Moving the Palace

by Charif Majdalani

  At dawn the next morning, Moore decides that the hunt cannot continue. Although nominally under English supervision, the mountains of Darfur are still free; press on and the risk of sparking off hostilities with Sultan Ali Dinar becomes too great. A council is held under three tamarind trees. Rough maps of the region are spread out on folding tables. A dry wind flips their edges back or sends them flying. Moore rises, declaring there’s nothing left to be done. Ali el Tom says Bellal will likely seek refuge in the sultanates of the west, where he is from. Moore announces that at any rate, England will not intervene in the west, it’s too close to the zone of French influence, and he’s not about to risk war with the French over a few Mahdists. And he brings the meeting to a close. But as the troops prepare to turn back, the colonel draws Samuel aside and Samuel takes this chance to tell him what he thinks—that is, if they had gone on, they could’ve had Bellal, and Ali Dinar would’ve been glad to have him out of the way.

  “I know,” answers Moore. “But I didn’t want to crush him like a bug, when he had neither men nor weapons.”

  Samuel observes that Bellal is now out of reach. Not at all, Moore asserts, and someone will have to go out there and finish the job, with support from the sultans of the west, who hate him.

  “But he’ll have rebuilt his forces in the meantime,” Samuel protests.

  “So much the better,” says Moore. “This way we’ll give him a chance at a truly royal defeat.”

  “I’ll wager I’m the one you want for this job,” says Samuel.

  “I’d gladly go myself,” says the colonel. “You know that. But I can’t abandon my men. And you’re the one I’m appointing. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “But what guarantee do we have that the sultans of the west will agree to go and fight Bellal?” Samuel persists.

  “I’ve told you already. They hate him,” Moore replies. “All you have to do is negotiate cleverly with them and be persuasive. Just think—if you pull it off, you may be lucky enough to be the last to look upon the splendors of the ancient world.”

  *

  Samuel leaves. He crosses the Marrah Mountains despite Sultan Ali Dinar’s standing death threat against any White Man who dares set foot there. Accompanying him is a Sudanese aide-de-camp, a native of Darfur we shall call Gawad. Samuel wears an imma round his neck at all times, above his shirt collar, which he rolls up over his face to hide the color of his skin in cause of any run-ins with the wrong sort. But the two men meet no one, or almost no one—perhaps, in the distance, a slow procession of peasants, donkeys, and oxen dragging their feet in strange silence, or perhaps, in the setting sun that spreads infinite gold across the savannah, a cortege of women, children, and mules, a diaphanous apparition. Perhaps one morning they even near, without noticing, a dozen huts, down to one side; it is the palaver of two farmers standing in the middle of the only path through the village that draws their attention, and with nudges and hands placed over their mouths they warn each other to be wary. But each time, they pass by unseen, and one morning the savannah of the west appears, with the vast yellow steppe of Dar Safa, stippled with acacias, on the horizon. But they still have to find a way down from the plateau, for the available paths are always clogged with small caravans or families returning to the heights. Moving northward, straying from the straightest course, they finally find a way down and reach the plain. A few days later, Qasim Wad Jabr, the Sultan of Safa, agrees to lend his assistance to bring down Moussa Bellal. But he has conditions. Seated on the doorstep to his house, amidst the buzz of insects and the cries of women debating beside large earthenware jars a few yards away, he tells Samuel that nothing is ever free: if England wishes to defeat its enemies, it must be generous with its friends. Samuel listens, sitting on a wooden stool. His hair is no doubt disheveled, and he cannot look away from the sultan’s mother, an enormous queen who nods off during the meeting while being fanned by huge ostrich plumes. And as he listens, Samuel realizes that the generosity the sultan is asking from the English must above all allow him to impose his suzerainty over the other Safawi chieftains, to force them to join a confederation of which he shall be the uncontested leader. That very night, leaning against a massive acacia, Samuel writes a letter to Colonel Moore. He asks for guns on behalf of the Sultan of Safa, rifles and pistols in great quantities, and as quickly as possible. Then he sends Gawad off with the letter, not really knowing what to hope for. Meanwhile, he spends his days at the sultan’s court, playing knucklebone with Qasim Wad Jabr, discussing military strategy over maps drawn in the sand with sticks, and learning the Safawi language. And no doubt he explains to Wad Jabr, during a stop on one of the hunting trips where they kill gazelles with javelins or single-shot rifles, that there’s no guarantee he’ll get weapons. “Then Bellal will not be brought down,” the sultan distractedly replies.

  One night, during a meal in honor of the chieftains of tribes allied to the sultan, in front of Wad Jabr’s dwelling, which the fire makes look like a colossal palace, the conversations revolve around Samuel’s person, what brought him to Darfur, and the few Lebanese known to have been in the region. A Safawi chief tells the story of a Syro-Lebanese slave trader who worked for Sultan Rabih of Borno. Qasim Wad Jabr tells the one about the Lebanese man who left with Emin Pasha for Equatoria, thinking to start a trade in precious woods, only to die of dysentery by the old hero’s side. After which, it is Samuel who tells a story, one he heard at the Syrian Protestant College, from that fellow countryman who set about running guns to various Abysinnian kings, in collaboration with a French adventurer who had apparently been a poet in his own land. One day, as he was escorting a load of rifles for the Negus, he was captured by the latter’s enemies, who decided to execute him on the spot with the very weapons he was readying to deliver. And as trays filled with morsels of beef pass from one guest to the next, Samuel taking some in turn, he goes on, to the amused and shining eyes of the chieftains and their retinues, to tell that the rifles refused to kill the arms dealer, that the execution squad fired its salvo at the condemned man lashed to a tree, but not a single bullet touched him. The Abysinnians cried out that it was a miracle, loosed the man’s bonds, and let him go. The audience laughs and waits for an explanation, platters of meat making another round, and Samuel clarifies that the execution took place on a highly magnetized patch of land, and quite likely, lodestone in the ground caused the bullets to veer off course—that was one possible explanation; there were others, including a miracle itself, and now his audience is murmuring admiringly and invoking God, in whom the only true knowledge resides. After which a singular silence falls and Samuel notices that, in the gilded orange light where shadows play to and fro at the will of the flames, his story, which links a Lebanese man, guns, and a miracle, is giving rise to strange reveries in the heads and gazes around him. He grows worried at this, because at first he himself believed only very moderately in this business of guns, and now he wonders anxiously how the sultan’s disappointment will manifest itself toward him if promises are not kept. But they are. The guns arrive, an entire arsenal transported by an endless caravan descending from the north after skirting the Marrah Mountains. From the summit of a small ridge, Wad Jabr’s troops come to a halt beneath banners green and white, admire the hundreds of camels unreeling in a placid line across the desert. A few hours later, Gawad hands Samuel a letter from the colonel concerning guns and also gold. Samuel looks up from the letter and his eyes meet Gawad’s. From the man’s look, Samuel understands the gold is there, whole bags of it, that it would be best kept discreetly from the reach of greedy hands.

  *

  In the weeks that follow, Wad Jabr unites all the tribes that are loyal to him. A wind of power and bellicose intent sweeps through the region. Dark legions arrive from the west and the north, warriors with heads wrapped in turbans with a thousand folds. Princes, rare of name, fierce of eye, and thunderous of voice, come to meet them under venerable nettle trees. Wad Jabr’s camp swells like a stormy sea, and b
anners flash from every corner. “All this is thanks to you,” the sultan tells Samuel one morning, but Samuel remains silent, for it is Moore’s madness, his gold and his rifles, that have fanned this sumptuous inferno, that have made possible this theatre whose stage manager and sole spectator Samuel now is. One morning, emissaries from Moussa Bellal arrive, bringing Wad Jabr comminatory orders to surrender to the will of the Almighty, as the Mad Mahdi has done, and rid himself of this Christian envoy, or else war will be inevitable. Wad Jabr burns the letter in a fire over which kid lambs are roasting, and the battle finally comes to pass, near a place known as the King’s Well. Banners by the hundreds fly in the wind, blazing in the heavens, raging with their thousand colors, their Koranic verses flinging out imprecations. Beneath them, black horsemen by the thousands, silent and magnificent, face one another in two snaking lines in the middle of the desert. At the heart of the opposing ranks, a fringed green and black banner signals the unsettling presence of Moussa Bellal. That madman Moore was right, thinks Samuel, it really is spectacular. But ten minutes later, he forgets its beauty, the fusillade is violent, the roar and the charge are horrifying, and there is he is, in his European suit, an imma around his head, dragged thoughtlessly into slaughter, instinctively flailing to save his skin, firing his revolver point-blank, then tossing it away and brandishing a saber as if he’d done this kind of thing all his life, desperately whirling it around himself, and blood is splattering his face, dark hands are flying all around him, still gripping their sabers, dark throats suddenly adorned with red necklaces and convulsed eyes. After which, when Moussa Bellal’s troops have been decimated, and there is nothing left of Moussa himself but a head on a pike, Samuel thinks that, too, would please Moore, it’s very Orientalist, and he snickers, a horribly nervous snicker, realizing he’s shaking like a leaf, and keeps shaking as the Sultan laughs his vast laugh, his teeth whiter than jasmine.

  4

  AMONG THE MANY STORIES OF THOSE MEN WHO, FEELING hemmed in by the mountains and the sea, left Lebanon in the early twentieth century, the story of Shafik Abyad is without a doubt one of the most singular. And yet it began somewhat unassumingly, when this carpenter’s son from the village of Beit Chabab, in the Lebanese mountains, left for Egypt in the first decade of the new century. According to firsthand accounts I was able to obtain from that era, it seems he first alighted in Alexandria, where he found work with an Italian carpenter or cabinetmaker who supplied doors, windows, and sculpted woodwork for the villas and modern apartment buildings with which the city was just beginning to bedeck itself. Another of Abyad’s tasks for his employer was to seek out precious fittings and fixtures from the abandoned monuments in the Arab old town. Bourgeois Greeks, Lebanese, and Jews sometimes integrated these elements into modern ensembles when commissioning residences where art nouveau rubbed shoulders with repurposings and Oriental references. But Shafik Abyad likely also ended up supplying antiques to Western dealers, for whom he became a well-known broker, buying from or helping himself to ruined edifices of Arabian Alexandria, which he would explore on his own before bringing in first local artisans to remove roof beams, ceilings, or mashrabiyas, and then mule drivers to transport these to a depot in the Mansheya district. All this must have allowed him to set aside quite a tidy sum, and one day, in some unaccountable fashion—though doubtless with a view to diversifying his territory and sources, or maybe on the advice of his former Italian employer— here he is, leaving for Libya.

  In Tripoli, he finds lodgings with the small Italian community, and in a city that is still an overgrown village of filthy, reeking alleys, he resumes his explorations. Since he speaks Arabic, locals receive him without complaint, despite his European suit, his too-thin neck aswim in a starched collar, his mustachio à la Léon Blum. That’s the kind of man he was, this Shafik Abyad, whose life would become intimately entwined with my grandfather’s for years: skinny, with a gaunt face, bushy mustache, and hollow cheeks. Despite a slight air of grumpiness about him, shopkeepers and artisans help him in his search; he finds a few pieces he then sends on to Alexandria by boat. All this goes on for, say, a year or so, until one day he spots a small Arabian palace in the neighborhood by the citadel. It has a few handsome doors, finely-worked windows, a Moorish marble pool, a small mashrabiya, and two carved stone chimneys like fat pointed bells, as well as a wall painted with birds and fountains, a decorative ceiling and staircase, and even four large mirrors in bronze frames, survivors of a time when the spoils of piracy furnished the town’s markets. Its owner, a wholesaler of dates and dried fruits in a white burnous and Oriental slippers, takes him on a tour of the edifice, now a home to local hens and goats. When, stepping over a fallen roof beam, Abyad asks the wholesaler how much he wants for the woodwork, doors, ceiling, and mirrors, the man thinks for a moment; he has a string of amber prayer beads and a somewhat sly air about him. He mutters figures under his breath and then, like a man who for the rock-bottom price of a pound will let you walk off with every orange he has, verging as they are on rot, he offers to let Abyad have the entire building for the price of the woodwork and the mirrors.

  Although these proceedings might, in their details, seem less than trustworthy, this much is beyond doubt: one fine day, Shafik Abyad indeed finds himself the owner of a little gem in the labyrinth of Tripoli’s Arab quarter. Careful not to spoil the integrity of the whole, he leaves the woodwork and the mirrors where they are, but soon realizes he has an unsalable property on his hands. Perhaps he considers having it restored and renting it out to a consulate, but he soon gives up on that and another plan, absolutely unhinged, comes to mind. I do not know—nor will anyone, ever—what planted the seed of that incredible idea in his mind. He may have heard tell of those desert nations where princes build their houses just as peasants do, from baked clay or brick, and thought a stone palace with frescoed walls, delivered to their doorstep, would dazzle them. Unless it was some camel-driver who told him that the kings of these lands, now vassals of France, were beginning to have abodes built for themselves in order to show European colonists that the ancient traditions of Islam and Arabs were in no way inferior to theirs. The fact remains that one morning, Shafik Abyad organizes the dismantling of his little seraglio stone by stone. After which he charters an enormous caravan that he loads up with every last piece: frescoed walls, mirrors, chimneys, pool adorned in Moorish style, finely wrought roof cut into three sections, carefully detached staircase. Then he enters into endless discussions and negotiations with the caravaners on which way to go and the agreed-on prices that grow and change from one day to the next, and finally the convoy carrying the Arab palace in pieces leaves Tripoli for parts south.

  The initial destination is likely the region around Lake Chad. The trip takes five weeks, with the usual difficulties: endless, incomprehensible stops at oases, inexplicable sulking from the guides when Abyad lets his irritation show, nerves due to rumors of plunderers nearby, the truth of which Shafik doubts. But nonetheless they press on, they cross the Libyan desert, the Fezzan with its rare oases, then the Tibesti with its mountains like masterpieces wrought by Titans. For a week, mustache drooping, collar starched, and eyes wide before these colossal natural sculptures, Shafik Abyad must look like a pioneer of the American West passing beneath cliffs in the Nevadan desert, except that his caravan consists not of squeaking carts but slow ruminants with an air of superiority, hauling not the meager effects of wretched migrants but a miniature palace with arabesque motifs on its doors and frescoed walls, brought all this way to be sold to black princes still somewhat hypothetical, it’s true, but to whom the praises of this singular product will soon be sung.

  *

  And yet of course, a palace cannot be sold like a crate of fruit. In Borno, Abyad unpacks the thousand pieces of his princely abode before the local sultan’s, with its towers and adobe walls. Beneath great perfumed canopies, the sultan, with his court in tow, comes to look it over like a customer and his family strolling absent-mindedly among the scattered
wares of an opulent flea market. At last, his eye settles upon one of the bronze Italian mirrors and the decorative ceiling. “All or nothing,” Abyad replies, then packs it all back up and sets out again. In Kanem, to the east, where since the recent French conquest there has no longer been a sultanate, but only powerful chieftains, he drops anchor several times in the middle of market towns, on squares of red sand surrounded by earthen dwellings whose walls and clay towers his caravaners sneer at, as if they themselves were now guardians of the beauty they’ve hauled across the desert and defended from plunderers. They must wait each time, for the princes are hesitant; they come to see the item for sale or send along dignitaries in slippers who strut about, chest disdainfully outthrust. There is endless nattering; Shafik Abyad sketches out the plans, relates the number of rooms and the height of the ceilings, and he is made to wait. He waits for days and weeks in nameless corners of the savannah that, every morning, become marketplaces, mats laid out on the ground. Babbling women in garish dresses squabble over the price of grasses and roots and sheep or veal carcasses, while lengthy herds of living bovines and ovines belonging to local worthies keep wandering in and out of the tall mud-and-straw houses, passing between fragments of the palace transported from Tripoli, or originally sometimes even Rome or Damascus, which seem like the fruits of fabulous plunder that pirates have strewn across a beach, the better to divvy up. Then come the nights, and there is nothing but lonely trees and red sand. Great sheets are laid over the royal rubble of Shafik Abyad, and the fires lit all around make them look like an army of ghosts.