Dora Bacaicoa, Neffah

Dora Bacaicoa, Neffah

Ahmed’s hands hung, clenched, from the pallet bed. A world of fantasies was trapped between his stiff fingers. Groaning, he brought his hands to his face, to his lips, trying to stem the spurts of imaginary blood. His body ached, all the way down to his bones…

He saw himself, once again, at the peak of a mountain, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. At his feet was spread the desolate, tense valley, bathed in yellowing light. Suddenly – had it come from the sky? – a landslide fell upon them. A huge boulder crushed him, flattened him as if he were little more than a piece of lifeless matter. Ahmed did not feel any pain, apart from a slight pressure on his chest.

 Now, in the valley, some tall, large women picked him up, took him to an enormous house. There he saw beds, and more beds, all white. The women left him on one of them.

“You’re going to die, you’re going to die…”, Ahmed told himself.

Yet, strangely, he was not afraid. He had, though, always been terrified of “the thing” that would make the goats and sheep he cared for stiff, that would quickly leave them foul-smelling and riddled with worms. Did something similar happen to people, too? He had never seen a dead person.

He was the standoffish, solitary orphan who earned his annual jillaba robe and his food surrounded by the animals that the master left in his care. He only saw the other shepherds when they came together to eat the evening meal. Sullen, silent, he would eat slowly, offering his dog the best bits. Then we would wrap himself in his jillaba and, throwing himself down onto a pile of straw, accompanied by the dog that would never leave his side, he would sleep with his eyes sunk into the distant stars.

The hospital. The white house where he found himself was the hospital. He thought of his grandmother, who had disappeared, who he had one day gone to see in the hospital in Chefchaouen. The shepherds told him that she had died there. Ahmed’s innocent mind had always connected those two things: the hospital and death.

The women had left him strewn on the bed, as if he were a limp rag, as if he no longer had any bones. He started coughing. Spurts of blood came from his mouth, fresh and red.

“I’m done for!” The child thought. “I’m broken inside, broken!”

No-one paid him any attention. The strangers all around him carried on chatting, arguing, living, while Ahmed was slowly dying, drowning in mouthfuls of warm blood. A hand offered him a pan filled with soft cheese. Covered in red blood, Ahmed sunk his lips into it, time and again, anxiously slurping up that smooth, soft mass of white. He wanted to live, to live…

The overriding desire to conquer death brought him to his senses, piercing, like an arrow, the imperceptible line that separates being awake from being asleep, rising in his throat like the blood that he, fully awake now, sought out on his own lips. 

***

But the pain that gripped him was not a dream. Ahmed opened his eyes and looked around. In the darkness of the dingy, dirty room, there stood out, shining like a shard of topaz, a chink of sky. Ahmed’s brown eyes were fixed upon it. How he would have liked to fly away toward that blue glow.

Memories came flooding back, scuffling with one another. And with them came a more pronounced pain than the one keeping him in that dark hole. His Neffah! Tears slid silently down his dark cheeks, dotting them with murky shards of glass that came between him and the light. His Neffah, his beloved dog! He remembered her as a little pup. He had fed her sheeps’ milk, without the master knowing. All those nights Neffah had slept, curled into a ball, right beside his face, tickling his nose with her fur!

Neffah had grown, becoming the most beautiful dog in the area. She knew how to nip at any animal that strayed too far from the flock, so that it would return to the others. They would race with each other and Neffah would always win, fast as the wind. And what about that time that boy fell in the river? If it hadn’t been for the dog… That very same Neffah had taught him how to swim, too, helping him to lose his fear of water.

Ahmed came to suspect that Neffah was actually a person. What is more, he was convinced that she was his sister. He had sat many times looking at Neffah closely, waiting to see her turn into a young girl. At first, his young mind could not understand why she was a dog.

One night, the shepherds told stories of demons, of spirits that flew through the air and attacked humans. Then Ahmed understood it. He looked questioningly at Neffah.

“Is it true that you are my sister and that a demon has turned you into a dog?”, he asked with his eyes.

And her eyes responded:

“Yes, Ahmed.”

In any case, even if Neffah were not a girl, having a little dog as a sister would never have bothered Ahmed. It might even have been more fun.

But now his dog was no more. She did not even look like an animal anymore. The previous night, Neffah had eaten some meat that a shepherd was keeping for his dinner. Furious, he summoned the other shepherds. They trapped her between them. They began beating her. Ahmed, in a frenzy, put himself between them. They beat them both with equal viciousness. They left Neffah an indistinct, bloody lump.

Intoxicated, now, by this murderous rage, they might well have killed Ahmed, too. Some women intervened. Barely conscious, they brought him to this dark and dingy place. Then the next day dawned. A day on which Neffah was no longer alive.

Ahmed, his brown eyes filled with a fire that his tears could not put out, was caught between hatred and sorrow, dreaming of a country without humans, where placid sheep and gruff goats could graze peacefully in its valleys, where a dog like Neffah, lively and playful, could eat meat, lots of meat, without pain…