by Paul Bowles
When Driss got his permission and went home he told his father what the cabran had said. “You mean the government thinks it can kill all evil spirits?” his father cried.
“That’s right. It can,” said Driss. “It’s going to.”
His father was old and had no confidence in the young men who now ran the government. “It’s impossible,” he said. “They should let them alone. Leave them under their stones. Children have gone to school before, and how many were hurt by djenoun? But if the government begins to make trouble for them, you’ll see what will happen. They’ll go after the children first.”
Driss had expected his father to speak this way, but when he heard the words he was ashamed. He did not answer. Some of his friends were without respect for God. They ate during Ramadan and argued with their fathers. He was glad not to be like them. But he felt his father was wrong.
One hot summer Sunday when the sky was very blue Driss lay in bed late. The men who slept in his room at the barracks had gone out. He listened to the radio. “It would be good down in the valley on a day like this,” he thought. He saw himself swimming in one of the big pools, and he thought of the hot sun on his back afterward. He got up and unlocked the cupboard to look for his gun. Even before he took it out he said, “Yab latif!” because he remembered that he had only one cartridge left, and it was Sunday. He slammed the cupboard door shut and got back into bed. The radio began to give the news. He sat up, spat as far out as he could from the bed, and turned it off. In the silence he heard many birds singing in the safsaf tree outside the window. He scratched his head. Then he got up and dressed. In the courtyard he saw Mehdi going toward the stairs. Mehdi was on his way to do sentry duty in the box outside the main gate.
“Khaï! Does four rials sound good to you?”
Mehdi looked at him. “Is this number sixty, three, fifty-one?” This was the name of an Egyptian song that came over the radio nearly every day. The song ended with the word nothing. Nothing, nothing, sung over and over again.
Why not? As they walked along together, Driss moved closer, so that his thigh rubbed against Mehdi’s.
“The price is ten, khoya.”
“With all its cartridges?”
“You want me to open it up and show you here?” Mehdi’s voice was angry. The words came out of the side of his mouth.
Driss said nothing. They came to the top of the stairs. Mehdi was walking fast. “You’ll have to have it back here by seven,” he said. “Do you want it?”
In his head Driss saw the long day in the empty town. “Yes,” he said. “Stay there.” He hurried back to the room, unlocked his cupboard, and took out his gun. From the shelf he pulled down his pipe, his kif, and a loaf of bread. He put his head outside the door. There was no one in the courtyard but Mehdi sitting on the wall at the other end. Then with the old gun in his hands he ran all the way to Mehdi. Mehdi took it and went down the stairs, leaving his own gun lying on the wall. Driss took up the gun, waited a moment, and followed him. When he went past the sentry box he heard Mehdi’s voice say softly: “I need the ten at seven, khoya.”
Driss grunted. He knew how dark it was in there. No officer ever stuck his head inside the door on Sundays. Ten rials, he thought, and he’s running no risk. He looked around at the goats among the rocks. The sun was hot, but the air smelled sweet, and he was happy to be walking down the side of the mountain. He pulled the visor of his cap further down over his eyes and began to whistle. Soon he came out in front of the town, below it on the other side of the valley. He could see the people on the benches in the park at the top of the cliff, small but clear and black. They were Spaniards and they were waiting for the bell of their church to begin to ring.
He got to the highest pool about the time the sun was overhead. When he lay on the rocks afterward eating his bread, the sun burned him. No animals will move before three, he thought. He put his trousers on and crawled into the shade of the oleander bushes to sleep. When he awoke the air was cooler. He smoked all the kif he had, and went walking through the valley. Sometimes he sang. He found no hares, and so he put small stones on the tops of the rocks and fired at them. Then he climbed back up the other side of the valley and followed the highway into the town.
He came to the café and went in. The musicians were playing and singing. The tea drinkers clapped their hands with the music. A soldier cried: “Driss! Sit down!” He sat with his friends and smoked some of their kif. Then he bought four rials’ worth from the cutter who sat on the platform with the musicians, and went on smoking. “Nothing was moving in the valley today,” he told them. “It was dead down there.”
A man with a yellow turban on his head who sat nearby closed his eyes and fell against the man next to him. The others around him moved to a further part of the mat. The man toppled over and lay on the floor.
“Another one?” cried Driss. “They should stay in Djebel Habib. I can’t look at him.”
The man took a long time to get to his feet. His arms and legs had been captured by the drums, but his body was fighting, and he groaned. Driss tried to pay no attention to him. He smoked his pipe and looked at his friends, pretending that no Jilali was in front of him. When the man pulled out his knife he could not pretend any longer. He watched the blood running into the man’s eyes. It made a blank red curtain over each hole. The man opened his eyes wider, as if he wanted to see through the blood. The drums were loud.
Driss got up and paid the qahouaji for his tea. He said good-by to the others and went out. The sun would soon go below the top of the mountains. Its light made him want to shut his eyes, because he had a lot of kif in his head. He walked through the town to the higher end and turned into a lane that led up into another valley. In this place there was no one. Cactuses grew high on each side of the lane, and the spiders had built a world of webs between their thorns. Because he walked fast, the kif began to boil in his head. Soon he was very hungry, but all the fruit had been picked from the cactuses along the lane. He came to a small farmhouse with a thatched roof. Behind it on the empty mountainside there were more cactuses still pink with hundreds of hindiyats. A dog in a shed beside the house began to bark. There was no sign of people. He stood still for a while and listened to the dog. Then he walked toward the cactus patch. He was sure no one was in the house. Many years ago his sister had shown him how to pick hindiyats without letting the needles get into the flesh of his hands. He laid his gun on the ground behind a low stone wall and began to gather the fruit. As he picked he saw in his head the two blind red holes of the Jilali’s eyes, and under his breath he cursed all Jilala. When he had a great pile of fruit on the ground he sat down and began to eat, throwing the peels over his shoulder. As he ate he grew hungrier, and so he picked more. The picture he had in his head of the man’s face shiny with blood slowly faded. He thought only of the hindiyats he was eating. It was almost dark there on the mountainside. He looked at his watch and jumped up, because he remembered that Mehdi had to have his gun at seven o’clock. In the dim light he could not see the gun anywhere. He searched behind the wall, where he thought he had laid it, but he saw only stones and bushes.
“It’s gone, Allah istir,” he said. His heart pounded. He ran back to the lane and stood there a while. The dog barked without stopping.
It was dark before he reached the gate of the barracks. Another man was in the sentry box. The cabran was waiting for him in the room. The old gun Driss’s father had given him lay on his bed.
“Do you know where Mehdi is?” the cabran asked him.
“No,” said Driss.
“He’s in the dark house, the son of a whore. And do you know why?”
Driss sat down on the bed. The cabran is my friend, he was thinking. “It’s gone,” he said, and told him how he had laid the gun on the ground, and a dog had been barking, and no one had come by, and still it had disappeared. “Maybe the dog was a djinn,” he said when he had finished. He did not really believe the dog had anything to do with it, but he could
not think of anything else to say then.
The cabran looked at him a long time and said nothing. He shook his head. “I thought you had some brains,” he said at last. Then his face grew very angry, and he pulled Driss out into the courtyard and told a soldier to lock him up.
At ten o’clock that night he went to see Driss. He found him smoking his sebsi in the dark. The cell was full of kif smoke. “Garbage!” cried the cabran, and he took the pipe and the kif away from him. “Tell the truth,” he said to Driss. “You sold the gun, didn’t you?”
“On my mother’s head, it’s just as I told you! There was only the dog.”
The cabran could not make him say anything different. He slammed the door and went to the café in the town to have a glass of tea. He sat listening to the music, and he began to smoke the kif he had taken from Driss. If Driss was telling the truth, then it was only the kif in Driss’s head that had made him lose the gun, and in that case there was a chance that it could be found.
The cabran had not smoked in a long time. As the kif filled his head he began to be hungry, and he remembered the times when he had been a boy smoking kif with his friends. Always they had gone to look for hindiyats afterward, because they tasted better than anything else and cost nothing. They always knew where there were some growing. “A kouffa full of good hindiyats,” he thought. He shut his eyes and went on thinking.
The next morning early the cabran went out and stood on a high rock behind the barracks, looking carefully all around the valley and the bare mountainside. Not far away he saw a lane with cactuses along it, and farther up there was a whole forest of cactus. “There,” he said to himself.
He walked among the rocks until he came to the lane, and he followed the lane to the farmhouse. The dog began to bark. A woman came to the doorway and looked at him. He paid no attention to her, but went straight to the high cactuses on the hillside behind the house. There were many hindiyats still to be eaten, but the cabran did not eat any of them. He had no kif in his head and he was thinking only of the gun. Beside a stone wall there was a big pile of hindiya peelings. Someone had eaten a great many. Then he saw the sun shining on part of the gun’s barrel under the peelings. “Hah!” he shouted, and he seized the gun and wiped it all over with his handkerchief. On his way back to the barracks he felt so happy that he decided to play a joke on Driss.
He hid the gun under his bed. With a glass of tea and a piece of bread in his hand he went to see Driss. He found him asleep on the floor in the dark.
“Daylight is here!” he shouted. He laughed and kicked Driss’s foot to wake him up. Driss sat on the floor drinking the tea and the cabran stood in the doorway scratching his chin. He looked down at the floor, but not at Driss. After a time he said: “Last night you told me a dog was barking?”
Driss was certain the cabran was going to make fun of him. He was sorry he had mentioned the dog. “Yes,” he said, not sounding sure.
“If it was the dog,” the cabran went on, “I know how to get it back. You have to help me.”
Driss looked up at him. He could not believe the cabran was being serious. Finally he said in a low voice: “I was joking when I said that. I had kif in my head.”
The cabran was angry. “You think it’s a joke to lose a gun that belongs to the Sultan? You did sell it! You haven’t got kif in your head now. Maybe you can tell the truth.” He stepped toward Driss, and Driss thought he was going to hit him. He stood up quickly. “I told you the truth,” he said. “It was gone.”
The cabran rubbed his chin and looked down at the floor again for a minute. “The next time a Jilali begins to dance in the café, we’ll do it,” he told him. He shut the door and left Driss alone.
Two days later the cabran came again to the dark house. He had another soldier with him. “Quick!” he told Driss. “There’s one dancing now.”
They went out into the courtyard and Driss blinked his eyes. “Listen,” said the cabran. “When the Jilali is drinking his own blood he has power. What you have to do is ask him to make the djinn bring me the gun. I’m going to sit in my room and burn djaoui. That may help.”
“I’ll do it,” said Driss. “But it won’t do any good.”
The other soldier took Driss to the café. The Jilali was a tall man from the mountains. He had already taken out his knife, and he was waving it in the air. The soldier made Driss sit down near the musicians, and then he waited until the man began to lick the blood from his arms. Then, because he thought he might be sick if he watched any longer, Driss raised his right arm toward the Jilali and said in a low voice: “In the name of Allah, khoya, make the djinn that stole Mehdi’s gun take it now to Aziz the cabran.” The Jilali seemed to be staring at him, but Driss could not be sure whether he had heard his words or not.
The soldier took him back to the barracks. The cabran was sitting under a plum tree beside the kitchen door. He told the soldier to go away and jumped up. “Come,” he said, and he led Driss to the room. The air was blue with the smoke of the djaoui he had been burning. He pointed to the middle of the floor. “Look!” he cried. A gun was lying there. Driss ran and picked it up. After he had looked at it carefully, he said: “It’s the gun.” And his voice was full of fear. The cabran could see that Driss had not been sure the thing was possible, but that now he no longer had any doubt.
The cabran was happy to have fooled him so easily. He laughed. “You see, it worked,” he said. “It’s lucky for you Mehdi’s going to be in the dark house for another week.”
Driss did not answer. He felt even worse than when he had been watching the Jilali slicing the flesh of his arms.
That night he lay in bed worrying. It was the first time he had had anything to do with a djinn or an affrit. Now he had entered into their world. It was a dangerous world and he did not trust the cabran any longer. “What am I going to do?” he thought. The men all around him were sleeping, but he could not close his eyes. Soon he got up and stepped outside. The leaves of the safsaf tree were hissing in the wind. On the other side of the courtyard there was light in one of the windows. Some of the officers were talking there. He walked slowly around the garden in the middle and looked up at the sky, thinking of how different his life was going to be now. As he came near the lighted window he heard a great burst of laughter. The cabran was telling a story. Driss stopped walking and listened.
“And he said to the Jilali: ‘Please, sidi, would you ask the dog that stole my gun—’”
The men laughed again, and the sound covered the cabran’s voice.
He went quickly back and got into bed. If they knew he had heard the cabran’s story they would laugh even more. He lay in the bed thinking, and he felt poison come into his heart. It was the cabran’s fault that the djinn had been called, and now in front of his superior officers he was pretending that he had had nothing to do with it. Later the cabran came in and went to bed, and it was quiet in the courtyard, but Driss lay thinking for a long time before he went to sleep.
In the days that came after that, the cabran was friendly again, but Driss did not want to see him smile. He thought with hatred: “In his head I’m afraid of him now because he knows how to call a djinn. He jokes with me now because he has power.”
He could not laugh or be happy when the cabran was nearby. Each night he lay awake for a long time after the others had gone to sleep. He listened to the wind moving the hard leaves of the safsaf tree, and he thought only of how he could break the cabran’s power.
When Mehdi came out of the dark house he spoke against the cabran. Driss paid him his ten rials. “A lot of money for ten days in the dark house,” Mehdi grumbled, and he looked at the bill in his hand. Driss pretended not to understand. “He’s a son of a whore,” he said.
Mehdi snorted. “And you have the head of a needle,” he said. “It all came from you. The wind blows the kif out your ears!”
“You think I wasn’t in the dark house too?” cried Driss. But he could not tell Mehdi about the Jilali and the dog.
“He’s a son of a whore,” he said again.
Mehdi’s eyes grew narrow and stiff. “I’ll do his work for him. He’ll think he’s in the dark house himself when I finish.”
Mehdi went on his way. Driss stood watching him go.
The next Sunday Driss got up early and walked into Beni Midar. The souk was full of rows of mountain people in white clothes. He walked in among the donkeys and climbed the steps to the stalls. There he went to see an old man who sold incense and herbs. People called him El Fqih. He sat down in front of El Fqih and said: “I want something for a son of a whore.”
El Fqih looked at him angrily. “A sin!” He raised his forefinger and shook it back and forth. “Sins are not my work.” Driss did not say anything. El Fqih spoke more quietly now. “To balance that, it is said that each trouble in the world has its remedy. There are cheap remedies and remedies that cost a lot of money.” He stopped.
Driss waited. “How much is this one?” he asked him. The old man was not pleased because he wanted to talk longer. But he said: “I’ll give you a name for five rials.” He looked sternly at Driss, leaned forward and whispered a name in his ear. “In the alley behind the sawmill,” he said aloud. “The blue tin shack with the canebrake in back of it.” Driss paid him and ran down the steps.
He found the house. The old woman stood in the doorway with a checkered tablecloth over her head. Her eyes had turned white like milk. They looked to Driss like the eyes of an old dog. He said: “You’re Anisa?”
“Come into the house,” she told him. It was almost dark inside. He told her he wanted something to break the power of a son of a whore. “Give me ten rials now,” she said. “Come back at sunset with another ten. It will be ready.”
