Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

  I caught the expression of worry on Malika’s face. When I sought her eyes, she smiled unconvincingly. I misunderstood, and thought her fear was political. I noticed again, when we left, the way she clustered the children around her.

  In the ksar that night, off a dark alley, in an ancient mud-walled house, Ameur introduced me to his friends. We met in a windowless room, lit by a naked bulb. Sitting on Saharan rugs, we brewed tea on a butane burner and smoked cigarettes. The heavy trucks of a military convoy rolled nearby, shaking the neighborhood. We talked politics.

  One man said, “We Saharans are great girl-chasers. We’re famous for it. It’s something we all do. It’s in us. The desert heats our blood.”

  Another said, “We’ve heard that in America girls of sixteen will give themselves to a man.”

  “That’s young,” I answered.

  He looked disappointed. “Then it’s like here.”

  “Not exactly …”

  Another said, “Here, the soldiers will always take the best girls for themselves.”

  But one of them refused to be discouraged. “It’s a recognized fact that by the end of the decade there will be six times more women than men in the Sahara.”

  I didn’t ask him to explain. He was a young man, thin and unmarried. He looked uncertain. I thought, give him his jackal’s paradise.

  AMEUR TOOK ME on an overnight trip to Touggourt, an oasis famous for its rugs. He had a driving test to administer there, and he told me after we started out that he had friends to see. It was afternoon. We drove for three hours through a pale desert of scrub and sand, and came to the oasis, with its date palms, donkeys, and mud-brick buildings.

  At the shaded café in a park at the center of town I watched Ameur move easily among the other customers, knowing everyone, stopping to shake hands, to embrace, to smile and laugh. In Touggourt, too, he was loved.

  A man with a goatee motioned for me to sit with him. He wore a leather jacket, and had heavy eyebrows and an alert expression. He wanted just to say, “I’ve known Ameur since he was a boy of four. Ameur is extraordinary. He has always been like this.”

  Ameur had booked me a room in the hotel. Because I was his guest, he wanted to pay for the night. The hotel clerk would not allow it. He suspected that we were changing money on the black market. He insisted that I pay for myself, and in officially declared dinars. He demanded the currency-exchange document that all foreigners were required to carry.

  The clerk’s demand was normal for Algeria at the time—in fact it was the law—but Ameur took it as an insult. He introduced himself, something he rarely had to do, but the clerk was a newcomer and had never heard of him.

  Ameur began to shout. The clerk would not be swayed. Ameur stormed out of the hotel. I followed. We drove back to the café and drank espressos. The caffeine strengthened Ameur’s resolve. An oasis is a small place. Because Ameur’s reputation was now at stake, we set off again for the hotel.

  On the way, by a small police station, Ameur pointed out the two plainclothes detectives standing conspicuously in the street ahead of us. One was fat and bald. The other, his deputy, had a thin, pockmarked face and the look of a country bumpkin. I thought they both looked a little dangerous. Ameur set his face to neutral as we drove by.

  But then Ameur had an inspiration. He stopped the car abruptly, asked me to wait, and walked back to the detectives. I watched in the mirror as he shook hands with them, put his arms over their shoulders, and ushered them into the police station. They emerged a while later, and to my surprise came over to climb into the back of our car.

  At the hotel, the chief detective did the talking. This time there was no argument from the clerk. He no longer demanded my currency documents, and he apologized for having to record my passport number. Then he offered the room for free. Ameur refused disdainfully, and dropped cash on the counter.

  We all trooped down to inspect the accommodations. Ameur noted with satisfaction that I had been assigned the room numbered one. We crowded into it, while the clerk waited humbly in the hallway. The chief detective made a show of turning back the sheets to see if they were clean. He sat heavily on the bed to test the mattress. Ameur cycled the light switch. The deputy went down the hallway to flush the toilet and check the shower. Then we stood around awkwardly until I realized they needed an approval.

  “Very good,” I said.

  “Impeccable!” Ameur said.

  And we trooped out.

  Ameur did not spend the night in the hotel, but went off to the house of a woman. He said he was a good Muslim. He had stopped drinking. He loved his children. But he said there was trouble in his marriage. We drove home to Ouargla on the second day, and did not speak about where he had spent the night. By mutual sentiment we did not speak about Malika.

  THE WEATHER CHANGED overnight, so that one morning thick gray clouds lay over Ouargla. I met Ameur in the afternoon. We picked up his friend the air-traffic controller, and cruised.

  The controller’s name was Ishmael. He was a Haratin black, the descendant of slaves brought to the oasis by caravans from the south. Were it not for the fact that he had married another Haratin, that his children were Haratins, and that he lived in the ksar’s old Haratin quarter, I would have guessed that he rarely thought about his skin color. He had read about the difficulty between whites and blacks in the United States, but mentioned it just once, laughingly, as if to say that it had nothing to do with his own life. He said that the desert like death makes equals of all people.

  Ishmael knew I had worked as a pilot, and he wanted to talk technicalities. He said that being an air-traffic controller in the Sahara means you wait for an airplane to radio in, then you say “Cleared to land,” and you report the wind and temperature. This may happen four times a day. Since the same airplane will eventually depart, you also get to say “Cleared for takeoff.” You can issue the clearances in Arabic or French—or in the international language of air-traffic control, which is English. Ishmael did not get many chances to practice his English in Ouargla, so he took the chance with me. He said things like, “I have certain you seem interesting to our airport.” Ameur agreed hugely because in any language he loved to talk about flying.

  Ameur, Ishmael, and I drove to Ouargla’s airport. It had a small, dusty terminal building guarded by soldiers. We climbed the stairs into the glass-walled cab of the control tower. A controller, one of Ishmael’s friends, slouched sleepily by the radio. He woke up to ask Ameur about the possibility of finding a rebuilt distributor for his car. Ameur was polite, but just now did not want to be distracted. Out on the tarmac, a crowd of passengers climbed down the stairway from an Air Algeria Boeing. Ameur recognized the pilots.

  The clouds overhead had the airport people excited. Downstairs in the weather room, we found the meteorologist presiding over a vintage teletype and a rack of old instruments. He was a lanky young man with sloping shoulders and an academic disposition. The weather came from the north, he said. He called it an important atmospheric depression, and pointed to a cold front that had escaped from the Mediterranean and was swinging just now across the Atlas Mountains. He took us out a side door to squint at the overcast, which he called merely the leading edge stuff. He showed us the windsock standing straight out.

  Back inside, the teletype rattled. The meteorologist stooped over the latest reports. “I have rain at Annaba. Rain at Constantine. At Bou Saâda, and Biskra.” He looked up. “I have rain everywhere. It’s coming this way.”

  Ishmael said, “The airport is prepared!”

  Ameur said, “Pas de problème.”

  The Air Algeria pilots walking across the ramp toward us seemed less interested. They regularly flew through the clouds of Europe, and saw enough rain even back home in Algiers. Their visit to the weather room was yet another routine. But they brightened when they found Ameur there. They embraced him. While the copilot indulged the meteorologist, the captain took Ameur aside to ask about an exhaust pipe for his Fiat. Ameur promised it
within a week. The captain admitted he was short of cash. Ameur called the exhaust pipe a small gift, and insisted on peeling off a little extra to help the captain until the next paycheck. The captain felt profoundly grateful. That was Ameur’s genius. In a land of drought, he knew how to seed the clouds. Moreover, he seemed never to calculate the returns. He was the warmest and most instinctive of men.

  From the airport we drove to an outlying village, to a farm market, where Ameur and Ishmael heaped sacks of vegetables into the back of the car. Under darkening midafternoon clouds, we started back toward Ouargla. Several miles out, near a small palm grove and a cluster of houses, we came upon an old turbaned man standing beside the road, and sitting beside him, a boy of about ten. The old man was tall and thin. He gestured for a ride. Ameur slowed, but raised his hands in helplessness, because the car had no room. The old man waved his understanding. We drove past.

  Ameur looked at me. “I wonder if that boy was sick. That boy looked sick.”

  He turned the car around and drove back to the hitchhikers. Indeed the boy had a swollen throat and a fever. The old man was his grandfather. He squeezed into the back beside Ishmael and the vegetables. The boy sat wordlessly on my lap up front. We set off for the hospital. The old man said he cultivated dates, and was too poor for a taxi.

  Ameur prodded the boy gently, touching his neck and cheek. “I just had a sense, you see, it’s not normal for a boy to sit. I thought he had to be sick.”

  The hospital was a modern government building, the last outpost of Algeria’s once-hopeful socialism. I asked Ameur if the doctors were competent.

  He shrugged. “Among the old ones, some. Not among the new ones.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It’s like everything else. They don’t give a damn.”

  But Ameur did. He went with the boy into the registration room as if he owned the place, and went behind the counter. From the nurse, he extracted a promise that the doctors would not keep this boy waiting. Before leaving, he slipped money into the callused hands of the old man. He never introduced himself, because it was enough that God was his witness.

  THE RAIN STARTED as a drizzle. We dropped Ishmael off in the ksar, and drove home. Ameur’s children dashed about excitedly in the still-dusty street holding their hands up to touch the drops. Malika stood inside the courtyard feeling the coolness against her face, looking calm and relieved. Ameur felt so good that he wanted to telephone the United States. I gave him a number. He got through, and said, “It’s America!” and handed me the phone. Afterward, we drove the children to the municipal zoo.

  The zoo was playground size. It stood in a nationalized palm grove on the outskirts of town. The rain had turned the dirt there to mud. In an open-sided thatched-roof shelter, a zookeeper sat watching insipid Algerian variety shows on a black-and-white television. He lowered the volume when we walked in, and announced that because of the weather the admission was free. In a glass case beside him two small vipers huddled near an electric bulb. They were the color of sand, horned, and still.

  “They’re dangerous,” I said.

  “Very dangerous,” Ameur said.

  The zookeeper nodded. So we all agreed.

  A collection of scorpions infested another display case. The zookeeper reached in with a scrap of metal and prodded one. It curled its tail. The thatched roof had rotted away directly overhead, and was letting in the rain, which was falling harder. I had crushed a scorpion that morning in my hotel room. I wondered why the zoo bothered to collect them.

  The zookeeper kept poking the scorpion, daring it to strike. When it did not, the zookeeper said nastily, “Watch the rain hit him now. The scorpion is a desert creature. You’ll see. He can’t stand the water.”

  He was wrong. The reason scorpions populate the oases is that they seek water, and thrive where they find it. Some species can survive submersion for up to three days.

  I sloshed with the children across the muddy yard to see the animals. They lived miserably on concrete pads in wire enclosures—ostriches, monkeys, foxes, and two mangy lions who refused to look at me. We returned to the car and drove away. Ameur mentioned that the place always saddened him.

  The rain continued. Ameur’s wipers, which had been chattering and screeching across the windshield, shed their blades. Ameur was annoyed. Wiper blades were perhaps the only car part he was not prepared to come by. Who would have thought of the need? There had been no rain in Ouargla for years, and nothing like this for a lifetime.

  Ouargla was set up to live on groundwater alone. By nightfall, the residents had grown worried, because the rain had not let up, and most of the neighborhoods were without power, and the roofs were leaking, and the mud walls had begun to melt. Ameur’s telephone had failed. We ate by candlelight. The entire family joined us. I watched Malika in the flickering light. After dinner, Ameur and I drove with the children through the dark, empty streets of the oasis. The water forced Ameur to drive at a creep. In places it came almost to the car’s doors. Soldier sentries stood miserably at their posts. A new river flowed through the marketplace.

  Ameur commanded his children, “Look! Look!” meaning, “So you will remember!”

  And they did.

  Only months later, on a desert road, Ameur, the driving examiner, was in a car accident. He was not behind the wheel or in his own car, but was with a woman to whom he had long before given a license. Because he was in love with her, he had forgotten to attach his seatbelt. When she lost control and the car rolled, Ameur struck his head and went into a coma.

  After it was clear that he would never return, his friends deserted him. Eventually they deserted even the memory of him. They said that God had punished Ameur for his sins. I try not to blame them. They were growing older in a puritanical desert. They sought distance from their own indiscretions. By condemning Ameur, they could repent. And there was something else. After a strong man dies, cowards may forget that once they needed him. Ameur’s friends were cowards, and he could not help them now. Far away in Algiers he spent his days staring mindlessly at the walls of his mother’s ruined house. Eventually word came back to the Sahara. What Malika said to me in Algiers was true. If you told Ameur the sky is blue, he would answer, “Yes, the sky is blue.” But if you told him the sky is red, he would agree with that, too. Nothing was left of his kingdom.

  10

  MALIKA’S

  DESERT

  THIS IS NOT a legend. Ameur’s mistress lived in an oasis 150 miles west of Ouargla. She was a career woman, a gynecologist named Fatima. By the age of thirty, she had not married, which was unusual because she was neither ugly nor poor. She met Ameur and decided she loved him. He allowed her to be a strong woman, and he did not fear her. In return, her dedication was absolute. There were nights when she gave Ameur a taste of paradise. Malika found out because Ameur, in one of his secret rages, punished her with a declaration. She later told me that he was a tormented and sometimes cruel man. His affair with Fatima lasted several years, during which he made Malika pregnant with her fourth child. Fatima did not get pregnant because Ameur did not want her to, and because she knew about contraception. She could offer Ameur her passion with none of the immediate consequences. Moralists say she also offered him self-destruction. They blame her as well as him. That’s probably fair. Fatima was driving on a well-paved road when she lost control. Word spread quickly through the desert: Ameur lay unconscious in some roadside oasis, breathing shallowly, bleeding from the head. Fatima was unhurt but wild with sorrow, refusing to leave his side. Malika had gathered her children around, and would not go to him as long as Fatima remained. It didn’t matter to her that Fatima was the only doctor for many miles. Fatima was her demon.

  The impasse was broken by an old friend of Ameur’s in Algiers, a wealthy merchant who, sensing the gravity of Ameur’s condition, chartered a private jet to evacuate him from the Sahara directly to Paris, where Ameur was put in the intensive care unit of Saint-Sulpice, a hospital near the
city’s center.

  Fatima arrived in Paris within hours, went to the hospital, and introduced herself as Ameur’s wife. She stuck fiercely by Ameur’s side, and after several days began to quarrel with the French doctors, accusing them of neglect. It is true that they wasted little time on him. He was an “Arab,” another would-be immigrant. When his condition stabilized, they took him off the respirator, and left him alone. He lay in the ward, still deep in a coma.

  Malika left the children in Ouargla to the care of her old Berber mother, and rode Air Algeria to Paris. Her ticket was a gift from the pilots at the airline. At the hospital, having revealed herself as Ameur’s true wife, she demanded that Fatima be kept from visiting him.

  Fatima argued that she was Ameur’s second wife under Islamic law and she may almost have believed it. Fatima was very much the outcast then. She had sacrificed her family, her friends, and her career to be with Ameur. She was smarter than Ameur, but trusted him when he promised marriage. She made herself his public woman. Then in a moment of weakness, with a shift of her eyes and a move of the steering wheel, she sacrificed him as well. It was a fate too terrible to accept, even in the Sahara. And so she had married Ameur in her heart.

  Nonetheless, under Islamic law the marriage was illegal. A man may take a second wife only if he does not neglect the first one. And for years Malika had been neglected. The hospital administrators did not know that, but they were pleased not to recognize polygamy.

  Fatima tacked. She claimed to be Ameur’s physician, and demanded the right to attend to him.

  The French asked for her credentials.

  She said she had left them in the Sahara.

  The French answered, then go get them.

  They underestimated her. She had the money and devotion. She flew back to Algeria, hopped another flight to the desert, and within a day returned to Paris with her documents.