by Rob Spillman
At 8 p.m. the entire family gathers in front of the TV for the results of the polls. Visibly ill at ease, the female news anchor announces that the FIS has won a landslide victory taking three-quarters of Algeria’s municipal councils. Even in the affluent districts, the well-heeled having spent the day at the beach.
Then a breakdown of the results by constituency. It’s one long death knell, the FIS emerges triumphant almost everywhere, even in Kabylia.
The hydra’s been legitimised.
At first Moussa laughs nervously, his knees tremble. No, it’s not true . . . They’re bound to say it’s a joke.
Is this Iran?
Nacéra and Kahina start to cry, that’s it, we’re done for, they’re going to force us to wear the hijab. Pa bawls at them to be quiet. Slimane’s inwardly jubilant, Ma groans, her diabetes. Sahnoun’s with his thriller.
Through the window, a mighty clamour echoes from every corner of the city. Moussa goes out onto the balcony and sees a dense moving throng, a vast black ocean. Hordes of bearded young men in kamis, thousands of them, in the grip of hysteria. Koran in hand, they chant verses and slogans: “Sharia now! There is no God but Allah.”
Behind them, kids parading behind a barefoot, snotty-nosed self-appointed leader waving a makeshift flag, a torn plastic milk sachet on the end of a long reed.
All around, cars honking, ululations, traffic jams. The FIS stewards zealously direct the cars. Moussa recognises familiar faces: Spartacus, Baiza, Mustapha, Fatiha’s brother. Look, even Slimane’s down there, for God’s sake. Going to have to sort him out, give him an earful, he deserves it.
Moussa doesn’t want to see or hear any more. He goes back to his room to calm down and breaks out in a sweat. This isn’t really happening?
What to do?
A chill runs down his spine. His mind’s frozen, his limbs numb, his blood pressure plummets, he paces up and down. It can’t be true? Better off sticking with the FLN in that case . . .
His mouth’s dry, he goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water. His grandma, wearing a yellow and bright pink Kabyle dress, asks him what’s going on.
“This is it, the FIS has won, we’re dead.”
“Dead? The FIS, who’s the FIS?”
Moussa goes back to his room and stares at the Michael Jackson poster and his own, side by side. Calm down, dammit. Yeah the FIS’ll be buggered. Carry on, work, work, work, hang in there. Music . . .
The following Thursday, there’s a wedding at Frais-Vallon. Late afternoon, usual briefing with the band. Sort out the set.
Djelloul’s taking care of the transport. Pick-up truck for the gear and the musicians.
Moussa rides in front, of course.
Djelloul’s the band’s official driver. He charges 100 dinars for each musician and has a good night out. Djelloul’s never had a car of his own, he always drives the ones he’s repairing.
Rashid should be coming. When Rashid comes, it’s important, it’s not the same.
Forgotten anything? No, set of strings for the mandola, found them at the last minute, black market. Stage outfit chosen with care, and the posters. Rashid’s given him three, first proofs. He told him to put one on a display stand, clearly visible. Visibility is crucial.
Djelloul reverses into a parking space, puts on the hand brake, and turns off the engine. Everyone gets out, loads of people, cars parked haphazardly, kids. They’re shown into a kind of dressing room—big cushions on the floor, smell of perfume, cakes.
On a side table is some Muslim whisky—in a teapot, in other words. They roll joints, take slugs of whisky, buff their shoes to a shine, tune their instruments.
Rashid chats to Moussa as he dresses in front of a huge mirror. He tells him about a video he saw on MTV and suggests ideas for Moussa’s look. Moussa feels good when Rashid’s there. Rashid knows his shit, fuck yeah, solid.
Dazzling in his green-spangled suit and leather tie, and fragrant with perfume, Moussa gives the band last-minute instructions, the order of the songs. Final adjustment to his bow tie, everyone looks immaculate.
Sound check, then launch into the first number. Vibe tense at first, audience on edge, the elections, shadow of the FIS?
Pouring all his rage into his mandola, Moussa goes straight for the gut, no pissing about. Let’s do it!
From the first song, the audience goes wild, men and women. They invade the dance floor. Moussa’s on a high, he tries out different styles of song, different moves.
By the fourth number, he’s Hendrix: he plays the mandola behind his head, on his knees, the crowd’s ecstatic.
Then it’s the break, Moussa’s in front of the mirror, checking his kohl, his teeth, his tie, his make-up. Everyone’s congratulating him, that was amazing, thank you.
The bridegroom, wearing a tuxedo and white burnous, comes over in person to thank him. Moussa wishes him joy and lots of children.
In the mirror, Moussa looks himself in the eye. He can see into the far distance, a faint green glimmer at the back of the cave. The smell of certain, early fame. Yesss, he’s away.
Where’s that joint got to, anyway? The bassist.
Moussa:
“Hey, don’t bogart that joint.”
Bassist, doesn’t quite catch what he says:
“Huh, what?”
Moussa, cool velvet:
“Bogart, Humphrey Bogart, you heard of him?”
Bassist, “Er . . .”
Moussa:
“You know, the ’50s, Bogart, always had a cigarette in his mouth, he never passed the joint, get it? Don’t bogart the joint.”
Bassist, no reaction . . . Rashid chuckles quietly.
He got that one from Rashid, apparently it’s an American thing, “don’t bogart the joint,” pass it on. Good old Rashid.
At last the bass player passes him the joint, Moussa takes two drags, passes it to Rashid, and signals to the band. They’re on again. Come on, boys!
He begins with a very gentle ballad, an old lullaby about mothers separated from their babies. Muted bass, light cymbals, bit of synth in the background, that’s it. Moussa pitches his voice quite low, very ethereal, just on the verge of tears.
The emotion’s overwhelming. All the mothers are dabbing at their eyes, wailing rises from the balconies. It gives Moussa goose bumps.
At the end, old women come on the stage to kiss him, to wish him long life, health, and happiness.
Now for the real deal . . . two, three, four, he gives the signal. “Ayadho,” beautiful melody, lively, haunting chorus. It’s going well, Moussa watches the bassist, the off-beat rhythm, gets the audience to clap their hands.
The second half’s going better, the PA system’s pretty much OK. Moussa has the audience eating out of his hand, he’s ruling the stage, he makes love to the mike, plays all his trump cards. The party goes on till the sun’s already high, the first heat of the day. Moussa’s tired but happy. He feels free, it does a guy good.
Two weeks later, all the posters are printed, Rashid drove over to pick them up himself. Moussa on tenterhooks, meet up at Rashid’s at 5 p.m. He’s promised him some spliff to celebrate.
No problem, Moussa goes downstairs in his flip-flops and, from the entrance to his building, hails the first kid he sees, literally the first, and asks him to bring back 200 dinars’ worth of gear.
Spartacus, leaning against the wall, beard and kamis, overhears. He walks up to Moussa:
“Brother, you looking for spliff ? Listen, Dahmane got busted by the police, but they didn’t find the stuff, his wife had hidden it. Now she’s selling it to pay for a lawyer for him. If you want to do a good deed, in the name of God, she’s got three kids, she’s on her own . . .”
Feeling charitable, Moussa takes pity. OK then, he’ll take 400 dinars’ worth. Braiding his goatee, Spartacus runs off to get him the gear.
On reaching Rashid’s place, Moussa already feels plural: five hundred posters, just think!
Rashid’s spread them all ove
r the living room. MOUSSA MASSY, MOUSSA MASSY, MOUSSA MASSY everywhere.
“Take fifty or so for yourself, your friends, events, parties. We’ll keep the rest for the day you release a cassette, and we’ll add a sticker to promote it. By the way, have you thought about the title for the album?”
Moussa, excited:
“I thought of ‘Zombretto.’ You know, the kids are all out of their skulls on zombretto. It’s mother’s milk to them. It’s a title that reflects their world, their deprivation.”
“Perfect, yeah, ‘Zombretto.’ That’s pretty cool. OK, let’s go for it. ‘Zombretto, an album by Moussa Massy!’ Yeah, and it sounds quite salsa, too. Great!”
After two joints, a beer, they’ve got a plan of action. Rashid takes notes, turns on his computer, yeah, technology. Program, file, that’s it, Moussa’s knocked out by the computer, the mouse, it’s a different planet. Rashid does projections, simulations, clicks on the mouse. Moussa watches his name come up on the screen, it’s like NASA or something.
Shit, really got to make this work . . .
The plan’s put together at last, Rashid’s thought of everything, distribution, flyposting . . .
Moussa gave Spartacus three posters to put up around the neighbourhood. At Bouhar the baker’s, in front of the bus stop, on the wall of his apartment building.
Djelloul wanted one for his garage, Kahina for her supermarket, and Saliha, yeah, even Saliha, for her high school.
Moussa’s put up four in his bedroom, plus another stuck on cardboard backing. Now he’s a pro, he can start talking career a little, just a little.
And he’ll have to up the rate for weddings.
At last, it’s all beginning to come together. Little by little, not quite how he’d like it, but it’s coming.
Moussa knows deep down he’s not there yet, he’s well aware it’ll take more, a lot more. TV, mega concerts at La Coupole or Ryadh El Feth, on the esplanade, yeah, 50,000 people with at least a 60,000-watt PA. That means you’ve really taken off.
And then, the ultimate, of course: recording in a studio, releasing a cassette like everyone else. Don’t settle for less, aim for the sky, beyond the horizon.
LEILA ABOULELA
•Sudan •
SOUVENIRS
THEY SET OUT early, before sunset. Not the right time for visiting, but it was going to be a long drive and his sister Manaal said she would not be able to recognize the painter’s house in the dark. The car slipped from the shaded car-port into the white sunlight of the afternoon, the streets were empty, their silence reminiscent of dawn.
Since he had come on the plane from Scotland two weeks ago, Yassir had not gone out at this time of day. Instead he had rested after lunch wearing his old jellabia. He would lie on one of the beds that were against the walls of the sitting room, playing with a toothpick in his mouth and talking to Manaal without looking at her. On the bed perpendicular to his, she would lie with her feet near his head so that had they been children she might have reached out and pulled his hair with her toes. And the child Yassir would have let his heels graze the white wall leaving brown stains for which he would be punished later. Now they talked slowly, probing for common interests and so remembering things past, gossiping lightly about others, while all the time the air cooler blew the edges of the bedsheets just a little, intermittently, and the smells of lunch receded. Then the air cooler’s sound would take over, dominate the room, blowing their thoughts away, and they would sleep until the time came when all the garden was in shade.
In this respect, Yassir had slotted easily into the life of Khartoum, after five years on the North Sea oil-rigs, noisy helicopter flights to and from Dyce airport, a grey sea with waves as crazy as the sky. Five years of two weeks off-shore, two weeks on with Emma in Aberdeen. No naps after lunch there and yet he could here lie and know that the rhythms the air cooler whispered into his heart were familiar, well known. When he had first arrived he had put fresh straw into the air cooler’s box. Standing outdoors on an upturned Pepsi crate, he had wedged open the grimy perforated frame with a screwdriver, unleashed cobwebs and plenty of dust: fresh powdery dust and solid fluffs that had lost all resemblance to sand. The old bale of straw had shrunk over the years, gone dark and rigid from the constant exposure to water. He oiled the water pump and put in the new bale of straw. Its smell filled the house for days, the air that blew out was cooler. For this his mother had thanked him and like other times before, prayed that he would only find good people in his path. It was true, he was always fortunate in the connections he made, in the people who held the ability to further his interests. In the past teachers, now his boss, his colleagues, Emma.
But “Your wife—what’s her name?” was how his mother referred to Emma. She would not say Emma’s name. She would not “remember” it. It would have been the same if Emma had been Jane, Alison or Susan, any woman from “outside.” Outside that large pool of names his mother knew and could relate to. That was his punishment, nothing more, nothing less. He accepted it as the nomad bears the times of drought which come to starve his cattle, biding time, waiting for the tightness to run its course and the rain that must eventually fall. Manaal would smile in an embarrassed way when their mother said that. And as if time had dissolved the age gap between them, she would attempt a faint defence. “Leave him alone, Mama,” she would say, in a whisper, avoiding their eyes, wary, lest her words, instead of calming, provoked the much feared outburst. Manaal had met Emma two years ago in Aberdeen. What she had told his mother about Emma, what she had said to try to drive away the rejection that gripped her, he didn’t know.
For Yassir, Emma was Aberdeen. Unbroken land after the sea. Real life after the straight lines of the oil-rig. A kind of freedom. Before Emma his leave on-shore had floated, never living up to his expectations. And it was essential for those who worked on the rigs that those on-shore days were fulfilling enough to justify the hardship of the rigs. A certain formula was needed, a certain balance which evaded him. Until one day he visited the dentist for two fillings and, with lips frozen with procaine, read out loud the name, Emma, written in Arabic, on a golden necklace that hung around the receptionist’s throat.
“Your wife—what’s her name?” his mother says as if clumsily smudging out a fact, hurting it. A fact, a history: three years ago he drove Emma to the maternity ward in Foresterhill, in the middle of a summer’s night that looked like twilight, to deliver a daughter who did not make her appearance until the afternoon of the following day. Samia changed in the two weeks that he did not see her. Her growth marked time like nothing else did. Two weeks off-shore, two weeks with Emma and Samia, two weeks off-shore again, Emma driving him to the heliport, the child in her own seat at the back. A fact, a history. Yet here, when Manaal’s friends visited, some with toddlers, some with good jobs, careers, there was a “see what you’ve missed” atmosphere around the house. An atmosphere that was neither jocular nor of regret. So that he had come to realise, with the sick bleakness that accompanies truth, that his mother imagined that he could just leave Emma and leave the child, come home, and those five years would have been just an aberration, time forgotten. He could marry one of Manaal’s friends, one who would not mind that he had been married before, that he had left behind a child somewhere in Europe. A bride who would regard all that as a man’s experience. When talking to her friends she would say the word “experienced” in a certain way, smiling secretly.
Because the streets were silent, Yassir and Manaal were silent too, as if by talking they would disturb those who were resting indoors. Yassir drove slowly, pebbles spat out from under the wheels, he was careful to avoid the potholes. The windows wide open let in dust but closing them would be suffocating. From their house in Safia they crossed the bridge into Khartoum and it was busier there, more cars, more people walking in the streets. That part of the journey, the entry into Khartoum, reminded him of the Blue Nile Cinema, which was a little way under the bridge. He remembered as a student walking ba
ck from the cinema, late at night to the Barracks, as his hostel was called, because it was once army barracks. He used to walk with his friends in a kind of swollen high, full of the film he had just seen. Films like A Man for All Seasons, Educating Rita, Chariots of Fire.
There was still a long way for them to go, past the Extension, beyond the airport, past Riyadh to the newly built areas of Taif and El-Ma’moura. Not a very practical idea, a drain of the week’s ration of petrol, and there was the possibility that the painter would not be in and the whole journey would have been wasted. Manaal was optimistic though. “They’ll be in,” she said, “Insha Allah. Especially if we get there early enough before they go out anywhere.” There were no telephones in El-Ma’moura, it was a newly built area with no street numbers, no addresses.
That morning, he had mentioned buying a painting or two to take back to Aberdeen and Manaal had suggested Ronan K. He was English; his wife gave private English lessons (Manaal was once her student). Now in the car when he asked more about him she said, “For years he sat doing nothing, he had no job, maybe he was painting. I didn’t know about that until the Hilton commissioned him to do some paintings for the cafeteria. No one knows why this couple live here. They are either crazy or they are spies. Everyone thinks they are spies.”
“You all like to think these sensational things,” he said. “What is there to spy on anyway?”
“They’re nice though,” she said. “I hope they are not spies.” Yassir shook his head, thinking it was hopeless to talk sense to her.
The paintings were not his idea, they were Emma’s. Emma was good with ideas, new suggestions, it was one of the things he admired about her. Yassir didn’t know much about painting. If he walked into a room he would not notice the paintings on the wall and he secretly thought they were an extravagance. But then he felt like that about many of the things Emma bought. What he considered luxuries, she considered necessities. Like the Bambi wallpaper in Samia’s room must be bought to match the curtains, which match the bedspread, which match Thumper on the pillowcase. And there was a Bambi video, a Ladybird book, a pop-up book. He would grumble but she would persuade him. She would say that as a child she had cried in the cinema when Bambi’s mother was shot. Popcorn could not stop the tears, the nasal flood. Of pop-up books and Halloween costumes, she would say, as a child I had these things. He would think, “I didn’t.”
