A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  I’m certainly not going to touch another drop. Another bottle is opened anyway; Gérard and Guy go for it too. Some glasses later, Guy begins confessing the secret of his family’s pied-noir past. Our hosts take it blithely in their stride. How would they blame him, a young man, for his father’s misdeeds? He need not bother mentioning it.

  Now, though, Guy wants to exonerate his father. He was by no means an evil destroyer of hospitals and schools, but did all he could to stop other Post Office employees sabotaging the place, and voluntarily gave the keys of his family home, on the day they left, to an Algerian workmate and his family.

  Guy obviously feels much better having got all that off his chest. And now, humankind being a many-splendoured thing, Khaled and Hamid remember that their old patronne was a kind and motherly woman, who baked a mean madeleine, took tea under the pergola with their own mothers, and always helped Khaled and Hamid out with their French spelling.

  I suddenly feel horribly drunk. The wine is full-blooded Algerian, not watered down by any of that namby-pamby French stuff: fourteen per cent alcohol. Those extra percentage points make some difference indeed, with a full stomach and the North African sun, windows wide open to the sleepy vineyard without.

  Luckily the after-lunch nap traditions of Morocco apply here in Algeria too. Soon we are all stretched out on sofas, rugs and cushions and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  13

  Finally we are on a bus. They do really exist. This one is taking us eastwards still, across a broad plain of yet more olives, vineyards and orchards. The city ahead of us, just visible through the heat-haze, is Tlemcen. Gérard’s new Little Cunning One, consulted with Guy’s grudging approval, tells us that Tlemcen – whose name was also written ‘Tilemsen’ in earlier times, when its inhabitants were fonder of vowels than they are today – means ‘springs’ in Berber Tamazight. It was also once known as Agadir, which is Arabic for ‘fortress’, and before that the ancient Romans called it Pomaria, meaning ‘orchards’. Guy and I agree with Gérard: there is plenty of back-up for all three names in the surrounding landscape. Springs-orchards-fortress-town. But we’re finding it hard to take much of an interest. We wish we hadn’t drunk all that wine.

  We were planning to look up the first relative on Samir’s list, his cousin Hocine, tonight. But I’ve gone off the idea. I don’t want to talk to more people I don’t know and worry about whether I’ve missed some essential point of Islamic etiquette and probably have to eat a lot of food for hours. I want to sit quietly and not be assaulted by all sorts of strange new stuff. The boys feel the same. Cultural exhaustion. What we need is a nice quiet evening of nothing at all. As soon as we get off the bus, we’ll start asking around for hotels.

  Tlemcen looks very promising as we ride in: an ancient and noble walled city, not an upstart frontier town like Oujda, set in a jewel-green landscape with a background of pine forests and deep-red cliffs. Within its walls are small, friendly streets with plenty of greenery. Its architecture, ancient, modern and French-colonial, all harmonizes sweetly.

  No hope for peace and quiet, though. The first person we ask about hotels when we get off the bus, a curly-headed young man whom we soon know as Liamine, turns out to be a professional guide. It was obvious, really. Why else would he be hanging about a bus station, waiting for new arrivals to ask him silly questions? Liamine is not any old guide, either, but a personage of great liveliness, not to say effervescence, and full of enthusiasm for his subject: the historical treasures of Tlemcen. Which we need to come and check out immediately. Of course we do! What could be a better time than the present?

  None of us is in any state to withstand a charm offensive. And we certainly couldn’t claim that the cost of Liamine’s services was prohibitive – he’s asking so little it’s positively embarrassing. Within minutes we have been loaded up into his friend Ismail’s small yellow taxi, and we’re off on the grand tour of the town. Of course they’ll take us to a hotel – soon, soon! They know just the place, a lovely, clean, tidy, cheap hotel, right here in the centre. But first we must relax, sit back in our seats, stop worrying, and let them show us around!

  Liamine and friend now take us and our hangovers on a bewildering switchback ride through a world of mosques and holy tombs, of bizarre histories and irrational tales, weirdly interwoven with histories of science and logic, of intellect and rationality. But then, in the high days of Tlemcen’s might, as a great university city of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that was one of the hot topics of philosophical debate: the question of the separation, if any, between faith and logic, religion and reason. Come to think of it, history seems to be repeating itself at this very time here in Algeria – hopefully not as tragedy.

  First we go off towards the centre of town. Compared to anywhere we have been so far, Tlemcen’s streets seem surprisingly free of women in veils. We pass a good half-dozen women without so much as a scarf over their hair. But of course! say our guides proudly. Lots of women in Tlemcen go around en cheveux – ‘in hair’! This is a cosmopolitan city, not a backwards peasant town!

  Strange to note that, after just a couple of days of no-visible-hair at all, the sight of bare female heads actually strikes me as strange and faintly shocking. How horribly easy it must be to launch and perpetuate a tradition of prudery.

  Our first stop is the town’s Jewish cemetery, and the tomb of Rabbi Ephraim, a charismatic Andalusian doctor and scientist who arrived here from Toledo in 1442, fleeing the persecution of the Jews and, as legend has it, riding on the back of a lion, using a serpent as a rein. Be that as it may, says Liamine, the Rabbi, a very erudite man, cured the Sultan’s family of its ailments so well that he was rewarded with a large plot of land in the city, on which to build homes for all the Jews of the area, collecting them together in safety within its stout walls.

  Every one of the tombs in here – big slabs of rough stone laid flat on the ground – has been liberally splashed and dribbled with whitewash, just like our first marabout tomb. White, Ismail says, is a lucky colour here in the Maghreb, a symbol of happiness and plenty. And we’ve just missed the February mass pilgrimage to his tomb, we hear, as we throw the obligatory coin into Rabbi Ephraim’s fountain. Everyone participates in his moussem, a two-day event of wild drumming and frenzied dancing. Being Jewish is no bar to being venerated by Muslims of the Sufi persuasion, any more than being Christian. A last remnant, hanging on by the skin of its teeth, of the great days of the Peoples of the Book.

  And are there Jews and Christians still living here in Tlemcen, then?

  Hardly any, alas, say our guides. As we may imagine, most Christians left with the French: there was a lot of bad feeling. Most of them had sided with the colonizers. A handful stayed on – those few who had made some close connection to local people and their culture. The story of the Jewish exodus, though, is more complicated. There are still some Jews left here, but nothing compared to the days before the French. The Christian colonizers of the nineteenth century came up with the perfect scheme to drive a wedge between the other two Peoples of the Book – a divide-and-rule strategy that worked its mischief to the very end. Although they refused Muslims citizenship rights unless they were prepared to renounce their religion, a special case was made of the Jews. They were offered preferential treatment, says Ismail, and they accepted it. Maybe there wasn’t much else they could have done. But still, as the nationalist movement grew, Muslim Algerians saw the Jews as traitors, or, at best, lackeys of the oppressors.

  Towards the end of the French regime, though, Liamine tells us, things started to look more hopeful. Once Vichy France had started collaborating with the Fascists of Europe, setting up concentration camps here in Algeria, filling them with European Jews – and any other despised groups – not a few Jews joined the ranks of the Algerian nationalists against the colonists. The nationalist movement was not supposed to be about religion, anyway, but about liberation for the whole country. That is why the constitution here forbade political parties based
on religion. Still, maybe it was too late for reconciliation: there was too much prejudice and mistrust already. Then, once the war against Hitler was over, there was Israel, and its maltreatment of the Palestinians. When Algeria got its independence, the Jews were not given automatic citizenship: they would have to ask for it individually. A tit-for-tat move. Well over 100,000 Jews left for France along with the pieds-noirs. A few thousand went to Israel. Hardly any are left. Less than one per cent of the population.

  But let us go back into the past, say our guides cheeringly, to happier times when the last two Peoples of the Book, at least, were still united. Next stop will be the mosque of the marabout El Halaoui, whose name means ‘The Sweetmaker’ or ‘The Confectioner’.

  We leave the car and head off into the maze of narrow streets that lead into the medina. Interesting to note that there is no separate French ville nouvelle here in Tlemcen. This must be one of the places where the settlers got too close to the colonized, then, and those macabre lessons were learned that would later deprive Moroccan Muslims of electricity and sewage systems.

  The Holy Confectioner’s is a sweet little mosque, set into the side of a hill and built in 1354, when – according to Liamine – the Andalusian style would have been the height of fashion here. The great architects of el-Andalus were very influential on this side of the water, he says: the Grand Mosque down in the centre of town was actually copied from one of their triumphs, the Grand Mosque of Cordoba, which still stands in Spain to this day, now transformed into a Grand Cathedral, its Islamic minaret reworked into a Christian bell-tower.

  We don’t actually go inside. Although here in Algeria, unlike Morocco, Christians are allowed to visit mosques, I am not dressed correctly. I can’t go in with my hair uncovered. The boys stay out in solidarity. All for one and one for all, as Dumas might have said. From the doorway you can see a simple little prayer room; beyond it a courtyard with a pagoda-like shelter supported on a dozen slim columns. Oddly enough, it is roofed with tiles identical to a type I have often admired on certain English Art-Deco buildings: clay tiles glazed in a light pea-green. I have always thought these were a home-grown invention, and they strike me as oddly out of place here in Moorish North Africa. But of course, in the days of Art-Deco, people went around naming their dance-halls ‘Alhambra’ and their entertainment corporations ‘Granada’, didn’t they? The green glazed roof-tile must have been Orientalist in inspiration. What odd things you do learn when you travel.

  The Confectioner’s tale, as told by Liamine, is certainly worthy of The Thousand and One Nights.

  El Halaoui was another Andalusian. Some say he was Cadi of Seville until it fell to the Christians and he fled to take refuge here. Others (Ismail is representing this point of view with some vigour at present) say he gave up the post voluntarily. Willingly or not, he now decided to give up the riches and vanities of this world; he would devote himself to a plain hermit’s life and the Sufi search for transcendental Oneness with God. Checking the facts as I write, I see that Seville fell to the Christians in 1248, and El Halaoui arrived here in 1266, so whoever is correct, he certainly made a long slow journey of it to Tlemcen. Once here, El Halaoui lived a life of poverty and simplicity, teaching the children of the city, as they sat at his feet muching his homemade goodies, lessons in the godly ways of justice, mercy and charity. Eventually his reputation for piety and wisdom, and his way with children, came to the ears of the ruler of the city, who invited him into his court to become teacher and guide to his very own sons. But now the grand vizier became jealous at El Halaoui’s preferment – as grand viziers will – and began secretly plotting his downfall. One fine day, the Confectioner found himself accused of using witchcraft – of planning to make his pupils love him more than they loved their own father. The vizier had set the worm of doubt in his patron’s heart. El Halaoui was beheaded and his body thrown over the city walls to the dogs, as was the custom in those days.

  Hang on a moment! I recognize this story. We’ve heard a song about it. An Andalusian song. Didn’t something very nasty happen the vizier, involving lime mortar?

  It certainly did. Ismail knows the song, too, and starts quietly singing it as we walk, tapping out the rhythm with his taxi-keys.

  Liamine goes on with the story. As darkness fell that night, when the watchmen of the city went to close its gates, a wavering voice from without called to them, saying, ‘Rest easy. The town is safe. All is well. There is no one out here but the sweet-maker.’ This went on for seven nights, until the ruler and citizens of Tlemcen concluded that El Halaoui hadn’t been a sorcerer after all, but a holy man, as they had originally thought. So they built him a nice marabout-tomb and this pretty little mosque to make up for it. And then, of course, the vizier, as we know, got his just rewards.

  There is something about the way Liamine tells this story that does not resonate with faith and piety. Does he actually believe in these marabouts? Would he or Ismail come and pray at their shrines?

  No, they certainly would not. Nobody their age – no young educated people – care for all that marabout-cult stuff. But many of the marabouts really were great scholars and interpreters of Islam, scientists and philosophers who contributed greatly to the sum of human knowledge. It is the worshipping of them that is mistaken. The supernatural stuff was added later, by a people who knew they had been great men but no longer had any understanding – education having been eliminated from this country by the colonial powers – of their true importance. Rabbi Ephraim, for example, not only studied medicine at the University of Toledo, but also devoted many years of his life to studying the commentaries of the Christian Thomas Aquinas on Aristotelian philosophy. And most daringly for his time, the Rabbi argued that the holy texts of the three Peoples of the Book should not be taken as literal truth, but as metaphor. And what do the wor-shippers at his shrine admire him for today? Using a snake to harness a lion! That is their memorial to a man who was a fervent rationalist! It’s stuff for the old folk, or for superstitious country bumpkins. And not really Islam at all.

  It is wrong, anyway, contributes Ismail, to believe that other beings than Allah can share his sacredness, or grant you his baraka.

  Liamine laughs at his friend, and a heated debate ensues, in a mixture of French and Arabic. Liamine’s conclusion: Ismail is a superstitious country bumpkin himself. The very concept of baraka is a Maghrebi deformation of true classical Islam.

  Extraordinary to find yourself in a country where young men engage in animated theological discussion in the streets! How many centuries is it since that would have happened in Britain? Not since Cromwell’s time. Another extraordinary thing is the amount of French Ismail and Liamine mix in with their Arabic when they’re speaking to one another – do they always do that, or is it meant as a courtesy to us? Because if it is, I say, it’s not working. There’s a lot too much Arabic in it for us to get more than the faintest idea what they’re on about!

  But no, says Liamine. That’s the way everyone talks here in Algeria. In the cities, at any rate. You swap between the two languages as the fancy takes you.

  The French language is our bottin de guerre, our war booty, says Ismail with a grin at Gérard and Guy. The spoils of war. We can do what we like with it! Mix and match! Bend it to our will!

  But anyway, the answer is that young people prefer the mosques downtown, where you get a good imam who has something to say about changing the world for the better – that’s what religion ought to be about. Who wants a load of old farmers’ mumbo-jumbo?

  Back to the car and we are soon skirting a big oval park of oleanders and palm trees, created, our guides say, by draining the ancient lake in which Barbarossa, who took control of Tlemcen in 1518, drowned a dozen of its ruler’s sons. What a ferocious man Barbarossa seems to have been – and how far and wide he travelled. When he wasn’t raiding small towns on the Ligurian coast, he was drowning princes in Algeria. There was a lot more to him, though, Liamine tells us, than unbridled ferocity. Barbaross
a may have been a murderous privateer as far as Ligurians were concerned, and pretty unpleasant if you were an emir of Tlemcen, but he was a saint in the eyes of the beleaguered Moors trapped in the south of Spain. Their forcible conversion to Christianity had been decreed; they were threatened with having their children taken from them ‘for the good of their souls’. Now they were forbidden to leave the country. The name Barbarossa, the story goes, is a European corruption of Baba Aruj – Father Aruj: the name bestowed upon him by the hundreds of grateful Muslims he rescued, between 1504 and 1510, from the coasts of now-hostile Andalusia, and carried to safety in Algiers. So in 1508, when he plundered Diano Marina, he must have been en route to a mercy mission over in Spain. I must remember to tell my neighbours that when I get home. I’m sure it’ll make them feel a lot better.

  We roar on uphill now, along an elegantly curving road through the high and leafy hinterland of Tlemcen, towards the mosque and tomb of its patron saint – the marabout Sidi Boumedienne. Another Andalusian, it seems, also born in Seville, but a hundred years before the Confectioner: before the persecution began, in the days of bold intellectual enquiry, when the Peoples of the Book were at the height of their cooperative powers.

  Do they not have any home-grown marabouts, then? How come this town is so full of Andalusians?

  Simple, says Liamine. This town has Andalusian connections going right back to the very beginning of the story, and to its bitter end. Boabdil, the last king of Islamic Granada, came here to die. And seven centuries earlier Tariq ibn Zayid – Tariq of Gibraltar fame – was here in Tlemcen when he received the request to lead the invasion of Spain, to re-establish order there. (This seems perhaps an excessively euphemistic description of Tariq’s goal in invading Iberia, but hey, it’s Liamine’s story.) Sidi Boumedienne himself, though, Liamine says, belongs to the high point of Moorish civilization, and the flowering of the culture of the Peoples of the Book: the days of bold intellectual enquiry, when there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing between the Maghreb and el-Andalus.