by Assia Djebar
Three dinars for each apple. Almost the price that he had predicted—the apple’s weight in gold. But he can do it. The only thing that he retains of Bassora is this garden, its apples—nothing else of the noisy, red, dusty city.
He gets back on the road with his loot and is back home three days later.
His wife is on the patio, reclining on the divan they moved out a few weeks ago when the rain stopped. She smiles when the traveler returns.
The three boys come running, surround him, hang onto his legs. He carries them all at once. He leans forward, bearing the burden of this triple squirming weight, over the sorrowful one.
He kisses her forehead. The smell of lilacs mixed with juniper overcomes him. Behind him, the water in the fountain trickles feebly. Usually, there is a din, an irregular orchestration with jumps, from the aviary in the back. But he can’t hear it.
He kisses his wife on the forehead. She lowers her eyes. Before long, he has unpacked the treasure: the three scarlet apples.
She offers no thanks. She only brushes him with her hand, which she lets pass over her knees to him. He is hunched over, freed of the children. He rediscovers the beloved face, the face of the soft moon, the “month of nostalgia’s full moon.” Verses bloom on his lips. His excitement overcomes his desire for praise.
She looks at the fruit, then turns her head away.
For her, he would have been a thief, but he has only been a traveler.
The next day—no, the day after the next day—was the fateful day.
A dust wind started up early in the morning. As usual, it blew in from the northeast. Not a cold wind. A wind that first crossed a desert of pebbles before pouncing on the Abbasid capital like a furious wolf.
The impoverished quarters on the other side of the river were the most affected. In their palaces with rear northern gardens and terraces stepping down to the Tigris, the lofty dignitaries draped their walls with thick carpets or blankets. At the first glimmers of the ashen dawn, the slaves busied themselves with the necessary precautions.
At the sick woman’s home—which was not really luxurious but comfortable all the same—the servant spread out a barricade of several white linen rags, as if hanging them out to dry in the sun, along one side. The wife came to stretch out to the right of the rose arbor, near a venerable jasmine whose delicate leaves were still green even though the plant was no longer in bloom.
A little later, the husband appeared. He puttered for a moment near his wife (the three apples, on an embossed plate, remained within her arms’ reach). He reassured the children, distractedly. The servant, who had been clearing the fine, red sand from the terrace with a broom since dawn, watched him go.
Two hours later, he was standing in his stall, which shared a partition in the back with the stockpiles, absorbed in his work. He came up for an instant to the threshold, stole a glance at the sky. He thought he could detect a strange silence—as if things had stopped.
But still, there was the hum of passersby, carts, donkeys, foot traffic, then a psalm-intoning crowd heading for a nearby sanctuary—the respiration of the business district. It has been his own since he succeeded his father, who had been dead for ten years. He knew it, lived by its rhythm; he no longer really heard it anymore because it was all so familiar to him.
But the peculiar silence he had noticed seemed to preside higher up in space. As if it were hovering in the domain of the djinn. At least this is how he explained these observations, which, inexplicably, surprised him.
“The northern wind has come!” exclaimed a nearby voice. It was his neighbor, the carpet merchant.
“Indeed,” he replied. “And it’s only the first day!”
He went back into his stall, dreamily, uneasily. An omen, no doubt. “This suspense,” he thought, his soul darkening. “This silence above, nothing but a lull.” The thought occupied him for a second. Then, when he turned his attention back to the road, just before diving back into his work, he sighted the man who would be his downfall.
He was a young black man with noble bearing—well proportioned and broad shouldered, with truly black, luminous skin and delicate features. He didn’t have the look of someone born in Sudan or the Casamance. He looked like the males that the caliph, as well as the husband’s father, liked to have serve in the palace. They would choose them from among other children and castrate them. Then the new eunuchs were assigned to watch over the principal harem, that of the First Mother. They were reputed to be sweet, intelligent, and, despite their condition, “terribly seductive.”
Yes, this one morning when the wind seemed to have descended suddenly, the husband met the man who would be his downfall. He was dressed in bold colors, with his head covered in green silk and orange taffeta. A flamboyant headdress, angled rakishly over his wooly hair.
With a laughing face, he advanced slowly on dancer’s feet. Gazing at the apparition, the husband saw that the young African was holding—his hand lifted up to his shoulder, in a frozen gesture—an apple. A red apple.
The husband took a step toward the sunny threshold. The black man was about to disappear into the crowd (he had just gracefully waved away a group of beggars), when, without thinking, the young merchant cried out forcefully after him, “Oh slave!”
The black man turned, his hand still slightly elevated, and suddenly rotated the fruit, as if in a game, or as if he were an acrobat executing a slow and measured movement. He faced the husband, who has repeated his call. The black man approached, a somewhat vapid smile on his lips.
“Wherever did you find apples this time of year?” asked the young man.
The black man twirled and started to laugh. A clucking laugh, almost feminine. He had wide eyes, and his eyelids drooped under the weight of their heavy lashes, which he batted like a smitten virgin. The inquiring merchant appraised him, noticing the fine, almost athletic proportions of his body, the softness in his delicate facial features, and, not least of all, the languorous expression in his gaze that he wore so well. “A eunuch from the palace, that’s for sure!” thought the merchant, and waited, suddenly certain of the black man’s response: at the caliph’s palace they have everything, even fruits out of season—even apples that ordinary Baghdadis have to go as far as Bassora to find!
Then the black man whispered sophisticated formulas, intricate parentheses, as if reciting something, his face animated with a precious studied expression. However, the husband wasn’t listening and only registered the essential: “It’s an apple my friend gave me. My dear friend, her name be praised and her smile endure! Her cuckold of a husband had to go all the way to Bassora to fulfill her wish. He brought her back three apples, purchased at three dinars a piece. Remembering me, she gave me this one as a symbol of our love. May he return and go all the way to India this time to bring her back what she wants, so long as he leaves us to love in peace. Yes, it was my friend who gave me this apple, may she among beauties be praised, she, the most attentive lover in the city.” And he smirked.
The husband maintained his composure. Told his employees to close the shop. His body enveloped in an icy sweat, his face frozen, he decided to go straight home.
The fateful day proceeds in fast-forward.
The man hastens home. He will remember nothing of this trip back. It is not yet noon; it’s as if he were coming to eat lunch an hour early.
It seems that the wife has not moved. She is in the same position, like a statue. Her husband’s eye is riveted to the silver platter. His voice slow, neutral: “You . . . have finally had an apple?”
She watches him in light that seems to have been washed by the wind, which descended sooner than expected.
“No . . . Why?”
Plaintive voice. She would like not to have to talk. She feels tired, so tired. The children are laughing in the garden in the back.
“Where is the third apple?” resumes the voice, more severe. The voice of an inquisitor.
“I don’t know . . .” the sick woman sighs. “One of t
he boys must have taken it or eaten it.”
And she closes her eyes, fatigued. Vaguely, somewhere in her conscience, she asks herself, “Was it really me who once asked for an apple, so long ago? Did I really want to eat it? I want only to sleep, to forget.”
She leans back her head. In a flash, the husband turns his back.
At the end of the patio, the panels of the heavy door clap, like a knell.
It’s the end of Atyka’s third lesson. Taking leave of her twenty or so students, she asks them to bring their books for the following day.
“The man will tell what else happens on the fateful day. The husband. The husband will come before the caliph, three days after the body of the woman in pieces has been fished out of the river.”
“In the text, the story picks up again on the nineteenth night,” a young girl exclaims. “Won’t we see the wife, so beautiful . . . beautiful and pitiful,” she amends, smiling, “alive, loving, defending herself and such?”
And two or three of the teenage students decide to walk along with Atyka. They keep talking . . . about The Thousand and One Nights, of course, and about French translations, of the first and all its expurgations, and how abundant the second one is. The conversation goes off in all directions. The weather is nice along the way, and Atyka is surprised at how comfortable she feels with these young people. In front of her, at an intersection, a passing military convoy reminds her of the present and its terrors.
“I’m going to leave you here,” Atyka decides.
She doesn’t want to tell them, these students who seem to like her, that a silent unease surrounds her in this suburb where she resides with her young husband.
“I was livid. Carried away by my jealous fury, I plunged a knife into her throat. The throat of the one I believed to be unfaithful . . . Was it me, was it really me who, in the same blind rage, cut off her head and mutilated her body? Then, my heart growing ever colder, decided to wrap the body in pieces in a linen veil?”
This is the confession.
The guilty husband’s confession on the day when the carpenters are getting the gallows ready for Djaffar, the caliph’s vizier, for him and his forty cousins.
The people have been crying, the people have been lamenting the imminent martyrdom of the handsome Djaffar. But the murderer has risen up amid the weeping crowd. He is handsome and has a noble bearing.
“Punish me! Save the life of Djaffar the vizier!”
Another man, in his turn, volunteers himself as the murderer. A venerable old man.
“Take me in his place! I am old! I am guilty! The victim is my daughter, and I wanted, wrongly, to avenge my honor!”
The old man and the young, handsome man—father and husband to the woman in pieces—are brought before the caliph. In the double repentance, there is a competition between the two confessions.
Behind them, the crowd breathes a sigh of relief for Djaffar. The forty Barmékides, the young, valiant warriors and the shrewd men alike, go back to their homes, free.
Thrown into confusion by this unexpected twist, the people wait in front of the palace. Some believe that the husband is guilty and some would sooner see the old man punished—but there are those who report that the old man would sacrifice himself to ensure that his grandchildren do not find themselves orphaned by both mother and father.
And the body, the body in pieces of the young woman discovered three days ago, waits, wrapped again in the white linen rags. The red woolen thread is undone, the coffin made of palm leaves is open, the carpet unrolled, the olivewood chest unlocked.
Three days ago, under the caliph’s watch, censers were lit that now smoke around the body of the woman who remains unburied.
Word quickly spreads: “The husband is definitely the murderer. He himself provided all the details: the red woolen thread, the coffin, a description of the carpet, the ornate lock on the chest. He’s given up all hope. After having tossed the chest into the Tigris, he came back home to find his oldest son in tears. He told his father that a black man on the street had stolen an apple he had taken from his mother. He pleaded with the black man, told him that his father had gone all the way to Bassora to find the apples, that he paid a fortune for each one, but the slave went off. The child didn’t dare to go inside and admit the mishap to his mother.”
“And so,” remarks someone in the crowd, “the old man has forgiven his son-in-law and wants only to join his beloved daughter in death.”
“O noble father!” exclaims the crowd. “O handsome murderer!” cry those whose hearts are moved by the husband’s contrition.
The body of the woman in pieces rests near the room where the caliph hears his counsel. Unburied. Unmourned.
Beneath the ramparts, the Baghdadis are about to disperse when another alarming rumor begins to spread in a blaze of dust: “The vizier Djaffar’s life is at stake once again!”
“Once again, the caliph has given him three days to find the culprit. If not, he will be executed in his stead!”
“The culprit? What culprit, since the husband has pled guilty?”
A high dignitary comes out of the palace and is swarmed by the gawking, impatient crowd. “Indeed,” he announces, “our Emir of the Believers, may the glory of God be on Him and Allah’s mercy keep Him, has decided, in his wisdom, that the husband was pardonable, that his fury was legitimate. Everything is the fault of the black braggart who slandered the young woman!”
The young woman cut into pieces.
The murderous husband, because of his broken heart, has not budged from the palace of the caliph, who has grown so fond of him.
Only the father leaves the palace. His face is tragic. Preceding him are rows of servants bearing the olivewood chest.
Djaffar the Barmékide must find the arrogant and slanderous black man. How will he recognize the culprit in this metropolis where hundreds of eunuchs, slaves, emancipated Sudanese, Ethiopians, and so many others live and circulate in peace?
Djaffar goes back home. He ponders. He prepares himself for death again. This time, because the vizier’s numerous cousins are safe, the fever in the city is not as high as it was before. Djaffar has told them not to come to his home, not to give him their support. With a simple change of mood, the caliph could raise the stakes and include the rest of the family in the sentence.
No, Djaffar prefers to wait for his destiny alone, in the company of those closest to him: his wives (favorites and concubines) and his children, including the youngest ones.
As the moment comes to say good-bye, those close to him weep and sigh. He gets up to return to the palace, the place where he will probably be executed.
The last of his daughters, his favorite, comes before him. She doesn’t understand the reason for this general sadness. Her father holds her to him, his face grave. Imagining that he is going on a voyage, she holds him for a long time, tenderly. She hugs him again. Embracing her, Djaffar asks, “What’s that under your dress?”
He has felt a ball moving against the child’s chest—some toy that she is hiding in the cloth. Delighted, she laughs noisily. “No, not a toy, only an apple!”
The father, unsettled, responds, “An apple?”
She hastily takes a scarlet apple from her bodice and relates, tenderly, “It was Rihan, our slave, who gave it to me!”
“Rihan?”
They bring in the handsome black man; he confesses. In the street, he took the apple from a little boy, despite the boy’s protests. He was evidently very attached to it, because his father, he said, had brought it all the way from Bassora. Yes, Rihan then went walking in the souks all day long, holding the scarlet apple . . . Yes, when he was asked, he indicated that a beautiful woman had offered him this fruit, so rare in this season . . . In the end, the following day, he decided to offer this apple to Djaffar’s little girl, whom he loves so dearly.
There is nothing for Djaffar to do but drag the culprit to Haroun el Rachid. He laments that he cannot, as they are under the braggart’s own roof
, put his hand on the “arrogant and slanderous black man.”
All along the way, Djaffar, the tenderhearted, happy to escape death, assesses his slave’s behavior certainly not as a venial sin, but as a fault less serious than previously thought. “How to plead the cause of my eunuch? How to try to obtain the sultan’s pardon?” he wonders.
At the palace, Djaffar having informs Haroun of the events and how he has learned the truth. Rihan will surely be taken to the gallows. The deadly mistake of the boy who filched the apple from his mother escapes notice, as if the fortunate intervention of the little girl has redeemed him. Djaffar has an idea. He asks the caliph to imagine a more extraordinary story.
“More astonishing than the one that concerns the black man—that would surprise me,” Haroun el Rachid replies.
“I will make one up, I will keep you breathless with exciting adventures. Then you will be the judge, Master. Hear me, and if my story pleases you, the favor I will ask of you will be . . .”
“The favor? What favor, my friend?”
“To let Rihan live. It will make my youngest daughter so happy!”
“And so the stakes have changed,” replies Haroun el Rachid, who installs his friend, on this autumn day that has just begun, at the foot of his bed.
At the following class, the fourth, the students tremble for arrogant Rihan (whose name means “rare perfume”) even though he is responsible for the young wife’s death, for the husband’s insane jealousy.
A teenage girl in a white chador with scalloped edges remarks sweetly, “I hope that Djaffar shows himself to be a skillful narrator and saves Rihan’s life.” Then, in Arabic, she recites the well-known hadith: “As said by our prophet, may the grace of God be on Him: The best among the believers shall lead my people, even if it’s a Sudanese slave! You see,” she concludes in a soft voice, “Islam promotes equality.”
