Notebook One continued….
Chapter Two
Between stone and sand
Alert to the immediate threat to his family, Karim turned his back on the field where his flock lay, still and bloodied. Desperate to find his wife, son and infant child, he rushed to find a place to run to. He remembered the ruins of an Ottoman fort, not far from the oasis. It was a ruin now, and served no purpose other than shelter. He had often driven his flock over its gravel rubble to graze on the few patches of grass that grew there. At times, he had lain prone in its stony skeleton to shelter from the wind. His sheep would find comfort huddled together and pressed close to the ground. Other times, he had crouched up against a wall to hide from the sun, and felt the hardness of stone against his back, its unforgiving nature so unlike the fluid talc of sand that slipped through his fingers and could form a soft mattress. At times of bad weather, with desert floor on the move and the gibli blowing grit and dust, he had stayed the whole night with his flock. Once, he had sheltered there under a cloud of locusts that had darkened the sky. Their flight had taken hours to pass over.
At the fort, they discovered they were not alone in their distress. Many others had found the place before them. They too were dispossessed of land and everything they owned. They were startled and confused. Though made destitute, they were not yet aware of their changed status; not ready to understand that they were now subject to the yoke of a new colonial power, whose coming had long been rumoured though never imagined – never imagined because which of them could have envisaged the scene they were now part of, their land trampled by an army of mechanical beasts and armed men whose language was strange and whose origins they could not guess at. They had been thrown together in disarray and found themeselves in the ruins of a place long-time passed and thought of only as a timely reminder of man’s witless arrogance.
The infant Amna cried as other infants did. Their small bodies were resonating with the distress of the trauma, so many mothers rocking their children to sleep hoping to counter fear with their fortitude, and yet weeping. Karim was appalled by the wailing, Amna’s cries multiplied so many times over in the enclosed space of the bounds of walls that bounced the wailing back. He had never before sensed human frailty so piercingly real. Not even in the worst of storms. The elderly were either lost in stony silence or they were cursing. They sat unconsoled and unconsolable. They sat in the dark, huddled like sheep. The cries, the soothing, the weeping, the anger – all dissonant emotions too absurd in their mix to make sense of, except as a mangled nexus of fear of the unknown. Karim felt the hurt so deeply entrenched in his own flesh and bone that he knew he would never forget the violence and injury of it.
It took some little time for the tribes to accept what had happened to them. But not to come to terms with it. That did not seem possible. It took more time to know that in and of itself the devastation was a sign of their reduced status as a subjugated people. They trusted that this could only be temporary, that Allah in his mercy would return them to their true destiny as a people free to roam.
Karim, and others like him, had been alarmed by the spectacle of their grim demise so quickly wrought on them, their traditions so easily blown apart, seemingly fragile like a fabric uncouthly ripped from the face of a bride. And then to have been deflowered of their will to go free with such gratuitous and imponderable violence was unthinkable. He had expected a swift reaction. After all, in the face of an external threat, it was custom for the tribes and clans to come together, even to put aside any feuds outstanding between them.
Perhaps their reaction was muted now because there was fear of the possible greater calamity of mass starvation. More obviously, any kind of resistance was stalled by the lack of arms.And so the tribes had seemed to fall apart, despite their craving for the return of their animals and land, for what they considered to be inviolate to them and impossible to be separate or separated from. They were like moss is to the rock, the lizard to sand or the eagle to the sky.
Karim was the first to speak out, arguing they should seek an indemnity against further atrocity. He dared not speak of other fears, fears for their own slaughter, or the theft of their women and children. This was understood like a shiver down the spine. He was angry beyond constraining anger. He could not bear the thought that he would never again find a place for his wife and child, or a tract of land he might call his own. Shepherding had been his only trade. It had been his diligence and pride that had increased his flock, and won him the reward that was his bride. His voice rang out in the wrangling of argument, raw and shrill, though his nature before had always been measured and gentle.
A novel about different geographies, identity, belonging and alienation. We travel in wild places, wilderness of the mind, nostalgia and loss of memory or experience misremembered. This is one woman’s quest for her lost children and lost places. In the journey, psychological and physical, new realities present themselves as new insights that challenge her perception of herself and of others.
The third novel of a Libyan Trilogy. Presented and serialised in episodes which I call Notebooks. This is the opening of ‘Euhesperides Notebook One’.The image below is of oases in a desert. It may become the cover image for the printed book.
A novel about gardens and wildernesses in the real world and in the mind, physical and psychological. The story is a quest for things lost – memory, children and sense of place. The novel travels across different geographies where identity and a sense of belonging are challenged.
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Opening pages of Chapter One ‘Stock Still’
Chapter One
Stock still
The panicked ewes were bleating for their lambs. They were corralled in a fenced-off quarter of the military barracks. Carabinieri untrained in the business of slaughtering sheep were wielding their combat knives with ferocious intent. The young bedouin watching covered his eyes and wept.
At the order of Benito Mussolini, ruler of the new Roman Empire, Italian ground forces were pushing south from Tripoli. They were reaching the oasis of Ain Zara. As they ranged like scavengers across the Jeffara Plain, they seized the livestock of the bedouin herders who pastured their animals there, doing so according to their ancestral rights. These ancient rights had long been respected under the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire in return for taxes paid; but, with that hegemony now yielded to the jurisdiction of an Italian state ambitious for empire, indigenous rights were disregarded and dishonoured. Bedouin rights were being expunged by a rapacious lust for territory.
The assault had been sudden, on a scale the bedouin could not have prepared for. Being nomads in a desert, they had no equivalent means of defence against a modern military machine. Bewildered and struck by terror, they were helpless and in awe. They watched the brutal theft of their livestock seemingly with little effective retaliation. Donkeys, mules, horses and camels, wild or domesticated, were drafted as carriers of ordnance for the invading troops deployed for the purpose of ‘penetrating’ Libya, taking her by force. By means of stealth and power, the trajectories of empire were reaching south towards Fezzan, expecting to do so peacefully, ‘peacefully’ implying expected surrender.
Karim, whose name means ‘generous’, had been guarding his modest flock from wild dogs. It was early in the night when the Italian Savari had comeriding into the pasture. The thunder of their horse’s hooves had heralded their arrival droning like an afreet. Wilder and more cunning than any pack of wild dogs, they had routed and kettled his scattered sheep into their malevolent fold and driven them away. Shaken and disbelieving of what he had seen with his own eyes, Karim had followed the bandits at a safe distance witnessing the droving of his flock to the military barracks, where, in the chaos of many commingled herds, the lambs were parted from their panicked mothers, and slaughtered en masse. On seeing his sheep suffer this ungodly butchering, he had stood stock still. Still in his shivering skin, but trembling in the sinews that held him taut, while his mind was arrested in dread. He was struck immobile like the stump of a felled tree.
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Second Edition
This second edition with additional chapters and maps, and Author’s Notes and Index is now available.
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New Excerpt from Part 3
Chapter 23 – Into the Hinterland (Part 3)
The Bedouin knew it was surveillance, meant to frighten them, but the airplanes had never, so far as they knew, caused any immediate loss of life. The temerity of the pilot, they agreed, was something to be wondered at.
However, despite this reasoned dismissal of the threat, Ibrahim sensed they were disturbed by what they saw as the marker of a new twist in the progress of the conflict, a possible game-changer, certainly something that amounted to a worrying breach of their sovereign space. The fortunes of conflict were now to be defined by the altitude of clouds as well as the reach, shape and cover of land. It was an unnatural intrusion, a theft of their shelter. They had not imagined that occupation could descend from the sky.
In the company of the Bedouin, old men and young, Ibrahim and Ali sat in a ring round a fire, while tea was being brewed in the long drawn-out stages of bitter to sweet. The bitter was very harsh and kept the men awake until well past midnight. Much was said about the beast of the sky that had suddenly appeared as a force to be reckoned with in their fight for freedom, so uncompromising and existential as a threat to which they felt unequal in arms but superior in resolve. What was the beast’s intention, they asked? Did it matter if they were spied on from above, their camp no longer hidden? Were they indeed being spied on, or had they merely been spied, in the exercise of some other mission of no particular concern to them?
They recounted times past when they had welcomed the Europeans who had come on foot or horseback, and more recently some in four-wheeled vehicles. How unwittingly they had disclosed their privileged knowledge of the great sand sea. When the Italians returned later armed with guns, the audacious deceit awakened a rebellious spirit in them. They would never again divulge the locations of springs, or water courses running through the limestone steppes and in channels beneath the desert. They would not let slip where gold was to be found, nor any other precious ore. Those matters which were a mystery to the stranger must remain a mystery.
Now, as Europe moved into Africa, as the land was being torn apart like remnants of cloth to be divided between empires, and now that Italy was moving south from the coast, her intention was as clear as the rallying howl of a wolf to its pack stalking a flock of sheep. The sky itself was pierced and shredded, and from now on they would have to hide in wooded ground. They spoke of new meeting places, places for storing caches of guns. They spoke of their safe havens of mountain farms that provided food and volunteers.
CHAPTER ONE
Across the lake
Mra’ja the history teacher had spent the night awake, worrying. At the first show of light, he was loathe to start the day. He prayed, then he let the seconds slip by while restless time passed like sand through a bottom-less hourglass. He felt himself suspended in the emptied globe and let the day go forth without him.
Gradually, the spirit moved him to rise and open a window. Peering out, he found the sky was steely grey. A voluminous, grey cloud was becalmed in the absence of a wind. It hung like a submarine above the white build- ings of Derna. The air was cool on his warm skin. He shivered. Dogs barked in the hills. Like exclamation marks they punctured his thoughts. Cockerels crowed as they had done all night in random fashion. They gave a feel of useless assertiveness, now in the East, then over there in the West, next in nearby streets in the suburbs south. A ship in the harbour blasted its horn, a rude interruption. The song thrush, a recent arrival in the orchard, was silent, or else flown. Some things were as before. But the possible arrival or departure of the song thrush spoke of seasons changing. In his imagination, Mra’ja willed the song into being. It was not blended like the blackbird’s, but intermittent with pauses and repeats, like history.
Then panic fell upon him.
For Mra’ja was more aware than most that the past lived on in the present. At the beginning of the new school term, he would as usual remind his students of the ill-at-ease ghosts of things thought to be passed. He doubted that his young charges would feel the need to be troubled as he was by the their unfinished business, because just now the world was seemingly at peace with itself. Summer had been kind, and Ramadan, the month of fasting, had given them spiritual ease and good company.
Ease was a deception, of course. Mra’ja doubted the recent conflict had really ended with the truce. Did a treaty with all its caveats, no matter how honourably signed, ever guarantee lasting peace? More specifically, would the Sultan stand his ground and defend his Ottoman sanjaks in North Africa, if and when the time came to do so? Mra’ja thought not. And the time would come. He could see the Ottoman Empire falling and crumbling around them.
Peace after all was a distraction, an abstract idea, in Mra’ja’s view. It was a wing and a prayer, less tangible than a child’s trust, or, more ominously, more illusive than hope. This strain of thought made him intemperate at times. He was often irritable. Being used to his alarmist commentary on the state of the world, his wife, Maryam, coped by putting his despair down to his over-anxious disposition. But then, of late, she too could feel a smidgeon of his cause for anxiety. Talk of the imminence of war was spreading fast, by telegraph and post, from little town to little town all along the coast of Ottoman North Africa, in the forgotten villayet of Tripolitania.
Mra’ja understood well what was at stake. Under the old Ottoman suze- rainty, the three sanjaks of Tripolitania – Tripoli, Fezzan and Cyrenaica – had enjoyed a fair degree of freedom to run their own affairs, safeguarded in large part by a long-established interdependence between the coast and the hinterland. This equilibrium was delicate and likely to be challenged by the kind of change imperialist Italy would impose if she could. That was the question – if Italy could? Mra’ja was one of the very few who anticipated what would come after if the bonds that had kept that peace were torn apart.
Tripolitania was a large territory. To the stranger, it appeared boundless, so sparsely populated as to be considered virtually empty. Believing that the Balkan provinces were more key to the strategic advantage of the Ottoman Empire, Italy did not expect the Sultan to honour his imperial commitment to Tripolitania and so to defend her. And therein lay Italy’s opportunity.
Derna, in Cyrenaica, like so many of the coastal towns, was a surprise in waiting. Lying 170 km to the west of Tobruk, and 291 km to the east of Benghazi, she was a tract of plenty, cradled at its southern boundary by a curve of hills which lay at the eastern reach of the Green Mountain, Jebel Akhdar. Its water reserves were a mystery since there were no observable rivers at the surface, and yet the mountain slopes were covered with a dense forest of oak and evergreen carob, living proof of there being a source of sweet water. In lapses of time not yet understood, run-off from the winter rains that fell on the high plateau rushed into the valleys carrying laterite, staining the limestone escarpment iron-red, gouging the deep ravine of Wadi Derna so that Derna flourished as a green wonder, straddling the two sides of the valley. Gardens and fields were replenished by the flood water that flowed across the littoral, inundating the land with its rich allu- vium, and carving a nutrient-rich delta similar to the delta of the Nile. But from the beginning, Derna had been inaccessible to shipping due to its east-facing harbour. Derna was intriguing, unexplored, a fertile backwater, awaiting capture.
The Suez Canal had given impetus to trade with the Far East, but Europe had turned its gaze to the continent of Africa, and its northern and western coasts. By 1911, European forays into West African territories were deliv- ering surprising gains. From the northern coast, France had penetrated the Sahel and claimed Tunisia and Algeria for herself. Germany and Spain had designs on Morocco, as had France. Britain was in Egypt. Only the Sultan’s poorly defended territory of Tripolitania remained for Italy. Its Latin name declared its inevitable destiny of becoming Roman again.
The moment of readiness was signalled on June the 4th in 1911, when Rome celebrated the inauguration of the Altar to the Fatherland, a monu- ment dedicated to the glorious memory of Victor Emmanuel 11 and the founding of the state of Italy. In its panoramic terraces of white marble and with its gilt bronze equestrian statue, it commemorated the fiftieth anni- versary of the Unification of Italy. With its national status now affirmed, the future fortune of the Kingdom of Italy had become an almost-sacred mission. The government of the Kingdom, hesitant at first but spurred on by unrest in its industrial centres, dared to envisage Italy joining the club of European Empires, with the resurrection of an ancient Roman one. There would be no resistance to speak of, so the theory went. Dissent could easily be pushed aside, or overwhelmed by force. In any case, the natives, as they deemed them to be, needed rescuing from themselves and their presumed uncivilised way of life.
Mra’ja heard the song thrush calling out, this time in the real world, with its series of interrupted notes. He searched for the brown speckled bird hidden in the autumn-turning leaves of the vine. There was only the one sound of its song, repeating. Except there was also a jangling of pots and pans indoors. Maryam was arranging items in the kitchen. She would take the whole day to prepare the meal that broke the fast. It would be a modestly elaborate affair, the stages deliberate and thoughtful. The siesta would take its time as would the making of bread.
As for Mra’ja, he stood idly by at the door, committed to the lethargy that came from missing his coffee. The day would roll forwards as it must, slowly, allowing time for him to fret some more. Loosened tresses of his wife’s hair swung from her headscarf to the rhythmic to and fro of the kneading of dough.
Author’s statement – Why I had to write This Land belongs
After finishing my first novel, Chameleon in My Garden, I wanted to savour more of the place to which the story belonged. I had fought a campaign for my husband’s release from prison, but, having won the disfavour of the Libyan regime, I could not return to join him when he was freed. Libya itself was still a prison for him as for everyone.
Those who might have told me more about the history of this land which had so absorbed me had sadly passed away. I regretted being so preoccupied with my own challenges that I had not found time to ask them about their stories. I forgot about the importance of their memories.
Having spent thirty years writing ‘Chameleon’, and needing to return to writing, now on my laptop, I reflected on what could possibly follow my husband’s release. That story has yet to be concluded. It was interrupted by the Arab Spring with its searing elation and soon-to-be dismay. It is a story more suitably told by present and future Libyan generations. But writers cannot resist a story. Now that I knew that what came after ‘Chameleon’ could not have form until I had fathomed what had gone before, I turned to the possible memories. This became my second novel, This Land Belongs.
I started with the date of 1922, the year my female protagonist, Fathia, was to be born. There were few clues or intimations that I could latch onto. There was a grandfather much beloved and spoken of with pride. He was the Mufti of Derna imprisoned by the Italian colonial authorities some years later, whose photograph I had seen displayed in the now replaced British Museum Library. There was Derna, a place I had visited several times, a town that was blessed with water that flowed from a spring. It lay on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. And, of course, there was Benito Mussolini who was preparing to march on Rome, just as Fatma was ready to be born in Derna, delivered by a Sicilian midwife from the convent.
These fragments of a story were sufficient to engage me in a search for more. They took me further back in time to 1911 and the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912, precursor of WW1. The stage was set for a full cast of characters to emerge of their own logical accord. There was the history teacher vexed with a dilemma. Then there was the farmer and his valley farm in Shahhat in the Green Mountains, and my memory of a sweet dessert of walnuts and pomegranates. Also, there came the eager foreign journalists, investigators of an international incident surrounding the murder of an American, and witnesses to a brutal invasion, drinking coffee in the cafes and struggling with their representations of the truth. Along with the Sicilian midwife came her brother, injured in WW1 and keeper of Sicilian bees. Next a laicised priest with a camera, and Sicilian geographers with ambitions for adventure and fame.
I did not create a staged play of good and evil actors but found there were many Italian actors whose generosity and basic goodness redeemed the Italian spirit of the time. Movingly, Moslem converts, English, Jewish and Catholic, were prepared to throw their lot in with the heroic Senussi resistance.
Backbone to the Derna community was a collection of aunts, mothers and daughters who nurtured their families throughout thirty years of oppression and war of one kind or another. I paid tribute to them. In the process of getting to know them, they became part of my own real family. On the laptop page, as in life, these people were populating my imagination, and they stood shoulders above their notorious oppressors, those with such illustrious or intimidating names, such as Italo Balbo the Ras of Ferrara, Rodolfo Graziani the Butcher of Fezzan, and Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, Il Duce.
Encompassing all this humanity was the alluring landscape arena of Cyrenaica, almost mythical in its scope for allowing a story to unfold. The Green Mountains, the Ancient Greek site of Cyrene on the hill slopes overlooking a fertile plain up to the Crescent Bay of the blue Mediterranean.The massive desert hinterland, unknown and unmapped, was a mystery. The orchards of Derna, unforgettable for the overhanging abundance of fruit trees in bright sunny lanes, and the white domes of its mosques. There were oases with date-palm trees, oak, carob and juniper forests on the plateau, hillsides perfect for picnics on a carpet of wild flowers, horse treks in the mountains, the long ceremony of tea-making and sweet pastries, sumptuous weddings and glittering brides, births and tragic deaths. However, most alarmingly, there were the wastelands commandeered by the Italian colonialists for concentrations camps.
Along with the collision of these clashing realities came a sense of everything being super-charged with energy, light, and the human capacity for charity. But also, alarmingly, with the human capacity for vanity and its corollary of inhumanity.
Coming to the final chapters, I understood I had revealed to myself a beautiful landscape that had been purloined and oppressed by a colonial occupation for thirty years or more. It was a usurpation of power and agency that destroyed the natural continuity of life in the very land that was stolen. It had disrupted ancient trade patterns and normal communing between local and diverse communities. It had deprived a people of their own unique destiny. What a terrible fate it was, to be located at the north of one continent that faced the southern shore of another, and there to lie under an alien gaze that might be loaded with either a hateful antipathy or an envious desire.
So the final chapters give the floor to the actors’ and the poets’ voices. With new independence, a sense of belonging to the land and of the land belonging was rightfully returned, once fascism in Europe was defeated, after a phenomenal struggle in which so many lives were lost.
New research on the plight of Libyan Jews under Italian persecution was brought to my attention, and I realised there was an additional searing memory which I had not included in the first edition of This Land Belongs. There were natural links already embedded in the early part of the story, and so it was natural that a second addition was written to include extra chapters in final Part 10.
I see Libya as a living organism. It is also a carpet, a pathway, a journey within and across, a longing and an inconvenient convenience, still longed for, still enviously desired.
CHAPTER ONE
Across the lake
Mra’ja the history teacher had spent the night awake, worrying. At the first show of light, he was loathe to start the day. He prayed, then he let the seconds slip by while restless time passed like sand through a bottom-less hourglass. He felt himself suspended in the emptied globe and let the day go forth without him.
Gradually, the spirit moved him to rise and open a window. Peering out, he found the sky was steely grey. A voluminous, grey cloud was becalmed in the absence of a wind. It hung like a submarine above the white buildings of Derna. The air was cool on his warm skin. He shivered. Dogs barked in the hills. Like exclamation marks they punctured his thoughts. Cockerels crowed as they had done all night in random fashion. They gave a feel of useless assertiveness, now in the East, then over there in the West, next in nearby streets in the suburbs south. A ship in the harbour blasted its horn, a rude interruption. The song thrush, a recent arrival in the orchard, was silent, or else flown. Some things were as before. But the possible arrival or departure of the song thrush spoke of seasons changing. In his imagination, Mra’ja willed the song into being. It was not blended like the blackbird’s, but intermittent with pauses and repeats, like history.
Then panic fell upon him.
For Mra’ja was more aware than most that the past lived on in the present. At the beginning of the new school term, he would as usual remind his students of the ill-at-ease ghosts of things thought to be passed. He doubted that his young charges would feel the need to be troubled as he was by the unfinished business of History, because just now the world was seemingly at peace with itself. Summer had been kind, and Ramadan, the month of fasting, had given them spiritual ease and good company.
Ease was a deception, of course. Mra’ja doubted the recent conflict had really ended with the truce. Did a treaty with all its caveats, no matter how honourably signed, ever guarantee lasting peace? More specifically, would the Sultan stand his ground and defend his Ottoman sanjaks in North Africa, if and when the time came to do so? Mra’ja thought not. And the time would come. He could see the Ottoman Empire falling and crumbling around them.
Peace after all was a distraction, an abstract idea, in Mra’ja’s view. It was a wing and a prayer, less tangible than a child’s trust, or, more ominously, more illusive than hope. This strain of thought made him intemperate at times. He was often irritable. Being used to his alarmist commentary on the state of the world, his wife, Maryam, put his despair down to an over-anxious disposition. But then, of late, she too could sense his premonition of war. Talk of the imminence of war was spreading fast, by telegraph and post, from little town to little town all along the coast of Ottoman North Africa, in the forgotten villayet of Tripolitania.
Mra’ja understood well what was at stake. Under the old Ottoman suzerainty, the three sanjaks of Tripolitania – Tripoli, Fezzan and Cyrenaica – had enjoyed a fair degree of freedom to run their own affairs, safeguarded in large part by a long-established interdependence between the coast and the hinterland. This equilibrium was delicate and likely to be challenged by the kind of change imperialist Italy would impose if she could. That was the question – if Italy could? Mra’ja was one of the very few who anticipated what would come after if the bonds that had kept that peace were torn apart.
***
Tripolitania was a large territory. To the stranger, it appeared boundless, so sparsely populated as to be considered virtually empty. Believing that the Balkan provinces were more key to the strategic advantage of the Ottoman Empire, Italy did not expect the Sultan to honour his imperial commitment to Tripolitania and so to defend her. And therein lay Italy’s opportunity.
Derna, in Cyrenaica, like so many of the coastal towns, was a surprise in waiting. Lying 170 km to the west of Tobruk, and 291 km to the east of Benghazi, she was a tract of plenty, cradled at its southern boundary by a curve of hills which lay at the eastern reach of the Green Mountain, Jebel Akhdar. Its water reserves were a mystery since there were no observable rivers at the surface, and yet the mountain slopes were covered with a dense forest of oak and evergreen carob, living proof of there being a source of sweet water. In lapses of time not yet understood, run-off from the winter rains that fell on the high plateau rushed into the valleys carrying laterite, staining the limestone escarpment iron-red, gouging the deep ravine of Wadi Derna so that Derna flourished as a green wonder, straddling the two sides of the valley. Gardens and fields were replenished by the flood water that flowed across the littoral, inundating the land with its rich alluvium, and carving a nutrient-rich delta similar to the delta of the Nile. But from the beginning, Derna had been inaccessible to shipping due to its east-facing harbour. Derna was intriguing, unexplored, a fertile backwater, awaiting capture.
The Suez Canal had given impetus to trade with the Far East, but Europe had turned its gaze to the continent of Africa, and its northern and western coasts. By 1911, European forays into West African territories were deliv- ering surprising gains. From the northern coast, France had penetrated the Sahel and claimed Tunisia and Algeria for herself. Germany and Spain had designs on Morocco, as had France. Britain was in Egypt. Only the Sultan’s poorly defended territory of Tripolitania remained for Italy. Its Latin name declared its inevitable destiny of becoming Roman again.
The moment of readiness was signalled on June the 4th in 1911, when Rome celebrated the inauguration of the Altar to the Fatherland, a monu- ment dedicated to the glorious memory of Victor Emmanuel 11 and the founding of the state of Italy. In its panoramic terraces of white marble and with its gilt bronze equestrian statue, it commemorated the fiftieth anni- versary of the Unification of Italy. With its national status now affirmed, the future fortune of the Kingdom of Italy had become an almost-sacred mission. The government of the Kingdom, hesitant at first but spurred on by unrest in its industrial centres, dared to envisage Italy joining the club of European Empires, with the resurrection of an ancient Roman one. There would be no resistance to speak of, so the theory went. Dissent could easily be pushed aside, or overwhelmed by force. In any case, the natives, as they deemed them to be, needed rescuing from themselves and their presumed uncivilised way of life.
***
Mra’ja heard the song thrush calling out, this time in the real world, with its series of interrupted notes. He searched for the brown speckled bird hidden in the autumn-turning leaves of the vine. There was only the one sound of its song, repeating. Except there was also a jangling of pots and pans indoors. Maryam was arranging items in the kitchen. She would take the whole day to prepare the meal that broke the fast. It would be a modestly elaborate affair, the stages deliberate and thoughtful. The siesta would take its time as would the making of bread.
As for Mra’ja, he stood idly by at the door, committed to the lethargy that came from missing his coffee. The day would roll forwards as it must, slowly, allowing time for him to fret some more. He turned to his wife who was making bread for the breaking of the fast. Her loosened tresses, freed from her headscarf, moved to the rhythm of the kneading of dough.
Nita Nicholson 
Tell me what you think