from Bonsoir, Lune

Al-Maghreb, 2004

In Tazanakht, where the caravan stopped, she found a large, kind family of goat farmers who needed help butchering. They were Amizagh, could not communicate with her, and did not try. They spoke encouragement to her in their own language, and when she at last sliced cleanly through a tendon with a single stroke of the blade, gave her a chorus of approval. The language, she didn’t understand. The gestures and nods of assent, she did. The mother of the family was short, thin, and nervous. She chewed gum all day, and every few hours she’d walk to a small, dying tree on the property to affix her used gum to its bark. The tree was covered with green and pink dots, such that when the woman stood next to the tree, Souria could see where the gum started at the height of her ankles and ended just above the crown of her head. Souria wondered whether the gum was killing the tree, or if the woman had simply chosen to torment a tree that was already ill.

The father of the family had exactly four teeth, all of them in the bottom of his mouth. He had one good eye and one wandering eye that sometimes rolled to focus on her, and when she had occasion to look at him, when she handed him a pair of ears or the slick liver pulled from a goat’s insides, she made a point of looking at his poor, unloved eye, the one the rest of the world never watched.

The father, perceiving an understanding Souria didn’t actually have, spoke to her in his language, sometimes gesturing wildly and even getting angry about the topic of his one-sided conversation. “Ya’allah,” he’d say, in conclusion, and spit, as though she’d responded. Souria listened, and sometimes even grunted in agreement anyway. The mother and the father had eight children between them, and the older children helped with the slaughter while the younger three climbed in the argan trees. At night, they roasted goat meat over a desert fire. The younger children sang, and the mother got in the middle of the circle with them and danced gedra. Between key changes the father pressed on with his vitriol, though everyone else ignored him.

Souria stayed the two days until the town market, when she sold the other three gold tablets, along with almost all the tribe’s jewelry, for what she hoped was a good price: since the silver seller paid her in the new country’s currency, she didn’t know whether she was being cheated. The silver seller was installed in one of the garages surrounding the market. He had an old calendar from two years back on his wall, with little gold curlicues annulating around the numbers 2002. Frozen in time atop the month of December, sitting in a gold chair, was a kindly-looking, round-faced man whose hair, at the temples, had long since receded from the worried look in his eyes. He had a blue tie and dark lips. Pinstripes spread out horizontally along his suit collar and vertically down his chest. Souria assumed he was the king of the new country.

The silver seller sized up her malaffa. “No Berber,” he said. “Tamazight?”

She shook her head no. Out of pride, she kept a stoic face as he counted the dirham in front of her. If he was swindling her, he didn’t deserve the satisfaction of knowing it was more money than she’d ever seen, not just in one place but in all of her lifetime.

When he finished, he said, “Your father?” She knew the word. “Why didn’t he come sell it?” She was the only girl at the market, the only woman in town all that day, and she’d walked quickly into the silver seller’s so no man could stop her.

“My father is very ill,” she answered, in the broken dialect she’d learned in her travels. “I have no brothers. We are a family of girls.”

The silver seller...