A Riffians Tune Page 3

  ‘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.

  The journey started slowly and happily, the trotting of the horses creating a mellifluous drumbeat that was uplifting to hear, but as we neared Maghnia we came to a very steep descent into a valley, at the foot of which was a railway. Mr Morui, sitting at the top, driving and talking, had completely forgotten to ratchet up the brake, so the wagon lurched forward, pushing the two horses and knocking them onto the tracks. Like emptying a sack of potatoes, we were jettisoned from the wagon in every direction. Landing on my left side onto cement a few metres away from the wagon, I was horrified to see my father struggling to stand up and my mother on her back like a tortoise, flailing her arms and legs in the air. The whistle of the train pierced the valley, and a few seconds later, a freight train whizzed past. The two horses were killed instantly. Men, women and children screamed and cried.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ said an old woman, consoling Mr Morui.

  ‘I wish it were,’ he replied.

  ‘Do you want us all to die?’ I asked, shocked by the event and perplexed by Mr Morui’s wish.

  ‘You don’t understand my living pain,’ he replied, crying.

  ‘Jusef, Jusef, your hand, your hand!’ shouted a frail, old woman stuck on the ground beside me. I stretched both hands to pull her, but her weight and my strength failed us both.

  ‘She must have broken something!’ shouted my mother.

  Shaken, leaving Mr Morui behind, we resumed the journey on foot to the train station. The old woman, limping and crying, leaned on my right shoulder; my left was badly bruised.

  At the station, a colourful water-seller, weaving through the crowd like a king, accosted us and barked, ‘Water!’ He was dressed in a long red robe with a large golden belt around his middle. A rawhide bag full of water was strapped across his shoulder, and from this and other straps that crisscrossed his body, a myriad of little golden bowls were strung. A large sombrero fringed with red and yellow tassels shaded his entire face, but it was still possible to see his big, bushy moustache and matching eyebrows that hid his eager seller’s eyes. He energetically shook a rattle to draw attention to himself, but he needn’t have bothered. I stared at him.

  In the midday sun at the hot, dry station, people were thirsty and followed him like a pied piper wherever he went. I had never before seen such exquisite-looking clothes. Laden with all his golden goblets on display and in his beautiful costume, the water-seller, I thought, must be extremely wealthy. Why doesn’t my father sell water like he does? Should I think of becoming a water-seller when I grow up?

  The train arrived, a juggernaut looking like a giant, steel snake with huge clouds of smoke billowing from it as if it belonged in the depths of hell. I felt both terrified and excited. I had never dreamed such a thing existed. There was no queue and there was no order. Travellers swarmed and blocked every entry door with no respect for women, consideration for age or care for the frail or disabled.

  ‘Push! Push!’ shouted everyone surging forward en masse like a wave.

  Pushing and shoving, we climbed into the train, but not everyone made it before the doors were slammed shut. All seats were occupied by French soldiers, armed with rifles laid across their laps, looking tense and sweaty. The aisle was overcrowded with men, women and children all sitting on top of each other. To escape the ticket controller, an old man stepped on me as I sat cross-legged in the aisle. One middle-aged man was dangling from the ceiling like a monkey and trying to pass from one compartment to another. A morose French soldier was irritated; he pummelled the man with his machete and burst his bowel. The man fell on me like a bird shot from the sky. Nobody mourned him or wiped up his blood. He was shoved to the door and left in the corner to bleed to death. I was surprised and shocked to see that my father was not bothered by the dying man.

  A passenger asked my father to write a complaint. ‘To whom are you going to complain?’ my father asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered the man.

  ‘Well, you don’t complain about the governor to the governor. This is the way it is, my brother,’ said my father, resigned. At the next stop, the mortally wounded man was shoved off the train.

  The train journey ended in chaos, as before reaching Oujda, a border town, the train’s whistle went off and the train slowed. Hundreds of people took a risk, jumped off the train and ran into the desert. I watched as one man, limping and carrying a heavy bag on his shoulder, struggled to keep up. Falling down, he picked himself up and fell down again. Yet, he carried on.

  As the deafening noise of the whistle continued and people kept jumping off, I asked my father, ‘What’s happeni
ng? Why are we not jumping?’

  ‘They are contraband smugglers,’ he answered.

  The whistle crescendoed until a train engineer arrived and tightened a tiny screw on a box on the wall just above me.

  4

  At Oujda, my father didn’t want to pay for a seat for me on the coach. ‘He’s too young! And too small!’ he argued.

  ‘He’s over thirteen kilos,’ the coach driver insisted.

  To end the argument, they decided to weigh me on a baggage scale. I was thirteen kilos. Provided I sat on my mother’s lap, my father didn’t need to pay. My mother and I were squashed into each other most of the way from Oujda to Zaio. When her knees got tired, I sat on the floor at her feet, but with her restless feet, she kept kicking me, sometimes hard.

  We spent the night in Zaio with my uncle Hamidi, my mother’s brother. He asked my parents if they would let me stay with him to be his shepherd. It was an evening I will never forget. They talked and bargained over me; they were deciding for me, and I wished they would stop. I didn’t want to be a shepherd; my memory went back to the French boys coming out of school, and I wished I were one of them. While my uncle and mother bargained, my father was absent. I wished he had said no.

  We left in the early morning, and I was carrying a bag twice my weight on my back. My toes were bleeding and my back was aching. After a tiring journey, we arrived at Hashi’s house. There was no door to knock upon, no dog to bark nor donkey to hee-haw. The house had aged, and us with it. My two sisters appeared. They didn’t know who we were, nor we who they were. They looked scruffy, dirty, thin and disengaged. They had survived on aiarni, a white bulbous root that grows under the soil, has to be dug up, chopped, dried and then baked. It is extremely bitter and horrid to eat as it sticks in the middle of the throat and cannot be swallowed in one single swallow.

  The first visitor I saw was Mrs Malani, who dashed to hug me. Warm hugs had been very rare in my life. She stroked my head and checked my scalp for lice; she found many, and she cried, but I didn’t know why. Mrs Robbi came days later, and I wondered what had happened to her. I remembered her as big and fat, but no longer. The change was stark. She looked older, less agile and less happy, but maybe more wise. She had lost her sharp tongue and her front teeth, and she seemed to listen more. She was aware of the gap in her mouth and often closed it before finishing her sentence or put two fingers in front of it. She tried to hide her crumbling body and missing teeth, but no disguise could mend what time had eroded. I looked at her, and she looked at me as if she were saying something to herself.

  After I’d spent months of complete boredom, my sister Sanaa dragged me to the mosque. We fought, and she won. On a high hill facing the sea, the mosque was a very small stone building, L-shaped with two tiny rooms, but with no fence, no trees, no water or sanitary facilities in or around the building. I was shoved through the door into a small room. A middle-aged, skin-headed man with a long beard, thick moustache and a sapling branch in his hand ordered me to sit cross-legged on the bare floor at the very back of the room. I disliked him immediately; just the look of him was terrifying. The other boys in the room all looked ragged and bored; some were older, and others were younger. They didn’t know who I was or where I had come from, but perked up at having a new arrival join them.

  The moment I sat down, my freedom was stolen. I wasn’t allowed to move, stand up or leave the room. Each time I tried, the hafiz shook the sapling branch over my head as a threat. Like a mouse, I remained terrified. I was handed a big piece of polished wood on which he wrote a bit of the Holy Koran. My task was to memorise it, but he realised I didn’t know the Arabic alphabet. He wrote the alphabet on the piece of wood and asked another boy to teach me how to pronounce the letters. My only real learning ended with the alphabet. All that came after that was memorising. Because the text of the Holy Koran was in Arabic, we memorised it in Arabic, even though I didn’t speak or understand it.

  We were beaten morning and afternoon on a daily basis for trivial reasons, like passing wind, whispering, or not reciting in a good strong voice. To save time and energy, the hafiz would corner three boys and whip them all at once with the supple green branch of a sapling. Whoever tried to escape would get the worst. He often called me up and pulled my ears. Anyone passing must have heard crying and begging for mercy, but no one ever bothered to stop.

  One local hafiz was particularly violent and bad-tempered. I broke his cane, but he brought a new one the next day. I broke that one too.

  ‘Who broke the cane?’ he asked the boys.

  ‘Jusef,’ they said.

  He sent me to a tree nearby and asked me to bring a long, supple stick. Enthusiastically, I climbed the tree and cut a stick as long as I could, two metres long and an inch in diameter. He sat me in a corner so that I couldn’t move and whipped me with it. The pain went all over my body so I didn’t know which part he was hitting. I went home with a swollen neck and welts all over my body, but I didn’t tell my mother or father. I knew they would do nothing about it. I watched my mother assess my wounds, but she only turned her head as if she hadn’t noticed. It was as I expected.

  I hated the hafiz and if I could have poisoned him, I would have done. Failing that, I ran away to escape a beating the following morning. Sanaa spied me taking the path away from the mosque and called Salwa. They ran behind me, grabbed me and struggled to stuff me, like an oversized ferret, into a big potato sack. I was no match for their strength and could hardly breathe. Sanaa threw the bag over her back.

  As punishment, they took me to Seva, a deaf mute who lived alone in an isolated hut perched on a hill, far from anyone. She was demonised, believed to be a nasty witch, and children of my age and even older were terrified of her due to the piercing, high-pitched shrieks she made while flailing her arms around as if conducting an invisible orchestra.

  As I had feared, she moaned and screamed with wild eyes, her long, straggly hair flying as she energetically swayed with extravagant motions of her arms. The look of her disturbed me. I stood petrified; a warm trickle down my legs was the only movement I could make. When she saw I was afraid, she inched forward, stretched her arm toward me, stroked my head gently and smiled. She dissolved my fear and disappointed my sisters.

  To escape the beating, the torture and the humiliation, I realised I had to be a hafiz myself. Though endowed with a good memory, I woke myself up at four o’clock every morning while everyone else was sleeping and memorised the required text by candlelight. I got angry with myself if I didn’t get up promptly and asked my parents to buy me an alarm clock. They always promised, but never did. I nagged them to wake me up; again they promised, but they didn’t do that either. I tried to guess the time by measuring the shadows the moonlight created on the wall.

  In the absence of the moonlight at the end of every lunar month, I relied on the roosters, especially the brown one. It was big, constantly chased the hens, was very sensitive to the dawning light, and when it started to crow, it didn’t stop. It was getting old, and my mother was afraid that its meat would become too tough if it were left to live longer, so she decided to slay it for dinner. I was deprived of a good timekeeper.

  At dawn, without any breakfast or anything to eat, I picked up my slate and went to the mosque. My mother gave me one or two spoons of sugar and said, ‘That will help you to remember.’ It might have done, but it also entirely rotted my teeth, and I was toothless at an early age.

  Upon arrival, I sat down on the bare floor and started the memorising process with the other boys, all sitting cross-legged and terrified, in a semicircle around the hafiz. At seven o’clock, the hafiz tested us to see who could recall the surah. Called by name, each boy went individually, squatted on the floor and faced him. If the surah were recited with smoothness and confidence, the hafiz would give his order to wipe the text off the slate for the next surah.

  Those with good memories would wipe their slates with water, paint them with chalk and expose them to the sun to dry. They
always took a while to dry, especially during the winter. Those whose memories failed were abusively beaten, and I was in this position more than once. The hafiz, Hajout, an elderly man, acting like a Spanish bull charging a toreador, whipped me with a cane, and a searing pain spread all over my body.

  ‘If beating me would help, I would have done it myself!’ I shouted, as if I were facing a reasonable and intelligent man. But Hajout knew no logic.

  Mr Brosso, a violent, middle-aged hafiz, picked on boys and beat them at random. He turned the local mosque into a torture chamber, and alleviated his depression by brutalising us. My classmate Zine had a good short-term memory, but poor retention. He memorised quickly, but was unable to recall text three or four hours later, so when called by Brosso, he failed to remember. Held by two big boys, he was beaten by Brosso with several sapling branches at once. Traumatised and bleeding, Zine screamed, lost water and consciousness. Watching him, I cried, felt his pain and deplored his humiliation.

  After a particularly brutal afternoon when Zine and I were tortured, I convinced Zine that we should run away from home and the mosque to escape Brosso’s grasp. We left, but not knowing where to go, we crossed the valley, headed east, toward the mountain and walked until it started to get dark. Zine began to cry from hunger and twisted his ankle on a tree root, as we were both barefoot. I helped him walk to a shrine nearby.

  We spent the night there in pitch darkness, hungry and terrified. We stayed through the following day but then, thrown out by the caretaker, had to return home.

  When I finally dragged myself home, my mother looked surprised at my weary state and said, ‘Jusef, you look horrible! Didn’t you sleep well at your sister’s?’

  Avoiding her gaze, I answered, ‘I wasn’t at my sister’s. Zine and I ran away from the hafiz. He beat us. I would have run away for good if Zine hadn’t twisted his ankle.’

  Under her deep conviction the hafiz held the gate to heaven, she told me, ‘Beatings are of no benefit to the hafiz, but they are to you!’ With that, she shook her fist in the air and turned away from me.