The Hummus Dealer of Meknes, a short story Read online

went home, repeating as he went the ingredients he’d seen her buy. He dismissed oregano and cinnamon as possible additions to her hummus—too noticeable a flavor, too assertive. A tiny touch of mustard, finely ground, might work. So might asafetida, if you could close enough to it to put a pinch in your mixture. Ground sumac and black pepper would reveal themselves and customers might shy away from speckled hummus. But it was very possibly that little twist of something the spice merchant had produced from under the counter.

  The spice merchant was also named Mustapha. Mustapha the hummus merchant went to him one day and said, “Brother, please help me. I have been your customer for a goodly time but I may soon be no more your customer because a certain woman of advanced years has opened a stall opposite mine and is selling more hummus than I ever did. Please help me. If she has mentioned the secret ingredient she puts in her hummus to make it better than mine. Or if you could tell me the contents of that little package you took from under the counter . . . please?”

  Mustapha the spice merchant smiled and shook his head. “Let me attend your worries in reverse order. The substance I sold the woman in question is not to put in food. And you wouldn’t want to buy it anyway, you’re of the wrong sex.”

  “Ahah. And the answer to my first inquiry, that of the secret ingredient?”

  Mustapha the spice merchant shrugged. Then he shook his head. Then he turned his hands up as if to say, “Who knows?”

  “She has not said?”

  Spicy Mustapha shook his head.

  The hummus merchant said, “As a man highly knowledgeable about herbs and spices, might you make a suggestion?”

  The other said, “If I were you I would experiment, but as an expert in herbs and spices I would bet on the barest pinch of asafetida.”

  Thanking the spice merchant many times, Mustapha went home with a small parcel of asafetida, keeping it downwind from his nose. He had leftover hummus from the day before and he decided to sprinkle a single pinch of the foul amber powder over the top and mix it thoroughly. The problem was, he couldn’t get the foul smell out of his nose. So when he tasted the hummus it seemed that he might as well be eating asafetida. He rubbed mustard oil into his hands and that seemed to help. He powdered his hands with ground cinnamon and now he could only taste cinnamon.

  How could he know if asafetida would work? Maybe he should put it in with the chickpeas when he cooked them. Maybe he should just admit defeat.

  He had the scribe in the street of lawyers make him a sign which read, “New improved hummus of excellent quality.” It cost him a hundred millims and it was a rash expenditure, for he suspected that fewer than a quarter of his customers could read. He set out little dishes on which to put samples, the way Annisa had. It didn’t draw more than flies. It came to the point that he couldn’t give his product away. True to her prophecy, merchants were coming from far away to buy Annisa’s product by the heqat, loading it onto jackasses and going away smiling.

  It was no use. Mustapha decided it was time to end it all. He rose well before market time one day, and took a rope with him to the place near the governor’s mansion where there grew a cork oak with a horizontal branch of a suitable height above the ground. Mustapha climbed into the tree, inched along the large branch and secured one end of the rope. He fashioned a noose in the other end and with a sob and a sniffle put it around his neck.

  As he was getting up his nerve to jump out of the tree, a voice came up to him. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” came the voice.

  He looked down to Annisa standing directly under him. If he jumped he couldn’t avoid falling on her, perhaps to kill her.

  “Move away, woman. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  She said, “If you come down I will tell you my secret ingredient.”

  “Truly?”

  “I would rather tell you than be crushed trying to catch you.”

  Mustapha, rather glad he didn’t have to follow through, took the noose from his neck, untied the rope, dropping it to the ground. When he climbed down, he saw that Annisa had coiled the rope. She handed it back to him. Without waiting for him to ask she said, “There are actually two secret ingredients.”

  He said, “Aha. Is it the asafetida and mustard flour?”

  She smiled. He noticed that she had all her teeth and that they were whiter than his. She shook her head. “Neither. The most important secret ingredient is customers’ gullibility. I never actually told anyone there was a secret ingredient, but customers wanted to believe it. They wanted to speculate what it was. I let them speculate. Speculation and mystery are spicy enough for most folk.”

  He said, “And what was the other ingredient?”

  This time her smile was wider and she cocked her head in a fetching way. “It is my unswerving faith in my ability to fool people into believing what they wanted to believe all along. It is called self-confidence.” She took a few steps away and came back. “You, young man, can’t add these secret ingredients to your hummus here in Meknes. I have already taken over your market. But you could go to another town and add them there and prosper.”

  She took a few steps away again, turned, put a fist on her hip and cocked her head like a preening bird. She said, “Or, you could stay here and marry me, an older woman who could teach you many things, and when I die you would have the wealth to secure a young bride who would give you those sons you want.”

  She gave him an enigmatic smile, let her eyelids droop in that sultry way that Berber women have, and walked away.

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