Tangier

Achar

Mohammed Achar's clinic, a subsection of the Ministry of Public Health, was known in Dradeb simply as "Dr. Achar's." It was a maze of tiny rooms linked by passageways that were narrow and damp. When the wind blew, which was often in Tangier, the place was a symphony of slamming doors.

Achar prowled about the corridors like a bear. Burly and strong, he moved like a man with too much to do and insufficient time. One Saturday in the middle of June he was everywhere at once, dropping into the tiny treatment rooms, assisting doctors who needed his advice, holding hurried consultations in the hall on the cases that kept pouring in. From time to time he'd disappear into his refuge, a cluttered, book-lined office in the back. Here, at a desk heaped with X-rays and reports, he puffed on cigarettes, sipped mint tea, and shouted furiously over the phone. His heavy bass voice boomed down the hall to the waiting room at its other end-a signal to the people thronged there that someone in Dradeb cared.

On this particular Saturday there was a small operation to be performed. Early in the afternoon Achar went to the scrub room, washed his hands, then extended his arms so that his nurse could help him with his gown and gloves.

The patient was a boy with a hernia near his groin, so small it took the doctor more than twenty minutes to find. Achar took no notice of the time, was too involved with his work. He liked surgery, enjoyed patching people up. His hands, he thought, were skillful though hardly great. It embarrassed him that there were rumors they were magical and blessed by God.

Had his staff started that? He hoped not, though he knew they loved him as much as he loved them. He was a benevolent dictator who shouted orders in crises. But when there was time he always asked their views. "If any of you ever thinks I'm wrong," he told them, "tell me right away. Even if I don't take your advice I still want you to talk. And if I seem to be acquiring a complex, you must tell me that too. I detest the myth of the master physician, the all-knowing doctor-saint." He meant it, and hoped they understood the dangers of being corrupted by the healer's power. When he passed through the waiting room and poor people leaned to touch his hands, he turned away with shame.

It was difficult to work in Dradeb, but Achar had no desire for a private practice on Boulevard Pasteur. He was always short of antibiotics and blood, and had constantly to worry about keeping his reservoir filled and maintaining his generator in case the electricity should fail. Still he persisted, and now, after some years of effort, he'd managed to assemble a devoted staff who shared his notion that there was too much disease to allow oneself to rest.

Probably, he thought, he was a better administrator than anything else, with the gift of motivation, of getting people to work. But it took so much energy to enliven others, to give and give while taking nothing in return. Surgery was his diversion from that, an abstract game he played. Looking down at the exposed tissues of the boy, he thought of the body as a puzzle. But afterward, when he'd closed the wound and sewed it up, he felt a rush of exhaustion, a need to rest and close his eyes. It came upon him always after an operation-his bones ached from standing, his eyes from so much strain. And, too, he wondered about usefulness-whether these little operations, these little patchings-up, were really the answer to human pain.

When he returned to his office, hoping for a quarter hour's rest, he found a young man named Driss Bennani sitting before his desk.

"Fischer's dead," Driss announced. "He died in California ten days ago."

Achar lit a cigarette. "His heart?"

"I suppose so. His son didn't say. Just a note to tell me that he was dead and that he thought I ought to know."

"Well," said Achar, thinking back to the last time he'd examined Fischer in Tangier, "I'm very sorry to hear this, Driss. He was the only American I ever liked."

"He was a great man, Achar. I learned more about architecture in my year with him than from all the professors I ever had. He was a visionary. He knew that buildings were for people. An obvious truth, but not many people see it here."

Achar nodded. "Yes," he said, "Fischer had great plans for us. He was going to build us a great hospital, the best equipment, a place where we could really work. I suppose all that's out the window now-they're going to tear us down, I hear, and put up skyscrapers in our place."

"Not quite yet," said Driss. "The redevelopment of Dradeb has been postponed. They've got a different project now. They're going to use the money for a road."

"I see, though I'm not sure where they'll put it. There're buildings to the edges of the road we have now."

"No, Achar. You don't understand. Not a new road through here. A road to go around."

"Oh, yes, I see." He didn't, though-was too tired to concentrate on what the boy was trying to say.

Driss noticed his lack of attention and began to raise his voice. "A new access to the Mountain. The Governor doesn't like driving through here, and also there's the King. Not that he ever comes to Tangier-I don't think he's been here in three or four years-but in case he does come he'll have a more pleasant access to the hill. So the plan is to build a road up the Mountain from the other side. That way the people who live up there won't have to drive through here anymore."

"A blessing, I suppose."

"But don't you see?" Driss was angry. He stood and began to pace around the little room. His bitterness caught Achar by surprise. "There'll never be a rehabilitation. The whole project was a charade. They just wanted to cosmetize the place, put up some high rises to make the street look good. Fischer's idea, to make a new village here, never had a chance."

Achar watched him carefully. "Sit down, Driss," he said. "You don't have to shout in here. And stop talking like an idealist. It's foolish and boring too. If Fischer's plan had been approved, two-thirds of the money would have been stolen before they laid a brick. Fancy designs, big talk-that sort of thing always conceals a sham. The only way you ever change conditions is to get the people to change them for themselves. Fischer didn't understand that, but he was a foreigner. You were born here. You don't have that excuse."

"Yes. Yes." The boy seemed dejected. "I know all that, of course."

"Good! Then you can start doing something instead of talking about how bad things are. Get them to put up some lights. Stop the traffic every few minutes so people can cross. Get some damn water in here-dig up those rusted pipes, or whatever is wrong, and put in some new ones so we can drink. Look at this clinic. It's falling apart. It leaks when it rains, and in winter it's like ice. But we function here, Driss. We make it work."

After a silence Driss leaned forward, spoke angrily between his teeth. "Let me tell you, doctor, why there's no water here-the real reason. It's not the pipes. The golf course on the south flank of the Mountain has to be watered all day long, and since there's a shortage now, they're drawing on the reservoir that feeds Dradeb." He shook his head. "I don't want to build anymore," he whispered. "I want to tear things down."

Achar looked at him. He had to be careful now. But the young architect seemed sincere, with an anger he thought he could use. "All right," he said finally, "that's very nice. You want to tear things down. But not old buildings. Something else."

"Yes," said Driss. "You know exactly what I mean."

Achar lit another cigarette. "Why have you come to me?"

"People tell me you're a man who understands the future. That's why I came. But not just to talk."

"But you do talk about these things?"

"Sometimes-with people I can trust."

"It's dangerous to be a dissenter, Driss. There're a lot of people who make their living turning other people in." The young architect nodded.

Achar leaned back. "So," he said, "you want to see things changed."

"Yes."

"Well-we'll see. I'll mention your enthusiasm to some of my friends. Perhaps one of them will get in touch. Excuse me now. I need to rest. Then there're patients I have to see."

After Bennani left, Achar closed his eyes. Now, thirty-eight years old, he believed in ideas but no longer in men. When he'd been a medical student, at Cairo University, Gamal Abdel Nasser had been his god. He still kept the man's photo on his office wall, but he'd decided years before that Nasser had been weak and failed. All the talk about pan-Arabism, a great new era, a new place in the world for the backward peoples of Islam-all that had been rhetoric for the masses, without any result. Nasser had plunged into the anti-Zionist cause while his regime became corrupt and his power was misused. While he became a world figure, rushing to conferences here and there, to Washington and to Moscow for aid, he neglected the real issue, which was misery, the misery in which people lived. He became corrupted by his glory and lacked the courage to take away the privileges of his friends.

Now Morocco was miserable, it seemed to Achar, and the King, a clever man, was working ruthlessly to preserve his power. He'd nationalized the foreign banks, confiscated the foreign-owned plantations, but the only difference that had made was a few favored Moroccans had become rich. Achar didn't like foreigners much, but his dislike of them was nothing compared with his hatred for the Moroccan ruling class. Not just for the King (who symbolized everything that was wrong) but for the whole rotten system, the payoffs and favors, the entrenchment of powerful families, the shallow self-seeking of commercial people on the rise. The country was going under while they played games in Rabat-a modern Versailles, he thought, where the King distracts his rivals with golf tournaments, luxuries, and intrigues.

Now the system was starting to bend beneath the pressure. Achar, with other men, wanted to be sure that it finally cracked. He'd decided to devote his life to that-it seemed a logical extension of his work. What was the point of treating symptoms when the problem was the disease? He wasn't interested in a military coup. Monarchy or dictatorship-the repression would be the same. He wanted radical change, an austere socialist regime, first of all a program to break the psychological power of Islam. As long as Moroccans could shrug and say "It's God's will" before their miseries, it was hopeless to try to improve their lot. As a surgeon he'd shown people that the ills of the body could be attacked with a knife. Now he wanted to show them that the system that oppressed them must be attacked the same way.

Yes, he thought, Driss Bennani might be one to help. He could join the cadre that met in the clinic in the night, discussing ways to build a new Morocco, making plans to tear the old Morocco down.

Several hours later he was passing through the waiting room when a familiar face caught his eye. It was Kalinka Zvegintzov seated among veiled Moroccans on one of the hard benches that filled the room.

"Kalinka." He came up to her. "Are you waiting to see me?"

When she nodded he motioned for her to follow, leading her to an examination cubicle in the back.

"How are you?" he asked. "And how is Hamid? I haven't seen him in weeks."

"He's been very busy, I think."

"Good. I was worried he'd forgotten us. It happens so often when people leave Dradeb."

"He's working all the time," she said. "Sometimes he doesn't even sleep. When he thinks I've fallen off he slips out to the other room. Then he sits in the dark smoking cigarettes."

"Thinking about something?"

"That's what he says. But he doesn't talk about his work. I think he's healthy, though. Otherwise he'd come to you."

Achar laughed. "Oh, Kalinka. Hamid can come here anytime, whether he's sick or not. I've known him all my life. We were born within a hundred meters of this place."

She nodded, and as always Achar felt a certain strangeness in her manner, a retreating inside, a distancing from events.

"Now what brings you here, Kalinka? Your spring cold's all gone, I think."

"I don't know," she said. "Sometimes I feel weak. My chest hurts. I'm tired all the time."

"Well, I'll have a look at you. Come on then. Take off your dress."

She looked up at him and hesitated. He excused himself to fetch his stethoscope, and when he returned he found her sitting on the examination table in white silk trousers and brassiere. Her dress, an Oriental floral print, was hanging from the hook. He looked at her carefully-her skin was pale and so translucent he felt he could see deep within, even past the network of blue veins.

"You're so very thin, Kalinka. Perhaps you don't eat enough."

She shook her head. "I'm not very hungry," she said.

He began to examine her, listen to her heart, then thump his forefinger on her chest and back. She seemed fragile to him, perfectly proportioned and yet petite, her rib bones so delicate he felt they'd break if he touched too hard. It seemed improper for him to lay his thick, hairy fingers on such a fragile creature, and yet, thinking that, he suddenly understood her attraction for Hamid.

When he was finished with her torso he stared down her throat and then, with his magnifying flashlight, deep into her eyes. The whites were a little jaundiced, he thought. Bent over, so close to her face, he felt suddenly that his head was twice as big as hers.

"You still smoke, Kalinka?"

She nodded and looked down.

"I told you last time you'd have to stop."

"I try," she said in her funny sing-song French. "But there is nothing else for me to do."

"Don't be ridiculous. Tangier is full of things. You like to draw. Why don't you do that?"

She shrugged.

"Learn Arabic then. It's the least you can do."

"Hamid is unhappy with me." She blurted out the words so quickly they caught him off his guard. Then, immediately, she raised her hand to cover up her mouth.

He sat back, looked at her, thought a few moments, then spoke. "Why, Kalinka? Why is he unhappy? What makes you think he is? Tell me what's wrong."

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "Sometimes he looks at me so strangely, and I feel he's about to speak. Then he turns away. He questions me. I try to answer but I can't. He asks me to draw pictures and tell him stories. I try my best but he's not satisfied." There were tears forming in her eyes.

"You're not unhappy with him?"

"Oh, no! I love him. He's the only thing I care about here."

"What are these questions? What does he want to know?"

"Everything. He wants to know about the past. About Peter and Hanoi. My life. He asks me questions about my life."

"Surely you can answer him."

"No," she said. "I try. But I cannot. It's all so vague to me. Like a dream."

He didn't know what to say. Here was a woman who lived with his boyhood friend, a strange Asian woman who said her past had fled her memory. It was hard enough to be a doctor, to diagnose illnesses, to examine the exteriors of patients and from them divine the processes beneath. But to diagnose a woman's heart-that was beyond his skill.

"You must stop smoking. I insist on that. The hashish makes everybody mad. It's an opiate here-the fog in which Moroccans sleep. People who smoke it turn inward, confused, and can no longer see the world. It's very bad for you. It makes you dream. It dulls your senses. It clouds your sight. You must give it up, Kalinka-right now, right away. Take walks. Grow plants on your balcony. Draw pictures. Listen to music. But stop smoking. That's why your chest aches. That's why you feel weak, tired all the time. It's the hashish that has made you forget."

He was surprised at the force with which he delivered his little speech-it was not like him to lecture a patient that way. He thought back upon what he knew of her life-her reputation as a femme fatale. This tiny creature had broken the spirit of the Russian, then ensnared Hamid. Achar did not believe the talk about her casting spells, but when Hamid had fallen in love with her he'd acted like a fool. What was it about her? What was the source of her power? He looked at her carefully again and for a moment, a splinter of a second, saw something that made him feel weak. It was something ancient, veiled-a whole history that showed on the smooth, blank features of her face. It was as if all the mystery of the Far East showed there, all the centuries of struggle and bloodshed, strange rites, formal rituals, something placid, hieratic, deep. It was so compelling that, for a minute, he could not tear his eyes away. But finally she grinned and broke the spell.

"Yes," she said, "the hashish. I will try. I promise I will try to stop."

At twilight Achar went out to walk. It had been a busy day at the clinic, and still there were people waiting to be helped. But he needed to breathe, to get out of those narrow rooms, to feel the cool air that rolled across the valley from the sea. The taps were not yet turned on, but children were waiting near the pumps. Dradeb was a beehive, pulsing with misery and life.

Most of its houses were constructed out of discarded bricks mortared in haphazard ways. The roofs were sheet metal, kept in place by stones on top; otherwise, when the wind blew the roofs might fly away. There were large portions of Dradeb where the houses were not so good, shacks made of discarded pieces of cars and bamboo culms with only a blanket for a door. There were shanties that had been erected on top of an old Jewish cemetery-the gravestones, poking up in the middle of the rooms, served as tables or even beds. Such rot, he thought, such a rotting place. Dradeb stank of over-flowing septics. Its little lanes were filled with rubble and discarded blackened greens.

Achar thought of Fischer then, walking these alleys with Driss Bennani months before, such an improbable combination, he'd thought so many times, the young Moroccan with the old American Jew. He'd liked Fischer, missed him, was sorry now that he was dead. The man had been a builder and a dreamer. Now Driss wanted to tear things down.

Achar passed a carpentry shop, waved to the men inside. Walking up an alley by the mosque, he could hear the machine in the miller's shop grinding flour out of wheat. He walked up Rue de Persil, moving to the side to avoid a rat. It lay dead in ooze that trickled down from an outhouse. There were dogs standing in the alleyway, thin, bony mongrels with supplicating eyes. A week or so before, the police had come while men demolished shanties that encroached on private land. Then the trucks took people and their possessions to another quarter, and the uncomprehending dogs were left behind. They seemed to Achar to be getting thinner every day. Soon they must find a source of garbage, he thought, or else they will become savages or die.

Finally, at the top of the hill, he turned and looked back down. There it was, Dradeb, the slum, and his clinic, a compound of shanties too. The place needed schools, water, most of all a passion to change. Only yards away, across the river on the Mountain, one could buy Cuban cigars and English marmalade.

It was foolish, he knew, to agonize over injustice. Fischer had done that. He'd been naive. Achar knew the world was full of inequalities, always had been, always would be. But Dradeb was so unnecessary. Morocco was not poor. There were huge deposits of phosphates in the south, and tourism earned a fortune in foreign exchange. There was money, it flowed in, not to the people who needed it, but to the coffers of the King and his friends.

Let them be rich, he thought. Let them play golf and live in palaces and eat great banquets and dress in haute couture. They could have all that if only they would share. But they shared nothing, and even took from those who had so much less. They watered their golf course from the reservoir of Dradeb, so that even to drink was now a luxury in the slum.

He looked up at the Mountain, the glittering villas, hanging in terraced gardens so high above.