Yes, Christo silently commented, that’s just what I’m afraid of.
A noise like an electric shaver cut the air followed in a burst by music from the other side of the walclass="underline" dolorous yodeling embroidered by an epileptic clarinet. In the thin belt of shadow that intersected the square, boys had been playing a game with round stones; now they broke away and moved briskly in a pack.
“Hashish? Monsieur pour hashish?”
“English? Deutsch? Good dope for you. Ich haben.”
Christo rose to his feet as they pressed in, but Tomas pulled him back down. “Don’t encourage them.”
More and more came, as if a chemical signal had been released drawing them like insects to a food source, Christo felt waves of sour boy-breath on his face as they shoved and clamored, cried their incantation: “Hashish! Hashish!”
Slapping heads, an older boy thrust his way to the front. “You waste your time with these filthy childs. I take you somewhere no big noise. You sit, have tea, smoke best hashish all you want, no problem. Listen all new tapes just flown in. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones.”
“Cessez donc!” Tomas cocked his fist “Cessez.”
They recoiled momentarily, then surged forward, giggling and aping Tomas—“Cessez!”—in shrill, taunting voices. The first brave hands shot out to poke and tug; the first rumble of animal menace rose like heat from the ground.
Tomas stood quickly. “Let’s walk.” They drove through wild puppy furor, but were clear for only a few seconds before it reformed around them in a circular dance that combined entreaty and defiance.
It was eerie, the way they froze all at once, went mute. Christo tensed, expecting the worst, but the pack began to dismantle, boys drifting away in bashful groups of three and four. From the direction in which they carefully did not look, it was possible to detect the cause of their submission.
He was tall and elegantly slim in his Western clothes, his dark face dominated by eyes like a pair of ray-gun apertures, one sweep of them more than enough; a terrible power quickly flashed. Just from the way he set himself, it was clear he had the juice, that he would be a chieftain of the streets anywhere — Bedji or Lima or Chicago.
“Ibrahim.” Tomas approached him. “Salaam aleikum.”
“Aleikum salaam.”
They grasped wrists in a kind of Indian-wrestle greeting. Christo was introduced as an “American businessman.” Ibrahim bowed deeply, emitting a powerful fume of bay rum.
“You come yourself to meet us,” Tomas intoned. “We are most honored.”
“We in turn are honored by your visit.” Ibrahim had a rolling, staff-announcer’s baritone. “This way please, and we shall ride.”
The car was long and black, and pitted by rust and by the sharp stones that were everywhere. It had to be the only Oldsmobile in town. Ibrahim drove at cortege speed through several miles of dismal countryside, gray-green succulents and disintegrating rock. Tomas whispered urgent cultural lore.
“From now on, we are in the care of the family. They will dictate the atmosphere. They will decide how and when to complete the transaction. In Islam, the most important thing is how one provides or accepts hospitality.”
“Okay, okay,” Christo said irritably. And to himself: Good manners? Something else I don’t have.
Turning off the main road and passing through a chicken-wire gate, they pulled up at a low, oblong warehouse with a shining tin roof. Ibrahim’s curt horn beeps fetched out a fervently obsequious little man who opened doors and ushered them inside; where his nose should have been, there was a tan hole.
Everyone wore sunglasses except Ali Mustafa, the patriarch, a generous dumpling of a man in a crisp linen tunic, who soaked up deference with the careless inveteracy of a mullah. Clearly, he was running the show. Welcoming his guests to a fragrant sanctum where carpets had been laid over the floor, he bade them recline among the cushions that encircled a brass table. He snapped his fingers and a tray of sweet mint tea in glasses was brought. Christo took his cues from Tomas during the long Arabic toast. The tea was like syrup and made him sweat even more profusely inside the djellabah. The glasses were replenished and a young relative played a halting version of “My Blue Heaven” on the flageolet. Ali Mustafa beamed.
“We thank you for your long trip,” he said.
“Yeah, great to be here,” Christo said, like someone on a talk show.
“Your wisdom in coming is to your credit. It pleases me much to open my doors for citizens of the world. Since I am a child and my father teaches me to sift kif through horsehair, I am dedicated to a search for better and better ways to make and preserve hashish. Please to come now with me and see for yourself.”
More sunglasses, more relatives. They were busy as beavers in the processing room. Ali Mustafa knelt beside one of his cleaners, dipped into the man’s wide metal pan and rubbed fine powder through his fingers.
“Just to touch our hashish is a pleasurable thing.” He opened his hand to display the resinous globules that adhered. “And you will see the color, how dark. These plants, my friend, extraordinaire. Most we pick before the strong winds come, but these we grow terraced behind a mountain and protected. We wait and wait to pick, and the ripeness is so sweet to make perfume in the valley at night. You see now how it takes form.”
From one of the gallon cans, Ali Mustafa scooped an expertly exact amount of his product onto a square of cellophane, laid a second square on top and placed this sandwich in the lower plate of a hand press.
“My grandsons invent this machine. The heat is inside, by electricity. No flame.” He turned a small black dial, activating the scavenged element of a steam iron, then spun the crankshaft; the plates clamped together. “Now is the beauty. The spirit of hashish, comme on dit … It unites. The essence set free in the heat.”
The slab he removed moments later was fudge brown, smooth and sealed airtight in cellophane.
“This,” holding the slab over his heart, “this is the pride of Ali Mustafa.”
Once more around the brass table, they waited in reverent silence while the narghile was prepared. Made of cut green glass, it had four flexible, gold-embroidered smoking tubes attached to amber mouthpieces. The urn-shaped bowl was filled to the rim with alternating layers of black tobacco and hashish, a hot coal nestled on top.
Ali Mustafa leaned close to present one of the mouthpieces and Christo saw his eyes were milky and brown like an old dog’s. Suspicion churned inside, stirring up from Christo’s cloudy bottom the urge to see conspiracy. Their cunning scheme: banish his vigilance to an island of smoke, fill his head with hash anarchy, then ambush with curved blades. A piece of throat for every family member. Something now at his ribs.
But it was Tomas nudging him. All right, if only for protocol. Christo inhaled, water bubbling and rebounding off the glass, smoke jetting into his lungs. A kick in the chest from a mule. He clapped his hand over nose and mouth to hold down the coughs.
“Very smooth,” Tomas offered, blue smoke billowing from his nostrils. “And the taste, very fresh. Your skill is unique, Ali.”
Christo could only nod agreement. He had exhaled by now, but articulate speech was beyond him. His eyes were tearing and his throat rippled upward. He took another toke, more cautiously this time, but still felt that mule kick.
“Superb,” he rasped. Protocol.
Ali Mustafa chuckled, tossed another chunk of hashish onto the hissing embers. “Superb, my traveling friend, mais oui. Your pleasure is mine also.”