'I thank God I am not with you!' I muttered to myself as I descended the slope that leads down from the gate of the fortress. So my intuition did not lie. It was indeed a council of war. Why, though, is Sabir making peace with the Egyptians and encouraging strife among his own people? Time will tell! I beg your pardon, My Master the Senoussi! Your idea's no good. It will never stop the wars. My idea, God forgive me, was better. If only they'd done it fifty years ago!
Ask forgiveness of God, Yahya! Don't return to that memory!
Still muttering, I had set about untying my donkey from the palm trunk when one of the boys playing in the sandy space came running to give me his shoulder while I mounted. I pushed him away gently, saying, 'Your grandfather can still get on his donkey on his own.' I pressed down with both my hands on the saddle and jumped on to the donkey, which set off of its own accord towards the east, in the direction of Aghurmi. It knows its way. I wish I could say that men know their own way. I wish I could say that even of myself!
Once more, I've been able to do nothing for you, Maleeka. Your uncle wasn't able to protect you, as a child or a woman. She was very small when she complained to me that the boys and girls cheated when they were playing in my garden, and dragged me by the hand to arbitrate between them. In front of me the children denied they had cheated but she easily lured them into revealing their lies. In the end I asked her, 'What do you want, Maleeka?' and she told me with the utmost seriousness, 'I want you to punish the cheaters, Uncle.' I made a show of rebuking them and left her to play with them, but in the end they got sick of her and me and excluded her from their games. And when she was a little older, she started coming to the garden to spend most of her time with me. She would go with me to the water troughs when I irrigated or cropped it and ask me why the plants I grew there were different from the vegetables she saw in the other gardens. I'd tell her that these plants were medicines and only a few people in the town grew them. She'd smile and ask me, her eyes roaming over the plants, 'Is there a medicine for me here?' 'A medicine for what, Maleeka?' 'A medicine to stop my devilry.' I'd smile and say, 'Now that would be a medicine, Maleeka!' 'But my mother says that a devil possesses me, and she's right. Why am I different from the other girls?'
I didn't tell her that she was this oasis's only blessing.
Or perhaps its only mistake, I don't know.
Think about something else, Yahya. Don't get yourself even more confused.
The way was long and I hadn't covered more than half the distance before I found myself bathed in sweat. The sun this early morning was hotter than the blazing heat of forenoon. I got off the donkey at Gouba Spring and went over to it. The shade of the trees surrounding it was a blessing. I took off my spectacles and carefully descended the stone steps to the spring. Then I bent down over the water and scooped it up in my hands to wash myself. It was a long time since I had seen my own face in this spring, which was as clear as a mirror. All I could see now was a shadow on the surface of the water as I bent over. What do you want, Yahya? You've become a very old man. Your sight and your body have become weak. Why then have neither my anger nor my bewilderment abated? Why do I still ask myself the same questions that tortured me in my youth? The end is near, but I still don't know peace of mind.
I sat in the shade of a palm tree next to the spring and Maleeka never left me. Why had they placed her between the grindstones of war, feuding and conflict that crush all men? And why war? Why all the suffering and misery on this earth? I can perhaps understand even Sabir's prophecies, which pour down perdition on the people as a reward for their sins, but what of those who do not commit sins? What crime, for example, did this child perpetrate?
You tormented your mother, Maleeka, and she tormented you. You tortured her first with your beauty, which put all the belles of the oasis to shame, the girls whose mothers would hang amulets on them and cense them to ward off envy. Throughout your childhood, Khadeeja would smear your face with soot and dress you in dirty clothes, but you remained the prettiest, despite it all. Adults would stop in the road to take a look at your enchanting features and say, 'God protect her!' This would make your mother even more terrified for you and she'd try to imprison you in the house, which you were not allowed to leave. But as soon as you got a little older you learnt how to escape. You'd dress in boys' clothes, hide your smooth hair under a cap, and roam the town at your leisure. And nobody could understand why the Ruins of the Kings, where the people of the town, generation after generation, have searched for treasure, attracted you. Were you looking for treasure, like them? But you'd return from the ruins with a beetle of stone in your hand or a shard of pottery bearing coloured drawings, and the moment your mother saw it, and you, she'd start yelling and wailing, smashing the things and throwing them into the fire, and then she'd summon the witches to cast the devil out of your body by beating you with sticks and reciting spells. As though a voice had told me that your mother was up to it again, I'd rush to the house and thrash them in turn with my stick, shouting that they and no one else were the devils, and they'd rush out howling while your mother beat her cheeks in despair. I'd find your body bruised and blue from the beating but you'd laugh all the same as you felt the places where it hurt and you'd say, in the midst of your moans, 'It's your fault, Uncle! You didn't find the medicine to save me from being punished.'
Indeed, you spoke like a grown-up and fashioned things such as grown-ups never made, coming to my garden and scooping up soft mud from the earth to form into the shape of beetles and birds that looked like the birds drawn on the walls of the ruins. Then you learnt how to fetch clay from which you could make small statues, which I could hardly distinguish from the tiny stone statues scattered in the ruins. I'd watch your small fingertips in amazement as they busied themselves in rounding a head and spreading out the arms and legs from balls of clay, and I'd ask myself, 'Where did she learn this craft?' No one in the town before or after her tried to do what she did. Even as a child, she realized from her experiences with her mother that the people of the oasis didn't like these things either, so she'd give them to me and tell me, 'You break them, Uncle. I'll make you new ones tomorrow.' Then she'd take me by the hand and say, 'Come. Show me how to grow things.'
My heart wouldn't allow me, however, to break her beautiful little statues. I knew I mustn't keep them at my house lest any, old or young, should see them and say, 'Yahya too plays with devils.' I'd keep them for a short while and contemplate them, and the delicacy with which they were fashioned would amaze me. Then I'd dig sorrowfully in the ground after Maleeka had left me, bury the statues, and spread earth and dust over them instead of smashing them before her eyes.
Later she became my constant companion in the garden. She'd come of her own accord or her mother would bring her, to stay with me instead of running away from us in disguise to the gardens of strangers or to the Ruins of the Kings on the Mountain of the Dead, whose caves even adults fear to wander in. She was my only joy in this land of gloom and sorrows. She'd talk to me and learn from me how to cultivate plants and help me to sow and graft them. I didn't have to repeat anything to her that she'd learnt before. I became more attached to her than she to me and could no longer bear for her to be away from me for a single day. But her mother buried all that intelligence with Mi'bid and they expected Maleeka to accept that destiny, and I couldn't save her from her mother or from Mi'bid or from Sabir or from the Easterners or the Westerners. Now I see what they're planning for you, after all the hullabaloo and the threats and lies. Even if war breaks out, and irrespective of who wins, they will force you afterwards to return to the man you hate.