A Moveable Feast

Omar said I was the last foreigner in the valley. In summer, when it was all green, and gritty sweat would bead on your brow if you walked uphill and yellow cloudbanks swept up over the high-brown slopes, there were trekking parties with clicking poles and reflective sunglasses and special shoes. But not now. Now it was the end of November and in the morning the sky was so sharp and clear it hurt to look at it, and in the midday sometimes grey rain ran in and fell as wet sleet in the valley and clean snow high up. Next week, or tomorrow, or this afternoon the high road to Azilal might be closed and Ait Bougmez would be locked for days, or weeks, or even for the whole winter if it was a bad one. That’s what Omar said in his soft-spoken, delicate French.

I had arrived in Tabant late in the day when a bitter-dust wind ran in along the dirt road and the sky had gone to pale white behind the ridges. Up from Beni Melal, to Azilal where old Berber women were leaving the Thursday souk with hunks of meat and plastic bags of potatoes, across the high ground in a white minibus. We stopped for prayers on a high-swelling bank of brown land cross-pinned with twisted trees. The land rolled out high and half-level, then the great glass-white peaks around M’Goun rose in its place where it fell to the distance. The men on the bus ranked up in a neat row beneath the vast cold sky and knelt to the east. An old man with a twist of green cloth around his brow led them in their devotions.
Then past cold shepherds’ huts and down into the valley, and I met Omar on the dirt street of shutter-shops and he took me to his home and apologised for the lack of electricity.
I put my bag in the corner of the long narrow guestroom at the front of the flat-roofed, mud-walled building, and peered through the cracked glass of the crooked windows. Outside there were great skeins of snow on the mountain banks beyond Ait Bougmez, and the sky was pale. Then the muezzin called for mahgrib prayers and it was time to eat.

We ate in the little kitchen by the guttering light of a hurricane lamp, sitting on the floor on dirty blankets. There were a few dates, and warm bread, and a soup of white lentils, and sweet milky coffee from an old tin pot. Omar’s two little children watched me with big eyes, and his wife smiled and filled my coffee cup over and over. They had red-raw cheeks from the high mountain air.
“Tu fais le Ramadan?” Omar asked.
“Today, yes,” I said, then felt the need for utter honesty and added, “almost.”
Omar smiled, “Tu est Chrétienne, non? Alors ce n’est pas nécessaire …”
“Yes,” I said, “but on days when I travel I try. I cannot eat or drink while I am on the bus, or in the grande taxi with people who are fasting. Today I left Azrou in the morning; I ate some bread in my room at eight, but nothing since then.”

Each morning I would wake in the white light with the thin breeze of the High Atlas rattling the crooked windows of the guest room. They would brew me tea and bring me bread, though they had eaten long hours before in the pre-dawn darkness. Then I would go out on foot and walk up high onto the mountain slopes among the broken juniper bushes and hard brown rocks. One day I walked as high as the snowline, and another I was besieged for half an hour on a rocky buttress as a huge bear-headed sheepdog snarled and lunged at me before the shepherd scrambled down the slope and threw a rock at it and laughed at me. Another day a sour wind chased rain in along the whole length of Ait Bougmez in minutes and I shivered under a cliff face until it stopped.
Somewhere out in the hills, alone and away from people who were fasting I would eat a little cheese and drink some water. I would come back to the house in the afternoon. In the last of the light I would read and write in the guestroom, and Omar’s children would stalk me, closer and closer, then leap upon me and giggle with delight when I flung them off.

Omar did not pray, but he did not eat until after mahgrib. First there was the bread and soup and olives and coffee, then he and I would go out along the muddy lane, treading gently in the heavy darkness, to the little hall, built of new concrete below the road, with a generator for light, one crooked pool table and a few broken plastic chairs. The men of the valley came there each night to play cards and smoke kif.
Sometime after nine we would go back to the house and sit again in the kitchen on the dirty blankets in the lamplight and eat the tagine from the shared bowel with stale bread. There was never any meat for the tagine.

“You do not fast in Christianity?” Omar asked.
“Not like this.”
He shook his head, “C’est un chose bizarre, le Ramadan, tres bizarre.”
I made a noise of polite protest, but he shook his head again, “Truly my friend, Islam is a bizarre religion.”
They wanted me to stay for the feast, but it was still five days away, and I was worried about the snow on the road out of the valley. I would leave in the morning.
“And tomorrow,” I said, “je vais faire le Ramadan…”

I ate with them in the headache hours long before dawn: white soup with a little oil and dry bread and sweet white coffee. Then we all slept again and once it was light I packed my bag and said goodbye. Omar and I stood shaking hands on the muddy chicken path that ran up to the high brown slopes behind the house. A thin-cold rain was falling and somehow it washed away French as a shared language and Omar drew out a handful of English words from somewhere and I did the same with Arabic (though of course, Tamazight – of which I knew none - was his mother tongue). We stood in tongue-tied sincerity in the chilly drizzle – thank you, thank you very much; shukran, shukran jazilan – then I went down hill into the village where a minibus was waiting to leave for Azilal.

The valley was wet and grey all along its length and I could not see the high peaks through the cloud. Once we had wound up through the switchbacks onto the highlands there was thick, sodden snow on all sides, and the shepherds’ huts were already banked up with high drifts.
There was already an aching hollow of hunger in the pit of my belly. It ought to have been breakfast time. I hugged myself in the cold as we rattled over the rough, snow-streaked road and thought of good breakfasts in other places…

I thought of breakfasts in remote and empty hotels in Pakistan, Anglo-Indian breakfasts, left behind by the British long ago and then warped slightly by the subcontinent but not realising that they had become a parody: porridge in chipped white bowls with coarse sugar to poor on, and tea – milk separate – from tarnished pots, and the waiter with a moth-holed sweater against the cold of the empty dining room with grey mountains beyond the dirty windows. After the porridge a limp-oily omelette, and limp toast, cooked in a dry frying pan. There were chillies in the omelette… They were good breakfasts on which to walk in the hills, but there were better breakfasts elsewhere: murky black coffee with a muddy inch of dregs at the bottom of the glass, and a banana pancake crisped and caramelised at the edges and a plate of diced watermelon and the shadow of the mosquito net on the room behind and the smell of incense from the Balinese offerings down in the courtyard.
Good Kurdish cheese in Van on the street of the shoe-shiners and a little plate of olives and bread in heavy slices and cooked cream with clear mountain honey and bitter-sweet tea from a glass so delicate it felt like it would break in my fingers. And the best breakfast ever in Jaisalmer, from a cart with the rickshaw-wallahs. It was a plate-sized crispbread, bubbled with little air pockets from the frying, and a great ladleful of yellow dhal poured on top, then a fistful of red onion, diced fine enough to taste sweet, and a squeeze of lime juice, and a scrap of newspaper to keep the grease off your palm as you balanced it on your left hand and broke fragments from the edge, eating your way inwards. And a deep-fried sour-dough and a cup of hot milk with skin forming on the surface in Kashgar in the early morning before I walked across the city in the blue-cold haze of the dawn to the great Sunday Market, and crepes and café-cassé and pain-au-chocolat and fresh jus-d’orange in Casablanca on another visit to Morocco, and a bowl of good pho with flakes of beef in the rain in Dalat. And in Athens, after a long, long train ride from Alexandrouplis, through the high mountains, shepherd-green in the early spring, at the end of a long, long road from Cairo, nothing more than a great bowl of yoghurt with honey. The yoghurt was whiter than snow and smoother than fresh linen in a high-windowed room above a narrow bay, and cooler the water in the hill-stream in summer, and the honey was sweet.

It was raining horribly in Azilal. A week earlier on the day of the Thursday Souk it had felt like the grit-wind might sweep the scruffy red town clear off these highlands and away like breeze-cast paper; today it seemed that the stinging-bitter rain might wash it to a red mud in the gutter-gulleys of the hills.
The aching in my belly had turned to a sad, hungry nausea. All the shops and the cafes were closed. A few dirt-yellow grades taxis were idling at the wet roadside. The drivers had broken umbrellas. One man with a coarse jellabiya and a beard shot through with grey was going to Marrakech. There was no one on the wet-windy street but he called out the destination anyway, in the Berber way, with machine-gun Rs and only one vowel in the whole word: “Mrrrrakshhhh! Mrrrrakshhhh!”
The only other passengers were two fat Berber women in drab-coloured robes. The driver asked me to buy the double space of the front seat so that we might depart sooner. I had done so before for comfort, but was reluctant. We waited half an hour in the rain. There were no more passengers. The women paid double fares for the back seats, so I had to do the same for the front. We rolled south along the fringes of the Atlas. There was a wet smell from the driver’s damp jellabiya. The window was thick with condensation and the wipers squeaked at the glass. Outside there was wet country of stones and bushes. The two Berber women took on that sad aspect that fat women on journeys often take, and peered glumly at the rain.
The driver fiddled with the dial of the radio until he happened upon some horrible pop music. He did not speak much French, but he grinned at me, “Tu aimes?”
“No.”
“It’s French music, non?”
“I believe it’s American.”
He fiddled again and came upon something similar. “Tu aimes?”
I did not, and it was not French.
Another twist of the dial. It was Michael Jackson. It was not French. “But I’m not French anyway,” I said.
“A-ha!” He swept across the bands again and for a moment an Egyptian with a soaring voice wailed the high-echoing notes of the Qoran from the dashboard speakers. “Tu aimes?” he asked doubtfully, but decided for me: “Non.” Finally he hit Berber music, a thin, wiry sound, just a slow heart-beat drum and a hard-snapping string and a man with a fractured voice. “Tu aimes?”
I did, very much.
“Tu fais le Ramadan?” he asked, and was delighted when I said yes. I was less delighted. I was lunchtime, and I was thinking about food, good food that comes at unexpected corners.

There was mutton karahi in Chitral in the little chaikhana with green carpet on the floor and cricket on the television and a tall Afghan cook, and the way it sizzled in the wok when the boy brought it to you and a great pile of flour-dust naan to eat it with. And Uiygers with green eyes selling walnut nougat in grey Chinese cities far from the Xinjiang desert and the saw-blade mountains. There was puri sabzi and egg with cumin, and muglai parathas in Bangladesh fried to the colour of copper, and crisp and full of cloud-soft egg, and there was river fish stewed with spinach. There were sardines, brought up from Essaouira on the white coast, up to the mountains and grilled with paprika in week-day souks in other Atlas villages. Falafel with pickle, wrapped in a flatbread for breakfast in Damascus from the stall near the flyover, and sweet-grilled pork on skewers near the railway station in Bangkok, so tender that it fell apart in your mouth and you didn’t have to tug at it like other kebabs. And momos in the bitter cold at the monastery on Spitti, full of garlic and mutton and steaming lemon tea to drink with it, and thukpa soup with thick-flat noodles later in Kaza the day before I took the bus across the pass and saw the ibex. And sweetcorn in the night market in Kota Baru, steamed with milk so the sweet-popping yellow corns were soft, and Indian omelettes cooked on a griddle with the bread bedded into the egg, all full of onion and ginger and chilli. And martabak at night from some dark Indonesian street corner, and how hungry it makes you to watch it slowly crisping in the hot oil, bubbling, browning, and thinking of all the egg and meat inside. Fried bananas wrapped in little strips of pastry, and the way banana tastes when it’s cooked, and crisp-sweet strips of pork fat and basil and peppermint to wrap it with in some highland town in Vietnam the name of which I have forgotten, and fish and chips – yes, fish and chips – at night in Hong Kong, sitting outside on the steps with two Nigerians. And fruit of all kinds: lychees like eating perfume, and rambutan, and the pleasure of peeling the hairy red rind off the glass-egg flesh, and watermelon like eating sweet snow, and the sweet-sharp luxury of marquisas behind their shabby pith, and butter-yellow jackfruit, and the way the best mangos – like the one the Buddhist monk gave me one day in the rain in Vietnam – can make you moan with helpless pleasure.

The rain had stopped and there was yellow winter sunlight when we came to Marrakech. I left the grande taxi station at Bab Doukkala and walked along streets lined with women selling parsley and the remembered-smell of cold meat from the butchers’ stalls.
The Place Jemaa el-Fna had its distant-war sound as always with drums and pipes, and the sunlight made you squint. My throat was aching now, and I felt an ill-considered rage as I passed the café on the corner of Rue Bab Aganou and saw the other tourists, dark glasses against the hard light, eating brochettes et frites with salad, and half chickens and drinking coca cola. Neither I nor the waiter had eaten since four in the morning.
In the guesthouse with the orange tree in the courtyard off the dust-narrow alley south of the square I left my bag on the hard bed in the room of cool tiles and went up to the roof with a bottle of water. The rain had cleared the light and the sun was falling to the west, beyond the dark rank of outer hills outside the city. In the opposite direction the High Atlas was now covered with snow, far down the lower slopes. The whiteness made them look vast, Himalayan, though they were barely half the height of that range. I could still hear the noise from the place and see the square-block minarets of the medina. There was an hour to wait, and I was already laying out the tables for the feast to come, laying out tables of feast from all corners.

There was another fast-breaking in the darkness at the desert edge in Yarkand; a cluster of stalls and great tandoor-baked kebabs covered in tomato and onion bread and afterwards great slices of dripping-red watermelon and all the men in flat caps eating with furious urgency. And in Syria in quiet restaurants with humus and tabouleh and pickles and plates full of other things I could not name and flat bread and cool water, and good basmati rice in Indian hill towns and two paranthas on the side, and a copper-handled bowl of paneer butter masala, red and rich with a twist of cream on the surface and a sprinkling of pistachios and fresh-chopped coriander, and Nasi Padang, anywhere in Indonesia with twenty plates on my table and squid stewed with turmeric and chicken with chilli and beef in heavy read sauce and greens with garlic and grilled fish chunks and eating myself silly on it, and Rawon Setan near the Marriot Hotel in Surabaya, black sauce and cubes of dark beef that go to pieces against your tongue, the smell in Singapore food courts of steam and rice and chilli, and fish, and walking past black-crackling woks in the rain in Kuala Lumpur, and whole, red-roast ducks hanging behind glass and a meal of red-tandoori chicken in Tanah Rata with a salad of sliced onion and lime juice, and Turkish lokantas, simple eating-palaces with thick lentil soup and bread, and yellow-soft rice and bread, and lamb with stewed tomatoes all sharp-sweet and aubergine cooked to creaminess with garlic, and bread, and black tea.

When I watched the progress of Ramadan days at other times that month, times when I had eaten crisp-soft oil-breads with diced onion and paprika in the half-sordid privacy of my own room, or swallowed sweet water alone on a hillside, I had seen the way mornings had a half-normality, then afternoons had a slow lethargy, given back to sleep if possible, and then the last hour had an air of franticness as tables were swept, plates polished, tomatoes diced, bread sliced, cigarette packets fiddled with. I understood it now, for I paced back and forth along the blue-tiled roof, in near hysteria, staring at the bottle of water as the storks flew in and the sun dropped and the noise from the square rose a pitch… and then it was time.

The prayer call went up, and the cannon fired beyond the walls of the medina and I drank a litre and a half without breathing then went out to the square, and straight to the stall at the end of the outdoor kitchens where the served harira soup from a great vat. There were men – all those who could not go back to a home somewhere for a private iftar – jostling around it, eating the thick red soup urgently without sitting down, sucking at the wooden spoons. I ate two full bowls, then went to a stall where they fried tiny sole from the Atlantic coast in good, coarse flour. Their flesh was paper-white and the bones so fine you didn’t notice that you were eating them. Then I had oily beef brochettes with parsley and cumin and a little bowl of tomatoes, then I left the stalls of the square and ate a tagine – with meat this time, lamb, falling off splinters of bone, and potato and tomato and I scraped it all up with bread until I was mopping at the charcoal bottom of the pot. Then I went back across the square and drank three cups of peppery tea from a copper urn and ate two little plates of dark-malt cake with it, and I was no longer hungry.
But I bore very much in mind that the man in the white jacket who poured the tea would do what I had done today again tomorrow, and every day for the rest of the month, and I, quite wisely, would not.

© Tim Hannigan 2008