The fetishists, p.27
The Fetishists, page 27
At dawn the dervish fled to the encampment. His mother had sensed he would. She followed his trail and climbed the hill. Then she opened her jaws with the grievous cry: Aw-w-w-w. Aw-w-w-w-w. . . .
The howl echoed off the distant mountain and bounced back as an even more painful, grievous cry. The lark in the fugitive’s heart fluttered, and he returned to his mother. He thrust his head against her chest and told her he could not stay. She replied in the dieb tongue that destiny had sentenced him to live torn between opposites: man and wild animals, exile and origin, body and heart. He would never find serenity unless the impossible happened and the two opposites united. If he thought that leaving the mother who had nursed him with her milk to join a human female, that cleaving to another female, would guide him to serenity, he was fantasizing. He was fleeing back to the dark recesses of the first cave, to emptiness and madness. Then she approached him and shook him with the claws of her forelegs. She asked him in stern, clear language: “Who has sowed evil in our desert, which has no rival for beauty or splendor among the Creator’s creations: man or the dieb? Who has wiped out the gazelles and exterminated the Barbary sheep: man or the dieb? Who has drained the water from the wells and polluted the springs: man or the dieb? Who has uprooted the desert trees, set fire to the plants, and destroyed the grasses: man or the dieb? Who has dared to kill birds merely for sport: crows, cranes, and tiny sparrows: man or the dieb? Who has lifted his hand to kill his mother, brother, and father: man or the dieb? Now then: which of us is the savage beast: man or the dieb? You are fleeing from a mild-mannered clan that seeks only some small, bitter morsel of food once a month to avoid dying of hunger; you are taking refuge with a clan that kills without being hungry, drinks water and squanders it, destroys needlessly, and kills for no reason at all.” The weeping dervish replied that he would never be able to resist the cry, because the bird in his chest had flown and entered the beautiful shepherdess, leaving only his vile body behind on the plain, with her. The poor mother understood that man must return to his people’s fold just as a dieb returns from men’s campsites to the dieb pack. She embraced him for a long time, but hid her tears. When the dervish disappeared behind the hills, she turned toward the qibla and pointed her long muzzle toward the dawn’s pristine firebrand. Then she aired her lament: Aw-w-w-w.
It is reported that this howl of farewell lasted for an entire year—in other versions of the story, for twelve years. Since that time, this calamitous cry has become the language of the diebs.
Musa had heard this story about alienation and had known since childhood that his first grandfather married the beautiful shepherdess after he returned from living as a jackal. He remembered this story now, not because he saw a dieb over his head, but because he had rid himself of the member that caused the grandfather’s flight from his mother—the demonic organ that had tempted him to the shepherdess and inflamed the heart of a mother who had plucked him from the barren countryside, rescued him from thirst, sheltered him, and provided him security and life. He had not been able to prevent himself from feeling angry at his idiotic ancestor ever since he heard this shameful tale. Today he had exacted vengeance for his jackal grandmother and had excised the cause of that exile. He licked his lips with his tongue in an attempt to moisten his mouth and to create some saliva.
He murmured with difficulty, “Now you can bring the good news to our grandmother that I propose to return to our clan, and here’s the proof. Take it and inform Grandmother of the prodigal grandson’s desire to return to the clan.”
And . . . he lost consciousness again.
6
Al-Bakkay’s men picked him up in the morning and carried him to the leader, who organized a banquet in honor of the invalid. He also ordered his Bantu slaves and his vassals to construct a tent especially to welcome the invalid’s visitors. He slaughtered livestock and bought food, sugar, and tea from the markets of Waw to feed the guests and entertain well-wishers who came to congratulate the dervish on his safe survival from an attack by diebs.
This, at least, is what the shaykh said publicly. It was what the dervish wanted people to hear from the leader’s mouth. After the merchants brought him and Adda received him in his tent, he exchanged a long, mysterious look with the shaykh, to the consternation of al-Bakkay’s men. With this look Musa confided his secret and begged the leader to keep it hush-hush—without ever resorting to words. He knew the shaykh was the only creature on the plain who expected—because of his experience or special gift—that Musa would do something with his heart, perhaps more than he actually had done. As a matter of fact, the acquiescence he saw in his noble friend’s eyes surpassed his own expectations. He expected to see some accusation, blame, or anger there, but during the fleeting moment their eyes met, all he witnessed was pain.
Three men lifted him off the camel with extreme care and placed him in the tent—wrapped in a grey blanket that years of use had faded till it was almost white. The bleeding had stopped overnight, but his thobe was stained with blood and oil. His clothing smelled of oil and scorched flesh, and he had withered and aged. His face looked quite dark. The sides of his lips were coated by a delicate layer of foam. His upper lip had pulled away from his teeth, which projected and protruded even more. His eyes seemed extinguished, and their large whites rotated. He shuddered and shivered with feverish shakes, and his head was racked by pain and exhaustion.
The shaykh summoned an old black woman. She arrived, carrying wooden containers in which she kept herbal salves and preparations concocted by druggists and old women. She wrapped him with covers in a corner of the tent and then thrust a hand covered with a viscous salve between his legs. He screamed with pain.
One of the merchants reported, “The dieb circled his head all night long.”
The shaykh asked them to stay, but they excused themselves on the grounds that they might be late in reaching Murzuq, where al-Hajj al-Bakkay was waiting for them. The shaykh accompanied them to the foot of the mountain and then returned. He found the invalid raving about the splendid life he had lived in the clan of his ancestors, the diebs. The old woman continued to purse her lips disapprovingly and to cast furtive glances at the shaykh. Finally he told her sternly, “Diebs attacked him in Acacia Valley.”
When she stared at him skeptically, he cast her a look like a thunderbolt, and she stammered in alarm, “Yes. Yes. Diebs attacked him.”
As he stood at the entrance, preparing to celebrate the rituals with the well-wishers who would come, he asked, “Was I the one who said diebs circled his head all night long? Am I the person lying in bed and raving about his enjoyable life in the clan of the diebs?”
The old woman replied like a child, “Diebs attacked him in Acacia Valley.”
She never spoke about this again.
Musa’s aged foster mother came and wept over him for a long time. Finally the leader was obliged to forcibly remove her from the tent. Shaykhs and older women arrived as did girls and boys. His visitors included Tamghart, Taffawut, Okha, Akhmad, the imam, the herald . . . and the diviner Temet. The diviner, though, did not enter the tent; she stood by the rear stakes. Accompanied by a group of women, she looked at him through a slit in the tent. Days later, Udad came from the mountains. He knelt beside Musa for a long time without saying a word. His eyes were miserable, and his glances were vacant, mournful, and absent. Even Musa thought he was ill. When the dervish asked how he was, Udad smiled dejectedly and indicated that he was happy. The dervish’s body was burning with fever, and pain caused him to pass out. Then Udad slipped away and traveled to Tadrart.
While conscious, Musa made a point of providing an exaggerated account of the pack of jackals that had attacked him in Acacia Valley. He wanted the tribe, who knew about the separation of dervishes from their ancient source, to be clear that the beasts had come to reclaim their descendent. When Musa had resisted, they had attacked him below his navel. Tongues, which are always keen to create fables, needed no further incentive to transform this story into a new legend. Some days later, in the heart of the night when the leader was sitting beside the invalid, Musa said, “I’m not lying. The dieb really visited me after the purification.”
The shaykh bowed his head and put an additional handful of branches on the dying fire. These snapped in the flames and disturbed the stillness of the wee hours of the night.
The dervish whispered, as if to himself, “If I hadn’t purified myself, the messenger wouldn’t have come from my grandmother. Do you think the messenger would have visited me if I hadn’t completed my lustration?”
His head bent, the leader continued to watch as the tongues of flame lauded the new firewood.
The dervish continued, “I know you’re laughing at me, but I remember my circumcision. The jurist didn’t cut sin off by its roots. So when I matured, my heart yearned for Eve. If he had cut more, back then, woman wouldn’t have dared to steal me from my nafs—the way she did my grandfather.”
The leader moved his head with an inscrutable gesture, and the invalid continued, “Our grandmother, the dieb bitch, committed a huge error when she didn’t liberate him from sin. If she had purified him when he was young, he wouldn’t have fled from her when he grew up. Eve’s Satan leads man from down here.” He pointed to his wounded crotch.
The leader made no comment. The patient suggested, “I have a request. . . .”
The leader did not turn his way. So Musa concluded, “That you keep this a secret between us.”
The leader raised his head for the first time since Musa had begun speaking. The dervish read pain and a promise in his eyes. So he stretched out on his back and fell asleep.
NOTE
1. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, trans. John E. Woods (Alfred A Knopf: Everyman’s Library, 2005) p. 235.
3
Terrestrial and Celestial Waw
Then he entered the desert and seized it.
Then he traversed it, the areas that people mined, from mountain to plain.
AL-HALLAJ, “TASIN AL-SAFAʾ,” AL-TAWASIN1
1
Once the sultan declassified the secret, the face of Waw changed.
Emastagh drew up plans to extend the city wall’s wing that stretched north and stopped before its obdurate jaw—with triangular dentils reminiscent of the architecture of Ghadames had curved west to meet the other section and swallowed the “Earth’s Nipple.” On both sides of the extant wall, rows of low buildings coated with lime were used by merchants for shops that displayed merchandise caravan merchants brought from the north and south of the desert continent. People of the plain could not believe their eyes when they saw—in their desolate wasteland—punctual delivery of merchandise for which caravans had previously traversed vast distances on trips that had lasted months—even years—to import from Ghadames, Kairouan, Tripoli, Kano, Timbuktu, Agadez, or Tamanrasset. Here they found the temptations of those legendary cities that a member of their tribe would boast his whole life about visiting, if he was fortunate enough to visit them even once, in the far reaches of the desert. Even dates and grains, for which they had bartered butter, cheese, and livestock with farmers in the oases, now sped to them, and merchants displayed the choicest varieties in front of their shops. The tribe’s notables enjoyed window-shopping there and discussed the miracle that could not have been accomplished had the jinn not lent a hand with the haunted metal. Many forgot the ancient covenant more quickly than they would have expected and repeated with amazement that this magical metal inevitably transformed into a paradise any land it entered. Sages devised various excuses for weak-kneed individuals when they saw the munificence of the merchandise with which the shops overflowed—to the point that merchants had to hang some items on the fronts of their stores or to display them in sacks, bags, and containers outside their shops once the shelves inside became so crammed with merchandise that the goods spilled out. The city—in fact the whole plain—was scented by spices, condiments, perfumes, rose water, musk, and incense. The smell of green and black teas filled the air, and merchants displayed two types of sugar—regular blocks or molded into loaves that resembled farmers’ huts in the oases—and salt, also in the same two forms. The plain overflowed with all varieties of grain. Whenever a new caravan arrived, it brought more sacks of wheat, barley, sorghum, millet, and sugar cane. From the deserts came dried meat: gazelle, Barbary sheep, wild hare, wild buffalo, lamb, and camel. Textiles stole the hearts of the virgins with their colors, patterns, and varieties. Women and girls began to hover around the fabric shops as though visiting the tombs of the ancients and the sepulchers of saints on feast days. Boys and young men were attracted too, because the demonic merchants prepared lures no less enchanting for them.
They imported long, free-flowing gowns dyed blue with indigo, all varieties of tagelmust: from Aïr and Ahaggar and a type made by the Bantu of Kano. Likewise, they did not forget Tamba sandals, which were embroidered with a dozen thongs of different colors. Mounted warriors besotted with raids found swords, spears, saddles, and whips for sale. Older men purchased tobacco and natron to chew while they sat perched on the balls of their feet or leaned on their staffs near the stores, listening to the souk’s clamor.
The secret metal remained in circulation.
The sultan ordered the creation of shops to display jewelry, objets d’art made of gold, and gems, with the understanding that the workshop would remain a depot where artisans and smiths created the wares for these shops. Thus continued the work of the smiths and the secret music that had signaled the beginning of Waw’s resurrection from the Unknown and the opening of the golden age for the central desert.
2
With the arrival of autumn, the date for the banquet drew near. The herald continued his excursions through the community’s camps and circled the wall of Waw. He climbed the hills and traversed the plain as if wishing to share the glad tidings with the rocks of the wasteland, the boulders of the mountains, and the crests of the acacias after engraving them in the memory of the tribe and the immigrants and after the herdsmen and wayfarers had learned the date by heart.
God had not merely granted the tribe’s herald a mellifluous voice; He had singled him out with another gift that allowed him to compete with the female poets, who wrote love poetry and panegyrics, and the male poets, who wrote chivalrous and martial poetry. He celebrated the news and added enough magic that an event became a splendid legend people yearned for. Mothers frequently related his legends to rambunctious children to encourage them to go to bed early. People of the desert did not think it odd to hear new legends about Waw from the herald—ones nobody had heard before. All the same, the sages asserted that these texts had appeared in Anhi in the section generations had handed down and that grannies had recounted in tales, aphorisms, and secret confidences, because desert people habitually attributed to the Lost Book cold, stern texts that discuss the philosophy of life and the secret of death and that caution naughty grandchildren not to succumb to a sedentary life and the acquisition of possessions. On the other hand, successive generations have attributed narrative texts characterized by a didactic spirit and a lovely style to the imagination of the ancestors. Apparently shaykhs and wise men detected this cold, stern, severe spirit (and these adjectives seem correlated with wisdom) in the blind herald’s stories, even though they were true to the imagination of the ancestors in marrying a pedagogical goal with aesthetic beauty.
On the great plain, encircled by the peaks of eerie mountains, the herald’s cry recounted two unknown stories about Waw. The blind man with his noble voice chiseled stories into the desert’s memory, putting into circulation advice from ancestors to their descendants: “Avoid greed and beware of curiosity.”
Report of the First Version of the Legend
Waw opened its doors to the lost traveler after he had despaired and begun to strip naked. None of the desert’s wise men understand why mercy is shown so tardily. A lost person is not rescued and a thirsty person is not given water till he has despaired and flung off his clothes. Similarly no one knows whether clever desert dwellers deliberately resort to this ploy to placate heaven and to proclaim their repentance or whether the drop of life latent in water compels the traveler to kneel and kiss the sand only after it has evaporated and carried away whatever was left of his mind, so that the arrogant desert dweller forgets his sense of shame at the gates of oblivion, which is the only portal that does not distinguish between pride and disgrace and accepts only the naked. It is said that an explanation appeared in the lost Anhi for this harsh test: heaven deliberately delays mercy till thirst has purified the migrant’s body of pride and stripped his awe-inspiring veil from the shameful orifice called the mouth. Everyone who has been rescued naked from this monster feels shattered and keeps his head bowed for the remainder of his life. Anhi says that proud, obstinate people, whose arrogance does not allow them to remove their veil and clothes and to kiss the earth, find the doors of Waw closed in their faces. Angels patrolling the desert lose their way when searching for them. They find corpses inside these travelers’ garments, as maggots feed on their bodies and hawks and crows circle overhead.
Our traveler, however, was not arrogant; he stripped off his pride along with his clothes—as righteous people do. Heaven brought Waw and set its awe-inspiring walls before him, below the sandy heights. A veil of darkness descended with it. So the traveler did not know if the sun had set or if infidel thirst had led him by the hand to the dark recesses. He staggered and fell to the ground. His face disappeared in the dirt, and grains of sand filled his mouth and nostrils. He breathed in the dust and chewed on the nasty, salty grains. He raised his head and observed Waw’s playful lights, which flashed on and off, moved closer and farther away, twinkling and hiding with virginal seduction. He thought he was standing on the heights of the Kingdom. So he waited for the Angel of Retribution and prepared for the Reckoning. This is also one of the marvels of Waw, and eyewitnesses relate that the Promised Oasis did not appear to them until they had despaired of finding it and had long forgotten about it. It also appeared in Anhi that it resembles a shadow—fleeing from those who search for it, but chasing those who have despaired of finding it.
