448
MARK MIRSKY
in, an aperitif of Vitamin C. The conversation has turned to books,
Camus,
L'Etranger.
The Arab shot down under the hallucinations of Meurseault in
the sun while I sway beside my Berber friend expecting a stroke,
buoyed by the grotesque correspondance and the ferocity of our argu–
ment. But Abu backs away from our disagreement with a shattering
smile, "This is what my teacher says. You understand. I do not know,
this is my teacher's opinion."
We are at the water's edge.
In
the courses of these southern deserts,
the guidebook prophesizes a host of plagues, bilharzia for a moment's
immersion . "You would like a swim?"
"Not here."
"A swimming pool. " His eyes twinkle.
Pulling my leg? I follow him as he turns, anxious to get back in
the shade. My brother produced a swimming pool filled with Parisian
girls in bikinis, a French Auberge Jeunesse in the middle of the
wilderness.
We dive into the blue waters. His black body gleams in trans–
parent ether. We touch as we race back and forth in the pool. A thrill
runs through me as we laugh and I remember seeing a Negro Chassid
pressed into the long swaying line of men at the Lubovitcher Rabbi's
in Brooklyn, a rope of prayer.
Later in Tinerhir, after I announce to a table of curious young
men with whom I share a pot of sweet, rank spearmint tea, that I am
Jewish, they ply me with questions, information p.bout the Jewish
Berbers who left the town, ten, fifteen years ago. The next day, one of
the young men who is studying literature at college, brings me some
articles studiously copied out of a journal in French of Arabic litera–
ture, circa 1912, about the movements of the Jewish merchants
through the south of Morocco and the independent kingdoms they
established. The Jews were here long before the Arabs, they tell me.
Some at the table are pure Berber, others mixed.
Do they write in Berber? I ask. No, they say, there are no more
books in Berber. Under the French it was encouraged but now it is
only a spoken language. They are reticent and I don't want to push the
discussion past a mutual ironic understanding. Here in the South, at
least, they seem sad that the Jews have left; pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli
as a matter of form, but wistful about their fellow townsmen of so
many thousands of years.
So,
my Jewish Bedouins are ' gone. Flown off
