Taking advantage of the chadors rustling over our heads, I whispered in Maryam’s ear:
“What’s Amazigh, girl?”
“Berbers.”
“Oh!”
Predicting what might come next, she scolded me.
“But don’t you dare use that word! Oh no!”
I thought about it for a moment:
“Berber … barbar … ah barbarian … got it.”
In Maryam’s expression I could see that hint of sadness in the face of fast-approaching apocalyptic scenarios. Amira, however, was far away. Far from the scene of her crime.
Madam Lilla was enjoying the breeze, like a mare on a jaunt over a mountain plateau. Wisps of grey hair that had slipped out of her bun fluttered in the wind racing through a crack in the window, and now she looked like an artist and now a guide for alternative tourism.
“Saida is like a daughter to me. How many years has it been, Saida? Thirty? Maybe more? The Amazigh uprising… Oh the good old days! But I am so happy that they will never return…. Oh, the days we had here. Saida’s uncle … let’s call him an old friend … he died years ago. He was one of the bravest leaders in the Amazigh uprising. A man of truth. A man who understood life and women.”
Indeed Saida wasn’t really a woman: she was more an Eastern man who hadn’t forgotten how to feel shame; and so whenever we started talking about her or her uncle and certainly when the subject turned romantic she would start fiddling with the rearview mirror and then with the side mirrors – in short she would spend all this time peering into mirrors. And we were the only car on the road. Madam Lilla was having fun teasing her.
“Back then Saida was a young girl. I talked with her uncle all the time, arranging for her study in London. And it was a good thing she went. What do you say, Saida? You sort of owe me for all those nights in London, no? Ah! What a sweet girl. What happened in Soho stays in Soho! So tell us what’s going on here then.”
Saida seemed sweetly taken by surprise, it was as if she wanted to present Madam Lilla – or Thirina – to us in the same way Madam Lilla introduced her: through their shared past and spirited adventures. Glancing at us in the rearview mirror she said. “Thirina, or as you know her, Madam Lilla, has done incredible things for the Amazighen. If the world is talking about us today much of that is thanks to Madam Lilla.”
Pausing like a soldier about to lower her voice before a commanding officer, she turned to Madam Lilla and said, “The English are helping a lot. The Americans, too. This time it’s all OK, Thirina. Once we get rid of Gaddafi… We are getting close to that day of honour and independence we have been waiting for for so long.”
Gazing out the window Lilla spoke to the clouds with a confidence that came with a sacrifice she had made and that we knew nothing about.
“Sadly, Saida, this is true. You will pay for the alliances you have made and be all the more compromised for them.”
Saida began nervously adjusting the mirrors again: clearly she either agreed with Lilla or didn’t want to question her out of respect. Lilla went on.
“I’m following the situation. There will be a civil war. Families weren’t ready for everything to move this quickly. The English will come back for revenge and the Americans will come for the oil. Your uncle’s fears will come to pass… Tribal wars… Which is why we turned down foreign aid… But now…”
Then sensing she might have come down too hard, Madam Lilla changed tack.
“But still my only hope lies in the Amazigh. You are the only educated community. The Amazigh women in particular. If they remember where they come from then the true meaning of those cave signs will be revealed.”
I looked at Maryam. Signs in a cave? No answer. I looked over at Amira. She was still out of reach. Lost in a dream world, she hadn’t said a word since we crossed the border. Lilla let out a mournful sigh.
“Your uncle wouldn’t have wished for it to be this way. He died because he didn’t want things to turn out like this.”
Frustrated, Saida said, “You weren’t here, Thirina. We had no other option but to cooperate.”
Without hesitating Madam Lilla reached out to her. “I know Saida. How could I not… There is no pure rebellion if there is no self-sabotage in the equation.”
I looked at Maryam and Amira. This much was clear: we were a capable crew ready for the storm which was all good. Because in a storm there is no time to question what came before (remember the tall tale we told the Libyan militia) or what comes next (exactly where Saida was taking us). But when the wind died down we would lose our footing. As we sped along that road I looked closely at Maryam and Amira, and Madam Lilla. We looked like people who wouldn’t know how to stomach still waters. Even Amira, who’d been silent since we set out on this lightning adventure, seemed as peaceful as a child in a cradle. Maryam’s frustration was no more than what you might get from a fly buzzing about in your car. And of course it goes without saying that Madam Lilla was a prima donna ready to burst into song after a long musical introduction. So it just seemed better to plough through the waves than ask the tough questions….
We hear the rattling of the guns in the boot again, but Saida doesn’t stop. She pops in a CD, hoping the music will drown out the sound. Asmahan’s Joyous Viennese Nights. She must trust us as ‘Thirina’s girls’, because she says, “if only those Kalashnikovs were as buttoned up as the English,” and she laughs.
Quietly listening to a Viennese waltz sung in Arabic, we travelled down that stretch of land stained with desert. We were with an Amazigh woman buying Kalashnikovs from the Brits; Madam Lilla, codename Thirina, whom we’d just learned had played a key role in several former Amazigh uprisings; and the three of us who looked like three flamingos forced into the city by a sudden catastrophe, and, as if that wasn’t enough, were crushed on the asphalt between two bodies of water. We might have resorted to the standard gestures to express concern but a mysterious inner peace had come with our willful abduction.
Deserts should be nobler than this. This was nothing but a stretch of land full of stones the size of your hand. There wasn’t a trace of the dignity of the desert or the fruit of the earth. God must have got bored before he could decide which one he wanted. The landscape was a sharp, strong, dirty yellow. It was the place where the ambitiously lazy and disengaged decided to stay when the rest of humankind was lining up for the great first migration wave out of Africa. I mean you wouldn’t even miss Libya if she wasn’t on the map. Those aware that an abundance of human life was sacrificed for the most inhospitable swaths of land might ask why would people even squabble over such a place.
“Oh my dear Saida,” said Madam Lilla, cutting the silence as she geared up for a speech. “The people here took up arms for oil and for revenge. But you … oh, they have no idea…”
Turning to us, she went on, “Ladies, the mother goddesses and the women who ruled these lands hundreds of years ago have all gone underground. Dido, al-Kahina, Tanit, Tin Hinan and so many more powerful women. They have changed their names and covered themselves…”
Elbowing Maryam, I said, “She’s talking about your lot.”
As Madam Lilla went on in her documentary tone Maryam seemed to hang on her every word, “And the Amazigh women kept the words of those ancient mothers close to their breasts so that these accursed lands would have meaning again. So they would have a tongue to speak. So there would be life, do you see?”
Startled, Maryam nodded her head with the enthusiasm of a hardworking student who was faithful to her teacher. Lilla went on, “The Amazighen, indeed feel free to call them Berbers, which is what they should be called in my opinion, for is there anything nobler in this world than being a barbarian? If only they had protected their lands and their independence…”
Madam Lilla stopped mid-sentence and Maryam was left openmouthed. Some of what Madam Lilla was saying must have come from the heart because now and then her voice cracked.
“Do you remember what your uncle used to say, Saida?�
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Madam Lilla looked at Saida. She was looking back over those years as if staring at some something that had broken down along the way and she trembled with disappointment. Then, as if addressing that lost world, she continued, “‘Thirina, when we win the legend does too.’ Yes, that’s what he used to say. The legend will win!”
“What does ‘Thirina’ even mean?” said Amira finally breaking her silence.
Madam Lilla tossed the question to Saida, trying to get her to play along in a new game. Saida looked as stressed as on the first day at school.
“What does it mean, Saida?”
Saida fiddled with a mirror and then spoke, her voice like crumpled paper.
“Love.”
Madam Lilla was silent, leaving us a space where our dreams could grow. A shard of glass sunk into Amira’s heart as she gazed out of the window and Maryam only whispered, “of course”. I imagined Madam Lilla pushing fifty and racing along the horizon on horseback, a bundle of grace and laughter. The uncle in question is in his forties. The ornaments on his wild black horse ring across the desert as he charges after her. In his dark-skinned face his tame eyes glimmer with a hungry passion. On and on they gallop…
“Why did you leave, Thirina?”
Suddenly reproachful Saida had posed the question. But clearly there was more: this was a long unwritten angry letter… She stopped looking at the road and turned to face Madam Lilla. But the old woman was not to be deterred by such tactics.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Saida,” she said sharply and then as if Saida had never asked the question she said, “Eyüp Bey must have told you on the phone. We won’t be staying long. So we need to draw up our itinerary tonight. I trust you can help us choose the best routes given family situations and the state of the war. And I am assuming you can take us as far as the Egyptian border.”
How many times had Saida’s heart been broken in the same place and no doubt by the same person? Now she is a little girl asking her mother about her greatest disappointment only to find that her mother remembers absolutely nothing of the day. And yet when Madam Lilla speaks of goddesses and fairy tales and poetry the expression on Saida’s face reveals the boredom of having listened to these shimmering lies so many times.
“Could we stop somewhere?” asks Maryam in her harshest growl. She receives an equally harsh look from Saida in the rearview mirror. Figuring I should back her up, I say, “Just when do we get to wherever it is we’re going?”
Not bothering to look back Saida says, “We’re close,” and nothing more; a scornful freedom fighter forced to suffer the whims of three abducted tourists.
Deaf to any dissent, Madam Lilla carries on in the same tone, “But I really must get to Yefren by the day after tomorrow.” She’s playing a game, pretending that we aren’t even there. Clearly disturbed, Maryam’s face goes white and I take her hand.
Finally we see posters on the remaining walls along the side of the road, which gives us the feeling we are getting close to something. Again Madam Lilla is like a tour guide talking from another time.
“Ah! Saida, what bliss! Who would have guessed that one day we would see such signs along this road? Ladies, these signs here have the colours of the Amazigh flag: red, white and blue. Gaddafi banned Amazigh flags and their languages and so to see them here now… Oh God! That sign there is an Amazigh symbol. A free person standing between earth and sky, bringing the two together. Zin. As for that one of a woman who looks like young girl in a skirt, she’s Tanit, the mother goddess. Oh, Saida! Just admit that the legend is winning …”
Madam Lilla was in her own world, which made everyone in the car uncomfortable, except Amira who was still somewhere else. At last we saw a market village in the distance. Typical late period Middle Eastern architecture: iron sprouts reaching out of unshapely concrete chunks splattered with whitewash.
“So you no longer live in the old city then. But these new houses are all cockeyed,” said Madam Lilla. Looking around I couldn’t find a trace of anything that looked like an Old City. Only a sea of dirty yellow stones. Suddenly children swarmed around the jeep as if they had popped up out from the earth in the twinkling of an eye. They were all doing the same thing. Holding up three fingers on one hand and a victory sign on the other.
“What’s the three mean?” I asked.
“It’s an Amazigh sign,” said Saida. And she continued – of course addressing Madam Lilla – with a slight touch of pride in her voice.
“We started our own education programmes at school. Teaching the Amazigh alphabet, Amazigh history… In fact we’re building a museum at the school, a little museum to tell what happened during the war. Do you remember Maren and his sister? When you left…” her voice dipped then rose “…they were still kids. They have both left their jobs and come back from London. After we took control of the state-owned radio tower, they began working on a broadcast in Amazigh. So it looks like once people come back from America and Europe things will get moving. In the near future they will start studies on our oral history. And we are shooting a film showing local historical remains, a documentary that should be ready in a few months.”
“Now you’re talking, Saida! Brava!” said Madam Lilla. It seemed like empty praise, I thought to myself, as Lilla put her hand on Saida’s hand that clutched the stick. She squeezed tightly and let go. However Lilla must have had the power to repair all the hearts she had ever broken in a single touch. Saida flashed her a shy smile. That was the first time I realized Madam Lilla was a truly dangerous woman.
At the entrance to the village were men in T-shirts and sunglasses who looked more like gun-toting surfers from California than soldiers on active duty, their feet dangling off jeeps. Somewhere a war was in full swing, which we understood from the writing on the jeeps and all the bullet holes. Yet it didn’t seem real.
“The men go to fight in the morning and come back in the evenings… Sometimes they don’t come back,” says Saida, “but the clashes have been pushed farther north. Nothing’s really happening around here any more. So we have finally retaken our land. Tooth and nail. Just a month ago there were snipers up on those hills. Thank God we succeeded in driving them away. Now the fighting is only in the north. Which is why you need to head south, which will draw out your trip a little.”
Madam Lilla echoed her earlier sentiments, “Just as I thought. Now that’s my girl!”
Her face now a shade of green, Maryam looked like she might throw up if she only opened her mouth. Taking deep breaths, she threw herself out of the car. Amira was silent as she walked beside Madam Lilla. Most likely she was thinking about the bride and the incident at the hamam. With an air of indifference Madam Lilla gave Saida her handbag and we stopped at an undistinguished house. This was Saida’s home and I was shocked to see all the lace, plastic flowers and cut-glass sugar bowls in a glass display case. A young girl raced over to us and suddenly stopped as if there was a wall of glass between us. Her skirt was still billowing.
“Say hello to mother Thirina, my little girl,” said Saida. Madam Lilla stood there like a queen waiting for her hand to be kissed. The girl seemed unruffled. “My daughter is quite famous now, Thirina,” Saida said and the little girl covered her mouth and smiled.
“She called Gaddafi a donkey live on Al Jazeera TV. Tell them what you said to Gaddafi, sweetie?”
Hopping from foot to foot and first turning the words over in her mouth, she cried out, “‘Don’t you get it, donkey Gaddafi! We don’t want you!’ That’s what I said.” And she raced out of the room. Madam Lilla and Saida broke out laughing. We joined in to liven the mood, Maryam seemed a bit better. Amira was having a look around and, as if she was Madam Lilla’s daughter, she said. “Thank you for having us.” And with that humble ‘thank you’ we went into our room. Four beds each with a different bed cover and patterns on the pillow covers were lined up in a row. It made the room feel like a flower garden in full bloom. “I need to get going,” Saida says. “The women are working at t
he school. I should check up on them. And you should rest. If you’re hungry there’s food in the kitchen. There’s no bread so we’re always making pizza but what can you do. I’ll leave some on the table. I should be back late. I also need to check the radio tower.”
Madam Lilla turned up her nose at our made-up room like it was full of dirt that might get on her skirt. “Please wait, Saida,” she says, “we’ll come with you.” We? Maryam was in no state to go anywhere and she was already making for her bed. So clearly she wasn’t coming. The trip must have taken a lot out of her. But Amira looked like she didn’t want to be alone, hanging on Madam Lilla’s every word. “I want to see what my girls are doing,” says Madam Lilla.
So the three of us follow Saida and her daughter down a narrow street with the usual trail of children as is standard in this part of the world. Saida’s little girl takes after her mother, proud as a little anchovy trying to be a shark. The houses are empty and so are the streets and we hear only the sound of our footsteps. I look down at my shoes now covered in dust. ‘They look much better this way,’ I think to myself. With all the dust in my shoes, I feel like I have run away from home but also like I have deliberately set out on a trip that is a chain of bizarre events. I once wrote, “Truth is in the dust.” Now looking down at my shoes I think, ‘if that’s not the case then we’re done for.’ It felt like everything that happened in the airport and everything that was happening in Turkey had happened years ago. Crossing the border we had crossed into another time and place and now I didn’t have to think about what I’d left behind. All three of us could feel the weight of what we had left behind lifting, and the peace of mind in the here and now. We avoid looking each other in the eye because we are afraid one of us might say, ‘have we gone crazy? Come on, let’s get out of here.’ Best to live for the moment. My heart contracts and I turn to Amira who is walking silently beside me. “Are you alright?” I ask. As if picking up a conversation she’s been having with herself since we set off together she suddenly turns to me and says in a trembling voice, “No, it wasn’t an accident. I killed someone. I suppose it was revenge. I mean I suppose I got my revenge. And it wasn’t just for me… I think it was for him, too.”
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 12