Gold Dust (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  Having remained there for a number of months, he placed the camels in the care of the other men. He then came to visit Ukhayyad and his wife in their summer quarters in the Adrar oasis. Dudu, as he was called, told Ukhayyad that Ayur was related to him on his mother’s side and that he would come to check on her as one of his kin. Ukhayyad recognized a familiar tenacity in the man’s eyes—the brutal resolve of those forced to migrate forever, a determination that concealed secrets no tongue could utter.

  During the man’s stay, Ukhayyad could not restrain himself. It was not long before he divulged the extent of his attachment to the piebald camel. He sang his list of questions to the stranger: “Have you ever seen a piebald Mahri in the desert before?”; “Have you ever seen a camel with such grace, lightness, and stature?”; “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful and dignified?” The guest would smile between every question and the next, shaking his head. “No.” Inexperienced, Ukhayyad did not know that idle talk leads one to reveal secrets. And according to the law of the desert, divulging secrets to strangers can cost a refugee his life—or so say the fortunetellers, who have it on the authority of the witch doctors and soothsayers in Kano.

  Dudu lodged with them in the oasis for a number of days and then asked their leave to travel. He sold a pair of camels to some peasants to supply himself with dates and barley. Then he returned to his camel herd, promising to visit them again when circumstances permitted. After the guest had left, Ukhayyad discovered that the man had left him a surprise; he had hidden a sack of dates and a sack of barley in Ukhayyad’s underground cache.

  16

  Two days later, the sacks were stolen from the cache. In the sand above where they had been stored, a sign had been left for him by the thief—the clear outline of a triangle traced in dry dates. The shape puzzled Ukhayyad and he asked the blind old woman from Tiba to read its hidden meaning. The soothsayer asked, “You said it was a triangle? Did you ever promise something to the goddess Tanit?”

  His head split, and he leaped like someone who had been stabbed. “Tanit?” He remembered his pledge. He recollected the saint and the pyramid-shaped tomb. But he had eaten the animal and fed the offering to his bride. He had completely forgotten about his earlier promise. Was this a sign from Tanit? That was her mark. It was the same shape that was branded on the forearms of men and tattooed on the women’s abdomens. In the darkness of night, he had even seen it on Ayur’s belly. The same design was carved into sword handles and engraved on leather saddle horns and satchels. It was etched into gun barrels and embroidered into clothes. Tanit’s mark appeared everywhere and on everything. Was the disappearance of the two bags a cautionary reminder? Have mercy, Tanit! I did forget—I failed to recognize your sign on the pyramid pedestal! In my weakness, I neglected my promise!

  After war broke out along the northern coasts, the movement of caravans through the interior of the continent began to falter, then stopped. The famine intensified and spread across the entire desert. At first, this did not affect desert commerce. But as the war went on, it drove peasants to raise the price on grains and dates. Later, many began to bury their harvests in secret caches, and refused to barter or buy. Those two sacks had disappeared at the very moment Ukhayyad had needed them the most. That only increased his rage and self-loathing. And his contempt for women.

  He despised women because, now, he looked at things with his eyes rather than his heart; and as his feelings melted into cool reason, Ayur’s magic began to dissipate. He had once thought that her charm would last forever. Once upon a time, he had thought it was as powerful as the vision of fate he saw during his tumble into the well. Now, he was certain that to draw near to love was to bury oneself in a grave. Now he knew that the passing of time was a kind of magical charm as well, one that broke love’s spell and scattered its poetry.

  It was this woman who had brought calamity on the piebald; she had driven Ukhayyad to break his promise. He had never before broken an oath in his life. Now, without thinking, he had done so. And with whom? With the hieroglyphs of the ancients, with the goddess Tanit herself. He wished he had known it was her shrine, or he would not have forgotten. But truth only shows itself after time has passed. This is the law of truth, on the authority of the elders who repeat it over and over.

  He concealed his secret from the soothsayer and stepped out into the open desert. He sat until midnight, unable to arrive at a solution to his problem. Since he had realized the truth only after the fact, and only after famine had come to reign in the desert, there was no way to fight fate’s prescription. Where would he find a healthy, strong, and sane camel after these lean, dry years? How would he acquire a camel when he himself went without food and when his wife and child were nearly starving? He recalled an incident in a sandy region of the desert a few weeks earlier when he had cooked his leather sandal and eaten it. Ukhayyad had been following the tracks of a camel he had purchased back in easier times and then left to pasture in a valley between the northern and southern deserts. Along the way, he met one of the herders there who told him that he had seen the camel weeks before toward the east. He rode on the back of the piebald until he arrived at Zurzatin, and the herders of the Kel Abada there told him that they had seen thieves taking the animal with a herd of stolen camels across the eastern desert toward Ghadamès where they would be sold. Their stories contradicted one another and did not make sense. Others claimed that bandits had slaughtered and eaten the camel right where they found him. In a daze, Ukhayyad wandered about, hungry and miserable. He had not tasted real food in days. Despite that, he refused the invitation of the Kel Abada to eat with them. The sandy parts of the desert promised nothing. They were treacherous and devoid of herbs, scrub brush, and game. The desert of the Hamada was paradise compared to this heartless place. In the Hamada, if you did not find a gazelle or moufflon, it would offer you a rabbit. If you did not find a rabbit, it would give you a lizard. If it was not the right season for reptiles, the Hamada would set you a green table garnished with wild herbs. If the heavens held back their rains, the Hamada would show you mercy, providing you with the fruits of the lote tree left over from the previous year. My God—how merciful the Hamada was! In contrast, this desert fed you nothing but sand, dust, and the scorching southern winds.

  When he could stand it no longer, he took off his leather sandal. He gathered wood and lit a fire. He roasted the leather on the fire until it became soft and puckered—then he devoured it. It was delicious, not any different from the camel skins he had eaten many times before. He opened his eyes after the meal. He began to stare at the piebald’s profile. It seemed to him that the camel was smirking. His eyes were smiling, laughing at him. He stood up and shook his finger at him, warning, “You better not tell anyone what you saw here. Do you understand? This is my secret.”

  He removed the other sandal and studied it in his hands. Collapsing on the ground, he spoke to his friend as if he were addressing himself: “Don’t laugh at me. A warrior is also a pitiful creature—someone who might eat his sandal when he’s dying of hunger. Don’t measure me by your standards. Unlike you, God didn’t give me a place to store water and food. Hunger strikes down even the noblest of creatures. Starvation can bring even sultans to their knees and force them to grovel like slaves. Show some mercy!”

  I heard Sufyan ibn Ainiya once say, “Those with children never have enough and never find rest. We used to have a cat that never once got into our cooking pots. But as soon as she gave birth to kittens, she started to.”

  Cited in The Great Book of Asceticism

  by the Imam Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Husayn al-Bayhaqi

  17

  Ukhayyad woke up in the night, alarmed.

  He had seen the local soothsayer standing over him, telling him to slaughter the piebald.

  He wiped away the sweat and slipped out of the hut. A pale moon peeked timidly in the sky. In the magnificent silence of the oasis, the night-time singing of crickets could be heard in the palm grove. He walked abo
ut the open desert and thought: this soothsayer from Tiba must be a ghoul. What he had seen was not a real dream, but a ghost who wanted to eat the piebald’s flesh. Who would dare to eat the flesh of a stately animal with graceful limbs?

  Tomorrow he would find the witch and kill her in cold blood. But, beforehand, he would find out what she meant by telling him this. Perhaps that too had been a sign of something else. The language of soothsayers is never self-evident. He returned to the hut, but was afraid to go back to sleep. Those who suffer nightmares fear the bed.

  In the morning, a peasant woman told him that the soothsayer from Tiba had left the oasis. Her son had come and taken her away with him in a caravan passing toward Aghadès. Three days after the woman had left, Ukhayyad saw her in a dream. She spoke to him directly: “I am not the one who demands the head of your piebald. It is Tanit.” Then she vanished, and he never saw her again after that. In a few days, he forgot her altogether. He returned to his old self and devoted his energies to staving off the hunger that surrounded them. Only the day before, a whole family—husband, wife, and three children—had died. The doors of life had closed in their face and they shut themselves up in a hut. No one saw them until their corpses began to rot and one of their neighbors broke down the door. They found the family heaped in a pile, their bodies decomposed and crawling with maggots. The children’s eyes had almost popped out of their sockets. The imam at the mosque said that they had been strangled to death. Apparently, the father had choked them to prevent neighbors from hearing their cries.

  That night, Ayur told him, “If you don’t do something about the state we’re in, we might as well do what that family did. But we should do it out in the desert rather than here. There will always be three bullets for your rifle, right?”

  He did not reply.

  In the morning, he went to the merchant to borrow some oil. He had known the man during better times and had bartered with him in the past, exchanging strips of dried gazelle and moufflon meat for barley, dates, and sugar. The man would not turn him away disappointed. But the merchant swore that he did not have enough for his own supper. He did not have enough for his own supper?! Only a few months ago the man had received a caravan from Timbuktu and purchased their entire merchandise. Then he turned around and quickly sold the same goods at twice the price to the merchants of Ghadamès. Then, as the food shortage intensified, he began to sell them at exorbitant prices to the peasants. Once a profiteer, always a profiteer! The merchant had caught the whiff of starvation before it had started to spread. He knew the war would go on and on.

  Ukhayyad remembered his wife’s ambiguous hint, and the hidden hatred it concealed. A woman despises nothing as much as she despises a failure or a man convinced that he is a failure. Toward such a man, she can be openly hostile, even if he is her most intimate relation. How brutal woman can be! My God—where had her charms gone? Where was her poetry, her spark? He asked one of the peasants for food, but the man swore the same thing. When times get tough, all men make oaths and then break them. The peasants were terrified of the future, of the unknown, of the surprises war would bring.

  Ukhayyad sat for a long time on the edge of the water channel. Then he got up to leave. But he had only gone a short distance when the peasant caught up to him. Tears glimmered in the man’s eyes. He opened his hands to reveal a few dry dates. Three, maybe four dates. The man said, “These are from my children. They are for your child. I know you have a boy.”

  The man raised his face and completed the gesture by addressing his words toward heaven: “Lord, what sins have these children committed?”

  Ukhayyad studied the four dates for a few moments. Tears welled in his eyes too. He hid them with his veil and hid the dates in his pocket. Before disappearing into the date grove, Ukhayyad heard the peasant cry out, “Why don’t you sell the Mahri? Why should a man like you starve when he owns a Mahri like yours?”

  Ukhayyad froze. How dare he? Did the ignorant man suppose the piebald was merely a beast? Would he have Ukhayyad eat the flesh of his brother? He began to regret having taken the dates from him. He would give them back. He had to respond to the insult by returning them. People were impossible to deal with—they give generously to you with one hand, and stab you with another. But Ukhayyad did not give the dates back. He could not bring himself to go back. The memory of his child’s cries at home forced him to swallow the insult. The boy had been born sickly like Ukhayyad’s mother—skinny and pale, weak in heart and body, beset by sorrow. Since his birth, he had never once smiled. He did nothing but cry. The sound of a home filled with crying children is the only thing that can drive a free man to sell his purebred mount at the public market.

  That night, Ayur stepped up her campaign against him, building upon what the peasant had said, “We will not starve to death as long as that Mahri wanders freely in front of our home.” This was the last thing he had expected her to say. A well-born woman would never ask for Mahri flesh, even if she were dying of hunger. What kind of woman would crave Mahri flesh?

  She was silent for a moment, then followed with another thrust of the knife: “We have eaten nothing but alfalfa for the past few days. Like sheep.”

  He tried to choke down the pain but could not. He leaped up and sarcastically said, “How do you expect us to go into the desert to use those three bullets if we have nothing to ride?” He could not escape the contempt he felt toward the woman, toward himself, toward children, toward the whole world. From the moment they emerge from their mother’s bellies, humans never truly enjoy a single moment in peace. As soon as they put one calamity behind them, they greet the next. At first they must struggle against the drought, then against the Italians. Then they have to go from the pangs of thirst to the torture of hunger. From the scoldings of fathers to the resentment of wives. From the harshness of the desert outside to the ulcers that burned inside the belly. That is how it is—each thing in its own turn. Yes, the troubles of the outside world might subside—but only so that troubles at home might begin.

  In the grove, he vomited. Whenever contempt raged in his insides, this happened. He did not vomit food, but yellow bile. With it, the disease inside came spilling out.

  Late that night, he came back and slept outside the hut. For two days after that, Ayur exchanged not a single word with him.

  It was then that her kinsman, the stranger, returned to the oasis. Dudu went to the market and bartered two camels for some goods. Ukhayyad met him at the entrance to the market, and there he arrived at an inspired, face-saving solution. Foreigners do not understand the language of borrowing and lending, especially if they are wealthy. Ukhayyad would pawn the piebald to the man. In exchange, he would borrow a camel or two until the war subsided. Then, with luck, he would ransom the Mahri. For this loan, he would put up the most handsome Mahri in the entire Sahara as security. When Ukhayyad spoke to Dudu about the deal, he saw the spark in the man’s eyes. It was the kind of glitter that only ever flashed in the eyes of merchants who had lifelong experience trafficking in gold. It was the glitter of gold itself. Was it greed? Ukhayyad told himself that the arrangement would sustain his family until their luck changed. And at the same time, it guaranteed that he would be able to hold on to the piebald.

  But Ukhayyad made one mistake: he did not understand what traders meant when they talked about offering something up as security.

  O people! This she-camel of God is a sign unto you. Let her feed on God’s earth. Do her no harm, lest a swift penalty afflict you!

  The Qur’an, 11:64

  18

  Before leaving, Ukhayyad went off to be alone with the Mahri. In the morning, he prepared himself for their private ritual. He went to the grove and begged for a handful of green alfalfa to bribe the camel with at evening. “As you can see, no sooner do we escape from one trap than we fall into another,” he told the camel. “Still, be patient. Didn’t you and I agree to be patient? Patience is life—we learned that together long ago.”

  He patted the a
nimal’s neck, and the piebald stopped its chewing. “Sometimes in this world, friends are split apart, and distance must take its share,” Ukhayyad continued. “But don’t be afraid. Our separation won’t last long. We’ll meet up again when the smoke clears and when those wretched men stop their war against us. The war can’t last forever.”

  Overcome with fear, the camel protested: “A-a-a . . . .”

  He swallowed what was in his mouth, and rejected the proposition: “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

  Ukhayyad tried to placate him: “This isn’t how nobles behave. Children cry and women cry. Grown men remain steadfast and patient.” He wiped his hands on his robe, and buried his head in its wide, loose sleeve. Man and animal embraced for a long time in the night silence.

  The foreigner took the camel with him when he left the next morning. He fitted out the camel, complete with saddlebag and a harness decorated with strips of colored leather. Still, the man did not mount the camel. Instead, he tied the purebred Mahri to the tail of his own dirty mongrel. They departed for the Danbaba desert where they joined up with his herd.

  But even Ukhayyad, who had been raised with camels, did not know the true extent of the animal’s character. He did not know what it meant to befriend a purebred Mahri camel. Just three weeks after leaving, the piebald returned. By that time, Ukhayyad had traded one of the two camels for dates and barley to stem the hunger of Ayur’s mouth and eyes. Using the one remaining camel, he plowed water channels for the peasants in exchange for a quarter portion of their harvests. He was out the door at dawn only to return, exhausted, in the evening. Then he would collapse and sleep like a dead man. He was content to wear himself out and sleep soundly. He had forgotten the last time he had enjoyed such deep sleep—throughout the time of famine, an obstinate insomnia had lorded over him. It had been his family, not the hunger, that was stealing his sleep. But now, able to fill his wife’s mouth and eyes, he could drift off as soon as he lay down. That pleased him, but at the same time it bothered him. He felt an unfathomable sense of dread—perhaps because he sensed his conflicting feelings might be a signal and he feared such warnings. The desert had taught him to be attuned to them, that in life, nothing was more formidable than a sign, especially if you ignored it or failed to recognize it in the first place.