Tears of the Desert (6 page)

I knew in a way that fighting wasn’t ladylike, but I still felt that a girl should be able to stand up for herself. In any case, as the oldest child I often had to fight Mo’s battles for him. But my father wasn’t happy whenever he heard that I’d been fighting. I think he feared that there was too much of Grandma in me, and that I would end up hot and angry like her.

“Why d’you fight so much, Rathebe?” he’d ask me. “Let your brothers fight the battles. If you keep fighting people will say you’re a fierce, troublesome girl.”

“I’m not fighting because I
like
it,
abba,
” I’d reply. “I’m just defending myself against the others . . .”

In truth I actually enjoyed fighting and I knew that I’d inherited enough of Grandma’s hot spirit to be reasonably good at it. I was only saying this to cheer up my father. I wanted him to continue believing that I was a good, well behaved, daddy’s girl.

By contrast, Omer quite openly courted trouble. Close by the village were some fields where we grew our crops of sorghum, maize, and sesame. My father employed several young men to help with his livestock, but Grandma insisted that we should grow our own food. We’d have to wait until the rains came before we could start planting, but each of us children was expected to plant three or four rows of sorghum and of maize.

The day after the first rains we’d head down to the fields. Grandma would count out the same number of seeds for each of us. First, we’d make a row of holes in the damp earth with a sharp digging stick. Then we’d each go along our row, dropping two or three seeds into the holes and stamping down the earth with our bare feet. At the end of the planting our feet would be hot and swollen and in need of a clean and a rest.

Before leaving the fields, we’d have to make a
jahoub kadai—
a scary man. We’d cut two sticks, one slightly shorter than the other, and tie them together in a cross shape, driving the longer stick into the ground. We’d dress the sticks in some raggedy clothes, and tie an old turban around the scary man’s head. When the wind blew the
jahoub kadai
looked just like a person running across the fields, and it would scare the birds away.

As is the case in most families, there was a great deal of competition between me and my brothers. The first time that Omer came with us to the fields, I realized that I could play a trick on him and Grandma. If I cheated and put twice as many seeds into my holes as I was supposed to, I reckoned I could finish my rows in double-quick time. Grandma was astonished when I completed my work so quickly. Better still, I could see how it annoyed Omer.

But a week later we returned to check on the fields, and my trick was found out. The young plants in my rows were far too dense, and would soon strangle each other.

“Who did this?” Grandma demanded.

No one answered.

“I said,
who did this
? Who was it? Who cheated?”

“It was him!” I blurted out, pointing an accusing finger at Mohammed.

“Mohammed!” Grandma snorted. “I should have known!”

Mohammed burst into tears. “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! She’s lying, she’s lying.”

I turned to Omer. “Well, it must have been him then. He’s too young to know any better.”

I saw Omer puff out his chest in defiance. “What if it
was
me? What if I
did
do it?
So what?
”

“
Which one of you was it?
” Grandma demanded.

“I did it,” Omer repeated. “
I did it.
And what are you going to do about it?”

For a second Grandma stood there in astonishment. Then she grabbed Omer, threw him over her knee, and gave him a beating. But her heart wasn’t in it, of course. And even if she had beaten Omer to within an inch of his life, he would never have cried. It just wasn’t in his nature to do so. After that, I often wondered if Omer really believed the cheating rows were his. But I just think that he was a natural-born bad boy and he liked getting into trouble.

Grandma used to hang a raffia net in the room beams of her hut, in which she’d keep little treats. Omer realized he could stand on a wooden stool and use a cleft stick to unhook it. He’d pull it down, and Mo and I would gather around to peep inside. As soon as we saw that there was something delicious, we wouldn’t be able to resist having a nibble. A nibble quickly became a bite and in no time it was all gone.

Later that day Grandma might have guests come to visit, and she’d go to fetch her bag of treats only to discover that it was empty. She’d fly into one of her rages, and we three would flee the compound as fast as we could. If Grandma caught me or Mo, we’d each try to blame the others. But if Omer was caught he’d announce proudly that he was the thief, and what was Grandma going to do about it?

Grandma could never be angry with Omer for long; she was too fond of him for that. She was forever telling him stories of the old times—of heroic Zaghawa exploits. One day an old man and his wife came calling. They stayed for ages, drinking hot, sweet mint tea and chatting. Just as they were leaving, Grandma grabbed us children.

“See that old man?” she announced. “One day, long before you were born, he was a great Zaghawa hunter. He went to the forest and single-handedly killed an
hjar . . .
”

We stared at him in astonishment. The
hjar—
the leopard—is one of the most fearsome wild animals in our area.

“He killed an
hjar—
but how?” I asked.

“He was very brave,” Grandma continued, in a grand fashion. “And like all great Zaghawa warriors, he was very clever. He tricked the
hjar,
and that’s how he killed it.”

“I’m going to do the same,” Omer announced, proudly. “When I’m bigger, I’m going to kill an
hjar.
”

I prodded him in the tummy. “In your dreams, fat boy!”

Grandma silenced me with a clip around the ear. “Can you guess how he tricked the
hjar
?”

We shook our heads. “Then I’ll tell you. First, he killed a goat. He took the goat and rode into the forest. He checked until he found fresh leopard footprints. Then he got down from his donkey and he started to dig a hole. Once the hole was big enough, he covered it with branches and grass, old leaves, and mud—until it was impossible to know it was there.”

Grandma paused. Her eyes were gleaming with excitement.

“But what happened next?” I blurted out, unable to keep quiet.

“Well, that man was very, very clever,” Grandma continued. “He climbed a tree and tied the goat to one of the branches. Then he hid himself as best he could, and settled down to wait. Late that night the
hjar
came along the path, sniffing in the darkness as it went. It could smell the dead goat, and taste its blood on the air.”

The leopard had bounded forward to seize the goat, but the ground suddenly gave way. As the magnificent animal fell into the hole, the hunter had dropped from the tree, spear in hand. The
hjar
had clawed and snarled at its attacker, but it was unable to escape the trap. As Grandma told us about the death of the
hjar,
I felt somehow sorry for it.

“Was it very beautiful?” I asked. “The
hjar,
I mean.”

Grandma fixed me with a baleful eye. “Beautiful?
Beautiful?
It was big and fierce with savage teeth and sharp claws—is that what you mean by
beautiful
? It had eaten half the cows in the village—perhaps that’s what you mean by
beautiful
? And it had killed lots of little children as they scampered through the forest, and eaten them all up. . . . Maybe in a way you’re right: Anything that kills and eats little children
has to be all right.
”

With Grandma’s fierce comments about sharp claws and little children being eaten, Mo was close to tears. His bottom lip was quivering, which was always the first sign. As for Omer, he was loving it. I took hold of Mo’s hand, and tried to move the subject along a little.

“So what did he do with the
hjar
?” I asked.

“He skinned it, of course,” Grandma replied. “The
hjar
has a beautiful, bright yellow coat with brown spots. He rode back to the village with the skin slung over the donkey’s back. All the children came running and crying out in excitement: ‘Look! Look! The hunter has killed an
hjar
! The hunter has killed an
hjar
!’ He made his way to the marketplace and sold the skin for a lot of money. They used to make fine shoes out of the skin of the
hjar,
you know.”

I wondered why it was that they didn’t
still
make
hjar-
skin shoes? Was it because most of the
hjars
had been killed? We knew there were a few leopards left, because occasionally we’d hear their calls. But they were deep in the forests of the Jebel Marra, and as far away from people as they could possible get.

The next time the three of us were out as a group, Omer made a special point of tracking down the grandchildren of that old man, the village leopard-killer. He challenged them to a fight.

“Ha!” Omer exclaimed, once he’d beaten them. “Ha! Your grandfather may have killed an
hjar,
but you can’t beat me! I’m going to be the greatest leopard killer there ever was!”

While Grandma’s stories were always about the family, the clan or the tribe, my father would try to inform us about the wider world—about the history of Sudan, about foreign cultures and distant countries. Omer had no time for such things and Mohammed was indifferent, but for some reason I had a thirst for such knowledge. As for Grandma, she thought it positively dangerous to turn our minds away from the timeless certainties of the village. Their battle for control of our minds was at its fiercest when concerning the radio set.

One day my father came home with a tiny, battered radio that he’d bought in the nearest big town. It had a shaky antenna that had been half-repaired with sticky tape. Each evening he would try to tune it in to the news, and he was a particular fan of the BBC World Service. He used to tell me that he didn’t believe a word of the Sudanese news until it was confirmed by the BBC. This was one of the earliest inklings I had that there were dark powers at work in our country, and that little they said could be trusted.

We were one of the few houses in our village to have a radio. Oddly enough, bearing in mind that it was “newfangled technology from the outside world,” Grandma became its greatest fan. This was largely because it was such a status symbol. Every morning she would fetch it and place it outside her hut. Grandma didn’t care what she listened to, as long as it
wasn’t
the news. She would twiddle the dial until she ended up on some foreign music program, and then she’d leave it on that all day, at full volume. She couldn’t understand a word, of course. She just seemed to love the noise.

When my father came home in the evening he’d retrieve the radio, place it back in the “living room” and start trying to retune it to the BBC. I knew he found this hugely frustrating, but he never complained. He just came up with a way to deal with it. On his next trip to town he purchased a much bigger radio set. This one was bright purple and shiny new. When he presented it to Grandma she was overjoyed. As status symbols went this really was it.

My father quietly repossessed his little battered radio. He replaced it in the living room, where it remained permanently tuned to the BBC. What he had neglected to tell Grandma was that the new radio had a very limited range and could only pick up broadcasts within Sudan. His tiny old thing was a long-wave set, which could pick up programs from all over the world. It made no difference to Grandma: As long as her radio was big and impressive, and noise came booming out of it, then she was happy.

But however insular Grandma might have wished our life to be, the outside world had a way of affecting us, and often in the most unwelcome of ways. To the east and south of our lands lived several semi-nomadic Arab tribes—the Rizeiqat, the Hamar, the Ta-aisha, and others. We called these people the
Ahrao—
a word that for us signifies “the Arab enemy.” Traditionally, there was little love lost between the
Ahrao
and us black African tribes. If trouble was to come, it came invariably from the
Ahrao.

My father employed a
hiry carda,
a cowboy, to look after our cows and our goatherd. He was around eight years old, and he came from a neighboring black African tribe called the Birgid. I didn’t look down on him because he was poorer than us, and my father’s worker. In fact, Mo, Omer, and I admired him, because he was older than we and he had a job. We’d always want to help look after the animals, and often he would take us along.

Each morning he’d fetch the animals from their
gory—
the house of the animals. This was a circular enclosure made of cut thorn trees driven into the ground. He’d gather up the animals and drive them into the bush to find good pasture. While doing so he had to prevent them from eating any farmer’s crops, and he had to chase any wild animals away. The best pasture was in the foothills of the Jebel Marra, and he’d have to make sure that none of the animals wandered off and got lost in the mountains.

At the end of each day he’d return the cows and goats to the
gory.
It served two purposes: The thick barrier of acacia thorns would keep out wild animals, and it also deterred anyone who might be tempted to steal our livestock. Before leaving for the night, the cowboy would drag across a rough gate made of thorn scrub to seal off the entrance. Finally, he would place one of our dogs at the gateway to warn us of any trouble.

One afternoon he came running into the yard. His face was bloody, his shirt was torn, and he was terrified. He had been driving the animals to some new pasture when the
Ahrao
had attacked. He was only a small boy, and he had run for his life and hid in the bush. In no time, all our goats were gone. The
Ahrao
had left the cattle and our donkey, but the goats were small and fast and relatively easy to herd eastward into their flat desert lands.