Desert Divers (11 page)

‘Bou Saada had quite simply had the misfortune to be the first of the Saharan oases to be conquered by the French. After the conquest, the Ouled Nail tribe continued their resistance for another twenty years. When at last it ceased, the tribe was impoverished and their social network torn apart. War and occupation had led to social anarchy. With the misery also came prostitution, first around the garrisons, then around the tourist hotels.

‘When the same thing occurred later in other oases, the legend had already made “Ouled Nail” into a brand name, used by all prostitutes regardless of which tribe they really came from. Many were children, who themselves had been led to believe the myth with which some of the greatest of Europe’s writers marketed them.

‘Michel’s liberation presumes children “far too young, don’t you think, to know anything about love?” It presumes child prostitution. That is the fundamental moral problem which is never put into words in
The Immoralist
.

‘When my income is insufficient to support the family, my little brother Ali will have to let foreign gentlemen fuck his backside for money. That’s what it is about. The rest is romanticism.’

‘The journey is a door through which one goes out of the known reality and steps into another, unexplored reality, resembling a dream,’ Maupassant writes in his travel accounts from Algeria.

Yes: the reality of the colonies functioned like a dream.

No one had asked the French officers to conquer Laghouat or Zaatcha. Far less had anyone asked the soldiers to massacre the population. No one forced them to do it. It was enough that no one stopped them. They were simply given an opportunity which they were unable to resist.

They took it – in the same way as Saint-Ex, Vieuchange, Loti, Eberhardt and Gide took the opportunity to step into their far more innocent dreams.

For them, the colonies were an arena in which they were able to
live out
everything not socially accepted in their own countries.

It is doubtful whether the colonies ever produced either the power or the income their supporters hoped for and advocated them in expectation of. But in the spiritual life of Europe, the colonies had an important function – as a safety vent, as an escape, a place to misbehave.

Like the dream, the colonies offered a refuge away from the demands of their own society, an outlet for the cruelty and self-importance not tolerated in Europe. Not yet tolerated.

In the colonies, while one represented the highpoint of civilization, it was possible to escape much of civilization’s unpleasantness: the banality of the bourgeoisie, the
tristesse
of marriage, the inhibiting control of impulse – and become party to mass murder, child abuse, sexual orgies and other
expressions of urges which at home largely found their outlets in dreams.

Maupassant alludes to it. Gide’s
The Immoralist
is an indication of it. But apart from Conrad, of course, which of the writers of the epoch expressed it in art? Who is prepared even today to dive into this dark well and clean it out?

Timimoun is the only oasis in the Sahara where I could imagine myself living.

I like the narrow winding alleys constantly changing direction to avoid the pursuing rays of the sun. The houses form bridges across the narrow shafts of streets, the streets becoming tunnels, the courtyards as deep as wells down which the sun cannot penetrate. The windows are narrow apertures, so deep the sun cannot shoot in through them. Over the centuries, innovations have built on the basic principle of desert architecture: defence against the sun.

I love the shimmering blue dragonflies hovering above the green flowering water of irrigation pools, a promising murmuring, rippling, gurgling everywhere. The water runs through a complicated system of gullies criss-crossing each other, branching out or merging. Black men plant cabbages in the soft silt.

I love the salt-white plains round Timimoun and the hourglass fine sand. I love the mountains with their long red roots of sand. I love the new-moon dunes, shaped like sickles with sharp, wind-polished edges.

The car’s shadow with its high wobbling wheels seems cut out of a comic strip as I return to Timimoun at sunset through a sea of dunes.

I would like to come back here always. I would like to spend the winters at the El Gourara hotel with my word processor and a small disc library of the classics of modern egoism from Hobbes to Huysmans. And soon all the other works ‘on line’ from all the national libraries and databases of Europe. Plus a discarded, bound and thumbed old desert novel by Pierre Loti.

That is my desert romanticism.

I would live here undisturbed by human complications, without love but also without pain.

Live off bread and dates, watching the wheatear and the desert crow, listening to the palm doves as they grumble, tut-tutting in the date grove. Sitting in the sunrise looking out over the salt marshes and enjoying the monotony and silence of the desert.

I have a bell. A copper sheep-bell. All round me in the great expanses of landscape I can hear the loud clanging of many different sheep-bells, some far off in the distance, others quite near.

Only my bell doesn’t clang.

I feel inside it with my fingers and find a soft rag wound round the clapper.

It’s a mangled, threadbare old towel, initials embroidered on it in blue, my mother’s initials, which are also mine. I recognize the towel easily; as a boy, when I longed for love, I used to wrap it round my member and liberate myself into it.

A Swedish officer called Thorsten Orre wrote
Sketches from the Desert
, the first ever Swedish desert book, and he lived here in Timimoun.

I read Orre in the days when you could borrow two books ‘for pleasure’, but as many non-fiction, ‘fact books’, as you liked.

With this rationing system, Swedish libraries laid in my contemporaries the foundations of the often lifelong conviction that non-fiction was not ‘for pleasure’, that reality as an experience was always inferior to fiction.

Orre was one writer to help me out of that dogma. No fantasies ever matched his facts.

In a small village south of Timimoun, Orre met a man by the name of Abdelkader Ben Mohammed Omar, his professional title
rtass
– a thin, wretched thirty-year-old who looked fifty. He was also as good as deaf: both eardrums had been perforated. He was the last surviving well-diver.

Abdelkader undressed and tied a cloth around his hips, then greased his body with butter, stuffed tallowed camel wool into his ears and recited his prayer.

A well-diver at work.

The well to be cleaned was only eight metres deep. Orre measured the rope which fastened the basket. A heavy stone was put into the basket and lowered to the bottom. Abdelkader went over to the well and placed himself astride it, then thrusting his feet against the inside of the wall, he climbed down to water level.

There he took a deep breath, clapped his feet together and let himself sink.

The others stayed around the well, silent and grave. The work of the
rtass
is full of danger. He wears his life out in advance. Although a slave, or almost a slave, he is regarded as holy.

Orre stands with a watch in his hand. After twenty seconds of breathless silence, the rope begins to jerk as if someone were climbing up it. A cloud of bubbles rises to the surface and then Abdelkader’s head appears.

He gets out of the well, wraps his
burnus
round him and watches in silence as the others hoist up the basket, now full to the brim with sludge from the bottom of the well.

He dives five times in a row that morning. In the afternoon, he again descends into the well and continues working. After his last dive, he goes to one side, dries himself thoroughly and sits down in the blazing sun with his back against a palm tree. His whole body is still shuddering.

I also shuddered.

I was afraid of wells. At Sunday School, I could hardly bear to listen when the brothers threw Joseph into the well. I
looked down into the dark depths. I tasted the icy water. I sensed the absolute loneliness down there. I – who didn’t even dare dive head first from the edge of the swimming pool – how could I read about the wells of the desert without becoming that diver myself?

It was always me, emaciated, marked by death, my eardrums already perforated from the tremendous pressure, who dived down to the bottom of the well to clean it out.

Götgat Hill has been transformed by the bulldozers into a deep shaft. I start climbing outside the milk bar at the foot of the hill. I am small but quite strong. I hold firmly onto the edge of the pavement and find good support for my feet from the stones and protruding iron girders. The situation looks hopeful.

But the pavement gets narrower, and by about halfway I am climbing directly on foundations of houses, like a façade climber, while at the same time the chasm below me grows deeper and deeper.

When the house foundations come to an end at Urväder Alley, I have nothing but loose gravel ahead of me and I can’t go any further. Nor can I go back.

I am left suspended like the victorious Renaissance man in Leonardo’s drawing, but am actually quite helpless, incapable of moving either hand or foot from their fragile holds.

The only thing that can save me now is a new ESCARPMENT – the word itself comes as a great relief and subdues my panic.
If only
the entire universe would tilt like a motorbike
on a corner, the centre of gravity would no longer pull me down into death, but would keep me there so that I could slowly crawl up the wall of the house.

Why not? I think. A great many hopes presumed to be the basis of our salvation are less reasonable than that.

I drive east towards El Golea. So little happens on this road that each well is marked by its name and depth on the map.

Because each individual moment in the desert is monotonous, it is assumed that it will always go on being monotonous in the same way. That is a mistake. There are a thousand different ways of being monotonous and the desert knows them all.

The emptiness draws you to it like a vacuum. I suddenly remember the smell of wood stacks, and the smell of trains in the days when compartment windows were shut with a leather strap hanging in a dark-brown perforated tongue below the window. And the delicate sound of my father’s razor as he stropped the blade …

The damp cold in the earth cellar when you enter it to take the muslin covers off the bowls of soured milk. From the musty air in there, I suddenly step out into the warm summer smell of flowers. I close both doors behind me and replace the hasp, which is made of wood. The nettles on both sides of the narrow path are high and menacing. Holding the bowl of soured milk out in front, I hunch up my shoulders and walk between the nettles straight out into summer …

In a cloud of memories, I stopped the car at the last of the named wells,
Inhal
, the water in which is said to be ‘
bonne, abondante, à 12 m
’. Deep down there in the darkness of the well, the surface gleamed, covered in a film of dead insects.

There was neither rope nor chain at the well-head. You are supposed to take your own rope with you. Otherwise you die of thirst by a well of that kind. If you fall in you are lost.

If you fall in …

Suddenly I remember the ball, the pail, the rough walls, Edgar and Valter’s faces as they disappeared above …

Suddenly I remember it all.

In my childhood, open wells were common in the Swedish countryside. The water was hauled up in a pail fastened by a rope or a chain to a balancing lever.

All parents warned their children about the well. That was just about as realistic as warning them about the traffic today. When the lid of the well was off, it was strictly forbidden to play by the well. But as soon as we played ball, the ball was drawn in that direction by some mysterious force and often vanished down into the hole. Many a time have I seen the ball floating on the dark gleaming water down there and stood fishing for it with the pail.

When we failed to retrieve it in that way, one of us had to sit on the pail and be lowered down. Edgar was eldest, so went first. Valter was youngest and went down next. The third time, I could hardly refuse.

I sat on the pail, clutching onto the chain. With a jerk, I shot up in the air when Edgar seized the other end of the lever. Valter grabbed the chain and swung it round towards the well. I hung there slowly twirling above the well opening. My expression must have shown that I was about to burst into tears, had changed my mind and no longer wanted to do this. They stopped for a moment, waiting for me to say something. But I said nothing. Then they began slowly lowering me down the shaft. The longer the chain became between me and Valter, the more the pail spun around, first in one direction, then the other, so that I bounced against the sharp flintstone walls of the well. My hands shook. It was only six or seven metres down to the water, but I daren’t look down. Nor did I dare look at the white hole up there growing smaller and smaller and further and further away. Supposing I let go? Supposing I let go! Who would save me down here? It was already too cramped for one person, let alone two. And Valter would never be able to lift both Edgar and me. Now I was down there! My feet and the seat of my trousers were already in the icy water. Now I had to let go with one hand to try and reach the ball. The cramped space suddenly seemed enormous, the ball constantly dancing away. The boys up there tried to move the chain so that I could get nearer the ball. The result was that I swung like a pendulum between the well walls and had to grab the chain with both hands again. I suddenly slipped down half a metre and was seized with panic. I thought I was lost, but they had only ducked me. I still had my head above water. The ball came floating towards me and when I pressed my arms together, it caught in my grip.

‘I’ve got it!’ I cried, and they started pulling me up. I sat curled up with the ball against my stomach and chest, twirling around, bouncing through the shaft.

In the Sahara there were wells ten times as deep. In the Sahara it is a profession, the
rtass
’s, descending into wells of that kind and continuing, diving below the surface of the water to clean them out.

There is a book of life which can be read in two directions. I read it from the beginning. Then my lips begin to twitch. Quite out of my control, my lips keep trembling against each other. The unpleasant feeling of the actual trembling is made almost unbearable by the sensitive surfaces of my lips rubbing against each other. To relieve it, I try to tremble with my mouth open, but at once it dries up and starts cracking.

Not until I turn the book over and start reading it from the back do my lips grow still and the twitching stops just as suddenly as it had begun.

In the low light of the morning sun, I drive between sabre dunes and star dunes on towards Ouargla. The sand trickles and murmurs across the road, like the film of water trickling down the butcher’s shop window when I was small.

The entire landscape is based on that contrast: the heavy, firm, dark gravel lying there, sweating desert varnish and being
baked together into the rigid base on which the light, bright, mobile sand appears, as fine as pollen and soft as velvet.

Here and there a few sparse twigs of broom are scattered in the sand, sometimes gathered into bushes resembling punk hair styles.

Ouargla has been a town since the sixteenth century. For a long time it was the southernmost post in the French Empire, the starting point for the great Saharan expeditions.

Today, Ouargla is the administrative centre for the oil-rich area of the south. But there are also half a million date palms in the oases and almost as many in the suburbs.

The old houses in Ouargla are built in the characteristic style which in the Sahara goes by the name ‘Sudanese’. The material resembles clay, the shapes are soft and organic, the houses apparently growing like fungi or rising like dough. The windows are diagonal slices in the thick fabric of the walls. ‘As if the rays of the sun had sliced their way through the walls,’ I think – but the cuts are naturally placed counter-clockwise in order to let in as little sun as possible.