“Don’t forget I’ve got my tribe. The most powerful tribe. . ”
“Your tribe was scattered by the Italians — and he knows that. He also knows that your father, mercy on his soul, wasn’t pleased when you married his kin. I overheard Dudu repeating your father’s curse more than once, ‘Marry her and be damned.’ I don’t know where he heard it. But, as you know, nothing remains hidden forever, not even in the desert. Didn’t I tell you there was a great secret sleeping in the man’s heart?”
But Ukhayyad was to hear another strange thing a few moments later.
“I forgot to ask him what exactly their relationship is,” Ukhayyad said as darkness began to shroud the expanse of the horizon. “I never asked her either.”
The herder blurted out, “She’s his paternal cousin.”
“His cousin?”
“Yes. Dudu has been in love with her since they were children. The two fathers had a falling out and the two were separated from one another. It’s not surprising that her father would refuse to let her marry him. When her father died, her clan left for Azjar. During that time, Dudu was being held prisoner among the Bambara tribes. He had gone on a raid to steal gold and fell into an ambush. Years later, he managed to escape. He returned to Aïr and discovered that she had gone. He gathered his vassals and attacked the Bambara — and took that cursed gold as his prize. He then sold it in Ghadamès, and you know the rest of the story. He said that the reason he had gone after the gold was to secure a dowry. This is only part of the man’s secret. As for the rest, it remains concealed and only God knows what it is.”
Ukhayyad was utterly astonished. He doubled over low, like a dervish in the throes of ecstasy. “You were right,” he said. “A man doesn’t leave his country without good reason. You were right — secrets sleep in the heart of the foreigner.”
21
The piebald caught up with Ukhayyad less than a week after he returned to the oasis. This time the camel arrived in a much worse state. Ukhayyad had never seen him in this condition before. He had become so emaciated his ribs stuck out. His eyes were sunken in hollow sockets. His forelegs were covered with deep gashes, the wounds of palm rope, the coarsest kind of rope there is. They had rebranded the camel on his left shank as well, changing the ‘+’ brand of his tribe to ‘11+,’ the mark used by the tribes of Aïr.
This was a sign from Dudu, the clever fox. It was a provocation. Dudu wanted to say that the Mahri did not belong to Ukhayyad anymore. Allowing the camel to come after him was itself a sign from one who wanted to put a flame to Uhkayyad’s heart.
When your beloved is far away, separation is bearable. Out of sight, out of mind. But to see the beloved is for passion to rekindle. This was the trick Dudu was playing. The herder had been right, the heart of the stranger is the refuge of unknowable schemes. When they parted, the herder told him, “You should not have pawned a Mahri like this to a foreigner. The likes of him should be kept hidden from the eyes of strangers. But what’s done is done.” The man spat out some of his chewing tobacco as he left to rejoin his herd.
Ukhayyad thought he would never see this herder again. He assumed that, after his master’s crazy proposition, the herder’s sense of dignity would suffice to make him leave Danbaba for good. It was a shameful demand. The first time Dudu had come to the oasis and stayed as a guest, Ukhayyad had not noticed anything wrong in either his appearance or behavior. All that he had noticed was that, in addition to the veil made of ashen cloth, the man wore a second, more impenetrable veil. Ukhayyad did not claim to know much about the hearts of men, but Dudu’s gloomy silence and unease had betrayed this second veil, the one that cloaked his heart.
The eyes are the mirror of the heart, as everyone knows, and while you can disguise your face behind a veil, you cannot hide the heart — for it speaks through the eyes. When Dudu had greeted Ayur, he was formal, even ceremonial — and nothing in his behavior aroused any suspicion except his fingertips. Etching his index finger into the ground, Dudu traced the sacred triangle for a while, then nervously went back over it, erasing the figure of Tanit he had just drawn. In that instant, a tremble shot through his fingers. At the time, Ukhayyad had not recognized the sign. But now, after thinking about it so intently, and after this latest secret had been divulged, he could see Dudu’s behavior for what it was. How fantastic the secrets of strangers are! And how strong these men are because of it! He who knows how to conceal his secrets is always the strongest.
That day Ukhayyad attempted to test his strength. He decided to abandon the Mahri for good. If he did not do it now, the shame of Dudu’s insult would stick to him forever. The desert was a merciless place. When the curse of shame sticks to a person there, he is stricken from memory. Worse, the scorn becomes inscribed, not only upon him, but upon his progeny as well. In the code of the desert, it is more merciful to be blotted out from the minds of men than it is to suffer this kind of scorn. A man scorned suffers not the finality of a single death, but rather death hundreds and thousands of times over — every day, every hour, every moment of his life. A real man, a man with dignity, chooses to die once rather than a thousand times. The thousandfold death is fit for slaves, and maybe vassals — but not self-respecting nobles.
In the morning, Ukhayyad placed the saddle and baggage on the plow camel and stole off, before the eye could distinguish the white thread from the black one in the twilight gloom. He descended into an arid valley and thrust his foot into the neck of the camel, spurring him into a trot. At that moment, he heard a distant howl of pain, “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”
The wail came from far away, but the complaint and torment it communicated shot across the open desert to Ukhayyad. Only pain can turn the bellowing of camels into the howls of wolves. The piebald always howled when he complained, but he never complained unless the pain touched his heart. There is no creature in this world who can bear corporeal pain like a camel. At the same time, there is no creature as weak as a camel when it comes to heartache. Ukhayyad knew this from his experience with the piebald.
As he listened to the wail and his heart split in two, he tried to snuff out the pain that sparked in his core. It quickly ignited a fire whose flames consumed his breast. He whipped the plow camel’s shanks, spurring him to gallop on. He wanted to flee far, far away. He wanted to disappear, he wanted the sound of the camel to fade away and the fire inside him to die out. But the more pain flooded in, the more memories began to pour out. As if in a dream, he saw their friendship as it had been at the very beginning, before they were born, before they were clots in their mothers’ wombs. He saw them together, before they were even a thought, or a feeling, in their fathers’ hearts. He saw them before they were a desire that took hold of bodies, before they were even dust drifting in the endless void. He could glimpse them back when they had been merely a sound in the wind, the echo of a song, the lamentation of strings played between the fingers of a beautiful woman, and the trilling of a houri in paradise. Yes, that was it — the sublime sound of a merciful houri singing in the shadows of the well. And now he saw it clearly: before they ever existed as anything, they had been as one being.
How could he go off now — cloaked in the darkness of dawn, fleeing like a thief — abandoning the Mahri? How could Ukhayyad throw him off, as he might toss away a ring from his finger? How could he cast him to the barbarians in the Danbaba desert? Could a woman, a boy, and a stupid thing that people in the brutal desert called ‘shame’ make him abandon his divine half and trade it for the illusion of the world? And what was a woman? She was the noose Satan created so that he could lead men around by their necks! What was a son? The toy fathers play with, thinking they will find immortality and salvation — while in actuality they find instead the ruination of their wealth and life! And what was shame? Another illusion created by the people of the desert so as to shackle themselves with chains and rope.