The Market

WHEN ALI BOUGHT BACK the families’ slaves, he was only seventeen years old. He was an orphan who had been raised by his grandfather, whom he’d never disobeyed in his life. So when he came forward to buy back the slaves his grandfather was offering for sale, it was an act of defiance the patriarch would never have expected from a grandchild he had taken in as his own son.

He bought Tawida not because she was pregnant again, but for the sake of the absent Muhammad. In fact, neither he nor Muhammad was even aware of her pregnancy. He had heard that she had lost two children—one at the bathhouse after being forced to drink the herbal potion that caused miscarriages and one when she fell off a ladder as she was cleaning the roofed enclosure.

As soon as he heard what was happening, Ali rushed to the market place, his throat tight at the realization of the plot that had been hatched against Muhammad. He felt sure his grandfather must have lost his mind. As he ran toward the market, he racked his brain for possible explanations for what his grandfather had done. Why would they have tricked Muhammad into going away and then sold off his beloved along with other slaves?

Ali knew how in love Muhammad was with Tawida, and he couldn’t bear the thought of his being in torment when he came home and didn’t find her. Nobody seemed willing to understand that love erases the boundaries between master and slave, white and black, Arab and Negro. Such boundaries didn’t exist in the realm of concubinage, which was a practice no one objected to. But the minute things went beyond mere pleasure-seeking to a love that joined two souls on an equal footing, these human distinctions would rear their heads once more, looming like mountains on the horizon. When this happened, the distinctions themselves became the reason to wage all-out war on the love that had come into being. What bizarre things happen to the human soul!

That night, Ali was banished from his grandfather’s house, which had been his home. His grandfather was hurt by what he had done: he had publicly gone against his word and challenged his authority by buying back the slaves he had said were to be sold. He’d stood up among the vendors in the market and shouted, “My ancestors’ slaves aren’t for sale, and if anybody comes near them, I’ll slit his throat with this knife!” Who did this boy think he was, anyway? The fact was, Ali hadn’t been defending the slaves or his ancestors’ legacy. He’d been defending his uncle Muhammad, who’d been deceived and dealt a treacherous blow to his very heart, and who had been whisked away to Malta to get him out of the way.

Standing with a group of merchants on a platform that was slightly elevated above the level of the crowd, his jard wrapped about him, Ali’s grandfather stared at him in stunned silence. Meanwhile, other men were asking, “What’s your grandson doing here? How dare a young boy keep his grandfather’s word from being carried out in front of the whole world? Besides, why are you coming here to sell slaves if you’re just going to buy them back again?”

It was at best an impropriety, at worst an ignominy and a show of outright disloyalty!

Men were swarming around Tawida and other slave women on the display platform when suddenly Ali stepped briskly forward, yanked someone’s jard off him, and covered her with it. So enraged that he was hardly aware of what he was doing, he shrieked, “Enough! The market’s closing! Now get out of here!”

A spiteful merchant in the crowd—a crony of his grandfather’s—shouted, “How much did you pay for her, boy?”

Looking at his grandfather, Ali replied, “I’ll be surety for whatever my grandfather is asking for them. I owe him many a blessing.”

The person speaking wasn’t some teenager still wet behind the ears, but a grown man. Thinking perhaps, like others there, that Ali wanted the slave women to himself, the grandfather bellowed, “Go back to your shop now. Go!”

“I’m not leaving before they do,” the grandson replied evenly.

Ali had his grandfather over a barrel now. Left with no other choice, the grandfather said to his slaves, “Go home.”

The slaves then filed joyously away and made their way to the house.

Afterward Ali came up to his grandfather, kissed him on the head, and left the square.

His grandfather was furious with him, but didn’t let on in public.

When Ali arrived home that evening, he found his mother in tears. His grandfather came out in his nightclothes, his head uncustomarily bare. The minute he came up to him, he slapped him across the face, saying, “Get out of my house, you disobedient ingrate!”

His mother shrank away, while his grandmother tried to intervene.

As for Ali, he offered no resistance. “Yes, sir,” he said to his grandfather. “I’m leaving.”

There were tears in both their eyes.

Ali tried to kiss his grandfather’s feet and apologize, but the gesture was rebuffed. Torn between the need to support her husband on the one hand, and her nurturing instincts on the other, Ali’s grandmother blurted out to him. “Don’t leave!” Turning to her husband, she said, “His place is here and nowhere else. If he leaves, I leave with him.”

The response was swift and decisive: “Another word out of you, and you’re divorced.”

As for Fatima, who revered her father so much that she hadn’t shown him her face since puberty, she couldn’t argue with him, even if the matter had to do with her only son. Knowing what awaited him, she wordlessly gathered his things into a knapsack and, wrapping her arms around him at the entrance to the roofed enclosure, said, “Go to your uncle Sadeg’s house until tempers have cooled.”

Two days later Ali learned that his grandfather was sick in bed. He wanted to visit him, but Siddig advised him to postpone it. After all, his grandfather had fallen ill over what he’d done to him in the marketplace, and when Ali’s paternal uncles had gone to see him he’d described Ali to them as “an ill-bred pipsqueak that still pees his pants.” After the incident in the marketplace, Ali was forbidden to go to the shop where he’d worked with his uncle Muhammad. His grandfather took the keys away from him and entrusted them instead to Jaballah and Ali’s uncle Amin. When Jaballah was away from the shop, Ali would sneak over to see him and get the latest news. He avoided Amin, who was a shameless, impudent man. Jaballah, on the other hand, was loyal and conscientious, and never turned his back on Ali.

After this, Ali’s uncle Sadeg took him to work with him in the gold market. When his grandfather learned of it, he stopped passing by Sadeg’s shop so that he wouldn’t have to see him. Even so, Jaballah would just smile and say, “The old man’s sore, but he loves you. I know, because he asks me about you. One time he said, ‘Jaballah, go to the market and see what that pipsqueak’s up to. And if his mother wants to see him, take her there in the wagon. But use the back gate, and go while I’m taking my afternoon nap to make it look as though nobody knows what she’s doing.’”

About three months later Muhammad returned from Malta, worn out, wan, and thin. He showed up one day at the jewelry shop in the Zalam Market. Ali was learning gold engraving, a craft he was taking to little by little. As he sat engrossed in a piece he was working on, someone darkened the door. He looked up, and who should he see but Muhammad. Muhammad had looked for him both in the grain shop and at home, and when he found out what had happened, he’d come to find him in the gold market. The sight of his uncle was like glimpsing a beautiful moon on a pitch-black night.

“Hummayda!” he cried. “It was awful not having you around!”

“My dear Allaywi!”

In spite of himself, the boy fell into his uncle’s arms and wept.

Passersby and vendors turned and stared at them curiously. After all, men weren’t supposed to cry. In fact, no man ever cried even in this disease-ridden, poverty-racked city. He bucked up, resigned himself to the pain, and finally grew hardened. If he couldn’t, he had to be prepared to endure people’s hateful gossip. Consequently, for a man to cry was a rare occurrence, and if it did happen, it was kept hidden, like a sin committed in secret. So what earthshaking event had released these copious tears and heartfelt emotion within the hearing and sight of the city’s marketgoers?

In his uncle’s eyes, Ali glimpsed tears mingled with a look of fierce rage. And he heard him say, “If I don’t repay them in double measure for what they’ve done, I’m not Muhammad Bin Shatwan.”