Gold Dust (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  As he struggled, searching for the being, the same two things stood in his way: the gloom and the ceiling that was always on the verge of collapse. His steps were anxious and hesitant. The sweat poured out of him, he panted, and groped along the empty hallways like a blind man. For some reason, he would not use his hands to feel his way along the walls. Instead, he walked feebly and alone into the void, always about to tumble into the abyss. Whenever he awoke from the vision, he took a deep breath and thanked God that he had not fallen, and that what had taken place in the dream had not happened here in his waking life.

  Likewise, what troubled and baffled him was his inability to understand how he came to be inside the crumbling house, since it had no door, nor windows. He could not have dropped from the sky. He simply appeared there, inside, and did not emerge again until he woke up. He wandered about in the darkness like a blind man. He trembled, terrified of falling, dreading the being and unable to escape this phantom place until he awoke.

  Without understanding why, he was sure that if not for the rickety floor, the crumbling palm trunks, and the gloom, he would have been able to locate the invisible being. He tried to force himself to move, but was undone by his helplessness. On the fourth day, though his sleep was no less fitful and broken than it had been before, his nightmares abruptly stopped.

  Shame had planted an ache that surpassed all other feeling in his heart. Yet now, the return of the dream filled him with fantastical thoughts of dread. He was terrified by something obscure and this fear had begun to displace his sense of shame. Yet when the dream disappeared on the fourth night, it was the shame that remained.

  These were restless days for Ukhayyad. He forgot to drink tea. He forgot to drink water. He had even forgotten the piebald. He spent his hours wandering through the fields, and climbing up and down the mountain until he was overcome by fatigue. Then he would collapse and lie down wherever he happened to be—under a broom or lote tree, in the shade of a rock, or inside a cave, on the summit of the mountain or at its foot. The piebald paced after him, bewildered. While Ukhayyad climbed up mountains, the camel would wait at their foot, in distress.

  Who had dared to spread the pernicious rumor that had turned the signs upside down? Who had invented this falsehood? Was it Dudu—or his wretched servants? Was it Ayur, hoping to repay the insult he had shown her when he traded her away for a camel? Or had they all conspired together in the lie? How could they say that he had sold his family for a handful of gold dust? What did gold have to do with it? He had accepted the flecks of metal as a gift, but only at the last moment. He had refused the dust, but the man had insisted. Had his insistence been a ploy? What perplexed Ukhayyad most of all was how quickly the rumor had taken flight—already it had traveled to the farthest reaches of the desert. From time immemorial, it has been said that desert winds carry with them all kinds of rumor and report—especially stories of scandal and outrage. My God—the story told of a shameful deed, the likes of which had never been heard of before in the desert. Even the lowest slave would never sell his wife or child for a handful of gold dust. To hell with the gold—that handful of dirt—he had accepted. The stuff brought nothing but ruin. Ukhayyad had even mentioned how, in his tribe, the yellow copper was considered a curse. And now its curse had caught up with him. It had caught him even though he had not done anything wrong. What they said was libel and slander, but had he inadvertently done something wrong?

  He had almost forgotten the promise he made to Tanit. Was Tanit’s pledge behind this—or was it his father’s curse? This was enough to make his head split and his heart explode. Patience now—he needed to be patient. Patience was a form of worship. It was prayer. Patience was life itself. Were the confused thoughts in his head what Sufi sheikhs meant when they talked about the malicious whispering of the Devil? Was this what people called madness?

  He had suffered patiently through all kinds of calamity, but how could he withstand something like this with mere patience? It was worse than shame and worse than death. If only he had died! No, it was better to die after he had a chance to make good his mistake. He would have to show people the truth of what had happened. He had sold no person—he had relinquished only his fetters. Of his own will, he had slipped his chains in order to win back his life with the piebald. He had sought salvation—to be free. But who would understand the nonsense he was spouting now? Who would believe these fantastical ideals coming out of his mouth?

  In the end, though, he had accepted the gold dust. He had redeemed the pledge of his camel and handed over his wife and child to a foreign man who claimed—perhaps fraudulently—to be her kin.

  So easily had he fallen into the trap. No one would believe his story—all the evidence seemed to condemn him. What would he do? He could not go to his death covered in this sort of shame. He would go to the bastard and wrench the truth from his lips. He would force Dudu to tell the truth to all who would listen. And, most of all—he would return the damn gold. Dudu had used it to slander Ukhayyad. The man had dirtied Ukhayyad’s hands and polluted his soul. What now could wash away the stain of that accursed shiny yellow copper? Death might wash away the curse, but how would Ukhayyad wash the insult from people’s minds?

  He made up his mind to leave the valley. With a single blow, the rumor had killed the fables of Ukhayyad’s new life. The illusion returned—as shame. The doll came back as child, the noose as wife.

  The meaning of everything returned to what it had once been—with a vengeance.

  27

  He had no idea how he made the journey, nor how he arrived at the oasis. Nor did he recall how many nights he spent on the road, nor whether he stopped to sleep, or whether he had journeyed day and night without interruption.

  Just south of the oasis, in the open space beside the palm groves next to the hut he had once lived in, he spied a group of veiled men tending to slender Mahris. Was this a wedding procession? Had Ukhayyad arrived on the wedding night?

  He followed the path that wended around the green thicket of trees. At the entrance, he met a peasant. He asked the man where he could find Dudu. The farmer stuttered and hesitated, standing there in seeming astonishment. Confounded, he finally pointed toward the east and uttered, “You’ll find him over there—at the vineyard spring.”

  Ukhayyad led the piebald into the palm groves. The man stood, watching him with bewilderment. What did his look mean? Was he staring at Ukhayyad simply because he had returned to the oasis, or had another rumor gone around that Ukhayyad had died? Had the poor man heard the story of Ukhayyad’s horrible deed—was he stunned to see him show his face again? Or had the man simply noticed something in Ukhayyad’s eyes? Only God knows what goes on in the minds of peasants.

  From the west, from beyond the groves, ululations exploded from a distant celebration. Had the wedding begun?

  Around the vineyard spring all was silent except for the crickets that began to compete with one another in song.

  He heard the noise of water tumbling from the basin of the spring into small channels below. Ukhayyad walked toward it.

  The spring was surrounded by a thick ring of date palms, and fig and pomegranate trees. The basin of the spring was round and wide. From its mouth gushed pure, still waters, which then poured over the lip into conduits below. There was only one path that led from this dense copse toward the eastern desert. Through this opening the peaks of sand dunes appeared in the distance.

  Ukhayyad turned right. He hoped to approach the spring from the path on the eastern side, he wanted to keep the Mahri close by him. Before he even reached the pool, he saw the man’s loose-fitting robes—they had been thrown over a bramble of palm. As Ukhayyad’s heart raced, the universe seemed to grow increasingly quiet. It seemed that now even the trees were listening to him, thinking, observing and . . . waiting. As the silence intensified, the singing of the crickets became more raucous. He heard the sound of water in the spring—the man was taking a bath. The groom was bathing—and getting ready to slip in
to bed next to his wife. The man had certainly known how to steal her. He had set up Ukhayyad to act as his accomplice—and then he snatched her away. He was the worst kind of bandit—no: bandits steal only camels, but this devil steals other people’s wives! This was unheard of in the desert—and Ukhayyad had been the man’s first victim. But it was worse than this—the thief had then gone and told people that he had bought her, fair and square, with his gold. His slaves were his witnesses—and they would swear to it. They had already sworn to it—Dudu had been confident that people would not talk. He had been sure that people would happily accept his fait accompli. He had come from Aïr to retrieve his kinswoman—his cousin, no less!—and had used his own money to do so. Who could object to such a thing? On the contrary—they would think him a brave man for doing what he did—a hero. And they would believe that Ukhayyad—descendant of the great Akhenukhen, son of the most venerable of the desert tribes—had sold his wife and child for a handful of dirt. To them, he would be a villain stained with shame. And what shame!

  The afternoon sun was slanting its way toward sunset as Ukhayyad came to a halt. He looked down on his opponent’s head. The two men stared at each other for a long time.

  Dudu cast a feeble glance up at Ukhayyad and stopped splashing in the water. His gaze was now unveiled. His bare head was exposed, as were his eyes. He had been caught undressed, with no veil to cover his heart. His ears were suddenly huge, and flopped around like those of a donkey. His pate was bald and eggish, and his beard was a billygoat’s. His body was suddenly all skin and bones—none of this had ever shown under the flowing robes he always wore. Puffed out and colorful, this man’s clothes had made his corpse look imposing. Everything about the man was a fraud. Ukhayyad now stood amazed at how easily this dull monster of a man had fooled him. His vision and judgment had been completely blinded by this sorcerer. There was no doubt about it—he was a witch doctor. Was he not from Aïr—that land of sorcerers and witches?

  He opened the palm of his hand and raised it toward his head. It did not take long for Ukhayyad to aim. Never lifting his gaze, he pulled the trigger. The shot exploded . . . but missed. Dudu rose, his eyes now begged and pleaded for mercy. The man’s lips moved as if he had something to say. Right then the second shot ripped through his throat. Dudu disappeared into the water, his eyes and mouth wide open, the words dead on his lips. The bullet had given him no time to utter what he had to say. As blood mixed with water, red billows began to ripple and spread, until they consumed the pure waters of the spring.

  “This is a gift from the giraffe,” Ukhayyad said as he opened the pouch of gold dust and poured it over where the body had vanished into the spring.

  Beneath the rays of the setting sun, gold flecks sparkled in the glimmering blood-red waters.

  To the distant west, beyond the palm grove, another wedding song sounded.

  28

  Ukhayyad flew toward the desert. His aim was to reach Jebel Hasawna in whose caves he would find refuge. He spent the first night after the incident out in the open wilderness. There, the vision that had abandoned him now returned. It was the same dream—with the same dark phantom that concealed itself in the folds of the shadows and in the debris-strewn rooms. It was the same decrepit house, still sealed securely though without windows and doors, and despite the fact that it was crumbling apart. The house was like a closed circle. And all the while, he searched around—through the chimeric hallways, on the roof that was always on the verge of collapse. As he searched for the being, for the secret, he felt a breeze on his skin. Now he stumbled, now he used his hands instead of his eyes to look. Now he avoided the imaginary walls. He could not see these walls, nor could he touch them, but he knew they were there—sturdy, thick, and impenetrable.

  This final vision was not a dream at all. It had started while he was asleep, but continued after he awoke. He deliberately kept his eyes open during the dream so as to pass through it. But the shadows were too thick, and the roof under him continued to shake, threatening to collapse at any second. And although the invisible being made its presence felt, it never showed itself. This strange, wakeful state went on and on for what seemed like hours. When Ukhayyad finally sat up in the glow of dawn, his head ached. He lay down again and went back to sleep.

  In the following days, the dream vanished once again. Throughout this time, Ukhayyad kept to the outskirts of the mountain.

  The foreign invasion still threatened the road toward the Hamada desert, the merciful realms across whose western and southern edges his tribesmen had scattered. Ukhayyad knew that after all that had happened, his blood ties to them had been severed. And not just his ties to his own tribe, but to everybody. The blood he had spilled would never wash away the shame attached to him—only death would clean his slate. He had been sentenced to live in isolation forever. It would be folly for him to speak with any person now, or to look anybody in the eyes again. Now, his sole friend would be the piebald. He had wanted to remain by the piebald’s side—and now God had granted this wish and decreed it so for eternity. The piebald now belonged to him and he to the piebald—and nothing but death would pull them apart. Not even death would separate them. They would depart together, and together they would return to their original state, to what they had been before birth.

  Perhaps what had happened was a blessing, and not just a curse: Yes—with this damnation was also a kind of salvation. When a curse is eternal, it contains its own form of release: it drives one toward exile, and in exile safety is found.

  But this particular curse did not halt on the frontiers of exile. The victim’s kinsmen had arrived from Aïr and then fanned out across the desert, each demanding Ukhayyad’s head. Initially, they were men who claimed to be his kin so as to inherit some of the wealth Dudu had left behind. The man’s unavenged blood now stood between them and their fortune, for it was custom in the desert to insist that a murdered man be avenged before his inheritance was divided. Thus, they began to seek Ukhayyad in earnest, not out of any love for Dudu, but in order to carve up the spoils as quickly as possible. To this end, they had employed tricks borrowed from elsewhere—tricks the northern wastes had never known before: they began bribing herders and those nomads who knew every detail of the northern deserts. It is a well-known fact that gold blinds all and corrupts even the best of people. It was that accursed gold that led them to Ukhayyad. And it was gold—not really these men—that chased after him in hot pursuit. Is there any curse in this world that does not have its roots in that metal?

  At first, they combed the mountain range, searching through the summits stone by stone. Then, they were led to his hideout by camel dung—the piebald’s droppings. They set up camp beneath the mountain, and then stopped climbing through the mountain stones for several days. Perhaps they were awaiting a messenger or a command from the group in the oasis? There were three groups of them: one here, another tending the flocks of camels in Danbaba, and a third quartered in Adrar oasis. The battle was led from the oasis—at least, that is what a herdsman heading west had told him.

  Ukhayyad thought about the trap closing in around him. Time was now working against him. If he remained holed up in the nooks of these parts, they would find him within a day, or a few days at most. His water supply would run out in two days, and the green grasses—that gift of the merciful rainclouds—had already begun to wither and grow sparse. The summer sun had begun its labors.

  He waited for twilight to fall, then stole between the rocks until he arrived at the ravine where the piebald was grazing. He saddled the camel and placed the waterskin on him, along with all the provisions he could carry. He then set out toward the mountains. The camel galloped the whole day until they approached the eastern end of the range. Ukhayyad climbed up to the highest peak, where he hid his supplies. He walked back to the Mahri and then flung himself on the animal’s neck. He gazed into the camel’s deep, merciful eyes. “Now we will separate,” he said in a plaintive voice. “We must part. They’ll kill us if we s
tay together. Go into the Hamada desert, as far away from here as you can. Don’t be afraid about me. No one can touch me while I’m here on these peaks. They don’t know these paths and ravines and caves like I do. They are not from here—they’re foreigners. The important thing is for you to disappear. You’ll be safe when you get to the Hamada. When this trouble passes, we’ll find each other again. After that, you and I will never be apart again, ever. Agreed?”

  The camel rose to his feet. He rubbed his muzzle against Ukhayyad’s arm. He licked Ukhayyad’s cheeks behind the dark veil that covered them.

  Ukhayyad delivered his last will and testament to the animal with their mantra, “Patience. Just be patient. Don’t forget the power of these magic words. Patience is life.”

  The Mahri stared at the horizon where the barren waste stretched forever. Then he headed off on the long journey.

  The despondence in the camel’s eyes was something Ukhayyad had never seen before.

  29

  Ukhayyad retreated into the most rugged part of the region. There he took refuge in an unusual cave. It was actually more a cleft that crept all the way up the wall of stone to the mountain’s summit. He avoided the lower caves, since they would be the first place the mercenary herders would look. The desert of the Hamada was now surrounded—from the north, the Italians sought to rush in, and from south, the tribes of Aïr sought to violate its pristine wastes. He was trapped. Even God’s vast wilderness could be transformed into a prison—one more impenetrable than the Ottoman jail whose ruins he had seen in Adrar. Ukhayyad felt suffocated. He was completely stranded—and nothing good comes to a person once he is cut off from everyone and everything.