by Annie Hawes
A party of Naima’s friends arrives: a bunch of happy, excited women and girls getting ready for a wedding, who have come to do the required elaborate henna traceries to their feet and the palms of their hands. I am so gripped watching the skill of the expert – an extremely old lady wearing masses of kohl in her eyes – as she trickles on the intricate fine designs of henna paste that I completely forget that I’m standing here naked. Mind you, so is the expert. What a brilliant institution the hammam is! It must be very good for your mental health, too, constantly seeing such a huge variety of other ordinary women’s bodies in a state of undress. It would certainly stop you neurosing about your own. Though, speaking of neurosing, I certainly don’t envy them all that depilation. A few feet away from the henna-lady two women are removing the hair from one another’s legs by a strange technique involving running bits of thread up and down them. I can’t understand how it works, even when they demonstrate it on my own legs. You twiddle two threads together, and somehow they grip on to each hair as they roll past, and rip it out by the follicle. Some women in here have gone a lot further than the Brazilian: not only no hair at all, but the intimate area in question highlighted with an arc of henna instead. If they even so much as mention trying that one on me, I’ll be out of here so fast . . .
Now everyone decides that I would look a lot better with some kohl in my eyes, and somebody produces a strange little object like a tiny leather bottle, with an applicator-stick of made of a sliver of smooth bone. Now, lean your head back, shut your eyes – and the stick is whisked between your shut eyelids. Voilà! Everyone agrees that I am greatly improved.
Seeing how spellbound I am by the henna-designs, Latifa and Naima convince the henna-lady to stop the intricate stuff for a moment and apply something quick and simple to my hand. Mischievously, they suggest a moon and a star in my palm. Everyone is giggling as she paints it on: but then everyone is always giggling in here, so I suspect nothing. Later this evening I will discover what it signifies: that I’ve just got engaged. And for the next fortnight, until it starts to wear off, I will have to remember to keep it hidden – or put up with constant cackling enquiries as to when the wedding is.
We leave the hammam, all pink and glowing, just as Ladies’ Time is coming to an end. I am wearing the towel on my head, as Islamic health theory prescribes. And I have discovered that, if you’re female, there is a lot more to it than just your own health. You are wearing it for the sake of men’s souls. Apparently the sight of wet hair on a female, implying that she has recently been naked – and possibly having intercourse with her husband, since she may have been doing her ritual post-coital cleansing, as prescribed by the Koran – is enough to inflame the senses of any poor, weak men she passes and drive them beyond the limits of temptation. They might easily commettre une faute malgré eux – commit a fault in spite of themselves. Is this ‘fault’ the same as a sin? Would it be in thought, word or deed? I daren’t ask.
I didn’t realize, I say, that the theory behind the hijab was that men needed protecting from their own weakness. I’d always imagined it was more or less the opposite. But little Aisha and Zeinab assure me that this is so. Women must cover up to help men, because they cannot help themselves.
Gérard and Guy are sitting outside a café down the alley, waiting outside to take their turn as soon as the men’s time begins. My towel works brilliantly. Not only do they not commit any faults, but for some perplexed moments they don’t recognize me at all, with my enveloping headgear and startling black-lined eyelids.
The attendants will soon signal the changeover from women’s to men’s hammam time by simply removing the bit of cloth that’s been hanging over the street door. Cloth means women: no cloth means men. Gérard and Guy wait for the Sign that they may head on into the steam, while I go back with Latifa, Naima and gang to wait for them. With a small detour, that is, to an area of the market we missed previously, which the girls feel I should see because it is full of great bargains in the world of toiletries – an area called the Melilla souk, where all the gear brought over from Spanish Africa by the privileged inhabitants of the border towns or by local smugglers gets sold on. Almost all household items are cheaper on the Spanish side of the border than here – from soap and shampoo to towels and sheets. It is mostly women who do these smuggling-runs, they say; the lady smugglers bind their purchases onto their midriffs with lengths of cloth – often so much stuff that they look absurdly huge around the middle. Then they slip their jellaba on over the top, and off they go. They don’t care how obvious it looks, because they know that the frontier guards, men and Muslims, could never manhandle a woman, or insist that she undress before them! The guards do their best to punish the female contrabandists by making them wait hours before they finally let them back through the border. But why should that bother them? They are expecting it, they’re used to it, and they know they’ll be let through eventually – and make enough profit to feed their families for a month! A fine creative use of Islamic tradition.
Faced with the Grandfather Situation again, I decide that I am certainly not going to scuttle past him like a naughty child this time. I shall greet him properly, holding my head high beneath my towel, and see if I can’t make him feel a bit discourteous at the very least. The labass greeting, a bit on the friendly-and-casual side, is certainly not good enough for this occasion. I want to greet him ceremoniously, religious-style. So as I walk towards him, I politely announce As-salamu aleikum.
Absolutely no response – not even so much as a grunt. He does not wish me peace, he just straightens his back to ramrod stiffness and stares right ahead. He’s certainly very convinced of the correctness of his behaviour. But look, maybe it has worked after all. He hasn’t raised his stick!
As soon as we’ve sat down by the brazier, with the tagine now simmering upon it, tended by Naima’s boys, everyone starts insisting that we must stay for the meal – there is plenty for everyone. Is there no end to the hospitality of Moroccans? I manage to say no, against much protestation from the hostesses. I don’t think I can take much more multilingual socializing. And then, of course, there is the lure of the real bed with the real sheets . . . I badly need to let all these experiences settle down in my head, to sit quietly in a room all on my own.
I am ashamed of this thought when I am called inside Latifa and children’s home, where the three little girls are now putting on an impromptu dancing display in my honour, while Aisha accompanies them on a sort of double-sided tambourine with a big red henna handprint on the drumskin. Nobody who lives here has the remotest chance of sitting quietly in a room on their own, that’s for sure. Their whole home turns out to be just this one room, opening straight off the balcony. I’d imagined it was an entrance, leading into a flat somewhere at the back of the building. But this is all there is: each of the doors along the balcony leads to just one room. There is no furniture in here at all. A tin chest sits in the corner, and there are four neat piles of sheepskins against the walls. The plumbing is the tap on the balcony; the balcony is the kitchen. On the tin chest stand two enamel washing-up bowls, the jug I met earlier, a round-bellied cooking pot and a couscoussier. Everything is scrupulously clean and tidy. On a shelf in a wall embrasure sits the tray, holding the neatly washed teapot and glasses, together with some screws of brown paper: the tea, mint and sugar. Nothing else. This is the sum total of the family’s possessions. Naima’s is next door: it’s identical. The boys sometimes sleep in with Grandpa, two doors along, and sometimes here with their mamma. And the beds? The sheepskins are piled up for seats by day, spread out for sleep at night. The sheets are in the chest. Thanks to those paving-stone vandals of the 1960s, there’s a single light bulb in the ceiling, at least, and a shared loo in the corner of the stairwell. And you don’t need a bathroom because you have the hammam.
The girls are now dragging me over to join in the dancing, trying to tie a shawl around my hips. I do my best to copy their hip-waggles. The shawl, knotted at the side, empha
sizes the movement so dramatically that you quickly get the hang of the thing, weight on one leg, other knee bent, a quick sideways jerk of the pelvis. Aisha starts speeding up the beat, and all the little girls are jiggling and squeaking along with me, when I suddenly realize that we have a large audience at the door. Not just Latifa and Naima but the neighbour women and plenty more children. The doorway is filled with eyes, at every possible height. And, right at the back, Gérard and Guy, now jubilantly clean. Embarrassed, I try to scuttle off to the side of the room, but no chance. The women all start joining in, dancing their way into the room and doing that you-you-ing in their throats, clapping, waggling, banging their hips flirtatiously into mine as they work their way round the room. The little girls are hysterical with joy. Pandemonium. Is this the way they always carry on of an evening? What they need is a nice quiet TV set.
Eventually, as darkness begins to fall, things calm down, and the sheepskins are brought in, this time to play the role of sofas. The men’s version of the hammam, as told by Gérard, sounds a lot tougher than the ladies’ one. You get a ferocious pummelling and stretching from a big fat masseur who seems intent on rending you limb from limb. Guy doesn’t believe it’s always like that – he’s sure they were getting some macho test for foreigners. Either that or all the men here are double-jointed! They feel wonderful now it’s over, though, and they are absolutely starving!
Our generous hostesses immediately start offering to share their tagine again, and I pinch Gérard’s leg hard, from my sheepskin seat, before he starts accepting. We are certainly not going to eat any of their food. They seem a lot worse off even than Khadija’s family, in spite of having two husbands sending money back from France. What on earth sort of wages do French abattoirs pay? We agree to come back tomorrow instead and have lunch with them before we leave for the border. Much better – at least if we come tomorrow we’ll be able to bring them a bit of shopping, a couple of chickens or whatever, some small gift to balance things out.
We wander off through the town and find a small friendly couscous place for our dinner. I can hardly wait to get it down my neck and be off to that quiet hotel room on my own. Not only am I worn out with foreignness, but even when I’m relaxing I still have to speak French. When I get to the hotel I’m going to talk out loud to myself in English for half an hour, I decide, in case I end up forgetting how to do it. But the evening is destined to be longer than I expected. Suddenly, one of the waiters appears bearing an extra bottle of wine. Compliments of the house, he says, smirking. And which of you is the lucky man?
11
Gérard and Guy must have done some fine networking down at the hammam last night. Every man in Oujda seems to be wishing us No Harm as we stroll about the town, trying to find a chicken shop in which to buy our parting gift for Latifa and family. Labass, we answer casually, as if to the manner born. Eventually, with the help of a large number of interested bystanders, we track one down, in the medina – a most extraordinary shop, or booth rather, its shopfront embellished with a lurid ten-foot-tall painting of a crowing cockerel, cut out of a bit of hardboard. One in the eye both to the tasteful French and the repressive Islamists. Underneath the cockerel lies – rather contradictorily, you might think – a large pile of eggs in a wide-mouthed basket. Towards the rear of the establishment several rows of nesting boxes are fixed to the wall, while at its centre, on a floor covered in a layer of straw, a dozen or so live chickens are pecking and clucking. At the back sits the owner, who seems to be an intimate friend of every member of the small crowd that has delivered us to his door.
Tentatively, with a picture in mind of a nice ready-plucked clingfilm-wrapped specimen, we ask about chickens for eating: but in our hearts we already know what the answer will be. Yes. Just pick the ones we like the look of. This event suddenly takes on the nature of a test. Does any of us three have the faintest idea how to detect, by looking at a live chicken, how good it will be to eat? No. The two things – obviously rather intimately connected – belong in our addled Nazrani minds to completely separate categories. A cosy, feathery creature clucking about a farmyard or a pallid headless-and-legless oven-ready thing in a butcher’s shop. (Debating amongst ourselves, we find that we have another idée fixe, derived from the intensive chicken-industries of our lands: that the chickens that give you eggs cannot be the same ones you eat. We quickly discard this notion. What an alienated bunch we are.) So, on with the dilemma of choice. Are we going to choose the wrong one, and have the chicken salesman snickering behind our backs? Nothing else for it. Gérard shuts his eyes and selects two at random, complaining that he has never passed the death sentence on a living creature until today. The shop man, looking quizzically on at all this performance over a simple chicken dinner, starts picking up our chosen victims.
But we have reckoned without our cortège: they are having none of it. Two of the boys now demonstrate the correct way of selecting a chicken: you pick it up, ignoring its protests, and you prod and squeeze at breast and thigh, checking for meatiness. Then you argue about the price for quite a long time, telling the owner what pathetic skinny creatures they are, while he tells you that, au contraire, they are prime specimens, the like of which you will not find for many miles around. Eventually, two chickens are selected and removed to the back of the booth. A squawk or two later, and our gift is ready. We bear the victims off to Latifa’s, tied together unceremoniously by the feet, necks lolling horribly. The children spot us from the balcony as we and our cortège are still threading our way painstakingly through the braid-plaiting, in the style of the Ministry of Silly Walks, and the whole family comes down into the square to receive us. Now they send our chicken-purchasing companions packing, in no uncertain terms. Good. I’ve been fearing that we might worsen the outraged-Grandpa situation immeasurably if we entered his house yet again – this time accompanied by a large number of local witnesses to his inability to control his womenfolk.
But all is well. The patriarch is indoors, lying down, and we get along the balcony unscathed. They have a huge pot of harira ready for lunch, which we eat with great chunks of bread instead of spoons. Honour is satisfied. An hour or so later, bidding many farewells to everyone, we goose-step our way back across the square.
Algeria, here we come.
Before we have even managed to establish exactly which bus will take us to the frontier, and what its timetable is, one of the boys’ new hammam friends, passing by in a decrepit Renault, offers to drive us there. He has nothing better to do, he says, and it’s not far. He needs to go that way to get himself some petrol anyway. We climb in and off we shoot. Ahmed will take us the unofficial way, he says, which is quicker because you don’t have to mess about with all the paperwork. That’s the way most people go, from round here, and they do it often, because petrol is an awful lot cheaper over the border, among the Algerian cousins, who have their own oil wells, and are happy to share.
We drive out of Oujda towards a broad, undulating plain, nice and green compared to that last parched stretch of the Rif, streams and their accompanying greenery criss-crossing it. We soon come to an area of very swish mini-mansions, mostly in a somewhat brash 1970s style, complete with suburban-type gardens. Émigrés’ houses, says Ahmed. Rich people.
I puzzle over this remark for some time before realizing these are not émigrés from another country, but Moroccan ex-émigrés like Yazid – returnees who have managed to build the fine house they’d always dreamed of. Ahmed tells us that the émigrés have gone a lot further than this to make a good impression in the neighbourhood – they’ve even built a new mosque on the outskirts of town to show everyone how devout they still are, even after all those years among the faithless Nazarenes. And the funniest part of it is that, after spending all that money to make a good impression, not one of them is ever seen there at prayer-time.
Another five minutes out of town, and we’re off the main road, heading along a wide, dusty track across the plain. After a while it begins to make a long curve
around the back of a stand of low trees. All of a sudden we are in a broad, empty field, deeply rutted with many dried-up tyre-tracks, with something of the aspect of a very lumpy parking lot. There are various cars dotted about the place: and a largish lorry is parked tight up against the vegetation.
That is the bombardier, says Ahmed, the lorry that brings over clandestine supplies for people who need more than just a tankful of petrol. We’ll carry on another couple of kilometres and get back on the main road again, Algerian side.
Fortunately it now strikes Gérard that an unstamped passport could cause all sorts of problems for us Europeans if we happen to get stopped and asked for our papers as we travel through Algeria. Especially if there are going to be lots of extra patrols on the roads, with all the trouble going on. Taking this back way in, just to save half an hour, could be a bad mistake.
It’s all the same to him, says Ahmed. He’ll fill his tank here, from the bombardier, and we’ll set back off the way we came.
Twenty minutes later, he drops us off in view of the Algerian frontier post, does a slaloming U-turn, and vanishes back towards Oujda in a cloud of dust.
This little deviation from our official route would hardly be worth mentioning, were it not for the role that this unofficial back door into Algeria will play in a few years’ time. Once the new millennium has got under way, many Black Africans will begin to turn up in Oujda, heading for the Melilla fence – if you can call a solid metal construction, now twenty feet high, a fence – to seek asylum or work in Europe. There are plenty of black students at the university here, so they don’t stand out as much in Oujda as they might elsewhere in Morocco, and much of the local population is sympathetic to their situation.