Date Pits between the Toes

AUNT SABRIYA and I were walking home along a foot-worn dirt path under a merciless noonday sun when all of a sudden we heard footsteps behind us. When we turned to see who it was, we saw Lallahum’s kitchen servant Mabrouka—the one who’d smacked me with the bread shovel—running to catch up with us. Out of breath, she kept looking behind her, as if she were afraid somebody would see her. She held one hand on her head to keep her bandanna in place, and the other on her chest to keep her big boobs from jiggling up and down.

When we saw her approaching, she stopped in her tracks. Her bare feet, visible from under her caftan, were covered with dirt.

“Lord have mercy,” Aunt Sabriya murmured when she saw the girl. The farms we were walking past were surrounded by tall hedges of prickly pear cactuses. We stopped to wait for her in the latticework shadows cast by the towering plants on either side of the path. The girl came up to us, out of breath, saying, “T . . . a . . . k . . . e . . . t . . . h . . . i . . . s!”

As she spoke, she reached out and placed an egg in Aunt Sabriya’s hand.

“What’s this all about?” my aunt asked, bewildered.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Asgawa just told me to give it to you.”

“Why?”

“She said it could be the little girl’s lunch.”

As she said “the little girl,” she looked at me.

“Does Lallahum know about this?” my aunt inquired.

Seeming afraid, she didn’t answer.

“I’m late,” she stammered. “The shakshouka’s going to burn, and Lallahum will notice I’m gone.”

Realizing that the girl would be punished if the old woman took notice of her absence, and knowing what a tight spot Asgawa would be in if that happened, my aunt said to her, “You’d better get right back then.”

The servant girl looked hard at me. Then she turned and headed back.

As she scurried away, my aunt called after her, “Give my best to Asgawa!” Which was another way of saying, “Tell her thank you for me!”

From what I could see, Asgawa had returned to us one of our eggs behind the old woman’s back. Maybe she figured four eggs were too many for Lallahum, and that considering our miserable lot in life, we deserved that fourth egg more than she did. Besides, since she only had one eye, she wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was missing when she had lunch that day, since all the eggs would be beaten together to make the shakshouka. After what happened, I concluded that Asgawa really did have a good heart, and that she and the kitchen servant were probably in the habit of pulling the wool over the old woman’s eyes together.

We started off again without a word, my aunt clutching the egg in one hand and holding onto me with the other. A few moments later, I looked back to see the kitchen servant, but all I saw was the cloud of dust she’d stirred up with her bare feet. She’d disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared. A wistful silence had come over my aunt, and when I spoke to her, she didn’t say anything. We’d been walking for a while by now, and it seemed like we’d never make it back to the Slave Yards. My aunt let go of my hand, since we were sweating so much that we couldn’t hold on to each other anymore. The last half of the way home we just kept our eyes on our feet, trying to find some saliva in our mouths. When the Yards with their huts finally appeared in the distance, they looked like heaven to me. Meanwhile, the sea breeze broke the heat, freshening the air.

When they didn’t have any work to do, the people who lived in the Slave Yards didn’t go anywhere or do anything. They just spent their time talking and shooing away the flies that swarmed all over the place when it got hot. As they waited to be summoned for this job or that, they would chase the cats and dogs—of which there were more than there were people—patch their worn-out clothes, weave floor mats, boil broad beans and chickpeas to sell in the streets, and brew bad booze. The women and girls would bring water from nearby wells and sweep out the huts with brooms made from dry palm leaves. When they didn’t have any clothes to wash or meals to cook, the women might get together and gossip. Meanwhile, the hungry children, who were as numerous as the flies, would gather around the soldiers who came to inspect the ghetto from time to time, begging for food or waiting for the scraps the soldiers would leave behind for them.

Mounds and mounds of garbage lay piled up along the highway leading to the Slave Yards. The sides of the road were strewn with liquor bottles and remains of things that were no longer recognizable—ruined boats, empty food cans, and lard and oil tins that were usually picked up by Yard residents to finish off their huts with, or to put to some other use in their wretched lives. I’d seen tins like that turned into utensils for cooking, eating, laundering, or water transport. I’d also seen them filled with sand and lined up or stacked to wall in rooms and entire houses.

Tired and hungry, my aunt and I were walking as fast as we could to get out of the hot sand. We passed some little kids who were rummaging through the garbage for something to eat. Poverty made it a normal thing to visit garbage heaps. But Aunt Sabriya didn’t like me mixing with those children. She would take me with her to the sea to wash up several times a week. She’d scrub the fleas off me and pick the lice and nits out of my hair. As for Miftah, she’d shave his head so close you would have thought he’d never sprouted a hair in his life. We got dirty fast, and there was nothing to keep the filth off us except for the clothes other people had thrown away because they were no good anymore, or because they had so many they didn’t need them. We would patch them and put them on, and it wouldn’t even occur to us to change them until they’d started wearing off our bodies. It wasn’t unusual to see girls wearing pants they’d gotten from soldiers at Bawwabat as-Sur under their dirty caftans, or for women to go around in threadbare army fatigues that soldiers had left along the roadside. As for the men, they would wear tattered uniforms and army boots that had been nabbed from their owners while they were drunk or dying, then altered to fit Negroes’ lean, lank bodies, and protect them from the hot sands.

There was an elderly Negro man by the name of Tazay who had made himself a reputation as a good clothes patcher-upper. As a young man he’d been a slave in the orchards of Ghadames. Then, at the age of sixty, he’d been freed by a notable of the region to atone for a sexual sin he’d committed. Islam grants its adherents the chance to atone for certain sins by freeing slaves, although many people would indulge in sins without bothering to atone for them. Either that, or someone would free a slave who wasn’t very important. So one person was granted freedom in return for somebody else’s sin—this was a religious principle. But it meant, ironically, that a single sin by one person was equal to another person’s whole life!

Tazay was known for his ability to alter shoes in such a way that they were unrecognizable to their original owners—that is to say, to the people they’d been stolen from. He’d done it so many times that he’d become quite good at it. With his rusty awls and needles, Tazay could work wonders with a piece of leather. One time my aunt took me to him to alter some shoes that were too big for me. They’d been given to me by a nice lady I’d worked for in Souq Al Hashish. I don’t know what he did to them, but when he was finished they were the same shoes, only a little smaller.

Tazay would patch old rags together and turn them into weird-looking outfits that protected Slave Yards residents from the cold and the heat but which, for some reason, were even uglier than they’d been before. In any case, he was good about not throwing anything away, including his incomprehensible African jibber-jabber sprinkled with words from the local dialect.

As he sat in front of his hut in what was left of an old pair of trousers, Tazay looked to me like an old man without a color. His skin was so dry and cracked that it was hard for him to move around, so his bony wife would bring him the things he needed for fear that his skin would peel right off.

Tazay was good at other things too, such as building huts that looked like the ones in residents’ home villages. The abundance of palm branches everywhere helped him to create the similarity. He and others would climb the palm trees, strip off the dry fronds, and spread them in the sun. Then they would knead them together with straw, dry grass, and sea spume and fill metal tins with the mixture to make the roofs and walls.

Out of a hundred huts inhabited by around a thousand Negroes, Tazay had built sixty-five huts in this way. They were surrounded on the outside by additional walls, and the space in between the inner and outer walls was used for cooking and housing chickens, animals, or homeless Negroes.

Not far from Tazay’s hut, a woman by the name of Sadina came up to my aunt and started talking to her. As the two women stood chatting, Tazay’s scrawny wife watched him patiently, weaving away without a word. She didn’t budge unless he asked her for help. As for me, I felt as worn-out as Tazay’s skin, and I was dying to get back to our shack and rest.

My aunt, who’d been carrying her shoes under her arm, set them on the ground and put them on again. I did the same. As for Sadina, who had her feet stuffed into an old pair of army boots, she seemed determined to go on chattering in the hot sun. Unlike me, my aunt didn’t seem to mind despite how exhausted she was, so she didn’t try to cut the conversation short. Maybe they were talking about something that was important to her.

Some hens scurried across the narrow paths that ran between the huts nearby. A young man passed through after the hens, pounding softly on a drum, as if he were getting ready to play for a wedding or some all-night celebration, or maybe in anticipation of the big danga season coming up.

Sadina asked the young man a question, but I couldn’t hear what it was, since her voice was muffled by the sound of his drum. It had a beautiful, vibrant rhythm and a black skin that was drawn taut like ours. As he mumbled something to the woman, he kept the drumstick moving deftly and delicately over the drum’s surface. Then Sadina turned back to my aunt, who told her she’d come in the late afternoon for them to wash the mats belonging to the Ridwan family in Benghazi. The income it brought them would be a welcome reward after a grueling day.

Sadina remarked, “The family wants servants for their son’s wedding party. He’s getting married to a Jewish girl. They weren’t going to agree to it, but Ridwan’s so crazy in love he threatened to convert to Judaism. Well, that gave them a scare! It would have been the disaster of the century. The family would never have been able to live it down. The fact that it’s going to be such a big event means they’ll need lots of mats to seat the guests. We can make a few piasters off it and get ourselves some food, too. After all, it isn’t every day that a Muslim marries a Jew. Just think: Ridwan Khalifa Ridwan gets hitched to Khamisa, the daughter of Sihoun the scrap metal merchant, or, as folks around here call him, ‘the sweeper’! The Jews of Benghazi will be hopping mad about it, and so will the Muslims. Nobody saw it coming, that’s for sure. In any case, Ridwan’s family will insist that Khamisa declare herself a Muslim in front of some big gathering of notables with a Muslim sheikh in attendance. That’s the only way they can ensure that the marriage will be recognized as legitimate and keep people from giving them a hard time over it. As for the Jews, they’ll be so disgraced that they’ll shut themselves up in the synagogue on Qazzar Street and weep and wail for days. Khamisa’s mother is an observant Jew, you know. Seeing the daughter she’s dedicated to the service of Yahweh marry a Muslim man isn’t going to sit well with her. She and Khamisa’s two hardline sisters, Sisi and Mazala, are going to put on a funeral, not a wedding.”

My aunt was so wrapped up in what Sadina was saying that she’d stopped feeling tired and sad, and when I looked at her face, I didn’t see the woman who’d taken me to be locked earlier that day.

“Come on, come on. I’m hungry!” I whined, tugging at the hem of her dress.

“I know, I know,” she said, putting me off gently. “We’ll go in just a bit.”

She didn’t see how desperately I’d been trying to keep from peeing on myself: squeezing my thighs together, writhing and dancing around so that I wouldn’t leak in front of anybody. But finally, when I couldn’t hold it any longer, I let the pee come rushing out between my legs like the shayshama. Hot, humiliating, and copious, it dug a rivulet in the sand underneath me and got my caftan and my bloomers wet all over again. But the loud splatter at least forced the chatterbox Sadina to notice I was there.

Instead of paying attention to the distress I was in, however, Sadina went from talking about the Jewish girl to talking about how I couldn’t control my bladder. Then she started telling my aunt to “treat” me by putting a date pit that had been heated in the fire between my big toe and the toe next to it. Apparently she didn’t think there was enough torture already in the Yards, since otherwise she wouldn’t have volunteered her unwanted advice when she could see us roasting on the hot sand.

Realizing her mistake, my aunt bowed her head without a word and took my hand. Then, interrupting Sadina’s sermon, she led me away with my hand in hers and we headed back to our tinplate shack, our little heaven.

She said to me, “We’ll have something to eat and rest for a while. In the evening when Miftah comes, we’ll have supper together and then go wash the Ridwan family’s mats and clean ourselves up after that.”

What a day it had been. It was the day when my virginity had been walled in—a day of stinky urine, exclusion, hunger, searing heat, tiredness, and sadness. It had started with wormy dates and ended with somebody advising my aunt to torture me by sticking a hot date pit between my toes!

Whoever had thought up ideas like that must have been schooled by the accursed Satan himself, before God decided to ease life’s cruelty and create the angels.