A Handful of Honey Read online

  So thoroughly was my mood lifted by the eventual victory of the Algerians in the teeth of what seemed almost impossible odds – Algerians were free at last to build themselves a country of equals, a socialist Islamic republic where exploitation and oppression would have no place; and women had played a central role in the struggle, so they would be fine too – that I was able to open my duffel bag at last and seek out my beloved jeans. I was myself again. I would eliminate the evil skirt from my life for good.

  Or would I? I opened the bag only to find, neatly folded right at the top, another identically horrible skirt in a gloomy dark brown: Eugenia, of course, still fearing for my freedom if I didn’t learn to keep my legs respectably nude. I dissolved into sniffles.

  Time, Rashid decided, for a short lesson in North African dance styles. Dancing would cheer anybody up. He performed the slinky Tunisian, then the hip-twitching Egyptian, while his brothers clapped out the rhythm. And now, see how much more beautiful is the Berber dancing of our own town, Timimoun! Round of applause . . . As night fell we were chugging on through a dark invisible France, wrapped up snug in a nest of bright North African blankets, looking at photos of Aunt Rashida and Cousin Aisha and everyone else they were going to miss from back home – and some they weren’t . . .

  Timimoun, they told me, lay far away on the edges of the Sahara: a small friendly town of ancient stone aqueducts and sculpted red-mud-brick arches, of hot, dusty camel-trains and cool, shady palm groves, of bright, bustling markets, where the wares of the Black south meet those of the Arab north. It was a last green outpost before the liveable land gives out and the endless sand takes over. Ancient trails led out from it, still used by the Tuareg nomads, who can live for weeks on dates and camel-milk alone, the Blue Men of the desert, their faces tinted indigo from the chèche that veils all but their eyes against sun and sand. Oil- and gas-juggernauts follow the same routes nowadays, twenty wheels on them at least, each one as big as your house – no, bigger, interrupted Mohammed – bringing prosperity to their country at last. Soon there will be education for all, jobs for all, said Sayid, the serious one. People won’t need to leave Algeria any more to find work: there will be plenty for everyone! Mohammed and Karim gave him an ironic cheer. But it’s true, said Sayid. Twelve years isn’t long to build a country from war-torn ruins. Of course, it hasn’t happened yet . . .

  By the time we got to Paris, some twenty intense hours later, bonding was complete, and the brothers were certainly not leaving me alone in the Gare du Nord to wait all night for the Calais train. There was a whole week to go before my forced repatriation. I must come and rest at Uncle Kebir’s. Get my strength up before I left to face London and the Unknown.

  Do not fear, said Mohammed. You will be welcome. He has plenty of beds, beds for twelve, he said so!

  Twelve bedrooms? In Paris? Was their uncle a millionaire?

  Sayid dug out the precious scrap of paper, crumpled and dog-eared, with Kebir’s address on it, spelt out in wobbly capitals by a hand unused to our spiky European alphabet. We showed it around, asking directions, and got plenty of black looks. Dégueulasse! Disgusting! A white woman with a bunch of Arabs! A confused hour later, we found ourselves in darkness at an empty echoing end-of-the-line Metro station. Now we were directed on, amid more raised eyebrows and pursed lips, to the bitter end of a dying bus route. Black drizzle here, one o’clock in the morning on an empty road: no houses now, but concrete warehouses half-derelict on rubbish-strewn land. We tramped on in silence, jackets sodden, bags weighing heavy. So much for the Champs-Elysées: no Elysian Fields here. This was not the Paris of my brothers’ dreams.

  At long last a pale glow through the cold mist resolved itself into tall searchlights above twenty-foot wire fencing. We rattled tentatively at looming steel gates, blinded by the glare. Beyond the wire mesh, a sea of mud, a flotilla of Portakabins. Could this be it?

  Welcoming voices called out, some in French, some in Arabic. Kebir’s nephews? At last! Bienvenus! As-salamu aleikum! The gates squealed open to admit us. Kebir! Come out! Quick! Here they are at last!

  But then they saw me and stopped in their tracks. A woman! No! A woman on site is a sacking offence!

  Uncle Kebir, quick thinker, whisked me in through the door of the nearest cabin: a shed filled with shovels and pneumatic drills. Attends ici! Wait here!

  A minute later he was back with an impenetrable disguise: a neighbour’s long jellaba of fine pale wool, a pair of big muddy boots – and, mysteriously, a large emerald green bath-towel. Where did that go?

  Wind it round your head, of course! Your chèche! Perfect! Voilà! You’d hardly notice her at all!

  And so, invisible in my huge green turban and steel toecaps, I squelched my way behind the Uncle through the floodlit quagmire to Portakabin Number Seven. Mire without, maybe: but inside our cabin was another world. Behind the anonymous grey door, warm light reflected from the dozen steel bunks: the red glow of a round clay brazier, a terracotta bowl of charcoal embers, burning bright on its low pedestal in the centre of the room, soft kelims spread all around it, gold, pink and green. And my five new-found brothers already sitting snug around its warmth, cross-legged among the firelit shadows. I joined them, while Uncle Kebir brought out our dinner, couscous to be eaten from the communal bowl at our knees. Make your own personal hollow in the fragrant pile before you, and the uncle will fill it with rich, finger-licking mutton and vegetables, steaming hot, spiced with plenty of garlic, coriander, chilli . . . yes, yes, use your hand, no cutlery required. The boys ate elegantly with their fingertips: how on earth did they do that? The couscous granules trickled warm between my fingers; the sauce dribbled luxuriously up my wrist. A thousand miles from my last cutlery-free experience, in every sense.

  Soulful music serenaded us from the cassette player in the corner, Uncle Kebir’s pride and joy. As we ate, he nursed a long-handled copper pan to the simmer on the charcoal brazier, and soon we were sipping tiny glasses of hot, sweet tea. Aaaaah. Who needed Paris, anyhow? This was fine by me: a home safe and sound, with five kind brothers and a generous uncle to look out for me. I could stay here for ever. Or for five days, at any rate.

  In the mornings, Uncle Kebir cooks us a Proper Breakfast of eggs scrambled with plenty of crushed broad beans, tomato, onion, olive oil, served with good hot flat-bread toasted over the charcoal brazier – none of that namby-pamby French coffee-and-croissant nonsense, not here in Timimoun. Within the house the copper pot always gleams on the brazier for tea; and the teapot sits on the embers beside it, because, explains Kebir, if you have one glass, you must always have three. Don’t add more tea when you refill the pot, though – just more mint and sugar. I learn many other useful things. The tea must be poured from elbow-height, yes, like that, says Cousin Hassan, who is starting university next year. It needs the oxygen or it won’t taste right. How do you calm a camel that’s angry from overwork, asks Rashid, who is going to buy a massive flock of sheep, the biggest Timimoun has ever seen, with his Parisian earnings, and maybe a few goats too, and, of course, a thoroughbred camel to ride while he herds them all. Simple! he says. As soon as the camel starts to make those threatening gurgling sounds in its throat, you pull off your jellaba, the sweatier the better, and cast it at the animal’s feet. It will happily vent its spleen on that and not spit its bolus of fierce, burning stomach acids at you. Awesome. By night Karim fights with Mohammed over the cassette player. Will we listen to Mohammed’s non-stop tapes of Rai music, complete with trumpets and saxophones, for my education? Or to the endless pulsating chants of the lovely Oum Kalthoum, brightest star in the traditional Arabic musical firmament? Still, the brothers are not Arabs, they tell me, not at all, whatever the French public may think. They are Berbers and proud of it: their people have dwelt in North Africa, on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, since long before the Arabs even heard of the place: since many centuries before Islam, even. You call this coastal strip, stretching from Morocco through Algeria to Tunisia, the Maghre
b, which means, in Arabic, the Far West: the land of the setting sun.

  So, aided and abetted by my new-found family I retreat into darkness and warmth and Timimoun, where I stay to the last possible moment of my last day of freedom.

  An objective observer might see nothing but an acre of building-site-cum-concentration camp with a bare searchlight poised high at each corner: the only hint of Africa the occasional burnous-clad figure trudging from hut to hut through the grey drizzle, carrying his cross of shadows. (Could the figure be me, invisible in my green towel turban and boots, squelching my way to the bathroom block?) But look again and you may spot, in the cool whitewashed courtyard beyond our home, Aunt Rashida and the rest of the women working under the lemon tree, grinding the corn, handful by handful, between the two round flat stones, or deftly rolling the moistened flour against the reed mat on their laps, the fresh-made couscous granules trickling from their fingertips into the shallow baskets at their sides. The older women still cover their heads when they go out, says Hassan, but Rashida and the young ones have given that up, spurred on by the air of freedom in their new country. Two of his sisters were even training to be teachers. On my last night, Mohammed and Uncle Kebir sing a beautiful plaintive song, all in close harmony: the special Timimoun song for the palm groves in spring, when the whole town is busy working high in the date-palms, pollinating the long strings of date-flowers so that they will bear fruit. Nature would do the job for you herself, of course, says Rashid the farmer, but you’d have to plant a lot more trees, a male for every five females. And Timimoun doesn’t have the water to waste on trees that carry no fruit, not with the encroaching desert all around. So human hands must take over her work, with the song to lighten the load.

  Despite the desert, though, there is life in the burning sands beyond the high red earth walls of the precious date-palm groves. In the outlying hamlets, says Sayid, you’ll still find the wise bearded marabouts who, if you treat them right, will take you down into their cool subterranean homes, seat you cross-legged on their floors of fresh sand, and make you up a gri-gri amulet to beat any and every ill . . .

  Except, maybe, a travel document that’s about to run out.

  I finally left Timimoun-on-Seine a mere five hours before the thing expired. Mohammed, Rashid and Karim came to the Gare du Nord, braving more volleys of hissing and tutting, to see me off. I would be back as soon as I’d paid off my debt and got my passport back, I promised, as I hugged them goodbye on the platform and clambered up the three high steps onto the wheezing Calais train. Failing that, if it took too long, I would come and find them in the real Timimoun.

  And so it came about that I found myself wandering alone, late that night, through the cold wet streets of London, asking my way to Trafalgar Square, the only name that came to mind in this unknown city, there to be swallowed up into the street life of the down-and-outs of Piccadilly. Portugal was soon forgotten in the struggle to survive; so were the brothers of Timimoun. Twenty years would pass before I would finally make it all the way to North Africa: to the fringes of the Sahara and the old home town I had never known.

  1

  The coincidence that would lead me at last to the far side of the Mediterranean and the shores of Africa took place – as luck would have it – just a couple of miles from the northern shores of that very sea. A couple of miles as the crow flies, at any rate, because the winding road to my present home here more than doubles the distance, climbing steeply uphill through drystone walls, vegetable patches and terraced olive groves. It occurred, in fact, under a grapevine on the sunny patio of a small stone-built shack in the Ligurian hills of Italy, where I had been living now, off and on, for almost a decade.

  I never did manage to settle down full-time in London and, almost by chance, I’d ended up here in Liguria, where you could buy a home for a song – especially if you didn’t mind setting up in an isolated, hillside cottage with no running water, standing in a decrepit run-down olive grove well over a mile from the nearest village. No sane local would dream of taking this place on – it was only a couple of decades since Ligurian villagers had given up the simple peasant-farming life and made their escape to a world of electricity, water closets and indoor taps; and they counted it a lucky one. That, of course, was why my house was so cheap. But surely, I’d said to myself, I could learn to make some sort of a living from the olives? Plant a vegetable garden down by the well? Keep a chicken or two, maybe? Of course I could – people round here had been doing it for centuries: just add a nice new pump to the well, a solar panel to the roof, and I’d be set up for life.

  So it was here in Italy, among the steep silver-green terraces of an olive grove slowly responding to my loving kindness, that Gérard – an old friend now domiciled in the south of France – came calling. It was easily done: my place is a mere hour’s drive from Nice, along the coast road or the Autoroute du Soleil. Gérard had brought a friend with him: another Frenchman, a bit shy, nice flash of a smile, large horn-rimmed specs, dark curly hair, name of Guy. A name which, in French, is pronounced ‘ghee’, like the clarified butter of Indian cuisine.

  The guests settled down under the grapevine at my lovely new garden table – a beautiful oblong of veined white marble I’d just found in the local junkyard down in the river valley – and got on with uncorking the wine. I went in and got the pasta on. They had a surprise for me – some amazing news, said Gérard, brandishing a folded Michelin map as he brought me in a glass. And a proposition to make. No, not now! It would wait till the dinner was ready!

  As soon as I’d set our three plates down among the wine-bottles, out came the surprise.

  Here, said Gérard, doing his best to open the map out with a flourish, while the evening breeze from the coast did its best to sabotage him. Eventually, Gérard won: the thing was tamed, spread out, and weighted down with wine-bottles. I could read the legend.

  The Michelin map, it said, of North and West Africa.

  Africa? I said.

  Africa, yes! said Gérard happily. He and Guy were in full mid-life crisis: they were about to leave this continent and travel from Morocco to the Ivory Coast. From the Mediterranean in the north to the Gulf of Guinea in the south, right across the Sahara. Not on some organized tour, though, nor insulated from the experience by any luxurious four-wheel-drive. Their plan was to sleep where locals slept, eat what locals ate, and travel by public transport – or whatever means local people used. They would scarcely need any money at all.

  Which was lucky, said the quiet Guy, because, as it happened, they scarcely had any money at all.

  Gérard had thrown in his job, he said. He would be leaving at the end of the month.

  Was he serious?

  He certainly was. He and Guy had already been to get their African inoculations.

  I could hardly believe it. Gérard’s was a fabulous job, at a French radio station. All he had to do was stay up and read the news reports as they came in through the night – an activity that made him one of the most well-informed people I knew – and choose the ones that might be of interest to the French commuting public the next morning. These would go into a small tidy pile in the News Team’s in-tray: while everything else – which was, admittedly, most of the news from most of the world – he simply crumpled up and hurled into a waist-high bin in the corner of his office. Friends, me included, could pop in for a nocturnal can of beer with him whenever they liked, since the place was otherwise deserted. But Gérard had lost interest in a career in news-gathering, he said. The in-tray was tiny, the bin was always overflowing. He had a powerful urge to go off and experience, at first hand, some of the sources of all this irrelevant rubbish. And Africa was so close: just across the Mediterranean. So he had decided to start there.

  So, was I coming too, then? asked Gérard, picking up the wine-bottle and emptying it into my glass. Why not?

  What, come to Africa? Now? Me? It certainly wasn’t the right moment to go haring off across an unknown continent, I said. I could
n’t even make up my mind whether I was staying here in Italy permanently, throwing in my lot with this small, scruffy olive-farming village, carrying on trying to turn the olive grove into a going concern – a job I could make a decent livelihood from. Or should I be giving that up as a mad pipe-dream and heading back to England to put plan A into action: get a sensible home and a sensible career? Whatever the answer might be, trips to Africa did not come into the equation.

  But look at the map, said Gérard in his most persuasive voice. There was the Mediterranean, right at the bottom of this hill. Just a few miles across the water to Africa. It was nearer to us, here in Italy, than London was. Why was it an unknown continent? That was the question! It was ridiculous not to have been there already. And we had the ideal travelling partner for this trip, too. Guy had Africa in his blood. Four generations of his family had been born there. Guy himself had been conceived there, even – though he’d never actually set foot in the place. What could be more perfect?

  Guy laughed. He was a positive mine of information, he said – of nostalgic hearsay, from his parents and grandparents, about a French-run North Africa of the past, a Maghreb paradise of cocktails and cafés dansants, of horseback promenades in the hills and picnic-baskets on Mediterranean beaches. A paradise that had been created, as far as Guy could tell, by making the place a hell on earth for its original inhabitants. He certainly wanted to see Algeria for himself at last – if only to exorcize a few ghosts.