Among the Faithful (10 page)

O
NLY EIGHT DAYS
before
‘el-Eed el-Kebeer'
, The Great Festival! Kalipha pounded upon the door this morning before I was up. I was told to dress quickly, not to wait for coffee: there was buying and selling of lambs for the sacrificial feast. I scrambled into my clothes and we made our way to the
fondook
at the outskirts of the market-place. The massive courtyard was already crowded with victims, but more were being driven in, their lumpy pink tails hanging like shawls from their backs. I have never heard such an uproar – the bleating, the baa-ing, the frenzied bargaining! Mohammed, shining with self-importance, strode up to us with the announcement that Sidi Hassein, his patron, had commissioned him to buy two fat lambs for the fête. He led us through the sea of grey backs to show us his selection. Kalipha plunged his hand through their wool and felt their heavy tails. ‘You have not chosen badly,' he said, secretly very pleased. While we stood there the patron himself appeared and approved of the choice. Then Mohammed was radiant!

We had our breakfast under the pepper trees alongside Hassein's shop. Mohammed sat upon the round mat he was making. His needle, a curved strip of polished wood, threaded with braided strands of dried grass-sped in and out. No need for his master's
‘Feesa! Feesa!'
Faster! Faster! Today Mohammed was, at least, the junior partner.

The fête was already in the air. Men discussed their purchases, and how much of the carcass they would give to the poor. The Koran prescribes three-fourths, but in this decadent age, according to Kalipha, it is customary to distribute ‘several morsels' and keep the rest for one's family.

The first day of the Great Fete! All morning the street has been a
rainbow
of children bound for the market-place. The girls in their long
futahs
, the brilliantly striped shawls that bind their hips, look like little women. Most of them are barefoot, some wear coloured slippers, some clogs and silver anklets. Others teeter along in ludicrously big French shoes. A few have compromised and are wearing clanking anklets
plus
the high-heeled shoes.

Small boys go in for the gimcracks that make the most noise – trumpets, snappers, firecrackers, ratchets, drums, bells, and whistles. The happy tumult of the market-place fills the whole town, but grown-ups are indulgent. ‘Let them, let them!' laughs Kalipha who ordinarily hates a rhythmless racket,
‘el-Eed el-kebeer
is principally for the children!'

The streets last night were tense until the cannon boomed. Then the mandolines, the singing, the syncopated clapping began. The fête was on! Coffee-houses had been given permission to remain open all night. They brimmed with gaiety – their own peculiar brand that is never obtrusive or rowdy. The main street had become a cheerful lamp-lit passage across which the clients of rival coffee-houses conversed. The lanes and by-streets, a spooky catacomb through which one hurries after dark, were starred with festive doorways.

We visited all our favourite cafés, drinking innumerable coffees, teas and syrups. Convivial lights rimmed the market-place, one whole side of which was being converted into a playground. They were setting up the rickety paraphernalia – the swings, the little Ferris wheel, the valiant wooden horses. Children who should have been in bed ran about gleefully anticipating the dawn.

In the dim crypt between the double gate, which is a saddle
souk
by day, bedouins were gathered and one of them was singing to the flute. They have their own songs, even their own mode of singing. There is an eerie, haunting quality to their voices – a quavering
far-off
sweetness – as if they were singing under the water. To the same weird little melody the boy improvised endless stanzas, borrowing his themes from his delighted auditors. He sang the praises of one man's new burnous, of another's horse that had excelled in the last Fantasia.
As we took seats in the ring he wove us in, welcoming ‘Madame' and ‘Courage', not neglecting to mention the nosegay over his ear.

All at once the music stopped. The town criers were abroad; all ears were cocked for the pronouncement. It was decreed that the women should visit the cemeteries during the morning, the men in the
afternoon
. Any man found there out of hours would be imprisoned. The order was received with unanimous approval, and the boy took up his song.

Kalipha was all for making a night of it, and he probably did after I went to bed. I slept but little, however, for the carnival beneath my window never flagged and at daybreak I awoke to the same joyous hubbub, only now it was the children!

It is the time of the pilgrimage. The Holy City is full of strange faces, men who have journeyed here from all over northern Africa.
*
They are conspicuous for their new-looking raiment. ‘
Voilà
a pilgrim from Gabes,' Kalipha will remark, ‘notice the way he is wearing the burnous? And there are three from Touggourt!'

‘But how can you tell ‘

‘Sometimes by the burnous, sometimes the robe, but mostly by the headgear.
Voilà, le turban de Sousse! C'est chic, n'est-ce pas?'

During the week or two that they remain, they are lodged in the precincts of the Mosque of Sidi Sahabi, in the courtyard of which a coffee-house has been set up for their diversion. Favourite taverns are neglected these evenings; the men all flock to Sidi Sahabi.

Late one afternoon, days before the influx, we were sitting outside a coffee-house at the outskirts of the City, idly watching two figures approach by the road that crosses the plain. They were carrying staffs, coming slowly as if they were footsore. ‘Pilgrims from Morocco' exclaimed Kalipha as they limped toward us. ‘Praise the Prophet!' They stopped at our table and asked for directions and water. They were barefoot, darkened by the sun, their white garments grimed with dust – they had been two months and a half on the road! The spokesman
was skinny, short, rather negroid; his talk sounded strange to my ears. Even Kalipha had difficulty understanding the dialect. The taller one, of finer features, kept his eyes on the City as Kalipha pointed their way and instructed them to ask near the Gate for their fellow-countryman Abdallah, the Tea-maker. We gave them our good wishes and watched them trudge across the market-place and pass beneath the ancient gate that had admitted so many thousands like them.

While Believers pour in by bus, train, caravan and automobile, there are only a few from Kairouan this year on pilgrimage to Mecca. The long drought early in the spring has impoverished the City, so that, instead of the usual exodus, to her shame and sorrow, there is only a handful. With envy we hear that a small place of prosperous olive trees is sending five hundred! One of Kalipha's cousins, an elderly man who has put by all his life for the sacred journey, left this morning amidst a mighty fanfare. Months ago he arranged his worldly affairs as if he did not expect to return. He drew up his will and appointed Kalipha the guardian of his family during his absence.

We were invited to his home last night, the eve of his departure. Mohammed and Kalipha joined the menfolk at the mosque and Eltifa, Fatma and I went directly to Sidi Ali's dwelling where scores of women were gathered. The usual curiosity, I was passed around, handled, and screamed at – on the supposition that if they shout I will surely
understand
. Eltifa found an opportunity to whisper that Kalipha's first wife, Aisha, was present. I spotted her at once, a large, rather florid woman who kept rolling her eyes at me as if to say, ‘Oh, the things I could tell you!' With each new set of arrivals there was a flurry, a jangle of welcoming cries, and I escaped to a corner where two little boys made room for me. They were dressed alike in crimson robes. We were admiring one another's clothes, they the fur on my collar, and I, the crescent-shaped pockets on their miniature vests, when there was a rush for the stairs, the women scrambling into their
haïks
as they fled. The men were coming! I was hauled up and away to the roof where we knelt around the low parapet looking down upon the court. I was surrounded by phantoms – black and white shapes crouched or standing in startling groups against the starlight. ‘If only Beatrice were here!' I kept thinking.

It was a tremendous farewell! The large court filled rapidly. There was all the turbulence of a marriage procession, the shouting, the shrilling of pipes, the throbbing of tom-toms. Turbans and fezzes formed a ring eight or nine heads deep. One well-wisher after another stepped briskly into the centre to chant a single line, whereupon the rest would heave a mighty chorus, while the aerial cries of the women fluttered off in ribbons. My knees were raw by the time the men finished with a lusty prayer that all the guests assembled might
experience
the bliss of pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet.

This morning the pilgrims were conducted to the station; thousands of them from all over Tunisia will embark tonight on the same boat. Kalipha says that everybody is talking of something that happened as the procession swept through the town. One, Sidi Gadoona, a draper, sitting before his shop, dashed in and got his money, locked the door, and even as he ran he was putting on his street-robe to join the future
hahj
on their fateful journey.

Yesterday I learned with dismay that Baba Hahj has been hurt because I have not yet visited his household. So it was arranged that this afternoon I should make my call upon his wives.

Papa Hahj, or ‘Babelhahj', as we call him, is probably Kalipha's closest friend. He is a likeable little man with a quick smile and merry eyes. There is nothing about him, however, except of course his title, to indicate that he has performed the sacred pilgrimage, or, that he is, as Kalipha insists, ‘very, very religious'. The other
hahj
I have met dress only in white and with the honoured prefix have assumed a certain sobriety and dignity, neither of which distinguish Babelhahj in the least. His size and his humorous face are against him. Then, too, he is such a little dandy! His big gaudy turban makes him look top-heavy, his street robe is always conspicuous for its stripes and now that mustard-coloured, mail-ordered shoes are the fashion he is sporting a pair.

Babelhahj occupies a unique position in the eyes of the menfolk of Kairouan for he has achieved the impossible: conjugal felicity with two wives under the same roof! ‘How does he do it?' I have often
heard them ask. Kalipha has told me as much as he knows of his friend's affairs. Babelhahj has been married to his first wife, Haleema, for over twenty years. Their one child, a girl, died at the age of twelve, and Haleema never succeeded in bearing another. In her compassion for her husband she implored him to take another wife, but his respect for her was such that for years he refused to do so. She was overjoyed when he finally consented to marry Macboobah, a much younger woman, who promptly presented him with a daughter and is again pregnant. All summer I have hoped that Babelhahj would invite me to visit his remarkable household, only to learn that he is offended because I have not done so!

He and Kalipha escorted me to the house. (The latter, of course, did not enter, but waited for us in the café across the road.) In the entrance passage a little girl came running to fling herself into
Babelhahj's
arms. Obviously, she had been dressed up for this occasion. An uncouth Western frock-all open work and ribbons-hung below the tops of her buttoned boots; on her head was a rakish pearlstrung fete cap. The women were in the court to greet me with outstretched hands and a cordial ‘Welcome in the name of Allah!'

Babelhahj explained that each wife has her own complete household. I was first taken into Macboobah's, a spacious room, as clean as wax. The doorway, the windows, the bed, were hung with spotless curtains; Kairouan carpets brightened the tiled floor. As in every Arab home that presumes to be at all
de luxe
there stood the ugly French dresser and upon it the inevitable flowers under a glass bell, but it was nice to find the whitewashed walls adorned with warrior-saints on smoking chargers.

I felt extremely self-conscious sitting above them on the only chair; I missed my little interpreter and almost regretted that I had refused to let Mohammed beg time off from his work. In desperation, at last, I abandoned my high seat and joined them upon the floor. I think we all felt better. Their French is even less than my Arabic, but we talked – now that I think of it, it's amazing the ground we covered! I learned that Kadusha is two years old, that she adores her crystal hat and never willingly removes it, that her mother wants her to learn to read and write. I was told, too, that Haleema's brother is a letter-carrier; that
the women had woven the rugs upon which we sat. They demonstrated how one sits in front of the loom weaving, while the other embroiders in back. I, in turn, told them – don't ask me how – that I am single and alone, that I write stories for children, and that I love Kairouan. We got on famously! Then we crossed the court to Haleema's house. The low table, which they now set before me, was covered with a towel. ‘How Mohammed will mourn!' I thought, as Macboobah lifted the cloth disclosing dishes of home-made cakes – mealy
baklowa
with flaky crusts, date-stuffed
mahkroods
, and little cones of short-bread. My ‘Share in the name of Allah' provoked only urges to begin. One is always expected to eat in solitary state,
‘kief-kief sultana'
, (like a sultana) as I expressed it, which made them laugh and pat their chests with pleasure. Haleema brought the tiny cup and saucer, where upon Macboobah must jump up to fetch her rosewater with which to flavour my coffee. That set Haleema rummaging for her scent and I was drenched with amber. As I ate, there was an easy, pleasant flow of conversation among my host and his wives; Kadusha sat between her two mothers watching me. I suspect that Haleema is a bit indulgent for when I offered Wistful-Eyes a cake Macboobah smiled and shook her head, but Haleema, with an Oh-come-Mother-just-one look, let the little girl choose which.