by Annie Hawes
Being Europeans, we can’t help taking him up on this. Couldn’t he get himself a free wife, a good-looking man like him? Maybe he should try going to Europe first?
Youssouf just gives us the shy smile. No, no. He’s never been to Europe – he doesn’t like going too far from home. Fez is quite far enough. But we are right. The way things are going in his town, anyone who doesn’t go off abroad to work and bring home some European wages may as well give up the idea of getting married altogether. You’ll never earn enough here in Morocco. It’s always the same way in this country. As the saying goes, the dirham’s up the dog’s bottom, and the dog’s got rabies!
Gérard and Guy being not only Europeans but also men, they now, naturally, have to ask Youssouf how much I would be worth as a bride.
In money, or in livestock? asks Youssouf, taking this in good part.
Camels, say my tormentors.
Youssouf takes a good look at me. About twenty, he says. But it would be twice as many if she didn’t all have those freckles.
All right. Enough. Remind me to get myself a haik at the very next town.
The boys, who have evidently been studying the how-to-barter section of the Petit futé, say they won’t take less than forty for me. Youssouf is not playing any more, though. His situation is too serious for joking, he says.
But Guy is serious, too. Why does Youssouf want to pay to get married? Couldn’t he keep his money to make his home nice, or bring up his children, or whatever, the way Europeans do? How could he believe his bride really loved him, anyway, if he had to pay?
Youssouf laughs. Among his people, he says, the girl keeps the bride-price; it is essential – it is her insurance in case anything happens to her husband. In case things go wrong. And where he comes from, love is something that grows after you marry, not before! First you must choose the right woman; then respect will deepen into family feeling; then come children and love. He needs someone who knows his family, who will be happy to share a house with him and his mother and help look after her in her old age. She is not well. And he doesn’t think any European woman – if one would have him! – would want to do that. He wants a girl who understands, a girl from his own home town, down south. Though he’s not sure anyone there will have him there, either, because he’s fast getting past marriageable age. No father wants a man over forty for his daughter – not unless the husband-to-be is already rich, that is – because he fears she will end up raising her children in poverty, looking after a sick old man.
Even if things work out, Youssouf confides after a short pause, he’ll probably be getting a black bride, not a white one. He’s not bothered himself, but it will disappoint his mother. Even if he does as well as he’s hoping, he doubts he’d be able to afford a white, Arab bride . . .
Youssouf ’s emotions seem to have got the better of him. As if there wasn’t enough noise in this lorry already, he suddenly reaches out and turns on the radio, belting out Arabic music at top volume. We are out on the open road now, the lorry at full throttle on the bass register, the crackling radio howling above it. Impossible to talk; the noise is deafening. Not that I have any idea how I would have responded to those last remarks, anyway. Outside my scope entirely.
So I just sit quietly and watch the road unfurl before us, the hilly landscape drier and harsher now. The road must be passing closer to the sea: a flock of seagulls is picking its way through a patch of newly turned field down below the roadside. I am drifting off to sleep, lulled by the steady, deafening roar of the motor, the wailing of the music. An advertisement comes on, now, in Arabic, naturally enough. Idly I listen, not expecting to understand a word. Sound-effects of a Moroccan party going on indoors; drumming, laughter, the you-you- ing of women. Two men step outside, shutting the door against the noise, exchanging a few calm words. A restful moment; the click of a lighter; a close-up sigh, an exhalation of pleasure above the distant you-yous. A sultry voice-over addresses us: no mistaking the one word I can understand. Marlboro. They are having a Marlboro Moment, Maghreb style.
Opening my eyes some time later, I find myself gazing at some pictures hanging on the padded panel above Youssouf’s windscreen, in the place where you might hang a pair of fluffy dice if you were a British lorry-driver, or your favourite saint if you were an Italian camionista. Youssouf’s pictures are a set of three cardboard-framed prints just a few inches square – simple bold woodcuts, colour-washed by hand. They remind me of eighteenth-century illustrations, the kind of thing you might have found in some Hogarthian street market. One is a seascape: a chunky-looking boat lies becalmed in a flat sea, while above it a ray of sunlight catches a passing bird. The next has a jellaba’d man standing in a yellow stubble-field, his arms held wide, some odd-looking stooks of corn all around him. In the last, another jellaba’d man, this one on a wild hillside, gazes at a bush that is going up in red-and-yellow flames.
A burning bush! Of course – they’re Bible pictures. The story of Moses and the Burning Bush, Noah’s ark with the dove bearing its olive branch and . . . I’m not sure what the other one is. But the first two are definitely Christian stories, from the Bible. Is Youssouf a Christian, then? I ask him, shouting over the noise of the engine, pointing at the pictures.
Of course not, he shouts back. Those are stories from the Koran! We are all Ahl al-Kitab – Peoples of the Book!
I sit quietly and ponder this one, speech being too much like hard work under present conditions.
All Peoples of the Book! I’d thought this was pretty esoteric knowledge when I learned it in Granada – it certainly isn’t something most Christians know today. Apparently it’s ordinary run-of-the-mill information here in the Muslim world. It had certainly never dawned on me, though, that we meant one and the same book, with the exact same stories in it. But of course, if the Old Testament stories are really Jewish ones, Talmud tales from before Jesus was born, and Christians have simply added their own Jesus-stories on top, there’s no reason why Muslims wouldn’t have done the exact same thing when the Prophet Mohammed arrived a few centuries later . . .
But – Islam? I shout. The Koran? Images? How come?
Ah, they are very old, says Youssouf. And that is all he has to say on the matter.
I wonder what Aytan would make of this. Not just imitating God’s perfect creation, but the very holiest of his works. There are more intricacies to this world of Islam than even The Little Cunning One can tell.
Another loud hour or so has passed, and the road must be drawing ever closer to the coast: there are seagulls everywhere now. Suddenly there is a roar from behind us, so loud it is even audible over the racket in the cab. The seagulls take off, startled. The roar is upon us, starts overtaking. A squadron of huge black Motoguzzis, half a dozen of them, their riders in black too; leather knee-boots and mirrored sunglasses, straps and holsters criss-crossing broad-shouldered black bomber jackets. They whoosh past us in a rush of air and vanish beyond the horizon as suddenly as they appeared. Extraordinary. If I didn’t happen to know I was in Morocco, I would be certain that we’d just been overtaken by an oversized squad of Italian traffic cops.
Not a hallucination, but the Special Personal Police of His Moroccan Majesty, Youssouf explains, called to some emergency. Riding off, no doubt, to nip in the bud some heinous crime that threatens to unseat the Royal Person – or to give someone a shave. The king, I gather, has visited Italy at some point in his life, and been well impressed by the Armani-designed police get-ups. Sacrificed himself on the altar of desire, you might say. It looks as if his subjects are only too right to see him as a man easily entrapped by the dubious charms of the Nazarenes.
As dusk begins to fall, Youssouf pulls over to the side of the road, coming gently to a halt on a wide, flat area of beaten earth beside a spreading olive tree. He switches off the engine. The radio dies with it. Wonderful.
Food, he says. Manger! Venez! And without more ado he opens his door and jumps down from the cab.
But we haven’t brou
ght any food, we say, not liking to mention that we thought we’d be in Oujda by now.
Never mind! There is plenty for everyone! Youssouf always travels with enough to last him several days, just in case. By the time we have struggled down from the Gak haystack, he is already on all fours, unloading his dinner equipment from somewhere deep beneath its chassis. A rolled-up rug with two thick blankets inside it, half a dozen chunky bits of branch – off the woody, lower limbs of a grapevine, I see, as we go to help – and last of all, a mystery item: an eighteen-inch-high slice off the top of an oil-drum. Youssouf bowls this along the ground towards the tree, indicating to us where to spread the rug, and lies it on the ground nearby, whereupon we see that its top is pierced with three neat, round holes, large, small and medium.
His own invention, he tells us proudly. A friend in Fez, who fixes cars for a living, cut the holes out for him with his angle-grinder. The big hole is for steaming the couscous, the medium one for the stew, and the small one for the teapot afterwards. It saves messing about balancing your pots on trivets or stones, and you use a lot less wood, too. You just light your fire – grapevine wood is the best, burns a good long time and doesn’t take up much room to carry – and pop the oil-drum contraption over the top of it. And see, here in the side, an air inlet where you can add more wood or poke in a stick to spread the fire and lower the heat.
We are suitably impressed.
We should get our bedding out of our bags, Youssouf tells us now, unrolling his blankets, and get ourselves settled in.
What, are we going to sleep the night here, then?
Certainly! he says. First eat, then rest! Night has fallen. This hotel has a thousand stars. And better still, it is free!
This seems a little odd, coming from a man who seemed to suggest that we would arrive in Oujda sooner than the bus if we came with him. But maybe he just thought we’d rather travel than sit and wait. Or did he mean we’d be so late we’d have to get a hotel there anyway?
Who cares? This is a lovely spot, the air cool and delicious, the landscape wide and open, the gnarled limbs of the olive tree framing the first few stars in a huge and darkening sky. Silence is all around us. Nothing to hear but the faint trilling of the night cicadas, a honeyed lullaby after the ear-battering lorry and its radio. And who would have missed the patent cooker?
Youssouf has the fire lit in a trice, cooker ready next to it. Now he goes back to the lorry and produces a cardboard box from behind his seat: two round-bellied saucepans sitting neatly one inside the other, holding a bag of couscous granules, two carrots, an onion, several twists of newspaper, a hunk of meat and a two-litre bottle of mineral water. And a round metal tray. Youssouf is clearly a man of many skills. He pulls a clasp knife from his pocket now, and sets to creating a finely chopped onion with no need for a chopping board. A series of vertical slashes with the onion held in the palm of the hand; rotate the onion ninety degrees, do the same again; now hold it on its side over the pan, and slice crosswise; and there’s your onion in bits, ready to fry. Just the way Italians do it.
We didn’t realize we were going to be eating en route like this, we say apologetically. We really have nothing at all but half a baguette and some wine to share with him, and he probably doesn’t even drink wine, does he?
No, he says, but it’ll be good for the sauce. With a bit of wine, the camel meat will tender up nice and quickly.
Camel meat . . . none of us has ever tried that, we admit. Nervously, in some cases.
Best meat there is, according to Youssouf. Especially for steak hâché. We’ll have to try camel steak hâché another time, but there’s enough meat for a good sauce for the couscous. Nobody will go hungry. He cuts a corner of fat off the meat, throws it into the pan and uses it to fry the onion, along with the contents of one of the twists of paper: two small red chillis. The other holds some kind of deliciously aromatic herb. It’s called za’atar, he says, but we are none the wiser. Now in goes the meat, the carrots . . . Where is that wine? A big splash of that, too, and the pot sizzles. Now some water. And will we pour the rest of the water into the other pan, please, for steaming the couscous?
So we settle down round the fire with Youssouf, master-chef, and wait for dinner. We pass the wine-bottle round, taking a swig each, and, to our surprise, Youssouf accepts one too. Nobody here to notice this frenchified behaviour, I suppose. We thank him for his generosity, sharing his food with us, cooking our dinner.
But you should always be generous with others, he says, and God will be generous with you.
Of course, those Pillars of Islam again. Which reminds me. Who, I ask now that I have some chance of hearing the reply, is the man in the picture in the lorry, the one standing in the field?
Do we not know that story? Youssouf is amazed. It is a picture of his own namesake! Of Youssouf ’s dream! The dream that told him that one day his brothers would all bow down before him. Surely we have him in our own Holy Book too? The nine brothers who were all jealous of him, Youssouf goes on, warming to his theme, because he was their father Yacoub’s favourite, so one day, while they were out pasturing their flocks, they met some passing Egyptian merchants and sold him into slavery, then went off home and told old Yacoub that he’d been killed by a wild beast.
I’ve got it now – Youssouf must be the same name as Joseph. And Yacoub is Jacob. Our own Youssouf is too carried away by the story, though, to notice that I’m with him at last. He has got on to Youssouf interpreting the Egyptian king’s dream, which told that there would be seven years of plenty and seven years of hunger.
Of course, and he became advisor to Pharaoh, I interrupt, almost as excited as Youssouf himself. He saved Egypt from famine, and his own brothers had to come begging to Egypt for corn, and didn’t recognize him as the man in charge.
That’s it, says Youssouf. So his dream had come true, and there they were, bowing down before him!
Gérard and Guy are looking mystified. How on earth could Youssouf and I both know this story so well? It is a strange feature of Catholic countries that they hardly seem to get told any Bible stories when they are children. Italians are the same. The old Church hierarchy may have lost the battle to stop the Bible being translated out of Latin, but still, somehow, it has managed to cling on to the ancient system where only priests knew the Holy Texts, and held the power of interpreting them to the common multitude.
Islam, on the other hand, doesn’t have an Establishment. There is no fixed hierarchy of priests, bishops, archbishops, no Head of the Church. An imam gets and keeps his position by popular consent of other imams, and of his congregation. So unlike the Christian Church, I suppose, Islam never had any incentive to try to restrict access to the Tales of Power. In fact, of course, it does the exact opposite: schoolchildren here spend hours of their lives reciting the Koran aloud.
Be all that as it may, Youssouf and I are enjoying ourselves a lot, taking turns to tell this story we both know. Another of the things people did before television, evidently. This must be the timehonoured equivalent of bumping into someone who’s been watching the same TV series as you. The Peoples of the Book club, Holy Writ as shared soap opera.
Our Youssouf may be called after the Youssouf of the Book, he says, but alas, he is not so handsome. And so far, not so rich, either. Still, there’s hope yet, maybe, once he’s got his hay sold.
Handsome? Was Joseph especially handsome? I don’t think I remember that cropping up in the Bible version. Though I do recall his having a very good-looking Coat of Many Colours, I say. A kind of stripy jellaba that his father had made for him, which made his brothers all the more jealous.
Did he? This tickles Youssouf’s fancy a lot. Imagine that, he says, chuckling, if it wasn’t his looks at all, but his outfit! No, no, there’s no coat of many colours in the Koran, but Youssouf certainly was very good-looking. Remember how his slave-master’s wife couldn’t resist him? Even though she was a married woman, she went after him, but Youssouf was an honourable man and turned he
r down.
Ah, yes, that rings a bell. Potiphar’s wife. And in revenge she lied and got him arrested. She told everyone that it was him, not her, who had tried it on.
Yes! Yes, that’s it! But before that, there’s the bit where she invites all her women friends round to see how irresistible he is. She’s arranged for Youssouf to come in and serve them. He walks in carrying the bowl of fruit, and they choose one each, pick up their knives to begin peeling and eating, but they are so overcome by his beauty that every last one of their blades slips, and all of them cut their hands, blood everywhere! So handsome he was!
No, I’m absolutely certain we don’t have that part of the story. How could I forget that image: a room full of women blinded by their lust for a handsome slave, their hands full of cut fruit and flowing blood? The Koran version of the story, as recounted by Youssouf, now shifts from the erotic to what must be the world’s first whodunit. The elders of the tribe, called in to judge who is telling the truth over the alleged rape-attempt, consult together a while and ask to have Joseph’s garments brought before them. If they are ripped from behind, it will prove that Joseph was trying to get away; if they’re torn at the front, though, Potiphar’s wife is telling the truth.
