Gold Dust (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  When Ukhayyad returned from his journey, he found the Mahri anxious. He stroked the animal’s body and massaged the mended skin. The piebald’s eyes were swollen with sadness. He led the camel into the southern pastures where they could be alone. Ukhayyad took some barley out of his sack and held the grain in his hands. The camel turned away. Ukhayyad followed after him with the food, but the animal stubbornly refused his advances. “I know why you’re so rough with me,” Ukhayyad said, returning the grain to his knapsack. “You’re angry because I left you and went off. I did not abandon you. We had agreed to it together. We’ve guaranteed the return of your color. Now, you’ll return to being a piebald like before. Aren’t you looking forward to seeing yourself dappled, beautiful, and rare?”

  The piebald’s eyes welled up with tears and Ukhayyad hugged him. They stood a while embracing in the infinite expanse just as the night began to thicken.

  The gods do not forgive those who break promises.

  Sophocles

  12

  But the piebald had not forgiven him. The humiliation in the dancing arena was a sign that he had not. Had Ukhayyad misjudged things? Camels do not forget wrongs. They are like slaves—and you had better watch out if you mistreat them.

  Instead of celebrating him, that damned poetess had composed a nasty ode skewering the camel. “His color is spotted, but his mind is rotted,” was how it began. Within two days, echoes of the poem had traveled throughout the entire encampment. He would cut out that wretched woman’s tongue and give her a taste of his whip.

  One day soon after the dance fiasco, he took the purebred to the pasture. There, away from everything else, Ukhayyad scolded him. He made the camel kneel under the lote tree and began to shout, gesturing into the air with his whip: “What did I do to you to deserve this from you? You should be thanking me, not trying to humiliate me. Just look at your colors—you’re even more dappled than before. If I hadn’t rescued you, your splendor would have disappeared altogether.”

  The Mahri protested, turning his head askance, but Ukhayyad blocked him. “Don’t try to get away,” he yelled angrily. “We’re settling our accounts today. Didn’t you hear the poem that wicked poetess composed about you? She has been watching us for a long time, waiting for us to make a mistake. I commissioned her to sing your praises, and she insisted on seeing you dance before she did. Then you decided to spite me during the dance—and see what happened? She composed a poem ridiculing us instead! Are you happy now?”

  He rose to his feet, clapped his hands as if to say “I’m done,” and wandered across the open desert space, kicking away rocks with his sandals. “I’m so stupid. So stupid,” he repeated. “Instead of paying our debt as quickly as possible, we argue and fight. We need to make good on the promise we made. Have you forgotten the pledge we made?” But it was Ukhayyad, and not the Mahri, who had forgotten their promise.

  Still, Ukhayyad had not altogether forgotten that he had pledged to sacrifice a camel at the shrine. In fact, he had purchased a purebred camel from a sheikh who was emigrating to Mecca. Ukhayyad traded a splendid Touat kilim rug for the animal. The sheikh had come from Marrakesh, saying that he had decided to leave this world behind. He said he wanted to spend the rest of his days in Mecca where he might live near the Prophet’s grave. The tribe slaughtered a goat for the man and feted him for three days. He cast off the rest of his possessions and sold off the last of his animals. The camel had been given as a gift to Ukhayyad, the ascetic sheikh insisted. He had not bartered the camel for the rug, he said, but had accepted it because he needed a prayer rug.

  Ukhayyad recalled the promise he uttered at the tomb of the ancients: “O lord of the desert, god of the ancients, I pledge to bring you a fat camel, sound of body and mind.” But that camel was not yet fat, nor yet of sound mind and body. Ukhayyad decided to wait for the animal to mature and fatten. At the time of his humiliation in the dance arena, the young purebred was still grazing hungrily in the southern pastures. Ukhayyad recognized that what had taken place was a sign of something. The lord of the desert was announcing his presence and warning him—he was demanding that the offering should not be delayed any longer.

  Thereafter, other events occurred. Fate brought with it carelessness, and Ukhayyad’s life took another course. There was nothing strange about this turn at all. Like prophecies, signs flicker into view only for one moment before they disappear and are gone forever.

  13

  Marry her and be damned.”

  This was the message Ukhayyad’s father sent him through Sheikh Musa. He had not expected this sort of response, and it filled his eyes with a cloud of rage. Sheikh Musa tried to warn him. “Gently,” he said as he shook his finger. “Fathers may speak to sons however they like, but a son cannot answer his father in kind.” Ukhayyad swallowed his anger and rose to hide his humiliation in the desert.

  The reason for all this was that an Eve had joined the tribe to help herd the skinny she-goats. The gorgeous girl came with her kin from Aïr, fleeing the drought that had gripped that part of the desert over the last five years. While unmistakable signs of affliction showed on the miserable beasts of her tribe, her beauty remained in full bloom. Not even the dusty road had stripped her of her splendor. Besides her beauty, she had a light spirit and a great deal of charm. It was this charm that slew Ukhayyad the first time they met.

  Beware the charms of women! Their allure is a mystery—it is as plain and simple as the desert itself and yet there is nothing more obscure or indecipherable. Their charm is like the murmuring of jinn on Jebel Hasawna—you hear it, but cannot make out the words, or you hear the sounds, but their meaning escapes you. A look might suggest a woman’s charm—or an offhand smile, passing glance, shake of the head, or the way a word is spoken. Or it might be nothing more than a musical ring in her voice. The allure of women was something created just to slay men like Ukhayyad.

  He first met her during a moonlit gathering. He watched her bewitching smile flash in the dim light and followed her slim silhouette as she wandered between the women. Then he heard her sing. My God—what a powerful voice! Her songs welled up from deep inside. She sang as if she were plucking out the loneliness from her heart. She sang as if she were exorcising the bleak solitude of the desert. Her divine voice communicated what her charms could never directly express. Each man who heard her sing that night began to swoon and dance. Ukhayyad danced with the other young men until morning.

  He met her in passing after that, both during the late-night gatherings and in the pastures. She would sing heavenly songs for him out in the open desert spaces and he would listen attentively to the agony of a girl who had been driven by drought and famine to emigrate and live in exile from her homeland. It was not difficult to find this melody among the people of the desert. Who in the desert had never tasted drought? Who had not been driven into exile by famine? Such things were the inescapable fate of the desert—and all the songs of the desert were an expression of this grief, drought, and homelessness. The peoples of the desert sang of endless exile, of the eternal longing to return to God’s presence and the origin of all. They sang of longing for that ever-merciful oasis, the original oasis, the oasis of which the oases of Fezzan were but miserable ghosts. The oasis that no longer exists, that never existed.

  Ukhayyad had caught a glimpse of that oasis when he tumbled into the well. But now that mystery had vanished. Now it was the girl’s songs of longing and agony that made him burn—and in his heart, he wept. He spoke with the girl often, asking about Aïr, the drought, and the grief of emigrating from Timbuktu. Then they played, reciting lines of poetry back and forth to one another. She knew more poems by heart than she had hairs on her head. Her hair was itself a poem of braided plaits falling thickly across a full bosom.

  He went to her uncle to ask for her hand, and won his approval. He then sent word to his father, asking for his counsel, and was stunned by the response, “Marry her and be damned!” He did not understand his father at all—he had
never lived with the man and did not know him well. All he knew was that women held first place in his father’s life. His mother had occupied second rank among his wives. The poor woman was sickly and weak in body and heart. Ukhayyad remembered her colorless face right before she died. Her heart killed her before Ukhayyad’s seventh birthday. An African slave woman had raised him after that. Ukhayyad’s father then married another woman from the clans of the vassals. He married her before he became chief, but they never produced any offspring. Even with all these wives, the man’s adventures with other women had never ceased throughout the years. He was famous for often repeating the saying of the Prophet, “The three dearest things to me in your world are: women, perfume, and—most of all—prayer.” He then liked to offer his commentary, “See? Women come first. They’re at the top of the Prophet’s list.” When the clan engaged in raids into the African interior, his father would relinquish his share of the spoils save for what he was owed of the women captives. He would then snatch them up, carrying them back into the desert as his concubines. He had even married a number of them according to God’s law, despite the fact that they were heathens who knew nothing of Islam. In the clan, it was said that back when Ukhayyad was a small child, his parents had fallen out because of how the man carried on with a beautiful mulatta who lived in a neighboring encampment. After Ukhayyad’s mother passed away, his father became chief, inheriting the title from his maternal uncle who had died unexpectedly. It was said that the uncle had not intended to leave the leadership to Ukhayyad’s father, but had died precipitously, ambushed by bandits in the Danbaba desert, and the sheikhs of the clan had not been able to go against custom simply because of the nephew’s well-known passion for women. In those days, a passion for women was not seen as a vice that compromised a man’s virility. On the contrary, to be passionate, even mad for a woman was a virtue thought to befit warriors and noblemen. Ukhayyad’s father bolstered his standing by repeating the lofty saying of the Prophet concerning women. In doing so, he effectively ambushed and neutralized the men of religion, ensuring his immunity from the malicious interference of would-be religious scholars and people who think that Islamic law should be used to settle disputes.

  Like his father before him, Ukhayyad also learned a few Qur’anic verses from a blind sheikh who spent his life wandering with the clan. Then the sheikh died from the bubonic plague, and his place was taken by Sheikh Musa, who not only educated him, but also treated him like a sincere friend. Noticing the coolness of the youth’s relationship with his father, Sheikh Musa took an interest in Ukhayyad and helped to ease the early loss of his mother. Despite the introverted character Ukhayyad had inherited from his mother, the sheikh found a path to his heart. The first time was when he rescued the boy from the flashflood. That day, some people of the tribe thought they heard thunder echoing through the mountains to the north. But others told them they were wrong, writing off the possibility of such a miraculous thing. “Who’s ever seen rain in the desert in the middle of the summer? When have the southern winds ever brought a downpour?” They said that those who sounded the alarm had heard nothing more than the call of Resurrection Day—and they ridiculed the idea that a roar of thunder had been heard by anybody. And so, no one bothered to move out of the low-lying valley. At night’s end, when the deluge came, it swept away the entire tribe. The only one who clearly foresaw the flashflood that night was Sheikh Musa. When the torrent surprised the encampment, he was squatting, reciting his devotionals in front of his tent.

  The young Ukhayyad had been sleeping under the moonlight in the tent door, while his old African slave took refuge from snakes and wolves by sleeping further inside. In a dream, he watched as glowing embers floated, unextinguished, across a large body of water. Then he was swimming beside the hot embers as they began to die. Dream mixed with reality as he awoke from his sleep. All was chaos—the old woman was shrieking, along with the other women and children in the camp. Men shouted and goats bellowed. The roar of the water shook the earth, but even all this could not drown out the soft hissing sound of embers as they died in the waters of his dream. That hissing sound would reverberate in his ears forever.

  Sheikh Musa swooped by, snatching the old woman with his right hand, and clasping the boy to his waist with his left. He raced them across the valley. The only thing Ukhayyad remembered from that experience was the faint whisper, the soft hissing of the embers.

  14

  Sheikh Musa had mediated between father and son during their first falling out. At that time, Ukhayyad’s father had wanted his sons to inherit the title of chief, to keep it from falling into the hands of outsiders. The man was determined to marry his son to his sister’s daughter. The girl was sister to a nephew, Mukhammed, who was preparing to take over as chief. In a message Musa delivered to Ukhayyad, the father emphasized that this was their one chance to secure the title within their household. For if his sister’s daughter married Ukhayyad and they produced a boy, then the family’s honor would be guaranteed. It never occurred to Ukhayyad to think of Mukhammed’s sister. She was a dim-witted girl with dull eyes, lacking all spark and poetry—she was an ordinary, even sickly girl without charm or talent. To him, there was nothing womanly about her, nothing feminine—so how then could he marry her? He cursed the idea of becoming chief, and sent a message to his father: he would not do it. The man never said a word about his son’s rudeness until now. Today, he had replied to Ukhayyad’s earlier insult in kind: “Marry her and be damned.” The message burned Ukhayyad to the core.

  He did not need Sheikh Musa to remind him of the significance of this message. Every young man in the desert knew that heaven opened its doors each morning to receive the prayers of fathers.

  Ukhayyad had inherited his father’s obstinacy, but not the man’s desire to lead the tribe. He had taken up the man’s tenacious nature, but not his love for status among men—and stubbornness was far more useful in the struggles against the desert. From his perspective, being chief brought nothing but headache. He who has visited the houris of paradise and who has drunk from heaven’s river would never seek to inherit the title of chief!

  So he made up his mind and chose Ayur. He fled the throne and plunged into the embrace of a goddess of charm and allure. He married the young refugee and repeated the very mantra his father had taken from the Prophet: “The dearest things to me in your world are three: women, perfume, and—most of all—prayer.”

  He chose woman. But, in time, this same woman would be the one to bring about the piebald’s ruin. And the camel Ukhayyad had pledged to the saint so long ago, the camel he had left to fatten up in the pastures, would be the same camel he slaughtered instead for the feast on his wedding night.

  15

  So it was that his father disowned him. The man told Sheikh Musa, “Tell that idiot son of mine that the Tuareg are smart to pass things down on the mother’s side. Tell him to take his girl and go back to the land of sorcerers—go back to Kano and Timbuktu!”

  When his father cut him off from his inheritance, Ukhayyad left the tribe. But he did not head for Aïr, the land of sorcerers—the drought there had been driving more and more refugees toward the northern Sahara. Instead, he departed toward the lower valleys that lay on the outskirts of the Fezzan oases. There he wandered during the rainy months alongside migrants from many tribes and nations. During the dry summer months, he settled in the oases until his first son was born.

  At that time, foreign invaders finally broke the resistance along the coasts and began pouring across the northern desert. The area of the red Hamada desert had witnessed many bloody events. Emissaries arrived, looking to gather fighters. Ukhayyad went off with the piebald to talk in private. “What did you think—that life was one long melody?” he asked. “You need to understand: men do not have the privilege of calling themselves warriors until they have gone to war and come back. You’re not a true nobleman if you have not tasted battle. This is our chance.”

  But this is not what fate ha
d in store for them. News came that the resistance in the Hamada had been crushed, and that his father had died a martyr during the fighting. It was said he fought bravely. In fact, people throughout the desert composed odes afterwards, glorifying his courage. Perhaps they did this because they were not expecting a man who was a perennial marrier of wives—and moreover a slave to his passion for kidnapped African girls—to record such glorious deeds in fighting the Italians. One of the herders told Ukhayyad that his father had kept his head, even during a blitz attack on them. He went around the tribe recruiting fighters and fought until his camp was surrounded. The siege went on until a disagreement erupted among them. Some of the sheikhs had been broken by thirst, and thought they had all better surrender. Ukhayyad’s father and a number of loyal men went off by themselves to make their final stand on Jebel Hasawna. There, he had died of thirst. At that point, the tribe surrendered, as had many other tribes. After a long interval, Ukhayyad’s cousin became sheikh, but there was nothing in that fact for the man to enjoy, since the tribe had been scattered to the four corners of the earth. Some of the families took refuge in Ghadamès, others in Tamanresset. Others still resolved to emigrate to the Sudan. The new sheikh’s mission to reunite them came to nothing. He had failed to convince the other sheikhs to wait patiently for the calamity to pass, and was wandering about the deserts still, seeking to regather the families under his leadership. If only the tribes in the wide desert would disband completely—then power disputes would vanish, and brother would no longer have to fight brother.

  At precisely that time, a relative of Ukhayyad’s wife came to stay with them as a guest. From the south, he had come with a caravan laden with gold, ivory, and ostrich feathers, all of which he had managed to sell in Ghadamès before it was overrun by the flood of invaders. With the money, he purchased herds of camels, and took up with a group of herders in the Danbaba desert.