During the afternoon Kalipha showed up and we sauntered through the town. Cafés and fryshops were closed. The bey’s fortune could not buy one a cup of coffee or a fried cake. In the hushed souks work went on in a desultory fashion or did not go on at all, for many of the shops were shut until nightfall. We killed an hour or so calling on Kalipha’s friends – Sidi Shedlie in the perfume souk, Sidi Amar a leather worker, Sidi Salah Najar, a scion of one of the old aristocratic families, but a simple tailor, for all that. They had heard – leave it to Kalipha – that I was keeping the fast. ‘Sima Ramadan?’ they asked me bashfully, as if to confirm a report too good to be true. ‘I swear by Allah,’ was Kalipha’s prompt and proud reply, ‘Sima Ramadan!’
This sort of thing bothered me dreadfully at first. My insistence upon an explanation mystified Kalipha. ‘But they do not demand your reasons!’ he protested. And it was the truth. My motives interested them no more than they had Kalipha. It was a fact, wasn’t it, that I was Sima Ramadan? Enough. Praise be the Prophet! Such warmth and faith gradually cleared my conscience of hypocrisy. This experience which I was sharing with them was bringing us humanly closer. They were my friends, they trusted me. I had gained more than a set of lively impressions and sensations, something infinitely precious, more enduring. Perhaps, I reasoned, there was, after all, something ‘religious’ in my observance.
The City’s pulse was very low by three o’clock in the afternoon. We walked across the plain to the Mosque of Sidi Abdelli, where Kalipha’s parents were buried, and sat on the little blue-tiled pavement above Meneh. While Kalipha talked of her and of his father, the strenuous Kassem, the red sun was going down, down toward the horizon. ‘But come!’ he cried abruptly, glancing at the sun, then at his watch. ‘We must be quick if we are back before they call the prayer.’
Kairouan, in the meantime, had shaken off its torpor. Everything was alive and exciting, waiting for the signal from the minarets that the day’s penance was done. Coffee-houses were ready for business, the fry-shops were piling up mountains of honey-coils and crisp breakfast cakes, little girls darted home from the public ovens with covered bowls on their heads, the beggars under the Great Gate had never been so importunate, vendors wearing trays of cakes or carrying pitchers of coloured syrups praised the Prophet and their merchandise in the same breath. We found seats outside Hamuda’s stall. The tables were set with jugs of water, and now, as the moment approached, every man had an unlit cigarette between his fingers. The sun had set. The muezzin was already on the balcony of the little mosque next door. Every minaret had its solemn figure watching the turret of the Great Mosque for the flinging out of the red flag. ‘Allah Akbar!’ A burst of song came down to us, the rest was blurred by the joyous bellow that leapt from the crowd. Cigarettes were lit; water and coffee could come after. The tension slowly relaxed, serenity and good humour were restored. Our first meal, the fatoor, which Kalipha had prepared before leaving the house, awaited us, but we were in no hurry. We sipped our coffees leisurely as the blue dusk thickened and the bats swooped over the street.
Kalipha had decided that Beatrice and I were to have our dinners at his house during Ramadan. His master hand exceeded itself on those feasts! And then the delightful evenings around the fire-pot or in the coffee-houses, a number of which had special Ramadan attractions. Professional storytellers held forth in some, continuing from night to night the same wondrous stories. Bedouin music drifted from others, in Ali’s large touristy café near the entrance to the souks the bagpipes of the snake charmer squealed. Below our hotel, in the back rooms of the restaurant, some imported dancing girls cut mighty swathes in the profits of the courtesans who occupied the little deadend street against the city wall.
Because of me, the family did not wait until just before daybreak to eat the last meal. After midnight Mohammed would fetch from the oven across the street a pair of roasted sheeps’ heads or some other delicacy which Kalipha had prepared as a surprise. Abdallah, whose tea was especially in demand during Ramadan, and Eltifa, who had engagements for almost every night in the week, were both home by this time. Abdallah was not too tired to brew another pot of tea and to tell us one of his rather austere little stories of warrior saints and miracles, nor was Eltifa too dead-beat to regale us with the innocent gossip which she had accumulated during the evening. This was the best time of all, I used to feel!
The last half of the fast is generally considered to be the hardest. There is no longer any novelty to street fights, the combatants can be killing each other but the heedless crowd moves on. I, like everybody else, was wearing ‘the face of Ramadan’, and for the first time in my life I had no hips! Perfect strangers came up to me with the question, by now so familiar, ‘Is it true that you are keeping Ramadan?’ to which Kalipha with proud dignity would reply: ‘You will find the answer in her face.’
As the fête approached a motley flock of harbingers appeared – toy merchants, flower, candy, and sherbet vendors, bizarre clowns and magicians. Old Bab Ali, the travelling tumbler from far Morocco, was welcomed back to the marketplace.
But Kairouan’s chief thought was clothes. The coffee-houses buzzed with talk of new turbans, vests, gondorrahs. Every day we must visit the souk of the tailors to see how Kalipha’s street-robe – blue with black stripes – was progressing. The souks at night were very brisk. Fathers brought their children to be outfitted. When the costuming was completed, the shakakahs were broken on the customers’ seat, the contents counted, the money proudly paid – the benign fathers making up the difference – and, after coffee or pink syrup had consummated the transaction, the little peacocks marched home carrying their neatly folded purchases like love-offerings.
Ah, yes, good Sidi Ramadan was preparing to depart. He was patching his shoes, mending his garments, brushing his fez. His visit had been a happy one, it had seemed so short, he would be missed, but oh the joys of the fête! The marketplace would wear the panoply of carnival – swigs, whirligigs, and whatnot. For a sou a child could soar like a bird, or ride madly off to Zanzibar on a wooden horse! The streets would sing with new raiment and promenaders would kiss shoulders in festal salute. The women would visit the cemeteries, there to spend the daylight hours without molestation or supervision. Striped tents would be erected over the graves of those who had died during the past year, bright rugs would enliven others. It was not only a reunion with the dear dead, but a convivial old-home-week compressed into three short days. There would be a tent over Zinibe’s grave, of course, and from dawn until dusk her loved ones would sit beside her, and, when at last it was time to go home, they would set a lighted candle in the little niche of the head-stone to keep her company through the night.
Before sunset on the last day of Ramadan an old man with a brown chaplet in his hand wandered through the town exhorting the Faithful to watch for the new moon. But they were already on the roofs, behind the crenellations of the City wall, on every promontory that gave them a limitless view of the sky. Perhaps I imagined that there was a special glory in the setting of the sun tonight, perhaps it was only the consciousness that millions in Egypt, in Morocco, in India, Arabia, and Persia were watching with us. As if regretfully, the sun sank at last behind the hills, and in a few minutes the Call filled the air with sweet sad music, but, although it meant the end of the long fast, it rose, swelled and died this evening without huzzahs as the children of Islam gazed silently, steadfastly toward the glowing west.
CHAPTER 8
Interlude
THERE HAD BEEN a serene timelessness about the winter – no Sundays to make us conscious of the passage of the weeks, no Christmas, New Years, or Easter, no need at all for clocks and calendars. Time had been meted out to us in one fair piece. Beatrice’s departure – for it was understood from the first that she would leave for Brittany in the spring – was always in the future. Things would go on like this forever, it seemed, and as if afraid of prematurely destroying this illusion, we avoided the subject of parting. ‘Ne me dites pas de ça!�
�� Kalipha would implore when it came up. ‘It is not necessary to set a trap for sadness; it will come of its own accord too soon.’
It came, consequently, with incredible suddenness. Kalipha and I accompanied our friend as far as Enfidaville, the first stage of her journey. There was a constrained moment of handshaking, another of boisterous blessings and reminders, and we were left watching the train rush self-importantly across the plateau and rapidly diminish, until it was just a mote upon the horizon. When even that had whisked away, we turned and walked back to the station.
There was nothing in sight to justify the low white building – no village, no human habitation, nothing but plain and sky, sky and plain; the horizon encircled the drowsy little Gare d’Enfidaville like an immense hoop. Kalipha had brought our lunch along – a casserole of liver and chestnuts and a chunk of Eltifa’s bread. He was as happy as a child on an outing. Not that he wasn’t sorry that Beatrice had left – he defied anyone to say he wasn’t sorry – but the train ride, the picnic, the prospect of a long afternoon in the soft spring air and the journey back to Kairouan in the early evening were not to be wasted on futile regret. Singing, jigging his shoulders, he spread a napkin on the ground, uncovered the casserole and divided the bread. He ate with more than his usual gusto. ‘How beautiful the air is!’ he cried, pulling in great draughts of it. ‘What silence! Not a sound, not a movement. It is as if we were alone in the world!’
Never in my life had I felt more so. I made a dismal pretence of eating, but the food would not go down my throat. In the end, without a word of remonstrance, Kalipha ate my share as well as his own, and, except for a surreptitious glance from under his shaggy brows, he gave no sign of noticing my abstraction as he endeavoured to divert me. Finally, when we were having coffee in the buvette, he ventured plaintively. ‘You are very calm, ma petite.’ The whole afternoon lay ahead and he did like his friends to be gay. ‘No need to tell me why,’ he commiserated, taking my hand, ‘for I am sad, too. You should have seen me this morning in the midst of the packing. The tears came, I could not stop them. I cried,’ he raised his hand in a so-help-me attitude, ‘I cried! And Mlle Beatrice, she comforted me. “I am the one that should cry!” she said, and I swear, my little one, there were tears in her eyes!’ I had to smile at the picture of that sudden burst of sorrow, of Beatrice’s consternation, her timid awkward attempts to console him. ‘But what do you wish?’ he went on with a profound sigh. ‘Life is like that. When the moment comes – one goes, for who can escape his destiny?’ And he was launched upon one of his interminable, somewhat vague discourses, only half heard, in which he compared terrestrial separations to the Last Great Departure, allowing a little chagrin to be fitting and natural. Grief was like a tap. You could switch it on or off, or you could turn it so that there was a moderate flow, neither too much nor too little – just enough to keep the heart moist but not the eyes. For what-was-to-be-gained and was-it-not-wrong … Did I understand? ‘Yes, I understand.’ I replied absently. ‘But it is easy to talk.’ I saw instantly that I had said a terrible thing. His face froze into an oblique smile of bitterness. ‘You mean to say,’ he said, ‘that I mind our friend’s leaving less than you do?’ It took a good many more coffees to straighten that out! But when it was finally settled that his loss and my loss were absolutely equal, we found a sunny sheltered bank out on the plain, Kalipha made a pillow of his burnous and promptly went to sleep, and I opened Beatrice’s parting gift, her own copy of the Odyssey.
There was nothing casual about our homecoming that evening. The family had apparently been given instructions to do their utmost to cheer me, for I was given a heavy welcome. Mohammed came running with his arms up, Fatma rained kisses, Abdallah sent in with his compliments a round of mint tea. Eltifa, who was leaving for a fokkarah, came to the threshold in her black haïk, clapping her hands and chirping: ‘Welcome, O Rose! Welcome, little sister!’ Then, thinking to make me laugh, she croaked in what was meant to be Beatrice’s contralto: ‘Eltifa, the jasmine! Eltifa is a gazelle of El-Yemen!’
But after dinner we all ‘had djinns’. Mohammed, rebuked, flung himself down and went to sleep, Abdallah, for reasons known only to himself, kept strictly to his own household, Kalipha caught Fatma making faces at him and in a black rage grabbed up the first thing he could lay his hands upon and clouted her around the court. My intervention brought his wrath down upon me. ‘“Make a little Patience” you say,’ he stormed, throwing the punitive instrument, one of his wife’s wooden clogs, into the corner. ‘What have I been doing for the last two years? For two years – nay more than that – I have put up with her shiftlessness, her stupidity! I have explained, I have coaxed, I showed her. All softly I encouraged her, telling myself: “She is still young, she will learn.” But it was not for nothing that the husband before me divorced her! Good God, how I am afflicted! “Faite un peu de patience!”’ He smote his forehead. ‘I have used up all the cloth! Of what shall I make this “patience”? Tell me.’ Then, clasping his hands, he glared at the ceiling and in a loud voice implored Allah to change his luck.
During the ensuing gloom, he smoked one cigarette after another, darkly turning over in his mind how he could rid himself of his ‘affliction’, while I, on my side of the fire-pot, was thinking of the evenings with Beatrice. The best of them had been spent in this little room. What peace, what serenity there had been, fuller and sweeter for being shared with such a friend. A friend with whom one could be comfortably silent for hours, who when we conversed caught the most delicate shades of one’s meaning. It had been good to look up from one’s book upon that tranquil semicircle, Eltifa with her distaff against her knee, Fatma beside her picking over the raw wool or carding the washed fleece, Abdallah, in his accustomed place behind the fire-pot, listening with quiet amusement to Mohammed’s animated chatter; on one side of me Kalipha smoking his kif-pipe, Beatrice, on the other absorbed in The French Revolution. ‘Listen to this,’ she would say. At such moments of intense admiration there was more gold than brown in her eyes. From Carlyle’s heroic prose we would drift, ruminatively, to talk of other things. I was going to miss the stimulation of those evenings. No book, no matter what I was reading, was as interesting to me as Beatrice’s conversation. She was utterly devoid of sentimentality and sham, her words stood for something, just as every stroke of her brush was thoughtful and honest. She was younger than I; it was true she knew the world better, but that large enlightenment of her mind, which distinguished her from any other person I had ever met, had nothing to do with age and experience.
Kalipha threw his cigarette into the fire. ‘Allons!’ he said brusquely, getting into his burnous. ‘Au café! Il faut chasser ces djinns qui nous embettent!’
The day after Beatrice’s departure, at Kalipha’s suggestion, I took her room for the summer. The whitewashers came with buckets and ladders, and by afternoon, the walls were dry enough for me to move in. But it was not the simple shift that Ali and Kalipha supposed it would be, not a mere matter of carrying in my table and suitcases. For I had suddenly found that I could no longer be tolerant of bed-bugs.
All winter, fired by Beatrice’s hardy indifference, I had scorned to let them worry me. If she could rise above them, so could I. We had been brought up, of course, in the belief that they are shameful vermin, necessarily associated with filth, and yet, the Arabs, who were not a dirty people, had bed-bugs and thought nothing of it. After all, I told myself, they were not scorpions or cobras. What could a few little bugs – even quite a lot of little bugs – do to me! By such reasoning, I did actually succeed in ignoring them. (A recollection that will always give me a certain satisfaction.)
But, with Beatrice gone, my borrowed stoicism collapsed. I felt that I would rather die than sleep another night on that loathsome bed. It was a complete victory of matter over mind. First of all, I threw out the mattress. Then, having got Ali to take the iron frame apart, I went to work with a blow torch which Kalipha had borrowed from a smithy. In the meantime, the men, who
were not to be trusted for thoroughness, stood by exchanging amused glances. Their complacency switched to horror, however, when, after the bed had been fired and put together again, I began making it up without a mattress. I was not going to sleep like that, was I? Just a folded blanket between me and the springs! Hullah-hullah-hullah! In an agony of dismay, Ali lugged in, one after another, the mattresses from every bed in the hotel. Kalipha implored, beseeched me to let the women make me a new one. But how could I be sure that bugs wouldn’t get in during the process? No, I preferred to sleep on the springs. And to tell the truth, that little iron cot, cleansed and purified by fire, had for me, at the moment, all the appeal of the most luxurious bed in creation! But there was no convincing Kalipha who had worked himself into a state of helpless fury. There was such a thing as going too far! ‘Now what are you doing?’ he demanded suspiciously. I was pouring kerosene from my lamp into four little tins. Curious as to what precautionary measure this might be, he watched as I set a can under each leg of the bed. ‘Y’Araby!’ he groaned when he finally caught on, and clapping his hands to his head, he laughed until I thought he would break a blood vessel.
I liked to move about in my spacious, bare, clean room. It was blissfully cool too. From the hot glare of the street it was like stepping into a cave. Soon the heat would be too intense to stir out of doors much during the day, yet my windows would make it impossible for me to feel myself a prisoner. In the other room, I had been obliged to run to the terrace to see what was going on in the street, now all Kairouan was right beneath my windows. I could look deep into the shops across the way, the little mosque opposite was a starting-point for processions – marriage, circumcision, and funeral – and there, in full view, was the great double gate, the old arch and the new, side by side, auricles through which the life-blood of the ancient city poured tempestuously, unceasingly, in and out.
Among the Faithful Page 9