The Process

3. THOU

Thou art the crossroads of my life, Hassan Merikani!

You know what that means in the language we speak. We say about people like you: He can walk in the souk of my head, the marketplace all Arabs live in. More than that, you stepped into my head without even knocking or calling out: “Trek! Make way!” and you made your home there like my head was your very own house where you walked up and down teaching me school without as much as taking off your big Nazarene shoes. Christian or not, you’re an African, Hassan, belonging to us. American passport or not, we know people like you. I may be God’s Little Burro or Allan’s Ass, like I always say, and I may be a square-headed Berber just down from my own Little Hills, like they call me in Tanja but I was Hamid the King of the Train before I ever knew you. When I see a prize, I know how to take it. You never do.

I swung into Tanja one day about noon on the back of the train from Kebir and I dropped from the still-moving cars as we glided along by the beach before we got into the station: no money, no ticket; I travel free! I tumbled head over heels six times in the sand and when I got to my feet, there were you. Playing Ping-pong with beachboys in the smallest bikinislip ever seen on the beach, you were leaping about like a naked Afreet, one of King Solomon’s magical Blacks. My flesh crawled at the sight of your flesh, the cool hue of your skin. “There goes my Abid—my slave!” I swore to myself. “I’ve bought me a Black.” I was a newly ruined man of nearly sixteen who felt he had nothing to lose. How could I know you would cost me so much before we were through?

That midnight, alone, you sat drinking mint tea on the terrace of Fuente’s café in the Socco and there, not a full arm’s length away from your chair on the other side of the iron grill they took down more than ten years ago now — there hunkered Hamid, ex-King of the Train, hidden under the hood of his ragged jellaba. You slapped at your neck, like my black eye was a tickling fly, because I was trying to peer deep in your ear, drilling to see what you had inside of your head. Now, all these years later, I know. When I’ll be dead, Hassan, I still will remember some things that you said. I always remember the first time you turned and your eyes caught in mine — so do you. You jumped up like something had bit you, calling the waiter as you dropped some loose change on the table, and ran up the Street of the Christians, heading for home. I chuckled and ducked through the shortcuts, just watching you dash up that flight of steep steps and into your house, double-bolting the doors without catching your breath. Were you spying on me from out of some little slit of a window high in the wall? Why didn’t you turn on a light? I had nothing to do, so I could hang about all that night and all the next day and all the next night until you got over your fright and came out, or until I climbed into your house with you — somehow. I didn’t know how.

I hung about easy down in the steep street below, under the arches and deep in the shadows, well out of sight. I slouched in an alley or I prowled in a lane, watching who toiled up the steep street of stairs or who drifted down to see Aissha the Whore in her neat little cupboard under the steps. A sailor crawled out on all fours with his buttons undone and his guide, who was waiting outside, collected commission from Aissha, who brazenly jangled all her gold bracelets right up to her shoulder to pay him his cut. Jimmy the Guide steered the sailor down the steps by the mosque and away out of sight. Then, the Barber Drunk with God, who used to have his barber chair in the middle of his one little room right under your house, where he dyed his own beard bright henna-red, shaved his own head and the heads of his customers, and rolled fancy turbans for his patrons on Fridays, strolled out of the mosque chanting night-prayers. He sang a long holy verse on one quavering tone as he slowly moved up from one broad step to the next of your street until, standing right under your window, he suddenly stopped, climbed into his little shop and he slept. That fat Soussi neighborhood grocer, who stayed open all night, slumped over his counter asleep on his vegetables with his head lolling out in the street. For an hour or so a chorus of cocks crowed on the flat roofs of all the houses in town but nobody passed. Then, at last, your new next-door neighbor and my old friend from the train, Si Mohamed, came staggering down from where a pirate-taxi had dropped him in Amrah, dead with sleep because it was the middle of the night, and he was carrying a big roll of straw-matting to go all around the inside walls of his little house.

“Have you become a snail or are you some new kind of turtle, Si Mohamed?” I asked him politely as I bent down low under his load to look into his eyes. I knew he must have been smoking a lot. People who smoke are always out doing crazy things like that in the middle of night.

“Oh, so it’s you!” grunted Si Mohamed. “Here, take the key to my house and open the door for me will you, Hamid, there’s a good lad!”

Mektoub! It was written! Inside that one minute, I was inside the house next to yours, like a bee in the very next cell. Already, I knew exactly how I was going to get into your house. Si Mohamed set down his load and starting making the tea. I passed him a pipe of our great grass from the Little Hills and we passed an hour or so before pink summer dawn, talking about the people we both knew in smuggling who worked the train. Si Mohamed used to run chickens and contraband meat over the border from Kebir into Tanja, so we had all the same friends. I told him the tale of how I had just lost all of my smuggling capital down in Rabat. He could see I had been really cleaned out: he knew the girl. While he was pouring a fresh pot of tea, I said: “Nice little place you got here. Who’s next door?”

Si Mohamed spat on the floor: “A Black Christian! Didja ever hear the likes before in your life! Why, I spoke to the man in the street, the day he moved in on a Friday. Just to look at the man, I thought him a Muslim, of course. I asked if he’d been to the baths, expecting to walk down the steps to the mosque with him, as the muezzin was calling the prayer and, d’you know what he says: I’m a Christian! he says. Annah Nazrani! And him Black, think of that! Says he wants to learn Arabic, too! Then, why can’t he be a Muslim like everyone else in the world, tell me that? You can hear him moving around in there sometimes and I don’t care if he hears me!”

I calmed down Si Mohamed and got him back onto the subject of matting, until he made me a fairly good price to fix it up on the wall with wood-stripping screwed into pegs in the plaster. I had two days to do it in, while he made his run to Kebir for his chickens and meat. Not one dirham in advance would he give me, and I half thought of selling his matting to eat when, all of a sudden, a much better idea popped into my head. Si Mohamed went out to borrow the tools because that was part of our contract. He was to get the plaster, wood-stripping and pegs and the screws and, above all, a big heavy hammer to knock holes in the walls for the pegs to hold up the mats. I just sat there and smoked while I thought out my plan.

About seven o’clock in the morning the pounding began, you remember? I knew it was waking you up. Si Mohamed hung around for a while, until he was almost late for the train, just to see me put in my first pegs in the thin wall with fresh plaster and, then, he went away satisfied I knew my job. I did and I do. I took that big old hammer in my two hands and, saying: Bismillah! I spat on its head before Si Mohamed was well down the steps. I wet both my hands with more spit that I slicked on its slippery shaft. Hard as that wall was, my hammer was harder! One two three and the wall came tumbling down! There you were like a hole in my picture. Were you really astonished when I came through the wall, right into your room? Really, really? Were you, really? What a scandale!

That same afternoon, we discovered together that cave on the beach all alone. Do you remember that day? The grapes! Do you remember the grapes we hung up for the little djenoun? What a day! Ah, but, of course, that was way back then!

The very next day, you turned purple and green when I wanted to borrow a suit. You Christians are all alike, every last one of you, white or Black. You’re all always screaming: “Don’t take that! That’s mine! I want it right back!” Every last thing you lay your hands on is My this and My that! as if anything really belongs to you, here in this world, or really is real. I never could get into my head the way you all feel about things like a suit or a shirt or a life. I can feel that way for a moment, if a woman is mine, but you in American say: “Here’s the keys to the car. Why don’t you take out the wife?” That old yellow suit was the suit you had bought for a wedding, you screamed, and I screamed right back: “That’s right! It’s a wedding I’m going to!” So, I took it and went. Did you think that a wedding of ours is over and done in a couple of hours? Why, up in my village, Jajouka, a wedding lasts eight nights and eight days, a whole week!

Inside three days, I was back and I knocked on your door. When you came down the steps, you took one long look at me and you snapped: “You’ve been sick on my suit!” Somebody had, it was true. You know how it is nowadays at these modern weddings in town, some of the boys bring in a bottle or two that goes around as quiet as sin and as quick. Someone has got to be sick. You made me so mad, I bit blood in my lip as I turned away from your door, blazing with sorrow for you in my heart. I brought water into my eyes just to think how bad you must feel to be talking to me like that for so little. At that moment, I could have given you up. I raced back to the fondouk where the smugglers stable their donkeys. In the room of a friend, I shucked off that suit and I put on my rags. I rolled that old suit in one bundle I took straight to Casa Luxy the Cleaners, on the far side of the Grand Market near the Cinema Rex — now called the Cinema Rif because it belongs to a big stiff from the Rif I used to know on the train. He never lost his capital and so much the better for him. Luxy wanted so much money to clean that suit that I took the ticket and sold it for a few francs more and bought an old seersucker suit out of the grab bag of rags the Americans used to send us to dress ourselves in. With my new clothes in my hand, I went to the hammam where who should I run into but my old friend from the train, Si Mohamed. Before he could say a word about the wall which I had fixed and repainted on your side but not his, I slapped him on the bare buttocks saying: “How’s your Black Nazarene neighbor, these days?”

Every day for more than a week, your suit hung high on a perch in a tree above the Grand Market while I sat smoking over my tea in my little café from where I could see you walk right underneath it, five or six times a day. Every time you threaded your way through the streets of the town, down from your house in the casbah, down the Street of the Christians out into the Socco Chico where the cafés line the plaza and on up the Street of the Jewelers, out the old gate past the money-changers in their booths and across the Grand Market, the way it used to be before they cut down the trees in the middle all hung with cages of bright singing birds and goldfish in bowls to be sold by the flower-sellers who banked up their blossoms around the white washed boles of the trees against which they leaned smoking their pipes and smiling at any who passed, up past the daily market for maids where the veiled girls hang around to be hired by the day or the hour or even less if they were pretty — well, if you had ever looked up, you’d have seen your old suit cleaned and hanging high in the air like a scarecrow of you. You really were sick. Your face was as yellow as that old mangy suit when you marched through the maids without even a glance and on up the street past the Jewish Community building, right to the end where the traffic cop stands, and not turning right to Dean’s Bar — he’s dead, too bad — climbing on past the Mingih Hotel with a slow turn to the left around the Cape of Good Hope for the hustling guides and a quick glance up and down the rank of tables and chairs on the terrace of the Café de Paris to see who’s new, rich and alive and, then, straight down the Boulevard to the British Post Office. Who else remembers, today, in which building it was? That’s where your check was supposed to come in and, according to you, it never did.

When I needed any money from you, it was always too soon or too late. Us Moors can eat misery for breakfast, dinner and supper and we get used to seeing a thick slice of it on our plates but Hamid is a hakim for money. I can say: presto! and make money come out of your nose. Who needs any more in this life? You were the one who always was asking me questions like: “How old are you, Hamid?” and: “When were you born?” How do I know! Was I there to ask them what time it was when my mother was giving me birth? You think I pop out of her belly to say: What day is this, please, I be born? Do I know? I know only one thing: I am a ruined man. I who was Hamid, King of the Train — I who played cards with the Customs, letting them win — I who could bring anything in, as big as the train, if I liked — can smuggle no more. How was I ruined? By a wicked woman, of course. How old was I then? Oh, maybe fifteen.

You never saw the old train the French made for us, here, hundreds of years ago, with open cars out on the back for us “natives”—Fourth-Class? That train brought me from Kebir to Tanja almost as soon as I could walk. My Pa had put me to school in Kebir in a room big enough for four donkeys or twenty small boys on the floor but the schoolmaster beat me over the head with my own wooden slate. When he found I drew pictures of him instead of my letters, he threw me out in the street. I was sitting in the middle of the road, drawing faces with my finger in the dust, when an old woman grabbed me by the arm. She said: “Little boy, help me carry my baskets to the station and I’ll give you this penny for candy.” What she smuggled to Tanja was mainly market-produce and our rations of sugar and oil which cost more down there. She brought back to Kebir things we really were needing, like bobby-socks, bubble gum, Lucky Strike cigarettes. When we got to the station, she tried to pull me up after her into the train so I struggled and cried but she promised the ride and one more penny in Tanja to carry her things from the station up to the Grand Socco Market — that’s where the smugglers’ traffic took place. Once I saw how that worked, I never had to ask anybody for a ride home.

I worked three years for that old woman and I learned how to smuggle and steal. Fourth-Class in the train carried nothing but smugglers, out in the open car on the back of the train. While we ran through our Little Hills between Kebir and the sea, we hid our merchandise all over the train, fighting each other for the best places and even crawling from one axle to the other underneath the cars. I knew every place. I knew every Customs man, too, and they all thought a lot of me because I gave them a tip every trip. Out of what I made stealing from the old woman and dealing, myself, I paid some to the Customs men and hid some away for my capital. It grew every trip.

One day the old woman came panting up to the station. “Carry me this and carry me that!” she cried. I told her: “Old woman, go carry yourself! I deal on my own from now on.” The first time I ever went with a woman I found in the train, it was nice but nothing much happened. I had to wait another six months for that, so I must have been twelve or thirteen. By the end of that year, I had two women I kept — one at each end of the line all set up in a house to be nice to my friends from the Customs. I did the cooking, though. I don’t trust the hand of any woman alive in the pot, not even my mother. Women put terrible things in your food, calling it love. Here in Tanja, any woman at all will use Borbor to turn a man into a donkey and do whatever she wills. In our Little Hills, all the Master Musicians cook their own food all their lives.

Inside three years, I was Hamid, King of the Train. I rode with the Customs, behind drawn blinds, playing Ronda with cards, pouring out wine which was mine. I kept all my merchandise in with me too, to be safe. The Customs men watched it for me while I checked out the train for them. I was rich for a boy of my age, so all the smuggler-women swarmed around me like flies. For them, I was a prize because they all had daughters to sell. I picked out a girl like an apple who was thirteen or twelve, still unveiled. When we fixed on her price with her father, I paid the down payment in front of the Cadi, our judge. Then, I took all my capital into my hand and set out for Rabat, where I’d never been before in my life, to buy all the things we were needing to make it a really grand wedding.

When I got to Rabat in the late afternoon, I saw just outside the station a boy I knew very well from the train and he was riding around on a brand-new bicycle, purple with trimmings of gold. One hundred francs in advance for every short ride from just here to the corner, that’s what he wanted from me but, because I was rich, I paid for ride after ride after ride. The streetlights turned on while I was learning to ride like a bat, swooping out further afield until the boy called me back because he had to go home, so I followed him there, as blind as a lover. I completely forgot he had a well-known wicked sister who worked the train with only the merchandise she carried between her legs. She already had ruined many a man. That bicycle blinded me or I’d never have walked right into her house with my pockets bulging with money. Before I sat down, she had sent out for five cases of beer and, then, five cases more and, then, we sent out for ten. By the end of the week, we had filled up two rooms of a vacant house next door with beer bottles up to the ceilings and pouring out of the windows and doors.

That woman never would leave me alone. When we went out for a ride, she always ordered a carriage with two horses and she sat there beside me as decently veiled as a wife but, “Ho!” she would cry to the coachman whenever we passed in front of a shop. That woman was all the time needing some things. “You just wait for me here!” she would say as she disappeared into that shop for an hour until she called me to come in and pay for everything that she and her brother and I and the coachman could carry out in both arms. I paid and I paid and I paid. I woke up one morning and saw her asleep on the pillow beside me, so I decided to slip on my pants while she slept. Crinkle-crinkle! Rustle-rustle! That crackling noise was my very last five thousand franc note in my pocket, whispering to me: “Get out, get out!” At that very moment a handful of coins fell out of my pocket to ring on the floor. “What!” she cried, bobbing up in the bed. “Where you going?”

“To the hammam to wash,” I lamely replied as I kissed her.

“My brother goes with you!” she snapped. “Here, let me see that.”

I gave up and gave her the works. When the last round was emptied, she threw me out on my ear. I went shambling slowly away down her alley, singing out at the top of my voice, so all the neighbors could hear:

Love is like a snake

That glides between your thighs

Before you feel it strike

It has put out both your eyes!

I was ruined and I knew I was ruined so I wandered along to the Street of the Women. That’s gone, now too, like the little old train and all. Even the big iron door they used to have to keep the women inside doesn’t hang any more in the arch of the gate. There, I saw a man with a ladder and pails, so I hailed him to say I was an expert whitewasher and painter out of a job. He and I walked together into the very first house on the right where we talked the Madrona into a price to get her whole place done up spick and span, inside and out. When they gave me the money for whitewash, I came back with bright red, yellow, blue, brown and black to paint out a story of mine. Back in Tanja, I painted the walls of my house with girls in a jungle full of monkeys, devils and men, evil spirits and lions and birds but these walls in Rabat were big! I told the man I wanted no wages if he’d let me do all the work. I want what I want so, when he looked suspicious, I told the Madrona to spill him a beer, as I tickled her tired old tits.

When I laid my equipment out on a table, all the girls in the house came fluttering down like a covey of quail to see what I got. What I got is a lot, so I gave them all a peck on the cheek and a pinch on the ass as I pulled out and showed them my big magic brush. There were just seven girls in that house, I remember, so it took me a whole week to paint my way through. I could brush only one girl a night because they all thought it was such a treat to be in my picture that they wanted to take it in turns to be brushed by me. Before I got finished that first house of girls, there was talk of my brushwork all over the quarter and the girls in the very next house were yammering and lullilooing to get theirs done, too. They just couldn’t wait for me to come over and do the whole house. In the end, I did the whole quarter. I got my big brush in there solid and got down to work but, first, I had to jerk my equipment away from the Madrona who’d seen what a job I’d done on her girls and wanted hers, too, right there behind the cash-box. I would sooner have stuck my fist in the till than her box but she gave me the gold ring I drew off her finger by force. I gave that ring, later, to a girl in a house at the far end of the street and, would you believe it, that almost started a war. Those girls fight! Any one of those girls could lay a man flat on the floor from one bang on the head with her bracelets. When one house of girls got into a war with another house, they slashed each other with switchblades or bottles and glasses they broke on the bar. When I hear them breaking the glasses, I run! In one of those houses, a girl once cut off a guy’s root at the root!

I was there a long time, painting houses and girls. Let me see: a girl a night times seven nights in a week is seven girls, isn’t it? That’s a week and the weeks in a month are four with some little scraps left over now and then, so I’ve got little scraps of girls to add up but that’s hard. Like the fat Mina Smina I had on the steps when the Madrona screamed out that old song:

Oh, you pay on the landing and not on the stairs!

excepting she said: “You paint on the landing,” because she saw I had my brush out. So, that makes about thirty a month. It is more? And how many months would there be in a year? Only twelve? Oh, there were a lot more houses than that in Rabat, in those days. I painted a lot. It was all one great big picture, you see. It began as soon as you walked in the door and there was the music and dancing and drinking and girls and my pictures under the light. There were thousands of soldiers and men swarming through there every night in the week, not to speak of the tradesmen, musicians, gamblers and pimps who lived in the place, which was like a small town. Now, it’s gone. Now, it’s all torn down or people are living in there who don’t even know or could guess some of the things that went on in their rooms. Here and there, maybe, there might be a trace of my picture left in some dark corner under the stairs but, little by little, ever since Independa, they whitewashed it over until there isn’t a trace of my brush in Rabat. I’ve heard French people saying that painting is French.

The old train that used to run back to Kebir has gone, as the Customs have gone; as the houses and the paintings and girls have gone, now, forever. At the Customs, they said:“Why, we heard you wuz dead! Ayesha bought a taxi with your capital and her brother can drive it. What you gonna do, now?” When they saw I had no more capital to start in the business again, they turned wicked and kicked me off the train in Kebir, where I went to the house of my mother: as a matter of fact, that house is mine, in my name. You’ve seen it often enough: you know how it is. It wasn’t such a ruin, in those days.

That house was Grampa’s house and he had only one boy, my Pa, to inherit his orchards and farms and a quarry of clay and the kilns to make bricks, besides all the other houses and gardens he owned. All of his wives had given him only daughters but the last wife of all gave him a son. All those other women were mad because my Pa would inherit it all, so they cursed him. When he grew up, he had no use for women at all. He spent all his money in cafés with musicians or in the barbershops and steam baths with boys. He promised a boy he would take him to Mecca on the pilgrimage to make him a Hadj. When Grampa heard this, he called in the lawyers to draw up the papers saying my Pa could not inherit one dirham until he had married and had a son and that firstborn son would be the owner of the house so my Pa could never gamble it or give it away, but you’ll see, later, how he got around that.

Kebir is a town and the maidservants in our houses are girls who come down from the hill villages barefoot, looking for food. In our house, we had such a one who always was saying: “In my village this and in my village that,” until you were sick of it. “In my village, Jajouka, we have a girl who’s a pearl like no other. What a girl! No man who sees her wants to live one more minute without her! She’s so lively and gay: she’s so sharp and so bright. She’s witty and clean: she can dance: she can sing: she can weave: she can spin. She’s so sweet that she’s sour. She can laugh but she weeps. She’s tart like an apple, with a tongue like a thorn. She’s all honey and amber and a wonderful cook. She’s so quick and so light she never touches the ground. She married my cousin Mohand, the chief of the Master Musicians, up in Jajouka, and she’s got him half-dead and half-alive. He can’t live with her and he can’t live without her. They’re divorced and remarried two times, already, and if he does it again and still wants to remarry, he’ll have to go to Tetuan to get the permission from the big judge, the Cadi-in-chief.”

That girl could get up to her village and back in a day. So, one evening at nightfall, she comes dashing back into our house, crying: “Here she is! She’s here, she’s here!” She got hold of my Pa and told him some sense: he should marry this girl. Why, even then, her first husband was toiling over the mountains to Tetuan to get the permission, mad to remarry her. Here was this pearl: what could he be waiting for? I suppose he went out and took a look at her; I don’t know; I wasn’t there, yet. That pearl was my Ma: you knew her well.

The day I was born, my Pa started spending the money. He made the pilgrimage twice from Kebir to Mecca and back, taking a friend with him, all expenses paid, both ways, each time. The first Hadj he set up in the wool market of Kebir where he sits to this day in his cupboard-sized shop stocked high with hand-woven bolts of fine wool: he’s still a good-looking man. My Pa’s second friend demanded at least the same thing and he got it. He has an identical shop on the other side of the Souk. So, my Pa ate up all his orchards and farms and his quarry and kiln and one house after the other, buying Swiss watches and French racing-bicycles for good-looking boys. He divided our house with a wall through the middle of the courtyard and rented our rooms to get more money for keef and, later, for wine.

Pa rented out the little shop we call the biblioteca, which is built into the outside wall of our house, and a funny thing happened: it turned out he had rented it to a Soussi magician who had come looking for a treasure and the gold was hidden inside our own house. The Soussi had an old, very secret book like a registry of all the treasures in our Moroccan soil, guarded as they are by the little, invisible djenoun of the gold. The man lied, of course, telling us he was taking the shop to get the Kebir agency for Bebsi-Cola, which we didn’t have, yet, in our zone of Morocco. He never did, of course, but he did start selling charcoal and kerosene to get friendly with the women who run out into the street for a penny-worth of this and a penny-worth of that, with only some kind of a rag to cover their shameless faces.

We found out he was really a magician because, one morning early, a poor little girl toddling down the gutter, too young almost to walk, asked him for water to drink. He was handing her down his earthenware mug, when the man from next door dashed out with a stick and he knocked the mug out of the little girl’s hands to smash on the ground. He had looked through a crack in his door and he had seen the Soussi each morning eating his very own shit. To be a magician, you have to make yourself truly impure every day in order to put yourself outside the rest of the community who follow the Law which guards them from magic. You may need a magician for practical things but you don’t have to drink out of his cup.

The Soussi magician made friends with a boy going blind. He’s a man now, still feeling his way about town as he goes up and down hawking lottery tickets pinned to the front of his brown woolen jellaba. In those long-ago days, he was a very good-looking lad who played a music so sweet on his flute that he nearly landed in jail as a seducer of women — all the women in town! As he walked through the streets of Kebir with his hood pulled down over his head and only the flute and his hands sticking out, all the women and girls, whom he’d never seen and who never saw him, all fell sick of love inside their windowless houses. Some people said they just lay on the floor, kicking their heels. They pined away in their interior patios sniffing up jasmine and burning the meals in the houses, day after day. When the men of Kebir got together, they all agreed things could not go on that way; so, they jumped on the blind boy and carried him off to the Cadi, our judge who sits outside of his house on Friday at noon, sending people to jail. The cadi said: “Let me hear his flute!” To tell you the truth, we have no one in Jajouka who plays any better than this blind boy did then. The cadi lay back on his divan of justice to listen in rapture for hours. “Stop,” he cried weakly, lifting his hand. “That’s enough. You can’t play this stuff any more in Kebir. Here, take these lottery tickets to sell and give me the flute.” Turning aside to the men of the town, the cadi went on: “You have to extirpate this sort of thing by the root.” What did he mean? Why, he took the boy’s flute in both hands and he broke it over his knee. You see, that music was far too sweet to be heard in the streets of Kebir where the boy, now a man, is still selling lottery tickets up and down the alleys of town.

That boy, in those days, used to stop by the shop of the Soussi, who once dropped a hint that they had in the Soussi a magic for curing the eyes. It might be some use. He could send for it but it was expensive, of course, and it might take a long time to come. The boy stopped by every day, wanting and waiting to see, but the Soussi always would say that the magic pomade would be soon on its way. Then, one day, he said it had come. By that time, the boy was his slave and a slave is what the man needed. You see, his old Book of Treasures had told him there was a pot of gold which none of us knew about hidden in one of our rooms, and he wanted to get in there to snatch it while we were away. For this he needed a good blind assistant and he needed to get us all out of the house. That was easier when Pa went out of town. The magician bought us all tickets for a good Moroccan movie called Charlie Chan. Ma, scared stiff of what Pa would say, and knowing the neighbors didn’t think it nice for a woman to go out in the street, tied our big iron house key around her neck with a rope and us kids led her off to see the movie through twice. What we found when we got home was not very nice. The Soussi had knocked a hole right through the back wall of his shop into our house and, in Grampa’s room, there lay the blind boy like a dead man, alone. The Soussi was gone but his clothes and some money were still in his shop and the shop was still locked from inside. The blind boy almost died when we beat him some more but that way we got the whole story out of him.

The magician had twisted his head with the promise to bring back his eyes. Magicians are doctors of lies but everything about money is always a little funny in Morocco. Here, the mice eat your money because it is sinful to put it in banks. When you look for the bundle of greasy bills you hid in the rafters last fall, all you find is some mouse-must, some colored confetti and shavings made out of what once was your savings! When you’re rich, you buy gold and you bury it. Then, you call in a magician and pay him to weave you a spell to make your gold pieces look like a bag of old buttons until the day comes when you want your money back. Grampa had probably hidden his sack of gold in his room because he had so many wives he couldn’t trust any of them. The magician who wove Grampa his spell had written down in a book the secret directions on how to find it, so this other Soussi knew where to look and he knew all the words of the spells but he needed the blind boy to help him unbind them.

He had made a big ball of magical gum — axle grease and incense from Mecca — to burn while he said the words to open the ground, but he needed someone around to hold it, burning and smoking, during all the time he went down in the crack in the ground to talk in a thundering voice to the spirits who guard the gold, while he took it back from them; dangerous work. When all us kids and our Ma passed by his shop on our way to the movies to thank him, we saw the blind boy in there with him, smoking keef. We had not got down the street before they shut themselves in there and started to hammer the hole into our house. They went straight to the room where my Grampa had died, set down a lighted candle in a saucer of water and quickly laid out a circle of flour on the floor. The Soussi then brought in a pot of live charcoal and threw salt in it until the flames came dancing up orange and blue. He drove a short stake into his ball of gum, which he held over the fire to get it starting to smoke. He handed the stake to the boy, telling him this was no joke and to be sure to keep turning the stick and, no matter what happened, not to let go. When he said the words, there came a sound like the flapping of great wings in the room but the air did not stir although the wind could be heard, screaming by outside fast. The room rocked and trembled. The floor quivered and the tiles split open at their feet. “Hold onto that ball! Don’t let it drop or I’m lost. Do you hear me, Mohamed?” cried the magician as he stepped down into that hole. When we got home it was done. The boy was lying like dead. When he dropped the ball in the pit, he almost went out of his head. He nearly fell in the hole, himself, before it closed up again without leaving a clue. The Soussi was gone, too.

I run up to my village, Jajouka, whenever I can and that’s often. Whenever I want to touch earth, I go up there. No hills on earth are more blue than our own Little Hills and that’s true. I was born up there under a hedge and I’m related to all of the village, the Master Musicians who never have done anything else in their lives but make music since the first man danced with his goats on the hills in the moonlight, a long time ago. Once a year, for eight nights, we go dancing in memory of him. My uncles stand fifty abreast in front of a wall on one side of our broad village green, blowing their oboe-like raïtas into the sky until sheet-lightning flashes and snaps in your head. My hundred young cousins in white drum out thunder like oak trees playing football with boulders and, up on the hill, the olive trees playing football with boulders and, up on the hill, the olive trees thrash their long silver hair like dance-crazy maidens who tear at their veils. In the middle of that, with the whole village leaping and howling, children bawling, dogs barking under the moon, leaps one single figure in goatskins, lashing about him with flails. Bou Jeloud! All the villagers, dressed in best white, swirl in great whorls and circles around one masked man. Me! I danced Bou Jeloud. Maybe, that’s why I act a little crazy, sometimes. Up there in Jajouka, there is no wheeled traffic, no running water other than rills and no electricity. Electric light scares Bou Jeloud away and one day soon, when it gets to my village, it will.

Bou Jeloud is Fear and Fucking; running wild, chasing, beating, catching, biting, tearing and fucking; again and again and again. Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air with the music to fall out of the sky on top of the women, beating them with switches so they can go on having the kids. The women all scatter, like marabout birds in a pasture, to light in a huddle. on top of a hillock in one quivering lump. Then, they throw back their pretty heads to the moon and let out a long lulliloo! They flutter their gullets, lolling their tongues around in their empty heads like the clapper rolls around in a bell. Hot, narrow black eyes brim over their veils, sparkling with dangerous baby. Every mouth is round-open, so, yodeling: O!

Bou Jeloud is after you, chasing you! You’re run down, overrun, screaming with laughter and tears. You’re trampling children while wild dogs snap at your heels. Everything, suddenly, is swirling around in a great ring-a-rosy, around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More! and: No more! and: No! … More! Pipes crack in your head and you can’t hear a thing. You’re deaf! Or, you’re dead! Dead in cold moonlight, surrounded by madmen and ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you … frisking you, fucking you … beating you, butting you … taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great wind drops out of your head and you begin to hear our heavenly pipes, again. Someone is whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing right there beside you. Who is it? Why, my friend; that is You!

Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? My uncles killed two goats, saying: “Bismillah,” as they drew a knife over their throats and flayed them in a cave where they stripped me naked to sew me up in the reeking, hot skins. When they blackened my face, darkness swirled down like the beating of drums. As they put the flails in my hands and began to play our music, I fell to the ground. When Hamid fell, Bou Jeloud jumped into him. Even now, I’m afraid. Bou Jeloud is the Father of Fear: he is, also, the Father of Flocks. The Good Shepherd works for him. When the goats, gently grazing, brusquely frisk and skitter away, he is counting his herd. When you shiver like someone just walked on your grave, that’s him! That’s Pan, the Father of Skins. Did you almost jump out of your skin, just then, Hassan Merikani? I’ve still got you under my skin.

How did you like it up there? I know it got under your skin — and I don’t mean the fleas. We let you sleep late, so breakfast was goat cheese and honey on fresh golden platters of bread from my sister’s mud-oven out in the yard where our dinner, the rooster, was crowing to his last morning sun. My uncles, the Master Musicians, were lolling about in their big woolen jellabas and white turbans, sipping mint tea, their keef-pipes and their flutes. They never work in their lives so they loll about easy. They cop a tithe of one-tenth of the crops in the lush valley below. It’s always been so. They’re musicians and play for the king. Every sultan who ever lived in his palace in Fez, signed a dahir or order-in-council, giving us the full power of our right to play to the king in the morning to wake him and, on Fridays, to pipe him down from his throne to his knees in the mosque. We have privileges, rights.

Late in August, each Master Musician slips away up to the borders of Rif country, in the blue mountains miles up, over, beyond and above our own Little Hills. High above those keef meadows of Ketama, where I’ve never been, hangs the ruin of an old fortified monastery from which, so they say, the Old Man of the Mountain once ruled the world. His Adepts were called the Assassins because of the hashish they smoke — Hashishins were monks who ran naked in August, ran naked and mad through the meadows of keef. When they fell in their cells like a stone, the Old Man scraped off their skins with a knife because their shaved bodies were covered with gum from the keef flowers. That gum is hashish. They spread out the gum on great marble slabs where they pressed it and cut it in cubes which the Master sent out all over the world to Marseille and to Hollywood, even. That trade is finished, now, too.

Now, we just run into the valley to snatch up a bundle of grass to take home. We have privileges, rights but, yes, we’re afraid of that valley and glad in our hearts that the castle above is a ruin and the Old Man is not there any more; for, they say, he could point a long skinny finger like that, at any one Adept of his standing sentry up there on the tower and that Adept would leap, would throw himself down to smash on the rocks in the valley below because he knew that his moment had come. We don’t like to be told. Hamdullah! we still have plenty of keef.

There is so much keef smoked in my village you can see it rise over the hedges of prickly pear and the thatched roofs of our houses. You can see the keef smoke rising blue, like a veil for the winds to catch up and drop back on this village of mine like a blessing. We’re invisible, here in our hills. The music picks up like a current turned on and the kids are all out in the leafy green lanes, bawling:

Ha! Bou Jeloud!

Bou Jeloud the Piper met Aissha Amoka!

Ha! Bou Jeloud!

My uncles, the Master Musicians, know all the music but our women know the words to tease Bou Jeloud. When night falls, they sit with their drums in some place apart from the men and they sing over the fire:

O Brother Bou Jeloud, come up in our hills

As God is our guide, you can have all the girls

Allah, allalai i lalli

Allah, alla lai wai wa!

O Brother Bou Jeloud, don’t hide in the melons

Eyes blacker than pips, false eyebrows like felons

O Brother Bou Jeloud; good-by, good-by

Your rotten straw hat cocked over one eye.

Women tease Bou Jeloud just to make him run after them. That’s all women want. Bou Jeloud wants Aissha Amoka; that means Crazy Aissha. He’s crazy for Aissha. She drifts around after dark, cool and casual, near springs and running water with a silvery-blue face in the moonlight where she pulls back her veils like a wanton to show you her twinkling tits. Her face and her breasts are a beautiful blue, all starry with sparkling lights. She coos at you in the husky voice of a dove: “Young man, can you tell me the time?” If you answer her one single word you are lost. From that day forever, you are her slave!

Women are wicked but she is the worst of them all: Aissha Kandisha, Aissha Amoka or that Macarena I saw with you, once, in the streets of Sevilla, she’s the same. Beautiful, deadly but she can be tamed, if you’re a brave enough man and quick. You jerk out your knife and you plunge it deep in the ground between her two feet. That makes her your slave. It is then you will see her legs are all hairy and they end in two cloven hooves instead of two feet — like Bou Jeloud. They are, really, the same kind of people. When you’ve got her pinned down by your knife, you can ask of her all that you will. I’ve met her and jumped her: I, Bou Jeloud. I’m not afraid but I don’t want to meet her again. The first nights of our dancing we dance out that Fear. When our music catches you alone in the dark, you’re choking with panic. All the people down there in the valley are shaking with fear so they fall into bed with their chattering teeth. Ha, Bou Jeloud! High up in the Rif, they can hear us and shiver. Ha, Bou Jeloud! The rest of the nights go by like a dream.

This is our play: Bou Jeloud leaps like a goat from a thicket, falling on Aissha, who’s crazy enough to be out dancing around in the moonlight. When Bou Jeloud first came up to Owl Mountain — Jajouka — Aissha was already here. She’s so big and so powerful, she has to be danced by a whole troupe of young boys dressed as girls who, all of them taken together, are Her. Our women don’t dance to this music in public. Oh, no! That would be shameful. Our women are good. They run from Bou Jeloud. They sit on a hillock and throw him out one wriggling little boy-dancer they’ve dressed up as a girl. It’s the women who teach them to dance when they’re little, the real tiny kids who haven’t been circumcised yet. They never made me. I never danced for the women, not me! When the time came for me to be cut, it was the Caïd of our village who held me in front of him on the silver-studded saddle of his horse and he cut the skin off my little zib with his very own knife. I never cried out: I was Bou Jeloud all of my life!

We have comic characters, too, like the Three Hadjis who dance with wobbling crowns on top of their turbans but one cannot hear, one cannot speak and one cannot see. Then, a man in big baggy pants comes on pretending he’s pregnant, screaming for help. The Three Hadjis jump on his belly and pull a big monkey out of his pants but the monkey’s a boy, naked and furry because we grease him and stick yellow wool all over his parts. The man leads his monkey around on a rope, beating him and screwing him for hours and, then, the monkey grabs the stick and beats the man, leading him around and screwing him for hours. It’s crazy: it’s fun!

When Bou Jeloud was, finally, married to Aissha that last night of dancing under full moon, I slipped away to Kebir with a boy of thirteen or ten who had been dancing for Aissha all of those nights. I needed a clever assistant if I ever was going to get back my spot on the train. He was a good-enough lad but he didn’t have luck. In a day and a night, we walked down to Kebir, where I showed him how to get under the train. I could see he was scared. You have to get in there wedged tight and never look down at the wheels. When we got to the old border of Tanja, the train ground to a halt and the Customs got out to walk up and down and show us their legs. They never looked under the train except on market days, sometimes, when there were too many smugglers in there who hadn’t paid up. Then, all of a sudden, the train gave a jerk and my boy fell under the wheels. His hand and a piece of his arm flew up to hit me so hard in the eyes I nearly let go. His scream and the scream of the brakes stopped the train. People peered in trying to pull him out from under the car with his arm spurting blood like a fountain. A man tried to tie up his arm with his belt but nothing would stop it until someone in the back of the crowd started shouting: “Oil! Boiling oil!” It was some old thief who remembered the days when they cut off a hand for a theft, plunging the stump of the arm in boiling oil. Moojood! It was ready, the oil! Right there on the platform was sitting a man making doughnuts he looped in his fingers and dropped in his bubbling cauldron of oil. They picked up my boy gone white as a turban and ran dripping his blood right up to the man. Before he could stop them they’d plunged this boy’s stump deep in along with the sizzling doughnuts. What a terrible smell, like burning kebabs! I thought for a moment my poor boy was screaming but he slumped there like dead. It was only the doughnut man screaming for money from someone, anyone, because they had spoiled all his trade.

It took us a week to walk back to Kebir. When we slept in the rain, my boy got the fever and caught a djenoun. It wasn’t the boy’s fault, because he was amok, but I could see his djenoun wanted only one thing, my knife and my life. I was so afraid for my throat that I slept with my eyes open. When we got to Kebir, I went to a blacksmith I know and I told him: “Make me an iron collar and chain for this boy or I’m a dead man.” He could see he had to do it for me, with money or without. I’d looked after the boy like a doctor all day and all night for so long without sleep that I was half gone crazy, myself. I took him to Sidi Bou Galeb. You know, the shrine on the highway through town by the traffic lights where the tourists all want to stop with their cameras and one crazy Christian once tried to take photographs even inside. Only Muslims can go in there, of course. It’s a holier place than a mosque. If you have a rich family they chain you to rings in the wall under the arcades near the tomb of the saint. There were so many crazy people chained up in there I was afraid. If you’re poor, they attach you outside in the courtyard to trees. I began to feel so crazy, myself, I nearly fell on my knees when a guardian came up for a tip and asked with a leer: “Which one of you stays?” When I threw him the chain he laughed till he cried as I ran from that place. I sent word to our village for someone to go tell the boy’s mother to bring him some food. She sold the tin roof over her head to buy the boy bread and pay his way out of that place. Now, they both live in the bushes, stealing eggs from nesting chickens and milk from strayed goats.

I went on down to Tanja and, there I found you.

Oh, now I know how you Nazarenes think about things! I know how you think about things like radios, suits! You never could forget that radio, either, now could you? I remember how it happened, perfectly well. One night about midnight — oh, long after the affair of the suit — you were toiling slowly up the stairs of your street, just as I — oh, quite accidentally — happened along down the steps. I could see you’d been drinking. You said: “Hi, Hamid!” and five minutes later we were both smoking keef and listening to Radio Cairo on the shortwave, inside of your house. In the morning, you loaned me the radio of your very own free will, I remember, and I swore on the head of my mother to bring it right back. But, who can weigh his words in the face of the Unknown? A policeman I know, a very good friend of mine on the train, dropped into my room in the fondouk and he fell in love with that little radio as soon as he saw it. I swore on the head of my mother the radio belonged to an American friend who trusted me like a brother. “Why, then,” sneered the policeman, “he’ll buy you another.” I shrugged and forgot it, right then and there. “Mektoub,” it was written: what else can I say? But you — you never forgot that radio, right down to this very day. That’s the way all you Nazarenes are! You hold grudges for years where a Muslim forgives and forgets.

But I won’t forget you, Hassan Merikani. Oh, no! not for a long time, yet. I gave you the Key and I taught you the Lock. I let you walk in without having to knock. I taught you to eat like a Muslim, putting none but your right hand in the dish and keeping the left hand for things counted unclean, like wiping yourself without paper because paper is sacred, a bit. When Nazarenes go to the closet, they don’t wipe themselves with Holy Writ, now do they? Well, any scrap of paper could have the Name of Allah written on it, couldn’t it? Even a newspaper might have, “Allah” in print, in a piece about politics, no? How do I know? I can’t read, so I’m careful — I use the left hand God gave me and I know how to wash. I taught you how to wash yourself, too. I taught you to shave all your body-hair so I’d not be polluted by living with someone unclean. It was good you were circumcised because I could show you to Muslims and not be ashamed. Muslims like the alike. All Muslims are Brothers and, therefore, are Even, you see. But, God is Odd and loves the odd — that’s why He loves me. You, too, are odd and that’s why I never pressed you about God. Maybe, that’s been my sin, this letting you in without your submitting, but me, I’m a little wild man from the hills and I know what it is to be free.

When I told my uncles up in the hills, the Master Musicians, that you knew who Bou Jeloud was the first time you saw him, they said: “Bring your Black Merikani up here, so we can get a good look at him.” When I was too small to remember, my uncles tucked me into the hollow of their knees under their tickling beards, as they smoked while they talked Holy Things. “Can’t you remember?” you always were teasing me, filling a pipe the way I had taught you to fill it and light it for me. “Can’t you remember the Secret Name? Say the Word!” you insisted. “Tell me just the beginning Word.”

There you were, already inside of my head, so I laughed. Time passed. When I was ready, at last, you asked me to look a long time in the bright silver ball you hang on your keychain. I saw nothing at all. “Look!” you insisted; “they’re tiny, they’re small. Can’t you see the Master Musicians in there?” My eyes filled up a moment with water and, when it ran down my cheeks, I saw them. I saw them all sitting against a wall in Jajouka, talking. Now I understand television. “If that’s television.” you insisted, “you can hear what they’re saying.” Well, I listened a while and, I guess, I said what I said. I didn’t drop dead. The skies didn’t open up, even, or crack when I told the Secret Name we still know in the hills. You’re the one who almost jumped out of his skin. “Why, that’s Punic!” you cried, or something like that. “That’s pre-Roman!” Did you take us for tourists, perhaps? We’ve been here forever, a very long time. Light me a pipe and I’ll tell you some more but the Name, now that you have it, Hassan, you can’t write. The Name, Burning Name — it would set the paper to flame!

“And Aissha,” you’d ask me, “whose daughter is she?” You find her by springs and by wells and by brooks but she came from the sea. She’s Aissha the Moon, who dances on water. I never heard she was anyone’s daughter. “Do she and Bou Jeloud have any children?” Children from her? She’s a harlot who ruts with the ram in the sun. She’s silver. He’s gold. Leave me alone, now, I’m cold. No! Don’t bother me. Get out of my head, Merikani! Get out of my life! These are secrets you don’t tell a wife!

What we both have in common is this: you and I, Hassan, are kaffirs—Outsiders. That’s the truth of it and I don’t know why. Maybe we both strayed too far from our houses, if ever we had them. I don’t know what sent you out from your home, Hassan, but I was born under a bush. My mother ran out of the big house in Kebir in the middle of the night when she felt her pains coming on. She ran barefoot in the dust out of the town of Kebir, on up through the gardens and the orchards in the moonlight, through the blue valleys toward the Little Hills and home. Beneath the giant blue cactus palisade around Jajouka, my mother fell and bore me in a herd of goats. I am Bou Jeloud. I know all that and I know Tanja, too, because Tanja was always my city-girl, lying down there on her rock by the beach with her legs wide open to the sea. She’s not just a sailor’s slut: she’s been like a mother to me. From our side, from the hills, we have always run down to the sea and the city and back like a trail of ants with packs on our backs. Time and time again, giants and generals and sultans have tried stamping on us as we scurry along in our race to escape all their taxes. My blood is hot every time I make a run into Tanja to swarm up her old legs. I mount from the train at her feet, up her knees to the Grand Socco Market, spread like the belly of food on her lap. She used to wear a money-belt of booths where you could buy and sell cash all night and all day, as she dangled her other leg down the American Stairs by the port, enticing rich sailors to visit the girls. But all that, the girls and the money-changers and the money, have all gone since the day the whole city of Tanja was swallowed alive by the Whale.

I used to run that whole city by ear. I could sit in my favorite café, just sipping my mint tea and smoking my keef, and you may not believe it was true but I truly could hear almost every last thing that went on in the town. Not the Boulevard up on the hill in the New Town with its skyscrapers six-stories tall and its six hundred banks, but our Old Town inside its own walls was my house I had rented for life. When the maid breaks a plate out in the kitchen, don’t you see, in a flash, just which plate it is? When you hear the taps in the bathroom, don’t you know who’s taking a bath? The World is a River. If a Fountain shoots up in a River, don’t you know there’s a Whale? Well, one day in Tanja when you were away in the Sahara, we caught a real Whale.

In my little café, I heard Radio Cairo saying our sultan was the prisoner, now, of Madamegascar. Through the keef in my head, I could see this Madame Gascar with her yellow hair and her little yapping white dog she had trained to bite Arabs. If any real French madame had passed through the market right then, I’d have spat on her. And at that very moment, I heard the Whale blow, down below in the Old Town. Oh, I can tell you that’s a sound you know the first time you hear it! No other sound in the world but Bou Jeloud can match it for fright. Your short hairs crawl right up the back of your neck and, before you can breathe, your heels are kicking your ass to get out of that place. The Whale gave a roar like a beast eating buildings, crunching up little houses in one single bite. A voice in my head said; “This Whale is the Whale that’s going to eat Tanja!” And it did. It flushed up from the port, flooding into the Socco, our little plaza framed with cafés, where it began flailing the flukes of its tail in a spray of plate-glass. It tossed tables and chairs through the fronts of cafés and blew in the doors of the Indian bazaars every time it took a deep breath. The waiters and patrons were skidding inside as the owners slammed down their steel shutters; Clang Clang Clang! Jewelers were jumping inside their own safes when the Whale tasted blood. A Swiss tourist went down, his head bashed in with his camera. His blood and his brains washed over a shoal of Swiss watches that slid down the sidewalk like the guts of a shop streaming out in the gutter. The Whale, too wide for this steep narrow street up to the market, ripped down all the signs and the shutters on both sides as it came, sliding along on gold bracelets and rings rolling in rivulets under its centipede feet. If you stopped to pick up a thing, you were lost. Money-changers tossed their bills into baskets and were still scooping up change in their hats when they burst into flames from the blast from a hundred, a thousand! hot Arab faces all bellowing: O!

Two or three bare-faced girls of the kind they call “students,” and the first we ever had seen, came screaming like Aissha Amoka out front with some half-naked boys who tore off their shirts, to make flags. People in rags and people in gowns were spewed up in one belch by the town and vomited out onto the broad Grand Market square right under the stare of two dozen policemen who pushed their way out of the commissariat with their buttons undone. They just stood there, rubbing their eyes with surprise. Those girls without veils and the half-naked boys with banners flew up toward the Boulevard with its six hundred banks. The policemen popped in and popped out again but, this time, with guns. Their captain screamed: “Fire!” In one minute, there were so many people kicking and twitching or dead on the ground that it looked like a movie. Up on the Boulevard, was there a panic! Rich Christians and Jews ran out of hotels with their hair in the air, screaming for taxis to take them out to the airport. Other men and even some women with pistols ran to the banks, backing up trucks, station-wagons, taxis, anything on wheels. They loaded the gold onto handcarts and pushcarts and go-carts and baby buggies, to run with it out to the airport where planes swarmed out of the skies like bees to suck all the honey from Tanja and never come back.

Up in the hills, my uncles the Master Magicians had only one thing to say to me: “Get your Merikani back!” I smoked a lot of keef for a week and I saw they were right. Night after night, we sat talking of you in the house of my Uncle Mohand, whose second wife can make you see what people are doing far away by looking into a tray covered with sand. We could see you in a truck crossing the tray and every day we saw you getting closer and closer to a red pebble where a captain in a white tunic was holding trouble for you in his hand. I was out there with you crossing the sands, every night for weeks. Once, we saw you were dead. Once we saw somebody we didn’t know it was you because you had turned blue and there were two of you. When you reached the edge of the tray, the wife of Mohand would reach out with her hand to shake it like a sieve. When I leaned over the tray one night, it turned into a well and I saw you way down there beckoning to me from the far away bottom and I fell and I fell and I fell. I got well when they made me drink water in which they had washed out a spell written on paper with rust. You may not think they know anything much but my Uncle Mohand said: “That Merikani must come back soon!” And, isn’t it true, Hassan Merikani, you were up here in Jajouka dancing with us under the next full moon!

It was written: “Mektoub!”