Amazir

by Tom Gamble

Raja seemed to be struggling for words. Summerfield frowned. He had the canniest feeling she would burst into tears—which she promptly did. ‘Oh, terrible life, terrible life—I hate it!’ she wheezed, caught between letting her tears flow and hiding her face. The tears finished by getting the better of her and the young woman wailed alarmingly.

  Summerfield stood up, feeling helpless and Raja tottered towards him. Her final step sent her into his arms. ‘Oh dear,’ said Summerfield, confused. Women—the strangest, most complicated creatures. ‘Poor Raja, poor girl,’ he soothed. ‘Whatever’s the matter? Tell me,’ he said, holding her tightly. He felt the weight of her head on his shoulder and the moisture of her face seeping through his shirt to his skin. That smell of hers—the faint musk of her sweat, cumin, cinnamon and a flowery whiff of rose that came from the herbal perfume the women in the valley used—reached his nostrils and he inhaled. ‘Tell me, Raja,’ he urged softly, but she remained silent, her tears turning to a sniff and they stood there, the man and the girl, for several long and silent seconds. The awareness of her body slowly and inevitably dawned on him—the press of her firm and plump little breasts on his stomach, the hard, bony curve of her hips against his legs—and for an instant his body involuntarily awakened. His hand moved to her ribs and edged to the soft, pulpy base of her left breast. He felt a faint stir in his groin and a twinge of heat spasm through his penis. ‘Oh!’ Summerfield breathed heavily and pulled himself away. ‘Raja’—a little cough, his voice irritated now—‘For God’s sake, tell me what the matter is? I can’t guess!’

  ‘Badr!’ she finally hissed in a whisper.

  ‘Badr? Is he ill?’

  ‘It is like an illness. I’m so in love. We are so in love—but I cannot have him. I want to be his wife and the pain in me is so great. Summerfield—’

  ‘Another year, I believe,’ said Summerfield, realising that it was the last thing she wanted to hear.

  ‘A year!’ she wailed. ‘Twelve months more of this agonising longing. And what if we die between times? The French will come after the snows have gone. Their general knows where we are. Oh, hateful! Why does he do this to me?’

  ‘Who?’ said Summerfield, suddenly lost. ‘The general?’

  ‘Badr, that’s who!’ seethed Raja. ‘Does he deliberately play games? Does he use his lofty values to make a crazed and beaten woman of me? He is like a rock to me—cold as a stone that cannot be broken. Oh, these men! Oh, you are so cunning, so wicked! May God discover the truth and burn you all!’

  Summerfield stood back. After all, it was certainly within Raja’s inflammable capability to send a left hook flying towards him. ‘And me?’ he found himself retorting. ‘What about me? The loneliness of my nights!’

  Raja stopped and looked at him, her face creased into a mixture of incomprehension and curiosity. Everything with Raja was exaggeration. ‘What loneliness? You mean—?’

  ‘Me too, Raja—I suffer. I have the memories of a great love that night after night become drier and drier. They leave me with an emptiness like a starving belly. Raja—I haven’t kissed a woman in—’ he felt himself move towards her and held himself back. She seemed to realise this and her eyes opened wide in surprise.

  ‘So this explains your irritable, mean nature, oh Summerfield!’

  ‘Mean? Me?’ Raja could indeed have punched him.

  ‘The way you scowl at me and the other women as you pass. Receiving a hello is like extracting gold from donkey’s dung!’

  ‘Raja!’ squeaked Summerfield.

  A grin appeared on her face, slow and spreading and making Summerfield feel excruciatingly embarrassed.

  ‘So that’s it!’ she said, triumphantly, her grin baring all her teeth and even the hole in the side of the lower left row. ‘Summerfield—you are doing things with your hands! And it is so unsatisfying, so empty!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I’m English!’ said Summerfield, aware that his defence sounded just as hollow as his vacuous masturbation.

  ‘Harry Summerfield—you are sad! You need a wife, maybe,’ said Raja, completely cured of her own chagrin now and her voice carrying the certainty of one of the village gossips. ‘Or maybe, there are the goats that would help you out?’

  ‘Raja!’ Summerfield moved forwards and she squealed, backing out of his hut. Laughing, she gave a little skip and then turned one last time. ‘Thank you, Harry. Talking to you has made me feel much better now!’

  ‘And we could talk more, Raja—you have exactly the same problem as me! Hands indeed!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Her face blackened once again. ‘I’m a child of God!’

  ‘Exactly,’ sent Summerfield. ‘With all our oddities and imperfections! Ha! And take that!’

  Raja did not reply. Instead, she gave a terse, semi-obscene gesture with her tongue and hurried off towards the village.

  Days in the valley became dreaded days of waiting. At first, after the months of labour and care and watering, the people of the valley waited with excited expectation for a return on their effort. But as the days passed and nature was seen to be reluctant, a sense of irritation entered their expectations. The crops and orchards replied with a recalcitrant silence—a stony disobedience in the face of the villagers’ hopes and a refusal to answer their prayers. A noticeable trace of worry entered their faces as they gazed out over the expanse of the valley. The fruit was examined, the soil tested. People gathered by the village wells and took to tasting the water to discuss whether that had anything to do with it. A rumour flickered and smoked that it was God’s answer to the works that the Englishman, Summerfield, had undertaken and it was quickly smothered by the old Mullah and his cane of wrath.

  Every day brought with it its denial—why us? Why does the valley merit this punishment? And its anxiety—what will we eat during the blizzards? Will the others have more than I? The Kaïd called for a meeting with the leading figures of the valley to discuss the problem and the measures that could be taken, but the nagging truth that was on everyone’s lips remained unspoken: in the end run, they were powerless before nature. They could invent techniques and explore the wisdom of their elders and gather hay for readiness to feed the animals they would have to slaughter in the winter, but they seemed so small in comparison with the greatness and finality of nature’s swing.

  Summerfield, relegated to being an onlooker—he had none of the agricultural skills required to deal with the problem—saw the people of the valley sink slowly and inexorably into the great fatalism that characterised their culture and which constituted one of the most noticeable differences with his own. It will rain—if God wills it. Or we will starve, if it is to be so, were expressions he began to hear a hundred times a day.

  A western culture, he concluded, cogitating on his observations while walking through the unyielding terraced crops, would act differently. In Europe and in America, they had long since tried to wrestle destiny from God and from Nature, His daughter. For hundreds of years man had been making experiments and building inventions of wood and iron and now plastic and rubber and synthetics—Man’s alchemy to reverse control. Faced with a problem, the European mind and body flung themselves desperately at the solution, unsure of where they would end up, but certain that it would at least be somewhere. And moreover, somewhere that might give them even a little more edge on the impalpable ingredients of life they could not seize and that could never be completely mastered. For how to explain miracles? How to explain the complete and unexpected twist of fate that sent Man and Nature into one and then sent them exploding outwards from each other in disruption: freak weather, strange events, signs and omens and happiness when everything pointed so strongly towards failure and pain. Summerfield could not discern what approach was best or even if there was one which was stronger than the other. It was different and that was all. And maybe, in the end run, he concluded, the best was a meeting of both worlds—a willingness and trust that would leave God and Nature to open up the path to good outcome; while at the same tim
e searching and exploring to take up the challenge of responsibility over one’s own destiny. At some point along the way, the two would undoubtedly meet and great things would perhaps result.

  At last, two weeks into October, the order was given to begin to harvest what was possible before it rotted on its branches and in the fields. It was an occasion for everybody, from the youngest child to the oldest grandmother to put their backs into the earth and reap the resources they had planted.

  But the atmosphere was morose. Singing, half-hearted. People toiled and then went to bed instead of talking by an open fire. Songs were silenced. Laughter was as spare as the crops that lacked. The autumn would be hard and the winter harder still.

  As the last carts and baskets were unloaded into the fortified granaries that topped every village along the valley, Badr was asked by the Kaïd, Ahmed Youadi, to set up a series of patrols to observe the outlying mountains. Men in groups of ten were regularly chosen to climb the tracks and paths for any sign of the French and also to forage for any food that might be more abundant in the neighbouring valleys. Summerfield’s time duly came and he shouldered his Lee Enfield and trudged off with the rest of the men and a three-day absence from his home.

  They did not encounter the French, only a reconnaissance plane that they once watched from the safety of the maquis humming lazily through the valleys. They would probably not see it again before the spring for October and early November brought much fog and heavy downpour that made flying too hazardous and too unproductive.

  As Summerfield patrolled with his small band of adopted brothers, he mulled over the fact that he was single. Approaching thirty-one now, he had only really known two women in his life, not counting the occasional visit to the tarts in Stoke during his first writing assignment as a young man. It was all pretty depressing. Two love affairs and not much fun in them either, all told. Elizabeth, the upper middle-class femme fatale, whose ravenous sexual appetite was a necessary cure for her fits of depression; Jeanne, the young beauty, innocence stepping out onto the path of passion, the necessary discovery of the truth about herself and her deepest desires. Poor Jeanne, he heard himself saying as he followed the mesmerising rhythm of his companions’ footsteps. How he had lifted her hopes and broken her innocence. He shook his head, as though shaking free his sense of guilt: no, it had been pure love, the best and on the contrary it had been sublime. He had had nothing to offer her—nothing material in any case—and she had taken his love and desire with equal passion.

  He refrained from dwelling too long on her—it would only increase his emptiness—and instead thought about what Raja, the little imp, had said. It seemed he had a reputation for grumpiness. Strange, he had never thought that the womenfolk actually wanted him to look at them. In fact, he’d made a determined effort, in order not to cause anyone any offence, not to. They were, after all, supposed to do nothing before they were married. Or perhaps the Berber tribes were different. Perhaps, like many other peoples, they accepted religion as a useful set of laws and spiritual guidelines, but tolerated a little swaying from the path as part of the natural process of things.

  The women, he mused, finding conversation with himself becoming very interesting indeed, were in reality very coquettish. Most days, they took pains to adorn their skin with intricate henna tattoos. Wearing red, orange or royal blue was an everyday occurrence too, mostly in scarves and belts worn over their black working robes—nothing like the glum strictness of the city women. The kohl they applied on the lids of their eyes, although serving to ward off the sun, also gave them a sensual look, highlighting the clearness of their green and hazel eyes. From a wary, almost aggressive initial exchange of regards, Summerfield had glanced up at times to see the most impish of sensual shines in their eyes—Raja herself being the epitome of feminine sensuality in the valley. Beneath their clothes, he had sensed firm, ripe bodies made supple and strong through their work in the fields and soft and smooth from the unguents and oils they took care to cover their skin with at night. And it was their smell that at times made his head turn and that, strangely enough, fuelled much of his solitary pleasure at night.

  But what did the menfolk do? Summerfield found himself asking. And how did they view all this? Like most things, he concluded, what you are immersed in on a daily basis throughout the years becomes unnoticed or accepted as usual behaviour. Men and women courted and married like anywhere else. Like a game of fly-fishing, they sent out alternate lines that skipped and brushed the water’s surface in varying degrees of colour and light until, at one particular moment, the allure of the magical and dancing fly triggered the ancient instinct to thrust up to the surface and gob the hook. Fish, considered Summerfield—from the strong-bodied trout to the muscled, deadly pike—actually knew they were being duped, but the attraction of being caught and consumed was all-hypnotic and senseless to resist. As for the young and single, true—there had been cases of what Raja had referred to as pleasure with the goats and probably a bit of harmless groping among the rocks with either sex. Indeed, it was one of the old Mullah’s functions to oversee that these particular activities were discouraged and suppressed. But mostly, the young warriors-cum-farmers seemed content to stay within their own gender and seemed to find what pleasure they required in talking and smoking and sharpening their shooting skills. Music, too, proved a harmonious substitute for any lack of sexual activity and often poetry handed down from ancient times stretched many a night into the light of dawn.

  Coming to rest on a rocky outcrop, Summerfield sat with the rest of the patrol as they promptly lit up their pipes made from hollowed out bones. He passed a wad of black tobacco to a companion who lacked and nodded silently. Yes, thought Summerfield, gazing out over the endless sea of misty crests before him, Raja was right. I’m quite a sad case, all told. And maybe her advice was good: I do indeed need a woman.

  The night came suddenly and unexpectedly and brought with it a rolling series of clouds that dropped low across the crests to hug the slopes. Their leader, a small, wiry man whom the others called by the French-sounding nickname Hatif—the hasty one—ordered a fire to be lit among the rocks. As the cold turned from sharp dry to piercing damp, he showed Summerfield how to lean against the heated stone and warm his clothes. It was very welcome, for Summerfield found himself yearning for the heat of his hut and covers and cursing the very fact that they were out there in the freezing wild.

  He could not sleep. Perhaps an hour passed before the warmth inside his coat faded and he rose to warm himself again only to find that the fire had died out. He returned to his spot, lying down once more and trying in vain to plug the holes in his sleeping arrangement from the icy damp. Restless, he wondered if the others were having the same problem, though a quick peek from beneath his layers of cloth told him otherwise. Hard buggers, he told himself, glancing at the scattered bundles that were bodies and feeling a tinge of envy at the snores that were coming from several of them. It’d take him years to get used to these conditions.

  His discomfort turned inexorably towards irritation and his irritation towards anger. It was impossible—he just couldn’t sleep. Finally, shivering now, he rose and began to get his limbs moving to generate heat. To the left, some five yards away, he came across one of the sentinels who glanced nonchalantly up from his position and nodded.

  ‘I have to piss,’ muttered Summerfield as he stepped past. ‘Freezing!’

  ‘Where is your weapon?’ murmured the figure, a note of reproach in his voice.

  ‘Oh—back there,’ replied Summerfield, softly. ‘Safe. Can’t pee with a rifle in my hands.’

  ‘Better that than die pissing,’ mentioned the shape, giving a visible shrug.

  ‘Bollocks,’ replied Summerfield, sourly in English. ‘And don’t fall asleep,’ he added before slipping past the sentry into the mist.

  After ten or so yards, Summerfield thought he had gone far enough. He was a little warmer now, thank God, and standing still was at last bearable. He stopped thi
nking, listening to the eerie silence—in fact noise—of the mist. If he concentrated hard enough, he could hear it—a faint, hypnotising patter like something crackling softly on a window pane. Little by little, the grey darkness drew shapes in the rocks and, feeling a tinge of nervousness creep up on him, his eyes strained to discern the path back. He took two, three careful steps and then juddered to a halt barely three feet from a yawning precipice. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he exhaled, almost immediately subject to the reeling, uncontrollable signs of vertigo. Feeling his arms begin to flail in panic, he promptly sat down, a painful jab of rock into his coccyx, and edged backwards, safely away from the abyss. Now he did feel like peeing, he muttered, and turning onto his hands and feet to a crouching position, edged back towards the camp. Five more yards, obviously in the wrong direction, and a hand clamped on his shoulder.

  ‘Very funny,’ he murmured, expecting the sentry to be grinning into his face. Turning, something suddenly smothered his mouth—a cloth—and he felt himself being dragged back. His eyes went wild, straining to get a glimpse of his unseen attacker and a searing pain shot up his back and face. If he struggled, his neck would be snapped.

  For a dozen yards, unable to call for help, he was half pushed, half dragged across the slope, sure that at any moment he would be shoved over the edge into the void. And then, roughly forced to the ground so that his face lay pressed into the cold, wet grit of the rocky mountain slope, a series of whispers.

  ‘Kill him.’

  ‘No—make him talk.’

  ‘Kill him, I say.’

  ‘I know this man.’

  I know this man—the words came as a miracle to Summerfield’s ears. It spelt a thin slither of hope, a chance of survival.

  ‘I recognise his eyes. This is no Arab, no Berber.’

  ‘So we can kill him. The French do not have to know.’