I never met Yazid’s wife, but knew his two young children, a boy and a girl, who reminded me of my own. They climbed on him joyfully. He spoiled them, and saw in them a reflection of himself. He said, “I would never want them to become judges. There is no peace for a judge. You see how hard it is for me.”
The tension was inside him. We brewed tea alone in the desert, and even there he could not find peace. He could not shut off his thoughts. He said, “If someday you commit a crime, remember what I say. Do not run into the desert. Do not try to hide in the Sahara.”
He would have been happier as a professor than a judge. He grew up in In Salah, and was a bright boy, and went off to the university in Algiers, and as a law student chose the judiciary track in a legal system that afterward offered him no change of mind. He requested a position in the Sahara, and was sent to Tamanrasset. He was required to join the ruling party, and for years he had to attend weekly party meetings, where he saw firsthand the venality of the government he was bound to defend. By the time I met him, he had long stopped attending the meetings. So great was his scorn that he could barely bring himself to speak in full sentences about the men in power. He had retreated to the bench, to which he felt bound by an abstract duty to society. He made no secret of his disdain for the military dictatorship, and yet no secret of his disdain for Islamic law, the sharia, proposed by the revolutionaries. He refused the political cases—few of which made it into the court system anyway. He worked alone or with a panel of junior judges, and accepted his responsibilities because he believed abstractly in law, more now than ever.
Citizens were accused. Yazid pondered their dossiers, listened to their arguments, released a few, and found the others guilty. Their crimes ranged from murder to theft, and were rarely interesting. He condemned some of the criminals to death, some to long imprisonment, and most to shorter terms. By the standards of a tough country, he sentenced them fairly. He knew about conditions in the Tamanrasset jail, where prisoners peered from dark openings in the walls, and even the street reeked of their excrement. He said he did not want to sentence people to such a place, but had no choice. It was his burden.
He said, “The desert looks big, but it is not. It’s a village, small and up-close. You end up judging your neighbors. You end up judging your friends.”
I asked him why he didn’t leave.
He answered with a practical question. “Where would I go? What would I do?” He had a family to support.
One day he invited me on an official errand. We were driven by the chief of police in a government Land Cruiser with blue lights, a two-way radio, and a siren. The chief had a bushy mustache, a uniform, and a peaked cap. I called him Bronson because when we met he stuck his thumb up and said, “I should have been born an American. Char-les Bronson is number one.”
Yazid gazed out the side window at the passing buttes and mountains. We drove south from Tamanrasset and came to a settlement of black African refugees, where Yazid had ordered the municipal government to drill a well; he wanted to see that the work had been done, and that water indeed was flowing.
Bronson disapproved, on principle. He hated these southern blacks. “They’ve brought AIDS to the Sahara. It’s a very serious problem. Already we have had a dozen cases in Tamanrasset. Do you know how they got AIDS originally? AIDS is a monkey’s disease. It’s proof that Malians perform acts against nature.”
Yazid waved him on impatiently.
Bronson refused to be denied. With a practiced burst of his siren, he pulled up beside a group of refugees sitting on an embankment. They stood nervously. Bronson walked over to them and demanded identity papers. Through the open windows, I heard him trying to intimidate them. He spoke in French, and said something about “le juge,” and something about “l’Américain.”
The refugees seemed afraid.
Yazid looked angry and embarrassed.
The refugees had papers with legitimate Algerian visas. Bronson was disappointed, and got back in the car. He would have liked to arrest the refugees, or have them deported, killed, or enslaved. But not in front of the judge Yazid, who would have found some way to make trouble for him.
We drove to a homestead far down an oued, where an old man named Moulay Tayeb had built a small vegetable farm. At age eighty-four, Tayeb no longer bothered even to come to the market in town and had made a life for himself away from the silliness of society. Yazid said he loved him as a student loves a teacher, and he visited him once a week to remind himself of the desert. He wanted me to understand: to be in Tayeb’s presence was enough. He had Bronson wait by the car.
Tayeb lived in an unwalled compound of mud-brick houses, which he had built on a rise above the oued. His Tuareg wife, unveiled and handsome, was forty years his junior. She welcomed Yazid fondly and offered us a drink of cool water before directing us to the field where Tayeb was working.
The fields lay in a string down one side of the oued, in swatches of melons, potatoes, onions, eggplants. Lines of orange trees and date palms formed windbreaks. We found Tayeb cleaning an irrigation channel with a hoe. He was a tall, thin man in robes and a turban. He had a white beard, high cheekbones, and penetrating eyes. Yazid kissed his cheeks. I shook his hand. Because he was nearly deaf, we had to yell to make ourselves heard. His voice was strong and clear. He had fought in Libya for Mussolini, and spoke broken French and good Italian.
Standing in his field, looking me squarely in the face, he said, “I came here in 1967, when there was nothing. After nine wives, after seven sons, after ten daughters, after thirteen years at war, after sixteen years hiding in Niger, I came home with nothing. But for the man who considers himself dead in war, everything afterward is a gift. God intended this home for me. I dug the first well on seven October. I built the first house. I dug the first fields. I took a Tuareg wife, a good woman. You have met her, so you know already. She gave me a son, who is now twenty-six. I will introduce you. My son is a great gazelle hunter. He will take you hunting. He raises chickens not for the eggs but for the meat. He has four hundred chickens. Five chicks were born last night. Yazid has told me about you. You have a son, too. Did you bring a picture? Come, we will make tea.” He shouldered the hoe and started walking.
I smiled at Yazid.
Yazid said, “He has a mind so sharp, he remembers suckling his mother’s breast. He is the greatest man I know.”
We spent the afternoon with him. He was virile, and vital, and undiminished by age. His son, the gazelle hunter, joined us. He was soft-spoken. We ate together, and made tea. I thought: these people are part of a Sahara we would all like to find, a place like a dream. I could see why Yazid escaped to them.
But Yazid did not see it as an escape. That evening during the drive to Tamanrasset, he said, “In his entire life Tayeb left the desert only once, for two weeks in Italy during the war. He won’t live much longer. But I will think of him.”
I had asked him why he didn’t leave, and he had been chewing on the question ever since. Tayeb was again an answer. Yazid was not the type to boast about his desert bloodline, but he wanted me to know that his sense of kinship with such a man mattered to him. The desert offered him frustration, but richness as well. He meant to admonish me. Yazid and I were equals, men of the same age born into different circumstances, and he did not want my sympathy.
19
A DOOR
IN THE
DESERT
SALAH ADDOUN HAD arranged my passage south with the two trucks hauling dates down the Trans-Saharan 600 miles to Agadez, Niger, but now I had to wait. The trucks were battered Berliets with years of the desert on them. They stood empty like abandoned wrecks near the Tamanrasset camel market. Day after day, I heard rumors that soon they would depart. Then one hot afternoon word came that they had loaded and started their engines.
Salah Addoun came to see me off. He introduced me to the chief driver, a bearded man with a permanently amused expression, whose name was Ali. He wore stained trousers, a ragged shirt, an
d no shoes. Addoun had told me that Ali was the best, that he practically lived in the desert. He was a trader as well as a driver; the trucks and their cargoes belonged to him. The trucks were piled high with low-quality export dates in burlap sacks.
Ali expected me to act like a reporter. From the way he stood and waited, I saw that he expected to be interviewed. Not to disappoint him, I asked what he would bring back from Agadez on the return trip.
Ali looked at Addoun. He looked at me. He answered, “Chickens.”
I had a pad, and wrote it down. I asked him for his full name. He took the pad and printed it carefully in block letters.
I later learned that he wanted to be asked larger questions. The future of the Russian republic was his favorite subject. So he was disappointed with the interview, and assigned me to the other driver’s truck. I never did catch the other driver’s name. He was a gaunt Tuareg, who spoke no French and little Arabic. It didn’t matter anyway, since I would ride in the back, crouched on top of the cargo with the other passengers.
The judge Yazid came to say good-bye and to tell Ali to treat me well. I was embarrassed by the attention. Addoun disappeared into the market. Yazid and I stood together, enduring the awkwardness of departure. Addoun returned with a chèche against the sun and dust, a blanket for the nights, and a sack of oranges to share with the passengers. On my truck there were ten: itinerant Tuaregs and black Africans—workers, traders, and refugees, men heading home. They peered down at me from atop the cargo. I threw my suitcase to them and climbed up after it. They made room. We did not talk.
There was drama to the departure. The engines rumbled. The drivers stood apart, smoking cigarettes. Their assistants made the final adjustments to the cargo ropes, then wandered into the crowd to chat. The drivers climbed into the cabs. The assistants ignored them. The drivers shifted into gear. The assistants pretended still not to notice. The trucks began to roll. The assistants feigned indifference, and at the last moment turned and swung easily into the cabs.
It was midafternoon; I was glad to be on the move. We drove to the edge of Tamanrasset, joined the pavement of the Trans-Saharan, and headed purposefully out of town. Ten minutes later, where soldiers had barricaded the road, we stopped. The soldiers ordered us to climb down with our papers and luggage. The drivers turned off their engines.
As roadblocks go, it was not a bad one. Ali told the officer in charge that I was a tourist. The officer stamped my passport and wished me good luck. He said he did not see many Americans. He asked if I had visited Foucauld’s hermitage at Assekrem. He was glad to inform me that the border was officially open this week. He even complimented my French. He was less gracious with the other passengers. But we were delayed for only two hours, which in Saharan time is the merest moment.
Afterward, the pavement broke apart. I spotted the first of Addoun’s concrete pylons, which had been run over and lay on its side. We ranged out across a desert of diminishing mountains. The ride atop the cargo was cushioned by the dates; the passengers swayed among the sacks, facing forward, their heads wrapped in indigo cotton. By sundown we had settled into a rhythm. The terrain was treacherous. The trucks wallowed and rolled, hesitated, backed, and shuddered. Their gears ground. On high-speed level ground, the engines bellowed, and the tires heaved dust, and we hit twenty miles an hour.
Darkness closed around us. The trucks competed for the lead. Now our truck rolled ahead and we looked back to watch our dust swirl through Ali’s yellow beams; now our truck fell behind, and we tasted his dirt and followed his single red taillight. I don’t know how the drivers navigated. High thin clouds dimmed the stars and blackened the horizons. We crossed a confusion of tracks that appeared in the short throw of our lights to run in all directions. When late at night we made camp, I counted twenty-three men. We drank water from fifty-gallon drums lashed to the chassis, and built two miserly cooking fires. We baked unleavened bread in the sand, and ate from communal bowls. The air turned cool. I walked away and rolled into a blanket.
Hours later the murmur of a truck’s engine roused me. Lonely lights crept through the distance. The truck crested a rise maybe five miles away and disappeared to the south, pushing hard for the border, giving dimension to the night.
We left before dawn and spent the day passing through torn hills where sand lay in deep pockets. The heavily laden trucks bogged down often. You could sense the trouble coming on: the double-clutching of uncooperative gears, the desperate shifting down, the shuddering loss of momentum, the halt, the surrender. The drivers never spun their wheels. They stepped out to survey the sand. Calmly, they smoked their cigarettes.
The trucks did not sink into the ground, but pushed the sand into dikes that blocked their wheels. The passengers climbed down and excavated the dikes by hand and shovel. We became intimates of the tires, which were massive and heavily scarred. We inhaled the fumes of hot machinery, and embraced the dirt, oil, and leaking diesel fuel. I thought that if Mohammed had lived in a time of trucks, he would have praised them richly; if God is everywhere, then a truck must certainly be His expression. We kneeled by our Berliets. We submitted to them without question.
When the digging was done, we laid heavy sand ladders in front of the wheels. The sand ladders were ten-foot segments of military landing mat—perforated metal strips designed to link together to form a metal runway. Each truck carried a pair, like portable metal pavement, and so could roll forward ten feet at a time across even the softest sand. Then it would bog down again, and we would dig and reset the sand ladders. In places I had the feeling we were digging our way across the Sahara ten feet at a time.
When we found firm ground, and the trucks could keep rolling, and the passengers would run alongside to hang the sand ladders and climb aboard. There were various handholds and routes to the top. I preferred to do my climbing from the back, so that if I slipped I would not be crushed under the wheels. But most of the passengers were less careful. They assaulted the moving trucks enthusiastically from all angles, climbed breathlessly to the top, made jokes, and laughed. They were pleased by the smallest victories.
But other travelers had been defeated. We passed the half-buried hulks of their cars, abandoned to the Sahara, and later stripped of engines, wheels, and usable parts. These relics emerged from the ground like monuments to misfortune. The oldest models dated from the 1930s, the first era of regular desert driving. The newest ones dated from half a century later, during the last tourist traffic before revolution and civil war. Most occupants must have survived, continuing with a convoy, or more haphazardly with passersby. The wrecks did not rust, but they were soon blackened by the sun and wind. They became part of the desert geology. Some captured the dew, which allowed bushes to root in their shelter. Across one difficult mile I counted fifteen hulks—Volvos, Volkswagens, Peugeots, a Renault, a Fiat, and a Morris Mini.
I never saw another of Addoun’s markers. When I mentioned this to Ali, he said, “It’s better to find your own way.” I did not doubt the essential, that we were southbound along the Trans-Saharan. For as far as I could see in any direction, the desert was dense with tire tracks.
Toward evening, nomadic Tuareg children materialized from the empty land. They ran toward us in a flock, waving empty plastic bottles. We stopped and gave them water. They begged for sugar, but we had none. We gave them flour and a sack of dates. They were the poorest of the poor, worse off than the refugees around Tamanrasset or the nomads who had taken delivery of Aissa’s rifles. They looked spindly, gaunt, undernourished. Their skin was caked with dirt. They had ragged robes, and hair in wild dreadlocks. I spotted their camp at the base of a cliff—two tents, two goats, a woman watching. The men may have been hiding or hunting, or they may have been dead. Army reprisals in Niger and Mali had killed thousands, scattering their families into the wilderness.
We climbed back onto the trucks. The children watched us dully, shielding their eyes from the sun. As we rolled away, they trudged off, lugging the heavy water bottles.
It was obvious that they could not keep living this way, off the diminished traffic of the Trans-Saharan. I thought, these are the circumstances under which parents will arm themselves and blur the distinction between robbery and revolt.
That night, Ali and I drank tea alone. I asked why we had stopped for the Tuaregs—was he not afraid of attack?
He answered, “And if they wanted to attack, do you imagine these Berliets could outrun them? They don’t need to shoot. They can just wait for us in the sand. This is their desert.”
“So why don’t they rob us?”
He shrugged. “They rob others. This is my desert, too. For twenty years I’ve lived out here under the sky. I have no house, or wife, or children. I have these two old trucks. I drive round-trips every month, and always share my water and food. Sometimes I give them a sack of dates or a chicken or two.” He stirred the coals. “I don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. You Russians are not so wise.”
I smiled. “I’m an American.”
He smiled. “Ah! What difference does it make?”
He had opinions about European union, North African union, and the Falklands War, but he preferred the old standard of the United States and Russia, because it still held the special appeal of an all-out nuclear exchange. Imagine every continent a Sahara.
I asked him when we would get to In Guezzam, the government outpost on the border with Niger.
The question amused him. “Maybe not tomorrow,” he said.
Maybe not ever, I thought the following afternoon. The terrain had widened, and the drivers were ranging miles apart, finding their own ways through, bogging down or not, refusing to wait for one another. They were playing the averages, I realized, employing a method that, between equal drivers, produces the best speed across the desert. The old caravans had used the same method—they would have gotten nowhere had they kept the camels in line and waited every time one spilled its load. I tried now to ignore the other side of the method, which often amounted to the death of stragglers.
Sahara Unveiled Page 17