The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  ‘Ah,’ said Azaz, cheered up by this mention no end, ‘Lallawa: she makes the best m’smen in the world!’

  Lallawa. It was the name I had heard over and over in my dreams. Something cold brushed against my heart.

  But Lallawa did not answer when we knocked at her door. Taïb peered through her window, calling her name loudly. ‘She’s getting very deaf,’ he confided to me, ‘and she sleeps a lot now.’ But there was still no response.

  We walked around the back of her little mudbrick house, washed with the same terracotta shade as its neighbours, and found there an empty enclosure. There were chicken feathers and dried goat shit in the dust; but no sign of either creature apart from the musty smell that hung in the heavy afternoon air.

  Azaz frowned and said something to Taïb, who shook his head. ‘Her animals are gone; and she was so proud of them. Something must be very wrong. I’ll go and find Habiba. She’ll know.’

  ‘And who is Habiba?’

  Did I imagine it, or did he look uncomfortable?

  ‘She is a … cousin,’ he said at last. ‘A cousin to me, and to Azaz. Lallawa used to live with Habiba’s family.’

  Back down the track we drove, back into the deserted town, past the civic buildings bearing their subversive graffiti. Just off the square we drew up in the shade of a wall painted with a bright mural mixing Disney cartoon characters, famous footballers and elegant swirls of Arabic writing.

  ‘Habiba teaches here,’ Taïb explained as we all got out of the car again. The late afternoon sun was like a hammer on the back of my head, and it occurred to me belatedly that I’d eaten and more importantly drunk nothing for hours. He came to my side and without a word or permission put an arm around my waist to help me walk. I opened my mouth to protest, thought better of it and shut it again. He was only trying to help, and the shade beckoned across the schoolyard; but even so I felt uncomfortably aware of his proximity, of the bump of his hip against mine, of the sinewy muscles I could feel moving in his shoulders; the heat of him through his cotton robe.

  At the doorway to the school – a small prefabricated building, its entrance reached by a set of rickety wooden steps – Azaz went ahead of us. He disappeared into the darkness inside and a moment later I heard the usual staccato burst of Berber, followed by a lot of high-pitched shouting and laughter. Taïb helped me up the steps and into the welcome shadow within.

  Despite the late hour, thirty or forty children of all possible ages were crammed inside the single room. They grinned away like mad at the sight of a hopping tourist, their teeth startlingly white in the gloom. Some of the younger ones plastered their fingers over their mouths and gazed at me over the top in sheer delight; others shouted out words I had no way of understanding, and laughed and laughed. At last their teacher, a thin man with large, earnest eyes and a dusty brown robe like a mendicant priest, motioned for them to calm down and be quiet, and they subsided into some kind of order. Then he turned to Taïb and Azaz, and the three of them entered into an intense and lively discussion.

  I looked around. As my eyes got used to the light it occurred to me how different all the children were from one another. In Tafraout, only a couple of hours’ drive away, the children all looked much the same: with skin of a milky coffee colour and shining black hair. Here, every shade under the sun was represented, except for the palest European white. One girl, sloe-eyed and as pretty as an Arab princess in her pastel headscarf and bead earrings, had skin as pale as mine in winter; her neighbour was a deep, rich ebony, with a round ball of a head, her hair braided into intricate cornrows. Next to her was a little boy of maybe six, almost half her size and age, with the sharp cheekbones and fine features of the local Berbers; next to him an elfin creature of indeterminate gender sporting a head entirely shaved except for a single long braid sprouting from the crown of its head. A couple wore T-shirts that looked as if they belonged to someone else, or several someone elses, but most wore traditional robes in pale blue and mustard-yellow.

  The classroom was spotless, which was just as well, since everyone was sitting on the floor. All around the walls were examples of the children’s handiwork: the same sketchy houses and smiling suns and stick figures you’d find in any school anywhere in the world, displayed between swatches of embroidery and little hand-woven rugs bearing the same simple geometric patterns as those I’d seen fading their lives away in the Tafraout market.

  Someone tugged at my sleeve. I looked down to find a little girl with missing front teeth grinning up at me. ‘Asseyez-vous, madame!’ she insisted, pulling me towards a cushion placed ceremonially on the floor at the front of the class.

  I arranged myself awkwardly, and as soon as I was settled the children were upon me like locusts, giggling and babbling and demanding my attention, as if being down on their level gave them licence to treat me as one of their own. One of them plonked herself squarely in my lap.

  ‘Bonjour!’ she trilled, gazing up at me with huge black eyes.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I returned uncertainly. I could not remember the last time I had touched a child, let alone had one fall in my lap with such happy confidence. ‘What’s your name?’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘Voyez!’ she demanded, thrusting her notebook under my nose. Written across the page in great wobbly biro lines were five simple icons: small circle, vertical line, large circle with a dot in the middle, small circle, large circle bisected by a vertical line. ‘Mon nom!’ she declared in triumph. ‘Hasna.’

  I looked at Taïb, startled. ‘She’s written her name? In Tifinagh?’

  He grinned proudly. ‘Yes, Habiba is not here and in her place Abdelkader has been teaching them, just for today. It is the greatest good luck: he is a pioneer of Berber studies. Why don’t you show him your amulet?’

  Now that it came to it, I found that I really wasn’t sure I wanted the mystery my amulet contained to be revealed. What if the inscription was as simple as a name, written by some long-dead man or woman, a name with no relevance to any living person any more, and certainly with no relevance to me? What if it contained the ancient curse Taïb’s grandmother believed it might hold? My heart began to beat faster, then faster still. But with all eyes expectantly on me and having come all this way for this express purpose, it seemed ridiculously contrary to refuse. I took the amulet out of my handbag and handed it to Taïb, who thumbed the central boss carefully to one side and shook the roll of paper out into his hand. Abdelkader took it and smoothed it out, the vertical line between his eyebrows becoming increasingly deeply furrowed as he stared at the complex inscription.

  An unaccustomed silence engulfed the schoolroom as if somehow even the children realized an event of some significance was taking place, that a little bit of magic was about to reveal itself in front of their eyes, if they were quiet, very quiet. No one moved; it almost seemed that no one breathed.

  After a while, the teacher turned the little square of paper around and scrutinized it that way. He took it to the window and held it up to the light; returned to the front of the classroom and paced up and down. The children watched him, wide-eyed and expectant. My palms began to itch and sweat the same way they did when I contemplated a hard route. At last he gave a long and heartfelt sigh. ‘This is well beyond my limited abilities with the Tifinagh,’ he told me in his precise French. ‘I can make out a number of the characters, of course; but the letter forms do vary significantly across the wide region where Tifinagh has been used, which is after all half a continent! Also, I have to say that I cannot work out which way around it should be read – no, no, don’t laugh: it is not such a simple matter. The writing in it is crosshatched and I’m not sure which way to start to read it. Right to left is more common; but the older inscriptions may use a bottom to top orientation. The language, after all, originated as a way of writing upon rock, so to start from the ground upward makes a lot of sense. And of course the Tuareg use the most ancient version of the language of all, and the purest: it leaves the vowels i
nferred. Since then the forms have deviated both geographically and linguistically. And I’m afraid, as such, this is rather beyond my understanding.’ He spread his hands apologetically.

  Taïb said something to him in their own language, and Abdelkader scratched his ear and nodded, then gestured again at the paper, pointing something out; and then they both looked at the amulet. And then Azaz asked something and they all spoke loudly together at the same time. How they could understand one another I couldn’t imagine, but they seemed to be communicating together just fine.

  By now the children were getting restless, and so was I. ‘What?’ I asked peremptorily. ‘What are you talking about?’ It was my amulet, after all.

  Taïb turned to me. ‘Sorry. Abdelkader is of the opinion that this is old, and most certainly Tuareg: he says there are none of the modern additions to the alphabet, the modifiers that have come into use to make up for those sounds and characters that the original alphabet does not allow for. Vowels, for example: older forms of Tifinagh rarely mark the vowels that we are used to including now—adays. It’s all quite complicated …’ He tailed off as if the subject was simply too difficult for a mere woman to get her head around. I felt myself bristle, and almost as if he intuited this he raised his hands defensively and added, ‘He also says that Habiba is with Lallawa, who is very ill. All the women in the village are taking turns to look after her. We should at least pay our respects since we are here.’

  Habiba’s family home was bland and modest, two storeys of rendered breeze-block with small windows covered by dusty iron grilles and a doorway surrounded by garish factory-made tiles. The door was open: Taïb walked right in, calling out as he entered.

  A woman came running out of a room, drawing a veil over her head. As she saw who her first visitor was, her anxious expression changed to one of utmost delight. Taïb strode forward and kissed her four times on the cheek, an effusive greeting, intimate and warm, containing little of the usual reserve I had thought characterized relations between men and women in this country. I watched as she held his hands still between her own as they talked, their heads close together, and felt like a voyeur.

  Then she looked past his shoulder and saw me and for a moment her eyes narrowed.

  When Taïb turned back to us, his face was grave. ‘Lallawa is very sick, but Habiba says that we must come in and see her.’ His tone implied that it might be the last chance to do so.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll wait outside,’ I said. Habiba’s glance had made me feel like an outsider intruding into a private world of sickness and pain. But Taïb was having none of it. As Azaz also greeted his cousin, rather less intimately, it seemed to me, Taïb ushered me into the living room. In there, sitting on the low couches that lined three walls of the gloomy little room, were half a dozen women in black robes and head-coverings, and between them an unmoving figure lay on a pallet on the floor. They looked like crows gathered around a corpse, but as soon as they saw Taïb and Azaz the sombre mood changed and suddenly they were all on their feet, chattering. Kisses all round and the pressing of hands; then Taïb knelt by the prone figure. I craned my neck. For a moment, I thought she was dead, then a hand rose slowly and patted his face. Azaz knelt too and the old woman turned her face first to one, then the other, and smiled gummily at them. Her skin was the colour of spent charcoal, as if most of the life had already gone out of it. The sclera of her eyes was a bright, unhealthy yellow, and the pupils were milky with cataracts. At last Azaz gestured for me to come forward and I heard my name as Taïb explained to her who I was. I knelt awkwardly. ‘Salaam,’ I said, putting to use what I had absorbed from the glossary in the back of the guidebook, and extended my hand. Her fingers grazed my palm as lightly as a butterfly’s wings, the touch frail and papery. ‘Salaam aleikum, Lallawa.’

  The filmy eyes fixed on me with fierce attention and her fingers closed around mine like claws. I tried to pull away, but she held on, her grip surprisingly strong for one so ill. Her lips formed a shape, but the sound that came out seemed more like a gurgle than a word.

  ‘Show her the amulet,’ Taïb urged.

  ‘Are you sure? She seems very ill and I don’t feel right bothering her with it.’

  ‘No, please.’ Habiba appeared beside Taïb, resting a hand on his shoulder in a gesture that seemed at once relaxed and proprietary. ‘It will remind her of the good life she has lived. It will delight her, really.’

  I took out the amulet, and the claw-like hand fumbled for mine and brought the amulet so close to her face that her breath misted the silver. Then she pressed it to her lips with a sigh. When she laid her head back down on the pillow, one corner of her mouth turned up while the other lay lax, and I realized belatedly that she must have suffered a stroke. She made an indistinct sound; frowned and tried again. ‘A … daa.’

  ‘Adagh?’ Taïb asked and she nodded. He opened the compartment and took out the piece of paper, then handed the amulet back to me, carefully unfurled the paper and held it out.

  Habiba shook her head. ‘She won’t be able to make it out: she’s almost blind now.’

  But the old woman seemed determined. We watched as she narrowed her eyes and strained, her head coming up off the pillow as if the effort of trying to engage with the inscription was a physical fight. She touched the marks and mumbled. Taïb leant closer so that the paper was barely an inch away from her face. I could see the frustration in her eyes as she tried and failed to focus; and at last a fat tear squeezed out of one eye and ran in a deep runnel down the side of her nose.

  ‘Stop,’ I said softly. ‘You’re upsetting her.’

  Taïb patted the old woman gently on the cheek and sat back on his heels. ‘Tanmirt, Lallawa. Tanmirt.’

  He rolled the parchment up and replaced it as the amulet sat in the palm of my hand. His fingers brushed my own and I felt a sudden charge of electricity run up my arm. Bemused by this sensation, I was slow to respond to Habiba as she touched my shoulder. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

  I followed her out of the room, past the black-clad women who watched me curiously with their bright black eyes, down a long corridor where doorways gave off into other small, dark rooms, and at last we emerged into a small square courtyard roofed unevenly with reeds through which the sun slatted down in sharp white contrast to the dark shadows. In the middle of the courtyard sat a dry fountain. Habiba gestured me towards this, then flicked a switch on the wall and with a rumble a pump started up and a trickle of water began to fill the conduit that ran to the fountain.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve travelled so far for no good reason. Her sight’s been failing for a couple of months now and her latest attack seems to have made it worse. Wash your hands and your amulet in there,’ she said. ‘The running water will appease the spirits.’

  Spirits? Such superstition. But I hobbled over and did as she suggested, washing my hands, then rubbing my wet fingers across the etched silver and glass, making sure no water got into the hidden compartment. Something about the ritual of this act was obscurely comforting; although maybe it was just the silky-cold feeling of the water on my hands on such a hot day after the gloomy confines of the sickroom. Habiba passed me a towel and I dried my hands and the amulet carefully.

  ‘It is a beautiful thing,’ she said. ‘Lallawa has pieces like this. I remember when she lived with us when I was a very small child, and I found her jewellery hidden beneath her sleeping mat and took it all out and put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I looked like a Tuareg princess, but she caught me and smacked me.’ She gave me a smile that transformed her face. ‘I screamed and ran to Mother to complain; but she said Lallawa was right to smack me because every woman’s property is her own, no matter how low her estate. She is very old, Lallawa; no one knows how old, least of all Lallawa herself. She has had a very long life, and a good life, too, considering what happened to her. She really loved the desert. Before her latest stroke I promised her she would see it one more time –’ Her voice hitched and
I realized that she was fighting tears, and abruptly found my own eyes pricking. ‘I promised she would take the salt road one more time before she died. But, as you see, she is too ill now.’

  ‘The salt road?’

  ‘The desert tracks to the salt mines in the depths of the Sahara, the routes the traders took with their caravans of camels. The roads to and from the markets at which slaves were bought and sold, exchanged for salt and other goods. The Tuareg often use the term to mean “the road of life”, or even “the road of death”. And sometimes it is used to mean all those things at once. I feel bad that I cannot do this one last thing for her; it will be harder for her to die in peace. But your amulet has brought a little of the desert to her.’

  I felt something wet upon my face and a moment later realized the tears I had felt pricking my eyes were running down my cheeks. I could not remember the last time I had cried: I had come to despise such sentimentality. Part of me felt infuriated by myself; but another part – some new aspect I had developed, or perhaps one that had been long-since buried – was unashamed.

  Habiba, though, turned away from me to gather mint from an overflowing tub outside the kitchen door. Then she beckoned me inside and I watched as she set about making tea, boiling water over a single butane ring, warming the silver pot, adding a handful of gunpowder tea, a generous handful of the fresh mint and three huge bars of sugar. ‘My God, is that the amount of sugar that goes into every pot of mint tea?’ I thought of all the glasses of this stuff I had drunk since arriving in Morocco, and shuddered.

  She laughed. ‘I was going easy on you: you Europeans don’t like too much sugar – I have noticed how even Taïb’s tastes have changed since he went away to Paris.’

  There was a certain sharpness to her tone as she said this, and I found myself wondering what it meant, or whether I had imagined it. ‘Do all the young men go away? To work, I mean.’

  ‘It’s hard to make a living in the area. You’ve seen it: it’s poor and dry, and getting poorer and drier by the day. There’s no work here, no money, no luxuries. So, yes, the young men – and often the young women nowadays – go away to get an education and a job and send money home to the ones left at home. It’s how we do things in Morocco.’