There was no reason, that I could see, for me to dread the summer. My money had come before Beatrice left, and so little had our living cost all winter that, after paying my debts, there was money enough to carry me well into the autumn. By now the fever which Kairouan had induced in me had subsided and I was back at work, transcribing and submitting to magazines the stories Kalipha had told us. For human intercourse, I had Kalipha’s family; every day since Beatrice’s departure had carried me inevitably, without my, realizing it, deeper and deeper into their concerns. Moreover, I had Beatrice’s letters to look forward to – magnificent, characteristically vigorous letters, each an event to be discussed for days. And before she left Paris for Brittany, she sent off a box of her books. Mindful of how we had husbanded the few we had between us, she sent none of your ‘slim’ volumes to be tossed off in an evening, but Romaine Rolland, Sévigné, Thackeray, Proust and Fielding. Let the long summer come! Entrenched in clean surroundings, among people I loved and trusted, with money enough, with work to do and books to read – it had no fears for me.
CHAPTER 9
The Long Summer—Excerpts from my Journal
May 1
ONLY EIGHT DAYS before ‘el-Eed el-Kebeer’, The Great Festival! Kalipha pounded upon the door this morning before I was up. I was told to dress quickly, not to wait for coffee: there was buying and selling of lambs for the sacrificial feast. I scrambled into my clothes and we made our way to the fondook at the outskirts of the market-place. The massive courtyard was already crowded with victims, but more were being driven in, their lumpy pink tails hanging like shawls from their backs. I have never heard such an uproar – the bleating, the baa-ing, the frenzied bargaining! Mohammed, shining with self-importance, strode up to us with the announcement that Sidi Hassein, his patron, had commissioned him to buy two fat lambs for the fête. He led us through the sea of grey backs to show us his selection. Kalipha plunged his hand through their wool and felt their heavy tails. ‘You have not chosen badly,’ he said, secretly very pleased. While we stood there the patron himself appeared and approved of the choice. Then Mohammed was radiant!
We had our breakfast under the pepper trees alongside Hassein’s shop. Mohammed sat upon the round mat he was making. His needle, a curved strip of polished wood, threaded with braided strands of dried grass-sped in and out. No need for his master’s ‘Feesa! Feesa!’ Faster! Faster! Today Mohammed was, at least, the junior partner.
The fête was already in the air. Men discussed their purchases, and how much of the carcass they would give to the poor. The Koran prescribes three-fourths, but in this decadent age, according to Kalipha, it is customary to distribute ‘several morsels’ and keep the rest for one’s family.
May 9
The first day of the Great Fete! All morning the street has been a rainbow of children bound for the market-place. The girls in their long futahs, the brilliantly striped shawls that bind their hips, look like little women. Most of them are barefoot, some wear coloured slippers, some clogs and silver anklets. Others teeter along in ludicrously big French shoes. A few have compromised and are wearing clanking anklets plus the high-heeled shoes.
Small boys go in for the gimcracks that make the most noise – trumpets, snappers, firecrackers, ratchets, drums, bells, and whistles. The happy tumult of the market-place fills the whole town, but grown-ups are indulgent. ‘Let them, let them!’ laughs Kalipha who ordinarily hates a rhythmless racket, ‘el-Eed el-kebeer is principally for the children!’
The streets last night were tense until the cannon boomed. Then the mandolines, the singing, the syncopated clapping began. The fête was on! Coffee-houses had been given permission to remain open all night. They brimmed with gaiety – their own peculiar brand that is never obtrusive or rowdy. The main street had become a cheerful lamp-lit passage across which the clients of rival coffee-houses conversed. The lanes and by-streets, a spooky catacomb through which one hurries after dark, were starred with festive doorways.
We visited all our favourite cafés, drinking innumerable coffees, teas and syrups. Convivial lights rimmed the market-place, one whole side of which was being converted into a playground. They were setting up the rickety paraphernalia – the swings, the little Ferris wheel, the valiant wooden horses. Children who should have been in bed ran about gleefully anticipating the dawn.
In the dim crypt between the double gate, which is a saddle souk by day, bedouins were gathered and one of them was singing to the flute. They have their own songs, even their own mode of singing. There is an eerie, haunting quality to their voices – a quavering far-off sweetness – as if they were singing under the water. To the same weird little melody the boy improvised endless stanzas, borrowing his themes from his delighted auditors. He sang the praises of one man’s new burnous, of another’s horse that had excelled in the last Fantasia. As we took seats in the ring he wove us in, welcoming ‘Madame’ and ‘Courage’, not neglecting to mention the nosegay over his ear.
All at once the music stopped. The town criers were abroad; all ears were cocked for the pronouncement. It was decreed that the women should visit the cemeteries during the morning, the men in the afternoon. Any man found there out of hours would be imprisoned. The order was received with unanimous approval, and the boy took up his song.
Kalipha was all for making a night of it, and he probably did after I went to bed. I slept but little, however, for the carnival beneath my window never flagged and at daybreak I awoke to the same joyous hubbub, only now it was the children!
May 17
It is the time of the pilgrimage. The Holy City is full of strange faces, men who have journeyed here from all over northern Africa.* They are conspicuous for their new-looking raiment. ‘Voilà a pilgrim from Gabes,’ Kalipha will remark, ‘notice the way he is wearing the burnous? And there are three from Touggourt!’
‘But how can you tell ‘
‘Sometimes by the burnous, sometimes the robe, but mostly by the headgear. Voilà, le turban de Sousse! C’est chic, n’est-ce pas?’
During the week or two that they remain, they are lodged in the precincts of the Mosque of Sidi Sahabi, in the courtyard of which a coffee-house has been set up for their diversion. Favourite taverns are neglected these evenings; the men all flock to Sidi Sahabi.
Late one afternoon, days before the influx, we were sitting outside a coffee-house at the outskirts of the City, idly watching two figures approach by the road that crosses the plain. They were carrying staffs, coming slowly as if they were footsore. ‘Pilgrims from Morocco’ exclaimed Kalipha as they limped toward us. ‘Praise the Prophet!’ They stopped at our table and asked for directions and water. They were barefoot, darkened by the sun, their white garments grimed with dust – they had been two months and a half on the road! The spokesman was skinny, short, rather negroid; his talk sounded strange to my ears. Even Kalipha had difficulty understanding the dialect. The taller one, of finer features, kept his eyes on the City as Kalipha pointed their way and instructed them to ask near the Gate for their fellow-countryman Abdallah, the Tea-maker. We gave them our good wishes and watched them trudge across the market-place and pass beneath the ancient gate that had admitted so many thousands like them.
While Believers pour in by bus, train, caravan and automobile, there are only a few from Kairouan this year on pilgrimage to Mecca. The long drought early in the spring has impoverished the City, so that, instead of the usual exodus, to her shame and sorrow, there is only a handful. With envy we hear that a small place of prosperous olive trees is sending five hundred! One of Kalipha’s cousins, an elderly man who has put by all his life for the sacred journey, left this morning amidst a mighty fanfare. Months ago he arranged his worldly affairs as if he did not expect to return. He drew up his will and appointed Kalipha the guardian of his family during his absence.
We were invited to his home last night, the eve of his departure. Mohammed and Kalipha joined the menfolk at the mosque and Eltifa, Fatma and I went directly to Sidi A
li’s dwelling where scores of women were gathered. The usual curiosity, I was passed around, handled, and screamed at – on the supposition that if they shout I will surely understand. Eltifa found an opportunity to whisper that Kalipha’s first wife, Aisha, was present. I spotted her at once, a large, rather florid woman who kept rolling her eyes at me as if to say, ‘Oh, the things I could tell you!’ With each new set of arrivals there was a flurry, a jangle of welcoming cries, and I escaped to a corner where two little boys made room for me. They were dressed alike in crimson robes. We were admiring one another’s clothes, they the fur on my collar, and I, the crescent-shaped pockets on their miniature vests, when there was a rush for the stairs, the women scrambling into their haïks as they fled. The men were coming! I was hauled up and away to the roof where we knelt around the low parapet looking down upon the court. I was surrounded by phantoms – black and white shapes crouched or standing in startling groups against the starlight. ‘If only Beatrice were here!’ I kept thinking.
It was a tremendous farewell! The large court filled rapidly. There was all the turbulence of a marriage procession, the shouting, the shrilling of pipes, the throbbing of tom-toms. Turbans and fezzes formed a ring eight or nine heads deep. One well-wisher after another stepped briskly into the centre to chant a single line, whereupon the rest would heave a mighty chorus, while the aerial cries of the women fluttered off in ribbons. My knees were raw by the time the men finished with a lusty prayer that all the guests assembled might experience the bliss of pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet.
This morning the pilgrims were conducted to the station; thousands of them from all over Tunisia will embark tonight on the same boat. Kalipha says that everybody is talking of something that happened as the procession swept through the town. One, Sidi Gadoona, a draper, sitting before his shop, dashed in and got his money, locked the door, and even as he ran he was putting on his street-robe to join the future hahj on their fateful journey.
June 4
Yesterday I learned with dismay that Baba Hahj has been hurt because I have not yet visited his household. So it was arranged that this afternoon I should make my call upon his wives.
Papa Hahj, or ‘Babelhahj’, as we call him, is probably Kalipha’s closest friend. He is a likeable little man with a quick smile and merry eyes. There is nothing about him, however, except of course his title, to indicate that he has performed the sacred pilgrimage, or, that he is, as Kalipha insists, ‘very, very religious’. The other hahj I have met dress only in white and with the honoured prefix have assumed a certain sobriety and dignity, neither of which distinguish Babelhahj in the least. His size and his humorous face are against him. Then, too, he is such a little dandy! His big gaudy turban makes him look top-heavy, his street robe is always conspicuous for its stripes and now that mustard-coloured, mail-ordered shoes are the fashion he is sporting a pair.
Babelhahj occupies a unique position in the eyes of the menfolk of Kairouan for he has achieved the impossible: conjugal felicity with two wives under the same roof! ‘How does he do it?’ I have often heard them ask. Kalipha has told me as much as he knows of his friend’s affairs. Babelhahj has been married to his first wife, Haleema, for over twenty years. Their one child, a girl, died at the age of twelve, and Haleema never succeeded in bearing another. In her compassion for her husband she implored him to take another wife, but his respect for her was such that for years he refused to do so. She was overjoyed when he finally consented to marry Macboobah, a much younger woman, who promptly presented him with a daughter and is again pregnant. All summer I have hoped that Babelhahj would invite me to visit his remarkable household, only to learn that he is offended because I have not done so!
He and Kalipha escorted me to the house. (The latter, of course, did not enter, but waited for us in the café across the road.) In the entrance passage a little girl came running to fling herself into Babelhahj’s arms. Obviously, she had been dressed up for this occasion. An uncouth Western frock-all open work and ribbons-hung below the tops of her buttoned boots; on her head was a rakish pearlstrung fete cap. The women were in the court to greet me with outstretched hands and a cordial ‘Welcome in the name of Allah!’
Babelhahj explained that each wife has her own complete household. I was first taken into Macboobah’s, a spacious room, as clean as wax. The doorway, the windows, the bed, were hung with spotless curtains; Kairouan carpets brightened the tiled floor. As in every Arab home that presumes to be at all de luxe there stood the ugly French dresser and upon it the inevitable flowers under a glass bell, but it was nice to find the whitewashed walls adorned with warrior-saints on smoking chargers.
I felt extremely self-conscious sitting above them on the only chair; I missed my little interpreter and almost regretted that I had refused to let Mohammed beg time off from his work. In desperation, at last, I abandoned my high seat and joined them upon the floor. I think we all felt better. Their French is even less than my Arabic, but we talked – now that I think of it, it’s amazing the ground we covered! I learned that Kadusha is two years old, that she adores her crystal hat and never willingly removes it, that her mother wants her to learn to read and write. I was told, too, that Haleema’s brother is a letter-carrier; that the women had woven the rugs upon which we sat. They demonstrated how one sits in front of the loom weaving, while the other embroiders in back. I, in turn, told them – don’t ask me how – that I am single and alone, that I write stories for children, and that I love Kairouan. We got on famously! Then we crossed the court to Haleema’s house. The low table, which they now set before me, was covered with a towel. ‘How Mohammed will mourn!’ I thought, as Macboobah lifted the cloth disclosing dishes of home-made cakes – mealy baklowa with flaky crusts, date-stuffed mahkroods, and little cones of short-bread. My ‘Share in the name of Allah’ provoked only urges to begin. One is always expected to eat in solitary state, ‘kief-kief sultana’, (like a sultana) as I expressed it, which made them laugh and pat their chests with pleasure. Haleema brought the tiny cup and saucer, where upon Macboobah must jump up to fetch her rosewater with which to flavour my coffee. That set Haleema rummaging for her scent and I was drenched with amber. As I ate, there was an easy, pleasant flow of conversation among my host and his wives; Kadusha sat between her two mothers watching me. I suspect that Haleema is a bit indulgent for when I offered Wistful-Eyes a cake Macboobah smiled and shook her head, but Haleema, with an Oh-come-Mother-just-one look, let the little girl choose which.
Parting was blissfully easy. No hysterical pledges of life-long devotion, that generally make Arab leave-takings so tedious; these women simply took my hand and asked me to come again.
Babelhahj and I joined our friend in the café. Impressed with the quiet harmony in that home, I asked Kalipha if he thought I knew Babelhahj well enough to ask him his secret. Kalipha, amused, put the question without cogitation. Babelhahj seemed not at all displeased. ‘Well you see it’s like this,’ was his whimsical reply, ‘I tell Haleema in confidence, “An old love is like an old fez – it’s comfortable.” And to Macboobah I say, “The love of a maiden is like jasmine over the ear.” Then each wife, believing that she is the favourite, can afford to be generous to the other!’
June 12
We have formed the habit lately of strolling out beyond the ramparts to the fondook just before sunset. It is good to get away from the racket. We sit on the stone ledge outside the little coffee-house and the profound stillness of sky and plain gather us in.
Tonight, Babelhahj and Sallah, a mutual friend, who were promenading along the road that skirts the city wall, strolled across to join us. Atop their slopes, strewn white with tombs, the Mosque of Sidi Arfah and Sidi Abdelli were hallowed silhouettes against the sun. The moon, like a pale petal, lay upon the sky, there was a ruddy light on the backs of the camels, a peach-bloom upon the ramparts. The women were already leaving the cemeteries; I could see their veiled figures, some black, some white, picking their way among the little domes.
>
While Kalipha and his friends talked together I amused myself watching the bread-man I see so often around the fondook. He is a short, amazingly sturdy, broad-bottomed fellow in prodigious green bloomers. His red moon face is humorous, and there is scarcely a tooth to his smile. The gaudy bandanna around his head is knotted in front and the ends, sticking up like horns, give him a decidedly jaunty air. Sallah, catching sight of him started to laugh; something he said made Kalipha and Babelhahj chuckle. ‘Sidi Makmood! Ya Sidi Makmood!’ shouted Kalipha, then turning to me he explained, ‘Attend! You are about to hear an amusing story. This Makmood is very droll!’
He stalked over to us – he walks like a prize-fighter – and cheerfully seated himself on the edge of a chair. He needed no coaxing to begin, but if he made his story brief, he apologized, it was because the sun was nearly gone. (Bread-stalls are busiest right after the sunset Call to Prayer.) In less than five minutes he left the men roaring. This was his tale.
He was the youngest of fourteen and he worked with his brothers in the fields. At noon one day he came back hungrier than usual. ‘Ya Ummi!’ he called to his mother, ‘Is there something to eat?’
‘In the kassar,’ she responded.
He uncovered the great bowl and found erfeesah, a pudding made of oily cake crumbled in the mortar, then mixed with dates and sugar. He ate and he ate until he had eaten half the erfeesah. He was still hungry, but he clapped the cover upon the rest.
Among the Faithful Page 10