A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  Here, on the far side of the bread-oven, we find Khadija herself, the matriarch of this place, wrapped in one of those apron-like striped cloths, hunkered down over a glowing brazier. A beautiful, high-cheekboned face, deeply lined from sun or laughter. And a tattoo, one of those vertical lines in faint indigo running from lower lip to chin. Khadija’s has a pattern of little dots on either side, too. It’s impossible to tell if she is closer to forty or to sixty. Unlike Mariam’s khimar, pinned tightly under her chin and religiously covering every last hair, Khadija has a bright blue-and-white headscarf wound loosely round her head, knotted on the top; plenty of hair showing. And another piece of cloth, a smaller version of the stripy hand-woven stuff, draped over it for good measure. Around her shoulders is wrapped a sort of pink-and-white patterned blanket, crossed over at the front shawl-style and tucked in tightly under her armpits. How on earth, I wonder, do women here manage with so many bits of cloth flapping around them, none of them apparently very firmly attached to their bodies? It would drive me mad – they’d be falling off all the time. It must take years to learn to keep them all under control and still move about more or less freely. I see now though that what I’d taken for socks are actually soft leather leggings with lots of little ties down the side. Good plan: one item of clothing at least that will definitely stay on.

  Khadija makes a gesture at the hand-on-the-heart salutation, which we return. We can’t actually shake hands, because in her right one she is juggling a ball of some kind of extremely sticky-looking, almost liquid dough. Still, Khadija manages to make us unexpected guests feel that she could have wished for nothing better than our presence in her home for Eid al-Fitr.

  You are welcome! she says in Spanish, beaming at us, before launching off excitedly to Mariam in Tamazight.

  Khadija’s making the pastry for this evening, translates Mariam, and she says you’ve done well to land up here, because hers is the best for miles around!

  Pastry? Is that what it is? I’ve never seen anything like it. With a bowl of that strange, wet-yet-springy dough at her side, she dampens her hand in a small jug of water, gets a new grip on the ball of dough, juggles it some more to the right consistency, then dabs it at the smooth metal hotplate balanced over the brazier. Each dab leaves a paper-thin layer on the hot surface that cooks, almost immediately, into an oval leaf so delicate it’s almost transparent. Now she peels it off with her fingertips and adds it to the pile next to her, wrapped in a towel on an upturned pot. It’s called warka, or millefeuille in French. Later you brush each sheet with melted butter, says Mariam, then layer it with the other pastilla ingredients.

  Behind Khadija, stirring something over another brazier in the wide entrance to the modern part of the homestead, is her daughter-in-law, Nadia, who receives us with the same delight as her mother-in-law. She doesn’t speak Spanish, though, or French either. Mariam translates for her. Wayfarers are always welcome, she says, especially today of all days! And there is plenty of food for everyone, God be praised!

  From a distance I took this newer building for the actual living quarters, and the others for outbuildings, but evidently I misunderstood. There is no door to its ground floor, which in any case seems more like the entrance to a garage or a shed than a home. Within it is the oddest kitchen I’ve ever come across. The walls are of modern brick and cement, raw and unplastered; the floor is just earth. The window has no glass. And Nadia, in bright pink headscarf, fuchsia cardigan and red-yellow-and-white striped skirt-cloth, is preparing the meat part of the pie – and half a dozen other items, by the look of it – in here, over a selection of cooking devices all at ground level. In the middle of the room, or possibly shed, a round-bellied, smoke-blackened pot simmers on an iron trivet over a small bonfire. No chimney of any kind. I suppose the smoke just goes out of the doorway and window. No sign of electricity, either, never mind gas. A sooty hurricane lamp hangs from a hook in the ceiling, unlit as yet. Inside the doorway stands a second brazier, with a conical earthenware tagine resting on the glowing embers – and a spicy, meaty perfume rising from it that makes my mouth water. Against the back wall is a smaller version of the outdoor bread-oven, built out of the same mud-mortar, stacked with brushwood and ready to light. Over in the corner of this room – can it really be the kitchen? – are a large pile of hay, an even larger one of brushwood – and a mule.

  Nadia sees me looking at the mule, laughs and begins to apologize. It isn’t their mule, Mariam translates, and it doesn’t always live in here. A neighbour has just lent it to them for a few days to bring their firewood home from the mountain.

  Ah, well, that explains everything, then.

  Back outside, Khadija’s pile of pastry leaves is growing. I’d love to try making one. No, maybe not. It’ll be one of those things that looks easy but takes years of practice to get right.

  Imagine meeting millefeuille pastry, though, in these surroundings! I remember once reading that if you drew a line around the parts of Europe where there was a tradition of using that fine layered pastry, you would also have a map of the areas that had been penetrated by Muslim culture: the strudel of Central Europe, where Islam reached the Adriatic from the east, and got almost to Vienna; the sfogliatelle and millefoglie of Naples and Sicily; and the millefeuille of France, whose deep south was once no stranger to Islam. I thought this sounded idiotic. How could ordinary people with simple medieval cooking equipment have taken up something so complicated and used it so regularly that it became a tradition? And what about Spain, then? No millefeuille there. Did the Moors just take it away with them wholesale when they left? Maybe they did. Because, against all odds, here is the simple medieval cooking equipment, still going strong, and there is the millefeuille. I’m going to have to eat my own words. And I’m looking forward to it.

  Pastilla – muy gustoso, says Khadija, confirming this in Spanish.

  Khadija speaks very good Spanish, says Mariam. Her father was a soldier in General Franco’s army.

  Was he? A Moroccan soldier in a Spanish army? This rings a bell. The year was 1936, and along the dusty roads of the Iberian coastline, peasant farmers working their fields saw a strange vision, unseen in Spain for many centuries: a thousand Muslim warriors, bearded and burnoused, weapons at the ready, marching to war. In a thick fog over the Straits of Gibraltar, 4,000 troops, a thousand of them Rif Berber tribesmen, had been smuggled, in fishing boats and tenders, past the Republican blockade to fight for the Generalíssimo Franco. A certain ginger-bearded gentleman living in forced exile on a small island in the Indian Ocean – Abd el-Krim, Rif chieftain – must have given a grim chuckle when he heard that his own men were being rearmed by the very Spanish officers who had destroyed their own republic – now paid four pesetas a day to make war on the elected Spanish government and destroy the Spanish Republic.

  Did Khadija’s dad actually fight in Spain, then? In the Spanish Civil War?

  Khadija, cleaning her hands at a water-butt in the far corner, isn’t sure what exactly he did. He never talked about it. But that was the choice men had here, in his day. They could sign up with the Spanish army, a full-time job – with a pension for the family, too. Or go over the border to Algeria for the seasonal work on the farms of the French pieds-noirs.

  Hear that? says Gérard to Guy, waggling his eyebrows meaningfully. Khadija’s father preferred to face death than to work for you and your pied-noir colonialists!

  Guy sighs. Gérard knows perfectly well that his father was a mere Post Office worker. He didn’t employ anyone, Moroccan migrants or otherwise. He just worked in the Algiers sorting office!

  Really, asks Aytan. Your family were pieds-noirs? In Algeria?

  It dawns on me now, for the first time, that Guy may turn out to be a pretty controversial travelling companion once we get to Algeria.

  But that wasn’t how Khadija meant it, anyway. Her father came back from the army with a pension – and enough money to buy the bricks and cement for the new house, she adds, waving a dismissive hand a
t the building. Except that it turned out to be no good. The family tried it for a bit, when Khadija was a child, but they soon moved back into the old, stone-and-daub house. That new one is made the European way, she says. You can’t live in it. You either bake or freeze.

  Now that her hands are clean, Khadija comes to inspect me more closely, pats me maternally on the cheek, and has a feel of my hair. She looks like a Berber, doesn’t she, she says to Mariam.

  Do I? It doesn’t seem too likely to me. But reddish hair, freckles and light-coloured eyes are, it seems, one of the many colour-schemes in which ethnic Amazigh are available. After some debate with Nadia, they decide that I look most like a Kabyle, a Berber from the hill-country beyond Algiers. I’m lucky not really to be a Maghrebi, though, the ladies inform me. My freckles would be considered a major blemish here, when it came to finding myself a husband.

  Now that we’ve got this intimate, Khadija moves from patting my face to patting my bosom. This will be a recurring theme during my North African journey, and I am sorry to have to report that I have absolutely no idea why. My bosom is perfectly ordinary and average. Is there some myth or legend current in these parts, concerning Western women’s mammary glands? I don’t know, because women are much less likely to speak any language I know than men – and I am almost always alone with women when these bosom-testing events take place. I can never manage to be offended, though – they are always so good-natured about it. Odd, when their breasts hardly seem any different to my own. It doesn’t seem to be to do with bras – nobody takes much of an interest in the underwear, though you’d think the western contraption I wear, with its hooks and eyes, would be worth an inspection. No idea. Mystifying.

  Khadija is now chucking me happily under the chin – apparently her investigations have proved satisfactory. A venerable old gentleman in grey beard and skull-cap, very frail-looking, emerges from a side entrance of one of the old buildings. He is using a doublebarrelled shotgun as a walking stick and is being followed by a small but rowdy flock of children. This is Khadija’s husband, Farid, says Aytan, performing the introductions. Three of the boys are his and Khadija’s grandsons, Nadia’s children: the two smallest girls are her granddaughters. The rest belong to neighbours. Farid shakes our hands cheerily, then says something long to Aytan. The infants bounce around us, pulling at our unfamiliar clothes and stroking my unfamiliar naked hair, giggling naughtily.

  Farid is saying, Aytan translates, that he and Mokhtar are going down to the mosque to join his son Abdelkrim (certainly a pretty popular name in these parts!) and the rest of the men. He’s asking if we will join him later, after the afternoon prayers. Sure enough, Mokhtar now appears, also armed, a slightly more modern-looking weapon slung over his shoulder. Seeing us, he unslings the weapon and brandishes it wildly, to a round of cheers from the children.

  Shooting, he says in Spanish, with another enthusiastic flourish. Boom! Boom, he adds, to more roaring and applause from the children.

  Shooting in the mosque? This seems a little excessive, even in a land known for its dissident traditions. But no: he doesn’t mean actually in the mosque, but in the square outside it. All the men in the village will be down there, waiting to catch the first sight of the moon: because the moment it appears, Ramadan is officially over. And then, every firearm the village possesses will be fired off, to make sure that nobody, not even the most distant goatherd in the mountains, can miss the good news.

  Mariam, Khadija and Nadia are chatting away by the brazier, and I begin to suspect, from the looks and laughter coming my way, that Mariam is telling the tale of our meeting – of my earlier attempt to rob the indigent poor outside the goldsmith’s home.

  What are they saying? I ask Aytan, who has taken his seat with Gérard and Guy on some rush matting by the bread-oven. But he has no idea: he’s only been learning Tamazight since he arrived here, he says. Not like Mariam, who already spoke a southern version of it, thanks to her Berber grandparents, and had a head start. Tamazight is not a dialect of Arabic, as I’ve imagined, but a completely separate language – over 5,000 years old, and with an ancient alphabet of its own, which I will discover, when I finally get to see an inscription in it, looks remarkably like the Elven script invented by Tolkien. Tamazight is the original language of the Maghreb, of course, and is still spoken wherever Berber cultures have survived. It seems that when the Berbers first encountered the conquering Arabs and their new religion, not all of them were too impressed. Many tribes just removed themselves from the sphere of influence of their new rulers – not hard to do when you live a semi-nomadic life anyway – and went off into mountains or deserts, where they would be left in peace to carry on their lives as they always had done. So the Tuareg nomads right down in the south of the Sahara speak it, as do the Kabyles over to the east, on the coastal hills of Algeria, not to mention the other Moroccan Berbers of the Middle Atlas mountains to the south – Mariam’s family’s home. And here in the Rif. Then, of course, my first ever Berber acquaintances, the Zenete Berbers, living in the desert oases of Algeria and Morocco.

  It’s a horribly hard language to learn, anyway, says Aytan. And he can’t understand a word once they get going at that speed.

  Our hostess is now wiping away tears of laughter with the back of her hand. She takes a quick look in my direction and chortles some more. Yes, they definitely were talking about me.

  Khadija says it was the crowd who were in the wrong, not you, translates Mariam. Once upon a time they would have respected that, Muslim or not, you must be in need, or you wouldn’t have been there.

  But don’t worry, adds Khadija, going back into Spanish. You will be fed tonight! Our sadaqa will go to the poor hungry Europeans begging at our gates! And she collapses into laughter again.

  Nadia has begun beating up some eggs. Mariam is emptying the almonds out into a big plastic bowl, and Khadija, not looking too thrilled by this contribution, has started chopping up something she says is a salted lemon. I try a bit. Ferocious: evidently an acquired taste.

  Can I give them a hand with anything? I ask.

  No, you certainly cannot, says Khadija, slapping playfully at my leg from her spot on the floor. Guests do not work in this house!

  This, frankly, is quite a relief. I’m not too good in other people’s kitchens even when all the equipment is perfectly familiar to me. Something tells me I might not acquit myself too well in this unfamiliar low-level stable-type arrangement.

  But maybe, says Mariam, we could get the almonds shelled, before we go and settle in at the schoolhouse?

  A lovely, simple job. The shelling equipment consists of one large flat stone and one smaller one – find them yourself. While seeking ours over beyond the yard wall, Guy and I stumble upon a mound of freshly plucked pinkish-grey feathers among the grass. Looks like we’re in luck: it will be pigeon pastilla, as recommended by Mariam.

  Khadija confirms this. Much better than chicken – and cheaper too! Her grandsons bagged half a dozen, yesterday and this morning, with Mokhtar’s shotgun.

  Her grandsons? Lord have mercy. The oldest of them only looks about ten!

  Nadia has stirred the eggs into an onions-and-spices concoction and squeezed in the juice of a lemon, which she nipped over and collected off the tree at the far gateway. I’ve already done a casual spot-check on the tree’s health – can’t help looking for someone to blame for the tragic state of my Italian one, can I? – and I am pleased to report that it’s in fine fettle, not a sign of blight upon it.

  Now Nadia’s oniony spicy eggs just need to be drained for half-an-hour, and we’re ready to go. Oh, and once we’ve finished shelling the almonds, they’ll need to be blanched, skinned, and lightly roasted. Then Mariam will pound them up in the mortar with a few spoonfuls of sugar. Then the pastilla just needs to be assembled and gently fried for half an hour in butter, over one of the braziers . . .

  Such a lot of work, I say.

  That, replies Khadija, is another good reason why people here
in the Rif wouldn’t bother putting almonds in their pastilla. In Casablanca they probably just buy them in a shop, ready-prepared, don’t they?

  Mariam, not rising to this bait, laughs and carries on bashing away. Nadia goes over to the sooty cauldron to fill a tin bowl with boiling water for the blanching and as she does so, her hand slips. Some of it spills from her dipper. Surprisingly, considering the floor is of earth, this small mishap causes a major disturbance. Khadija shouts something. Nadia backs out into the yard, turns her hands palms up and, eyes shut, recites some kind of prayer at high speed, half under her breath. Now, passing no comment at all on this occurrence, both of them go back to what they were doing, as if nothing at all had happened.

  Djinns, says Mariam, seeing my puzzled expression. The earth is their element; if you spill boiling water on it, you annoy them. Nadia was neutralizing the offence.

  What kind of revenge might a djinn take, then, if you didn’t appease it with prayer?

  You could never guess, according to Khadija. Djinns are capricious creatures, of uncertain humour. Depending on their mood they might do anything from just pulling your hair to mischievously burning your dinner, or making the milk go sour, or even making you or your livestock ill, putting the Evil Eye on you. Best say the prayer right away, calling the angels in to take their place. Then you need never find out!

  I’ve always imagined djinns as massive, powerful creatures that burst out of bottles and lamps to offer you three dangerous wishes and change your life. Thank goodness we are in the company of experts. This local underground variety sounds a lot easier to deal with: more like an imp. Or do I mean a sprite? A demon? A pixie? What a lot of varieties djinns did come in, once upon a time, in my own culture.