A Riffians Tune (22 page)

‘I lost a billy,' I said at dinner.

My mother pursed her mouth and peered at me. Salwa scowled at me. In a tense and humiliating atmosphere, I left.

‘He's not up to the task,' I heard Salwa say.

‘You weren't there to witness the drama!' I shouted to her from the other room. ‘You and Mother did a shabby job! You didn't shackle the billies properly, and you dare tell me I'm not up to the job!' I enjoyed the nonsense of Salwa's children, but not her sarcasm and snideness.

Though the night was short, morning arrived slowly, plodding like a turtle. With the money from selling the goat, Rabbia and I went to the sicklers' pick-up point. We arrived early and about twenty men, old and young, were sitting or standing around, waiting to be picked for work. At first, they scorned us. They didn't believe we had a job to offer, and, even if we did, that we could pay. I was ignored, and Rabbia became the centre of attention. Four men were needed, but all twenty competed aggressively to charm her. They pushed and spoke over each other. Rabbia forgot the task and enjoyed the excessive flirting.

When we picked the men and agreed on the wage, they requested to be fed and housed. Feeding wasn't a big problem, but it was impossible to offer accommodation to four men of dodgy character in a household made up of women and children. I refused. The deal collapsed and we headed to the field. While on our way, Rabbia dove into a moody silence. Tired from working, and impressed by the men, she wouldn't have minded filling the house with riff-raff.

‘Haven't you hired any sicklers yet?' asked Salwa at the end of a long day.

‘Not yet,' I replied.

‘This was the reason we sold the two billy goats and deprived the females from mating?' Salwa retorted, belligerently.

‘The sicklers wanted accommodation,' I replied, hoping she would understand.

‘No sicklers, no goats …' she said as she scurried away.

I looked at Rabbia and realised how angry and tired she was, sweat trickling down her cheeks, her underarms wet. ‘I need to go and see Salwa's husband tomorrow. He's a rough middle-aged man, and an accomplished farmer,' I told her.

I hurried to see Anzar first thing in the morning. I found him bored, not knowing what to do with himself, but his fate wasn't any different from other farmers when the summer harvesting was over. He was happy to see me, but looked anxious. ‘Is everything okay?' he asked, his children on his mind, I thought.

‘Yes,' I confirmed. ‘I need to hire some sicklers. Feeding them isn't an issue, but accommodation is.'

‘Do you really have money to pay?' he asked.

‘Yes, I have enough,' I answered.

With Anzar's help and without the distraction of Rabbia, I hired enough workers and we sickled the fields.

When all the fields had been cut, the real hard labour began. I gathered and carried on my back, like a donkey, piles of barley and wheat, and stacked them to be threshed and winnowed. I fastened the cow and donkey together with a yoke, then stood in the middle of a small field, held the reins of the yoke, and kept them orbiting around me all day long.

Under the stomping hooves, the grain and stalks split, the dust floated everywhere and penetrated my nostrils, my ears, lodged under my arms and between my legs in the folds of my penis. There were moments when I felt crazy, itchy, and wished there were a sea or river to jump in and never surface again.

While I was rotating the cow and donkey, Rabbia kept shovelling the stalks back into the circle with a pitchfork, and never stopped singing:

Mother, you are hard, blind and deaf,

My life was carelessly written

Discovered in a talisman,

Hanging on the tail of a dog.

THRESHING WAS A JOB,
but winnowing was a skill. I had to learn how to harness the east wind and winnow the threshed stalks and grain in the air with a pitchfork. The grain speckled the ground, the stalks were carried away by the wind and the chaff even farther. However, the east wind wasn't always present or blowing at the right strength. The west wind was useless. It would gust and die, and sometimes it collided with the east wind in useless wrestling. Rabbia and I spent hours and hours under the sun waiting to capture the east wind. Whenever we were blessed, I threw the stalks with gusto and Rabbia passed a huge and wide, heavy, prickly brush over the grain, for the east wind often failed to carry unthreshed stalks.

By the time we finished threshing and winnowing the grain, the summer began to wane. The sun started to lose its virility like an aged man, and the winds, like a mob, could be heard blowing the trees' branches, sounds that all farmers dreaded.

Farmers living in the high mountains and well versed in the ways of bees shivered when they saw the drones executed and expelled from the hive by their fellow bees. The massive execution was a measure of austerity and a sign of hard times to come.

In a seemingly confused hurry, summer tidied itself up, but no one was really happy to see it dying, despite the scorching heat. Before the summer breathed its final breath, I was free, with no specific job to do, but no money to go back to school. I avidly read every book I had. Rabbia, wanting to be a herbalist, started apprenticing to Mrs Malani.

‘
D
o you think one of Mrs Zainab's sons would like to be a sharecropper?' I asked my mother early one morning.

‘Her sons are not able, except maybe the middle one,' she said.

‘If he could farm our land, we would provide the cow, the donkey, the plough, and the seed,' I suggested.

My mother looked happy and hopeful, but preoccupied. ‘Sanaa wants to see me urgently. I want you to go with me.'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘I have an uneasy feeling. Her marriage is hell,' she replied. Clenching her teeth and without saying another word, she left the room.

I broke the day early and rushed to see Mrs Zainab and her son, Baja. Mrs Zainab lived with her five sons in a tiny one-room hut. It was not protected from the wind by garden walls or trees, or shaded in the summer. She and her children had been deprived from inheriting any land, for her husband had died before his father.

Mrs Zainab was happy to see me. She came out, gave me a welcoming smile, and was followed by an old, starved dog. I was struck by how tall she was and how skinny she looked, with painfully protruding cheekbones. Sadly, rumours around were that she had had an affair with the local
hafiz
, and for that reason, her women neighbours berated her.

‘What's in your heart?' she asked me.

‘I wonder if Baja would farm our land as a sharecropper?' I asked.

‘He's here,' she said and beckoned him. I had never had any contact with him. All I knew of him was second-hand. He came out and in complete contrast to his mother, was short, looked subdued, his shoulders looked perpetually shrugged, and he was clothed in black. He looked shy, but had a piercing voice.

His mother explained, and he smiled. ‘What would be my share in the crops?' he asked. (It was understood that most offers were one-fifth, and the best was one-quarter.)

‘One-third,' I offered.

He and his mother looked at each other and simultaneously nodded their heads. ‘You have my word,' promised Baja.

With Baja's words in my ears, I rushed home. ‘Mother!' I shouted, finding her outside the house. ‘Baja will work the fields for us!'

‘If we have rain,' she said cynically. She looked distracted, not really listening to me. She had been stirred by Sanaa's messages. As the summer was on its last breath and winter was nipping, my mother couldn't put it off any longer. Frightened of what Sanaa might ask of her, she insisted I should go with her.

Like Salwa, Sanaa had many children, six girls and two boys, not counting those who had died. But, unlike Salwa, her marriage had not been arranged. She had fallen in love with her husband while crossing the mountain and had sung several songs for him:

Wherever you are, I want to be,

Sharing the spoon, sipping the tea,

Food of my soul, light of light,

To be with you, no dark of night.

UNFORTUNATELY, SANAA'S ROMANCE
was short-lived. Her husband was tall, always smart, shrewd, a smooth talker, and Sanaa thought he was handsome. Sadly for her, he turned out to be a Casanova, but Sanaa wasn't a little creature ready to crawl into her shell and watch her husband have love affairs and a mistress a few doors down. She had hired every witch and sorcerer in the area surrounding the village, Zaio, to revive her husband's old romance with her, but they had all failed. She had paid many different witches to humiliate her husband by rendering him sexually impotent. The poor man had ingested many potions, and it was no wonder that he suffered from stomach disease, skin disorders and high blood pressure. Her husband was generous to himself and his friends, but frugal at home. Her limited allowance was sucked up by the witches.

Let down by witch doctors, she careened to vengeance. Not able to cool his carousing, she went for his brain.

‘Come with me,' she beckoned me, a dinner plate in her hand, and out we went. I thought she wanted to visit one of her friends on the other side of the village, but she headed to the donkey park, where donkeys were tied against the trees or anchored to the soil with stones. I couldn't make sense of her destination. In the middle of the park, surrounded by donkeys, she yanked out a kitchen knife and began cutting donkeys' ears off. She had cut six ears before I fully realised the extent of her barbarism, cutting the donkeys' entire ears off, not just the tips for seasoning. I stopped her by grabbing her knife-wielding hand. Disgusted, I went to the small park, and she went home with a plate full of ears.

Coming back in the afternoon, I found two meat
tagine
s, cooked, seasoned and ready to be served. Sanaa's husband came and brought a visitor with him. She fed them with donkey-ear
tagine
. Her husband and his friend stuffed themselves and continued their evening discussion. I gave Sanaa a dirty look, but she wasn't bothered.

‘I want his mind to match the donkey's brain,' she hissed. Sanaa had tried every Moroccan witch and witch doctor except Awisha, a Jewish witch and clairvoyant, domiciled in Melilla, a Spainish exclave on the northern coast of Morocco.

Sanaa knew about my desire to go back to school and my total lack of cash. ‘I will buy you a shirt, a pair of trousers and your coach ticket if you are brave enough to go to Awisha,' she said.

At first, I refused. ‘Awisha wouldn't help you,' I argued.

‘Nothing is beyond Awisha!' she answered, naïvely convinced.

I had no idea who Awisha was, where she lived, or how to reach her. ‘How can I find Awisha?' I asked.

‘Easy. Go to Melilla, the place where Moroccans congregate, and use your tongue.'

‘What does she look like?' I asked.

‘I don't know.'

‘How would I recognise her?'

‘She will recognise you.'

‘What will I tell her?' I asked.

‘She will tell you,' Sanaa replied. She wasn't worried that to look for Awisha, I might get lost or arrested, have to stay two nights, sleeping who knew where, provided she could put a lid on her lover.

Because I couldn't scratch a penny from anyone to go back to school, I agreed to do the dirty job. I succumbed to my need, but the prospect of facing two borders, Moroccan and Spanish, gave me nightmares since I had no passport or even a proper identity card.

‘Get up! Wake up! Get up! Don't miss the coach!' shouted Sanaa early the next morning.

With no food to start the day, I washed my hair with hand soap and took the earliest coach from Zaio to Nador. I paid the ticket collector, but didn't get my ticket. I thought the man would come back and give it to me, but he didn't. I reminded him, and he paid no heed, pretending to be busy fiddling with the large bag hanging around his neck like an albatross. Just before Nador, the coach changed ticket collectors. The new one asked passengers for tickets, which some had but others hadn't. Unfortunately, I hadn't. Those with no ticket were asked to pay from the coach's starting point, which created a riot. Luckier than some, I had two witnesses beside me who stood up for me. It was a ruthless and well-organised scam. I was happy to get off the coach.

I jumped on the next coach to Melilla and a world of difference hit me. The coach was packed with unveiled faces, young and old, speaking a mishmash of Spanish peppered with Tarifit. It ended its journey at the border, where Spanish and Moroccan police stood facing each other. The checkpoint was chaotic with no queue; passengers elbowed and jostled each other, and the atmosphere was unnerving. I followed the crowd, stuck closely to an old couple, and pretended to be their son. The old man showed his identity card, his wife moved forward, and I slipped by with her. The officer saw me and must certainly have thought I was an idiot, but my age was my saving grace.

In the ‘no man's land' between the two sets of border guards, I found a job, though it was short-lived. Returning Moroccans who had arrived in Melilla from Europe were illiterate. I helped to fill out their entry cards, for fees that were surprisingly far superior to what my sister had promised me. The Spanish police saw me filling forms and didn't mind letting me go back and forth. I made their job easier and they thought I was there to make some money. It was ticking toward one o'clock, the police looked tired and relaxed, and in those instants of obscurity, I disappeared on a bus toward the centre of Melilla, where I had never been before.

Not knowing where to get off, I stayed on the bus until it reached its final destination and was the last to get off. It stopped in a beautiful square between the sea and the main street. It felt like paradise to me. The wide boulevard was lined with sidewalk cafés, swaying palm trees, and big shops selling rows and rows of watches: Prima, Omega, and the rest.