‘Though it doesn’t matter, does it?’
I paused, the space between us quiet, small.
‘Perhaps not,’ I said, not caring either way.
‘Because it doesn’t exist,’ she pressed, something she wanted to say to me. ‘Perfection, that is.’
‘Are you talking about Jack’s letter? His perfect love?’
‘Everything is crooked.’
‘Even God?’
‘Especially God!’ That open smile of hers.
*
The two drivers joined us at the table. They were awkward, glancing at each other as if for support. Through the pane of glass that morning, I’d observed the religious paraphernalia in the cabin, the cards and the stickers, and the tasselled beads. Sophe had told me what she knew, my first lesson about Islam.
‘Where are you from?’ the driver asked now. A textbook question, one Sophe had been teaching the camp children just a few days earlier.
We told them. My country then hers.
‘What is your name?’
Something made Sophe answer in English, made her keep her Arabic to herself.
‘She is your wife?’ he asked me, ignoring Sophe.
I nodded.
‘What are you doing here?’ the second one asked, though with their beards it wasn’t easy telling them apart. They all start to look the same, I thought, the old joke, the old lazy joke. The women in the camp, Sophe told me later, called men like that, simply, ‘Beards’, encapsulating their fanatical attention to every detail of their religious observance.
‘What is it?’ the first Beard asked, pointing to my rough figurine.
‘It is a sculpture,’ I answered.
‘It is bad,’ he said, almost spitting it at me.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘Bad,’ he replied angrily. ‘You must not. It is forbidden.’
The two of them rose soon after, and turned their backs and returned to their camionette. Sophe and I meekly followed, our bags still in the tray. The offer of the lift had not been withdrawn, so we climbed aboard, the vehicle pulling away before we had a chance to settle.
‘What on earth was that about?’
Sophe was accepting in the face of their rudeness.
‘There are no people in Islamic art. Some Muslims say that to represent the human form is idolatry. That Mohammad forbade it.’
I thought of all those scenes of idyllic waterfalls and perfect, palm-lined, golden-sand beaches with not a human in sight.
‘They honour God in pattern.’
Nothing in the world of The Springs had prepared me for this. Suddenly all those Arabesques I’d seen, all those tiled mosaics on the floors of those hotel foyers began to make sense. The fading hennaed patterns on Sophe’s hands when she held them out to me. Look, see. Flowers and plants indivisible. An infinite pattern extending beyond the visible world into the eternal.
A part of me had registered the absence but hadn’t yet translated it into thought. Just another of the countless things that had disturbed me since I’d been there, unsettling in a way I hadn’t even realised. Sometimes the most profound things are the most difficult to see. That to introduce the human into art might be an affront to the perfection of God.
My own nagging thought came back: that carving stone, no matter the image, is an affront to beauty.
*
A telecommunications tower poked above a ridge on the horizon. After the beauty of dunes and old ksars, the oases and the palmeraie, and the ancient watercourse we’d followed for so long, this last settlement was miserable at first sight. The town at the end of the line: a single hotel, and a lifeless market and a post-office and a petrol station and a customs depot and a prison. That made me smile. Prisoners always, everywhere – the murderers and the rapists and the terrorists – are sent as far away as geography allows, beyond even the fringes of civilisation. The story of my own country, I said to Sophe as we climbed out of the camionette at the market.
The Beards would have dropped us off without another word, like roadside waste, their judgement unaltered by the miles since their rebuke. But I refused to let them discard us that way. My little show of resistance. My defence of my art.
‘Besslaama,’ I said, daring them to ignore me. Go in safety, a phrase I’d picked up from Sophe.
‘Besslaama,’ I said again, loud enough for the watchers in the marketplace to hear. Still the Beards refused to reply.
‘Besslaama,’ I said a third time, a direct challenge. Faces in the street were turning, curious.
This was enough to extract a grudging reply from them, twin echoes before the Beards wound up their windows and drove off. My little victory.
EIGHT
The hand on the waterfall-clock above the door had just passed nine when Sophe joined me in the only restaurant in town. I waved the waiter over and we ordered soup – haricot blanc – and une grande bouteille de limonade that he collected from a crate stacked against a wall. He pried the cap off without looking at either the bottle or us, his eyes fixed on the television mounted in the corner of the room. He swirled two glasses in a tub of water, then lifted them out, shook them, and carried them, dripping still, to our table, where he placed them lightly on the red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth.
When he was gone Sophe reached into the folds of her dress and produced a strangely shaped object, a stone of some sort, delicately cut – a burst of tiny unfolding petals. She handed it to me. I felt the weight of it in my palm. At first I thought it had been carved, that a master had sculpted this enchanting cluster of florets. But the texture of it was different, a movement no sculptor could achieve.
‘Une Rose du Sable,’ Sophe said. ‘A sand rose. They’re made of crystallised gypsum. The dew dissolves the gypsum in the sand over many years, leaving these roses just under the surface. No two are the same.’
I was breathless.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘Exquisite,’ I said, turning it in my fingers.
‘See – the whole of nature celebrates sculpture.’
I looked up. Her eyes. This wonderful gesture. I could have wept.
Later, as we ate, the waiter turned up the sound on the television to catch the evening news bulletin. The newsreader with his thick moustache and slick black hair behind his plain news desk – everything in Arabic sounds urgent, I thought. But Sophe turned to watch the television as well, and the waiter increased the volume again.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘An attack,’ she said, still listening intently to the bulletin.
I watched the images of the capital, agitated crowds of men and the government’s security forces in the street, but couldn’t tell if they were policemen or soldiers. Still didn’t know what the difference was. Knew only that men in uniforms were pointing guns at men with beards in flowing white robes.
‘Fou,’ the waiter said. Crazy. He’d said it in French, so it was meant for us. Sophe asked him what had happened. He gazed at the screen for so long it seemed he might not answer.
‘Les journalistes,’ he said eventually. ‘Les chanteurs. Les travailleurs étrangers. Et maintenant les Pères, les sept Pères . . .’
‘Seven priests have been killed,’ she whispered to me.
The waiter shook his head sadly, and clicked his tongue. He turned his back on the screen as if to walk away, then cursed and turned around again, muttering at the images of the soldiers struggling to contain the crowd. It was difficult to know whether to watch him or the television.
‘Tout est cassé. Tout est cassé,’ he repeated, again and again. ‘Tout.’
I raised my eyebrows in query.
‘He says everything is broken.’
‘Everything?’
Sophe shrugged.
; ‘Society.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Pourquoi?’ he said, turning slowly to me. ‘Pourquoi? Vous voulez savoir pourquoi?’
I nodded.
‘Parce que notre histoire est cassée. Le français nous a cassés, et nous n’avons pas guéri.’
He reached up to the television and turned it off, then left the restaurant. Sophe and I remained, our meals half-eaten.
‘What did he mean?’
‘He says they’re still wounded from colonisation.’
‘I don’t follow.’
She moved the palms of her hands across the surface of the vinyl tablecloth with its nicks and stains and burn-holes, as if she were polishing it.
‘These stories aren’t ours to tell. I don’t know how to tell it. Not properly, it’s so complex.’
‘Will you try? Please.’
And so Sophe gave me another lesson. She told me about the war of independence against France and how many were killed back then, an incomprehensible number. About the country’s independence heroes and its deteriorating trail of governments since – its generals and its presidents. She told me about the Islamists recently returned home from their holy war in Afghanistan, the political party they’d formed and the elections suspended by the government after they won the first round, the Beards. About France and America’s fear of another Islamic state, that they’d do whatever it took to prevent it, that denying the Islamists victory seemed the obvious thing to do. Then the Islamists’ retaliation, not just against the government but against non-Muslim foreigners. The threats, the ultimatums, the attacks. Locals too, popular singers and movie stars and journalists who favoured a secular state. The executions, the fear, and inevitably the government’s reply. The reprisals. Back and forth, so many killings.
‘You can see their frustration,’ she said. ‘Their anger. The broken commitments by their government. By our governments. Broken promises and powerlessness – that they’re fed up trying to chisel away at the foundations of their society to make it better. But still –’ Sophe pointed to the blank television screen – ‘that’s no reason. It’s beyond understanding.’
These were concepts divorced from any reality I knew. I could sense the drama, a hundred moral lessons somewhere there for the extraction. But it was a maze.
‘Come on,’ Sophe said. ‘Let’s walk.’
We left town and made for the dunes, the sand becoming softer beneath our feet, the lights of the town falling behind a ridge. There was more moonlight that night than I’d ever thought possible.
I started up the largest dune ahead of her, my calves stretching and straining, legs driving from the thighs. My boots disappeared below the surface with each footstep, sand creeping at my ankles, beneath my soles, inside my socks and between my toes. Grain by grain filling my boots, as if my feet were swelling inside them.
At the top of the dune I caught my breath, looked around. The lights of the town far below. So much dark land. If I reached for it I might even touch the sky, might feel the texture of it on my fingertips. Instead I stretched out my hand to Sophe a few steps below, panting. She took it, and joined me at the crest of the dune. A fluorescent wisp of cloud passed overhead. I turned full-circle, taking in the panorama of sand, the desert which dwarfed the town. All the dunes were moving, a layer of sand particles blowing and falling and gusting and lifting, the dunes shimmering with movement as far as the eye could see. I was heady with it, swimming in exuberance.
I closed my eyes. Then the sound of the wind changed. It had been different on the dune anyway, less insistent than in the town, gentler. But now there was something else – it was not the wind at all, but a plane’s engine, a jet, coming on fast. The faint thrum turning to roar. I opened my eyes and found it, low in the sky. Outstripping itself, in advance of the sound, it was a dark arrowhead and a mighty trail of flame, deafening. There was no time for fear, only awe. Then it was gone, swallowed by the stars and the desert wind.
On some primitive impulse we rolled down the dune. It started slowly, but soon we were careening out of control, losing all shape entirely. Whirling limbs churning the sand into the air, into our clothes, into our hair. That long tumble, pulled out of time, glimpses of Sophe in my spiralling, spinning blood, the pitch of excitement, her laughter in the turning night.
We landed together at the foot of the dune. I leant towards her, a wild exuberance upon me, but she turned away. Gave me her cheek instead, allowed my lips to touch her skin, and my fingers to brush the sand from her forehead.
NINE
Finally, Tuareg, three of them. Tall, indigo-turbaned, sunglassed even in the muted dawn light, they sat together in the front, their bodies close. Sophe and I were in the back. I didn’t know enough about the legends that had accumulated around them over the centuries to feel much myself, but Sophe was excited. She knew we were being taken across this next part of our journey, this great ocean of sand, by the real thing. That though they were not on camelback, those three men were the true people of the desert, indivisible from it.
The waiter from the restaurant had arranged the lift for us when we got back from the dunes the night before, and we’d risen early so we could head east across the sand. It was a weak dawn, dust in the air. After just fifteen minutes driving we stopped. Not to pray as I’d first thought, but to reduce the air-pressure in the tyres, a faint hiss against the burr of the engine as the landcruiser dropped nearer the sand. We started again, built speed, and soon began to float. The sweeping desert, the wind whistling, high and insistent through the landcruiser’s partly open windows, the haze that hung in the air that morning – light and distance flattened, and the desert seemed to sigh. There was no need for talk.
There was no road, just tyre-tracks in the sand reaching towards the horizon ahead, and the exhilaration of laying out our own route among them. Every few minutes a balise – a darkened concrete marker, sometimes a low cairn of stones – appeared in the grainy distance and grew closer, till we reached it, passed and it was gone. And once more there was nothing but lines in the sand before us.
Sophe offered the men dried biscuits, and in return they passed a bag of sweet dates back to us. We collected the pips in our hands and when we were done tossed them out the window into the throat of the wind.
We slowed as we passed through a village, but didn’t stop. On its streets of sand there were women at the well, with its giant arm and fulcrum, and children stopping their play to stare. I wondered if it was the Tuareg or us that interested them. At the edge of the village a clutch of abandoned buildings had fallen to ruin. Nearby was a crude animal enclosure and a handful of hard-headed goats tearing leaves off a branch thrown to them moments before. Beyond the goats, on the outer reaches of that fragile settlement, was a grove of eucalypts, at once both strange and familiar. Such unexpected life. A man harvesting them hacking branches off a trunk, two women bundling them for firewood.
*
The air began to stir. Particles of dust and sand thickening, a growing orange light. The Tuareg leant forward, looking out through the windscreen. I wondered if their language had a word for a change like this, and whether Jack had collected it as he had their words for dunes during his last months with the army. I pressed the palm of my hand on the window and felt the gusting wind.
We slowed. Then stopped. The world began swirling around, above us, beneath. The rising agitation, the insistence as grains of sand grazed against the glass or lodged momentarily beneath the thin rubber blades of the windscreen wipers, each particle in ecstatic dance . . . Yet the three men in their robes calmly waited for it to pass. There was nothing in the wind’s ferocity to trouble us, nothing in all the world to fear, and all that was required of us was stillness.
Then abruptly the swirling winds were gone and what was left was a moaning dust-filled sky. There was visibility enough to see that the tracks in t
he sand were merely smudged, not erased. We would continue.
An hour later, a small dark mass appeared in the haze. The Tuareg steered for it, three wise men pursuing a star. Nearer, we saw it was a mudbrick hut, now abandoned. The ground was stonier and darker in patches, with a different texture to it, and when the men spoke, their talk was lighter, like chatter. One of them smiled to us, with great white teeth, his veil having fallen from across his nose and mouth. It was only when we opened the doors to get out that we heard a bubbling sound. Not the wind, nor the men, but – an extraordinary thing – the sound of running water. Water! How alien the sound, the gushing of spring water feeding a low concrete trough in the middle of that wilderness, water pouring out of a metal casing at the head of the trough, spouting into a long, low reservoir, filling it, creating in the desert a shimmering pool. This miracle these men were showing us.
They stretched their long legs, as if shaking something from their limbs, like dancers before a performance. The air had thinned of sand and dust, and the sun was cleaner now in the sky. Sophe and I drank from the trough, cupping our hands in the cool water and lifting it to our mouths, the men laughing at us, the youngest splashing water on us with his smooth, dark palms.
While the two older men prepared tea, the one who wanted to play took my wrist and led me to the front of the landcruiser, pointing at patches of paintwork which had been blasted away by the sand storm. He banged his chest with an open palm and threw back his head, laughing, before reaching for my hand and holding it in his long fingers. We all squatted in the lee of the vehicle then, the men hitching the folds of their dress, a fire on the sand, a white enamel teapot filled with dried leaves and fresh spring water and settled in the ashes as the fire died. A row of small glasses pressed into the sand, one for each of us.
‘Life, love, death,’ I whispered to Sophe, who smiled.
The teapot was lifted out of the ashes, hot, the man gripping the handle with his long sleeve and pouring, raising it into the air as the stream of tea arced into the first of the small glasses, raising the pot thirty, forty centimetres high, the tea frothing from the height, and then, when the glass was nearly full the man flicking his wrist and cutting off the flow. The tea in the glass was then returned to the pot, and the man performed his duties again. And a third time. This virtuosity and his pride in it made me think of our father slicing the roast at Sunday lunch.
Closer to Stone Page 13