The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  24

  ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’

  It was the second time the question had been asked: this time it was in French.

  Taïb had his hands in the air. The men who had exited the dusty SUVs were turbaned and veiled, their eyes hidden behind gleaming sunglasses; and they were heavily armed. There were seven of them. The man who had spoken – tall and wiry, his skin weathered to a rich, deep brown – had a semi-automatic rifle levelled at Taïb. Another had his weapon trained on me. I had never seen a gun before: not a real, live, deadly gun held by someone who looked as if he knew exactly how to use it and would have no compunction in putting not one but a dozen rounds in me and leaving me to bleed my life into the sand. Curiously, I felt nothing at all about this prospect, neither fear nor anger: just a sort of detached numbness, as if my brain had slipped into some neutral default gear.

  ‘We just came out to see the desert,’ Taïb told him. ‘My friend is a tourist: English.’

  ‘No one comes out here! You’ve crossed the border illegally: that’s not something a tourist guide would do. Who are you? Show me her passport, and your identity card.’

  His air of easy authority, even without the tangible reinforcement of the weapon, was unquestionable. Taïb complied quickly, rooting out my handbag and handing over his own document. The man turned my bag upside-down: pens, make-up, a hairbrush, notebook, ChapStick, wallet, folded papers, passport – they all tumbled to the ground, sending up little puffs of dust.

  The man bent and extracted the passport, flicked through it and then tucked it into his shirt. He picked up my wallet and opened it up, grinned at his companions. ‘Plenty euros, and some dirham.’ He tossed the wallet to another man, who spirited it away into a pocket. I opened my mouth to complain, then thought better of it. Who were these men? Did policemen steal so blatantly? I had heard many tales about police taking bribes, but had thought that was just baksheesh, petty corruption. These men didn’t look much like police to me, or any other form of officialdom. In fact, they looked a lot more like the guys from whom Taïb had bought his illicit fuel, with their fatigues and desert boots, to say nothing of their studied anonymity.

  A third man was walking towards me. He swaggered from the hip, a loose-limbed confident strut. He walked as if he owned the place – if anyone could own the desert. If he had a weapon I could not see it. ‘What’s all this?’ he gestured towards the scuffed mound of sand topped by the seven flat stones. ‘What have you buried here?’

  I looked at Taïb, not knowing what to say.

  The man prodded the ground with his boot, shifting one of the stones.

  For some reason it was this action that brought my emotions back to life. ‘Don’t!’ I cried out sharply.

  Taïb shouted out in his native tongue and one of the men hit him hard with the butt of his gun so that he fell backwards to the ground, clutching his head. If I had held any hope of these men leaving us alone and going on their way, it disappeared in that moment.

  Now the man who appeared to be their leader walked towards me. I felt my pulse begin to race. ‘What have you hidden here – drugs? Or guns?’ he asked harshly. ‘Tell me or we will shoot your guide.’

  I was so shocked I laughed. ‘Neither!’

  From behind me Taïb shouted, ‘Tell him, Isabelle: tell him about Lallawa!’

  I looked up at the man looming over me, alien and unknowable in his mixture of modern and ancient garb. ‘There’s the body of an old woman in there,’ I said dully. ‘She is called Lallawa, a … relative of my friend Taïb. She wanted to see the desert for one last time before she died; we brought her here, she died and we buried her. That’s all there is to say.’

  The man looked at me for a long time, the glinting black sunglasses rendering his regard inhuman and unsettling. ‘I have never heard such an absurd tale,’ he said contemptuously at last.

  ‘But it’s true!’

  He said something to his comrade, who dropped to his knees and started to remove the stones from the grave.

  ‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ I said angrily.

  No one deigned to respond. I watched as they brought shovels from their vehicles and deliberately and methodically started to open up Lallawa’s grave.

  ‘Stop! Stop it!’ I looked to Taïb; but he was still sitting on the ground by the SUVs with his head between his hands while another man rummaged through the Touareg, tossing blankets, CDs and drums out on to the sand. ‘Can’t you stop them?’

  He raised his head slowly and looked me in the eye. ‘Does it look as if I can stop them?’ Both his demeanour and his tone told of a sort of flat acceptance of a situation that could be changed only by God.

  I thought they would stop when they saw the old woman’s body – but no. It took no time at all for them to find the white-shrouded form. The leader bent down and brushed the sand away from the fabric that covered the head, but even that was not enough proof for him: he pulled the white cotton away to uncover the old woman’s dead face. Seeing, perhaps, the richness of the jewellery she wore, he drew the shroud further down, revealing the bright amulets and the rings and bracelets on her crossed hands; he knelt there for so long, looking at Lallawa’s jewels, that I thought he was about to rob them. But the rest took a step or two back and muttered nervously, touching necklaces hidden beneath their headscarves or making odd warding-off gestures with their hands. With the light fading from the sky, it was an eerie sight. At last, without touching the jewellery, the leader pulled the shroud back over the old woman, then barked something at his men and they knelt and with evident reluctance lifted Lallawa from the resting place she had occupied so briefly and laid her to one side.

  I could not take my eyes off Lallawa’s body, so casually rendered up to the air again, the pristine white shroud now dirtied with sand, the fabric that Taïb had arranged so carefully to give the old woman her dignity now rumpled and desecrated by their manhandling. I had barely had time to get used to the idea of her death, let alone my part in the upsettingly bizarre al fresco burial; but to see her disinterred like this, in a manner at once casual and respectful, broke something inside me. I wept and wept, hunched over my own amulet, choking out great rasping sobs that seemed to come from far down in the depths of me; dark places I had deliberately left undiscovered and unexplored, sealed up with all their horrible, morbid treasures intact like an ancient pyramid. The tears came as loud and violent and unlooked for as a desert flood. I could not seem to stop them, had lost, it seemed, all control over myself at last. I did not even know why I cried. It may have been for the disrespect shown to the old woman’s corpse, for the shock of seeing Taïb clubbed to the ground, for being in the hands of brutal armed men; or it may have been a culmination of the day’s whirlwind of emotions. But a crack in a long-shored-up dam finally gave way once and for all.

  No one took the least notice of me, which was I suppose a blessing. The men were too involved in searching for whatever they thought might still be in the grave: they just kept digging and digging. Taïb had his head bowed as if in prayer; his guard was smoking, the smoke curling in a thin grey wisp up into the sunset sky.

  At last the leader said something and the men set their shovels aside.

  ‘It seems you were telling the truth,’ he said grudgingly to me. His French accent was rough, with a sharp African twang to it that spoke of origins far to the south without the smooth polish of precise Moroccan schooling or family visits to France. ‘Get up and go back to the car.’

  I staggered to my feet. ‘What about Lallawa? Are you just going to leave her lying there for the jackals?’

  ‘We are not savages,’ he said sharply and gave the order for his men to bury the old woman once more.

  I walked slowly back to the Touareg and sat down beside Taïb. The guard who stood over him watched me through slitted eyes. He couldn’t have been more than twenty: his skin was fine, almost downy, though there was a deep crease between his brows and another at the corner
of his mouth; when he drew deeply on his cigarette I watched his face settle into these lines like a man settling into a couch. He saw me looking at him, and drew his turban up over his mouth again as if I had caught him doing something shameful.

  Taïb took my hand in his, and found the amulet nestled there. I saw him frown. ‘If I were you, I’d put that on and cover it up,’ he said softly, and I did as he suggested. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he added.

  ‘Who are they? What do they want with us?’

  He gave a barely imperceptible shrug. ‘Trabandistes – smugglers. Maybe something more than that. I imagine we will find that out soon enough.’ For a man who had been clubbed over the head with a gun butt he looked remarkably relaxed, I thought, though there was a graze and a swelling on his forehead as if he were about to start growing a horn out of it. I touched it gently. ‘Are you OK?’

  He nodded. ‘Alhamdulillah.’ He ran his hand down his face, touching his fingers to his lips and then on down to his chest.

  The young man with the gun said softly, ‘Salama.’

  I didn’t know what to make of this at all. It should have served to make me feel ever more the outsider, the European intruder into an entirely North African drama, but somehow I found the exchange oddly comforting. I turned my head to watch the other men reinterring poor Lallawa and was surprised to see that they were doing so with considerable care, flattening out the bed of the grave with their shovels, smoothing the sand down with their hands, then handling the body as if the old woman still breathed. It was the leader himself who arranged the folds of cotton much as Taïb had done, so that the shroud lay uncreased and taut around Lallawa’s form, all the loose edges tucked firmly beneath the corpse. I saw him bow his head and touch his forehead, then his heart. The murmur of words drifted to me on a sudden cool breeze that suddenly blew up off the sands, stirring the men’s scarves, and then they filled in the grave and replaced the stones, leaving Lallawa buried better and deeper than Taïb and I had been able to manage. For several moments they all stood around the grave silently as if in thought or prayer, and I found myself thinking what a strangely dignified honour guard they made and that maybe, after all, Lallawa would not have resented the reburial quite as much as I had imagined she might.

  It was almost dark by the time the men turned to walk back to the cars. As they approached, Taïb got to his feet and I noticed with some surprise that in the intervening minutes he had rewound his turban so that it covered most of his face, leaving only his eyes visible. The trabandiste leader regarded him quizzically, then said something that made the other men laugh. Taïb stood straighter and responded, his attitude suggesting that he was defending himself. More words were spoken: they seemed less aggressive. I noticed that the guns were all slung over the men’s backs and that no weapons were trained on us. Were they going to let us go? I could hardly breathe for fear of disturbing whatever delicate balance might be in the air. Then someone said something and Taïb responded angrily, his words emerging in a shout. I put a hand on his arm, thinking perhaps to quiet him, but he shook it off as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked fearfully. ‘What are they saying?’

  It wasn’t Taïb that answered me but the trabandiste. ‘You will come with us.’

  ‘Come with you where?’

  ‘To our camp.’

  ‘But why? Can’t you just let us go? Who are you, anyway?’

  Taïb grimaced at me, a clear indication to shut up.

  The trabandiste’s gaze was enigmatic, as deep and serene as a pool untouched by light. ‘Who we are does not concern you. Who you are concerns us much more, Miss Isabelle Treslove-Fawcett.’ The way he said it made the words foreign and barely recognizable. ‘Get in the car.’ He opened the back door of the Touareg.

  I hesitated. ‘Where is my passport?’ It was a ridiculous thing to say: very British and entirely inadequate to the situation. But no one laughed.

  The trabandiste tapped his shirt pocket. Then he gestured to Taïb and barked out a demand, and without a word Taïb surrendered the vehicle’s keys to him. ‘Get in the car, Izzy,’ he said quietly. ‘There really is no choice.’

  25

  Four months had passed since the attack on the encampment. Mariata remembered little of the journey from the Adagh to Imteghren: she hardly noticed anything, so focused was she on the pain that burned inside her. As they crossed the Vallée de l’Azaouagh, entered the Tamesna and headed north, she would not eat, but turned her head away from food. She lay at night on a blanket on the ground with her eyes open, staring at the stars, a small scrap of dried, rusty indigo cloth clutched against her heart. Her brothers found her in the same attitude in the mornings, and it made them afraid. They invoked charms against the evil eye, when they thought their father could not see them and cuff them for it. ‘If your stepmother catches you acting like an ignorant baggara, she’ll throw us all out of the house. We are going to be modern people now, so you’d better start getting used to it.’

  (But as they’d crossed the Great Erg and a sandstorm threatened to swallow them, they’d heard him murmuring all manner of charms to appease the djenoun.)

  Mariata did not make a good impression on her new family. Wan and limp, with her black eyes as dull as spent coals, she looked as if she might at any moment pass through death’s door, and in truth she would have welcomed it. Everything that made her Mariata had been taken out of her: she went through her days as a living corpse, mourning for Amastan, seeking respite in her dreams.

  ‘What are we going to do with her, Ousman?’ his new wife nagged him. ‘You said she would be a help to me around the house and look after Mama Erquia, but all she does is sit in the courtyard with her face turned to the wall: I can’t get her to come into the house. She seems to be afraid of the stairs. Can you believe such nonsense?! Can you imagine how hard it will be for me to find her a good husband if word goes around that she is mad and sickly into the bargain?’

  ‘I’ve told you before, my daughter is of noble blood: she’s a princess of the Kel Taitok. I didn’t bring her here to be married off but to be safe.’

  Aicha gave him a sardonic look, one elegantly pencilled eyebrow raised. She was still getting used to this new husband; she did not know how far she could push him yet. But she would have his measure in time.

  When he was out at work, setting up the new shop with his sons and her father, Aicha, her grandmother Mama Erquia and her younger sister Hafida would stand over Mariata in the courtyard and torment her, princess or not.

  ‘Get up, you lazy peasant!’ the grandmother would cry, eliciting no response.

  ‘She’s like one of those flea-bitten mutts that lie around in the market square, sleeping the day away,’ Aicha said, curling her lip.

  ‘The ones they round up from time to time and poison around the back of the abattoir to stop the place being overrun with their hideous offspring,’ agreed Hafida. Having never before in her life had the luxury of another human being to bully, she threw her discarded date stones at the seated form and laughed when they stuck to the dusty blue of Mariata’s robe.

  ‘I wish someone would take this one around the back of the abattoir. Look at her, the filthy creature, littering up my courtyard!’ Mama Erquia complained. She had a wizened brown face, withered and toothless, resembling nothing so much as one of the elderly apes kept caged in the market square. ‘Nomads: barbarians, the lot of them!’

  ‘But some of the nomad men are very fine,’ Hafida demurred, ‘very noble and dramatic, all covered up in their indigo veils.’ She was jealous of her sister, for Ousman was very handsome and outlandish, with his Tuareg regalia and his desert manners, and her own fiancé was fat and boorish and twice her age.

  ‘It’s true: I have few complaints about Ousman,’ said Aicha. ‘He has quaint ways, and he treats me like a queen. He could wash more often, I suppose. But the women! They walk around the town as brazen as you like with their hair out on show for every man and his son to see, and wi
th the boldest look in their eyes. I’ve even seen them accost men and talk to them openly in the streets!’

  ‘They are no better than bitches on heat,’ Mama Erquia spat. ‘They’ll lift up their skirts in an alley for anyone. And the men run after them with their cocks up like dogs. They have no morals whatsoever. I have not seen a single one of them at the mosque.’

  ‘That will change with this one, I can assure you,’ Aicha told her, eyeing Mariata significantly. ‘I have asked Lalla Zohra to visit next week.’

  ‘The ma’allema?’ Hafida’s eyes were round with awe.

  ‘The girl is in need of instruction. She has to be taught to behave like a proper young woman if she is not to bring shame upon us all.’

  Lalla Zohra was an enormous besom of a woman, dressed from top to toe in black. She arrived with her copy of the Qur’an in her right hand; in her left was the long switch that she used to rap the hands of girls who did not pay due attention to their lessons, be they embroidery, scripture or moral training. The girls of Imteghren bore the marks of her chastisement – as pale moon-shaped cicatrices on the backs of their hands, or invisibly, as hard little patches of scar-tissue in the soul.

  Residual fear of the ma’allema caused Hafida to invent an errand she simply had to run on the other side of town, leaving Aicha alone, and in a worse mood than usual. Nor was her mood set to improve.