Shrine Visiting Season

The truck stopped at the side of the road. Halima jumped up in alarm and so did her three children. Lhadi opened the door, got out, and slammed it shut behind him. That annoyed the driver, but he did not protest, or say anything at all. After checking to make sure no other car was coming, the driver opened the door and got out on the other side. Lhadi walked along the right side, while the truck driver walked on the left. When Lhadi reached the back, he called out to Halima, who quickly answered, stood up, and looked down at him.

“Wake the kids up,” he shouted.

“They didn’t get any sleep.”

“Good,” said Lhadi. “Get ready to climb down.”

Lhadi watched the driver on the other side as he headed for the ditch. It was dark; there were no sounds, only the chirping of tiny insects in the trees. The driver went into a thicket of trees close to the road and started peeing standing up. When Halima saw him, she hid her head so Lhadi wouldn’t slap her.

When the driver had finished, he turned back toward Lhadi. “Get back on the truck,” he said, still buttoning his pants, “and make sure your wife, kids, and your things are out of the truck. I’m in a hurry, and it’s a long way to Oujda. I have to be there by six tomorrow evening.”

Lhadi put his hands on the side of the truck. He was about to get in, but then a thought crossed his mind. He could make his wife step down; that was not a problem. But who was going to help her get off the truck? When he imagined the driver putting his hands on her hips to help her down out of the truck, his stomach got in a twist.

“Halima,” he shouted.

“Yes.”

“Get down and leave the kids. I’ll come up and get them.”

Halima agreed. She threw down her cherbel, then grabbed the side of the truck and lowered first one leg, then the other. While she was suspended in mid-air, Lhadi reached up, put his hands on her backside and hips, and eased her down. She moved away and sat down with her back against a tree, but then she discovered that she was perched on a protruding piece of wood or a small branch. It hurt, so she changed her spot. She was panting hard, almost as though she had just run a very long way. Lhadi jumped quickly and nimbly into the truck. His three children were standing there, anxiously waiting for him in the dark. After talking to them first, he lowered them to the driver one at a time. They went straight over to their mother and squatted by her, watching what their father and the driver were doing. Lhadi started lowering blankets, piles of clothes, and a worn-out old suitcase to the driver below. Finally he handed down a pile of what must have been metal, because, when the driver grabbed it, it clanked. He also heard the sound of glasses clinking. This man had to be really crazy, he told himself, to put glass in a package without realizing that it would break.

The driver got back into his truck and switched on the ignition. The truck moved off. Lhadi stood in front of his wife with his hands on his hips. “In just a few minutes, it’ll be daylight,” he said. “Should we leave now or wait till dawn?”

Halima had no fixed opinion on the matter, so she told him to do as he wished. He sat down beside her and leaned against the trunk. The three children were half-awake, but eventually they fell asleep. The first snuggled in his mother’s arms, while the second and third rested their heads on either side of her lap. Lhadi took out a cigarette and started smoking.

“You’d better finish this pack,” Halima said.

“I will.”

“Now, before daybreak. Your father shouldn’t see you smoking or smell it on you. It’s forbidden.”

“I know. Anyway, I’ve only got five cigarettes left. I’ll smoke them before dawn. I don’t know what I’m going to do this week without being able to smoke.”

“Why can’t you behave like your brother, ‘Abbas?” Halima suggested, as she wiped her nose on her clothes. “He doesn’t smoke.”

“I can’t.”

“You could if you were a man.”

“I am a man.”

“We’ll see if you can survive this week without smoking.”

He kept smoking, gazing longingly at the cigarette as though it were his last one. He would have to quit smoking for a week because his father would not allow him to do so. Even though his father didn’t pray or fast very often because of his age, he considered smoking as much a sin as drinking. That was why, during this visit to the shrine of the holy man, Lhadi would have to stop smoking, just as he had had to do in previous years. It would be like a fast from smoking for a whole week. Even during the fasting month of Ramadan he would regularly smoke, but he did conceal it from his neighbors. If they had found him smoking, they would have stoned and cursed him, then recited the Qur’anic Sura of “The Kind One” [Al-Latif] in the mosque, which would immediately turn him into an undesirable person. Halima kept on warning him not to smoke in the daytime during Ramadan, especially on Sundays when he went to the airbase. But on other days she never knew how he managed not to smoke. She had asked him once, and he had replied that everyone smoked. It was exhausting, debilitating work; his body could not tolerate it.

Now Halima started thinking about this tricky problem. “Will he be able to stop smoking for a whole week?” Actually, he had never managed to do that; even here at the shrine for the last few years, he would go off with his friends and smoke somewhere. But at all events, he never smoked in front of his father. This week he would also shave his head and put on a red fez. His father could not bear to see him with hair like the Christians.

Lhadi stared into the dark, thinking about the day ahead. Insect sounds could still be heard from behind the trees close by. Just then, Lhadi watched a truck as it drove by, an American military truck. Lhadi tried to get a look at the driver, but failed. The all-encompassing darkness was making many things difficult.

Lhadi took out another cigarette, lit it, and started smoking with great relish. He put his hand over his crotch and started scratching with his long nails. Even though he had gone to the baths the day before, there were still a lot of bugs in his pubic hair, which made him itch. As they grazed freely in the thicket of hair, Lhadi itched and felt the urge to scratch. He cursed the bugs, which in fact were neither lice nor fleas but tiny bugs that attached themselves to the roots of small hair; they only detached themselves when they had sucked all the blood out of the place where they had attached.

Halima was well aware that the bugs kept bothering him. “Are you still scratching?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Keep scratching then! I’ve told you thousands of times to shave that forest of hair and keep yourself clean, but you’re stubborn. I’ve told you a million times to use a bit of kerosene, but you always refuse. You only ever listen to that impetuous mind of yours.”

“You know nothing,” said Ahmad. “The doctor at the American base told me not to shave my pubic hair. It enhances a man’s potency.”

Halima told herself that was not true; his vigor had certainly not increased recently. In bed he would turn his back on her and go to sleep without stirring a single hair. That was not the way a man with any virility was supposed to behave.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.

“Nothing. It’ll soon be dawn. Do you think your father has set up camp before us?”

“As I recollect, the people from our tribe set up camp one or two days before the season starts. That’s a good idea, because latecomers have a hard time finding anywhere to pitch their tents.”

“This year do you think your father will have put up his tent near the dome?”

“He’s done that for years; that’s the only place he’s prepared to put up his tent. He wants to get the holy man’s blessing so that the crop yield will increase every year. But unfortunately the harvest hasn’t increased for years. As you know, my father’s a spendthrift.”

“I know. I wonder how a man his age still insists on getting married.”

“Me too. And now he’s married that slut. She’s much younger than him; she’s even ten years younger than me. Sidi Lkamel doesn’t come to the aid of any man who marries frequently and squanders money. Even so, his clemency is plentiful and vast.”

While Lhadi was talking, Halima had already fallen fast sleep. He let her and the three children sleep on. For his part, he thought about smoking the remaining cigarettes before dawn. Afterwards he could chew some mint leaves, and that would hide the smell. Then, when he gave his father a hug, the latter would not notice the tobacco smell on him. Halima had not slept all night, so her body was now crumpled up in sheer exhaustion. She had tried to snatch some sleep on the truck, but it kept on swaying all over the road. Not only that, but the children had kept asking questions about a whole host of unconnected things. All that made sleep impossible. Lhadi was smoking, apparently competing with some imaginary ghost. He felt himself dozing off, too, even though he had assumed that the cigarettes would keep his brain alert. “Don’t fall asleep,” he told his wife. “It’s nearly dawn.”

“I haven’t been asleep,” Halima replied with her eyes closed. “Wake me up at dawn. . . . Let me rest my eyes.”

“No, wake up now. You can sleep when we get to the shrine.”

“We’re already there.”

“I mean, when we reach the tents. Once we’re there, you can sleep for two whole days if you want.”

“Be quiet and let me sleep. I’m here to visit the shrine, not to sleep for two days.”

While they were talking, their eldest child woke up. He was thirteen years old, but was mentally disabled, so he could not understand what they were talking about. The child was abnormal. He started staring at his father’s face, trying to make out his features, but without success. Instead, he watched the bright-red tip of the cigarette and was delighted whenever his father took a puff.

“Father, are we going to get to the shrine today?” the boy asked.

“Yes, very soon,” his father replied “At dawn.”

“Is my grandfather going to be there?”

“Yes, he’s pitched his tent near the holy man’s shrine. This year he’s going to be able to stay right near the dome.”

The boy stopped trying to make out his father’s face. Turning away, he stared off into the vast expanse of darkness. Closing his eyes, he put his head on his mother’s lap. His father did likewise until dawn.

Halima roused herself and woke the rest of them. Various animals were scattered around the neighboring fields. They discovered that the ditch nearby was full of stagnant water; tiny frogs kept leaping and croaking by the water at the edge of the ditch. Lhadi yawned, and so did everyone else. They all made use of the dew that had fallen to rinse their faces and heads.

Lhadi stood up, walked away from them, and stretched. The youngest of the boys joined his father and grabbed his khaki pants, which were old and had patches on them.

The boy seemed to like his father’s pants. Once he had a hold of them, he could not take his eyes off them. Halima rummaged through the pile, took out some bread, divided it into three, and gave the children each a piece. She yelled to Lhadi and examined him from head to toe.

“Shall I go up and get a cart?” Lhadi asked his wife. “Or shall we just put these piles on our shoulders and carry them up to the shrine?”

“We don’t need a cart,” she replied. “Why waste money? The children can walk.”

“We’re still one and a half kilometers away.”

“We can walk and take a break if the children get tired. Anyway, it would take ages for you to go up to the shrine and bring back a cart.”

Lhadi put two of the piles on his shoulders and handed another to Halima. He told the children to get ready to walk for a while. The retarded child tried to help his mother carry the pile, but she refused. She told him to be careful not to trip on a stone and fall down. The child said that he would be careful and would walk as far as possible. The two other children said they would do the same.

“Do you think the slut has woken up by now?”

“The first question you should ask is whether she’s accompanied my father to the shrine.”

“Of course she has. What would she do in Bni Yessef if she didn’t come to visit Sidi Lkamel?”

“I don’t know. But that slut really wants to annoy my father. People have told me that she hits him sometimes.”

“He’s a man. If he chooses to give up his manliness, that’s none of your business. Leave him alone. Let his wife do what she pleases with him.”

“But he’s old,” he said, swiftly adjusting the two piles on his shoulders. “He can’t do a thing with a stubborn mule like her. You know how my father is, don’t you?”

“But he’s the one who decided to marry her,” Halima said. “I am his daughter-in-law, and I’m older than her!”

“My father—may God show him the right way—can’t help loving women.”

The family had scrambled up the hill far enough. By now the road was no longer visible; it was concealed by clumps of trees scattered along an iron fence. Even so, the noise of a truck roaring by on the road below was clearly audible.

Now they all saw the tents pitched in the sunshine, and a number of water tanks that prominent people had installed near the shrine’s dome.

“Look, Father,” said the retarded child when he saw the tents. “We’ve arrived.”

“You children,” said the mother, “try to be polite. Your grandfather doesn’t like impoliteness.”

They were slowly getting closer to the tents. People seemed to be still asleep, not a sound to be heard anywhere. The tents managed to completely hide the shrine’s dome.

Actually, as Lhadi had anticipated, the slut had not come, something that upset him, because he could imagine his aged father having to put up the tent and arrange things. “You see,” Lhadi told his wife as soon as they arrived. “The slut didn’t come up here with my father. She’s getting even with him.”

“It’s what’s good for him,” Halima replied. “He clings to her closer than his own shadow.”

“Never mind. Go and take care of the tent, then clean and arrange the dishes and prepare breakfast.”

“The slut’ll arrive this afternoon,” Halima said. “That’s her way. She avoids the first day at the shrine because there’s a lot of hard work to be done.”

“There isn’t that much work,” Lhadi replied. “She does it to my old father just to be spiteful.”

“Don’t say that,” said Halima. “If she wanted, she could leave him and go somewhere else.”

“Where would that be? He provides her with the only warm place she can find. Didn’t she leave him three years ago? Only the Devil himself knows where she went. Why did she come back? Well, because the other men kept kicking her out.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Why not? I didn’t want my father to marry a whore, but what was I supposed to tell him? What can a son tell his father? You know that I can hardly look him in the eye. If he didn’t want specifically her, I could . . .”

“I know what I want to say,” Halima told him. “But it’s better to stay silent. You wanted to find him a wife, didn’t you?”

“Why not? I didn’t want my old father to marry a whore. Everybody keeps talking about her, or actually, about me.”

“Don’t pay any attention.”

She fell silent. “People talk about him as if he was a Caid or a Pasha,” she went on with a scoff. “But he’s just a poor farmer. Forget about it. Leave him to the slut and mind your own business.”

By now the tents were starting to rouse. All kinds of din permeated the air. Lhadi opened the tent flap and looked out. “Get breakfast ready,” he said turning to Halima. “When my father arrives, tell him I won’t be long.”

He made his way through alleys between the tents, heading for the big square where merchants had begun displaying candy and perfumes. All along the square was a long row of crepe sellers, all of them squatting cross-legged behind their pitch-black frying pans. He thought about buying a couple of kilograms of crepes, but decided against it. Instead, he walked over to the dome to seek a blessing from the holy man’s shrine. Crossing the square, he walked through the rows of tents to get to the dome, all the while telling himself that this year was different from previous ones. When he was young, for example, he had felt that the holy man was even greater than God; that made him very scared. But now, as he walked toward the dome, he no longer felt the way he had as a boy. Everything had really changed, he told himself, and yet he was still scared of the holy man. What mattered was that he was related to the Prophet—God’s blessing and peace be upon him. When his late mother had been sick, she had never trusted a doctor, fqih, or anybody else, but she did believe in Sidi Lkamel. In her final moments just before she died in agony, she had let out a feeble cry. “Ahhhh!” she had muttered. “Take me to my grandfather, Sidi Lkamel. Aaayeee!” But no one had managed to do that. Who knows? Maybe it was her grandfather who had decided to relieve her of all the pain and suffering she had endured for so many years. The people present at the time said, “Our grandfather Sidi Lkamel answered her plea quickly and sent the Angel of Death to take her.” Back then, Lhadi had believed it all, because he had watched his mother dying peacefully without moving hand, foot, or lip. Actually, she died smiling gently, as she stared fixedly at them all. Then she closed her eyes, the smile still implanted on her lips, and turned into nothing. “Her grandfather rescued her,” people said at the time. “He’s generous.”

“By now,” people also commented, “the Angel of Death has certainly taken her soul.”

After that, a cry went up, followed by weeping, wailing, and slapping of faces and thighs. Bodies collapsed in hysteria. A woman whom he could not remember now walked over to the cacti, cut off a thorny branch and started scratching her face with it, all the while crying and moaning, then she disappeared between the tents. Whenever Lhadi remembered that event, a tear would well up in his eyes.

Even though he felt tired, he kept on walking resolutely toward the shrine. He felt a very special sensation, one he could neither understand nor describe–a simultaneous feeling of power and weakness. Apart from these special moments, nothing mattered any more. He lingered for a while before crossing the shrine’s threshold. Feeling totally relaxed and safe from any danger he may have felt in the past, he went in. Many, many people want to die in this holy man’s aura, because of his close affinity with the Prophet. Almost everyone had the same wish, even people who idolized other holy men from the nearby tribes. Sidi Lkamel was specially esteemed, indeed. More than that, whenever people thought about him it was with a combined sense of awe and fear.

Two days passed. Presumably the slut had arrived by evening on the first day or else the following morning. When some pilgrims arrived from Bni Yessef, Lhadi rushed to ask them about his stepmother. They all thought she had arrived before them, and blamed their own lateness on a lack of funds. If so-and-so hadn’t come to their rescue by giving them some money, they couldn’t have made the pilgrimage to the shrine this year.

“So the slut has really done it,” Halima thought to herself. “She is quite capable of doing it. She must have gone off somewhere else with some unmarried man.”

“Doesn’t that slut have any shame?” She asked Lhadi. “Especially at this special time?”

“We don’t have to concern ourselves with the sins of others,” said Lhadi. “Maybe she’s sick.”

“I don’t trust that slut.”

When Lhadi’s father did the rounds visiting friends, he discovered that all the families he knew were there.

“Your father should get on the first truck leaving,” Halima suggested. “And go bring her here.”

“What if he can’t find her?”

“It doesn’t matter. He should try. People will talk about him. Have you ever heard of a man visiting the shrine without his wife?”

She told him that if he was unwilling to understand, she would go to see his father herself and make the suggestion.

The father agreed and fumbled in his bag for a few coins. He decided to take the first truck to Bni Yessef. But he did not find her there. The slut had finally done it.

A huge number of tents were spread out as far as the eye could see in the blazing sun. Merchants’ shouts and the chants of the possessed, they all mingled with a heavy layer of dust that rose to the sky. From time to time gunshots could be heard, followed by celebrations of joy. Lhadi and his father stared at the ground, heads bent. They were both deep in thought and completely oblivious to their surroundings.

“So my son,” asked the father. “What do you think the slut has done?”

Lhadi did not reply. He dearly wished that his father wasn’t with him, so he could buy a cigarette, smoke it, and think seriously about the problem. Lifting his head, he looked into the distance where the river flowed between the trees. A few naked children were sliding down the mud, then crashing into the water with a big splash. As a child, Lhadi had done exactly the same thing. He could still recall the sight of women’s naked bodies as they splashed each other with water, breasts dangling and hair stuck to their bronze bodies.

The father lifted his head and followed Lhadi’s gaze. Standing up, he walked wearily over to a small fig-tree. Lhadi shook off his lethargy and joined his father.

“What shall we do with the slut if she decides to leave? Didn’t you realize before now that she was a loose woman?”

“Yes, I knew, but I couldn’t go on living by myself. That’s why I married her. What bothers me now is how I’m going to face people. They’ll all be gossiping about me, saying she’s left me. Do you realize how enormous a disgrace this is?”

“I do. Especially since she’s so much younger than you.”

Lhadi thought about taking his clothes off and heading for the river, the way many men and women were already doing. He wanted to tell his father, but eventually he decided against it.

“Are you pining for her?” he asked when he saw tears shining in his father’s eyes. “Aren’t you a man?”

“It’s not her I’m crying about; it’s the scandal. You don’t even understand what people are going to say.”

“It doesn’t matter now. We’ll find a solution later. Don’t bother yourself about it.”

He grabbed hold of a small branch from a nearby tree and broke it off, causing a loud crack. He remembered that the children were still sliding into the water one after another, and that made his own desire to go for a swim even stronger. A woman caught his attention; she was lifting up her dress as she squatted under a short shady fig tree in the open air.

“We should head back to the tent,” he told his father, lowering his head. “We can discuss the problem later.”

His father did not seem to have heard him, but, once Lhadi headed back toward the tents, his old father followed behind. The dust was still high and the sun hot; there was the smell of gunpowder and other things, and the endless expanse of tents. Everything was fine, except that the slut was not there. Why had she chosen precisely this occasion to do it?

“What about visiting a fqih?” the father suggested as he walked alongside Lhadi.

“What for?”

“Or a psychic?”

“No point.”

“Maybe she fell into a well or had an accident.”

“Or perhaps she ran off with another man?”

However hard the old man tried to convince Lhadi that she had not done that, Lhadi was not convinced. He suggested that he had the solution, but this was not the right time. Scandal was avoidable, indeed more than that. He proposed to wait till the end of the pilgrimage season. Then he would take his father to the small city, and his father could stay with him till people in Bni Yessef had forgotten all about the scandal. He would only go back to take care of his land at harvest time, if he were still able to do so.

They kept walking through the layers of dust without saying a word. As they passed the shrine where many poor beggars were gathered in crowds, they almost lost the way to their tents . . . but the mentally handicapped boy grabbed on to his father’s pants.

“Father,” he said, “Mother’s looking for you.”

Lhadi did not reply but walked ahead of his father to the tent. When Halima saw him, she rushed over to him.

“The slut finally managed it,” she said.

“What?”

“She did it. Your father shouldn’t find out, or else he’ll kill himself.”

Lhadi looked behind him. His father was sitting at a distance from the tent, staring at the distant horizon.

“What do you mean?” Lhadi asked.

“Can you believe it; your father’s married to a whore. They took them both away.”

“Who?”

“She did it. The gendarmes found her under Aisha’s boy.”

Lhadi thought for a while, then walked away from Halima. It occurred to him that now was the time to suggest the solution to his father, even though the pilgrimage season was not yet over.

“People are bound to have heard,” he told himself. “It’s Sidi Lkamel’s will.”