The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  At another time in my life – at every other time in my life – I would have snatched it away as if he had tried to burn me, but perhaps because I felt guilty at my previous flinch I let him do it. I could not think of anyone who had ever kissed the palm of my hand, or anyone who had ever touched me so tenderly. I had spent my entire adult life avoiding intimacy with men: if I were honest with myself, they frightened me. I looked down now at Taïb’s close-cropped head, the cap of hair so black against his coffee skin, and felt … what? It was not fear, exactly, but it was not a comfortable sensation. I started to pull my hand away.

  ‘No,’ he said, holding on to it. ‘Look: you have a water-diviner’s hand.’

  I stared at him as if he was mad. ‘What?’

  ‘You see this line here?’ He traced the line that ran horizontally across my palm, bisecting it neatly.

  ‘Yes?’ I frowned.

  ‘Have you ever seen a line like that on anyone else’s hand?’

  ‘I don’t make a habit of grabbing people’s hands and examining their palms,’ I said. The conversation was becoming surreal.

  ‘The water-diviner’s line is almost always inherited. In our culture it is highly prized, thought of as tremendously lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’ I laughed bitterly. I thought of my mother’s hands, so small and neat. Mine, darker and broad as a spade, looked nothing like hers. My father’s … An image, unbidden, of his hand pale against my stomach, reaching down. I almost gagged, the memory was so strong. I pushed it away, as I always did when such recollections surfaced, but this one was stronger than most; or perhaps I was weak. I closed my eyes and was fourteen again. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt I had rolled up and tied under my breasts like a pop star I had seen in Jackie magazine. I had been outside sunbathing and had come in, hot and damp with sweat and sticky with Ambre Solaire, to get some orange squash and a little shade. There, in the kitchen, my father had pressed himself against my back, imprisoning me against the sink as the tap poured out an unending stream of water diluting the brightly coloured soda till the glass overflowed and ran clear. Some part of him as hard as rock pushed itself insistently against my buttocks as he pressed his hand against my stomach and down into my shorts. ‘Oh, Izzy,’ he breathed into my ear. ‘You are so beautiful.’ And then he had led me up to the attic …

  Fighting to stop myself retching, I pulled away from Taïb. But he would not let me go. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘You look as if you are terrified of me.’

  I shook my head, inarticulate with remembered horror. ‘Not you,’ I forced out at last. ‘Not you, never you.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’ I pulled away again. ‘Don’t. Don’t look at me, please.’

  ‘I love to look at you, Isabelle. You are so beautiful.’

  The howl that broke from me was that of an injured animal. And, like an injured animal, I wanted to run out into the desert with my wounds wide open and lie down and let my lifeblood seep into the sand and just … stop … existing. But Taïb wouldn’t let me.

  ‘Tell me, Isabelle. What is it that hurts you so? I cannot bear to see you like this.’

  ‘I cannot tell you. I have never told anyone.’ I gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘There was never anyone to tell. There never is, when you need it most: I learnt that lesson young. And anyway, I was too ashamed.’

  ‘There is nothing you could say that would shock me or make me think less of you.’

  ‘You do not know me. You do not know anything about me. If you knew me, the real me, you wouldn’t say this. You would despise me. You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.’ The words were tumbling out, tumbling over themselves in a dangerous, exuberant stream. I tried to hold them in, but they kept on coming, pushed up out of the roots of me by some terrible, unknown force.

  And then I told him what I had never told another soul: the dark and shameful secret that I had buried so deep since my awful fourteenth summer when my life had split in two. Before that summer there had just been Izzy: little wild, innocent Izzy who laughed and shouted and did not think before she spoke, who climbed trees and jumped off walls and threw herself into life with delighted abandon, knowing that she was indestructible; after that summer there had only been Isabelle, broken, terrified Isabelle, abandoned by one parent to the untender mercies of another, who could never talk, even with her best friend, about what was going on in her life, who had learnt to present a quiet, bland, industrious mask to the world, a mask that had fused itself on to the woman everyone now knew. Disgusted with myself, I had rooted out of my life everything that had made me the wild little creature that had driven my father to behave in such an unnatural fashion and then walk away for ever, terrified by what he had done. I had become half the person I might have been: buttoned down, emotionally repressed, fearful of intimacy and risk, and closed off from joy and release.

  Throughout it all Taïb’s solemn dark gaze never left my face. He did not grimace or show disgust, nor did he interrupt or try to touch me. He just listened, as no one had listened to me before.

  At last the well of words ran dry, leaving me as hollow as a gourd, my skin stretched as tight as a drum over the void my bones contained.

  Taïb looked away from me and was silent for a long, long time, his eyes downcast, until I was sure I had shamed him as well as myself by my vile confession. Then he said gently, ‘Poor Isabelle; poor Izzy. Such a terrible betrayal of trust and innocence, such an abuse of power. How could anyone do such a thing to any child, let alone his own?’ His eyes met mine and I saw the candle flame dancing in them. ‘And you have blamed and hated yourself for what he did to you.’

  ‘Oh, I have blamed him too, believe me,’ I said sourly. ‘Blamed him, and hated him for it.’

  ‘But you have blamed and hated yourself at the same time.’

  And even as he said it, I knew it to be true. All this time I had been punishing myself, caging the wildness in me, netting it down. I had conformed to the social norm, allowed the middle-class world to straitjacket me within its uniform and economic structure and sought to regulate every aspect of the world around me. And I had been remarkably successful in doing so. I had been so afraid of everything beyond my own control; and, most of all, I had been afraid of myself.

  I nodded slowly. ‘You are right,’ I acknowledged. ‘But I do not know how to change that.’

  ‘My people have a saying: time only moves forward, yesterday is gone. Turn your face to the future, Izzy; the past is behind you.’

  I gave him a shaky smile. ‘I wish it were so easy.’

  ‘Things are hard only if you make them hard.’

  ‘Sometimes things just happen to you and you have no control over them.’

  ‘Now you’re talking like my aunt! She would fall ill and claim it was the will of God, insh’allah, and she could do nothing but put up with it, and as a result would get sicker and sicker. My grandmother, whom you met, used to be driven mad by this insh’allah attitude of her sister, as she called it. “We are not puppets!” she would cry. “Get up and walk, instead of complaining about the stoppage in your guts. Drink water; eat figs!”’

  I could not help myself: I laughed aloud. I had just unburdened myself of my worst and darkest secret, the thing that had poisoned my entire adult life; and he had raised the subject of his aunt’s constipation. When I looked back again, there was a twinkle in Taïb’s eye and I knew that he had deliberately lightened the mood.

  He gave me the smallest nod and became solemn again. ‘It is true that in Islam we are taught that the path of our life is written for us by God, who is all-knowing and all-powerful. But that does not mean that we have no freedom to act and react. We each have responsibility for how we live, how we deal with the circumstances we are handed. We are free for all practical purposes, and claiming the omniscience of destiny is no excuse for making the wrong choices in our lives. We must always strive to be the best version of ourselves we can be, in this life and the next. Who knows
what is written for your future, Isabelle? The future could be wonderful.’

  ‘Or it could be very short.’ Despite this doomy pronouncement, I smiled, and Taïb smiled back and I felt a vast weight lift from me.

  I looked past his shoulder. Outside, the sun was coming up: a pale band of numinous light showed in the glimpse of desert afforded me by a gap in the circle of dark tents. I crawled out into the cool sand and stood to watch the glowing rim break over the distant dunes, transforming their weary grey to rich creams and burnished golds, the hollows in between filling up with colour as the sunrise poured its light down into them. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt my mind emptying itself, all the old fears and memories flowing out of me, until I was as light as the glowing air, and there was nothing between me and the sky and sand.

  29

  Mariata walked all night. The moon was kind to her, but sometimes she stumbled; and once she fell down and skinned her knees even through the thick fabric of her robe, the scattered rocks were so sharp. She walked as if in a dream; she walked as if she had no idea in her head except that of walking. In fact, she tried not to think at all and every time a doubt crept up on her, she pushed it away, allowing her body to take over and keep on moving. Despite this, it was not true to say she had no idea where she was or in which direction she was heading, because as the constellations moved overhead a voice inside urged her to take note of the alignment of the Scorpion’s Tail and unconsciously she found herself adjusting her course to follow it as it inexorably lowered its sting towards the south and east.

  As she walked she recited silently to herself folk songs from her childhood that her grandmother and aunts had told to her, songs heard around the fires when the caravanners returned from their journeys or the warriors from their raids; little bits of long-buried nonsense that surfaced from the depths of her memory:

  Two little birds sitting in a tree

  One like you and one like me

  Black his wing and bright his eye

  Throw a stone and see him fly …

  The stones were horribly sharp underfoot. She wished she had not worn the sandals she had brought with her from the Adagh but had invested in the solid red leather boots favoured by the Aït Khabbashi women, boots soled with Goodyear rubber; boots that covered the ankles and were laced tight to the shin. That was the right sort of footwear for hard walking like this, where each step was uneven and the ground crunched and grated underfoot like cinders. Up a rise she toiled, and down the other side, sliding one foot after the other, feeling the gravel and scree pour away beneath her weight.

  Oh, my camel, so mighty and strong

  With your fine hump so heavy with fat,

  Ride along now, my dear one, ride along –

  No, that wouldn’t do. She tried not to think about camels, for with that thought came panic and the memory of Atisi being beaten by the soldiers. Who knew what had happened to him down there on the road? Had they beaten him senseless and taken him prisoner? Or had they killed him and removed his body? The sight of Moushi dead by the side of the road, and the pack animal kicking up its heels as it vanished into the darkness, came back to her again and with it the knowledge of the stupidity of being out here alone, with nothing, not even a cup of water, to sustain her. The knowledge pushed at her, insistent. It poked insinuating fingers into the spaces between the songs and rhymes with which she tried to smother it. It whispered you will die into the gaps between words. You will die and no one will mark your grave.

  Mariata gritted her teeth. Shut up, she told it. We have only just started and there is a long, long way to go. If you threaten me with death on the very first night, what will you have left to frighten me with in three days, or five, or twelve?

  Hours passed and the stars wheeled through the black night and still she walked, a monotonous trudge through an unendingly flat region, studded with the ever-present clinker that battered her sandals and turned her ankles and made her calf muscles ache and protest. The Scorpion scuttled off the edge of the world and disappeared into the void. One by one the stars began to lose their clarity and eventually the moon gave up its dominion over the sky. When the sun finally made an appearance, it was to a grey and weary world. Colourless and pale, the land stretched itself out in front of Mariata, bleak and unfriendly. Things that until now had been formless revealed their grim monotony of shape: mile after mile of stone-scattered plateau, grey turning to dun and then, as the sun rose higher, to a dead and dusty brown. Her heart sank. This must be the Hamada du Guir, the vast barren plain that stretched for hundreds of miles between the great ergs, the seas of sand that lay to east and west. And everywhere she looked it was as dry as week-old bread. There was no sign anywhere of the oases the caravanners spoke of; there was no splash of green at all.

  She closed her eyes and tried to remember what she had heard from the traders in the funduq, sifting through the information she had stored away for just such a journey. Words came back to her in little bursts, like underground streams surfacing through the desert of her mind. The rock desert is the one that will kill you. If you miss a waterhole, you are dead. Igli and Mazzer and Tamtert are good places for camels. The sun will come up over your left shoulder. Find the two-horned peak and walk between the horns. They say a man can survive for a week without food or water. But only if the weather is cold and God smiles upon you.

  But it was another voice, distant, female, that reminded her: In the Hamada du Guir the dried riverbeds run north-west to south-east: follow their line and at last you will come to the Valley of the Oases.

  Mariata opened her eyes, turned her face to the sun and began to walk.

  Hours later nothing in the landscape had changed significantly. Even though she ploughed on determinedly, the horizons remained as distant and unchangeable as they had seemed at first light. The oueds she had followed were just indentations in the dusty ground, jagged and crumbling, floored with jumbles of stones smoothed by a river that had flowed and disappeared long ago, leaving only dry boulders in its wake, and even these dead watercourses faded out after a mile or two of hard walking. Once she found an area of spiky green plants and quickened her pace towards it; but the ground surrounding the vegetation was just as dry and dusty as every other part of this grim wilderness, and she cut her fingers when she tried to take some of the leaves. On she went, her back aching, her belly feeling heavier with each step she took, trying not to think of disaster. It was only half a day since she had eaten, she told herself, just half a day since she had drunk liquid. She could survive: she was a daughter of the desert. A man can survive for a week without food or water, she told herself over and over, her mind conveniently slipping past the dread provisos to recall the tales men told around the campfires, amazing feats of survival and perseverance when camels had died under them or been stolen in the night, leaving them with nothing, and she believed with all of her will that she was as determined as any man and that determination would give her hardiness, even though she carried a child. A pregnant lioness is the most dangerous animal of all, she remembered one of the hunters saying. But then she remembered that men said that this was because the female would rather turn on her pursuer and die in the process than save herself and her unborn cub. A few steps later she also recalled that they had laughed when they said this and joked about Ali’s pregnant wife, Hennu, who had become so bad-tempered with him of late that she had beaten him over the head with her shoe when he had come into her tent one night. Disheartened, she eased herself into the shadowy lee of a boulder and drowsed for a while, but her sleep was fitful and her dreams disturbing, so she pushed herself upright and kept on walking, even though the afternoon sun burned like a fire and beat down on her like a hammer.

  She did not know what it was that caught her eye – whether it was the distant flicker of movement or a new colour that entered the spectrum of duns and greys – but when she saw the camel it was as if a lightning bolt had pinned her to the spot. She stared and stared, unable
to believe her eyes, thinking it a trick of the heat-haze, a deceit of light and shadow. But yes, there it was, a camel-coloured object moving slowly, its head down as if it were searching in vain for something to graze on. And not just camel-coloured, either, for as she drew closer she began to make out other details: the red and blue of a distinctive striped blanket; black waterskins; white sacks of rice and flour; bundles of straw. It was the pack animal belonging to Atisi ag Baye. She almost cried out in shock, for to come all this way across the barren hamada and to find in the midst of nothing the very camel that had escaped you the day before was surely a miracle! She touched her amulet to her lips. Thank you, she whispered, though whom she thanked she was not sure. Whether it was Tin Hinan or the spirits who were responsible, or whether quite unwittingly she had followed the animal’s trail all this way, or whether they had both been channelled unerringly along the same route – none of it mattered. She was a daughter of the desert and the desert had provided.

  Filled with a surge of energy, Mariata girded her robe and started to walk quickly towards it, keeping always out of the animal’s line of sight. She was no more than a hundred yards away when she saw that there was a second figure with the camel: a man; no, a boy. Her skin shivered, despite the heat. Then she marched determinedly towards them. ‘Hey, you!’

  The boy was thin, his eyes large in his head. He looked appalled to see her. She could see the whites of them all around the pupil. His skin was as dark as the rocks.

  ‘That’s my camel you have there!’

  Quicker than a rat up a rock, the boy scuttled up the camel’s neck, settled himself amongst the provisions and urged the beast away.