by Joelle Stolz
My mother sighs. “Indeed I think this will be the last year for you,” she says, trying to soften her verdict with one of those smiles that melt my heart.
I quickly bend down and kiss her hand before dashing down the stairs hot on Bilkisu's heels. Ladi joins our expedition to help us carry the brass pitchers, the large white cotton towels and the fiber gloves we use to rub our skin.
How dark our street is! You have to know it well or you would be frightened in this pitch-black passageway where you have to feel your way at times. Many of our city streets are almost entirely covered to retain the coolness of the mud walls. The only lighting is provided, every fifty paces, by openings onto the sky; they let in shafts of light but are very narrow so they don't clog up during sandstorms. At night, a few torches are put up at the crossroads with gazelle horn good-luck charms; like the pointy horns on our rooftops, they are said to drive away the evil eye and the spirits of darkness.
To reach the women's baths of our neighborhood, we go down a passageway that is even narrower than the others and shaped like an elbow. For about twenty paces, we really can't see a thing. Ladi walks in front of us because she takes this road every day. In Ghadames, the servants don't sleep in their masters' houses; they have their own housing near the city walls.
Upon entering the passageway, Ladi groans plaintively several times: it's a signal that warns a male passerby that a woman is approaching. Caution! The loud thud of a foot stamped firmly on the ground tells us a man is coming toward us. Ladi retreats hurriedly and makes us stand in a recess in the wall until the man has gone by.
Bilkisu suppresses a giggle. “I'll never get used to this peculiar custom,” she says to me in a whisper.
I find it bizarre too. And unfair. Why should a woman retreat just because she is a woman, even if she has almost reached the end of the passageway? Once, I was bold enough to ask my father. He looked embarrassed.
“You see, our ancestors thought it best to avoid contact between men and women who are not of the same family. We are used to this arrangement. But, from what I've been told, in some countries the customs are very different. There are places where men must make way for the women, and even greet them by baring their heads in their presence.”
My mother was deeply shocked and refused to believe this. Why, that's an upside-down world! she said. Bilkisu was very intrigued. Did this mean, she asked, that in those countries women are considered superior to men?
My father smiled. No, he did not think so. It was merely a different custom.
That day, for the first time, I had a passionate desire to travel. It had never occurred to me before then that there were people who lived differently from us, who ate differently, who wore different clothes, and whose houses were built differently from ours. In the evening, lying on the rooftop where we sleep on summer nights, I saw the sky above me become infinite and sparkle with the constellations whose names and trajectories my father had taught me. Perhaps these other people call Deneb, Mizar and Altaïr by different names. Perhaps they don't share our belief that there is a big river of milk up there in the stars and that gazelles run along its riverbanks?
We finally arrive at the baths. There is no signboard because the baths aren't meant for people who are not from our city. There is no door either, just a woman attendant who keeps men out.
You climb up three steps from the street and slip into a kind of hallway that has a row of six to eight cubicles separated by walls. Every bather sits at the edge of a little canal filled night and day with Ghadames springwater; the temperature of the water is always pleasant, winter and summer, and never has to be heated. There is a metal bar between the two walls for hanging clothes.
Today we are lucky; there are no other bathers and we can choose our place. I hate arriving last, and being at the end of the row, where you have to wait for the residues of soap and the remains of henna poultice with which the women coat their hair to be flushed away by the flow of water. This small annoyance occasionally gives rise to arguments. But this morning the only sound we hear is the lapping of the water from the movement of our feet in the canal, the water streaming out of the pitchers as we empty them over our naked bodies, and the song Bilkisu is humming in Hausa.
It feels good to have her scrub my shoulders and back, pumice the soles of my feet, and dig into my scalp with her fingers.
“A lovely garden soon to bloom,” she whispers in our language.
“What garden are you talking about?” “I'm talking about you, you're becoming a grown-up.” She has just poured a last pitcher of water over my head to rinse me off and looks at me very pensively as the clear water trickles down my shoulders, chest and legs. Suddenly I feel shy and I quickly slip on my tunic, which sticks to my moist back. Bilkisu gathers her braided hair into a bun at the nape of her neck; the hundreds of thin braids form two rounded mounds on each side of her forehead.
Jasim has her forehead, but he has our father's eyes.
“Bilkisu, how did you end up at our house?” I ask.
I know my voice sounds hostile, almost nasty, and I am ashamed again. Then I see her sunny smile. Bilkisu never gets angry. She just has a slightly amused way of looking at you that makes you feel naked, like a few minutes ago when she was rinsing me.
“I wasn't much older than you when I met your father,” she says. “I was probably around thirteen, and at home it's like here, at thirteen a girl is certainly old enough to find a husband. My father wasn't rich, but he had a stall in the Kano market where he sold fine leather harnesses and saddlebags. He had been doing business with your father for years. No doubt he thought your father would treat me better than many of the men he knew. And he wasn't wrong.”
“So my father married you before marrying my mother?”
I had never dared question my parents on how Bilkisu had become part of our family. There are two wives in many Ghadames homes, the wife “from home” and the wife “from the journey,” called that way because the master of the house has brought her back from afar. Often the wife from the journey comes from the south, like Bilkisu. Therefore many families in our city have two sets of descendants, one set with lighter skin and the other with darker skin, and the inheritance is divided equally between the two.
Bilkisu has already told me about Kano, which is several weeks away by foot, on the other side of the Sahara. It is as old a city as ours but much larger, and the walls are so thick that the enemies' spears break against them without making a dent. Jasim loves to hear her describe how, after the Ramadan fast, all the nobles of the region parade in front of the emir's palace on their magnificently harnessed horses. This makes my brother daydream: he sees himself at the head of the procession, wearing a tall gauze turban while the acrobats perform in the dust.
But Bilkisu has never told me how she met my father. She glances at Ladi, who is busy chatting with the attendant. Then she replies, lowering her voice:
“Your father was already married to your mother and did not hide the fact. Meriem, as you know, is his close cousin, promised to him from birth. Yet your father loved her instantly because she was so beautiful and well behaved, like an image he had always cherished in his heart. A perfect woman in the perfect city.”
“A perfect woman in the perfect city.” I echo her words for they match the vision I have had of my mother since earliest childhood, and I despair of ever resembling her.
“Yes, he loved her and respected her,” Bilkisu continues. “That's why it was painful for him when, having no children after over two years of marriage, his parents urged him to take another wife. Your father doesn't think much of this custom, though it is very widespread, here and in my city, and our religion allows it. Yet the Holy Book tries to discourage the practice by suggesting that a husband must treat his wives equally, which is extremely difficult.
“You can quantify bracelets and lengths of fabric, and give the same thing to each wife. But how can you quantify affection? Or measure tenderness? This habit of taking sev
eral wives suits most men too well for them to see its drawbacks. It engenders a lot of suffering and sometimes dreadful rivalries that endanger the fortune and unity of families.”
“If he believes all this, why did he behave like the others?” I cry out, thinking bitterly of Jasim.
Oh, if only he had never been born!
I do not say this out loud, but Bilkisu understands. I often have the feeling that she is better at guessing my thoughts than my own mother.
“You would quarrel with Jasim even if he were Meriem's son and not mine,” she says. “You both have lively temperaments, and he would still be a boy, determined to lord his male superiority over you. Nothing can be done about that. Aren't you glad to have me around? Your mother is an imposing lady,” she adds tactfully. “I know she intimidates you and that it's hard for you to question her the way you question me.”
That's true. I have nothing to say in response. Then Ladi starts to get impatient.
“Haven't you finished scrubbing yourselves?” she complains. “I have work to do. No one will clean the house if I don't. You'll get there after the Arous if you continue jabbering like that!”
She picks up the towels, the combs, the pitchers, and pushes us out the door. And there we part. Ladi goes to the left, while Bilkisu and I take an alleyway that leads to the gardens. We can already smell the sour aroma of fruit crushed in the dust, and the odor of droppings from the animals that press against the doors of the pens.
After the darkness, the abundant sun and vegetation come as a shock!
The gardens are surrounded by mud walls, but ornamented with openwork through which it's easy to see what is going on. In the morning, as long as it is not too hot, there is the coming and going of the women servants carrying big spheres of freshly cut grass for the animals, and of the men carrying spades on their shoulders. All you hear is the rustling of feet on the hardened earth and the twittering of birds high in the palm trees.
“Bah! What an odor!” says Bilkisu.
She has a keen sense of smell and quickly pulls me into a garden whose gate is open. Behind us, a man is carrying two large baskets filled with human fertilizer. True, it doesn't smell good. But the cesspits in the houses have to be emptied from time to time, so why not use the waste as fertilizer for the earth?
Bilkisu has told me how surprised she was to discover that in our houses the toilet is located at the top of the stairway, behind a brightly painted door. No bad odors come from it. The excrement falls into a pit that is located far below, at street level, and behind a wall, so as not to inconvenience the passersby. Once in a while, a hole is made in the masonry to remove the accumulated excrement, then quickly closed up again and forgotten about. It's a practical and useful system, like many things our ancestors invented.
“Look, beautiful lemons, Malika!”
Bilkisu likes lemon trees because they produce both blossoms and fruit. She finds this oddity of nature very amusing. She picks up a ripe lemon from the ground and bites into its skin with her teeth.
“Take it, it's a thirst quencher,” she says.
“But this isn't our garden—”
“Bah! No one will begrudge us one lemon.” Emboldened by these words, we sit down at the foot of the lemon tree. The garden isn't very large, but it has all the essentials —a fig tree, a pomegranate tree, several date palms, tomato and onion plants, and grass for feeding the goats. In a corner, in the shade of the wall, there is an earthen jar with a wooden ladle attached to it; it contains cool water for refreshment.
“Do you want a drink?” Bilkisu asks.
I look at her reprovingly. She always looks cheerful and serene, like someone who has decided to be happy in the face of all opposition. Sometimes it annoys me.
“You did not really answer my question before,” I say. “What question?” “How you came to Ghadames.”
Bilkisu looks up at the sun, to gauge how much time we have left.
“Your father did not want a second wife,” she says. “I begged him to take me with him. Otherwise, I knew my father would give me to another man, a Kano storekeeper who had already asked for my hand in marriage. That man frightened me. I was always uncomfortable when he looked at me.”
I feel a twinge of sorrow. “And what about my father, didn't he look at you?”
She smiles. Her silver earrings dangle against her dark cheeks.
“Do you know that it was your father who wanted to teach me Arabic?” she says. “In our city, girls don't even attend Koranic school. They just recite their prayers, that's all. I was so proud to have a wooden board, a stylus and writing ink, like a boy. Alif, bā., tā., thā. … I was very conscientious, and I could see that your father was pleased to see me write the letters of the alphabet correctly. He told me that Meriem had refused to learn to read and write. She believes that women will lose their powers if they pry and try to know the same things as men. Your father was sorry about that, yet he still talked about her with admiration. ‘She is like a very pure metal,' he said, ‘like a blade that strikes directly at my heart.'”
“She must have been sad when she saw you,” I say. “Oh, it was dreadful for both of us! I was expecting your brother, and after three unsuccessful years Meriem had given up all hope of ever having her own child. I thought she would break down before my eyes. But she gritted her teeth and welcomed me in her house. Your father was very attentive to her and spent a lot of time talking to her. She hardly spoke. She just listened. I stayed in my room and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. It was my turn to be jealous. I thought of going back home, but the idea of the long trip in the desert with a child frightened me. We were like three wounded creatures who try not to move so as not to arouse pain. And then a miracle occurred: Meriem became pregnant as well. Another child was going to be born in our house! This changed everything. We prepared Jasim's arrival together, then yours. It was like an ongoing celebration.
“Now you understand,” Bilkisu adds with a tender smile, “why you are as dear to my heart as any daughter of mine would be.”
Suddenly, I respond with the gesture I usually reserve for my mother: I kiss Bilkisu's hand. She jumps up as though I had burned her.
“The husband will already be wearing his red turban if we continue dallying like this!” she says.
I suddenly remember my mother's words. This will be my last Arous, the last one I will be allowed to attend. Afterward I will be confined to the rooftops, like the other women, and never come back down again.
So I open my eyes wide because I don't want to miss anything: the streaked shadow of the palm trees and the pale green of the apricot trees; the flight of the birds as they squabble in the branches; the footprint on the earth of an embankment, toes spread wide apart …
We come out on the threshing floor, which is always located in full sunlight and exposed to the most favorable winds. When it is time to winnow the grains, the wind does half the work. Barley matures earlier than wheat. The swathes have been lying in a dry spot for days, protected from the birds by palm tree branches and mats of esparto grass.
I see many people this morning around the threshing floor: women servants; slaves tending the gardens; slave masters accompanied by their children who are bubbling with excitement on this eventful day. Even my uncle is here and, next to him, Jasim, looking his conceited self in his sky blue gandourah carefully chosen to show his dark skin to advantage. Of course, on seeing me, all he can do is stick out his tongue! I would gladly stick mine out in response, except Bilkisu pushes me in the direction of the women before I have time.
Facing east, toward Islam's holy places, the laborers have started threshing the sheaves that are arranged in a circle. Each one is holding a kerna, the wide, hard base of a palm tree branch, and is beating the stalks to separate the grain. Their clothes are soon covered with straw debris, sweat runs down their temples, and their backs are soaked. Every once in a while, they drink from the jug that one of us hands them. Their work is sacred to every
one here. We reserve wheat semolina for pastries and holiday dishes, but we eat bazina, the thick porridge of barley flour, every day. It's perfect for filling hungry stomachs.
Finally, the great moment has arrived. The grains are gathered into a round heap and covered again with a mat. An elderly man traces Solomon's seal in the dust with his finger so as to protect the precious harvest from evil spirits.
“Youyouyouyououou!”
The sound of ululation arises from the women's throats, a singsong wail that makes men shiver when they hear it. I would like to join in but my voice isn't strong enough yet and I am afraid of making a fool of myself in front of my brother. In the midst of the wailing, two women carry in a kind of doll they have made with bound palm twigs. This is Earth's husband, the Arous, and he will watch over the grain, wearing a fine red cloth turban.
The women's wailing grows louder for they must attract the baraka on him, the benediction from heaven. Their call courses through me, from head to foot, and now I start wailing too, eyes shut, my throat vibrating almost painfully, as if my voice had to chart a new pathway through my body. I feel as though I am suddenly exposing myself fully.
Bilkisu takes me by the shoulders and kisses me. “Bravo, you have the voice of a grown woman. It will soon be time to fill the bride's pitcher for you, from which you'll drink after your wedding night.”
But the thought of a groom makes me dreadfully embarrassed and I bury my face in the folds of her veil.
When we return, I notice the look my mother and Bilkisu exchange when Bilkisu tells her about my vocal feats during the Arous ceremony. This means the end for me: from now on, like them, I'll have to be satisfied with the palm grove on the horizon and hearing the stories my father and brother bring back from their travels.
My mother does not say anything. But she spends a long time combing my hair and then, to see how it will look, she adorns my forehead with a heavy diadem of several rows of gold coins, the work of goldsmiths in faraway Timbuktu, which all the women in Ghadames wear at their marriage. She also lends me her favorite earrings. Then she leads me to the imbedded mirror above the door to the stairway.
