Gold Dust

18

Before leaving, Ukhayyad went off to be alone with the Mahri. In the morning, he prepared himself for their private ritual. He went to the grove and begged for a handful of green alfalfa to bribe the camel with at evening. “As you can see, no sooner do we escape from one trap than we fall into another,” he told the camel. “Still, be patient. Didn’t you and I agree to be patient? Patience is life — we learned that together long ago.”

He patted the animal’s neck, and the piebald stopped its chewing. “Sometimes in this world, friends are split apart, and distance must take its share,” Ukhayyad continued. “But don’t be afraid. Our separation won’t last long. We’ll meet up again when the smoke clears and when those wretched men stop their war against us. The war can’t last forever.”

Overcome with fear, the camel protested: “A-a-a. . ”

He swallowed what was in his mouth, and rejected the proposition: “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

Ukhayyad tried to placate him: “This isn’t how nobles behave. Children cry and women cry. Grown men remain steadfast and patient.” He wiped his hands on his robe, and buried his head in its wide, loose sleeve. Man and animal embraced for a long time in the night silence.

The foreigner took the camel with him when he left the next morning. He fitted out the camel, complete with saddlebag and a harness decorated with strips of colored leather. Still, the man did not mount the camel. Instead, he tied the purebred Mahri to the tail of his own dirty mongrel. They departed for the Danbaba desert where they joined up with his herd.

But even Ukhayyad, who had been raised with camels, did not know the true extent of the animal’s character. He did not know what it meant to befriend a purebred Mahri camel. Just three weeks after leaving, the piebald returned. By that time, Ukhayyad had traded one of the two camels for dates and barley to stem the hunger of Ayur’s mouth and eyes. Using the one remaining camel, he plowed water channels for the peasants in exchange for a quarter portion of their harvests. He was out the door at dawn only to return, exhausted, in the evening. Then he would collapse and sleep like a dead man. He was content to wear himself out and sleep soundly. He had forgotten the last time he had enjoyed such deep sleep — throughout the time of famine, an obstinate insomnia had lorded over him. It had been his family, not the hunger, that was stealing his sleep. But now, able to fill his wife’s mouth and eyes, he could drift off as soon as he lay down. That pleased him, but at the same time it bothered him. He felt an unfathomable sense of dread — perhaps because he sensed his conflicting feelings might be a signal and he feared such warnings. The desert had taught him to be attuned to them, that in life, nothing was more formidable than a sign, especially if you ignored it or failed to recognize it in the first place.

Signs are fate — or so the desert told him.

Like any creature exhausted from long running, Ukhayyad began to relax as soon as his problems had disappeared behind a sand dune. His actions grew careless. Troubles return quickly to those who slacken their guard against them. If they cannot beat you in fighting face to face, they melt away — and when you turn your back on them, they return to attack you from behind.

These are lessons the desert teaches herders every day, free of charge. But this fickle advisor abandons men as soon as they begin to take up residence in oases, and arrogantly take up tilling the land.

This is what happened to Ukhayyad. Life in the oasis had dressed his slackness in something peasants call ‘ease.’ Ease is what conceals laxity. And in laxity hides rust.

The row woke him up at dawn. In the sweet intoxication of sleep, Ukhayyad thought he heard the bellowing of an enraged camel. He emerged from the hut to see the shadows of two camels struggling in the twilight, one attacking the other with its teeth. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief. The shadowy figure had the same frame and stature as his piebald. It was the piebald. He had overpowered his opponent, and was clinging onto him. His neck and left upper lip were spattered with blood. In the morning light, Ukhayyad discovered other bite wounds across the other camel’s body, and a serious gash under its chest.

Two days later, one of the camel herders arrived and said Dudu had sent him after the escaped Mahri. The man’s mouth was empty, toothless. Despite that, he never stopped laughing or chewing tobacco. He sat under a low, shady palm in the field. “Praise God,” he said, taking a pouch from his pocket. “He’s let me live long enough to see tobacco become cheap as dirt. Would you believe that a peasant at the grove gave me two handfuls for free?”

The man fell over backwards laughing, exposing his empty gums. Then he went on, “The war may have brought famine, but it also killed the price of tobacco — it’s one of the war’s genuine benefits. On the coasts, they only smoke cigarettes now. Have you ever tried a cigarette?”

“I don’t use tobacco.”

“Forgive me. I’m an addict. For me, tobacco comes before everything else. In the desert, I know how to live off herbs for months and years. But I can’t go one day without tobacco. You know, people like me commit heinous crimes if they can’t get it. Did you ever hear the story of that migrant who was an addict? Some peasants refused to give him tobacco, and he killed them all. He killed three men on account of tobacco leaf. Of course, that’s insanity — but it’s the sort I can understand!”

Then he laughed again.

That evening, the man told Ukhayyad stories about famine in the desert. He said that in recent years entire families had perished and were then buried in mass graves. In the southern deserts, only sparse rains had fallen — and drought had settled in early with the brutal summer. Everybody had fled the smell of gunpowder, abandoning the verdant pastures of the north. The northern reaches of the Hamada desert were completely empty this year.

“Is there any sign the war might end?” Ukhayyad asked him. “Just the opposite. Weeks ago, emissaries from the resistance traveled around the desert looking to conscript men. They want to bolster their ranks in Kufra oasis and Cyrenaica.”

He grew silent for a while. “It doesn’t seem that the war will end anytime soon,” he finally said, with a tone of dismay. The two men became lost in their thoughts, wandering far, far away. The herder chuckled, “But the upside of the war is that it has destroyed the price of tobacco. Famine doesn’t bother me, and now that tobacco is plentiful, I won’t have to kill anyone like that migrant did.”

“Let’s not talk about that for now,” Ukhayyad interrupted, “Tell me about the piebald. What’s his life like there?”

“Ah. He’s no camel, you know. He’s a human being in a camel’s skin. I’ve spent my entire life around camels, but I’d never seen one like him before. When Dudu first fetched him, he refused to graze. I saw the sadness in his eyes. I knew he was pining for you. The ability to feel longing is what sets the rare breeds apart from others. Did you know — he even refused to kneel! He’s been standing on his feet throughout these past weeks. I tethered him in a nearby pasture, but he broke the cords and raced off toward you. We caught up with him after a fierce chase, and brought him back to the pastures. That time around, we tied him with palm rope instead of camel-hair cord. I’m sorry I had to be so rough with him, but there was no other solution. Do you know what he did? When he couldn’t break the rope with his legs, he chewed through it. Then he bolted. We never caught him. He is no camel — he’s a human being.”

In the darkness Ukhayyad said, “I told him that patience is the only talisman that can protect us from disaster. He must have lost it.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ukhayyad mumbled some incomprehensible words. To which the herder replied, in a knowing tone, “I don’t understand how you allowed yourself to pawn him. A Mahri like him should have never been put up for anything.”

In his mind, Ukhayyad answered, “I did it because of my family. My wife. What do you know about children or wives?”

Ukhayyad envied this unfettered man who had no cares beyond his handful of tobacco. He had once been as free as the herder and even freer — needing nothing at all, not even tobacco. With the piebald, he had wandered God’s wide desert. But then woman appeared and separated him from tribe and companion. Didn’t Sheikh Musa say that it was woman who drove Adam from the garden of paradise?