We Have Buried the Past

by Abdelkrim Ghallab

  ‘Am I getting into a battle I’m bound to lose? No, that’s not going to happen.’

  When he went back to the door, he felt stronger, more agitated, and readier than ever. But as he pulled back the door-curtain again, the darkness seemed like a wild beast intent on crushing him. His new vigour sagged once more, his emotions intensified, and his steps hesitated. Even so, he begged the heavens above for help and looked up in the hope that the moonlight might help him find his footing and save him from this desolate atmosphere of darkness and silence. However, all he found in the sky above was a hue of dark blue and gleaming stars scattered here and there. He stood there in amazement, as though he had never before looked at stars enveloping the celestial dome.

  All this had a more powerful effect on him than did the darkness. It was as though the stars were actually lamps to illuminate for the heavens the work of the earth’s people, penetrating eyes to uncover the deeds of robbers, adventurers, and criminals that the darkness always tried to hide. He did not feel that he belonged to any of those groups, but everything around him made him feel that his situation was not natural.

  Influenced by the effect that the sky’s lamps had had on him, he retraced his steps, but he was still thinking to himself.

  ‘This golden opportunity will slip through my fingers. I’m not going to retreat in the face of this obstinate little girl.’

  The notion of ‘opportunity’ and ‘defeat’ preoccupied his mind as he thought about Yasmine’s defiance. He forgot all about the night sky and stars, and started frantically yelling, ‘Yasmine! Yasmine! Yasmine!’

  His yells reverberated in every nook and cranny of the house. A tranquil beast was suddenly unleashed in the night, like cries of alarm or the howls of a wounded wolf. Every living being in the house heard it all.

  Fatima leapt out of bed, and so did Abd al-Ghani, his eldest son, shocked and fearful. From the second-floor balcony an older woman of the family, whom the passage of time had left in Hajj Muhammad’s household, looked down. His widowed sister rushed out of her quarters, shouting, ‘My brother, my brother!’ All through the house, lights went on. From everywhere anxious eyes looked down, and people in every part of the house held their breath. Fatima went over to him.

  ‘Master,’ she asked, ‘is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Where’s Yasmine?’ he asked. ‘Send her to me at once and hurry up!’

  His voice was tense and angry. Fatima withdrew, and his sister took herself away, although she had a fairly clear idea of what was going on in her brother’s mind. The older woman upstairs felt as though she had committed a major crime by overlooking the master at a time when she did not have to show herself. Abd al-Ghani was furious that Yasmine had disappeared, his only thought being that she had not been around when her master had needed her.

  Fatima went looking for Yasmine and eventually found her half asleep (or pretending to be), in shock and with her face covered; she was in a corner of the provisions room. No sooner had Fatima told her to go and talk to her master than Yasmine became alarmed and started crying. Even so, she could still not explain why she was so scared, indeed terrified.

  Fatima understood everything; things like this were the subject of stories about servants. But it never occurred to her that a maidservant might be unable to stand up to her master’s will, so she forced Yasmine to respond to her master’s call and dragged her to his room, as a sheep is dragged to the slaughterhouse.

  Once again darkness fell on the now-quiet household, and the house’s residents returned to their innocent dreams. The stars in the sky kept a watchful eye on the acts of human folly that darkness endeavoured to hide.

  It was not long before another scream emerged from Hajj Muhammad’s bedroom, one that echoed through the silence of the household. This time it was Yasmine who screamed.

  6

  When Khaduj came home after visiting her family, her husband looked happy and content as he welcomed her back. Actually, she noticed that his happiness was even more obvious than normal. He took every opportunity to make her feel content, and kept the evening chatter going for much longer than usual, and asked for more details about the wedding and other incidentals that normally did not interest him. He did his best to please her by talking about her family – her mother and father – and the trouble they had taken over the wedding celebrations, welcoming their guests and making them feel comfortable.

  Whenever she had visited her family before and stayed away for an extended period, he had usually begun by complaining that she had stayed away too long. If he had agreed to her going, the griping might be moderate, even jovial, but it could also be more biting and serious if he had felt unhappy or anxious. In any case it would lead her to apologise for her absence and to ask for his forgiveness and forbearance. All this involved pleasure – and what pleasure it was! – as Hajj Muhammad was reacquainted with his beloved wife after a long absence.

  But this time he deliberately avoided anything that might upset her or make her apologise and ask for forgiveness. He felt that he was the one who needed to apologise, to ask for forgiveness and gain her approval. At the same time he realised that the time would surely come; it would be better to delay things and come up with a plan to prepare the right atmosphere to resolve the issue and make his wife content with the new situation, now that Yasmine had become her rival as a bedmate.

  Within the quiet framework of this family, it was not an issue that could be kept secret for very long, or erased by the course of events. Khaduj began to hear stories about the way her maidservant Yasmine had been recalcitrant; she had aroused Hajj Muhammad’s anger and enraged him during the night when everyone had gone to sleep. The stories went on to tell how Hajj Muhammad had yelled so loudly that it had reverberated throughout the household; everyone had been frightened and had looked down to see what was happening. Khaduj then learned that Fatima had gone all around the house searching for the disobedient runaway girl. Once she had found her, she had grabbed her by the neck and forced her to go to Hajj Muhammad’s room.

  Khaduj now began to have her doubts about her husband. She now noticed that Yasmine was the person whom he preferred to respond to his wishes; that he had started to rely on her to help him every time he was on the point of leaving the house and every time he came back, needing help with taking off his clothes and with his baggage. Not only that, but she was the one he asked to give him a massage and provide relief for his exhausted body. Based on these vague notions, the doubts that Khaduj was nursing inside her now turned into things that were far more specific, thanks to the numerous rumours she kept hearing. Preference might imply both affection and desire, but conviction involved sympathy and love.

  The jealousy that was eating away inside Khaduj severed all possibilities of doubt. She now decided to question Yasmine in detail. She began by asking how things had gone in the household during her absence and whether the servants had done their utmost to provide Hajj Muhammad with the life of ease that was his due. Yasmine found this line of questioning odd. It began in a friendly and innocuous fashion, but it never occurred to her that she was going to be asked about the infamous night when she had disobeyed him. No sooner had Khaduj asked about precisely that subject without the slightest degree of hesitation or reserve – indeed while seeming to be uninterested – than Yasmine faltered and was completely unable to hide her panic and distress. She tried to withdraw, but a violent reaction from Khaduj nailed her to the spot, quivering in fear and short of breath.

  She now gave up all hope of keeping everything hidden or of concealing what Hajj Muhammad might well have already confessed to his wife. She remained silent, stubbornly silent, until, that is, her recalcitrance was shattered by a ringing shout from Khaduj.

  ‘Confess, or else you’ve no place here after today!’

  The threat rang in her ears and had a terrifying impact on her entire being. She fully understood what it implied, and her whole past now loomed before her eyes: the slave market at Ibn
Kiran’s house; men coming every morning to check on new arrivals; standing there to be examined and probed like a dumb animal; moving from one house to another to gain the necessary experience; the slave trader’s voice announcing that she was clever and obedient, and above all a beautiful virgin girl. This last phrase had ingrained itself in her memory and continued to upset her. ‘Virgin?’ The question kept coming back, now answered in the negative.

  Alas, she was no longer one of those girls for whom men would pay a very high price. Her own master could be the father of her child. And now yet another word repeated itself, as though to provide confirmation of a dreadful crime. ‘Child?! No, no!’

  Yasmine could not even entertain the idea of assuming all these burdens and being shunted around slave markets and households where she would be tested.

  ‘I’ll confess,’ she told herself, ‘and let what might happen happen.’

  And so she responded falteringly to Khaduj’s threat, utterly confused. ‘I’m just an obedient servant,’ she said, her eyes closed. ‘I did my best to resist, but I had no choice but to obey.’

  ‘Get out of my sight, you little trollop. I was a fool to have trusted you. You’ll see how I deal with your betrayal and deceit!’

  Deep down, Khaduj had not wanted to hear this honest confession. After living in an atmosphere of doubt, she now found herself in one involving facts. Sometimes doubt can be a lethal kind of torture, but more often than not it is kinder than destructive truths.

  Now it was clear to her that she had a rival for her husband’s affections. She was well aware from the actual cases she had compiled and identified that that particular night had not been some passing fancy but rather the implementation of a concerted plan on Hajj Muhammad’s part, one aimed at making Yasmine his concubine and bedmate, and maybe the mother of children.

  ‘The mother of children?!’ Khaduj thought. ‘What kind of utter disaster is threatening your own family, Hajj Muhammad? Here I am, a free and honourable woman and daughter of a respected family, and now my children are going to have siblings born to a servant-girl whom you bought from a slave market? All my hopes are dashed, and any confidence I had in your intelligence and respectability has been shattered.

  ‘Shall I make it clear that I refuse to accept this situation and completely reject it? But what would be the point? He’s obviously come to a decision, there’s no doubt about that. Can I somehow break his resolve or bring him back to his senses, when he is so totally confident in his own personality, intelligence, and judgement? I’m threatened by disaster, and any resistance on my part will signal the start of that very disaster. No, I’m not going to object and resist. Instead, I’ll declare war on this bedmate of my husband, until I can finish her off or get her thrown out of my house. But there’ll be no actual battlefield; after all, she’s surrendered and is happy enough. He’s the one who’s controlling everything. My war will be against him. He’ll soon realise my intentions, but it’ll be bad for me if he finds out that I’m at war with him.’

  The possible strategies that she might adopt shrank in her eyes, and she burst into tears. She did her best to control her sobbing; it was not right for everyone in the household – the children, her husband’s family, and the servants – to know that the lady of the house was in tears. No one should know why she was crying; that would inevitably indicate a weakness and lack of control, which would have a negative impact on her authority and influence.

  She was still crying when Abd al-Ghani surprised her. She managed to put on a false smile, but could not hide her tears or remove the grief-stricken look from her face. As she responded to his concern, she begged him to leave her to her own worries and concerns. Abd al-Ghani was disheartened as he left, realising from his mother’s obvious unhappiness that there was some new disagreement of the kind that occasionally flared up between husbands and wives. Such situations usually returned to normal once tempers had cooled down and people were no longer so worked up.

  The anticipated storm finally broke at noontime, when Hajj Muhammad came home exhausted by the heat and work he had been doing. What he wanted was a quiet place to relax, a nice cool atmosphere, and some delicious food to eat. But what greeted him instead was his wife’s face, a tissue of sadness and distress. The smile from those dreamy eyes had disappeared, to be replaced by a bloated, teary visage. He did his best to ignore what he was seeing and busied himself taking off his outer garments. As usual, he called for Yasmine to help him do that and to relieve his exhaustion. But there was no response to his shouts. He turned to Khaduj and asked her to help him summon Yasmine. Furious, she looked away, unable to raise her reddened eyes to look at the man for whom she now felt a mixture of sensations – contempt and hatred on the one hand, and admiration, fear, and appreciation on the other. Her fear of his authority outweighed the love she felt for him, a love of the kind that was dictated by expediency and imposed by necessity. She admired him, but it was the kind of admiration inspired by power and strength. And yet, in spite of all that, she had never felt any contempt or hatred toward him until she had found out that he had taken a maidservant as a rival bedmate.

  She did not respond to his request by summoning Yasmine. Instead, she ignored his request and turned her back on him. With that, she left the room, as though he were not even there. She had no idea how angry he felt at her ignoring him and then leaving – or perhaps she did know, but could not do anything else.

  Nothing annoyed Hajj Muhammad so much as assaults on his own honour. He had never felt so demeaned as he did now, and at the hands of a woman at that, someone over whom he had total authority and control. Never before had Khaduj deliberately shunned, despised, and disobeyed him as she had just done. When he made her angry about something, her response was always moderate. Her argument would be muted; she would protest meekly and show how upset she was in a conciliatory and humble fashion. This time, however, her display of anger was anything but gentle. She had gone far beyond any limit expected in their married life together.

  Hajj Muhammad was all too aware of what was causing his wife’s distress. Yasmine had disappeared at precisely the time when she knew he would need her help. He was also conscious of the fact that Khaduj’s anger and furious reaction were due to a murderous feeling of jealousy or a resounding family scandal.

  Inside him he could feel a combination of unsettling reactions to what had happened. Firstly there was the utter contempt he had been shown by his wife, who had always admired and respected him. The way she had looked at him harboured within it an accusation levelled at his honour and dignity. The liberty and power that he enjoyed in this household were now under threat. He loved his wife and gave her significant status in the household, but he could certainly not brook this kind of opposition to behaviour that he alone had the authority to choose and follow. He certainly would not be able to discuss with her the rightness of his actions or his absolute discretion in such matters, but it was clear that he must put an end to this recalcitrance. If he did not, then a curse would fall on the household, and forever.

  Such was his fury that he leaped up and stood by the doorway. Every corner of the household then reverberated with a terrifying shout that shattered everyone’s nerves and made Khaduj herself shudder, a shout that was nothing other than a call summoning Yasmine.

  Yasmine herself was well aware that this whole matter was serious; this time she could not ignore her master’s summons. Leaving the kitchen, she proceeded slowly towards the source of the yelling, with Khaduj watching and listening. Hardly had she entered the room before the curtains were lowered and the door locked.

  Khaduj was now utterly shattered. Her features contracted, and she burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably. She made her way to an isolated room where she could be alone with her tears and misery.

  7

  The advent of spring breezes brought with it the echoes of drums and cymbals, the magic of tales of jinn monarchs, the various whims of dwellers on earth, fascinating colours and smells,
and the splendour of deep-red blood.

  Each year in spring and summer a number of Gnawa celebrations were arranged here and there in the quarter where the ancient mansion nestled. Invitations would be addressed to maidservants, and the black-skinned ones in particular. Those Gnawa ‘earth dwellers’ who had in some way been touched by a group of jinn felt a very strong connection between themselves and the colour black, which made them believe that every black maidservant belonged to a jinn family, even though these people knew almost nothing about jinn apart from the kinds of legend that fed the minds of such women, black and white alike.

  Hajj Muhammad’s maidservants were in the vanguard of those who would be invited to the Gnawa celebrations, but he would not let them spend the whole night outside the house, even though he had no objections to them going to watch – he too actually had a deep-seated conviction that there was indeed a strong link between maidservants and jinn. So, each year, the women used to follow the news of the celebrations from a distance. They would talk about them as though they had actually been there and enjoyed playing the various roles, and go on to describe the roles that the main dancers had played in order to please the jinn and gain their affection.

  But the occasion was not one that they were prepared to miss. Next to Hajj Muhammad’s residence was a huge house where many brothers were living, men with large families. They all used to gather in this ancient house around an old mother whose husband had died when her children were young and even babies.

  She served as the firm link that bound all these brothers, with their multiple lifestyles, to each other. She continued to gather them all around her as though they were still small children. She looked old, and her age confirmed it, and yet she still possessed a powerful will, a strong determination, and a dogged temperament. She was firm with her children and grandchildren and was quite prepared to start yelling angrily in the face of any of her children if she did not like something or it did not suit her temperament. If she became really angry, her yells would echo around and reach the neighbouring houses; everyone was quite used to it, and the yelling and screaming neither aroused their curiosity nor led them to investigate.