She loved him — perhaps she loved others as well — even when they were all but starving, living in a squalid mud hut outside the graceful walls of El Oued. At the time, he was on sporadic half-pay, and they subsisted on arrack and kef and were in debt to every money-lender in the village. The sergeant could not or would not find other work, and while Isabelle tried to write, tried to earn a few francs or dinars, their gums began to go spongy, their teeth to float about in the mush, their needful lips to ooze and crust with sores. They could hardly sink lower when the news came of Slimène’s transfer to wretched Batna and the French garrison there. Once more, his commanders were not interested in him — he could barely sit a horse, let alone lead a squad of men — but wanted Mahmoud out of the district and away from the Qadyras (who might or might not be fanatical Muslims); perhaps they wanted to step upon the tentacles squirming from Moscow, or perhaps from Berlin or London, they could not be sure. They could not be sure, in fact, that there were any tentacles squirming their way across the steppes (or alps or downs) and over the sea (or seas) and burning sands. At any rate, he made them uncomfortable and they wanted him gone, perhaps all the way back to France or someplace where he would not be a bother, source of rumor and speculation, or temptation.

The Arab Jeweler, ca. 1882
(Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 89.9 cm)
BY Charles Sprague Pearce
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Both stinking, hungry, covered with lice and fleas, and somewhat encrusted with the various happy or unhappy emissions of the flesh, they were moved more by the possibility of separation than by the specter of starvation, and they determined, after a night of alcoholized molasses and hashish, all the time entwining and entwining until they could not tell apart their limbs or skins, teeth or tongues, they determined to do what they were understandably reluctant to do — though each had a long history of it — and that was to beg. They decided to call upon the three sheiks, the naïbs of the Qadryas, bound as they were by Sufi law to give aid to those of their order in need.

Slimène, of course, developed the first stirrings of tuberculosis just before they set out to see El Hachemi, the eldest of the three brothers who was preparing to lead a group of Qadrya pilgrims to Nefta. He went along, anyway, to be a hindrance, a burden to Mahmoud.

Surrounded as the sheik was by anxious, excited pilgrims, they could not — I learned later from one of the household’s groomsmen — get him alone, even for a few moments, until late in the evening. When at last they sat down together on some rugs in a vaulted room in his lodge, a crescent moon and a few candles providing the only light, the effervescent, charming Slimène could not speak, but sat slumped, almost unconscious, perchance drooling. Mahmoud, reduced to tears, could only beg with his eyes, intent as he was upon preventing his Rouh from tumbling completely to the floor. The sheik, seeing how impoverished they were, and knowing of their troubles anyway, passed them a handful of francs, enough for food and a little more to put toward their debts or toward a place to live in Batna, saying,

— God will find more.

The Rouh, burning with fever, hunger, and delirium, mad with the futility and powerlessness of his life, all at once laughed hysterically, half-crying, half-screaming, able to make no words, just a jagged, piercing howl.

…they wanted him gone, perhaps all the way back to France or someplace where he would not be a bother, source of rumor and speculation, or temptation.

The sheik, no doubt in disgust and anxious to be away from the failed soldier’s uselessness and stink (he seems to have lost control, in his delirious outcry, of his bowels), left the room at once. As best he could, Mahmoud half-carried his raving, shitting soul to their horses — the sheik’s men had fed them — and led them away, back to the house which was no longer their home.

Two days later, having cleaned up Slimène as well as they could, they went to see El Hussein, El Hachemi’s brother, to discover if they could not, in the same manner, increase their fortune and thereby pay more of their debts, buy food for themselves and their horses, and set aside a little more for Batna. The sheik, observing the walking skeleton that Slimène had become, and remembering fondly the long, all-night discussions he and Mahmoud had had about the Sufi mysteries and about the murder of the marquis de Morès et de Montemaggiore and the sentencing of Dreyfus to Devil’s Island, wept at the sight of his friends — or perhaps his eyes watered from the odor of corruption and death about the man with one eye fixed on the sun, the other tracking an ant marching across the floor. Perhaps he also wept at their imminent departure and, like his older brother, passed them a handful of francs, saying,

— May the peace and mercy and blessings of God be upon you,
but in such a manner that suggested he was willing, if Mahmoud so desired, to cut her soul’s rotten head from its dying body and throw it over the wall to the village’s feral dogs.

Evidently, he declined the offer, but did accept the money.