A Riffians Tune

by Joseph M Labaki

  We vacated the room, but left the light on. We wove our way through the stenchy bowel of the town, each of us with a rolled-up blanket under his arm, heading for the garage that was miles away. Empty and deserted streets, dimly lit, echoed the sound of our footsteps. Secluded corners and empty doorways were home to tramps. Grouped together, it was hard to know their number. They were not all happy to be disturbed. One, tall and hairy, stood and shouted, ‘Tramps of the town, give me peace! Don’t disturb the tired, the elderly and us hard-working people!’

  As we emerged from the city slums, the sky opened and stars dangled from heaven. The night was over and a crisp, early morning began. There were no pedestrians on the road, but heavy lorries with smelly diesel engines heading either south or north were out in force.

  Gendarmes were on the lookout for overweight lorries, careless and drunken drivers. We were their first catch of the day. An American jeep stopped abruptly in front of us and two armed policemen jumped out, blinding us with a spotlight. Abdu’s face showed marks of a fight, impossible to hide or deny.

  ‘Look at the injuries you’ve sustained stealing that blanket!’ said the captain to Abdu.

  ‘Nous ne sommes pas voleurs! (We’re not thieves!)’ I jumped to defend Abdu.

  ‘Drop those blankets!’ said one of them. They kicked the blankets with their steel-toed boots, but nothing was inside, neither hashish nor gold.

  As if on cue, Abdu shouted, ‘Thugs attacked me!’

  ‘In your house?’ asked the captain.

  ‘In my room!’ replied Ali.

  ‘Why did they choose you?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Because Jusef stayed with me,’ said Ali, in tears.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ they asked.

  ‘To a garage that I rent,’ I answered.

  Confused and suspicious, the captain demanded, ‘Jump in the jeep!’

  ‘To go where?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said. I refused. ‘Do you want to jump in cuffed or uncuffed?’

  The gendarmes drove us not to the interrogation centre, but to a forest fifteen miles out of town, and there we were dumped to find our way back.

  Swollen with anger and mounting frustration, Abdu turned into a digging horse. He kicked the ground until half his shoe broke off. Ali, who had never ventured out of the town, felt disoriented with no clue of where he was. ‘How can we ever find the way home?’ he kept asking me.

  ‘It could have been worse!’ I shouted.

  ‘Worse? Worse?’ yelled Abdu.

  ‘Yes! Had they dumped us at the central police station, we wouldn’t see the sun for days, weeks, maybe months.’

  ‘Are we criminals?’ asked Abdu.

  ‘It’s easier for them to charge us as criminals than for us to prove our innocence.’

  ‘Ridiculous! Ridiculous!’ shouted Abdu, his face upturned to the sky.

  ‘Absurd!’ cried Ali.

  ‘Do you have a receipt for those blankets?’ I asked Ali.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What would stop them from charging you as a thief?’ I challenged, ‘And that’s not all! Abdu’s been in a fight. What happened to the man he fought? Did Abdu kill him and dispose of him? Unless the other fighter is found, Abdu could be suspected of murder. We are more lucky than unlucky. Let’s move,’ I pleaded.

  The path out of the forest, where north, south, east and west were indistinguishable, was physically rocky. Abdu couldn’t keep up; the sole of one shoe was dangling. Twice he nearly fell on his face. Lorries’ headlights, like fireflies, drew us to the main road like a beacon. Reaching the road, we saw how far we were from the town. Many cars, heading to the town, passed us, but no driver dared to stop and pick us up. At best, we looked like tramps; at worst, like thugs.

  As we were approaching a café, my bruised toes started to hurt. The café was packed. The garçon, rattling back and forth, was a small boy of ten. He was polite and quick. His boss prepared tea and coffee behind the counter, his eyes constantly upon him. The boy ran eagerly to please everyone, but that didn’t save him from being called a donkey when a clumsy client spilled his tea over the table. The boy wasn’t new to this; he looked immune to the abuse. Before noon, his ears had collected several titles.

  Before leaving the café, I felt unwell. ‘I have a stomach ache and nausea. The garage isn’t too far, and we should move quickly,’ I told the others.

  ‘My shop … my shop!’ shouted Ali. ‘I must go.’

  ‘Your room is no longer safe,’ I said. ‘The mob, organised into teams and unchallenged, will get you and whoever is found in the room with you.’

  ‘You brought that on me!’ he accused me.

  He jumped up, picked up his small sack, grabbed his blanket and made one step to leave. Abdu shot out his hand and pulled him back to his chair. Ali was surprised by how aggressive Abdu could be. By the time I had paid the bill and joined them again, my pain was worse. The garage was only half an hour’s walk, and I could barely make it.

  The area was unfamiliar to Abdu and Ali. The garage was built as part of a terraced house, and designed to harbour a small Simca. I opened the door and collapsed instantly. I wrapped myself into a blanket.

  ‘Is this your new room?’ asked Ali, looking around. ‘It’s just walls!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Reading Ali’s mind, I continued, ‘Your room has no water or toilet either. The window that you have comes from the crack in your floor and a dirty river runs underneath. Would you like to share this room with me?’

  ‘No,’ replied Ali. ‘My room is central, close to my shop.’

  After a few hours of sleep, I got up and felt much better.

  Hearing voices talking loudly and sometimes over each other, the landlady realised there was more than one person in the garage, and this wasn’t what she had agreed to. She came out of her house and stood in the doorway of the garage. She looked physically unfinished, with a beefy and large trunk, legs only a few inches long and a tummy pushing hard against her clothes. She peered at Abdu and sneered at me.

  ‘Face of an angel and heart of a devil, you brought not one but two with you!’ she shouted at me.

  ‘Lalla, my friends will soon leave.’

  ‘Do they need a blanket each to visit you?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Lalla.’ I ran out of truth. Had I told her I was hiding from thugs, her husband would have refused to rent me the garage. If I told her that Abdu and Ali intended to spend the night with me in the garage, she would be outraged. Abdu had endured enough of her sarcasm and clever talking. Impulsively, he stood up and pulled his trousers down. Ali and I vibrated with shock.

  ‘I know what you carry under your trousers! You don’t need to show me,’ she said, still blocking the garage door and any light coming through.

  ‘Do you want to increase the rate?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if more than one lives here.’ Undisturbed, she turned her back on us and began conversing across the street with a black woman with shiny teeth who was three times her size.

  ‘I am leaving,’ said Ali, shocked by the audacity of Abdu and the unshakable confidence of this odd-looking, sawn-off woman.

  ‘I am leaving too,’ chimed in Abdu.

  I had some books and clothes to pick up from Ali’s room. On our way there, Ali told me, ‘I wish you’d never come to me!’

  I wish I had never needed you, I thought to myself. Had we been allowed to study, this wouldn’t have happened.

  ‘I want to get to my room, cook something, hold my transistor against my chest and be first in the market tomorrow. This has been my daily life since the age of eleven, when I left my mother and abusive stepfather,’ said Ali.

  His hope was dashed. When we reached his room, the door was open wide. Ali knew he had locked the door, as double-checking was his daily obsession. Sliding into the room, his ears swelled and got red as tomatoes. No words were uttered by either Abdu or me. Inside the room, Ali gasped and collapsed, his head agains
t the wall, just like an orthodox Jewish pilgrim at the wailing wall. The room’s walls had been hammered full of gaping holes, the birds were lying dead at the bottom of their cages and mountains of dust and debris were everywhere as if a cyclone had hit. Like a hen, I scratched the rubble to see what I could find.

  Suddenly, I spotted an envelope with my name on it stuck on the wall; no one could miss it. I yanked it down. It was one and a half pages long, and it read:

  Jusef, you and your baccalaureate classmates refused to join us in the strike and disobeyed the committee’s will and order; you swept aside, for your personal benefit, the interest of struggling people and attended your classes. We know how stubborn you are and how clever you think you are. We know you scabs will hide and emerge to sit the national baccalaureate exams, but before that, we will catch you, skin you and scalp you.

  Signed: The Committee – God is Great –

  Fearfully, I read the note and wadded it into my pocket so Ali and Abdu wouldn’t see it. Abdu, deeply stunned, lamented over Ali’s room. Ali seemed to have been struck by a lightning bolt.

  Looking at him and the state he was in, I said to him, ‘Ali! Come with me! If the garage can hold a French Simca, it can hold two people.’

  ‘That’s it!’ said Abdu, lightened by my suggestion. Ali showed no enthusiasm; he looked stunned.

  ‘We must move, and quickly!’ I shouted.

  ‘Do I have time to go and see my clairvoyant, Zui?’ asked Ali.

  ‘Do you need to see Zui even when you have no roof?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly why I need him,’ he answered.

  I realised the only way to move quickly was to accompany Ali to see Zui. He spent less than fifteen minutes there. Coming out, he looked a different person, calm and relaxed.

  ‘How much will the landlady charge me?’ Ali asked.

  ‘No idea, but we will strike a bargain,’ I replied.

  ‘She will go berserk if she finds me living there without paying rent,’ murmured Ali.

  ‘Such a woman’s wrath should be avoided,’ I said. We all left just like the night before.

  Hearing me unlocking the bolt, the landlady and her husband rushed out one after the other. Under the scrutiny of her spotlight-like and razor-sharp intuition, she welcomed Ali with a smile that left nothing of her face but her shiny front teeth and the receding gums above.

  Quickly and without the usual seesaw bargaining, she charged Ali forty-five per cent less than she had charged me. She took the money and Ali picked up the key. Both smiled at their own success. I thought the total rent should be divided equally. For Ali, however, what the lady charged each of us must remain set in stone.

  23

  The garage was truly a new environment for me. It was a tiny part of a small mud house sandwiched in the midst of a terraced block, right on the narrow mud street. Children, free-range, filled the street, and constantly looked for something to do, to eat or to steal. Before I rented the garage, it had been a wasted space, but now it was a lived-in area and so attracted the children. They knocked on the door, threw stones in whenever the door was open, peeped in, shouted and ran, or blocked the garage door by simply standing and watching. Yet, they all feared the landlady; she was a fierce watchdog.

  Settled in the garage, Ali and I became the landlady’s wards. Her property was a shrine pedestrians could watch but never touch. Had she been allowed to carry a gun, she would have.

  A peculiar boy of unknown age and parentage kept knocking on the garage door and running away, but one Friday morning was his unlucky day. When he passed and gave in to his maniacal knocking habit the landlady was baking. She went out, hands wet, and followed him to a tree that he had climbed to hide and enjoy her tantrum. She pulled him down to the ground and squeezed him against the tree. In a frenzy, he flooded her with kicks and punches. She couldn’t grab either a foot or an arm. In her final attempt, she grabbed his head and, being the same height as he, gnashed his ear with her powerful jaw and sharp teeth. With all his power, he jerked away, leaving half of his ear in her mouth. The boy yelped and yelled. When I rushed to the scene, all was over, but her chin was blotted with blood.

  ‘I got a bit of him!’ she told me.

  I felt sorry for the boy. He should be in school, I thought. Had his parents been sterilised, he wouldn’t have lost half of his ear and be left with the other half mashed.

  For weeks, I rarely ventured out except to go to the Catholic centre to have my French lesson with my new teacher Suzanne on Friday afternoons, to the Turkish bath two miles away, or to get bread from the unlicensed shops nearby.

  Puzzled, the landlady told me, ‘How weird you are, Jusef! Students go to school and you nest on your books just like a hen!’

  ‘I have to teach myself,’ I said, finding the woman both curious and peculiar.

  ‘Don’t let what you have learned from the big masters leak out of your head,’ she advised me.

  ‘I don’t have very much in my head,’ I answered.

  ‘Make sure, then, you don’t fatten your ignorance,’ she said, looking serious. ‘If you give me your palm, I will tell you a lot. I am a gifted palm reader.’

  She is one of them, I thought to myself. She reminds me of the witch in Oujda years ago when she told me I had run away from home. She also reminds me of Awisha in Melilla.

  In an act of impulse and audacity, expecting nothing dramatic, I stretched my palm out for her to read. She looked puzzled and confused. I laughed at her face dancing in waves.

  ‘How is your mother?’ she asked, her eyes on the ground.

  ‘My mother is dead.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ she said. ‘She isn’t, but it’s not your fault. They have kept you in a pit of darkness.’

  ‘Can you tell me where she lives?’ I challenged her.

  ‘No, I can’t. The onus is on you. Your mother is alive and she works like a doctor. She is extremely beautiful, but unfortunately, a born romantic.’

  I wondered when she was going to stop and lift her eyes off my palm. She became serious and her appearance changed. ‘Your father was a genuine aristocrat,’ she continued. ‘He died young, I think, and tragically …’ She closed her eyes as if going to sleep and said, ‘Your mother knows where you are and is eternally sad. She prays for you and sends you her silent greeting every morning.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word of what you say,’ I said, anxious to go back to my book and keen to get rid of her.

  She didn’t look offended, politely left the garage and slid into her house next door. What a woman! I should never enter into conversation with her, I thought. God only knows what she will say next; I could be killed on my way to sit my exams, be executed, spend my life in prison … I don’t give a damn about what she said. I reassured myself, intending to concentrate my mind on my work.

  I found it difficult to navigate through all the baccalaureate subjects without the help of professors. One can hide from the thugs, but not from the examiners, I thought. Oral exams are particularly hard as they are so fluid. The examiners can take any direction, unlike the written exams.

  Late one afternoon, I took a risk and ran down the long, narrow, twisted descent to the medina to visit Kadija, a girl who had sat in front of me in class. Having worked in Melilla, I was wary of potato throwers, so I watched over my shoulder. My heart thumped when I lifted the knocker on her door.

  She was first to the door. Behind her stood a boy, his big eyes full of curiosity. Kadija didn’t smile or say ‘come in’, let alone offer tea according to tradition. ‘I can’t navigate through maths. I need some help,’ I said.

  ‘What about me! I haven’t even started yet. Honestly, I can’t even think about it. Those thugs have crushed my hopes,’ she said, tears cascading down her cheeks.

  ‘Faissal is keen to sit his exams. He would be happy to pay for private lessons. Do you want to join us?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely!’ she responded.

  ‘Let the other girls k
now. They all live in the medina.’

  ‘I know where they live,’ she said. ‘They are deeply upset, and so are their parents. They are frightened to venture out.’

  I tried to find Faissal, but he was elusive. Coming out of my French lesson with Suzanne and going through a busy street where boys and girls spent the entire afternoon exhibiting themselves to each other, I spotted Faissal and Najib together. Faissal was doing all the talking and Najib all the listening, nodding his head to keep Faissal talking.

  They left the wide street and turned into a narrow lane. Fearing I would lose them, I hurried behind and anchored my hand on Faissal’s shoulder. Both were happily surprised to see me, and with so much to talk about in a street that echoed every word and every footstep, I invited them to my room for tea.

  Faissal never refused an invitation and Najib never contradicted him. ‘I live away from the town centre. Where do you live?’ I asked Faissal.

  ‘Hiding with Najib, whose father owns a small terraced house in the medina.’

  When we arrived, Ali was not in the room, and Faissal wondered who else lived there. ‘Ali, an old friend of Abdu,’ I explained.

  ‘In which class is he?’ asked Faissal.

  ‘He’s not a student,’ I said. ‘He’s a grocer.’

  ‘That’s quite strange,’ said Najib, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Ali’s room was vandalised,’ I said, ‘but I was the intended target.’

  ‘The thugs are cracking down on all baccalaureate students. My nephew Hamidi, a baccalaureate student from class B, was assaulted. Coming back to his room, bending down to look for his room key amidst his shopping, he was hammered by a heavy stick across his back. Two hooligans pushed him against the door, thinking the door was open so he could be beaten in private. But Hamidi is Hamidi! His hand is never far away from his mortal knife. In a quick dance, he pulled it out and slashed the cheek of one attacker. I’m lucky. Nothing has happened to me,’ said Faissal.

  ‘You spoke to Kadija about clandestine lessons!’ burst in Najib, his eyes flashing at me.