by Tom Gamble
‘I can give you this gift, but we cannot touch for it is forbidden. For love—that most beautiful gift—we must wait. Because if you love me, you can wait.’
She sat down opposite him and drew close so that they both sat, their legs entwined. Summerfield took her face in his hands and with his eyes travelled the clear curves of her shoulders to the full hang of her youthful breasts. He was won by her sweetness and her honesty and he loved her.
‘Promise you will accept the rule,’ she whispered.
Summerfield smiled. ‘Usually rules are the only things I have an insatiable urge to break.’ Raja laughed softly. ‘Though this time, my dear Raja,’ soothed Summerfield, ‘so young and so virtuous as you are, I accept.’ He leant forwards, breathed in her scent of cumin, musk and cinnamon and her lips came to him, subservient and hungry and they kissed for a long time and with much tenderness.
That night, Summerfield told Jeanne of his plans. For the first time since the ambush, he saw her come alive, the hope rushing back to her and a look of gratitude came to her face.
‘Thank you, Harry. I’d die if I were to stay here. Once again you’ve saved me and I am grateful.’
‘It is the right thing to do,’ was all that Summerfield replied, his mind preoccupied with the nagging thought of losing Raja.
It all went very quickly. The Kaïd’s man, Moulay, came to Summerfield’s house and briefed them on what they had to expect. Certain rules were laid down and agreed to: that they should not question his decisions; that they should remain as calm and as quiet as possible at all times; that they were to strictly follow his rules on the drinking of water; that in extreme heat they should cover their skin entirely with clothing and bathe once daily using the sand and that if they got separated they were not to attempt to look for him—he would find them. Summerfield was given twenty rounds of ammunition for the Lee Enfield and four old gold coins that they should use for their various needs including buying their way out of danger if required. Miraculously, several slabs of salted meat were produced from the Kasbah storerooms and hidden away in their saddlebags wrapped in cloth. They carried two large goatskin gourds for water and Ahmed Youadi was reassuring: the desert was rich with water if you just knew where to find it.
The snow disappeared and the first buds of February peeped through the soil and on the branches. On the day of leaving, a great crowd gathered to see them off. This was partly the Kaïd’s idea, for he wanted as many people to see the event as possible—it gave all the more chance of the news reaching the French and persuading them not to attack the valley under the pretext of Jeanne’s presence. Some people turned up to see the white woman leave and with her, they hoped, the bad spell that lay over the valley. But the majority of people turned up to say goodbye to Summerfield, the outsider, the Englishman, who had learnt their ways and fought by their side. The man who had brought strange games and edifices, not to mention ideas, to the valley and who had provided so much content for fireside gossip over the last two years that it would serve for decades to come.
The old Mullah with his helpers was there, as was the Kaïd and his personal bodyguard of warriors. Tears were shed and shouts of encouragement shouted over the clamour. For two hours that morning, the hunger that haunted five hundred bellies was forgotten as the two mules and three people set off south.
Summerfield was stricken with a feeling of fear that gave rise to nausea. He had looked everywhere, calling in at her parents’ house, neighbours, the river and even climbing up to the refuge. Raja was nowhere to be seen.
The wild thought went through his head that perhaps she had done something reckless, decided to kill herself or follow them or simply run away from the pain of it all. Yesterday, one last time sitting next to each other, semi-naked in the warm refuge, their caresses becoming increasingly tender and poignant. They had talked about the future and their hopes and she had finally let the tears run from her. Coming back down from the mountain slope and having to part ways had been agony. And now, added to that was the awful thought that she might be dead.
The Kaïd was impatient. There were many other things to do in preparation for the desperate and telling spring that was fast arriving. He sent men looking out for her and wanted things to begin on time. His heart pounding, Summerfield gave the Kaïd an imploring glance and received an irritated nod of assent: ten more minutes. Hurriedly, Summerfield left Jeanne and her look of surprise to scour the village one last time for Raja.
It was by the great rock that he found her. The same rock beneath which she had first come across him, a captive shivering with sickness and empty of hope, all those many months ago. He recalled how she had introduced herself with such innocence and yet with such cheekiness: Raja—Hope. The girl. The grin. The sign.
She was sitting on her haunches, huddled against the cold and Summerfield thought he could hear her muttering. His noisy approach startled her and she let out a shriek of surprise. For a few seconds they could not move. In her eyes was the deepest sadness he had ever seen and for a rare instant he felt the vulnerability she so brashly hid, the femininity behind the daily mask of humour and hardness. Then, in a split second, she rose and he was moving towards her, taking her into his arms. A cry of pain and of loss came from her, and Summerfield felt his own eyes smarting with tears. Their mouths sought each other, desperate and wild and their bodies pushed against each other almost fighting. He squeezed her breasts, took her buttocks in his hands and pulled her against him in a parody of love and desire. They kissed long and hard. And then they grew silent, as though their love-acting had spent their bodies like the real, the godly. They held onto each other, stumbling then stabilizing, tottering then firm. He placed his hand softly in the folds of her dress between her legs and felt the heat of her sex. He heard her sigh. With his other hand he stroked her face, traced the contours of her forehead, eyebrows, nose, lips and chin which she mirrored.
‘Do you remember, Harry? That time I found you?’
Summerfield smiled sadly and whispered a yes. ‘You were an answer to an unspoken prayer,’ he said, softly and kissed her lips.
‘I was a girl. I knew nothing about life. I had not the slightest notion of what men meant or did or what love was. But my secret is—do you want to know my secret, Harry?’
‘Tell me,’ said Summerfield, rubbing gently against her.
‘My secret is that I knew, from that very moment I saw you there, beaten and ill and strange in your foreignness, that I loved you. I kept it a secret, Harry. Or else I did not know what the voice in my head was saying. But I fell in love with you the instant you looked up at me.’
Summerfield withdrew slowly from their embrace and looked deeply into her eyes and felt he had touched something beautiful in her. He smiled. ‘You reassure me. And make me feel strong. Wait for me, Raja and one day I will return.’
‘I will wait, my dear Englishman. May God protect you…’
55
Moulay was a small, hard, sinewy man who considered speaking an unnecessary waste of breath. On the index finger of his right hand was the largest ring Summerfield had ever seen—a smooth, round chunk of ivory stained yellow. The rare times he did speak, it was for two reasons: giving orders and proffering opinion in the form of either fathomless wisdom or the shallowest of nonsense—Summerfield could never guess which. Moulay swore that the more people spoke, the more breath they used up and the shorter their life became. And that was it. The longest flow of words from his mouth in nearly three days.
‘So if you spoke only twenty words in your lifetime, you’d live until five hundred and three, is that it?’ Summerfield had teased, having become increasingly irritated by Moulay’s taciturn monosyllables.
‘What the camel imagines, the camel drivers guess,’ replied Moulay, mysteriously. Summerfield rolled his eyes heavenwards and turning his head, vainly sought Jeanne’s support. But she was looking away, back towards where the valley might lay and Summerfield exhaled gloomily. What might take three months of
travelling had got off to an agonisingly tedious start. He could only guess at his companions’ thoughts, rendered more difficult by the fact that Moulay seemed to live with his face permanently covered by his cheiche so that only his eyes showed—Summerfield hadn’t even seen him unwind it for eating and cringed at the thought of what crusty debris might lay behind the headscarf. And Jeanne’s continuing and obstinate self-imposed isolation. He’d hoped her spirits might lift upon leaving the valley but despite the odd flicker of emotion, she remained generally morose and unwilling, lost in her thoughts of Jim and her trials. All in all, Summerfield began to think that he had greatly sacrificed something for her in leaving the valley and that she was unquestionably the most ungrateful person he’d ever met.
So they travelled, both during the first hours of light or the dusky hours of evening so as not to be seen, picking their way down ravines and mountain flanks and through the great labyrinth of the gorges of Tedrha which made them seem so puny and unimportant. Teasing Moulay was the solution Summerfield now favoured in an attempt to make the man communicate. But Moulay was a veteran of the desert caravans and silence seemed to be his second nature. He was sand, a vast stretch of silent sand and his eyes would dart expressionless away from Summerfield’s when under attack and lose themselves in a distance Summerfield could not perceive.
The day after leaving the valley, they had heard a bi-plane buzzing lazily in the vicinity and, watching from the cover of an overhanging rock, had seen it dip its nose into the myriad of valleys, disappear in silence and then resurface with a low-pitched drone as it struggled for altitude in the thin mountain air. They had not been seen and Moulay ordered that they should cut down even further on the time they spent journeying during the daylight hours and instead wake an hour earlier at three in the morning. Summerfield hoped that the Kaïd had been good to his word and sent news to the Vichy French forces of his intention to face them in the open. He couldn’t bare the thought of Raja’s family being shelled and his mind was constantly plagued by the fearful image of the young woman running from the explosions only to have her back hit by shrapnel. He could almost hear her screams at these moments. He wished he could have real companions with whom he could speak and distract his mind.
Moulay may have been a dire travelling companion, but Summerfield recognised the man’s skills in orienteering. Working without a compass (Summerfield had acquired one some days before in exchange for a slice of salted meat and occasionally checked their guide’s calculations), Moulay led them by the stars or the shadows the sun produced from the rocks and trees. Sometimes he knew the path and made an abrupt and somewhat indecent gesture with his riding stick for the direction to take. Other times, Summerfield watched with growing fascination as Moulay’s otherwise expressionless eyes moved and oscillated with calculations and intuition, darting across the terrain and summing up the right track to take. He almost seemed to see beyond what lay before them, retro-plotting their course according to a combination of criteria: time, direction, danger, ease, possible escape and weather. And Moulay never failed, even if, at times, Summerfield had to bite his lip to keep himself from questioning the chosen path. What seemed an impassable sea of boulders revealed a sandy-floored track; what seemed to be a stomach-churning precipice turned out to be a gentle series of steps down the flank of a mountain. On several occasions, just before dawn would break, the wily guide led them to secret places that he swore only he and God and the animals knew about. They were often small paradises lodged in the rocks or at the bottom of ravines, bubbling with clear water and emerald coloured reeds. In one such place, Moulay plucked fish from the pools and in another, a tree that Summerfield had never seen, gave perennial fruit—small, yellow buttons that tasted like raspberries to the tongue. Gradually, Summerfield’s mood changed, his respect for Moulay’s strengths overcoming his dislike of Moulay’s weaknesses. However, his teasing didn’t stop—it was a way out of the gloom, a distance he made between the hopes for his life and the harsh reality of Jeanne’s burden of guilt and pain.
The landscape changed. Treeless and craggy ravines gave way to pine groves and smoothened rock. In some places, the maroon-coloured stone looked like ball upon ball of polished wool flowing downwards into valley streams and Summerfield imagined there must have been much volcanic activity in the area many thousands of years before. Then came fertile earth, rich and dark red and carpeted with the greenest grass he’d ever seen. One morning and one night more and then the earth became pink and fine like sand. Wild olive trees scattered the gentling slopes and the spaces between summits became wide and windy. After the fifth or sixth day of travel, Summerfield lost count and took his mark instead on the terrain and the direction they were headed. Then, one day, after setting out at their customary 3 a.m. and circumnavigating a plateau of jagged black rock, they mounted a gentle hill to see before them, in the first indigo of the day, the vast expanse of the Saharan threshold—a plain criss-crossed by the shadows of tracks and rivers, scudding clouds of oases, dark green against light beige, and the scattered rectilinear patchwork of isolated villages. Summerfield’s breath left him and disappeared upwards into the greatness of the space and the vast horizon. Again, before the omnipotence of nature, the certainty that God existed came to his lips and he offered up a prayer that made Jeanne look curiously at him and Moulay frown in incomprehension.
‘English,’ commented Summerfield, giving Moulay a cheeky wink. ‘Just my humble thanks to the Almighty for the beauty of this land.’
‘May God be praised for His miracles,’ chimed in Moulay and sank to his knees in Morning Prayer, bowing to the east across the desert plains.
The next day, barely ten miles out on the plain, Moulay led them to a small outcrop of rock that contained many caves—perhaps once troglodyte dwellings, imagined Summerfield—and left them there with food and water. Taking the two mules, Moulay rode silently away, gesticulating in that obscene way with his stick towards the south.
‘Ksar-Tazzr,’ he said, turning back to them. ‘A village. No more mules,’ he grunted and Summerfield saw in his eyes that he was grinning.
‘But when are you coming back?’ asked Summerfield, in mountain dialect.
Moulay shrugged his shoulders. ‘When God permits,’ he answered and trotted off across the dusty earth with the mules.
It was the first time Summerfield had been alone with Jeanne since they had set out from the valley. It felt strange. She lay sleeping in the shadow of the cave and Summerfield watched her with something approaching curiosity. Her face had tanned during the days of travel despite their avoidance of the hottest hours and once more he was conscious of the features that set her apart from a purely European physiognomy. He remembered how she had suffered from this difference and he remembered, during those furtive meetings in the orange grove, how he had reassured her of her beauty. It was the shine of elegance that comes of mixed blood—the finishing touch of something southern, something eastern in her and it still made him perplexed, still made him spellbound. Had she made love to Jim? he wondered and saw himself, seemingly years ago, the first to unfold the petals of this rare flower. He shook his head involuntarily, a gesture of perplexity: they had been so madly in love. And now the love he felt for Raja was growing that way too. Did it mean that it was all so ephemeral? That there were other loves waiting for him in life? That what he had imagined as the One to whom all the paths in life were meant to lead him were in fact just a series of illusions, mirages that served as destinations on the sprawling clock of days, weeks and years? His mind wandered emptily. Minutes passed and then he shook himself back into consciousness. No, Raja was different: it wasn’t just a physical beauty, the foreignness, the adventure that her body represented—it was also the sweet, warm togetherness that he felt; a certain compatibility of spirit, a certain complémentarité—the French word came quicker than the English—of characters. A woman (girl, he had nearly said) like Raja was fun, a challenge and made everyday seem different and boisterous.
Their sparring was like making love and underlay the passion of the real act. In this aspect, Jeanne had been different. Coming back to the flower, it seemed the best image for her. He had picked a beautiful poppy, wild but fragile once uprooted and his love for her had been worship, a look from afar, a desire like a bee has for pollen.
Moulay came back five hours later on foot. Summerfield, ready with his Lee Enfield from under the rocky overhang, had been tempted to shoot. Jeanne, for once alert, had whispered to him that she recognised the solitary figure as Moulay and Summerfield had slowly, carefully replaced the safety catch.
‘Where are the camels?’ said Summerfield, frowning at Moulay as the wiry little man sat down and drank.
‘Camels?’ Moulay’s eyes carried a hint of laughter. ‘Why camels? Why not horses?’
Summerfield shrugged irritably. ‘So where are the horses, then?’
Moulay shook his head just once, sharply. ‘Not horses. A lorry.’
‘A lorry,’ echoed Summerfield.
An erratic wave of his riding stick towards the south. ‘Coming.’
For the first four days, they cut across the flatness of the pre-Sahara in the back of a battered Berliet stacked high with slabs of salt. A small cavity, just big enough for Summerfield to stretch his legs in a sitting position, had been made among the cargo at the back. Anyone opening the tarpaulin would see the roughly hewn slabs and nothing else.