The men often sit around on a stone in the sunshine, their heads covered with a flap of their coat or a bath towel. They just stare out into the distance. What are they looking at? The dusty horizon, the dirt tracks where the trucks are rolling along, like large multicolored beetles, and the outline of the rocky hills, the white clouds moving across the sky. That’s what they are looking at. They have no desire for anything else. The women are waiting too, over by the fountain, not talking, veiled in black, their bare feet planted squarely on the ground.
Even the children know how to wait. They sit down in front of the store, and wait, just like that, without playing or shouting. Once in a while, one of them will get up and go turn in his coins for a bottle of Fanta or a handful of mints. The others watch him in silence.
There are days when you don’t know where you’re headed, when you don’t know what might happen. Everyone keeps an eye on the street, and by the side of the highway, the ragged children are awaiting the arrival of the blue bus, or the passage of large trucks carrying diesel fuel, wood, cement. Lalla is very familiar with the sound of the trucks. Sometimes she goes and sits with the other children on the new stone embankment at the entrance to the Project. When a truck is coming, all the children turn toward the far end of the road, a long way off, out where the air dances over the asphalt and makes the hills shimmer. You can hear the sound of the motor long before the truck appears. It’s a high-pitched droning, almost like a whistle with, every now and again, a sharp honk that blares out and echoes off the walls of the houses. Then a cloud of dust comes into view, a yellow cloud mingled with the blue exhaust of the motor. The red truck comes barreling down the paved road at top speed. Over the cab of the truck there is an exhaust pipe spitting out blue smoke, and the sun glints brightly off the windshield and the chrome. The tires are devouring the pavement and zigzagging a little due to the wind, and every time the tires of the semi slip off the pavement, a cloud of dust billows into the sky. Then the truck passes in front of the children, honking very loudly, and the earth shakes under its fourteen black tires, and the dusty wind and pungent odor of diesel fumes waft over them like a hot breath.
Long afterward, the children are still talking about the red truck and telling stories about trucks, red trucks, white tank trucks, and yellow crane trucks.
That’s what it’s like when you’re waiting. You often go out and watch the roads, the bridges, and the sea, to see the people who haven’t been left behind going by, those who are getting away.
Some days are longer than others, because you’re hungry. Lalla knows those days well, when there’s not a penny in the house, and Aamma hasn’t found any work in town. Even Selim the Soussi, Aamma’s husband, doesn’t know where to try to find money anymore, and everyone gets gloomy, sad, almost mean. So Lalla stays outdoors all day long; she goes as far out as possible on the plateau of stones, out where the shepherds live, and looks for the Hartani.
It’s always the same; when she really wants to see him, he appears in a dip in the ground, sitting on a stone, his head wrapped up in a white cloth. He’s watching his goats and sheep. His face is black, his hands thin and strong like the hands of an old man. He shares his black bread and dates with Lalla, and he even gives a few pieces to the shepherds who have come forward. But he’s not proud about it; it’s as if what he gives is of no importance.
Lalla glances over at him every once in a while. She loves his imperturbable face, the aquiline profile, and the light that glows in his dark eyes. The Hartani is also waiting for something, but he’s perhaps the only one who knows what he’s waiting for. He doesn’t say what it is since he doesn’t know how to speak the language of human beings. But you can guess from his eyes what he’s waiting for, what he’s looking for. It’s as if part of him had been left behind in the place of his birth, beyond the rocky hills and the snow-capped mountains, in the immensity of the desert, and one day he would have to find that part of himself, in order to really be whole.
Lalla stays with the shepherd all day long, only she doesn’t get too near to him. She sits on a stone, not far away, and gazes out in the distance; she looks at the air dancing and rushing over the arid valley, the white light making sparks, and the slow meandering of the goats and sheep through the white stones.
When the days are sad, anxious, the Hartani is the only one who can be there, and who doesn’t need words. A look is enough, and he knows how to give bread and dates with nothing in exchange. He even prefers for you to stay a few steps away from him, just like the goats and the sheep, who never completely belong to anyone.
All day long, Lalla listens to the calls of the shepherds in the hills, whistling that bores through the white silence. When she goes back to the Project of planks and tarpaper, she feels freer, even if Aamma does scold her because she’s brought nothing home to eat.
That’s the kind of day it is when Aamma takes Lalla to the house of the woman who sells carpets. It’s on the other side of the river in a poor part of the city, in a big white house with narrow screened windows. When she enters the room used as a workshop, Lalla hears the sound of weaving looms. There are twenty of them, maybe more, lined up one behind the other in the milky half-light of the large room where three neon tubes are flickering. In front of the looms, little girls are squatting or sitting on stools. They work rapidly, pushing the shuttle between the warp threads, taking the small steel scissors, cutting the pile, packing the wool down on the weft. The oldest must be about fourteen; the youngest is probably not yet eight. They aren’t talking, they don’t even look at Lalla when she comes into the workshop with Aamma and the merchant woman. The merchant’s name is Zora; she is a tall woman dressed in black who always holds a flexible switch in her pudgy hands with which to whip the little girls on the legs and shoulders when they don’t work fast enough or when they talk to their workmates.
“Has she ever worked?” she asks, without even glancing at Lalla.
Aamma says she’s shown her how people used to weave in the old days. Zora nods her head. She seems very pale, maybe because of the black dress, or else because she never leaves the shop. She walks slowly over to a free loom, upon which there is a large dark red carpet with white spots.
“She can finish this one,” she says.
Lalla sits down and starts to work. She works in the large dim room for several hours, making mechanical gestures with her hands. At first she has to stop, because her fingers get tired, but she can feel the eyes of the tall pale lady on her and starts working again right away. She knows the pale woman won’t whip her with the switch because she is older than the other girls working there. When their eyes meet, Lalla feels something like a shock deep inside, and a glint of anger flares in her eyes. But the fat woman dressed in black takes it out on the smaller girls, the skinny ones who cower like she-dogs, daughters of beggars, abandoned girls who live at Zora’s house year-round and who have no money. The minute their work slows down, or if they exchange a few words in a whisper, the fat pale woman descends upon them with surprising agility and lashes their backs with her switch. But the little girls never cry. All you can hear is the whistling of the whip and the dull whack on their backs. Lalla clenches her teeth; she looks down at the ground to avoid seeing or hearing it, because she too would like to shout and lash out at Zora. But she doesn’t say anything because of the money she’s supposed to bring back to the house for Aamma. To get even, she just ties a few knots the wrong way in the red carpet.