When I meet up with Kika, I’ll tell him about Father, mainly about his hands. My father’s hands have always been large, with crooked fingers and rough skin like a crocodile. The blood that used to flow through them dried up long ago, and on the top of them there are veins knotted like an old palm tree. The hands of a man who has lived with wood for a long time, who’s married to it. Kika has no father. He says his father is in Spain and that he’ll join him when he gets his visa. But I know that he was born without a father, in the desert waste like a snail (and this is the best part of his story). God gave my father two skilled hands. With care and patience, they create something out of nothing, bringing form to something that had no form before. They steal secrets from colors. Sometimes he applies it to the wood like an adversary, as if pushing it to give up its mysteries. Other times he uses fine, delicate strokes. Either way, what was nonexistent is now there, embodied in a delicate form that possesses beauty and splendor. All of this happens outside of his own will. My father doesn’t think about the drawings he does. They come to him all on their own. They race with one another to appear first on the wood. All of a sudden, what you think is the wing of a butterfly appears. And then, just as a rose has opened before your eyes, its full meaning manifests itself: attractive, brilliantly colored, complete. Everything that comes from his hands is beautiful. He spends hours drawing a field of colored butterflies. Little by little he detaches himself from the world around us, as if he has left us for gardens we cannot see, where there are creatures we could never imagine existed except in the disorder he takes control of. As the minutes and hours pass, as the sun moves across the sky, Father’s feverish excitement appears ever more clearly in his fingers, as if intoxicated by the nectar of the plants they tame. He takes the brush and fixes the drawings I had thought were butterflies, then thought were a field of roses. He uses his brush to dab at them with some final, violent strokes, and lo and behold, in front of me there’s a beehive brimming with activity.
I put the paint can down when I heard him ask me to bring him the adze. It was then that I remembered the dog. It might have been sitting in the courtyard waiting. I wasn’t worried about it when I was with Kika, but I remembered it now that he wasn’t here. Maybe he had gone to the embassy with his mother. I left for the courtyard thinking about how much I had come to love Kika and hoped that he would stay with me forever. The sky was just as depressing as it was yesterday. The mosque’s courtyard was a wide-open stone expanse covered in water. A large workshop opened onto the ocean—columns and countless arches scattered about; large, bare rooms and stables with what remained of the metalworkers’ workshops erected inside them, their work adorning the balconies and stairways; what remained of the carpenters’ workshops where doors, windows, and mashrabiya that would separate the women’s prayer space from the rest of the mosque’s pavilions were to be built; workshops for the gypsum and marble that would adorn the floors, hammams, and fountains; and leftover stone, alabaster, wood, metal, sand, and dirt, as well as the wind blowing over it all. The minaret rose in front of me on the north face of the mosque. It was still wrapped in steel and had holes in it where, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, some seagulls had built their nests. High cranes were moving all around it, its tip almost disappearing in the fog. My eyes followed a worker who was climbing the scaffolding fastened to the minaret, and I was sure he was going to fall. Would he be the latest one? I stopped, waiting for his end to come. The worker stopped too. He looked down as if measuring the distance or listening for the thwack of himself hitting the ground. For reasons I don’t understand, people are drawn to death as moths to a flame. I’ve been thinking a lot about death these days. The difference is that moths don’t actually think about death and what goes along with it, as if they’ll rise from the ashes after the fire has consumed them and they’ve disappeared completely. Moths aren’t concerned with such things. All they care about is the distance that ties them to the flame. The worker continued to look down into the abyss, as if to test the wisdom of the thoughts swirling around in my head. I ignored him for a moment, then followed him out of the corner of my eye as he climbed. Now he was going to fall. No, he wouldn’t. Or, and this would be more likely, he’d fall as soon as I forgot about him. That was how suicides went. They loved to remain hidden. A feeling of shyness overtook them when they felt like they were being watched. I followed him as he climbed, in order to give him the chance to reexamine the course of his miserable life. I followed the unspooling tape in my mind, then I stopped again, intent on surprising him, determined this time to follow the path of his about-to-be-extinguished life to its very end. Other workers had fallen before, from the same place, the same height—or even from lower down—and they died immediately. Why should he be an exception? Not to mention the fact that we were building the mosque over the old municipal pool where the custom of death was deeply rooted; rooted in the very idea of the pool. It was in this pool, when it was there, that our relatives, friends, and neighbors’ children drowned. And now we were erecting a mosque on top of their bodies. So why should this worker be the only exception? There’s no height from which people don’t fall. There’s no place where people don’t die, especially when it’s a mosque built over the bodies of our friends. Work on the mosque was in its final stages. All that was missing were two more dead bodies, three at the most. So rather than being empty, the courtyard had been invaded by architects, carpenters, metalworkers, gypsum and zellij craftsmen, electricians, sewer cleaners, and builders, as well as those who hadn’t mastered any craft at all. Everyone who had worked before on the mosque and was no longer needed still insisted that the work was not finished. They still insisted that there was plenty of work awaiting them. And why so insistent? For death to continue its work, nothing more. Even those who hadn’t worked a single day sat, their arms outstretched on the rock overlooking the ocean, or along the road. They played cards, waiting for the need for their death to arrive so that construction could continue and the mosque could finally rise up high in all its glory. When I turned around this time, the worker had disappeared. Had he fallen, or had he climbed up to the sky?
A man parked his old car in the middle of the courtyard. He said he wanted to see Father. It was the National Department of Electricity employee who had taken off his cap and khaki coat so I wouldn’t recognize him. His bare face now resembled that of a frog. His short body was stuffed into a green suit, and underneath it was a red-and-white plaid shirt. His head was bald, with a deep groove running down the middle of it, as if he had two heads—he’d pushed one to the front, and the other to the back. Perhaps he had come in disguise, with two heads and wearing the clothes of someone who works in a circus. Because of the stolen pipes, he was wearing clothes unbefitting of a respectable employee of the National Department of Electricity. Thus, when I saw him, I told myself that this face was one I didn’t know, one I hadn’t seen before, to allow him to continue his ruse of disguising himself. I think his disappointment became even greater when he saw that I had met him before, and that the ruse he had cooked up to surprise me didn’t bear any results. That’s what disappointed him. We left the car behind and crossed the mosque’s courtyard, moving between the intertwined columns that provided little shade because the sun had risen so high in the sky. The employee shuffled his dusty shoes through the thicket of steel, with me in front dragging my feet lazily as I ignored him and looked at today’s life all around me with greater optimism. The smell of cedar wood rising up around my father didn’t surprise me the same way it surprised the employee. The accumulated smell of long years surrounded by wood, by entire forests of cedar. Perhaps it was surprising to the employee who didn’t know that wood has a life, and that it has good times and bad. I looked at the frog’s face, waiting for the effect of the smell to show on it as I walked between the columns underneath the prayer room’s ceiling until we arrived at the mosque’s interior. I chuckled to myself: “Who is this man walking behind me?” Father was standing on a hi
gh bench and satisfied himself with turning his paint-spattered beard in our direction. His nose was also dabbed with paint, as was his forehead. However, it wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. I told him that this was an employee from the National Department of Electricity, then I plunged my brush again into the can of red paint. Father stepped down from his bench without giving the impression that he had noticed the employee was there. He stood over me watching, while I waited for his torrent of dissatisfaction and nagging, along with his steady flow of disappointed observations. I saw him roll up his sleeves, take the brush from my hand, and plunge it into the paint. Then he walked away for a few moments, deep in thought. He wasn’t concerned with us standing there in front of him. Father recalled his glory days. He retook the lead. He took the bull by the horns as if this unexpected observer was all that was needed to spark his enthusiasm. His legs were slim and graceful. He walked away from the pieces of wood, then walked back toward them. He took some measurements and recorded them, and then he started drawing. But his two steady hands had been replaced by two shaking hands; the confidence they once possessed was gone. They weren’t as delicate as they once were. I could see the top of his head as he leaned over the wood. A red circle shone in the middle of a little bit of white hair that fell over its sides. In his hand he had his brush that had been plunged into the red paint. He held it upright at an odd angle, as if he were holding a red line, trying unsuccessfully to find a place for it between the lines he had already drawn. I repeated, “This is an employee from the National Department of Electricity.” The frog’s face came closer. He placed his hand on Father’s shoulder and tapped it gently, nodding and saying that building the mosque where the municipal pool had been was a nice idea, providing Father with this job after such a long period without work. He continued to rub his shoulder with the same calm, reminding him that he would always be a great carpenter, adding that the ceilings he had done in the past were at one time exemplary models their owners would show off, and that still, to this day, adorn the rooms of great palaces in Fez and the ancient mosques of Marrakech. In the good old days . . . Father began to nod, saying, “Great days, ha!”—dazzled by the moment, adding, “Yeah, yeah. When the work deserved it.” Father put his brush into an empty pail next to him. Perhaps he felt that this would be an opportune moment to tell of his past glories. The employee took advantage of this unexpected moment of relaxation to tell Father that his lines were no longer as straight as they once were, that his hands shook, and that permanence belongs only to God, as if his hands had forgotten the craft they had once mastered. Yes, that was what I thought too. That in itself was embarrassing. I no longer worried about him. I was only going to be worried if it had to do with the stolen pipes, and I would have been more worried if it had something to do with the employee playing his private investigation game with Kika and me. As it was, the employee was talking about lines that weren’t straight, shaking hands, and slow work. Father wiped his brow with his sleeve several times. I looked again at his gnarled hands. I saw that the red-splattered fingers were trembling, and that his clothes were splashed with other colors. A look of severe disappointment came over his face, which also had paint on it. A sound like a whistle rose from his chest, and then I saw him walk around the ceiling examining the work we had done over the past months. He grabbed a piece of ceiling we had spent a week arranging, ripped it from its place, and broke it apart. He raised his finger. He extracted a splinter from it and blood shone on its tip. He looked at the splinter, dazed. It was as if he considered it to be the embodiment of all the blood wasted on this work. Calmly, the employee returned to pick up the brush and put it back in the pail, leaning over the piece of wood. He stood there for a while following Father’s lines and curves, the unpleasant surprises that his colors had imprinted on the wood. As he continued to examine the work, he said, “They say that your hands are no longer as skilled as they once were, that the craftsmanship is gone from them. There is no power nor strength save for in God.”
For a long time after the National Department of Electricity employee had left the mosque’s courtyard, Father didn’t get up from where he had been sitting. His paint-smudged nose looked as if it were mocking a situation he hadn’t been expecting. His nostrils were moving to the rhythm of the wheezing coming from his chest. With exaggerated calm he grabbed the saw and began to cut the wood we had spent six months smoothing, drilling, and cutting. Six months of hard work, and many more months drawing, calculating, assessing, examining, appraising, and reappraising; all of it coming apart bit by bit before my eyes with calm, patience, and a strange pleasure. The smell of sawdust grew strong around him. The forest smell still emanated from his body. His hands, even as they were destroying what they had built, no longer obeyed him as they once had. I went as far as the door to the mosque’s courtyard. I watched the seagulls fly across the square of sky there. Were they black or white? When the birds landed on the roof of the mosque I couldn’t see them anymore. I pictured their feet scratching the roof, their annoying sound getting on my nerves even though I couldn’t hear them. Everything about these birds gets on my nerves! What were these birds that live in marinas and on deserted beaches doing on the mosque’s roof?
6
When I told Kika that it would be better to go someplace else, and he responded, “We’re good here,” it was too late, because the girl had already lodged herself in our minds a while ago, like a spotlight that shone brightly tonight. Kika repeated, “We’re good here,” as he turned toward her. Her dress was blue. I saw it before I saw her. Then I saw her looking into the room, scrutinizing the faces there. A thin girl you wouldn’t say was older than fifteen, although her eyes shone with the spark of a mature woman. She stood between the door and the counter, blinded by the blazing light coming in from the hallway. Even before Kika put his hand on my shoulder, he asked, “Why is she looking at us?” I pretended not to hear or see, even when he leaned toward me and whispered tensely while squeezing my shoulder excitedly, gleefully even, “She’s been looking over here for a while.” Tense. Excited. Squeezing my shoulder. Yet relaxed at the same time. As if the cords that kept him balanced had slackened slightly.
I said to him, “Since when, Kika? She just showed up.”
“Then why would she look at us this way? Not like how women normally look at men?”
“And how do women normally look at men?”
Instead of answering, his eyes continued to mull it over while I looked at his pants pocket to see if it was bulging as much as a pocket with a wad of cash should be. Perhaps she was looking at us through the color of her blue dress. He took two steps toward the door, then walked back. I told myself that Kika wasn’t limping because he wasn’t still carrying the pipes he had been yesterday. Still, he was limping a little, and it was then that I saw and confirmed that he had the money in his pocket, the money we had gotten from the pipe deal. I think I had come to trust Kika ever since he first put his hand on my shoulder and I had lost all fear. Like someone absolutely comfortable with his future. She was closer to the door than to the counter. She moved hesitantly as her eyes flitted about, like a ewe that has lost its way from its pen. Sometimes the shadow of a girl passing by blocked her, or the head of a man leaning toward his friend. Other times it was the body of the bouncer who stood between her and the room, not letting her move forward. A young brown-skinned man, tall, with an excessively ample belly, an eagle tattoo on each bare arm, and around his wrist a wide red-leather wristband. The eagle occupied the uppermost part of each arm, its large wings outstretched and facing downward on the sweaty skin, creeping toward a woman and a forest. There were symbols and numbers surrounding them, and delicate drawings resembling flowers. The young woman behind him continued to look at us. I wasn’t close enough to say for sure that she was looking at us. There were lots of men getting drunk, with an equal number of girls laughing, and there was music and the sound of clinking glasses. A singer in the middle of the room beneath a colored spotlight sang
out into the darkened room. The singer’s presence under the colored light made the surrounding darkness seem a little less dreary. The people in the light were like shadows being moved by a drunken wind, as if the singer and his voice were trying to light up a darkness in the customers’ souls, but couldn’t. I fixed my gaze on Kika’s legs and saw that they wouldn’t stop moving. One leg went up as the other went down, out of his control. In their own way, they were thinking about the girl. “There she is again,” Kika said, running a hand over the back of his neck, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the other, wondering if he’d go and bring her over. He looked at me, and at her, with what appeared to be a confrontational glare. I was content with looking at Kika’s back pockets to try and guess the amount of money they were hiding, because the amount we got from the pipes was in one of them. Sometimes the bulge was visible in one pocket, sometimes the other. Kika is usually unaffected by young women in bars. They’re not his type. It’s schoolgirls and factory workers that get his attention. For them, he’ll wear the fancy clothes his mother, Kenza, buys for him. He’s tall. He says it’s the Adam’s apple that sticks out of his throat that attracts the girls. The girl behind the guard’s tall frame looked inside, craning her neck this way and that, ceaselessly talking and gesturing. When Kika wondered, in simultaneous protest and anger, “Why doesn’t he let her be?” squeezing my shoulder with his trembling hand, I noticed that she was looking all around, and that I was looking at her as if she were disoriented, lost, a stranger to us and the place where we were—me, Kika, the men, the young women, and the singer. As the moments passed, his body leaned over more and his legs sped up. Now I lit a cigarette because his agitation was contagious. I drew on it nervously and exhaled a cloud of smoke from my nostrils in order to forget about Kika and the cash (I still didn’t know which pocket Kika had put it in). I saw him put his hand into his pocket. I waited for the bills to appear, knowing that they wouldn’t right then. Maybe they’d never appear, because I no longer trusted him as I had just a short while ago. I was amazed at the amount of smoke coming out of my nostrils. In the meantime, the girl had disappeared. She left through the cabaret’s entrance with the guard, but what seemed like a shadow of her presence lingered. I told Kika that it would be better if we went somewhere else. He replied, echoing what he had said before, “How come? We’re good here.” I bit down on my cigarette and turned toward the counter. Finally, Kika took out the cash that the copper pipe deal had netted us and began to count it. Then he raised his glass, laughing, pointing to the bills scattered on the counter in order to give the impression that he had forgotten all about the girl. The girl, her dress, and the memory of her dress were all behind us now. The clock hanging among a row of different sized and colored bottles in front of us pointed to quarter to nine. The two hands were stuck to one another, and there was no way of knowing if they were going to stay that way. I focused on them. Instead of looking, I listened closely, but I didn’t hear them ticking. Then I heard them, tick tick tick tick. As I kept looking, I realized the clock had only one hand, and it had stopped. I think I saw her even before turning around. Even before Kika yelled, “There she is again!” with the same determination, the same eagerness, without surprise, with the same agitated joy, without the least bit of shock. As if I had been expecting her to show up at any moment. She appeared without the guard, neither in front of her or behind her. I turned toward Kika, imploring, “Better we go somewhere else.”
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 5