A Riffians Tune (2 page)

She was respected for what she could do and feared for what her tongue might ignite. She could split couples and even families, bickered incessantly with my sisters, and was a source of pain for my mother. When not barking at my sisters, she was guffawing loudly, ensuring she could be heard for miles around.

Mrs Malani, a gifted herbalist, lived a few miles south and was a complete contrast to Mrs Robbi. She was a strikingly beautiful young woman: tall, with deep blue eyes, thick mahogany hair and an unfailingly cheerful disposition. I always felt safe whenever she was around. While my mother was very fond of Mrs Malani, my father preferred Mrs Robbi.

* * *

MY SISTERS DIDN'T MAKE LIFE
easy for me, my mother or, in fact, anyone else. Mrs Robbi never missed an occasion to say how unworthy of husbands they were. To make this worse, two of my elder sisters, Salwa and Sanaa, were determined, against my mother's warning, to tattoo their faces.

Endless bickering and quarrelling ensued. My mother was consistent and persistent in her attempts to dissuade them. Puzzled, tired, and disappointed she wearily delineated Salwa's physical beauty, ‘You are tall and slender with olive skin, honey-coloured hair and long legs. What more to wish?'

Although happy to hear their mother's compliments, nothing could change their resolute determination to be tattooed. My mother's words washed over them without effect. ‘While it might look fine when you are young, as you get older, it will look horrible,' she implored. ‘Look at me!'

Bad-tempered, the two sisters threw everything they could grab, slashed the door, kicked the wall and spat on my mother. Frightened, watching and expecting them to hit her, I cried in the hope of stopping the tantrum. When Sanaa became aggressive, shouting and getting closer to my mother's face, I pelted an onion at her. Angry, she cut the onion in two and rubbed each half on my eyes.

‘You can cry louder now!' she thundered in my ears.

My eyes stung like fire, and I couldn't open them. When I finally did, I found myself alone. I looked for my mother, and she wasn't in the room. As I went out, I found her sitting in the shade in the courtyard, braiding Sanaa's hair, talking and laughing. I took my hurt away to play outside the compound.

Defying my mother's advice, my sisters went to Mrs Himo, a tattoo artist living on a distant hill. She spent the whole day poking their faces with dull needles. When they came home in the evening, no one could recognise them. Each one came back with five tattoos: one on the forehead, one on each cheek, one on the chin and one on the tip of the nose. Mrs Himo's disfigurement of their faces worked against their burning desire to win a husband. Shortly after this mutilation of their faces, Mrs Robbi started to refer to them as ‘the twin piglets' (there was only one year of age difference between them and the tattoos on their noses were strikingly prominent).

As the gibes of Mrs Robbi started to bite, and the decoration did not turn out as expected – the lines were not as straight as they were supposed to have been – my sisters began to wonder if there were a way out.

Despite their hatred of Mrs Robbi, they went to see her to ask if she could erase the tattoos. She answered jokingly, ‘We can burn them off!' knowing the cure would be more defacing than the disfigurement.

* * *

MY LIFE OUTSIDE, AWAY FROM
Hashi's house, was sometimes fun. My cousins and I spent hours and hours trapping birds. Uncle Masso sold me two bird traps in exchange for four eggs that I had stolen. I set my traps under a fig tree or on the top of a hill; traps had to be hidden under the soil, but allow for the movement of the tiny worm trapped in the middle and wriggling to free itself, ironically, movement that would attract the birds. What euphoria whenever a bird was caught! The hunting was never just for fun; it was for food, but trapping birds was a competitive sport where skill and luck were combined. I always felt proud to come home with a bunch of birds hanging around my neck. Small though they were, their contribution in feeding my needy family was great.

‘You are a born hunter, my son! You catch far more birds than your cousins!' exclaimed my mother.

One summer's day, I was outside playing by myself, as usual, when two strong men grabbed me and carried me inside the house. One of them put my legs, as tightly as he could, between his own and presented me, like a sheep about to be shorn, to an old man. All I could see were a pair of scissors in his hand, a knife beside him on his right and an egg yolk on his left. He grabbed my penis, and in a second I was cut and bleeding all over my legs and toes – circumcised. Then everything was a blank. Unconsciousness brought sweet relief.

Pieces of dried, dead skin fell off, but the joy of scratching prolonged the healing. I waddled like a duck for weeks.

I asked my mother if I would need a second circumcision. It was a relief to hear, ‘No, no.' But I didn't believe her. Fear of being grabbed by a man kept me on the lookout whenever I was outside. Though the physical experience was once in a lifetime, it was never so in my dreams. The nightmare haunted me for many years to come. Wary and untrusting, I became suspicious of every man.

The only scar that haunted me more than circumcision was hunger.

D
rought struck. The beautiful valley, hills and mountains became desert. Even the sea shrank. The foxes' howls died, but the owls' hooting filled the sky, as they predicted the house would be abandoned and become dilapidated, ruined and haunted by vultures. Dead fish washed up on the shore, and those who were lucky enough to be near the sea lived on their dead and diseased remains.

I asked for bread but there wasn't any. I searched the house; I couldn't find any. Day and night passed without food. I thought bread and dreamed bread, and I wasn't the only one. Coming into the house at midday, I found my mother, sickle in hand, digging at the wall, chopping and eating the soft stone, cracking it with her teeth. I saw her struggle to swallow it. I did the same until she stopped me.

As if struck by a spell, Hashi's dwelling became a haunted house. Overnight, seventeen sons and nine daughters, with all their children, disappeared. My father's fate was the worst. With my mother, he decided to take us to Algeria, the French colony, in the hope of teaching the Koran, but my father had no practical skills to draw upon or youth to plough with. He was a simple
hafiz
but in a land of abject illiteracy, he was a consultant.

At sunrise we started the journey. Two of my sisters were tricked into staying behind and abandoned to their fate. I was about five years old and barefoot, as I had been since I was born. I was given useless Spanish shoes with tyre soles, twice the size of my feet. I threw them over my shoulder, but thirty minutes into the journey tossed them as a bother.

After two days plodding along, we spent the night in a cave on the bank of the river Moulouya, ‘The Twisted', a river notorious for unpredicted flooding, sweeping trees and claiming human lives. The cave was inhabited by a mentally disturbed hermit, who was tall and too thin, with very long, matted black hair cascading down his back. His wrinkled, leathered face was hardly visible under his beard and moustache. He had not one single tooth and looked demented, deranged, dirty and dangerous. The cave was narrow and exceedingly deep, with a cold blackness that hung in the air. A man called Bourass was already inside with his wife, elderly mother and son. I refused to go in.

‘Get in!' shouted my father. Then from inside, he called, ‘Come in!'

I ignored him. Hearing my father shouting, the hermit came up behind me. Terrified of him, I rushed into the cave and cried, ‘Let's go back! Let's go back!' My pleading fell on deaf ears.

It happened that Mr Bourass was also a
hafiz
, so a quick pact was struck between him and my father. They conversed in the complete darkness of the cave. His wife and my mother didn't exchange a word. The same night while everyone was sleeping, Mrs Bourass crawled to our rawhide bag and devoured a good portion of our barley loaf. The cold, miserable morning started with a dispute. My father and Mr Bourass, like hedgehogs, listened passively.

‘You ate my bread!' my mother accused Mrs Bourass.

‘A lie in your face!' Mrs Bourass retorted. Confronted, challenged, humiliated and interrogated like a criminal, she broke down and ran to throw herself into the river. I watched her with horror. No one called her to come back or followed her. When she reached the river, she meditated over the cold, running water and changed her mind. She slunk back and squatted on the ground alone.

It was early on that cold morning that we came face to face with the river. It marked the division between our Spanish-occupied north and the French colony, the south of Morocco. French customs and police patrolled the border and were mortally feared. Ruthlessly, they stripped illegal immigrants of everything – even a loaf of bread – and turned them back to die.

The river looked alluringly quiet and was half a kilometre wide, but only experts knew how and where to cross. They would never go straight across, but would zigzag to avoid whirlpools, of which the river was full. Hidden undertows were everywhere. My father had no knowledge of either the depth or the undertow. Mr Bourass, far younger than my father, took his clothes off and rolled them around his neck. Watching him, I saw heavy bones with no flesh.

He shouted, ‘Cross in pairs! Hold hands! If one sinks, the other should pull!' We trusted his advice and his technique sounded safe.

I was tied to my mother's flimsy belt to keep me from going under. The water reached my chin and got into my mouth. I choked and coughed, but still managed to stay afloat and guide my mother across.

We all crossed except Mr Bourass' mother. She was left until last. Mr Bourass escorted her, held her hand; she rolled her clothes up, half-naked, and they crossed side by side. Mr Bourass' mother was old, short, frail and heavy-boned, but with no flesh, like her son. He decided in the middle of crossing to take a short cut, as she was tired and struggling. She suddenly slipped into a sinkhole and started to sink in the mud. Her son, trying to pull her out, yelled at her.

I watched in horror, biting my lip. Naïvely, lured by the shallow depth of the water, I ran into the river. My mother yelled, ‘Stop!' She grabbed me by the hair before I got in too deep.

‘I am coming!' shouted my father as he waded into the water only to get stuck in the mire. There were a few people on the other shore, including the hermit who was running in circles like a whirling dervish and flapping his arms like an owl. Mrs Bourass sank quickly. The only sign of her was a bubble on the surface of the water. Mr Bourass stood in the middle of the river and refused to come out, but he was also afraid to dive under the water. A scarf emerged toward the shore. It was obvious that Mrs Bourass would never surface again.

I thought my father, mother and sisters would moan and cry, but no one did. Stripped of our inner dignity, all that was left was a façade of humanity.

Soon, it got colder. I was soaking wet, and my teeth chattered so hard that I couldn't speak or feel my tongue. The Bourass family was left behind, and mine moved on.

Still full of fear and horror, we took an offshoot path, less known and much less safe, but surprisingly, full of moving migrants of all ages – old and young, men, women and children, making up mass columns that stretched into the distance. This slow and steady exodus included some families just like ours, and occasionally, some individuals who appeared to be struggling on their own. Everybody was carrying a rawhide bag.

Migrants were scattered everywhere like tired and hungry sheep. We followed a few columns, and the road was prickled with small sharp grey stones. Moving on, we heard an amorphous cry. I listened and asked my mother, ‘What is it? Listen!'

It sounded like a distressed child's voice, but too raw to be human. It stopped and started, a constant sound of distress. I spied a young girl alone, abandoned, small and very thin, about three or four years old. At first she looked like a wild cat. Her whole face was covered with long, dark, dirty hair. We stopped to see if her parents were about, but there was nobody around except a dark, dying dog. Not far away on a gentle hill, there were some wild pigs. When we stopped, she staggered, crying constantly, toward us.

‘Why is she here?' I asked my mother. She gave me no answer. I stood, transfixed, glassy-eyed, staring at the girl. While we stopped, other migrants were passing by, their faces as well as their hearts dried and dead. No one stopped, looked or asked questions about this abandoned girl.

‘Does anyone want this girl?' I asked my mother.

‘No, no …' she answered.

‘Not even her parents?' I asked. Then I thought of my two sisters left behind and concluded that my parents didn't want them. I feared they might leave me as well if I couldn't keep up with them.

We moved on, and her cry became louder. She tried to follow us, but being weak and hungry, she couldn't. Bit by bit, the distance between us and the girl became bigger and bigger until she disappeared. She was left to die or live with only the company of a starving dog.

Trudging on, my toes were sore and calloused, I felt my knees might buckle, and I asked my father to carry me.

‘If you can't walk, stay here,' he responded.

I stopped and squatted on the ground, but they continued moving without looking back. As they got farther and farther away, I realised I was being left, pushed myself up and ran to catch up with them.

Three days later, my sister Miloda started to feel ill, unable to move or stand up. She soon developed diarrhoea and could not stop vomiting. Passing an empty, derelict shack, we huddled inside and found a hidden place to make a fire so we wouldn't alert French customs or the police. Together we foraged for tinder and wood scattered in the path and managed to find enough for a small fire. My father lit it and my mother put Miloda on her lap, both facing the fire. My father drew a talisman and my mother hung it around Miloda's neck.