Pear Morning

A Peaceful Friday Morning in Bou Saada

Is it already a month since I have started giving English lessons? Since our first day I told them that this may not continue, and we are in a trial, that can succeed into more serious and regular paid lessons. Our verbal agreement include that each one of us is free to stop the lessons on his side. Few students dropped during the month, others new ones joined us, but I was attached the most to those who accompanied me from the first, to the last, lesson.

How are you? I asked. They answered in one voice: Fine thank you and you? One of them, who always makes jokes, and is the fastest to learn, added in Arabic: here you are giving us a lesson! Aissa (=Jesus), Raid (=pioneer), Aimen (=the right handed), and a relative of them joined me from our center to the nearby hill to take photos.

I headed to the center of the city where a couple of storks had made a nest above the telephone tower. The storks were not there. To the left there was the martyr's monument.

From between the two buildings of the municipality I found my way to an old café usually attended by old men. I like its peaceful slowness and calm and found it an opportunity to take photos, especially to old men, and to the machine of the Espresso that we don't have in Iraq.

Espresso Machine

Mille Feuilles et une Feuille

Thirsday. No work. Just another day. To spend. To spend? To the left my friend. What for? For buying journals. You forgot that? El-Watan, and… where is Le Soir D'Algerie? Didn't come yet? Okay let us take…. mmmm… Liberte… To the café my friend… and here is a new mille feuilles…. And your Espresso… and three L&M cigarettes.

You eat by big bites as if time is running out of you. You know that your time is a Saharian one these days. Lessons of patience are giving to you while you have some right loin pain. Hmmm? Are you enjoying that? I am a little astonished by your anarchic way of learning French. You seem to take learning new things as fighting. As if you are fighting. A son of rat becomes a digger! Why you are looking at me like that? Do you want to speak. Speak!

No I don't want to speak but I found your proverb strange. A rat and a digger!! Here look at those cartoons. Astonishing. Algerian journals got talented cartoonists. That was a discovery for me you know. We don't use to have good cartoonists in our area of the world. They express themselves cleverly. Not like you! A rat and a digger! Huh!

Lettres de Mon Moulin Bou Saadien

"Lettres de Mon Moulin" are short stories from the villages of France by Alphonse Daudet. Yesterday night I read "Le Secret de Maitre Cornille" which is about that old Mr. Cornille who refused to accept the fact that they don't need his windmill to grind the wheat anymore since the newly built steam-driven mills in the area. He locked the door of his windmill in the face of the people. Every day he went out from his windmill carrying a full bag on his donkey. He says that it is grinded wheat. That was his secret. One day, somebody entered inside the windmill, and discovered that its walls are falling from the inside, and the bags that Mr. Cornille takes out every morning are full of nothing but the debris of his old windmill.








Yesterday was the first time in my life to see a red tuna. In Iraq we used to have them canned. But the surprise didn't stop at that. When we opened the tuna, we found a sardine inside it. That was so strange to me. I was happy to a degree that I went for a walk at night. I took with me my copy of bilingual (French – Arabic): Lettres de Mon Moulin of Alphonse Daudet, thinking that I may found some time to read outside.

I woke up this morning, drank my Espresso. Then was surprised again by my family, who saw how much happy I was yesterday by the red tuna. Today they surprised me by another kind of fish that I never saw before: Anguille!!!

I have nothing to do in Wednesday (as most of the week days), so I took a nap, then woke up and head to a café to have an Espresso and a cigarette (I only drink a cigarette in cafés these days. I buy single cigarettes, i.e. one by one and not by packets, in a trial to limit its availability).

In our unpaved neighbourhood, the sun is no strong, and I was still sleepy.

The table is not so clean, and tatooed by: Tanga!

From that Kiosk, if you may call it kiosk, which lies under the umbrella, I buy my solitary cigarettes which can have different markes in different days.

This is the picture that I like the most.

With my shadow, Le Soir D'Alger on my hand, I went back to my windmill.

Just another morning in Bou Saada

Good Morning. It is a new morning. Come with me in a walk in Bou Saada. I offer you an Espresso with Croissant. Wait, what is this? He did it! We adviced him not to cut this painting but he kept saying that he liked the face of the old man, and the rest of the painting was a failure. Anyway.

Look at this side; this is where he puts his colors, papers, and almost everything. I like this shelf particularly because it is chaotically beautiful. I don't like orders you know.

Let me shot the door please, it is an iron door as you see and it makes noise in the morning. I don't like it. Anyway. Our street is still unpaved. This quarter is relatively new in Bou Saada. It started in the 80s. Few houses separated by empty spaces. Now, it is crowded. And noisy. Many cars. I hate cars. Anyway.

You see that mountain in front of us? That is called mountain Iz-El-Deen. Iz-El-Deen can be a name of a person. Literally it means: "The Glory of Religion"! Sounds strange maybe to you. Religion is present vividly in our daily life here. In my last trip to the capital, we were speaking of Prophet Mohammed in the taxi that took us from Bou Saada. I a bus in central Alger, the capital, a young man next to me started talking to me comparing Mohammed and Jesus. He seemed to me an Evangelist. In the taxi that was taking me back to Bou Saada a man started telling us about the detailed life of Moses. We are exaggerating? May be you can say that we exaggerate in everything. Who are we? That is beyond my.... my... anyway.

Let us go just few meters to the right to buy journals and then head up to the café. I like El-Watan cartoons. I like to read any French journal. I am practicing you know. I'm thinking about getting a degree in languages, or literature. French language maybe, or Spanish. I am teaching English these days you know, and a student told me last Friday that she had saw me before in the Iraqi T.V. channel. Being Iraqi is a privilege here. Well, to a degree, I mean. I asked her what I was doing in the T.V. and she said that I was wearing a yellow T-Shirt and trousers. Her friend asked her: really? You saw him? She answered: yes, I saw him.

Look at the colors of our females' dresses. Anyway.

I come to this café when I want to see people cause it is near the garage where taxis take you to the surrounding villages. Another bigger garage that lies far from here is specialized to taxis which can take you to other governorates and big cities. This garage is for villages.

Yeah I know the coffee is little strong. Little bitter. Anyway.

Elie Mitri's Hair Cut

Night is my preferred time in the 24 hours. From my space ship, or, in other more earthy term, from my bed, I watch some T.V. Then I join my theatre, my now more dimly litted bed, to play a scenic reading of some novels. Novels, finnished, and unfinnished, take the roles chaoticly, moodly. I read "Je t'Offrirai une Gazelle" of Malek Haddad once in Arabic, and twice in French. Yet, I sometimes read some of its lines again before I sleep. The novel is about an Algerian novelist and his manuscript of a novel that he refused to put his name on it. He said, trying to explain, that " the benefactors to dreams travel incognito".

As far as I can remember, no novel had entered into my dreams. Yet, I have dreamt before two days of a Lebanese singer named Sabah. I saw Sabah the day before the dream in the T.V. talking frankly about her life including the strange accedent of her brother killing her mother and her mother's lover. Anyway, in my dream, I was with Sabah in a trip somewhere in my Iraqi neighbourhood, in a place that kept being mysterious to me since it is covered by rich trees. Young lovers in our neighbourhood used to go to that site to meet. In the dream we discovered a secret site where Inas (an Iraqi actrice that played the role of Affifa Iskander in an Iraqi series) was hiding.

That dream passed away without much revelance to me. But yesterday's dream was funny. And because of it here I am writing to you.

I dreamt I was with some resident doctors I knew from Hilla in a balcony. Our enemy was on the other side of a river. It was night. It was me who dared to start shooting on them. I was very accurate and professional. That passed as if a scene from a video game. The balcony was empty, or almost empty few seconds after that. I went walking in a beautiful place which is unknown to me but it seemed to me, in the dream, that I was in this same place in an other old dream of mine, and I remembered that old dream while I was dreaming. Anyway, let us go to the funny scene.

The funny scene started when Elie Mitri came to fight a man he thought he can win. Another man joined the fight and Elie Mitri fell on the ground. The men kept fighting each other while Elie Mitri stood hardly. Bullets came from the side of the scene and passed through Elie Mitri's hair cutting it fastly and sharply. Stunned he came walking to me and said: "And here I got a new hair cut!". His hair was cut beautifully actually. That was very funny that I can still giggle when I remember it.