Do the Weird Crime, Serve the Weird Time

MY HEART

SHIFTING AS SAND

My capture had been the irony of ironies.

War was newly upon us, and I had seen its strange fever grow in Naema. It had grown in many of our friends, but we had young children, which should be a cure for the fever. At first I had argued with her. I did not feel the need to rid “our country” of the French. “Our country” was drawn on a map in Europe. The French were newcomers, much as we Arabs were newcomers taking land from the Berbers. If we drove the French away, surely the Berbers would drive us away?

My arguments fell on deaf ears, or rather ears full of new words, that packed them as tightly as the wax packed in the ears of Odysseus’s sailors. I found a sublime solution. I would take her to see her family in the South, in the Haut Plateau. It is not like the North. Nothing thrives in the southern wilayat, and she would see that life is more precious than principle. Her family lived here in a miserable little village, she would see her mother fussing over the children, and she would yearn not to put them in danger. This was good, because the war will not last. France will win.

I shed my Western clothes for the trip. We would go as Arabs to see Arabs. There was a small bus that runs into the Plateau once a week, and Naema, the children and I boarded it. She did not chatter about the war as we drove into the sea of sand. She spoke of her mother, of favorite foods and games. She taught songs to the children. As the sight of sand became everything, lines drawn on a map could not bother her. The bus climbed onto the snow-covered Plateau and her spirit soared like a desert falcon. I had always found the emptiness oppressive, perhaps it mirrored emptiness within me. So as she told our children the stories of Ali and Fatima, I entered into a silent dream of her family reunion. I could see her mother running to meet us, her stupid brother with his rotten smile, the cousins and hangers-on joyous because a fatted goat would be slain. I heard the laughter and tasted the hot sweet tea, and the showing of family treasures.

The land of the Plateau lies flat and stretches as far as is painful. The snow, as a white as blank page made it worse. I knew that history, that old enemy of mankind, hungered to write something here. We saw the village long before we arrived. There was no one to meet us, but from the bus we could see her mother sitting in her doorway, her veil tossed overhead, crying loudly. I held the children back, while Naema ran to her mother. Behind us the bus drove on, stranding us here for a week.

Her brother, in his stupidity, had killed a cousin because of a minor quarrel, and was now hidden in the desert. Her mother was alone, the more distant family members having suddenly found reasons to be elsewhere.

She looked dully at the chocolate we had brought, the tea and the olive oil. We moved in, and we began telling her that she would have to come to the city with us. Life is too hard in the South for an old woman. She had the arguments that you expect—her friends were here, she must wait for her son; she could not survive in the noise of the city. But she knew and we knew that she would be joining us in a week.

We went to bed. It seemed that I had no more than closed my eyes, when the house was filled with sound. A gendarme came looking for the fugitive brother. He knew a man was in the house, he had seen, he was nobody’s fool. Naema was yelling he was mistaken that I was her husband fresh arrived from the city, and I was staring a gun pointed at my face, being told to rise and dress.

The gendarme said that I did not dress as a city dweller.

And that was that.

Since my lot was cast before I could speak, I chose not to speak. I knew his type, the same sort of bureaucrat that I deal with everyday. There would be no argument. I would be held until Saturday and then sent by bus to the city where all things would be resolved. So I went along meekly. I would sleep in the jail. Not much different than my mother in law’s, except that I could perhaps hope for a more comfortable bed. Besides this served my plan well. Naema would see the sort of things the war could lead to and abandon her notions.

However the gendarme awakened me at dawn. I kept up the pretence I could not speak French, and he told me in halting Arabic that I must go with him to school. In did not understand this sudden need for education, but saw his gun as checkmate in our little game.

He tied my hands together and we set off. He rode on a donkey and I was pulled behind, at a very slow pace, so that I could walk unhurt. Suddenly I realized that we were leaving the village. Perhaps he meant to kill me, I would be sad to die where I could not see a tree or any green thing. I was very tired I tried to tell myself that I would be dying for the sake of my family, because I thought if I had a reason, I would at least have inner way out of this absurd situation.

I walked a long way. Longer than I had ever walked. Maybe I would simply walk across the great emptiness and dissolved into it. The gendarme began to speak to me. Since he thought I was ignorant of his tongue I known that he merely talked to fill the void with words.

He was Corsican, a countryman of Napoleon. He tried to tell me what good things the French had brought to the land. How their law was better than Berber law or Islamic law. How I would have a trial and everything would be fair.

I liked it better then there was only silence in the vastness. The snow was thin, but it made my feet very cold.

At last we came to another village, so like the one had left I wondered if we had merely gone in circles.

We went to a schoolhouse where a pale and weak looking schoolmaster signed for me like a shipment of grammar books. I listened to them discuss me. Was I one of the rebels? The schoolmaster was to deliver me to yet another village, where perhaps justice waited for me. Like a camel they tied me to a post outside of the school. The schoolmaster showed me his sidearm, no doubt useful in classroom discipline.

After a decent interval the gendarme departed and the schoolmaster took me inside the tiny school. I could see that he didn’t want to have me. He did not relish the job of jailor. I realized that many French might be as uncommitted as I. Perhaps together we could muster enough apathy to leash the dogs of war.

He fed me, and told me in passingly good Arabic that he too was born here. The words did not inspire any brotherly feelings in me. He asked why I had done it. By “it’ he meant of course the stupid murder by my stupid brother-in-law. So I muttered some nonsense. He did not ask me my name. I doubt that Arabs often have names, but then I did not ask his.

He took me to his bedroom for the night, pointing at a cot with his pistol, which by now I was sure had never been and would never be fired. I undressed and lay down. He did the same and shortly thereafter began to snore. Sleep did not come to me. I am not an adventurous man. I did not know how to plan an escape, or consider that I could pull the pistol from his sleeping hand, and make my get away. Where would I go? If I fled I would be a criminal. If I went through this charade I could possibly clear my name. I lay awake until I needed to make water.

I rose and went to the courtyard.

There in the moonlight was Naema, her brother and another man.

She spoke quietly and quickly, “Don’t worry Fadlan! Tomorrow he will take you to Tinguit. We will be on the road and free you. Courage. We can’t take you now.”

They turned and ran into the moonlight. So strange had the scene been to me, that I stood there wondering if it had been a dream. It was not a scene from my life, and all I wanted was the scenes from my life back. I made my water and returned to my bed.

We rose the next day. I saw that he was lost as I was. We were brothers in our lack of commitment. I wanted to say something, but what can you say to your reluctant captor? My numbness, my emptiness comes out when I opened my mouth. I let him tie me up and he lead me out of the village to a limestone cliff at the edge of the Plateau. He had taken me to a path, one branch leading east and the other south. He surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but sky on the horizon. Not a man could be seen. He turned toward me, and I tired to share my emptiness with him. He could at least know that he was leading one like himself. He handed me a package. Not understanding I took it. “There are dates, bread, sugar. You can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too,” he said, “Now look there’s’ the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.” He took my elbow and turned me rather roughly towards the south. “That’s the trail across the Plateau. In a day’s walk from here you will find the pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you and shelter according to their law.”

I thought I should tell him that I would be saved by my family if I went east. I wanted him to know that it was not too late to avoid action, which will only take us form the things we love. That we could hold onto our routines and not have war. Because when war comes, it will eventually call us to its service. “Listen,” I began.

“No, be quiet,” He said. And he was still the man with the gun, even if he did not believe in that which had given the gun to him. He waked away. I headed east. I saw him look at me with some something like horror.

I laughed, but I knew he could not hear, in fact could not hear when he had been standing besides me. I was walking to a temporary peace, but war would swallow us up. The day would come when I would believe and he would believe, and an unseen hand will lift all the chess pieces on the board, and our silent days of waiting and our nights of dreaming our own strange games would end.