The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  ‘They are a backward people, the nomads, old-fashioned and barbaric. What do they know of the modern world? They don’t even have houses, Hafida: can you imagine? They live in houses made of goatskins, with their goats.’

  ‘That will be why she smells as she does.’

  ‘Don’t worry, sister, it’s her bath-day tomorrow.’

  ‘Imagine living without electricity or running water.’ The sisters were very proud to inhabit one of the first houses in the town to own such amenities.

  ‘No showers.’

  ‘No cars.’

  ‘No market, and only one smelly old dress.’

  ‘Did her father lie with a goat to get her, do you think?’

  There was a pause, and a slap, followed by a cry, and then Aicha said icily, ‘Do not speak of my husband so.’

  *

  The next day at the hammam Aicha regarded Mariata critically as she got undressed. ‘You’ve put on weight, daughter. It suits you.’

  ‘My mother was a Tuareg princess, and she is dead,’ Mariata replied sullenly. ‘Do not call me daughter.’

  Aicha shrugged. ‘Like it or not, I stand in place of a mother to you now.’ She put her head on one side and looked Mariata up and down. Then a line appeared between her brows. She turned to her sister. ‘Take hold of her, Hafida.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t question me, just do as I say.’

  Obediently, Hafida took Mariata by the arms. Aicha walked around Mariata, scrutinizing. She frowned as she took in the girl’s fuller breasts and rounded contours. ‘When was your last period?’ she asked sharply.

  Mariata stared at her dully. ‘What?’

  ‘Your period. Your monthly bleed.’

  Mariata flushed to the roots of her hair. ‘It is none of your business.’

  Aicha was not to be put off. ‘I am your stepmother and you will answer me. So think: when was it?’

  Silence. Mariata thought about the question, for her own benefit. She could not remember the last time she had bled. Not since leaving the Adagh, that much was certain. She had not given it a thought: there had been too much else to think about, to mourn. But now that Aicha had called her attention to it, she turned her mind inward to examine herself as she had not done in a long, long time; and then she knew. Just like that, she knew. The realization was world-changing, immense. A spark of warmth flickered in the core of her, flowing up from her belly and around her ribs, engulfing her heart until she felt as if she were on fire – on fire with hope. Amastan, oh, Amastan …

  She must have smiled to herself, because when she focused on Aicha again, the older woman was staring at her in rising fury. Gathering herself, she said, ‘I really have no idea.’

  ‘Insolent brat!’ Aicha took her by the upper arms and shook her till her head flopped this way and that. ‘Think, damn you! Think. When did you bleed? You have been here for three months now: have you not bled during all that time? Are you ill? You don’t look ill.’ She thrust her face aggressively at Mariata. ‘Have you somehow managed to sneak out of the house and sell yourself to men?’

  The whites of Mariata’s eyes showed all around her dark pupils. Unable to fight free of Hafida, she spat at Aicha, who slapped her hard across the face, so hard that the sound ricocheted off the tiles.

  Mariata’s shriek of rage drew Khadija Chafni from the hammam’s antechamber. ‘What is going on here? Are you having trouble with the Tuareg girl again? People will talk!’

  ‘They certainly will.’ Aicha shoved Mariata’s robe at her. ‘Put that on: we’re going home before anyone guesses your shame.’

  But Mariata felt no shame: only a glorious, rising triumph.

  Back within the safe walls of the house, Aicha was inexorable. She consulted feverishly with Mama Erquia, as the resident expert on such matters, and the old woman sent a boy and a donkey to fetch a healer from an outlying village. It took several long hours for this person to arrive, by which time Aicha had worked herself into a froth of rage and Mariata had settled herself comfortably in the knowledge of her changed state.

  The healer was not from Imteghren but was of the Aït Khabbash, a semi-nomadic tribe living on the fringe of the desert. She wore a blue robe pinned with huge silver fibulae and had a sigil tattooed uncompromisingly on her forehead: two diagonal lines crossing at the top with a triangle of three dots seated above the intersection. A huge, colourful scarf enveloped her head and draped down her back. Ushered into the room in which Mariata had been shut, she removed this with a flourish.

  After a few minutes of prodding the healer declared the Tuareg girl four months pregnant; maybe more. Aicha paled. Her hands flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my God,’ she muttered. ‘My God, what will we do? Such shame it will bring down on us all. It will destroy our reputation.’ She turned to the healing woman. ‘What can you do about it?’

  The Aït Khabbashi considered Mariata with her head on one side, her eye as bright as a bird’s. ‘I can attend the birth when it comes.’

  Aicha glared at her. ‘No, no, you’ve misunderstood. I want you to get rid of it.’

  ‘No one is getting rid of my baby,’ Mariata said quietly, but nobody paid her any attention.

  The healer regarded Aicha steadily. ‘She’s too far along for me to do anything other than that.’ Out of Aicha’s sight, the woman looked Mariata briefly in the eye. One lid dropped swiftly, then she turned back to Aicha. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

  Aicha let out a wail. ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. I’m sorry.’

  ‘A lot of use you are as a healer, you old charlatan!’

  The Aït Khabbashi shook her head in mock sadness. ‘What will people say when I tell them? Great goodness, they’ll be surprised to hear the Tuareg’s daughter will be beating you to the first birth in this house.’ She rubbed her hands in glee.

  Aicha pursed her lips. Then she took off one of her gold bangles and thrust it at the woman. ‘Take that and stop your mouth. If I hear one whisper of this I will send someone to come and find you. In the night. Do you hear me?’

  The healer regarded her with loathing. Then she turned to Mariata and said something to her in the old language. Mariata caught her hands and kissed them, smiling, then kissed her own hands and pressed them to her heart. ‘Thank you,’ she replied in the same tongue. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Get out!’ Aicha caught the healer by the arm, digging her nails in hard, and propelled her towards the door.

  The woman did not flinch. At the door she disengaged herself from Aicha’s grip and made a complicated gesture in the air, chanting as she did so. ‘And that is no more than you deserve!’

  The next day they found strange symbols chalked on the door. When she saw them, Mama Erquia almost swooned in horror. She subsided against the door with her head in her hands. ‘Sehura,’ she kept saying, ‘sehura, sehura … It is my fault: I knew she was a sorceress. I have brought woe upon our house!’ and no one could get anything more out of her for the rest of the morning. Mariata noticed when they went to the souq to buy vegetables that people who had most likely passed their door on the way regarded them curiously and no one greeted Aicha with their usual warmth, keeping their distance as if she carried some contagious disease.

  By the time they got back to the house, Aicha was in a foul temper. She marched into the old woman’s quarters and switched on the electric light, flooding the room with its harsh glare. ‘Put it off, put it off!’ Mama Erquia covered her head with her hands, moaning that now the djenoun would come for her.

  Mariata smiled to herself. Today she could hardly keep from smiling. She felt as if she carried a furnace within her, as if the world was being remade in her own belly. It was just as she had suspected: the healing woman had cursed the house and placed a waymarker on the front door to attract any passing djinn. But before leaving the house she had blessed Mariata, and the baby she was carrying, to exempt them from this curse. ‘May you have a fine son,’ she had told Mariata. ‘As fin
e and strong as his father.’ For that, Mariata had kissed her hands.

  Ousman had barely set foot inside the house on his return from Marrakech before Aicha was upon him. ‘She is pregnant!’

  ‘Who is pregnant?’

  ‘Your daughter! Your stupid, stupid daughter!’ And when he threw his hands up as if to deflect her words, she rounded on him accusingly. ‘Did you know?’

  Ousman sighed. Then he said, ‘It is no shame for a woman to bear her husband’s child.’

  ‘What husband? There is no husband!’ Aicha stormed, hands on hips.

  ‘Not now, no: he is dead.’

  ‘No one will believe that tale for a moment. Well, she had better have a husband, and soon: I will not have her dragging my family’s reputation through the streets.’

  ‘She is still in mourning for his death. And our women have always made their own decisions about whom, and whether or not, they marry. I cannot force Mariata to marry if she does not wish it.’

  ‘What nonsense! What sort of man are you if you cannot even command your own daughter?’

  ‘It is not our way.’

  ‘You’re not living in a tent any more like an animal, and your daughter cannot just spread her legs for anyone she chooses. We have standards, and I’ll not have a bastard under this roof!’

  Another man might have struck her, but Ousman was a Tuareg, bred to respect women no matter how annoying they might be. Instead, he turned and stalked off into the gathering night and did not return while any of the inhabitants were awake. Mariata found him the next morning when she rose early to have some time to herself before the inevitable chores started, rolled in a blanket in the salon. At first she thought there was a stranger in the house, a wandering man who had come in off the streets, for she had never seen her father without his veil before. And he had a beard! Such a thing was rare amongst their people. But when he opened his eyes she knew him.

  She folded her arms, uncomfortable. ‘So, has she told you?’

  Ousman uncoiled himself from the floor, retrieved his tagelmust and wound it slowly and neatly until he was decently covered once more. Only then, it seemed, did he feel able to address the subject. ‘Felicitations, Daughter.’ He inclined his head.

  ‘You do not seem overly happy about it.’

  ‘I am neither happy nor unhappy. But I worry for you.’

  ‘As well you might, since your new wife is intent on finding someone to destroy my baby!’

  Ousman looked pained. ‘It would be better if you were to take a husband, Mariata. A man from the region, to take care of you and the child, when it comes.’

  Mariata recoiled. ‘Never! How can you even think of it?’

  ‘Aicha will not let you live under this roof with an illegitimate baby.’

  ‘It is not illegitimate!’

  ‘Even so: there is no husband here to claim the baby as his own. No husband to protect you. And this house is not mine to rule over. I am in business with Aicha’s father, and I have my sons to think about as well as you. The best thing you can do for yourself would be to take a husband, to protect you in the eyes of this society.’

  ‘I don’t care what these people think of me – I despise the lot of them! Do you really think I would take as a husband one of these bare-faced men, who have no respect, no heritage and no code of asshak?’

  ‘Hush. These folk may have different ways to our own now, it’s true, but once, a long time ago, we were the same people. Our own founder came from this very region in the time of the Romans: your own ancestor, Tin Hinan. Your bloodline began here, in the soil of this place.’

  Mariata stared at him in disbelief. ‘From here? No wonder she left: I would walk a thousand miles out into the desert to escape Imteghren!’

  Her father sighed. ‘Mariata, there is no dishonour in marrying a man from Imteghren.’

  ‘I would not pass this child off as some other man’s. I had rather live on the streets.’

  Ousman made the sign against the evil eye. ‘Be careful what you wish for, Daughter.’

  Ousman and his new wife were reconciled: once more the quiet night air of the house was disturbed by their cries. And somehow a compromise was reached. Aicha would make it known that her stepdaughter was to be offered on the marriage market; but in the proper Tuareg tradition Mariata would be allowed to have the final say in choosing her husband from the young men put forward.

  ‘There is no time to waste,’ she told Hafida grimly. ‘If she’s already starting to show, how will a man accept the baby as his own if it comes too soon?’

  ‘Best not to choose a man who can count,’ was Hafida’s only advice.

  For some reason there were far more unwed men than women in Imteghren. No one knew why exactly there should be such a shortage of girls of marriageable age, but that was how it was. In addition, the word appeared to have gone around the town that although something of a firebrand Mariata was a beauty; and men were intrigued by the possibility of taking a fiery young Tuareg girl to wife. They had heard that nomad girls were wild in more ways than one, not as shy and buttoned-up as the local girls, and Mariata’s reputation (no doubt earned by her scenes in the hammam) bore this out, and so they begged their mothers and aunts to pay their suit. Rather to her horror, Mariata found herself in some demand. Rigged out in one of Aicha’s second-best robes in pastel colours that flattered her skin colour, and a headscarf that hid her tribal braids, she gazed at her reflection in the big mirror in Hafida’s room. With kohl painted around her eyes and the creamy rouge that Hafida had rubbed into her pale cheeks, she thought she looked like one of the ugly plastic dolls she had seen in the souq: make-believe mannequins like fake miniature human beings. Her spirit rebelled at such treatment but she quelled it. ‘It is not you they are seeing,’ she told herself fiercely, ‘but only a mask.’

  Besides, she would soon see off any suitors and their crow-like mothers. Of that she had no doubt. And the longer she played along with Aicha’s ridiculous scheme, the longer her baby would be safe.

  Her brothers found the whole idea of their sister being paraded for sale offensive and demeaning, and for a short time Mariata’s hopes were raised that Azaz and Baye might talk their father round; but they were soon to find that Aicha had a greater hold over Ousman than his own kin.

  It was not long before the mothers and aunts and cousins of certain young men of the town came calling. They would spend an hour or so sitting in the salon with Aicha and her grandmother, sipping mint tea and extolling the virtues of their sons and nephews – so handsome, so hard-working, the eldest of ten, or eight, or seven; such a good man, so pious and good with children, and with his hands, and able to pay three thousand dirham and some goats for the right bride. And then Mariata, in her alien disguise, would be trotted out and made to sit hemmed in by her hated new family, nodding and smiling and inwardly seething as the women asked Aicha about her skills. Could Mariata make good bread? And keep a clean house? Did she rise before cockcrow: was she a hard worker? Could she make goat’s cheese and card wool? Did she embroider and sew clothes? Could she make a proper couscous and did she know the secret of harissa paste? Could she recite the Qur’an and observe Ramadan and the prayer times like a proper Muslim? And, with lowered voices as if she had no ears or wasn’t even there, was she a clean girl, and possessed of an unbroken hymen? To all these questions, Aicha looked them in the eye and answered yes, and yes, and yes, while Mariata flushed to the roots of her hair and dreamt of flinging off her borrowed robes and setting about the lot of them with a large stick, whooping Tuareg war-cries all the while. But for her child’s sake she endured the shame and the fury: now let the young men come.

  A few days later, the first suitor – Hassan Boufouss – turned up in his best white going-to-mosque robe and skullcap, accompanied by his two grandmothers, father and three sisters. In the guest salon Hassan’s large lugubrious eyes roamed in panic over the smooth-plastered walls, the shelf of plates and ornaments, the coloured rug and fretted windows
, and returned constantly to the open door as if he might at any moment bolt out of it.

  Aicha ushered Mariata in ahead of her. The Tuareg girl’s headwrap was askew and her cheeks were flushed, as if there had been a tussle preceding this entrance. She cast a contemptuous gaze over the gathered crowd and turned to Aicha. ‘Who are all these people?’ She folded her arms. ‘I’m not going to do this with all of them staring at me.’

  The old women exchanged glances.

  ‘Forgive the girl: she’s shy and not used to our ways,’ explained Aicha, pushing Mariata in the back.

  ‘I am certainly not shy!’ Mariata tore off the offending scarf, uncovering her tribal braids.

  The throng gazed on, frozen by shock. Then one of the grandmothers grabbed Hassan by the arm. ‘She has no modesty, this one,’ she declared, and dragged him to his feet.

  Mariata smiled and stood aside to let them pass. Led by his grandmother, Hassan went like a docile calf, though his gaze flickered wonderingly over the Tuareg girl as he left, as if she represented to him a glimpse of a forbidden world; a world from which he would ever be excluded.

  The next day, undeterred by the whispers that at once circulated throughout the town following Mariata’s untoward conduct, Bachir Ben Hamdu and his parents arrived. Bachir was a very different proposition to his cousin, Hassan. Mariata was shocked by the immodesty of his clothing. Not only did he bare his face in the way of all the men here, but the garment on his lower half would normally be worn only as underclothing amongst her people, clinging as it did in a shamelessly revealing manner to every part of him. She stared at him, stone-faced, keeping her eyes fixed carefully on a point between his chin and his waist as he stood under the gaze of the portrait of King Hassan II, making his greetings. He told her his name and that he was delighted to make her acquaintance and hoped soon to know her better. He did not wink or in any other way accompany this last remark with a salacious gesture, but she felt his palm, hot and sweaty, as he touched her hand, and went rigid with disgust.

  Aicha was delighted. ‘That went very well,’ she declared after he had gone. ‘I think he will offer for you.’