Stories of the Sahara

by Sanmao

  He stared at me as though he’d already exhausted all of his patience. ‘To friends of the Sahrawi, I have no name,’ he said quietly. Then he stepped on the gas. The car sped off into the distance.

  I gaped at the dust, feeling wronged deep down but unable to articulate why. It had been unfair of him to not give me a chance to explain. And then he’d rudely refused after I asked his name.

  ‘Salun, do you know this person?’ I turned and asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly.

  ‘Why are you so afraid of the desert corps? It’s not like you’re a member of the guerrilla troops.’

  ‘It is not that. This sergeant hates all of us Sahrawi.’

  ‘How do you know he hates you?’

  ‘Everybody knows. Only you do not know.’

  I looked closer at the earnest Salun, who never cast judge­ment on anyone. He must have had a reason for saying some­thing like that.

  After the misunderstanding with the milk, I was too embarrassed to buy groceries at the barracks for a long time. Much later, I ran into a young soldier from the canteen on the street one day. He told me that his whole troop thought I was gone for good and asked why I hadn’t been buying groceries recently. Seeing that they hadn’t misunderstood my intentions, I happily started going back there again.

  As luck would have it, the first day I went back to the barracks for groceries, the sergeant strode in with his big boots. I bit my lip and looked at him nervously. ‘Good day!’ he said, nodding to me before going to the till.

  I had decided that this man was a racist for harbouring such hatred of the Sahrawi. I didn’t have the energy to bother with him. Standing aside, I focused on telling the soldier what groceries I needed and paid no more attention to the sergeant. Later, as I was about to pay, I noticed the sergeant had a large tattoo on his forearm under his rolled-up sleeve. It was a pretty tacky drawing of a string of dark blue hearts above a row of medium-sized words: Don Juan de Austria.

  I found it very weird. I thought for sure there would be a woman’s name beneath the tattooed hearts. I didn’t expect it would be a man’s name.

  ‘Hey! Who’s Don Juan de Austria?’ I asked the soldier behind the counter after the sergeant left. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Ah! That used to be the name of a battalion in the desert corps.’

  ‘It’s not a person’s name?’

  ‘It was the name of someone during the time of Carlos I, back when Austria and Spain were one kingdom. The legion used his name for one of the battalions. But that was a long time ago.’

  ‘But the sergeant that was just here had the name tattooed on his forearm!’

  I shook my head, took my change and went out the front door of the canteen. Who knew I’d run into the sergeant there at the doorstep. He was waiting for me. He lowered his head when he saw me, following me for a few strides before speaking. ‘Thank you, and your husband, for the other night.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘You brought me home when I. . . I drank too much.’

  ‘Ah, that was so long ago!’

  This man was so strange, suddenly thanking me for something I’d already forgotten about. How come he hadn’t thanked me last time, when he drove me home?

  ‘May I ask why there’s a rumour among the Sahrawi that you hate them?’ I asked boldly.

  ‘I do hate them.’ He looked me in the eye. The directness of his answer caused me quite a fright.

  ‘There are both good and bad people in this world,’ I said, naively spouting a cliché. ‘There’s no such thing as a people who are especially bad.’

  The sergeant’s gaze swept past a large group of Sahrawi squatting on the sand. His face showed a frighteningly intense focus again, as if a terrible, uncontrollable hatred were burning inside him. I stopped with my platitudes, staring at him. A few seconds later, he snapped out of it, gave me a deep nod and then strode away.

  This tattooed sergeant still had not told me his name. He had the name of an entire battalion on his arm, but why a battalion from a long time ago?

  One day, our Sahrawi friend Ali invited us to a place outside of town, where his father lived in a large tent. Ali was a taxi driver in town and only had time to visit his parents at the weekend. The place where Ali’s parents lived was called Lemseyed. Perhaps it had been a wide river tens of millions of years ago, but now it had dried up into a canyon with cliffs on both sides. There were a few coconut trees in the riverbed and spring water flowed continuously. It was a tiny oasis in the desert. Such a vast land with quality fresh water, and yet only a handful of people resided there. I couldn’t understand it at all.

  In a cool twilight breeze, we sat with Ali’s father outside his tent. He leisurely puffed on a long pipe. The red cliffs looked especially majestic in the sunset. A lonely star rose in the sky above.

  Ali’s father served us a big plate of couscous and thick sweet tea. I grabbed some couscous, pressed it into a greyish ball and stuck it in my mouth. With this kind of view, it seemed only fitting to sit on the ground and eat the food of the desert people.

  ‘What a great place, and with spring water, too. How come there’s practically nobody living here?’ I asked the old man, curious.

  ‘It was once lively here. That is how this place came to be called Lemseyed. But then it was struck by tragedy. The people who lived here left and outsiders refused to come. Only a few families like ours insist on staying here.’

  ‘What tragedy? How come I don’t know about this?’ I pressed. ‘Did the camels die of a plague?’

  The old man glanced at me and continued to smoke his pipe. He looked into the distance, his mind seemingly far away now. ‘Murder! People were murdered! There was so much blood that no one dared drink from the spring for a time.’

  ‘Who murdered whom? What incident was this?’ I couldn’t help but lean closer to José. The old man’s voice had become full of mystery and terror. Night had fallen.

  ‘The Sahrawi murdered soldiers from the desert corps,’ the old man said quietly, looking at José and me. ‘Sixteen years ago, Lemseyed was a beautiful oasis. Even wheat could grow here. The ground was full of dates. There was plenty of drinking water. Almost all Sahrawi took their camels and goats to pasture here. The tents numbered in the thousands…’

  As the old man described the bygone days, I looked out at the few remaining coconut trees and could barely believe that this desiccated land had once flourished. ‘Then the Spanish desert corps also came,’ the old man continued. ‘They set up camp here and did not leave…’

  ‘But the Sahara Desert didn’t belong to anyone back then,’ I interrupted. ‘It wasn’t against the law for anyone to come.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Please hear what I have to say.’ The old man made a gesture with his hands. ‘The desert corps came. The Sahrawi did not allow them to access the water. The two sides often had disputes over this. Then…’

  Seeing that he’d stopped speaking, I urged him on. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Then, a big group of Sahrawi people raided their camp. In one night, they slaughtered the entire unit in their sleep with knives.’

  My eyes widened. I looked at the old man over the flick­ering fire. ‘You mean they were all killed?’ I asked quietly. ‘The entire unit, murdered by Sahrawi?’

  ‘Only one sergeant survived. He had got drunk that night and fell asleep outside the camp. When he woke up, his companions were all dead, nobody left.’

  ‘Did you live here at the time?’ I almost asked, Did you participate in the killing at the time?

  ‘The desert corps are so vigilant,’ José said. ‘How can this be true?’

  ‘It was unexpected. They had worked too hard during the day. There were not many guards, either. They did not expect the Sahrawi would come with their knives to kill.’

  ‘Where was the military camp set up at the time?’ I asked.

  ‘Just over there!’ He pointed at an area above the spring. There was only sand, not a tra
ce of any former habitation. ‘From then on, nobody has wanted to live here. Of course, the murderers escaped. A fine oasis has been wasted into what you see now.’

  The old man lowered his head to smoke. A piercing wind rose, filled with whining cries, setting the coconut trees a-tremble. The tent’s support beam began to squeak.

  I raised my head and looked out into the darkness at the place where the desert corps had set up camp sixteen years ago. I could picture the crowd of Spanish soldiers in military uniform fighting the headscarved Sahrawi with their knives raised. One by one, they each fell to the ground in slow motion as though in a film scene, piles of bleeding bodies crawling along the sand, hundreds of helpless hands reaching for the sky, bloodstained faces screaming silent cries. In the black wind of night, there was only the hollow laughter of death reverberating across the vast and lonely land. . .

  Startled, I made a great effort to blink. The vision dis­appeared. Everything around me was as serene as ever. We sat in front of the fire, no one speaking.

  I suddenly felt freezing cold. My heart was unhappy. This wasn’t some ghost story that the old man had told us; it was a vicious massacre from recent history.

  ‘The sergeant who survived – he’s the one with a tattoo on his arm, who always stares like a wolf at the Sahrawi?’ I asked softly.

  ‘They were a battalion of great unity and fraternity. I still remember how the sergeant shook as he threw himself onto the bodies of his slain brothers, after awakening from his drunken state.’

  ‘Do you know what his name is?’ I asked.

  ‘After this incident, he was sent to the camp in town. Ever since he has refused to speak his name. He says all his brothers in the battalion are dead. How could he deserve a name? Everyone just calls him “Sergeant”.’

  Even though this had happened many years in the past, thinking about it still disturbed me greatly. In the distance, the sandy ground seemed to writhe.

  ‘Let’s go to sleep!’ José said loudly. ‘It’s late.’ He turned and went into the tent without another word.

  This event had already become a tragedy of the past. I almost never heard anyone in town talk about it. Every time I saw the sergeant, my heart would skip a beat. How long would it take for such a bitter memory to dissipate in his heart?

  About a year ago, things became even more complicated in this desert that the world had all but forgotten. Morocco to the north and Mauritania to the south wanted to partition the Spanish Sahara. Meanwhile, the native tribes of the desert had organised into guerrilla troops and gone into exile in Algeria. They wanted independence. The Spanish government was unsure of its next move and behaved ambivalently. There had already been so much bloodshed to maintain this territory, but they didn’t know if they wanted to hold on to it or let it go.

  During this time, Spanish soldiers were getting murdered when they travelled alone. Wells were poisoned. Timed explosives were discovered on an elementary school bus. The conveyor belt at the phosphate mining company was set on fire. Nightwatchmen were hanged on electric wires. A landmine on the highway outside of town exploded and destroyed a passing car…

  This kind of unceasing turmoil made the whole town jittery. The government shut down schools and evacuated children back to Spain. Martial law was enacted by night. Tanks rolled in one after another. Multiple layers of barbed wire fences went up around military institutions. Particularly terrifying was that we were surrounded by hostile forces on three sides. When incidents flared up in town, it wasn’t clear which party could have been responsible.

  Given this situation, many women and children returned to Spain almost immediately. José and I didn’t have any dependents, so we bided our time. He went to work as usual while I stayed home. Besides mailing letters and buying groceries, I didn’t spend much time in public places for fear of explosions.

  People began selling their furniture cheaply in our once peaceful town. There were long lines at the airline office every day, everyone vying for tickets. The cinema and stores were always closed. Handguns were distributed to all the Spanish civil servants who remained. There was endless anxiety in the air, stirring up great unrest even though there hadn’t been any direct military confrontations in town.

  One afternoon, I went into town to buy the Spanish daily. I wanted to know exactly what the government had in mind for this land. The newspaper didn’t say much; every day it was the same thing over and over. I walked home slowly and glumly. When I saw military trucks bearing many coffins heading towards the cemetery, I was deeply shocked and assumed that conflict had already erupted at the Moroccan border.

  I had to pass by several cemeteries on my way home. The Sahrawi had two graveyards of their own. The cemetery for the desert corps was enclosed by a snow-white wall and had an ornate black metal gate. Rows and rows of crosses stood within these walls, stone slabs below them marking the graves. The metal gate to the cemetery was open as I walked past. The first row of graves had already been dug up. Many soldiers from the desert corps wanted to take out their fallen brothers and put them into new coffins.

  Seeing this, I understood instantly. The Spanish government had long refused to make an announcement about their decision. The soldiers here lived in the desert, died in the desert, were buried in the desert. Now they were digging up the deceased in order to take them away. Spain was going to let go of this land, after all!

  Some of them had been dead for many years, but because the desert is so dry, they weren’t just a pile of white bones. Horribly enough, they had become shrivelled corpses that looked like mummies. The soldiers carefully lifted them out beneath the glaring sun. They gently placed them into new coffins, nailed them shut, pasted some paper on top and then moved them into the truck.

  The crowd of onlookers made a little path to allow the coffins to pass through, squeezing me into the cemetery. At that moment I realised the nameless sergeant was sitting in the shade of the wall. I wasn’t uneasy at all about seeing dead people, but the noise of the coffins being nailed together was ear-piercing. Seeing the sergeant there, I remembered that he was also near the cemetery the night we found him drunk on the ground. The tragedy had happened so long ago. Could it be that his pain hadn’t diminished at all over the years?

  When the third row of graves was being unearthed, the sergeant stood as though he’d been waiting for this moment for a long time. He strode over, jumped into a hole and pulled out a corpse that had not yet rotted into an embrace like a lover. He gently held the body in his arms and gazed calmly into the dried face. There was no hatred or anger in his expression. What I saw was only a sorrow that verged on tenderness.

  Everyone waited for the sergeant to put the corpse into the coffin. Beneath the scorching sun, he seemed to forget about the world around him. ‘It’s his younger brother,’ a soldier said quietly to someone else holding a pickaxe. ‘He was killed with all the rest.’

  It felt like a century passed before the sergeant started to move towards the coffin. As if handling an infant, he gently laid the body of his beloved family member, dead for sixteen years, into his resting place for eternity. When the sergeant was passing through the gate, I looked away, not wanting him to think of me as a nosy and unfeeling spectator. He abruptly stopped in the midst of the crowd of onlooking Sahrawi people. The Sahrawi scattered with their children in tow.

  Row after row of coffins were sent on to the airport. Now that the brothers in the ground had been transported away, only the neat crosses remained, shining white under the sun.

  One morning, José worked an early shift and had to leave home by five. The situation had worsened to such an extent that I needed the car that day to pack up some things and ship them out of the desert. We had agreed that José would take the shuttle bus to work so I could have the car. But I still woke up at the crack of dawn to drive José to the bus stop.

  On the return trip, I didn’t dare take shortcuts for fear of landmines and drove on the tarmac the whole way. As I neared the slope that led int
o town, I saw that the petrol tank was nearly empty, so I thought I might as well pull into the petrol station. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was ten minutes before six. It wouldn’t be open. I turned around and decided to head home. Just then, not far from me on the street, there was an incredibly low boom, the sound of an explosion. A pillar of black smoke rose into the sky afterwards. I was very close to it. Even though I had been in my car, my heart was beating like crazy from the fright. I drove quickly home, hearing the sound of ambulances in town rushing to the rescue.

  ‘Did you hear the explosion?’ José asked when he came home in the afternoon.

  I nodded. ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘That sergeant died,’ José said abruptly.

  ‘The guy from the desert corps?’ I knew it couldn’t have been anyone else, of course. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He was driving past the place where the explosion happened this morning. A group of Sahrawi kids were playing with a box. There was a small guerrilla flag stuck in the box. I guess the sergeant thought there was something fishy about it. He got out of the car and ran over to the kids to chase them away. And then one of the kids ripped the flag out and the box exploded…’

  ‘How many of the Sahrawi kids died?’

  ‘The sergeant threw himself over the box. He was blown to bits. Only two of the kids were hurt.’

  In a daze, I began making dinner for José. I couldn’t stop thinking about the events of the morning. At a critical moment, this man, who had had a hatred gnawing away at him for sixteen years, gave up his own life to protect a few children of those whom he regarded as enemies. Why? I hadn’t ever thought that he would die in this way.

  The next day, the sergeant’s corpse was put in a coffin and quietly laid into a grave that had already been dug. His brothers had left long ago and now rested in another land, while he hadn’t managed to catch up with them. He was now buried silently in the Sahara. This place he both loved and hated would be his home for eternity.