Or perhaps he didn’t run off, perhaps he told his mother to let him sit on her lap. We won’t ever know, because he wasn’t the person he is now and, after all, he was only a little kid.
Abandoned, innocent, relegated to the background both by his mother and his sisters, who now picked up the newborn babe whenever he cried. He opened his mouth, like a toothless old man’s, and shouted with a stridency nobody would have thought possible from such a tiny creature. His father said, look, your brother’s much less of a cry-baby than you, and doesn’t wake anyone up early in the morning. And what will happen when you fall out with him, who will win, you or him? You or him, who’s much smaller? If you want him to learn to respect you and call you Azizi, you should start showing who’s boss now.
And so many things changed in the Driouch household with the arrival of that second boy, and in the end something happened that nobody could explain, and that some even put down to the appearance of an evil spirit.
It all happened in a minute. The opportunity presented itself and Mimoun took it. They’d left the little one, who must have been a couple of months old, on blankets in the girls’ room while they had breakfast downstairs, taking advantage of the daylight streaming through the door. Grandmother was still recounting last night’s dreams with one leg stretched out and another tucked under at an awkward angle. She said she’d had one of her presentiments.
Mimoun looked at the little one, stared hard and, without giving it much thought, took one of the big pillows and gave it a hug. His little brother was looking around and all he could see was shadows and colours, until the only thing he saw was the white, soft material and afterwards even, at the end, only the darkness that precedes loss of consciousness.
The women were still talking cheerfully, still laughing, while the little fellow, getting smaller and smaller, waved his legs and feet inside this kind of mummy wrap in which he was imprisoned. He hardly made a noise. In fact, he made no noise at all, just stopped struggling, or being rigid. And Mimoun went off to play in the yard in front of his mother, who afterwards thought the boy had been there all the time, from the moment he dunked his last mouthful of bread in the dish of olive oil and it floated there, plop. Nobody had noticed he’d spent too long standing and staring at his little brother.
Until much later, when grandmother and daughters began to collect up the breakfast things, to put the bread in flour-covered cloths and went to look at the baby, nobody realised he wasn’t moving, that the peace reigning wasn’t at all because of the sleep they’d thought he was enjoying. No, they didn’t at all imagine that silence could be anything but deep sleep.
Nobody remembers seeing Mimoun prowling near the child before the fratricide, and we don’t even know if he, to this day, remembers anything at all.
4
Mimoun is special
Sometimes some of the family don’t remember whether rival number one existed or not. Especially because grandmother got pregnant very soon afterwards, and the newborn child was named after his dead brother, as tradition demands. And especially because of his short sojourn in life, thanks to which he’d go straight to heaven. We don’t know whether Mimoun remembers him or not.
Rival number two was certainly easier to tolerate. He was also an ugly cry-baby and carried on so that everyone was at his beck and call all the time, but Mimoun had now grown up, started to go to school and, most importantly, begun practising the difficult art of taming the people around him, creating bonds, as the fox said.
He didn’t have to try hard with women: he only had to smile and slightly inflect his perfectly placed mole. His sisters allowed him to curl up longer than usual between the still warm eiderdowns at the back of the living room where he still slept, one either side of him. They must have allowed him to stay there longer than was called for in such situations, either because they were afraid of him sleeping alone in the room that was to be the boys’ or feared for his little soul that was more ethereal and delicate than normal, perhaps because of that thwap! Whatever the reason, everybody was sure that boy wasn’t quite normal and might break into smithereens or turn to ash at the slightest provocation. It was the only way you could understand why his neck went all stiff, and why he rolled on the ground screaming in a way that gave everyone goose pimples, frantically waving his legs and feet and leaving his mark on the floor. And it could happen anywhere: while grandmother was washing clothes in the river and he couldn’t cajole the rest of the women into letting him paddle in the pool of stagnant water they’d made to do their washing. Child, get your dirty feet out of there, they’d have said. And grandmother, when Mimoun had already begun his tantrum, must have run to chide the women she laboured with, beating djellabas and seruals on the stone, asking them not to upset him, the boy’s not well, you can see that, and above all never cross him next to running water, that’s the worst place for anyone to get angry. And that’s how she must have learned to recognise the moments when his fragile spirit was most in danger: near water, when dawn was breaking, around noon and, above all, at twilight, when you couldn’t tell if it was day or night.
It worked with his sisters and his mother, naturally, for they understood the child’s precocious sensitivity. Grandfather can’t have felt the same way, though; no doubt he ran over waving a rope sandal whenever he heard Mimoun having one of his tantrums no doubt he over brandishing a rope sandal, let me deal with the kid, I’ll cure the spoilt brat of all his fits and get rid of all the djinns he’s got inside him; when they see the djinns I’ve got they’ll scarper quick enough. But he hardly ever caught him: grandmother or one of his aunts would stop him in time. And in case they weren’t around, Mimoun learned to run. To run as fast as his feet would carry him over the stones on dusty paths or barren fields. He ran into places grandfather couldn’t reach, or ran so quickly he couldn’t catch him. Then grandfather must have repeated the usual, ah, I’ll catch you, sooner or later I’ll catch you, and when I do I’ll skin you alive. But when he had the boy next to him he’d not remember his threats.
And now and then grandmother took him to get a cure, so convinced was she that he had such a peculiar character. She took him to the one-roomed house where a woman was expecting him, amidst strange smells, and she sat him down right next to her. Tattooed from under her lower lip to the top of her robe, this lady kneaded lots of fenugreek into a paste with her saliva. Psst, she’d go, as she spat into the pot and stirred with her chubby, chubby fingers. And she must have put a thimbleful of the mixture in the crook of his elbow and tapped it rhythmically with her two fingers, invoking in the name of God, in the name of God, in the name of God. As if she were making music. Until lots of very fine filaments began to emerge from the sticky paste stuck to Mimoun’s skin and disappeared into the air. Do you see that? the woman must have said, all his fears are leaving him, lady. Look at the state the poor boy was in. Look, they’re getting thicker and thicker, poor boy.
5
Run, Mimoun, run!
Mimoun never showed any interest in squiggles on pieces of paper that meant things, he didn’t see that they were useful, and while his teacher scrawled alifs, bas, tas and so on on the blackboard, he dreamt of hutches for pigeons and rabbits that reproduce and never die from sudden plagues. He’d already been bored in the mosque by lengthy recitations of suras2, though the singsong chant and swaying movement left and right seemed pleasant enough. And the way they emphasised certain syllables, from time to time, and strained their necks to make their voices sound deeper. He could put up with all that, for sure, despite the thin switch of olive the imam held aloft threateningly.
School proper was another matter. Getting up so early, for a boy like him who needed to sleep until his body had told him it had slept enough. An hour’s walk there, an hour’s walk back. And worst of all: that teacher, who had such long arms and was so black, and seemed straight out of hell. He’d have heard lots of stories about this man long before going, and his older cousins must have scared him stiff before he starte
d school at the age of seven. Ssi Foundou will hit you on your fingertips, which is where it hurts most, or on the soles of your feet. He’ll hit you so hard that afterwards you won’t be able to walk, and only because he’s caught the whole class making a racket, and you aren’t even to blame.
And it was like that. Ssi Foundou’s arms hung down to his knees, and his hands must really have hurt when they beat you. His black skin frightened Mimoun. He’d never seen a black man before. Let alone one who carried a wooden cane the likes of which that man did.
Mimoun learned as he always learned, very quickly. Although the teacher’s words spoken in southern Arabic sounded like incomprehensible curses, he soon learned to distinguish between ‘Come here, you bastard’ and ‘You can go home now’. There he got used to being hit in another way. Not like his father hit him, all of a sudden and unexpectedly, taking him by surprise. No, with Ssi Foundou it was different: he had to go tamely to receive the punishment he deserved. If he didn’t, the blows came thick and fast, Driouch, ten more strokes, Driouch, twenty more, and I’ve not finished with you yet. And he wasn’t finished yet. They probably hurt him more than a beating from his father. Everything was so cold, so calculated, and he didn’t even seem annoyed when he lifted the piece of wood up high and sliced through the air, swish, until he could no longer feel the ends of his fingers and thought they would burst and blood from his veins would spatter everywhere.
He was so tired of being beaten he started skiving off school. He’d walk there with the others and then roam the streets near the small building, waiting for his companions or older pupils to come out, and when he was far enough away so they couldn’t catch him, he’d shout out the worst he could think of, up your mother’s twat, or you pansy go fuck your grandmother’s hens. His legs sometimes failed him and more than one stone hit him in the face, so that when he got home his forehead or cheeks weren’t a pretty sight.
If he missed one day, he’d automatically get beaten harder. The teacher would say why didn’t you come yesterday, and you’d say, I was ill, teacher, sir. You’re a liar, he might say, Saïd saw you grazing sheep in the middle of the morning, near here. And it didn’t make any difference if you didn’t have sheep, only goats, by now you’d learned it was better to keep your mouth shut or the punishment would be more severe.
And the more days he stayed away the harder it was to go back, and the harder it was to go back, the more he stayed away.
Until he reached the fourth year and had to sit that important exam to allow him to go on to the next stage. A very important exam, his grandfather probably said, if you don’t pass you can’t continue at school and you’ll be a donkey for the rest of your life. Because despite the evident reality and Mimoun’s character, grandfather still longed for his firstborn son to devote himself to medicine so at least one of his children could abandon life in the fields and enter a profession as respectable as that of a doctor’s.
The exam was so crucial, so difficult Mimoun soon tired of staring at the incomprehensible sheet of symbols he hardly recognised. He knew he couldn’t leave before time was up so decided to amuse himself drawing in the bottom right-hand margin of the paper. He drew the house wall at the top of which he’d left lots of openings for birds to nest, and drew baby pigeons, beaks wide open, waiting for the masticated food their mothers were about to pop inside. He drew all this, not realising pen ink couldn’t be erased. And he began to erase as hard as he could, rubbing the paper and wearing it down so much he removed the drawing and made a hole in its place.
A hole was even more visible than a tiny drawing of pigeons, so Mimoun thought he should repair the sheet of paper. He tore off a strip from elsewhere, licked it like a stamp and stuck it underneath. It was perfect. You couldn’t see the drawing, only a slight wrinkle on the paper.
When grandfather went to school to pick up the exam results, Ssi Foundou told him not only that his son had failed, but that he’d also missed lots of school and completed a great feat of engineering on the day of the test. Mimoun started to run the moment he saw his father’s face as he left the teacher’s office. They went all the way home like that, grandfather angrier than ever and Mimoun out of breath and really scared because his father had never tried so hard to catch him up before. For the first time he felt his life was at risk, that perhaps nobody could save him now and he wouldn’t be able to escape even when they got home, that this time his father wouldn’t pretend he’d forgotten his threats.
Thinking perhaps he wouldn’t just get hurt but that he might even die, Mimoun’s strength began to wane and he felt his legs slowing down, legs that weren’t keeping up with him. Until he felt grandfather’s hand grab the back of his neck and his blood seemed to stop circulating where he gripped him tightly. Mimoun looked around for someone, anybody at all, to ask for help. There was nobody in the middle of that barren, dusty clearing, nobody. Nobody, as he shouted at the top of his voice. Nobody, as his father repeatedly kicked the bottom of his back, nobody, as he put his hands over the nape of his neck to try to deflect his father’s hands and arms. Nobody, as he realised he was being dragged towards the prickly pears by the roadside, and that at any moment he’d end up there. Nobody, but nobody was there when Mimoun felt the barbs of the prickly pear pierce his face and hands, cutting through his clothes and inflicting a thousand wounds. The worst pain came from the thousand little thorns that remained in his skin.
And if grandmother liked to justify her son’s unusual behaviour in years to come with the episode of the smack, Mimoun would recount in great detail the incident of the prickly pear to explain away his future extravaganzas.
6
Keep still, Mimoun
Mimoun stopped going to school, he wouldn’t be a doctor, and he wouldn’t stop working in the fields. grandfather had to start getting used to the idea that his first male child wouldn’t do any better in life than he had. He stopped pinning his hopes on him and centred all expectations on his second son instead.
Mimoun had more time available to learn the things of life we have taken centuries to unlearn. Some of which we never throw off.
And if grandmother used the thwap! slap theory to explain why her son was the way he was, while Mimoun clung on to the one inspired by the prickly pear episode, grandfather had another he rarely mentioned and which everyone tried to keep quiet about, for fear the nightmare would return. Even now, if any of us dared ask did that stuff with the goats really happen when father was twelve…? before the sentence was finished, grandmother would look appalled and put her calloused palm over the guilty mouth. Shut up, silly, don’t ever talk about that, shut up. Because some people say if you speak of the djinns you’ve seen or the djinns someone in the family has seen, you yourself may go mad and never get your sanity back. Never ever.
Grandfather, on the other hand, never stopped talking about the goat episode, as if it could explain why father kicked in the doors of the house or threw over the dinner table and splattered broth over the walls of the living room, or could even justify the peculiar way he rolled his eyes so you could only see the whites of them.
All the same, it was obvious he was on edge when he mentioned it, adopting his meditative pose and staring into space, scratching his beard that was already turning white.
He said, yes, this son of mine has never been the same since that accursed summer’s night. He always says he’s not normal, he’s not normal, and it’s true he never has been from that moment. And now you see him looking well enough, because over time he’s forgotten that apparition, may God keep all such apparitions far from you, my children.
Someone was getting married. And, as you know, anything can happen on a wedding night, boys go out and about and nobody says a word, they do things you can’t even speak about the rest of the year. Even girls enjoy more freedom, and there’s plenty of scope for flirting and falling in love.
The night when one or other of Mimoun’s older cousins was getting married, he went to the river down by the main road, le
vel with grandfather’s garden plots, right behind the hedge of prickly pears. He must have gone there in the dark; they wouldn’t have given him an oil lamp on a day when there were so many guests in the Driouchs’ house. Right there, in the gully cut by the river that was now half dry, Mimoun had the terrifying vision that marked him for the rest of his life. The moon was shining on the little stream trickling there, and there was probably a slight mist, that mist that hangs close to the ground. In the middle of that serene, silent night, a goat rose up on his hind legs on the highest wall of the riverbank and looked at Mimoun. It stared at him and said: Have you seen my son? I’ve been looking for him for a while, he must be around here somewhere, I heard him calling to me. And Mimoun, scared stiff, probably ran off, as if possessed, or else stood rooted to the spot, staring quietly at the apparition.
They say that afterwards he ran home, wrapped his shaking body tight in blankets in the darkest corner of his bedroom and didn’t emerge for three nights and three days. Refused to talk to anyone about what had happened.
It is quite true something happened by the river that night, because all those who saw him rushing into the house, his face drained of blood, thought he’d come eye to eye with the devil himself.
Other non-official versions abound in the family. Some say it was the alcohol flowing at the wedding party, along with the first joint of hashish Mimoun ever smoked with his cousins, that gave him such a shock it transfigured his face. The most unofficial version of all is the one nobody ever recounts: the firstborn son of the Driouchs was to fully enter the adult world by playing the part family members at his age got to play in such scenarios. If you bear in mind that grandmother’s brother had come up from the river just after Mimoun, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that, tired of assailing donkeys and hens, he’d taken advantage of the euphoria of the moment to find a more human cavity in which to slot his erect member. It wouldn’t have been at all peculiar if he’d said, down a bit, Mimoun, I won’t hurt you, no, I won’t hurt you, keep still, just relax, just relax, that’s right, yes, that way it won’t hurt so much.
The Last Patriarch Page 2