The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society
Page 10
Azrou means ‘rock’ in Berber. It takes its name from a huge rock in the middle of the town, upon which is written AZROU in huge letters. Below the rock there is a line of cheap cafés and basic hotels. I checked into one of them, on the promise of a cold tap in my room, and, after a splash, set off in the soft evening light in the direction suggested by Carl’s map. I had two photos of the plant I was seeking and a photocopied map of the area. For an hour and a half I climbed uphill and into the forest. The holly oaks and hawthorns that grew along the lower slopes soon gave way to the great blue Atlantic cedars. It really was like a fairytale forest, the traveller dwarfed by the immensity of the huge trees. The air was still and hot, but the distant blue fronds at the top of the trees lifted and fell in the gentlest of breezes.
I wandered here and there, startled occasionally by scufflings and slitherings, and awed by the beauty of the forest. But there was no sign of Cytisus battandieri, and as the gloom settled deeper and the first star appeared in the jagged shreds of sky above the treetops, I decided to give up and return to the town. I was disappointed and a little uneasy: I had invested what for us was a substantial sum of money in this trip and, if I didn’t come home with these seeds, we would have a seriously hard winter.
Still, I had only just arrived and maybe the next morning, after food and rest, things would turn out right. I settled into one of the cafés below the hotel; open to the street, they were bathed in the scent of smoke, roasting meat, coriander and diesel fumes. I picked a table in a tiled room at the back, where I could sit alone, and ordered a tumbler of sweet green tea – stuffed with mint like seaweed in the Sargasso Sea – and a mutton kebab from the grill outside. A ceiling fan hummed lazily, doing its best to keep the flies on the move, and, slurping my tea in anticipation of the meal ahead, I took my book out from my bag and read all the extraneous bits on the cover and inside, delaying the pleasure of beginning.
It was The Captain and the Enemy – Graham Greene’s last novel. I savoured its opening sentence: ‘I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest is my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September I met the Captain for the first time.’ Well, what an opening! I had read once that the New Statesman ran an annual competition to submit the first line of a novel in the style of Graham Greene, and that Greene submitted these very words under a pseudonym. Amused when it failed to win, he had the delicious satisfaction of using the words at the start of his next novel.
My dinner was before me now and I sighed a sigh of contentment as I slipped beneath the glorious spell of being alone and far from home, well fed, and embarking upon a new book.
‘Hallo, my friend. Where are you from?’
I froze, then buried my head deeper into the book. I wanted to read and eat. I was too tired to deal with some stranger’s curiosity. Maybe he was not addressing me and would soon go away.
‘Is the book you are a-reading a good one? Tell me, my friend. Where are you from?’
My interrogator had drawn so close I could feel his breath on my face. Without looking up, and with a very bad grace, I grunted, ‘I’m English,’ and read determinedly on. But it was no good: I’d already lost the thread. ‘Aha, English,’ echoed my irrepressible interlocutor. ‘English from England. Many books I have read from your country.’
‘Good,’ I growled.
‘Yes, many books. I enjoy particularly the novels written after the war.’
The words were overenunciated with a crazy relish, crisp and clipped, and addressed directly into my ear as the man, who was sitting at the next table, had pulled his chair out and was leaning across the narrow space between us.
‘And what is that book you are a-reading?’
Rudely, without raising my head, I said, ‘Graham Greene!’
The man’s eyes lit up. ‘Ah, Graham Greene, I like this author very much… The Captain and the Enemy. This was a later book and not so interesting as The Power and the Glory, but it is very…’, he paused, searching for the words, ‘… provoking of thoughts.’ And then the man embarked on the most astonishing resumé of the Greene oeuvre: Brighton Rock, The Lawless Roads, The Comedians, Travels with my Aunt. He’d read the lot. ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, ‘I may buy this book from you after you have read it? I would like to use it with my students.’
It was time to throw in the towel and, besides, it was becoming a privilege to be called a good friend by this fellow Greene fan.
‘May my friends and I join you at your table?’ he asked.
‘Please do.’ I dissolved and smiled as my new friend and his two friends and a friend of theirs and the latter’s cousin all pulled up chairs and sat down with me.
‘My name is Mourad; this is Ali; and this, Aziz and Abdullah and Hamid.’
‘I’m Chris – Christophe.’
We all shook hands and, in the face of such evident goodwill, my churlishness vanished.
‘You are here for holly-days?’ asked Mourad with an earnest smile as he inclined his head to listen intently to my answer.
I had never seen anyone revel so much in a simple exchange of words, and found it disarming. Mourad must have been in his mid-twenties, though his neat moustache, meticulously laundered clothes and polished lace-ups made him seem older.
I put away my book and we sat and sipped mint tea together, searching in a mixture of French and English for common ground. Mourad told me that he had recently finished an MA in English Literature at Meknes University, hence his erudition, although his peculiarly clipped enunciation came from hours hunched over the radio listening to the BBC World Service. He had hoped to teach at the local college, but as there were no vacancies he tried to get by giving private lessons.
‘And what sort of living is that?’ Ali cut in. ‘No one here has any money to pay him, though they want to pass their exams sure enough! And he keeps lending them his books! So he has to work like me in the peach harvest to make ends meet.’ He emphasised his words, and Mourad’s folly, by suddenly grabbing hold of his friend’s shoulder and squeezing it fiercely.
But Mourad was not the only one of the group struggling to make a living. Most of them, it seemed, did a variety of irregular jobs, labouring or harvesting, as well as trying to pursue their ‘professional’ work. Understandably they were intrigued by my seed-collecting mission and, after I had paid the bill, we all strolled down the road to the Pâtisserie Central. Here we installed ourselves at a little melamine table beneath the stars and watched the evening promenade swell to fill the street, as we ate those sweet Moroccan pastries called gazelle horns, and sipped juice made from almonds.
The evening promenade was dazzling to watch. It was August, so the town’s population, normally around 25,000, had doubled, as émigrés returned from France and Germany for the summer holiday. This made for an extraordinary mix of cultures and dress. Whole families would promenade up and down the road, maybe a couple of dozen strong – the older women veiled from head to toe, the teenagers provocatively dressed in skimpy singlets and the tightest of jeans. In between ran the whole gamut of European and Moroccan fashion, from exquisite silk caftans through Parisian haute couture to the coarse and shapeless sacks of the hardliners. Darkness fell suddenly and the heavy throng was illuminated by the lights from the cafés and the odd car cruising carefully through the crowd. The streets were thick with families milling and dust and warm darkness, and the sound of laughter and pleasantries. And there wasn’t a beer in sight.
At our table, the conversation was spirited, if disjointed, as every few minutes an acquaintance of one or other of the group stopped at our table and embraced or kissed everyone with a show of profound affection. I shook hands with each arrival and held the shaken hand sincerely to my heart. Every time, after the embraces, there commenced a lengthy formula of greeting – labass, veher, hamdullillah – with earnest hopes as to the well-being of all the family and friends of the recipient, and commendations to the care of Allah.
Mourad had earlier established that he, Ali and Aziz would become my team of seed-pickers in the morning, and as well as that he would not hear of my staying at the hotel. ‘I know that Hassan who runs the hotel,’ he warned me. ‘He is the king’s spy. You must stay at my family house.’ So, laboriously, we made our way up the street to the hotel where we gathered my bag and left the spy Hassan fuming. And thus I found myself, after ducking and twisting down dark alleys in one of the more crowded neighbourhoods of the town, in the bosom of a Berber family.
Mourad’s family house was a combination of partially built and dilapidated, a structure of reinforced, chipped concrete and shoddy brickwork, with steel rods sticking out all over the place. The floor was concrete, too, and the windows were mostly just unornamented wire grilles. Yet, within the shabby exterior, you could discern the elements of a small Andalusian palace. There was a central courtyard open to the sun, with a tap that ran into a drain in the centre, and around the drain was gathered a little crowd of old oil tins with basil, coriander, thyme and mint and a couple of spindly marguerites. The rooms were arranged on two storeys around the courtyard, and were furnished with rugs and, all around the walls, low beds covered in cushions.
This secret palace was peopled by a family of extraordinary complexity, to whom I was slowly introduced over the next few days. Mohammed, who was Mourad’s brother, was easy enough to fathom. At nineteen, and the youngest son of the family, it fell to him to pour the tea and serve and clear the table. He was a beautiful, shy young man who, with help and encouragement from Mourad, had just gained a place to study at the university in Meknes. Then there was an older brother, Hassan, who had a car repair workshop – almost completely devoid of tools – around the corner. Hassan employed Little Mohammed, who was ten and also lived in the house. Little Mohammed had no family of his own and had just turned up one day, alone and utterly destitute. They had taken him in – although they were not too far off destitution themselves – and he was now part of the family. So too was cross-eyed Abtisa, who haunted the house like a tiny wraith. She had arrived through Latifa, the younger of Mourad’s three sisters, who worked as a nurse in Azrou hospital. Six years before, a young couple, on their way to give birth at the hospital, had suffered a car accident. The husband died immediately, but the wife survived in hospital just long enough to give birth to Abtisa, before joining her husband. Nobody at the hospital knew what to do with the little girl, so Latifa took her home. Abtisa was the prettiest little six-year-old, but cross-eyed to the extent that it was a job to know which way she was looking or at whom she was smiling.
Presiding over this enormous family was Aïsha, a huge woman with skin like polished ebony. She drifted imperiously about the rooms in brightly coloured robes, making sure everything was immaculate and well done and to her liking. She welcomed me warmly to her home.
The money to run the household came from wherever and whoever, as fortune dictated. Mourad had brought in a little from some back-breaking work on the peach harvest, as well as some presents – spices, cloth and coffee – from his students; Hassan’s tool-less workshop provided occasional sums; Latifa worked for pennies at the hospital; Mohammed, when studying was over, did whatever turned up. Mourad’s father was a logger working in the cedar forest and spent most of the time living away on the timber camps.
Mourad told me something about his father’s work: how the pay was negligible but the tasks demanded of the men almost superhuman. Local worthies – ‘friends of the king’ as Mourad put it – would buy the logging concessions on tracts of cedar forest, and then put in poorly paid and ill-equipped teams to do the work. And there was no mechanisation at all in the forest: no cranes, chainsaws or caterpillars – just levers and chains, axes and cross-cut saws and sheer human strength. Mourad pointed out this forestry work to me over the following days and it was staggering. There were logs of cedar eight feet in diameter and twenty feet long, which made a massive load for one of the trucks to haul from the forest. And these logs, weighing as much as five tons, were loaded by hand, all the men getting together at the end of a day’s cutting and rolling the monsters up ramps into the back of waiting trucks. ‘There are many, many fatal accidents in the forest,’ Mourad told me. ‘The foresters are very lucky just to survive.’
Having heard all these things I expected Mourad’s father to be a great bull of a man, but I was wrong. He showed up later in the week, a small, slightly built character, very quietly spoken and utterly dominated by his galleon-like wife. In fact, I hardly heard a sound from him other than a few welcoming grunts, but then exhaustion often does this to a man.
In the morning, I showed Mourad, Ali and Aziz the photos I had of Cytisus battandieri. ‘Yes,’ said Mourad. ‘We will find this plant; it is not a problem. Today we will go to the forest of cedars to i-dent-ify it. Then we return with sacks for the seeds.’
By the time we escaped the clutches of the town, the sun was hitting its zenith and it was a relief to plunge once more into the shade of the cedars. My companions, however, seemed rather nervous and, as we drew deeper into the forest, looked timidly around them, jumping every time they heard a scuffle or a rustle. And there was a lot of scuffling and rustling.
‘Cobras,’ explained Mourad. ‘Black cobras, and they do not just wait for you to stand on them, but they attack you.’ And by way of illustration he showed us a wicked scar that ran right across the meat of his thumb. He had been about ten years old, he said, and out in the woods with his father, when – as is the way with boys – he stuck his hand into an interesting hole in some rocks. Unfortunately, there was a snake in there and it bit him. The snake was a black cobra. Mourad’s father, seeing the snake, whipped out his knife and slashed his young son’s hand deep to the bone. Apparently the venom of these particular cobras will kill you in a couple of minutes, and it was only this instant reaction that saved young Mourad from death.
Of course we all felt very much better after this story, as we walked hither and thither through clearings and thick forest, through stands of young trees and amongst the more thinly spaced old giants. And there was still no sign of the Cytisus battandieri, or hällehäll as it seemed to be called in Berber.
Mourad appeared from behind a tree, sucking a piece of grass. ‘Show me once again the photograph, Chris,’ and he looked at Carl’s broom photograph for perhaps the fifteenth time that morning. ‘I do not know this plant, Chris. Why your friend does want it?’
‘Well, it has beautiful flowers and it smells nice, and it’s very much in demand as an ornamental plant in Europe.’
‘Aah, in Europe,’ Mourad echoed in a knowing manner, then studied the photograph a little more. ‘I myself do not find it very beautiful. For example, it has no flowers at all.’
‘That’s because the photograph was taken when the plant was in seed; the flowers have all fallen.’
‘Ah, now I see. But I know plants that are much more beautiful, and, what is more, I know where they are.’
‘No, it has to be hällehäll – that’s what my order is for.’
Mourad looked disappointed. ‘We must continue seeking,’ he said, and we shambled on until we reached a clearing, in the middle of which stood a thin man in a worn dark suit and a thick woollen hat. He carried an umbrella and he was thoughtfully picking his teeth with a knife.
‘Who would this be, Mourad?’ I asked.
‘This man is the gardien du forêt. He will know where we can find hällehäll. But to ask him could be dangerous, for this is the king’s forest and he might decide to report us to the authorities, or he might want some money and we will have to pay him.
But now we have no seeds – so let us ask him.’
The gardien du forêt didn’t seem in the least surprised to see us. Mourad greeted him with the standard formula and then they continued a long animated conversation, the final moments of which showed signs of a breakthrough. Finally the gardien stepped across, shook my hand and beckoned me to follow him along a path at the edge of the clearing. ‘He knows where to find hällehäll,’ said Mourad happily. ‘And he does not mind us picking it; in fact, he will help us.’
We called for Ali and Aziz and together we climbed a hill and crossed a track into another part of the forest. I walked at the back with Aziz, who was a tall, refined-looking young man with slender fingers. Aziz spoke no English but beautiful French. ‘Ah, mon ami Christophe,’ he said mournfully. ‘There is nothing in Azrou for a man with my talents. I am only waiting for the letter of authorisation and some money from my girlfriend, who lives in Lyon. And then I will return to France.’ As he spoke, he wrung his hands, as if in supplication.
But just then, we burst into the light of another clearing and there was the Cytisus battandieri, hundreds of bushes stretching away in all directions. I grabbed a branch and picked some seedpods. Some were greenish still, but others split, cracked and twisted in my hand, spilling little black seeds. Our timing was perfect. A load lifted instantly from my mind: I would have something to show for the trip, after all.
It was right in the middle of the day just then – too hot to do any picking, and besides, we had no sacks to put the seeds in. But all around we could hear pods bursting in the hot sun, a sharp little crack and the patter of tiny seeds scattering among the dry grasses and the hard earth.