Kalipha, Mohammed, and Farrah were waiting for me at the door. We had to hurry, for the procession was well in advance of us; on account of Kalipha’s club-foot we never quite caught up with it. Through the narrow streets it wove, triumphantly singing. Under the busy gate, and out upon the vast sun-warmed plain. Jemma Towfeek, the little mosque toward which we were heading, reposed placidly among its scattered tombs. The bobbing cherry-red fezes, the snowy burnouses, the lusty voices bawling Allah’s praise, and, like an afterthought, in the rear, the tossing palanquin, its colours so splendid in the sunshine! Its carriers were constantly changing, for anyone who wishes to expiate his sins may help to bear the bier. At short distances, consequently, there was a scramble for its handles. Up the road, then diagonally across the plain to Jemma Towfeek we swept.
Kalipha thought best that I should wait at the mosque during the interment, so Mohammed and I seated ourselves on a bench outside the door. The loud ringing voices gradually receded – the grave must have been at least half a mile away – until they were just a faraway, sweet tone upon the silence. Several times I had chanced to be wandering in the cemeteries at the time of a burial. I knew just how the shrouded body would be lowered deep down into the narrow brick chamber prepared for it, how logs would be laid across the top to support the roof of bricks and cement, how earth would be shovelled over it and packed and levelled.
The events of the morning had brought vividly to Mohammed’s mind the death of his grandmother, Meneh, who lived on like a hardy perennial in the hearts of her family. But the little boy spoke of her playfulness, her drollery, how some evenings she would keep the family circle doubled with laughter. His own rang out fearlessly at the recollection. I thought I had never heard a better sound! For pure delight I joined him. It was wonderful to be laughing together like this! Something hard and tight and very dry inside me was relaxing, expanding. I begged him to tell me more about Meneh.
Before very long we were aware of voices down on the road. In scattered groups the men were leaving the cemetery. Presently Farrah and Kalipha came up, and we reached the road in time to be among the last stragglers. One of them was Zinibe’s Mohammed in his rust-coloured burnous, hiking home all by himself.
The men were ready for a smoke, so we stopped at the first café we came to. We sat quietly drinking our coffees, facing the cemetery where Zinibe lay waiting for the two fearsome angels, Munkar and Nekeer, who would descend, any moment now, to examine her concerning her Faith. ‘Ah yes, my friends,’ sighed Kalipha, abstractedly. And then, as if to himself, he added, ‘Today it is Zinibe, and tomorrow – which of us?’
CHAPTER 7
The Month of Abstinence
SIDI RAMADAN IS COMING to those who smoke and pinch snuff! a little girl sang teasingly as she skipped down the street. The patrons of the coffee-house smiled at one another. The Month of Abstinence was hardest on them. To do without food and water from daybreak until sunset was one thing, but to do without coffee and cigarettes was almost more than a man could bear. Ramadan! The Holy City talked of nothing else! Days of piqued faces and short tempers, of lassitude and street brawls, but the nights, ah, the halcyon nights of feasting and conviviality! Glorious Ramadan – ninth month of the Moslem calendar – when the Prophet received the first revelation!
Kalipha was the happiest man alive when I mentioned that I was thinking of keeping the fast. My reasons did not interest him. ‘Yes, yes, I know, that is what you say!’ Smiling wisely he tapped his brow. ‘This thing has a thousand explanations – very practical, very wise. As a writer you want the experience, then, because your money has not yet arrived, you are obliged to economize. All this is very well. But Allah, who knows the heart, is not deceived. Ah, ma petite, how often have I said that you are a Moslem? Here is proof! If you were born into the Faith you could do no more’ He laughed joyously. ‘Abdallah, Eltifa – how the whole family will rejoice! The women will raise the zaghareet – Alla-la-een! Alla-la-een! – like that. And the city! If Kairouan honoured you before, how much more will she honour you when it becomes known that you are Sima Ramadan!’
This lively prophecy rather staggered me. In vain did I argue that my observance would in no wise be religious. Kalipha could not, would not understand. It was futile to pledge him to silence or even to the exact truth. The most solemn vows and adjurations would not hold him from broadcasting his ‘triumph’ and reaping the sweet fruits of public approbation. An alarmed silence fell between us when I declared I would give up the idea. After a time Kalipha said, very seriously: ‘But this is not necessary! Observe Ramadan for whatever reasons you wish; it will be recorded in any case. And if I am asked why you keep the fast I will say, “It is Mademoiselle’s way of showing her respect for me and my religion.” This, surely, is no lie?’ It was, at any rate, far enough from downright falsehood, as well as strict truth, to enable us to compromise.
The day before the beginning of Ramadan is called Leylet er-Rooyeh, The Night of the Observation. Bedouins thronged the streets, the plain between the city walls and the cemeteries was speckled with their tents, which seemed to have sprung up overnight like mushrooms. The coffee-houses – even the meanest cubby distinguished with the name – prospered. The fryshops, those appetizing pockets in the walls, were freshly whitewashed, their copper kettles scoured to the ultimate brightness. During the afternoon, about the time that they close their shutters for the day, the friers were busy making honey-coils and other Ramadan fritters. Gaily painted candy carts we had never seen before were trundled through the streets. The minarets all over the city were hung with tiers of little black cruses that waited only for the dusk to bloom. But quite apart from the visible signs, there was something in the air – something piquant, and tantalizing, soberly festive. ‘Sidi Ramadan est en route!’ said Kalipha, who every day during the past week had given us a whimsical account of the good saint’s preparations, his visit to the baths, the packing of his suitcase, and so on. In fancy, I saw a little man, pulled sideways by the weight of a large yellow suitcase, hiking furiously across the plain.
Towards sundown watchers appeared on the balconies of the minarets, the roofs of the baths, all along the city wall scanning the west for the new moon that would proclaim the beginning of Ramadan. Kalipha, Beatrice, and I joined those who were watching from the sand hill outside the city. The sun had set, the muezzins had called the prayer, a strong wind was blowing and the men, their chins buried in their burnouses, sat hunched in quiet groups. A few shafts of orange were all that remained of colour, the hills below were fast deepening to violet. Above the sombre cloud banks a blue star, the bedouins’ star, Kalipha always called it, glittered, a very prince among the twinkling pin-points. But where was the bright little crescent? The first to spy the herald would run at top speed to the Kadi and the boom of the cannon would officially pronounce it Ramadan. The populace would converge at the Mosque of Sidi Okbah for the service, whose solemnity and importance were surpassed only by that commemorating the birth of the Prophet.
We left the knoll absorbed in its vigil and hurried to the mosque, for Beatrice and I would not be allowed there later on. The vast columned nave was as bright as a ball-room. Great lanterns hung from every arch and the celebrated candalabra, composed of multitudes of glass cups with floating wicks, were glistening pyramids down the central colonnade. On stockinged feet we padded among the smooth and fluted pillars – glorious shafts ransacked from all the empires of antiquity to uphold this great Islamic shrine. Although it was early, worshippers were scattered here and there, fathers sat with their sons, a few small boys were having a merry game of hide-and-seek, old men moved their lips in prayer, a mother swathed in black led in her little ones, off in an arcade a knot of women conversed quietly through their veils.
We were on our way home when the cannon sounded. Like an echo a muffled roar sprang up from the city and lingered for many minutes. Kalipha, who had come to a halt, shouted: ‘Bless ye the Prophet! On Him be the peace!’ We hastened to the main s
treet, where all was noisy and bright and gay as Broadway at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Everybody was shouting, ‘O blessing! Blessing! Bless ye the Prophet! On Him be the peace!’ ‘O followers of the Best of Creation – fasting! Fasting!’ ‘Fasting tomorrow, ye sons of Islam!’
What a change from the Kairouan we had known all the winter! By nine o’clock, ordinarily, the population had retired within doors and every reminder of vivid, impetuous day had given way to stately silence. The souks were locked, shop fronts dark, street stalls empty. The main street was deserted save perhaps for a little flock of women shuffling home from the baths or a lone man making for the warmth of some favourite rendezvous. Coffee-houses were snug dens of sociability and in the stygian blackness of by-streets occasional chinks of light hinted of women at their looms, of tea and story telling.
But Ramadan turned winter to summer, night into day! Business hob-nobbed with pleasure in the brilliant corridors of the souks; in coffee-houses bordering the market-place bedouins sang to their flutes; the main street gleamed with shop lights, flowed with promenaders wearing musk or jasmine over their ears. In sequestered lanes and quarters the women, too, were celebrating – the thump of their little pottery drums, their shrill merriment defying locked shutters and bolted doors. While high on the minarets those tiny flames, which the wind had spared, fluttered valiantly. Long after Beatrice and I went to bed the singing, the clapping, the plaint of mandolines from the coffee-house below mingled with the happy voices of the promenaders.
I have no idea at what hour the revelry subsided, but when, quite suddenly, I found myself awake, Kairouan was deep in sleep. In a dream Munkar and Nekeer had visited me accompanied by a corps of grisly djinns beating drums and blowing upon little goat-skin bagpipes. Even now, and I was positive that I was awake, I could hear the hollow boom-boom of the diabolical skirling. Afar off, but coming nearer, slowly, taking their time, steadily, with fateful certainty. I lay very taut, though reason scoffed at my fear. Supernatural rubbish! About as supernatural as your straw mattress! The strolling drummers are abroad rousing the city for its last meal. Kalipha warned that you would hear them before daybreak. ‘Awaken! Awaken!’ the tom-toms and zukarrahs are saying. ‘Partake of sahoor! Eat and drink until ye can discern a white thread from a black!’ Now they had turned into Kalipha’s lane and were advancing toward the street. Passed the Bath of the Bey, passed Numéro vingt, where Mohammed, Kalipha, and Fatma lay under the same blanket, passed the public oven – I cowered under the bed-clothes as the lurid racket climbed through the bars of my window, filled the room, and, before I actually died of fright, moved gleefully off down the street.
I awoke next morning vaguely disturbed as by the memory of a nightmare. Even before I opened my eyes I sensed that Kairouan was changed. By half-past six the noises of traffic, commerce, and industry are welded into one terrific roar, the component parts of which are lost in the monstrous orchestration of street sounds. But all was strangely quiet this morning. Dang-dang-dang every stroke of the copper-smiths hung upon the bland air. ‘Caka! Caka breema!’ a solitary bread-boy piped his little roulade. Camels groaned and farther down the street a jackass, the legendary cause of their grievance, started honking, while a confused chanting informed me that there was a Koranical school in the neighbourhood.
No good listening for the slap of Hamuda’s slippers on the stairs – Kairouan had settled down to Ramadan. With the dreary realization that there was to be no coffee this morning, nor tomorrow morning, nor any morning for an entire month, I crawled out of bed. For the life of me I could not understand why I had gone in for Ramadan; my stomach growled its resentment, the more so when I heard Mohammed delivering Beatrice her breakfast. ‘Bonjour, ma soeur!’ he knocked at my door and all radiant came in to wish me good of the fast. He himself was observing it for the first time in his life. Weeks ago he had announced to the family that he was no longer a child; this year he was going to keep Ramadan. As he was under no obligation to do so for two more years at least, they neither discouraged nor encouraged him. Abdallah’s face, however, betrayed his delight, Eltifa, motherly soul, could hardly approve, but she would not have dreamed of interposing in a matter that was, as Kalipha observed, entirely between Mohammed and Allah.
This morning, in his own eyes at least, Mohammed was a man. That uneaten breakfast had for him all the significance of a boy’s first shave, his first long trousers. Satisfaction glowed deep in his merry eyes, and crept out of the corners of his large mouth when I intimated that I recognized his new status.
‘Ah yes,’ he sighed, ‘in a few more years – three at the most – you will find me bringing up the marriage procession.’ I asked if he had decided upon Halima, the daughter of his patron, but Mohammed was no longer so sure that his old playmate was his choice. Lately a friend of his father, a wagoner from Sousse, had been teasing Mohammed about one of his daughters. Half in jest, half seriously, he told of her charms, her accomplishments, always referring to her as ‘your fiancée’. Mohammed went him one better and spoke of ‘my wife’, and although these conversations were more or less in the spirit of fun, he was plainly coming to think of her as practically his. Like a chicken that is destined for the table of the bey, his Fatma was in her little cage over there in Sousse being nurtured and fattened especially for him, Mohammed ben Kalipha.
‘Three chests will not hold the linen she is bringing me!’ he cried. ‘Yesterday her father gave me this good advice, “Listen,” he said, “work hard, save your sous, and before you know it, my friend, I will be driving you to Sousse to sign the marriage contract!”’
‘But you do not know this girl,’ I said, forgetting for the moment that the idea of love as a basis for marriage is incomprehensible to the Arab mind, ‘and you do know Halima. Wouldn’t it be safer to marry someone you have always liked?’
‘Halima is very nice,’ Mohammed admitted. He swung his bare feet in silence for a few moments. Then his face brightened. ‘Ma femme can read and write in French as well as Arabic! She can also embroider, as well, I believe, as any woman in Sousse. Sidi Amar swears that it is impossible to find words to tell me of her beauty!’
‘Halima is beautiful too,’ I insisted, ‘and although she has never been to school, she can weave and cook.’
‘I know,’ he said sadly, ‘it is very difficult.’ There was time to decide, I observed. Then, by way of reminding him that he had been a long time from his work, I asked if he had begun to save. The question rushed him to a subject much nearer his heart – the three-day fête that brought Ramadan to a close. Oh, the fête-the fête-the fête! The clothes he would wear! He had bought himself a shakakah, a little pottery bank, and every night he would deposit two francs, his wages for the day. Yellow pantaloons he would buy himself, and a complete set of embroidered vests (he drew his hands over his thrust-out chest), then a robe – of silk perhaps – new slippers, a tasselled fez – ‘une coutûme complète, ma soeur!’ he laughed joyously, ‘même un mouchoir dans ma poche pour fantasie!’ It was the thought of such finery, as yet unearned, that sent him scuttling back to the market-place.
Everything was off schedule today, or rather, on a new one. Kalipha, who always made a point of being on hand to supervise the cleaning of our rooms, slept away the morning, in consequence of which it was nearly noon before I heard the swish and knock of Ali’s mop. On the other hand Beatrice, whom I almost never saw until supper-time, dropped in. She had a fist full of brushes, the inevitable blur of paint across her cropped hair. She had been standing behind her easel, she said, a cigarette in her mouth, when Ali shambled in. He had made the bed and had started on the floor when he uttered a loud cry, down clattered the mop, and the huge fellow rushed out of the room, his hands to his face. When he came back he had a towel bound about his nose and mouth and with signs and shrugs and apologetic laughter he explained it was the cigarette smoke, one intentional whiff of which would erase all the merit of the month’s grim fast.
I had no mind for my
work today. The little irregularities and interruptions tempted me to truancy and the terrace outside my window had an irresistible pull. Now and then a street brawl – an inevitable accompaniment of the fast – slowed up the traffic as everybody stood vacuously about until the stormy altercation was settled. An occasional donkey weighed to the earth with household furnishings elicited shouts of praise from passers-by. Of all months Ramadan is deemed most propitious for marriages and the common sight of a bride’s dowry on the way to her future home never fails to evoke cries of ‘Bless ye the Prophet!’ Several of the shops set deep in the shade of the pepper trees across the street were closed. The bread-counters and the date-stalls along the curb displayed their wares as usual for, Ramadan or no Ramadan, invalids and children have to eat. There were less city folk, more bedouins in the throng, particularly bedouin women, their draperies, strong lapis to begin with, faded to every exquisite shade of blue, their head-dresses flaming orange, hot red. There was colour, noise, movement enough in that vortex, Lord knows, and yet to the practised eye it was not quite the customary hurly-burly. A certain amount of work had to be done and so people moved about and did things, but they all felt as I did – languid and a little light-headed.
Among the Faithful Page 8