Amin Maalouf - Leo Africanus

We had agreed that each time my father went to the country for the week she would put a knotted blade of grass in a crack in the outside wall. One day, towards the end of Safar, the second month of the year, I went past the house; the knotted blade was there. I pulled the bell rope. Warda shouted from within:

‘My husband is away. I am alone with my daughter. I cannot open the door.’

‘It’s me, Hasan!’

She explained confusedly that some men had come a few minutes before; they had knocked on the door insistently, saying that she must let them in. She was afraid, and Mariam, who looked pale and weak, seemed afraid too.

‘What’s going on here? You both look as if you’ve been crying.’

Their tears began again, but Warda quickly pulled herself together:

‘For the last three days it has been like hell. We dare not go out into the street. The neighbours come all the time to ask if it’s true that…’

Her voice choked, and Mariam continued vacantly:

‘They are asking if I am suffering from the illness.’

When people say ‘the illness’ at Fez they mean leprosy; when they talk of ‘the quarter’ without further designation they mean the leper quarter.

I still had not taken in what they had just told me when I heard a drumming on the door.

‘The police, in the sultan’s name! You are not alone now! A man has just gone inside. He can speak to us.’

I opened the door. There were at least ten people outside, an officer, four women veiled in white, the rest soldiers.

‘Does Mariam, the daughter of Muhammad al-Wazzan the Granadan live here?’

The officer unfolded a piece of paper.

‘This is an order from the shaikh of the lepers. We are to bring the aforesaid Mariam to the quarter.’

A single idea turned over in my head: ‘If this could be an ordinary nightmare!’ I heard myself saying:

‘But this is slander! She has never had a single mark on her body! She is as pure as one of the verses revealed in the Qur’an!’

‘We shall see about that. These four women have been appointed to examine her on the spot.’

They went into one of the rooms with her. Warda tried to follow them but someone stopped her. I stayed outside, my mind in a fog, but trying at the same time to make the officer listen to reason. He answered me calmly, appearing to see my point of view, but ended by replying to each of my outbursts that he was an official, that he had orders to carry out, and that I must speak to the shaikh of the lepers.

After ten minutes, the women came out of the room. Two of them were holding Mariam under her arms and dragging her along. Her eyes were open but her body was limp. No sound came from her throat; she seemed unable to take in what was happening to her. One of the women whispered something in the officer’s ear. He made a sign to one of his men, who covered Mariam with a coarse earth-coloured cloth.

‘Your sister is ill. We must take her with us.’

I tried to intervene; they thrust me roughly aside. And the sinister procession set off. At the end of the cul-de-sac a few idlers were gathered. I cried out, threatened, gesticulated. But Warda came after me, pleading:

‘Come back, by Heaven, you mustn’t bring out the whole neighbourhood. Your sister can never be married.’

I went back towards the house, slammed the door, and began to hammer the walls with my fists, oblivious to the pain. Warda came up to me. She was weeping, but her mind was clear.

‘Wait until they have gone and then go and talk to your uncle. He has good relations with the palace. He can get her back.’

She held me by the sleeve and pulled me back.

‘Calm yourself, your hands are raw.’

My arms fell heavily on Warda’s shoulders; I embraced her fiercely, without unclenching my fists, as if I was still hammering at the wall. She subsided against me. Her tears ran down my neck; her hair covered my eyes; I could only inhale her breath, burning, humid and perfumed. I was not thinking of her; she was not thinking of me. Our bodies did not exist for us. But they suddenly came into existence for themselves, kindled by anger. I had never before felt conscious of myself as a man, nor been conscious of her as a woman. She was thirty-two, old enough to be a grandmother, but her face had no lines, and her hair was jet black. I no longer dared to move, for fear I might give myself away, or to speak, for fear of sending her away, nor even to open my eyes, for fear of having to recognize that I was entwined with the only woman rigorously forbidden to me, my father’s wife.

Where did her mind wander during those moments? Did she feel herself drifting like me towards the intermingling of pleasure? I don’t think so. Was she just numb, body and soul all swollen up? Did she simply need to clutch hold of the only human being who would share her anguish? I shall never know, for we never spoke of it; never did our words or actions ever recall that a moment had existed in which we were man and woman, bound together by the pitiless fingers of Destiny.

It was incumbent upon her to withdraw. She did so imperceptibly, with these words of tender parting:

‘Go, Hasan my son, God will come to our aid. You are the best brother that Mariam could have!’

I ran, counting my steps to myself so that my mind would not dwell on anything else. As far as Khali’s house.

My uncle listened to me without showing any signs of emotion, but I could see that he was moved, more than I had expected, given the complete absence of relations between himself and my sister. When I finished my story, he explained:

‘The shaikh of the lepers is a power in the land. He alone is entitled to remove from Fez those who have been infected, and he alone has authority over the denizens of the quarter. Few qadis dare oppose his decisions, and the sultan himself only rarely takes it upon himself to interfere in his gruesome domain. Furthermore, he is extremely rich, for many among the believers bequeath their properties for the benefit of the quarter, either because the illness has afflicted their family, or because they take pity at the sight of these unfortunates. And the shaikh administers all the revenues. He uses part of it to provide food, lodging and treatment for the sufferers, but there are substantial sums left over which he uses in all sorts of shady ways to increase his personal wealth. It is highly likely that he has some business association with the Zarwali, and that he has agreed to help him to take vengeance upon us.’

I had distinctly heard my uncle say ‘us’! My surprise did not elude him.

‘You have known for a long time what I think of your father’s obsession with this Rumiyya. He lost his head one day, because she very nearly left him, because he thought his honour was at stake, because he wanted, in his way, to take revenge on the Castilians. Since then, he has never recovered his good judgement. But what has just happened concerns neither Muhammad nor Warda, nor even poor Mariam; the whole Granadan community of Fez is being held up to ridicule by the Zarwali. We have to fight, even for the daughter of the Rumiyya. A community begins to fall apart the moment it agrees to abandon the weakest of its members.’

His arguments mattered little; his attitude gave me new hope.

‘Do you think we shall be able to save my sister?’

‘Ask the Most High to bring you hope and patience! We have to fight the most powerful and devilish individuals. You know that the Zarwali is a friend of the sultan?’

‘But if Mariam has to stay in the quarter for long, she really will become a leper.’

‘You must go and see her, tell her that she must not mix with the others, and bring her turtle flesh to eat, which helps to fight the illness. Above all, she should always keep her face covered with a veil impregnated with vinegar.’