The Taste of Translation

by Anne Gambling

  I cannot tell.

  Then how can I help?

  I need good soldiers to protect us on the journey. They will be well paid for their trials but must be willing to take a vow of silence. We journey into the wilderness.

  He nods. Three of my men come to mind immediately. I will send for them. But … He frowns. The wilderness? A journey of forty days and nights?

  She shrugs. Perhaps.

  Who is with you?

  Fenula. She points to where Sara is bowed some way distant in the reception hall beside Rasool.

  He starts, grips her arm. Your eunuch – he is from the south, is he not? What black magic has he promised you?

  She smiles, enclosing his hand in her own. It is not black, his magic, but white with God’s light. It will protect me and, pressing his hand to her belly, my child.

  Take care, take good care, he said once the soldiers had been summoned and briefed. It is likely your brother sent a scroll to Abu I-Fariz’s chief vizier as a precaution so there may be others on the lookout for your caravan. I have told my men to lead you east for a full day and full night at least before you give them alternate instructions. They are Andalusians of the old order. Trust them, they will serve you well.

  In the pre-dawn of a desert morning two days hence, they turned south.

  Ours is an odd tribe, Maryam remarked as they rocked back and forth over the stony ground, her cat wrapped in an over-full lap. A Sufi woman, a Christian servant, a half-breed child, a medina stray and a black eunuch.

  Fenula grasped her mistress’ hand. Love binds us. Our family is joined by spirit, not blood, and therefore is far deeper. She kissed Maryam’s sunburnt cheek.

  So they continued, deep into the mountains, through valleys and canyons on their way to the southern slopes of the central Anti-Atlas where Rasool’s tribe, the Feija, dwelt. Further and further south, further and further into the mountains, along a track rougher and rougher still. The plain wide, stony, dry. Banded by valley walls as black as ebony.

  There is a legend, said Rasool, that once our land was vast and green, a forest filled with beasts. But when one ate the son of a saint, he cursed the land in his sorrow. The forests vanished, the rivers dried up in their gorges, what animals were left fled. Now, only we remain, making of it what we can.

  A narrow canyon forked to the right.

  This way, he pointed. Now we are close. But the path is steep. First let us rest.

  A rock overhang offered welcome shade in the dry riverbed.

  Look, he said, these are the marks of my ancestors. And pointed to strange symbols, the forms of animals, carved into the rock.

  Is this a mule? Maryam asked.

  He laughed. More likely a camel, but it still has four legs.

  And the symbols?

  Hieroglyphs of the Tuareg, our forefathers from the western Sahara, the people you call the trackless ones. But I do not know their meaning. My brother may – he serves the fqih of our tribe.

  Rasool touched the stone markings gently. Symbols like these heal the sick, he said.

  They reached the village of his birth before sunset, stepped into a stony hillside above a narrow valley where a palmery and several fields stood well-tended by a small river.

  Maryam laughed to see him rush from hut to hut calling the names of his relatives, his childhood friends, bringing his mother, sister, brother to meet his mistress. A bowl of couscous was shared before she lay down to sleep on a freshly swept floor, her child safe, her journey over.

  The reunion of Saffaar and Esha when he returned from Fez was not the joyous event either had hoped for, both preoccupied by the effect that the king’s moods still wrought on the court.

  They lay together, naked in the soft summer night on the roof of their apartment, on a couch made for two, the marriage gift of one now gone.

  So much has changed! Saffaar told the stars above his head. al-Gani is no longer al-Gani!

  Esha quietly turned and kissed his fragrant beard. There is nothing to tell that you don’t already know, she sighed and lay her head on his chest. Have you seen Maryam? Is she well on her pilgrimage?

  No words could he say, but held her while she wept into his skin where no words could fill her void.

  The fqih stood over her, an amulet held in turn above belly, heart, forehead.

  Ah, he said and recited from Hafiz:

  I see the beautiful curve of a pregnant belly

  Shaped by a soul within.

  But shook his head. I cannot see his father. Too far distant.

  Is he alive?

  The fqih looked up, into and behind his own eyes for a long moment before again shaking his head. I know not, he said, breaking the trance. Too far distant – whether in this world or the next, I cannot tell.

  He returned to his work with the amulet, bringing her back to the raw of her reality.

  I feel the energy of one who disturbs you. A troubled man, he loves – the fqih hesitated – but his love is poisoned. He is infested by djinn. The women will weave a protective haik to wrap yourself against the evil eye that would find you. And we need a haik for your child once born.

  He shook his head, sighed. Many sins, this man, many sins. And they are not yet at end. I like not what I feel of him in you. We must prepare. And he turned to Rasool, spoke low in their own tongue.

  Each day the women weave. Concentrating on their task, infusing the protective wraps with baraka, transforming their love for her into energetic talismans.

  May I help? she asks.

  No. Your energy must be on your child, says Rasool’s mother. Fenula may help, all who love you may help. And she instructs Rasool to sit in the doorway, each in his way woven into the weft of the baraka.

  The fqih feels the slow roiling shifts of a full-term child and urges the women to hurry. The cloth must be finished without interruption or the baraka will be too thin, he explains.

  When the time comes to paint protective symbols on the cloths in blessed henna, he comes and sits with her. Your veil, he says.

  Yes?

  It too will be blessed. In this way the energy will surround your aura.

  Of course, she says and removes the lemon wrap from her head.

  He lowers his eyes away from her face. You may be present at the ceremony but borrow a headscarf from one of the women. Your modesty is most important at this time.

  The women sort and crush the henna leaves, grind them to powder which spills and lifts into the air like fine-floated green dust. All the while they chant. All the while, the fqih sits by the door, his trance blocking evil spirits from the sacred space. Water is boiled over a fire, brought to him to be blessed, before the powdered henna is mixed in and a thick paste forms.

  Here, says Rasool’s sister, you may add the drops of tannin from the pomegranate skins. They are for your home in Granada. Now stir the mixture five times round to help the energy flow.

  They paint using a small stick wrapped in wool. A pyramid of interlocking circles emerges, into which a sun, half-moons and stars are connected with ladders to reach the heavens. On the four corners of her cloth, a thick cross with a square of white space unmarked at its centre is drawn.

  This is the magic of the five, they explain. The empty space is the eye at the centre of the four directions. Only it has the energy to attract the evil eye to itself and disperse it to the four winds.

  On her lemon veil, they paint the eye itself, fulsome, with a thick brow and row of five dots above. Within a square, they paint another eye, together with a snake and scorpion, their venom both poison and cure.

  On the baby’s wrap appears the moon of the four seasons, crescents floating within the angles of a thick cross. Permanence and recurrence – the world ever-changing, ever-repeating. A circle of dancing figures completes his haik, the symbol of the Tuareg, the trackless ones. He will not be followed.

  Suddenly she falls to her knees. The pain between her legs has never been so strong, her belly neve
r so hard.

  Oh! she gasps and reaches out to Fenula. Oh!

  The fqih nods. It is time, he says. He is ready. And the women surround her, all midwives in an hour of need.

  She is wrapped in pain. Yet in the same moment stands apart, watches as it loses its intensity, its brightness. In the instant she clutches Fenula’s hand, she is wrenched out of pain to fly high above and watch this act of life brought from darkness into light. Her pain far below in love’s vessel on the mat, and she feels only a dull throb grip and recede, contract and release, like a wave washing onto a shore. A cradling wave on which she floats, it comes and goes, she comes and goes, floating above the wash, backwash.

  Oh – but the seventh wave! It almost brings her under in its crest and foaming rush to shore – harder, faster, further than the others, ripping at the sand beneath her feet. The birth canal opens, widens, stretches. She cries out afresh with this new rush of tide. Her thighs tremble, no longer can she squat.

  They bring large cushions and she throws her pain within, buries her face, feels his urge to be born, to come into this world of light. Hears him call:

  Mama, Mama!

  Darim! she answers. Darim!

  The women look one to the other. Who is this man the Lady Maryam conjures from memory?

  She calls on and into the dark passageway within. Darim! Come. Come now. Come into the light!

  With each push, she cries this name, but her child suddenly reticent. She feels the fluid shunt him through the canal, but in the same moment the backwash returns him to darkness, warmth, a known universe. An ebb and flow between coming and retreating, a wish to see light but reluctance in the face of that which can blind. Confusing, this ebb and flow of a full moon tide. This coming, not coming.

  Where is my baby, where has my baby gone? she whimpers.

  Shhh, Fenula hushes. These things take time. Patience. Rest between contractions. He will soon be here.

  Again she speaks with his soul: Darim, come into the world, this place of light and wonder and magic, you will see. And you will delight in the love we can share when we both live in the light. Come now, my child. Let the wave carry you to shore where I am waiting to hold you close.

  Maryam floats back down from her place on high to hold him to her breast, and welcome him fully, bare skin to bare skin, eye to gentle eye.

  His name is Darim, she tells the women, named for the narrator of the hadith about travellers, wayfarers, pilgrims. The hadith which says:

  Whoever dedicates himself to God for forty days will find springs of wisdom sprout from his heart and flow on his tongue.

  The child nuzzles at her breast, content in his sucking, and the women bow their heads into the candlelight surrounding mother and child, the glow of their collective love radiating out into the desert sands where the men of the tribe sit in a circle around the fqih. Waiting, for just this sign.

  Twenty-eight

  There is a scroll and on it are written the names of people and places. There is a scroll and on it are drawn the journeys of pilgrims traversing landscapes of the heart.

  There is a scroll which Maryam sketched into existence as she awaited the birth of her child in that small desert village on a stony hillside above fields filled with henna and a grove of palms. A scroll of more than a metre of parchment which charted their journey from Granada south and across the sea to Ceuta, south seven days hence to Fez before the detour east and then south again – south-west, in fact – into the mountains and across the passes to the southern slopes of the Anti-Atlas which overlook the vastness of a desert stretching away into eternity, too huge for any map to contain.

  All this she drew. And later, when her child had grown to a boy, she showed him the story of their life.

  You are a map-maker? he marvelled. But how?

  She smiled. It is quite simple – we take a length of parchment and begin our story. Merchants, pilgrims, officials – all use road books such as these written by those who have trod the paths before. They help them find where they need to go, show them the things they will see along the way.

  But who is our book for, Mama?

  For us. To know where we have been, to dream whence we go. To help us on our next journey, she said, cuddling him close, knowing we have had the adventure before. It is a survey of our life and something to treasure for always.

  Is it for Father? Darim asked. So he knows where we have travelled?

  Yes, she agreed. It is for Father.

  His face puckered into a small frown. But why cannot Father’s journeys be part of the map so we may know where he has travelled?

  Alright, let us add Father’s journeys to the map. Let us pretend we are the famous al-Idrisi who made a map of the world for a Sicilian king, and include all the things we know, even if we have not trod the paths ourselves. And she brings her writing box, its fine-haired brush an artist’s delight.

  Here we will place Father’s city of birth, Toledo, far to the north of Granada, she explained and began to paint a small walled city.

  What is it like, Mama?

  I do not know. But he told me once it was a pearl, with fine walls, a grand citadel, fertile lands, gardens laced with canals and waterwheels to irrigate her orchards. His family had a fine estate.

  Then it sounds like your Granada.

  I suppose so.

  She drew Toledo to look like Granada, added Sevilla to the scroll and his journey between the two, charting his last known journey away, colouring the route to the border, the rocky paths up to the pass, over and into the other’s territory.

  But did he not return to Toledo? Darim considered. We could draw his horse carrying him north. All this way, he pointed.

  Alright, let us paint his horse carrying him far. Far to the north, just as we have come far south.

  She hesitated a moment, then turned to her son and held his shoulders firm. Know this, Darim. No matter where Father is, a part of him – and at this she brought his hand up and placed it on his breast – a part of him is held fast in here. In your heart. For you are come of love, born of love, live in love. And he is here with us, ever, in love. He is not gone, that is illusion. He is flesh and blood and bone and spirit spilling from every pore of your body.

  And if you ever wish to speak with him, she continued, stay silent, close your eyes, go deep inside yourself and open the door to your heart, and he will be there, waiting for you.

  Oh! She laughed and cried in the same moment. He will hold you so tight and with such love that you will gasp for breath and shout out in surprise! I know this. I know all this for the same happens within me. His love lives inside me, as indeed it lives inside you.

  Darim crinkled his brow, scratched his ear, asked: But what is love, Mama? How do I know love when I see it?

  She smiled, wiped her tears, kissed his forehead, said: Love is the light in our hearts – from the love we give, the love we receive. It is the bright white light of noonday sun on the Vega, the one which dissolves all shadows before its flood. It is the rainbow that smiles at us after rain, to show us the beauty of the world within.

  But I cannot see into my heart, Mama. How do I know that love is there?

  Do not forget that we cannot see air, the breath which fills us with life, but still it exists. Without it we could not live. Breathing is easy, yes?

  He nodded. It just happened. He did not have to do anything special to make it happen.

  So, she said, it is the same with love. You do not need to do anything special. Just as you stay open to breath filling your body, stay open to love filling your heart with light and wrapping you in a blanket of the warmest weft.

  She hugged him tight in her arms. Warm they were, together, loving. And he knew then it was as easy as breathing.

  Twenty-nine

  Six years, six years. Six years of peace

  In the life of a family. Six years, six years.

  Six years to herald a lifetime of six-year years.

  When,
after six summers, six winters, no one has appeared to disturb their idyll, she relaxes, laughs more freely – at the antics of the boy, at the work she makes with the women, at her own wariness of the past.

  Ah, but when we are not so vigilant, when we ignore the serpent’s poison, when we dam too solidly the river which flows ever to its source, it will insist on breaking our barriers with an intensity which serves to confirm the flimsiness of such constructions in the first place.

  And so she has a dream. Of a memory she had attempted to shield herself from through love of the boy. This sedentary love, this six years of stable and peaceable love. The memory is of their leave-taking and it fills her dream – the pressure of his life-filled hand in her own, the touch of her fingers to his lips a last time, while the words she recited come hard and penetrating, a ghazal pursuing her down dark corridors as she flees the prophecy in the voice of its author:

  The pennants of morning are unfurled,

  Night’s bell has tolled, it is time to travel on.

  No, she cries. No! We stay. We stay! And forces herself to wake, to end it there with her insistence on staying.

  Some weeks pass, and she is lulled into a state of motherly contentment once more. If you will not listen, the serpent says, eyes bright-fixed on his quarry, I must speak louder.

  Oh! Maryam wakes, piercing the sleep of Fenula and Darim both.

  What is it, Mama? What has happened?

  She looks to the boy, tousles his soft curls, tries to calm her frantic heart. Nothing, she says, forcing a smile. Just a silly dream. Back to sleep now, for the moon is still high in the sky.

  She settles the child at her side, rubs softly his back until again she hears the deep breaths of one who sleeps safe in love. But Fenula’s eyes are still on her, and rising, she follows her mistress from the house to the edge of the desert where they stand together, sisters sharing a new knowledge.

  I was in a room, a salon, perhaps a teteria, Maryam intones, searching the stony plain’s eastern horizon for some slim sliver of dawn to lighten the darkness of her heart. It was a place I knew not. I was with three men – they were foreign, dressed in strange garb, and had with them a dog. A curious spotted dog. White, with black spots. I have never seen such an animal, she admits.