In memory of Mohamed
Hadjoum, whose profession has led him to die unknown in the snow traps of the
Moroccan Rif Mountains in 1995.
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus, The Rebel
The Clock Strikes Midnight:
The crackling of the radio mingles in an uneven
escort with the shivering light around tonight's lonely candle. The candle's
flame burns silently within the pale, lit circle, resisting the creeping
darkness.
I no longer tolerate sleeping in such obscurity
on the tables of this isolated classroom, built on the wreck of an ancient
graveyard beneath these forgotten, barren mountain chains.
How I fear these white graves scattered in
disorder around me!
I fear that their dwellers will rebel someday
against me. I must be bothering them by living among the dead.
The
headmaster approached me this morning to express his condolences for the loss
of my colleague, Badre Badrawi, and wished me a speedy recovery. He then
explained the administrative difficulties in finding a replacement schoolmaster
for my late colleague and shared details about the pupils' groups.
The headmaster advised me to be patient and explicitly told me not to interfere with the natural course of the establishment and to avoid repeating the old catastrophe.
‘Animals around here are starving!'
Now
I wonder if the jailer who escaped from prison into the surrounding area,
riding his warder's bicycle, had heard such advice; would he have delayed his
escape through the forest and darkness?
Probably, such calculations are useless when freedom is at stake. That may be the reason why he departed, leaving behind his jail fellows, terribly astonished, whispering in the following morning the piece of news: the prison guards found during their pursuit pieces of a torn-out jail uniform discarded about on the shrubs where the warder's motorcycle wheels kept spinning around near the traces of a human body, which had rolled in blood long before disappearing.
The Clock Strikes Midnight:
The puffs of air coming through the cracks in the ancient walls of the
so-called classroom gently shake my candlelight. I cup the candle with both
palms in an effort to preserve its energy for as long as possible. The candle's
teardrops slide down hot and large before freezing on the tray.
As the candle steadily burns down, I must sprinkle salt granules around
the wick to stop it from melting. This is my only candle, and the night still
stretches ahead. Night has always felt so long. It was simpler before, when
there were two of us: two schoolmasters.
We used to work alternately in this forlorn
classroom, located between these arid mountain ranges, educating pupils who
only missed their classes on special occasions such as weddings, ploughing
days, rainfall, snowfall, inundation, and funerals.
Sometimes, a parent would drop in, covered in
an empty plastic manure sack, to solicit the redemption of his children when a
fit of rain would catch them at school, because trenches and rivers would
overflow and accordingly bar all the winding paths that swirled through the
endless mountains connecting the school to their homes.
Bad weather would sometimes give us an
unexpected day off. So, we would free the pupils and close the classroom doors
and windows to gather warmth for the night. We would arrange the tables as two
high beds and drape our coverlets over them. A cup of mint tea lay next to the
pillow before any chat or discussion soon became a third companion. Yet, the
endless winter nights would exhaust all our topics. So, we became hooked on
reading prison literature: humans thrown down by helicopters in terrible detention
camps and left to the snow. Even when they try to escape, they are recaptured
and taken back to the place where they are condemned to spend their entire
lives.
Stories were repeated again and again. However,
we read them all through the night. Sometimes we would read the same novel
simultaneously, in unison. Reading aloud helped us avoid silence and folly. The
memory of this classroom proves that one schoolmaster out of two has entered
the world of folly through this blessed school's door.
Living and working among graves is such a terrible thing! Teaching and raving among people who rest forever: dead people in a silent place at a quiet time. An absolute silence. With everything around us being tongue-tied and voiceless, we kept the radio on all night long. We would sleep only to the rhythm of its crackles and dream solely to the sounds of its whistles. We learnt, with the stream of nights, how to have the same dream on the same night. We prepared ourselves for the dream before going to bed; we selected a subject in all its meticulous details, and in the dream, all our hopes and fears united in the dream of escaping from the graveyard to the place where living people are. A dream repeated on and on until we woke up one morning in a new form of seclusion.
The door would not open . . .
We pushed it out with all our force. In vain. We rooted it out of the doorframe:
What whiteness!
The snow
was knee-deep. It melted away, revealing an endless doorstep: a blank page
wiping away the graves, the traces of water springs, the deep trenches, and all
the paths swirling around the orphan classroom.
The snow
remained longer than we had ever expected. Its threat rose inch by inch above
the knee. At that time, we began to fear that the snow would bury us alive in
our classroom while we were running short of food.
Our only hope was to see the snow melting away
within the next twenty-four hours. Days, however, passed by all alike: nights
without moon and mornings without a horizon to separate the whiteness of the
earth from the whiteness of the sky.
Sometimes, some day, there loomed in the remote
horizon small living shadows crossing all along the whiteness and planting
sticks along the way: those were the village people, and that was their style
to ensure the snow depth before advancing. They planted sticks deep in the snow
to remember the safe way back home. Otherwise, they would themselves fall down
in the trenches, which the snow had hidden down there as traps for foreigners.
In fact, most victims of snowfall are strangers unfamiliar with the region's geography. When the snow melts away, their graves are dug near our classroom, and they are buried without rituals.
The Clock Strikes Midnight:
The candle slowly diminishes. Hot teardrops
slide down, round and large, before freezing on the tray. The candle burns away
silently.
I hate strong odours. Even the smell of fresh
paint on the classroom walls stifles me, bringing the old, burning odour back
to my mind.
We were two schoolmasters. We used to wake up early to prepare our
breakfast here in this classroom and eat it in a hurry at the school tables.
Then we would prepare a lunch meal and leave it on the camping gas at the back
of the classroom.
Afterwards, we would clean the place before the pupils arrived. We
would rearrange the tables and tidy up our coverlets before hiding them under
the tables, following the administration's warning about storing items within
classrooms. Actually, if the headmaster were to take a six-hour walk to visit
us in our world, he would find us baking in the classroom, too.
We used to make our bread by hand. Badre would knead the dough inside
the classroom, taking shelter from the cold and rain, while I set three
equivalent stones around one of the pits in the classroom, and there it is: a
brazier able to lift a pan and bake bread!
After baking, we toss some nails onto the remaining embers, seeking
protection from the evils of charcoal that might affect our lives while we
sleep.
In times of snow and cold, the heat from the brazier would warm the
classroom, making it suitable for sleeping before we awoke on a stifling winter
night, surrounded by oppressive odours and vibrant colours flickering
everywhere in the room: sparks flying in all directions, flames dancing on the
tables, snapping and devouring them. Fire tongues licked the walls, blackening
the space. Wood crackled, split, exploded, and fell into burning embers . . .
The windows collapsed, and the wind invaded the classroom. Fire blazed
up. There was no time for thinking. We drenched our coverlets to fight the
fiery tongues, striking anywhere. There were fire tongues everywhere poking at
us. We struck with all our strengths. Tables and windows, everything had gone
mere big embers. We struck aimlessly. The red colour all around us was fading away.
We struck with all our force. We struck, struck, struck till darkness
prevailed. At last, darkness!
Waiting for the morning, we sat outside the classroom door, coughing up
our supply of smoke.
In the morning, crows returned to circle above our heads, over the
graveyard, to herald a new day. Then, pupils arrived at school. They were
surprised to find themselves transformed into tourists, as they had no classes
that day. They leaned out of the windows to take a look inside, trying to
identify their seats by the arrangement of the coal table frameworks.
"There, you used to sit!"
"And you behind me there!"
The classroom was transformed into a true
charcoal mine: roasted vegetables, bare iron sticks of tables—whose wood had
been burnt away—coal, coal, coal . . .
We were not ready to spend another night here despite the intimidation stirred up by the pupils' parents, who came to congratulate us on our safety and mock our internal fears, again retelling the old tales about the atrocity of the forest's wild night animals: starving wolves with piercing looks, sharp claws, and deadly fangs.
The Clock Strikes Midnight:
The candle has already melted away. There is nothing left of it but
teardrops around the candlewick, depleting its last energies. The candle is in
agony, and morning is still far ahead.
No one can spend one single night here.
In the past, even though we were two, the night would overpower us.
However, with that conflagration behind us, we left the establishment,
untroubled by the night and all kinds of threats from the well-informed
villagers. We departed.
Travelling on foot was never a problem. Mainly, on market days when the
path swarmed with marketers going to and fro. Apart from market days, the
forest was deserted and silent except for occasional frightened birds' shrieks
here or there coming out of the high cedars. The long path wound right and
left, up and down. The reptiles rustling on both sides of the path would
increase our fear. We were racing against sunset. The jamming trees veiled the horizon.
Details everywhere in the forest were gradually fading away. Colours
blackening. Shades are standing erect everywhere, getting bigger. Shades
melting into shades to make one only colour: darkness. At last, there came the
night.
We could not see any farther than our footholds. It was pitch dark. We
would almost certainly have gone astray if we had continued the journey. The
pocket torch was useless in the utter darkness. The fugitive prisoner's wheel
was once again spinning in my mind. I could almost hear its buzz somewhere
nearby. It was completely dark, and the path still stretched a long way ahead.
Stopping was inevitable. There had to be a rest. I collapsed on the ground,
leaning my back against a tree trunk, exhaling my exhaustion.
My feet were swelling with heat inside my shoes, and sleep was gently
closing my eyes. Sleeping on the ground in the wilderness at night was a fatal
mistake. I thought that sleeping on the branches might be safer from earthly
surprises. Of course, it is uncomfortable, but it was only for an ephemeral
night.
I climbed up the tree nearest to my touch and made sure of the solidity
of the branches. I called my friend to come up and sleep in safety below the
tree. He refused. He had such a violent sleep. He couldn't sleep calmly. I left
him alone. I switched the torch on to light a circle on the ground to rest
within. He stretched up his white coat, within the torchlit circle, and laid
one hand under his head and the other between his thighs. He couldn't sleep
with his hands cold. Something in the pockets of his coat made him ill at ease.
He sat up to get rid of it. He took a little pocketbook out and handed it to me,
and lay down again on his white coat.
However, scarcely had his hands warmed up when he tore the whole
universe with his shrieks, imploring me for help while I, from over the tree, lit
with my torch a circle, a stage, an arena inside which twist:
Black and white.
(Snores and calls of help.)
Black and red.
(Snores and moans.)
Black and blood
(Snores and silence.)
From the tree, I watched the live show below: wild blackness devouring a weary friend.
