I focused half blindly upon the mound, dreading arrest, incarceration, and noticed a heap of dirty tissues and paper napkins.
‘My used handkerchief,’ I lied, uncomfortably.
The soldier on the right lowered his rifle, approached cautiously, leaned forward like a stork, and scrutinised the waste. He called in Arabic to his brothers-in-arms. With a wave of a gun nozzle, I was dismissed. I hurried off, praying they would not shoot me in the back. So traumatised was I by the incident that I returned to my room, tore open my luggage and changed my clothes, fearing a warning posted across the country: Alert! Dangerous Western woman at large, last seen wearing a rose-pink cardigan.
And so to Timgad, a World Heritage Site: a Roman city in the north-east of the country, fringing, according to the US State Department, the most dangerous area in Algeria. Timgad lay on the northern slopes of the Aurès Mountains and was created ex nihilo, out of nothing, by the Emperor Trajan in AD 100. From Sétif to Batna, Batna to Timgad, my route crossed high plateaux, vast in their emptiness, where sheep grazed placidly on tufts of shrubs in the drizzle. In the distance, a hazy outline of soft copper-mauve mountains. I was alone in a taxi with a driver I had hired for the day: round trip forty euros. We were at an altitude of 1300 metres, penetrating Chaouia territory. The Chaouias were another Berber tribe, shepherd peoples who had fought the Romans fiercely to maintain a hold of their lands. And not so long after the Romans had departed, the fiery certain-minded Arabs had invaded, intoxicated by the words of their Prophet, spreading their message, imposing their language. They had conquered, they had Muslimised.
‘Arabic is the language in the schools, with French at secondary level. Never taught are our Berber tongues. The Arabisation of Berbers through Islam. They are attempting to erase our identity.’ So spoke Assia whose bed I had shared.
‘Algeria’s problem is a question of identity. Sort that out and the other difficulties will evaporate.’ Achour’s contribution.
The deeper I penetrated, the more clearly I saw the simplicity yet time-immemorialness of Berber history. Their pottery, their ancient argan and olive cultures. Since man had risen up on to two legs and had begun his journeyings north from Central Africa, the Berbers had inhabited these long-distance Atlas ranges and, behind the mountains, they had settled the mighty ocean of sand that today is the Sahara Desert and was, back then, during primeval cultures, lush, fertile plains (possibly with olive trees).
Staring out at the passing world I wondered again, as I had on so many occasions throughout these journeys round the Mediterranean, what has religion to do with this? What had the long reach of Islam to do with these Berber farmers, with their remote, prehistoric existences? And, has the Berber mentality always been that of the clan, the tribe rather than the nation?
Their homes were rectangular tents of skins or mud-baked. Old tyres were laid out on sheets of black plastic to secure them against the bleak, unrelenting winds. How was it when the snows fell? Men in dun-coloured, heavy, hooded robes trudged the flat plains. Two Berbers in their brown cloaks, hoods up, sat in the open boot of a car, goat between them, smoking. In the middle of the cloudy, muddied mountain a woman in the full hijab squatted by a white wall. Above her head in large red letters, COIFFEUR. HAIRDRESSER.
Batna. A dusty, wind-battered semi-constructed industrial nowhere, a metropolis creeping skywards from out of the mountain’s groin. At its approach, wild olives and the ubiquitous military blockades. Shops with gaudy lampshades, men loafing in cafés, spitting in the streets, boys kissing boys, playing dominoes, troops of turbaned males on worksites squatting, smoking. Almost every building was a carcass save for the mosques. Again: what had they to do with this sand-ridden, sandblasted nothingness? An insignificant eatery read, L’Espoir. Hope! Aside from that café, nothing was in French, only Arabic. But it was the French who set solid foundations here in the nineteenth century, as a permanently guarded access point to the Sahara.
The rain was easing, but the sky remained overcast, possibly due to the clouds of cement rising like air balloons. I wound down the window and felt the grit scratch my features, irritate my nostrils. To the right, a stone settlement clinging to an incline with Berber shepherds in brown. To the left, a blockade of uniformed police officers standing about with motorbikes. Everywhere, the faces of military, of religion. Looming before us alongside a red Roman fort was a vast grey prison. On the outskirts of town, dark-skinned boys roamed with sizeable goat herds. I remembered Hamzoui’s words: the disenchanted young whose families have nothing … chosen to train to fight the Holy War.
Batna, quite without character, but a strategic nugget and (though I didn’t know it then) an Al-Qaeda stronghold.
My head was throbbing. It might have been the altitude or the lack of springs in this rattling husk with its stench of diesel or the newly constructed breezeblocks, squat, grey uglinesses dotted about the sandscape.
Timgad, well preserved, buried for centuries beneath sand and now protected by its altitude and dry winds, had been a military colony, a desert-port station for Roman troops, strategically positioned for dominance over these Berber hill tribes, and observation of traffic in and out of the desert.
Timgad, I read, ‘with its square enclosure and orthogonal design based on the cardo and decumanus, the two perpendicular routes running through the city, was an excellent example of Roman town planning’. The place was completely deserted and I tried to picture its meticulously gridded streets inhabited. Had they been adorned with trees, blossoms falling in springtime? Today, swallows were plentiful and swooping low; storks nested on the Capitol’s columns; wild rocket and chamomile perfumed the monuments’ sockets; olive presses lay broken, jigsaw pieces of a forgotten fecundity … Ghosts rose up before me, a few wild olive shrubs shooting up within the ruins, a cypress here and there, imprints of chariot wheels indented the slabs beneath my feet. A grove of olive saplings backdropped the amphitheatre. I imagined columns of marching men, feet beating against the slabbed paving stones. The roofless rising pillars, disciplined skeletons, recalled a regimental exercise. I pictured chariots galloping at full speed through the gates of the imposing Arc de Triomphe. I heard the snorts of sweating beasts, messengers arriving with news from the coast; spreading excitement as an expedition returned victorious from the interior. Fountains flowing, vegetation. But I could not fathom the fish images carved into the steles and on the stone surfaces at the Roman market. Fishes seemed an unlikely inspiration here in the middle of nowhere, so far from the sea, ringed by parched desert lands.
Two thousand years ago, a forty-kilometre lake had irrigated this city. These hilly circumferences were bosky with Mediterranean oaks. Those evergreen woods and the abundance of fresh water had been deciding factors in the choice of Timgad for the Roman soldiers’ metropolis. Twenty-first-century Timgad claimed neither a copse nor pond. The Romans felled the bulk of the trees; they denuded the ancient forests to heat the gallons of water required for their public baths. (The Roman latrines were in better shape than most of the modern offerings I had encountered in Algeria.) Eventually, the lake had dried up, curled in on itself as the desert crept further north.
Waterless was the ruined city I stood in; a desolate, windy outcrop of regulated stones yet, bizarrely, a shimmering play of light on one of the distant mountain descents reincarnated the lake and, for a fleeting moment, the mirage was there: Timgad in all its glory.
I paused on a jagged stone stairway, polished by two millennia of footsteps, and leaned against an altar. A Muslim couple were wrapped in one another within the shadows of abandoned stone, snatching illicit desire, perhaps love. In the distance was the bluish outline of Djebbel Chelia. At 2328 metres, Chelia was the highest summit in northern Algeria.
A man beside a pillar was watching me.
At the tail end of the morning, I perched in weed-infested thermal baths, listening to birds, to a plastic bag flapping in branches of a self-seeded fig while munching on a boiled egg.
The
man approached, pop-eyed and earnest. ‘Drinkwater?’
I was taken aback.
He pulled out a scruffy plasticised card. One word written on it: POLICE.
‘Are you French?’
I shook my head, puzzled.
‘An archaeologist?’
Again, a negative.
‘I have been instructed to keep an eye on you. Tourist control,’ he added when he saw my concern. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Olive stories, clues.’
He nodded and backed off, ‘Bonne chance’.
Stirring myself, moving on, I caught sight of the bug-eyed lawman waving, approaching again, this time in the company of another, all in black. ‘Le Directeur’ of the site.
The toothless, rustic-faced director shuffled forward. ‘Anything we can do, Madame …’ His thought ran out of steam.
The museum had been closed since the troubled nineties. Might he allow me entry? I decided not to request it. He ruled over a forgotten, unexploited backwater. I doubted he even had the key. I bought my driver lunch at the café close by the ticket booth. We ate chicken and ice cream and drank nonalcoholic beer. He offered to pay. When I refused, he insisted on buying me a trinket at the tourist stall alongside the site. I picked a carved wooden camel. We must have been their only customer in weeks. His Berber generosity was touching.
My next overnight was to be Annaba. It involved returning through Sétif, and then an easterly descent towards the coast. En route, Djémila. Basil and Mahyouz, my beekeeping team, linked up with me. Neither had visited the black-earthed city before. A retirement complex built by Rome for its military personnel, fabled for its rich, fertile soil. Two thousand years ago, a river had skirted it, fed from the summits of the overhanging mountains. Twenty-first-century Djémila was a tranquil backwater with no more than half a dozen Berber farms nestling in a verdant valley, each homestead looking back across time towards the skeletons of their ruthless enemy, the Romans.
The construction of the city included four gates, offering access to each compass point. The Gate of Jifel led south to the coast, to a port that had once been a maritime doorway to Rome. Today, Jifel is a gently paced seaside enclave but during the heydays of the Roman Empire with its bustling, lucrative activity, a splendid lighthouse illuminated the passage of cargo ships and travellers in and out of its harbour. Ideally situated within easy reach of the Mediterranean, Djémila, with its clean climate, attracted citizens, retirees, from as far afield as Carthage, some 170 kilometres to the east. I found vestiges of olive presses and oil activity but not an inspiring volume and I concluded that this city might have been an axis point. Volubilis lay to the west, Carthage to the east: both operated massive olive businesses. The caravans of laden camels crossed the Sahel west to east, east to west, transporting the precious oil. The traders, no doubt, exchanged with the Djémilian agriculturalists other produce grown in the black, irrigated earth, while hordes of stevedores waited at the ports to load and unload the goods, taking care that the amphorae heavy with oil were carefully stored and kept out of the light. Shifting the produce was as vital to the Romans as farming it.
Woods of olive trees encircled the foothilled outskirts of Constantine where the women were in the full black hijab. Constantine, originally Cirta, a natural citadel that spread itself across towering rocky outcrops where extensive bridges straddled the River Rhumnel. The city, the oldest continuously inhabited in Algeria, had held a key position within ancient North Africa. The Phoenicians settled it, rare such a hinterland choice for them, for its water. Scipio, at the Battle of Cirta, routed the Carthaginians and Berbers and secured the site for Rome. In spite of its cosmopolitan history, its occupants were and always have been predominantly Chaouia Berber.
I tapped my driver on the shoulder and requested he pull over. I stepped out, craning my head to take the city in, perched like a bird’s nest on natural rock. Here was the hometown of Quashia, our gardener, a man I had always thought of as Arab. Quashia always claimed, and I had seen it on his family home movies, that the women of his household did not ‘porte la voile’, wear the veil, but the city looked, as we skirted it, with its rocket-high, twin-minareted central mosque and renowned madrasa, hardline Muslim. When Quashia was growing up, close to sixty years ago, Algeria was unleashing itself from the French and the hand of Fundamentalist Islam had not yet squeezed. The city I was gazing upon was a living example of the shift, of the power of fanatical faith to change traditional ways.
I began to recall Quashia’s tales as a boy shepherd in the mountains, of his sheepdog that had died, a creature whose cracked photo he still carried in his wallet almost fifty years on, of the firewood he had collected on his back from the mountainsides, selling it in the streets to feed his mother and siblings after the murder of his father at the hands of the French in 1949, the year after the Sétif Massacre, when Quashia had been fourteen, of the shack-bungalow he had built with his own bare hands after theirs had been burned to the ground. His stories had a context for me now.
I pulled out my phone and dialled him, working in the grounds of our olive farm, holding the fort. Miraculously, I had a connection.
‘Guess where I am?’
‘The olive trees are in blossom,’ he yelled. ‘You should be here! Weather’s hotting up, though. We should think about that well you are always talking about. And the repair of the drip-feed pipes.’
‘Are you a Chaouia Berber, Mr Quashia?’
I heard his laugh, knew that toothless grin almost intimately. ‘Mais, bien sûr. One hundred per cent.’
I also recollected how, while I was in preparation for this long voyage, he had requested time off to make the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Spiritual a man though I have always known him to be, this had both surprised and unsettled me. I gave the city one more glance, wished Quashia and our farm a bonne journée and settled back to my travels.
A descent into softly sloping inclines, silvered by olive groves and wildly yellow mustard flowers, onwards through weed-infested vineyards, originally Phoenician, then Roman, later French. On past a colossal and perfectly grotesque cement factory, to Annaba. Annaba, nudging the eastern hem of Algeria, was a picturesque Riviera-style seaside resort frequented by French colonisers who had described it as their ‘petit Nice’. Ancient tracks for the trains that transported the wheat from the mills to the boats were still visible. The modern railway station was the colour of desert sand. From here, if it was safe, I would return west – 600 kilometres, over ten hours by train – to the port of Algiers in search of a boat to Sicily.
Finally, the rain had stopped and the clouds had lifted. I was welcomed by the first sunshine I had been blessed with since Morocco. Still within the core of Hamzoui’s framework of beekeepers, my hosts Mostafa, a dead ringer for American actor Bill Murray who, not surprisingly, he had never heard of, and wife, Nadjet, with one peppermint-white glass eye, were a courteous, well-educated couple with a son living in Paris and an unmarried daughter who drooled day and night over wedding-photo albums. I was housed with Nadjet’s sister, Saoud, who lived alone in a colonial bungalow in a pretty tree-lined street. It could indeed have been the suburbs of Nice. A shy and studious fortysomething spinster, Saoud was a professor of classical Arabic, a strict adherent of Islam and up before the light of day, praying. The women of the family, Saoud, Nadjet and daughter, waited on me hand and foot, which embarrassed me deeply. They did not wear veils but they were believers and saw me as a very different woman.
‘Our lives are within the kitchen, but you have found a place out in the world and it is our pleasure to serve you.’
‘Algeria,’ said Mostafa, ‘is producing one million barrels of crude oil a day. Unlike Morocco, our government doesn’t need the revenue accrued from tourism but culturally, socially, we are worried. Algeria is closing down.’
As students, both Mostafa and Nadjet had studied in Europe and they harboured deep-seated concerns for Algeria’s future. They were alert to the dangers of insula
rity, particularly for the young who had no exchanges with others abroad, who could not leave for the West because visas were denied them, who could only travel to neighbouring Islamic countries. Consequently, they lacked perspective, lacked a broader vision of the world.
I began to understand why Hamzoui had gone to such lengths to make my trip possible. I began to comprehend the hospitality that had been offered to me. I had put this unconditional generosity down to our mutual friends, our beekeepers from Provence. I had supposed that this varied collection of apiarists with their remarkably efficient network across this vast North African spread welcomed me because Marie-Gabrielle was Algerian and a mutual friend, but it was more complex.
These people were starved of exchange and I, somehow, represented a lifeline.
‘The psychosis of terrorism runs deep here. Fear has raised its head again and everyone is anxious for the country’s future. The aim of the terrorists is to close us off from the world.’ Mostafa’s words.
Concerned for my wellbeing as Hamzoui and his beekeepers were, they had not wanted my trip to be aborted. They needed a witness, a messenger to the world beyond Algeria. And the bombs, exploding during the opening moments of my arrival, had threatened to disrupt their well-laid plans. But I had not cut and run, and this meant a great deal to them. I had not understood any of this. In fact, my determination to continue along my loosely programmed itinerary had not been an expression of bravery or courage. Stubbornness was a more apt description. Ignorance. Beyond Blida, I had received little news. My mobile rarely picked up a signal. Michel and I had hardly exchanged a word since my arrival, and only once had I visited an Internet café.
Annaba. Once upon a time, the Phoenicians’ Hippo Regius, rechristened by the Romans, Hippone. Under the Romans, it grew into an early cradle of Christianity guided by Saint Augustine whose mother, Monica, had been a Berber. It was invaded by the Muslims in the twelfth century and from that date onwards the local Berbers had been Islamised. Souvenirs of that epoch lay within the winding labyrinthine medieval heart built by the Muslims in patterns of blue and white, like famed Sidi Bou Said neighbouring Carthage.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 28
