The men left, and when they got home they cut the throats of their fathers. Only one son did not have the courage. He hid his father instead in a great jar meant for storing dates.
The next day the men assembled in the palace courtyard. The king asked, “Have you killed your fathers?”
“Yes,” they answered. “And may God damn their souls.”
The king said, “Now I’ll see if you have lied to me. I want each of you to return tomorrow with your king, your enemy, and your best friend.”
The subjects left the palace in confusion, desperate to fulfill the king’s mysterious request. The young man who had hidden his father went home. His wife served him dinner. His father emerged from hiding and joined him for the meal. The young man was so nervous that he could not swallow the food.
His father noticed. “What worries you, my son?”
“Father, it is the king. He has asked me to bring to the palace my king, my enemy, and my best friend. But I don’t understand the meaning of his words.”
“Oh, my boy,” said the old man, “eat, and do not worry. Tomorrow, when you wake up, put your son on your shoulder, take your dog in hand, and command your wife to accompany you.
“Show your son to the king, and say, ‘Here, sire, is my king. When he cries, my heart breaks. I would give everything I own to console him.’
“Show him your dog, and say, ‘Here is my best friend. Wherever I go he accompanies and defends me. When I feed him he is happy, and he wags his tail. When I beat him he doesn’t get angry, or run away, but continues to serve me.’
“Then show him your wife, and say, ‘Here is my enemy. She causes me constant trouble. When I bring something home, if I don’t give her a share, she begins to scream and cry.’ ”
The young man felt reassured by his father’s words. He finished his meal and went to bed. In the morning, all of Ouargla’s men assembled in the palace courtyard. The king said, “Approach and show me. Have you found what I asked for?”
The crowd was silent. No one had been able to solve the king’s riddle. But then the young man stepped forward with his son, dog, and wife, and he repeated the words of his father.
The king listened, and answered, “My friend, I can tell that these thoughts are not your own. They are so wise that only an old man could have uttered them. This tells me you have hidden your father. He is not dead after all.”
The young man hung his head in shame.
The king said, “I will pass judgment on you now. Because you did not obey me, I hereby expropriate all your possessions. But because, out of love for your father, you alone have retained your sanity, I give you one-half of all my possessions, and appoint you as my successor to rule over these imbeciles who have neither minds nor hearts.”
The king put the royal staff in the young man’s hands, draped the royal robe on his shoulders, and sat him upon the throne.
Ever since then the men of Ouargla have venerated their fathers. They have loved their children. They have enjoyed their dogs. And their wives have perhaps been less fortunate.
7
THE
KING OF
OUARGLA
THE KING OF Ouargla was a driving license examiner, Malika’s husband, my friend Ameur Belouard. He lived with Malika and their four children in Ouargla, and was sent by the Ministry of Transportation on a circuit to other oases to test new drivers. Whenever possible he rode Air Algeria. He loved airplanes, especially jets, wished he had been a pilot, and knew all the Air Algeria pilots by name. They knew him, too. He was a famous man. Whenever he flew they asked him to ride with them in the cockpit, and were genuinely delighted with his company, and flattered him by talking shop. It was the least of favors they could do for him. They would have liked to do more. Over time I learned not to be surprised by this. Ameur Belouard was admired throughout the Algerian Sahara. The extent of his reputation became clear to me only with distance, in settlements far from Ouargla, when strangers sought me out simply because Ameur had sent word.
He was forty-two then, a small man with swarthy skin, and impatient reflexes. Women found him attractive; men imagined him their brother. He was of course more than just a driving license examiner. He was street-smart, corrupt, and connected. A telephone nested in his hand. He would find you a black-market refrigerator or television, and expect nothing immediately in return. He knew the best sources for tires. He gave good exchange rates on foreign currencies, cash only, no records kept, and always carried a thick wad of Algerian dinars. He could be counted on for a loan, among friends, no interest asked. He knew a man at the telephone exchange who could repair a bill or cut through the interminable delay for service. He could book you a seat on an overbooked flight. He could book you five seats. People believed in him because he was a fixer.
His Ouargla was not a pretty place. At its core, it had a mud-bricked ksar, an ancient fortified village of twisted streets with a certain picturesque appeal, but farther out it grew in boulevards and shadeless slums into an oil and government town. I met Ameur during my first visit there. He was the older brother of a friend in France, an Algerian immigrant, who had insisted that I look him up. “Sacré Ameur!” my friend had said fondly.
This was during the opening days of the Islamic revolution, when Algiers was rioting over the price of wheat, and the army was machine-gunning the protesters. I left the capital’s shattered streets, and flew south, expecting to find a peaceful desert. Instead, I found in Ouargla an army garrison on high alert. A soldier in a guard tower cocked his Kalashnikov when I walked by. As a foreigner, I was conspicuous; as an American, I was suspect. A captain of army intelligence questioned me, and sent watchers in leather jackets and sunglasses to shadow me around the oasis. It was sort of comic. At the shabby government hotel where I stayed, the clerks downstairs breathed into my phone calls.
Ameur found out about the surveillance from army insiders who thought they owed him. He came to the hotel café to meet me, and said, “Do you know what these bastards are doing to you?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know how they are treating you?”
“They have their jobs.”
“I don’t want you to worry.”
“I don’t.”
“They’re frightened,” he said.
“I know. I’ve come from Algiers.”
“It’s because they’re soldiers.”
“I’m sure.”
“The people will have no pity on them.”
I didn’t answer. I thought Ameur was talking too loudly.
“They could be dangerous for you,” he said.
“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“You are my guest. I don’t want you to worry.”
“I promise, I won’t.”
“You’ll see. I’ll make a call. I’ll take care of these bastards for you.”
“I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
But he would hear none of it. He touched my arm. “There is no problem, absolutely no problem!” He said it a third time, and with emphasis. “Il n’y a pas de problème!”
I indulged him, as all his friends did. Anyway, Ameur was unstoppable. Confidence was his greatest asset. He came from a peasant family, and had the eagerness of a social climber. When he heard about the world beyond the Sahara he liked to remark, “Now, that! That’s class!” He wore pressed, pleated pants and patterned Parisian shirts. He would have looked at home in most of the world’s biggest cities. Only his loafers gave Ouargla away: they bore the unmistakable indelible ochre stain of desert dust.
He stole me away from the hotel in his worn Peugeot sedan. My watchers were on foot, and could not follow; I doubt that they cared. We drove to Ameur’s house, by a new mosque, where it squatted randomly in trampled dirt, without shade or vegetation.
Ameur had built the place with his own hands, of cinder block and concrete. It was a small flat-roofed bunker, typically poor and unfinished on the outside, offering few hints to the neighborhood of its inner comfort
. Power and telephone lines burrowed into its side. Only one small window, barred and shuttered, looked onto the street. The other windows looked onto a courtyard hidden behind high walls. An air conditioner rattled and hummed. A television antenna stood on the roof.
We entered the courtyard through a metal door and were greeted shyly by the children, ages three to ten. I gave them small presents from Paris and a bag of bad chocolates from across town. We left our shoes in the entrance hallway. The house had two parlors, one for the male visitors, and the other, next to the kitchen, for the family and women.
But Ameur was a naturally open man. In a gesture of friendship, he invited me into the family’s room, which was cool and dark and heavily furnished. I do not know where Malika was; I had not yet met her. Ameur and I sat in overstuffed chairs while his eldest daughter served us strong, sweet coffee. She brought in a French language exam, just graded, on which she had earned a perfect score. She brought in a map of the world, and asked me to point to my home. She pointed to hers.
In a wall-length cabinet stood Ameur’s prized possessions—a stereo, a television, a video recorder, a multivolume Arabic encyclopedia, and a collection of Malian figurines, souvenirs of a trip south from the years before Algerians were imprisoned by their currency. His most prized possession, the telephone, stood alone on a brass tray beside Ameur. He dialed the number of an army intelligence officer, and worked himself into an indignant anger, speaking in French to allow me to understand. He felt personally insulted by the way his guest had been treated.
After he hung up, he said, “They will not bother you again.”
I said, “I’m impressed.”
He nodded and tapped his chest. “Ask anyone and they will tell you. Ameur Belouard is the king of Ouargla.”
I never saw the watchers again. It was a short, strange period in Saharan history when soldiers and the political police hesitated.
WE DROVE TO a market street in the old ksar, where Ameur asked a butcher to hack the leg from the carcass of a lamb. The butcher tried to make a gift of the meat, but Ameur refused, and paid liberally from a thick wad of bills, without requiring change. The butcher joked with him to demonstrate their friendship. We bought carrots, potatoes, and tangerines. We drove the food home, and the children carried it inside. We returned to the car and kept driving.
Ameur drove with both hands on the wheel. He was the government examiner, a public example, a pillar of civic responsibility, and more than polite. When a donkey and cart blocked our way up an alley, he did not gesture, or gun his engine, but waited patiently. When a group of veiled women stepped off a curb, he stopped to let them pass. When a truck turned without signaling, he clucked. He did not drive fast, or brake hard, or accelerate aggressively. He did not take corners quickly. He was smooth, alert, and very safe. He felt every eye was upon him.
It took me a while to realize that he had no destination. We crossed the town, crossed back, angled off, and turned around, cruising Ouargla like country boys from Texas. We covered all the main streets from both directions. Other drivers cruised as well. Ameur tapped the horn in friendly hellos, and waved to his acquaintances. We stopped to talk to an air-traffic controller. People came up to us and crouched beside the car to pass the time. Ameur promised to provide one man with hard-to-find white house paint. No problem.
When daylight faded, the air cooled. We swung by Ameur’s house and picked up his youngest daughter, a coy, curly-haired girl of four. He called her his princess. She sat on my lap as we drove north from town, following a paved road for miles into the desert. Ameur wanted to recite his evening prayers in the dunes. He said he had been a drunk and a sinner in earlier years, but had returned to the path of righteousness.
I asked when.
He answered, “Recently.”
I asked why he wanted to pray in the desert.
“Because the sand here is clean.” He went off alone to bathe his soul in it.
His daughter nestled in my arms against the night winds. She smelled of soap. We wandered into the darkness under stars softened by translucent clouds. Ouargla lined the horizon like a lighted thread.
8
SLEEPING
WITH
WOMEN
THIS IS ANOTHER story about Malika’s desert. Long ago in Ouargla, when merely to see a woman was to have slept with her, there lived a powerful judge who had seen all the town’s women except for the wife of the tax assessor. His problem was that she was rumored to be the most beautiful of all.
The judge asked himself, “How shall I go about seeing this man’s beautiful wife?” Then he had an idea: “It’s easy. I’ll send the assessor on a mission.”
He wrote a few letters, then called for the assessor, and ordered him to deliver them to an oasis called the M’Zab, days distant. He accompanied the assessor to the gates of Ouargla, and when he was certain he had gone, he went to speak to the assessor’s neighbor, an old woman.
“Tell me,” he said. “Exactly how does your neighbor the assessor knock on his door when he comes home?”
“That’s easy,” she answered. “He knocks like this. He taps with his finger.”
The judge thanked her. From a jeweler he bought a beautiful gold ring. Then he went to the assessor’s house, and tapped on the door exactly as the old woman had showed him.
Inside, the wife said to her black maid, “Get up. Go to see. Only one man taps so. Your master must have come home early.”
The maid opened the door and found the judge. She returned to her mistress and said, “He taps like the master, but he is the judge.”
The assessor’s wife was as wise as she was beautiful. She answered the maid, “Show the judge into the parlor. We will prepare a lesson for him.”
The maid led the judge into the parlor, and invited him to sit in the place of honor on the rugs. She went to the kitchen and, following her mistress’s instructions, prepared a meal on covered plates.
When the meal was ready, the maid carried it on a tray to the guest. The judge was at first delighted by the hospitality, but when he lifted the covers he found on each plate a single cooked egg. “What is the meaning of this?” he asked.
“That women are like eggs,” the maid said. “To some, God gives white shells. To others he gives black shells. But inside they are all the same.”
As impressed by the wisdom of the assessor’s wife as by her virtue, the judge abandoned any thought of seeing her. But when he stood to leave, he carelessly dropped the ring he had brought for her. The ring slipped under a corner of the rug.
When the assessor returned from the M’Zab, exhausted after a long journey through the desert, he sat on the rug. Feeling a lump under his thigh, he discovered the ring and drew the obvious conclusion. He called the maid. “Tell your mistress that I will never see her again.”
For months afterward he refused to clothe or feed his wife. She became pale and weak, and fell sick. When her parents came to visit her, they were shocked by her condition. She told them about the judge’s visit and the ring.
Now the parents went to the judge. The father said, “Your honor, we once had a lovely garden that we entrusted to a friend to fertilize and irrigate. But now we have discovered that he has allowed it to wither. We asked him why, and he told us that he discovered the tracks of a jackal there, and was afraid to return.”
The judge called the assessor before him, and asked, “Why have you neglected your garden?”
“Your Honor, I discovered jackal tracks.”
At first the judge was stern. “If you don’t tend your garden,” he warned, “I will tend it myself.” But then the judge remembered the woman’s virtue and her wisdom. He said, “The desert is home to jackals, it’s true. You found tracks, so it is certain that a jackal visited your garden. But nothing was eaten. Nothing was damaged. Nothing was touched.”
The assessor believed the judge. He took back his wife, clothed and fed her, and according to the legend lived as happily with her as before.
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br /> 9
AMEUR
WAS A
MODERN
MAN
AMEUR WAS A modern man, and wanted me to meet his wife. We returned from the prayers in the sand. She came into the family living room before dinner that night, smiling warmly, drying her hands on an apron, surrounded by a protective gaggle of children. I thought she was lovely. We shook hands. Her palms felt rough from housework. She asked about my wife and young children, then studied the snapshots I showed her. “They are beautiful,” she said. “You must miss them terribly.” I admitted that I did. She asked about mutual friends in Algiers and France. I assured her they sent their love. This seemed genuinely to please her. Her voice was thin, gentle, pleasant to hear. I guessed she was a good mother, and by Saharan standards a good wife. She had vulnerable brown eyes. She was retiring. She was undemanding. So Ameur should have been a happy husband. But I admit that Malika made men restless.
She returned to the kitchen to finish preparing our dinner. Ameur and I ate in the living room. Afterward we watched television as the Algerian president, a military man, spoke to a somber assembly of party hacks in distant Algiers. Before the address, an invocation was offered by a child who recited verses from the Koran in a musical choirboy’s voice, with his hand cupped over his ear. The president stood beside him, with his head high, his eyes ahead, and his hands extended, palms up.
A formally dressed man sang the national anthem. Ameur’s children, who had come into the living room, sang along. Malika stood in the doorway, listening calmly. Ameur watched the television with growing impatience. The president spoke in the Algerian dialect, but his words were covered by a simultaneous translation into classical high Arabic.
Ameur swore. “They don’t dare to talk plainly! Do they think people will be reassured by this circus? These are the same men who have driven Algeria into the ground. Do they think we are impressed?”
He switched off the television, and asked me to accompany him. “We will drive to the ksar,” he said. “I will introduce you to my friends.”
Sahara Unveiled Page 6
