The Last Carousel Page 14

  “Do you wish to see racing camels?” Madame asked me.

  “I should like to see camels who are not serious,” I assured her.

  Madame customarily had so little concern for money that I wasn’t even certain she could count. From her clanging French dialogue with Hassine, which now ensued, I was pleasantly surprised to observe not only that she could count but that she was driving him back across the sands.

  While they were occupied, I snatched the remains of the loaf Madame had been working on. By the time they reached an understanding I had it consumed.

  The understanding was that we were to leave the following morning at six; to avoid driving in the heat of the day.

  “God willing,” was Hassine’s parting shot, “we will have tea in Djerba tomorrow evening.”

  “We aren’t going to Djerba,” Madame corrected him. But he was already gone.

  Hassine Ameur Djemail was as deft as Madame herself at turning a deaf ear.

  We began waiting for Hassine Ameur Djemail at 5:45 A.M.

  The heat of the day, trapped all night between the walls, made the hotel lobby stifling. But the night clerk told me he could not switch on the overhead fan until the heat of the new day had begun. Wandering around the lobby looking for a switch, I marveled that he could tell how much heat belonged to yesterday and how much to this morning.

  Madame dozed in an armchair. A wind from the desert paused in the street just beyond the door, saw that it was too hot inside our lobby and moved on down the street. Madame roused herself, shredded a copy of Algérie Républicaine and returned to sleep.

  I asked the night clerk how he could tell the difference between yesterday’s heat and this morning’s, and he said he could not; that the decision was made by the day clerk, who came on at nine. I wondered whose responsibility it was to decide whether the streets were light or still dark. I put a few shreds of the Algérie Republicainé together and pretended to read them until I fell asleep in the hotel’s other armchair.

  A touch on my shoulder woke me. It took me a moment to recognize Hassine, now wearing a white jellaba. He’d traded his GI cap for a fez.

  “How are we to have tea this evening in Djerba if you are to sleep the whole morning in Tunis?” he demanded.

  “We’ve been waiting since before six,” I informed him. The clock above the bar showed half past nine; the day clerk was on duty, the overhead fan just beginning to turn.

  “God was unwilling we leave so early,” Hassine explained easily. “Against His strength we are helpless. You are my brother.” That was just how he put it: I was his brother.

  He gave his brother the front seat—the seat of honor—beside himself. He gave Madame barely time to scramble into the back seat. A minute slower and she would have been left behind. My being his brother didn’t make Madame his sister.

  “If we are to stop to look at rocks all the way to the desert, Madame,” he reproved her, looking terribly put upon, “I will have no time to visit my mother’s grave.”

  Hassine waited sullenly at the wheel while Madame and I walked among the rocks; where once the invincible city stood.

  This was the point at which Dido, navigating by night instead of beaching her ship every sundown, disembarked. At her first dig she exhumed a cow’s skull, presaging a city that would live enslaved. So she tried again farther west and brought up a horse’s skull: adumbrating a city warlike and powerful. And she named it Qart Hadasht: New Town. The Romans pronounced it “Carthage.”

  The sea was still bearing tribute: waterlogged melons, Coke bottles and dead fish. It looked like the good times were gone. The New Towner had had his day.

  And what a hard, hard time he gave everybody; especially the Roman. In battle as well as in business.

  Right from the start the New Towner looked all wrong to the Roman businessman. He not only looked wrong but he smelled wrong. His ankle-length robe and his heavy perfume in themselves were offensive. Worse was his habit of prostrating himself before the European before talking business.

  It wasn’t until later—after the Roman shook off that cloying scent and went to the baths—that he realized he’d been jobbed. Again.

  A nation of such effeminate hustlers should be a pushover in warfare, the Roman concluded. And found himself jobbed yet again.

  The New Towners drove as ferociously in battle as they did in trade; and their boldness in both was matched by their enterprise on the high seas. Two thousand years before Columbus, the Carthaginian Hanno led sixty ships of fifty oars each down the west coast of Africa. Hanno presented his city with the skins of three African females who’d fought him so fiercely at Fernando Po that they’d had to be killed. The skins were of female gorillas. This remains the earliest recorded instance of a movement for the liberation of women.

  “Hassine has not seen his mother’s grave for two years,” he began again as soon as we were back on the road, “but if Madame and Monsieur enjoy standing on rocks, that is no matter. Hassine’s mother is nothing. Madame’s pleasure comes first.”

  “If you had come to the hotel at the time you gave your word,” Madame phrased her retort neatly, “we would have had time to see my mother’s grave. Now neither of us will visit graves.”

  “Madame,” Hassine cautioned her as though she were being immodest, “you are only a woman.”

  “Now we go to Médenine,” Madame ended the discussion.

  There weren’t many curves in that road from Tunis to Médenine and that was just as well, because the road was narrow and Hassine drove fast; and never troubled to use his klaxon except to summon the attention of Bedouins on donkeys going the other way. Hassine Ameur Djemail, Owner of Citroën with Two Suits in Garage, was passing! Attention must be paid to this man.

  We drove between mountain and land, half scrub and half sand. At times I felt we were tilting downward into some sort of green-white hell. Madame dozed in the back seat and I dozed in the seat of honor. I was between sleep and waking when I sensed something pass and came full awake.

  “A camel!” I announced triumphantly, craning my neck into the dust behind us. “I just saw a camel!”

  “God willing, we shall see many camels,” Hassine assured me, “and yet greater wonders. In Djerba—”

  “This camel was hauling a cart,” I finally put it together. “I didn’t know camels pulled carts.”

  Hassine beamed at me. “An old saying of the desert,” he counseled me gently, “three things cannot be made to pull a cart: the cat, the lion and the camel.”

  There’d be a hell of a row if they did get all three between the shafts, I realized. But somewhere in Tunisia a camel was pulling a cart—all by himself. Or herself. I kept my eyes on the road.

  There was always a dust cloud approaching with something in its middle. Some turned out to be camels and some turned out to be carts; but never the one hitched to the other.

  Hassine saw a Bedouin sleeping beside the road and gave the horn such a blast that the Bedouin leaped out of the blanket and into the brush. It was a woman.

  “Why do you frighten these harmless people?” Madame came awake to ask.

  “To keep them from thinking they too should have a flag,” he answered immediately.

  Between a sky too white and hovels too black we saw the last Jews on earth who earn their livings by driving camels.

  This was the ghetto of Médenine. And again we had to leave Hassine waiting. Jews had exactly as much appeal to him as had the rocks of Carthage.

  But Madame had an impassioned curiosity about all peoples; and I had my camera.

  We found ourselves in a treeless square where camels made the only shadows. Like knock-kneed kings shorn of their powers, some standing and some kneeling, they formed a square within the treeless square. Because of the light, it took me a minute to discern that, in the shadow of each brute, a driver waited.

  Their eyes, I sensed, were all on us. And to them we were even more alien than Arabs. Yet I sensed no hostility. It wasn’t till my ey
es adjusted to the light that I saw they were all boys.

  One, robed in black, with a great shock of black hair and light-blue eyes, led his camel up to us. While the camel stretched its neck over our heads, the boy looked up at us, smiling as though expecting something. He was inviting me to ride his camel.

  “Tell him I have a fear of heights,” I asked Madame.

  “He speaks no French,” she informed me, “and I don’t know how to say cowardice in Hebrew.”

  I tried to make a deal: “Will you take my picture if I get on top of it?”

  She wanted no part of that camera; but the camel boy waved to a friend to act as photographer. The kid caught on to its mechanism immediately. The problem now was how to get on top of the brute.

  You don’t swing aboard as you would a horse. You climb it. Even when it’s kneeling, you still have to climb.

  I hauled myself to its top and very nearly went off the other side. I finally got into a sitting posture, with one hand canted toward the sun to get my face in profile; as I had seen Lawrence of Arabia doing in a photograph.

  Then I looked down. I was high. Really high. I motioned to the kid with the camera to get out of the sun, and the gesture started the camel moving! I hadn’t counted on its moving and I had to hold on to its neck to avoid being pitched off. The driver took the reins and began leading me around the square as if he’d captured something.

  I couldn’t catch the rhythm of the camel’s walk. When I leaned forward it lurched, throwing me back; when I leaned backward it developed a new lurch and threw me forward. Camel boys came leaping all around the square, making merriment of my plight. I suspected Madame was enjoying the scene as well.

  The would-be photographer ran beside the camel, trying to get me into focus. When that didn’t work, he stopped and knelt to get a sight-line on me. But just as he’d focus I’d lurch, either forward or back, and he’d have to take off after the camel and rider again. At last he decided his best move was to get in front of the beast and catch us coming head on. When this didn’t work, he began leaping straight up off the ground and snapping the camera in midair.

  To be leading one’s camel around the square in that tiny ancestral ghetto, with an American astride it, was plainly a distinction: The shock-haired boy was positively strutting. He made a complete turn of the square, bringing me back to where I had boarded. And then I knew I had a problem: how to get off.

  I accomplished this by sliding down the brute’s neck and then dangling. Had the driver not persuaded it to kneel, I’d be dangling yet. Madame apparently detected something humorous in this peril-fraught scene; but I overlooked this demonstration of bad taste on her part. It was one thing for a gang of camel rowdies to jump with glee but quite another for a supposedly sophisticated woman to join them. After she paid the camel driver and the cameraman, both accompanied us to the ghetto gate.

  As soon as we returned to Hassine it was clear that we’d wasted the better part of his day. But before he could go into his complaint about spending time looking at rocks, walls, Jews or Bedouins—time that would have been better spent looking at Djerba—Madame gave the orders of the day: Rue Sidi Yahya.

  I didn’t know what she was up to and didn’t ask, figuring I’d find out soon enough.

  The entrance to the Rue Sidi Yahya was guarded by two French soldiers, checking the passes of soldiers looking for women. Sidi Yahya was reserved for black or Jewish whores and the common soldiery. Officers had access to the preferred brothels of white Moslem women.

  My camera was loaded. I was ready.

  I knew we were in the wrong neighborhood as soon as we passed the guards. It would have been no more than awkward, and in bad taste, for a respectable white Christian woman to come to look at women who’d been cast out, black and Jewish at that. But to have her followed by an American with a camera, and he followed by a fat Arab—and none of the three of them looking as though he were going to spend a franc—was a soundproof insult.

  The shadow of a whore in one doorway met the base of the building directly across the Sidi Yahya: The street was that narrow. I speculated on the possibility of being confronted by a 6’7” Senegalese pimp wearing a single earring and wanting to know just what I had in mind. That the street came to a dead end half a city block away was not reassuring. The girls were packed in there pretty tightly.

  The Jewish women wore European dress. The tribal women, on the other hand, stood stripped to the waist, some with cicatrices of purple and indigo seaming their cheeks. Madame paused to speak to one; but the woman only fixed her gaze beyond Madame as though Madame didn’t exist. When a woman needs a soldier with his pay in his pocket, there isn’t much percentage in telling your story to a madame sociologue. She had no better luck with the Jewish women. Even though they weren’t able to throw us out, they still didn’t have to act as if they’d sent for us.

  But after she passed one sandy-haired child, a girl no more than eighteen, I caught the suggestion of a smile from the girl. She looked to be both Jewish and French; and since French soldiers have been exploring the wilds of the Rue Sidi Yahya for a hundred years, she might well have been. Which would have made her persona non grata to the Christian and Moslem communities as well as the Jewish. I hesitated. She pointed to my camera, then to her face.

  “Foto?” she asked shyly. “Foto?”

  I was only too pleased to oblige. When I asked her to move just a bit to the side, out of the direct glare of the sun, she smiled pleasantly and snatched the camera out of my hands. Then she stood, still smiling pleasantly, yet with a shadow of menace on her face, the box held behind her, in her own doorway.

  We were only having a bit of a joke between us, of course. So I held out a 100-franc note to keep it that way. She shook her head no: A hundred francs wasn’t enough to keep it a joke. It might be for her; but there were now three other girls, all white, on either side and behind me.

  All I had, besides the 100-franc note, was a 500- and a 1000-franc note. We could get by if I gave up the 500, but we really needed the 1000-franc one.

  “Ficky? You ficky?” one of the girls demanded, slapping derisively at my fly. I came up with the 500. The sandy-haired one shook her head: No. Just as if she knew what I was holding. Then the two on either side began pushing and the one behind started acting funny too. I glanced toward the gate, where the guards were watching. They too were smiling. I came up with the 1000-franc note but held on to it until I got a grip on the camera. She didn’t let it go until she got a grip on the bill. Then we both let go at once. She had the note and I had the camera. I looked around for Madame.

  There was such a crowd of women around her, all jeering, that I couldn’t see her. I looked around for Hassine. He was standing his ground but wasn’t planning to advance. I moved reluctantly toward the small mob just as Madame broke free, coming fast on her flat-heeled shoes, the dozen whores strung out, pretending to chase her, some actually running a few steps behind her to keep her running. Hassine turned and fled toward the gate.

  I gathered whatever shreds of my dignity remained, simply to wait until Madame had passed me in her flight. It just wouldn’t look right, I told myself, to get to the gate before she did. I walked on hurriedly behind her to give the impression, to whoever was watching this wretched demonstration of cowardice, that I was the lesser coward.

  Then, just as we’d almost reached the gate, the sandy-haired girl ducked in front of me, raised Madame’s dress to her waist and ran behind her, holding the dress up with one hand and pointing with the other, jeering, “See! She has one too! She has one too!”

  If the soldiers at the gate had laughed outright I would have liked it better than the tight little smiles I felt in passing; smiles that said we’d gotten no worse than we’d deserved. They were right, as Madame was the first to acknowledge—as soon as we were safely back in the Citroën and on the road.

  Hassine kept his silence. He was abashed at his own cowardice, I surmised. But I overestimated Hassine. He wasn’t i
n the least abashed: He was affronted. He had warned us not to look at Jews, he had warned us not to look at women who were not serious. We had insisted; with the consequent loss of Hassine’s dignity.

  “In Djerba there are no women who are not serious,” he began that again. “In Djerba, we shall drink the world’s finest tea. In Djerba—”

  “In Djerba,” I interrupted him, “we would do better to smoke The Terrible Turkish Hubble-Bubble, also known as hashish, kat or kif”; my chief idea being that if I could get a water pipe into his mouth, it would keep him from trying to sell us Djerba.

  “We are not going to Djerba,” Madame decided from the back seat; and I was glad to hear it.

  As dusk came up from the desert, a low wind stirred the sands. “That feels like rain,” I told Hassine.

  “I am of Djerba, a Man of His Word,” he came through without hesitation, “it will not rain this night between Cairo and Damascus.” He softened the blow with that benign smile and the assurance, “You are my brother.”

  We drove in silence after that. Once Madame laughed at something, all to herself in the back seat. Hassine looked at me curiously.

  “She laughs in her sleep,” I told him. I suspected she was reviewing the recent flight of the Frenchwoman and the American man on the Rue Sidi Yahya.

  We drove until very late. I roused myself now and again when I sensed something passing us from the other direction. But when it was a camel, there was no cart. And when there was a cart, there was always some fool of a donkey pulling it. The air grew cooler and a slanting rain touched the windshield. I glanced at Hassine. He was ready.

  “It is not rain,” he explained, “only a few drops of water falling from the sky.”

  Once, our headlights caught a camel resting under a date palm. Its rear was pointing toward a cart. The cart was unhitched; but I felt close to elation.

  “Close, wasn’t it?” I asked Hassine.

  “Three things—” he began.