Sirocco Read online

  Papa threw his hand up in the air. “What can we do? Le maktoob, c’est le maktoob!”

  Monsieur Michelet agreed, “Et oui, ‘Destiny is destiny.’ The Arabs are correct—when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.”

  Everyone sighed as if to say, “Nothing we can do to change that.”

  Still wrestling with the inescapability of fate, Papa said to no one in particular, “You know that fucking owl in the plane tree?” Aware of my father’s persistent feud with the night bird, Monsieur Cavalier shook his jowls while the other men nodded gravely. Papa took a sip of his cloudy drink. “It hooted three times, night before last. Woke me up. Early morning it was. ‘Here, take this,’ I told it.” Reenacting his defiance to the prophetic bird, Papa slapped the crook of his bent left arm with a whack of his right hand—a hard blow, causing my own arm to sting in sympathy. “I yelled,” he went on. “ ‘You won’t take my father. Not yet, you son of a bitch.’ But, just then, my father gasped. His bedsprings creaked and he expelled his last breath. I knew, then, the fucking bird had won.”

  No one spoke. Papa finished his drink and thumped his glass on top of the counter. “Allez, Cavalier, pour us a round,” he ordered with a wide gesture encompassing the people in the room.

  By ten o’clock, we said good night and walked down the deserted street. Under the full moon, our shadows—crisp as under an August midday sun—glided beside us like docile puppies on a leash. Gently rustling eucalyptus leaves anointed the evening with their clean scent, and the crickets’ clear monotone lulled me into indolence. Then Pépé opened and closed the little black gate, violating the night’s serenity with the sound of metal scraping against the concrete threshold. Papa said to Maman, “Lili, remind me to repair this door tomorrow.” He always said that.

  We trailed the path across the front garden and turned to climb the stairs. Graceful skaters, our shadows slithered along the wall. They mimicked our ascent, briefly erasing the handrail’s lacey silhouette that clung to the moonlit house like phantom ivy.

  We closed this long day with a quick bowl of onion soup and carrot salad before going to bed.

  Until my room was free of the wake’s cloying scent, I was to sleep on a mattress at the foot of my parents’ bed. Maman and I layered sheets and a pillow atop my makeshift bed and the house settled into its comforting nighttime ritual. The creak of bed springs, the drip of a faucet, and the dry bark of Papa’s smoker’s cough lulled me into a drowsy sense of security. And yet, the stimulation of the day’s events and moonlight filtering through the shutters’ slats kept me awake.

  As I lay on my side, my gaze skipped along the floor beneath my parents’ bed, across the corridor, and into my bedroom. There, the full moon brushed the multihued tiles with a dulling silver glow. My heart raced. At any moment, now, I’d see the shadows of Pépé Vincent’s shuffling feet ….

  Papa’s leitmotiv repeated in my head in a loop, “Keep your head out of your ass. Come down out of the clouds. Stop making things up.” Heeding Pa’s familiar command, I inhaled deeply and confronted my fear that Pépé Vincent might come back to haunt me.

  I tried to be rational. All my life, Pépé had loved me, protected me, so why would his spirit hurt me now? If he wished to manifest himself to me, wouldn’t it be simply to tell me that he loved me?

  This soothing notion slowed the throbbing at my neck, pounding in my heart, leaving me to almost wish I could see the shadow of Pépé’s shuffling feet ….

  I don’t remember falling asleep, but when next I opened my eyes, I had a vague notion I had come out of a nightmare—a nasty dream that clung to me like a swatch of thick, dusty spider web.

  Chapter Eighteen

  One afternoon, after Pépé Vincent’s funeral, I drifted to the hallway where Maman sat, holding Mireille between her knees while tending to her earache. The wide-open front door overlooked the garden and street two floors below, where the sun oppressed all that grew and breathed. The cicadas worked hard to drown out the buzzing bees and crickets, while grasshoppers and other hopping, flying, and creeping things went on hushed errands.

  Maman sat in a chair near the open door where sun and shade drew a razor-straight line across the corridor’s tiles. I rested one hand on the back of the chair and watched her count drops into Mireille’s ears. Poor Mimi’s ear infections stank to high heaven, making her the constant butt of the boys’ sing-song teasing: “Mi-miche is stin-king! Mi-miche is stin-king!”

  “Stop wriggling like a worm, ma fille,” Ma said, losing patience with Mireille. Then, eyes and hands still focused on her task, she asked, “What is eating you, Nanna?”

  “Nothing,” I said, surprised she knew something was bothering me.

  She glanced up. “It cannot be ‘nothing.’ You have acted like a scared mouse for days.”

  The sun poked slanted fingers of heat into the darkened house. Up to her knees, Maman’s legs looked bleached under the blinding sun, while the rest of her and Mireille faded into the shade.

  “Really, it’s nothing, Ma.”

  She stuffed cotton wads into Mireille’s ears. “Tell me anyway.”

  A cooling breeze swept the freshly washed floors with the mixed fragrances of late summer—the heat-exuded scent of acacia, the tang of cow dung dropped earlier by a small herd on its way to pasture, and a whiff of Mireille’s sick ears.

  “It’s just a stupid dream.”

  Maman wrapped her arms loosely around Mireille. “Then tell me.”

  The anguish that, since the dream, had haunted my days and kept me awake at night surged like water through a failing dam and spilled past my lips.

  “In the dream, I was at the little roadside market—you know, Ma, the one at the end of the Sidi Rached Bridge on the way to Sidi Mabrouk from Constantine?”

  Ma nodded. Mireille exclaimed, “I know it. That’s where they sell spices, and fruit, and vegetables.”

  I nodded and, as I began to tell it, the dream sucked me in, forcing me to live it all over again.

  The Mirror

  Arab vendors had set lean-tos under the shade of plane trees lining the band of packed dirt between the road and the Rhumel River below. The shelters, homespun blankets draped over sticks jammed into the ground, fused into a tapestry of vibrant geometric patterns.

  I stood on the narrow band of ground between the back of the lean-tos and the deep gully dropping to the riverbed.

  Between bouts of animated bartering, turbaned and skull-capped sellers sat cross-legged on prayer rugs and slurped piping-hot glasses of mint tea. Now and then, they leaned forward and brandished woven straw fans over stacks of fat, gooey dates to shoo away the flies.

  Oblivious to their surroundings, hobbled mules milled their teeth over mouthfuls of oats.

  Tied to plane trees, nose to the smooth bark, donkeys stamped their hooves against the packed dirt.

  A mild breeze from the Rhumel cooled the shaded tents, while sunspots, patterned by the lobed plane leaves, played over pyramids of lemons, grapefruits, melons, prickly pears, and tomatoes adorned with mint.

  The rich earth-colored paprika, cumin, and turmeric sent exotic aromas from the opening of jute bags, mimicking, in impressionist strokes, the lean-tos’ colored blankets.

  Sounds from the dusty road traffic mixed with laughter, animated bargaining, and the feeble bleating of a little white goat tethered to a stick in the ground.

  Suddenly, tarnished-silver clouds roiled in, sucking away the dazzling colors, the smells, and sounds, as swiftly as a straw siphons a glass of lemonade.

  A round silver-framed mirror hanging from a string at the back of a lean-to reflected the angry sky. I recognized Pépé Honninger’s Art Nouveau mirror and approached it, wondering how it came to be here.

  As I peered into it, a narrow, swift, blinding-white beam of light shot like an arrow from between the darkening clouds at my back and struck the mirror with the dry zap-zap sound of connecting electric poles.

  The mirror shattered, but did not break
apart, causing my reflection to look like a finished jigsaw puzzle. I jumped back, startled, but my fragmented image did not shift. I moved forward then sideways. Still, my face remained a static puzzle in the mirror.

  I touched my face. My fingers found no nose. No mouth. No eyes. No ears. No chin.

  My features … my whole face was held captive of the mirror ….

  The touch of Ma’s hand on my cheek rescued me from the dream just as, long ago, she had rescued me from a spiderweb-filled greenhouse. I clung to the comfort of her quiet eyes, but Mireille grasped my arm. “What happens next, Nanna?”

  My sister’s question made me realize that I had not only relived the dream, but had also been recounting it.

  “You had no face ….” Mireille’s prodding thrust me back into the dream’s maelstrom.

  I had no face. Instead, a flat, smooth plane that felt like virgin clay.

  I dug into the mirror to reclaim my trapped image. The glass splintered, shattering the puzzle sections of my features into even smaller pieces on the hard-packed dirt at my feet.

  I dropped to my knees, frantically gathering the chips of my face. Pieces were missing; others were smudged with blood from the cuts on my hands.

  I was sweeping what bits I could into the folds of my skirt when the wind picked up, tearing the tents from their tethers. Billows of stinging dust swept up the mirror fragments and the remnants of my face.

  In a daze, I rose from my kneeling position. Reeled about—featureless face and hands raised to the clouds—and howled like a she-wolf calling for her litter lost in the desert of a frozen land ….

  As I finished recounting my nightmarish vision, Maman’s warm hand took hold of my frozen arm.

  “Come, Nanna,” she said. “Let’s have a hot café au lait.”

  Mireille followed us into the kitchen. Maman reheated this morning’s leftover café, poured it into three bowls, and stirred in milk and sugar.

  Mireille buttered slices of gros pain, the fat, crusty baguette I liked. “Nanna, you want sugar on your tartine?”

  “Lots of butter and lots of sugar.”

  While we finished our snack, Maman searched my eyes. “Do you feel better now, ma grande?”

  I swallowed my last piece of buttered bread and nodded heartily. “Whoui. Merci, Ma.”

  The table cleared, I retreated to my bedroom, feeling like a terrible load had been lifted from my very soul. I even summoned enough energy to work on my math—the school subject that had given me painful stomach aches all my life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  All my life, I had passed from grade to grade by the skin of my teeth. I liked geometry, but calculus was endless torture. I excelled at composition and dictation, but sentence diagramming was pure anguish. Continual reading enriched my vocabulary, taught me how words fit together, but I had no idea why.

  By age ten, the gap between what I knew and what I should know had widened into an abyss. Every three months, I waited until the last possible moment to submit my progress report to Papa. The anticipation of his disappointment and rebukes pecked at my guts like an angry hen until he concluded his usual chewing out, “Good for nothing …” and, in disgust, tossed the signed report on the table.

  The hen then retreated into semi-seclusion until the next report.

  Nanna, age 7, École Ferdinand Buisson in Sidi Mabrouk

  My Story

  School year, 1956

  By age twelve, I desperately wished composition were more important than calculus. If so, I’d really shine. I enjoyed writing short paragraphs on topics the teacher assigned in class and often wondered how authors came to spin whole stories. How they managed to whisk me away to unknown places, introduce me to extraordinary characters, and coax me into becoming one of them. By what sleight of words did they move me to laugh, cry, hope, and despair?

  I came to wonder whether I, too, might be able to write stories. Touch others.

  At night, before falling asleep, and in the morning, before fully emerging into the real world, I thought of storylines, rejected them, opted for new ones.

  One day, I dipped the nib of my pen into an inkpot, set it on a sheet of paper and wrote, “Once upon a time ….”

  As it unfurled, the story took on a life of its own—an unmanned loom shuttle pulling dyed threads through the warp of a tapestry in progress—weaving new angles, guiding my pen to plait images, sounds, tastes, and feelings. It was magic.

  I spent every minute after school and my house chores on my mission, locking myself in the bathroom for privacy. As it unfolded, the story seesawed between easy and hard, exciting and hopeless, tossing me in a maelstrom of highs and lows. But, as I penned the words, “The end,” my mood settled on utter exaltation, taking my breath away as no book I’d read ever had.

  Maman asked, “Are you all right, ma grande?”

  I felt fuzzy as if awakening from a long sleep. “Oui, Ma. Why?”

  “You have not been yourself these past few days.”

  I was all set to tell her about my story when Yves came into the kitchen, complaining that he had hurt his finger. Ma picked him up and cooed.

  Zizou said, “You’ve spent lots of time in the bathroom, Nanna. Do you have the runs or what?”

  I wavered about showing her the story, but she didn’t care much for reading. Besides, she was more likely to make fun of my writing aspirations. “I needed to be alone to write a composition for school.”

  This explanation seemed to satisfy her. But what good was it to write a story if no one read it? Yvette would have been the perfect audience, but she and Tonton Gilles were in Italy for a month.

  At recess, two weeks later, I kicked myself all the way to the classroom podium where Madame Denis, our teacher, sat at her desk. She distractedly looked up from her stack of handbooks. “Oui, Danielle?”

  I placed my sheaf of paper on her desk and darted out of the room.

  When class resumed, I sat staring at my marred desktop, hoping Madame Denis hadn’t read my work. Praying she never would.

  My story told the tale of a dashing prince, in the submerged kingdom of Atlantis, and his faithful companions riding herds of spirited sea horses. They collected pearls of unusual size and orient gifted by giant oysters. Hauled coffers of gold bullion and precious stones and casks of ancient wine from long-sunk vessels.

  They raced their sea stallions to pay ransom. To free the delicate princess doomed to wed the colossal octopus enthroned like a malefic spider in the hub of his submarine grotto.

  Following the epic rescue, the prince and princess married in a forever-to-be-remembered ceremony, under shifting schools of baby sardines, swirling like silver clouds in a shimmering liquid blue sky. They swore to honor each other forever amid magical gardens of swaying seaweed softly lit by plump jellyfish that glowed like so many dangling moons.

  Still under my story’s spell, I equated the heady sensation that had swept me away as I wrote to the intoxication young swallows must experience while learning to soar into unending space—their first flight to freedom.

  While I begged all the saints in Heaven that Madame Denis had set aside my story, she tapped her ruler on the desk to call us to order. “Mesdemoiselles.” She brandished several sheets of paper. “I would like to read a story one of you wrote.”

  Friends searched each other’s faces, trying to guess the author. They shook their heads in turn, pointing chins at each other, meaning “Pas moi. Toi?”—pas moi. What about you?”

  Madame Denis’ voice cut into the wordless stir. “ ‘Atlantis Sous les Flots’ par Danielle Bjork.”

  A rush of bottoms scooting on benches, shoes scuffing the floor, and twenty-nine pairs of eyes stung my face beet-red like a sudden gust of Sirocco sand.

  The teacher forced the quizzical faces back to the front of the class. “Sit up straight, Mesdemoiselles.”

  As she read, I heard her words in a haze; they might have been broadcasted through layers of cotton wool. I stole glances at the still
bodies ahead of me, lamenting, Why did I ever bring this story to class? Why did I even have to write it?

  An ominous hush signaled the reading was over. I was doomed.

  Madame Denis fanned the sheets in her hand. “Mesdemoiselles, this is how a story should be written.”

  The enormity of the compliment turned my whole body to jelly, compelled me to look down to hide my embarrassment. And my pride.

  The teacher asked, “Danielle, tell us how you came to choose the subject of your story.”

  I stood up, hands at my back. “Uh … Uh ….” Loud sneers from a couple of the beribboned spoiled girls channeled my thoughts. “My father said that nobody really knows how Atlantis was destroyed or if it even existed. But, uh … he read that scientists, now, say the continent of Atlantis was destroyed by the worst volcanic eruption and tsunami—that’s a huge tidal wave—ever. He … he says ….” I took a deep breath. “According to my father, some books say Poseidon, the Lord of the Ocean, became angry and destroyed Atlantis when … when its warriors lost against the warriors of Athens. My father says, also, that other books tell how Atlantis was totally destroyed when one of its scientists discovered the secrets of the Cosmos, which was not permitted by the gods.”

  Madame Denis nodded. “Thank you, Danielle. You may sit down.”

  I took my seat while she scanned the room. “Any questions or comments about the story I just read? She slowly rearranged the pens on top of her desk before breaking the continuing silence. “Bien. Now we will have dictation.”

  For the next few hours, I floated like a fluffy cloud in a clear blue sky and couldn’t wait to hurry home and trumpet my triumph.

  Maman read the story. “C’est magnifique, ma fille. I did not know you wrote stories.”

  “It’s my first. You really like it?”