The Saffron Gate

by Holeman, Linda

  ‘Woman is Lalla Huma,’ Aziz said, setting my bags on the tiled floor. ‘She give you food, you sleep, give her only one franc,’ and then he turned to leave.

  ‘What time will you be back for me?’ I called. I don’t know what I had expected, but I was filled with a new surge of fear at being left here, alone, with the silent woman.

  ‘Starting time, madame,’ he said, and uttered one sentence to the woman. She picked up my cases — she was smaller than I but lifted them with apparent ease — and climbed a set of stairs that ran up one of the outside walls of the building.

  As the gate shut with a clang I stood alone in the courtyard. Then I hurried to follow the woman up the stairs, to a tiny room on the second floor of the house, the one window with an elaborately decorated wooden grille overlooking the street. There was nothing in the room but a hard pallet on the floor, with a thick woven blanket folded neatly in the middle. At the foot of the bed was a bowl covered with a wooden lid, which I thought must be a chamber pot. There was a candle in a little decorated jar on the windowsill; beside it a box of wooden matches.

  I had barely time to wonder what I would do — how I would communicate with Lalla Huma — when she left for a few moments and then returned with a large ceramic bowl of steaming water and a long strip of clean cloth. As soon as she left again, I took off my shoes and stockings and began unbuttoning my dress to wash, but stopped, going to the door to lock it. There was no lock.

  I washed hurriedly, dressing again, as I had no idea what was expected. In a short time Lalla Huma again opened the door and entered, this time carrying a tray with an earthenware plate of unidentifiable shredded meat and long fingers of cooked carrot and a pot of mint tea. The pot was made from some kind of bone.

  She took the bowl of water and the damp cloth and left. I never saw her face, and she never lifted her eyes from the floor as she did these things.

  I ate and drank, my eyes heavy, and then put on my nightdress and lay on the narrow pallet, pulling the heavy blanket over me. The street outside was quiet, although as darkness fell I heard the call from the minarets: Allah Akbar — God is Great. I had, since I’d arrived in North Africa, become accustomed to the calls, which came five times a day.

  The sound, so familiar now, only increased my loneliness. ‘Etienne,’ I whispered into the darkness.

  I was awakened at dawn by the first call to prayer, and rose, glancing through the wooden grille. Parked below, in the still street, was the dusty Citroën, and outside it, their foreheads pressed to the ground, were Mustapha and Aziz. I quickly dressed and, without waiting for the mint tea offered by Lalla Huma, who appeared silently out of a door when she heard my feet on the tiled steps, hurried out to the car. Mustapha and Aziz were back inside, but were asleep, snoring in tandem. I thought perhaps I’d been mistaken. Maybe it hadn’t been them I’d seen praying. Mustapha was on his back with his head under the steering wheel and his feet sticking out the opposite window, the red and black striped djellaba over him. Aziz was turned sideways in the single back seat, his arms wrapped around himself and his legs doubled up against his, tomach. There was an assortment of sacks and bags on the floor; perhaps food for the rest of the journey. When they had left me at Lalla Huma’s I hadn’t considered where they would spend the night, but now wondered if they’d slept in the car.

  I rapped on the roof of the car — the skins were gone — and Mustapha raised his head with a start, banging it on the steering wheel. ‘Non, non, madame,’ he said, grimacing, rubbing his head, and Aziz mumbled, ‘Too early for start time.’ Both men settled back, and I returned to the house and had my tea, along with the now familiar rounds of unleavened bread and thick fig jam.

  I waited until after seven o’clock, when the streets were noisy with men and pushcarts, camels and donkeys, and boys tapping goats with short sticks to keep them moving, and again went out to the car. I couldn’t believe that Mustapha and Aziz could sleep through the cacophony. When I finally managed to rouse them, they both sat up, looking disgruntled, but Mustapha retrieved my bags and again put them in on either side of Aziz, who, although upright, still had his eye closed. He seemed to have grown an alarming amount of stubble through the night; I thought that by the time we reached Marrakesh it would be a full beard.

  As we drove away, I asked Aziz if they’d slept in the car all night.

  ‘Some time, madame,’ he said. ‘First we sell skins. We get petrol, we eat, we visit friends. Is good night,’ he said. ‘Lalla Huma is good? Your night is good?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘Yes, thank you, Aziz.’

  I had been able to wash off the worst of the dust and grime from the road, I’d eaten a hearty meal, and had a deep sleep. I’d been lonely, and sad, but I had felt that every night since the last one I’d shared with Etienne.

  ‘Where does your family live, Aziz?’ I asked him.

  ‘Settat,’ he said. ‘Same Mustapha.’

  I didn’t know how big Settat was, and wondered if there would be another house like Lalla Huma’s for me to stay at, or whether I would stay with Aziz or Mustapha’s family.

  ‘Today I see wifes, children. I don’t see one month. I am driving many places with Mustapha.’

  Had he said wifes? Did he mean wife, or wives? I knew from Etienne that Muslims could have up to four wives. ‘How many children do you have?’ I asked him then.

  He smiled proudly. ‘Six. Four from wife one. Two from second wife. But she is young, second wife. More will come, Inshallah.’

  ‘And Mustapha?’ I asked, looking from Aziz to the driver. ‘Mustapha? You have two wives?’

  Mustapha understood me, shaking his head, his lips turned down, and held up his index finger.

  ‘Mustapha has bad luck. No money for second wife. But maybe soon fate gives him another wife.’ Aziz said something to Mustapha in Arabic, and Mustapha gave a wry smile.

  ‘Your husband,’ Aziz said to me then, ‘why he lets wife go alone to Marrakesh?’

  ‘I don’t have a husband,’ I told him.

  He frowned, shaking his head. ‘Quoi?’ he said, drawing out the word, sounding incredulous. ‘What?’ he repeated. ‘Why no husband?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Maybe … maybe bad luck, like Mustapha,’ I said. It was a question I’d never been asked outright before.

  Aziz nodded, sadly. ‘This is not good. I pray for you, madame. I pray for you for husband. You like we take you to shrine? We pass shrines on the way to Marrakesh.’

  ‘No. But thank you, Aziz,’ I said, and turned my head to look out the side window. Aziz understood the gesture, and sat back, not saying anything more.

  We drove downwards from Sale, the road sloping to the mouth of the river, where I could see what looked like a steam ferry moored.

  ‘We must cross Boug-Regreg,’ Aziz said, and as we inched towards the landing stage for the ferry, I stared around at the crowds who had also gathered to cross the river to Rabat. There were the usual camels and donkeys and goats, as well as crowds of women in their voluminous robes, babies peeping from the front or the back, small children clutching their mothers’ skirts. A large man, in splendid robes of burgundy and blue silk, sat on a donkey far too small for his weight, and a tall man with skin black and glistening, in a simple white robe, held the donkey’s bridle.

  When the steam ferry was packed so tightly there wasn’t room for another man or even goat, we were transported across the brown river. The short trip was noisy with the babble of animal roars and grunts and brays and bleating, mingled with the cries of children, the high, quick voices of the women and the lower rumbling of the men. We were the only car on the ferry, and I was viewed, much like at Larache, with open stares. One woman stooped to look in the window and hissed something through her covering, her dark eyes narrowed.

  I drew back, leaning to one side, so that I was away from the open window and closer to Mustapha. ‘What did she say?’ I asked Aziz.

  ‘Womens think you bad, show face to all men,’ h
e said, and after that I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead, looking neither right nor left, and was relieved when we docked on the other side of the river and headed on the road to Casablanca.

  The Rif mountains had died away before we reached Sale, but now I saw the outline of others far to the east.

  ‘Atlas mountains,’ Aziz told me. ‘But not big Atlas. Smaller. Big is later, near Marrakesh. High Atlas,’ he said.

  The road continued to run alongside the Atlantic. I watched the sun dance on the water, the gulls swooping. There were more olive gardens and orange trees, and the smells were fresh and clean. The plains looked fertile.

  ‘Will we go in to Casablanca?’ I asked, and Aziz shook his head.

  ‘No Casa. Too big, too many peoples, hard to drive,’ he said. ‘The road is beside city.’

  We passed Casablanca on the edge of the sea, white, huge and glorious, all spires and towers and ramparts. We left the magnificent white city, turning away from it and the Atlantic, ready to move inland towards my destination, Marrakesh.

  An hour past Casablanca we stopped beside the walls of a tiny mud village. ‘We eat,’ Aziz said, gesturing for me to get out of the car.

  It was only then that I saw a small structure with a corrugated tin roof. Two men stood over a grill; going closer, I saw eggs bubbling in an inch of grease in a blackened pan. Clouds of blue flies flitted dangerously close to the heat. An old camel sat on its callused knees nearby, gazing at us with a look of haughty grandeur, occasionally grumbling and spitting. His smell was stronger than that of the frying eggs.

  I stood beside Mustapha and Aziz, holding my tin plate and sopping up the grease-laden eggs with tough wedges of unleavened bread. Mustapha went back to the car and brought out a bag of sticky figs and another of dry olives. The men at the grill made us mint tea; I drank it from a dented tin cup. Then we were back in the car. Mustapha and Aziz appeared to have greatly enjoyed the meal, patting their stomachs and burping. I couldn’t lose the oily taste of the eggs, even though I ate all of my olives and figs.

  ‘Now in three hours, maybe four, we come Settat,’ Aziz said, smiling, and I knew how anxious he was to see his family.

  But a few miles from the village where we’d had lunch, the macadam road came to an abrupt end, blocked off by stacks of uprooted, rotting cacti and rusting barrels. Beyond the blockade the road had caved in, and there were jumbled chunks of macadam as far as I could see.

  ‘Aaaaahhhh,’ Aziz breathed. ‘Not good. Road is broken,’ he said, and then spoke to Mustapha in Arabic.

  Mustapha turned the wheel sharply, on to simple hardened tracks that ran away from the macadam. The tracks were sandy soil woven with some sort of tough vegetation. Without the cooling ocean breezes, the hot wind blew through the car as though an oven door had opened, covering us in a thin film of dust. Mustapha pointed to the narrow ruts that led into what appeared to be a blank canvas of earth and sky.

  ‘Piste, madame,’ he said.

  I turned to him.’ Pardonnez-moi?’ I said.

  ‘Piste, piste. No road. Piste’

  I shook my head, looking back at Aziz.

  ‘We drive the piste’ he said. ‘The tracks of caravans. Roads no good, drive piste through the bled. Maybe road come back, maybe not.’

  ‘Bled? ‘ I repeated.

  ‘Bled,’ he said. ‘Bled, madame. No city. Country. Big.’

  I nodded, thinking how lucky I was that Aziz could speak French well enough to explain the features of the landscape and to tell me, in the most basic terms, where we were and what we would do next.

  We rattled along the rough piste. Here the land was occasionally dotted with circles of mud huts with roofs made of woven rush. There was always a well and corrals of a sort — defined by low hedges of cacti or wattled thorn — containing hundreds of piteously bleating goats. Under their shade a group of swathed figures sat; I assumed them to be men, as there were no children about. These villages, Aziz said, were called nourwal. When, some miles further along the road, we passed dozens of tents made of dark hair — goat or camel — perched on a rocky slope, Aziz said douar. After the different forms of habitat had sprung up a few more times and Aziz had again named them, I understood that the mud hut villages were permanent, with the wells and the ancient trees, while the skin tents, with children guarding small groups of camels and goats, were nomadic villages.

  When we had first started on the piste it had appeared that the countryside was flat. But I was mistaken. We suddenly plunged downwards, and then almost immediately upwards again. This went on for what felt like an interminable time. I clutched the dashboard, aware that my hairline and collar were damp with perspiration and gritty with sand. My stomach rolled with the landscape. It was almost like being at sea again, sailing up and down on the waves. Had this land once been under water? Were we indeed driving on the bottom of some ancient ocean?

  I closed my eyes, grimacing as my stomach heaved. I tasted the oily eggs in my throat. Finally I opened my eyes and turned to Mustapha, letting go of the dashboard and sitting up straight, clearing my throat. I didn’t want to let these men think me weak. They already pitied me because I was unmarried.

  ‘Mustapha,’ I said, ‘will we be able to get back on the road soon? So that we can reach Settat before nightfall?’

  Mustapha didn’t answer.

  ‘Too far from road now,’ Aziz said. ‘Better we stay on piste. And tonight, sleep in bled.

  ‘Here?’ I asked, looking around at the empty expanse.

  ‘Sleep in bled’, he simply repeated, and I stared straight ahead, willing my stomach to remain still. I thought of how disappointed Aziz and Mustapha would be, so close and yet unable to get home after a month away from their families.

  But I was also thinking about a long Moroccan night in a small car with two men, in the middle of nowhere.

  NINE

  The bled went on in a great emptiness, and yet I began to find beauty in the late afternoon sun on the parched earth, the rocks, the sudden stands of scrubby palmetto palms. Eventually I forgot about my stomach, and told myself to stop worrying about the night ahead, as there was nothing I could do about it.

  Instead, I concentrated on looking more intently at what I had thought was empty land, realising I was actually seeing things where I thought there had been nothing.

  A few times another wreck of a car drove by us; one of us had to idle, slightly off the piste, to allow the other to pass. The other cars were always driven by Arabs, and Mustapha and Aziz waved and called loudly to the drivers, who responded in the same way. I didn’t know whether the men knew each other or this was simply the way of the piste in Morocco.

  I was staring at a white rise in the distance, which I knew, from Aziz pointing out others previously, was a saint’s tomb where the nomads stopped for prayer — and where Aziz had offered to take me to pray for a husband. These occasional tombs broke up the monotony of the desolate stretches of now red earth and stony ground reaching out on all sides of us.

  When we suddenly dipped lower and I lost sight of the bit of white ahead, the car hit a hole and bounced to the left. Mustapha yelled, turning the wheel, but the car slid off the piste and into a deep rut of sand.

  The engine roared as Mustapha tried to drive out of the sand. Then both men got out of the car, walking around it and arguing with each other in Arabic. Mustapha motioned for me to get out as well, and he got back behind the wheel. I stood to one side as Mustapha stepped on the gas and Aziz pushed from behind. He shouted at Mustapha, and Mustapha turned off the engine. They took out my cases, and then repeated the process. The tyres spun in the sand, digging deeper. I went to the back of the car, putting my hands on the Citroën beside Aziz’s and pushing while the car roared again, spitting sand and dust into my eyes and ears. I could taste it on my tongue. I closed my eyes and turned my face to one side. Still the car didn’t move. Mustapha, leaving it running, came and stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the situation. Then he reached into the car,
drew out the mouldering djellaba and tore it down the middle. He placed a piece under each front wheel, again spoke to Aziz, and the two men exchanged places.

  It was the same as before. Even the added traction of the cloth was of no use. Aziz turned off the engine and came and stood beside us. ‘We need more push,’ he said.

  I licked my lips. ‘I’ll drive, and you both push,’ I said.

  They stared at me.

  ‘All right? ‘I asked.

  Mustapha shook his head and spoke one long angry phrase to Aziz.

  ‘My cousin is afraid of the woman drive car,’ Aziz said. ‘She will take away the baraka.’

  ‘I can drive,’ I said. ‘I have driven a car. In America.’

  Aziz spoke to Mustapha in an argumentative tone. Finally Mustapha threw up his hands and walked away, muttering. He walked in a tighter and tighter circle in the scrubby dirt for a few moments, then came back and stared at me.

  ‘Fine you drive. Go,’ he said, and I got in behind the steering wheel. I put my hands on it, and then turned the key, slowly pressing on the gas and clutch. I closed my eyes for a moment at the unexpected pleasure it brought to just hold the steering wheel and feel the car fumble under me. I thought of the Silver Ghost. It spite of the tragic outcome of the accident, the car itself had suffered very little damage. Once its broken windows were replaced and the dents and scratches smoothed and repainted, I had Mr Barlow sell it for me. I never wanted to see it again.

  It had fetched a surprisingly large sum of money. When Mr Barlow handed the thick envelope of bills to me I shook my head. ‘I don’t want it,’ I said, looking at the envelope as though it contained something poisonous. I felt the money was dirty, was poison. ‘You can keep it, for the rent,’ I told him, but he shook his head.

  ‘Come now, Sidonie, you’re not thinking straight. You’ve got to plan for the future,’ he said, and left it on the kitchen table.

  I had made a wide berth around the table for the next two days, as if the envelope of bills was some live thing that might jump up and bite me if I came too close. But finally I had taken the envelope and hid it in the back of my closet, relieved that I no longer had to look at it and think about what it represented.