Disappeared by Bonnar Spring

Author:Bonnar Spring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s twilight when the women bring a large dented pot inside. Without enough chairs to go around, Yasmin asks Nadia to unfold a couple of rugs. These she arranges into a comfortable nest on the floor around me. We sit in a circle—Fay to my right, then counterclockwise, Yasmin, Hamid, and Nadia, on my left side. They made a rustic vegetable stew, mainly potatoes and carrots in irregular chunks, skins left on. We serve ourselves from the pot with big spoons.

Yasmin tucks her long skirt and sits on her knees. As she talks, her expressive hands constantly touch Fay, smooth Hamid’s hair. She begins by apologizing for the simple meal. Even under the warped circumstances, it’s only polite to say, “No, no, it’s delicious.”

The stew, if not exactly delicious, is substantial and nourishing. “How do you get your food?” I ask.

According to Yasmin, something gets delivered every couple of days—whether it’s a pot of soup that only needs reheating or a bucket of vegetables or fruit or, very occasionally, meat. “And never fresh meat unless it’s a chunk cut off a goat they slaughter. Ah!” Yasmin claps her hands. Hamid, startled, leaps into his mother’s lap, overturning her spoonful of stew. “Tonight’s the start of Eid al-Adha. There’ll be mutton tomorrow.”

All over Morocco, families are gathering for a meal of thanksgiving. And I’m in a locked room somewhere near the Algerian border.

Yasmin cocks her head to one side. “I’m surprised they didn’t send any over tonight, though.” She hasn’t even finished her sentence when the obvious conclusion—retaliation for the current trouble—washes across her face. Yasmin erases her brief grimace and, making light of our simple meal, tells her first story of the evening: how their rudimentary kitchen had been whittled away to nothing.

“You see,” she says, with one of her puckish smiles, “to cook properly one must have all sorts of dangerous weapons. In the beginning, when Nadia and I thought it was only a matter of a time until His Majesty relented, we gave our jailers no trouble—on the contrary, we offered to cook and to clean for them. We made ourselves useful.”

Yasmin squints at us in the twilight, something she would do often in the course of the evening, and spins a tale right out of Scheherazade, complete with different voices for the various characters—how she and Nadia ingratiated themselves with the soldiers who, at first, considered them a novelty and gave them the run of the place as long as they obeyed the rules.

With a ragged sigh that’s almost a sob, Yasmin admits it was easy for her to be docile because she was still in shock from the death of her husband and son. Nightmares kept her awake in the dark hours, so she’d collapse in the shade in the afternoons, crying and praying. And then crying some more.

“But Nadia was restless,” Yasmin says. “She used activity, not prayer, to relieve her anxiety. One day she simply walked through the gate into the desert. After that, they put the bar across the door to our residence.

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