‘Tell me about your life as a miller,’ I requested in French, translated into Kabylie-Berber by Achour.
He earned the equivalent of four euros for every hundred kilos of fruit he pressed. In time-honoured Mediterranean tradition, it was the women who harvested, climbing the mountainsides with baskets, descending at sunset loaded with olives. Back-breaking work. There was a waiting list of up to two months for farmers to press their fruit.
‘TWO MONTHS! At home,’ I explained, ‘if we do not press our gathered fruits within four days, we are not entitled to retain our AOC.’
Once off the branch, every hour an olive is not pressed, its acid level rises. No wonder, then, that the oil here carried a toll of 4 per cent. In Europe, any oil over 0.8 cannot be labelled ‘extra virgin’. Here, the crops lay in baskets growing mouldy.
Back in the car, I asked Achour what the problem was.
‘There are insufficient mills.’
I was puzzled. The oil from this region was renowned, the finest in the land. It did not bode well for the rest.
Achour pulled over on a bridge.
‘Senseless to drive through forests of wild olives in this curtain of rain,’ he said.
Two barefoot adolescents appeared selling freshly cut asparagus. Achour gave the boys coins. They shoved their streaming faces through the open window, looking me over, laughing insanely.
‘I’ll take you to meet Berber women instead, the olive-gatherers.’
Our first stop was Louisa, a big-boned, bovine female in full Berber regalia and heavy pewter jewellery with solid bracelets that resembled handcuffs. Aquiline Louisa owned fifty olive trees. She beat the fruits off the branches with sticks and then gathered from the earth. She never netted the ground. Louisa’s had been an enforced marriage. At sixteen her father wed her to a twenty-year-old. She had not been happy. Her first child was born a year later. She had missed her parents and her village. Her husband had been a drinker and beat her and she had suffered at the cruel hand of a controlling mother-in-law, now dead. Still, she had borne ten children.
‘I am lucky,’ she said. ‘My farm lies on even ground, easy to maintain.’ Neighbouring women in her hamlet were obliged to scale cloud-capped summits to gather. Louisa offered us a galet, which translates as cobble or paving stone, but is a small, flat cake baked with olive oil and flavoured with prickly pear fruits. We ate with our fingers, at a bare wooden table.
Onwards to what evolved into a party at the household of Tassadit, where a chorus of Berber women introduced me to their folk music.
‘This mountain is famous for its olive songs,’ explained an earnest young girl, trainee of Achour’s, in Western clothes, dull in comparison to the trio of locals with their fringed headscarves of many colours, their hooped gold earrings. Reds, black, yellow were their flowing voluminous, beaded skirts. One, with hennaed nose and eyebrows resembled a whiskery brown rodent. They shouted and yelled in their Kabylia dialect, reciting snippets of poetry, then grew quiet, shy. Villagers were appearing, descending from all about. Our number had reached sixteen. The crones recounted their gathering tales. I listened to their stories.
‘I was eight years old when I first harvested with my mother. They were better days, no stress.’
‘My mother sang me lullabies of her days in the groves.’
Then, bingo. The village’s star, the leading chanteuse, was wheeled in. Eighty-four, with several silver teeth and one leg. The other had been wasted by diabetes. She lifted her bright skirts and slapped her hand against a long scarlet sock. ‘Here is my stump,’ she screamed. Alone, she had carried her fruits from raggedy, high ground to mill in a basket on her back, but had made her income singing at circumcisions and weddings. Her reputation had grown from her improvised olive ditties.
She broke into song, belting out the words, and all fell silent. Her voice was taut as wire. The tunes were unexpectedly political, anti-French. She had lost her father when she was five. Female neighbours had brought in the crop for her mourning mother.
‘Leave me to cry,’ she ululated. Her lyrics were of birds with broken wings found in the groves, of healing them, rearing them before they flew off, abandoning her. The bird image represented the young man who never stayed. Or the sons who went off to war and never returned. The women in the olive fields sang out their grief as they toiled. Always women, solidaire, female solidarity. In another, ‘a Frenchman came, snatched away the bird I had reared’. French soldiers or colonists killing or imprisoning the young men.
When she was not singing, she talked loudly, still performing, wallowing in the attention.
Achour whispered to me, ‘She speaks in rhyme, improvising, using symbols, as she goes’.
She had spoken in verse for so many years it was second nature to her. The others confirmed that she never used plain speech.
‘One daughter and one leg left, wheelchair-bound,’ she yodelled as though drunk. Everyone was conversing at once, attempting to sing, to translate or they watched on in reverential silence as the beak-nosed songstress elegised her broken-hearted life with music. Her repertoire was entirely her own, never regional folksongs.
‘Are you recording this?’ one young man hissed in my ear.
‘I have no tape-recorder.’
‘Quick, pass me your phone.’
Played back later, the recording was tinny; grizzled, plangent melodies from a dying world. I was most grateful to the student for his initiative.
A landslide delayed our return to Tizi-Ouzou, boulders ejected from the upper mountain by rain force had crushed a travelling car. A grizzly scene of injured man submerged beneath its mangled carapace. Obliged to pull over, we found ourselves among the population of a village. All were attempting to dig, wrench the fellow out. Men were yelling on phones while the women in their coloured costumes were drenched, sweating, mud-spattered, wielding spades and sticks, heaving at metal while rivers of silt, broken glass, blood eddied at their feet. There was little hope that any medical assistance could reach the spot. It was dark when we turned the car about. The victim had died.
The old woman’s lamentations were still moaning in my head.
‘I could use a drink. Fancy a swift whisky before I deliver you to your host for the night?’
I had assumed I would stay at Achour’s farm and I had taken it for granted that as a Muslim alcohol was forbidden. Achour lived two mountains away. Impossible for an overnight stop. He had arranged a bed with one of his researchers.
One hotel in Tizi served booze. After the deliciousness of washing my freezing hands in warm water, I entered the bar of the white Art Deco hotel. Achour ordered his whisky and I a Stella Artois. Wine was only available with meals. Before putting the world to rights, after a day plagued by rain and louring clouds, we toured the lobby where Kabylia crafts and jewellery were on display.
The women of the tribes, without kilns or wheels, fashioned and baked the pottery. First, they climbed the mountains to collect the clay, carried it home on their backs in baskets, cleaned it, taking out the impurities and lumpy bits, and then they added water to soften and mould it to the form they desired. All this was achieved out of doors on the ground, squatting on haunches in their brightly striped long dresses and bare feet. Once the pot or jar had been painted it was heated, fired, also out of doors, on open flames. This process took anything from three to six hours. After the pot had set, they glazed each article with a resin to seal in the patterns and to make the pottery shiny. They never signed their craftwork because, until recently, these pieces had never been intended for use beyond the family circle. Achour explained that it was possible to tell the provenance of the different objects – pots, pitchers for transporting and storing water or olive oil, others for the milk of goats and ewes, couscous bowls, oil lamps – by the designs and the colours of the dyes used to decorate them. The larger pots were water-carriers. Placed on their backs, strapped to their waists, the women clutched the handles, while climbing or descending the tracks from well
s or streams to their stone homes.
Cereal was the foundation of their diet, prepared with olive oil or sheep’s fat. Eating meat was a luxury reserved for weddings and special occasions. Special jugs and dishes were kept aside for those celebratory events. Ideqqi was the name given to these Berber women’s art. Clay shaped by hand, fired in the open air, their objects closely resembled findings from archaeological sites all across the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, the pieces were so fragile that it was almost impossible to find examples that had been baked more than thirty or forty years earlier. One or two, perhaps a century old, like those encased behind glass at the hotel. As with the folksongs, the symbols on the pottery narrated stories of the women’s lives, bearing witness to their experiences.
Back in the bar, Achour talked of his childhood. Like the asparagus boys we had encountered, he, too, had gone barefoot and slept on rugs in front of an open fire, but he had been educated and he was the exception. After the long walk from school, he was obliged to work with his family, gathering olives and tending sheep.
‘Shepherds, barefoot or semi-clad, were nicknamed “potato feet”,’ he laughed.
Compared to many, his parents were wealthy yet they always helped their neighbours. It was the tribal tradition. Recently, he had structured a government-aid scheme that created opportunities for the underprivileged, training them in beekeeping, offering them an opportunity to earn an income while also learning the values of nature. A similar arrangement existed for the cultivation of olive trees. To encourage the farming of olives, a state-subsidised programme had been put in place. In northern Algeria, there existed millions of hectares of wild olives. Individuals willing to learn to graft them with hardy cultivars were recompensed.
‘You know deforestation is at crisis level here, and we already have so little arable land. Soil is losing its water and does not replenish even in weather as wet as this. The olive tree has a root system that attracts humidity back to the earth. Land regeneration, olive cultivation, these are means of creating a future. The people here are heartbreakingly poor,’ he sighed. ‘You will see as you travel on eastwards.’
Achour ordered another drink and then recalled olive dishes that had been lost over the centuries but have long been known in the Kabylia Mountains: smoked and perfumed olives, zaitun mubakhkar. Recipes, he thought, that had originated in Baghdad. Olives from the oasis city of Palmyra were considered a great delicacy in the Middle Ages. In the Tunisian adaptation of A Thousand and One Nights, they talked of salted and limed olives.
Outside Tizi, in a foothills settlement that had taken us a while to find due to the inclement weather, we stood together, getting drenched, and shook hands. I thanked him for the wealth of the day, for his broadmindedness, ‘the illicit drink—’
‘Our secret.’
And his company.
‘Tanmiert. Thank you, in our Kabylia-Berber language. A parting thought: if you tend an olive tree kindly, harvesting with consideration, four angels will look down from on high into the four corners of your home, but if you maltreat a tree the four angels of melancholy will creep into your dreams and weep. I hope you do not think that we have gone too far, talking of the world, drinking together. Next time we meet, may it be in Paris.’
Achour’s research assistant, Assia, awaited me, a neat-faced woman in her early thirties who stooped as though slowly subsiding. Housed at her mother-in-law’s who occupied the downstairs floor, Assia, husband and two children were as poor as church mice and I wondered silently what strains she suffered. In the kitchen, with dirty pots and pans piled high because no water flowed from the taps, we ate couscous (again!), but this was the plainest I had been offered, and we drank water. The children screamed and fretted noisily at the table.
‘It’s rather late for them and the food is spoiled. We were expecting you a while ago,’ Assia apologised, or covertly accused.
I felt guilty, reflecting on my conversations and secret imbibing with Achour downtown.
While we spooned the cold food, the mother-in-law in rich burgundy, ankle-length dress swanned in.
‘I love your outfit,’ I smiled.
‘From the market in Tizi, second-hand from Syria.’
She talked of her olives. Hers were for family only and she harvested alone. The fruits were pressed after a month in storage. I expressed shock.
‘It has always been the custom here,’ she explained. Her husband spent his life in France. He had sailed off when she was twenty-two. Now she was sixty. He sent money regularly and popped back occasionally.
‘It’s difficult; neither widow nor wife.’
My thoughts turned to Quashia. All his life he’d worked in France, returning to Algeria two or three times a year to holiday with his family.
Unexpectedly mother and son both rose. ‘Goodnight and safe onwards journey,’ bade the mother with son nodding behind her. With that, they were gone. Assia packed the children off to bed and returned to the kitchen. I was a little confused until my hostess explained that her husband was sleeping at his mother’s, vacating his share of the marital bed.
I protested vociferously. ‘I’ll find a taxi, return to town.’
But Assia would have none of it and hurried off to fetch water from the flat below.
I washed from a bucket of cold water in the lavatory – the sanitation was a sorry story – and was utterly humiliated when I discovered that the few litres I had used and then flushed down the loo had been intended for everyone. I protested again. ‘This is a terrible inconvenience, please …’
Assia looked as though she might burst into tears. ‘I promised Achour that I would look after you.’
For her sake, I desisted, until in the bedroom I grew uncomfortable again. I am in the habit of sleeping naked.
She handed me a traditional Berber robe with beads, glitter, heavy materials. It weighed a ton. I donned it and lumbered into bed. My hostess joined me moments later, snuggling towards me. I switched out my bedside light and rolled on to my side, at the farthest extreme of the mattress, curled up like a creature in hibernation. Assia left her light on, ‘in case the children come’, and inched nearer.
I lay on my side listening to the rain.
She wanted to be close and, I suspected, intimate.
‘We are used to this,’ she said softly. ‘Sleeping all together, many of us, sisters, cousins, in one bed.’
‘Yes, but I am not your sister or cousin …’ My response was unnecessarily abrupt.
‘You are my sister in womanhood.’
True.
I wondered about the depth of intimacy between Assia and her husband and in what manner these women supported one another’s emotional needs, but I did not ask. I did not want to open myself up to inadequacy, an inability to deliver. Still, I swung my body towards her so that I was lying on my back staring ceilingwards, signalling that if she needed to talk I was ready to listen. She did.
‘I look forward to Fridays, our sabbath, but I spend it in housework. I never go out. That’s why I signed up for Achour’s beekeeping programme. With hives of my own to tend, I had an excuse to disappear to the country, to get away. But guess what? I have developed an allergy and the doctor has warned me my life is in danger. I must keep away from forests and my bees. But still I go; I prefer the risk.’
Was this a male doctor, I wondered silently. ‘Does your husband help out when you are not here, when you are with your bees? Does he prepare meals?’
Occasionally, he laid the table and he enjoyed playing with his children, particularly his son, but they had no dishwasher, no kitchen at all to speak of and no bathroom so it was more practical to leave the chores to his wife. Sometimes her mother-in-law had hot water so, with buckets, Assia could clean the house.
‘It’s the same for all women.’
Eventually, I must have dozed off because I was woken by my phone’s alarm at 6 a.m. Assia was directly out of bed to make coffee.
‘No, please, don’t worry.’ But she was alre
ady in the kitchen. I had no means of cleaning my teeth.
Achour sent his chauffeur for me. Out into the relentless downpour, followed by Assia who lugged my backpack, refusing to hand it over, splashing behind me in the mud, lacking her obligatory headcovering. She took me in her arms and hugged me so intensely we might have been lovers. ‘Please stay in touch, email me, thank you, thank you for your company.’
‘I’ll get your email from Achour.’
‘I don’t have one.’
I was bound for Bejaia, bumping the curving hillsides in a beekeeper’s van; its driver also an initiate of the apiarist programme. Mud, spring mud. Scents of sodden spring. Streets, fields, orchards; waterlogged. My thoughts were on the crippling water deficits these people endured, the lack of quality of life. I remembered a line by the French historian Fernand Braudel I had scribbled months back in a notebook: In Kabylia, when the ‘gates of the year’, equinoxes and solstices, opened, the Berbers said the season signalled new fortunes: ‘barley bread or famine’. We had passed this year’s spring equinox by several weeks and I wondered how the harvests were faring at the hands of such a deluge. I wondered at these people’s ability to survive at all.
Speeding through squelchy inclining villages. Market day in the altitudinous limestone outposts. A sign outside a café offering ‘Sand wishes’. Mile after mile of dense, wooded slopes, sub-arid Mediterranean oak forests. Astounding to consider that Algeria’s forests cover only 2 per cent of its vast terrain and that, due to logging by the French and mismanagement by the Algerians, they were disappearing at an alarming rate year after year.
How precious the tree is, I was thinking. How essential. I recalled Achour’s remark: ‘The olive tree has a root system that attracts humidity back to the earth.’ This was new to me. I wanted to know more.
Disappointing the views, veiled by clouds. I recognised all too well the value of rain. Still, I found myself selfishly willing it to let up. The days were blurred, filmy, but then Algeria itself was barely visible, cloaked in a fog of fears and confusions.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 26