by Jane Johnson
‘To Nana’s house,’ he told me.
‘Nana?’
‘Our grandmother, Lalla Fatma. She is a renowned healer and herbalist. There are plants growing here that grow nowhere else in the world, and Nana is expert in their use.’
The panic took a grip. ‘No, no, that won’t do at all,’ I said, trying to muster the firm voice I used on the ditzy temps they sent me when my own assistant was away, enunciating slowly and with exaggerated clarity. ‘It’s very kind of you, but no. You need to take me to a hospital. For X-rays.’
The man laughed; but what was amusing about wanting to go to hospital with a suspected broken ankle? I forced myself to try again. ‘Look, it needs to be X-rayed and set in a cast so that it can mend properly. I really don’t think a few plants are going to do the trick.’
But my rescuer turned away without a word and it struck me suddenly that maybe his French was not as fluent as I had thought. I sighed. Over his shoulder I could see the beginnings of a medieval-looking peasant village – a jumble of adobe buildings in the same rose-red hue as the surrounding rocks, as if they too were excrescences of the natural landscape. They had flat roofs and tiny, iron-fretted windows, and some were so ancient they appeared to be crumbling back into boulder and crag. Not much chance of a hospital here. Black-robed women stopped chopping vegetation or digging in the ground and silently watched us go by with their wary, sloe-black eyes. By contrast, the children ran about shouting and laughing at the sight of a European on a donkey. Goats and sheep jostled around us, baaing in confusion; this was not the time they usually came down from grazing on the mountain. What was going on? An enormous white cockerel standing on a wall flared its carnal red coxcomb at us; its harem of chickens clucked and scratched in the dust below.
‘There is no hospital here,’ the man said conversationally, confirming my worst fears, ‘not in the sense that you mean. There is no X-ray machine; and the doctor … well,’ he paused, ‘my grandmother is more skilled than any doctor. People come to consult her from Taroudant and Tiznit; even from Marrakech.’
My thoughts raced ahead to a time when I would walk with a stick because of a joint that had healed badly; no, my frantic brain amended, with a prosthetic leg to replace the one lost to blood poisoning and gangrene brought on by the use of weird herbs …
‘For God’s sake!’ I cried out, on the edge of hysteria, feeling all control slip away, now and in my future. ‘I need a doctor!’
No one paid me the least attention, except the ragged children with their dark, laughing eyes. They thought I was hilarious.
The girl leading the donkey handed its rope to the man and ran ahead calling, ‘Lalla Fatma! Lalla Fatma!’
Women of all ages and descriptions emerged from the mudbrick houses to see what the commotion was all about; seeing me, a European woman, they pulled their veils up to hide their hair and faces as if I might suddenly assault them with a camera, like any other ignorant tourist. A few moments later the donkey came to a halt outside a wall washed in the same pinky-ochre as the rest of the village. My rescuer pulled me down off the animal and into his arms, revealing surprising strength in his wiry frame, and carried me through a garden fragrant with orange and lemon trees, olives and roses. Up the beaten-earth path he went, then over the threshold, ducking almost double to take me through the low door.
The contrast between the virulent sunlight and the cave-like interior was so intense that for a moment I thought I had gone blind. When my eyes adjusted I realized that the large chamber we had entered was full of women in the midst of domestic tasks, or sitting with their backs against the walls chattering like birds, their henna-patterned hands gesturing busily. One woman ground something in a large stone mortar; a second attended to the coals in a brazier in the centre of the room over which a big, tarnished copper kettle sat steaming; another sorted through a dish of lentils, discarding small stones from amongst the pulses; a fourth carded wool. The fifth – vastly fat – assembled a number of clay pots on a low circular table, helped by the girl who had led the donkey down the mountain. If this was not enough for me to take in, four goats now came bursting through the open door after us, bleating wildly. One of the women lumbered to her feet, grabbed the broom and, addressing each one by name – Teaza! Imshi! Tufila! Azri! – shooed them all out again. Already my head was spinning.
The big woman got to her feet and said something to the others. One by one they all got up, kissed her hands respectfully and departed, leaving only four of us in the room. Where there had been bustle and noise there was an abrupt and pregnant quiet. The Berber man set me down gently on a mat on the floor, but the old woman scolded him furiously until he made me a bed of cushions. I lay there, looking up at her, not knowing what to do or say. She was extraordinary-looking, dark-skinned and imposing; unlike the other women in their plain black robes she wore a long blue chemise and over that a vibrantly striped swathe of silk in orange and black knotted over her ample chest, and draped up over her head. Around her neck was a necklace of amber beads, each bead as large as an egg; heavy silver earrings weighed down her pendulous earlobes. The sleeves of the under-dress were pinned back to reveal muscled forearms glittering with silver bracelets that rattled and clacked as she gestured at me.
‘Marhaban, marhaban!’ she exclaimed, and then began chattering loudly at the pair who had brought me to this place. While the three were engaged in what seemed to be a heated discussion, I looked around. Great oil jars, of such a size that they might easily have hidden Ali Baba’s band of thieves, lined two walls; a series of sacks of what I thought would be grain or flour or rice sat next to them; and all around the uneven adobe walls were jars and boxes and tins – vintage caddies of Tetley and Lyons and Chinese gunpowder tea – that, from the look of their brands and packaging, must have originated in the pre-war period, although their gilt and glitter were as bright as new. And now a new sensation assailed me: a dozen different odours, some rank, some pungent. Amongst them I clearly identified animal shit, lanolin, cooking oil, spices and sweat; and over all something entirely unidentifiable and foreign. My head reeled from the pain, the noise and the smells, and the sheer strangeness of it all, waves of nausea washing over me, accompanied by the dancing black stars that presaged loss of consciousness.
The young man knelt beside me and gently raised my head. ‘Nana says I am very impolite and must apologize to you.’ He placed his hand on his heart. ‘I am Taïb’ –Tie-yeeb – ‘and this is my sister Hasna.’ He nodded to the slim, solemn girl who stood behind him. ‘This is the house of my grandmother, Lalla Fatma.’
Recognizing her own name amidst the foreign words, the old woman inclined her head and patted her capacious bosom. ‘Fatma, eyay, Fatma,’ she repeated. They all looked expectantly at me.
For a moment I couldn’t remember my own name. Then, with a Herculean effort, I wrestled the information out of my head. ‘Isabelle Treslove-Fawcett,’ I said, and watched their faces go blank. ‘Isabelle,’ I amended, and finally, giving up, ‘Izzy.’
At that, they all burst out laughing. Grandmother Fatma made a low, buzzing noise, and they laughed even more. My disorientation was complete.
‘I’m sorry,’ Taïb said at last. ‘Izi is the Berber word for housefly: cursed and wretched things.’
Cursed and wretched: lucky me.
Now, Taïb turned to his grandmother and off they went again, chattering away in their guttural language. He gestured out of the door and up at the mountain, then back at me, still in my climbing harness, and the old woman looked with amazement at me. She said something loud and emphatic, hit a palm with a fist, shook her head. The subtext was clear: these modern European women who think they can do what the men do! Climbing a mountain, whatever next? Is it any wonder she has come to grief?
She waved her hands in resignation, then bustled off to supervise whatever Hasna was preparing over the brazier, and a moment later the scent of rose of attar mixed with something strange and bitter added itself to the layers o
f odour in the room. Having thus cleansed the atmosphere, she placed a thick sheepskin on the floor and lowered herself cross-legged on to it with the neat, controlled power of one who has trained her thigh muscles over long decades, and without further ceremony laid hands on my injured ankle. My cry ricocheted off the walls, but no one took any notice. Instead, they stared at my Salomon mountain boot as if it were a truly foreign object. It was, indeed, an old model, a dear favourite of mine, the intricate eyelet-lacings concealed beneath a flap of zipped Goretex. To the untutored eye it must have looked impenetrable, impossible to open: a magic boot. Taïb flourished a knife and made to start cutting it open. ‘No!’ I leant forward, despite the nausea, and showed him where the zip was that would unlock the secret. ‘Mais doucement, s’il vous plaît. Très doucement.’
True to my request, he worked the zip down, opened the lacing as wide as it would go and eased the boot off my foot with infinite care – which still managed to bring acrid tears to my eyes. Then for some reason he passed me the boot. I clasped it to my chest like a talisman.
Lalla Fatma folded her hands around the injured ankle, then with what seemed extraordinary expertise immobilized the joint while interrogating the swelling all around it, her fingers busy and probing. It all hurt, but nowhere near as much as I feared. ‘La bes, la bes, la bes,’ she murmured over and over, as if to reassure me.
Soon I found myself relaxing: which was a mistake. The next thing I knew she had clamped the ankle down with one hand and twisted and pulled the foot hard with the other and there was the most tremendous popping sound, as if someone had discharged a gun. A scarlet sea engulfed me, not pain exactly but something deep-seated and primal as if a flood of adrenalin had been released by the sound, a wild red inundation. And then it was replaced by a wash of white light and someone applauded; people chattered.
When I opened my eyes again I found that the old woman was looking remarkably pleased with herself, as if she had achieved something that added to her great renown. The other women, as if on cue, had come back in and she immediately began to boss them around, clapping her hands to chivvy them along, and the room after its moments of suspended quiet abruptly became noisy and bustling once more. Hasna passed her grandmother a dish containing a muddy green paste and the old woman promptly broke an egg, drank the white and added the yolk to the mixture. She set the dish down beside the brazier to warm and went to the shelves, returning with a clay jar whose lid was stoppered with wax. This she opened, after applying some force to the lid, and at once a powerfully revolting smell exploded into the air: rancid, decayed, indescribably rank. She sniffed it appreciatively, then dug her hand into the jar and came away with a handful of the dark goo within. Then she grinned at me, revealing a serious lack of teeth, and held out her hand. There was no way she was coming anywhere near me with whatever witches’ brew she had there. I jacked myself up against the wall. ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No, no. Water, please; just water.’
Taïb translated, but his grandmother was having none of it. ‘Oho, oho,’ she said over and over. ‘Aman, oho.’ She waved a finger at me. Then, with her surprising, brutish strength, she seized my ankle and set about slathering the foul substance into it with long, firm strokes. After my horror of the smell wore off, I realized this was in fact quite a pleasurable sensation, a deep tissue massage that radiated heat out of the injury and up into my leg, where it proceeded to disperse. Perhaps she really did know what she was doing.
My ankle gave an involuntary galvanic jerk. It moved! Not broken then, after all, I thought with a sudden surge of hope, though it hurt like hell. Now she slathered on a thick layer of the warm green paste, set into this a handful of reeds for splints and bound it with strips torn from Taïb’s proffered white turban. ‘Two weeks,’ he translated for me. ‘You must stay off it for two weeks. You have damaged the ligaments and perhaps the tendon, but the bones are intact.’
This was good news compared to the lost-leg scenario; but not so great for a climbing holiday. I hadn’t even completed one route, I thought bleakly. I grimaced, then remembered the manners my French mother had beaten into me, and thanked her. ‘Tanmirt, Lalla Fatma.’ It was as much of the language as I’d picked up so far but the old woman seemed delighted. She beetled off to the sacks by the wall and came back with something of a deep, maroon red. Taïb suppressed a smile, like a magician allowing his audience a glimpse of the rabbit before making it vanish, poker-faced. I stared at him, but now the old woman was saying something to me and uncurling her fingers to make her offering. My hand reached out from a long habit of politeness, then retracted in horror.
‘Locusts,’ Taïb translated, trying to keep a straight face. ‘Locusts eat only the finest plants and they have great strength in their jumping limbs. If you eat them, their strength will pass into your ankle and it will heal quickly.’
‘I am not going to eat locusts,’ I said, pushing Lalla Fatma’s hand away gently but firmly.
‘But they’ve been dry-fried and coated in sugar. Delicious,’ Taïb went on. ‘We eat them like bonbons. See.’ He popped one into his mouth and crunched down on it and I watched him, aghast, then laughed aloud as he made an appalled face and palmed the pulpy remnants into his hand. ‘OK. They are quite revolting. Nana will be very disappointed in both of us.’
His grandmother looked from him to me, clucked her tongue and left the room. Had I mortally offended her? I had little way of knowing. But a couple of minutes later she was back with something shiny that she began to fasten around my ankle. ‘Baraka,’ she said, as if I should know what this meant. ‘Baraka.’
‘For good luck,’ Taïb translated. ‘To keep the evil eye at bay, and help you heal. Since you won’t eat the locusts, that will make you well.’
I bent forward. There, bound to the bandages with thin leather bindings, was a small square of silver. My heart jumped. Then I unzipped my pocket, took out my amulet and held it out on the palm of my hand for her to see. ‘Look.’
Taïb and his grandmother stared at the giant version of the thing that had been pinned to my ankle and started talking very fast, their heads bowed close together, hers swathed in the bright black and orange silk, his close-cropped black peppered with solitary grey hairs. He was older than I had at first thought.
‘It’s very similar, isn’t it?’ I asked conversationally.
Taïb looked up. ‘They’re from different regions. The small one belongs to our Mauretanian ancestors; this other is from further south, I think. They are both clearly Tuareg in origin. Where did you get it from?’
‘It was a … gift.’
‘An expensive gift. This is a very good piece. Do you know where it came from?’
‘I believe it was found near some grave in the desert,’ I said vaguely, unable now to remember the name of the woman mentioned in the archaeological paper. ‘Someone whose name meant “She of the Tents” or something similar.’
He started. ‘You don’t mean Tin Hinan?’
The name sent a little shock of recognition through me. ‘Yes. That was the name. But it may not have anything to do with her at all.’
Taïb was regarding the amulet very intently. Then he shook his head. ‘It cannot be that ancient: it must be a coincidence,’ he muttered, almost to himself. ‘Would you let me buy it from you?’
Was this some sort of polite code for making a gift of the amulet to the family for their rescue of me? I felt a sudden irrational fury: all they had done was brought me to this old witch with her smelly goo and peasant medicine. The amulet was mine and I would not part with it. I closed my fingers tight around it. ‘It’s not for sale.’
He shrugged. ‘Even if we cannot prove the provenance it would fetch a good price, you know. In Paris. There are a lot of collectors for this sort of artefact: an original inadan piece, not a modern nickel copy.’
I looked at him askance. ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘You mean for a poor backward Berber?’ He gave a short, sharp laugh.
‘The truth is I am only back in the region to visit my sister Hasna here’ – he nodded to the girl, who smiled back – ‘and Nana and the family. The rest of the time I deal in North African antiquities, in Paris, for the most part.’
And suddenly I knew who he was, and felt a fool. The cousin the restaurateur had mentioned. ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You’re that Taïb.’
When it became clear I was not going to explain this odd remark any further he said, ‘Could I take a closer look? It really is a fine example.’
Reluctantly, I made to hand my amulet over to him, but, as I did so, something inside it seemed to shift. I turned it over and stared at it. ‘Oh! I think it’s broken. It must have happened when I fell.’ Abruptly, I felt nauseous. The amulet had saved my life; and now it was broken.
Taïb craned his neck. ‘It’s not broken: look.’
The central boss was out of place, pushed sideways by the impact of the fall. Behind it lay a second level, a hidden compartment. I had forgotten all about my injury now, for inside the hidden compartment nestled a tiny roll of what looked like paper, or was it parchment; or even papyrus, or whatever the ancient peoples wrote upon? With trembling fingers, I tried to winkle it out, but it had been in there a long time: it was recalcitrant.
‘You try.’ I held it out to Taïb, but his grandmother laid a hand on his shoulder and said something very loud and very fast that drew from him a look of consternation.
‘Nana is superstitious. She says it’s best to let the dead rest.’
‘The dead?’
‘It’s just a saying. Not to disturb the past. She’s worried it may contain bad magic, a curse, and she doesn’t want it to pass to her family.’
Let sleeping beasts lie. All of a sudden I remembered the words of my father’s letter. No chance of that! I fiddled determinedly with the narrow opening until the curl of paper fell out into my hand and waited for the weird tingling sensation I had had when I first touched the amulet, but there was nothing. The paper just felt very fragile, very brittle: I was afraid it might disintegrate as soon as I tried to open it, but I had to know what it contained. Carefully, I smoothed it out. What had I been expecting to find inside? Something like a message in a bottle spelling out ‘Help me!’? I stared uncomprehendingly at the arcane glyphs: amongst them a circle with a horizontal line across it, like a no-entry sign; a triangle with a line sticking out of it like a dropped umbrella; a stick-figure man, arms upraised; an X with the top and bottom closed; a symbol like an overturned picnic table; two tiny circles, one on top of the other. The writing seemed to go from side to side and from top to bottom, intricately interwoven as if to ward off interference from an interloper like myself. I looked to Taïb. ‘Do you know what it is: can you read it?’