Where the Rivers Meet

Without my seeing what he was doing, he held a snake up in his hands and slipped it into mine and then leaned down and lifted out the other. He nodded to me and, with our backs to the road and our arms extended, we held the snakes up high. I didn’t breathe or move. The thumb and forefinger of my right hand squeezed the snake’s neck just below its aggravated spitting head. My left hand held its tail. The Russian held the cobra and whistled softly to it to be calm. We heard a car with a loud diesel engine slow down and then drive by without stopping. I turned my head just a little and saw Mahmoud Charbeuf sitting in the back seat beside Hassan while another man I didn’t recognize drove.

The herdsmen were standing in the doorway of the cafe staring at us, hypnotized by the two snake charmers and the snakes. Doubtless they had not known their traveling companions’ profession and the contents of the basket until then, and when we lowered the snakes the herdsmen moved towards us ready themselves to agitate.

The Russian lowered the cobra into the basket, leaving the lid off, which did not please the cobra, which kept its head erect and swaying nervously. He then very carefully slid his right thumb and forefinger up along the other snake’s body under my fingers and with his left thumb and forefinger squeezed the snake, easing my fingers downward very slowly and evenly until he replaced them without letting the snake’s head turn aside. I held onto the tail, which he then took with his free hand. The Russian’s face was sweating. There was no mirror in which to see my own condition, but when I looked down I saw the front of my tan jalaba was soaked with sweat.

The Russian lowered the snake slowly past the weaving head of the cobra, still murmuring in a light easy rhythmic whistle. The cobra weaved over his wrists and forearms without grazing him. After a few moments of stillness during which I saw the charmer’s blue eyes turn pale and his face lose color, he withdrew his hands slowly, his lower teeth biting his upper lip. The cobra then lowered its head into the basket, and my companion lidded both snakes in their soothing darkness.

The Russian hung his head over for a few minutes breathing hard. Then I grasped his hands and helped him to his feet. Our witnesses were hushed and seemed no longer hostile to us. Two offered us drinks from their soda bottles and we drank and nodded our appreciation.

We rode in silence save for the fearful childlike cries of the        sheep.            Somewhere ahead was Charbeuf, but I had almost forgotten him. Perhaps if he had found me then, he would consider me even more mad, more majnun, and be glad to be rid of me. I was majnun, I thought at the time. Some inner madness. The Russian and I were both mad or had this madness in us, no matter how each of us came to be in Marrakesh or anywhere. In disguising me from my pursuers the Russian had moved so swiftly, as if he had caught the snakes themselves by surprise. And then we stood together, two equally mad, equally desperate men with personal histories that neither knew or needed to know We were rescued by our madness, which was the source of our strangeness and our freedom.