Morning Sea

by Margaret Mazzantini

  The gazelle always comes noiselessly – a light leap and there she is, with her rimmed eyes, her diamond-shaped pupils, her ears with their light, tufty fur, and her bone horns, little and coiled. They’ve become friends. Farid hasn’t told anyone about her. But he’s always worried someone will find out, terrified someone will catch her. She’s young and overly trusting, taking risks, coming too far into the residential area. She ventures along, tension beneath her coat, quivering muscles primed to bound away, not to stay. Each time they have to get accustomed to trusting. They belong to the same desert but to different races. Farid presses himself back against the wall and waits for the gazelle to breathe out of her dark nostrils so that he can breathe with her. She moves her muzzle. She wants to play. Once, when she sits on her hind legs, it looks like his mother at sunset, the same regal pose.

  It’s a spring morning. Omar is working on the roof. He connects electrical cables and waits for a spark, the signal that the soap opera is safe. These days, the electricity comes and goes in hiccups. The women don’t want to think about the war; they want to cry over love. They want to find out whether the good man will learn that his son is really his and whether the bad man will plummet over the cliff in his black car.

  Farid saw Omar step backwards on the roof, vainly seek for something to grab on to, stumble, stand back up. Other men have climbed up on the village roofs, men in camouflage outfits and yellow hats. They look like construction workers, but they shoot, aiming low at the people in the market, who run and yell. The men are loyalist troops. Many are foreigners, murtaziqa, paid mercenaries from other, sub-Saharan wars. When they shoot, they yell like in the movies. A half-naked soldier crouches to do his business. Maybe he drank too much tamarind juice, or maybe he’s scared. Now he fires like that, trousers down.

  Omar stayed to watch them. He tried to speak, to stop them. They put a rifle down his throat. Fight with us or you’re dead. Farid saw his father slide towards the rain gutter. He was missing a shoe. Farid could see one of the beige socks Jamila mended in the evenings. The men put a pistol into his father’s hands. Omar shot into the sky towards the birds that weren’t there. Then he let the pistol fall. The man without trousers pushed Farid’s father off the roof.

  Farid saw the pick-up trucks with machine guns and bazookas and dirty, wild faces, green flags wrapped round their heads. They even killed the animals to scare the people.

  Fortunately, the gazelle wasn’t there that day. She only came when it was quiet.

  Jamila waited for night to fall, night that is never as dark as one thinks. The full moon lit up the sandhills and the palm groves, the buildings, and the clay houses with their spiky points against the evil eye.

  She hid Farid in the root cellar with the tealeaves and hanging dried meat. All around came lightning bursts of fire, shots, the smell of burning petrol in the sand.

  She dragged her husband’s body into the courtyard and washed it with water from the well.

  Omar’s hair is thick. When it’s wet, it looks like bunches of grapes. Jamila cleans his ears, clutches his hair. It’s a blessing, my love. This way, it will be easier for the angels to take you, to carry you into the sky. There’s an old desert belief that the innocent dead are dragged up to heaven by their hair.

  In the gardens around theirs, other women are praying and crying. Some families were taken hostage, used as human shields.

  When morning comes, Omar’s body is no longer there.

  Jamila whispers through the clay walls. She talks with their ancestors, asks their advice for the journey.

  Farid comes out of the root cellar. He smells that strange smell, the unguent for the dead. He looks at the freshly turned dirt in the garden, the broken swing his father didn’t fix in time.

  He gathers his things, a notebook, his red sweater for winter.

  He looks at the picture of his grandfather sitting on a camel in front of the oasis, his grandfather in his white turban and glasses, sandals on his thin feet. Grandfather writes the Qur’an on wooden panels. He knows the ancient fables and the big battles with the Romans and the Turks. He told Farid about the Red Castle and the pirates. He walks with a limp because he stepped on a mine left behind after the war against Chad. Sometimes he brings Farid to the desert with him. Farid has seen the worm-eaters, the rock drawings of elephants and antelopes and of simple handprints. Once, they got lost. Grandfather Mussa told him that real Bedouins die in the desert, enfolded in a swirling sandstorm. He said that it was the best thing one could hope for, that God caused them to get lost in order to reunite them with their destiny. The desert is like a beautiful woman. It never reveals itself but appears and disappears. Its face changes shape and colour, volcanic black or white as salt. An invisible horizon that dances and moves like its dunes.

  Farid saw Jamila move the rock and take the money, which she wrapped close to her body with a piece of cloth. He heard the sound of her chattering teeth.

  She packed some things in an Adidas bag.

  Farid looked for the gazelle through the wooden slats. He wanted to say goodbye, smell her breath in the mud enclosure in the garden.

  They left at dawn. Jamila kissed the stone slab in front of the door. Farid thought of the smell of certain afternoons when his mother took off her veil and danced barefoot, in her bra. Her little belly, shining with argan oil, moved like earth, like earth vibrating with life, the centre of the house, the stone of salvation.

  Jamila snatches the key from the door and tucks it away. They run between houses and clouds of smoke, sliding along like rats. The war is the next block over. Bullet streaks burn the sky. The key falls in the dirt. His mother doesn’t bend to pick it up.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Farid. We have to hurry.’

  ‘And how will Father get back in?’

  ‘He’ll call a blacksmith.’

  Jamila has not told him that Omar is an angel buried within the desert.

  Farid looks around. What’s happened to his friends, to the bumper cars beneath the canopy, to the ice kiosk, and the sunglasses stand?

  At the city gate, it’s like a fair. They see people with eyes like animals’. Sweat pours from their heads, from their noses. Everyone is yelling and looking for something. Beyond the gate lies the desert. Jamila and Farid queue with the others, people with rolled-up mattresses on their backs and suitcases that won’t fit on the buses.

  Many hope to find safety in the refugee camps across the border. Jamila knows that’s a dangerous journey. The loyalist forces control kilometres of barbed wire and fire on the fugitives.

  They will go towards the sea. The truck is full of packages and black men packed in like slaves. It almost neglects to stop to pick them up. Jamila yells and follows it. The two of them clamber aboard as quickly as they can. Farid scrambles up first, like a monkey, then her.

  Farid sees a jeep with flaming wheels barrel over an old man. It’s the first thing he sees in the desert.

  He can’t keep his eyes open. His mother puts her veil over his face to keep out the sand. The wheels of the truck go up and down the dunes.

  Kilometres of silence, nothing but the growl of the motor. It’s a war scene from any war. Human beings deported like beasts. They don’t stop to piss.

  They all have their eyes closed, heads low and white with sand.

  The horizon is viscous. The ghibli shakes its soot-dirtied surface. They see carcasses of burnt cars, litter blowing in the wind.

  Grandfather Mussa told him that everything that ends up in the desert belongs to the desert, that it means something because it can be used for another purpose, another life.

  Colourful rags appear on the sand like clothes spread to dry on the ground – a shirt, a pair of empty-looking blue jeans. A bit further on, there’s a shoe.

  Then they see heads sunken into the sand and devoured by the heat. Hair. Jawbones. Hands like dried carob beans.

  On the truck, everyone yells, and then everyone is silent. Jamila leans over the side to throw up. Fa
rid has the veil over his eyes. He sees the open-air cemetery through that pale filter.

  They are all black Africans. Dead for months already, from before the war. Their clothes are intact, no bullet holes.

  Everyone on the truck knows they were migrants from Mali, Ghana, Niger, abandoned in the desert after the colonel struck a deal with the Europeans to block the flow of desperate illegal immigrants.

  God in the desert is water and shade.

  An empty bottle lies beside one fleshless hand. The last gesture before death.

  Where is God in this desert?

  Jamila is thirsty. Thirst. She rummages in her bag, dumps water on her son’s head, pulls the veil away from his mouth. She quenches his thirst, pulls him to her. Drink, Farid. Drink.

  They are the only two left in the world.

  The house is an abandoned clay egg behind them.

  Then, bushes, some of them with white buds. A salt bush. The air is milder. The ghibli roars listlessly, a tired feline in retreat.

  It’s the pre-desert zone. Rows of grapevines. Dry and crumbling stone walls. Abandoned cottages like something out of the Tuscan countryside. It’s one of the old rural villages where the Italian colonists lived. A grove of crooked olive trees. Archways opening onto nothing.

  There’s sand in the engine. The truck stops. The driver has a covered Tuareg face, his red ancient eyes yell at them to get off the truck. All of a sudden comes the roar of an explosion so near it interrupts his yell. And yet the sky is calm. A flock of messenger birds passes in a mobile drawing. The Tuareg is talking on his mobile phone, shouting in Tamashek. Farid doesn’t understand.

  The sun climbs higher into the sky. They’ve been waiting for two hours. Farid and Jamila walk through the ghost town looking for relief. There’s a square, an old town hall. They go into the church. The roof has collapsed. The apse is disfigured. The floor is earthen with a few bricks. They rest against a wall, share the bread. Jamila prays. It’s not a mosque, but it doesn’t matter. It’s shade where people have knelt to speak with the voice of silence.

  One of the black men has taken off his shoes. His foot is swollen like a skinned ram. He’s from the savannah. He’s walked for days. He’s afraid of gangrene. He complains. A Somali man helps him. He holds his knife in the flame of his lighter. He cuts the man’s foot, then wraps it in a leaf, like dates before they’re closed into a box for tourists.

  They start walking again.

  The rumble of a motor. A quad bike appears on the horizon.

  A fat man is driving it. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a Pepsi bottle on it and words underneath, Ishrab Pepsi.

  Farid looks at the T-shirt that triggers a thirst from another world.

  The man takes over the package tour group. He will lead them to the sea.

  They all walk behind the quad bike, which looks like some kind of lunar tractor. The black man drags his foot wrapped in green. One person drops a mattress; another drops a cooking pan. Too heavy. They proceed in absolute silence. Before, they talked, but now, no. There’s no sound but the moans of a pregnant woman, though she seems stronger than the men. She conceals her condition beneath black layers of cloth, fearful perhaps that she’ll be left behind.

  A line of cockroaches crosses the dunes.

  They leave the ancient track of wandering Bedouins, a trail of footprints the sand will sweep away. They’ve returned to their destiny – finding their way in nothingness.

  Grandfather Mussa didn’t want to leave. He stayed in the garden, his feet soaking in a basin, and watched the eagles on the lookout for lizards in the desert.

  Jamila is not sad. She sinks, catches her breath before a new wall of sand. Farid is on her shoulders now, wrapped in a womb of cloth, like when he was little.

  Jamila is young, just past twenty. A young widow with her child. The desert is their seashell.

  Farid wears an amulet round his neck.

  The horizon changes. It is punctuated by sun-baked greenery, a wall of carob trees. Oleanders in bloom line their gradual descent.

  Farid has never smelled this smell before, wild and deep.

  Is this how the sea smells, the bright expanses and blue depths?

  Now they all run, heads low between thorny prickly pears. Farid jumps off Jamila’s shoulders, leaves his little camel. He runs and rolls between the sand and the tamarisks. It’s the first time he’s left the desert.

  A hand gathering money on the beach, another man in a turban but wearing city clothes, his pale jacket damp with sweat at the neck and on his shoulders. The fat man yells. The bottle of Pepsi jiggles on his soft belly. They have to hurry. They’re out in the open. Though of course the situation is under control. The colonel’s henchmen have given orders to allow the boats to leave. Now the colonel wants desperate people to fill the Mediterranean and strike fear into European hearts. This is his best weapon, the rotten flesh of the poor. It’s dynamite. It blows up the refugee centres and the hypocrisy of governments.

  Now on the beach, they’re all protesting.

  They look in dismay at the rusty hulk on the water. It looks like an overturned bus, not a motorboat.

  They yell and shake their heads.

  The boat is too expensive, too old. The boat is a wreck.

  The man in city clothes says, What did you expect, a cruise ship? He shouts that the deal is off. He’ll find another bunch of boatpeople to cram onto this boat, people who aren’t as stupid as they are. He shakes his arm, says they have to leave, clear out, go back into the bushes, the desert. He spits on the ground and says he hasn’t got time to waste on rats.

  He throws the money onto the sand. A young man picks it up, but the city man wants nothing more to do with it. He climbs onto the jeep. The young man follows him, begs through the window, Please, for Allah. There are many women in the group, including his pregnant wife. He asks the city man if he has children. The city man opens the door of the jeep straight into him. He steps forward and puts the money in his wallet. This time no one breathes a word. The human trafficker walks across the sand in his shiny shoes. He opens the trunk of the jeep and flings plastic-wrapped packs of bottled water onto the sand. I thought you might be thirsty. Everyone thanks him. Jamila grabs a boiling-hot bottle of water and slips it into her bag.

  Farid looks at the sea for the first time in his life. He touches it with his feet, gathers it up in his hands. He drinks it and spits it out.

  He thinks it’s big, but not big like the desert. It ends where the sky begins, just beyond that horizontal blue line.

  He had thought you could walk on it like pirate ships. Instead, it’s wet and sucks you under. The waves move back and forth like the clothes on his mother’s clothesline; if he runs away, they come after him.

  The pregnant woman lifts her dress to step into the water but ends up wet to the neck. She opens a thin mouthful of too-big teeth. She looks like a camel that’s scared of a fire.

  Everyone climbs, pushes, scrambles aboard.

  The boat sinks lower and lower.

  Two boys from Malawi, quicker on the uptake than the others, walk with bare feet like sailors. They check out the inside of the boat, open the tanks held tight with bungee cords in the stern, stick in their noses to make sure the tanks really hold diesel fuel. The fat man yells that they are damned sons of bitches, ifriqiyyun, slaves who’ve escaped from the oasis ghettos. He programmes their route on the GPS and leaps off the boat, getting wet up to his belt. His hand thumps the side of the boat. Good luck, sons of bitches.

  Farid looks at the sea, clear and smooth like a pale blue earthenware tile. He looks for fish, their backs. The first bits of their new life. Jamila kisses him and fiddles with his hair. How long will the trip last?

  Not long. Just enough time for a lullaby.

  Jamila starts singing with her nightingale voice, whistling and imitating the sound of the zukra. Her voice lowers to the sea. Then she falls asleep. Her slender head like a gazelle’s, like a big sister’s. Farid finds a space ami
d all the bodies and looks back. The coast isn’t there any more, nothing but the sea, rising and falling. He ­remembers his house, the swing, the majolica tiles round the well with their rust- and emerald-coloured drawings. He thinks of the gazelle. She came and went as she wished. Always at sunset. She had started to eat from his hand. He’d pluck dates and pistachios and serve them to the animal, his open palm a plate. He thinks of the sound and then of the smell of the gazelle’s mouth. There were spots on the inside, on her tongue. She smelled of wadi, of a recent flow of water through the dust. The best muzzle on earth, apart from his mother’s. That last day, he’d hugged her. He hadn’t even known he wouldn’t see her again, her burnt beige coat that lit up at sunset. Her fur smelled like a rug, the same smell Farid smelled in the desert when he pitched the tent with Grandfather Mussa and they slept on the prayer mat.

  He doesn’t mind leaving the past. He’s a child. He’s too young to have any real sense of time. What he knows and what awaits him are all in the same hand.

  First, he’s excited; then he’s scared; then he’s tired; then nothing more. He threw up. Now there’s nothing left. The sun follows them like a ravenous tongue, dripping on their heads, suffocating heat, sweat.

  The sea is monotonous. There’s never anything new. Looking at it is a mistake; it’s like looking at a headless animal with an infinity of shaking humps, blue flesh spraying foam from its submerged mouth. Farid looks for that head that never surfaces, just comes close and then disappears.

  He wonders about the face of the sea. What does it look like?

  One of the Somali men fired at the waves a while ago to test a flare. It didn’t work. The flares are rotten, like the boat. The young man drank too much with his friends. They burnt their stomachs and their brains. Now they’re punching each other.

  Everyone is pale, grey as a rag. All of them have thrown up. The vomit flows along the worn wood floor with the heaving of the sea.