Leaving Tangier

4. Noureddine

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Azel couldn’t sleep. Why was he so obsessed with leaving Morocco? Where had the idea come from, and why was it so tenacious, so violent? Afraid of his own thoughts, he wavered between that uncontrollable desire to leave and the recruiter’s proposals, which he couldn’t completely dismiss. Insomnia gave frightening intensity to these tortured ruminations. Careful not to disturb his sleeping family, he went out on the balcony, which overlooked the Marshan cemetery. A lovely silvery light shone so brightly that the sea seemed like a white mirror. Azel counted the tombs, looking for Noureddine’s grave. He couldn’t manage to picture what that superb body disfigured by saltwater must look like now. Azel had been the one to go identify the corpse of his cousin and friend. The other victims had been disfigured, perhaps even mangled by sharks, but Noureddine’s body, although bloated, had been untouched. All around them were weeping families; some of them hadn’t even known about the attempted crossing. Among the dead Azel had noticed two women and a child, covered with a white sheet, and it was then that the governor had swept into the morgue, furious in his distress.

‘This is the last time! Hey you, cameraman, come over here and film these bodies! All Morocco must see this tragedy! It has to be in the evening papers — too bad if it spoils people’s appetites! We’ve had enough! Basta! We’re sick of it! This must stop. Morocco is losing its strength, its young people! Where’s the police chief? Get him here right away. We’re going to seal off the coasts!’

Azel had never forgotten even one detail of that scene, or the suffocating smells from those bodies nourished, only a few days before, by the dream of a better life. Nor would he ever forget Noureddine’s milk-white eyes, or his right hand clutching a key. As a child, Azel had been horribly afraid of death and everything about it. He could spot a corpse-washer at any distance, so anxious was he to avoid any handshaking or eating out of the same plate with them. He hated that cloying incense burned around dead bodies. He had always refused even to look at the face of someone who’d died. It was stronger than he was, an irrational fear, a phobia that haunted him. When he was ten years old, Azel had run to hide at a neighbour’s house on the day his own grandfather was buried, convinced that death was contagious and that its shadow would come carry him off at night under its cloak. The first time he ever forgot his fear was when he’d had to go claim Noureddine’s body. He’d handled all the administrative procedures to bring his friend home. Paralyzed by their son’s death, Noureddine’s parents had wept and refused to accept what had happened. Kenza, clothed all in white, was not allowed to attend the funeral: the women had to stay home, it was the custom. She screamed out her grief, weeping both for her cousin and for her fiancé, suffering over her own fate as well. Noureddine had been buried that same day, because of the advanced decomposition of the body. Azel’s efficiency had astonished everyone. The tolba, men learned in the Koran, had gathered in the front room, where they read silently from the Book and chanted a few prayers together. Before going on to the cemetery, the cortege stopped at the neighbourhood mosque, where a man with a strong, loud voice recited the Janâzatou Rajoul, ‘the burial service for a man.’ The prayer was spoken in front of the body, well wrapped in its white shroud and adorned with a piece of green and black embroidery. A few minutes later, Noureddine was carried by Azel and three other friends to his grave. The tolba began the prayers of farewell; the body was placed in a narrow hole and quickly covered with earth, flat stones, and cement. It was all over very quickly. The family distributed bread and dried figs to some beggars and the tolba. Azel stood among the relatives to receive condolences. He was sobbing. When people urged him to set aside his anger, to follow the path of wisdom and patience, Azel took that as nothing more than a conventional formula, the kind trotted out on such occasions. He would never forget his friend! And he would never give up trying to avenge him in some way.

Azel smoked a cigarette out on the balcony, then tiptoed back to bed, where he began wondering once again about the abrupt disappearance of Mohammed-Larbi, the friend who had probably been lured into some Islamist group, although the young man’s father kept saying that was impossible. His son, he insisted, was a nonbeliever who did not observe Ramadan and often got drunk, in fact his drinking was a dreadful burden for the family and their neighbours.

‘Exactly,’ a policeman had explained. ‘That’s just the type of guy who interests the Islamists. They’ve got ways of winning them over. And once he’s in, they give him a passport and some visas — counterfeit, obviously, but the recruit doesn’t know this, and they send him off to a Muslim country like Pakistan or Afghanistan for training, where another team takes over, a tougher bunch, and the goal becomes clearer: taking revolutionary action to cleanse Muslim countries of native and foreign infidels. The whole procedure takes from three to six months, because the brainwashing doesn’t start right away, they take their time and above all apply the most sophisticated techniques, they’re experts, well organized, cleverly set up, they don’t waste their efforts, we know that from men who’ve become disillusioned and escaped from them, guys who suddenly realized what was going on, but what can you do about all this? We’re vigilant, but these people play on religious faith, irrationality, weakness of character, whereas our sole advantage is spotting the fake documents. Their recruits don’t travel by airplane, however: they choose busy times in the ports, at night, and sometimes they slip a bill or two into the policeman’s or custom official’s hand and that’s that. I know, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s the truth: the Islamists’ main ally is the corruption they claim to be fighting, because it’s thanks to baksheesh that they manage to slip past the border police. Your son will turn up one day, old man, and you won’t recognize him, he’ll have changed, so let us know, and you’ll be doing your country a great service…’

Mohammed-Larbi had been a restless youth, rebellious and, above all, desperate. During the riots in Beni Makada, a slum neighbourhood in Tangier targeted by the authorities during an anti-drugs campaign, he’d been arrested and had spent a few days in police custody. He was a quiet high-school student, but sometimes, enraged at the country’s predicament, he would insult the authorities and opposition figures alike, calling them all incompetents. Azel was convinced that he’d joined an Islamist group and was now in some sort of ‘liberation army.’ Although Azel had often called him a hothead, he’d liked Mohammed-Larbi, and was sorry he hadn’t spent more time with him in the days before he disappeared.

Azel depended for support on his sister, who worked as a nurse in a clinic and for private patients as well, since the clinic didn’t pay very much. The boss was a surgeon — a short guy, very fussy, with that way skinflints have of always talking about money, whether it’s the price of tomatoes or a scanner — and he paid Kenza the minimum wage, telling her, ‘You’re learning the business.’ In one day he earned what his employees took home in a year, which didn’t prevent him from praying five times a day, visiting the holy places each spring, and making a pilgrimage every two years. Before each operation, he demanded payment in advance, in cash. He was as famous for his greed as for his surgical skills. People even said that for love of money he had betrayed his best friend. And yet he slept soundly, beaming with satisfaction. Kenza had no choice. She preferred her exhausting job to the unstable existence of her friend Samira, a colleague who had become a ‘hostess’ in what was essentially a prostitution ring. Samira went on trips with men she didn’t know, to parties where she took dangerous risks. Everything had been marvellous at first, glamorous and easy. People asked to dance with her, never to sleep with her. That suited her fine. But all that gradually fell apart. How many times had she come running to Kenza, terrified, badly beaten, raped!

Azel had given up looking for work, at least in the ordinary way — a letter enclosing a résumé. He’d gotten nowhere like that. He’d looked all over the place, in the civil service as well as the business community, but he’d lacked the backbone to venture into that predatory world. All in all, Azel was a nice guy, not a tough guy. Poor boy! He had no idea he was on the wrong track. No one had warned him: after creating hell, bastards go to heaven! His obsession pursued him everywhere: the thought of leaving! He cherished it, clung to it. Meanwhile, he barely managed to keep going, trying to sell used cars, acting as an agent for a realtor, and he’d even waited patiently at the French consulate on behalf of a man who could afford to pay him two hundred dirhams for the five hours on line. Azel managed to earn a little money, enough to buy some contraband cigarettes, purchase name-brand clothing on credit… As for girls, his friend El Haj, a distant cousin of Noureddine’s, was the one who took care of slipping a hundred-dollar bill between their breasts.