Something drags her from the depths of sleep. She sits up and leans into the darkness, but all she hears is the soft pelt of rain against the plastic tarpaulin Aicha’s strung up to cover the courtyard. She punches a pillow back into shape and settles under the blanket.
The tinny sound of someone knocking on metal filters through the rain.
‘Adi? Where is she? I lose my key. One minute, maybe I find it. Adi? Open the door. Darling? Oh no, my key is gone in the water. Habss.’
Addy pulls one of Aicha’s djellabas over her head and stumbles out into the courtyard. She tiptoes across the damp earth, feeling her way against a clay wall. When she hauls open the metal door, Omar stands there dripping water. He steadies himself against the door jamb and leans forwards, kissing her sloppily on the lips.
Addy reels back from the smell. ‘You reek of whisky.’
‘You have to know I never drink alcohol, only Coca-Cola.’ He stumbles into the courtyard. ‘Oops, it’s a bad step there. I must fix it.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘No problem, habibati.’ He drapes a wet arm over Addy’s shoulders. ‘The policeman have some whisky, so he invited me and some others to drink it with him. I must do it to be well with him.’ He slumps against a wall and pulls Addy into a hug. ‘What happened to you, darling? I looked for you at your house.’
Addy peels his wet arm from her shoulders. ‘Your mother insisted I stay here. She didn’t want me walking there in the dark.’
‘It’s a good decision. There are many bad men at night. I’m a bad man for you, darling. You must be careful of me.’
‘Let’s get you into the room. You don’t want your mother to see you like this.’
‘My mother can see me like this, no problem. I can walk fine, darling. I have control of myself.’ He straightens his shoulders and takes a deep breath. Then he strides straight across the courtyard to his bedroom door. Addy shuts the metal door and runs across the courtyard.
‘I’m sleeping in your mother’s room, Omar.’
‘If I am here, you sleep with me, habibati. Nobody can say anything about it.’
Addy hesitates, her hand on the door handle to Aicha’s bedroom. What will his family think of her sleeping in Omar’s room? Rachid and Nadia had seemed to be fine with it, but what would Aicha and Omar’s grandmother think?
Behind his bedroom door, Omar retches.
The rooster wakes Addy early the next morning. Omar lies beside her, fully clothed in his jeans and his damp green denim jacket, his arm slung over the white sheet across her breasts. His face is turned away and her eyes follow the curve of his ear to the black wiry curls of his hair. The room is dark, but a halo of bright sunlight glows around the edges of the shuttered window, outlining his sleeping body.
As her eyes adjust to the dim light, shapes emerge – a guitar propped in a corner, a large wooden wardrobe missing a door, a desk of planks and concrete blocks, an Art Deco dresser with a cracked mirror, an analogue TV protruding from the wall on a bracket, a set of African drums.
She leans over Omar and studies his face. She kisses the hill of his cheek and slides out from under the sheet. Dressing quickly, she slips out of the room and tiptoes across the courtyard. The chickens are awake and scratching around the earth for titbits. The rooster glares at her and emits an ear-splitting crow as she hurries past.
Inside Aicha’s bedroom, Addy rummages through her leather bag for her toothbrush, a comb, a pocket mirror and a lipstick. She skirts around the rooster and the chickens and heads to the tap by the kitchen door. She brushes her teeth and splashes her face with cold water. Twisting the lid off the lipstick, she examines her reflection in the pocket mirror. The purple smudges under her eyes from the Red Devil are gone and her complexion’s the colour of milky coffee. Her eyes are almost turquoise in the Moroccan light. She twists the lipstick back into its tube and puts it into her pocket.
Addy sits beside Fatima on a log in front of the bread oven in the stable yard, doing her best to help her to bake the day’s bread. Omar squats down beside Addy and scratches his bare head.
‘It smells good. I’m very hungry.’
‘Good morning.’ Addy points to the bread. ‘Agroume. Fatima’s teaching me Tamazight.’
Fatima giggles and prods a hot disc of bread out of the homemade clay oven with a poker and a wooden paddle. She adds it to a stack of bread in the straw basket by her feet. After scooping a raw circle of flattened dough onto the paddle, she slides it into the oven.
‘I’m so sorry for last night, Adi.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘No, I’m sorry for it. I did a mistake.’
‘You know, it’s possible to drink and not get drunk if you only drink a little bit.’
‘In Morocco, it’s not possible.’ Omar rises and stretches, letting out a loud yawn. ‘We don’t have alcohol often, so it’s easy to get drunk. I even don’t like alcohol, habibati. It tastes rubbish to me. But it’s nice to be with my friends, to feel good altogether. Then everybody is sick after. It’s normal.’
Addy follows him through a heavy wooden door into the courtyard. ‘You’re not supposed to drink to get sick.’
‘I’m only sick on the earth. Everybody else is sick in the car of the police. Even the police. He needs to clean it well. It’s smelly.’
‘You were out driving in the police car last night? When you were all drunk?’
Omar shrugs. ‘It’s fine. He’s been the police of Zitoune since he was very young. He drives well. We went only to Oushane to see some friends.’
‘You went back to Oushane? On that mountain road? With a drunken driver? Are you crazy? You all could have been killed.’
Omar drags the low wooden table and two stools out of the kitchen into the centre of the courtyard.
‘Don’t worry, darling. We know the road even if our eyes are closed. It wasn’t our fate to have an accident last night.’
‘I’ll take you for a walk to the gorge today,’ Omar says to Addy as they walk to her rented house. ‘Today must be a special day for you since I did rubbish last night. The paths are for goats only, so tourists never go there.’
‘That sounds great. I’ll bring my camera.’
While Omar’s in the bathroom, Addy roots through the chest of drawers. What has she done with the envelope of her father’s Polaroids and his unfinished letter? She’s been so absent-minded lately. Too much on her mind. She knocks Let’s Go Morocco off the chest of drawers and the envelope plops onto a black zigzag on the thick white rug. Addy stoops to pick it up. She doesn’t remember putting it inside the travel book. But, then, maybe she did.
She wraps the blue letter around the photo of Gus and Hanane and tucks it into her jeans pocket, hiding the envelope with the other Polaroids in the drawer underneath her underwear.
Omar emerges from the bathroom, his face dripping with water and his blue tagelmust wound around his head into a turban. He rifles through the wooden wardrobe and pulls out a long piece of white cloth.
Addy looks at Omar. ‘A tagelmust?’
‘Yes, darling. I know that Mohammed has tagelmusts here for tourists. You might lose your hat in the wind. You will be like the Amazigh Queen Dihya.’
‘There was an Amazigh queen?’
‘Yes, a long time ago in history.’ He twists the fabric around Addy’s head. ‘Maybe one hundred years. Or one thousand.’ He shrugs. ‘Dihya was a Jewish lady, or maybe Christian. But for sure, she was an Amazigh lady. Anyway, she fight the Arabs for many years. They called her the Kahina. It means the Lady Who Sees the Future. They were frightened of her. They came to Africa to make everybody Arab and Muslim. Dihya made a big Amazigh army. She said the Imazighen are proud and we must be free. After many years of wars the Arabs became stronger and they won. So the Imazighen became Muslim then, so at least that’s good. But we never became Arab.’ He stands back and assesses his handiwork.
‘A strong woman.’
Omar catches Addy’s gaze i
n the mirror. ‘For sure. It’s why I choose you, darling. You are a strong lady like Dihya. You are the queen of me.’
Addy shifts her eyes away from his gaze. ‘It’s nice to be back in Zitoune. It almost feels like home.’
‘It is your home.’
‘Not really.’
‘What you mean, habibati?’
‘Nothing.’
Addy walks over to the mirror and stares at her reflection, patting the white turban. She drapes the long, loose tail of fabric across her shoulders. ‘What happened to the Kahina?’
‘She was captured. Then nobody knows. Some people say her djinni took her away to be safe.’
‘Her djinni?’
‘Yes. You must control djinn well or they can make big troubles.’
‘You really believe in that?’
‘For sure. Everybody believe in djinn.’ Omar shrugs. ‘Or maybe she poisoned herself.’
‘Like Cleopatra.’
Omar tucks the end of his tagelmust into his turban. ‘The Queen of Egypt. I know about her.’
‘From school?’
‘From Chakespeare.’ He turns around and smiles. ‘You are so beautiful, habibati. You are pure like a white flower close to my heart.’ He comes over to her and cups her face with his hands. He brushes her lips softly with his.
Addy closes her eyes. The familiar warmth spreads across her belly and she leans into him.
Omar drops his hands and heads towards the door. ‘So, we go?’
‘Now?’
A smile plays on his lips. ‘It’s a long walk, habibati. We must keep our energy.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Zitoune, Morocco – February 1984
Gus looks over his shoulder. ‘Are you okay, Hanane?’
Hanane stumbles through the crevice and into the cave. She blinks to adjust her eyes to the morning sun streaming into the cave’s dark recesses.
‘I’m fine.’
She brushes the fine pink dust of the sandstone mountainside off her pink djellaba.
Gus takes her hand and leads her over to the far wall, where an ancient hunt gallops across the stone.
‘Look, Omar showed me this place. I don’t think there’s a place he doesn’t know in these mountains. I’m amazed he has time for school.’
‘Omar is a very bad boy about school, not like his brother. Momo is such a good student. He told me he wants to be a teacher one day, like me.’ Hanane traces her fingers over the delicate carvings, along the graceful curves of horned antelopes running from slender hunters with spears and bows and arrows. ‘It’s lovely. Whoever did this drew well.’
‘I didn’t know you were a teacher, Hanane.’
‘I’m not. Not yet. But it’s my dream to be a teacher. I practise on the boys. I help them with their homework. Maybe one day I’ll be a real teacher.’
Hanane looks at Gus as he examines the carvings. She shouldn’t be here with him, alone. It’s only a slight comfort to know Omar and Yassine are down by the river keeping lookout for them. If she and Gus were seen alone together … no, she couldn’t think about that. They’re far away from the village. No one comes here. She didn’t even know this cave existed. Even when she’d had the run of the fields and mountains when she was a girl, she’d never discovered it. And the fields where she searched for the plants for Jedda’s medicines and potions were on the other side of the village, in the valleys around the river’s source.
She taps the odd cuneiform letters running under the drawings like a lazy river. ‘It’s Tifinagh. Our language. I wish I could read it. I only recognise a few letters.’
Gus peers at the X’s, zigzags and triangles, squinting as he takes a closer look. ‘This is Tamazight?’
‘Yes, I think so. There are several Amazigh dialects, but Tifinagh is the alphabet of all of them. Tamazight is the one we speak in the Middle Atlas Mountains.’
‘It’s amazing the language has managed to survive.’
‘It’s because the Imazighen are mountain and desert people. We were nomads for a long time. Many are nomads yet. We were away from the influences of the cities and the Arabic culture.’
Hanane watches Gus as he takes a picture of the drawings with his strange camera. A man of curiosity. Always wondering, looking, reading, sketching, taking pictures. Wanting to know all he can about the world around him. To absorb all that life has to offer into his very soul.
She wanders over to a large rock by the cave’s mouth and sits down, the view of the valley, lush with spring green, below her.
‘I’ve brought some more poems for you,’ she says. ‘I wrote them in English to practise.’ She reaches through the side slit in her djellaba for the sheet of folded paper in her apron pocket.
He turns to her and smiles. His eyes the colour of the blue wild irises she seeks out for Jedda in the spring. The special flower that hides in the shade, like a shy girl, hesitant to reveal its beauty.
‘That’s wonderful, Hanane. I love your poems. I’ve got something for you, too. Wait one minute.’
He disappears into the wall crevice, leaving Hanane on her own. Maybe she made a mistake to bring these poems. Poems of love. Poems from her heart to his. What will he think of her boldness?
He staggers out of the crevice, a string bag laden with wrapped packages in his hand. He walks across to the rock and sits beside her, then pulls out a package wrapped in a tea towel. He unwraps it to reveal discs of fresh bread. He hands her another package wrapped in wax paper. Cold chicken legs.
‘I got Omar to bring us a picnic.’
‘I didn’t see him carrying this on our way here.’
‘No, he was out here earlier this morning. He hid it on a ledge in the wall and covered it up with stones. He’s very resourceful.’
They spread out the picnic on the tea towels over the rock and share out the food. Bread sprinkled with semolina, fat black olives, plump chicken legs, hard-boiled eggs, and oranges as big as Gus’s hand.
‘Read me your poems,’ Gus says as he chews on the bread.
‘I’ve written short ones. The words flew into my mind and out of my fingers.’
‘You have my undivided attention.’
She reaches through the side slit in her djellaba for the sheet of folded paper in her apron pocket. The sheet quivers in her hand. She takes a breath and reads:
Sky-riding swift
Make your feathers a pen
And write my love in the sky.
My heart is a harp
Silent until your fingers
Strum its silent song.
Settled by your side
We are like cats
In warm sun
Content in silence.
She folds the paper and slides it back into her apron pocket. Silence. She folds her hands in her lap. The heat rises in her cheeks. She’s made a terrible mistake.
Gus reaches over and rests his hand on hers. ‘They’re lovely, Hanane.’
She looks over at him. He swallows hard and stands. He walks over to the cave’s mouth and rests a hand on the sandstone wall as he surveys the valley.
‘Hanane, I love you. I don’t know how or why it’s happened.’ He shakes his head and looks over at her. ‘I shouldn’t have let it happen. It can’t happen, my love. I’m a Catholic. You’re Muslim. One of us would have to convert, and I don’t see that happening. My faith is the one constant I’ve had in my life. I’m so sorry. I should never have let it get this far.’
A heaviness descends over her liver, over her heart, as if her body’s turning into the stone of these mountains. She blinks at the tears that threaten to weep from her eyes.
‘I understand. It’s all right. I understand.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Zitoune, Morocco – May 2009
Just past Yassine’s café, Omar veers left down a narrow path through the olive grove. They meet a broad-shouldered farmer in coarse brown wool clothes leading a donkey towards Zitoune, the panniers fat with mounds of mint and thyme. He
looks familiar – she’s sure she’s seen him in the village, or possibly in the olive groves. The farmer carries a thick, freshly-peeled wooden staff, which he jabs into the earth to steady his footing as Addy clings to an olive tree to let them pass. But Omar’s as nimble as a goat, jumping out of their way as he greets the man in Tamazight. As the farmer disappears through the trees, Omar reaches behind and takes hold of Addy’s hand.
‘I miss to feel you, darling.’
‘You’re not shy about holding my hand?’
‘Of course not. Your hand is my hand.’
‘My last boyfriend didn’t like to do it. It embarrassed him.’
Omar squeezes Addy’s hand. ‘I don’t like to hear about your boyfriend. I’m jealous.’
‘It’s ancient history. Like Cleopatra.’
Omar looks over his shoulder. ‘What happened?’
‘He went with another lady. I didn’t like it, so I finished with him.’
‘In Morocco, it’s not so strange for a man to go with another lady. I can have four wives.’
‘Not with me you can’t.’
Omar laughs. ‘Darling, I know it. Anyway, I don’t have energy for another lady. So, no problem.’
Addy drops hold of his hand and stops in the middle of the path. ‘Omar. I … I …’
‘What is it, habibati?’
She brushes her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Why haven’t you married? All your friends are married. I’m sure there are many Amazigh girls who’d love to marry you.’
The line between Omar’s eyes deepens. ‘Be sure about it, Adi. Since I was eighteen, many people came to my mother to arrange a marriage for me with their daughters. From all over Morocco, even.’ He waves his hand in the air for emphasis. ‘But I don’t want it. Since I got older, the fathers come to me direct. They come from Beni Mellal, from Azaghar, even from Casa. In the mountains everybody knows about me.’
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