The boy stopped trying to make out his father’s face. Turning away, he stared off into the vast expanse of darkness. Closing his eyes, he put his head on his mother’s lap. His father did likewise until dawn.

  Halima roused herself and woke the rest of them. Various animals were scattered around the neighboring fields. They discovered that the ditch nearby was full of stagnant water; tiny frogs kept leaping and croaking by the water at the edge of the ditch. Lhadi yawned, and so did everyone else. They all made use of the dew that had fallen to rinse their faces and heads.

  Lhadi stood up, walked away from them, and stretched. The youngest of the boys joined his father and grabbed his khaki pants, which were old and had patches on them.

  The boy seemed to like his father’s pants. Once he had a hold of them, he could not take his eyes off them. Halima rummaged through the pile, took out some bread, divided it into three, and gave the children each a piece. She yelled to Lhadi and examined him from head to toe.

  “Shall I go up and get a cart?” Lhadi asked his wife. “Or shall we just put these piles on our shoulders and carry them up to the shrine?”

  “We don’t need a cart,” she replied. “Why waste money? The children can walk.”

  “We’re still one and a half kilometers away.”

  “We can walk and take a break if the children get tired. Anyway, it would take ages for you to go up to the shrine and bring back a cart.”

  Lhadi put two of the piles on his shoulders and handed another to Halima. He told the children to get ready to walk for a while. The retarded child tried to help his mother carry the pile, but she refused. She told him to be careful not to trip on a stone and fall down. The child said that he would be careful and would walk as far as possible. The two other children said they would do the same.

  “Do you think the slut has woken up by now?”

  “The first question you should ask is whether she’s accompanied my father to the shrine.”

  “Of course she has. What would she do in Bni Yessef if she didn’t come to visit Sidi Lkamel?”

  “I don’t know. But that slut really wants to annoy my father. People have told me that she hits him sometimes.”

  “He’s a man. If he chooses to give up his manliness, that’s none of your business. Leave him alone. Let his wife do what she pleases with him.”

  “But he’s old,” he said, swiftly adjusting the two piles on his shoulders. “He can’t do a thing with a stubborn mule like her. You know how my father is, don’t you?”

  “But he’s the one who decided to marry her,” Halima said. “I am his daughter-in-law, and I’m older than her!”

  “My father—may God show him the right way—can’t help loving women.”

  The family had scrambled up the hill far enough. By now the road was no longer visible; it was concealed by clumps of trees scattered along an iron fence. Even so, the noise of a truck roaring by on the road below was clearly audible.

  Now they all saw the tents pitched in the sunshine, and a number of water tanks that prominent people had installed near the shrine’s dome.

  “Look, Father,” said the retarded child when he saw the tents. “We’ve arrived.”

  “You children,” said the mother, “try to be polite. Your grandfather doesn’t like impoliteness.”

  They were slowly getting closer to the tents. People seemed to be still asleep, not a sound to be heard anywhere. The tents managed to completely hide the shrine’s dome.

  Actually, as Lhadi had anticipated, the slut had not come, something that upset him, because he could imagine his aged father having to put up the tent and arrange things. “You see,” Lhadi told his wife as soon as they arrived. “The slut didn’t come up here with my father. She’s getting even with him.”

  “It’s what’s good for him,” Halima replied. “He clings to her closer than his own shadow.”

  “Never mind. Go and take care of the tent, then clean and arrange the dishes and prepare breakfast.”

  “The slut’ll arrive this afternoon,” Halima said. “That’s her way. She avoids the first day at the shrine because there’s a lot of hard work to be done.”

  “There isn’t that much work,” Lhadi replied. “She does it to my old father just to be spiteful.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Halima. “If she wanted, she could leave him and go somewhere else.”

  “Where would that be? He provides her with the only warm place she can find. Didn’t she leave him three years ago? Only the Devil himself knows where she went. Why did she come back? Well, because the other men kept kicking her out.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “Why not? I didn’t want my father to marry a whore, but what was I supposed to tell him? What can a son tell his father? You know that I can hardly look him in the eye. If he didn’t want specifically her, I could . . .”

  “I know what I want to say,” Halima told him. “But it’s better to stay silent. You wanted to find him a wife, didn’t you?”

  “Why not? I didn’t want my old father to marry a whore. Everybody keeps talking about her, or actually, about me.”

  “Don’t pay any attention.”

  She fell silent. “People talk about him as if he was a Caid or a Pasha,” she went on with a scoff. “But he’s just a poor farmer. Forget about it. Leave him to the slut and mind your own business.”

  By now the tents were starting to rouse. All kinds of din permeated the air. Lhadi opened the tent flap and looked out. “Get breakfast ready,” he said turning to Halima. “When my father arrives, tell him I won’t be long.”

  He made his way through alleys between the tents, heading for the big square where merchants had begun displaying candy and perfumes. All along the square was a long row of crepe sellers, all of them squatting cross-legged behind their pitch-black frying pans. He thought about buying a couple of kilograms of crepes, but decided against it. Instead, he walked over to the dome to seek a blessing from the holy man’s shrine. Crossing the square, he walked through the rows of tents to get to the dome, all the while telling himself that this year was different from previous ones. When he was young, for example, he had felt that the holy man was even greater than God; that made him very scared. But now, as he walked toward the dome, he no longer felt the way he had as a boy. Everything had really changed, he told himself, and yet he was still scared of the holy man. What mattered was that he was related to the Prophet—God’s blessing and peace be upon him. When his late mother had been sick, she had never trusted a doctor, fqih, or anybody else, but she did believe in Sidi Lkamel. In her final moments just before she died in agony, she had let out a feeble cry. “Ahhhh!” she had muttered. “Take me to my grandfather, Sidi Lkamel. Aaayeee!” But no one had managed to do that. Who knows? Maybe it was her grandfather who had decided to relieve her of all the pain and suffering she had endured for so many years. The people present at the time said, “Our grandfather Sidi Lkamel answered her plea quickly and sent the Angel of Death to take her.” Back then, Lhadi had believed it all, because he had watched his mother dying peacefully without moving hand, foot, or lip. Actually, she died smiling gently, as she stared fixedly at them all. Then she closed her eyes, the smile still implanted on her lips, and turned into nothing. “Her grandfather rescued her,” people said at the time. “He’s generous.”

  “By now,” people also commented, “the Angel of Death has certainly taken her soul.”

  After that, a cry went up, followed by weeping, wailing, and slapping of faces and thighs. Bodies collapsed in hysteria. A woman whom he could not remember now walked over to the cacti, cut off a thorny branch and started scratching her face with it, all the while crying and moaning, then she disappeared between the tents. Whenever Lhadi remembered that event, a tear would well up in his eyes.

  Even though he felt tired, he kept on walking resolutely toward the shrine. He felt a very special sensation, one he could neither understand nor describe–a simultaneous feeling of power and weakness. Apart from these special moments, nothing mattered any more. He lingered for a while before crossing the shrine’s threshold. Feeling totally relaxed and safe from any danger he may have felt in the past, he went in. Many, many people want to die in this holy man’s aura, because of his close affinity with the Prophet. Almost everyone had the same wish, even people who idolized other holy men from the nearby tribes. Sidi Lkamel was specially esteemed, indeed. More than that, whenever people thought about him it was with a combined sense of awe and fear.

  Two days passed. Presumably the slut had arrived by evening on the first day or else the following morning. When some pilgrims arrived from Bni Yessef, Lhadi rushed to ask them about his stepmother. They all thought she had arrived before them, and blamed their own lateness on a lack of funds. If so-and-so hadn’t come to their rescue by giving them some money, they couldn’t have made the pilgrimage to the shrine this year.

  “So the slut has really done it,” Halima thought to herself. “She is quite capable of doing it. She must have gone off somewhere else with some unmarried man.”

  “Doesn’t that slut have any shame?” She asked Lhadi. “Especially at this special time?”

  “We don’t have to concern ourselves with the sins of others,” said Lhadi. “Maybe she’s sick.”

  “I don’t trust that slut.”

  When Lhadi’s father did the rounds visiting friends, he discovered that all the families he knew were there.

  “Your father should get on the first truck leaving,” Halima suggested. “And go bring her here.”

  “What if he can’t find her?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He should try. People will talk about him. Have you ever heard of a man visiting the shrine without his wife?”

  She told him that if he was unwilling to understand, she would go to see his father herself and make the suggestion.

  The father agreed and fumbled in his bag for a few coins. He decided to take the first truck to Bni Yessef. But he did not find her there. The slut had finally done it.

  A huge number of tents were spread out as far as the eye could see in the blazing sun. Merchants’ shouts and the chants of the possessed, they all mingled with a heavy layer of dust that rose to the sky. From time to time gunshots could be heard, followed by celebrations of joy. Lhadi and his father stared at the ground, heads bent. They were both deep in thought and completely oblivious to their surroundings.

  “So my son,” asked the father. “What do you think the slut has done?”

  Lhadi did not reply. He dearly wished that his father wasn’t with him, so he could buy a cigarette, smoke it, and think seriously about the problem. Lifting his head, he looked into the distance where the river flowed between the trees. A few naked children were sliding down the mud, then crashing into the water with a big splash. As a child, Lhadi had done exactly the same thing. He could still recall the sight of women’s naked bodies as they splashed each other with water, breasts dangling and hair stuck to their bronze bodies.

  The father lifted his head and followed Lhadi’s gaze. Standing up, he walked wearily over to a small fig-tree. Lhadi shook off his lethargy and joined his father.

  “What shall we do with the slut if she decides to leave? Didn’t you realize before now that she was a loose woman?”

  “Yes, I knew, but I couldn’t go on living by myself. That’s why I married her. What bothers me now is how I’m going to face people. They’ll all be gossiping about me, saying she’s left me. Do you realize how enormous a disgrace this is?”

  “I do. Especially since she’s so much younger than you.”

  Lhadi thought about taking his clothes off and heading for the river, the way many men and women were already doing. He wanted to tell his father, but eventually he decided against it.

  “Are you pining for her?” he asked when he saw tears shining in his father’s eyes. “Aren’t you a man?”

  “It’s not her I’m crying about; it’s the scandal. You don’t even understand what people are going to say.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. We’ll find a solution later. Don’t bother yourself about it.”

  He grabbed hold of a small branch from a nearby tree and broke it off, causing a loud crack. He remembered that the children were still sliding into the water one after another, and that made his own desire to go for a swim even stronger. A woman caught his attention; she was lifting up her dress as she squatted under a short shady fig tree in the open air.

  “We should head back to the tent,” he told his father, lowering his head. “We can discuss the problem later.”

  His father did not seem to have heard him, but, once Lhadi headed back toward the tents, his old father followed behind. The dust was still high and the sun hot; there was the smell of gunpowder and other things, and the endless expanse of tents. Everything was fine, except that the slut was not there. Why had she chosen precisely this occasion to do it?

  “What about visiting a fqih?” the father suggested as he walked alongside Lhadi.

  “What for?”

  “Or a psychic?”

  “No point.”

  “Maybe she fell into a well or had an accident.”

  “Or perhaps she ran off with another man?”

  However hard the old man tried to convince Lhadi that she had not done that, Lhadi was not convinced. He suggested that he had the solution, but this was not the right time. Scandal was avoidable, indeed more than that. He proposed to wait till the end of the pilgrimage season. Then he would take his father to the small city, and his father could stay with him till people in Bni Yessef had forgotten all about the scandal. He would only go back to take care of his land at harvest time, if he were still able to do so.

  They kept walking through the layers of dust without saying a word. As they passed the shrine where many poor beggars were gathered in crowds, they almost lost the way to their tents . . . but the mentally handicapped boy grabbed on to his father’s pants.

  “Father,” he said, “Mother’s looking for you.”

  Lhadi did not reply but walked ahead of his father to the tent. When Halima saw him, she rushed over to him.

  “The slut finally managed it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “She did it. Your father shouldn’t find out, or else he’ll kill himself.”

  Lhadi looked behind him. His father was sitting at a distance from the tent, staring at the distant horizon.

  “What do you mean?” Lhadi asked.

  “Can you believe it; your father’s married to a whore. They took them both away.”

  “Who?”

  “She did it. The gendarmes found her under Aisha’s boy.”

  Lhadi thought for a while, then walked away from Halima. It occurred to him that now was the time to suggest the solution to his father, even though the pilgrimage season was not yet over.

  “People are bound to have heard,” he told himself. “It’s Sidi Lkamel’s will.”

  The Tight Rope

  We were sitting on rickety old chairs facing a big square. It was hot. The square was surrounded by shops and stables and looked dirty. Small alleys converged on it from every direction. We sat there drinking tea and listening to strident, dull music, music talking about cigarettes and alcohol, but not women. There were some animals as well, lolling around the square in the heat and looking for a cool spot under overhanging roofs or close to walls that shade had long since deserted. People sat close to their pack animals; most of them were eating bits of dry bread and olives without showing any hint of disgust. Some dirty Europeans were sitting next to us on rickety chairs too, staring vapidly at nothing in particular. A small group of wealthier Europeans crossed the square and started taking pictures of us and other people who were sitting close to their pack animals, eating.

  Once in a while some men and children would emerge from the narrow alleys and gather in the square. The square would empty, then fill up again. It was incredibly hot, but that meant nothing to the children; they just kept on playing.

  Then we spotted another group of children coming out of a small, narrow alley in single file. They were heading for the square, slowly and listlessly. We kept watching them intently because they seemed so regimented and in line. When we noticed that their hands were tied, we assumed it was a kind of game that downtrodden children played. Not only that, but they were all barefoot; in fact, one of them had no pants, and his tiny genitals showed unashamedly.

  By now the small group was getting closer to the square, all regimented and in line, but the other group of children seemed completely uninterested. Now we observed that each child in the small group had a rope attached tightly to his hand; actually, it was a single rope that was tied to all their hands. The children kept walking across the square in a single motley row. Some of them were crying.

  We now realized to our utter amazement that this was no game, but something much more serious. Some of the Europeans picked up their cameras and started taking pictures of the naked children, who kept on crying as they continued across the square, all tied together by a single rope with its end trailing behind them. Just then, we spotted some men who came rushing out of another small, narrow alley into the square—men with hats and uniforms. Later we discovered that they were the police. We did our best to construct a picture of what was going on.

  Eventually the policemen started grabbing the children who were playing listlessly in the square in the hot sun. We watched the entire scene: policemen using a long rope to tie the children to one another and laughing out loud. As they arrested the children, we watched Europeans taking pictures. At this point, the policemen started to leave the square, pushing the two groups of weeping children ahead of them.

  The sun was hot, the square was dirty. All over the place people were crammed together like pack animals, eating bread and olives. No one seemed to care. For them it was perfectly normal for the police to tie up dirty children and take them away.

  “Why are they doing that?” the man next to me asked, as he sipped iced tea. “Is it some sort of game?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “it’s a special game.”

 

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