The King of the Franks part 10

           

             The next day, a truck skidded through the village in a driving rain.  They had come for me, the white man.  Through the thin walls of the mosque, I could hear the marabout speaking the northern tongue, and then the qadi, translating it into another dialect.  The men in the truck shouted back.  The marabout continued to speak in his slow, measured tone.  The men in the truck I could picture in my mind: swathed in robes, with a touch of camouflage here and there; in the back of the pickup, a heavy, mounted gun through the top window.   

           The men themselves, heavily armed, bearded, brimming with indignation.  Below them would be the marabout, in his simple tunic, his bag of herbs and charms, his battered Qu’ran, lecturing, speaking, but always from the distance which his moral authority provided him.   

            No one would so much as touch a hair on his head.  Here was Charles’ Africa: the north, with its native form of Islam; the north, with its idiosyncratic expression of the Prophet’s faith; a force which pulled the social fabric apart with its burning moral burdens and restless political desires, yet also hospitable, the master of the most benevolent religious gesture of peace, the open hand.  The marabout, with his simple moral authority alone, and with the fear that his supernatural power engendered, sent the men on their way.  His greatness had upended them.  His sway was supreme.  The next day, I was to see how far it reached.

            That morning the marabout entered my room.  He handed me a change of clothes: the attire of a trader from the north.  He watched me dress.  The outfit was simple, but to wind it properly, I needed his aid.   

           His spindly hands wrapped the garment effortlessly; he never said a word.  He wound the end of the cloth over my hand, and tucked it into the spot between my chin and breast bone.  Then he looked at me, as if judging the soundness of a horse for a long journey, and without a word grasped me by the wrist.  

          For the first time in nearly three days I was outside.  Puddles of water lay all around me.  I could smell the enveloping dampness of this great, mountain forest.  But there was no time to linger.  A small truck rattled by and stopped.  The driver, a tiny brown man in a filthy cap, torn tee shirt, and blue jeans stuck his head through the window.  

        The marabout spoke to the man, and the man climbed down.  I was placed in the closed rear of the truck, among boxes of animal feed.  The marabout watched, and I could see his expression relax.  I was not a person to him; I was a concept, an ideal to discharge.  His duty done, I thought I saw him cry as I pulled away.  I wondered if it was from joy.  I imagined it was from relief.

The King of the Franks part 9

          I expected some remote forest retreat: a cave hidden by a screen of trees, an overgrown logging shed, long abandoned.  But we briskly entered a busy, bustling Muslim village.  A smith was pounding nails on an anvil.  A butcher held a knife aloft and was poised to drive it into a cows neck, a teacher taught students the Arabic alphabet on some chipped slate, sitting under the spreading boughs of a tree.  The marabout lead me inexorably to an unassuming structure with maghrebi touches: rough, white stucco, exterior; a slender, modest minaret topped with a copper crescent moon, tinged with green. 

            We quickly entered and the marabout gestured that I should remove my shoes.  As I did, a cluster of men sitting against the wall turned to look at us.  Two other men, reading on the floor, rose to meet us.  One was the qadi, and he starting to speak to the marabout rapidly, with alarm.   

             The marabout replied softly; but whatever he said enraged the qadi, who now began to scream, the entire time taking great care not to look fully at me.  The marabout said nothing during the harangue.  He bowed his head somewhat, not in subjugation, for in this part of the Islamic world the marabout is held in higher esteem than the qadi, but from what I imagined it was a sense of shame.  The qadi did not share the marabout’s definition of hospitality, and it grieved him.

            The marabout then began to quote the Qu’ran, interspersing it with the native language.  The qadi’s block head, stripped with a gray border of hair, and set with innumerable wrinkles, began to undulate. 
            The marabout continued to speak softly, and with undue haste.  But it was obvious: this was a lesson to be learned.  God enjoins us to protect the stranger, even at the risk of our lives.  A Muslim must give a stranger a place in his home and since the marabout was itinerant, the stranger must stay in God’s house.   

            So I found myself in a small, windowless room on a straw pallet, a bucket for my functions, and when evening came, a boy who would not look me in the eye brought me a bowl of cous-cous flavored with curdy goat’s milk.   

            As night fell, I could hear a screech.  At first I thought it was gunfire, but it was only monkey’s roosting in the eves of the mosque, serenading the quickly falling tropical night.

The King of the Franks part 8

After hiding in a hallow log, in the morning I walked on, at a more frantic pace.  I had to leave the trail, and cut through the dense growth; the slow going only made me more frenetic, more desirous to move.   

Then I reached a broad clearing.  Reaching such a place was both the promise and great danger of the tropical forest: the unexpected was upon you before you had time to react.  There were several women collecting twigs.  I screamed to them in the little dialect I knew.  They saw me and their blank expressions congealed to horror.  The white skin, disheveled hair, the eyeglasses covered by sweat and grim, it was the very image of the forest devil, or perhaps less supernatural: a simple intruder, a natural enough phenomenon, but to be feared as much as any specter.  Strangers brought great peril.  

 And for these people, the Muslims of the mountains, the stranger required protection, and the succor he demanded was a curse.  They scattered and I chased them.  At first, I could not tell which one I would be upon first, but then I had one by the arm.  I began to speak rapidly to her in English and French.  Her face was contorted.  I squeezed her arm too tightly.  Here, I held a Muslim woman in my arms, and I broke two taboos, one from Islam, touching a woman who is not family and one from Africa, a lack of civility.   

She rightly began to scream, saying something in dialect with great effort, as if squeezing an object out of her lungs, through her mouth, beyond her teeth; then she began to say, in French, with great breaths in between, “He, marabout… He, marabout,” and I felt a flutter of movement behind me and let her go, and she fled into the shield of high scrub which surrounded us. 

Behind me was a man out of one of Charles’ childhood photos.  Small, brown, dressed in a tan robe shiny from over washing, he had a small round head shaped like a dumpling, a face composed of alternating lines and creases, and a long, tangled white beard which framed his face like a border of snow around a fissured brown stone.    

Around his shoulder hung a dry leather bag, bulging with herbs, collected recently, damp with dew.  This was a Muslim marabout, the heroes of Charles’ youth, the mediator between this world and the next.  But for the Muslim lack of adornment, and the prayer beads, he was indistinguishable from the native version of the same functionary.  This was Islam’s foray into the jungle and here stood in front of me the results.  Islam had been extruded through a unique African cipher and the “witch doctor” had emerged with these distinctive Muslim markings.  If you removed this man from this forest and flew him to Mecca, he would wilt and die. 

I took a few steps toward him and began to speak in Arabic.  He listened to me without betraying whether he understood Arabic in the Cairo dialect.  His fingers began to nervously race around the round, wooden, prayer beads.  He opened his mouth once, to lick at his lips, revealing a smattering of blackened teeth.   

Now I could see that this white man speaking the tongue of the Prophet disturbed him immensely.  His small frame quaked with tremors; five hundred years of contact with the white man had instilled, even in these remote, upland people, a trembling mistrust.  White men brought grief, illness, dislocation, slavery.  Here, the very trails to the coast were trodden by the slavers, their minions and captives.  Along the coast, fringed with palms and studded with fishing dhows, were the dark hulks of slave forts: the last foothold of the slave in Africa.

            So, as I stood before the marabout, his eyes fixed on mine, it was apparent that he wanted to disengage himself from me.  But I continued to speak my mangled form of Cairo Arabic and the gist of my plea emerged to him from the confused grammar.  I sought sanctuary from my enemies.  I sought his hospitality and protection.  His face then slackened, and he walked quickly toward me.   

            He took both my hands and pressed them to his.  An African gesture; my hands were being pressed from the capital all the way to the mountains, with varying levels of intensity, with different shades of truth or subterfuge.  He began to mumble softy in the northern language, and then he began to intone something from the Qu’ran.  He stepped back, he stooped, he raised himself up, he pressed his eyes up to the overhanging trees (since he could not see the sky) and reveled in some trance, as if he was communing with the spirit of this vast, nearly silent forest.   

           But no, this was not an African gesture.  What the marabout was invoking was a foreign rubric of conduct, brought down with the Arabs and Magrebis came south through the northern mountains or   the rivers from the coast – to give sanctuary and hospitality to the stranger in need, no matter what danger it brought.  And it was just in time.  Down the logging road, we heard the rumble of trucks.  The marabout grasped me by the wrist and whisked me silently into the forest. 

The King of the Franks part 7

I had nothing.  They took the tape recorder, pads, pens, passport, phone, money.  The road was not signed.  I had no idea of my exact location.  But it mattered little; I was the only one around.   

There was just the gentle slope of the hills, and in the near distance, the lush green mountains covered in a frothy mist.  Beyond that fringe of vegetation, the highlands, the salted deserts, the border.   

I continued to walk north.  I imagined we had traveled three fourths of the nation, and now my best shot for a telephone in a country at peace was some thirty kilometers north, in a border town.   

As the sloping forest encircled me, the world became an arena for sound and smell.  Monkeys squawked in the overhead boughs; a type of flower, blood red and pungent, was in crazed bloom all in the underbrush.  I walked on.   

The tropical day slipped into dark, and quite suddenly it was night, and a penetrating chill invaded the forest, brought down from the mountains, I supposed, for I could smell the odor of ice and snow, breaking through this screen of vegetation, water, and blooming, imitable life.   It was then that I heard the trucks.  I realized, very quickly, that the rebels had been following me.

The King of the Franks part 6

When we were half an hour north of the city, I realized I had made a terrible error.  I have a sense, when I am overseas, of when I am moving into a situation that is starting to exercise control over me.   

It started with the crackling of the radio: and from that cacophony, a voice emerged, uttering something urgent in the language of the south of this land, and I strained to listen.  But as the land-rover moved over heavy ruts, it became increasingly difficult to hear what was being said in a language I have inadequate command over.  I asked in English for the first time what was the matter.  The armed solider turned around.  His eyes were wide with fear, but his face was placid, even turgid, in its lack of visible emotion.  

 I quickly realized that I should use French.  I asked him what was going on.  He explained, in the mixed patois of the region, that the rebels had blown up a guard post two kilometers from us.  He and the driver then discussed other routes in rapid dialect.

I asked in French if Charles was going to meet us in --- and I named the Muslim village.  It was an idiotic question, and only exposed my great fear and vulnerability.  I unconsciously looked at the handle of the door, to see how easily it could open.

“No,” he said, in rapid French, “the front has moved.  The rebels have had a breakthrough.  We are turning back to the capital as soon as we find a safe road.  Minister Charles is still in the city.”

On hearing this, I sat back deeply in the seat.  The sun shone bright on the plain.   

We had moved beyond the banana plantations, with their even rows, and lush, verdant vegetation, and into the true open country, a velt broad and flat and stretching north, to the dark mountains. 

 Quite suddenly, we drove through a village.  But something was wrong.  There were no people; then a few houses were leveled, and then some more; many were burning.  The guard in the front seat drew a weapon: a dull black pistol, and held it out the window and up at the sky.  

 But no one was about: not the villagers or those who had toppled the homes.  A small stucco building with a cross was burning, and in the windows, a few bodies hung out in obscene postures.   

Then we were suddenly out in the plain again, and all was quiet.  All we saw were some of the leader’s failed initiatives in the bush:  a hospital without any windows, abandoned to vines, a water plant without a roof, with monkeys roosting on its ledges, a highway overpass which immediately ended in a field of sugar cane.  

 The mountains were in the distance, and moved ahead of us continually like the moon fleeing before an advancing car.  The land was suddenly broken, the first indication that we had reached the foothills of the mountains.  

 It was then that I was broken from the spell.  I asked why we continued to head north during a military offensive, toward the rebel lines, and not south, toward the capital city, its hotel, its consulates, its airport.  The guard told me the capital was being overrun.  He mumbled words like fifth column, foreign treachery, or perhaps I just imagined that those were his words.  For I could no longer concentrate.  Now his gun was pointed at me.