Goat Mountain. Habib Selmi
mother had said so too, weeping with joy at the news of my appointment. Later, after staunching her tears, she had reminisced about events from my childhood, grown hazy in my memory.
***
A voice drifted from the house, muffled as though it were coming from underground. The scent of moisture and damp straw hung in the air. As I walked towards the building, I had the distinct impression of approaching a holy shrine. Crossing the threshold, this impression increased as I found myself in a room, its floor covered in mats and its corners shrouded in darkness. A man was kneeling motionless on an old rug, a pitcher of water to his right. He was facing a wall on which hung a small lamp, its light reflected by the surrounding stone. I retreated and the man immediately rose to his feet and followed me out. I remember his smile clearly. It was a broad, friendly smile but something about it disturbed me, though I was incapable of saying what. He saddled two mules and we set off. Having reached the far side of the marketplace, I turned to look back and saw the shopkeeper watching us leave. I waved to him and he waved back. To this day, I feel certain that he still remembers me.
After leaving the village, we mounted the mules, crossing through wide fields and trotting past shuttered houses and farmers herding their livestock. My companion stared straight ahead, thrusting his chin forward every now and then to indicate the direction. I glanced at his face, observing his wide dark eyes, ruddy lips and short hair, parted neatly down the middle with a precision that suggested an inordinate amount of care.
Having reached the top of a sandy rise, we began to descend the other side and I was forced to pull tightly on my reins and sit bolt upright for fear of falling from my mount. As I did so, the man turned to me.
“Be careful,” he murmured, “The path’s bumpy.”
The sun rose in a crystal clear sky and my body began to trickle with sweat. During the first stretch of our journey, we occasionally glimpsed men on mules and donkeys, conversing with one another in raised voices that drifted to us in the distance. Then, quite suddenly, we were confronted by nothingness. The ground stretched into the distance, bare but for several lone shrubs. The sound of the mules’ hooves striking rhythmically on the ground rang clearly in my ears, lulling me to sleep. Although it was still morning, the heat was intense. As I raised my face to the sky, I felt as though we were the sole recipients of the sun’s infernal blaze. Every particle of its heat seemed to be bearing down on us and us alone. My hands began to slacken and, every now and then, I was forced to release my grip on the reins so as to wipe drops of sweat from my eyes. Since receiving my letter of appointment, I had not once thought about what Goat Mountain might actually be like. How could this have escaped me? I gazed around at the silent, rosy landscape. For the first time I felt fear, tinged with regret, and heightened by the silence of the man leading me through that vast emptiness to an unknown destination. He remained taciturn, rigid on his mule as though fastened to it by leather straps.
We crossed a parched valley fringed by oleanders. The hooves of our mules sunk swiftly into the deep sand which bore no trace of man or animal as though we were the first to set foot on its virgin surface. The man tugged on his reins, halting his mule by a carob tree that rose up incongruously in the arid landscape. I assumed he intended to rest but he remained motionless, gazing at the tree as though seeing it for the first time.
Then, without turning to me, he spoke:
“Here, seven men were slaughtered, their corpses left for the crows.” He dismounted and began stirring the sand with his foot.
“Here they lie,” he repeated, “here they lie.”
“Who slaughtered them?”
“The Pasha,” he murmured, as though to himself.
He stood tense and unmoving, then, stretching out his hands and closing his eyes, several tears slid down his cheeks. As though sensing my discomfort, he brushed them brusquely away.
“My grandfather was among those men.”
“Why were they killed?”
“For rebelling against the taxes,” he replied after a short silence, speaking low as though divulging a secret.
He paused again, before embarking on a long speech, in which, with increasing relish, he described his grandfather who had married three times and fathered eighteen sons. Five of them had travelled to the city and lost all contact with home. Others had died in tribal wars.
At first, his speech captivated me and I began to picture the corpses decomposing beneath the blazing sun. Then, quite at random, I felt a wave of hatred rise within me, prompted by his tears. As I watched him, his face began to change, his features blurring into those of my father. This was a man about whom I knew nothing, except that he was the grandson of a rebel slaughtered in an obscure, mysterious land.
As we progressed steadily up a steep rise, the rocks around us multiplied and the path became too narrow for the mules to walk side by side. We moved forward in single file. Then, wending our way down the other side, we reached a small stream. Without a word, we pulled our mules simultaneously to a halt and dismounted.
The man seated himself on the bank while I plunged my head into the water before scooping it up and splashing it onto my chest. I finally decided to immerse myself entirely, sinking happily under. Watching me, the man laughed.
“And what will you do in Goat Mountain?” he asked.
His question troubled me, perhaps because he had not asked it straight away. I stopped splashing and, for a moment, considered not replying. Then, looking him squarely in the eyes, I answered.
“I will teach the children.”
Without a word, he looked away then rose to his feet and mounted his mule.
“So now they’re worried about the children . . .” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm as we set off once again.
2
Goat Mountain was not large. In the afternoons, dust started to swirl, dying down only at nightfall when the bats began their tireless circling. The school consisted of a single classroom, which could hold up to thirty children. In its courtyard stood a mulberry tree, which the residents of Goat Mountain estimated to be around three hundred years old although they did not know who had planted it originally.
We arrived shortly after midday, passing by houses where naked children peeped through doorways. A crowd of men came to walk alongside us, peering intently up at me as though I had descended from some alien planet. At the far end of the village, on a slight rise, my companion halted his mule in front of a small house built and we dismounted. One of the men led the mules off to be watered and fed. I hovered, unsure what to do next, stripped of volition before the sea of enquiring eyes fixed upon me.
“This is the school,” the man said, gesturing towards the building.
On hearing this, the men began muttering knowingly to one another and some of them broke into broad smiles before eventually heading off on their separate errands. I am certain that the villagers will continue to talk of me for years to come as they harvest their potatoes, disagreeing between themselves as they carry on talking about the appearance of the mule I rode that day.
I spent the first night with my companion whose name, I learned, was Ismail. Even as I walked through the door, I was struck by the cleanliness of his house, boldly defying the sandstorms which visited the village every afternoon without fail. The furniture was arranged with painstaking precision, but what truly astonished me was the tall wooden bookcase on which large leather-bound volumes were stacked. Without asking permission, I headed straight to it, unable to rein in my curiosity, and began flicking through the tomes of Qur’anic exegesis, history, Islamic law and literature. Ismail turned to me, his lips curved into a smile.
“Those belonged to my grandfather.”
I continued leafing through them.
“He was a great scholar,” he added. “He studied at the Zaytuna University for two years but had to leave early because his father couldn’t afford the fees.”
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