Desert Divers

by Sven Lindqvist

  Michel read Southern Mail when it was published in 1928. He was four years younger than Saint-Ex. He had also read Nietzsche and Rimbaud, and had done his military service in Morocco, and he, too, had dreams of the desert. One September day in 1930, disguised as a woman, he disappeared into the unsubjugated tribal area some miles north of Tiznit. He was on his way to Smara.

  Saint-Ex never got that far.

  But every morning he did fly one of the off-duty Cap Juby planes to drive the condensation out of the cylinders – planes at that time had to be rested like horses – and sometimes he diverged from the flight path along the coast. Once he flew right into ‘the mysterious Smara with its virginal ruins, as forbidden to the white man as Timbuctoo’.

  In actual fact, Timbuctoo had been occupied by the French in 1893, and Smara was no more forbidden than that. It was destroyed by French troops in 1913. But the ruins were still defended by the Saharan tribes. Just flying over Smara was a bold, almost foolish act.

  Vieuchange was now heading that way. On foot.

  24

  I go by car.

  It is a peculiar day. All week the wind has blown in off the sea but now it is coming from the desert, hot as a hairdryer. The runway in Tarfaya has been shrouded in wet sea mist; today it is shrouded in the hot dry haze of pure dust.

  I scrape the sand off the car just as one scrapes snow off a car in a Swedish winter, and as I drive into the white haze it is like driving into a snowstorm. Only slowly does it occur to me that because I am in the desert, this must be a sandstorm.

  Twilight descends in the early morning and my field of vision shrinks so that I can see only a few metres ahead. When I stop and get out of the car, I find it difficult to keep my balance. The sand stabs like icy pins at my unprotected face. It is impossible to breathe into the wind. I hurry back into the car and drive on as fast as I dare through the mounting drifts.

  The sand is not slippery, but occasionally it is treacherously loose, and sometimes as hard-packed as stone. The dust is finer than snow and penetrates the car so that the air is thick to breathe. The smell is sharply mineral, quite unlike the euphoric fragrance of snow.

  Most of all, the physical feeling is different. The body suffocates when it sweats without sweat. Moisture vanishes immediately off the skin, leaving a crackled layer of salt which encloses the body as if in a mould.

  When I was small, I often fantasized about sandstorms. Before falling asleep, I surrounded myself with the whistling, biting haze. To be able to breathe, I walked backwards, into the wind. My watch filled with sand and stopped. I drank the last drops from my crumpled water-holder and knew I had to die.

  In these sandstorm dreams, there was always a mirror-like lake of clear fresh water which saved my life just before I slipped into sleep.

  To believe in water in the desert is not as crazy as it seems. Sometimes it actually rains. At this moment my childish dreams come true, the dreams of desert pools glimmering in hollows and a green veil thrown over the sand. I drive through a green desert gleaming with moisture – although the whole of the Sahara is heading towards me and I am almost suffocated.

  No traffic comes towards me. At a turn-off to Boucraa, I am stopped by a military column: open vehicles, dark snow-goggles, on full alert. The Polisario, the Saharan liberation movement, usually strike in the shelter of a sandstorm.

  I turn back and spend the night in El Aaiun. Two tank battles are fought that night, one near Boucraa, between Moroccan troops and the still-unconquered Saharans.

  25

  Vieuchange tried to get to Smara disguised as a woman. His posthumous journal shows him preoccupied with the actual disguise and the conditions his female rôle forces him into.

  He shaves his legs. He learns not to show his hands. He always lies curled up like a dog, never on his back – only a Jewess lies on her back. He sits with his knees wide apart, never close together. When he rides, he keeps his heels lower than his toes.

  Michel Vieuchange, dressed as a Berber woman.

  In daytime, he is bathed in sweat inside the blue garment which envelops him like a tent. He longs in vain to feel the wind on his face, to be able to move freely. He wants to know where he is. He wants to see the great expanses of desert. He wants to see the men coming and going. But all he sees is the ground.

  Few accounts of the Sahara deal so much with the actual ground in the desert, the small broken stones, the gravel, the stony riverbeds, the dark tormented soil. That is all he sees.

  He doesn’t see the sunrise, only a golden wave of light sweeping over the ground, leaving behind it small lakes of night in the hollows.

  In the towns, he sees nothing but the room in which he is imprisoned like a criminal: the rough walls that crumble at his touch, the low sooty ceiling and the light let in by deep holes so narrow he can’t see out.

  In the heat, he pours water over his veiled head so the evaporation will provide him with a little cool. The meat hanging from the ceiling is invisible beneath its carpet of flies. He doesn’t eat any of it. He hardly eats anything at all, but lives off sweet mint tea.

  On cold damp nights, the women press their bodies against his to seek warmth – or perhaps with other intentions which simply fill him with distaste. Frozen and soaked through, he waits for the golden wave of sunrise finally to sweep over the ground, this ground which is all he sees.

  26

  I am living in a stable together with a naked gnarled old woman with long breasts hanging down below her waist. She is kind to me. It’s only her horse that’s pigheaded.

  She has the horse up in a hayloft with the railing missing. Nothing but its own instinct for self-preservation keeps the horse from falling down.

  When I come up to the hayloft, the horse eagerly starts nuzzling my hand and pockets for the sugar it is used to being given. I try to get down again, but the horse bars my way as it nuzzles through my clothes and my body more and more intimately and insistently. Not until the woman comes up and gives the horse some lumps of sugar can I leave.

  It strikes me when I see her breasts that perhaps she is my mother and that it is my own greed, greater than the horse’s, that has made them so long.

  27

  The sky is clear again the next morning. The sand-sweeper is already busy sweeping away the drifts. Every tuft has a small train of sand pointing away from the wind.

  A few miles outside El Aaiun, a gang of Saudi falconers have their caravan camp. They hunt for partridges over great distances with the aid of sophisticated radar equipment, pursuing them in four-wheel-drive vehicles, then, taking the hood off the specially trained falcons, for a few exhilarating moments experience their own power as the falcon cruises above its prey, strikes, kills and brings back the meat.

  ‘The price per kilo will have been considerable,’ say my Saharan hitchhikers dryly.

  They are elegant young men with knife-edge creases in their trousers and smart briefcases. At their destination some miles further on, I go with them to two tents by the roadside. The tents smell of milk. Some women live an outfield life there with their goats.

  They splash us with lavender water from a litre bottle and call out to the retired soldier in the tent next to them. My hitchhikers and the old man begin the usual ping-pong game of courtesies and mutual exchanges of information. The smart town lads are transformed into scions of herdsmen, and with surprising expertise they carry out the traditional tea ceremony.

  ‘If you were staying any longer, I would have slit the throat of a goat for you,’ says the old man.

  He is lying on a plaited mat, kneading a large cushion on his stomach. The air is fresh and pleasant under the sky-blue tent, the roof shutting off the sun but giving free rein to the wind. The charcoal glowing in the chafing dish ticks metallically and there is a strong smell of mint and goat’s milk.

  After the obligatory three cups, I drive on towards Smara through vast flat countryside, punctuated by odd tussocks and groups of heroic tamarisks.

  Rig
ht out in the dryness, I again meet a large cloud of grasshoppers coming from the south-east, not so much flying as being blown my way by the desert wind, bowling along the ground like a gigantic wavering wheel of insects, some young and pink-winged, but most mature, well-filled, golden-winged creatures which strike the car with a crashing sound and are crushed.

  The Hotel Goldsand, the best in Smara, has been requisitioned by the governor. At the Hotel Erraha across the street, I am given the only room with a window. Two beds, and a hook in the wall. A handbasin outside the privy at the end of the corridor. A pound a night.

  28

  I go to bathe after the dusty journey. On my way I see a notice: Club Saquia el Hamra Musculation. Bodybuilding in the Sahara! Suddenly I feel my muscles aching with a longing for exertion.

  The premises have just opened for the day and are still empty. I hang my clothes on the wall and start warming up.

  As I lie in the leg-press, an intellectual Moroccan wearing glasses comes and shows me how I can get greater play by pulling out a peg. He is a bookkeeper in the civilian administration and has been here for three years, his family in Casa, as they call Casablanca. Goes home to see them every third month.

  We train together and alternate three times fifteen with light weights. There is – he says, in the winter as well, but most of all in the summer when Smara is turned into a reeking hell – there is a yawning chasm between official rhetoric and the reality of war-weariness and longing for home. The Sahara has been designated ‘their’ country, but it certainly is not their climate or their landscape when they come from northern Morocco …

  After the long gap in my training, it is wonderful to feel my muscles working again, at first reluctantly, then more and more delighted at being needed. The ego-experience climbs down from my head and out into my limbs. Bit by bit my body comes back and becomes my own again.

  After training, we go on to the bath-house. In the innermost of the steaming rooms, we mix hot water from one tap with cold water from another into our black rubber buckets and spend the rest of the afternoon scooping, soaping and scrubbing our newly found bodies while listening to the splash of water against tiles and the murmur of voices under the vaulted ceiling.

  There is no wind in there. The light doesn’t hurt your eyes. Your nails don’t split. You don’t get sand in your mouth. The air is not prickly dry in your nose. On the contrary, it is thick with steaming moisture and feels soft and smooth in the hollows of your body. Good water flows. In the desert, that is paradise.

  29

  The human body has six hundred muscles. You use most of them automatically without experiencing them. The best part of training is finding new muscles which have never been conscious before.

  How many muscles has a human life? You’re sure to use most of them automatically, without experiencing them. Particularly in long-term relationships, developing a routine is labour saving, and thus enervating. The best part of suddenly encountering solitude is that it provides training: you discover your life when you have to start using its long-since forgotten and atrophied muscles.

  30

  I am living on a hillside, the road meandering past. I wake early and go out for a newspaper.

  The news on the front page is criss-crossed with thick black lines which make them invalid and partly illegible. There is only one legible and valid item of news. That is printed in microscopic typescript and says that the country has been invaded by a foreign power. The foreign troops can be expected at any moment to pass along this particular road.

  Then I suddenly remember that I had a goat as well as a dog when I left. But the dog is too faithful and the goat too rebellious and unmanageable. So I have tied them up in the forest. I was thinking of fetching them later, but forgot them. Are they still alive? Has anyone found them? Have they died of starvation? I must find out before the foreigners get here. But how shall I get there? My wife is already messing about in the garden. The children will soon wake up. So far, I am the only one who knows about the invasion, about the goat, about the dog – and what shall I do?

  I go and ask my father. He has put a piece of white paper in front of him on his desk. He takes out his pocket-knife with its mother-of-pearl inlays, slots a nail into the groove and opens the knife. It is the small sharp blade he opens out. Without a word he starts slowly and carefully cutting away the white on his nails.

  He isn’t cutting his nails. He is trimming them. He prunes them, just as you prune a tree or a bush in the garden. He cuts off just that part of the nail which helped him open the knife.

  I say nothing. Father is also silent. With a scraping sound, the slice of nail falls onto the white paper.

  31

  The first inhabitants of Smara were black and came from the south. Their rock engravings show a Saharan savanna where elephants and giraffes grazed.

  In the millennium before our era, they were driven back south by the drought. Those who stayed behind were subjugated by Berber peoples from the north, who rode horses and had weapons made of iron.

  The desert deepened all around them. The horse was followed by the camel, which arrived from the east around the year 100 and made possible the regular caravan trade across the desert.

  In the year 1000, there was a gang of Saharans who called themselves the ‘Almoravids’. They took over the caravan trade, penetrated northwards and conquered Morocco and Spain. There we got to know them by the name of Moors.

  In the thirteenth century, all the Saharans who stayed behind in the desert were conquered by a Bedouin tribe, Beni Hassan, emigrating from Yemen. Hassanic Arabic pushed out the Berber language, Znaga. The ruling Arabs accepted tributes from their Znaga vassals who in turn ruled over the black indigenous population: slaves and freed slaves. A council, djema, drew up laws and chose a chieftain.

  The most famous of these chieftains was Ma Ainin, ‘The Water of the Eyes’. He founded Smara in 1895 as the centre for the Saharan tribes and his headquarters in the struggle against the Europeans.

  The main enemy was the French, pressing from the south through Mauritania, from the east through Algeria and soon enough from the north through Morocco. That was why Vieuchange had to travel in disguise. He belonged to the enemy.

  Smara was not colonized until 1934 when the Spaniards, with the help of the French, occupied the town.

  Decolonization also came late. The Spaniards were not prepared to hand over power to the Polisario until the mid-1970s.

  But the King of Morocco had territorial ambitions. He dreamt of a Greater Morocco that would include parts of Algeria, Mali and Mauritania, and on down to the Senegal river. He maintained that Spanish West Sahara belonged to him for historic reasons.

  The matter was referred to the international court at the Hague, which replied that there were indeed legal ties between Morocco and West Sahara, but that these ties did not entail territorial supremacy. The principle of the right to self-determination through the free declaration of the will of the people should, the court decided, be applied without restriction.

  32

  What happened next was extremely peculiar. Only in Smara has anything like it ever happened to me.

  One evening, I am sitting in the corridor of the Hotel Erraha, talking to a Moroccan greengrocer. He is from Rabat and has been tempted to Smara with subsidies from the government. Here he has a cheap house, earns good money and likes it. And as evidence that there are no problems in the town, he alleges there are no soldiers there.

  ‘No soldiers, no problems.’

  He says this in the Hotel Erraha, which is full of soldiers on leave.

  They are sleeping in heaps on the floor of the corridor in front of us.

  They have come directly from the fighting at the Wall erected as a defence against the Polisario, sand running off their uniforms, wild-eyed, heads wrapped in cloths and rags. With its music, its lights and occasional women, Smara to them is a paradise compared with the dry dust, the eternal wind and the shadeless heat out there. />
  Maybe they have no other problems, but they are undeniably soldiers.

  Through the hotel window, the greengrocer and I look out over the town. It consists mainly of military installations resembling cartons of eggs with their rows of yellowish-white cupolas. Behind the hotel, army vehicles are lined up in a gigantic military parking lot. In the street below we can see military police walking around in pairs, checking Saharan identity cards. Moroccan conscripts roam in groups along the street, hanging onto each other like teenage girls. A column of army trucks – with their engines running – is ready to depart to the front. The trucks are full of soldiers with closed, sullen, bitter faces.

  But the greengrocer maintains they don’t exist.

  ‘But hang on a minute,’ I say, in appeal. ‘You can’t even go and have a pee without falling over sleeping soldiers. It’s seething with them down there on the street …’

  I point out through the window. But that makes no impression on the greengrocer.

  ‘Further away maybe,’ he says. ‘But here in Smara there are no soldiers, no problems.’

  Is he saying what the police have told him to say without bothering to make it plausible? Does he wish, while protecting himself, to tell me the exact opposite: ‘Many soldiers, many problems’?

  I don’t know. All I know is that our conversation ceased once it lost touch with reality.

  33

  On October 16, 1975, when the international court decision was delivered, the Moroccan invasion of West Sahara was already planned in detail. Hassan II was unable to back down. He did the same thing as the greengrocer.

  He made a great speech in Rabat, explaining that the international court had upheld Morocco’s demands.