After a trip of fifteen hours, the bus stopped in a forsaken road, thirty miles from Gourama. From beneath her sharp eyebrows, the old woman behind gave me drowsy looks as I was taking my bags from the overhead compartment. She made sure I was not taking hers. When I descended, the morning wind rose up and blew right in my face. The sky was murky, and the sun was leisurely making its way upwards. A corroded route sign I used to smear with balls of mud and stones during childhood summer holidays with the boys of the village was then twisted backwards by God knows whose maliciousness. It read Ait Sbaa Aljadida, which, in Arabic, means The New Tribe of the Lion.
The myth recounts the incredible story of Sidi Mham'd, an upright man who helped the poor, comforted the needy, and most of all a man who, in a holly hierarchy, goes back to the holly family of the prophet. Sidi Mham'd lived peacefully in his humble house in the outer reaches of the tribe, until the French stepped onto the land he so vowed to decontaminate perforce.
Disturbed by his influence the countrymen, the wrath of whom they saw he directed against the colonizer and the infidel, the French went very nervous and insecure. When they wanted to spare themselves the deadly tricks and traps he used to throw in their path, they put him in jail, and when they put him in jail, they thought he was defeated. Sidi Mham'd was strong and long-suffering and faithful. They tortured him to hand his men over. But how could he in moments of testing, he who spent his life fighting the infidels, give up those who fought by his side? When the French were convinced of his unwavering loyalty to his quest, they decided to lock him up, one silent and boring night, inside a cage of ravenously famished lions; they wanted to kill both the monotony and the man. To the surprise and fright of the custodians, however, Sidi Mham'd transformed, by aid of his baraka, the righteousness of his deeds, and the sacrosanctness of his lineage to a lion that broke the iron bars down, and disappeared in the discreet districts of the mountains, from which he never returned. From that time the tribe was named after the lion he was in heart, became in body, in memorial of such a great act of resistance.
The bus was oddly slow, and I felt I needed only one more hour of sitting to take the form of a poorly written '4'. My uncle was waiting for me somewhere before the rising sun on the very old mule that still survived my uncle's infuriated temper. My uncle looked thin on the skimpy mule, and the huge turban he wore covered up the sun in an untimely occultation. In truth, the turban was so enormous that I thought I should be there in time before it would suddenly bring him to the ground. As he saw me coming up to where he posed like a knight from the olden times of starvation, he bid me a big toothless smile and down-climbed the worn out creature that might have sighed with a curse, two or God only knows how many. The old mule, I thought, surely needed a means of transportation.
My uncle hugged me with a force incongruous with his skeletal shape. 'Come on quickly, son! Get on iwa, mount! Let me help you up!' He urged. 'Don't worry,' he added, 'I will take care of the bags'. My uncle was the sort of person who would not like to do again, say again, show again, and, most importantly, make orders again, and if he had to, he would do it with brutality.
My uncle was able to find places for the bags and himself on the unsaddled being. I felt we were too much for the mule, but, in spite of everything, my uncle was not satisfied with the speed of the animal. 'We will never get there with this castrated son of a donkey!' He suddenly grumbled with great anger. 'Slap the stone-headed scalp iwa of the stubborn bastard to get moving!' my uncle kept harassing the whole way to the house. He would at times take a pause to breathe, and at times heave a long sigh of displeasure, unnecessarily dramatized. He would examine both sides of the path in displeasure, and I would think he was trying to find a big stone to smash the head of the mule, for fairly recently he stuck a pitchfork in his leg when he found up he was eating from the hay of the neighbours. Now something would all of a sudden attract his attention. 'kick iwa the ungrateful belly with your fine shoes!!' he would command over and over again, every time with a bit more accentuation on 'fine' to the extent I thought my uncle would kill the mule to have my shoes. The style of the shoes I wore could only be found in the city, and would certainly never reach the villagers, who would deem its price to be too expensive, especially that they did not have roads for such much classy footwear. The irregular soil, gritty ground, and dusty pathways of the region would quickly render elaborate things the way rural life wanted them to be, plain and simple.
The sun had then completely risen from behind the highland which I thought, in my childhood, was its private dwelling. Sometimes, in the fanciest fits of imagination, I would believe that if I were to peep from above the summit of the highland late at night, I would find a foreign man the sun invited in particular to get on the nerves of the moon, or perhaps the sun would be dancing particularly for the moon, who would not wait so long before he would submit to the temptations of carnal love. During very dark nights, I would be sure where the moon was.
My uncle was now calm, and the mule was moving gently up and down the easy slopes and valleys. Every now and then, a lizard would peep from behind a tree branch, or run fast between the dry herbs. On the way, three shrouded men greeted from above a short heap of stones in friendliness. When I asked my uncle what they were doing there that early, he said they must be workers gathering stones to mark the boarders of the land. Now that we started down a steep vale I saw what I thought were more than a hundred tombs. 'When did all these die, uncle?' I asked. In fact, I was there a few years ago and I so little remember to have encountered this neat cemetery. 'Beehives, son, not people, beehives iwa, and you will see many of those still…' He paused, cleared his throat, and then resumed, 'we have a dozen on the roof of the house…'. I learned later that some of the villagers who had neither sheep
to sell, or land to plough earned their living by raising bees, the honey of which they would sell in the weekly souks of the closest hometowns, Bouarfa and Rish. Honey of the south sells well, not only because it is delicious taste and fragrance, but also since it is curative to many illnesses, and it is curative to many illnesses since honey bees travel hundred of miles to eat hot medicinal herbs. My uncle raised bees for domestic use only. When we arrived, I did not forget to put my shoes into my plastic bag, which I put inside my baggage; I wore my sandals for the rest of my stay.
Five it was past ten, a time when usually, on summer mornings in Ait Sbaa, I would be already up, toddling inside the shaded woodland of olive trees, surrounded by plants of all kinds, tagging along the shrubbery to the music of the streaming river, the lulling sound of which I recognized to be a language we cannot speak. I would meditate the sounds of birds, frogs, insects, trees till I feel the sun on top of my head watching over the little village in vigorous surveillance. I would embrace a shady tree and envy my own blissful delights. The birds, as I could perceive, would stick together in flocks, taking wing from tree to tree in an unstinting ecstasy, adding chorus to the already playing symphony of harmonious joyousness.
It was early, but as always, Lalla Safia, my aunt, had already put the breakfast table outside on the thick handmade floor coverings. My uncle leaned against the garden's short wall which, made of mingled hay and mud, gave the house a dignified charm. From inside his aqrab (local leather shoulder bag), he brought two wooden tubes in the size and shape of pencils, and put the end of one inside the first part of the other. Then he produced a tiny plastic parcel full of kif mixed with taba (tobacco). He put the head of the long pipe inside the powder and used his forefinger to fill the shkaf (head of the pipe), and, with the other hand, he burnt a match and smoked in delight. My uncle would be careful to blow some rapid air into the tube to dispense with the ash
while it was still burning. Aicha, the bashful daughter of my uncle, would now approach, a big plate of malwi in her hand, a soft and delicious bread always offered in breakfast with olive oil and honey. She would pour some tea in every cup, and raise the bered high enough to achieve what they call a thick tea turban. My uncle fills another shkaf, drags two continuous breaths from his sebsi, sips the minted drink with a sound, undoes the pipe, and puts it back with the parcel inside the bag. He would produce the things every once in a while.
Aicha appears again with a towel she places on the pillow next to my uncle, and says I could take some rest inside. Aicha was blonde with blue eyes, and she moved like a butterfly in the house. She used to help in the kitchen, milk the cow, and take breakfast to the men in the field. In addition, she was studying English at the University of Letters in Wajda, but at the end of each schooling year, she would spend the summer at home.
That year she came a bit early to attend the wedding ceremony of Malika, her sister. Malika married Abd Elkrim, the son of Moha, the fqih. Abd Elkrim, who now lived in Spain, brought a Chevrolet and promised to get new carpets for the mosque, a new loudspeaker, buckets for the Turkish toilets, and other supplies. His mother, Tamlalt, moved among the other women in self-importance, and was speaking strangely loud. I felt she wanted everyone to notice she was there, and, in reality, there she was with her fleshy carcass like a cow that ate an entire cornfield. If they had slaughtered her instead of the poor cow, she would have sufficed the whole tribe. The fqih, however, was as lean as the tubes my uncles used to smoke his kif. She must be either eating the poor fellow's share of food, or eating the share of food of the poor fellow. In fact, I have been lately pondering this state of affairs in the tribe, where almost all countrymen look like my uncle, all women like Tamlalt. I thought they must be drinking something in the water that had such a double effect. If truth be told, my brains could never serve me to find a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon, which I pledge to find one day.
Now all and one were gathering inside the massive khzana (tent) the young men of the tribe helped to construct at the rear of the house two days before. In the house of the bride, women were playing their own private poetic rhythms, singing and dancing, since they could not be in the same place with men. Enchanted by the festal gathering, I would attend the merrymaking in both places, and would linger longer in the female space, when Aicha would come to the middle of the female circle to dance like a bee under the beating bnadar (local circular drums). Of course, I would not fail to notice the hennaed hands and ankles she moved in loveliness, the takshita she recently tailored, and the soft cosmetics she applied. She looked like a renegade from the bygone times of Moorish captivity. Blessed is he who conquers Aicha.
The first lights started to steal looks at the horizon when the ceremony ended. I saw people dispersing in a contended drunkenness, dragging their feet, walking quietly as if afraid to awaken the slumber that yawns inside them. I saw them leaving, and I knew I must go to sleep as well. Inside the countless rooms of the house, people I do not know were sleeping exposed in the absence of sufficient coverings. They all looked defeated like a thousand soldiers after a toxic war. Those were coming from the other counties, and would depart in the following day. I was still looking for a place, any place to sleep, when Aicha appeared. She looked very tired herself, but her eyes were glimmering like a million stars. She asked me to follow, and so did I. The house was a maze of doors and entries, and I wished we could get lost inside; together; forever. No sooner had we approached a hidden room, than a violent din rose outside. I was terrified because I heard many tragic stories of the groom butchering the bride on a non virgin bed. As if infected by the thought, the face of Aicha blazed with fright under the flame of the candlestick she carried with one hand, protected with the other. To my relief, it was something else that stirred the noise, but something I was not interested to know. I took Aicha from the hand, and we disappeared in the dark.
The following day, the villagers were relating the story of both the treasure that was buried for centuries underground somewhere alongside the irregular path leading to the main route outside the village, and the treasure hunters who, by means of magic, knew where it rested, and, who, having had previously landmarked the fortune with stones, availed themselves of the wedding ceremony to dig up for the gold.
Later that day, Aicha told me, as we were bringing the cow back from the pastures, that many treasure hunters asked permission to dig up inside the house for a massive treasure from Almoravide dynasty, perhaps buried where, together, we buried our secret the previous night.
