Ten bees had already landed on the tray of fresh pastries to The Judge’s left. As they did each morning, the bees probably wondered why the honey drizzled atop the pastries was so warm, or why their fellows had been so remiss in letting it escape its hexagonal chambers, or why they were so casually disturbed in flight. Steam rose with the bees from the pastries in the wintery mountain air. On his right, a pile of croissants sat, less picked-over by bees, hints of chocolate peeking out from under their crispy edges. The Judge raised his hand, shooed away two bees, and darted to grab one of the larger, nutty pastries. It had been over six years since his last sting.
Marouane, the baker, had a glass of warm milk already on the counter, pale pink with grenadine syrup. The Judge clinked two multicolored coins onto the counter, grabbed the milk and mumbled his thanks. Three motorcycles, piloted by young men with someplace to be early in the morning, rattled past, their two-stroke motors blackening the street. Courier services had become popular after the privatization of Postes Watany, the National Post, and many young men were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.
An Adujatant-Chef of the Royal Gendarmerie walked up to The Judge’s table. “Sidi Harun, begging your pardon.” The Judge, as he did every morning, waved the nutty pastry in his hand at the chair to his left. “Shokran, Sidi Harun.”
“La shokran ala wajib,” The Judge said. There is no need to thank me for doing my job.
The officer pinched and twirled his ample mustache. “Judge, sir. Your Honor. You are, of course, familiar with the prophet Ayyub, peace be upon him.”
“May his memory be a blessing.”
“And you remember how he once told his wife that he would beat her a hundred times?”
“When she, as it is said, complained of the afflictions God was putting them through.”
“And when God believed Ayuub was a good man and faithful, and he restored to Ayuub his family, his wife was distraught because she thought he would have to beat her a hundred times in this, their hour of greatest happiness.” He paused.
“And God gave Ayyub the instruction to caress her back a hundred times with soft grasses instead, of course.”
“Right!” said the Gendarme, “This is my conundrum. God tells man that the beating of the wife in an hour of such happiness is forbidden, because Ayyub was his very faithful servant, and if he would not allow Ayyub to do it, it must be forbidden to all.”
“But how is this a conundrum? Are you not an upstanding man? You should not beat your wife at all!”
“I do not, Judge, sir! I have never wanted to!” Conspiratorially, he leaned towards The Judge. “When we are in bed, sometimes she asks me to beat her. I want to make her happiest, Judge, but God would not allow me to.”
“Ah, this is a conundrum!” The judge reached back with his now-spindly arms, gathering the collective knowledge of the sages, and brought his right hand to his temple, to tug the top of his ample sideburns. “I believe you will find that God makes a dispensation for those who have requested that violence be visited upon them, like the wrestler in the ring. The next time she asks, you can tell her yes.”
“Thank you, Judge.” The officer got up. His brilliant white peaked cap settled back on his head, the King’s coat of arms in polished brass caught the sun and scattered it across the Judge’s face.
The Judge sighed deeply. It was so often sex. They could trust him in a way they could not trust other judges, he supposed, and so they asked him those most intimate questions. He tossed the last bit of pastry high in the air, and it fell down towards his open mouth. It had been a month since he had missed. He had allowed himself this bit of play ever since a child sweeping the ground by the Tramway told him Judges were not allowed to have fun. He had worried then that the child was right, he could not remember having fun on purpose since he refereed the third place match of the World Team Handball Championship in East Berlin. And so he had perfected it now, so that it almost seemed like a chore, so that the fun had almost left it unless he caught some tourist watching him do the preposterous thing.
This morning, a gull swooped and grabbed the pastry in mid-flight. The Judge sat with his mouth open, facing the sky. A young man in a yellow Veloia high-vis jumpsuit swept the square with a palm frond. The Judge said a silent prayer for the health of the bird. A woman began frying semolina flour pancakes on a griddle next to Marouane’s bakery, under a rack of jars of nutella and chocolate sauce and marmalades. The Judge looked absentmindedly back down and noticed his milk. The son of the newspaperman on the corner of the square dropped three newspapers on the table, grabbed the coin that the Judge had already placed for him, and ran off again. The Judge scanned the headlines of Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat, Al-Haraka, and Le Journal d’Aujourd’hui, found nothing special, and put them back down. A tourist took his picture, an old man reading a newspaper, surely a contender for photo of the month at the Florence, South Carolina Society of Oriental Explorers. Judge Harun Margi swigged the rest of his milk, placed all three papers in the crook of his arm with practiced ease, and set off toward the Hall of Justice.
---
It had been surprisingly easy, The Judge noted to himself while flipping through Al-Haraka, the party’s newspaper, to join the Haraka Shaabiya, the Popular Movement, when he was a young man. The requirements were simple: commitment to democratic change and the agricultural principles put forward by the purged Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. All of The Judge’s friends were joining, and he had just finished his degree in agronomy and found himself without a job, so at 20 years old, Harun Margi became the Second Secretary for Haraka Shaabiya, the Popular Movement, in the valley of Ouataroucht.
The first protest against low olive prices that Harun Margi organized had 20 attendees. They mostly sat in small groups with signs and wheat-colored Haraka Shaabiya hats, playing parcheesi outside the Credit Agricole. The bank manager shooed them away, yelling about gambling to the local Gendarme Sergeant and hitting the protesters with a broom. It was the broom which was most responsible for the fact that the next protest attracted at least one member of every family in the valley and about as many donkeys. The story had spread, and groups of friends and families came down from the hills and up from the dells to yell at the bank manager, or watch him get yelled at. The theater in Ouataroucht had been the victim of the crash of a wayward Hawker Hurricane during the British campaign in North Africa and it was rare to have such a public display of inspired acting. When he was appointed to the Court, The Judge sent the bank manager’s son a letter of thanks, and a new broom.
It was Harun Margi who organized the broom-offended olive growers and pickers in the valley into a coordinated arm of Haraka Shaabiya, and Harun Margi who brought them out into the streets, first just of Ouataroucht, then other small towns across the valley, then to neighboring valleys. It was Harun Margi who surprised the fifty-strong Gendarmerie post in Ain Al-Muqit with a ten-thousand-farmer protest, and it was Harun Margi who organized twenty thousand farmers and field workers and nearly that many of their wives, so the newspaper had reported the next day, for a march up to Tarbouch to support the new constitution that would allow Haraka Shaabiya to run in the very first parliamentary election.
It was this newspaper-noted achievement which brought Harun Margi to the attention of Hicham Idrisi, the King’s Minister of the Interior. The leaders of Haraka Shaabiya called Mr. Idrisi “The Dyer,” after the way that he used the blood of the tortured to blacken the leather for the slippers he made for his wife and daughters. Mr. Idrisi’s interest took the form of a visit by a Gendarmerie Captain to the Margi family home.
Sprawling out in an architectural style that a tourist from Oklahoma or Los Angeles might describe as Ranch-like, with the open second floor as a courtyard of sorts and a home for Sambu, the family dog, the Margi home was one of the largest in the valley. Having owned half the hillside from generation to generation, and having been able to coax trees out of it to stay standing and give olives, the Margis were not as poor as some in the valley. They had, after all, been able to send Harun and his oldest sister to school. His younger brothers had shown great interest in farming, and his father Musa had taken the decision to let the groves and hillsides teach them instead.
Musa Margi answered the door for the Captain, poured him some sheba tea, and then sat quietly while Harun was interrogated for six hours about his political activity. By the time it had become obvious that Harun was interested only in winning better prices for the agricultural products of the valley, (and perhaps a subsidy for fertilizer to increase yields) and not in changing the structure of the government (which should have been obvious from the outset, Haraka Shaabiya had always been a Royalist and democratic movement, but the Captain had to check) it was too late for the Captain to leave, the one-lane cliffside road was impassable in the dark.
The next morning, the Captain asked Harun to walk him out to his Jeep. Harun opened the door, and let the captain out, and fended off a charge from one of the family’s sheep, and patted the hood of the Jeep. “You know, I’ve never been in a car before,” he said to the Captain.
“I can’t take you in this one,” the Captain said. “I bet horses go faster on these old dirt tracks anyway. They can move to avoid the holes.”
“They do,” said Harun. “Our horse is the best. But I usually ride one of our donkeys.”
“You’re a smart young man. Can I pay to send you to school?”
“I’ve been to school. It’s where I learned I didn’t need to go to school anymore.”
“And when you were in school, didn’t your father suggest that you become a Rabbi? Don’t tell me he didn’t, he told me so last night. If you want, I will pay for you to go to Rabbinical School in the United States, I will care for your family here until you return, and I will secure you a job settling the law so that you can provide for anyone in this valley if you want, even when you are an old man.”
Harun stared at the Captain.
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