O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 — The Marriage in Kairwan
From _Harper's_ Kairwan the Holy lay asleep, pent in its thick walls.
The moon had sunk at midnight, but the chill light seemed scarcely to have diminished; only the limewashed city had become a marble city, and all the towers turned fabulous in the fierce, dry, needle rain of the stars that burn over the desert of mid-Tunisia.
In the street Bab Djedid the nailed boots of the watch passed from west to east.
When their thin racket had turned out and died in the dust of the market, Habib ben Habib emerged from the shadow of a door arch and, putting a foot on the tiled ledge of Bou-Kedj's fry shop, swung up by cranny and gutter till he stood on the plain of the housetops.
Now he looked about him, for on this dim tableland he walked with his life in his hands.
He looked to the west, toward the gate, to the south, to the northeast through the ghostly wood of minarets.
Then, perceiving nothing that stirred, he went on moving without sound in the camel-skin slippers he had taken from his father's court.
In the uncertain light, but for those slippers and the long-tasselled _chechia_ on his head, one would not have taken him for anything but a European and a stranger.
And one would have been right, almost.
In the city of his birth and rearing, and of the birth and rearing of his Arab fathers generations dead, Habib ben Habib bel-Kalfate looked upon himself in the rebellious, romantic light of a prisoner in exile--exile from the streets of Paris where, in his four years, he had tasted the strange delights of the Christian--exile from the university where he had dabbled with his keen, light-ballasted mind in the learning of the conqueror.
Sometimes, in the month since he had come home, he had shaken himself and wondered aloud, "Where am I?"
with the least little hint, perhaps, of melodrama.
Sometimes in the French café outside the walls, among the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened mockery, he would break off suddenly, "_Voilà, Messieurs!
_ you will see that I am the best of Mussulmans!"
He would laugh then in a key so high and restless that the commandant, shaking his head, would murmur to the lieutenant beside him, "One day, Genet, we must be on the alert for a dagger in that quarter there, eh?"
And Genet, who knew almost as much of the character of the university Arab as the commandant himself, would nod his head.
When Habib had laughed for a moment he would grow silent.
Presently he would go out into the ugly dark of the foreign quarter, followed very often by Raoul Genet.
He had known Raoul most casually in Paris.
Here in the Tunisian _bled_, when Raoul held out his hand to say good-night under the gate lamp at the Bab Djelladin, the troubled fellow clung to it.
The smell of the African city, coming under the great brick arch, reached out and closed around him like a hand--a hand bigger than Raoul's. "You are my brother: not they.
I am not of these people, Raoul!"
But then he would go in, under the black arch and the black shade of the false-pepper trees.
In the darkness he felt the trees, centuries old, and all the blank houses watching him....
To-night, stealing across the sleeping roofs, he felt the star-lit mosque towers watching him in secret, the pale, silent espionage of them who could wait.
The hush of the desert troubled him.
Youth troubled him.
His lips were dry.
He had come to an arbour covered with a vine.
Whose it was, on what house-holder's roof it was reared, he had never known.
He entered.
"She is not here."
He moistened his lips with his tongue.
He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west through the doorway across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.
He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the terrace.
It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when, half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and uncovered her face.
To-night she uncovered it herself.
She put back the hooded fold of her _haik_, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.
The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city.
For an hour nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky....
That hush was disrupted.
The single long crash of a human throat!
Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!
"_La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul'lah!
Allah Akbar!
_ God is great!"
One by one the dim towers took it up.
The call to prayer rolled between the stars and the town.
It searched the white runways.
It penetrated the vine-bowered arbour.
Little by little, tower by tower, it died.
In a _fondouk_ outside the gate a waking camel lifted a gargling wail.
A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away.
And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.
Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy name.
A name is such a little thing.
I'll call thee 'Nedjma,' because we are under the stars."
"_Ai, Nedjmetek_--'Thy Star'!"
The girl's lips moved drowsily.
In the dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady lustre, unblinking, unquestioning, always unquestioning.
That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness.
He took her shoulders between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper: "Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words?
Talk!
Say things to me!
Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to make me seem like these Arab men, who wish for nothing in a woman but the shadow of themselves.
And I am not like that!"
"No, _sidi_, no." "But talk!
Tell me things about thyself, thy life, thy world.
Talk!
In Paris, now, a man and a woman can talk together--yes--as if they were two friends met in a coffeehouse.
And those women can talk!
Ah!
in Paris I have known women--" The girl stirred now.
Her eyes narrowed; the dark line of her lips thinned.
At last something comprehensible had touched her mind.
"Thou hast known many women, then, _sidi_!
Thou hast come here but to tell me that?
Me, who am of little beauty in a man's eyes!"
Habib laughed under his breath.
He shook her again.
He kissed her and kissed her again on her red lips.
"Thou art jealous, then!
But thou canst not comprehend.
Canst thou comprehend this, that thou art more beautiful by many times than any other woman I have ever seen?
Thou art a heaven of loveliness, and I cannot live without thee.
That is true ...
Nedjma.
I am going to take thee for my wife, because I cannot live without thine eyes, thy lips, the fragrance of thy hair....
Yes, I am going to marry thee, my star.
It is written!
It is written!"
For the first time he could not see her eyes.
She had turned them away.
Once again something had come in contact with the smooth, heavy substance of her mind.
He pulled at her.
"Say!
Say, Nedjmà!...
It is written!"
"It is not written, _sidi_."
The same ungroping acquiescence was in her whisper.
"I have been promised, _sidi_, to another than thee."
Habib's arms let go; her weight sank away in the dark under the vine.
The silence of the dead night crept in and lay between them.
"And in the night of thy marriage, then, thy husband--or thy father, if thou hast a father--will kill thee."
"_In-cha-'llah_.
If it be the will of God."
Again the silence came and lay heavy between them.
A minute and another minute went away.
Habib's wrists were shaking.
His breast began to heave.
With a sudden roughness he took her back, to devour her lips and eyes and hair with the violence of his kisses.
"No, no!
I'll not have it!
No!
Thou art too beautiful for any other man than I even to look upon!
No, no, no!"
* * * * * Habib ben Habib walked out of the gate Djelladin.
The day had come;
the dawn made a crimson flame in the false-pepper trees.
The life of the gate was already at full tide of sound and colour, braying, gargling, quarrelling--nomads wading in their flocks, Djlass countrymen, Singalese soldiers, Jewish pack-peddlers, Bedouin women bent double under their stacks of desert fire-grass streaming inward, dust white, dust yellow, and all red in the dawn under the red wall.
The flood ran against him.
It tried to suck him back into the maw of the city.
He fought against it with his shoulders and his knees.
He tried now to run.
It sucked him back.
A wandering _Aissaoua_ plucked at his sleeve and held under his nose a desert viper that gave off metallic rose glints in its slow, pained constrictions.
"To the glory of Sidna Aissa, master, two sous."
He kept tugging at Habib's sleeve, holding him back, sucking him back with his twisting reptile into the city of the faithful.
"In the name of Jesus, master, two copper sous!"
Habib's nerves snapped.
He struck off the holy mendicant with his fist.
"That the devil grill thee!"
he chattered.
He ran.
He bumped into beasts.
He bumped into a blue tunic.
He halted, blinked, and passed a hand over his hot-lidded eyes.
He stammered: "My friend!
I have been looking for you!
_Hamdou lillah!
El hamdou'llah_!"
Raoul Genet, studying the flushed, bright-eyed, unsteady youth, put up a hand to cover a little smile, half ironic, half pitying.
"So, Habib ben Habib, you revert!
Camel-driver's talk in your mouth and camel's-hide slippers on your feet.
Already you revert!
Eh?"
"No, that is not the truth.
But I am in need of a friend."
"You look like a ghost, Habib."
The faint smile still twisted Raoul's lips.
"Or a drunken angel.
You have not slept."
"That's of no importance.
I tell you I am in need--" "You've not had coffee, Habib.
When you've had coffee--" "Coffee!
My God!
Raoul, that you go on talking of coffee when life and death are in the balance!
For I can't live without--Listen, now!
Strictly!
I have need to-night--to-morrow night--one night when it is dark--I have need of the garrison car."
The other made a blowing sound.
"I'm the commandant, am I, overnight?
_Zut_!
The garrison car!"
Habib took hold of his arm and held it tight.
"If not the car, two horses, then.
And I call you my friend."
"_Two_ horses!
Ah!
So!
I begin to perceive.
Youth!
Youth!"
"Don't jibe, Raoul!
I have need of two horses--two horses that are fast and strong."
"Are the horses in thy father's stable, then, of no swiftness and of no strength?"
It was said in the _patois_, the bastard Arabic of the Tunisian _bled_.
A shadow had fallen across them; the voice came from above.
From the height of his crimson saddle Si Habib bel-Kalfate awaited the answer of his son.
His brown, unlined, black-bearded face, shadowed in the hood of his creamy burnoose, remained serene, benign, urbanely attendant.
But if an Arab knows when to wait, he knows also when not to wait.
And now it was as if nothing had been said before.
"Greeting, my son.
I have been seeking thee.
Thy couch was not slept upon last night."
Habib's face was sullen to stupidity.
"Last night, sire, I slept at the _caserne_, at the invitation of my friend, Lieutenant Genet, whom you see beside me."
The Arab, turning in his saddle, appeared to notice the Christian for the first time.
His lids drooped; his head inclined an inch.
"Greeting to thee, oh, master!"
"To thee, greeting!"
"Thou art in well-being?"
"There is no ill.
And thou?"
"There is no ill.
That the praise be to God, and the prayer!"
Bel-Kalfate cleared his throat and lifted the reins from the neck of his mare.
"Rest in well-being!"
he pronounced.
Raoul shrugged his shoulders a little and murmured: "May God multiply thy days!...
And yours, too," he added to Habib in French.
He bowed and took his leave.
Bel-Kalfate watched him away through the thinning crowd, sitting his saddle stolidly, in an attitude of rumination.
When the blue cap had vanished behind the blazing corner of the wool dyers, he threw the reins to his Sudanese stirrup boy and got down to the ground.
He took his son's hand.
So, palm in palm, at a grave pace, they walked back under the arch into the city.
The market-going stream was nearly done.
The tide, against which at its flood Habib had fought and won ground, carried him down again with its last shallow wash--so easily!
His nerves had gone slack.
He walked in a heavy white dream.
The city drew him deeper into its murmurous heart.
The walls pressed closer and hid him away.
The _souks_ swallowed him under their shadowy arcades.
The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, chypre and amber and musk, clogged his senses like the drug of some abominable seduction.
He was weary, weary, weary.
And in a strange, troubling way he was at rest.
"_Mektoub_!
It is written!
It is written in the book of the destiny of man!"
With a kind of hypnotic fascination, out of the corners of his eyes, he took stock of the face beside him, the face of the strange being that was his father--the broad, moist, unmarked brow; the large eyes, heavy-lidded, serene; the full-fleshed cheeks from which the beard sprang soft and rank, and against which a hyacinth, pendent over the ear, showed with a startling purity of pallor; and the mobile, deep-coloured, humid lips--the lips of the voluptuary, the eyes of the dreamer, the brow of the man of never-troubled faith.
"Am I like that?"
And then, "What can that one be to me?"
As if in answer, bel-Kalfate's gaze came to his son.
"I love thee," he said, and he kissed Habib's temple with his lips.
"Thou art my son," he went on, "and my eyes were thirsty to drink of the sight of thee.
It is _el jammaa_."
[Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath.
] "It is time we should go to the prayer.
We shall go with Hadji Daoud to-day, for afterward, there at the mosque, I have rendezvous with his friends, in the matter of the dowry.
It is the day, thou rememberest, that he appointed."
Habib wanted to stop.
He wanted to think.
He wanted time.
But the serene, warm pressure of his father's hand carried him on.
Stammering words fell from his mouth.
"My mother--I remember--my mother, it is true, said something--but I did not altogether comprehend--and--Oh!
my sire ----" "Thou shalt be content.
Thou art a man now.
The days of thy learning are accomplished.
Thou hast suffered exile; now is thy reward prepared.
And the daughter of the notary, thy betrothed, is as lovely as a palm tree in the morning and as mild as sweet milk, beauteous as a pearl, Habib, a milk-white pearl.
See!"
Drawing from his burnoose a sack of Moroccan lambskin, he opened it and lifted out a pearl.
His fingers, even at rest, seemed to caress it.
They slid back among the treasure in the sack, the bargaining price for the first wife of the only son of a man blessed by God.
And now they brought forth also a red stone, cut in the fashion of Tunis.
"A milk-white sea pearl, look thou; to wed in a jewel with the blood-red ruby that is the son of my breast.
Ah, Habib, my Habib, but thou shalt be content!"
They stood in the sunlight before the green door of a mosque.
As the hand of the city had reached out for Habib through the city gate, so now the prayer, throbbing like a tide across the pillared mystery of the court, reached out through the doorway in the blaze....
And he heard his own voice, strange in his mouth, shallow as a bleat: "Why, then, sire--why, oh!
why, then, hast thou allowed me to make of those others the friends of my spirit, the companions of my mind?"
"They are neither companions nor friends of thine, for God is God!"
"And why hast thou sent me to learn the teaching of the French?"
"When thou settest thy horse against an enemy it is well to have two lances to thy hand--thine own and his.
And it is written, Habib, son of Habib, that thou shalt be content....
Put off thy shoes now and come.
It is time we were at prayer."
Summer died.
Autumn grew.
With the approach of winter an obscure nervousness spread over the land.
In the dust of its eight months' drought, from one day to another, from one glass-dry night to another, the desert waited for the coming of the rains.
The earth cracked.
A
cloud sailing lone and high from the coast of Sousse passed under the moon and everywhere men stirred in their sleep, woke, looked out--from their tents on the cactus steppes, from _fondouks_ on the camel tracks of the west, from marble courts of Kairwan....
The cloud passed on and vanished in the sky.
On the plain the earth cracks crept and ramified.
Gaunt beasts tugged at their heel ropes and would not be still.
The jackals came closer to the tents.
The city slept again, but in its sleep it seemed to mutter and twitch....
In the serpent-spotted light under the vine on the housetop Habib muttered, too, and twitched a little.
It was as if the arid months had got in under his skin and peeled off the coverings of his nerves.
The girl's eyes widened with a gradual, phlegmatic wonder of pain under the pinch of his blue fingers on her arms.
His face was the colour of the moon.
"Am I a child of three years, that my father should lead me here or lead me there by the hand?
Am I that?"
"Nay, _sidi_, nay."
"Am I a sheep between two wells, that the herder's stick should tell me, 'Here, and not there, thou shalt drink'?
Am I a sheep?"
"Thou art neither child nor sheep, _sidi_, but a lion!"
"Yes, a lion!"
A sudden thin exaltation shook him like a fever chill.
"I am more than a lion, Nedjma, I am a man--just as the _Roumi_" [Romans--_i.
e_.
, Christians.
] "are men--men who decide--men who undertake--agitate--accomplish ...
and now, for the last time, I have decided.
A fate has given thy loveliness to me, and no man shall take it away from me to enjoy.
I will take it away from them instead!
From all the men of this Africa, conquered by the French.
Hark!
I will come and take thee away in the night, to the land beyond the sea, where thou mayest be always near me, and neither God nor man say yes or no!"
"And there, _sidi_, beyond the sea, I may talk unveiled with other men?
As thou hast told me, in France ----" "Yes, yes, as I have told thee, there thou mayest--thou ----" He broke off, lost in thought, staring down at the dim oval of her face.
Again he twitched a little.
Again his fingers tightened on her arms.
He twisted her around with a kind of violence of confrontation.
"But wouldst thou rather talk with other men than with me?
Dost thou no longer love me, then?"
"_Ai_, master, I love thee.
