Marrakech Noir

A Way to Mecca by Hanane Derkaoui

Riad Zitoun

It was five a.m. in the old neighborhood of Riad Zitoun, in the ancient city. The first Friday in the month of June. The voice of the muezzin chanted the call to prayer; two young men from the neighborhood were on their way to the mosque, when they encountered Hmad returning late from work. Their neighborhood was small, but Hmad didn’t speak to anyone. All that anyone in the neighborhood knew about him was that he had moved from an Amazigh village close to Ouarzazate, and that he worked as a waiter for a Christian in one of the ritzy neighborhoods in Gueliz.

“Listen, Ali, this serving job of Hmad the Chelh’s is really weird, ’cause every day he comes back at five in the morning.”

“It’s true, Brother Ibrahim, every morning we run into him when we’re on our way to dawn prayer.”

“But we don’t go to the dawn prayer every morning,” Ibrahim said.

“I know, I just mean that we see him whenever we do go to morning prayer.”

The two young men were late for the prayer, so they hurried their steps toward the mosque. Since their vigilance in matters of faith was only recently acquired, they were earnestly trying to project the appearance of being genuine believers who go to the dawn prayer every day, and who sit afterward with the faqih, debating aspects of the hadith with him, and asking innumerable religious questions. After the prayer, they were sitting far from the mosque smoking the only cigarette they had left after going completely broke.

“Why don’t we follow Hmad?” Ali suggested. “We could con him and get some money out of him.”

“Didn’t we say that we’ve repented getting money like that?” Ibrahim replied.

“We’ve been diligent about going to prayer for a month now and nothing has changed; besides, we’ve squandered the last of our money.”

“But we’ve repented, my friend,” Ibrahim repeated. “Stealing is forbidden. The faqih said that God will open the way for us and guide our steps.”

“God guides the steps of those who are educated and who have a university degree, or at the very least those who have a trade. As for us, what will He guide our steps toward?” Ali lamented. “There’s no diploma in picking safes or five-finger discounts... we have no experience except for stealing.”

Back before the tourist police proliferated, Ali and Ibrahim had worked as unlicensed tour guides. The license that allowed you to practice the trade with your head held high was only issued to people who paid a bribe at the new Institute of Tourist Guiding. This option was financially out of reach for them. Undeterred, they had wandered around Jemaa el-Fnaa and other historical monuments ambushing tourists. However, the tourist police kept a close eye out for them, harassing them and their peers. They were each arrested as many as forty times over the course of five years. They ended up abandoning the tourist trade and entering into the world of delinquency through its wide and welcoming door, by working on their burglary skills and organizing a few petty fraud operations.

Two months ago, they had both been overcome by a sudden religious impulse that shook their world. Their life was racked with turmoil, and they wavered in an ambiguous place between following the right path and straying from it. For they truly did want to be sincere, submissive Muslims like the ones the imam described. However, in the moment of temptation itself, they knew only too intimately about the bottomless depths of the city: its licentious underworlds, prostitutes, nightlife, and hashish establishments. But the explosive change came after they had robbed the house of an old lady in Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, and the old woman had said to them: “Take everything in the house and just leave me alive.”

Ali was the first one to be affected by the incident. He tried to talk to his friend about it while they were returning with the day’s loot on the back of a motorcycle: five hundred dirhams and a gold signet ring. When they got back to their room, Ali wanted to talk to his friend about this lady who reminded him of his grandmother. She had raised him in a village called Smimou near Essaouira before he left for Marrakech fifteen years ago. After splitting the loot, Ali had told Ibrahim with pain in his voice: “That lady really broke my heart. I don’t want to do this to old people anymore.”

“But who will we rob if not the old and weak? That’s the nature of the beast. We don’t have a choice,” Ibrahim had reminded him.

“What if we switched professions, turned to God in repentance, and became like other people? What do you think about us going to pray with the congregation?”

“Why not? This might be another way to stay clean and to find some peace of mind,” Ibrahim had replied, having felt the same shame as Ali.

Going to prayer in the mosque was an idea that had never enticed them before this. It was an entirely unexpected proposition. The young men thought that only those who had a lawful profession could enter the mosque, and because of this, they’d always kept away from the kingdom of God and the world of the faithful.

They had learned how to perform the prayer and the ritual ablution during their primary school lessons, and they had not forgotten. Ali and Ibrahim had not learned this at home because their families were poor Amazigh speakers in the Essaouira province who were not proficient in Arabic.

Ibrahim and Ali started to frequent the mosque, warily and curiously at first, but eventually they began to enjoy the Friday sermon and to delight especially in the ambiance of the dawn prayer. However, throughout the rest of the day, they weren’t seriously tempted by the mosque. Dawn prayer with the congregation was sufficient to purify their hearts; they had not committed any burglary or break-in for more than a month now. But what could they do for work? The money had run out and they hadn’t found any respectable employment yet. In truth, they had not looked for any real work. With the onset of faith, an unaccustomed indolence descended upon them. During the nearly two months of visiting the mosque twice a day, they hadn’t much felt the desire for adrenaline that had driven them to their risky way of earning a living. Faith had succeeded in quieting that impulse, but had not eradicated it completely. Now they felt the craving for adrenaline return while they watched Hmad close the window of his room.

“What exactly does he do for work?” Ali wondered.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Maybe we can get some money from him, or from the Christian he works for,” Ali said. “Maybe we can find something to blackmail him with? You know, Christians are easy pickings.”

“That seems complicated,” Ibrahim said. “We can’t even go into stores anymore. We’re complete outcasts in this city. All that’s left to us is old people in remote neighborhoods. We jump them, scare them a little with the knife, and take our share.”

“I’m begging you, not the old people. Let’s follow Hmad to the Christian’s place.”

The thieving duo finished their talk, and went back to the wretched room that their poverty confined them to.

Hmad was shedding his clothing so he could don his coral-colored silk robe, wrap his hair in a matching kerchief, and dab on a little perfume. He got into bed and tried to sleep while he thought over his night, which had been full of surprises. Important people had come to the party and he had earned a tidy sum of money. There had also been this man among the guests who had besieged him with stares all night long. He didn’t ask Hmad to join him in one of the rooms like the others did. He only gazed at him and looked into his eyes. The others didn’t usually look into his eyes. At these soirées, all of them only looked at his ass which he knew how to shimmy and shake so well.

He thought about the first time that he’d noticed how different he was from the other boys. He was twelve years old, and the other boys had started to talk about the length of their penises and such. Hmad had wanted to talk to them about what happened in his backside, about the tingling sensation that spread through it sometimes. He didn’t know what was happening to him. When he stood close to his male friends, he wanted to move even closer. In time, the boys began to go to where the river grew large, and there they examined each other’s privates, which had started to grow bigger. Hmad wasn’t interested in scrutinizing his thing. But he did want to get closer to the other boys, to touch and lick their amazing things.

He even used to play house with the girls, and considered himself an excellent housewife. He knew how to roast the birds that he’d caught, and how to make zamita from ground pearl barley. Sometimes he made the zamita from wari, which was a thorny plant that sprouted seeds; it was then made into flour. The zamita with wari was just like the zamita his mother made from time to time. Hmad had to live with his mother and his sister since his father had disappeared one year after he was born. Many people said that they’d seen his father in the village of Tighassaline, living with a prostitute there. In any event, his mother raised him on her own. She used to work in other people’s fields until the drought years hit the crops and the livestock, and then she was without work for some time. Later, one of her former employers from the north hired her on as a servant in his house. Hmad remembered those days with the greatest tenderness. His mother was an affectionate woman. She often hugged and kissed him, and constantly spoke loving words to him, praising his beauty and charm.

When he reached the age of fourteen, he didn’t go with the other boys to the one prostitute who remained in the village. The people of Tinejdad had driven all the other prostitutes from their village. Yamina had stayed despite their protests. She welcomed all the young men just becoming acquainted with their bodies for the first time. She taught them the fundamentals of desire and showed them sensual delights that were forbidden in the very conservative village.

Hmad didn’t go with his buddies to visit Yamina, so his friends became suspicious, and news spread about him: He’s one of those. No doubt about it. He really is a bit off...

It didn’t bother him that people alluded to this early and muddled manifestation of his femininity. He found freedom in it. He became more fastidious with his clothing, wore rings on his fingers, and sometimes painted his nails, delighting in his expressions of femininity. Ali Oukoubach paved the way for him in this department. Oukoubach was openly feminine even though he was forty years old. Oukoubach was Hmad’s beloved role model. The forty-year-old wore women’s clothing, painted his nails, and darkened his eyes with kohl. He performed at weddings and he had a pleasant singing voice that everyone admired. Everyone knew what Oukoubach did with the men that visited him every night, but no one expressed outrage.

Hmad was happy in his village. He thought that he too would grow up and everyone would accept him, and that he would entertain at weddings. Hmad also loved to sing; he had a beautiful voice. In fact, he didn’t learn a trade because he knew that his profession would be singing at weddings and pleasing men — just like Ali Oukoubach. Then something unexpected happened: Ali Oukoubach was found murdered. They discovered his body rotting in the grass by his house in Ksar Aït Assam. He’d been decapitated. The crime shocked the village and shook Hmad to his core. Hmad feared staying in the village and he no longer felt safe there.

When he reached the age of seventeen, he told his mother about his desire to leave. She gave him some money and saw him off with tears in her eyes.

“I’m going to work in Marrakech,” Hmad told her. “As soon as I have a house I’ll come get you.”

“My darling, may our Lord open a path of plenty for you,” she’d said in blessing.

Hmad stopped in Ouarzazate, also known as the City of Games, while on his journey. He even worked there awhile. He wore women’s clothing and danced. He loved his time there. But the time of games was soon over, and so Hmad left to continue on his journey toward Marrakech. In a big city like that, he thought that no one would bother him.

The thing that most captured Hmad’s interest in Marrakech was Jemaa el-Fnaa. In the first days after he arrived, a veritable giddiness took hold of him, and he roamed among the barbers, snake charmers, and singers; he would spend the night wandering from one group to the next. The smell of food assaulted him, but he didn’t have enough money to eat what he wanted, so he had to make do with one meal a day.

Hmad didn’t find a job in the beginning because he wanted artistic work like singing or dancing. He mingled with the leaders of various performance groups in Jemaa el-Fnaa until a folk music troupe took him on. The leader asked him to dress up in women’s clothing and to dance to the rhythm of their music, embellishing the entrance of their troupe with his coquettish sashays. This was delightful for Hmad. It had been his dream since he was a small child to become a woman, to sprout breasts, to have a woman’s sexy ass. He knew that sex-change operations were very expensive, so he made do with dressing up and applying the beautifying powders that were capable of transforming him into a woman.

He found a room in the Riad Zitoun neighborhood. He only had to cross from Riad Zitoun to Arset el-Maach to get to Jemaa el-Fnaa. Sometimes he took the route through Kennaria so that he passed in front of the Café de France, and there, he was really in the heart of the square. He was keen not to get to know anyone from the neighborhood so that he would be safe from offending them. He had briefly met some of the young men of the neighborhood and he’d told them that he worked as a waiter for one of the Christians. He was trying to steer clear of them all. He barely responded to their greetings. Hmad was able to make a living off of his dance performances at Jemaa el-Fnaa. He danced with kohl-darkened eyes and a white veil that revealed his two plump red lips, but which still concealed the features of his face. Jemaa el-Fnaa embraced him for many months before he met Gerard, who changed his life completely.

Gerard saw Hmad dancing at Jemaa el-Fnaa and liked him right away. He was a Frenchman in his fifties. His heart had scarcely started to recover from the shock of the death of his partner Albert, who was killed in a car accident in one of Marrakech’s suburbs. Gerard had waited in the halqa until the end of Hmad’s act and approached him as he was gathering his things. Gerard’s breath blew hot in Hmad’s ear as he whispered an impromptu invitation to a cup of tea.

Hmad and Gerard drank tea at the Café de France, then went up to the roof of the café that overlooked Jemaa el-Fnaa, its market stalls, open-air restaurants, the towering trees in the historical garden of Arset el-Bilk, and the four mosques strung around it. For the first time, Hmad saw the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque from above. How terrifying that high tower was from this place! The square seemed even noisier from up high than when he was in the middle of it. Hmad wanted to work in a more tranquil place, and to live in a better area than the old neighborhood of Riad Zitoun. It looked to him like there were mythical gardens contained within the ancient city. There were also some majestic villas in Marrakech, which he had glimpsed in magazines at the barber. Exquisite homes with swimming pools, broad balconies, and real gardens with flowers and plants swinging loosely from the windows. It was his dream to see one of them from the inside, to find out how it was decorated, and how its owners lived.

In the oasis town of Tinejdad, Hmad had lived in a rickety, abandoned clay castle. Most of its inhabitants, and those in the surrounding area, were poor. In Ouarzazate, in the days of the City of Games, he had lived in a small room in a filthy building on the edge of the city. He had never been blessed with a single day of living in a house with a garden. He looked at Gerard and thought, Maybe he lives in a house with a garden, and maybe he’ll invite me there.

Gerard did indeed invite him to his house. He invited him over and over again. He made coffee for Hmad on his first visit, then he started to invite him to lunch. Their relationship intensified. One night, they found themselves naked in bed. Despite his inclinations, Hmad had never before fulfilled his dream of sleeping with a man. There had been a few tourists who had offered him money in exchange for spending the night with them, but he wasn’t looking for money. He was earning enough from dancing to meet his needs, and he didn’t need more.

Hmad drank whiskey with Gerard, and his body became a little loose, which made the sex easy. Hmad let Gerard do whatever he wanted to his body. His fingers were magical, arousing all the titillating tingling in Hmad’s backside. The old sensations that he had hidden for years bloomed once more. His mother had provided him with a deep unconditional love, and because of this, he wanted to save his body. So he hadn’t shared it with anyone before Gerard. When he was in the oasis, he used to think that one day he would love a man with blue eyes. Gerard’s eyes weren’t blue, but he was blond with green eyes, and he liked that too.

Gerard wanted Hmad to change careers and work as a drag queen at his house. Gerard hosted three parties a week — for both gay tourists and Moroccans. Hmad didn’t fully understand what it meant to be a drag queen. But Gerard explained to Hmad that he would prepare him for this thrilling assignment himself, supervising his makeup and arranging things. Hmad was delighted. Finally, he had found love and work that he actually wanted, and on top of it all, a job which required him to dress as a woman. From his understanding of what Gerard said about his new job, it would allow him the opportunity to be the most beautiful of women three times a week.

Thus began his new life: spending the day sleeping in his room and in the evening cutting a path across Riad Zitoun through Arset el-Maach to Jemaa el-Fnaa. In front of the Koutoubia Mosque he caught a taxi to Gueliz. He arrived at Gerard’s house at eight, and prepared himself for the evening’s soirée. The drag queen makeup took a very long time. Three hours of preparation — of doing his eyelashes, whitening his skin, and then applying makeup to the rest of his face. After this, he would dress in an evening gown and circulate among the guests. Most of them were tourists, both male and female, some of whom would secretly slip cash into his bra. He understood that these parties were successful because of him, and that Gerard was paying him well: a thousand dirhams a night. He sent three hundred dirhams to his mother and saved the rest. He no longer thought about bringing his mother to live with him, but he had started to fantasize about living with Gerard. Oh, if only it were possible for him to become his housewife. To look after everything in that house, from the cleanliness of the rooms to the dishes in the kitchen; from taking care of the plants in the garden to pampering Gerard’s body. That house was heaven, and he dreamed every day of living in it. Gerard loved him and Hmad knew it was just a matter of time before he would ask him to move in. Hmad wanted to leave his room in Riad Zitoun and dreamed nightly of crossing the chasm between Riad Zitoun and Gueliz.

He thought about all of this as sleep began to overtake him at dawn, on the very day after he had met Ibrahim and Ali. He had responded to their greeting without even knowing them. He recognized their faces, having encountered them by chance here in the neighborhood more than once. It seemed like they were on their way to prayer at the mosque, thought Hmad. I want to go to the mosque too, but God will not accept me. I don’t think it’s possible for someone like me to go through the door of the mosque. He sniffed his perfumed body and thought: I’m not unclean, so why would God punish me for this inclination which He Himself created in me? There were many things Hmad didn’t understand about faith, and because of this, he left the matter for a later time — when he would go on the Hajj. God would forgive him as long as he submitted his sins before Him and did not advance further into sin than where he already was. He was not overtly concerned with questions of faith — with the exception of the Hajj.

Hmad wanted to walk around the Kaaba with the other pilgrims one day. To throw stones at the devil and shout joyfully: “Here I am at your service, O Lord!” The phrase rose up in his mind as the room filled with the fragrance of Meccan incense; Riad Zitoun had become the way to Mecca, and he saw himself in white clothing entering into the Kingdom of God, just like the others. He used to dream of the day when everyone would call him al-Hajj Hmad. This dream had been forcefully unleashed once again, ever since he had surrendered to the temptation that had overwhelmed him after he’d set foot in Marrakech. Lately, these bouts of temptation had grown in frequency. So he had started to visit the graves of the marabouts and the pious saints, until he finally found protection in the mausoleum of Sidi Bel Abbès, the holy helper of the poor and sick. Nothing would heal his heart, though, except a visit to the prophet’s grave and circumambulation around the Black Stone. He knew that the way to Mecca would open for him one day, for God does not shut His gates in the faces of good-hearted people. Hmad told himself that this dream would come true one day. He knew that things happened with time, and that the time for the Hajj would eventually come. His imagination was wandering toward Mecca when sleep finally conquered him.

Ibrahim and Ali woke up, then went back to watching Hmad’s window, and to the questions regarding his secret late-night job.

“He said he’s a waiter. Leave him alone,” Ibrahim said.

“A waiter that comes home at five in the morning?” Ali countered.

“It’s Marrakech, brother! There are places that never close.” Ibrahim rolled his eyes.

“But he isn’t working in a cabaret or a nightclub. He said that he’s a waiter in one of the foreigners’ houses, and there’s no respectable house that keeps its doors open until five in the morning.”

“We won’t get anything out of this scam. Hmad is from Chleuh country, far away from here, and no doubt he’s as inexperienced and naive as the rest of his people in Ouarzazate,” Ibrahim argued. “He really could be just a waiter.”

“I am almost positive that he isn’t just a waiter. This guy has a secret behind him that we need to figure out. Let’s follow him tonight and find out.”

Ali and Ibrahim ultimately agreed to follow Hmad when he headed to work and to return only when they had solid information. They went out into the alley to try to borrow a few dirhams for food while they waited for him. They ran into Mubarak, who was an unlicensed tour guide, but who was smart and eager and not burned-out like them. He supplied them with twenty dirhams. They bought two sausage sandwiches from Doukkali, the owner of a grilled-meat cart, and sat with Aouicha, who made tea right on the ground. Aouicha had worked as a prostitute before her beauty withered and her value in the city’s flesh market collapsed. She had not produced any children. When she retired, she set up shop on the ground preparing porridge in the early morning and making tea throughout the day. Ali and Ibrahim asked her about Hmad the Chelh, and she replied: “He is a well-mannered man who doesn’t talk to anyone. He drank tea at my spot two or three times and did not utter a word. He is just a wet-behind-the-ears Chelh who lucked out finding work as a waiter at one of the villas.”

“I don’t believe that he works as a waiter,” Ali told her.

“And why not? He seems to be clean like a waiter.”

“Exactly — the problem is his cleanliness. He seems to be cleaner than necessary. He has a strange kind of style. It seems more like he is an employee or an assistant at a pharmacy... something like that. What if he’s a cop?”

“And what would an undercover cop be doing in our stinking alley?” Aouicha challenged.

“Maybe he’s spying on some big gang.”

“You watch too many movies,” Aouicha said, waving him off. “Our alley is nothing but petty crooks the police couldn’t care less about.”

They left Aouicha’s spot and stopped by the cigarette seller, Zeroual, another person who was extremely suspicious of Hmad. Zeroual found him to be more stylish and tidy than was strictly necessary. In his mind, Hmad did not seem like the other Chleuhs of Ouarzazate, who were known for their uncouth appearance. As the three of them deliberated, their suspicions grew. The cigarette seller spoke with intense resentment. How could this Chelh peasant come from a village in the south and find work that easily in a villa of one of the Christians, whereas he was a son of Marrakech whose family had been here for generations and there were no prospects in front of him other than selling loosies?

“Marrakech only gives to outsiders,” Ali agreed.

“Yeah, they come from far away, they take the ministry’s permits, they become licensed guides, and we are left with nothing,” Zeroual said.

Ibrahim and Ali remembered with regret their days as tour guides. Those were the days of contentment and easy living. They used to be so happy when the day ended and they could roll a joint at one of their places. The most important thing with the tourists was to provide hashish at their evening parties, and sometimes to supply sex too. The foreign women were sexually liberated; they gave pleasure and took it themselves anytime they wanted it. It wasn’t necessary to have a relationship or to face all those obstacles that Moroccan girls put in front of you. Nothing remained of those glorious days except for the memories, nostalgia, and indignation toward the tourist police who had ruined their lives. They considered scamming the tourists an acceptable thing, because all of them were rich, and what they took from them through trickery and deceit was nothing but crumbs.

At the end of the day, the thieves left the cigarette seller and went to their room to change. They dressed in their most stylish clothing: nice shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Ibrahim put a chain around his neck and a watch that didn’t work on his left wrist. They surveyed Hmad the Chelh’s window. He stepped outside and the duo followed him across the back streets of Riad Zitoun to Arset el-Maach, and from there to Jemaa el-Fnaa. They lost him for a moment in the bustle of the square before Ali spotted him again.

“Look, look, there he is!”

Hmad was cutting a path toward the Koutoubia. They followed him, all the while hiding their faces behind newspapers like in the movies.

Hmad stopped at the horse-drawn carriage station and his pursuers hesitated. Ibrahim asked: “What do we do now?”

“We’re going to ride the same carriage as him — we’ll ask him where he’s going, and we’ll say that we are heading, coincidentally, to the same place.”

They rode in the carriage with Hmad, who stayed silent the whole way to Gueliz. He avoided looking at them, and didn’t ask them where they were going. He was thinking about the party that night and about Gerard. He was determined to ask him about moving into the elegant villa. Hmad was tired of Riad Zitoun and its clamor. Besides, the residents would find out sooner or later about his business, and then they’d harass him, or maybe even kill him like the people of Tinejdad had done to Ali Oukoubach. He trembled when he remembered the death of Oukoubach and his defiled body in the middle of the grass. He wondered: Is someone in Marrakech going to do the same thing to me? He comforted himself by thinking: Marrakech is a big, open city. Its people are accepting of who I am. He recalled all the jokes that were told about Marrakech men — about how they love other men, sometimes even preferring them to women, and about how this did not seem to be a problem for them. Despite all of this, deep inside he was afraid of being discovered, and of meeting his death like Oukoubach. He reassured himself that nobody, until now, knew the real nature of his work, or his hidden indulgences. His thoughts jumped back to Gerard: What makeup will he have ready for tonight? The previous night he had made his face up to look like an American actress named Marilyn Monroe. He felt very beautiful in Marilyn’s clothing. No doubt she was bewitching. He loved the long fake eyelashes most of all, the slightly curly blond hair, and the dress with bared cleavage. He could feel everyone’s stares and surging desire. He suspected that among the gazes were some looks of envy, for the partygoers knew about his relationship with Gerard, who had continued to praise Hmad’s devotion, candor, and sincere lack of desire for material things. Hmad really didn’t covet those items; he only wanted to be partners in everything, and to live together as lovers.

Gerard had asked Hmad if he wanted to move to France like many other young men in Marrakech, but Hmad made it clear where he preferred to live: “I want to stay with you. So if you stay here, I’m staying. If you go, take me with you.”

Their love was glowing and growing, especially since Hmad had become a drag queen and all those stares of admiration had been focused on him. Pride had succeeded in igniting and inflaming Gerard’s love even more. Hmad was overjoyed when Gerard looked at him adoringly. This was why he was so elegantly glammed up, perfumed, and adorned with rings. He hadn’t imagined that he would find his beloved this quickly. And on top of this, he was a sensitive and generous lover, despite being a foreigner. He assured himself that with Gerard he would live the rest of his life in love, bliss, and joy, not to mention the parties.

When he had left his village, he was determined not to live like Oukoubach, who had been killed by one of the many lovers he’d taken. Hmad wanted a stable life with only one partner to fulfill his desires, to look after him and his mother in the village. He had not spoken frankly with Gerard about the issue of helping his mother, but he felt sure that his lover would not fail him in this. Of course, he would help him send enough money so that his mother could live independently and with dignity. He decided, as he got off the carriage, to speak with Gerard about this issue as soon as the party was over.

Hmad was lost in his reveries and didn’t see Ali and Ibrahim getting off at the same stop. The duo paused to talk with the driver because they didn’t have enough money to pay the price of the carriage. Hmad continued on his way and almost escaped his pursuers before the pair bolted away from the carriage driver and trailed after him. Hmad entered a swanky villa surrounded by an enormous wall. It wasn’t far from the Ibn Tofail Hospital, where there were many other spacious colonial villas.

Ibrahim turned to his friend. “You have to believe him now, he really does work in that villa.”

“Let’s go inside and see what his work is like.”

“They’ll arrest us,” Ibrahim protested, pulling on Ali’s arm.

“They’ll be preoccupied — it looks like the party has started. They won’t notice us.”

The pair circled around the tall walls of the villa and stopped at the back. Ali climbed onto Ibrahim’s shoulders and pulled himself up on the wall. He stretched his hands down to his friend to help him climb up as well. Then they jumped inside.

Ali followed his friend, the sound of Western music filling the place. The guests flocked toward the house in groups. There were lots of fashionable male tourists with half-naked Moroccan girls on their arms. There were also chic young Moroccan men, more done up than was appropriate. It seemed like they were high-class elites — very clean and smelling of expensive perfumes.

“These are not our kind of people, brother,” Ali whispered.

“Just look at the children of Gueliz.”

“Yeah, high class, brother.”

No one paid attention to their presence as they sauntered inside. Two servers walked by with wine and champagne on trays, and Ali and Ibrahim grabbed glasses as if they were invited guests. They downed the drinks in one gulp and went back to the server to ask for more.

“Are you sure we can drink?” Ali asked. “We go to the mosque now and alcohol is haram.”

Ibrahim was already beginning to feel tipsy. “It’s not forbidden! Honestly, there isn’t a single verse that forbids alcohol in the Koran,” he muttered. “It’s only suggested to abstain. Anyway, we aren’t going to pray while we’re drunk.”

“I am afraid of this act. Turn to God in penitence.”

“God doesn’t know we’re in a villa in Gueliz, enjoying ourselves with all these exquisite drinks. Drink, brother, and don’t annoy me. We will pray later on.”

“You’re right, Ibrahim... these drinks are great!”

It was clear that most of the guests didn’t know each other. There were middle-aged foreign men trying to hit on stylish young guys while they drank champagne and beer. No one cared about anyone else here. Ali and Ibrahim wandered around the huge house. The gigantic living room was divided into two sections. One was decorated in Moroccan fashion, with cushions and sofas covered with green and purple brocade fabric, while the other section was furnished with sophisticated antique European canapé couches in orange and brown tones. The curtains were of the Moroccan patchwork style, sewn from recycled green and purple Indian saris. In the middle of the living room, a wooden stairway led up to the first floor, and in one corner a corridor crossed to another room that looked different than the others. In the middle of this room was a desk, and the walls behind it were covered with bookcases filled with volumes of all sizes, most of them bound in leather, and all neatly arranged.

Having never seen such an enormous number of books before, Ibrahim turned to Ali and said: “The Christian is educated.”

“I don’t think we’ll be able to dupe him then.”

“Educated people are stupid too, dummy,” Ibrahim quipped. “He’ll be an easy mark, just let me think of how.”

But Ali didn’t let him think. Instead he led Ibrahim across the painted hallway covered with authentic Moroccan tadelakt plaster until they found themselves on the way to the garden. The other living room in the European style was painted white, and led out to the open veranda beside the garden and pool, which was almost overflowing with water. They thought for a moment that they were in a dream. Or was this really the valley of heaven that the faqih had spoken about? Without a doubt, heaven looks like this place, Ali thought. What was heaven if not water, pure white surfaces, fruit trees, and a pool in the middle of a garden?

The thieves discussed the covenant of faith and how this place seemed proof of the profligacy that they had heard the faqih speak about.

“They are the people transgressing beyond bounds,” Ali said drunkenly.

“They’re infidels,” Ibrahim responded, raising his glass high. “Death to the infidels!”

It seemed to them that this was a completely different life. For a moment, they felt filled with a compassion that left no place for hunger, which had hardened their hearts. For they had chased after this hunger since their childhood in the luckless village of Smimou. Their entire lives had been spent hunting for scraps of food, and this endless foraging transforms any human heart into a callous brick.

“Why don’t we leave him and his business alone, brother,” Ali said, more relaxed after another glass of champagne. “He didn’t do anything to us.”

“Wake up, Ali! If we go back to Riad Zitoun, we go hungry. The twenty dirhams we borrowed from Mubarak are gone, and tomorrow he’s going to ask us to pay him back. What are we going to say to him, you thin-skinned sissy?”

“We are going to look for work, pay off our debts, and start a new life,” Ali insisted.

“A new life — without a trade or education, and with the tourist police waiting to ambush us on all sides of the square?” Ibrahim drawled. “Rest is for the rich, for those people I saw coming into this villa as invited guests. As for us, we jumped the fence. No one wants us here.”

“It feels like no one has wanted me here since I was born,” Ali said. “My dad just shot his load into my mom’s belly, and then she tossed me into the cold room of our shack. Nothing was prepared for my arrival into the world: I had no food or clothes, and I studied nothing, so why did my parents even bring me into this life?”

“They brought you to me so we could con gullible people and eat sausage sandwiches at the end of the day,” Ibrahim joked. “That’s the most he could do for you.”

“Ibrahim, I want to get married. I want to have children,” Ali blurted out, the alcohol loosening his tongue.

“It’s like the proverb says: Here you are naked and asking for a diamond ring. Marriage? Are you nuts? We haven’t paid rent in two months. Where is your stupid bride going to live?”

“Maybe I’ll find a girl with a job to love me, and we can manage together.”

“Why would a girl with a job want you?” Ibrahim asked with a laugh. “Girls with jobs are looking for guys with real jobs, not thieves like us.”

The duo finally stopped probing their painful thoughts and surrendered themselves to the music.

“I’m going to get another drink, stay where you are,” Ibrahim said as he headed back to the servers.

He brought back two flutes of champagne. They sat on the edge of the pool drinking and gazing at the fruit trees that surrounded them.

“No one is even picking the fruit here, look how it’s scattered on the ground.”

“I told you, they are the people transgressing all bounds,” Ali said.

“Infidels.”

Ali and Ibrahim were soon joined by a group of screaming young people — young men and women who threw their clothes in the water and filled the pool with their bodies. Some of them started kissing each other. Among them was a teenaged Moroccan boy who was passionately kissing a middle-aged foreign man.

“We are among the Sodomites, my friend,” Ibrahim murmured.

“I told you, they are transgressing,” Ali repeated.

“Infidels.”

The thieves retreated from the pool, tipsy. They stumbled toward the living room where everyone was dancing to raï music.

Cheb Khaled was singing: “Didi... didi oh... didi...”

Moroccan girls writhed to the music, and the foreigners accompanied them by clapping to the beat. People were clinging to each other with glasses in their hands; the drinks were flowing everywhere, and the neatly arranged tables were covered with dishes of succulent food.

Ali and Ibrahim were given plates. They piled them with pieces of fried meat, chicken, and unfamiliar salads. The pair ate greedily, and at that moment they were absolutely certain they were in heaven. They had never been to a party this lavish in their whole lives. True, Ibrahim and Ali had known tourists before, but the ones they knew were tourists of a different stripe — ones who could be found wandering across Jemaa el-Fnaa morning and night with their backpacks. Those were the ones they had taken advantage of and swindled, whereas the rich ones sought refuge in villas and luxurious gardens, and in parties like the one they were crashing.

“How do they go shopping, then?” Ali asked.

“Clearly they send their servants to do the shopping for them.”

The thieves had just finished their plates and were preparing for another round when a voice suddenly shouted from the top of the stairs: “Maintenant, la surprise de la soirée... Mademoiselle Marilyn Monroe!”

Ali looked quizzically at Ibrahim. “Did you hear that?”

“Some kind of surprise... some kind of food, maybe?”

“He said Marilyn Monroe is here. She’s an actress, stupid,” Ali said, shaking his head.

“But she died years ago.”

“I swear to you, he said that Marilyn Monroe is here.”

They turned toward the stairs and saw a young woman of outstanding beauty descending, very deliberately, the wooden stairway in the middle of the room. She was blond, with large breasts almost bouncing out of her white dress that was slit open at the bust to reveal her charms. She was puckering her delicious lips as if to kiss an imaginary person, and she stretched out her soft arms invitingly. She came down the stairs slowly, stepping to the beat of the soft music. She appeared to be Moroccan.

Some of the men shouted: “Oooh!”

“Ay luv yoo, Marilyn!” one guy screamed.

She seductively lifted up the hem of her dress so that her translucent white stockings appeared, hooked to something even more alluring. The flesh wrapped in the tight muslin pantyhose looked even more tempting than the naked flesh itself.

Ibrahim imagined himself removing her stockings, taking his time kissing those tasty lips of hers. He hadn’t touched a woman’s body for months because he couldn’t afford a prostitute, and he didn’t dare flirt with the poor girls in Riad Zitoun.

In the days when they’d been tour guides, Ibrahim hadn’t been deprived of sex. It had been available from the female tourists who generously offered their bodies and their bountiful love. There was no need for marriage, the women didn’t get upset, and there were no protective brothers, chaperones, or uncles. Just total surrender to the heat of a throbbing body, giving pleasure and taking it. Most of the time they were both drunk, so Ibrahim couldn’t remember exactly how many women he had slept with back then. When they were tour guides, he’d also had a relationship with Zahra, a married woman. He regretted not getting married back then. If he had done so, there would be children jumping around him right now. He pushed the thought of marriage from his mind and simply enjoyed the sight of Marilyn Monroe. He was truly astonished, because he knew that she had died a long time ago.

“I can’t believe Marilyn Monroe is here,” Ali said, his mouth still open in shock.

“I swear, you’re so stupid. It’s a man,” Ibrahim responded.

“A man?”

“Yeah, I swear, it’s a man,” Ibrahim said. “Just look at his legs.”

Ali looked at Marilyn’s legs. They did seem manly. He turned to face Ibrahim. “It’s true! She really is a man... wow! Where are we, my friend?”

“We are with the people transgressing beyond all bounds,” Ibrahim said grimly.

“Infidels.”

They could accept many things, but not a man dressed as a woman. In their opinion, this was something revolting — an unforgivable crime that violated all that was holy. Ali was reeling as he yelled: “I want to throw myself on that effeminate Christian and choke him.”

“He isn’t a Christian — he’s Moroccan. See, his face isn’t foreign,” Ibrahim said.

“He isn’t foreign?”

“I don’t know why I feel like I know him. Something about him reminds me of someone I’ve seen before, but I don’t know from where...” Ibrahim trailed off as he took a good long look at Marilyn.

“Yeah, he does seem familiar.”

“Anyway, we came here because of Hmad the Chelh,” Ibrahim reminded. “We should go look for him.”

“I totally forgot about him... I didn’t see him with the servers — where could he be?”

They circled the house once more, but they couldn’t find him.

“I’m sure I saw him enter this place,” Ibrahim said.

“Me too. I definitely saw him, but where could he have gone?”

“Let’s try the first floor.”

They went upstairs and encountered paintings and photographs of naked male bodies in seductive poses throughout the red hallway. Ali, fighting off his drunkenness and arousal, yelled: “They are the people transgressing beyond bounds!”

“Infidels!”

They opened the door of the first room on the left side and found a foreign man and a Moroccan girl clinging to each other. The foreigner was annoyed and bellowed in their faces: “Allez vous faire foutre!”

Ali closed the door and turned to Ibrahim. “What did he say?”

“He said, Go fuck yourself.”

“Goddamn you. Goddamn all of you. They are the people transgressing beyond bounds!” Ali said once again.

“Infidels.”

Ibrahim and Ali said these things, but experienced at the same instant a powerful arousal.

“Oh, if only I was in his place,” Ibrahim mumbled. “If only I could hold a woman right now, touch her waist, plow her until she moans.”

“Unbelievable... not a single woman hit on me at this party,” Ali griped.

“Have you seen the people here, have you seen their clothes? Their faces? We look like a couple of homeless bums and you wonder why they aren’t chasing us?”

“No one has even noticed we’re here,” Ali grumbled. “Everyone is drunk, or in bed with a slutty girl, or a girlie boy.”

Ibrahim opened the door to the second room and saw two young guys naked on the bed, hiding under the blanket in fear.

“I am about to explode. I want a woman now, any woman,” Ali moaned. “I just want to go to bed with a woman beside me.”

Like most young men of his age, Ali thought about sex obsessively. Nothing would cure this except for marriage, or being able to have a woman every day. But marriage was impossible for him. Sex had tortured him even more since he had been overtaken over by religious sentiments. He had started to feel sinful because of his urges, and the fact that he couldn’t satisfy his needs in the legal way that the faqih talked about.

Ibrahim grabbed Ali’s arm, pulling him out of his thoughts. “Quit daydreaming and help me look in the other rooms. Maybe we’ll find that damned Chelh in one of them. I bet he’s not even a server here. But someone must know what he really does in this place.”

The thieving pair were Chleuhs themselves. But they considered themselves to be different from the poor and backward Chleuhs from Errachidia and Ouarzazate, since Ali and Ibrahim had been born and raised close to two cities: Essaouira on one side and Marrakech on the other. They were fortunate that they’d been raised in a village close to Marrakech, the center of Moroccan civilization. A city of achievements and the pride of the Berbers. A city open to all cultures. You only had to wander across Jemaa el-Fnaa to see the whole world, and you could hear half the world’s languages while sitting in the humblest café. Being from Marrakech filled them with a particular pride. How could that damned Chelh be working in this heavenly villa amid all this bliss when he was from the godforsaken wasteland between Errachidia and Ouarzazate? The train didn’t even go there.

Ali was still caught up in his dreams of having a woman to warm his body. He was nearing thirty and he still hadn’t enjoyed the pleasure of daily sex that the faqih said marriage provided.

Ibrahim turned to him again, once more snapping him out of his reverie. “Focus, Ali. We’re here to look for Hmad the Chelh and we haven’t found him yet.”

“And where will we find him in the middle of all this racket — with guests, servers, and suspiciously locked rooms?”

“We’ll ask the owner of the house,” Ibrahim suggested.

“There’s an idea, we’ll ask the owner of the house.”

They went over to a group of people surrounding Marilyn Monroe but were roundly ignored. The music was loud and most people were occupied with their companions. They finally asked a drunk Moroccan girl and she pointed at someone else in the circle around Marilyn, saying: “He’s over there, his name is Gerard.”

Ali and Ibrahim turned toward Gerard, who was leaning against Marilyn’s shoulder with his ass glued to her thighs.

“Bonsoir, monsieur,” Ibrahim greeted.

“Bonsoir,” Gerard replied.

“Nous cherchons Hmad Chelh?”

“Il est là; c’est Marilyn, ma drag queen préférée,” Gerard said before turning away.

Ali whispered to Ibrahim: “Did you understand anything?”

“He says that Hmad is Marilyn.”

“This damned Chelh is mocking us. He’s a fairy and a faggot!” Ali seethed. “We’re going to blackmail him and expose him to the neighborhood, or maybe to all of Marrakech, if he doesn’t pay up. We’re going to take so much money from him in exchange for our silence. Just like we did with Nadia the dancer. She paid us for months before she disappeared from Riad Zitoun. Where did that fornicator go? These people are transgressing beyond bounds.”

“Infidels,” Ibrahim said.

Thoughts raced through Ali’s brain. He remembered his mother warning him about the consequences of leading a life of debauchery. He pictured his older brother warning him about what some boys do with each other, recalled the faqih declaring the secret practice of homosexuality to be haram and the gravest of sins. He suddenly smelled a strange fragrance that was neither perfume nor alcohol. A queer aroma that he remembered trailing behind Hajj pilgrims when they returned from Mecca. Or like the smell of the mosque — that pleasant smell of old books, cheap incense, and shoes.

Ali drew the knife that he always kept in his pocket. The knife that he used to threaten old people with before he had repented before God. He flung himself at Hmad the Chelh, chanting: “For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds!”

The faqih had explained this verse to them only a few days before, describing all the punishments for homosexuality, and explaining that God rejoiced on His throne when sexual deviants were stoned.

Ali threw himself on Hmad the Chelh, aiming several sharp stabs at his stomach. Hmad staggered before he fell to the white floor covered in his own blood. Gerard threw himself on top of Hmad, screaming hysterically and kissing Hmad. A great tumult arose. It seemed as if everyone in that heavenly villa awoke from their drunkenness.

Ibrahim roared at his friend in shock: “What have you done, you brute?”

Ali didn’t hear anyone. He didn’t see anything. He was only dreaming of heaven... of the huge quantities of red wine... the wonderful food... and the women... And he called out, hysterically: “They are the people transgressing beyond bounds... infidels!... They are the people transgressing beyond bounds... infidels!”

Translated from Arabic by Jennifer Pineo-Dunn

The Secret in Fingertips by Fatiha Morchid

Douar el-Askar

They call me Scheherazade, a nickname Philip gave me to stress the fact that with my fingertips I tell tales as magical as The Thousand and One Nights. I adopted the name because it seemed to suit me even more than my own name, which I preferred to completely forget, convinced that deep inside every woman lies a Scheherazade. If the tales of Scheherazade were a shield for her against death, the language of my fingertips was, for me, a shield against poverty.

The language of fingertips, like any other language, can be be learned and mastered with some perseverance, and a gifted person can even practice it creatively. I discovered my talent by chance, as often happens with discoveries. Some would consider me a whore, for it is easy to cast judgment, but I do not consider myself so. You can define me as follows: an ambitious, somewhat smart girl, who life blessed with a gorgeous physical body, but who had been denied the material means needed for well-being. There are those who would see this as a definition of whoredom, or at least a hint at it. But in Marrakech, beautiful rich women are called princesses, while beautiful poor ones are called whores.

I said I was smart, but my intelligence was not the kind that would benefit one in their education, though I reached the baccalaureate level without great effort. What I mean is daily-life smartness, which some would call heart smartness. I don’t like the latter label because I’ve got a silly heart, or otherwise it wouldn’t have fallen for our neighbor Saeed — the drug dealer. I forgot to tell you that I am from Douar el-Askar, a neighborhood that hosts soldiers’ families and hordes of laborers who work in the local food industry factories — particularly with apricots and olives. It’s one of those suburban neighborhoods that sprang up like mushrooms outside the Old Medina of Marrakech. The city that was once red before turning as black as my own days.

I am sorry if I sound scatterbrained — jumping from the rooster to the donkey, as Philip would say. Let’s go back to daily-life smartness. I realized at some point that success in school was no longer equivalent to success in life. That had once been the case, but our generation began to learn only as much as was helpful to engage early in the battleground of life. No one wanted to end up like Mahjoub el-Wafi, who studied medicine for twelve years only to open a clinic in Tameslouht. Poor thing! He would get his payment in chickens and eggs from the people of the neighboring douars... that’s why I decided to be more practical than Dr. el-Wafi. So I asked myself the following question: what career guarantees a bright future?

After a prolonged consideration of things, I opted for a career in massage: relaxing massage... weight-reduction massage... Thai massage, Chinese... or even satanic massage. What’s important is that it was an independent occupation that could be exercised in luxury hotels, beauty salons, and even private homes. It didn’t require specific tools — just trained fingertips and some basic oils. Most importantly, it was in demand among the well-to-do. Being with the poor makes one poor, as Saeed says.

Aunt Mannana, the fortune-teller in Jemaa el-Fnaa, helped me make the choice while staring into my palm lines: Your good fortune will come from beyond the seas. He will be older, wealthy, and renowned... but the secret is the fingertips.

I didn’t understand then what the fingertips of unskilled people can do except steal — until I learned how to massage.

After that memorable meeting with the fortune-teller, I began to secretly examine each foreign face I met. I wondered if that face was good fortune coming from afar.

You might see my consulting fortune-tellers as a contradiction with my practical approach to life, but you will understand the matter once you realize that every great thing starts with a dream. For me, fortune-tellers were sellers of dreams to those who dare not have any. Besides, they can fill a person with tremendous self-confidence, thanks to an amulet that provides one with a charm known only to Moroccans, which is called qaboul (acceptance). It’s an alchemy that makes one lovable, attractive, and irresistibly charming.

I entered the world of massage with spectacular confidence, psychologically prepared for this new venture. It would suffice for me to add the ashes of some amulet to the basic oils with which I massaged the bodies of my clients, to feel my own miraculous abilities, to access their feelings, entrails, hearts, and pockets.

This is how I got to know Mr. Philip, or, rather, his body — only a massage allows you to know the body of a person before knowing their name. He had the traits of the foreigner the fortune-teller had prophesied. He was a Frenchman in his seventies who settled in Marrakech because of a dream he had shared with his deceased wife. They had both discovered the red radiating face of Marrakech: the hospitality of its people and their sense of humor, the delicious food, the magic sunsets over its palm-tree alleys, its markets alive with colors and smells, and the Jemaa el-Fnaa Square with its exoticism, its clowns, storytellers, dancers, snakes, apes, and clamor, bestowing a new life on its visitors. The Frenchman bought a house in Derb Dabachi in the Old Medina, a neighborhood that was a busy passageway to Jemaa el-Fnaa. Derb Dabachi was also famous for hosting in the famous Ghazalah Cinema, before they destroyed it, as well as the notorious gay shop called al-Gaman.

With renovations, the old house was transformed into a wonderful riad where Philip wanted to live the stories of The Thousand and One Nights for the rest of his life. He called it the Riad of Dreams. He forgot that dreams could turn into nightmares.

At the time, I was a young trainee at a massage center in a five-star hotel. I got that job thanks to Saeed — the drug dealer. In Marrakech, you can manage your life if you’re smart enough to adapt to all situations and take advantage of each one of them. But no one was smarter than Saeed when it came to taking advantage of people and things. He was the kind of person to whom the popular saying applies: He lays hands on whatever he sees, and has a share in whatever he hasn’t seen yet. He worked sometimes as a tour guide and sometimes as a driver. He traded in everything from clothes to illicit goods, and had numerous clients — the kind of clients attracted to Marrakech’s hashish rather than its palm trees. He would give me presents that seemed more expensive than what he could afford.

I don’t know what exactly attracted me to Saeed. He wasn’t handsome, but he had the charisma of someone who lived on the edge. Yet I felt safe with him, and this seemed another contradiction of mine. The cops could’ve arrested him any time they liked and thrown him in jail, even if he had friends among the police who benefitted from his deals in return for their silence.

Some policemen provided protection by ignoring your activities until someone stronger than you emerged on stage, and then you became a scapegoat. I had a passion for Saeed, but at the same time I didn’t want to spend my whole life with him. My ambitions were larger than him, and men like him only loved my body and its charms.

I had a strong feeling that I was a princess who was born in the wrong place and in love with the wrong man. I resembled none of my family. All of them were ugly, including my mom who was a housemaid of pure breeding, one of those who labored in homes for meager wages, or worked every day at olive and apricot factories in Douar el-Askar for their daily bread. My father spent his life working in a tannery far away from our neighborhood. He died of lung cancer caused by inhalation of dyeing chemicals when I was ten years old.

I have two sisters, dark-skinned like my mom, short with snub noses and curly hair. I alone was fair-skinned with hair like silk and a slender shape. I honestly doubted whether we all came from the same father. My mom said, justifying the differences, that during her pregnancy she used to work for a beautiful French lady. She said pregnancy cravings had their own secrets and mysteries. Who knows what happened? Perhaps I am the daughter of some foreigner for whom my mom worked. If that’s true, I can’t help but thank her. At least she saved me from the ugliness that would have disqualified me from the world of massage.

I also have an older brother who took refuge from the family’s poverty in faith. After he had failed his studies and given up all ambition, he grew a casual beard and spent most of his time in the mosque. As alcohol is forbidden in our religion, he replaced it with maajoon. In the beginning, he tried to exert his authority over me and my sisters as the man of the house, but the power of the pocket money I provided him with and the effect of maajoon made him docile, so he contented himself by asking God to lead us back to the righteous path.

If Mr. Philip were the foreign man destined to bring my happiness as Aunt Mannana had foretold, then the tree had to first be shaken for the fruit to fall.

“Do you prefer a regular massage or a special one?” I had asked him, feigning innocence.

“I want a relaxing massage,” he replied. “But if the special massage is better than the regular one, why not try it?”

He seemed like the kind of person not used to the intimate caresses often demanded by foreigners his age. I thought that sometimes one learned nothing from the passage of years. I filled my palms with the oils prepared according to Aunt Mannana’s recipes and passed my soft fingertips on his stiff skin after I galvanized them with smooth, sensual energy. I tried to make the exciting part of the massage inevitable. The soft music, the smell of Oriental incense, and the room’s coziness all together completed the play of my fingertips.

Clients who developed an erection went from bashfulness to confusion, and then to laughter. There was nothing like laughter to establish communication. Here, I would intervene gently to puff up their virile ego, showing admiration for their male organ no matter how tiny it was, explaining that it was just a natural reaction in real men. Of course, I didn’t give a damn about boosting their sexual prowess. I, as a matter of fact, cared only for the extra tip that I got from them. I developed the ability to manipulate any kind of human being, aside from Saeed, who kept manipulating me.

I don’t know why I became so weak in front of him. Was it my love for him or my fear of him? Moments of tenderness in his company were accompanied by his fits of violence. He would sometimes beat me and then perch at my feet, crying and pleading: Forgive me, my sweetie, I’m not cruel, but this hellish life is full of cruelty. We would then embrace, cry together, and make love passionately, dreaming of a better tomorrow.

He taught me exciting massage techniques, which I practiced on his body. He taught me the art of using my fingertips, how to tempt and then deny, how to make the client pass gradually and slowly from relaxation to sudden pleasure. In fact, I was very perplexed when he told me all this, and I didn’t understand how he could be so jealous yet at the same time tell me to indulge my clients. He said that it was not lovemaking and that my fingertips had nothing to do with my body. How could he say that when he knew that things sometimes did not stop at my fingertips? What if the client were to ask for oral sex?

Finally, I convinced myself that my body had nothing to do with my mouth either, and I immersed myself completely in massage. This was basically prostitution disguised as massage. However, after I started working at the Riad of Dreams, I discovered that prostitution was an essence with a variety of expressions. Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at me, as Christ said.

After the first massage session, Mr. Philip offered to employ me at the Riad of Dreams. I discovered later that our meeting was not a coincidence, and that Saeed had planned it all. Saeed told Mr. Philip that the Riad of Dreams lacked a beautiful lady with the skill of massage. Then Saeed sent him to me at the hotel for a trial session; afterward, he told him that I was his neighbor and close friend.

It saddened me that he did not present me to Mr. Philip as his girlfriend, but he justified his deed by saying that Marrakech had ears that were wide open and mouths that were gaping — everyone knew what was in everyone else’s bowels — and that Mr. Philip’s knowledge of our true relationship was none of his business. He added that he was to blame for considering my own good and my future. I thanked him with an embrace and closed the subject, as was the case after every quarrel. And so I began my adventure at the Riad of Dreams, and at first I was happy with my new job.

Unfortunately, exactly two months after I got this new job, my mother fell sick and stopped working. So I had to provide for everyone and bear the cost of medication and other household expenses, which compelled me to sometimes ask for help from Saeed, who began to get nervous about my endless demands.

One romantic night, while Mr. Philip was away in Paris to attend the funeral of one of his friends, we were making love in one of the luxury rooms at the Riad of Dreams. Saeed, to my surprise, said: “I have an idea for us to break out of this misery. You just need to make Mr. Philip fall in love with you and marry you... Then, Scheherazade can become the lady of the riad. Imagine changing its name to Riad Scheherazade. This can happen if you truly help me realize our dreams.”

I was shocked by the suggestion. “How dare you ask me to marry him! What’s in it for you? Wouldn’t you be jealous? And what about our marriage?”

“I doubt his sexual potency,” he laughed. “Of course we’ll marry after we get rid of him and you inherit everything.”

“What do mean by get rid of him?” I asked, terrified.

Saeed stroked my hair lovingly. “Honey! Don’t you see that he’s already one inch away from death? But that’s my job. All you have to do is to make him fall in love with you and propose to you. After that, you’ll see good things happening, my dear Scheherazade, my Lady of the Riad.”

At that very moment, the face of Aunt Mannana the fortune-teller took hold in my mind. She had stared at the lines of my palm and said: Your good fortune will come from beyond the seas. He will be older, wealthy, and renowned... but the secret is in the fingertips. I wondered, What if this really is the destiny written in the lines of my palm? Who can escape destiny?

I admit that I actually dreamed of becoming the Lady of the Riad, especially since my life obligations were tearing me apart: moving daily from the choking misery of my family’s home to the luxury of the riad and its clients who were obsessed with their bodies; tumbling between traditions, beliefs, and my veiled sisters who were submissive to the authority of my brother and his scary asceticism, and the world of massage and its licentiousness.

Back at home, together with my sisters and my mom, we would pray behind my brother, who enjoyed his role as imam. None of them, however, knew about my inner suffering.

I believe in God, but my brother’s ambivalence was not a good thing, as he saw no problem in his reluctance to work or continuing to take pocket money from me. He also began to incessantly ask me to help the brothers who had also stopped working and devoted their daily lives to worshipping, even though working was an act of worship in our religion.

Plus, my mother pestered me with her usual question: When will Saeed propose to you? Your brother is upset with people’s gossip...

I’m not the type of person who cares about gossip. I’d realized at an early age that I would either care about myself or about people’s gossip, and it didn’t take me long to make my choice. I started to enjoy the idea of being the Lady of the Riad. I would take quiet time to gaze at myself in the mirror. I would see myself as a princess strutting around in my own palace. Why not? Do luxury and beauty not go together? However, I wanted no harm done to Mr. Philip. He’d always been nice to me and preferred me to his other masseuses, saying that I was more beautiful and intelligent than any of them, and that I had the admiration of all the clients. But who knows? Maybe he hadn’t even thought about the idea of marriage at all.

Saeed and I schemed together so that things would later take the course we had planned. It wasn’t difficult to seduce Mr. Philip, who Saeed prepared slowly, the way Marrakech people prepare tanjia. After a few weeks, Mr. Philip came to our house to propose to me, carrying a bouquet of red flowers and red with embarrassment. He was led by Saeed, who was walking proudly and looking relieved.

My brother, who we didn’t take into account, opposed the marriage, and threatened to burn down the whole riad. He was shaking with anger as he cursed Saeed: “How dare you do this, you villain? You are not a man... Having had enough of her, you now pass her on to an old Nazarene the age of her grandpa.”

Saeed snapped back in the same violent tone: “It’s you who is the villain... You just want your sister to keep supporting you and the family. If you were a real man your sister wouldn’t have had to go to work in the first place!”

The marriage proposal turned into a brawl. At one point my brother tried to grab me and threatened to kill me, while my mom cried and begged him to calm down. I don’t know how I suddenly got the courage to stand up to him for the first time in my life.

“How dare you deny what Allah has permitted?” I bellowed. “Philip agreed to convert to Islam. Since I’m not a minor, the new family law says I don’t need the permission of anyone. You’ll keep receiving your pocket money as usual. As for me, I embrace my freedom whether you like it or not!”

We left the house — Philip, Saeed, and I — escorted by my mother’s tears and my sisters’ laments.

I married Philip after he converted to Islam by saying the shahada; we married before a cleric and two adls: There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. I never imagined things would be so easy, especially since I knew Philip to be an atheist. After the wedding, which was quite intimate, I became the Lady of the Riad but severed ties with my family — my brother disowned me and forbade my mom and sisters from having anything to do with me.

Philip was happy with our relationship and did everything to make me happy too, as I gave his life a sense of plenitude. One day, he confided in me about his past life in a tone verging on bitterness: “I was a bank manager and I had so many friends, but retirement revealed my shallow relationships with my colleagues. Once one retires, work-based relationships also retire. Those human ties rarely survive outside the walls of administrations and offices. Like chairs and files, they depend on space, not people. Only my relationship to my late wife grew stronger after my retirement, which is the reason why we decided to leave Paris.”

While Philip was enjoying his new life, I was striving to convince myself that I’d made the right decision. A decision now spoiled with the taste of fear and anxiety, especially as Saeed’s material demands and greed grew with time. Saeed asked to work at the reception desk next to Leila, so he would know every penny that entered the money box. I never liked Leila, there was something mysterious in her behavior that hinted at a big secret in her life, and, frankly, I didn’t like her way of flirting with Saeed. She wasn’t beautiful. She was one of those Marrakech girls with brown skin and curly hair, but she was attractive and witty in a way I could not be. Everyone called her Flifla, which meant hot little pepper — because she was so hot and sexy.

Longing for my mother and sisters began to tear me down, and I felt increasingly trapped by Saeed. He no longer showed any interest in my body. He justified that by saying he didn’t want to draw attention to our relationship, since to Philip I was Saeed’s best friend, and his flirting with Leila was only a cover.

I would cringe whenever Philip hinted at something going on between Leila and Saeed, while Leila would only lower her eyes and smile in the kind of hypocritical way my townspeople were so good at. My nerves were frayed. The virus of jealousy took hold of me and I began to experience an unbearable sense of tension as I became the Lady of the Riad, and thus bound to behave decently, especially with clients used to the special messages. Naturally, I stopped giving massages after I trained two new girls to do the job. This act impressed Philip, who took it as an expression of faithfulness.

Faithfulness is a term that has no place in the riad, where the client is king and everyone else a slave. The client gets to live out The Thousand and One Nights in the Scheherazade Riad (I forgot to mention that Philip changed the name of the riad on our wedding night). Saeed’s drug trade started bringing a special kind of client to the riad, and the reception desk became a secret place for all sorts of illegal business behind Philip’s and Leila’s artificial smiles.

Saeed would be evasive whenever I tried to dot the i’s. He would say, “Do not be stupid and spoil everything with your pathological jealousy. Am I jealous when you sleep with Mr. Philip? Of course not, because it’s just a plan to unite later in times of prosperity. This was our choice, together! Don’t be crazy.”

The problem was that I wasn’t sure whether anything happening around me was actually my own choice. I was involved in a mean game, believing that I held all the cards, but the actual winning card remained in Saeed’s hands. He ended up taking a room at the riad after making his presence necessary there, and winning the trust of Mr. Philip, who considered him almost a brother-in-law. And why not? Isn’t he like a brother to me?

I could no longer understand Saeed. Sometimes he would express his impatience to get rid of Philip and I would urge him to wait. I became afraid of my own shadow. Other times I felt he enjoyed his new status and was in no hurry to change anything.

During one dismal week, news of my mother’s death reached us. My sorrow was immense, especially since my brother, who blamed me for her passing, prevented me from attending her funeral. Philip tried his best to mitigate the impact of the shock, but my grief was as deep as my feelings of loneliness. A month after her death, he decided to take me abroad for a change of scenery.

While preparing for the trip to Paris, Saeed handed me an official-looking paper and asked me to make Philip sign it before leaving. “It’s just a proxy for me to be able to purchase supplies for the riad in Philip’s absence,” he explained. “This will also help us plan for our future together.”

“How so? And if he asks me about it, what will I say?” I asked him.

“Serve him a few glasses of champagne and massage him with your magic fingertips. I am sure he will sign anything you put in front of him,” Saeed replied sarcastically. He then stepped forward and hugged me, and I suddenly realized how much I had missed his embrace. Then, he added: “It’s in Arabic, you can translate it any way you want. Do this, my dearest Scheherazade, and soon we will get rid of the ghost of this old man.”

I did as he said. Philip promptly signed the paper, which I presented to him as a certificate of residence, confirming that I officially lived in the riad. I added that my brother needed it.

We departed Marrakech, leaving the riad to the care of Saeed and Leila. Although I had always dreamed of traveling abroad, I could not enjoy my time in Paris. I felt bitter in Philip’s arms. A feeling of dissatisfaction haunted me and a sense of guilt tore me down when I remembered the death of my mother, who had taken her grief for me with her. How strange that now that I had a car, wore expensive clothes, ate food prepared by chefs, and enjoyed sessions of personal massages, misery was creeping into my life. Laughter no longer tasted of joy nor smiles of satisfaction. I felt as if a void was growing larger inside me every day. My dreams had become real, but their color was gray.

Meanwhile, a voice inside me kept whispering that Saeed was lying to me. I could no longer stand Leila’s presence at the riad. I wanted to kick her out, but Saeed was against the idea and kept saying that she was an important piece of the plan, that we had to keep her there until everything was over. I tried to put an end to my suspicions, and I convinced myself that jealousy was the cause of my tragedy, hoping that I would soon get rid of her. For now, I just had to trust Saeed and his secret plan. But things were not so simple.

After my return from Paris, I went to see Aunt Mannana, as I often did when I felt down.

She welcomed me early in the morning in her semidark room on the roof of a decadent building, amid the smoke of incense. She had fear in her eyes, as her henna-dyed fingers arranged the cards on a small table in front of me. “There’s an adder in your home... wriggling under your bed. Beware of the adder, daughter,” she said.

I was terrified as I imagined the snake coiling over my body. Who could it be? It was Leila, no doubt. I could no longer bear her yellow smile as she cast her shadow over me every morning and said in her Marrakech accent: How are you this morning, Lalla Scheherazade? And how is Mr. Philip?

The words of the fortune-teller stoked the flames of doubt in my heart as jealousy ravaged me. And so, during a dawn that was grim with insomnia and longing, I slipped from Philip’s thorny arms and crept on the tips of my fingers and toes down to Saeed’s room, seeking a little love. Overwhelmed with burning desire for the warmth of his body, I opened his door quietly so as not to wake up the servants. To my surprise, he was fast asleep with Leila, who should have been at home in her own bed. I almost fainted as I fled the specter of betrayal and rushed toward the bathroom where I vomited up my bitterness. Philip got up and rushed after me. He carried me back to the bedroom and called a doctor. The doctor said that it was food poisoning. He was correct in his diagnosis, for I had indeed swallowed the venom of the adder and her lover — the traitor.

I spent a week in bed utterly dejected with Philip playing the tender nurse. But tenderness was hard for me to accept as I began to hate men, the world, and myself. I thought a lot during that week about a plan to take revenge on Saeed — the ignoble creature whose trust with Leila polluted the riad and suffocated me. Yet what if I complied with his plan? Made him get rid of Philip alone, so that he could spend the rest of his life in jail while I eliminated Leila and poverty.

Philip was a nice man who really loved me, but he was old and had lived his life and realized all his dreams. As for me, I was still at the beginning of my journey, which would remain forever postponed if I didn’t act quickly. I had only myself to rely on.

I met Saeed in private and questioned him: “What’s your plan? I see you’re no longer in a hurry to get rid of Philip.”

“I prefer to keep the plan to myself so that I don’t implicate you with me, dearest Scheherazade,” he told me. “You’re so sensitive. I’m afraid you might become weak and give away the secret. Let me act on my own. Stay calm and affectionate toward him, and let no one suspect us. Forget about Leila, she is good and loves you.”

How dare he defend her in front of me? How impudent. I was about to tell him what I knew about his affair with Leila, but then I thought better of it. He kissed me passionately and whispered in my ear: “Do not let the devil toy with you, sweetie. You know I wouldn’t do anything without you. You are Philip’s wife and his only heir, and even if I did care only for his money, I’d have to marry you to get it. Besides... what good is money without your love?”

The power of his persuasion equaled my vulnerability before his affection. I tried to calm myself with the idea that Saeed’s relationship with Leila was only sexual, and invented all sorts of arguments for that: she must have been coming onto him, and a virile male in our culture cannot repel a woman who makes such advances. Then I decided to confront her instead — yes, I should threaten her. Tell her that if she didn’t keep away from him, I’d kick her out and take my bread out of her mouth. Maybe that would scare her and prevent her from further shenanigans with Saeed.

With this in mind, I seized an opportunity and invited her to Philip’s office one afternoon. I told her: “We are women and we know about each other. This is why I want to tell you that Saeed is like my brother, and I know what’s going on between you... I want you to put an end to your relationship with him or I’ll kick you out of the riad.”

I was surprised at her reaction. She burst into laughter and looked at me with insolence. She brought her face closer to mine and whispered mockingly: “Keep your lies for your Nazarene husband. I know everything about you. I know how jealousy is ravaging your heart.”

I fumed with rage and couldn’t control myself; I raised my hand to slap her in the face. “Respect your mistress, slut,” I hissed.

Leila returned the slap with similar violence. “You’re nobody’s mistress, you idiot,” she tossed back defiantly.

I lunged at her and we started punching and pulling each other’s hair while exchanging vile curses and insults like bullets. Suddenly, Saeed rushed into the office and tried to separate us.

“What’s your problem? Everyone can hear your screams across the riad!” Saeed shouted. “Enough!”

I could feel my lower lip bleeding as he pulled us apart. “Do you see what you’ve done?” I yelled back.

Saeed turned to Leila, held her hands, and said almost soothingly: “Don’t be silly.”

“It’s you who are silly!” I growled. “Don’t defend her.”

My limbs froze when I saw him hug her. “Calm down,” he whispered to her. “It’s not the right time yet.”

“What do you mean by that, you traitors?” I demanded.

At that very moment, Philip entered as the room, anger illuminating his pale face. He took hold of Saeed and cried out: “How dare you do this to me? You robbed me, you son of a bitch!”

Saeed pushed him and Philip fell down. From the floor, he lifted his eyes to me. “And you, were you his accomplice?”

I didn’t understand what was happening, so I asked: “What’s the matter? What did you do, Saeed?”

“You see, it is the right time,” Leila jumped in, as she ran a hand through her disheveled hair. She walked toward me. “The game ends here. Didn’t I tell you that you were nobody’s mistress? The riad is no longer his. It now belongs to someone else.”

I asked for an explanation as I helped Philip to his feet.

“You’ve been outsmarted,” Leila gloated. Then she turned to Philip. “What good is money to you when you’re about to kick the bucket? Come along, Saeed, let’s get out of here — we have what we need.”

Saeed followed her to the door and Philip rushed after them. “You can’t get away from me so easily!” he barked. He grabbed Saeed’s shoulder, but Saeed turned around and shoved him hard. Philip fell to the ground again and Saeed unleashed on him, punching and kicking him while he was down.

I screamed and tried to pull him away. “Stay away from him! You’ll kill him!”

Saeed pushed me as well, and I fell to the floor as he turned his attention back to Philip.

Leila stood by the door, smiling maliciously. “Enough, darling. Let’s go,” she said.

Saeed got up, leaving Philip listless on the floor, and headed toward the door, his back turned on me. Shaking with rage and hatred, I jumped up, grabbed an iron statue from the desk, and hurled it at Saeed with all my strength. It hit the back of his head. Blood immediately gushed out of his skull and he fell to the ground.

Leila shrieked: “You killed him, bitch!”

At the sight of so much blood covering the floor, I lost consciousness.

I opened my eyes to the sight of a paramedic.

“Wake up. Are you okay?” he asked.

The room was crowded with policemen. The ambulance took Saeed to the hospital while Leila and I were arrested.

Leila turned out to be a fugitive from Belgium, where she was involved in a drug-trafficking ring. She confessed to the police that she was the one who had planned everything. Leila had known Saeed before he’d employed her. Together, they had sold the riad and its contents using the proxy that I made Philip sign, and were about to flee abroad with the money. They were each sentenced to ten years in prison.

Saeed was transferred to jail after spending several weeks in the hospital. Some police informants who used to protect him now revealed his involvement in prior criminal cases, which increased his sentence to fifteen years.

I myself spent a few months in custody before I was released on bail that Philip paid. He also forgave me. “Behaving badly once does not make someone a bad person,” he told me. He did his best to save me from any further trouble.

I must say that during the time Saeed was in the recovery room, I oscillated between two contradictory attitudes: on the one hand, I wished for his death so that Leila would be deprived of her lover forever; and on the other hand, I prayed for his safety so that I wouldn’t be deprived of my freedom. Luckily he didn’t die, because freedom was far more meaningful than love.

I am now living at Riad Scheherazade as the undisputed lady there, taking care of Philip (my fortune come from afar). He recently suffered a stroke. I massage him with tenderness, using my painstakingly acquired methods. Who knows? He may recover from his hemiplegia. Isn’t the secret in the fingertips?

Translated from Arabic by Norddine Zouitni

Delirium by Mahi Binebine

Souk Semmarine

To share the same body with a wayward being is no easy feat. Kamal and I were in constant conflict, most often over nothing. We argued day in and day out, and our fights sometimes grew so heated that passersby, ignorant of our history, would take us for fools. We spoke as one on a single matter: our love for Mama Rosalie — an intense, unconditional love.

It would be hard for me to give you an accurate account of my companion, as we can only know ourselves subjectively. Mama Rosalie had drummed into us an old story her mother used to tell: A rock suspended in the heavens is fated to fall on the head of the man who disparages himself on earth. Since the dawn of time, this meteorite has been floating in the firmament. And so I can only speak well to you of Kamal because, whatever people might say, we have a certain affection for each other. He’s a little bit of me, and I’m a little bit of him. We are, then, rather handsome young men: well-built, baby-faced, with those dull eyes — bloodshot, but kind — particular to men who’ve ceased to dream, who’ve thrown in the towel and no longer expect anything of anyone.

Our greatest asset was the language of Goethe. In all of Marrakech, we were the only tour guides fluent in German. We might as well have been oil barons. Not a Kraut in the land of the Moors escaped our nets. We were the rightful rulers of the coach buses crammed with white bodies, hormone-fed, laughing and avid, ready to spend a fortune at the Semmarine, the grandest souk in town. We would lead them into our friends’ bazaars, singing the praises of our ancestral handicrafts, so elegant and refined, the work of a gifted people living in the most beautiful country in the world: This carpet here belonged to the mistress of King Moulay Ismail, who took tea at her home on a hilltop overlooking Meknes all throughout his reign; that sculpture there was custom-made for the regent Ba Ahmed, who commissioned the Bahia palace with its 156 rooms in the Old Medina of Marrakech; this dagger, once belonging to Tashfin Ibn Ali, son of the founder of the Red City, served to cut the throat of an Andalusian rebel who’d come with his compatriots to build the wall encircling the old town; and this box before your eyes is an extremely rare piece: the bones of a mythical camel that crossed the Sahara a hundred times, encrusted in thuya wood by the chief of the Jewish artisans of Mogador. We rattled off our string of lies without blinking an eye, with remarkable eloquence, a penchant for anecdote, and absolute conviction. Thomas Mann, Stephan Zweig, and Herman Hesse lent their music to our hoaxes; they were, so to speak, our accomplices. Their words peppered our speeches, helping us to justify the exorbitant prices that we charged with reassuring nods of the head. A good share of the booty was paid to us afterward.

Kamal and I made a small fortune each week, half of which ended up in Mama Rosalie’s purse, and the other in the till of the potbellied owner of Café Atlas.

Once our morning work at the souk was done, we’d spend most of the day drinking beer by the case, in this godforsaken hole in the wall where we found a kind of peace. Our secret squabbles would die down; we’d admit to the snag in our argument on this or that subject, each of us conceding a point in the debate, even flattering each other, becoming affable and easy. If only we’d had two distinct bodies, we’d have embraced one another like a couple of drunks.

Come nine o’clock sharp — just this side of an alcoholic coma — we’d climb onto our mopeds and fly straight to Mama Rosalie’s. That we made it home safe and sound every night was no less than a miracle. If we sometimes took a spill in a narrow alley between buildings, it was rarely serious. We’d get to our feet and bravely continue on our way. As soon as we arrived, a good warm meal (the only one of the day) was served to us by a young housekeeper with sumptuous curves who we always swore we’d take advantage of, though we never had the energy to go through with it. Mama Rosalie stayed shut away in her room, refusing to cross paths with the pitiful wrecks that came stumbling through the door every night of her life. She’d wait until the next morning, at coffee, when we’d become human again and speak intelligibly. We loved these moments of reprieve, loved resting our heads on her knees and letting her fuss over us like in the old days, when she’d spend hours picking our hair for lice. We couldn’t get enough of her caresses or her half-soothing, half-reprimanding words. Just knowing she was there beside us gave us the strength to face another day, to face the chaos of the souk and its hordes of tourists. We’d recharge our batteries, laughing at the same old jokes we’d told a thousand times. That just about sums up our existence, Kamal’s and mine.

Café Atlas was a world teeming with the dregs and mold of the city, a lure for all kinds of human distress, an island of survival on a sea of torment, engulfing you in its smoke: stories sung by vagabond dreamers, the humid air filled with joyful chatter, and tears that fell from a thousand bursts of laughter. It was a place where you could be without really being there, a place closed in by dirty, smoke-stained windows that hurried passersby would brush against on their way to somewhere else, where the din of life was a faint, distant sound, drowned out by the omnipresent voice of the divine Umm Kulthum, and where the beer and wine flowed freely. Ah! Café Atlas was our paradise... or our hell, depending.

On that particular night, riding home on our mopeds, we’d suffered a brutal fall. Our face was covered in blood. We couldn’t move so much as our little finger. Kamal opened his eyes to see a dead child laid out beside us. A crowd had gathered, the people’s accusing looks like so many blazing pitchforks ready to stab us. He saw horned serpents and yellow scorpions flowing from gaping mouths, the sleeves of the crowd’s djellabas billowing around us in a ghostly danse macabre as people screamed and screamed. The child, dressed all in white, stood and began to join in the dance.

“He’s dead!” Kamal told me.

“Who?”

“The dancing child. Black blood is flowing from his ears.”

“I don’t see any child,” I said.

“He’s lost in the crowd, that’s why you don’t see him.”

“There’s no crowd! We’re alone in the street,” I insisted.

“You don’t hear them screaming?”

“I can only hear you.”

“And the blood on the ground?”

“It’s ours. Look closely, we’ve just fallen. It’s not the first time!”

“You’re lying. You refuse to see what’s in front of your face!” Kamal shouted. “You never want to see anything!”

“Come on, get up. Let’s go home. A warm meal is waiting for us.”

“I hate you!”

“You’ll get over it.”

“I’ve always hated you,” Kamal said.

“Because I see you. I don’t judge you, but I see you. You don’t like to be watched.”

Kamal went silent. I’d never seen him in such a state. His fixed expression raised a kind of invisible wall between us. I tried to change my tone, to soften my words, to reason with him in every possible manner, but he wouldn’t listen. It was as if, by some obscure trickery, he’d caused me to vanish from our existence. He’d turned his back on me — on me, his companion for better or worse since childhood. My protests were in vain. I could see my words driving straight into that wall of silence, then rolling down it like drops of condensation.

He stood up, got back on his moped, and rode straight to the souk. Most of the stalls were already closed. The muezzin was calling for the evening prayer. He stopped at Morad’s — a friend who owned our go-to bazaar.

“Hide me,” he sobbed. “Hide me!”

“What’s going on?” Morad asked.

“I hit a child,” Kamal whispered. “I killed him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a murderer!” he bellowed.

“Calm down and come inside.”

“The kid was no more than ten!” Kamal trembled, and his bloodied face seemed to confirm his story.

Morad asked no more questions. Where we’re from, we stick together and we take care of each other first and worry about the consequences later. He brought Kamal into his bathroom and made him take a shower. Kamal let himself be taken care of, his expression blank, his movements slow. Morad came back with a first-aid kit and attended to his wounds. The sting of the alcohol didn’t even make him wince. Then Morad went to find him a clean gandoura and some babouches, which didn’t take long in the bazaar. He led him to a cramped room at the back of the shop where a mountain of carpets rose up to the ceiling.

“Stay here,” he said. “We’ll talk it over in the morning.”

He came back with a sandwich, closed and double-locked the door behind him, and was gone.

We stayed there for several days, in the shadowy half-darkness, not speaking a word to each other, like a surly old couple. Kamal went from bad to worse. He began to cry, playing the film of his imaginary accident over and over again in his mind, filling gaps in the scenes with hallucinatory details. Sometimes snakes would coil themselves around his body to keep him from escaping, or scorpions would form a blockade like a fakir’s bed of nails. Sometimes there was a blinding light, and ghosts surged toward him, grasping at his face. It was very painful for me not to be able to save him from this nightmare. But what could I do? He was ignoring me. I’d become persona non grata, a stranger as dangerous as the menacing beasts that closed in on him.

Morad paid us visits at mealtimes, bringing a basket of food and several cases of beer. He brought news from the outside too, which was quickly becoming frightening. The police were indeed looking for us. Two inspectors were making rounds of the souk, stall by stall, asking for leads about where we might be. I didn’t understand any of it. I knew we hadn’t killed anyone; I’d been there at the scene of the accident, and much less inebriated than Kamal. As word spread, I felt Morad’s anxiety growing. He wouldn’t have abandoned us for anything in the world, I was sure of that, but he was afraid. Doubt gradually came over me, piercing me with its cruel venom. I couldn’t see the logic in this story. Why in the hell would the police be looking for a drunk who’d fallen off his moped in a deserted alley? Because they’re bored to death down there, and to pass the time, the demons were amusing themselves by toying with our fears, our anxieties, our lives. I know something about that, having frequented the likes of them inside Kamal’s feverish body. A body I didn’t choose, and that was, so to speak, my purgatory.

If only it hadn’t been so horribly sad, the end of this story would have seemed right out of a burlesque farce staged at some provincial theater. But no, our end was unjust: we didn’t deserve it.

After rallying the entire family to join in her search, Mama Rosalie, worried sick, had finally alerted the police to her son’s disappearance. The inspectors were simply doing their job, trying to bring Kamal back to his mother. That’s why they were looking for us. Morad would only understand it much later, after we were gone. Even then, the thought of it all still made Morad gnaw at his fingers as if they were ripe dates.

Kamal’s visions were becoming more and more frequent, happening now in broad daylight. Morad couldn’t take any more of the screaming; even muffled by the carpets, the noises were frightening the tourists, causing them to flee the bazaar. “It can’t go on like this,” Morad told us one night, when he brought us our dinner.

His pride injured, Kamal decided to take off right away. He thought of Mama Rosalie saying: I would rather not be there than outstay my welcome! And so, without anger, he got back on his moped and abandoned his hideout with dignity. He seemed almost normal, his expression serene; I started to feel reassured. He rode out of the Old Medina, along the ramparts, not sure which direction to take. We had missed the fresh air. We were euphoric, flying with the birds that were still awake at this hour of the night. I heard him murmur that he was happy to breathe air free of carpet dust and of the fetid odor of rats. Our gandoura billowed around us in the wind. For a moment, we felt an odd kind of weightlessness. Seeing a child crossing the road in the middle distance, Kamal turned sharply toward a patch of open ground. Instead of braking he accelerated, following in the direction of a flock of birds. Then silence, a silence like that of the sea, at the bottom of a cesspool where we found ourselves with a shattered skull: a bit drunk, a bit dead. We looked at each other for the last time, and I saw him smile. A shiver ran through us when we glimpsed, on the surface of the water, the silhouette of a dancing child.

Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef

In Search of a Son by Mohamed Nedali

Bab Ghmat

Old Rezzouk and his wife showed up at the police station at eight o’clock in the morning. Their son Abdeljalil hadn’t come home in three days. It was true that the young man occasionally stayed out all night, but never twice in a row, and never without first telling his parents.

The cop at the desk, a man in his forties with a cold, severe expression, asked Rezzouk to describe the missing person. “Name, age, address, and occupation?”

The old man swallowed the frog in his throat. “Abdeljalil Rezzouk,” he began. “Twenty-six years old, number eleven, Derb el-Boumba, Bab Ghmat.”

“Occupation?” the cop grumbled.

Not knowing how to answer, the old man said nothing.

“Well? Spit it out!” snapped the cop.

Confused, Rezzouk started rambling: “Our... our son was... he was, for a few years.... a cigarette vendor, first here in Bab Ghmat, then in other parts of town. And then he... he—”

“He moved up the chain!” the cop cut in, jeering. “A classic promotion, no doubt.”

The old man and his wife looked at each other, perplexed. “What do you mean by chain, sidi?” Rezzouk asked.

“You don’t know, or you’re pretending not to know?” the cop inquired, a suspicious look in his eyes.

“In the name of Allah, the Most High, I don’t know!” Rezzouk roared.

The cop stared at him, one eyebrow raised, an incredulous sneer on his lips. “I’m not taking the bait,” he muttered under his breath.

“Pardon, sidi?” the old man said. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Come back in an hour!” the cop barked. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a cell phone — a Samsung touch screen, very sophisticated, with a black leather case, worth three thousand dirhams at least — and started playing with it.

Rezzouk and his wife hobbled out the door and crossed the street. It was eight fifteen a.m., and the sun was already beating down hard; it was going to be another hot day in the Red City. The old man found two large squares of cardboard next to a garbage bin. He handed one to his wife.

“What are we doing?” she asked.

“Waiting!”

The couple sat down in the shade of a giant eucalyptus tree opposite the station. They had forty-five minutes to kill.

“Isn’t that a call shop over there, on the corner?” his wife asked, her voice trembling.

“How many times do I have to tell you, he isn’t answering his phone!” the old man replied. “Are you deaf, or do you have amnesia?”

Two fat tears formed in the woman’s eyes and pooled there for a moment before streaming down her pale cheeks. She wiped them away with the frayed sleeves of her djellaba. The old man watched her out of the corner of his eye. A moment later he stood up again, as if overcome by remorse or pity, and began walking in the direction of the call shop, fiddling with a piece of paper. His wife watched him until he reached the entrance. May God finally give us a sign of our son’s life, she implored silently, peering up to the sky. Deliver us from this unbearable agony! Two minutes later, the old man returned.

“Well?” she asked him, her gaze fixed on his lips.

The old man sat back down on the square of cardboard. “He isn’t answering his phone,” he sighed, throwing his hands in the air. “For three days I’ve been repeating the same thing to you like a broken record.”

His wife began silently crying again. Chin in his hands, face crumpled, the old man just stared at a random point on the ground, absorbed in shadowy thoughts. If misery were one day to take a human form, it would find none better than this old couple from the medina, seated here in the shade of a giant eucalyptus wholly indifferent to their plight.

Every five minutes, the old man glanced at his digital watch, a gray Casio with a stainless steel band. At nine o’clock sharp he stood up. His wife joined him and they returned to the station.

“Come along!” said the cop at the desk, still in a foul mood.

They followed him down a long corridor that reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The offices they passed all looked the same, like high school classrooms. People stood, waiting in front of the doors, anxious and silent. A few crouched down, their backs to the wall, and others paced around the doorways; a young woman was crying alone in a corner. At the end of the corridor, the cop led them up a staircase covered in tarnished mosaic tiles, faintly lit by a fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. On the upper level he stopped in front of the first office on the right. Chief Hamid Zeghloul, read the nameplate on the door. The officer bent his index finger and gave two light knocks, barely audible. A “Zid!” could be heard from the other side. He went in, touching two fingers to the visor of his cap, and closed the door behind him. Two or three minutes later, he came out again.

“Come in!” the cop ordered the old man. “You, lalla, wait on the bench over there!”

His wife reluctantly obeyed.

Chief Zeghloul was a solidly built man with a thick forehead, bulging eyes, a Saddam-like mustache, and a prominent jaw — he didn’t look a day over fifty.

“Hello, sidi!” Rezzouk said as he stepped through the doorway.

“Hello, cherif! Please have a seat,” the chief said.

The old man sat down in one of the two chairs facing the desk. His deep suspicion of the police force — a sentiment largely shared by his countrymen — only added to his anxiety over his son’s sudden disappearance.

“I’m sorry — profoundly sorry — to inform you that your son, Abdeljalil Rezzouk, died yesterday, around two o’clock in the morning, in a traffic accident.”

A pallor spread instantly over the old man’s face, but he didn’t say a word.

“The police found his body on the side of the road,” the chief continued. “The criminal had fled the scene — a drunk driver, presumably. An investigation is underway to determine the exact circumstances of the accident... You will be kept informed of the results, of course. Once again, I’m deeply sorry, cherif.”

“May I have the exact location of the murder, sidi?” old Rezzouk asked when he’d recovered enough to speak.

“The accident took place...” the chief began, caught off guard by the question. “The accident took place... the accident took place on... Excuse me a moment, I’m going to look for it in the report.”

The chief opened a drawer, closed it again, opened another, took out a green folder, extracted a sheet of paper, and skimmed it. “The accident took place on the road that runs parallel to the wall of the Menara gardens,” he said. “Near the Larmoud District, to be precise. Do you know where that is?”

The old man parted his lips to speak, but nothing came out. He stayed speechless for a long moment.

The chief stood, placing a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of genuine commiseration. “May God have mercy on his soul,” he told Rezzouk.

The old man was paralyzed with grief and could hardly move.

“Now, you’ll have to go to the district attorney’s office with a copy of your national ID card. He’ll give you the authorization to collect the body of the deceased at the morgue in Ibn Tofail University Hospital — the civilian hospital, that is. If you don’t feel up to the task, you can designate a third party, a member of your family, preferably...”

The old man stood, sputtering his thanks. As he turned to leave, the chief called him back. He held out some banknotes, four or five of them, folded in half. The old man politely declined the offering; the chief insisted.

“It’s my contribution to the funeral,” the chief said. “And I assure you, sidi, I’m more than glad to help.”

Rezzouk finally accepted the money, less out of conviction than in deference to this chief who was so kind and respectful; the few cops the old man had previously dealt with were all washed-up brutes, totally insensitive to the hardships of ordinary people like himself. He must be an exceptional policeman, he said to himself as he left the office.

The funeral service was held the next day at Bab Ghmat Cemetery, one of the oldest in the medina. The coffin was trailed by a great procession. Practically all the men of Derb el-Boumba were there, women being prohibited from attending burials on Islamic soil. In addition to the imam and his chosen readers of the sacred text, dressed all in white, there were many strangers who had come out of this sense of Muslim solidarity — or maybe pure idleness. Rezzouk believed that the crowd was proof that his departed son had been greatly respected in the neighborhood.

Once the burial was over, the crowd dispersed. The old man remained at the foot of the grave: hunched over, eyes closed, palms held to the sky, he murmured a long prayer for his lost child, imploring Allah, the most merciful and compassionate, to forgive the boy his sins — those committed in words, in deeds, and in thought — to spare him the terrible trials of the last judgment, and to reserve a place for him in paradise, alongside His chosen prophet, His loyal companions, and His blessed faithful. As soon as the old man had pronounced the final amine, a young man approached him.

“My sincere condolences, s’di Rezzouk!” the young man said, clutching his shoulder in a formal embrace. “I am so very saddened by this painful event!”

The young man was tall and dark with gray, sparkling eyes and hair cropped close — so close that you could see his scalp. A long diagonal scar ran across his right cheek. The old man looked at him, trying in vain to put a name to his face. He was sure that he’d seen him before, two or three times, maybe more. But where? When? He had no idea.

“You probably don’t remember me, s’di Rezzouk,” the young man went on. “My name is Noureddine, Noureddine L’Guebbas. Abdeljalil and I were good friends a few years ago.”

“He was a good man, wasn’t he?” the old man replied, his voice choked by tears.

“A very good man,” Noureddine said. “And a loyal friend too!” After a silence, he added: “May his murderers be condemned to eternal Gehenna!”

The old man’s eyes widened as he looked up, suddenly alert.

“God knows I warned him,” Noureddine continued, “and many times over! But Abdeljalil wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Warned him?” the old man repeated, taken aback. “Of what?”

“Of the fact that he’d been — for some time already — in the crosshairs of the drug squad!”

“What? Why?”

“Abdeljalil refused to pay the current fee for the dealers in our category, a few hundred dirhams per week. And he tried to persuade those who paid it to stop.”

“Then my son didn’t die in a traffic accident?” the old man asked, stunned.

“No, s’di Rezzouk.”

“Do you know how he died?”

“I don’t know, s’di Rezzouk, but... but I heard that they smashed his skull against a beam in a jail cell.”

The old man’s heart tightened, his legs grew weak, and the world went dark around him; everything had taken on a look of sinister unfamiliarity. He collapsed at the edge of an old grave, his head in his hands, devastated.

“Are you all right, s’di Rezzouk?” the young man asked.

The old man raised his head with a sorrowful expression, his forehead creased with two deep lines. “Remind me of your name, young man?”

“Noureddine.”

“Would you like to help me, Noureddine?”

“Of course, s’di Rezzouk!” he answered, vaguely anxious, wondering what the old man was going to ask of him.

“I’ll surely need your help to uncover the circumstances of my son’s murder.”

“What can I do for you, s’di Rezzouk?”

The old man reached into his pocket and took out a Bic pen and a small notepad with yellowing pages. “For now, I’ll need your phone number.”

“What do you plan on doing, s’di Rezzouk?”

“I’ll bring charges. I’ll alert the press, the human rights organizations in Morocco and abroad. I’ll write to the governor, to the wali, the minister of justice, the prime minister! I’ll even write to the king! Yes, I’ll write to the king! Is he not our nation’s commander in chief?”

Noureddine suddenly became aware of the danger he might face if he got mixed up in this thorny affair. A real danger, perhaps even with fatal consequences. Resting a finger on his temple, he was silent for a moment, growing pensive. The risk was great, certainly, but that shouldn’t stop him doing something for the man who’d been his best friend in the underworld. So he gave his phone number to the old man and, just before leaving him, reiterated his condolences.

Now that’s what you call a true friend! Rezzouk thought to himself, following Noureddine with his eyes all the way to the cemetery gates. You don’t meet a brave man like that every day.

That night was a sleepless and cruel one for the old man. In the morning, he returned to the police station.

“What can I do for you, cherif?” Chief Zeghloul asked politely.

“I want to know the truth about my son’s death!” Rezzouk blurted out in a rage. “The whole truth!”

The chief just stared at the old man.

“My son didn’t die in a traffic accident!”

“Just what are you saying, cherif?” the cop asked.

“The truth, chief! My son was killed by members of the drug squad.”

“What you’re saying is serious,” the chief replied, his tone suddenly menacing. “Very serious. Do you have proof?”

“Proof, no. But I have a witness.”

“Who’s this witness?”

“A friend of my late son’s.”

“His name and address?” the chief requested. “I want to question him as soon as possible.”

“His name is Noureddine... Noureddine...” The old man was silent for a few seconds, searching his memory for a surname. “It will come to me later... I have his phone number, though.” He took the notepad out of his pocket and flipped through its yellowed pages. “Here it is.”

The chief pushed the desk phone toward Rezzouk and pressed the speakerphone button. “Go on,” he ordered. “Call him and tell him to meet you somewhere. In a park, for example.”

The old man dialed the number and heard a woman’s voice at the other end of the line: “Maroc Telecom, bonjour! The number you have dialed is not in service.” He tried again, got the same message, and hung up, stupefied.

“Tell me, cherif,” the chief said after a silence.

“Yes?”

“Where did you meet this Noureddine?”

“At Bab Ghmat Cemetery, near my son’s grave.”

“There were others around, I imagine?” the chief asked.

“No, no one.”

“No one came to the ceremony?”

“Oh, yes. Lots of people,” Rezzouk told him. “But after the burial, they all left.”

“And you stayed there alone?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing alone by the grave?”

“I was praying for my son’s soul,” the old man shared, sorrow filling his voice again.

“And how were you praying? Standing up? Kneeling? Describe it to me as carefully as possible,” the chief pressed.

Confused and suspicious, the old man stared at the chief. “Those are pointless details.”

The chief stared back with a faint, sneering smile. “You must know, cherif, that in our work, the truth is like the devil: it hides in details that the average person finds unimportant. A gesture, a look, a trifle, a mere nothing — yes, sometimes the truth hides in nothing at all! Believe me: if I told you all the crimes we’ve solved thanks to an insignificant detail, I’d be here all day.”

Though unconvinced by the chief’s argument, the old man relented: “I was there, standing at the foot of the grave, my hands raised to the sky, eyes closed—”

“You had your eyes closed?” the chief interrupted.

“Yes, to better concentrate on the prayer.”

“And it was then that this Noureddine approached you?”

“Yes.”

The chief swiftly pushed his swivel chair back from the desk, nodding his head up and down as if he’d found the key to the mystery. “Go home, cherif!” he urged the old man. “You’re very tired.”

Rezzouk got up and, without saying a word, began walking toward the door.

“Some advice, cherif!” the chief called after him with the self-satisfied air of a man who understood life better than most. “The next time you visit the cemetery, be careful not to pray with your eyes closed.”

Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef

Mama Aicha by Halima Zine El Abidine

Jemaa el-Fnaa

As I was getting ready to leave the furnished apartment that I’d rented in the heart of Casablanca, I realized that I had forgotten the most important thing: the organdy. This length of purple silk from Kawamata that I’d spent half my scholarship money to buy during my first year of university in Japan was part of a memory that had been boxed away for twenty years. When I’d arrived there as a teenager, I could think of nothing but the disappointment of it all, the crushing defeat. In my hand I carried a small satchel of clothing, and from my shoulder hung a wallet containing my passport, my registration certificate for the university, and postcards showing scenes from the city I loved more than anything: Marrakech. Marrakech opens her gates to the world, but she had driven me — her own son — out.

My father insisted that I seek refuge in the most remote corner of the earth, where the hurricane winds sweeping our country could not reach. “This is a time of fear and death. I can bear your distance, my son, as long as you’re safe,” he told me. “I could not keep you here knowing you might be taken at any time by the secret police and the men with whips — seized by treachery or coercion. Though Japan, where your uncle Salim lives, may be far away in the east, it’s still closer than the corridors of the commissariat in Jemaa el-Fnaa. Leave your glorious dreams of revolution behind, son, and do something with your youth, and when you are a grown man, you will realize that no revolution in the world was ever led by inexperienced students.”

That is what my father said as he bid me goodbye at Marrakech Menara Airport one day in the late seventies. The stern headmaster who terrified everyone in the high school, teachers and students alike, seemed sad, diminished. When he gave me a final parting look, his eyes were full of tears.

Alone with my thoughts as I sat in the window seat on the plane, I let my own tears flow. All of the words that had died on my tongue repeated themselves in my head. Everything I hadn’t said to my father. What had we done that we should be either sent to prison or driven out of the country?

My phone rang, and I ignored it as I attempted to find my way out of a garage that was like a maze. Maybe it was my mother, although I’d told her — when I had dinner at her house last night — that I was going to Marrakech today to see Aziz and his mother Aicha.

I’d been gone from Marrakech for twenty years. For twenty years I’d been the cause of my mother’s tears. Distracting myself, immersing myself in books and theories. It was true that I had done very well and had become an instructor at a Japanese university. But these were successes without savor. I had no one to celebrate with, no one to whom I could speak in my native tongue about the black misery that blotted out my name from the diplomas I had earned with such distinction. Regret gnawed at every part of me. If only I had not obeyed my father and emigrated to this much larger prison, allowed myself to be torn out by my roots. I had no friends or companions except the postcards that I’d brought with me. I kept them close to my heart, and with them the piece of organdy silk. I saw the faces from my country in them. I talked to them and they spoke back to me. I passed the nights in their company.

As for my uncle Salim, our only connection was through the money my father sent him to support me during the early years of my exile. Family is not a matter of blood, it is a matter of birth and upbringing — I would console myself with this thought when it became clear that my uncle wasn’t going to worry himself about me in a country where sons became adults and took responsibility for themselves as soon as they started university. In Marrakech, where I had come from, sons could have gray hair and they would still be children in the eyes of their parents.

The phone rang again. Be patient, Mother, I can’t answer right now, I’m looking for a way out of this lousy garage that you directed me to. My poor mother. Perhaps she had wanted to come with me to Marrakech. Maybe that was what she’d been hinting at when we spoke yesterday, revealing a sadness that had spread and taken root like a tree in the depths of her eyes. “While you were gone I might as well have been dead,” she’d said. “Aicha was the bosom in which I sought comfort, but in the end, I left her to her tragedies and came to Casablanca to drink from my cup of sorrow alone.”

“But you used to spend school vacations at our house in Marrakech, and the majority of the time you were with her,” I replied.

She looked long and hard at my face, as though trying to find in it remnants of her seventeen-year-old son who had existed once, before he was torn away from the safety of her lap and flung into the dark spaces of a strange country. “That’s right. I couldn’t get used to living here in Casablanca. If the secret police hadn’t made our life miserable after you went abroad, we would never have left our house and relatives and neighbors. Your father wouldn’t have made us move to this noise-infested city.”

The phone continued to ring. I picked it up in one hand while the other kept a grip on the steering wheel. It was Aziz. I pulled over next to the curb. His voice sounded weak but animated, as though he were eager to talk. “Why didn’t you pick up? Were you still asleep? Or is your phone still set to Japanese time?”

“I’m already on the road. I’ll be in Marrakech in three hours,” I told him.

“I’ll be waiting for you at the Argana Café. From there, we’ll go to my mother’s house. We’re having lunch there, as we agreed.”

“I’ll drive as fast as I can so I’m on time for Mama Aicha,” I promised.

“How she cried when you left the country. Your being there by her side during the year before you left lightened the pain of my absence for her.”

How I, too, had cried...

We had promised each other that if either of us were arrested, we would die before we confessed the other’s involvement, so that one of us would remain to take care of our two mothers. Aziz kept his side of the bargain, but I didn’t. He stayed strong and never implicated me, even under torture. I abandoned them both and went abroad.

We were teenagers. My father’s bookshelves had taught me to love literature. Aziz and I would devour the novels that I filched from my father’s library without his permission. Then, at the Arset el-Hamd youth center, we met some other young men our age or a little older who were training themselves to dream — to look ahead to a more just future. They exchanged forbidden Red Books with us. We even joined the leftists in the March 23 movement. It was a secret organization, and we were part of the cell at the high school. There, we began training to dream collectively. This dream had started to grow inside of us when the police raids caught us by surprise.

“You have to leave. You have to give up on your dreams. You have no other choice,” my father had warned me the day he accompanied me to the airport. I’d been aghast. So I would set out alone on a journey into the unknown. A journey without meaning. I endured it as one endures torture. Deep inside me there was a howling, like trapped wolves. I felt like a traitor. I wanted my mother’s hand, wanted her to pass it over my chest, to thaw this cold. I had only this still-bleeding wound to remind me, and the fragrance of a city whose soil I smelled in the color of my own skin. That soil from land reclining upon the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, palm trees held in its embrace. When I was a child, the world as far as I was concerned began and ended there. After I grew up a little, I discovered that Jemaa el-Fnaa Square was the beating heart of the city, and Marrakech was the beating heart of the world. Don’t tourists flock to it from all over the globe, to dance to its songs and sing along under its glittering lights? Don’t they say that Marrakech lavishes a noisy tumult of joy and ecstasy on strangers, while for its sons and daughters it offers only a silent sadness? What is the good humor for which the people of Marrakech are known if not a proud mask concealing the bitterness of their days and the misery of their lives?

Marrakech was slipping away from me. I kept searching in vain for her radiant face in the postcards scattered across my desk and pillow, so that I wouldn’t lose my memory of her, so that I wouldn’t lose the colors of the city, which had begun to fade from my heart and mind. Words flared up inside of me whenever I thought about the organdy, that piece of fine silk cloth I had rushed to buy as a gift for Mama Aicha. The cloth had remained stored away in my cupboard all these years. I’d made a promise to myself and I hadn’t kept it. Marrakech was far away, and the freedom I had dreamed of had gotten tripped up along the way, arriving with its body parts damaged and mutilated.

Aziz and I were born the same year. Mama Aicha had nursed me along with Aziz. We drank the same milk, we studied at the same schools, and we read the same books. Together we dreamed of a cultural revolution that would bring prosperity to our humble families. A revolution that would stay its course until it had granted dignity to all the children of this nation. Mama Aicha’s home was next to ours, at the entrance of el-Rahba el-Kadima alley, only a few steps from Jemaa el-Fnaa. It was a beautiful house, overflowing with life. Pots of chrysanthemums, narcissus, jasmine, and crocus clustered along the walls of its interior courtyard, and basil and lavender spilled from trellises across the tiled floors.

In the middle of the courtyard was a large planter box that held a towering mulberry tree whose branches shaded the entire area. Toward the end of winter, the tree filled with magnificently colored migratory moths whose wings made a rustling sound like the ethereal music of sacred temples. As small children, Aziz and I would watch them for hours on end, and we were tempted to try to catch them so that we could keep listening to the music of their wings in private, while we read or studied our lessons. But Mama Aicha was always there to stop us from getting too close to them.

“These moths are going to lay eggs, and from their eggs hundreds of larvae will come out, and they will make cocoons,” she’d tell us.

Every time she repeated this our jaws would drop in amazement. She would laugh and explain to us each time how the larva was the silkworm and the cocoon was the ball of silk.

We would ask her: “Why won’t you let us play with the balls of silk?”

And every time she would answer: “Because I’m going to turn them into thread, and from this thread I’ll weave a purple cloth called organdy, to make a kaftan so fine that only a princess or a queen would wear one like it.”

“Why?” we’d ask again.

“Because no one in the whole world knows how to make this kind of silk cloth from a worm except a queen in far-off China. Since she’s a queen, she won’t sell her cloth to anyone but other queens, and for a very high price. Though I’m not a queen or a princess, I want to wear it too. I’ve promised myself that one day I’ll have my own kaftan of organdy silk.”

Every year Mama Aicha gathered the cocoons. And every year she told us about the Chinese queen who owned fields of white mulberry trees. In their branches lived millions of moths, and their cocoons became the silk thread used to make the organdy.

The years passed, and Aziz and I were no longer children. Maybe because we ceased to ask her about the organdy kaftan, Mama Aicha whispered to us once with deep sadness: “I have only a single mulberry tree from which a few larvae feed, and it gives me just a little thread each year. How many years will I have to wait? It won’t suit me to wear this kaftan when I’m old.” She was silent for a moment, and then her face brightened again and she went on: “But anyway, I’ll keep taking care of the mulberry tree and my larvae. If I don’t wear the cloth myself, your wife will wear it, Aziz; and yours, Yusuf.”

She continued to sit on the edge of the planter. She drank her midday tea there once she had finished the housework and fed her son and her husband, after the first had gone to school and the other to his shop in Souk Semmarine. She hummed along with whatever was playing on the radio fastened on a hook above the window grate in her bedroom: the songs of Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Abdelwahab Doukkali, and Naima Samih. She had an angelic voice that poured sweetly from her throat like the breeze in Marrakech at the beginning of spring. Yet no one heard her except the mulberry tree and the birds that came seasonally to hunt the moths or their larvae, and Aziz and I on our days off from school. When the songs on the radio stopped, she would tell us captivating stories about her childhood in her Amazigh village. Stories with which our imaginations would roam to strange and wonderful worlds. When we left her to go study our lessons, she would converse with the mulberry tree instead, talk to it, ask it questions, confess her secrets to it. She told it of her kaftan, which was still not finished. She raised her eyes to the sky, wandering in her thoughts far from the orbit of her domestic space. The sky was closer to her than Jemaa el-Fnaa, which she had never seen. Only its sounds reached her. She listened to them furtively and with a great deal of curiosity, trying to find connections between them and what Aziz and I told her about the square. We were children. We told her about our adventures and our small acts of mischief, about the storytelling circles there, about the singers whose voices were not as fine as Mama Aicha’s, about the fortune-tellers surrounded by sad women, about the famous street performers Bakchich and Tabib el-Hasharat, and the spectacle of the donkey who could read.

We would take a detour from el-Rahba el-Kadima alley toward Derb Dabachi in order to cut through Jemaa el-Fnaa. Then we would take Prince Avenue until we reached the Hotel Tazi, then veer left in the direction of Arset el-Maach. We spent our day at the Ibn el-Banna Middle School. When we returned home in the evening, we always paused for a few minutes at the edge of a storytelling circle that had just formed so that we could bring back fresh tales from the square, embellished by our own imaginations, for Mama Aicha. Our accounts of the square made her happy. She listened to us with bright eyes and asked for more. Once we moved from the middle school in Arset el-Maach to the Mohammed V High School in Bab Ghmat, Jemaa el-Fnaa was no longer the only wellspring of stories for us. Other sources erupted between our adolescent feet, their stories drawn from the sufferings of the Moroccan people and from accounts of popular revolutions. Our new stories were only for us and our comrades at the high school, and at the Arset el-Hamd youth center. For this reason, we hid them from our mothers.

Mama Aicha knew nothing of the world around her beyond her husband, Si Mohammed el-Blaighi, her only son, Aziz, my mother, who was her friend and neighbor, and me. Only a single wall separated our two houses, and even if this wall prevented my mother from going over to her friend’s house to drink a cup of tea with her in the shade of the mulberry tree, it did not stop the two young mothers from communicating. As for Mama Aicha, her feet never crossed the threshold of her own front door. She had not left the house since her husband brought her there as a bride from Souss, a girl of only fifteen.

“A graceful posture and a shapely body like none other. God must have been in a state of the highest pleasure with creation when He made it. I’ve never seen such blue eyes and such long eyelashes in all of Marrakech. Her gaze is soft, suited to a world of refinement and happiness. When I looked at her face for the first time, I thought it was the round disk of the sun itself,” my mother had said when she told my grandmother about her.

Si Mohammed was infatuated with her. He feared the least gust of wind might carry her away. When he left the house, he locked the door with an iron key as thick as the arm of a small child. To keep her from suffering from loneliness in his absence, he brought her first a radio and then the seedling of a tree. As he planted it, he told her about the emperor’s wife who discovered a white worm eating the leaves of her mulberry tree, secreting luminous threads in which to wrap itself as it did so. From them, the emperor’s wife wove an enchanted silk fabric fit only for queens: organdy.

The seedling became a tree. She was pregnant, and the movements of the fetus filled her with dreams and love and wonderment. One spring morning she gave birth to Aziz. When they celebrated the aqiqah afterward, joy radiated from Si Mohammed’s eyes as he served food and drink to the well-wishers. He didn’t lock the door when he went back to his shop afterward. He handed over the key to Aicha. She believed that she was finally free. She was happy because her husband had entrusted her with the key to the house.

Despite all of this, she was content with the warm, calm monotony of her small space. Content with hearing our stories about what happened outside. She never thought about going out.

Her days passed happily, her mind filled with thoughts of her son, her husband, and the mulberry tree. There was nothing to trouble her. She watched as Aziz grew up, and her dreams grew with him. He was a diligent student, and his success in school made her heart brim with pleasure.

One winter night there was a windstorm. It snapped branches off the mulberry tree and ripped flowers from their beds. The earth dissolved into muddy pools beneath the downpour of rain. The family members huddled in their beds, trying to sleep.

Aicha heard the rapping of claws on the door and voices like the howling of wolves in the mountains where she’d spent her childhood. She reached out to her husband sleeping beside her and cried out with all her might: “The wolves are coming for us, Sidi Mohammed!”

Si Mohammed slept on and did not hear her strangled cry.

An apparition of her son appeared before her, trembling as he ran. Behind him, a wolf bared its fangs. She awoke terrified and dripping with sweat. Her husband finally opened his eyes and asked: “Who’s knocking on our door in the middle of the night, and in this storm?”

“Don’t answer them!” Aziz shouted, coming into their room dressed in his winter clothes and sneakers.

“Weren’t you sleeping?” his father asked him in surprise.

“The knocking woke me up. Don’t open the door for them, Father, it’s the police.”

“What?”

“It’s the police. They’ve come to take me away,” Aziz moaned.

“But what did you do? What crime did you commit? They don’t show up in the middle of the night like this except to catch the most dangerous criminals. Tell me, son, what crime are you guilty of? When? Where? Answer me, I beg you.” His questions tumbled over one another while his son remained silent. He got out of bed and took him by the hand. “Tell me what happened, child, so I know what I should do.”

“I’ve committed no crime, Father,” Aziz whispered.

“So what did you do?”

“I dreamed, Father. I only dreamed. I dreamed of clean bread, and a new suit of clothes for everyone on Eid, and notebooks and pens for all the children.”

Bewildered, Mama Aicha was blotting at the tears streaming from her eyes with the hem of her nightgown. She tried to speak, but her words were choked. Aziz pressed his palms to her face, brushed away her tears, and kissed her cheek.

The pounding at the door continued, becoming more violent. Aziz loosened her arms from around his neck. “Don’t be afraid, Mother... Don’t be afraid, Father. I won’t let them get me, I’ll run away.”

The door couldn’t hold out long against their powerful fists. It soon gave way. Four men in black suits stomped across the threshold. Their chief led the way. To Mama Aicha, he looked like a wolf baring its fangs.

He bellowed in a voice like thunder: “Where’s Aziz?”

No answer.

He repeated the question.

No answer.

He made a sign to the others behind him. In the blink of an eye, they spread out through the house, throwing wardrobes to the floor. Clothing scattered everywhere. They dug their claws into the furniture, ripping it open and sending the stuffing flying into the air. Aicha’s tears mixed with the rain pouring down into the open courtyard of the house. She asked herself, What can my son Aziz have hidden in the furniture? How could he hide a weapon when a moth’s death makes him cry?

One of the men returned from Aziz’s room. “We found notebooks decorated with a rising sun, and these are the colored pens that were used to draw them.”

His mother returned to asking questions no one heard: “Drawings... since when is this a crime? And colored pens as well?”

The skinny, mean-faced man who seemed to be their leader ordered them to handcuff the father. They would hold him hostage until the fugitive son surrendered himself. They blindfolded him and threw him into a black car that took off like an arrow.

Mama Aicha tried to leave the house, but the agent who had been left behind to watch her blocked her way.

Time passed slowly. A terrible desperation arose in her chest. The seconds seemed like months, and the hands on the clock did not move. Who would hear the sound of her voice? Was there another mother anywhere on this earth afflicted by such a calamity? Who would bring her news of her son? Of her husband?

She sobbed and sobbed. She wandered aimlessly through the house. She pounded on the walls with both hands and shouted. Perhaps her friend Zahra would hear her. She could shout! This was the first positive thing to come from this ordeal. She had discovered that she possessed a mouth that could raise its voice.

Si Mohammed returned after a two-day absence, which felt like an eternity. He wept bitterly. He didn’t hide his tears from his wife. Mama Aicha cried out when she saw him, and a wail escaped her: “No! No, don’t tell me they got him!”

“Aziz couldn’t escape,” he told her. “They had security forces and spies on every road. I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth, leaving lines on the pavement. He opened his eyes. He saw me struggling desperately to get to him and embrace him, and the guards restraining me as I tried to throw myself on him and take him in my arms, to erase the whip marks on his chest.”

“Did he speak? What did he say to you?”

“He said in a strong voice, Don’t cry, Father. Don’t be sad. I won’t die. I’ll return... I’ll return.”

Mama Aicha waited for the return of her son. The first month passed, then a second and a third. There was no news. She decided to leave the house and track him down on her own.

Her friend Zahra asked her: “Where will you look for him, Aicha, my dear? Neither you nor I know the streets and alleys of Marrakech. Who will help us pick up his trail?”

“I’ll go to the fortune-tellers in Jemaa el-Fnaa. Will you come with me, Zahra? Perhaps one of them can tell us of Aziz’s fate, or point us in the right direction.”

Each woman put on a djellaba and pulled a veil over her face. They headed for Jemaa el-Fnaa Square. Mama Aicha’s steps faltered and she stopped, amazed and confused, in the middle of the square. Loud voices. Music. Singing. Prayers. Curses. Brazen laughter. Dirty words. Bodies pressing against each other in the throng. A male body attached itself to her from behind. My mother pulled her firmly away by the hand and turned toward the tall figure wrapped in an old winter djellaba. Like all the rest of them, he was hiding his face beneath the djellaba’s hood. They came to Jemaa el-Fnaa to rub up against the behinds of women in the crowd. “Goddamn you,” my mother said, uncertainty in her tone. Mama Aicha, for her part, although she was so worried about her son that she could scarcely think about what was happening to her body, was on the verge of collapse from the excessively crowded space and the feelings of shame and humiliation.

They sat down in front of the first fortune-teller they saw. She asked Mama Aicha: “Am I reading your fortune or is there a man in your life whose secrets you need me to tell you?”

“Neither. I only want to know where my son is.”

The fortune-teller looked at her cards for a long time, and then said: “Your son was bewitched by a woman and is lost to you.”

Mama Aicha went to another fortune-teller and the same exchange was repeated with only slight differences. It seemed to the two women that the fortune-tellers of Jemaa el-Fnaa were all programmed to say that women were a source of temptation and evil, and therefore that they would not find the solution they sought here. A woman who had been watching them instructed them to go to a fortune-teller who appealed to a higher power. Her hut was near the shrine of Moul el-Ksour, one of the seven saints of Marrakech. She was famous throughout the city and beyond for the accuracy of her visions. When the woman realized that the two friends did not know where the shrine was, she offered to accompany them.

The fortune-teller was very thin and tall. Her bug-like eyes squinted toward each other, with the pupil on the right swiveling left and the pupil on the left looking right. Were it not for the nose protruding between them, they would have run together to become a single horrible eye. Mama Aicha prayed to God to protect her when she beheld this ugly creature. The woman who had guided them told them that the fortune-teller had once been beautiful and charming, until one day the prince of the jinn noticed her and fell in love with her. He made her deformed so that no other being would desire her. To compensate her for the loss of her womanly beauty, the cost of his selfish love for her, he revealed to her all the secrets of the world beyond, and lifted the veils from her sight.

The fortune-teller asked Mama Aicha why she had come.

“My son has disappeared, ma’am, and I want you to show me the way to him.”

The fortune-teller lit incense and sprinkled the room with rose water. She invoked the names of the kings of the jinn and the righteous among men and uttered other words that they didn’t understand. She reached inside a small cupboard covered with a fine green shawl, and she took from it a wooden box painted with a lustrous yellow coating. Inside it were sand and seashells and agate-colored grains of coral. She placed it in front of her and put her hand in the sand. She moved her lips as though she were reciting something to herself, and her eyes flicked rapidly in opposite directions. A terrible fear crept into the hearts of the two friends when they heard sounds like the echo of cannons emerge from the belly of the fortune-teller, who suddenly opened her cavernous mouth wide and said in a harsh voice: “The cards... the cards. Yes, My Lord, the cards...” She scattered the playing cards in front of her but did nothing to halt the unsettling sound emanating from her abdomen. “Is your son wearing a state uniform?” she asked.

Mama Aicha rejoiced and answered immediately, “Yes,” because she knew that a prisoner had his regular clothes taken from him and exchanged for a special prison suit.

“Was your son riding in a vehicle?”

Mama Aicha’s heart began to beat faster, as Si Mohammed’s voice rang in her ear once more: I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth. She answered, “Yes.”

“Is he with a group of others like him?”

“There’s no doubt about that.” In every alley of the city there was a bereaved mother — this she had heard from Yusuf, who had not stopped visiting her since those evil hands stretched out to snatch away her own flesh and blood from his very bed.

Then the fortune-teller said something that could scarcely be believed, after the accuracy of everything she had said before: “Give me a piece of his underwear. I will write a charm on it and you must burn a part of it each day for three days. After a time that is neither long nor short, you will find him returning to you, once he has tired of the nightlife and grown to hate the fornicator who seduced him.”

Mama Aicha stood up, all of her hope having drained away. “Is this what the jinn who possesses you told you? Tell him to go back to his cards,” she snapped. “My son is not seduced by the nightlife or taking shelter in the arms of women. My son, my love... I’ll look for him myself. Let’s go, Zahra, these women are nothing but frauds.”

“I knew that. I just wanted to bring you here because I thought it would do you good to get out of the house.”

“Don’t worry, Zahra. I’ll set him free myself.” She said this with a strange earnestness and determination, as if another voice, stronger than her own, were emerging from inside of her. The voice of a different woman, not the Aicha we knew.

Her husband didn’t forbid her to leave the house, but instead pointed the way himself to the secret cave in which all of the city’s most distinguished students, and the best of its high school teachers, were packed away.

When she arrived at the detention center, she saw that it wasn’t invisible, as she had previously believed. It was an imposing building with colonial architecture squatting at the northern corner of Jemaa el-Fnaa, not far from the circles of singers and the dancers and acrobats and magicians and food carts. Neither the singers’ melodies nor the voices of the storytellers — nor even the clamor of the monkey tamers — could capture Mama Aicha’s attention that day. She had always dreamed about the vast possibilities of this freewheeling square, but now that she found herself in the middle of it, she was scarcely aware of the entertainment and diversions that filled it. Her eyes were fixed on the dreaded building. She paused to look at the police station that had swallowed up her son, and she examined the faces of the officers and state security guards who surrounded it.

She approached the terrifying building with hesitant steps. Whom should she ask? And how? What had her son been accused of doing? Why had they taken him? Did they know Aziz? Do you know Aziz? Aziz, the handsome young man with the enchanting smile. He was a good boy, did well at school, drew suns with his colored pens. Was it simply because he had drawn a rising sun that he deserved to be punished?

The questions crowded together inside her head. She imagined herself making her way around the building and asking the policemen who surrounded it one by one. But when a stout, cruel-looking officer came over and ordered her to move along, she realized that she was all but rooted in place in front of the building. Her eyes began to overflow with tears, soaking her veil.

The policeman repeated his order. “Can’t you hear? I told you to get going. You’re not allowed to stand here. There’s nothing to see — the show’s over there, behind you, you crazy woman. So move along, scram.”

“I’m not looking for a show, sir. I want my boy, my son...” she said, stumbling over her words in fear.

“Your son? Is he a policeman? Does he work here?”

“My son is only a student, sir, a young man in the baccalaureate division. Ever since he started school he’s always been the first in his class. He’s seventeen and his name is Aziz.”

“I thought you were asking about an employee here. This building is not a school or a youth center. Go look for your son somewhere else.”

“But my son is here, sir. Locked up here three months ago.”

The policeman was confused. He was only a lowly patrol officer. He had nothing to do with what happened inside. He didn’t know what to do. He tried to hide his confusion behind curses and shouts: “I told you to get out of my sight, you bitch! Get on your way or I’ll break your teeth! This isn’t a high school. If your son is a criminal, go look for him in Boulmharez Prison. This isn’t a school or a jail. So get lost!”

No one in her whole life had ever cursed at Mama Aicha. Bitch. That was the first time another person had flung this hurtful word in her face. She who knew nothing of the world. She who had left her small Amazigh village to come to her husband’s house in Marrakech without ever having had her ears polluted by a dirty word. In Jemaa el-Fnaa, as she moved among the fortune-tellers holding court in the square, she had heard obscenities that embarrassed her. But this foul word now exploded like a bomb in her own face. It was directed at her.

“A bitch? I’m a bitch?”

She hurried to get away from the policeman who had broken her resolve and wounded her deeply. As she rushed on, the face of her husband appeared before her tear-filled eyes. How could she confront him after today? How could she look him in the eye now that her modesty had been defiled by a stranger with a word that had never even crossed her mind before? She ran as though she were trying to escape herself and escape the word bitch that pursued her. She came to a halt in the middle of a circle of Abidat Rma. They were singing their nomadic songs and dancing. If only she could disappear. To hide from what she was accused of, she slipped in among the audience. Her feet betrayed her and she collapsed into a seated position on the ground in the first row. Her veil hid her face. She stared at the dancers without seeing them, as silent tears soaked her veil and traced rivulets down her cheeks. The roar of the blood in her veins drowned out the voices of the singers and the music they were making. The dance kept going energetically in front of her, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel.

As she made her way home, crushed with disappointment, she noticed a gathering of people not far from the commissariat, near the taxi stand. Her heart alone steered her toward them. She heard somebody wail in anguish: “Let me talk to the person in charge of the jail so I can ask him about my son! The baccalaureate exam is around the corner and he’s being prevented from going to school!”

Aziz was just one of many. She found on every pair of lips her very own questions. They were fathers and mothers, wives and sons, worn out with watching and waiting. Chance had brought them all together in the same place. They came as individuals and convened without having known each other before. Each mother told her story. Each father condemned the brutality with which his son had been treated during his arrest. The police chased them away, but they returned. For Mama Aicha, there was something about finding herself united with those who shared her pain that made her forget the ugly word and feel that at least she was not alone.

The news of the secret jail spread throughout the city, and eventually it was no longer secret. It was the commissariat of Jemaa el-Fnaa. The arrests didn’t stop, so the number of guards in the vicinity of the commissariat doubled. The mothers began to gather in the middle of the square. They rested in the chairs belonging to the food vendors. Jemaa el-Fnaa gradually became an area for protests. Tourists and visitors to the square, Moroccan and foreign, wandered through without paying attention to the intermittent clashes between the families of those imprisoned and the security forces, the families forming into lines and moving en masse toward the building, and the police, always vigilant, driving them back among the circles of storytellers.

Suddenly, with no warning, the process of releasing the prisoners began, without a trial. Each day a few would leave, bringing with them news of who would come out next.

The number of families shrank. The remaining ones kept up their vigil near the jail. Their initial worry transformed into a real hope that the confinement might be lifted for all of the city’s young men who had disappeared.

Early one morning in January, with rain sweeping across the desolate square as it usually did on cold mornings, the families were surprised to see, through the filaments of falling water, lights shining at the door of the jail. They hurried over to find out what was going on. The lights were from a jeep that was transporting the remaining prisoners. Mama Aicha saw her son as he was being pushed roughly to climb into the vehicle. His head was shaved and a band of black cloth covered his eyes. She slapped her cheeks and cried: “Aziz! It’s my son, Aziz! Where are you going, my boy?”

Aziz heard her cry. He raised his shackled hand and clenched his fist. Cries and cheers filled the air. The names of the prisoners were repeated in every corner of Jemaa el-Fnaa that day. Mama Aicha steeled her heart. She banished the tears from her eyes. They were forbidden from betraying her devastation.

It was an agonizing moment for Mama Aicha, who was torn between fear of the cold and the dark, and fear of the wolves that were looking for scapegoats.

The cars began to move and the families trembled with worry. Rumors spread through the city, confirming that the prisoners who had been charged with conspiracy and plotting to overthrow the regime had been transferred directly to the execution wing at Kenitra Central Prison outside of Rabat. They would execute them after a quick trial. The most important work of proving them guilty had already been carried out by the police in the Jemaa el-Fnaa commissariat. Other sources, however, maintained that they were still in Marrakech. That they were being held inside a secret vault in el-Badi Palace, an old prison where the Saadi kings used to entomb their Portuguese prisoners alive. Aziz’s mother tried to discover the way to this vault but she could find no one to guide her. She continued meeting regularly with the other mothers and fathers and wives. They met up near the Jemaa el-Fnaa commissariat and then congregated in the shade of the giant trees in Arset el-Bilk just beside the square. The security officers watched them and counted their very breaths, but the families didn’t care. They supported each other and fortified themselves against despair by nurturing their dreams and pursuing hope, however false it might be.

Three years they waited, weaving together strands of hope.

Their initial hesitant search efforts transformed into a full-scale protest and then into an understanding that more action was needed to find out the fate of their imprisoned relatives. The first mission that the families undertook, with Mama Aicha among them, was to see the governor of the city.

At first, the governor was the epitome of politeness. He explained to them that they lived, thanks be to God, in a nation of laws. Even the most violent criminals were punished according to the law. If they thought that their relatives, whom they claimed had been locked up by the state, were not guilty, then they should look for them away from the centers of power, because the state did not detain people without trial, and apart from the civil prison at Boulmharez, it had no other place dedicated to this function. “Therefore I advise you,” the governor concluded sternly, “to look for your sons far away from us here. Each one of you must do so on his or her own. It’s strictly forbidden to gather like this without authorization. This country has laws, and we can’t permit you to keep spreading misinformation and disorder like this.”

The governor’s answer stripped away all remnants of fear from inside Mama Aicha, and she felt a strange power coursing through her body and in her soul. She immediately snapped back at him in a tone that was at once strident and aggressive: “That’s why we came to you, sir, because you’re the governor for His Majesty in Marrakech. You’re the representative of the king here. You’re the chief of this city and its protector. If our sons have died, in God’s name give us their bodies so we can bury them, and if they’re still alive, issue the orders to release them from prison so we can see them. It’s been more than three years now since they disappeared.”

“That’s enough! Go home or I’ll have you and everyone with you thrown in jail. I was clear with you. I won’t tolerate this kind of disrespect against the state.”

They left the governor’s building. When they paused outside the door to collect themselves, Mama Aicha addressed the group: “Worse than the jail they threaten us with is what we put up with every moment. Isn’t our running frantically through the streets like lost dogs worse than jail? Isn’t their kicking us out in this way a punishment no different than torture? Isn’t the agony of waiting a kind of death that is slowly creeping up on us? As for me, neither jail nor death frightens me. I will go look for my son, either to get him out of prison or to enter it myself.”

“Wherever you go, Aicha, we go with you,” said one of the other mothers, “to give credibility to these calls for change.”

“In that case, let’s go back to Jemaa el-Fnaa. We’ll stage a sit-in in front of the commissariat. We’ll demand that they tell us where they took our sons.”

They occupied the area and were dispersed right away. They returned the following day, the following week, the following month. They always returned. Sometimes the police weren’t enough to break up the protest. They arrested them. They arrested Mama Aicha and the other mothers more than once, and then they let them go after a day or two. Mama Aicha always came out even fiercer, more determined. She no longer cared about dying, and she was no longer afraid of being arrested.

When she returned home one evening, she noticed under the door a piece of green paper folded into the shape of an envelope. On the back was a circular seal. She opened it and saw that there was writing on it. A shudder went through her in spite of the August heat. Her feelings swung between happiness and sadness — she didn’t know how to read, yet she knew that the letter was from her son. She couldn’t wait for her husband to return. She tucked the letter into her bosom and hurried off toward his store in Souk Semmarine. She didn’t answer him when he asked, surprised, why she had come, as she had never visited him in his shop before. Out of breath, she handed the letter to him.

“It’s from Aziz.”

“How do you know? Who told you it’s from him?” he asked.

“I felt it with my heart.”

“Oh, Aicha, it is from him. They’ve transferred him and all his comrades from the secret underground cell to the Ghbila Prison in Casablanca. It’s now possible to visit him. He says that we can go on Saturday morning.”

“That’s tomorrow!” she exclaimed.

They didn’t sleep that night. They went into the kitchen together and prepared Aziz’s favorite dish: tharid with chicken, onion, and raisins. They went to the wardrobe and selected some of his favorite clothes: his light summer shirt, a new pair of jeans which he’d worn only once or twice before his arrest, clean underwear, and his Adidas sneakers. Before dawn they were at the train station.

They arrived at the prison early in the morning and stood in the line of families which stretched along the whole length of the massive wall, waiting to be called to enter the visiting room. As the hours passed, Mama Aicha counted each second. She kept her eyes fixed on the mouth of the guard, following the movement of his lips with rapt attention, afraid that he would speak their names and they wouldn’t hear him. She was assailed by anxiety that the workday would end before they would be allowed to visit. Finally they reached the visiting room. She stuck her head between the bars on the outer window to search with her own eyes for the face of her son among the nearly identical heads behind the second window. Shaved heads, sallow faces that showed their bones, bulging eyes. Before she was able to speak to her son, the screen was lowered and the visit came to an end. She pounded her fist against the window and shouted with all her might: “I’m not leaving this room! I didn’t see my son and I didn’t speak to him!”

Her anger was contagious, spreading to the other remaining families so that they, too, refused to leave in protest of the shortness of the visiting time. Ten minutes was barely enough time to raise the screen and lower it again. The whole prison mobilized to deal with this emergency. The administrators bargained with the families, but they would not accept; they threatened the families, to no avail. A SWAT team surrounded the visiting room to force the families out at gunpoint. They arrested some of the fathers and forbade the rest of those waiting in line from visiting again. Immediately after that, the prisoners announced an indefinite hunger strike, demanding that the conditions of the prison be improved and the date for a trial be set.

The women resolved that the men should stay out of any active confrontations. They could watch from afar and help with communications. Mama Aicha went out into the streets, joining hands with mothers and wives advocating for the improvement of prison conditions and the acceleration of the announcement of a court date. They staged a sit-in at the Ministry of Justice. They forced their way into the meetings of political parties. They pressured their leaders to end their silence. They brought petitions and proclamations to the newspapers. They went to the colleges and universities to inform the students about the plight of their imprisoned sons.

A few of the prisoners were released to ease some of the tension. Then the trial came. The sentences ranged from five years to life. Aziz’s lot was twenty years in jail. After this, the prisoners launched another hunger strike, protesting the even worse conditions of the prison to which they were moved after the trial.

Mama Aicha’s house in el-Rahba el-Kadima alley became a regular meeting place for the mothers and wives of those imprisoned, where they strategized and planned counterattacks that would expose jails and jailers alike. In her small house in the heart of ancient Marrakech, a plan was formed to occupy Assounna Mosque, the largest mosque in the capital of Rabat. They staged a sit-in there one Friday immediately after prayers.

They made another plan to go to the Faculty of Literature in Rabat, and so they went. The students there joined forces with them in a demonstration the likes of which Mohammed V University had not seen since the Moroccan Student Union was banned. In Aicha’s house, they made signs to carry during the May Day marches. They raised their voices high to expose the truth about the prisoners of conscience who were denied the right to education and medical care. They camped out at the Ministry of Justice and the minister met with them. He made them promises that the demands of the prisoners would be met, and a committee traveled from his ministry to the prison to negotiate with the inmates to end the strike. The demands were met, but the sacrifices were great. All of them emerged from the forty-day strike as thin as skeletons. A young man from Marrakech named Selim el-Mnabhi had died during the strike. Mama Aicha was right there alongside her comrade Umm Fkhita, the mother of the martyred Selim, as she prepared to receive the corpse and carry out the burial according to custom. They held a martyr’s funeral — Selim’s funeral — a funeral in which old and young marched together, men and women. Leftist activists from every Moroccan city were in attendance, walking beside the two mothers, Fkhita and Mama Aicha, in a funeral that was unique in all the history of Marrakech.

The phone rang. It was Aziz.

“Hi, Aziz. I’ve arrived, my friend. I’m in Jemaa el-Fnaa now. I just parked my car. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

I wandered around the café looking for Aziz, but I didn’t see him. I stopped in the middle of the room and dialed his number, only to have his voice speak to me from a table right beside me. I saw an old man with haggard features and white hair searching my face as he tried to smile. But I didn’t know him. I approached him to ask him about Aziz. Maybe this was a friend of his. Maybe Aziz was in the bathroom and he would return in a moment. Instead, the old man raised his cloudy eyes to my face and addressed me by name: “At long last, Josef.” As he said this, he attempted to rise to embrace me. “At last.”

Damn! It was him. He used to address me as Comrade Josef, and I would call him Azizovitch.

“You didn’t recognize me, Yusuf? I’ve changed that much?”

What? Changed? You’re a completely different person, my friend. A person I don’t know. A different face. Features I don’t recognize. Only the voice still resembles the old Aziz, I thought. “What did they do to you, my friend, during all those years you spent in prison?”

“I don’t remember anymore, Yusuf,” he whispered. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t like to remember. Nothing makes me suffer now except the pain that my condition causes my mother and father when they see death creeping slowly over my body. If you only knew how hard Mama Aicha fought to get me out alive, Josef. Yes, if only you knew.”

“I do know, my friend. My mother told me all about Mama Aicha’s determination, alongside the mothers and wives of the other political prisoners. How they pressured the regime and embarrassed it in front of the international community before they were able to wring out a blanket pardon for their sons and husbands. Mama Aicha and her companions were behind many changes that this country has seen. When I was in Japan, I used to follow the news from here almost daily, before the Internet — and after. The justice-and-reconciliation initiative that brought about your release, along with the adoption of guidelines for making financial reparations to former detainees — this is what opened the airports and the borders to us.” I was proud that something good had come out of the tragedy. “But I didn’t come back right away. It was as though I was afraid of seeing you — all of you. I dreaded the moment when my eyes would meet yours. You especially, comrade.”

“Oh, my friend... whatever was in my eyes has been extinguished forever. You have nothing to fear from them. Forget your friend Aziz. He’s only a ghost now. Let’s go see your second mother, Aicha. She’s waiting for us with a seven-vegetable couscous she made in your honor.”

Mama Aicha greeted me with a warm hug. She kissed me and kept kissing me as though I were a sweet child. Her eyes were shining. The house was just as it had been when I left it. Flowerpots still surrounded the courtyard. The mulberry tree was still ripening. Mama Aicha seemed younger than her son. She must have been around fifty-four by now. Were it not for the traces of sadness that lingered in the depths of her eyes, I would have said that she had not changed. She was as radiant and pure as she had been when I last saw her twenty years before.

I handed her my gift, wrapped in rose-colored cellophane paper. She removed the paper with a huge smile. “Cloth made from the purple silkworm. Organdy. My first dream. This is wonderful, Yusuf, my son. How fine and beautiful it is. This is cloth for a sultaness, Aziz. I’ll take it to the tailor tomorrow, and within a month at most he’ll make me a dress from it. When will you get married, Aziz? When will you get married, my son? I want to wear it in your honor.”

Translated from Arabic by Anna Ziajka Stanton