Free Tangier by Angus Stewart

anyone else, would have been an insult. There was nothing academic about the knowledge. I could sense their communal insistence, pleasure critically poised upon my supposed satisfaction.
    Visually the scene was beautiful. Badly hinged, ill-joined boards, the door had been closed against the wind. The flame of the paraffin lamp flickered. Light played across the prematurely aged faces of the married couple; and the pale regularity of the little girls' features, which the excitement of a stranger exploded into giggles, ineffectually smothered by a handful of dress clasped to the mouth, before solemnity returned without parental admonition. Loneliness was sabotaged. The irony of the situation was compounded by the fact that thought had robbed me of all appetite whatsoever. Five years later I was eating more easily among very poor people.
     
    The visit to this family was in return for an unexpected visit paid me by Niñ and his father some months previously, early one evening during Ramadan. Might they spend the night? Of course. But there were elements of farce to follow,
    Staying with me already were a young English doctor and his girlfriend. The Moroccan countryman's first experience of the English (and probably any Nsara - Christians) at home was arriving in the middle of a cocktail party. Introducing my Moslem guests to the English couple, I made for the kitchen to prepare mint tea, and stopped dead. The newcomers couldn't be offered so much as a cheese straw. The sun was still horribly high in the sky. Until it set, and the cannon boomed from Tangier's harbour, the Moroccans wouldn't accept even a glass of water.
    'I think we should stop eating these soggy crisps.' Katie suggested.
    'Angus must pour the drink back into the bottle as a symbol of solidarity,' said Hugh who, having tried French and Spanish unsuccessfully on the bemused senior djibli , was sensibly admiring the two live hens which had armed with the Moroccans and now lay bound among the bottles.
    'I think courtesy will be adequately expressed by our looking at our watches and remarking sympathetically how far the sun still has to fall,' I said. This I did, but not before Katie asked me: 'Isn't your little boy too young to observe Ramadan anyway?'
    In the kitchen I explained to her that while at an uncertain thirteen Niñ was not, and though there is no specific age at which one must begin the fast, he had eaten heartily during daylight hours a few days previously. 'I think he's observing it today as much for Dad's benefit as for Allah's,' I said. 'And I imagine he won't ask me for a cigarette the moment the gun booms either.'
    Though the English couple and myself were no longer in the flat when the official signal to break abstinence echoed dully through the city that night the hypothesis proved correct. During my return visit to the hills, and with Ramadan ended, the boy would surreptitiously request a cigarette before leaving the hut. Lectures on health hazards sound hollow to a simple Moroccan, never mind coming from a heavy-smoking Nesrani . On our overland march to his village Niñ was to make it clear that he was nervous of any witness. Tonight in Tangier, he was scared only of his Dad. In fact I had received muttered instructions that he would not be smoking within minutes of their entering the flat, and had replied with a Moghrebi word and a wry look which, together, expressed: 'You don't say!'
    The night was only beginning. Hugh, the girl and I had planned to eat out; then go to the Koutoubia night club. It was the first day of their brief tour of Morocco. I had no idea hose to make harira . The soup would be the first thought of my Moroccan guests the minute the earth's rotation permitted, the Governor of Tangier to telephone the artillery battery the order to fire its blank shell. Whether his decision was determined traditionally at the moment when a thread of white cotton became indistinguishable from a thread of black, or by Greenwich and a