily robed snake charmer. It was a sinister-looking customer, slender and greyish and about as long as a useful scarf. Behind its head was a suspiciously loose flap of skin,
which I feared might be the stuff of which a hood is made; but I didn’t want to think of the word ‘hood’ because the next word that comes into your head is ‘cobra’.

The stony ground was hurting my knees and I could feel the sun roasting the top of my head. My snake, which seemed tranquil enough, despite the frenetic rhythms and the atonal wailing of the trumpet, actually had the effect of keeping the sun from burning the back of my neck. I thanked it quietly, and almost took a little comfort in its being there, warm and smooth and not actually unpleasant. I looked round the semicircle of kneeling figures,
dark-featured
and earnest, some in denim jackets and baseball caps, most cloaked in
djellabas
.

Mourad, anxious for my well-being, looked over to me and smiled – but his smile froze as he was told to hold out the palm of his hand, and upon it was placed a large, black scorpion. I’ve heard it said that the sting of the black ones is lethal, and I felt pleased that I had not been the one selected for the honour. And then I felt bad: it was wrong to wish such a thing on anyone, let alone someone as charmingly ingenuous as Mourad. Even if it was entirely his fault and served him right…

Unlike my snake, Mourad’s scorpion was an
adventurous
type and within moments began moving up his arm towards the inviting opening of his short-sleeved shirt. It moved slowly for a scorpion, dulled by the intensity of the sun, but nonetheless soon reached the comfort of the sleeve and set about moving into its shade. I winced a little on Mourad’s behalf, as did the couple of hundred people now watching.

Mourad was desperately trying to catch the attention of the lead charmer, but he was too busy working the
crowd with yet another energetic monologue,
emphasising
the rhythm of his speech with beats of the hand-drum. Suddenly he caught sight of the beseeching Mourad and his plight and, stepping swiftly across the space made by the kneeling men, took the scorpion delicately between thumb and forefinger and returned it to Mourad’s outstretched hand, where it sat still.

My snake, meanwhile, had gone to sleep, bored no doubt by the next part of the proceedings, where the snake charmer placed a piece of paper in our outstretched hands. Apart from Mourad and his scorpion, all the rest of us
kneelers
had snakes of one description or another draped around our necks, leaving our hands free. Mourad was kneeling on stony ground with both his hands outstretched: one for the scorpion, the other for the paper. This was a gruelling posture to maintain for any length of time. I hoped it was going to be worthwhile.

Drawn on the paper, which was lined and torn from an exercise book, were what I took to be runes. I’d never seen runes before and had no idea what they looked like but I was sure that that’s what these symbols were. They were drawn in blue biro and I found myself wondering about their efficacy; I’d have preferred them carved in stone or perhaps drawn in blood. Everyone seemed to be taking the ceremony absolutely seriously, though, and my fellow
initiates
had their faces bowed in earnest concentration, trying not to show their fear.

I was working hard on this, too. I recalled that wild animals are goaded by the smell of one’s fear, and that, while you can fool a fellow human being into thinking you’re not afraid, you can’t hide the smell of it from an animal. Still, I was trying my best to fool this sleepy snake into thinking
that I wasn’t afraid of it. I was thinking as hard as possible of things other than snakes. And perhaps it worked – for, apart from a brief interest in the openings between my shirt buttons, it didn’t stir… until, amid a climax of drumming, chanting and music, the ceremony came to an abrupt end, and the snakes and scorpion were collected up and put back in their various receptacles.