Among the Faithful (5 page)

Kalipha had raised his hand like a baton, his mouth opened
anticipatively
. ‘
Allah akbar!
’ I began, self-consciously. ‘Wait!’ interrupted Kalipha, scowling. ‘Begin again! Louder, more clear! The voice of the
muezzin
, remember, must carry to the street. There is nothing in this chant, I believe, to make you ashamed! Hold your head up!’

‘Allah akbar! Ashed wullah elehheh ullala, ou ashed weneh Mohammed errusool Allah! Allah akba! Haya alla Salat! Haya alla
falah! Al-lah Akbar!
’ I could see by his face that I had done Kalipha credit. Sidi Tahar was positively beaming. The first sibilant note had brought his half-brothers rather dazzled to the door. Kalipha, dull red with pleasure, was a study in righteous piety as their encomiums rained upon him. After that, all our wants were accorded us! We were even emboldened to ask for, and were graciously granted, the two chairs. Our business settled, more coffees were pressed upon us, Tahar gravely expressed through Kalipha, his hope that we would frequently honour his household, and a date was set for our first visit.

Beatrice was determined that we should waste no more than a day in getting settled. But we had yet to learn that nothing is so urgent to an Arab that it cannot be put off until tomorrow. The items we had asked for came piecemeal, with unconscionable waits between. The sheets, when they finally showed up, beautifully folded, bore the
clearest
evidence of having been slept on for weeks since last they were laundered. Ali, who was something of a dunce, finally admitted that they
were
pretty dirty, but, he was quick to assure us, they had come from the bed of the patron himself!

We had thought it would be such fun to have our dinner brought to us each evening like a surprise package. Kalipha’s memorable meal had given us a relish for Arab food, or so we thought until we took the covers from two dubious-looking messes. One was a soup with a strong taste of rancid oil, and even Beatrice, who wasn’t at all squeamish about food, baulked at the stew. Kalipha was on hand to see how we fared that first evening. He found us at my table eating oranges, the supper untouched beside us. He tasted each dish and, without a word, he threw them both in the slop-pail, and banged himself out of the room. We heard him raising an awful row in the restaurant below. He returned with Mohammed a few minutes later and laid out for us a full meal subtracted from their own supper.
Cous-cous
with camel meat, carrots and pumpkin, a cluster of dates which they had bought on the way, and chunks of Eltifa’s crusty brown bread, still warm from the baking. And so, Kalipha appointed himself our chef, as he had already installed himself our ‘cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire’.

The Hôtel de Sfax had still other disadvantages, quite unforeseen. Beatrice’s north light proved an ever-changing dazzle caused by the
reflection of the glare against the chalk-white mosque opposite. Also, her room was right on top of the clamour and din of the street. It was like trying to concentrate in a boiler factory, while I almost suffocated at night. Because of the terrace outside my window, Kalipha insisted that I keep my shutters locked until daybreak, it was weeks before he could bestir them to put me behind bars. But there could be no compromise with the broken lock on my door. Kalipha was dynamite till
that
was fixed. He would tolerate neither excuse nor delay, in a towering rage he threatened to sleep outside my door. The locksmith arrived with unheard of alacrity! In short, without Kalipha, who was our advocate with Sidi Tahar, who bulldozed Ali, who argued, fought, soft-soaped, lied and swore for us, living in the Hôtel de Sfax would not have been possible.

My faith in our friend received a bad jolt, however, the day I
discovered
a bed-bug. Sanguine specks on the sheets had aroused suspicions which I had allayed by calling to mind his vehement ‘guarantee’. Then I found that bug on the counterpane. I impinged it on a needle and showed it reproachfully to Kalipha. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But you find them everywhere!’ he protested. Even Beatrice, considering her past attitude, was mighty complacent. ‘Why, it stands to reason these beds are alive with bugs,’ she said quite casually. So we let it go at that.

But, for all its shortcomings, we had found our place in Kairouan. Although she never admitted it, Beatrice was accustoming herself to the infernal racket. She found it no longer necessary to forage the crowded streets, she could sketch from her windows, or from the broad terrace that hung just above the heads of the throng.

At 7.30 each morning Salah, the kindly
cafetier
from across the street, brought us coffee. Beatrice and I seldom saw each other till evening, when she came into my room for dinner. (My room – since I had the table.) Shortly after the
muezzins
’ call, the door was knocked and either Kalipha or Mohammed brought in the basket. Those little dinners – piping hot, perfectly prepared, eaten together in the cosy lamplight – are good to remember! We had finished and opened our books when Kalipha would appear with a firepot and the
paraphernalia
for tea. If we felt like talking, very good, but if we wanted to read, undisturbed, somehow he knew it without being told. He quietly kept
the tea going and, curled up compactly on the bed, he smoked with a serenity that permitted us to forget all about him.

The French town had ceased to exist for us until the morning we received official notice that we were to appear that day before the
commissaire de police.
We had already submitted our passports, they were on file at the station; we had taken out our cards of identity, consequently we were puzzled by the rather peremptory summons.

In the absence of the Commissaire himself Monsieur S—, his assistant, received us. We knew at once that he had been drinking, and after he had put to us a few pointed questions his purpose, too, was apparent. We were here to be admonished on account of Kalipha.

‘They tell me that you have taken up with this vagabond Courage.’ The nickname which so characterized our friend, and conveyed in the Arab town such affection, had suddenly become insulting, opprobrious.

‘Yes,’ Beatrice replied, after a pause, ‘it is true that we know Sidi Kalipha.’

This reply infuriated our inquisitor. ‘“
Sidi
Kalipha”,
hein?
’ he mocked her respectful use of the prefix, ‘you call that miscreant “
Sidi”
?’ He began to roar at us. With the violence of his passion, his face, red to begin with, took on the look of raw liver. We sat speechless. I was frightened, but Beatrice’s eyes were blazing, she was gripping the arms of her chair. I started to explain our attitude towards our companion, but I was shouted scurrilously down. Beatrice got to her feet. ‘Come on. Don’t be a fool. You can’t talk to him, he’s drunk.’ With his raucous voice still in our ears we made our way to the street.

We were cooling off in the market-place when Kalipha strolled up. He knew that we had been to the police-station, and he had a fair idea why. The declining sun filtered through the soft streamers of the pepper trees. Abashed, he took a seat beside us. Beatrice ordered him a coffee, and for a few minutes we all smoked in moody silence. ‘Well?’ he said at last, searching our faces. I reached over and found his hand. ‘You look like a bridegroom!’ Beatrice told him, smiling. She adjusted the little bunch of jasmine that hung over his ear, and studied him critically. Then, ‘Can we get to work on that portrait the first thing tomorrow morning?’

W
E DID NOT LIVE
among the Arabs for a month without learning something of djinns, nor without coming to feel a certain respect for phantoms that exert such influence over the learned and ignorant alike. Kalipha, who could not read or write his own name, believed implicitly in them, but so did young Ramah, a graduate of the Sorbonne, so did our merchant friend, Mohammed el Mishri, who made annual trips to the Continent. To acknowledge the Koran, in short, is to admit ‘the might, majesty, dominion, and power’ of djinns.

Before Adam even, they existed. Because they were created of ‘smokeless fire’, they are extremely volatile, assuming any of a
thousand
guises and capable of becoming visible or invisible at will. Hosts of them in ages past were converted and, as True Believers, they now perform the prayers, give alms, fast during the sacred month of Ramadan, and make the Pilgrimage. These, the good djinns, visit men only to comfort and protect them, but beyond Kalipha’s assertion that they certainly
did
exist, I heard very little of them.

It is the infidels, the
sheytan,
that abound in wickedness, inspiring a vigilance that is warp and woof of daily existence. You durst not empty a basin of water without uttering the magic word, craving pardon of the invisible one you may have soaked; to light the fire or let the bucket down into the well without ‘Permission, ye Blessed!’ is enough to throw consternation into an entire family; while to enter an uninhabited house, the baths, the public ovens, and, especially, the toilet, without a conjuration is tantamount to disaster.

Mohammed and Kalipha never mounted the staircase of the Hôtel de Sfax after dark without a prudent ‘
Bishmella
! In the name of
Allah!’ One night when Mohammed was accompanying me home he confided his fear that a djinn – maybe Iblees himself – was haunting the place. Hamuda, our coffee-boy, had been the first to suspect its presence. On three successive occasions, as he was ascending to serve us, he had fallen and broken the cups. The first two times his father had beaten him, but when it happened the third time ‘they knew it was a djinn’. Mohammed swore that Ali, too, had heard curious, unaccountable noises in the corridor. My attempts at reassurance were powerless to rid him of the obsession. Unluckily, when we were climbing the stairs, he trod on his blouse. His fist shot above his head as he cried, ‘What did I tell you!’ Pride would not permit him to ask me to light his way down again, but a new link to the bond between us was forged when I held the lamp until he reached the street.

Kalipha saw nothing remarkable in the fact that most of the malice of djinns is perpetrated upon women. Their instability and weakness, indisputable even among themselves, makes them as clay in the hands of the evil ones. When woman was created, and from a crooked rib, at that, did not Iblees, the chief of the
sheytan
, send up the shout: ‘Thou shalt be my arrow with which I shoot and miss not!’ Man’s very nature, supplemented, of course, by the seal ring upon his finger, protects him. But even he is by no means impervious. For example, there was a man in the town, a man of pious habits and exemplary character, who one day disappeared from the face of the earth. Nobody saw him leave, nobody knew why he left – least of all his wife and grown children. Friends and relatives joined the search. After a year had elapsed, with still no word from him, they divined the mystery. A djinneyeh had married him and spirited him to the
underworld.
In her good time he would return. Sure enough he did, at the end of two years. He appeared as he had vanished. It was said that when his wife, who was alone in the court at the time, saw him
standing
there she had a kind of fit. Kairouan could talk of nothing but Sidi Woomah’s homecoming. But he himself was strangely taciturn. In answer to the eager questions with which he was besieged, Woomah would lay a finger upon his lips, and the most that could be got from him was an enigmatic, ‘One does not speak of this.’ Gradually, however, as evening after evening he sat with his friends in the
coffee-house
,
it became less difficult for him to speak of his experience. It had been, by all the accounts I heard, anything but unpleasant. The djinns, perhaps to make him feel more at home, had worn the aspect of humans and had treated him with great politeness. The climate of the nether world, too, had been unvaryingly balmy. Nobody dreamed of questioning Woomah’s credibility, though I think it did surprise them to hear that there had been ‘automobiles, gendarmes, and all sorts of machinery’.

It was all very puzzling to me because, although the djinns had stolen Sidi Woomah, which was certainly not praiseworthy of them, they did not sound like a really bad lot. ‘Were they wicked djinns?’ I asked Kalipha.

‘N-o-o-o,’ he said, thoughtfully shaking his head.

‘They were good ones, then?’

‘They were like us,’ he replied, ‘good ones and bad ones, with a little good in the bad ones and some bad in the good ones.’ A trifle exasperated, I recklessly suggested that Woomah might have
voluntarily
dropped out of sight, maybe because of ennui (if his wife was subject to fits), maybe wanderlust. It sounded to me, I said, as if he’d been having one fine time down in Biskra or Touggourte!

Under Kalipha’s steady gaze I felt my colour rise and I repented of my heresy. ‘Nobody,’ he declared gravely, ‘not even the
bash mufti
himself is more devout than Sidi Woomah.’ Wagging his finger he proceeded to rebuke me with this proverb: ‘“If you hear that a
mountain
has moved from its place, believe it, but if you hear that a man has changed his character, do not believe it, for he will act only
according
to his nature.”’

The few times I saw Sidi Woomah he was surrounded with men whose faces wore the fixed look of children hearing a ghost story. He had not been home much over a year, however, when it was voiced about town, ‘Have you heard? Sidi Woomah is not to be found!’ The wise smiles with which this intelligence was given and received made me surmise that his lot might be considered a very enviable one, but I never intimated my suspicion to Kalipha, feeling sure that he would be obliged to deny that such a fate was anything but deplorable.

Close association with Kalipha’s household meant a very practical
schooling in demonology. Whenever Abdallah left the family circle of an evening it was because the wife or daughter of so-and-so was possessed, and at least two-thirds of Eltifa’s engagements were
fokkarahs
, or parties for the propitiation of some woman’s djinn.

The djinn, it seems, enters the body by way of the brain and searches until he finds a place to lodge. He announces his seizure with unmistakable symptoms – loss of appetite, listlessness, fits of yawning or bad temper. A practised seer like Abdallah is sent for, and, with chaplet and holy writ, he makes a formal investigation. The patient and her family gather in a dark room. Abdallah sits facing them,
chanting
the Koran and rhythmically swaying, now and then dropping another lump of
benjoin
upon the fire-pot. Lulled by the fumes of the djinns’ favourite incense, the family rock with him, intoning the
familiar
passages. Often it is a long time before the spirit responds and the woman begins to jabber. She goes through the progressive stages of the trance until the djinn is rampant, causing her to rave and foam at the mouth. Now Abdallah can converse with the guest. With the utmost civility he is made welcome. Then the question is put to him, ‘What is it ye crave, O ye Blessed?’ and the patient’s lips articulate the djinn’s response. ‘A reading of the Koran will content me’, he may say, or, ‘For the love of Araby, Sidi, kill a lamb that I may drink the blood!’ Generally, however, he wants a
fokkarah
, in which case a night is set, the woman’s friends are invited, and the musicians engaged to play upon the
bangha
, a powerful Congo drum, the beat of which makes the demon well-nigh delirious with delight. To the pounding of the
bangha
the patient dances, sometimes for hours, until her djinn is appeased and she drops in a swoon. The guests work over her then, chanting exorcisms as they systematically pull her nose, cars, toes and fingers. The djinn may leave,
but he may not.

If, in a few days, the symptoms repeat themselves, Abdallah makes another visit. Sometimes the tormentor can be bribed with delicacies – a diet of raw meat and eggs, or the blood of a black chicken. But when persuasive measures are unsuccessful a scroll, penned with certain verses from the Koran, is burned and the patient inhales the smoke – none but the most tenacious
sheytan
can withstand this dreadful vapour! If even this fails to evict him, Abdallah is justified in
announcing that the djinn has married his patient. So a compact is made with him. If he elects to remain where he is, he must agree to be quiescent until the anniversary of his seizure. If he leaves his bride, he must not return until that date. In both cases he will be made festally welcome. To ‘tie’ the djinn to his promise Abdallah makes his patient an amulet – a bit of the Koran encased in leather or velvet – which she pins among her garments or on her headkerchief.

As I understand it, it is only when the sprite settles in the
brain
itself that his victim succumbs. Be this as it may, most of the women that died while I was living in Kairouan were taken of djinns. When death. occurs criers from the mosques broadcast the obituary through every quarter of the city. ‘Hark!’ Kalipha would say at sound of that sombre chant; then, when he had gathered its purport, he would sigh: ‘There is no strength or power but in Allah! Sidi Bombourt’s daughter, a girl of fifteen, has just died of a djinn.’ Another sigh and he would add laconically: ‘This afternoon she leaves her father’s dwelling
without
the veil.’

There were many things about djinns that perplexed me. Why, for instance, when given the choice of various forms of entertainment, did they generally demand the
fokkarah
? Kalipha accounted for this with a hunch of the shoulders. ‘It’s a matter of taste, that’s all. You like chicken, I prefer lamb. It is the same with the djinns.’ Altogether, as my mentor on this subject, Kalipha was about as inchoate as I would have been had I attempted to explain for his complete satisfaction the holy trinity. ‘Tiens,’ he said, perceiving that his answer left me still in doubt, ‘the next time there is a
fokkarah
in the family, you shall attend.’

We had not long to wait. The following week there was one at the home of his niece, Kadeja, a household almost as familiar to us by now as Kalipha’s own. Kadeja was married to a bedouin, and though they made their home among his tribe far out upon the plain, they were spending this winter in Kairouan. It was Kadeja’s neighbour, Shelbeia, who was giving the
fokkarah
. The same dwelling housed both families, who shared the common court, but Kadeja’s apartment being the larger, was to be used for the occasion.

We hardly knew what to expect. It was the tenth anniversary of Shelbeia’s spirit marriage, and, in accordance with the covenant, she
must celebrate the bridegroom’s return. This we understood, yet reasoned it must, of necessity, be quite a serious affair. We were as nervous as cats when we arrived at the house. Lighted windows and doorways illumined the court across which Kadeja hastened to greet us. We had never seen her dressed in such finery, her hands and wrists were dyed with henna, her brows and lashes blackened with kohl. She positively sparkled with gaiety and excitement. Boolowi, her little
stepson
, came running to meet us, and Sidi Farrah, her husband, towered smiling in the doorway.

The room, which may have been twice the size of Kalipha’s, looked spacious to-night. The painted chest, the loom, and the kitchen
utensils
had been removed to the court and Kadeja’s rug, cut from the frame only a few days ago, was spread upon the bed. In a row against the wall facing the door sat the black shrouded figures of the
musicians
. Kadeja’s mood on the one hand and these sombre presences on the other created in us an even greater uncertainty as to the exact nature of the occasion. With restraint we acknowledged our welcome. We were composing ourselves upon the bed when one of the black bundles chirruped to us in Eltifa’s voice, ‘Welcome, O Rose! In Allah’s name be welcome, O Sultana!’ A standard feature of our evenings at Kalipha’s was a little game in which each side made extravagant attempts to out-compliment the other. Eltifa’s startling salutation solicited from us like rejoinders. ‘Eltifa is like the jasmine,’ we told her hesitantly, hardly daring to smile. ‘Eltifa is the golden date.’ Her sister performers came to her assistance now and it needed all Kalipha’s ingenuity for Beatrice and me to hold our own in so unequal a contest. The vociferous merriment which it provoked relieved us of any further constraint.

Suddenly Shelbeia, bedizened with bright silks and party make-up, appeared on the threshold. It was something of a shock to find
her
in such high spirits! There was not the slightest indication that she housed a rampaging djinn. I appealed to Kalipha, ‘Then this is not really such a serious occasion?’ He seemed at loss for an answer.

‘Serious, yes,’ he replied, ‘but not
too
serious.’

Shelbeia summoned the musicians to dinner and they filed out in lock-step murmuring and laughing among themselves. Kadeja then
deposited the kassar before us and while Kalipha, Farrah, Beatrice and I devoted ourselves to the excellent macaroni, Boolowi, not yet of an age when he might eat with the men, sat patiently by in his high
Egyptian
fez. When the bowl was removed and the coffees were served, Kadeja and the little boy, their backs towards us, ate their own supper at the opposite end of the room.

Now and then as she turned her head I saw that Kadeja’s profile was singularly pure. Smallpox had long ago cheated her of any claim to beauty, it was doubtful whether she could see from one eye, but the warmth of her character, her ripe personality endowed even her ravaged countenance with a kind of beauty. How different she was from the spineless neurotic women I had met and yet she had been conditioned to the same inviolable seclusion that had made them what they were. ‘Ah, Kadeja. She is another thing,’ was her uncle’s way of putting it, ‘she is like a man!’