Tuareg Read online

  The cold dawns when Laila would curl up against his stomach in search of warmth; the long, beautiful, bright mornings they would spend hunting, full of expectation and fear: the soporific midday heat and the sweet siestas; the flaming red skies in the afternoons, when the shadows would stretch out to the horizon and the intense and fragrant nights spent by the fire-side, listening to well-known legends being told over and over again; their fear of the harmatan wind and of drought; their love of the windless plain and the black cloud that turned the desert into a green carpet of acheb flowers; the goat that died; the young camel that finally became pregnant; the cry of the little one; the smile of his eldest son; Laila’s cries of pleasure in the half light. This was his life, what he yearned for, all he had worked for and everything he had lost because he had not been able to live with the fact that his honour, a Targui’s honour, had been offended.

  Would anyone have blamed him for not seeking revenge on the army? Who would blame him now for having done exactly that and for losing his family along the way? He had not considered the size of his country. He had ignored the number of people that lived in it and stood up against it, against its soldiers and its governors, without thinking of the consequences or of what his actions might lead to.

  Where was he going to find his wife and children in this huge country? Who, out of all its inhabitants, would be able to give him news of them? With every day that took him further north he became increasingly aware of how small he was, even though that very same desert, in all its immensity, had never made him feel powerless in all the forty years or so that he had spent in it.

  Now he felt powerless, not in the face of nature’s grandeur but in the face of the vile people that lived in it, people who were capable of involving women and children in a war between men. He did not know what type of weapons one used against those people. He had no idea how to play their game and he remembered a story that the old black man Suilem had told them once. It was a tale of two families at war who hated each other so much that one of the families buried the other’s small child in the sand, causing the mother to go mad with sorrow. But that was the only story of its kind in the whole history of the Sahara that he could remember. It had shocked his people so much that its memory had lived on and been carried through the centuries by word of mouth, only to be recounted night after night as a warning to adults and as a lesson to the children.

  ‘See how hate and fighting lead to nothing more than fear, madness and death.’

  He could repeat from memory every word the old man had said and maybe only now, after years of listening to it, did he really understand its true significance.

  So many men had died since that dawn when he had first headed off into the desert with his mehari, in search of his lost honour, that it should really have come as no surprise to him that of all that blood shed, some of it would eventually trickle back to tarnish his life and the lives of his family.

  First there was Mubarrak, whose only crime had been to head up a patrol, having taken over from another man who nobody had heard of. Then there was the sweaty captain, who had defended his position by saying that he was just following orders. There were those who had not been able to defend themselves at all — the fourteen sleeping guardians at Gerifies — whose only crime was to have been asleep and in his way. There were the soldiers who he had killed on the edges of the “lost land” and the men who had been blown into the air before they had even known what had hit them.

  They were too many and then there was him, Gazel Sayah, with only one life to offer up in exchange — one death to compensate for so many.

  Maybe that was why they were using his family, as part payment for this huge debt.

  ‘Insh. Allah,’ Abdul-el-Kebir would have said.

  The image of the old man came to mind again and he wondered what had become of him and if, as he had promised, he was struggling for power once again.

  ‘He was a mad man,’ he muttered quietly. ‘A crazy dreamer, born to be on the receiving end of life’s blows and with the gri-gri of bad luck stuck to his side and hidden in his clothes. His gri-gri was so strong that I got swept up in it too.’

  To the Bedouins, a gri-gri was an evil spirit that brought with it illness, bad luck or death. The Tuaregs tended to dismiss it as a superstition that only the servants or slaves believed in. Even so, many of the most noble inmouchars had been known to avoid certain regions that were famous for their bad spirits, or certain people that they knew attracted them.

  It was a sad and tragic fact that when a gri-gri fell in love with you there was no hiding from it and nothing in the entire universe could protect you from its malign spirit. Even if you buried yourself in the deepest of dunes or sought refuge in the depths of Tikdabra, the gri-gri would still search you out and stick to your skin like a tick, or a smell, or the dye from your clothes. The Targui felt sure that the gri-gri of death, the most loyal and insistent spirit of them all, had taken hold of him. A warrior could only be freed from that kind of spirit when he came face to face with another warrior whose own death spirit was still more powerful.

  ‘Why have you chosen me?’ he would ask it at night, when by the light of the fire he imagined he could almost see it sitting there on the other side. ‘I did not summon you. It was the soldiers who brought it with them when they came to my home and the captain shot the sleeping boy.’

  From that day on, from the very moment that his guest had been shot under his roof, it only seemed logical to accept that the gri-gri of death had consumed the master of that jaima, in the same way that the gri-gri of adultery would settle inside the wives-to-be, who cheated on their husbands in the month prior to their wedding.

  ‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ he protested, as if trying to banish it him from his side. ‘I wanted to protect him and I would have given my life in exchange for his.’

  But as Suilem used to say, the gri-gri was deaf to human pleas and threats. Those evil spirits had their own criteria and when they loved someone they loved them to the end of time.

  ‘There was once a man who fell victim to the locust gri-gri. He lived in Arabia and year after year, without fail, a plague of them would demolish his crops and the crops of his fellow citizens.

  ‘In desperation, his neighbours took him before the caliph and begged that he be executed, otherwise, they said, everybody would die of hunger. But the caliph, realising that it was not the man’s fault, defended him by saying: “If I kill you, then the locust gri-gri, who will continue to love you beyond death, will still visit your grave once a year. So I order you now, while you are alive and tomorrow when you shall be a spirit, to travel, every seven years to the coast of West Africa, where you shall stay for seven years. In that way, we won’t offend Allah, the locust being one of His creatures as well and we will effectively distribute the load in order to alternately enjoy seven years of misery and seven of abundance.”

  ‘So that is what the man did during his lifetime and his spirit continued that way too, long after he had died, which is why the plague visits us for a time and then returns, with the man’s spirit, to his own country.’

  Whether the legend was true or not, it was certainly true of the locusts and it was also true that the Tuaregs, being the more cunning of all the Arabian peasants, had solved their hunger issues in a much more practical way and one which did not demand the execution of an innocent man. They chose to eat the locusts in the same way that they ate their crops. Toasted over a flame, or made into flour, they turned them into their finest foods and when they arrived in their millions, blacking out the sun at midday, it was never a miserable occasion, but one of prosperity and abundance for months on end. Laila would turn the insects into flour, mix them with honey and dates and turn them into cakes as treats for the children.

  He had loved those cakes too and now he yearned for the long afternoons when he would sit at the door of his tent, eating them with a steaming hot glass of tea and watching as the sun slipped below the hor¡zon. Then, as
the women milked the camels and the children brought in the goats, he would walk slowly over to the well and check its level from the parapet. He could not bear to believe that all that was now over and that he would never again return to his well, the palm trees there, his family or livestock, just because this invisible and malign spirit had become attached to him.

  ‘Go away!’ he begged once again. ‘I am tired of carrying you around and of killing without knowing why I am doing it.’

  But he knew that even if the gri-gri had wanted to go, the sad souls of Mubarrak, the captain and the soldiers, would never have allowed it to.

  Every weekend, Anuhar-el-Mojkri would leave his comfortable and cool study in the government palace, get into his old Simca that he had left full of water and provisions in a small street round the corner and rattle his way up to the nearby buttress of a mountain that overlooked El-Akab. At the top of the mountain there stood the ruins of what had once been an impenetrable fortress and refuge for the inhabitants of the oasis, during times of war and unrest.

  There was nothing left to explore inside the castle walls as many of the stones had been removed by the French and used in El-Akab’s new buildings. Anuhar-el-Mojkri, however, had discovered in the caves and rocky walls of the narrow passages that ran to the back of the ruins, that by looking carefully and by gently removing the outer layer of millennia dust, you would find an infinite number of cave paintings that told the story of the Sahara’s remote past and its people.

  Elephants, giraffes, antelopes and leopards inhabited the drawings and under his expert hands, hunting scenes, love scenes, pictures of daily life and of the people that inhabited his land long ago, would miraculously appear. He cleaned each stone with infinite care and with the instinct of someone who had been born an archaeologist, seeking out the pictures in places where he would have logically chosen to draw them himself.

  It was his big secret, his pride and joy and in his tiny bachelor apartment he had put together hundreds of beautiful, colour photographs that he had taken during more than two years of meticulous work. They were the photographs that Anuhar-el-Mojkri planned to use to illustrate his volume: ‘The Frescoes of El Akab,’ which one day he planned to surprise the world with. He was still waiting to find something else though, something he had been looking for, for a long time, even though he had no idea where it might be. He was after a replica of the Tassili Martians, huge figures that were over two meters high with their clothing and postures drawn in great detail, which would prove that they had visited, back in the dark ages, those regions which were now desert, but that would have been, back then, fertile and rich and inhabited by all kinds of exotic animals. For the governor’s secretary to prove that the inhabitants of another planet had visited El-Akab, so far away from Tassili, would certainly have constituted the high point of his lifelong ambition and he would have happily sacrificed his promising political career for just one of those drawings, however crude it might be.

  So, on that particular day, under the heat of a midday sun that beat down harshly on his large, floppy straw hat, he found himself sitting before a small hollow in the smooth face of a living rock, shielded from the wind and the rain. He was praying that the moment had arrived for to him to discover the thing that he had always hoped he would find. His body was overcome with a strange sensation, almost as if he was having a premonition and he realised that his hands were trembling as they traced the line of a deep incision that promised to be the vague beginning of one of those tall figures.

  He wiped off the sweat that was running down his forehead and steaming up his glasses, marked the line with white chalk until it became visible, took a quick swig of water and gasped in horror as he recognised the deep and threatening voice that came from behind him:

  ‘Where is my family?’ He spun round, falling against the wall for support as he saw, only three meters away from him, the black arm of a gun and the svelte silhouette of the Targui, who, since their first meeting, had haunted his dreams.

  ‘You?’ was all he could say.

  ‘Yes, me,’ came his dry response. ‘Where is my family?’

  ‘Your family?’ he said in a tone of surprise. ‘What have I got to do with your family?’

  ‘What have they done with my family? The soldiers took them away.’

  Anuhar-el-Mojkri, realising that his legs were about to give way, sat down on a rock and took his hat off, wiping the sweat off his face with the palm of his hand.

  ‘The soldiers?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘That’s not possible! No, it’s not possible, I would have known about it.’

  ‘The soldiers took them away.’

  He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief that he had taken out of his back pocket with trembling hands, then looked him in the face, through his own, short-sighted eyes.

  ‘Listen!’ he said, his tone quite sincere. ‘The ministry mentioned the possibility of seizing your family and exchanging them for Abdul-el-Kebir, but the general opposed the idea and I’ve never heard them discuss it again. I promise you!’

  ‘What minister? Where does he live?’

  ‘The Minister of the Interior. Madani, Ali Madani. He lives in the capital, but I doubt he has your family.’

  ‘If he hasn’t got them, then the soldiers have.’

  ‘No,’ he said with absolute conviction. ‘The soldiers can’t have them. The general is a friend of mine, we dine together twice a week. He’s not the kind of man who would do that and even if he had been considering it, he would definitely have spoken to me about it first.’

  ‘But my family isn’t there. My slave watched as they were taken away by the soldiers and five of them are still there, waiting for me in the guelta of the Huaila mountains.’

  ‘They can’t be with the soldiers,’ he insisted. ‘They must have been police that were sent in by the ministry,’ he said, shaking his head despondently. ‘I can believe that son of a bitch would do something like that.’

  He adjusted his glasses once again, which were now perfectly clear and looked at Gazel with renewed interest. ‘Did you really cross the “lost land” of Tikdabra?’ he asked.

  Gazel nodded silently and he gasped, whether through admiration or plain disbelief, it could not be said.

  ‘Fantastic!’ he exclaimed. ‘Really fantastic. Did you know that Abdul-el-Kebir is in Paris? The French are backing him and it’s very possible that you, an illiterate Targui, might well have changed the course of our country’s history.’

  ‘I don’t care to change anything,’ he said, reaching out his hand and taking the water bottle, which he proceeded to drink from, only lifting his veil up very slightly. ‘All I want is my family back and that they leave me in peace.’

  ‘That’s what we all want: to live in peace; you, with your family and me, with my drawings. But I doubt they will let us.’

  Gazel pointed with a nod of his head to the drawings marked with chalk that he could make out on the adjacent wall.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘The history of your ancestors. Or the history of the men that lived here before the Tuaregs took over the desert.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting your time up here when you could be sitting peacefully in the shade, somewhere in El-Akab?’

  The governor’s secretary shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Maybe because I am disillusioned with politics,’ he remarked.

  ‘Do you remember Hassan-ben-Koufra? They dismissed him so he went to Switzerland, where he had amassed a small fortune and a few days later he was run over by a lorry carrying fizzy drinks. It’s ridiculous! In a few months he went from being the “viceroy” of the desert, to a man with broken legs, crying in a clinic somewhere, in a land that’s covered in snow.’

  ‘Is his wife with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then, that’s all that matters,’ the Targui noted. ‘They loved each other. I know because I watched them together for some time.’

  Anuhar-el-Mojkr
i nodded in agreement.

  ‘He was an authentic son of a bitch, an unscrupulous politician, a thief, traitor and a fox. But he had something good in him and that was his love for Tamat, so maybe he deserved to stay alive, if only for that reason.’

  Gazel smiled vaguely, even though the other man was unable to see him doing so, looked at the drawings on the walls and then stood up, picking up his gun as he did so:

  ‘Maybe your love of history and my ancestors has saved your life,’ he commented. ‘But do not move from here or try to give me away. If I see you in El-Akab before Monday, I’ll blow your brains out.’

  The other man had picked up his chalk, his brushes and his cloths and had gone back to his work.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ he replied. ‘I wasn’t planning on doing so.’

  Then as the Targui headed off, he shouted after him: ‘I hope you find your family!’

  The bus he found himself bumping along in was the filthiest, most rickety, clapped out, old vehicle imaginable. It gasped and chugged along asthmatically, through the bushy plains and rocky terrain, at a speed that could not have exceeded fifty kilometers per hour.

  It had to stop almost every two hours, either due to a puncture or because the wheels had got stuck in the sand and the driver and the conductor would ask the passengers, with their goats, dogs and baskets of chickens to get out of the bus and either push, or sit down on the roadside and wait while they changed the wheel.

  Every four hours they had to stop and refill the petrol tank, using the primitive method of attaching a hosepipe to an old drum that was tied to the roof. Every time they reached a steep hill, the men would be asked to get out and walk.

  For two days and two nights they were squashed in there like dates in a rabbit-skin sack, sweaty and woozy due to the intense heat, not knowing how much more of the torturous journey they could take and longing for a change in the monotonous desert landscape.

  Every time they stopped, Gazel felt the overwhelming urge to abandon the filthy vehicle and continue on foot, however long it might take him. But he also knew that it would take him months to reach the capital on his own and that every day and every hour he gained, brought him closer to Laila and his children.