by Malka Marom
“Yarit—I wish you could visit-stay with me, yaa-A’ida.”
“Yarit, Wallah, it is unfortunate that you are a stranger. You strangers all think you are not fortunate. My husband heard it from Salim,” A’ida tells me. “In the maq’ad, to the men, Salim told how you strangers could be blessed with such good fortune: strong and healthy sons, unassailable reputation, trusted allies, and great wealth. But if you lack only one thing—for example, if you had a son who, like mine, cannot grow from child to boy—you would think yourself unfortunate, for you strangers expect to be blessed with everything, everything . . .
“We Badu are the opposite, Wallah. We Badu expect nothing, and if we are blessed with only one thing—like not having to share a husband with another wife, for example—we think ourselves fortunate.”
“Is that why Azzizah and Tammam are content to share their husband, even if, as you say, it is not good?”
“Wallah, it is not good. But we Badu are content, if not with one thing, then with another.”
A’ida chuckled under her veil. “And the heart has space to love many wives at the same time, Wallah, just as your heart has space to love your children, your husband, parents, sisters, brothers, friends, all at the same time . . .
“It is not good,” she adds, “not good to be fiercely faithful to anything, not even to your kinsfolk, or even to your husband, or even to your son. For a reed not bending with the wind is bound to break, and a woman is like reed, and like glass, Wallah, once she breaks, she can never be repaired whole, complete again.”
“Why did you wait until now to give me this knowledge?”
“My heart is large today.” She laughs, pressing into my hand the silver ring that Abu Salim presented to her—showing him what she thinks of his gift, I guess.
“Why do you think Abu Salim invited me to visit-stay in the tents he forbids all other strangers to enter?” I ask, escorting her back to her camel-moving-van.
“Allah aref—God knows,” she replies. “Perhaps he favours you, as I do.”
Is that what happens when you toss a camera Polaroid into the equation? Or are prejudice, cynicism, paranoia, and fatigue getting the better of me?
“I miss you already,” she says, and showers blessings upon me.
I mutter blessings in return, then say, “The compound will be quiet, sad, empty, after you leave.” And I mean it.
Azzizah and Tammam part from her Badu-proper—brief, formal. They simply mutter, “Ma’assalame—peace be with you.”
“Allah ysalmkin—Allah shall reward you,” she replies. Her husband and children leading the camel; she, holding her infant, walks behind, as is proper for a woman.
She must have told Tammam that I wished to leave, go home.
“No . . . Stay, just a while longer,” Tammam said to me as she, little Salimeh, and I sit by her fire-circle after nightfall. After that, for days, she dragged me along to tend the goats with her, as if I am the only friend she has in the world.
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“Salim went with his bride to stay-live at her father’s dwelling-place, for he is needed there,” Mutt and Jeff told me this afternoon.
Not proper, A’ida would say, no doubt; a woman follows her husband, and a man should pitch his tent near his own father for his father’s food is sweet.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Abu Salim had arranged it with the father of the blemished bride. Evoking some ancient legend or story, or maybe dougri—straight, man to man he might have said: “Listen, between us, no one will marry your daughter, for she is blemished. Now, I will purchase her for the price of water rights, but on one condition—that you keep my son away from me, forever—daimann . . . We Badu never forget and rarely forgive.”
There are only absolutes in the Badu’s world. There is no room for mitigation. Perhaps that is why alcohol is forbidden in Badu compounds the desert over, and prayer is unusual. Their reality—their way of life—their desert—is as much unreality as they can comprehend. Even when, with eyes etched red by sun, sand, and wind, they slumber the days away, lethargic, they wander the wasteland of time. Past, present, future—fused by desert days, by desert nights—is always within them. They do not wait, as we do, for some tomorrow when the Messiah will come, filling todays with yesterday, craning to glimpse redemption that lingers, eternally, around the next bend.
BOOK III
Passage
CHAPTER 30
What a day. It started out to be no different from the day before last: I was homesick; the compound was shrinking by the day, and the days were stretching endless and monotonous, as the extraordinary became ordinary. The Badu were growing tired of their stranger-guest, I felt, maybe because I was growing tired of being her. Or maybe we were just low-spirited now that the wedding guests had gone and the rumour was squelched—except in stories, perhaps—and the adrenalin rush had fizzled out like the tail end of pyrotechnics.
Fighting off lethargy was becoming more difficult by the hour, and there were moments when one might sanely wonder if the brewing of crisis after crisis in this region was an attempt to boost adrenaline. Some days the Badu slept on and off all day. I turned in earlier and earlier each evening.
Lean now, like the Badu, my stomach had stopped rumbling. Azzizah worried over how little I ate, how loose my clothes were on me; what worried me was how my mind wandered, my thoughts diffused, unfocused.
At dawn, like the desert revived by dew, I would feel energetic and go with Azzizah or Tammam to comb the dry riverbeds for driftwood, or with Mutt and Jeff or Tammam to shepherd the goatherd. But, soon after sunrise, we’d scramble off to the first spot of shade we could find, and doze off.
It was at this hour, early dawn, only twenty-four hours ago, give or take, that Tammam and I left the compound to water the goatherd. Then we headed to the wadi of the acacias. The heat was raging by the time we reached the “forest” of five spindly thorn trees. There, we collected a few dead twigs and thorns and started a fire. It took only one match, they were so dry, and the fire flamed out almost before our tea was brewed. In the shrinking shadows, Tammam and I, and the goats, were catching a nap. Then, from far away, a dream-like call tore through the mountains—a call to come home.
“Quuuuiiiick!! Faaaassst!! Huuuurrrrry baaaack hoooommmme!!” It sounded like Mutt and Jeff shouting. “Quick!! Fast!! Hurry back home!!”
“Salimeh! Salimeh!” Tammam, screaming hysterically, bolted for the compound. Her world had narrowed even more, it seemed. She showed no sign of concern for anyone else back home—not for Azzizah, who was looking after little Salimeh; not for Abu Salim; not for Mutt and Jeff. Any of them could have been bitten by a scorpion or snake, suffered a heart attack or stroke, or coughed himself to death. The Badawias’ loyalty had thinned with blood, it seemed.
She did not turn around to check if I was catching up to her, which I almost did—for a while. My feet had learned to conquer wadis and mountains by now, but not as fast as the girl-Badawia.
“Tammmaaaaamm!” I called out to her soon after I cleared the bend of the dry riverbed, and the next bend, and the next. But I saw no sign of her, not even from the ridge overlooking the next weaving kilometre or so of this wadi and the one next to it. Nothing out here sign posted east and west, north and south, and no landmark identified one mountain chain from another, one dry riverbed from another. Goat dung trailed off in each and every direction. The desert was a scalding and bleached furnace, and I had no water with me. Still, the image of Badu nobility clouded my mind and I expected at any moment that the mountains would echo Tammam’s calls to me: “Nura, yaa-okhti—my sister—ta’lli ahni—come here. I’m here! Here!” I stood parched in the silence, waiting for the echo of these words that had carried us beyond The Divide, tribal hatred, bad blood . . . I waited and waited, then called out to her: “Yaa-okhti—my sister—Tammmaaaaamm!”
The picture I had long carried in my mind of th
e noble Badu—the one in which a traveller—or pilot; Arik, my Arik—stranded in the desert and a Badu or Badawia comes to the rescue, offering water and hospitality; the consideration Tammam had shown me day in, day out, for weeks—vanished.
Now, she didn’t seem to give a damn about her guest, or her goats—the goats that sustain her Badu way of life.
Relevance peaks and ebbs under the desert winds.
Her ear, which could pick up the soft tread of a camel fifteen to twenty minutes away, was deafened now by her fear for her girl-child. Or so it seemed.
I should have stayed in the shade of the “forest” of acacias, I berated myself. As I turned my anger from Tammam to myself, my picture of the Badu reappeared. I clung to it now, as for dear life. I was dehydrating now, and soon the sun and wind would sere my brain: I’d start drinking sand, savouring it like dream water.
I’m a goner if I stay here, I thought. The waterhole couldn’t be more than an hour away, two hours at most. With the wind at my back, I could make it in an hour, I thought. Then it hit me: the wind was blowing toward the waterhole and the compound, and that is why I wasn’t hearing a sound from Tammam, or from Mutt and Jeff.
I don’t know how long I walked with the wind at my back, and with Arik, my guardian angel, encouraging me, before I saw Azzizah running toward me and shouting, “I found her! I found her!” Tammam and little Salimeh, and Mutt and Jeff joined us, looking as relieved as I felt.
When I heard we were only minutes away from the waterhole, I took a child’s pride in the fact that I had navigated so well in that wilderness, at that hour, with no shade to point north. “Wallah, I was walking in the right direction.”
“Aywa, you are like a Badawia now,” said Azzizah. And already, at the waterhole, Azzizah, Tammam, and Mutt and Jeff embellished this whole episode into a legend-story of a rite-of-passage from dependence to independence; turned it into an allegory of the Badu’s dream-of-dreams: roaming the desert free as the wind, unfettered by dependence on, and responsibility for, sister, brother, son, daughter, mother, father, clan, tribe.
It was a rite-of-passage to personal freedom, guided only by the forces of destiny.
According to the Badawias, it was destiny’s decree that I go through that initiation, that rite-of-passage, just as I was about to take leave of them, their compound, their mountains—I had no idea then how many passages and transformations I would go through before the day was over.
“Min zaman—long before today—the alum crystal had revealed that no harm would befall our guest, Nura, in our home grounds, but today, Wallah, I feared fate held it in store for her to get lost to the desert, yaa-Rabb,” Azzizah said, hauling yet another bucket of water.
We must have consumed ten buckets there, we were so parched.
“Aywa, I am sure it was decreed by fate that I would lose sight of her in the blinding heat of the high sun,” Tammam said. “Her blood on my head, I was thinking, her blood on my head, her blood on my head . . . Yet faster than ever before in my life I ran. Wallah, how fate pushed my feet to run away from my sister Nura, so that, like a Badawia brave, she by herself could traverse el sahrah—the desert.” Tammam spoke in the lilting cadences of Badu legend-telling, revising as she went along, like storytellers everywhere.
Now I wonder if the second part of her story wasn’t as true as the first—if, as she believed, she couldn’t help but turn tail on me, for she was but an instrument of fate . . .
“It is a good omen,” said Azzizah, “a good omen that it happened in the last few hours of the last day. It means good fortune coming late, but not too late, for us all, Inshallah . . .” Her eyes blurred gladness with sadness at the thought of my leaving.
In a week or two, or at best a day or two, I hoped, Gingie would pick me up from the maq’ad alone, or with Riva and Mottke!
No way could they be here today, I thought, even when little Jeff urged me, “Quick-fast, for Abu Salim had told me you must pack-tie your belongings, take them with you to the maq’ad.” He was putting me on, I thought, seeing mischief in his eyes—and in the pail in his hands.
“LLaaaaa!—No!” his little brother screamed, ducking behind me, just as Jeff aiming the pail, sending an arc of water over us both. Felt ice cold to the sun-baked skin. I laughed longer and harder than the prank warranted—overloaded emotions, needing the release.
“Pack your belongings quick-fast. Nemshi—let’s go,” Jeff urged me; swore on the life of the rain that a stranger-man awaits me in the maq’ad.
Up at the compound, the Badawias insisted I stay-sit with them for one glass of tea at least.
“But no one is tending the herd,” I said, hating to prolong goodbyes, to add yet another parting to the chain of them that formed my life.
“Ma’alesh—never mind the goatherd,” Tammam said, building the fire.
“Abu Salim will be angry with us if we do not fetch Nura quick-fast,” Mutt and Jeff said, pressing to cut our parting short.
Azzizah dispatched them to inform Abu Salim that I would be leaving the tents “in but a short while.”
“Stana—wait a second,” I said as Mutt and Jeff were about to take off. I bundled together my cassette recorder and blank tapes and handed them over. They were delighted and surprised to hear that it was my going-away present to them.
“Can we take it to the maq’ad? Is it really ours to keep? We won’t break it, we know how to work it . . . Yaa-Allah! Yaa-Allah!” they exclaimed. “May Allah reward you, yaa-Nura . . .”
“Mabrouk . . . Mabrouk—may you always be blessed,” I told each in response.
Tammam blessed them and me, but Azzizah frowned. “Not good, not proper,” she muttered under her veil, as if nothing had changed since that first morning in her compound, when she dismissed every gift I presented as “not good . . . Presented not proper, for all to see . . .”
“Have a heart, yaa-Azzizah. Let me have the pleasure of seeing how my presents please you,” I told her, handing her my red duffel bag, containing my first-aid kit, complete with vitamin and mineral supplements, iodine, antihistamines and antibiotics, and water-purifying tablets—all of which she recognized by now.
To Tammam I presented my warm Eddie Bauer parka, and the huge blue and white Maple Leaf hockey goalie’s duffle bag she liked. It would be useful in the tying and untying of her possessions when and if drought or any other instrument of fate forced them to move.
“Would little Salimeh like me to present to her my wristwatch, for to remember me by?”
“Wallah, she would,” Tammam replied. Then she suggested I leave for Abu Salim my great old green sweater—“for in size as in colour it bespeaks your generosity of heart.”
“Aywa, it would please Abu Salim. If you present it proper, not to his face,” said Azzizah.
In return, Tammam gave me one of her gun’ah—long back veils: “So that your back be protected against evil eyes of envy and twisted tongues that weave false rumours behind a woman’s back.”
Next, Azzizah gave me her spare old face veil, exquisitely worked “to cover a woman’s cheek and chin—bespeaking of her pride, strength, endurance—and her nose—breath, inner life, heat, fire, soul—and her mouth—her hunger, craving, desire, sexual charm. So that your face be covered-protected against anyone out to shame you, defame your kin, your clan . . . And so that even a person blind in both eyes could hear the coins of your virtue—your self-restraint, modesty, deference . . .” Silent now, we sat around Tammam’s fire-circle, as if words would have rendered our feelings trivial, would have tarnished the moment.
“Oh, eyes be strong, you cherish people and then they are gone,” Tammam broke the silence before the tea was brewed.
“Ma’assalame—Peace be with you wherever you go,” Azzizah whispered in my ear, the proper-formal send-off.
“Allah ysalmkin—May Allah reward you two for the hospitality you extended to m
e,” I responded, proper-formal.
“Aywa, you two! Strong-willed in send-off, shed not a tear—till after you part,” Tammam muttered. Shy but delighted, she giggled under her veils when I embraced her—not proper-formal, but a good loving hug.
Azzizah, escaping my parting embrace, ran like a bashful maiden to the lookout point to catch a last glimpse of her stranger-no-stranger guest.
Tammam accompanied me as far as the last bend.
The knapsack I carried was heavy with the gifts presented to me and with all my writing-to-remember and cassette recordings. All made heavier still by the Badu’s trust that I would never breathe a word of what I had seen or heard or sensed in their compound, without their permission, and the trust that my conduct, reflecting their hospitality, would do them proud, enhance their reputation and mine.
The air was alive with dream lakes, elongated and stretched wide like rippling mirrors—tauntingly unattainable. As I walked toward them, they danced away—faster, slower, always in step with my stride. The Jeep bobbed like a green dinghy, not far from the maq’ad. Shade and kaffiyyes—black and white, and in the foreground the aroma of honour-coffee brewing on a fragrant fire—to honour-welcome—
Tal.
I didn’t think I’d ever see him again, except in my imagination and dreams—those realms in which I see Arik. I imagined I’d bump into him on the street, or in some lobby during intermission at some concert or movie. He probably would have asked me how my stay in the forbidden tents had gone. Then we would have parted and gone on with our separate lives—not because there were ill feelings between us, but because there weren’t. It is our lives that are in conflict, not our hearts . . .
I had tucked him away in my heart like a treasured memory; a dream-angel like the one in my childhood dream, the one who would escort me to the wilderness. The angel that you, Arik, had sent to show me that love transcends time, preserving the past as a path to the future.