by Annie Hawes
Abdallah has been bidden to show us straight to our quarters, he says, leading us into a room whose floor is also of sand, then out through a central courtyard of sand with a single palm tree at its centre. Up a step into another room – more sand – out again and up a narrow exterior staircase tightly enclosed between more red-mud walls. The place seems extraordinarily complicated, all the more so because the thick layer of sand leads me – unused to such a flooring material – to believe for some time that we haven’t actually arrived in the house proper yet. Suddenly we are out on a flat roof with a view right across the town, palm trees and walled gardens everywhere, narrow alleys running between them, more flat roofs below us – some decorated with piles of dates, others with chickens, and one with a small flop-eared sheep, of the brown-face desert breed Habib so despised. Here on the roof is a free-standing guest apartment, an extra mud-brick room built on the flat roof. Abdallah throws the door open. Thick, bright rugs all over the floor. No furniture. No sand either. Good.
We all traipse inside, and Abdallah, perfect host, leaves us to settle in. We will be eating in an hour or so, if we’d like to repose ourselves, though we’re welcome to come down earlier to take some refreshment. Would we like tea?
He vanishes off into the labyrinth, and we settle ourselves and our stuff in. Speedily done, in a furniture-less room. Back out on the roof we stand and stare, turning hither and thither, stunned. A strange pink evening light; a view that goes on for ever. On the edge of the town, the deep green strip of palmeraie, its edges blending into a broad plain – not sand, not stones; it has a strange white bloom to it, a crystal luminescence. The salt of the sebkha. Tall outcrops of red rock, the colour of the town, are all that’s left of the lake’s prehistoric banks; they look like ancient fortresses standing over the plain. One of them is topped with a real ruined fortress, a ksar as red as the rock, hardly distinguishable from it. Straight ahead, in the distance, way beyond the salt plain, lie the curving pale masses of the desert dunes: the Grand Erg. An endless ocean of cream-coloured sand, huge rolling waves of it, pitted and shadowed, sensuous yet sterile, stretching on right to the sharp line of the horizon. The Sahara. It seems impossible that this view can be real, that we could just walk straight out there and . . . die.
Back downstairs – but which of the rooms, if any, is the sitting room? It is strange how disorienting the lack of furniture can be, our need to identify a specific function to a room. Here we are lost. Nobody in the first room. We cross the courtyard into the second. In here, a huge and beautiful rug of pale greens and golds has been spread over the sand, and Abdallah and three older men are hunkered elegantly down on it. And this must be Hadj Mouloud, now rising to greet us gravely, dressed all in noble and voluminous white, his chèche pristine white too, and so complicatedly entwined that there must be yards of fabric in it.
We all introduce ourselves. Hadj Mouloud enfolds Gérard in his voluminous white embrace, does some air-kissing, then gives Guy the same treatment. I step towards him, start to raise my arms – and quickly lower them. Whoops. Faux pas. I am only to be accorded a handshake, of course. I am a woman. An untouchable, almost.
More hand-shaking with the other guests: Monsieur Brahim is a teacher, and the other man whose name I don’t catch is an official from the Daira, the town hall. We are welcomed some more, hands on hearts, and invited to take our seats. We do our best to follow our hosts’ lead and settle into a neat crouch rather than collapsing higgledy-piggledy onto the carpet. Everyone is behaving very formally, treating Hadj Mouloud with immense respect, as he takes charge of the tea-tackle which is now brought in by a veiled woman – to whom we are not introduced. How hard it is to reverse your usual norms of politeness. Good manners here, we have now understood, dictate that we should steadfastly ignore her – or at least, that Gérard and Guy should. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, but since our hostess – if that is who she is – steadfastly refuses to catch my eye, I don’t have much of a decision to make.
The tea hasn’t even finished brewing before I give up on the crouching and collapse inelegantly onto the carpet. Much better. The rug is lovely and soft, the sand pristine. Gérard, with a gesture of resignation, does likewise, and our hosts all laugh happily, as at a great joke. They have been waiting for this to happen all along. This inability to sit normally is a European failing well known to the residents of Timimoun, which they find most entertaining. I, for one, am beginning to suspect that we’ve actually got a completely different design of leg-bone, and the thing is physically impossible. Guy, still doing as the Romans do, stiff-upper-lipped, realizes the game’s not worth the candle and takes a seat too, to a round of applause.
Now that we’ve all done our trick, Hadj Mouloud, guffawing, says he will get some cushions brought in for us – we look much too uncomfortable to eat like that! The tea is ready now: Hadj Mouloud has added the water to the pot. But it cannot be served yet. A younger woman, unveiled but also not introduced, appears with a pitcher of water, stands by Gérard and waits expectantly. Abdallah mimes washing his hands. Gérard holds his hands out, and she pours a few splashes of water onto them – and onto the floor, naturally enough. Took me by surprise, but it doesn’t matter, of course, if your floor is made of nice absorbent sand. Evidently djinns don’t live indoors. Or do they just not like sand?
Gérard rinses his hands, shakes off the water. Still the woman waits. Of course: three times. Gérard completes the course; the unnamed female member of Hadj Mouloud’s household goes on to Guy, who follows suit. Now she pauses. Who is next? Should I hold out my hands? Or will I be making another faux pas, looking as if I consider myself to rank above our host and his friends?
And what are your first impressions of our town? the teacher is asking politely, apparently unaware of the silent drama going on.
The pitcher girl – a daughter? a servant? – is in the same quandary as me. Hadj Mouloud has to give her a nod of his head to show that I am, indeed, next in rank. Clearly a woman eating with the men is an unheard-of situation. I am neither fowl, flesh nor good red herring.
Stunning, the boys are saying. Timimoun is beautiful! Unbelievable! And then the people – there are so many different ethnicities, so many styles of dress, that it’s impossible for a newcomer to make head or tail of them!
I wonder now whether I should have offered to go and sit with the women, wherever it is that they sit? I don’t want everyone being ill-at-ease, if my presence is a problem. It can’t do any harm to ask. So I do. The gentlemen are most amused. No need at all, they say. There is, in fact, a system in place for dealing with anomalies like me. European women, explains Hadj Mouloud, count as honorary men. It is just that his womenfolk are unfamiliar with the protocol. Hadj Mouloud has welcomed many foreign guests into his home, but I am the first woman he has had the honour to lodge.
In fact, as it turns out, my presence in Hadj Mouloud’s home will present him with various insurmountable problems. However, as yet, I am blissfully unaware of this – and so is Hadj Mouloud.
The first woman returns with our starters. Two sorts of flatbread, piping hot, one stuffed with onions and spices, the other with a kind of cinnamon-and-date compote, whose sweet perfume suddenly brings flooding back the memory of my days as an Undesirable Alien, and a certain Spanish train journey. Abdallah leads the way, ripping a section neatly out of one, using just the fingers and thumb of his right hand the way the Moroccans did with that bestiya. I think I’ll wait till everyone else has had some. It will look like good manners, and hopefully there’ll be a bit just the right size left, so I won’t need to show myself up.
Conversation turns to the rest of Gérard’s and Guy’s trip. And mine. Everyone is horrified to hear that I am even thinking of returning through the north alone. Hadj Mouloud says it is impossible. Things are getting serious up there – the forces of law and order admit to having arrested 6,000 people, but the word is that it’s more like 15,000. The extremists are reacting. There is talk of a fatwa on
all non-Muslims. These people may be deranged, but that does not mean they can’t harm you. And a woman travelling alone! Unless, of course, I was to wear the full hijab? But even so, my eyes are the wrong colour – and if I were to be challenged, and had to speak, I would be sunk. The Daira man says there’s usually a weekly plane leaving El Golea for Algiers – maybe I could catch that? If it’s still running? And get straight out of Algiers again, obviously. The Daira man has a telephone in his office, he says. He will find out tomorrow.
As dinner is served, by yet another woman, I try again to make eye contact. She won’t look at me at all. But then, why am I expecting her to? A decent woman should not make eye contact with unknown men – and that’s what I am, if I’m sitting here. An honorary unknown man. I’ve been an honorary man all through this trip, I suppose. Strictly speaking, apart from the very occasional foreigner – and maybe women selling in the market – men here would never ever speak to any woman at all except ones they were related to, either by blood or marriage. Depressing thought. The very idea makes me feel claustrophobic. Still, at least they have good big families. Imagine if you tried that in England.
As if to the manner born, we three make our little dents in the piled golden couscous on the communal platter and receive our share of the meat and vegetables – smells delicious – being distributed by Hadj Mouloud. As we start to eat – tastes delicious too, tender mutton (perhaps the ram whose private parts we met earlier?), lots of spices, and I think there are dates in there somewhere – we discover that the teacher and the town hall man are not really here for us after all, but to discuss some business with our host. Hadj Mouloud apologizes deeply. He did not know exactly when we would be arriving. But he has delegated his son to entertain us for tonight, he says, and he hopes we will not be offended. Thank goodness: we were afraid Jean-Pierre had built us up as visiting dignitaries of some kind. Hadj Mouloud is having some legal problems over a piece of land he donated to the poor some years ago, he explains. It has not been used in the way he expected: he has been bitterly disappointed. After dinner he will be consulting with his two other guests about this matter.
Over dinner we discover all sorts of interesting things. The first is that the more you move about on a carpet resting on deep sand, the more the sand ends up on top of the carpet rather than underneath. Hadj Mouloud seems to have forgotten about the cushions, and even sitting in the lotus position – or my best approximation of it – does not bring me close enough to the communal couscous-dish to eat without dropping a worrying amount on the beautiful carpet, which I suspect is of silk. Then there is the matter of the cross-legged position being almost as uncomfortable as the crouch. I try putting my legs to one side, then to the other. They either get in the way, or tangle scandalously with my male fellow guests’ equally dysfunctional lower limbs. With the three of us squirming about like this – while our hosts eat peacefully from their elegant squatting positions as if nothing was more natural – the sand is soon not only all over the carpet, but creeping inside my clothes, and even more annoyingly, into my food. I soon have to give up chewing the couscous at all; grains of sand are skreeking horribly between my teeth. Luckily, you don’t actually need to chew couscous. It could have been designed with just this situation in mind. And maybe, indeed, it was.
The people of Timimoun, we learn, bring all this sand into their houses on purpose, each spring, to keep the floors cool for the summer. It must take years of training, is all I can say, to learn not to get it mixed up with everything. Or do you eventually get used to sand in hair and eyelashes, between fingers and toes, and even creeping into much more intimate areas? I never will find out how on earth they get all this sand back out of the house again, and what the floor beneath it actually consists of – I keep missing my chance to slip this question in to the conversation. While we eat, and Teacher Brahim fills us in on two-thousand years of Timimoun history, I try casually poking my finger down into the sand as far as it will go; but meet no resistance. Just more sand. And you can’t really start digging an inspection pit in your hosts’ floor over dinner to see what’s beneath it, can you?
Meanwhile, Monsieur Brahim is having a go at explaining the complex ethnic situation here in Timimoun. The place is not at all the modern city full of new immigrant populations that we have imagined. Three of the different ethnic groups have been here for centuries – the Haratine and the Berbers getting on for two millennia, the Arabs not much less. The Haratine are the ones who look more like black Africans – they are the very oldest inhabitants. The Zenete Berbers started heading this way – from somewhere in the area of Babylon, though nobody’s really sure – around the time of Jesus, well before the birth of Islam. And yes, they really were believers in the old Jewish faith. Archaeologists think it was probably the Jewish Berbers who built the fouggaras, the water system that kept life going here once the desert had started closing in. Later, after the birth of Islam, came more Zenete Berber Jews fleeing the advance of the conquering Muslims; then newly converted Muslim Berbers and Arabs; and somehow the Judaism got lost. But there are ancient documents in local zawiya libraries, and even in the homes of some of the marabouts, dating right back to the ninth century – the desert air preserves parchment better than any museum – many of which are written in Hebrew. The Jewish Berber culture once stretched from here to the Tafilalet and Sijilmassa – and from there, of course, on into el-Andalus. This is known, says Monsieur Brahim, thanks to the survival of an agitated letter, written in about the year 800, by the head of Babylonian Judaism, which is addressed to the Jews of the Sahara and of Andalusia, and pleads with them to abandon their Palestinian heresies.
Gérard asks how it is possible, if all these groups have been here so long, that they have preserved their ethnic differences so thoroughly – do they never intermarry? Nobody is answering this. Trust Gérard to ask uncomfortable questions at the dinner table. Dinner rug, that is.
The man from the Daira leaps into the breach. Each group has always had a different role to play, he says. The town always had a complex relationship with the desert nomad tribes, who had constantly to be negotiated and bargained with: they were essential to the existence of the Gourara oases, both as clients, merchants and transporters for local produce – the dates, cloth, basketwork, spices and so on – and as suppliers of necessities like meat, grain, raw wool and salt. But they were also a threat to the oases’ survival, especially in times of war, when one tribe might decide to ‘protect’ an oasis town – in the Mafia sense of the word – to ensure its supplies, thus making it a sitting target for the opposition. And so it was that the Haratine got on with the farming of the palm groves, to which they were best suited, while the religious zawiyas, and the landowning and merchant classes of Timimoun – all Arabs or Berbers – provided the negotiating skills vital for survival. They were in any case closely related to the nomad tribes, by language and by blood. And the nomads also appreciated the skills of the holy men of the zawiyas, the local marabouts, in resolving their own inter-tribal disputes. And so was harmony achieved.
But they didn’t intermarry? Gérard repeats, tenaciously.
No, they didn’t.
Speaking of Berbers, this seems a good moment to introduce the topic of a certain Berber friend of mine, who spent some time abroad, working with his nephews in Paris . . .
All this emigration is a bad business! It brings nothing but trouble, interrupts Hadj Mouloud. Nothing but disrespect and shamelessness!
Something in Abdallah’s expression leads me to believe that this is a tried-and-tested theme of his father’s, which he is hoping we won’t pursue. But it is too late. Mouloud, who seems to have a somewhat irascible character, is pursuing it anyway. He is very annoyed about this modern habit of emigrating. It is ruining his town, and all the other oases along the Gourara. Leaving your land and your people to work overseas – or in far-off cities – is not honourable behaviour. Only people who have nothing, or don’t own a foot of land, would do such a thing.
Irresponsible people, who have never learned the duties of property. Especially the Haratine, but there are some Berbers who are no better. And then the Haratine return with more money than they have sense, all sorts of foolish ideas in their heads: they’ve got rights to this, and rights to that . . . And when they haven’t gone all pious and puritanical, and started denigrating the status of the local marabouts, they bring back suitcases full of worthless trinkets that turn the heads of others. Music machines, radios, cameras . . . They have no interest in working the way they once did, here in their own land, and following the old, decent ways. Young people leave and never return to look after their parents; there is no shame and no respect. The place is not safe any more, and theft is rampant! You can’t even trust your own palm-grove workers not to rob you, these days. They even sink so low as to steal from your vegetable plot! And from the waste land on the borders of the palm groves, too – because how else do these new jumped-up Haratine manage to keep livestock when they own no land? Obviously they must be stealing the forage! They will lie about the date-crop, too; every year it shrinks, if a man is to believe what his sharecroppers say. Nowadays they don’t want to pay the landowner his fair share when the harvest’s in, and when you insist on your rights, they threaten to leave! Once upon a time here in the Gourara, there was no leaving! And it was the people with responsibilities who made the decisions for the good of the whole town, not the propertyless and the landless, who only care for their own personal matters. If you have no stake in the place, what kind of decisions will you make? Of course they won’t be for the general good!
Strange. I’m sitting in an Algerian oasis listening to an old landowner coming up with the exact same arguments that were used by old landowners in Britain a hundred years ago, when the lower orders began to demand a say in running their country. Plus ça change . . .
