by Esther Freud
Chapter Seventeen
Luna and Umbark lived in one small room in a street in the Mellah not far from our old house. Luna opened the door to us dressed in a plain white caftan and without her veil. Her face was round and golden white and her blue eyes watered when she smiled.
‘Come in, come in,’ she said, leaning down to kiss me.
There was nothing in the room except a mattress covered in woven rugs and a mijmar on which an iron pot bubbled and stewed, giving out the delicious smell of tajine.
‘Please, I am not expecting you to fast also.’ Luna glanced at the pot. ‘So I have made something for your lunch.’
Mum’s colour rose. ‘I should have told you, during Ramadan, I think . . . I have decided, I am also going to fast.’
‘And pray?’
Mum paused. ‘Yes, and pray. In fact I am very interested . . . how shall I say it? I want to become a Sufi.’
‘Does that mean I won’t be allowed to have lunch either?’ I wanted to know.
‘The Sufis do not pray five times a day like us,’ Luna warned, ‘they pray seven times.’
Luna set down a tray of tiny honey-filled pastries in front of me.
‘Where’s Umbark?’ I asked her.
‘He was called out to a woman who is sick.’
‘Is Umbark a doctor?’
‘All the Gnaoua have special healing powers that have been passed down through each generation,’ Luna said proudly. ‘They stay by the side of the sick and pray and play their drums. They burn incense in the mijmar until the sick one goes into a trance and then they beat the devil out.’
‘How long does it take?’ I crammed a pastry into my mouth.
‘That is never the same. Sometimes a few hours and sometimes days and days.’
‘And do they see the devil actually coming out?’
‘No, they just see the sick one becoming well again.’
‘Even if you get bitten by a scorpion?’
‘Especially if you get bitten by a scorpion. The Gnaoua have magic powers to draw the poison out.’
I wanted to ask more questions about scorpion bites and if there was a cure for dog ticks and whether or not you could die from body lice, but Mum wanted to talk to Luna about the Sufi. Luna said that Sufi was the unorthodox side of Islam. The mystical side.
‘During Ramadan the Sufis begin their prayers, like us, at sunset. They pray after dark, at sunrise, at midday, mid-afternoon and then again at sunset. And’ – Luna screwed up her eyes in concentration – ‘they perform a ritual washing of nose, ears and arms before each prayer and it is important to remove your shoes.’
‘Oh Mum, please . . .’ I was prepared to beg. ‘Please don’t be a Sufi.’
Mum took me with her when she went to buy her prayer mat. There were thousands to choose from, packed so tightly in multicoloured columns of wool that it seemed impossible to choose one without disturbing a whole tower. Mum was dressed in her haik, pulled halfway across her face for the occasion. As we passed down the lanes of carpet, the stallholders called to us, sliding the rugs expertly out and holding them up for our inspection.
She chose a small wool mat. ‘So I can take it with me when I go out,’ she said.
I wanted her to choose a thick woven carpet, too heavy to leave the house.
‘Children are always embarrassed by their mothers.’ She guessed the reason for my dragging feet. She held the mat rolled like a scroll under her arm. ‘My mother used to put her lipstick on on the top deck of the bus.’
I kicked against the road as we walked and continued to resist the warm fingers of her hand as they reached for mine.
For weeks the city was calm and quiet and hungry during the day, but each evening once the prayers from the mosque had faded into night a party broke out. Mum was keen to abide by the rules of Ramadan, and she rose at dawn, washed, prayed, and got back into bed. Sometimes I would wake to hear her mumbling a mantra of long vowels, a little like the song I had sung for Charlie on the Barage, and that usually succeeded in lulling me to sleep again.
Mum managed to persuade Linda to join her in her fast, but as far as praying was concerned Linda said it was bad enough being on a diet that didn’t make you any thinner, without having to get up at the crack of dawn to mumble words you didn’t even understand. Bea, Mob and I were allowed to eat and drink whatever we liked as long as we did it behind closed doors.
Mum looked on with a scornful smile as Linda spooned apple purée into Mob’s open mouth. ‘One for you and one for . . . me. One for you and one for . . . MUMMY.’
‘It’s not eating,’ Linda said defiantly, ‘it’s just encouragement.’
At night Mum broke her fast with a bowl of harira at a café in the Djemaa El Fna. We sat up late into the night drinking syrupy mint tea and talking to the people who drew chairs up at our table: men from the Gnaoua we had come to know through Umbark, Linda’s blind poet who would occasionally appear, and Akari the Estate Agent, always in a bustle of excitement over what he called his ‘business’, and who would inevitably greet us with detailed reports of Snowy, our old black hen and stories of her seven newly hatched chicks.
‘Do you think she’d remember us if we came to visit?’ Bea asked him after a story which involved Snowy rescuing his youngest child from a dog.
Akari clapped his hands and turned hurriedly away to tell Mum about an outside cinema he had just built in his home village. Our darkest suspicions were confirmed.
‘Snowy’s been eaten,’ Bea proclaimed and she made me promise not to talk to Akari ever again.
Bea and I left Mum drinking tea and nibbling on a lump of majoun and wandered off to play games in the square. Hideous kinky tag was still our favourite, and we kept a good eye out for Luigi Mancini at all times.
Mob was usually too sleepy even to be carried and Linda would wrap her in a blanket and lay her under the table. On nights when my eyes began to swim and my legs shiver with the cold, I draped myself in Mum’s burnous and, using the hood as a pillow, crawled down beside her.
One night as we stumbled home, me moaning on my mother’s hand to be carried, we found that we were being followed. A man trailed us through the streets, the shadow of his peaked hood looming darkly against the walls of houses. We hurried on, our ears sharp and listening for the flapping of the man’s babouches as they kept a steady pace with ours. Mum gripped my hand, and Mob was hoisted on to Linda’s other hip. Bea’s skipping walk became a run as she twisted in her tracks to check our chances of escape. I flew on my mother’s hand, my fingers white in hers, the toes of my sandals sparking as they grazed the road.
Breathless, we reached the tall doors of the hotel and as we slid through into the safety of the courtyard, Bea stopped and called out, ‘Look, it’s only the Fool.’
‘It’s the Fool, it’s the Fool,’ I repeated in a swirl of relief and the Fool bowed his head and raised his hands in a greeting.
The Fool became our private escort, following us home if we stayed out after dark, so that soon we were so accustomed to his silent presence we wondered how we’d ever dared go anywhere alone.
Bea continued to go to school. She knew the name for every picture in her book, even the words for lampshade, wheelbarrow, and a plaster cast for when you break your arm.
‘I’ll never be allowed to go to school,’ I said, watching as Bea skirted the edge of the playground. There was a fight between two boys from the school next door and a third, who stood on the outside kicking the one who was losing. He was kicking him in the back of the knees. Bea dodged the fight and arrived at the gate where Mum and I were waiting.
‘How was it today?’ Mum asked.
‘All right.’ Bea swung the cotton sardine bag she still used as a satchel.
We followed her out into the street.
‘But I won’t ever, will I? Will I?’ I insisted on an answer.
‘What?’
‘Be allowed to go to school?’
‘Not quite yet,’ Mum said to my secret r
elief, but I persisted anyway.
‘But when then?’
‘When you’re a little older.’
‘When will that be?’
‘I don’t know at the moment.’ She was losing patience.
‘Never,’ I muttered under my breath.
I thought about the boy with the stick and the girl who was too frightened to ask to go to the toilet. Never, I decided. Then I began to worry about how if we ever did go home I wouldn’t know anything. Not how to read. Or write my name. Or tell the time. Or anything.
Bea and I were eager to arrive at the hotel before Mum’s next prayers were due. A few days before, on our way back from the flea market by the old gate of the city, Mum had stopped abruptly, looked up at the sun and, unperturbed by the fact that she had forgotten her prayer mat, knelt down in the street to pray. She mimed her intricate washing procedures and stretched out her arms to Mecca. Without a word we hid ourselves behind a wall. We agreed firmly that, if asked, we’d never seen or heard of her before. From time to time we peered cautiously out, only to see the same straggly bunch of children watching from a distance and the occasional trader slow down his laden donkey to throw her a quizzical look. I told Bea about Mum’s mother putting lipstick on on the top of a bus, and she agreed with me that it didn’t sound such a terrible thing to do.
‘She didn’t know how lucky she was,’ she said.
Finally Mum stood up and dusted down her clothes. We crept out from behind our wall and, punishing her with a vow of silence, kept our distance on the journey home.
Chapter Eighteen
It was a drizzly, warm grey afternoon when we met Aunty Rose. Bea and I were carrying fruit home from the market, and I was in the middle of a story about two sisters who get adopted by a kind old man in silver-and-gold waistcoasts, when we were stopped short by a large, laughing lady in a flowery dress.
‘And where are you off to in such a hurry?’ she said, looking into our basket of oranges. ‘Not running away, I hope?’
Her voice was happy at the end of every sentence and she talked as if she had known us for a long time. Her round cheeks were crossed with tiny pink lines that wrinkled up when she smiled and her soft, grey hair was piled high over her head and held in place by a multitude of pins.
‘Well and I haven’t even introduced myself,’ she said, placing her hands firmly on her hips and smiling. ‘Rose. But to you’ – she fixed us with a tiny frown – ‘Aunty Rose.’
‘Aunty Rose,’ we both mumbled obediently.
‘And now, I think you should both come back to my house and we’ll have a glass of lemonade.’
‘We could have a biscuit too,’ I added quickly, ‘because Mum says we don’t have to fast if we don’t want to.’
Bea kicked me.
Aunty Rose took my hand and said ‘I should think not too’ very indignantly and she marched us off down the street.
Aunty Rose lived in a house that had shrunk. It must once have been on the same level as the street, but now you had to climb down two steep steps to go through the front door. Aunty Rose bent her head and stooped low as she unlocked the door with an iron key, only straightening up once she was inside. All the rooms were white and small and the windows were arches through which you could see people’s legs up to the knee hurrying past in the courtyard outside.
Aunty Rose had furniture. In our house everything was on the floor but Aunty Rose had a wooden bed with legs and a table at which you could sit on high-backed chairs. There was a checked cloth on the table and a jug of yellow roses.
She made lemonade with white sugar and lemon juice. She poured us each a glass with a green sprig of mint floating on the top and set down a plate of wafer-thin biscuits. The biscuits tasted of almonds and melted in your mouth.
‘You never know when you’re going to have company,’ Aunty Rose smiled, smoothing her dress over her lap. She took a long drink of lemonade and asked, ‘Excited about tomorrow?’
We looked at her. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Good grief, girls,’ Aunty Rose snorted with amusement, and then, softening, as if moved to pity by our state of ignorance said gently, ‘Christmas.’
‘Christmas? Tomorrow?’
We were stunned.
‘Cross your heart and hope to die,’ I tried to make her swear.
‘What . . . Christmas when Father Christmas comes?’
‘How do you know for definite?’
‘When you hang up stockings?’
‘But we haven’t even got a present for Mum.’ Bea was worried.
Aunty Rose convinced us with her tree in a bucket in the corner of the sitting-room. It was a baby pine with no decoration. By its side were arranged small clay figures and a brown clay cradle with a cow. ‘Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus,’ Aunty Rose explained. ‘I made them myself.’
I would have liked to stay and learn how to make things out of clay, especially the animals, but Bea was in a sudden hurry to be gone. Aunty Rose packed up the remaining biscuits and gave them to Bea to carry. ‘I’ll only eat them otherwise,’ she said, patting her stomach. She made us promise to visit her again so that we could collect our Christmas presents.
‘She didn’t say “present”,’ I pointed out to Bea once we were outside, ‘she said “presents”.’
Bea was preoccupied. ‘What are we going to get for Mum?’
All I could think of was a clay drum.
‘A clay drum?’ I suggested.
‘No.’
Hard as I tried I couldn’t think of anything else. We walked in silence through the streets away from Aunty Rose’s house, surreptitiously eating biscuits and trying to avoid the swishing tail of a donkey that was walking just in front. In the Djemaa El Fna we searched for anything that might transform itself into a possible present for our mother. There were Berber women selling bracelets with blue stones and a man from the mountains with a cloth covered in pendants of carved amethyst.
Bea counted our money. It was the money left over from shopping. Thirty-five centimes. We looked at the spice stalls and the loaves of black bread, the water melons, the pomegranates and potatoes, the almonds and peanuts in their shells, the pumpkin seeds, pistachios and chick-peas. Then I saw it. A stall that had never been there before. A stall of ripe, red strawberries.
‘Strawberries!’ Bea’s voice was a whisper of admiration.
The strawberries were sold in wicker cornets. A cornet cost fifty centimes. Bea asked if we could buy half a cornet but the man said no. She tried to swop two oranges to make up the extra fifteen centimes but the strawberry man wasn’t interested. We gazed longingly at the strawberries for nearly half an hour, hoping to be taken pity on. Eventually we gave up.
As we walked despondently away through the square we saw the same woman as before dozing by her pile of oranges.
‘Come on.’ Bea pulled me towards her. A row of people squatted by their makeshift stalls. ‘Come on.’
We arranged our six oranges, carefully balancing them into a pyramid, and when we were satisfied with the display we sat proudly back and waited. Waited for business to begin. Bea said that if we sold each orange for five centimes we’d only have to sell three oranges to have enough money to buy the strawberries.
We made bets on the passers-by. ‘I bet the fifth woman who passes will stop and buy . . .’
‘What?’
‘Three oranges.’
When the fifth woman hurried past, eyes averted, we started again.
‘I bet . . .’
We’d been playing this game for what seemed like a very long time when we realized the fifth woman walking directly towards us was Mum. She was approaching too fast for us to get up, pack up our oranges and run, so we bent our heads, letting our hair hang down over our faces, and pretended to be deep in conversation. Bea in Arabic, me in the language I had perfected for the singing of my songs – something I now used as a way of acquiring otherwise unobtainable possessions. Mum’s ankles swished under her haik as she passed just feet in f
ront of us. She passed our stall and strode purposefully on, stopping only to buy a loaf of bread. Then she rounded a corner and disappeared into the maze of narrow streets that led away from the square.
We were so busy discussing our triumph of disguise that it took some time to realize we had a customer. It was the Fool. He had on a new djellaba, and since he danced with the Gnaoua every afternoon and was their friend he also wore something underneath. He bought one orange. Bea let him have it for four centimes. He sat with us while he ate it, sucking the juice out through a hole he made with his thumb. He only had one tooth. It was brown and pointed and was right at the side of his mouth. Bea asked him what had happened to his other teeth, but he shook his head and said he never had any other teeth. ‘Just this one, only ever this one.’
The Fool was still sucking on his orange when a woman stopped and began to barter. She wanted to give us ten centimes for four oranges. Bea refused to sell unless we got twenty. Finally a deal was struck: four oranges for fifteen centimes. When she had gone, we peeled the remaining orange and split it three ways before going off to buy our strawberries.
Convinced that I’d never really been asleep I woke at dawn to inspect my stocking, which was in fact one of Linda’s babouches with the heel flattened down. I had chosen Linda’s shoe because Linda had the biggest feet. It was dark in the room and I had to search silently with my hands for the shoes which we’d left propped up near the door for Father Christmas. I needn’t have worried so much about there not being a chimney, because as my eyes became accustomed to the dark I saw that the babouche had been filled.
‘Bea.’ I shook her awake. ‘He’s been.’
I wanted to tell her that there was a long, thin packet of something in the shoe that smelt of rose petals, but I knew she’d be angry if I ruined any element of her surprise. She jumped out of bed and ran to open the door. Maybe she was hoping to catch a last glimpse of Father Christmas as he disappeared down the steps by the toilet in his red coat with the white fur edging. Through the open door the morning filtered in in pale green banana-leaf-shaped patterns and buzzed with the chatter of waking birds, stretching their wings in the courtyard. The occasional crow of a cock hung mournfully across the roofs.
