Among the Faithful (14 page)

After the
sahoor
, our last meal, when Kalipha, very reluctantly, took me home, the revelry was still going on, but behind closed doors, doubtlessly out of deference to Madame. Occasionally on the dim stairs we would meet a young man of good family; Kalipha would avert his eyes as the other slipped hastily past us. In such circumstances, one must never, never mortify a man by recognition.

My new attitude towards Kalipha was becoming increasingly hard to maintain. Once I began to see the humour of my command performance, angry resentment was done for, and all the affection I felt for my friend surged back with increase because I now knew him better. It was my little cat, of whom we were both absurdly fond, that made it hardest to hold out against Kalipha’s blandishments.

Like all the black cats I have ever known, Kiddypussy was an out and out individualist, and, like any cat that is made much of, he was articulate and knowing. ‘He talks. I swear he talks!’ Kalipha often marvelled. His own household had always included a couple of furtive, half-wild, negligible felines, but never had he known the like of this one! ‘
Mais vous savez, il n’est pas un chat!
’ he would solemnly assure
me. In short, Kiddypussy was in a fair way of becoming legendary among the Arabs who were perfectly ready to believe him to be three parts djinn.

It was on a morning toward the middle of Ramadan that Kalipha came in with boiled liver. I greeted him briefly and turned back to my work. He waited in silence until Kiddypussy had polished the plate. ‘Was the liver to your taste, my little monsieur?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me, have you eaten well? Eaten until the stomach is round like a melon? Dined, in effect, like a prince?’ He kept this up until the cat left off washing his face and threw his whole weight against Kalipha’s leg. ‘Ah, that is better!’ he said approvingly, gathering him to his lap. ‘For whether you have eaten well or badly, my friend, politeness is the principal thing in the life. And now, give me your ear for a little moment. Sit down, that is right, and listen well, if you please, for my heart is heavy, heavy, Kiddypussy, and who have I but you to tell of my misery?’

The understanding between the two was uncanny! From the tail of my eye I saw that the cat had obediently settled himself and had assumed, under the even strokes of the brown hand, quite a meditative air.

‘I assure you, my friend,’ Kalipha continued, ‘I walk about like a man condemned. Abdallah, Eltifa, they speak to me, I do not hear. “His thoughts are on pilgrimage,” they say. Ah, yes, they know my despair! I walk, I sit, I make my little purchases, I prepare the
fatoor
, but always it is as if somebody else were wearing these garments, this robe, this vest, this fez. This morning, while I was marketing, you understand, I stepped in front of a camel – a camel high as a minaret – enormous – a veritable
chameau de bataille
, I assure you. They seized me by the skirts not a second too soon! But whether I live or die, Kiddypussy, it is all the same to me. Will you visit me sometimes at Sidi Abdelli? I shall be sleeping beneath the cold earth …’ A few minutes more of this and I had either to laugh or to cry, so I laughed, we both laughed, and Kiddypussy, as if he perfectly understood, jumped from Kalipha’s lap into mine!

Oh the relief of being friends again! Reconciled, without any mention of moving, – decidedly, we had both triumphed! I had not
long, however, to cherish this illusion. Two days after our reconciliation, quite early in the morning, there was a knock at the door and Kalipha came in followed by his friend Sidi Brahim, a
spahis
or policeman, and Sidi Sallah, Tahar’s half-brother who ran the restaurant downstairs. All three had the look of bringing me very bad news. ‘
Ma pauvre petite
,’ Kalipha sighed as he seated himself, ‘you did not close your eyes all night!’

‘But I slept very well!’ I said, truthfully.

‘Impossible!’ they cried out aghast. I had not been molested? Nobody had tried my door? I had not heard? The fighting? The screams? Not even the shots? Why, between three and four, this place was a madhouse! Jealous clients doing battle up and down the corridor – the women tearing around, hanging out of the windows screeching for help – a mob on the stairs! The revolver shots were heard in the French town!

Up to this point they had all talked at once. ‘Unhappily,’ went on Sidi Brahim very gravely, ‘Monsieur the commissaire has heard of the
scandale
. But what would you, he is not deaf! This morning I was summoned before him and – and – but it is necessary that I tell you the truth – I was charged with the responsibility of moving you to safer lodgings. You will pardon me, Mademoiselle, I do only my duty which, Allah in His wisdom knows, is utterably detestable to me! Permit me to counsel you, Mademoiselle,’ he lowered his eyes apologetically, ‘it would be wise to move at once.’

‘At once!’ I cried, ‘this minute? But where shall I go!’

‘I assure you from my heart,’ soothed Kalipha, taking my hand, ‘there is absolutely no cause for anxiety. Your good friends have settled everything. Sidi Brahim,’ he put his hand on the other’s
shoulder
, ‘came directly to me. “The situation is such-and-such” said he “what can we do?” Oh, I tell you, Sherifa, he was distracted! So together we found you a house. Indeed, we have already persuaded the landlord – Sidi Taïb who has his shop in the saddle
souk
– to waive the quarter lease and allow you to pay by the month. As for furniture – Sallah, here, has already laid the situation before Sidi Tahar who has said you may have the use of everything in this room, without charge, for as long as you need them. Tell me, am I right or wrong, Sidi
Sallah?’ (Sallah smilingly swore he was right.) ‘So, my little one,’ Kalipha declared, ‘all you have to do is put Kiddypussy in this bag and stroll over to your new home. And what a beautiful little house it is! You will see –
un vrai chateau!
’ His effusion was put an end to by a loud knocking and Ali stuck his head in to say that the donkey awaited below. ‘Then come, let us go!’ Kalipha cried gaily, whereupon, in the same spirit, they all fell to carrying out my table, bed, chairs, and wash-stand. Within an hour I was moved.

I
SUPPOSE I WOULD
have disliked any house I had moved into under the same circumstances, even if it had been a ‘château’, which mine assuredly was not. It was the typical lower-class house, a hollow square of one storey situated in a foul little lane solid with dwellings more or less like mine. On the stone lintel were graven the Arabic characters, ‘He is the Great Creator, the Everlasting’. How many centuries of tenants had these charmed words protected and reminded of
mortality
! The door-key (it looked capable of opening a dungeon) admitted you into a vaulted passage which crooked into the court. Opening upon the court, at right angles to each other, were two long narrow rooms, each having a pair of low windows, one on either side the door. There was, also, a dark, rank-smelling crypt, a combination
kitchen-latrine
with a brick oven and a simple hole in the floor.

‘Isn’t it nice?’ cried Kalipha with anxious exuberance as I stood looking around. ‘Here, you see, is the well. Water for cleaning and washing only. Did you remark that the rooms have been freshly whitewashed? How the good sun pours into this little court! It is charming, isn’t it? Well-arranged and so clean. Perfect, in fact, for a demoiselle living alone. Ah, look up,
ma petite
, your neighbours have come to bid you welcome!’ Several kerchiefed heads were poised upon the parapet. Without
glancing
up, Kalipha spoke to them, and immediately their fingers flew to their mouths and the
zaghareet
crowned us. ‘They are wishing you good fortune! Thank them, my little one! Tell them
katarheerick!
’

But my thoughts were morbidly measuring the height of the walls. The parapet was scarcely twelve feet above us; in the black of night a man could easily lower himself into the court. I was suddenly belligerent.
I had been compelled to move – actually or by connivance I would never know – but not Kalipha nor Sidi Brahim nor even the French could force me to live here alone. Kalipha was prepared for everything. ‘What an idea!’ he exclaimed reproachfully. ‘Do you think I would permit you to live here alone! I, who am responsible for your peace of mind and safety! Ah,
ma petite,
for shame! At this very moment Fatma and the rest of my effects are on the way. Look!’ he pointed, ‘there is your chamber – and here is mine. Quite separate, quite private. But come now, to work! First we must burn benjoin upon the fire-pot – disinfect this house of evil djinns that would make us mischief!’

One small donkey sufficed to transfer Kalipha’s chattels and that evening, by way of housewarming, he prepared an elaborate
fatoor
in our own court. Eltifa and Abdallah were invited and, to Kalipha’s evident satisfaction, Abdallah completed the fumigation of our dwelling by chanting the ninety-nine names of Allah. One could fairly see the djinns scrambling out of cracks and cornersfalling over one another – darting every way – running for their lives at the sound of those august attributes! ‘Now,’ sighed Kalipha with immense relief, ‘the house is habitable!’

The excitement of moving soon wore away, but the strangeness of my new quarters never did. I felt I was buried alive. In exchange for my window, the terrace, I had a square blue patch of sky. I missed the torrential noise of the street, that full exhilarating sense of living in the very core of Kairouan. Fatma and I were alone much of the day and the house was dead quiet, so quiet I could hear the rapid
whiff-whiff
of the fan whenever she lit the fire-pot. My table had been set near the window, for although the court always blazed with sunshine, my room was as dim as one of the mosque-tombs that dot the
cemeteries
. I was never unconscious of the room. Uneasy, faintly depressed, I was always secretly relieved when the evening brought us together in Kalipha’s lamp-lit chamber. Most of the time I went through only the motions of work, but occasionally, when I was really absorbed, lost to my surroundings, a hideous fright would grab hold of me – a feeling that someone, something, had come up behind me. ‘What is the matter?’ Fatma would look up with her quizzical smile as I burst into the court. But I couldn’t explain the seizure even to myself. Perhaps I
was tired, my nerves were ravelled, I needed a change. I knew that I was very worried. For Fatma was ill, dreadfully ill, and there was nothing I could do about it.

My pleas on her behalf had always angered Kalipha, nevertheless he had tolerated her for my sake. The beginning of the end came last winter. His worry over Kadeja’s trouble had told on his temper and poor Fatma, it often seemed, had only to set a vessel here instead of there to demonize him. Frequently when I came in to dinner, Fatma was not in sight. The explanation was invariably the same. There had been a row, Kalipha had beaten her or not beaten her, as the case might be, and Fatma was moping in the dark clammy hole off the court known as ‘the storage room’. It was Eltifa and Abdallah’s policy at such times to keep strictly to themselves. Mohammed, who had no love for his stepmother, was always as furious as Kalipha, and so, despite daily-renewed vows to mind my own business, I always found myself championing Fatma.

The climax came one miserable night during the rainy season. Fatma had a heavy cold which I was doctoring with aspirin and
goose-grease
. In reply to my ‘How is Fatma this evening?’ Mohammed shrugged his shoulders in the direction of the storage room. The rain was beating into the court. I threw my burnous over my head and dashed across to the threshold of the void where Fatma was hiding. To the point of tears I beseeched her to come back to the fire, but it was of no use, she would not even answer. My dismay, the fact that I could eat no supper, only made matters worse, for Kalipha’s anger, which had cooled by the time I arrived, was rapidly regaining the
boiling
point. Getting up suddenly, he flung open the door and commanded Fatma once, twice to return. Then, receiving no answer, to my horror he started after her with his cane. From that black cavern I heard her cry imploringly,
‘Mreetha, y’Sidi, mreetha!’
I am sick, O my master! I am sick! My own shrieks spared her a beating, but Kalipha returned with dreadful decision, hurled down the stick, and threw his burnous over his head. He started out, then paused, his hand upon the door. ‘It is finished! To-morrow I divorce her. I am now –
Silence!
’ he glared as I opened my mouth, ‘I am now going to give her sister warning. I will divorce this woman, but I shall not turn her out
like a dog, as better men than I would do. No! I will first warn her sister, her uncle, that between them they can decide where she is to go.’ The door banged behind him as he flung himself into the rain.

That Kalipha may not seem an utter brute, it is only fair to present his side of the story. In matrimony he had never been lucky. His first wife, Aisha, fought with his family. His second, Shelbeia, disgraced her husband by flirting to and from the baths. (But she parted her veils once too often!) Hanoona, the mother of Mohammed, neglected house and child and, on the day he fell down the stairs, Kalipha announced that he was finished with women … as wives.

He kept his vow for three years, or, until Eltifa rebelled. Against every argument of hers he could stand firm, except this, ‘Keep your vow, O my brother. Nobody has a better right. But marry yourself a servant. Among the women stranded by divorce you will find many that would be thankful to earn their keep in wedlock.’ So he was forced to relent; it was noised about town that Kalipha ben Kassem was in the market for a ‘wife’.

Now Fatma had reached the marriageable age when the death of her parents forced her to live with her sister, a shrewish woman, many years older than Fatma, with a raft of children and a surly husband who had all he could do to feed his own. Fatma became the family drudge. Food and house-room were begrudged her. The sister’s one idea was to marry her off. But the girl had no dowry, no talent
whatsoever
for weaving (unpardonable shortcoming in Kairouan), and, besides virginity, little else to recommend her. Nevertheless, a husband was found for her. Fatma was married, but soon divorced. She could not return to her sister’s. Her only other relative was an elderly uncle, Hassein ben Ali, who was probably the most unhappy polygamist in Kairouan and the butt of all jokes on the subject. Reluctantly, to save his niece from The Street, he took her in.

He was among the first to button-hole Kalipha. And if he swore that his niece was a model of thrift, neatness and industry, an inestimable asset, a complete angel, nobody could seriously blame him. Certainly Kalipha never did. In marriage you took your chance. You stuck your hand in the grab-bag and pulled out – if Allah willed – a Kadeja or a Zinibe. What Kalipha got was Fatma.

Poor Fatma succeeded as a servant no better than a wife. Not only could she neither cook nor weave, she proved unteachable and lazy. She was, also, an incurable slattern. Folded away in the painted chest were hip-scarves, pantaloons, and headkerchiefs that Kalipha had bought for her from time to time, yet nothing short of violence would induce her to change her garments. Her drab, loveless existence was enlivened only by such excitement as she could make for herself. It was discovered, for instance, some time after her coming, that food of both households had a way of disappearing. The cats were blamed until the day Eltifa caught her sister-in-law in the act of tying a basin of
cous-cous
to a cord dangling into the court. There was a frightful uproar, Fatma was never again detected in her philanthropy, but food continued to vanish.

On the other hand, she had her own little system of economy. Kalipha’s fortunes fluctuated from day to day. If he had been lucky enough to ‘trap a tourist’, and had twenty francs in his pocket, he was rich. He spent lavishly, splendidly, but the next day he might be
destitute
. Then it was that Fatma would quietly take from her little hoard whatever he required. Was it cigarettes? She would put into his hand the half-dozen she had filched from him last week. Was it charcoal, tomato-paste or meal? This ant-like practice simply delighted Kalipha. ‘O djinneyeh!’ he would petition the air, his eyes twinkling, ‘grant me, if you please, a garlic for the evening’s macaroni!’ And Fatma would eventually appear and, with a mocking little smile, hold out to him the garlic.

But one swallow does not make a summer, nor did this single trait reconcile Kalipha to her ignorance and sloth. I could not but feel that if he could secure her a certain refuge, I had no longer any right to keep him from divorcing her.

After that night Fatma’s cold grew steadily worse. She would not keep to her bed, but dragged herself around, wasting and coughing until she was beyond the aid of my aspirin tablets. Nobody paid
particular
attention to her, and, even if he had had the money, Kalipha would not hear of calling in the doctor.

Meanwhile, he was finding it no easy matter to dispose of his wife. Her sister’s door, he soon found, was shut to her – slammed and
locked. For all she cared, Fatma could die on the doorstep. So the pursuit of her uncle began. It really doesn’t seem possible that in a town the size of Kairouan it would take weeks to find a man! Kalipha waited hours in Hassein’s favourite coffee-house, hung about the mosque of his devotions, haunted the quarter in which he lived – to no purpose.

One fine moonlit night, just after I moved, we were strolling along the main street when we bumped into him. At a word from Kalipha he took leave of his companions and we seated ourselves on a bench beneath the pepper trees near the Djeladin Gate and Kalipha ordered coffees. Contrary to my expectations, Sidi Hassein was a stern-faced majestic old gentleman, not at all the sort, one would say, to be husbanding three harpies. The salutations were endless. One as much as the other was on tenterhooks, yet the leisurely tide of ‘How is your health? How is your household? Are you well? Is nothing wrong with you?’ droned on and on, until when they got to their respective cousins’ children, I could listen no longer. When I awoke Sidi Hassein was taking his leave. He swept away and I asked, ‘Well, what did he say?’ Nervously, Kalipha lit a cigarette. ‘What could he say? He will take her back. Only,’ it was a few moments before he completed the sentence, ‘this evening I learned that Fatma’s mother died of tuberculosis.’

There was a noticeable improvement in his attitude toward Fatma after that; it was as if he was aware for the first time that she was mortal. Sidi Hassein would relieve him of Fatma tomorrow, but now the thought of losing her among those termagants was horrible to him. Whether from fear of her disease or genuine concern for her welfare, he tried desperately to get her into the free ward of the hospital. He was told that only paupers were eligible and, so long as Fatma had a husband, she could not be considered destitute. For the time being, while she was with me, she was getting milk, rest, and sunshine, but what would become of her after I left? It was this worry that unstrung me, persecuted me with the mysterious terror that made me fear I might be losing my mind. This fear, itself, must have driven me mad if I hadn’t found – to my unspeakable relief – that all along Kalipha himself had been the prey of the same gruesome sensations! He, however, did not attribute it to our anxiety. ‘It is this house,’ he said
with a shudder. ‘It is polluted, it breeds evil. Though I said nothing, I felt it from the first. Somebody must be interred beneath the pavement. If a house is haunted, neither benjoin nor the ninety-nine names of Allah can purify it.’

Finally, after much deliberation and discussion, Kalipha arrived at this plan. On the day of my departure he would divorce Fatma, thus enabling her to get into the hospital. Next, with the sole object of stabilizing his resources, he would marry himself a weaver. If Fatma came out of the hospital alive, he could then afford to provide for her. The plan sounded all right, but would it work? Kalipha hadn’t a doubt in the world. He even explained it all to Fatma and readily obtained her consent. To be well again, poor girl, that was her one desperate hope!