Ibrahim al-Koni - New Waw, Saharan Oasis

He didn’t just laugh; he borrowed the language of the street and humiliated the council. He characterized them as cowards and denigrated the Law. So was the person sitting opposite them the leader they knew or had the jinn succeeded in possessing him, there in the sanctuary, in Retem Valley, and substituted for him another creature, a hateful member of their jinn community?

The diviner said, “You’re feverish, Master. It’s best for people with a fever to rest in bed.”

The hero Ahallum remarked, “My master is ill. The best thing would be to send for the herbalist.”

But a stern sage threatened him with his forefinger. “No, he’s crazy. Only madmen speak like this. So send for the sorcerer, not the herbalist.”

The leader guffawed again, laughing sarcastically. Then he embraced the dead bird and asked, “What’s the point of all this, given that we’re setting out tomorrow or perhaps today? Haven’t you said that travel is the antidote for every ill? Let’s go! Prepare! In fact, rise and depart now. Now! Now! Hee, hee, hee. …”

Silence descended over the council, an ancient silence, a mysterious silence, an aloof silence, a hostile silence.

The next morning the diviner appeared before the tribe and made the pronouncement they always feared, the phrase they shied away from just as they shied away from fire — more than they shied away from a raid, more than from an epidemic: “Amghar yazzrenghin: the leader has preceded us.”

Children, women, and weak-hearted men began to sob, but the sages yielded to an ancient oasis, to the ancient silence, the stern, hostile, aloof silence.

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7. Disproportionate, dissimilar.

1

The first garland was plaited like a girl’s braids.

He came to her tent shortly before sunset and placed the noble garlands on her lap. She leaned forward to examine the many strands. Then the breath of the mysterious blossoms perfumed her face. She noticed the flowers’ slender inflorescences (which young men compared to virgins’ locks and avoided referring to as crests) that intertwined in intimate embrace. Two side stems, which were crowned by white flowers with five petals, twisted around a central stem, which was also crowned by white flowers with five petals, the way a snake in the forest twists around the branch of an acacia tree till the branch, in turn, twists around the body of the snake, as the sages of those tribes say. The central stalk, which was crowned by almost imperceptible flowers, borrowed the flexibility of strands of hair to twine around the bodies of the two side stems. Then these slender bodies vanished in this intimate embrace. Of this marriage, all that showed was the soft, tender flowers’ fuzz that evoked the essence of a conquered creature. This being curved with the bend of a taut bow, meeting in a part that resembled a bow because in the rigor of the weaving, in the precision of the craftsmanship, in the inchoate, insane desire to suppress the stem, to hide the stalk, and to obliterate the three stems until nothing showed in the braid but retem blossoms, the juncture of the intertwining braids became a noble garland of white pearls.

The creator of this chaplet had not been content to make a single garland; that evening he presented the beauty a whole cluster of them. The beauty inhaled the perfume of the flowers piled in her lap and smiled. She smiled the type of smile that sorcerers normally see only in people “who have spent a long time talking about eternity” (as they describe hermits) and raised her fingers toward the void. The lover saw the row of her lower teeth when she laughed. She laughed in an odd way and then sneezed twice.

2

He had settled in the tribe’s camp a few months back and had attended the evening parties of the young women in the moonlight. He had, however, not rolled around ecstatically on the ground, and the jinn of ecstatic trancing had not seized hold of him. He had sat off by himself in the open. By sitting apart, he had seemed to be a loner like all foreigners and intimidating like senior jinn. Some individual tribesmen, however, affirmed that they had observed him swaying in response to the music and emitting incoherent sounds in response to the vibration of the single string of the imzad , which sought inspiration for its sweet tunes from the stars in the heavens and from the kingdoms of the Unknown. It was, however, certain as well that the ecstatic jinn had not seized him in the young women’s circle and that he had not tranced along with other fellows his age.

Suddenly, he stopped attending the full moon parties.

He stopped attending the evening parties and appeared in the grazing lands, where he long kept company with the herdsmen of the lower valleys. Inquiring minds also followed him there and returned to the campsite to say they had heard him sing unfamiliar songs that reminded them of the drone of the jinn in the blue-black mountain caverns. They had been unable to make out the tunes and hadn’t understood a single word of his songs. When they questioned the herdsmen about the stranger’s conduct, they said he hadn’t sung at their soirées and hadn’t spoken either. When they had asked him to join in their nightly singing, he had replied that foreigners have a different law and different songs. Since, of all the desert people, herdsmen are the most knowledgeable about the behavior of foreigners, they abandoned and avoided him.

He returned to the tribe.

He returned to the tribe, and then gossips discovered his interest in the poetess.

3

Other people said that his infatuation with her began before he went to the grazing lands, because passionate lovers are wont to seek refuge there. Fleeing to the wilderness was something everyone did when time struck them with the blow called in the law of love a “blow with the talon.” This phrase was borrowed by passionate lovers from the lexicon of sorcery to attribute to themselves. Joining the herdsmen was always just an excuse to forget and an attempt made by everyone smitten by this blow, by this ailment that was the only one sorcerers couldn’t treat: love! Meanwhile another group affirmed that the stranger’s ailment had not begun until after his return from the homeland where lovers typically buried their lethal ailment. But everyone knows that foreigners are a group who are extremely hard to fathom. Everyone also knows that the stranger’s secret would not be a true secret if love’s disease did not disclose its nature.

The tribe’s stranger also harbored another secret typical of any stranger, but many thought that his true secret had not begun until he became interested in the poetess. So they repeatedly intimated that love actually was his only secret.

Fate arranged for their first meeting to be at one of the nocturnal festivities when the full moon glowed high overhead and its alternative daylight inundated the wasteland. A bird fluttered in the breast then, and people yearned to reach the land of longing. Since they yearned, they sang, because singing is the only wing that can reach the domain of the homeland and enter the realm of the lost dominion. The poet sang with the ancient voice of longing. Then the bird fidgeted in the cage but did not escape. Other throats repeated the song after her, and the bird fluttered some more and beat its wings feverishly to fly off into space. Tears leapt from their eyes, and their breasts were oppressed by a mysterious sorrow. People conscious of the secret tried to vent their emotions by screaming. They shouted until their throats grew hoarse. Then they leapt about, danced, and raced off into the open countryside. But the captive bird attempted to overpower them; so they beat their heads with rocks till their foreheads flowed with blood. They crawled around on their knees and writhed on the ground like madmen. They achieved ecstasy only after a painful journey.