by Amin Maalouf
‘Tell your men not to move!’ cried the sham beggar woman in a male voice.
The Zarwali complied.
‘Order them to go off as far as the next village!’
A few minutes later only an impatient horse, two motionless men and a curved dagger remained on the mountain road. Slowly, very slowly, they began to move. The highwayman helped the Zarwali to his feet, and then led him, on foot, far off the road, between the rocks like a beast dragging his prey in his jaw, and then disappeared with him. It was only then that the aggressor revealed himself to his trembling victim.
Harun the Ferret had lived for three years in the mountain of the Bani Walid, who protected him as if he was one of their own. Was it only the desire for vengeance which prompted him to act like a bandit, or the fear of seeing his enemy established in the neighbourhood, once more hounding himself, Mariam and the two boys she had already given him? In any case, his method was that of an avenger.
Harun dragged his victim towards the house. Seeing them arrive, my sister was more terrified than the Zarwali; her husband had told her nothing of his plan, nor of the arrival of her former fiancé in the Rif. Besides, she herself had never seen the old man and could not understand what was happening.
‘Leave the children here and follow me,’ ordered Harun.
He went into the bedroom with his prisoner. Having rejoined them, Mariam pulled back the woollen hanging which was used to close the room.
‘Look at this woman, Zarwali!’
Hearing this name, my sister let out an oath. The old man felt the blade of the dagger pressing against his jaw. He flinched imperceptibly, without opening his mouth.
‘Undress, Mariam!’
She looked at the Ferret, her eyes unbelieving, horrified. He shouted again:
‘It is I, Harun, your husband, who order you to undress! Obey!’
The poor girl uncovered her cheeks and her lips, and then her hair, with clumsy and halting movements. The Zarwali closed his eyes and visibly lowered his head. If he were to see the naked body of this woman, he knew what fate would await him.
‘Stand up and open your eyes!’
Harun’s order was accompanied by an abrupt movement of the dagger. The Zarwali straightened up, but kept his eyes hermetically sealed.
‘Look!’ commanded Harun, while Mariam was undoing her clothes with one hand and wiping her tears with the other.
Her dress fell to the ground.
‘Look at that body! Do you see any trace of leprosy? Go and examine her more closely!’
Harun began to shake the Zarwali, pushing him towards Mariam, then pulling him back, before pushing him violently again and then letting go of him. The old man collapsed at the feet of my sister, who cried out.
‘That’s enough, Harun, I implore you!’
She looked with a mixture of fear and compassion at the evil wreck of a man stretched out at her feet. The Zarwali’s eyes were half open, but he no longer moved. Harun went up to him suspiciously, felt his pulse, touched his eyelids, and then stood up, unperturbed.
‘This man deserved to die like a dog at the feet of the most innocent of his victims.’
Before nightfall, Harun had buried the Zarwali under a fig tree, without removing his clothes, his shoes or his jewels.
The Year of the Storm
918 A.H.
19 March 1512 – 8 March 1513
That year, my wife Fatima died in childbirth. For three days I wept more intensely for her death than I had ever loved her in life. The child, a boy, did not live.
A little before the condolence ceremonies of the fortieth day I was summoned urgently to the palace. The sultan had just come back from his latest summer campaign against the Portuguese, and although he had indeed suffered only reverses, I could not understand the impassive faces which greeted me as soon as I had stepped through the main entrance.
The monarch himself showed me no sign of hostility, but his welcome lacked warmth and his voice was sententious.
‘Two years ago you asked for a pardon for your brother-in-law Harun the porter. We granted it. But instead of mending his ways, instead of showing his gratitude, this man never returned to Fez, preferring to live beyond the law in the Rif, waiting for the chance to avenge himself on the old Zarwali.’
‘But there is no proof, Majesty, that Harun was the assailant. The mountains are full of highway robb–’
The chancellor interrupted me, his tone louder than that of the sovereign.
‘The Zarwali’s corpse has just been found. He was buried near a house where your sister and her husband used to live. The soldiers recognized the victim; his jewels had not been taken. Is that the crime of an ordinary highwayman?’
I must say that since the first news of the disappearance of the Zarwali, which had reached Fez four months earlier, although I did not know the slightest compromising detail, the possibility of Harun taking vengeance had crossed my mind. I knew that the Ferret was capable of pursuing his hatreds to the end, and I was not unaware that he had chosen to live in that part of the Rif. Thus it was not easy for me to declare his innocence. However I had to defend him because, coming from me, the least hesitation would have condemned him.
‘His Majesty has too keen a sense of justice to agree to condemn a man without him being able to plead his own case. Particularly when it concerns a respected member of the porters’ guild.’
The sultan seemed irritated:
‘It does not concern your brother-in-law any more, but you, Hasan. It was you who asked for the Zarwali to be banished, it was at your insistence that he was ordered to go into exile in his village, and it was while going there that he was attacked and assassinated. You bear a heavy responsibility.’
While he was speaking, my eyes clouded over, as though they were already resigned to the darkness of a dungeon. I saw my fortune confiscated, my property scattered, my family humiliated, my Hiba sold on some slave market. My legs began to give way, and sweat overcame me, the cold sweat of helplessness. I forced myself to speak, with difficulty, miserably.
‘What am I accused of?’
The chancellor broke in once more, made aggressive by my too evident fear:
‘Of complicity, Granadan! Of having left a criminal at liberty, of having sent his victim to his death, of having held the royal pardon up to ridicule and of having abused the benevolence of Our Master.’
I tried to rally myself:
‘How could I have guessed the moment that the Zarwali would return from his pilgrimage, or the route he would take? As for Harun, I have lost sight of him for more than four years, and I have not even been able to communicate to him the pardon which has been conferred upon him.’
In fact I had sent message after message to the Ferret, but in his obstinacy he had not bothered to reply. However, my defence did not leave the sovereign unmoved, and he adopted a more friendly tone:
‘You are certainly not guilty of anything, Hasan, but appearances indict you. And justice lies in appearances, at least in this world, at least in the eyes of the multitude. At the same time, I cannot forget that in the past, when I have entrusted you with various missions, you have served me faithfully.’
He was silent. In his mind a debate was in progress which I forbore to interrupt, since I felt him slipping towards clemency. The chancellor leaned towards him, evidently seeking to influence him, but the monarch silenced him abruptly, before decreeing:
‘You will not suffer the fate of the murderer, Hasan, but that of the victim. Like the Zarwali, you are condemned to banishment. For two whole years, you will not present yourself any more at this palace, you will not live any more at Fez, nor in any other of the provinces which belong to me. After the twentieth day of the month of Rajab, anyone who sees you within the boundaries of the kingdom will bring you here in chains.’
In spite of the harshness of these last words, I had to make an effort not to make my relief too evident. I had escaped ruin and the dungeon, and a long journey for two year
s did not frighten me in the least. In addition I was allowed a month to put my affairs in order.
My departure from Fez was flamboyant. I decided to go into exile with my head high, dressed in brocade, not at night but right in the middle of the day, passing through the swarming alleys, followed by an imposing caravan: two hundred camels, loaded with all sorts of merchandise, as well as twenty thousand dinars, a treasure protected by some fifty armed guards, dressed and paid for out of my own pocket, in order to discourage the bandits who roamed the roads. I stopped three times: in front of the madrasa Bu Inania, in the courtyard of the Mosque of the Andalusians, and then in the street of the Potters, near the ramparts, to shower the passers-by with pieces of gold, reaping praise and ovations in return.
I was taking risks by organizing such a show. Some spiteful words whispered into the ear of the chancellor, then into the ear of the monarch, and I could have been arrested, accused of having mocked the royal punishment which had struck me. However I had to run this risk, not only to flatter my self-esteem, but also for my father, my mother, my daughter, for all my family, so that they should not live in disgrace through the period of my banishment.
Of course, I also left them the wherewithal to live safe from need for years, nourished, with servants, and always dressed in new clothes.
When I was two miles from Fez, on the road to Sefrou, sure that all danger had now passed, I went up to Hiba, perched on her mount in a palanquin covered with silk.
‘In the memory of the people of Fez there has never been such a proud retreat,’ I called out contentedly.
She seemed worried.
‘One should not defy the decrees of Destiny. One should not make light of adversity.’
I shrugged my shoulders, not at all impressed.
‘Did I not swear that I would take you back to your tribe? You will be there in a month’s time. Unless you wish to accompany me to Timbuktu, then to Egypt.’
Her only reply was an enigmatic and anguished ‘Insha’ allah’.
Four days later we were going through the pass of the Crows, in weather appreciably colder than I had expected in the month of October. When we had to stop for the night, the guards set up the encampment in a little depression between two hills, hoping in this way to shelter from the freezing winds of the Atlas. They made the tents into a rough circle, with mine rising up in the middle, a real palace of cloth, its sides decorated with artistically calligraphed verses from the Qur’an.
It was there that I was to sleep with Hiba. I awaited this moment with anything but displeasure, but when dusk fell my fair companion obstinately refused to sleep in the tent, without any obvious reason, but with an expression of such fear that I gave up arguing. She had found the entrance to a cave half a mile from the camp. There she would sleep, and nowhere else.
To spend the night in a cave in the Atlas mountains, in the company of hyenas, lions, leopards, perhaps even those huge dragons that were said to be found in such numbers in the neighbourhood, and so poisonous that if a human body came into contact with them it would crumble like clay? It was impossible to instil such fears into Hiba. Only my marvellous tent could terrify her on that cold autumn night.
I had to give in. Overcoming my own misgivings, I let myself be led towards the cave, in spite of the entreaties of the guards and their irreverent winks. Seeing Hiba absurdly weighed down with a large pile of woollen blankets, a lantern, a goatskin full of earners milk and a long bunch of dates made me feel that my respectability was somewhat in jeopardy.
Our shelter turned out to be cramped, more of a hollow in the rock than a real gallery, which reassured me, since I could easily touch the bottom and thus assure myself that no creature was in residence. Apart from my indomitable Hiba, who was behaving more and more strangely, piling up stones to make the entrance smaller, carefully clearing the earth away, wrapping up the goatskin and the dates in wool to protect them from frost, while I, idly mocking, continued to shower her with sarcasm and reproaches, without succeeding either in cheering her up or in irritating her, still less in diverting her from her feverish antlike bustling.
Eventually I became silent. Not from weariness, but because of the wind. From one moment to another it began to blow so strongly that it became deafening. It was accompanied by a thick swirling snowstorm which threatened to surge in spurts into our hideout. Not in the least perturbed, Hiba now surveyed her defence and survival system with an expert eye.
Wonderful Hiba! It was not this occasion that caused me to begin loving her. But she had never been anything else for me than the jewel of my harem, a brilliant, capricious jewel, who knew how to remain elusive from one embrace to the other. However, during the storm in the Atlas a different woman emerged. My only home was in her eyes, her lips, her hands.
I have always been ashamed to say ‘I love you’, but my heart has never been ashamed to love. And I loved Hiba, by Almighty God, dispenser of storms and calm, and I called her ‘My treasure’, without knowing that henceforth she was all that I possessed, and I called her ‘My life’, which was only right, since it was by her intervention that God enabled me to escape death.
The wind howled for two days and two nights, and the snow piled up, very soon blocking the entrance to the cave and keeping us prisoner.
On the third day, some shepherds came to unblock the opening, not to save us, but to shelter in the cave while eating their meal. They did not seem at all pleased to see us, and it did not take long for me to discover the terrible reason for this. Taken by surprise in the storm, guards and camels had perished, swallowed up in the ice. As I came nearer I could see that the goods had fallen victim to marauders, and the bodies to vultures. The encampment of my caravan was nothing but desolation and ruin. I had the presence of mind not to show myself concerned either at the death of the men I had engaged or at the loss of my fortune. I had actually grasped at the first glance that the shepherds were no strangers to looting. Perhaps they had even finished off the wounded. A word from Hiba or myself could have brought us the same fate. Suppressing my rancour, I assumed an air of extreme detachment and said:
‘Such is the judgement of the Most High!’
And, since my listeners had approved this dictum, I carried on:
‘Could we partake of your hospitality while waiting to resume our journey?’
I was well aware of the strange morals of these nomads. They would kill a believer without a moment’s hesitation to seize a purse or a riding animal, but an appeal to their generosity was sufficient to transform them into considerate and attentive hosts. A proverb says that they always have a dagger in their hands, ‘either to slit your throat, or to slit the throat of a sheep in your honour’.
‘Two gold dinars and five silver dirhams! I have counted them over and over again, weighed them and shaken them. That’s all that is left of my huge fortune, all I have left to cross the Sahara as far as the land of the Nile and to begin my life again!’
Hiba met my repeated lamentations with an inscrutable smile, mischievous, mocking and gentle at the same time, which only stirred up my anger.
‘Two gold dinars and five silver dirhams!’ I cried again. ‘And not even an animal to ride, and no clothes to wear except for these which the journey has made filthy!’
‘And what about me, don’t I belong to you? I’m certainly worth fifty pieces of gold, perhaps more.’
The wink which accompanied this remark emptied it of the slightest trace of servility, as well as the landscape in front of us which Hiba was indicating with a lordly air, a field of indigo plants on the banks of the river Dara, at the entrance to the village where she was born.
Some urchins were already running towards us, and then it was the turn of the chief of the tribe, black-skinned, with fine features, his face surrounded with a white beard, who recognized my companion immediately in spite of ten years’ absence, and hugged her to him. He spoke to me in Arabic, saying that he was honoured to offer me the hospitality of his humble dwelling.
I had gone with Hiba and her uncle into her uncle’s house, and we were sitting in a long low room on a woollen carpet, around which about twenty people were assembled, the elders of the tribe, their expressions showing no rejoicing at the reunion they were supposed to celebrate.
Hiba began to speak. She described me as an important notable of Fez, well acquainted with the Law and with literature, described the circumstances in which she had been given to me by the lord of Ouarzazate, and gave a graphic and moving account of the snowstorm which had brought about my ruin, finishing with these words:
‘Rather than selling me to some passing merchant, this man undertook to bring me back to my village. I have sworn to him that he will not regret it.’
With an outrageous impudence, she called out to one of the elders:
‘You, Abdullah, how much are you ready to pay to buy me back?’
‘Your worth is beyond my means,’ he answered in confusion. ‘But I can contribute ten dinars.’
She cast her eyes around the company, looking for her next victim:
‘And what about you, Ahmad?’
The one called Ahmad rebuked Abdullah disdainfully before declaring:
‘Thirty dinars, to cleanse the honour of the tribe.’
And she continued to go around the room in this fashion, cleverly making use of jealousies and quarrels between families and clans in order to obtain a larger contribution each time. The figures were adding up in my head. My two wretched dinars became twelve, forty-two, ninety-two . . . The last person to be appealed to was Hiba’s uncle, who, as chief of the tribe, had to vindicate his rank by going higher than the most generous of his subjects.
