To the Spring, by Night

by Seyhmus Dagtekin

  I never understood where it came from, the goat’s terror of the shears and the knife. You would have thought it had already had its throat cut, had been resuscitated after being cut in pieces, roasted on the fire, eaten, gnawed; and had preserved from that first experience the memory of the knife on its jugular vein, the memory of teeth in its charred flesh, and now saw in the sharp blades of the shears and the knife the source of its first fears, saw in the face of the man holding it in his grip the first of its executioners and the first to devour it. Yes, you would have said that this fear harked back to another age.

  To everyone his language, to everyone his fear, his gaps in memory. As for us, we understood that forgetfulness could be fatal, especially when there was a knife that had to stay closed as protection from the jaws of the wolf. No one was immune to forgetfulness, or safe from another’s hunger. Even if its tracks no longer appeared in front of our doors, the wolf was always there. It had just moved a little way off. Our fear in the night was kept at bay and our terraces were ours until the following winter. But forgetfulness and repose were fleeting. It would be back along with the fear that would banish such forgetting.

  In the meantime, the wolf didn’t leave us alone with ourselves. It signed to us through the fear of the goat, its shredded leg, and what we were told of the goat’s scattered remains in the domain of the wolf.

  It should be said that there was more to the wolf than fear. We knew it was in its nature to reflect something else than the fear that dwelt within us. If man projected onto the wolf something other than fear, then the wolf could show different sides to its character. The grownups told us that creatures conformed to the gaze we directed at them. If it was one of compassion, the wolf could graze with the goats, the sparrow feed with the eagle, the dove welcome the serpent into its nest. We knew that wild animals, revealing another side to their nature, could become companions to man, lightening his load and watching over his herd, as long as man was attentive to their appetites. We learned that from the grownups, who had learned it from those who preceded them, and it all went back to the greatest man in the village, Hâji Mouss, whose grave on its bit of land in the cemetery faced our house.

  Hâji Mouss, it was said, had been a shepherd to antelopes. But before he adopted that name, he was just Mouss. Hâji was a title bestowed upon those who had made the pilgrimage. Mouss had an older brother rich enough and pious enough that, when the time came, he decided to set off for the Friend’s sacred dwelling place and complete the pilgrimage. Such a journey meant preparing oneself for a great enterprise, a foretaste of that final leave-taking for which each person must hold himself ready. It meant leaving possessions and dear ones behind to join with other pilgrims, also relieved of all ties, in a coming together that revived a man’s primal sense of belonging. Crossing mountains and deserts, towns and villages, the brother set off for Mecca.

  It was after the overnight vigil on Mount Arafat, the most solemn moment of the pilgrimage when pilgrims gathered on a bare plateau, and – as if they had been deposited onto sand and revived by a rain that, it was said, would raise the dead like flower buds on the day decreed – opened their hearts to the memory of the Friend. After that night, Mouss’s brother lingered a little to savour that instant, which was like a homecoming, a foretaste for the pilgrim of the crowning moment to come at the end of every life. The sun was already high, and the heat of the desert was beginning to make itself felt. He recited one last prayer on the mountain, then remained seated and, in his contemplation, thought about his brother, about the antelopes in the mountains around the village, the grasses they fed on, the trees toward which they climbed. In his mind’s eye he saw their repose in shadow, and within his ears, heard the sounds of their chewing. In his nostrils was the scent of tender shoots, fresh flowers; in his mouth the taste of wild berries. And more than anything, he had a sudden craving for the bowl of milk Mouss offered him whenever he paid him a visit. Emotion clouded his eyes with a veil of moisture. He was suddenly transported to the coolness of the mountains near the village, with Mouss and his antelopes. He was in a state of ecstasy, with that lightness brought on by crossing those forests and those mountains in the heart of spring. He did not know how long his meditation lasted, nor the amount of time his vision of these distant places had stolen from him in this place of prayer. When he came back to himself to rise and depart, a bit confused by these yearnings, by this absence on the mountain, he saw before him his brother’s bowl brimming with warm milk. He accepted it as a sign of grace sent to him through his brother, and he drank the bowl of milk.

  When he returned to the village, the local inhabitants came to visit the brother to honour the completion of his pilgrimage, and to partake in their turn of the blessings such a journey bestows. In approaching someone who had visited those places, they wanted to feel themselves in the presence of that distant prayer that resembled no other, and which they would perhaps never have the opportunity to perform. As soon as he understood that the people from nearby had come to pay him this visit, he came out to greet them and asked them to turn back and go to his brother Mouss, the shepherd of antelopes, saying, “I may have completed the journey, but he is the pilgrim.”

  And it is Mouss who was called the pilgrim, following the revelations of his brother. Now Hâji Mouss, he remained the shepherd of antelopes, watching over both the antelopes and his land.

  Wild animals, the grownups told us, could distinguish a gaze of compassion from a look of fear or a glare of hatred, and they told us the story of the antelope shepherd and the wolf.

  One day, as he was leading his antelopes to pasture, Hâji Mouss received an invitation to attend a meeting of the wise men and scholars of his time. Unable to delay his departure, or to refuse the invitation, and not wanting to leave his herd without protection, he entrusted it to a wolf. He designated an antelope for its meal, telling it not to touch the bones, and afterward to put them aside. Hâji Mouss left for the meeting, and the wolf guarded the herd and ate the designated antelope, laying aside the bones. On his return Hâji Mouss found everything in order. He approached the pile of bones, touched it with his staff, and said, “Rise, O living one!” and the antelope stood erect. But it was limping. The shepherd had said nothing about the cartilage, and the wolf had gnawed at it too energetically.

  The grownups told us that story, and we saw that even between beast and man something could always be forgotten. The lapse could be more or less serious, but still, what was essential was not lost. Even limping, even without its cartilage, the antelope stood on its feet. The wolf had set the bones aside and had guarded its companion’s herd, and the antelopes had gone along with the bargain, fleeing neither man nor wolf, even if it meant becoming lame, and perhaps hoping that one day each of them would be more careful not to forget.

  But sometimes, between man and wolf, there was neither fear nor distance, each having found in the company of the other sufficient joy to encourage them to come together over the years, over a lifetime. What is important is to find the key to the other, to discover the path that can lead us to its dwelling place. Because, we were told, beings are like fortresses, with steep heights that discourage any impulse to approach one another. And without a word to bridge the gap, without a key to open a door, they can, in the same neighbourhood, remain strangers, hostile. Each can close himself off in fear of the nearby fortress, in fear of the cliff before him, in the fright each inspired in the other for lack of this key, for lack of a path that would lead one to the other. Once the key is found, the path discovered, knowledge supplants apprehension, joy takes the place of fear. For man can come close to what surrounds him through the knowledge the Creator bestowed on the first of men, knowledge that was in man when he introduced man to the angels and to the djinns, the grownups said. Man can recover this bond. And other meetings between man and wolf were cited, in addition to those, forced or fortuitous, of the people in the vicinity. To the legend of wolves they added a figure that you might encounter without f
ear on any path, they added the legend of the so-called wolf man.

  The wolf man’s house was in the north, a bit outside the village, near a few cliffs, and on the edge of the forest. Having found a language common to them both, he spoke with the wolves, and lived with them, it was said, for a good part of his life, participating in their councils, their hunting, and their feasts. He shared with them cold and hunger, abundance and fine weather, their raids and their hunts. With the wolves he howled in joy and distress, tasted the euphoria and the anguish of night, experienced their fear of men and dogs, and the fear they inspired in men, dogs, and other animals. How often the villagers had seen him vanish at the call of the wolves, and return days later to give an account to the people, curious to know how he could spend so much time in the company of these beasts they tried to avoid, of his travels side by side with these wolves who were his friends. As all joy has its sorrow, so the pleasure he experienced in going off with them was marred by the occasional misadventure. But he loved the company of wolves, as they did his.

  When he went with the wolves he first drew them away from the village, avoiding other communities, and led them into the deep woods so that their hunting would do no harm to humans and what was precious to them. The villagers, seeing him as an intermediary between themselves and the wolves, came to complain to him if damage had been done, even if he had not been with the wolves on that day.

  He had from time to time eaten human flesh when he came upon the wolves at the end of their hunt and was invited to share the prey with the rest of the pack, the prey being, on rare occasions, a human being. In his opinion, the best part of a man was the flesh of the heel. Sometimes, on his return, the people in the village found him robust, at other times thin and gaunt. And so they asked him why he stayed with the wolves when it became difficult. To leave their company was not easy. You could not, at the first hardship, abandon those whose abundance you had shared. Part of the comradeship was to share with the wolves both plenty and dearth, the sweet and the bitter. There were times, during a storm, when there was nothing to eat for several days, and they had to take refuge in their dens with a few roots they were able to dig up here and there and gnaw upon while they waited for another means of survival, like an infant cheating hunger with his thumb while waiting for his mother’s milk.

  It was said that, like every creature, the wolves too, on days when there was no hunting, in months when every living thing was hunkered down where it dwelt, when everything moist was covered over with ice and snow, when hunger alone had something it could gnaw on, when in the depths of hunger they had no resort but to appeal to the heavens … the wolves, they said, only in such extreme circumstances, received sustenance from on high. It was their howling, they said, between fear and invocation, between sob and prayer, which reached the farthest limits of the sky and brought down sustenance. And it was even said that my maternal grandfather had tasted that food.

  Caught one day in a snowstorm, he had taken refuge in the hollow of a rock. The wolves were assembled not far off. Turning themselves around, turning around each other, they had formed a circle on this carpet of snow, as when men come together for a summoning, and they began to emit howls that were like prayers or supplications sent past the grey clouds to the heavens. One after the other, howling back and forth, giving repeated vent to their cries, pausing, starting in again, and hurling their calls beyond the storm, as if pleading to heaven. And from the sky there dropped down food in the form of balls, larger than a fist, whiter than the flakes that continued to swirl. One ball for each wolf. One ball for the open mouth of each wolf, consumed with great calm and satisfaction. With an appearance of gratitude, and reverence.

  Once the balls were eaten, and their hunger appeased by this celestial manna, the wolves left the scene and scattered. Dazzled, and at the same time astounded by what he had witnessed, and wanting to sample this food that might sate his hunger, my grandfather ventured out of his shelter and, scraping up a few crumbs of the nourishment mixed with snow, tasted them. It was said that he never forgot the taste of those crumbs. That when it was snowy and cold, he went searching for another opportunity to share in the prayers of starving wolves. But the chance never came.

  And it was during one of those cold spells that he was found strangled, with that glimmer of hope deep in his eyes, that softness of mien that had become familiar ever since his encounter with the wolf balls. He lay not far from the spot where he spoke of having partaken of that celestial nourishment. We never knew what revelation he had had just before dying, or which face of death had appeared to him.

  We were also told about men praying in times of extreme destitution and hunger. They said it happened during the reign of Caliph Omar, when the new faith of the southern lands was spreading to the north. And when the people of the south travelled up in company with this faith to establish it on the northern plateaus. First arrived those with swords to propagate it, then men of peace to perpetuate it in the newly converted lands. The tribe of Hâji Mouss’s ancestors, from the region near Mecca, would have been among those who migrated north at the beginning of this upheaval, so we were told. The migration would have been led by Ayzer Ghéffari, one of the first followers of this new faith; Ayzer Ghéffari, whom I always envisioned in the company of his brother, staff in hand, coming down the far-off hill where his tomb was to be seen, below our village, to pay one of his visits to the messenger from Mecca. Visits that had made him one of the most beloved of followers, so it was said.

  The caravan for the north left with Ayzer. It arrived without incident at Mosul, one of the first stops on the northern route. The travellers spent the winter there and, with the return of the good weather, continued on toward the northwest. They were caught in an ambush in the mountain passes between Mosul and Cizîr, and half of them perished. They stopped at Cizîr long enough to recover from their losses and wounds, and then took the road toward Harran. The crossing of this semi-arid plateau was difficult. Toward the middle of the crossing, they were raided and stripped of the provisions and mounts that were left to them.

  Extreme destitution. A hundred people remained, counting the women and children, with no food, no shelter, and no animals, in the summer heat of these arid lands and the cold of their nights. They walked for several days, wandering in this no man’s land, at the end of their strength. There were losses from thirst, heat, hunger, cold. Not that they were trying to avoid death, but they wanted god to allow them to reach the destination they had set for themselves, in order to accomplish the good they had promised. They wanted to know these new lands, to honour them, allow their little ones time to grow up there, take root, become one with them. Death was the end of the journey, they were accepting of that. There would be an end, here or there. And in any case, they would be happy to come home to the divine presence. Ayzer turned to the On High to ask him for help and guidance.

  The grownups told us that one might wonder why such an ordeal should occur when one was trying to accomplish an act worthy of divine mercy. An ordeal might befall us in order to put our goodness to the test, to see how dedicated we were to the accomplishment of this good, and to ensure that the good not be done lightly, that we pay the price for it. That once it was accomplished, it had to its credit its share of hardship and devotion. A journey that was to alter the nature of its destination forever had to be burdened with hardship. To change the other was not to change it through the imposition of one’s power, one’s pretensions, one’s desire for wealth and glory. It was to go in all humility to endow it with a clarity that would redeem it from its forgetfulness, if there were forgetfulness, that would open it to the beyond within itself, would return to it a redolence of this first love. Man should be a reminder for man, not his scourge, his punishment. And the journey to the other, in the course of its completion, had to bring about the humility, the lucidity, that Ayzer and his companions must have come to know in the course of their journey.

  Their destitution having reached these extrem
es, the On High took pity on them, and, with the infinite generosity of his mercy, he brought them into the presence of a herd of antelopes and their shepherd. Every three days the herd and the shepherd appeared to them, quenched their thirst and satisfied their hunger before disappearing. At the end of their journey the shepherd returned with his herd of antelopes, entrusted the herd to their care, and then disappeared, said the grownups.

  So it was that Ayzer Ghéffari and his tribe arrived safely at their destination, and settled there, near our village. And the herd of antelopes that Hâji Mouss tended was descended from the herd inherited from that journey.

  But winter had an end, and the wolves other domains. In moving off, they freed us from fear and left us with what we knew: the stream, the field, the woods; the fronts of the houses converted into stables for the goats in the first months of spring, the terraces where we slept with our eyes in the stars, thousands upon thousands of stars, which pierced the night’s canvas with their light, lavished their coolness upon us on the hot summer nights, directed our gaze beyond fear. On those terraces the night was consummated in the wide-open eyes of our dreams.

  My mother had shown me the stars of Laylâ and Majnûn, the lovers, one night with a full moon under a clear sky teeming with stars, when we were on our way home from a visit.