Tuareg

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-Mojkri 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!’