The Salt Road (24 page)

‘Yes,’ said Azaz, his usually merry face solemn. ‘It was a bad time. Many people simply disappeared.’

‘Azaz’s father was a member of the separatist movement, but he didn’t take up arms: all he did was to campaign for free elections. He died in prison,’ Taïb said grimly. ‘No one speaks of such things now. The new king is different. He is more progressive than his grandfather, Mohammed V, or his father, Hassan II. He knows that if he is to succeed in making Morocco a successful modern country he’s got to avoid disharmony and political unrest.’

We turned another corner and found a flock of skinny sheep blocking the road. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes: where was their pasture? There was no shade of green to be spotted anywhere. Truly, the animals here must be as hardy as the people. It seemed a shame to eat them.

‘Why hasn’t there been more support for the movement?’ I asked.

Taïb considered this, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in a complex foreign rhythm as we waited for the sheep to move away. ‘Most Moroccans have Berber roots, but not that many regard themselves as Berbers first and foremost any more. They can’t afford to. The last century has been particularly hard. The French colonized Morocco and siphoned off its resources. Wars came and went: widespread poverty was the inevitable result. If you want to get on in life, you have to speak good Arabic, and good French. If you speak Berber, people think you’re an ignorant peasant and treat you accordingly. The younger generation have given up trying to scrape a living in the countryside: they’ve moved into the cities and adopted a Western way of life. Become a part of the system rather than fighting against it.’ He sighed. ‘My family is a good example, though Lalla Fatma remains the anchor to our heritage. We’ve lost our connection with the old language and the old ways. Even in the remotest places our people do not read or write the Tifinagh any more. We’ve managed to keep the language alive orally, but we’ve long since lost the use of our alphabet. At least there is support now to begin to teach it in the schools: the king has called the Amazigh culture “a national treasure”. But the damage has long been done: I feel it as a great shame that you cannot simply walk up to someone in Tafraout and ask them to read the inscription in your amulet; that no one can do so, even though it is the written form of our own language, a dialect of the one we speak every day.’

Until that moment, I had not realized that the language I heard being spoken around me and the weird symbols in the amulet bore any connection to one another at all. And suddenly it came to me why the sigil on the wall seemed so familiar: it was one of the symbols in the inscription. How extraordinary: I felt at once uplifted and confused by this unexpected connection.

The last sheep bounded up the stony bank, and we turned left and rolled up an unpaved track, the wheels crunching loudly over rubble. ‘And where do the Tuaregs fit in to all this?’ I asked.

Taïb negotiated the potholes expertly, flicking the wheel to the left and right. ‘A good question. We were all the same people once: Berbers spread right across North Africa, from Morocco in the west as far as Egypt in the east. But when the Romans conquered the Maghreb some of the local population capitulated, some resisted and some fled into the desert. The Tuareg were those who went into the desert. There, living outside all political boundaries and control, they managed to evade even the Bedouin raiders; and they took the roots of our culture with them, including our ancient alphabet. Now, they’re the sole guardians of the Tifinagh, particularly when it comes to the ancient uses, like the inscription in your amulet.’

‘Do you really think it’s ancient?’

‘The style of the amulet itself is certainly traditional. The thing you have to remember about the Tuareg is that until very recently their way of life has remained largely unchanged for a thousand years. But in the last generation they’ve suffered droughts, famine and persecution; their numbers have dwindled radically. And of course the modern world has impinged to some extent. When I say your amulet looks ancient, I mean its design is ancient, passed through generations of smiths from father to son down the centuries. So your necklace could be anything from a thousand years old to a hundred, or less: it’s hard to say. I recognize the motifs, but I’d need to know more about its provenance to know for sure how old it is. The inscription inside it should give us a better idea, though. And that’s where Lallawa comes in.’

‘Ah,’ said Azaz, cheered up by this mention no end, ‘Lallawa: she makes the best
m’smen
in the world!’

Lallawa
. It was the name I had heard over and over in my dreams. Something cold brushed against my heart.

But Lallawa did not answer when we knocked at her door. Taïb peered through her window, calling her name loudly. ‘She’s getting very deaf,’ he confided to me, ‘and she sleeps a lot now.’ But there was still no response.

We walked around the back of her little mudbrick house, washed with the same terracotta shade as its neighbours, and found there an empty enclosure. There were chicken feathers and dried goat shit in the dust; but no sign of either creature apart from the musty smell that hung in the heavy afternoon air.

Azaz frowned and said something to Taïb, who shook his head. ‘Her animals are gone; and she was so proud of them. Something must be very wrong. I’ll go and find Habiba. She’ll know.’

‘And who is Habiba?’

Did I imagine it, or did he look uncomfortable?

‘She is a … cousin,’ he said at last. ‘A cousin to me, and to Azaz. Lallawa used to live with Habiba’s family.’

Back down the track we drove, back into the deserted town, past the civic buildings bearing their subversive graffiti. Just off the square we drew up in the shade of a wall painted with a bright mural mixing Disney cartoon characters, famous footballers and elegant swirls of Arabic writing.

‘Habiba teaches here,’ Taïb explained as we all got out of the car again. The late afternoon sun was like a hammer on the back of my head, and it occurred to me belatedly that I’d eaten and more importantly drunk nothing for hours. He came to my side and without a word or permission put an arm around my waist to help me walk. I opened my mouth to protest, thought better of it and shut it again. He was only trying to help, and the shade beckoned across the schoolyard; but even so I felt uncomfortably aware of his proximity, of the bump of his hip against mine, of the sinewy muscles I could feel moving in his shoulders; the heat of him through his cotton robe.

At the doorway to the school – a small prefabricated building, its entrance reached by a set of rickety wooden steps – Azaz went ahead of us. He disappeared into the darkness inside and a moment later I heard the usual staccato burst of Berber, followed by a lot of high-pitched shouting and laughter. Taïb helped me up the steps and into the welcome shadow within.

Despite the late hour, thirty or forty children of all possible ages were crammed inside the single room. They grinned away like mad at the sight of a hopping tourist, their teeth startlingly white in the gloom. Some of the younger ones plastered their fingers over their mouths and gazed at me over the top in sheer delight; others shouted out words I had no way of understanding, and laughed and laughed. At last their teacher, a thin man with large, earnest eyes and a dusty brown robe like a mendicant priest, motioned for them to calm down and be quiet, and they subsided into some kind of order. Then he turned to Taïb and Azaz, and the three of them entered into an intense and lively discussion.

I looked around. As my eyes got used to the light it occurred to me how different all the children were from one another. In Tafraout, only a couple of hours’ drive away, the children all looked much the same: with skin of a milky coffee colour and shining black hair. Here, every shade under the sun was represented, except for the palest European white. One girl, sloe-eyed and as pretty as an Arab princess in her pastel headscarf and bead earrings, had skin as pale as mine in winter; her neighbour was a deep, rich ebony, with a round ball of a head, her hair braided into intricate cornrows. Next to her was a little boy of maybe six, almost half her size and age, with the sharp cheekbones and fine features of the local Berbers; next to him an elfin creature of indeterminate gender sporting a head entirely shaved except for a single long braid sprouting from the crown of its head. A couple wore T-shirts that looked as if they belonged to someone else, or several someone elses, but most wore traditional robes in pale blue and mustard-yellow.

The classroom was spotless, which was just as well, since everyone was sitting on the floor. All around the walls were examples of the children’s handiwork: the same sketchy houses and smiling suns and stick figures you’d find in any school anywhere in the world, displayed between swatches of embroidery and little hand-woven rugs bearing the same simple geometric patterns as those I’d seen fading their lives away in the Tafraout market.

Someone tugged at my sleeve. I looked down to find a little girl with missing front teeth grinning up at me. ‘
Asseyez-vous, madame!
’ she insisted, pulling me towards a cushion placed ceremonially on the floor at the front of the class.

I arranged myself awkwardly, and as soon as I was settled the children were upon me like locusts, giggling and babbling and demanding my attention, as if being down on their level gave them licence to treat me as one of their own. One of them plonked herself squarely in my lap.

‘
Bonjour!
’ she trilled, gazing up at me with huge black eyes.

‘
Bonjour
,’ I returned uncertainly. I could not remember the last time I had touched a child, let alone had one fall in my lap with such happy confidence. ‘What’s your name?’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

‘
Voyez!
’ she demanded, thrusting her notebook under my nose. Written across the page in great wobbly biro lines were five simple icons: small circle, vertical line, large circle with a dot in the middle, small circle, large circle bisected by a vertical line.
‘Mon nom!
’ she declared in triumph. ‘Hasna.’

I looked at Taïb, startled. ‘She’s written her name? In Tifinagh?’

He grinned proudly. ‘Yes, Habiba is not here and in her place Abdelkader has been teaching them, just for today. It is the greatest good luck: he is a pioneer of Berber studies. Why don’t you show him your amulet?’

Now that it came to it, I found that I really wasn’t sure I wanted the mystery my amulet contained to be revealed. What if the inscription was as simple as a name, written by some long-dead man or woman, a name with no relevance to any living person any more, and certainly with no relevance to me? What if it contained the ancient curse Taïb’s grandmother believed it might hold? My heart began to beat faster, then faster still. But with all eyes expectantly on me and having come all this way for this express purpose, it seemed ridiculously contrary to refuse. I took the amulet out of my handbag and handed it to Taïb, who thumbed the central boss carefully to one side and shook the roll of paper out into his hand. Abdelkader took it and smoothed it out, the vertical line between his eyebrows becoming increasingly deeply furrowed as he stared at the complex inscription.

An unaccustomed silence engulfed the schoolroom as if somehow even the children realized an event of some significance was taking place, that a little bit of magic was about to reveal itself in front of their eyes, if they were quiet, very quiet. No one moved; it almost seemed that no one breathed.

After a while, the teacher turned the little square of paper around and scrutinized it that way. He took it to the window and held it up to the light; returned to the front of the classroom and paced up and down. The children watched him, wide-eyed and expectant. My palms began to itch and sweat the same way they did when I contemplated a hard route. At last he gave a long and heartfelt sigh. ‘This is well beyond my limited abilities with the Tifinagh,’ he told me in his precise French. ‘I can make out a number of the characters, of course; but the letter forms do vary significantly across the wide region where Tifinagh has been used, which is after all half a continent! Also, I have to say that I cannot work out which way around it should be read – no, no, don’t laugh: it is not such a simple matter. The writing in it is crosshatched and I’m not sure which way to start to read it. Right to left is more common; but the older inscriptions may use a bottom to top orientation. The language, after all, originated as a way of writing upon rock, so to start from the ground upward makes a lot of sense. And of course the Tuareg use the most ancient version of the language of all, and the purest: it leaves the vowels inferred. Since then the forms have deviated both geographically and linguistically. And I’m afraid, as such, this is rather beyond my understanding.’ He spread his hands apologetically.

Taïb said something to him in their own language, and Abdelkader scratched his ear and nodded, then gestured again at the paper, pointing something out; and then they both looked at the amulet. And then Azaz asked something and they all spoke loudly together at the same time. How they could understand one another I couldn’t imagine, but they seemed to be communicating together just fine.

By now the children were getting restless, and so was I. ‘What?’ I asked peremptorily. ‘What are you talking about?’ It was
my
amulet, after all.

Taïb turned to me. ‘Sorry. Abdelkader is of the opinion that this is old, and most certainly Tuareg: he says there are none of the modern additions to the alphabet, the modifiers that have come into use to make up for those sounds and characters that the original alphabet does not allow for. Vowels, for example: older forms of Tifinagh rarely mark the vowels that we are used to including now—adays. It’s all quite complicated …’ He tailed off as if the subject was simply too difficult for a mere woman to get her head around. I felt myself bristle, and almost as if he intuited this he raised his hands defensively and added, ‘He also says that Habiba is with Lallawa, who is very ill. All the women in the village are taking turns to look after her. We should at least pay our respects since we are here.’