Maps of the Soul

Chapter 3

TWO

It had all begun with a truck that stopped in the market square during the midday stillness. The shopkeepers had closed up, and with the driver’s help, you crept onto the truck and hid amongst the sacks of coal. You endured hours of inhaling coal dust and listening to the buzzing of flies. You were smothered by the heat of the sun. The sweat you wiped from your brow was mixed with coal particles. You whispered prayers and incantations so that nobody would discover you, until you heard the truck starting, and felt it beginning to move. It drove down the hill that linked your village to the main road, which led to the capital. You waited a few minutes before raising your head over the sacks of coal and breathing God’s fresh air. When you looked back you saw the buildings and palm trees of your village receding in the distance and you realized with a heavy heart that a chapter in your life had come to a close, and that a new chapter was about to begin.

You had been forced to leave the village, but you didn’t regret it, because even before the incident that eventually compelled you to leave, you had been burning with desire to get out of the village before you died of boredom. Otherwise. it would have been left to the flies, bedbugs and fleas someday to put you out of your misery. You had reached the age of twenty-four and nothing you could see offered any promise of change.

You shepherded a flock and had learned the Quran by heart at the Sunni Mosque, after which you had become the teacher’s assistant. You would follow him with a pitcher to pour water on his feet during his ablutions, more like a servant than an instructor. Despite your education and the price you had paid for it in lashes and rebukes, you continued to roam with your flock like any uneducated shepherd boy.

You realized that your life would continue in much the same way if you remained in the village, and that all you could ever achieve through your education was the honorific title of Sheikh Othman. The only thing to set you apart from the rest of the villagers was that they would approach you in the market, in the mosque, or at your home, requesting you to read letters for them, or to write messages for them. And you always made a point to sign the letters “Greetings from the writer of this letter, Sheikh Othman”, even if the addressee didn’t know you. It was your way of proving your existence and boasting of the favour you had done them.

Writing and reading other people’s letters for free was the only way you could put what you had learned to good use. All that you were able to profit by your education was a handful of eggs that your teacher, Sheikh Abdullah, passed on to you from the gifts of his students’ families, for this was all the people of Awlad Al Sheikh were able to give to their childrens’ teacher. The most you could dream of was to one day take your teacher’s place if he passed from the world of the living before you, or you could compete with Sheikh Baraka in writing out amulets by the shrine of Sheikh al-Kabir. To yearn after any other ambition was hopeless, even if you were to read every single book from the oldest to the most recent and acquire all the knowledge therein.

Before Sheikh Baraka discovered you at the deserted well with Aziza, the daughter of Nafeesa the water carrier, you had met her many times before at the same place. Aziza was a young black girl with delicate features unlike most women of her race and colour. She was a few years younger than you, and you had known her since she was a little child trailing after her mother as she brought water to the villagers’ homes. In time, Aziza began to help her mother carry water, and her breasts developed along with a host of other enticing feminine qualities. She would always look your way with a tempting, beckoning glance and one time you had met walking towards the abandoned well. You walked along with her on the deserted path, under the shade of palm trees, and expressed your desire to meet with her alone. She acquiesced.

The well itself had been filled in long ago, leaving two sides still standing, between which was an empty space that you had made into a special, secret place for you to study, contemplate, and pray. You had covered it with palm branches and made it into a hut, where you left a straw mat and a water-jug.

After that first rendezvous with Aziza, you transformed the hut also into a place for clandestine rendezvous. Because it was surrounded by palm trees and still near the functional well that Aziza drew water from, it wasn’t hard for her to claim she was going out to the well and from there to sneak between the palm trees into this secluded area, and later to fill the clay jar with water before returning to the village, to conceal what had been her real motivation.

Your preliminary meetings with Aziza passed without any physical contact because, in spite of her admiration for you and her willingness to meet with you alone, she wasn’t ready to make the relationship a physical one. When it finally did happen, the contact was restricted to a few kisses for several meetings, before moving on to something more, but with one essential condition, she insisted that she had to remain a virgin. Indeed, the intimacy between you took place without violating this condition, which you also wished to observe in order to avoid complications, as well out of a sense of compassion for the girl. Moreover, it didn’t keep you from enjoying the act. The relationship didn’t trouble your religious conscience as it didn’t fall under the category of full s****l intercourse, which Islamic law considers among the gravest of sins.

When Sheikh Baraka raised the cover of palms over your hut, it seemed that he had been standing outside eavesdropping at first and had wanted to catch you red-handed. You were half-naked and locked in an embrace, and he began to shout, calling upon the people to come see the Quran teacher Al Sheikh Othman Al Sheikh committing lewd obscenities with Aziza, the daughter of Nafeesa the water carrier. But before anyone else could arrive, you had both dressed quickly. Aziza covered her body in her wrap and fled between the palm trees back to the village, while you remained to face Sheikh Baraka in the presence of the people who had been drawn by his vociferous bellowing. One of the first to arrive was an elderly farmer who denounced Sheikh Baraka as a liar, saying he had seen nothing more than the girl bringing you a pitcher of water, and that Sheikh Baraka’s perverse mind made him think there was something immoral going on between the two of you.

Meanwhile Sheikh Baraka was screaming and swearing that he had seen you in the act of adultery with Aziza the black prostitute. Apparently, he had been keeping an eye on you for a while and had heard a rumour about a relationship between you and Aziza, so he had lain in wait, observing her movements until he figured out when she would come to the abandoned well and followed her to carry out his plan. The problem was that he had chanced across Haj Badran near the well, someone who enjoyed the respect of the villagers and who corroborated Sheikh Baraka’s testimony. After that, it was hard to find someone who would believe your denials.

You realized you were fated tp be driven from the mosque, cursed vehemently by your family members, beginning with your father, mother and step-father, and perhaps turned out of your home too. You rummaged around your pocket and found a small amount of money. You knew of a truck loaded with coal bound for the city that would arrive from the countryside and stop for a while in the market square. You didn’t hesitate to follow through with the plan that would extricate you from your predicament and take you out of the village. You haggled with the truck driver, eventually paying him to find a secure place for you among the sacks of coal where you could hide until the time of departure.

The motive behind Sheikh Baraka’s actions had been revenge. All you had done to arouse his enmity had been writing a single amulet for which you had been recompensed merely two eggs. You used to go to the shrine of Sheikh Al-Kabir looking to earn extra income by writing amulets for men and women seeking spiritual cures.

Sheikh Baraka was renowned for writing amulets and everyone went to him. You, on the other hand, after hours of waiting, couldn’t find anyone but this single old woman who had failed to secure a place in the sea of people surrounding Sheikh Baraka and thus settled for an utterly unknown young man to write out her amulet for the treatment of a headache. Instead of the four eggs she had brought to pay for Sheikh Baraka’s amulet, she gave you only two since she considered an amulet written by someone like you to be only equivalent to half of an amulet written by the better Sheikh. He might have contented himself with driving you out of the vicinity of the shrine of Sheikh Al-Kabir, but that wasn’t enough for him. Ultimately, he decided to drive you out of the village completely so as to rid himself of all rivals.

Meanwhile, you saw an opportunity in these events to leave the village and its restrictive environment, which oppressed you like a weight on your chest, in order to seek out a wider space where your dreams could roam uninhibited. Such a place could only be the capital.

You had never been to Tripoli, although you had heard much of it. You knew that the villagers who visited it returned in a state of the utmost awe and captivation, mentioning its name as if they spoke of a magical charm that brought happiness, or as if they spoke of freedom itself, which brought with it the liberty to do whatever one pleased. Even though you knew nothing of the capital, it was enough that you knew Awlad Al Sheikh and all the boredom, monotony and suffering that came with it. You knew intimately the dirt and sand that blew into your mouth and eyes when the summer and winter winds came up from the south, so freezing and chilling that you had always wondered why that distant ancestor of yours who was the first to settle in this locality, hadn’t chosen some greener and lusher place than this arid and desolate spot.

All the evidence led you to believe that he must have been a criminal wanted by the law, who sought to escape to a place where the servants of the state would be powerless to reach him. So he had chosen this wasted, depressing place between the mountains as his sanctuary in order to hide among its bare, rocky hills and the sandy, rust-coloured horizon, which was broken only by more sand dunes. At the foot of these hills, by the few washes and creek beds fed by infrequent rain, your ancient outlaw grandfather planted a few date seeds that grew into a palm-grove and fed a generation or two of his descendants. But as time went on, and the clan grew, it became impossible to feed all those hungry mouths on the dates of these palm trees.

You once dreamed that you were sitting on a luxurious sedan chair with blue silk curtains, carried by seven strong black men on their shoulders. They took you up a mountain, on top of which waited a woman in a rose gossamer gown that fluttered in the wind. You awoke from your slumber happy, certain that those slaves were the servants and guards of success, bearing you up to the lofty heights where the Lady of Success and Happiness waited for you. But realistically, what success, what fortune could one find in a desert village that maps didn’t even deign to mention?

You had forgotten this dream and only remembered it as you leaned against the sacks of coal in the truck making for Tripoli with you in the rear. The black sacks came to represent the slaves in your dream, the truck a luxurious sedan chair, and Tripoli, which loomed on the horizon, the Lady of Good Fortune awaiting you atop the mountain. There was no other city in this desert country where dreams might come true.