The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  ‘Salaam aleikum.’ The ma’allema waited but Mariata made no response. She looked back at Aicha. ‘Can she not speak?’

  ‘Not in any civilized manner,’ Aicha said, and folded her lips primly.

  The ma’allema crossed the courtyard. ‘Now then, Mariata, my name is Lalla Zohra and I am here to bring you the words of the Prophet and the light of Allah, so that you may make your peace with him and with your family and behave as you should. Peace be with you.’

  The black eyes lifted and glared at the old woman fiercely, full of defiance and despair.

  The ma’allema had seen everything in her long life: she was not to be put off by such a show of silent insolence. ‘When your elders and betters greet you, my girl, you had best remember your manners,’ she said sternly. ‘Let’s try again. Salaam aleikum, Mariata. Come along, after me: wahai aleikum es salaam.’ Again she waited, but the returning silence was freighted with hostility.

  There was a sudden blur of movement and a whistling sound; then the switch landed with an audible snap. Mariata made a sound in the back of her throat like a wolf at bay. Like a wolf, she bared her teeth at the ma’allema.

  Lalla Zohra grabbed hold of Mariata’s hand and turned it towards Aicha. ‘Have you seen the state of her? Shame on you, Aicha Saari. Have you and your sister not impressed on her the need for cleanliness in a proper Muslim house?’

  ‘How can I get her clean? She will not even enter the house,’ Aicha said crossly. ‘She has only ever lived in tents and is afraid of the roof, and of the stairs.’

  ‘Just because someone behaves like a savage does not mean you should allow them to continue to do so. It is your responsibility – as a good Muslim woman and as this poor girl’s new mother – to educate her in the ways of polite, God-fearing folk.’

  ‘Mother! She is barely younger than my sister! I say if she is determined to live like a beast, I shall treat her as such.’

  The ma’allema’s eyes flashed. She stood foursquare with her hands on her capacious hips. ‘The Prophet teaches that whoever is kind to the creatures of God is kind unto himself; and that a good deed done to a beast is as good as doing good to a human being; while an act of cruelty to a beast is as bad as an act of cruelty to a human being. I remember teaching you these hadiths myself. But, quite apart from that, I beat into all my students the importance of cleanliness. Taharah, Aicha. Taharah! Shame on you. Allah loves those who turn to Him constantly and He loves those who keep themselves pure and clean. How could you possibly let her get into such a filthy condition? Now, go and fetch towels and scrubbing cloths and soap. We are going to take her to the hammam!’

  Mariata walked sullenly between her two captors from the house to the hammam, relieved at least to be outside. Imteghren was an uninspiring town, drab and dusty. Sand filled its streets and clogged the air. Impossible to believe now that once it had formed part of the great medieval trading town of Sijilmassa, into whose markets ebony, ivory, spices, oils, perfumes, slaves and all the golden treasures of the Songhai Empire had flowed on their way to Marrakech, Meknes and Fez, to the ports of the Mediterranean and the kingdoms of the north. Now, the entire place smelt of goat shit, cooking oil and diesel fumes. Mariata stared at the unfamiliar vehicles grinding their way through the crowded roads with their belching black fumes and grumbling engines and clutched her amulet. Scrawny sheep and goats wandered at will between piles of kitchen waste on the street corners; feral dogs lay in heaps in the shade; wild cats slipped out of the shadows when the dogs weren’t looking and snatched scraps from the bins. There were people everywhere: hugely fat women in enveloping robes and veils, swathed from head to toe despite the sweltering heat; thin men in striped robes and yellow sandals, their faces naked to view. To Mariata, they looked stupid and weak, more like boys than grown men. Even the men who had grown beards to cover their faces looked bizarre to her, as if they had been surprised halfway through eating a black sheep. She stared at the men insolently, and they gazed back and smiled with their big, wet mouths and greedy eyes, until she turned her face away, shuddering.

  The ancient fortress walls that surrounded the town were pitted with shot from bygone wars, but Mariata could not imagine why anyone would want to take the town or, indeed, defend it. Let the desert swallow it, she thought. Let the desert swallow them all. She did not want to live.

  The bathhouse was in the middle of the town, past the souq and the artisan stalls, in the shadow of the tall minaret of the central mosque.

  ‘Off with your clothes!’ Lalla Zohra commanded her as soon as they entered the changing room. ‘Every stitch – come along.’

  Mariata folded her arms and glared. Well versed in all manner of defiant behaviour, the ma’allema beckoned for the bathhouse manager to join her. If Lalla Zohra was a big woman, Khadija Chafni was huge: twice as wide in hip and chest, her wiry hair confined under a coloured cloth and every tooth in her head jutting at a different angle. Taking the desert girl by surprise, they managed to flip the fringed leather bag Tana had made for Mariata over her head, and together wrestled off her robe while Aicha stood aside and watched with a strange little half-smile on her face. Removing the amulet was more of a struggle. By the time they managed to take it from her all three were red and sweating.

  ‘Little heathen!’ Lalla Zohra declared, examining a long rip in her djellaba.

  Aicha, unscathed, swung the talisman from its beaded string. Even in the gloom of the changing room, the red carnelian in the amulet winked with a wicked light. ‘I wonder how much Ali would give me for this,’ she mused. ‘It’s solid silver, I do believe.’

  Zohra wagged a finger. ‘The necklace belongs to the girl, for all her beastly behaviour. And you know what the Holy Qur’an has to say about stealing and thieves.’

  Aicha pouted; then she stashed the jewel in the pocket of her own robe along with her own jewellery, ‘to keep it safe’. She calmly removed the robe and hung it on her usual peg, while Zohra and Khadija Chafni each took turns to hold Mariata by the arms while the other disrobed. Mariata stared at the three of them in disbelief. She had never seen a woman wholly naked before.

  ‘Come with me, darling girl,’ said Khadija Chafni. ‘We’ll get you so clean it’ll be like having a whole new skin.’ She turned to Zohra. ‘My, but this one smells bad: where did you find her, sleeping in the funduq with the camels?’

  ‘Close enough. She’s from one of the desert tribes,’ Aicha said, sneering. ‘A Tuareg princess, or so they say.’

  Khadija shook her head and clicked her odd teeth. ‘Ah, these desert girls. They never wash: some are even afraid of water. They say there are djenoun in the buckets, can you imagine? The noise they make, it’s terrible. Anyone would think it was a torture to be clean, rather than a pleasure.’

  ‘And a duty,’ Lalla Zohra reminded sternly. ‘A sacred duty.’

  They dragged her, stiff-limbed and resisting, into the hot room. There, the noise was raucous, trapped by the shining tiles and stone floor. Mariata stared about her, horrified. Everywhere she looked she glimpsed bare flesh, gleaming with sweat and water, black hair running in rivers down backs and breasts. It was strange to realize that these must be the same women she saw in the town, swathed from top to toe, some with only their eyes visible, who were now brazenly naked in each other’s company, blatantly displaying even their most private parts, which she could not help but notice had been stripped of every body-hair. Amongst her own people, although the women walked bare-headed and wore no veil, such unreserved immodesty would be regarded as scandalous.

  She was still gaping when Aicha suddenly upended a bucket of steaming water over her head. Gulping for air, Mariata slapped at her and then screamed in horror with all the force of her lungs. As the hammam manager began to apply the thick black soap that had been rendered down from olive pulp and clay, she batted away the woman’s huge, invasive hands.

  ‘Stop behaving like a child!’ Lalla Zohra growled, imprisoning Mariata’s wrists.

  ‘I’m
a grown woman: leave me alone!’ Mariata’s eyes burned with outrage.

  It was the first thing any of them had heard her say. For a moment, amazed, they relented in their attentions. Then Lalla Zohra said, ‘If you want us to treat you like an adult, you must behave as one. Here, take this and clean yourself. Thoroughly.’ She passed Mariata a handful of soap.

  Mariata rubbed the black stuff dubiously on to one arm. It felt disgusting, as slippery as frogspawn. How could something so black and foul possibly make you clean? It defied all logic.

  ‘Now rub hard!’ Zohra gave her a square of cloth formed of knotted string and watched as Mariata swept it gingerly over the soaped surfaces. ‘Harder!’

  ‘Like this.’ Khadija placed her vast hand over Mariata’s and applied pressure, rubbing up and down till the skin felt raw. ‘You see?’ she beamed. ‘The dirt is coming off. Look!’ She turned and beckoned the women of Imteghren. ‘Look! Have you ever seen such filth? See, it is coming off in great rolls of black. Underneath it the child will be as white as an Arab!’

  They all laughed and peered, happy at last for their curiosity to be licensed.

  Mariata glared at them. ‘What are you gawping at? Don’t look at me: look at yourselves, all soft and pale and fat as grubs!’ She prodded one woman with a considerable belly who had got too close, then bared her teeth at them all and laughed as they drew back into the steam. ‘What, afraid I may bite you? Isn’t that what the desert people do, the Kel Asuf? Yes, I am one of the People of the Wilderness now, and proud of it!’ And with that, she ran from the steam room, grabbed Aicha’s robe, her own robe and the fringed bag, and without bothering to dry herself dressed and fled the hammam at a run, her long black braids slapping like wet eels down her back.

  It was Ousman who found her as the sun dipped, on the road south, heading for Erfoud and the Sahara beyond. Drawing up beside her camel in a battered jeep, he wound down the dusty window. ‘What are you thinking of?’

  ‘I will not stay amongst these people.’

  ‘And where did you think you were going?’

  ‘Into the desert.’

  ‘Without supplies?’

  ‘I have water,’ she said mulishly, indicating an ancient goatskin gerber slung across her back. ‘And food.’ A sack of stale bread. ‘Besides’ – she tossed her head and her silver amulet flashed in the failing light – ‘I do not care any more whether I live or die; but, whichever it is to be, it will not be in this disgusting place.’

  Ousman got out of the vehicle and walked slowly around the camel. It was a Mauretanian, big and brown and mangy-looking. He punched its flaccid hump and felt its ribs; then caught hold of its halter and expertly manipulated its lip until its vast and filthy teeth were exposed. The camel bellowed its disapproval at this undignified treatment. Ousman looked it in the eye and it subsided; but when he moved around its shoulder to examine the hide on the back of its neck, its head swung round menacingly, lips curled, to bite. Without looking, Ousman reached back and swiped it smartly across the muzzle, making it gurgle in surprise. He looked up at Mariata, shaking his head. ‘Daughter, if you will run away into the desert, at least do so on an animal that does not bring shame to the reputation of the People of the Veil. Its teeth are rotten, its fat-stores diminished, its neck worn bald by riding. It has to be nine years old if it’s a day. Who sold you this walking bone-bag?’

  Mariata eyed him almost as sullenly as the camel. ‘The one-eyed man.’

  Ousman shook his head. ‘That charlatan! Everyone knows that any camel left at the end of the market is fit only for the pot. What did you give him for it?’

  She would not say. Ousman thwacked the beast till it went to its knees, then manhandled his daughter, kicking and shouting, into the jeep. He tied the camel’s halter to the back bumper and drove slowly, very slowly, back to Imteghren with the windows up so that Mariata could not escape.

  At the house Mariata was confined against her will in a room with an iron grille across its single small window. She heard the key turn in the lock; and running to look out saw her father leave the house with a purposeful stride and the camel in tow. He did not return until the muezzin called the faithful to fifth prayer, without the camel.

  Hushed conversation turned to raised voices in the next room. Mariata pressed her ear to the door.

  ‘That hussy!’ Aicha’s voice was shrill and indignant. ‘She did it to spite me. That jewellery was your wedding gift to me, and she knew it. And she left me naked but for my underthings at the hammam. The shame of it! I was forced to borrow Khadija Chafni’s djellaba, and now I will owe that great sow a favour that she will take great pleasure in extracting. Ugh. The little bitch, she will rue the day …’

  Ousman’s response was low and even-tempered, too low for Mariata to catch. Even so, she smiled, for the first time since Amastan had died.

  26

  For stealing her stepmother’s jewellery, only half of which Ousman had managed to get back from the one-eyed camel trader, Mariata was punished in small ways each and every day. Lalla Zohra came in the mornings to read the Qur’an at her; but after initial resistance Mariata surprised herself by enjoying the stories it contained. Some even made her think about things other than the massacre at the village and the void of loneliness inside her. Almost as if Aicha intuited that this punishment was not sufficiently painful to Mariata, she sent chores at her thick and fast. Mariata was to clean and sweep and wash every item of clothing and every piece of fabric in the house until her knuckles were raw and red and her back ached to the marrow. She washed every item of clothing in the house, or so it seemed: garments that had never before seen the light of day. When she had done that, Aicha brought her armfuls of rugs and blankets, couch covers and cushions, dishrags and dusters and teacloths, and Mariata washed and beat them all, carrying out her tasks mindlessly, in a sort of haze. Physical movement of any kind provided some sort of release from the blackness inside her; and it stopped Aicha’s incessant nagging.

  Her brother Azaz found her one day in the courtyard bent over a new tub of washing, spitting with fury over the stinging detergent. He watched as she rinsed and wrung out a huge white item and draped it, dripping, over the line.

  ‘What in the world is this?’ He took it down and held it up against himself: it was twice his size.

  ‘Mama Erquia’s bloomers,’ Mariata told him with a sigh. ‘She wears them underneath her robe. They do that here, you know.’

  Azaz hadn’t had the chance to find out such information yet: the girls in Imteghren seemed to want nothing to do with him, had wailed and flapped him away when he tried to court them. They weren’t like desert girls at all. He made a face and swiftly slung the bloomers back over the washing line. ‘That old witch! Why are you washing her filthy underthings? You’re Kel Taitok, it’s insulting!’

  Mariata gave him a small, exhausted smile. ‘You think I don’t know that?’

  ‘I’m going to tell Father: they can’t treat you like this!’

  She looked away. ‘It won’t do any good.’

  But while Aicha and Hafida were out of the house one day and their poisonous grandmother was snoring in her room, Mariata sought out her father. ‘They are treating me like a slave,’ she said wearily, showing him her cracked and reddened hands.

  Ousman looked away, awkward. ‘The way of life here in Morocco is different from ours: there are no slaves in this community. Here, everyone has to do their own “work”.’ For this concept, he used a word unfamiliar to Mariata; in Tamacheq there was no such verb.

  ‘Aicha and Hafida do nothing!’

  ‘They cook, and they cook well – even you have put a little more meat on your bones.’

  They had tried to make Mariata cook. It had been an experiment that lasted only a single day.

  ‘I hate them, and I hate their food!’ She caught him by the arm. ‘Let me go home, Father, back to the Hoggar. I will go with whatever caravan comes through Imteghren; I will have no pride. They can pack me up with
the merchandise for all I care: just let me go.’

  But he was adamant. ‘You will stay. The old way is dying out and we have to adapt to change. Besides, the conflict between Morocco and Algeria means that there are no caravans coming through Imteghren now; there are soldiers enforcing the border.’

  ‘What do I care about their borders and boundaries? We’re the People of the Veil. We have no boundaries: our country is wherever we wish it to be, we carry our territory within ourselves.’ How many times had she heard Amastan say these things? Her eyes filled with tears. ‘How can you bear this dull, settled life, amongst these awful people?’

  Her father’s jaw set: she could see he would not shift on this matter. And she knew why. Every night, even from the other side of the house, she heard his groans of pleasure and the shrill, birdlike cries of his new wife. It brought back unwelcome memories of her life with Amastan, of the life that had been so brutally wrenched from her. Night after night she dreamt of lying with him down by the river, of how his skin felt beneath the palms of her hands: warm and smooth, the muscles bunching and shifting under her touch, and she would wake with tears still wet on her face and a dull, deep ache in her belly.

  Then her father and brothers went on a buying trip to fetch supplies for the new shop in Marrakech, and Mariata found herself fully at Aicha’s mercy. With no one to intervene, Aicha treated her with sneering disdain, observing her as she went about her tasks, making comments all the while to her sister.

  ‘See how clumsy she is with the dishes, Hafida. In the desert they eat off stones. Even she couldn’t break those.’

  ‘Are those rat-tails growing out of her head, do you think? Perhaps she has a rat’s nest for a brain.’

  ‘It does not look much like hair to me, sister.’

  ‘And that great piece of tin she wears around her neck: I have never seen a necklace so badly made. Poor thing, she probably thinks it is worth something.’

  ‘I expect she thinks a spirit lives in it: an afrit or a djinn!’