Tuareg

The light and the silence woke him.

The sun flooded in through the latticed window in shafts, illuminating the rows of books and reflecting off the brass ashtray that was full of cigarette butts. But even though it was almost midday, there did not seem to be any noise coming from the patio and he was sure that he had not heard the wake up call that normally went off every morning.

The silence bothered him. Over the years he had become used to a strict military regime where everything he did was carried out to a rigid timetable. Any disruption to this routine, like not having been woken at six o’clock on the dot with half an hour to wash before breakfast, made him feel strangely uneasy.

And the silence.

The suffocating silence from the patio, which at that hour was usually full of the sound of the soldiers chatting away before the great heat descended, made him jump from his bed, pull on his trousers and run over to the window.

Not a soul to be seen. He could not see anybody next to the well or by the battlements on the west corner, which was the only bit of the wall he could see from his room.

‘Hey!’ he called out in a worried voice. ‘What’s happened? Where is everybody?’

There was no reply. He called out again, but still no response and the silence unnerved him.

‘They’ve abandoned me…’ was the first thought that crossed his mind. ‘They’ve left me here to die of hunger and thirst.’

He ran to the door and was surprised to find it half open. He went out onto the patio and a violent sun scorched his eyes, as it bounced back off the white walls, painted a thousand times over by soldiers who had had nothing better to do for days and months on end.

But no one appeared. There was no one on guard at the sentry boxes in the corner or next to the gate, through which you could see the desert stretching out to eternity.

‘Hey!’ he shouted again. ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’

Only silence again. That accursed silence and not even a light breeze, carrying signs of life with it, blew to alter the quiet of the place. It was if it had been petrified, crushed and destroyed by a sun that was already starting to beat down mercilessly.

He went down the four steps in two jumps and walked over to the well, still calling out to the mess, the soldiers’ quarters and the orderly room.

‘Captain…! Captain…! What kind of a joke is this? Where are you all?’

A dark shadow slipped out of the kitchen. It was a tall, very thin Targui with a dark litham covering his face, a rifle in one hand and a long sword in the other.

He stopped under the porch.

‘They are dead,’ he said.

He looked at him incredulously.

‘Dead?’ he repeated, dumbfounded. ‘All of them?’

‘All of them.’

‘Who killed them?’

‘Me.’

He walked over to him, not quite able to believe his ears.

‘You…?’ he asked, shaking his head, as if trying to get rid of the idea.

‘Are you trying to tell me that you, without anybody else’s help have killed twelve soldiers, a sergeant and an official?’

He nodded calmly.

‘They were asleep.’

Abdul-el-Kebir had seen thousands of people die, had in fact ordered the execution of many and even though he had loathed each and everyone of his jailers, he was overcome with an unbearable feeling of fear and an emptiness in the pit of his stomach. He leant against the wooden post that supported the doorway so as not to lose his balance.

‘You killed them while they were sleeping?’ he stammered. ‘Why?’

‘Because they killed my guest.’ He paused. ‘And because there were too many of them. If one of them had sounded the alarm you would have remained here forever, to die between these four walls.’

Abdul-el-Kebir watched him in silence and nodded his head as if it all made sense suddenly.

‘Now I remember,’ he admitted.

‘You are the Targui that gave us hospitality. I saw you as they carried me away.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘I am Gazel Sayah and you were my guest. It is my duty to take you across the border.’

‘Why?’

He looked at him uncomprehendingly. Finally he answered:

‘It is the custom. You asked for my protection and so I must protect you.’

‘Killing fourteen men in order to protect me seems a little excessive, don’t you think?’

The Targui did not respond and glanced towards the open door.

‘I’ll get the camels.’ he said. ‘Get ready for a long journey.’

He watched him as he walked away and disappeared from view behind the main gate that was slightly open and he suddenly felt oppressed, there alone in the abandoned fort. He felt oppressed and shocked, even more than he had been the day he had arrived there; when he had realised that he would never leave that place alive, that it would be both his prison and his grave.

He remained there for a few minutes, quite still, straining to hear something, although he knew it would only be the wind or the men that made a noise and on that day there was no wind and the men were all dead.

All fourteen of them!

He remembered their faces, one by one, from the incredibly pale and pointed face of the captain, who hated the sun and preferred to remain in the half-light of his study, to the sweaty, red-cheeked cook, to the dirty corporal with his long, cheeky moustache, who used to clean his cell and bring him food every day.

He knew every sentinel and every minion. He had played dice with them and written letters to their families and read novels to them during the interminable desert nights. He had often wondered who were the real prisoners up there, them or him, in that fortress set deep within the desert’s confines.

He had known them all and now they were dead.

He wondered what type of a man it took to admit killing fourteen human beings as they slept, without altering the tone of his voice or expressing a trace of guilt or repent in his manner.

He was a Targui. At university they had learned that this race was quite unlike any other race and that their morals and customs were completely different to any other group in the world. They were a proud, indomitable and rebellious people who followed their own rules. Still, no one had told him that their customs allowed for the murder of sleeping men, in cold blood. ‘Morality is a question of custom and we cannot judge them, therefore, according to our own criteria, since the way they behave is the result of ancient customs and their vision of life and its criteria are totally different to our own…’

The words of the old man came back to him as if it were just yesterday and he could see him sitting behind his enormous table, his hands and the sleeves of his black jacket, white with chalk. He remembered the efforts he would go to, to try and make his students understand that just because some of the ethnic groups in their country, which was at the time on the brink of independence, had not had much contact with the French, they should not be considered any more inferior.

‘One of our continent’s greatest problems,’ he would say over and over again, ‘is the undeniable fact that a lot of African people are even more racist than our very own colonisers were. Neighbouring tribes, almost brothers, hate and despise each other and as we become independent countries it is becoming increasingly apparent that the black man’s worst enemy is another black man who speaks a different dialect. We must not make the same mistake. You will be in charge of this nation one day and you must be fully aware that the Bedouins, the Tuaregs and the mountain Cabilenos are not inferior, just very different.’

Different.

He had never thought twice about ordering an attack on one of the cafés where the French used to meet, even though he knew that many innocent people would be killed. He had never hesitated before firing off a machine gun at paratroopers or legionaries. Death had simply been a part of his adolescent life and remained that way well into the first few years of his rule, when he had sent dozens of collaborators to the gallows. There was no reason why he should have been so taken aback by the death of fourteen jailers. He had known those jailers though, each one of them, their names, their likes and dislikes and he also knew that their throats had been slit whilst they had been asleep.

He slowly crossed the patio and stopped at the large window of the barrack hut, cupped his hands against the window and peered inside.

All he could make out was a row of bulky shapes, the hard old beds lined up some two metres apart from each other, covered in dirty sheets with not even a spot of blood visible, most of it having already been absorbed by the thick, straw mattresses.

Not a sound could be heard. Nobody was snoring or snuffling, sleep talking, or scratching their sun-burned, sandy skin.

Just the silence and the noise of some flies banging against the window as if even they had had their fill of blood and were fighting to get out into the light and fresh air.

Ten meters further down he opened the door to the captain’s quarters and the sun flooded into the cluttered, dusty room and on the large bed, he could just make out the contours of a small, thin body, covered with a very white sheet.

He closed the door again and walked around the rest of the fortress, but there were no other bodies to be found. The sentry boxes were empty and there was no one at the gate, as if the Targui, according to some strange ritual, had preferred to drag them back into their beds and cover them up there.

He went back into his prison cell and started getting together his letters, the photos of his sons and a well-thumbed copy of the Koran, which he had carried with him for as long as he could remember and put everything, including the few items of clothing he possessed, into a canvas bag.

Then he sat down in the shadow of the porch, near to the well, as the sun beat down, without mercy, gradually erasing every inch of shadow from the ground.

The suffocating heat made him sink into an uneasy slumber, from which he awoke intermittently with a jump, startled by the intense silence and the unsettling sensation of emptiness he felt. He started to sweat profusely, his ears almost hurting, as if he had drowned in a hollow universe and he muttered some words outloud just to remind himself that he had a voice and that sound still existed.

Was there anywhere in the world more silent than that great pantheon, which had been converted into an old fortress set deep within the Sahara, on that windless day?

Why on earth it had been built there nobody knew. It sat in the centre of the plain, far away from the well-known wells and caravan routes, far from the oasis and the borders, in the heart of absolutely nowhere.

The Gerifies fort, in itself, small and pointless and only useful in theory as a logistical back up and place of rest for any nomads patrolling the area, had been considered as good a spot as any other in that five hundred kilometre radius. So a well had been dug and battlement walls built and rickety old furniture brought in, probably from other barracks that had been dismantled. A handful of men were then condemned to keep watch there, sent to this corner of the desert, which was so remote that according to legend, not one traveller had ever passed by it.

Legend also had it that it took three months before a garrison of the French Foreign Legion based there, had realised that they were no longer part of the colonial armed forces but foreigners that had been overthrown.

There were six tombs lines up against the rear wall. They had each, at one time, had a wooden cross with a name written on them, but many years ago a cook had been forced to use them as firewood. Abdul-el-Kebir had often wondered to himself what on earth six Christians were doing there, so far from their homeland and why they had joined the Foreign Legion in the first place, only to end their days in the solitude of the endless Saharan plain.

‘One day they’ll dig me a grave next to those tombs?’ he would say to himself. ‘Then there’ll be seven anonymous tombs and my guardians will be able to leave Gerifies…and the hero of national independence will rest for eternity next to six unknown mercenaries.’

But things had not worked out quite like that and now they needed fourteen more tombs; tombs which no one would bother to mark since no one really cared about a bunch of useless jailers.

He turned round again instinctively to look back at the hut, still barely able to believe that there, inside, were all those bodies that had already started to rot in the dry, suffocating heat and that just the night before had filled the place with their voices and their presence.

He had often been tempted to strangle some of them with his bare hands. During his years as a prisoner he had generally been treated with respect but there were some who had subjected him to all manner of humiliations, especially after his latest escapade. His punishment for escaping had been extended to the whole garrison, who had been deprived of leave for one year, prompting many of them to plot his end once and for all so that they could be freed from that place, which had, to all extents and purposes, become their prison as well.

The idea of taking off again filled him with dread as he imagined the infinite journey across the sands and the stony plains, always under a relentless sun, without knowing where they were headed or whether the desolate plain they walked on would ever end.

He remembered with horror, the torment of thirst and the intolerable pain of his cramped muscles and wondered to himself what on earth he was doing sitting there in the shade with his bag in hand, waiting for a man, a murderer who was going to take him away across the sands and stony plains once again.

He appeared at his side out of nowhere, silently, despite the fact that he was accompanied by four camels. They followed him noiselessly, maybe in imitation of their master’s stealth or aware, perhaps, that they had just walked into a mausoleum.

He pointed to the huts with his head:

‘Why did you put the men in their beds? Did you think they would be better off in there, than where you killed them? Why did you bother?’

Gazel observed him for a moment, a look of incomprehension on his face.

Finally he shrugged his shoulders:

‘A bird of prey will find a dead body left in the open air within two hours,’ he replied. ‘But it will take three days before the smell of them comes through those walls and by then we’ll be well on our way towards the border.’

‘What border?’

‘Aren’t all the borders good?’

‘The ones to the south and the east are good. I’ll be hung from the gallows if we cross the west one?’

Gazel did not respond, immersed as he was with the task of getting water from the well for his insatiably thirsty animals to drink. Once he had finished, he glanced over at the canvas bag.

‘Is that all you have?’ he asked.

‘It’s all I have.’

‘That’s not a lot for someone who used to be president of the country.’ He looked back. ‘Go into the kitchen and bring out provisions and any vessels you can find.’ He shook his head. ‘Water will be a problem on this journey.’

‘Isn’t water always a problem in the desert?’

‘Yes, of course, but more so where we’re going.’

‘And where, might I ask, are we going?’

‘To a place where no one can follow us: to the “lost land” of Tikdabra.’