Among the Faithful

by Dahris Martin

  There ensued, while we all sipped our coffee, an elaborate interchange of greetings and interminable inquiries concerning their respective households. In Arab business transactions the idea is to avoid brass tacks for as long as possible; we were never quite sure when they got down to them. Beatrice and I sat helplessly by as the leisurely conversation unrolled above us. Kalipha with oily smiles and tempered gestures was doing most of the talking, Tahar’s face taking on not the slightest expression from which we could gauge the drift of the colloquy. Strain as we would for a familiar word, we could make nothing of this impenetrable thicket of gutturals. We were on our second round of coffees when Kalipha shiningly announced to us that the price had been agreed upon. One hundred francs, each, would cover our rooms, as well as our dinner, which was to be sent up from the restaurant each evening in covered casseroles. Room and board for four dollars a month was something like it! But now, what about clean sheets regularly, a table for me, lamps instead of candles, washstands, equipped with bowl and pitcher, a few hooks, and for each of us a towel? ‘Be patient,’ soothed Kalipha, ‘we have not finished.’ The thicket closed again and while the morning wore on Kalipha expounded our case. It seemed as if he must be apologizing for our fastidious requirements. (The regular clients, after all, have need of no more than a bed.) We caught the words Amerique, and bahee yessir, ‘very delicate’. His gestures had become brief, attenuated, as if he were describing a pair of bijoux. But from neither Kalipha’s unctuous affability nor Tahar’s courteous attendance, his occasional bland comment, could we judge how far we had progressed, or if, indeed, we had progressed at all! From the full stops now, during which the two smoked thoughtfully, we sensed a deadlock. Kalipha’s fez, which sometimes served as a sort of index to baffling situations, sat dispirited on the back of his head. Then he was speaking again and my jaded ears pricked up at the familiar sounds Adan, kief-kief bellaraby, ‘exactly like a Moslem’. Tahar was looking at me, his eyes kind with interest, Kalipha like a proud parent about to show off the precocity of an offspring. ‘Come now,’ he chirruped, ‘the Adan, and mind the long pause after Akbar.’ Beatrice revived and regarded me with humour. She had never heard my Adan and I felt very foolish. ‘Go on,’ she encouraged, ‘we forgot to say that we each need a chair.’

  Kalipha had raised his hand like a baton, his mouth opened anticipatively. ‘Allah akbar!’ I began, self-consciously. ‘Wait!’ interrupted Kalipha, scowling. ‘Begin again! Louder, more clear! The voice of the muezzin, remember, must carry to the street. There is nothing in this chant, I believe, to make you ashamed! Hold your head up!’

  ‘Allah akbar! Ashed wullah elehheh ullala, ou ashed weneh Mohammed errusool Allah! Allah akba! Haya alla Salat! Haya alla falah! Al-lah Akbar!’ I could see by his face that I had done Kalipha credit. Sidi Tahar was positively beaming. The first sibilant note had brought his half-brothers rather dazzled to the door. Kalipha, dull red with pleasure, was a study in righteous piety as their encomiums rained upon him. After that, all our wants were accorded us! We were even emboldened to ask for, and were graciously granted, the two chairs. Our business settled, more coffees were pressed upon us, Tahar gravely expressed through Kalipha, his hope that we would frequently honour his household, and a date was set for our first visit.

  Beatrice was determined that we should waste no more than a day in getting settled. But we had yet to learn that nothing is so urgent to an Arab that it cannot be put off until tomorrow. The items we had asked for came piecemeal, with unconscionable waits between. The sheets, when they finally showed up, beautifully folded, bore the clearest evidence of having been slept on for weeks since last they were laundered. Ali, who was something of a dunce, finally admitted that they were pretty dirty, but, he was quick to assure us, they had come from the bed of the patron himself!

  We had thought it would be such fun to have our dinner brought to us each evening like a surprise package. Kalipha’s memorable meal had given us a relish for Arab food, or so we thought until we took the covers from two dubious-looking messes. One was a soup with a strong taste of rancid oil, and even Beatrice, who wasn’t at all squeamish about food, baulked at the stew. Kalipha was on hand to see how we fared that first evening. He found us at my table eating oranges, the supper untouched beside us. He tasted each dish and, without a word, he threw them both in the slop-pail, and banged himself out of the room. We heard him raising an awful row in the restaurant below. He returned with Mohammed a few minutes later and laid out for us a full meal subtracted from their own supper. Cous-cous with camel meat, carrots and pumpkin, a cluster of dates which they had bought on the way, and chunks of Eltifa’s crusty brown bread, still warm from the baking. And so, Kalipha appointed himself our chef, as he had already installed himself our ‘cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire’.

  The Hôtel de Sfax had still other disadvantages, quite unforeseen. Beatrice’s north light proved an ever-changing dazzle caused by the reflection of the glare against the chalk-white mosque opposite. Also, her room was right on top of the clamour and din of the street. It was like trying to concentrate in a boiler factory, while I almost suffocated at night. Because of the terrace outside my window, Kalipha insisted that I keep my shutters locked until daybreak, it was weeks before he could bestir them to put me behind bars. But there could be no compromise with the broken lock on my door. Kalipha was dynamite till that was fixed. He would tolerate neither excuse nor delay, in a towering rage he threatened to sleep outside my door. The locksmith arrived with unheard of alacrity! In short, without Kalipha, who was our advocate with Sidi Tahar, who bulldozed Ali, who argued, fought, soft-soaped, lied and swore for us, living in the Hôtel de Sfax would not have been possible.

  My faith in our friend received a bad jolt, however, the day I discovered a bed-bug. Sanguine specks on the sheets had aroused suspicions which I had allayed by calling to mind his vehement ‘guarantee’. Then I found that bug on the counterpane. I impinged it on a needle and showed it reproachfully to Kalipha. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But you find them everywhere!’ he protested. Even Beatrice, considering her past attitude, was mighty complacent. ‘Why, it stands to reason these beds are alive with bugs,’ she said quite casually. So we let it go at that.

  But, for all its shortcomings, we had found our place in Kairouan. Although she never admitted it, Beatrice was accustoming herself to the infernal racket. She found it no longer necessary to forage the crowded streets, she could sketch from her windows, or from the broad terrace that hung just above the heads of the throng.

  At 7.30 each morning Salah, the kindly cafetier from across the street, brought us coffee. Beatrice and I seldom saw each other till evening, when she came into my room for dinner. (My room – since I had the table.) Shortly after the muezzins’ call, the door was knocked and either Kalipha or Mohammed brought in the basket. Those little dinners – piping hot, perfectly prepared, eaten together in the cosy lamplight – are good to remember! We had finished and opened our books when Kalipha would appear with a firepot and the paraphernalia for tea. If we felt like talking, very good, but if we wanted to read, undisturbed, somehow he knew it without being told. He quietly kept the tea going and, curled up compactly on the bed, he smoked with a serenity that permitted us to forget all about him.

  The French town had ceased to exist for us until the morning we received official notice that we were to appear that day before the commissaire de police. We had already submitted our passports, they were on file at the station; we had taken out our cards of identity, consequently we were puzzled by the rather peremptory summons.

  In the absence of the Commissaire himself Monsieur S—, his assistant, received us. We knew at once that he had been drinking, and after he had put to us a few pointed questions his purpose, too, was apparent. We were here to be admonished on account of Kalipha.

  ‘They tell me that you have taken up with this vagabond Courage.’ The nickname which so characterized our friend, and conveyed in the Arab town suc
h affection, had suddenly become insulting, opprobrious.

  ‘Yes,’ Beatrice replied, after a pause, ‘it is true that we know Sidi Kalipha.’

  This reply infuriated our inquisitor. ‘“Sidi Kalipha”, hein?’ he mocked her respectful use of the prefix, ‘you call that miscreant “Sidi”?’ He began to roar at us. With the violence of his passion, his face, red to begin with, took on the look of raw liver. We sat speechless. I was frightened, but Beatrice’s eyes were blazing, she was gripping the arms of her chair. I started to explain our attitude towards our companion, but I was shouted scurrilously down. Beatrice got to her feet. ‘Come on. Don’t be a fool. You can’t talk to him, he’s drunk.’ With his raucous voice still in our ears we made our way to the street.

  We were cooling off in the market-place when Kalipha strolled up. He knew that we had been to the police-station, and he had a fair idea why. The declining sun filtered through the soft streamers of the pepper trees. Abashed, he took a seat beside us. Beatrice ordered him a coffee, and for a few minutes we all smoked in moody silence. ‘Well?’ he said at last, searching our faces. I reached over and found his hand. ‘You look like a bridegroom!’ Beatrice told him, smiling. She adjusted the little bunch of jasmine that hung over his ear, and studied him critically. Then, ‘Can we get to work on that portrait the first thing tomorrow morning?’

  CHAPTER 5

  A Djinn Party

  WE DID NOT LIVE among the Arabs for a month without learning something of djinns, nor without coming to feel a certain respect for phantoms that exert such influence over the learned and ignorant alike. Kalipha, who could not read or write his own name, believed implicitly in them, but so did young Ramah, a graduate of the Sorbonne, so did our merchant friend, Mohammed el Mishri, who made annual trips to the Continent. To acknowledge the Koran, in short, is to admit ‘the might, majesty, dominion, and power’ of djinns.

  Before Adam even, they existed. Because they were created of ‘smokeless fire’, they are extremely volatile, assuming any of a thousand guises and capable of becoming visible or invisible at will. Hosts of them in ages past were converted and, as True Believers, they now perform the prayers, give alms, fast during the sacred month of Ramadan, and make the Pilgrimage. These, the good djinns, visit men only to comfort and protect them, but beyond Kalipha’s assertion that they certainly did exist, I heard very little of them.

  It is the infidels, the sheytan, that abound in wickedness, inspiring a vigilance that is warp and woof of daily existence. You durst not empty a basin of water without uttering the magic word, craving pardon of the invisible one you may have soaked; to light the fire or let the bucket down into the well without ‘Permission, ye Blessed!’ is enough to throw consternation into an entire family; while to enter an uninhabited house, the baths, the public ovens, and, especially, the toilet, without a conjuration is tantamount to disaster.

  Mohammed and Kalipha never mounted the staircase of the Hôtel de Sfax after dark without a prudent ‘Bishmella! In the name of Allah!’ One night when Mohammed was accompanying me home he confided his fear that a djinn – maybe Iblees himself – was haunting the place. Hamuda, our coffee-boy, had been the first to suspect its presence. On three successive occasions, as he was ascending to serve us, he had fallen and broken the cups. The first two times his father had beaten him, but when it happened the third time ‘they knew it was a djinn’. Mohammed swore that Ali, too, had heard curious, unaccountable noises in the corridor. My attempts at reassurance were powerless to rid him of the obsession. Unluckily, when we were climbing the stairs, he trod on his blouse. His fist shot above his head as he cried, ‘What did I tell you!’ Pride would not permit him to ask me to light his way down again, but a new link to the bond between us was forged when I held the lamp until he reached the street.

  Kalipha saw nothing remarkable in the fact that most of the malice of djinns is perpetrated upon women. Their instability and weakness, indisputable even among themselves, makes them as clay in the hands of the evil ones. When woman was created, and from a crooked rib, at that, did not Iblees, the chief of the sheytan, send up the shout: ‘Thou shalt be my arrow with which I shoot and miss not!’ Man’s very nature, supplemented, of course, by the seal ring upon his finger, protects him. But even he is by no means impervious. For example, there was a man in the town, a man of pious habits and exemplary character, who one day disappeared from the face of the earth. Nobody saw him leave, nobody knew why he left – least of all his wife and grown children. Friends and relatives joined the search. After a year had elapsed, with still no word from him, they divined the mystery. A djinneyeh had married him and spirited him to the underworld. In her good time he would return. Sure enough he did, at the end of two years. He appeared as he had vanished. It was said that when his wife, who was alone in the court at the time, saw him standing there she had a kind of fit. Kairouan could talk of nothing but Sidi Woomah’s homecoming. But he himself was strangely taciturn. In answer to the eager questions with which he was besieged, Woomah would lay a finger upon his lips, and the most that could be got from him was an enigmatic, ‘One does not speak of this.’ Gradually, however, as evening after evening he sat with his friends in the coffee-house, it became less difficult for him to speak of his experience. It had been, by all the accounts I heard, anything but unpleasant. The djinns, perhaps to make him feel more at home, had worn the aspect of humans and had treated him with great politeness. The climate of the nether world, too, had been unvaryingly balmy. Nobody dreamed of questioning Woomah’s credibility, though I think it did surprise them to hear that there had been ‘automobiles, gendarmes, and all sorts of machinery’.

  It was all very puzzling to me because, although the djinns had stolen Sidi Woomah, which was certainly not praiseworthy of them, they did not sound like a really bad lot. ‘Were they wicked djinns?’ I asked Kalipha.

  ‘N-o-o-o,’ he said, thoughtfully shaking his head.

  ‘They were good ones, then?’

  ‘They were like us,’ he replied, ‘good ones and bad ones, with a little good in the bad ones and some bad in the good ones.’ A trifle exasperated, I recklessly suggested that Woomah might have voluntarily dropped out of sight, maybe because of ennui (if his wife was subject to fits), maybe wanderlust. It sounded to me, I said, as if he’d been having one fine time down in Biskra or Touggourte!

  Under Kalipha’s steady gaze I felt my colour rise and I repented of my heresy. ‘Nobody,’ he declared gravely, ‘not even the bash mufti himself is more devout than Sidi Woomah.’ Wagging his finger he proceeded to rebuke me with this proverb: ‘“If you hear that a mountain has moved from its place, believe it, but if you hear that a man has changed his character, do not believe it, for he will act only according to his nature.”’

  The few times I saw Sidi Woomah he was surrounded with men whose faces wore the fixed look of children hearing a ghost story. He had not been home much over a year, however, when it was voiced about town, ‘Have you heard? Sidi Woomah is not to be found!’ The wise smiles with which this intelligence was given and received made me surmise that his lot might be considered a very enviable one, but I never intimated my suspicion to Kalipha, feeling sure that he would be obliged to deny that such a fate was anything but deplorable.

  Close association with Kalipha’s household meant a very practical schooling in demonology. Whenever Abdallah left the family circle of an evening it was because the wife or daughter of so-and-so was possessed, and at least two-thirds of Eltifa’s engagements were fokkarahs, or parties for the propitiation of some woman’s djinn.

  The djinn, it seems, enters the body by way of the brain and searches until he finds a place to lodge. He announces his seizure with unmistakable symptoms – loss of appetite, listlessness, fits of yawning or bad temper. A practised seer like Abdallah is sent for, and, with chaplet and holy writ, he makes a formal investigation. The patient and her family gather in a dark room. Abdallah sits facing them, chanting the Koran and rhythmically swaying, now a
nd then dropping another lump of benjoin upon the fire-pot. Lulled by the fumes of the djinns’ favourite incense, the family rock with him, intoning the familiar passages. Often it is a long time before the spirit responds and the woman begins to jabber. She goes through the progressive stages of the trance until the djinn is rampant, causing her to rave and foam at the mouth. Now Abdallah can converse with the guest. With the utmost civility he is made welcome. Then the question is put to him, ‘What is it ye crave, O ye Blessed?’ and the patient’s lips articulate the djinn’s response. ‘A reading of the Koran will content me’, he may say, or, ‘For the love of Araby, Sidi, kill a lamb that I may drink the blood!’ Generally, however, he wants a fokkarah, in which case a night is set, the woman’s friends are invited, and the musicians engaged to play upon the bangha, a powerful Congo drum, the beat of which makes the demon well-nigh delirious with delight. To the pounding of the bangha the patient dances, sometimes for hours, until her djinn is appeased and she drops in a swoon. The guests work over her then, chanting exorcisms as they systematically pull her nose, cars, toes and fingers. The djinn may leave, but he may not.

  If, in a few days, the symptoms repeat themselves, Abdallah makes another visit. Sometimes the tormentor can be bribed with delicacies – a diet of raw meat and eggs, or the blood of a black chicken. But when persuasive measures are unsuccessful a scroll, penned with certain verses from the Koran, is burned and the patient inhales the smoke – none but the most tenacious sheytan can withstand this dreadful vapour! If even this fails to evict him, Abdallah is justified in announcing that the djinn has married his patient. So a compact is made with him. If he elects to remain where he is, he must agree to be quiescent until the anniversary of his seizure. If he leaves his bride, he must not return until that date. In both cases he will be made festally welcome. To ‘tie’ the djinn to his promise Abdallah makes his patient an amulet – a bit of the Koran encased in leather or velvet – which she pins among her garments or on her headkerchief.