Gold Dust

17

Ukhayyad woke up in the night, alarmed.

He had seen the local soothsayer standing over him, telling him to slaughter the piebald.

He wiped away the sweat and slipped out of the hut. A pale moon peeked timidly in the sky. In the magnificent silence of the oasis, the night-time singing of crickets could be heard in the palm grove. He walked about the open desert and thought: this soothsayer from Tiba must be a ghoul. What he had seen was not a real dream, but a ghost who wanted to eat the piebald’s flesh. Who would dare to eat the flesh of a stately animal with graceful limbs?

Tomorrow he would find the witch and kill her in cold blood. But, beforehand, he would find out what she meant by telling him this. Perhaps that too had been a sign of something else. The language of soothsayers is never self-evident. He returned to the hut, but was afraid to go back to sleep. Those who suffer nightmares fear the bed.

In the morning, a peasant woman told him that the soothsayer from Tiba had left the oasis. Her son had come and taken her away with him in a caravan passing toward Aghadès. Three days after the woman had left, Ukhayyad saw her in a dream. She spoke to him directly: “I am not the one who demands the head of your piebald. It is Tanit.” Then she vanished, and he never saw her again after that. In a few days, he forgot her altogether. He returned to his old self and devoted his energies to staving off the hunger that surrounded them. Only the day before, a whole family — husband, wife, and three children — had died. The doors of life had closed in their face and they shut themselves up in a hut. No one saw them until their corpses began to rot and one of their neighbors broke down the door. They found the family heaped in a pile, their bodies decomposed and crawling with maggots. The children’s eyes had almost popped out of their sockets. The imam at the mosque said that they had been strangled to death. Apparently, the father had choked them to prevent neighbors from hearing their cries.

That night, Ayur told him, “If you don’t do something about the state we’re in, we might as well do what that family did. But we should do it out in the desert rather than here. There will always be three bullets for your rifle, right?”

He did not reply.

In the morning, he went to the merchant to borrow some oil. He had known the man during better times and had bartered with him in the past, exchanging strips of dried gazelle and moufflon meat for barley, dates, and sugar. The man would not turn him away disappointed. But the merchant swore that he did not have enough for his own supper. He did not have enough for his own supper?! Only a few months ago the man had received a caravan from Timbuktu and purchased their entire merchandise. Then he turned around and quickly sold the same goods at twice the price to the merchants of Ghadamès. Then, as the food shortage intensified, he began to sell them at exorbitant prices to the peasants. Once a profiteer, always a profiteer! The merchant had caught the whiff of starvation before it had started to spread. He knew the war would go on and on.

Ukhayyad remembered his wife’s ambiguous hint, and the hidden hatred it concealed. A woman despises nothing as much as she despises a failure or a man convinced that he is a failure. Toward such a man, she can be openly hostile, even if he is her most intimate relation. How brutal woman can be! My God — where had her charms gone? Where was her poetry, her spark? He asked one of the peasants for food, but the man swore the same thing. When times get tough, all men make oaths and then break them. The peasants were terrified of the future, of the unknown, of the surprises war would bring.

Ukhayyad sat for a long time on the edge of the water channel. Then he got up to leave. But he had only gone a short distance when the peasant caught up to him. Tears glimmered in the man’s eyes. He opened his hands to reveal a few dry dates. Three, maybe four dates. The man said, “These are from my children. They are for your child. I know you have a boy.”

The man raised his face and completed the gesture by addressing his words toward heaven: “Lord, what sins have these children committed?”

Ukhayyad studied the four dates for a few moments. Tears welled in his eyes too. He hid them with his veil and hid the dates in his pocket. Before disappearing into the date grove, Ukhayyad heard the peasant cry out, “Why don’t you sell the Mahri? Why should a man like you starve when he owns a Mahri like yours?”

Ukhayyad froze. How dare he? Did the ignorant man suppose the piebald was merely a beast? Would he have Ukhayyad eat the flesh of his brother? He began to regret having taken the dates from him. He would give them back. He had to respond to the insult by returning them. People were impossible to deal with — they give generously to you with one hand, and stab you with another. But Ukhayyad did not give the dates back. He could not bring himself to go back. The memory of his child’s cries at home forced him to swallow the insult. The boy had been born sickly like Ukhayyad’s mother — skinny and pale, weak in heart and body, beset by sorrow. Since his birth, he had never once smiled. He did nothing but cry. The sound of a home filled with crying children is the only thing that can drive a free man to sell his purebred mount at the public market.

That night, Ayur stepped up her campaign against him, building upon what the peasant had said, “We will not starve to death as long as that Mahri wanders freely in front of our home.” This was the last thing he had expected her to say. A well-born woman would never ask for Mahri flesh, even if she were dying of hunger. What kind of woman would crave Mahri flesh?

She was silent for a moment, then followed with another thrust of the knife: “We have eaten nothing but alfalfa for the past few days. Like sheep.”

He tried to choke down the pain but could not. He leaped up and sarcastically said, “How do you expect us to go into the desert to use those three bullets if we have nothing to ride?” He could not escape the contempt he felt toward the woman, toward himself, toward children, toward the whole world. From the moment they emerge from their mother’s bellies, humans never truly enjoy a single moment in peace. As soon as they put one calamity behind them, they greet the next. At first they must struggle against the drought, then against the Italians. Then they have to go from the pangs of thirst to the torture of hunger. From the scoldings of fathers to the resentment of wives. From the harshness of the desert outside to the ulcers that burned inside the belly. That is how it is — each thing in its own turn. Yes, the troubles of the outside world might subside — but only so that troubles at home might begin.

In the grove, he vomited. Whenever contempt raged in his insides, this happened. He did not vomit food, but yellow bile. With it, the disease inside came spilling out.

Late that night, he came back and slept outside the hut. For two days after that, Ayur exchanged not a single word with him.

It was then that her kinsman, the stranger, returned to the oasis. Dudu went to the market and bartered two camels for some goods. Ukhayyad met him at the entrance to the market, and there he arrived at an inspired, face-saving solution. Foreigners do not understand the language of borrowing and lending, especially if they are wealthy. Ukhayyad would pawn the piebald to the man. In exchange, he would borrow a camel or two until the war subsided. Then, with luck, he would ransom the Mahri. For this loan, he would put up the most handsome Mahri in the entire Sahara as security. When Ukhayyad spoke to Dudu about the deal, he saw the spark in the man’s eyes. It was the kind of glitter that only ever flashed in the eyes of merchants who had lifelong experience trafficking in gold. It was the glitter of gold itself. Was it greed? Ukhayyad told himself that the arrangement would sustain his family until their luck changed. And at the same time, it guaranteed that he would be able to hold on to the piebald.

But Ukhayyad made one mistake: he did not understand what traders meant when they talked about offering something up as security.