Hideous kinky - By Esther Freud Page 0,40
distance, the wool street, in a flash of new white light. It lay in front of us, a carpet of dancing colours. The street was lined with factories where the wool was dyed and hung out to dry in skeins on lines between the buildings, and at night, when the wool was cut down, the snippets and loose ends of a multitude of colours fell to the ground. We arrived like thieves before the road sweepers and ran about scooping up handfuls of the soft new wool.
Mum stopped. She stood still with a wide smile on her face and let her handful of wool petals fall to the floor. ‘I’ll make dolls,’ she said, ‘with woollen hair.’
‘For us?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she yelled, ‘dolls to sell. Now look for wool in black, yellow and red. Pieces long enough for hair.’
I searched the ground, draping each new strand over my arm until I had enough wool to make a hairpiece for even the most life-sized of dolls. Mum sorted the wool into separate skeins and tied them round her wrist. Then she knelt down and swept up a multicoloured pile of leftovers, motioning for me to turn around so she could pack them into my hood.
‘Stuffing,’ she explained.
Mum spent that whole day sewing the dolls. She made the bodies out of an old white T-shirt of Bea’s and stuffed them tight with wool, poking it into the ends of their legs and arms with a pencil. She embroidered blue eyes and red mouths on to their smooth oval faces and sewed on hair in a middle parting. The first doll she finished had black hair that reached down to her waist.
‘It looks like Mum,’ Bea said.
She made a dress out of a pink-and-grey flowery skirt I hadn’t worn since the Mellah. Mum had made it for me in Tunbridge Wells out of a cushion I didn’t want to leave behind.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’
I shook my head.
She worked all day on her sewing-machine until there were three perfect dolls. Mary, Mary-Rose, and Rose-mary. Mum was delighted. ‘Tomorrow we’ll sell them in the market,’ she laughed. ‘And then all our troubles will be over.’
The next day we got up early and walked to the flea market by the south gate of the Medina. We took a blanket which we spread on the ground, arranging our three dolls in the centre. The flea market was on the edge of a flat plain that stretched away to the mountains, the same mountains you could see from the flat roof of the Hotel Moulay Idriss, where it snowed all year round. From where I sat on the corner of the blanket it seemed that the plain was a desert of people, all selling mysterious objects from blankets of their own.
Mary, Mary-Rose and Rosemary attracted a great deal of attention, even at times drawing a crowd, but no one showed the slightest inclination to buy.
‘It’s not an exhibition,’ Mum grumbled as the dolls were poked and admired but never bartered for.
As the afternoon began to fade away and the various salesmen and merchants packed up their blankets, we had no choice but to give up.
‘I expect this is how Akari felt when no one wanted to go to the cinema,’ Mum reflected.
I had never had a doll before and now I had three. They slept with me in my bed, becoming more and increasingly more demanding of my time. There were various complicated ministrations and attentions at particular and specific times of the day and night, and especially in the morning when Bea was at school and Mum was praying or on a visit to her bank.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Akari closed up his shop to take us to Sid Zouin. We arrived by communal taxi with three other men and a cage of rabbits. Akari’s house was the first building in the village. It was a low, dark room full of tables and chairs. Men in white turbans sat in the gloom and drank coffee.
A silence fell as we entered and every man’s eye fixed on Mum. ‘This is Akari’s café,’ Akari said, and hurried us back out on to the street.
He opened a door in a high arch in the wall.
Akari had been right to sit in the Djemaa El Fna and cry for his garden. In Marrakech spring was just beginning, but in Akari’s magic garden it was in full bloom. Almond trees drooped under snowdrifts of blossom. Petals from the peach and apricot trees covered the