The Meq (42 page)

Emme’s gaze was too powerful for the first man to doubt her and the other man stared at her pearl and thought of gold. The ruse worked, but only to a point. Neither of them had the authority to finalize any deal without the complete knowledge and approval of their chief. A meeting here, at the races, was completely out of the question. Emme kept after them. She was lying, of course, dropping names and telling them our chief had been under El Heiba and now wished to quit the resistance and return to his homeland and race camels. The drivers paused and stared at each other for just a moment, then the conversation changed in tone completely. She had finally come up with a name common to them all. This enabled the camel drivers to verify their trust and at least tell her the exact location in which Mulai would be pasturing his camels along with his prize Arab horses the following year, without ever having to say or use his name. It was an elaborate and baroque deal, but a deal nonetheless.

Emme never mentioned the “bluebird” by name but at the same time steered the dialogue toward a blue-eyed white girl our chief had sold to Jisil al-Sadi years before. Emme asked if Jisil had sold her yet; being so white and skinny, Emme thought she would never adapt. One of the men said that Jisil only wished he could buy and sell the girl. She was not his, the man said, and she never would be. He added that the problem would solve itself in little more than a year, when the girl would be sold—then their chief could get back to the business of camel racing full time. Emme asked if the girl ever traveled with them to events such as this. One of the men said no, never, that it could never happen. Then the other man interrupted him with a stern look and brought the conversation back to camels.

The races went on until early evening. Emme and I left long before that, but we now had what we needed—a time and a place. We would meet them there. We would be waiting.

As we were leaving, in the midst of shouts and swirling clouds of sand, I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

“Why are you laughing?” Emme asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not that funny. I was remembering something.”

“What?”

“Another day similar to this one. The first time I rode a camel.”

Emme watched me for a moment, then reattached her veil. “Where was that?” she asked.

“In St. Louis.”

“Senegal?”

“No. Missouri.”

“When?”

“A lifetime ago . . . the day Star was stolen. The day an old friend died.”

“Look at me,” Emme said, unfastening her veil again, so I could watch her say the words. “We will find this girl, Z. She may not be Star anymore, but we will find her and free her.”

“I know . . . I just never thought it would be with camels.”

Early the next day Emme posted a letter to PoPo, telling him our good news and giving him our route and probable stops along the way, then we left Tindouf and began traveling in a zigzag, easterly direction. We were in no hurry and our final destination was still far away in the central Sahara and massif of Tassili-n-Ajjer. Our spirits were high and we talked at length about what the camel drivers had said and what it meant. It seemed clear that Star would be sold in just over a year, and that would be the same date the Fleur-du-Mal would do whatever it was he had in mind to do. What was not clear was Star’s relationship with Mulai and Jisil. Somehow, in some way, she had come between them.

For six long and uneventful months we had good luck with both the weather and the animals. We ran into no sudden storms and the camels stayed healthy. We even purchased two goats along the way. Why not, we thought; we were rich with hope. Emme talked often of the future, not only scenarios for Star’s rescue and escape, but for herself afterward. She said she might rethink a decision she had made concerning the mysterious A. B., the Frenchman from Saint-Louis in Senegal. She didn’t say what the decision was and I didn’t ask. I never asked about him because I never mentioned Opari. It had always been an area of mutual silence between us and seemed a fair trade.

Finally, on a clear but windy morning, we came within sight of In Salah, an ancient town in the heart of Algeria. It had been a crossroads for caravans, wars, and warriors for centuries. That day, although there were a few stragglers like us, it seemed desolate and nearly abandoned. Emme stopped an old herdsman who was leaving just as we were arriving and asked if there had been sickness or a threat of some kind to the people. In Berber, he replied, “No, no, only an Englishman, a soldier who has fled the war in the east. The people think other English soldiers will come after him. They want nothing to do with him, so they stay inside and wait for him to leave, but he doesn’t leave. He only sits in the shade and smokes Turkish tobacco. Very unpleasant, very bad.”

The old man waddled off and Emme shrugged her shoulders. We knew there was a war going on in Europe, and we knew there was fighting in Africa, but that was thousands of miles away, mainly in East Africa and South Africa and nowhere near the central Sahara. Emme thought that it was of no concern and told me to tend the animals while she went to post a letter to PoPo. I agreed without telling her what I really intended, which was to find the English soldier. I wanted news, English-speaking news.

I combed the markets and alleys of In Salah until finally, under the awning of an empty stall at the very edge of town, I found him, sound asleep in the shadows. He was snoring loudly and looked to be about twenty or twenty-one years old. His face was unshaven, but his beard was blond and barely more than peach fuzz. Either he or someone else had torn all the insignias off his ragged uniform. They were lying in a pile beside him, along with several papers, including a British newspaper. I figured he must be a deserter; there was no other reason for him being alone and so far from anywhere. I tried to find out what I could without waking him. I knew there was nothing I could do for him—not here and not now. Among his papers I discovered he had been in the Second Battalion of the Nigerian Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Austin Hubert Wightwick Haywood. The name sparked a memory. I had heard the colonel’s name before in other remote parts of the desert. He was known as the only Englishman in recent years to have crossed the Sahara. I looked down at the sleeping young soldier and wondered if he had heard the same thing, maybe even tried to do the same thing. I would never know. I took the British newspaper and ran back to my goats and camels and began to read.

Minutes later, I discovered the United States had entered the war in Europe. That was no surprise. Sailor had always said the Giza would eventually find a way to fight a world war. The rest was not news, not really, just reports of what was in fashion—economically, culturally, spiritually. Two things did catch my eye. One made mention of a new American poet on the scene—Thomas S. Eliot—and I wondered if he could be the same boy on the bicycle who had been so infatuated with Carolina, then dismissed the thought as impossible. The other was an article, with pictures, of a new biplane that was going to be tested in Scotland as a seaplane. I could not believe how far men had come, once they learned to fly. The machine looked remarkable. There was something familiar about the name of the pilot, and I was squinting in the sun, trying to place it, when Emme’s shadow interrupted. I looked up and knew immediately something was wrong.

“What is it?” I asked.

She was trembling slightly. She handed me a letter, but it never made the exchange. It dropped in the dust and I picked it up.

“It was waiting for me,” she said slowly. “It has been here more than a month.”

I opened the letter and looked at it. It was in French and I only understood a few words. However, I could read the signature at the bottom clearly—Jean-Luc Leheron.

“What does it say?” I asked, then changed my mind. “No, what does it mean?”

“It means I have to leave, go back to Dogon land—now—today”

I knew there would be only one answer to my next question, one small seed of an answer. “PoPo?”

“Yes. He is . . . not well. He is . . .” She stopped, then swallowed hard. “He is dying.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

“No, you will not. You will go on and stop this abomination. You must—we have never been this close to her. If you left now, you might not get back in time . . . many things might happen, many things. You will free that girl. She will fear you, she will have another name, but you will free her. You must! You will free her as you would a bird. You will do this because you were meant to do this. You have no choice, as I have no choice. PoPo is my blood and I know you understand this, Z, . . . more than I.”

I looked at her and knew without a doubt she meant what she was saying, and that what she was saying was true. There was no other way for it to be. Any delay was just that. “Then I think we’ll only say a temporary farewell, Emme Ya Ambala. I have not yet seen enough of you in this world.”

“I feel the same, Zianno Zezen. There will be a day somewhere, somehow, and you will introduce me to Star. That will be a good day”

We embraced in the sand with grit swirling around us. The wind was coming from the west and picking up. I heard dogs barking in the distance. The sun was low, but the sky was still bright with several hours left in the day. Emme loaded her camel with supplies, then climbed on, ready to head south.

“You will have to learn some new dialects,” she shouted down at me.

“I will talk backward,” I said, “it always works.” Then something else came to me. “ ‘I, now forty-seven years old in perfect health, begin, hoping to cease not till death—’ ”

“I am impressed,” she said, ‘’ ‘Song of Myself,’ but the correct age is thirty-seven.” She was laughing. “You are crazy.”

“Someone else told me that once. Do you know what I told her?”

“No, what?” Emme shouted back. She was already moving, swatting at the camel and straightening the reins. The camel groaned and balked as always. I walked alongside.

“Egibizirik bilatu.”

“What does it mean?”

“Something about truth,” I yelled. She was pulling away.

“I will remember that,” she yelled back. “Is it old?”

“Yes,” I shouted, but I knew she couldn’t hear me any longer. She was only a blue dot melting into a shimmering, shapeless horizon. “It is very old,” I whispered.

I left In Salah two days later, moving north and east, slowly at first—one day, one night at a time. As I crossed the oldest north–south caravan route from Ghadames to the Niger, I traveled even more slowly. I bought two more goats and a donkey. It was twice as slow and twice as convincing. By the time I got to the sandstone cliffs and hidden canyons of the Tassili-n-Ajjer, I was a full-time goatherd.

Mulai and Jisil’s “property” was neither legal nor defined by boundaries in any way. It was what they could hold on to and defend. However far that defense was extended was their current “property” line. Sentries on horseback and in pairs usually patrolled the entire remote area surrounding the al-Sadi camps. Occasionally, one sentry would be posted for a few months at a time near strategic passes and lookout points. My goats and I found one of these passes at the northern end of the Tassili range. There were two small streams and ragged pastures nearby and in the cliffs all around were caves and grottoes where I could camp and make myself familiar with the sentry, who would be lonely, hungry, and angry at being posted so far from his main camp. At least, this was what I hoped for, since disenchanted soldiers sometimes say more than they should. I had to find out anything I could, in any way I could, about the “bluebird.” It was still early in what passed for spring in the Tassili-n-Ajjer, but the deadline the camel driver had mentioned was only months away.

I started out making my rounds with the goats at a good distance from the pass itself. Gradually, daily, I let the goats stray closer and closer. I was in luck. The sentry who was posted to the northern pass was not hungry or angry, far from it, but he was lonely and one day called out to me. I played mute, waving my arms and making hand signals. He took pity on me and we struck up a friendship, of sorts. He did all the talking and I nodded my head. To keep him talking, I often brought tobacco and dates, things I kept with me for trade, but never imagined would be used as bribes for information. In such a fierce and friendless place, they were better than my gold.

He was named Idris, after Idris Alooma, the sixteenth-century ruler who brought firearms to the Maghreb. This Idris was heavyset, which was unusual in the desert, and I never saw him look at his rifle, much less use it. He was jolly and gregarious and he still had a small spark of innocence left in his eyes, though he was anything but innocent. He had killed many men. Death, especially as a warrior for Mulai and Jisil, was common to him. He could slit a man’s throat and still take time to sample the dates the man had been about to swallow. He would fondly remember the dates, never the man.

He spoke a common Berber dialect, which I understood, not the difficult archaic speech of the camel drivers. Since I always brought gifts and never spoke back, he encouraged my visits and even used his hands more for expression, as I did. When I pointed at my eyes with two fingers and made a fluttering motion with my interlocked hands, imitating a bird, a “bluebird,” he shut his eyes and waved his hand across his face, telling me this must not be seen, not be discussed. It was a forbidden subject. I knew that no female, more specifically a female slave, would have become a forbidden subject unless the chief or chiefs had made it so. Star may not have known she was the daughter of Carolina Covington, but her blood did.

I began staying longer, returning sooner, and generally becoming a friendly nuisance until I was virtually living at the pass with Idris. He showed me hundreds of caves in the area and most of them were decorated with paintings and engravings from ancient times. Idris had no idea who had put them there or what they meant, but he pointed out that some of the older engravings were of animals that now only existed in the south—rhinoceroses, giraffes, elephants, crocodiles, hippopotamuses. In Berber, he said, “Many rivers, long ago.” Most amazing was a cedar tree near one of the caves, its limbs spread and twisted, reaching fifty feet up and out between two rock walls, rooted in what was the riverbed, maybe three or four thousand years ago. It was still alive.