by Annie Hawes
A torrid wind is rising now, abrasive and dry. It is midday and, in spite of the wind, absurdly hot. The children all scamper off home towards their village: we start heading back to Timimoun, crossing the path of a man riding a little donkey, heading for a gap between the dunes, his gandoura and chèche of indigo cloth so faded it’s almost white. His feet dangle in time to the creature’s steps, the tips of his babouche slippers grazing the ground. Slipping between the dunes, he and the donkey vanish into the sand.
Moussa tells us, as we trudge on homewards, that the Gourara is situated in a world wind tunnel, a place where the winds from both sides of the earth meet and crash into one another. Is this possible? And that if the winds start to come strong from the south-east in the next week or two, the whole date harvest may be ruined, shrivelled on the bough. The pollination will not take. Women must tie their headscarves tightly, never loosen them outdoors, once that wind starts up. It is well known that the loosening of headscarves can conjure up a wind, even on the calmest of days.
I’m not sure how to take this. Perhaps it is a reference to the fact that I’ve got my chèche wrapped man-style, and we’re almost back in town, where this will embarrass our escort? I unravel it and put it on like a proper ladies’ khimar, just in case. The wind dies down as suddenly as it arose. Moussa turns and gives me a big grin.
We seem to be going a very roundabout way back into town, heading for the farthest end of the ksar. Moussa has something he wants to show us, he says, giving us a mysteriously gleeful look as he leads us on through the alleys on the edge of town, the head-high walls behind which the domestic palm groves lie.
We stop at a big iron gate. With a squeal of hinges, Moussa swings it open for us. We step out of the glaring eyeball-shrivelling sun and into another world.
21
A green and shady paradise: green foliage rustles above us, and all around us is the sound of trickling water, constant and miraculous. The air is cool and fresh. Rays of light penetrate the palm-fronds far above, picking out bright peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins. Beside us are pomegranate trees in flower, palest green leaves still barely in bud, their blossoms red stars against bare dark wood. Way above us, strings of date-flowers cascade from the heads of the palms; their fringed crowns are darkest green against the glimpses of blazing sky. After so many miles of harsh sand and arid stones, it is hard to believe this is not a hallucination: the classic desert mirage, in impossible close-up.
The water trickles on. A lemon tree stands just inside the gate, a little grove of oranges over against the far wall. In the centre are more fruit trees, peaches or apricots; below them rows of onions, carrots, maize, chilli-peppers. A big clump of cactus-leafed barbary figs stands spiky against the wall in the corner. There are other plants I don’t recognize – some kind of dark-green shiny bush, long thorns hidden among the leaves, its heavy clusters of pale pink flowers giving off a strong, warm perfume, of tobacco, roses, chocolate, a perfume that pervades the whole garden.
Henna, of course, says Moussa. Have we never seen henna before?
And those tall plants that look like huge parsley running to seed? They are cumin, a plant I’ve only ever met as a dry powder in a cellophane packet. Green and lively here, though. The bright sun-dappled grass in the centre of the grove is not a lawn, but a tiny field of barley. Some small children away on the far side of it are picking off barley-heads, and beyond them two women are heading their way.
Moussa seems to be waiting for the women to draw close. Are they friends of his? Family? They arrive, and we are all introduced. Oddly, though, Moussa seems to be introducing himself to them first. Do they not know one another already?
The older woman is called Rashida and is wearing, wrapped around her head, the exact pink-and-gold fringed shawl that looked so terrible on me. Taiwan must have flooded the entire Algerian market with the things. She looks gorgeous in it. The younger woman is Aisha, her daughter.
We three foreigners shake hands politely, waiting to be given more information. There is an odd air of expectancy. All of a sudden, Rashida, who has seemed all along to be trying hard not to laugh, claps her hands together as if she can no longer contain herself and with a peal of laughter throws her arms in the air – and then around me. Her daughter, laughing too, seems to be remonstrating with her in her own language, but suddenly gives up and joins in the hug.
Rashida has gone and spoilt the surprise, now! says Aisha. Have I guessed who they are?
I think I have. Moussa has set us up. Are they perhaps the same Rashida and Aisha who once prepared a very luxurious picnic for a certain train journey to Paris? Aunt Rashida and Cousin Aisha?
Yes, they are indeed, says Rashida. So young Moussa really did tell us nothing? What a good boy he is, she says, giving him a pat on the cheek. And there is a better surprise still to come, says Aisha: Kebir is here too, and Mohammed. Look, there they are, heading this way!
Where? With so much vegetation in here, shaded green broken by blinding fingers of light from above, it’s hard to see anything at all. But yes, two figures in white have detached themselves from the background of foliage, way down the other end of the grove, and are hurrying this way, threading through the crops. It really is Kebir! And Mohammed behind him!
But did Rashida even know who I was at all, I ask her, when this surprise was arranged with Moussa?
Of course she did, she says. She had heard all about me! It was a funny thing to see those boys so worried about someone else going off on a train into the unknown, just the exact way she’d been so worried about them!
Moments later, I am getting a public hug from a Muslim man. And then from another. Who would believe it? Uncle Kebir and Mohammed at last! I really have made it all this way – and found them!
I have gone all sniffly. So have Rashida and Aisha.
An hour later, we are still catching up with a couple of decades of news. Only Mohammed, out of all the brothers, is actually here in Timimoun for now, but we will soon be seeing Rashid again, who has succeeded in getting the flock of sheep he dreamed of, and the camel too. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see Karim and Sayid as well.
Karim is due back from his building job in In Salah, though no one’s sure exactly when he’ll arrive, now, says Aisha, with all this political trouble, and the roads inundated with soldiers. Mohammed has ended up joining his uncle Kebir as he was planning, but not at his old trade, because hardly anyone uses mud-bricks any more. New homes – if they get built at all – are just thrown up with cinder-blocks these days. So he and Kebir have gone back to farming the dates. Not just in this palmeraie, no; this one is mostly for the family’s own food. They have a couple of much bigger groves they rent over the far side of town, to grow their yearly cash-crop. Between times they work with Brother Rashid and the sheep – Mohammed bought a lorry with his French savings, which has turned out to be the saving of the project, as luck would have it. It was Karim, in the end, and not Mohammed, who became a builder, Mohammed tells us. Karim even went and studied architecture for a bit, though he never finished his degree. Sayid, meanwhile, still a very serious boy, did his engineering training as planned and is working now – but hundreds of kilometres away, at Hassi Messaoud, in the oil complex, away on the other Grand Erg, the eastern sand sea that borders with Libya. The only sad story is Hassan, who has vanished completely somewhere in France. He was last heard of threatening to marry a French woman and stay there – then complete silence. Did that bad man Le Pen and his racist friends get him? Or did he maybe marry the girl and decide to forget his religion and his roots? Rashida fears the worst. Nothing at all has been heard from Hassan for five whole years.
On a more cheerful note, we have been introduced to Aisha’s and Karim’s three children, who have presented us with pretty bunches of barley-heads, which they were collecting for our leben, they tell us, the buttermilk we’ll be drinking with our lunch. Because of course, yes, we will all be eating here together – they have prepared a surprise picnic lun
ch in our honour.
I have grasped now, not before time, that Rashida is Kebir’s wife, and Aisha his daughter. (Of course he was married, says Kebir. Who did I think the famous Aunt Rashida was?) And I have at last had the chance to thank both women for saving my life with their delicious food, after that terrible time on bread and fishbones. I still remember every mouthful as if it was yesterday!
Rashida remembers cooking it too, she says: preparing the chicken, shaping the patties, her heart full of fear for the boys going so far away, so young, and maybe never to return. And doing her best to pretend not to be afraid for Aisha’s sake, Aisha making the date pastries beside her, all excited – only a little girl, and so fond of Karim already! Though look at her now, married to him, a mother, and a good job in the town hall too! (Naturally I have to tell Aisha that it was obvious, even then, aged sixteen, that Karim was dead keen on her too – he couldn’t stop himself pulling out that little packet of family photos at any excuse, and there was no doubt which cousin his eye lingered over the longest!)
We have, of course, been shown around every corner of this beautifully groomed palmeraie. It is Kebir’s reward to himself and his family, he says, for all those years spent far from home, on the building sites of France. We have also learned that the local Berber word for these palm-grove gardens is the same word they use for ‘paradise’. It’s not hard to see why.
We have seen the raised stone pool into which the fouggara water flows, ready to be used for the irrigation later, when the midday heat dies down; and the row of basketwork beehives against the back wall, where the bees make the best honey, having such a multitude of flowers to choose from – especially the henna flowers with their built-in baraka. We have inspected the vegetables and the fruits, and been shown the the barley crop and the wheat crop. Kebir says this grain-growing is a recent development. Once upon a time people here hardly bothered with more than a patch or two of wheat or barley in Timimoun. You were better to concentrate on your date harvest. The nomad tribes would always bring corn down aplenty, come autumn, grain they received from the lands to the north, in exchange for the wool and cheese from their sheep. Once they arrived at the oases, they would swap half of it for dates: concentrated nuggets of calories, easy to transport. But things are all upside down these days. You can’t depend on that any more, not even when you have family among the nomad tribes, like Kebir.
Kebir has introduced us to his rows of tobacco plants – don’t tell the intégristes! – and to the family’s bewildering array of varieties of date-palm. Some have fruit that is sweet and juicy and to be eaten fresh; others grow dates that will dry out all by themselves up on the tree and last all winter – to be pressed into blocks for sale to the nomads. Now for the broader-trunk palms that produce feed-crops for animals – to sell, and to feed the two sheep they keep back in the yard at the house. Livestock don’t just eat the date-fruits, but even their pits, which the women crush in their mortars so the sheep can get at the nutritious kernels. Dotted here and there are some younger, lower trees of yet another variety of date: a palm that hates the smell of humans and has to be cajoled into growing by trickery. Each tree is hung with bunches of a pungent herb which in French is called armoise – until it has raised its head high enough above its owners and is no longer disturbed by their offensive presence.
Mohammed and Aisha have shown us how you pull out the fibre from the palm-trunks and twist it into rope – thick and sturdy, to be coiled into baskets and beehives; or thin like string, to be woven into mats or sacks, The leaves too are woven into containers of every kind: once a major export industry here, they say, before the invention of the plastic bag! We have seen the stone combs set into the water-channels to measure out the garden’s allotted quota of water. The rate of flow is set up by the kiel el maa, the town elder in charge of the water, and tampered with at your peril. Kebir has told us how the government’s new scientific wheat seeds, supposedly developed for desert oasis conditions like these, do not have the baraka of the ancient local varieties. The bread made from the government corn, Kebir says, tastes all wrong, and, moreover, its stalks are too short, so you don’t get enough straw for the compost. Compost is vital to keep these groves fertile – especially now that the camel caravans have been replaced by lorries, while beasts of burden, and their manure, have become so scarce . . . because, after all, how much manure does a Toyota make?
We have been introduced by Rashida to the crop with the most baraka of all – her own rows of waist-high henna bushes, their leaves gleaming and shiny, their flowers pyramids of starry florets, their warm scent even better from close up, and as sensuous as the Song of Solomon would have you believe. She has shown us the new growth of young leaves, their veins flushed red with the colour of rejoicing – a quality this generous plant is happy, she says, to share with us humans. This afternoon she will be harvesting the flowers, with the help of the children, to be taken to her neighbour Fatima, in whose distilling copper their perfume will be preserved for the rest of the year, transformed into a precious attar of henna, to be used at weddings and feasts – firstly by Rashida’s nearest and dearest, and secondly by whoever can afford it! The process takes twenty whole days on the fire, or twenty-five for the really high-class attar. Henna, in its every possible form, is essential at weddings, where – unless you want to look like people of no consequence! – display and ostentation are a necessary part of the festivities. Henna being a holy plant of immense and soothing powers, it will defuse the Evil-Eye-provoking envy that such celebrations might conjure up in the hearts and eyes of the guests – and maybe of the djnun too! – and turn that harmful and negative emotion into its opposite: a joyful pleasure in the good fortune of others.
The smell of the flowers certainly is heavenly, I say.
Rashida agrees. Of course it is. Attar of Henna was, naturally enough, the favourite perfume of the prophet Mohammed.
What exactly is armoise? I ask Gérard and Guy as we brush past another grey-green bundle of the stuff hanging beneath a palm, on our way to the domesticated corner at the far end of the grove, where rugs and mats lie spread in the shade.
It is, Guy explains, the herb that is used to make absinthe.
A herb which is very good for the digestion, says Kebir, and will be going into the pot of tea we’re about to drink. Come on!
Over in the far corner of the garden, beside another henna hedge, are two small bonfires of palm-prunings. One, right over by the wall, already has a pot simmering over it on a trivet, a couscoussier on top. Rashida has filled the tea-kettle from the fouggara and hung it from the tripod that stands poised over the other.