A Riffians Tune (3 page)

I asked my mother, ‘Why didn't my father draw a talisman for the girl we passed?'

She ignored my question, as she often did.

For a while, Miloda looked as if she were sleeping, but later, she started to gurgle. ‘She's dying,' my father whispered in a panicked voice.

‘Don't say that!' hissed my mother.

As time went on, Miloda's body grew colder and colder, her breathing shallow and laboured. Then my mother succumbed to the horrible reality that Miloda was dead. The climate of despair and horror grabbed me, and I thought I would be next. My mother was crying, holding and cradling Miloda, her tears running freely like a river. My father sat hopelessly upon a large stone.

‘Why don't we cross the valley and find someone?' I whispered into his ear, watching him grieving and lost.

My father and I went across the valley looking for help. As we ventured deeper, we happened on a few sheep. ‘There must be someone near,' I said. I looked around, but saw nothing, no sign of life. As we went farther, a small house appeared like a matchbox in the distance. There were a few trees here and there, and we were relieved to see a house or something that looked like one. Without hesitation, we headed straight to it. I wondered how we would find our way back.

We got closer to the house, but before we reached the door a big, fierce black dog emerged, growling and baring its teeth. It was impossible to get past. My father shouted, ‘Mohammed! Mohammed! Mohammed! Is anyone living here?'

The front door opened hesitantly and an old woman appeared. Badly myopic, she craned her neck right and left, and called in a brittle voice, ‘Is it you? Is it you, Ahmed?'

A few seconds later, an old man with a white beard came out. He tried to talk, but his voice was gentle and weak. The frenzied dog made it impossible to hear or understand the man, who advanced toward us as he waved the dog off.

‘Do you need some bread?' he asked. ‘Some water?'

‘No, thank you,' answered my father.

‘I do!' I whispered.

‘What is troubling your heart?' asked the old man.

‘I am from the north of Morocco, taking my family to Tassan, and one of my daughters has passed away. Could you help me to bury her? Could you show me where the nearest Muslim cemetery is?' asked my father in a rasping voice.

‘Unfortunately, there is no Muslim cemetery nearby. There is no land left for a cemetery. The French own the land and the sky,' said the old man. ‘As you can see,' he continued, ‘I am an old man. I cannot walk fast, and I cannot carry any weight. My shoulders are stiff and constantly in pain, but I will call my nephew.'

He called on his nephew, living in the house with him, to fetch a man called Mr Kadour. ‘Mr Kadour,' said the old man, ‘is young, strong and very helpful. He doesn't live very far away from here.' Turning to his nephew, he said, ‘Go to Mr Kadour and tell him we need a pickaxe and shovel.'

‘Where is your family?' the old man asked.

‘Over there …' my father motioned and described the place.

‘Go back and wait for Mr Kadour to arrive,' the old man told us.

A while later, the old man arrived on his own, limping and tired but talkative and eager to help. As he moved around the cramped hut, he murmured, ‘God, You are the Almighty. God, You are the Almighty …'

Mr Kadour arrived, pickaxe and shovel on his shoulder. The old man's nephew joined him shortly after. Mr Kadour asked the old man if he knew us. ‘No,' said the old man, ‘They are migrants – victims of poverty and oppression. We have seen a lot of them this month. God bless us all. Once the girl is taken care of, buried, they will move on … that's all.'

Mr Kadour explained how far and difficult it was to get to the cemetery, but that said, in the last few years two or three people had been buried on the top of a high hill nearby. I watched Mr Kadour dig the grave. In the middle of the large opening, he dug a smaller slot-like hole. My father carried Miloda to the gravesite where they laid her deep into the hole as if she were a gift to the earth, and covered her with large stones like a roof. Mr Kadour shovelled the fresh earth on top of the stones.

I had watched Miloda stop breathing. I had touched her cheek and found her cold and stiff. I had seen my mother weeping and had watched Mr Kadour sweating and digging and, all alone, I had felt pain and sorrow, but I didn't understand death. I didn't know if it were the end of pain or just the beginning of it.

A
fter eight days of crawling along with the sky as our only shelter, sleeping rough and hungry, we reached Tassan, a small village with two short and modest streets facing each other. A cemented space dotted with a few trees split the streets.

It was midday. I looked right and left, saw no one, and then heard a church bell, but it stopped as suddenly as it had started. I spied two women crossing the street; both were wearing black, their heads covered with veils, entering a big building.

‘Can we join those ladies?' I asked my mother, while hoping for shelter and a place to rest.

‘That is not for us,' my mother answered.

I wished one of the women, who looked strong and energetic, were my mother and could save me from my miserable and tramp-like life. I wished one of them would kidnap me.

Fifteen miles from Tassan, we joined a ghetto filled with destitute people just like ourselves. We stepped into a shack, one single room built with wicker and mud, crumbling, infested and leaking. The local community was composed of labourers and peasants – people impoverished in their homeland. Their houses, which were no more than huts, lay scattered on the sides of two rolling hills with a gentle creek snaking between them. The hillsides were barren except for a few trees battered by the wind at the very top, but the banks of the creek were dotted with fig trees.

Starving, walking barefoot with my toes bleeding and my heels turning into hooves, I hated the shack, the ghetto and the locals. I wondered why my father had brought us here and why he had left my two sisters behind. Running away from death hadn't improved our lives or ended our pain.

Within a few weeks of our settling, the ghetto and the rural community were struck by a mysterious plague. Our neighbour, young, strong and newly married, died within eight days. A week later, his mother passed away, and then his father the week after that. A collective cry filled the air. Age made no difference.

Because he was a
hafiz
, my father was hired to give the dead their ritual washing. As no one else wanted the job, he enlisted me to help him. Lifting the dead from their bedding proved to be hard on me. I had neither the physical strength to do the job nor the inclination to touch the cadavers. Once they were put on wooden slats, I held the jug and poured the water on my father's hands while he gently washed the naked bodies; his hands swabbed them while I watched. My father showed no feeling.

One morning, I was deeply disturbed by the body of one brawny man in his late twenties, looking strong and solid as if he would awaken, lying naked to be washed. I could never shake off this image from my mind. As the body was too heavy for my father to move, I pulled it by the arm to move it onto the slatted platform to be washed. My father washed his entire body except his genitals.

‘Father, you missed his penis,' I reminded him.

He said, ‘We skip that.' Then, I understood there were some parts of human beings so private, no one should touch them, dead or alive.

‘Who killed him, Father?' I asked.

‘God,' he answered.

‘Does God kill?' I asked.

‘Yes,' he responded.

Sad, I went back to the shack and wondered on what basis God had made his decision.

My father was hired as a Koran instructor for children. On the side, he drew talismans for the sick, the dying, the troubled and those possessed by demons. He drew a talisman for a woman whose son was dying. While waiting for her to pick up her talisman, I opened it and looked at it. I saw nothing but scribbles on the piece of paper. I ran to my mother and said, ‘I can do the same. If anyone wants a talisman, tell them I can draw one!'

My father's remuneration was in kind: a few kilos of flour, a meagre amount of oil and some sugar.Everything was voluntary on the part of the community; every family was supposed to make its contribution, but hardly any of them could. To be paid in kind, to collect two or three kilos of flour and a small amount of oil proved to be a difficult and humiliating task. Like a beggar, going from shack to shack to collect some flour, my father started to cry when everyone apologised for not having any. People did not own any land, and there was no industry or tourism; all they could do was work as cheap labour for the French farmers who owned the land, exploited the locals and despised their culture.

To visit an old family friend who lived far away, my father borrowed our neighbour's donkey. He rode the donkey and I was seated behind him. We started on a sunny day, the road was long and dusty and the journey was boring. Before we reached the house, two Frenchmen in a white car caught up with us. Neither my father nor I heard the car. It crept up behind us, and bit by bit, it got closer and closer and tagged the donkey. I jumped off, and my father was left on the donkey alone. I grabbed the reins and tried to pull the donkey out of the way, but it was slow and stubborn. Wherever I dodged, the car followed us. It was half an hour of horror, expecting my father to be crushed. The French driver didn't want to kill us, but was having good fun. They terrified me, traumatised the donkey, revved their engine, finally passed and sped away. One of them opened the window and shouted at me, ‘Ah, ha, haaaaaa,
attention
!' as he passed, his face twisted with the remains of his mocking laugh. I wished I had a gun to chase them as he had chased us, but they were in a car and I was dragging a borrowed donkey.

Puzzled, I later asked my father and mother, ‘Why do French people have cars, tractors, houses and food to eat, but we don't?' I wanted a serious answer or explanation, but I didn't get one.

‘They have this world, and we will have the next, the eternal one,' my mother answered with conviction.

I disliked this answer. ‘I want a car!' I said, ‘or a bicycle.'

‘In heaven, you'll get a horse!' my mother replied.

‘I'd prefer a car,' I retorted. ‘The car does as I wish, and the horse does as he wants.' I rained questions upon my parents. ‘Why do French people have all they want to eat, and we don't? They eat meat, and we don't? They eat fish, and we don't? They laugh, and we don't? They play, and we don't?'

‘In heaven, we will have honey and dates,' answered my father.

‘Can I swap?' I asked.

‘If you swap, you will go to hell!' threatened my father, eyes flashing.

Still unconvinced, I persisted, ‘Why are they able to build cars and tractors, and we can't?'

‘They learned, and we didn't,' answered my father, with an air of acceptance that I didn't understand.

‘What has stopped us learning?' I asked.

My father refused the challenge, got angry, exploded in a temper and shoved me. ‘A devil in your head!' my father reprimanded, looking ready to smack me.

Watching the middle finger of his hand approach my mouth, I darted out of the shack. If my parents had been French, I could have joined those happy, well-dressed and fed French boys and girls. Children coming out of school with jotters and pencils was, for me, the most enviable position in which to be, and made me burn with frustrated jealousy. I had no choice but to live in my own world – a world where books didn't pay their way. To occupy myself, I went to a spot where there was wet clay in the earth, and made cars, tractors and lorries and left them to dry in the sun.

As neither our housing nor our material possessions improved, my father was persuaded to join a gang of professional thieves. He hesitated at first. ‘I am an old man … and a
hafiz
,' he said.

‘Join us. You are just as hungry as we are. You won't need to do anything hard.' The reward was too tempting for my father to resist.

The gang was efficient, well-organised and dangerous. They swooped down on a different farm every night. Rich French farmers were their targets. The operative gang ‘collected' the goods overnight, by moonlight. They had no rifles, but had elaborately crafted fakes made of bamboo covered with dark cloth – a useful trick to deter anyone trying to stop or follow them.

The stolen goods were crops: grapes, potatoes and wheat. While men ravaged and brought crops home during the night, women hand-threshed the wheat with pummels. Sadly, my mother was among them. Storage was in remote, hidden, cavernous pits, far from the prying eyes of the local police. Emboldened by their success the gang graduated to stealing animals, mainly cattle. Under the light of the full moon, they poached a massive brown bull. Not able to hide it and seized with panic, they spent the entire night butchering, packaging and dividing it democratically. Watching them destroying the bull, I wished the police would catch them. They bribed me to be a lookout and stay awake the whole night in the darkness, one kilometre from the house. I went to the junction, sat down in the darkness and the next thing I knew, it was morning.

The gang's camouflage was sophisticated, but not perfect. The excess of digested grapes created a hygiene problem. As there were no sanitary facilities, personal waste floated everywhere. Half-digested grapes among the human waste formed sickening piles. The police could have easily discovered what was going on.

The land of opportunity turned out to be a pit of misery. My mother was constantly ill, lying on the floor. My sisters caught malaria; I sat on them to stop the shivering, but the convulsions rocked me. They lost their hair, and I, left alone, wandered just outside our ghetto and suffered racist abuse from Algerian boys.

After two years, thanks to my mother, we decided to return home to the Rif mountains. One beautiful sunny morning, when not a single cloud interrupted the vast expanse of perfect blue, we started the long journey home, just as poor as we had arrived. Mr Morui, a family friend and Riffian native, took us to Maghnia. He had a wagon with two dark horses and worked as a transporter of goods: potatoes, tomatoes, fruits, vegetables and sometimes people. It was a long flatbed wagon, and other people were cramped in the back.