A Riffians Tune by Joseph M Labaki

Author:Joseph M Labaki
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Clunett Press
Published: 2013-09-09T22:00:00+00:00

17

Back home, I did not recognise my mother. She looked threadbare-thin, frail, pale, and just waiting to shut her eyes and leave. She couldn’t stand up. I put my hands under her arms and tried to lift her, but she kept falling like a newborn calf, long legs but no power, and no dignity either.

‘Has Mrs Malani been here recently?’ I asked Amina, who was standing, watching and wondering.

‘Yes, she’s been here every day,’ she said. ‘She’s tried everything, but produced no magic.’

Worn out, Rabbia and Amina were ready to see our mother be called home where she could find peace and leave the pain behind. The drought was devastating, the fields produced nothing, and it was not worth picking the sparse amount of grain amidst the nettles. Only the fields at the foot of Makran and Tassamat produced some barley, yet they required a lot of work, much of it fruitless.

Baja and I toiled like father and son. Sickling, threshing and winnowing produced very little to take home and only a little hay to bale.

One hot day, Baja stood up straight, looked at the sky and the mountain, and yelled at me. ‘Jusef,’ he said, ‘I quit.’

Stunned, I didn’t know what to say. ‘What’s next then?’ I asked him.

‘I wish I knew,’ he said.

At the foot of Tassamat, in the middle of the field, under the burning sun, he shook my hand and said, ‘Goodbye’, a nauseating word. Baja went east to his home, and I south to my dying mother. After ten months of work, Baja went home with nothing to show for it. I will be in the same position if I’ve failed my exams.

Whenever my mother needed to relieve herself, Rabbia called me. We each held her under one arm, helped her onto the pot in the corner of the room, but she never managed to sit and was rarely able to crap. Rabbia would wipe her bottom while I held her around the waist.

I had wanted to take my mother to the doctor from the day I arrived, but had faced many barriers, not least of which was financial. While there was a wizard or a witch in practically every house nearby, there were no doctors, never mind a hospital, in the whole region. Nador, the nearest town, was over a hundred miles away on dirt roads. Hiring a taxi from Nador to our house would cost a king’s ransom, and most taxis didn’t go that far anyway, refusing to travel the country roads.

All Wednesday night, Rabbia and I discussed what to do about mother. At dawn on Thursday morning, I went to my brother-in-law Himich, a few miles away. I knocked at the door and awakened a fierce dog which refused to retreat or stop barking. Opening the door, Himich looked shocked to see me. He must have thought my mother had died, but soon realised from my gentle, faked smile that wasn’t the case.

‘I need your help,’ I asked him.

‘To do what?’ he asked.

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