Desert

the hills where the Hartani lives, as if she’d simply fallen asleep for an hour or two.

She looks out at the empty horizon, off the stern of the ship, then at the spot of gray earth and the mountain where the houses, like smudges, in the Arab city are growing larger. She winces, because inside her abdomen, the child has started making rough movements.

In the bus, driving down the dust road, stopping to let on peasants, women, children, Lalla gets that strange, ecstatic feeling again. The light is enveloping her, so is the fine dust rising like a fog on either side of the bus, entering the passenger compartment, sticking in her throat, and gritting under her fingers, the light, the dryness, the dust: Lalla can feel their presence, and it’s like a new skin covering her, like a new breath.

Is it possible that something else once existed? Is there another world, other faces, another light? The lie of memories cannot survive the noise of the coughing bus, or the heat, or the dust. The light cleanses everything, abrades everything, as it used to, out on the plateau of stones. Lalla feels the weight of the secret gaze upon her again, around her; no longer the gaze of men, filled with desire and yearning, but the gaze filled with mystery that belongs to the one who knows Lalla and who reigns over her like a god.

The bus drives along the dust track, lumbers up hills. Everywhere, there is nothing but dry burned earth, like an old snakeskin. Above the roof of the bus, the sky and the light burn fervently, and the passenger compartment grows as hot as the inside of an oven. Lalla feels the drops of sweat rolling down her forehead, along her neck, down her back. In the bus, the people are immobile, impassive. The men are wrapped in their woolen cloaks; the women are squatting on the floor, between the seats, covered with their blue-black veils. Only the driver is moving, grimacing, looking in the rearview mirror. Several times his eyes meet Lalla’s, and she turns her face away. The plump man with a flat face adjusts the mirror to see her better, then, with an angry gesture, puts it back in place. The radio, volume turned all the way up, screeches and spits and, when passing near an electricity pylon, lets out a long trail of nasal music.

All day long, the bus drives along the tarred roads and dust tracks, crosses dried rivers, stops in front of mud villages where naked children are waiting. Skeletal dogs run along beside the bus, trying to nip at the wheels. At times, the bus stops in the middle of a deserted plain because the motor stalls. While the driver with a flat nose leans into the open hood to clean the idling jet, the men and women get off, sit down in the shade of the bus or go to urinate, squatting amid the euphorbia bushes. Some take small lemons out of their pockets to suck on, clacking their tongues.

Then the bus starts out again, bumping over the roads, climbing up hills, like that, interminably, in the direction of the setting sun. Night falls quickly on the stretch of deserted plains; it covers over the stones and turns the dust to ashes. Then, suddenly, the bus stops in the night, and Lalla can see lights in the distance, on the far side of the river. Outside, the night is hot, filled with the whirring of insects, the croaking of toads. But it seems like silence after the hours spent on the bus.

Lalla gets off, walks slowly along the river. She recognizes the building of the public bathhouse, then the ford. The river is black; the tide has pushed back the freshwater stream. Lalla crosses the ford with the water at mid- thigh, but the cool river soothes her. In the dusk light, Lalla sees the figure of a woman carrying a bundle on her head, her long cloak hitched up to her waist.

A little farther ahead, on the opposite bank, the path leading to the Project begins. Then the mud and plank houses, one, another one. Lalla doesn’t recognize the houses anymore. There are new ones everywhere, even near the riverbank, where it floods when the water is high. The alleyways of tamped earth are poorly lit with electric lamps, and the plank and sheet metal houses look abandoned. As she walks down the streets, Lalla hears the sound of voices whispering, of babies crying. Somewhere, out beyond the town, the eerie yapping of a wild dog. Lalla’s feet are treading upon ancient traces, and she takes off her canvas sandals to better feel the coolness and the grain of the earth.

The same gaze is still guiding her, here, in the streets of the Project; it’s a very long and very gentle gaze, coming from all sides at once, from the depths of the sky, swaying in the wind. Lalla walks past the houses she’s familiar with; she smells the odor of coal fires going out; she recognizes the sound of the wind in the tarpaper, on the sheet metal. It all comes back to her at once, as if she’d never left, as if she’d only fallen asleep for an hour or two.

So, instead of going toward Ikikr’s house, over by the fountain, Lalla takes the path to the dunes. Weariness is making her body heavy, triggering a pain in her lower back, but it is the unknown gaze that is guiding her, and she knows she must go out of the village. Barefoot, she walks as quickly as she can between the thorn bushes and the dwarf palms, till she reaches the dunes.

Here, nothing has changed. She walks along the gray dunes, just as she used to. From time to time, she stops, looks around, picks a sprig of a succulent plant and squishes it between her fingers to smell the peppery odor she used to love. She recognizes all the hollows, all the paths, those that lead up to the rocky hills, those that go to the salt marsh, those that don’t go anywhere. The night is deep and mild, and above her the stars are bright. How much time has gone by for them? They haven’t changed places, their flame — like that of magic lamps — has not burned out. Perhaps the dunes have moved, but how could you tell? The old carcass that used to bare its claws and lift its horns and scare her so much has disappeared now. There are no more abandoned tin cans, and certain shrubs have burned; their branches have been broken to pieces for the brazier fires.

Lalla can’t find her spot up on top of the dunes anymore. The passageway that led to the beach has filled with sand. Laboriously, Lalla scales the cold sand of the dunes till she reaches the crest. Her breath is wheezing in her throat, and the pain in her back is so sharp she’s moaning, in spite of herself. In clenching her teeth, she changes the moaning into a song. She thinks of the song she used to love to sing, in the old days, when she was afraid:

“Mediterra-ne-e-e…”

She tries to sing, but her voice is too weak.

Now she’s walking over the hard sand of the beach, right along the sea foam. The wind isn’t blowing very hard, and the waves are purling softly in the night, and Lalla feels the giddy thrill once again, just as she had on the ship and in the bus, as if it had all been waiting for her, expecting her. Maybe it’s the gaze of al-Ser, the one she calls the Secret, that is on the beach, mixed in with the starlight, with the sound of the sea, with the whiteness of the foam. It is a night without fear, a remote night, the likes of which Lalla has never known.

Now she’s nearing the place where Old Naman used to like to haul his boat up, to heat the pitch or mend his nets. But the place is empty, and the beach stretches on into the night, deserted. There is only the old fig tree, standing against the dune, with its thick branches thrown back from being accustomed to the wind. Lalla recognizes its heavy bland odor with delight; she watches the movement of its leaves. She sits down at the foot of the dune, not far from the tree, and looks at it for a long time, as if the old fisherman were going to appear any second.

Weariness weighs upon Lalla’s body, pain has numbed her arms and legs. She lets herself fall slowly backward into the cold sand, and goes immediately to sleep, lulled by the sound of the sea and the smell of the fig tree.

The moon rises in the east, climbs into the night over the rocky hills. Its pale light shines on the sea and the dunes, bathes Lalla’s face. Later in the night, the wind rises too, the warm wind that blows in from the sea. It passes over Lalla’s face, over her hair, sprinkles sand on her body. The sky is so vast, and the earth absent. Below the constellations, things have changed, evolved. Cities have enlarged their rings, like mold stains in the valley bottoms, in the shelter of bays and estuaries. People have died, houses have fallen to ruin, in a cloud of dust and scattering cockroaches. And yet, on the beach, near the fig tree, in the place where Old Naman used to come, it’s as if nothing had happened. It’s as if the young woman had just gone on sleeping.

The moon moves slowly upward till it reaches its zenith. Then it descends in the west, out in the high seas. The sky is pure, without a cloud. In the desert, beyond the plains and the rocky hills, the cold wells up from the sand, spreads out like water. It’s as if the whole earth, here, and even the sky, the moon, and the stars, had been holding their breath, had suspended their time.

Now they are all stopped, as the fijar, the first dawn, begins.

In the desert, the fox, the jackal, no longer chase after the jerboa or the hare. The horned viper, the scorpion, the scolopendra, are stopped on the cold earth, under the black sky. The fijar has seized them, has turned them to stone, to powdered stone, to mist, because this is the hour when the heavens spread celestial time over the earth, chilling bodies, and sometimes interrupting life and breath. In the dip of the dune, Lalla isn’t moving. Her skin is shivering, in long shivers that shake her limbs and make her teeth chatter, but she doesn’t wake up.

Then comes the second dawn, the white. The light begins to mix with the darkness of the air. Instantly, it