The Shadows of Ghadames (10 page)

“You'll have to help me,” he says simply.

Today is a special day for me too, because my mother gave me my first young girl's veil, a dark blue fabric that I've draped over my
malafa
. I show Abdelkarim how to keep the veil drawn shut, with the edge wedged between one's teeth, and how to walk so as to outwit our vigilant city guards. For, as everyone knows, men and women walk differently.

“Look, men step putting their heels down first, in manly, self-confident fashion, whereas women put their toes down first, timidly, in a way that befits an inferior creature. That's how we're taught to walk by our mothers when we're very little, and heaven help us if we forget it!”

Abdelkarim stares at me, wide-eyed. “Do you mean to say that women have to learn to walk like women, and that if their mothers did not correct them, they would tread on the ground as men do?”

Now, it's my turn to be troubled. This had never occurred to me.

But I am even more embarrassed at suddenly being the teacher, and at Abdelkarim being the student, a strange student with a beard and mustache. I bite my lip painfully several times so as not to burst out laughing. We certainly make an odd couple, tangled up in our veils, taking cautious, little steps as though the room were carpeted with fragile eggs or feathers. I only hope the guards will not be looking our way when we go through the city gate.

Silence now. The time has come to weave our way through the streets next to my mother and Bilkisu, both as snugly
wrapped as we are. Whispering figures file ahead of us and we are joined by more and more of them, as the discreet but repetitive scraping of dozens — no, hundreds—of leather soles tread on the hardened mud—toes first!

Each time a door opens, we see the oil lamp in the cavity of the entryway conforming to the immutable code: the master is at home. He may be home, but his wife and the women next door are all making their way through the dark torchlit alleyways. This female procession in a flickering half-light is a rather bizarre sight.

We cross the small Mulberry Square, where the slave market is located. I have always found the dark arcades sinister, as if tragedy were permanently ingrained in the walls in spite of the purifying layers of whitewash regularly applied to them.

The procession must then cross Gâddous Square. This is the name we give to the iron cup that is held by a child seated in a cement niche. Under the niche is a
seguia
, one of the narrow ditches that brings water to the palm grove. For centuries this is the way we have been measuring the outflow of our spring so that we can divide it equitably.

Day and night the child fills the cup with water and hangs it above the ditch. From a small hole at the bottom of the cup, the water slowly empties out. Each time the cup is filled, the child ties a knot in a long palm-leaf filament. The
Amine el Mâ
, the water controller appointed by the city residents, must be able to check the outflow at any
given moment. So the cup serves as the measuring unit for irrigation. This is accomplished by blocking the openings of the
seguias
with earth, or unblocking them, depending on the time and the size of the gardens.

Filling and tying, day and night. The children take turns in the niche but they all end up looking the same, with sad, prematurely aged faces, worn out by the monotonous work. Whenever I see clear, fresh water flowing through the
seguias
in the palm grove, I think of the child sitting in the Gâddous niche.

When we reach the city walls, on the eastern side, we find that the guards posted under the archway have left the palm-trunk gate open. No greetings are exchanged. These men don't even seem to see us. Tonight the rules governing our lives are mysteriously suspended. Tonight the women of Ghadames belong to another world that will vanish with the first glimmer of dawn.

The moon, already high in the sky, can be seen through the branches of the palm grove, round and white, like a basin of curdled milk.

Zam-zam! Tap-tapa! Zam-zam!

We hear the throbbing of the
bendirs
and
derbukas
being struck by the women musicians with their callused palms.

Zam-zam! Tap-tapa! Zam-zam!

We finally stop near the half-crumbled ruins. I have never been in this faraway corner of the palm grove and am
surprised to see a kind of vessel covered with a tall earthen vault. The musicians are seated all around it, beating on the resonant skins of the drums.

“This is the other spring, our spring,” whispers my mother, taking me firmly by the hand. “There has to be water for the jinn to visit human beings. Water always attracts them.”

“Mama, aren't you afraid of the jinn?” “I am afraid of them when I am alone. Tonight, everything is different.”

A dozen women are undressing hurriedly. They leave their clothes hanging on the trunk of a tilted palm tree at the edge of the vessel and wade into the water up to their waists, twisting their damp hair. Two oil lamps project enormous, monstrous shadows under the vault. I squeeze my mother's hand very tightly, and press my face against the side of her body. But she raises my head.

“You have no reason to be frightened,” she says gently.

Some other women start dancing and soon they are nearly all swaying at the shoulders and hips, their necks very straight and their heads held high, almost motionless. The musicians play with increasing vigor. A very powerful music is required to summon the jinn and to make the dancers gyrate until they collapse, exhausted. There are lamps placed in a circle and scented resin burning on small burners.

Zam-zam!

The musicians are old. Gold coins from Timbuktu shine
on their black foreheads. They laugh as they strike the skin tambourines faster and faster, staining them with droplets of sweat. It is impossible to resist this music. It flows into the shoulders, chest and legs, making the whole body vibrate with a long, painful trembling. I join the dance, submerged, jostled, swept up by an invisible force.

Zam-zam! Tap-tapa! Zam-zam!

Then some women around me start saying mad, incomprehensible things in loud voices. Who are they talking about? One invokes a king out loud. Another, the red minister, but who is this minister? Yet another falls onto the ground, yelling “He slapped me!” I open my eyes wide, but I don't see anyone. The woman grasps her cheek and moans, then is immediately surrounded by a buzzing wave of women who console her and sweep her far away from me.

I want to be safely near my mother, whom I see sitting at Aïshatou's feet with other women from noble families. Aïshatou is enthroned in their midst, like a king at court, and they call her “Princess.” How strange. The world seems upside down.

Aïshatou looks at me with her yellowish gaze, and her lips smile slowly.

“Meriem,” she says finally, “do you want to show your daughter how women straddle the jinn, and how the jinn take them farther than any desert track?”

A few women grab me and pet my body laughingly, encouraging me with their voices and gestures. Suddenly, I can't stand having them touch me. And I have a headache,
a dreadful headache! I leap up and run away, with just enough time to see Aïshatou put her large black hand on my mother's arm to stop her from following me.

I don't know how I managed to break through the circle. My head feels both empty and clouded, as though I had slept in air saturated with sweat and powerful perfumes.

Outside, the night is chilly. The moon, veiled with smoky mist, is very low on the horizon and barely visible through the palm trees. My mind is a bit clearer now. I walk toward the shepherd's hut where we hid Abdelkarim when we arrived.

He is still there, shivering, waiting for dawn, wrapped in his veil that is too thin for the cold desert nights.

“Is that you, Malika?” he asks, worried. “When will they be coming?”

“When the ceremony is over,” I say. “I'll keep you company. That should make time go faster.”

I crouch outside, near the entrance. I am suddenly aware of being alone with him, but I know nothing can really happen to me tonight. It is as though I had been given some of the strength that aroused the women when they danced and this has buttressed my shoulders. I look up at the sky. Tanit … Wasn't she the moon goddess in very ancient times? That little silver moon we wear as pendants on bracelets. And the enormous one that appears periodically in the night sky only to dissolve when the voices of the muezzins resound from the minarets.

“It's so dark,” says Abdelkarim in a low voice. “It's a good thing you came. I was beginning to feel frightened.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Of the night. Of the desert. Once—”

He breaks off with a sudden coughing fit. Then he catches his breath. “I was around five or six. I had gone with my father by camel about an hour away from here, near those ruins called Ras el Ghoul, the hill of ghosts. I am sure you've heard of it. He wanted to see a shepherd who was looking after some of his livestock. In those days there was still a well under the ruins, a trickle of water that flowed to the end of a narrow, crumbling gully. The shepherd knew how to find it. It provided enough water for his own needs, and grazing grass for the baby camels.

“I walked away while he and my father were talking. I had started going around the hill, just a rocky peak, but it seemed like a long distance for a small child. Suddenly the sky turned red. In a few minutes, everything was engulfed in a violent sandstorm. Like all desert children I had been told repeatedly what to do if caught in one of those storms.”

“Sit down immediately, cover your head, and wait,” I recite without a moment's thought. “We're taught this when we're very small! Above all, don't walk, or no one will find you.”

“Yes, I'd been told this,” says Abdelkarim again, sadly. “But I must have forgotten. It was the first time I was in danger in the desert. I had always lived safely inside the city
walls. Up ahead I thought I saw the ridge of the ruins at the top of the peak. I ran and called for my father. Then I thought I could see the hump of a camel in the swirls of sand, and I ran even faster, convinced I would soon reach my father or his shepherd. It took me quite a while to realize I had gone astray and was completely lost.

“Only then did I sit down, bury my head between my arms, and cover my mouth with a flap of my tunic. Night fell, and though the wind died down a bit, you really couldn't see anything! What a night! I felt the air enveloping me with its thousand invisible hands, and I thought I might be carried away forever by the genies of the desert. It was the shepherd who found me, in the morning.”

“And your father?” I ask.

His voice breaks. “He must have gone very far looking for me. Two weeks later, travelers journeying down the bed of a dried out wadi discovered his body. He is buried there, under a heap of stones.”

My hands suddenly turn so cold that I raise them to my lips.

“Ever since then,” whispers Abdelkarim, “I can't spend a night without praying. I really only start breathing normally at dawn, with the first cry of the muezzin.”

Then, very slowly, Abdelkarim starts chanting the sura he had recited for me on the rooftop.

“I remember that sura. That's the one that led to your teaching me the alphabet.”

“There are several sorts of darkness in us,” says Abdelkarim. “Ignorance is one.”

“I know. I want to continue learning. I don't want my brain to lie fallow again.”

For the first time that night, I see him smile.

“All the better. But I wasn't thinking about your ignorance, but about my own. I learned several things while I was hidden on your rooftop. For example, that the world of women is not as stupid as I thought.”

I laugh. “Thank you. You're too kind. So, we've both learned something.”

“Yes, we've both learned something. Please tell your mother and Bilkisu, since I can't tell them myself. I know I won't see them again.”

Meanwhile, the sky has gradually turned pink and the last stars are fading. In the east, behind the dark row of trees, a strip of light is growing wider. The noise of footsteps puts us on the alert. It is Ladi guiding a tall, thin man down the path. He is veiled in black, carrying one of those long, leather bags with multicolored fringes that the Tuaregs fasten on their saddles.

Everything goes very quickly. After some brief greetings, I see Abdelkarim wrap a thin, dark cloth around his
hair, like a crown, carefully hiding his mouth. With this mask, he takes on the impenetrable look of a desert nomad. When he stands straight, draped in a large blue gandourah with pleats at the shoulder, he looks taller than usual and I think I never would have recognized him in a crowd.

“Farewell,” he says, leaning toward me. “If I can, I will give you news.”

And in a minute he is gone.