We Have Buried the Past

by Abdelkrim Ghallab

  Hajj Muhammad had a surprise in store for her. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you’re going with your sister and Lalla Fatima to visit Hajj Abd al-Latif al-Tazi’s house to finalise the engagement.’

  ‘Will we see the bride?’

  ‘That’s not important. But, if you have a chance to…’

  Khaduj now felt relieved; she was going to see the bride and get a look at the girl who would be calling her ‘Lalla’.

  Now she was even more excited. Abd al-Ghani’s marriage was really going to happen, and as a mother-in-law she could look forward to becoming a grandmother too.

  Khaduj’s visit to Hajj Abd al-Latif ’s household was not a surprise to that family, but it was disguised as such: they were of course aware that the al-Tihami family members were coming to request their daughter’s hand, but according to custom they were not supposed to be aware of this, and should welcome the visitors as though it were all unexpected. For Khaduj, the visit also had its more cryptic aspects. She only hinted at her objective as she arranged to catch the prospective bride unawares and with her face uncovered.

  A pleasant conversation ensued between the guests and the ladies of the house, all of it based on a pretence of not knowing anything. Zaynab, Khaduj’s sister, opened the conversation by introducing her sister to al-Batul, the mistress of the household.

  ‘On this happy day,’ Zaynab said, ‘Khaduj was most anxious to pay you a visit.’

  ‘You’re all most welcome,’ al-Batul replied in delight. ‘A happy day indeed! How we’ve been looking forward to your visit. My husband, Hajj Abd al-Latif, has been telling us wonderful things about Hajj Muhammad, extolling his virtues and his illustrious family.’

  ‘We in turn would like to make our relationship closer,’ Khaduj said, ‘and – God willing – become one family.’

  ‘It may be destiny, for nothing is beyond God’s power.’

  ‘Mr. Abd al-Ghani,’ Zaynab added, ‘is both intelligent and calm, just right for your daughter – God preserve her.’

  Al-Batul pretended to be shy and said nothing, busying herself with tea preparations, to avoid having to give a direct response.

  The olive-skinned maid al-Anbar started to speak. ‘Mr. Abd al-Ghani, of course—’

  Zaynab took it up, saying, ‘—is in the Qaysariyya Market: his shop’s the most famous one there.’

  The maid gave a broad smile.

  ‘God preserve him!’ said al-Batul. ‘Men who have businesses in the Qaysariyya are always fortunate.’

  ‘Mr. Abd al-Ghani knows only the Qaysariyya, the mosque, and the house, nothing more.’

  ‘He’s his father’s son,’ al-Batul rejoined. ‘My husband Abd al-Latif says that Hajj Muhammad knows only the mosque and the house.’

  ‘You were all created to be relatives,’ said Lalla Fatima. ‘The whole thing is a wonderful blessing!’

  The women of the household now all took part in the exercise of surprising the girl who was busy sewing in an isolated corner of the next room. She had never greeted female guests nor spoken to them. None of the ladies of the household made any attempt to stop their guests entering her hiding place so that she could evade them. Khaduj, her sister, and Lalla Fatima were all delighted when the mistress of the house used her hand to delicately lift the prospective bride’s face from her sewing and give her a kiss on the brow, wishing her all happiness in the future.

  By the time Khaduj left Hajj Abd al-Latif ’s house, something lay heavily on her heart. Her happiness had turned to profound sorrow: the surprise had been anything but a joyous one. She had been expecting something entirely different from the girl whose face had been delicately lifted from her sewing. She was expecting a pleasant oval face, white as snow, a tiny mouth like a ring, black eyes, level eyebrows, and a full body. Instead, she had been shocked to see a small brown-complexioned face, a wide mouth with full, almost bulging lips, vaguely blue eyes, eyebrows so thin that they might have been drawn with a sharp pencil, twin strands poking out from a head-kerchief to reveal frizzy hair, and a thin body with slender, spindly hands.

  The shock of it was enough to leave Khaduj speechless, and she said nothing. Her sister and Lalla Fatima sympathised with her plight, but they decided to say nothing until Khaduj herself had spoken. They all hurried back home. Khaduj’s feelings made her want to hasten the journey as much as possible, as though she needed to unload the burden of her disappointment as soon as she reached the door.

  All the way home Khaduj could not stop thinking about what had just happened. The visit had been a traditional one, and there was no hope of either changing Hajj Muhammad’s mind or avoiding the implementation of the decision that he had reached and the engagement he had arranged. As she hurried back to the security of her own home, she constantly reviewed the sequence of events. Once home, she took off her veil and looked around. Her sister, Lalla Fatima, was watching expectantly as though waiting for a word to be uttered against an accused.

  Yasmine and the other servants around her were making a great fuss to congratulate Khaduj on the happy event, and she manufactured a false smile to hide her sorrow.

  ‘May Mahmud share the same good fortune,’ she told Yasmine in a kind voice.

  ‘And Abd al-Rahman as well.’

  ‘And Lalla Aisha too.’

  ‘And Mr. Abd al-Latif.’

  Ululations now broke out – it was Yasmine who could not conceal her happiness.

  Amid all this ululation and shouting, Abd al-Ghani himself appeared at the door, as though just in time for the major announcement. He had no idea what had happened, nor did he know that he was about to be married. Even if he had thought about marriage, he would not have considered it any of his particular business; even when he had the usual kind of adolescent imaginings, they were regularly buried deep inside him. After all, he was still very much at the mercy of his father’s will, so how was he supposed to give any thought to things outside that context, even things connected with his own future, or a wife?

  The shock for him was enormous when Yasmine came rushing over and gave him a hug and kiss. ‘Here’s the groom!’ she shouted. ‘Here’s the groom!’ And she proceeded to let out some magnificent ululations.

  Other members of the family were there too. Abd al-Rahman looked utterly astonished, while Abd al-Latif, Mahmud, and Aisha all just stood there, as the entire household, having been looking forward to some truly joyous event, now celebrated noisily. But there was one person in the room whose heart was skewered by sadness, a feeling that had to be kept hidden as everyone else rejoiced, and that was Khaduj.

  The noisy celebration came to an end, and family members went their own way, swallowed up by the realities of daily life. The children set about their normal work, and Khaduj found herself face to face with her sister, Zaynab, who gave her an affectionate look and tried to make light of things.

  ‘God be praised,’ she said in honeyed tones, ‘the bride is a little beauty… but—’

  ‘But… but… My dear sister, she’s black! Am I to marry my son to a girl who’s dark-skinned? Dark-skinned!’ She would have burst into tears had she not been afraid it might lead to something even worse. She firmly believed it was not a good omen when there were tears on the occasion of a wedding.

  Zaynab realised that her function in this instance was to assuage her sister’s sadness, whatever the logic involved. ‘Khaduj, my sister,’ she said, ‘the girl’s still very young and pretty. Maybe her skin will lighten after they’re married.’

  ‘Lighten, or get even darker? That’s all nonsense, Zaynab!’

  ‘Does Hajj Muhammad realise the girl’s dark-skinned?’

  ‘Does he realise? How’s he supposed to realise? But now, how is anyone supposed to broach the subject with him or oppose the decision he’s made?’

  Zaynab did not reply. Khaduj seemed totally distracted as she thought about the situation. There was a heavy silence between the two sisters. Zaynab made no attempt to alleviate the dismal mood. The issue was obviously
much more serious than could be dealt with through some simplistic logic. Looking at her sister, Zaynab saw that Khaduj’s hand was on her cheek, and she was almost sobbing. She closed her eyes, as though seeking a solution to the problem in the colours of the mosaics.

  This heavy silence was suddenly broken by a horrendous sob from deep inside Khaduj’s heart. Zaynab’s eyes were immediately wrested from the multicoloured mosaics, and she looked fearfully at her sister.

  ‘Did you notice that tawny-skinned servant?’ Khaduj asked as she swallowed her sobs. ‘The one who greeted us with a smile and spoke to us in a brazen fashion far more than the lady of the house did?’

  ‘Certainly I did,’ Zaynab replied. ‘What of it?’

  ‘She could be the bride’s mother,’ Khaduj went on sadly, scarcely finding the words to say what she needed to express.

  ‘The bride’s mother?’

  ‘See if I’m not right!’

  ‘The servant’s daughter? Abd al-Ghani is to marry the servant’s daughter? No, no, Khaduj. You need to talk to Hajj Muhammad!’

  The words terrified Khaduj: ‘servant’s daughter’, ‘Abd al-Ghani’s bride is a servant’s daughter’, ‘talk to Hajj Muhammad’. The thoughts buried themselves deep in her mind, and yet they still resonated with horrific volume.

  The time came for Zaynab to leave, but Khaduj stayed where she was, ruminating and silently enduring her misery. Eventually Hajj Muhammad returned home from the sunset prayer.

  ‘So, how did you find the bride?’ he asked.

  In asking the question, he was not expecting any particular reply. Khaduj’s visit to the al-Tazi household was a matter of custom, and he assumed there would be nothing significant about it. Even so, he was delighted when Khaduj responded to his question with a phrase entirely devoid of meaning, mouthed while distracted.

  ‘A wonderful blessing.’

  In the room where the children gathered, Abd al-Rahman was talking to Abd al-Ghani about his forthcoming marriage, playing along with him in a manner that was not totally without provocation. He put down the book he was holding and looked straight at Abd al-Ghani.

  ‘You’re getting married,’ he said. ‘Do you know who your fiancée is? Have you ever set eyes on her?’

  Abd al-Ghani opened his eyes and stared at Abd al-Rahman. He was astonished at the need to address a question that had never even occurred to him.

  22

  The official relationship between the two families, the al-Tihamis and the al-Tazis, began with a formal session organised in the Dar al-Silaa, the large shop owned by Hajj Abd al-Latif al-Tazi. Two friends of each of the two heads of household had been invited to attend the meeting, as had Sidi Jaafar, a sharif hasani – that is, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad through his grandson al-Hasan. It was a custom in the al-Tazi household not to take any important decision without him being present. Hajj Muhammad had also invited Sidi al-Tayyia, another sharif, whose advice he would usually seek on any matter of significance, though without necessarily following it.

  The two sharifs started laying the groundwork on the subject of a matrimonial relationship. They recited prophetic accounts in a melodic colloquial dialect, and mispronounced Qur’anic verses which had no real relevance to the subject of marriage. They completely understood one other, however, and were working jointly towards the desired goal of bringing about an engagement between the two families. One of them would start reciting either the Qur’anic verse or the prophetic account, and the other one would finish it – although even then the addition might not conclude it correctly. And one of them would point to a particular argument so that the other could provide an elucidation or commentary on it.

  Their task was to bless the linkage of the two families and make light of any difficulties that might stand in the way of the agreement’s completion, and they both performed the task with a good deal of enthusiasm and exaggeration. They realised how much the two families wanted to finalise the relationship and appreciated, on the basis of their long experience at the task, that it was possible to surmount any difficulties, however hard it might seem at first.

  Hajj al-Tazi presented his requests for the dowry. For the formal engagement ceremony he was asking for a large amount of money, jewels, trinkets, pendants, clothes, and jewels. Hajj Muhammad was not in any way surprised by the size of the demands, because he was an expert bargainer and could use his skill to bring Hajj al-Tazi’s request down to a much lower level.

  Now the contest between the two merchants began, both of them being adept at haggling after having spent their long lives doing so. Every time the negotiations reached a tricky point, the ‘reconciliation committee’ would become involved, and whenever clouds appeared on the horizon, the two sharifs would invoke citations from the Qur’an and prophetic tradition.

  Finally, an agreement was reached – indeed, it had to be reached. Each of the two merchants was convinced that he was the winner, meaning that the desire that each of them had to conclude the deal was no less cogent than that of any two dealers in a situation where one was buying and the other selling. As a result of the negotiations, each thought he had won.

  The engagement between Abd al-Ghani, son of Hajj Muhammad al-Tihami, and Saadiyya, daughter of Hajj Abd al-Latif al-Tazi, was duly announced in the Mawlay Idris shrine, where friends of the families, guests, sharifs, and jurists were all invited to hear a recitation of the Fatiha as a token of the sacred ties binding the two noble families together.

  ‘Who’s the bride and who’s the groom?’ – no one who attended the ceremony asked himself those questions. They all blessed the link that now united the heads of these two prominent families without bothering about the identities of the prospective bride and groom. Those remained secret, perhaps only to emerge with the witnesses who were to execute the actual marriage contract.

  Several months went by, and all Abd al-Ghani knew was that he was now engaged to be married to a girl about whom he knew absolutely nothing. He was engaged, like it or not. He had never thought about it before; all he knew was that he had never expressed any desire to get married and had never felt like addressing the issue – something that in any case he could only do in his own mind, and then only when his nerves could stand it. Now, those same nerves had kept on at him mercilessly for many months. He tried to suppress such feelings and keep calm whenever he started to feel his agitation increasing. He was clearly affected by the whole matter, and yet each return to reality made it clear that there was no room for such emotion. He was a bachelor about to get married, and a potential husband to an unknown entity. While he was still a bachelor in reality, he had no right to behave like one, either psychologically or socially.

  He did his best to forget his situation; everything was designed to get him to do so. Ever since the Fatiha had been recited and he was engaged, there had been no indications that the family into which he had been betrothed in absentia was now thinking about anything to do with his actual marriage. It was out of the question to talk to anyone about it; he was the very last person who was supposed to talk about something that was considered no concern of his at that point. He was still living in his own private world of youth and adolescence, nerves and psyche. All he could do was to talk to his own world and hear what it had to say.

  ‘Saadiyya al-Tazi,’ he said to himself. ‘That’s all I know about this creature who’s to become a life companion. Life companion? Will the day ever dawn when I have a companion in my life…? Saadiyya, what does she look like? What colour’s her complexion? How old is she? Maybe she’s like my mother, Khaduj. If so, she’ll be an ideal wife in appearance and temperament.’

  These dreams danced as he imagined the unknown girl. And yet, the images had no dimensions to them. And so, in spite of the dreams, he had to live in a kind of fog where the only thing he could make out was the vague form of a woman.

  Time eventually rescued Abd al-Ghani from his dull, colourless existence. After two years of waiting, the family finally started making pr
eparations for his marriage celebration. He was still, like all his other brothers and sisters, going hither and thither to help get things ready without being asked for his opinion or advice on the story in which he was to be the principal hero.

  The celebrations began. Everyone in the household was happy, even the people who had to work hard all day and every day in order to prepare for the happy times ahead. But there was one person who could not find any happiness, someone who was separated from that happy world because his dreams had yet to find a secure resting place. He could no longer maintain the dialogue with his nerves and dreams. He was now a person with no heart, a body with no spirit, moving like a machine that has started to lose its power source – listless, active, but without any awareness.

  The entire family celebrated in the best possible way. Hajj Muhammad was celebrating not only his son’s wedding but also the acknowledgement of the family’s status in the city and the Makhfiyya Quarter. He was eager to show the in-laws that his position was no less prominent, wealthy, or highly regarded in the local context than theirs. With that thought in mind, he was making every effort to come out on top in the tacit struggle taking place between the two families involved in the one wedding.

  Eventually, Abd al-Ghani was taken to a small canopied area at the far end of the huge room where he had been born and spent his childhood years, a space that had been witness to a vigorous marital life, the hero of which had been Hajj Muhammad, and with multiple heroines – Khaduj and Yasmine.

  This was a wedding chamber, the centre of which had been decorated with a lofty pyramidal structure of silk curtain material decorated with gold thread. To either side of the chamber itself were two smaller rooms: one for the groom, and the other for the bridal matron, whose job it was to make the bride feel comfortable and offer advice and encouragement to the groom.