The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (17 page)

We initiates dispersed back into the crowd, and I was left with that sense of deflation you get as a child, when a show is over or you have completed some absurd dare. But it was short-lived, for Aziz came bursting through the crowd holding a dozen perfect sacks. ‘You’ll never believe where I found these,’ he announced, still evidently doubting the fact himself. ‘In the hardware shop!’

‘Come,’ said Mourad, putting his arm round my
shoulder
. ‘Now we are ready to make our fortune in the forest. Let us walk up to the Café Central and celebrate.’ 

S
ACKFULS OF
T
REASURE

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, after only the most perfunctory round of greetings and salutations in town, Ali and Aziz and Mourad and I set out up the track to the cedar forest, through the ilex woods and up into the domain of the magnificent blue Atlantic cedar. We found the
hällehäll
and I showed my
pickers
the highly technical contrivance I had developed for the work. You take a walnut-sized stone, cover it with a part of the sack, tie a string round the resulting knob, and take a turn round the waist – this leaves both hands free to pick the seedpods.

The first few minutes of picking are pretty exciting. You grasp a handful of pods, which on
Cytisus battandieri
grow like Indian feathered headdresses, and you break them off and stuff them in the sack. As you grasp them you can feel the ripe ones burst inside, and you see the little hard black
seeds spatter into the sack. There’s a certain satisfaction in feeling the weight of your sack grow infinitesimally with each handful, maybe a gram. And then a pleasure each time you find a heavily laden plant – you can see the ripe seeds through the almost translucent pods when the sun is low. Your mind clears and you hear all the sounds of nature: the cobras slithering contentedly to and fro in the dry grass, and troupes of monkeys – the Middle Atlas is heaving with monkeys – jabbering in the trees.

After about an hour you start to feel the tedium of the work. Your hands are a little sore, you’re a tiny bit frazzled by the heat, your eyes are stinging, and your nose and forehead are a little burnt from constantly looking up at the sun as you reach for the high-growing pods. After two hours you never want to see another seedpod as long as you live and you’re stuffing sacks like an automaton. After four hours Mourad and I sort of drifted together. ‘I think we should stop for lunch now. It is hot and we are tired,’ he suggested.

We slumped in the shade of a cedar and drank water and ate olives and bread and little triangles of Laughing Cow cheese spread. Then we lay down in the soft cedar needles and slept away the hottest hours of the day. I hardly need to tell of my contentment as I woke and watched my
pickers
fast asleep around the tree, and considered the swelling harvest of ripe seedpods. The expedition looked like being a success: I would come home with the goods, the hunter home from the hill. But not only that, it was turning out to be such a pleasure, too – new friends, a new world to get to know. Granted, the picking was grim, but you can’t expect everything to be effortless and, besides, who would want to be anywhere else but here in the Middle Atlas, lying
in a bed of soft needles in the Forêt des Cèdres, a gentle breeze cooling the air and lifting the great blue branches, and tonight to sleep in the friendly bosom of a real Berber family? I reckoned it a fair deal.

As I observed the sleeping pickers, lying lost to the world in various poses, I noted how thin they all were. There was not a hint of obesity – these young men were lucky when they could find enough to eat. They were poorly but neatly dressed; they could afford only the cheapest clothes but they wore them well and, although we were out in the woods for a day’s seed-picking, they were clean and neatly pressed. All of which stood in stark contrast to my own rather disgraceful appearance and incipient corpulence. Especially neat and fastidious was the tall, elegant Aziz. He had picked about a third as much as anybody else, but no matter: he was an engaging
character
and I loved his formal French. ‘Monsieur Christophe, you cannot know how I suffer,’ he would tell me in
confidence
. ‘Aziz?’ Mourad would say. ‘Aziz is not only utterly lazy, but also crazy.’

Looking at the sleepers, I wondered about wages. Mourad had been disinclined to discuss pay with me but this was a crucial issue for us all. I stood to gross £3,500 from this trip, which was a vast amount of money for me, and we needed a reasonable chunk of it to make ends meet at home. If I returned with nothing we would have to endure a certain amount of hardship – we would not go hungry or unshod – but it would be what is meant by hardship in our European society.

Hamid the waiter was earning about £4 a week – maybe £7, with tips, in a good week – thus the money I would gross would pay poor Hamid and his widowed mother for seven hundred weeks, the best part of fifteen years. Mourad had been lamenting to me the wretched lot of Hamid, but he was even worse off himself: he didn’t have a job at all. As he told me, he got the odd bit of translation work, and otherwise waited for whatever would turn up, while giving lessons for a pittance or for free. I figured that, at Mourad’s present perilous state of affairs, the money could support him for twenty-five years.

Aziz had no work and no prospects until his shadowy French girlfriend showed up with the imaginary visa. I didn’t know much about his financial position, if it could be called that, but he wasn’t a rich man. Then there was the
gardien du forêt
, with his lean frame, shabby suit and air of destitution; well, I dreaded to think what he was paid by the king to guard this little bit of the forest. (‘Against what?’ I asked Mourad. ‘Seed collectors, perhaps,’ he replied.)

I needed my lads to do the job – I’d need them even more later on, as it turned out, for the drying and processing. I could not do the job without them and I wanted it to continue – to come back every year or every other year to pick an order, and increase the variety of plants. Perhaps one day I could turn it into a business that Mourad’s group could run from here. But, for now, I decided I had the following options:

[1] Give them the whole lot.

[2] Split the money four ways (and pay the
gardien
daily).

[3] Pay outrageously good wages – say, £100 a day each. I was reckoning on twenty man days’ picking, which, leaving
myself out, made £1600 between them, and thus £1900 for me before expenses (and the bill at the Café Central was building up);

[4] Pay the current day-labourer´s rate at home in Andalucía, which was then about £15 per day. A doctor in Azrou would be lucky, very lucky, to earn £15 a day, and it was eighteen times what Hamid earned at the Café Central.

I mulled over all this as I lay there beside my new friends, who for all their poverty seemed to bear me no ill will for the monstrous divide that lay between us. Well, what would you decide? In the end I opted for the Spanish labourer’s rate – £15 a day, irrespective of whether it was a whole day or just a part of one – and when the pickers awoke, I told them the deal.

To my relief, everybody thought it was a magnificent emolument, and the
gardien
was thrilled. I gave all the money to Mourad, who said he would act as paymaster, and I added a fee on top for his administrative and organisation work. I don’t know if he was taking a cut from the others, too, for fixing them up with the job; it wouldn’t have been unfair as, after all, he was the one who had read
The
Captain
and the Enemy
.

‘
Eh bien mes amis, on recommence
? Let’s get started,’ I called, and we tramped out into the forest again. We picked for a couple more hours until the light began to fade, and then, stuffing the day’s harvest into four sacks, we shouldered them and trudged down the edge of the scarp to Azrou. It was dark when we entered the town. We took the sacks of
seeds straight up to the flat roof of Mourad’s house, tipped them out and spread them out in the moonlight.

For three more days we left the town early in the
morning
, after the obligatory session in the Café Central, and spent the whole day in the forest, returning at sunset. The great heap of pods on the roof grew and grew. At night we shovelled it into a pile in the corner, to keep it from the damper night air, and in the daytime we spread it all out for the rays of the fierce sun to bake the pods dry. As the sun warmed them, there was a constant cracking and splitting, and everywhere, as the pods dried, cracked and twisted, they leapt into the air, scattering their seeds over the dusty concrete roof.

On the morning after the picking was completed, we spread the seeds and then spent the rest of the morning lounging in the Café Central. I learned a little Berber and, by constant repetition and example, gathered the correct and proper formulae for greeting people one had not bumped into for, say, an hour.  

Towards midday we slouched home for lunch. Mourad’s house was not as strictly Muslim as some and, now that the family knew me, I was able on occasion to go to the women’s part of the house. As we arrived they were
preparing
lunch in what passed for a kitchen, although we from the Western world would hardly recognise it as such.  

There was no sink, drainer nor tap, for example; neither was there a cooker nor a hob; and the only work surface was a low wooden table, around which the women were
squatting
in the gloom. The immense battery of tools and
utensils
, pots and pans and plates so necessary for our European cookery was quite absent. There was a sieve for sieving flour, a big plate, a knife, a big
tagine
dish, a battered old pressure
cooker, a clay pot and a camping gas stove. The tap was in the yard. There were, unsurprisingly, no recipe books.

I thought of all the various meals we had eaten in Mourad’s house – delicious tagines and salads and
home-baked
flat breads. The cooking was a communal activity, shared by all the women of the house and conducted with grace and skill. It all served, somehow, to emphasise the prima-donna-ishness, the frippery and petulance of our more economically advanced societies. Here was a family without a car, a fridge, a telephone, a camera – the only ornament in the house was the obligatory photograph of Hassan II, the (then) king – and yet they took in orphans off the street, and looked after their old people with a naturalness and clear-sighted sense of duty unthinkable among their North European counterparts.

‘Chris, my friend,’ said Mourad after we’d polished off some flat bread and baked aubergine and were reclining away the afternoon hours, ‘I am thinking that tomorrow we shall make an ex-ped-dition.’ He emphasised this last word heavily; clearly he liked the sound of it. ‘And what did you have in mind, my friend?’ I answered lazily.

‘I have in mind that I shall find a car and that we shall all have a
pique-nique
at Aït Oum er-Rbia.’ He obviously liked that word, too – as you would, for it is one of the most delicious names I have ever come across in any language. Say it for yourself –
ayit-oom-err–rr-bía
– and don’t forget to roll those ‘r’s.