A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  Like our good king and his friends, says Mariam.

  Her Aytan, she says, turning to us three rational Westerners, looks at the unemployed back home in the shanty towns, at the poverty and ignorance here in the countryside, and dreams of a return to an Islamic tradition of social justice. It’s good, of course, to wish for a happier, more just world. But she is not at all sure that this lost paradise ever existed.

  Aytan interrupts her sharply, speaking Arabic now. Things are evidently getting too heated for non-Muslims to participate. The argument goes on, still in Arabic, as we stumble on down the hillside.

  Suddenly, making us all jump out of our skins, a great salvo of guns shatters the gathering darkness, roaring out from all over the valley, and from the valley beyond, and the one beyond that, the rolling echoes crashing round the mountains. A roar of cheers now from up ahead. Amid more outbursts of sporadic shooting, the women in the courtyards all around take up the call, filling the air with surreal guttural wails: the traditional ululation. A drum starts to beat out a triumphant rhythm.

  As we arrive at the courtyard before the mosque, three figures detach themselves from the crowd and come our way, arm in arm, firearms slung over their shoulders, shouting their goodbyes to the rest of the group, very flushed and happy: Mokhtar and Abdelkrim, supporting the frail Farid between them. Vamos! says Mokhtar. Time to eat!

  As we head off up the hill, the lamp-lit scene before the mosque is one that would not disgrace Abd el-Krim, or any of the other warlike Rifians of the last few centuries. A pall of blue smoke hanging above a jubilant band of white-turbaned warriors; roars of triumph fighting the the wild beat of the drums; and a gleaming forest of brandished rifles, brass accoutrements flashing against the darkening sky. The moon of Eid has been sighted.

  8

  Out here in the yard the children are banging out an excited rhythm with sticks, stones, and a small drum – a sort of ceramic tambourine. The sporadic firing of guns is still going on across the hillsides, the valleys multiplying the long booming echoes, as the men come back in. Farid insists on Guy, Gérard and Aytan staying outdoors to smoke a manly pipe of kif to improve their appetites. Well timed: the French contingent were secretly bemoaning the fact that there would be no wine at this meal. They’re not used to eating a festive dinner without so much as a glass of wine; it just doesn’t seem right.

  Hopefully the local solution to wine-less-ness will sort them out. Mokhtar is now giving Guy a lesson in burnous-wearing, folding the front sections carefully back, then flipping them over his shoulders into wide, draped wings. Guy looks even more melodramatic than before: positively Dracula. Still, now the sun’s gone in and the mountain chill is upon us, Guy’s purchase hardly seems foolish at all. I wouldn’t mind one myself.

  At the sight of us, the little girls have started up another round of that weird ululation in their throats. They grab me, want me to join in. Hopeless. I just sound as if I’m gargling. The children can’t believe a grown woman could be so incompetent. Mariam demonstrates again. She can do it perfectly – apparently even city-dwelling women do this at moments of celebration, or when they want to give the alarm. It is called a you-you, she says. Try again!

  I do, but it’s no good. This time it comes out like that strangled aaah you do when the doctor has his spatula down your throat. I admit defeat and go indoors.

  Inside the old house, the one where the family really lives, two carpets have been spread on the ground for the first meal of Eid al-Fitr, taking up almost the whole of the floor space. In here there is something a bit more like my idea of a kitchen: a sort of food-preparation and storage area with a work-table and a sideboard, buckets and bowls standing in for a sink, sacks of flour, spices and dry goods arranged on broad wooden shelves. I suppose it makes sense to divide your cooking arrangements this way, when you have no running water anyway, and you cook on open fires. Why mix up the clean zone, involving your stores and your buckets of clean water, with the messy, fire-smoke-and-ashes and dirty-water part of your operations?

  There is a plastic tablecloth in the centre of the carpets, where the communal platters of food go, and sheepskins and cushions are scattered around the edge against the walls; cushions whose covers look as if they’ve been thriftily created out of the usable remnants of the last few centuries of family carpets. No pickings for Mariam here. Nine of us adults are soon gathered upon the rugs, women at one end, men at the other. The children have their own corner beyond the female area, in which they are already creating a party atmosphere with an intricate clapping-and-singing game. Mariam and Khadija have put the radio on, promising us some Andalusian music – there is always an Andalusian band for Eid al-Fitr – but for the moment the station is just broadcasting an excited commentary, and even more celebratory explosions.

  Farid, Mariam told me once we women were indoors, is not a well man. He has trouble walking, his joints pain him so much, and he seems to be getting thinner by the minute, fading away. She thinks he is out of it most of the time on kif, to relieve the pain. He sits in his room all day, with the door open to the hills, smoking, warming himself on his little brazier and gazing out across the land; potters up to the mosque a few times a week to sit with the other men; and that’s that. He’s not really functioning as head of the household any more – Mokhtar has had to take over the role, though, truth to tell, Khadija is the real power in the house.

  Should I ask about doctors? I think I can already guess what the answer will be.

  Nadia and the older granddaughter are doing the serving, and bring out the bestiya – I hope that is the politically correct name for it – as the starter course. It really is the pièce de résistance it was advertised to be: a startling combination of tastes and textures, sweet and nutty, sharp and lemony, creamy and spicy, voluptuously meaty – sounds improbable but it’s wonderful. It’s been fried over the brazier in butter, both sides, all golden and crispy on the outside. You just grab an edge of it between fingers and thumb and pull. Burn your fingers, but it’s worth it. Mariam is proud that she’s managed to convince Khadija to try it with the almonds. It’s good, isn’t it?

  Not bad, says Khadija, answering for me, since my mouth is full. But that’s the cunning of it, she adds. You’d hardly know what mistakes were made in the cooking, would you, with all those sweet almonds to cover them up?

  Around the pie are a selection of salads, one of them mainly made of slices of orange, another of wild herbs which, Khadija says, shouting against the racket, she gathered this afternoon along with the smaller of the granddaughters, that one there who is bringing round the bread. They are doused in delicious thick olive oil, Khadija’s own, freshly made and still creamy with the olive flesh that will later settle and need to be filtered out – just the way you eat it in Liguria when it’s newly pressed. The wild herbs are not like anything you’d find on our hillsides, though. A flavour somewhere between rocket and watercress, and I don’t recognize the plant at all. But the orange salad is almost exactly like one a Sicilian friend once prepared for me, using those oranges with a very thick rind, most of which you leave on, just peeling off the zest as thin as you can. A speciality of his home town, Catania, he said. Another trace, perhaps, of the long-gone days of the Peoples of the Book? The bread is Khadija’s own, naturally: to be used to scoop up the salads. And everything is eaten with our hands, from the communal dishes, just like at Uncle Kebir’s. Though I shouldn’t say hands, plural, because it’s just the one hand, really: the right hand. You may be rubbish at this eating method, dribble and spill and create a mess all over your part of the carpet that would shame even a two-year-old Maghrebi, and every fibre of your being may be telling you to bring your left hand into play – but never do it! Much worse than any amount of mess. Your left hand is reserved for cleansing and loo-going purposes, and these being shared dishes, it would be like throwing a bit of used toilet-paper into the middle of the dinner. Unthinkable.

  I seem to have lost what little skill I ever acquire
d at dining Maghreb-style. I watch everyone else plunge a thumb and two fingers into the piping-hot pie, pulling off a neat section and raising it tidily to their lips. They even negotiate removing the occasional pigeon bone elegantly from between their lips without using the other hand. None of the above applies when I try. Guy and Gérard are faring no better. Everyone else enjoys the spectacle a lot, though, especially the infants, who are fascinated and delighted by our incompetence. Khadija, in stitches of laughter again, goes off to look for Western-style utensils among her cooking equipment, and comes back with three huge serving spoons.

  We eat and eat. Next comes the lamb tagine we saw in the making, with pumpkin and chickpeas, piled onto hot buttery couscous. Farid divides up the meat at the men’s end, placing a portion in front of each of them. Khadija does the same at our end. Now for the acid test: how to get the couscous into your mouth when you couldn’t even manage a piece of pie. All the children’s eyes are upon us, agog to see what kind of a mess we’ll make of it. We do not disappoint them.

  This couscous is strangely unlike the usual couscous, though: much nuttier and crunchier. A Berber speciality, Mariam says, only made in spring when the barley is young, by cracking and steaming the fresh grain, rather than grinding it into flour and then reconstituting it, like ordinary couscous.

  Why don’t people always do this, then? It’s delicious, and must be a lot less trouble to make. But there is a very good reason, says Khadija. Storing fresh grains of wheat or barley for any length of time is risky. They are living seeds, and may start to sprout or moulder; leaving your family to go hungry till next harvest. Not so with couscous. By grinding up the corn and rerolling it with water, you have turned each grain inside out. The bran is inside the granule now, the flesh on the outside; its own starch coats it in a protective film as you roll. It will stay fresh for years.

  A revelation. In all these years in Italy, it has never once occurred to me to wonder why people had bothered to invent pasta. The same principle, of course, applies. A lot of work, but at the end of it you have a year’s worth of your basic staple, in an indestructible form.

  As Nadia brings round a jug of some kind of sweetened yoghurt or buttermilk for us to drink, an Andalusian band comes onto the radio at last. Mokhtar shushes the children so we can hear.

  Moroccan blues, says Abdelkrim. What do we think?

  This music of el-Andalus has a good complex drum-beat at its heart, and I’m a sucker for anything with plenty of booming drums. I love it. It doesn’t sound at all like the flamenco-influenced music you would hear in Andalusia today, though. If anything, it’s more like the Portuguese fado, the phrases of song quite separate from the instrumental sections. No doubt, though, the roots of the fado will lie in Portugal’s Islamic past, too. But what’s the singer singing about? Are the songs actually about Andalusia? Everyone listens carefully.

  No, says Abdelkrim. Well, yes, in a way. It’s about a man who goes to visit his oldest friends, but there’s nobody there any more. The beloved buildings of their old home are standing empty and abandoned . He is asking the stones and the mortar what has become of the family, of all the joy and the love, the life that once filled the place . . . Now, it is just an empty shell.

  The next song, translated by Mokhtar, is about a Sufi saint, a marabout. The true story, he says, of a good and holy man, born in el-Andalus, in Cordoba, who gave up his riches and his high station to come here to the Maghreb and live a humble life of poverty, spreading the wisdom of Islam among the children; respected for his purity of spirit by everyone in the city, right up to the emir. But an evil, jealous courtier accused him of sorcery, had him beheaded, and his body thrown to the dogs. Later, the emir finds the vizier out – listen, that’s the bit he’s got to now! And metes out the punishment he deserves for wronging a man of such innocence. The emir has him encased in fresh lime mortar. As it shrinks, he dies in slow, excruciating agony . . . and now the people of the town build a beautiful tomb and mosque to the memory of the kind and holy man, who will never be forgotten!

  A fine, improving tale, and told with great zest and relish by Mokhtar, though his lively, not to say bloodthirsty, rendering of it hardly matches the musicians’ sad and soulful version coming from the radio.

  With the fruit course – delicious dates, I’ve never had them fresh like this, oranges and dried figs, and piles of nuts and toasted seeds – I get my second lesson on djinns.

  Khadija is warning me not to let Aytan take us back to the school by that short-cut past the rocky outcrop, the one with the three pine trees. Are we Nazarenes not afraid of djinns? Because in there among the trees is a small spring which is home to a very powerful one. Djinns, it seems, if they don’t live underground, like to live in water. And Khadija can’t believe how brave – or foolhardy – Mariam is, to pass right close to his lair like that, when darkness is so close. People say the djinns – the djnun – can steal your soul if they get hold of you as the light changes. After the afternoon prayers is the most dangerous time.

  Djinns are not, as I’ve imagined, mere creatures of folk tradition. They are officially part of Islam. It says in the Koran, Mariam tells me, that when God created man from clay, He also created the djinn from smokeless fire. Demons, I decide, must be their biblical equivalent.

  Khadija says that when men go to sleep, the djinns wake up and carry on the life of the village, growing their own invisible crops, feeding their own invisible beasts. You can hear them in the night, moving about, though you will never see them. God made man and djinn both, to help take care of his beautiful creation of the heavens and the earth, she adds, piously.

  Mariam laughs. She doesn’t think that part is in the Koran, she says.

  The djinn at the rock pool has a good side, too, though, Khadija continues regardless. He will help women who are having trouble getting pregnant. They must say their morning prayers there, seven days in a row, and on the last day leave him an offering of barley and henna leaves. It works, too! Mariam’s sister tried it, didn’t she, when she came visiting? And next thing we heard she was having a baby! Really? Maybe djinns aren’t so much like demons, then. I’ve never heard of a demon who had a good side – or, for that matter, one who engaged in agriculture.

  Mariam giggles and shushes Khadija up, checking the men’s end of the room to see if Aytan’s listening. He hates her doing that sort of thing! He even got angry when she took her sister to visit the marabout shrine back home – said it was superstitious nonsense, and not true Islam at all, and that no good could come of it.

  So what, I ask, has Aytan got against djinns, if they’re in the Koran? Or against marabouts, come to that?

  It’s not the djinns themselves, or the Holy Men, but the praying to them that he doesn’t agree with. He is becoming more and more of a puritan, like so many of their old friends from university, always talking of cleansing and purifying Islam, returning their religion to the fundamentals, getting rid of Sufi country people’s heresies and superstitions. Only then will the Islamic world, once the heartland of civilization and enlightenment, be able to return to its former greatness, and gain the strength to fight off Western corruption. He tells people off for being pagans and idolaters, asks how they can repeat the Islamic credo five times a day – that there is only the One God – and then go off and pray to some woodland spirit on the side? He says the same thing about praying to marabouts, too. It is the sin of shirk. But surely Christians have the same sin – praying to anyone other than the One God himself is wrong?

  They certainly do. It is the very first of the Christian Ten Commandments. Thou shalt have no god but God. And the next two commandments, dealing with the making of images and the worshipping of them, simply expand upon the theme. You can still see churches in England where, in the days when some members of the faith took these injunctions as literally as do the Islamic purists of today, they went about attacking the shrines of the opposition, smashing the heretical heads off statues of saints for this very reason. Mariam
is shocked. Destroying holy shrines? Her Aytan would agree that praying to a saint is wrong – and to a graven image even worse – but he would never dream of such a thing as desecration!

  I am sure she is right. Aytan seems the gentlest of men. Still, I am beginning to think that he would have got on like a house on fire with those stern Scots relations of mine. My Calvinist great-great-grandfather, I’ve been told – another man keen to cleanse and purify his religion – had plenty to say on the pagan tradition of leaving votive offerings at the wishing tree on the wild boundaries of his home town, and the terrible doom that would befall those who kept it up. His Scots campaign against woodland spirits has met with as little success as Aytan’s Moroccan one. On my last visit to Cromarty, the boughs of the tree, still crouching windswept over its holy spring, were entirely hidden by the myriad shreds of votive cloth flying from them, tattered pennants bleached and shredded by the sea gales.

  Your Aytan can’t help being made like that, anyway, Khadija tells Mariam comfortingly. Who could guess what he might take against next, though? He told Khadija off about her tattoo the other day – did Mariam know? He said tattoos are un-Islamic – because they alter God’s perfect creation! Perfect creation! Whoever would have guessed that Aytan had such a high opinion of her, she says, letting out a peal of laughter.

  Speaking of heresy, I notice, now that the greed has begun to wane and I can take more interest in my surroundings, another of those geometric frogs in the carpet before me, under rather a lot of fragments of food. Would Aytan disapprove of those, too, then? But there is much worse than a mere abstract frog in this room. Mariam draws my attention to a shamelessly figurative image hanging from a nail over on the far wall. Not having been brought up to be shocked by such a thing, I hadn’t even noticed it.