33

Hafid Bouazza

Ghost Town

Spookstad

‘Sibawayh!’

The silence shifted uneasily like a bashful woman in male company.

I called again. It was always the same ritual, ever since the day he had exchanged his place on my cot for the stable down below. Perfidious Sibawayh. My impatience, his maddening sluggishness.

‘Sibawayh!’

This time I tap-tap-tapped with my tremulous walking stick (silver-knobbed) hard on the floor.

Silence.

Some commotion, a cough, the a-metrical creak on the stairs and suddenly my gloom was filled with evil-smelling, swishing Sibawayh: he was undoubtedly adjusting his hurried clothing. Brusquely he helped me into my cloak.

‘What a stench … what a stench …’ I muttered, leaning on his low shoulder. He slipped ‘those-yes-yes-those’ babouches on to my feet and smoothed the hood of my cloak. ‘Now go and saddle the mule,’ I told him.

There was a time when mule and harness were matters of grave concern to me. Like all men of rank I had a predilection for the female animal, preferably dappled, sleek, nib-eared, the mane and tail plaited, the croup drum-sized. As for the harness, the caparison had to be brocaded, or at least veined with the illusion of gold thread. Scrofulous beggars with watery eyes, hands ever cupped, would gape at the silk and gold of bridle and stirrup as at the splendours of after-worldly promise. Both legs had to rest over the left flank, swinging gently from the knee, the cloak arranged in even folds, the feet shod in velvet-covered slippers. It was quite an art to affect boredom while holding the reins between thumb and curved little finger, and not only to conduct one’s mount with delicacy but also (when accompanied by two servants) to keep the eyes fixed ahead, over the pitching gait of the slave holding the bridle, and never to allow idle thoughts of vanity to draw one’s gaze to the black sun-soaked parasol-bearer at one’s side.

But now it was night and for various reasons I only visited my physician after sundown. Sibawayh returned to the stable. I stood in the room and waited, a quaky old man. Memories are unpredictable, except at moments of pitiful helplessness. A blind elder, a couple of centuries old, with shrunken untoothed jaws, is invariably both helpless and to be pitied.

Sibawayh’s youthful sullenness had, as was entirely to be expected, worsened over the years. Yet life (and here the wheels of memory turned again) had so indulged this once hollow-backed, round-bellied, blinking, half-naked slip of a boy. From the far end of a cramped blundering darkness (Sibawayh swore as he stumbled down the stairs) a slanting sunbeam of memory flared in my mind’s eye: a prismatic burst of blinding sunshine and blazing colours, meandering multitudes, tumult, a grimace of sunny cruelty. The slave market: bare heads baking in the sun, vivid turbans and canopies, corrupt shadows. Beyond the slave market stood the great azure mosque, its back unaccountably turned to us. Slaves, both male and female, stood on display in a long gallery, running the gamut of pale and luminous to gleaming black; warm nipples, cool bellies. And there he stood, dazed, eyebrows knitted against the glare, a hint of orphan’s sorrow around the corners of the mouth, arms folded behind the back (weathered elbows), jutting shoulder blades. There stood Sibawayh, nakedly exposed, obedient to the hands of the deafening broker invoking the sun’s help in his exposition of the state of the four-foot-high young Sibawayh’s health: the imperfect teeth, the endearing little pouch, the promise (unkept) of muscular development in his tender arms.

Mule-high, I gazed out over the multitude, my parasol-bearer at my side. I fell, forgive me, very nearly to the ground. Suddenly my precious dazzling white robes struck me as hopelessly cheap and unsuitable. By some miracle I managed to conclude the transaction without unseemly haste. Overcome with emotion, I yanked the reins and left the market. A servant followed behind with Sibawayh.

And since that day, the day when (moneybag on my right hip lightened, loins weighted with ample promise of ecstasy) I first led him, Sibawayh, to my dwelling, where I bathed him (his sun-brined skin warm as sand) and then took him, naked except for a fine mousseline wrap, smelling of apple orchards, to my cool room – since that day he had been nothing but intractable, runty, all elbows. His body grew more slowly than the sores on my skin. Amid draperies patterned with hunting scenes, spent after my exertions for a shameful Venus, the stout goat of my loins lolled on my belly, soiled, reeking of Sibawayh’s puckered profundity. Propped up on his bleached elbows he lay silently weeping, the nape of his neck furrowed and a trough between his jutting shoulder blades. The cleft of his hillock was smeared with blood – and the goat resumed his grazing.

My spacious and tastefully appointed suite, from the steamy kitchens to the awninged gate, put him in good cheer. Daubs of light and shade had free play with him when he ran about in the courtyard during the siesta (the only time he was permitted to leave my side). Only rarely did he slide an anxious, inquisitive glance into the gold-dusted stable. He never wore the pretty pampooties I had given him, and would weep when forced to put them on. No doubt he still felt the stony plains of his fatherland under the soles of his feet.

In my blind state this period of my life is a playground of sunny reminiscences, a pool of light in my greedy memory. In my private darkness Sibawayh eluded me, like a mouse too swift to be seen. He existed only in so far as he breathed, moved about or spoke, which he did less and less in my presence and more and more (in that same order), alas, in the stable, that nether world where he made his belated rediscovery of youth.

I heard him curse the mule. I heard him shuffle about. I heard a door open and then shut. I heard a heavy key drop on the flagstone with a clear high clink. I heard his step-step-step on the stairs.

I held out my hand for him to guide me and leaned on him as we proceeded through the corridor and down the naked stairway past empty rooms. Along the gallery, across the roofless courtyard, past the defunct fountain into the vestibule and then down the steps to the main gate: a cautious progress through a languishing house, as smooth and perfect as a womb.

At the gate I heard the jingle-bells on the old mule’s bridle. He guided my feet into the stirrups and hoisted me effortlessly on to the saddle, whereupon I shifted from one buttock to the other with a lamentable lack of grace, while keeping both legs over the left flank: a shrivelled fruitlet of life.

The house of our renowned Jewish physician was a few streets eastward, beyond the great mosque. He had subjected me to various treatments, all to no avail; salves and ointments redolent of summery lavender – a physician’s cunning sense of poetry. And all the while my skin continued to break out in suppurating sores while Sibawayh felt smoother than ever to my infrequent touch. I knew what he was doing on the pallet in the stable; I knew how he lured ungodly maidens and beggars’ daughters to celebrate his long-dormant lust. Each thrust wounded me. Indifferent to my heartache, he kept thrusting to the hilt.

My days of noble pursuits are over, my pride is awash in threadbare purple, the fool has vanquished the king, my writing quivers, I live in a portable darkness, my bowel movements give cause for concern. My prose resembles the spectres of my memory: empty vessels, truncated epithets drifting soulless in a ghost town where even my language is dead.

‘To the physician,’ I said.

He took hold of the reins and we set off at a slow pace. The mule shook its head and evaporated in a thousand tinkles. I turned back the edge of my hood. I laid my right hand open-palmed on my lap and crossed the heel of one foot over the instep of the other.

An inexplicable repugnance stirred in me. Suddenly the road dipped and my stomach lurched. This must be the alley frequented in the daytime by beggars trailed by ragged broods, their souls bared in a bowl or cupped palm. Some of them – legless, sightless, or in some other way disorderly – spent the night huddled in doorways and nooks. Some, too, persisted sleepless in their labour.

We would soon pass the door that had been painted a livid green to signal the resident’s pilgrim status, to summon the mumbled blessings of beggars. The pilgrim himself had recently died a dishonourable death, leaving his reprobate sons to care for their aged mother, who had previously lost her first husband, likewise a pilgrim, and who would survive her two sons as well.

The night was a veritable poem of sounds, from Sibawayh’s footfall to my hoofs: a lullaby to the pounding in my old temples. To my right sounded the far-off clamour of a demon’s wake – travesties of the sense of hearing. There was a cave on the mountain of Tawbad, which backed the town, where a spring slumbered and monsters and prophets were born.

‘A pittance, lord!’

The road had suddenly acquired a voice and hands, and began to tug at my cloak.

‘Alms,’ the hand begged, ‘a pittance for a man in need!’

I am repelled by beggars, particularly beggars whose rags belie their rhetorical skills. Here was a true poet of the wayside, a master if you will of mendicant eloquence who, glutted with inspiration, awaited with hungrily bated breath the passing of audible riches. He was also desperate, and hung on to my precious slippers for dear life. The scuffle did not last long. Sibawayh came to my rescue and the ghost made off with my babouches. Both of us barefoot now, we proceeded on our way.

The streets narrowed and I sensed that we had entered the Jewish quarter. Ivied archways sent down fluttery tendrils like rabbis’ beards. A salvo of sensory stimuli: a cascade of flying vermin, the rank smell of the dungheap, a sudden braying, feathery whirrings, squawking, barking and howling. Hurried footsteps – an interrupted dalliance?

We were nearing the end of the street. As I trailed my fingers along the walls, doors sank warily into the secure embrace of their ancient arms, which soon reopened to form a modest square. Our shadows flitted to the other side.

We entered a gently sloping street. Other cobbles, other sounds. A final turning and we found ourselves in the main square, where the slave market was held by day in the cheer of the noontide sun. Beyond rose the mosque, from which a side alley to the north-east led to the hell of tanneries and abattoirs. Running off the square in a north-westerly direction was a back street where those in the know could locate a small brothel, low-entranced and lavishly creepered. A rain butt by the door stood on guard, lidless and wrinkly.

Each time I touched the water in the butt before going in it would break out in a smile, believing my fingertips augured a shower. The old men in the mosque went through the same motions, with a different cistern.

This was the brothel to which I had paid many a hooded visit in the course of a nonchalant, manicured stroll – always with young Sibawayh in attendance. At the other end of the courtyard, guarding the much-frequented latrine, stood another rain butt, and yet another in the corner. They seemed to have taken the place of watchdogs. Even the host (corpulent, immaculate, a rosary in his fastidious hands) had the size and girth of a rain butt.

In my memory, images of this brothel glide by in a wheeling masquerade: the swish of clothing, gleaming buttocks, well-turned calves. My moist nose, my dry throat. A smeared crack. My rhythmic spasms in the swaying dark, the room draped with tapestries depicting a young doe eyeing the hunter across her shoulder, the hunter standing scissor-legged, with a relaxed proprietary air while aiming his spear, and then Sibawayh’s face crumpling up in a grimace of searing pain.

Why did I always think it was raining when I was secluded in those dimly lit rooms? I even fancied I could hear the patter of raindrops – only to step outside under gold and azure.

One day I took Sibawayh to a garden at some distance from the town. On a little stream in the sun-glanced shade he watched a duck with a downy flotilla in her wake, and she had splashed and plopped so madly that he had been afraid the poor thing was drowning. I can still see his eyes, in which the tears and the dragonflies and the sun had cut diamonds.

Further off, outside the garden, in the hellish glare, a shepherd and his flock slept away the bleached, baking noon.

Was midnight upon us already? We went past the mosque and after a while we approached the physician’s tall house. Behind it loomed the awesome mountain of Tawbad. It was on that mountain that a leprous fool, a self-professed prophet, had sought refuge from the world – no prophet without a mountain. The hostile populace had pelted him with stones, which had moved him to put a curse on the town before he fled, broken and bleeding profusely. His sole companion was a donkey. He had not returned since – a farcical ascension to heaven.

We halted in front of the physician’s door. My repugnance was undiminished. A sense of tedium came over me. There was nothing left to be distracted by – my memory had come to rest, it was spent. What did it matter? What of my affliction and what of Sibawayh – above all Sibawayh? What was there to stop me from grinding everything underfoot and having done with it? When all is said and done the end is only a question of dignity.

And at that moment, out of nowhere, a stick, glowing with malignant ardour, struck my brittle spine, and while the pain still throbbed in my head there came a second blow, this time to my shoulder. I had hardly the time to savour the ecstatic stiffening that pain can induce, for the blows came hard and fast, methodically aimed now at my left side and then my right. It all happened so quickly, there was no distinguishing between the pain in each limb. After a blow to my neck, the expert beating proceeded crown-wards. Eventually I surrendered to the unrelenting thwack-thwacking. For a split second of weightlessness (tumbling backwards off my saddle) the safety of the ground seemed dizzyingly far away. A leaden ball turned in my gut as I cowered on the ground trying to call out for Sibawayh, but my stiff tongue could not dislodge the words from the gush of vomit.

Translated by Ina Rilke