A Shimmering Red Fish

by Youssef Fadel

  Unlike before, the girl with the blue dress didn’t stop between the door and the counter. The music stopped. She moved toward the middle of the room, approaching the spotlight, as if this time she knew which way to go. We were interested in her now— she was someone who had just entered an unfamiliar place, with lots of movement and noise, under the circle of light that, just a little while ago, had enveloped the singer. Kika was no longer interested in anything other than the girl. Kika seems like a thirty-year-old man with his deep voice and Adam’s apple that juts out from under his jaw like a real apple. Suddenly, the girl was alarmingly close to us. The blue of her dress bloomed near us in an elegant blaze. The color of her dress reminded me of the blue in Father’s ceiling. The dress brought me back again to the mosque, which I had forgotten all about. I almost placed my hand on the dress. Maybe, after all, she came back on our account. We didn’t know her and hadn’t seen her before, but nonetheless, maybe she came because of us, or because of an idea she had in her head about us. Why else would she wear a blue dress—the same blue that floated across the sky of the ceiling? Why would she be wearing a blue dress if she weren’t thinking the same thing you and I were? Why else would she be looking at us that way as soon as she came in? I noticed that I had started to think like Kika, and I too wondered why she had disappeared and then come back. Why was she walking so slowly toward us that we could see her dress, and see that it was blue? And why was she looking at us as she approached to make sure that we saw her? “This girl isn’t looking for anyone. It would be best if we went somewhere else,” I said to Kika. Just then she was grabbed by a young man close to her, who was wearing strange leather clothes. He had a line of hair sticking straight up like a rooster’s comb. The girl trembled like a frightened goose and backed away until she almost bumped into the counter. When she made it clear that she intended to retreat, he grabbed her forcefully by the arm. This time she didn’t retreat. She remained looking at him, determined not to be scared of him or his threats. He leaned over close to her face and whispered a few words that were enough to make her blush. Her eyes filled with fear. Then he began to pull her toward the door. She looked around with pleading and terrified eyes that said this was the first time she had entered the bar in her life. As this was happening, Kika was gripping the counter with his fingertips, wondering why the man wouldn’t just leave her alone. I knew what was going to happen when I saw his fingernails dig into the countertop. Then I saw Kika moving forward in a deliberate manner between the other customers. A sudden uneasiness came over everything; the shadows stopped dancing around the anxious patrons. He walked out. I was no longer as concerned with his pockets as I had been before. I turned toward the stopped clock and, in my head, proceeded to count the money Kika had taken out of his pocket and then put back in, telling myself that Kika was my friend no matter what. I saw him come back with the girl, his hand in hers. Then I heard him say proudly, “I present to you Farah. She’s come looking for her friend Naima.” Farah gave a light, bashful laugh. She had spent the entire day looking for her friend, but hadn’t found her anywhere. She didn’t know anyone in this city. Casablanca is like a huge island. And in the end, they pointed her to this place! Kika happily handed me my share of the proceeds from the pipe deal as if he were making up for the fact that his other hand was holding on to the girl’s. Then he began to count out his share like someone well practiced in counting money.

  I began to count my money just as Kika did. I looked at Farah, moistening my finger and moving my lips so she’d see that I was counting real money, just like Kika, but better. I may not have actually been counting it, though, because I was nervous, really nervous. When I’m overly nervous I can’t do anything, especially something that requires focus such as counting money. Kika is better at this than I am because his fingers are long, and long fingers are good for counting money, no question about it. When he finished counting his money, he put it in his back pocket with his usual overconfidence. Farah was content to smile a bit wider and attach herself to me, putting some distance between herself and Kika and the way he was looking at her. Every time he tried to get closer to her, she became uneasy and backed up. I thought to myself that this girl was just like me. She didn’t know anyone in this bar, and Casablanca must have seemed like a huge island to such a lonely girl. She wasn’t used to places like this. She didn’t go into bars—she didn’t generally even go into coffee shops—and now she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. I asked her if she wanted to see the mosque. At that hour I didn’t think it was the right time for that. I took a piece of paper from my pocket, put it on the counter, and began to draw circles and squares on it, explaining the work Father and I were doing. Kika stood behind us. I could feel the heat of his breath on the back of my neck as he looked at the piece of paper. I wondered what he was thinking. He carefully studied the circles I was drawing. Then he grabbed the pen angrily from my hand and violently drew a line across it, tearing the paper in two. With his other hand, he scrunched the paper into a little ball and threw it into the air, hitting it with his head while letting out a strange laugh. He walked toward Farah. She walked around me to stand further away from Kika. I told myself that maybe the time had come. The time had come to leave, because Kika had changed. Kika was definitely giddier than he should have been. This time she didn’t let him hold her hand as we crossed the room to go outside. The angry flash I saw in his pupils changed my mood, and I was no longer feeling as cheerful as I had been before. The place got louder—clinking glasses, chairs, and tables scraping the floor, girls laughing. In place of the other singer there were now women singing whom I hadn’t seen get up on stage. A group of cheikhat were singing songs while they danced, clapped, smoked, drank, and shook their fat bellies like bears, all to the drunks’ delight.

  7

  Suddenly, in front of the cabaret’s entrance, I remembered her name—Farah. It was as if I were hearing it for the first time. As if I hadn’t heard Kika utter it just moments ago. Farah! Standing on the sidewalk across the street, Farah fixed her gaze on the door as if she had already forgotten us. She was waiting. Her friend Naima might show up. I thought about the cash Kika had given me, and the uncomfortable situation we now found ourselves in. The bills sat in my pocket in place of the green stone that was no longer of any use. I touched my pocket and thought, “There, now it’s bulging like Kika’s pocket.” I put my left hand in and touched the bills, knowing each denomination by how soft it was. A calmness passed through my fingers, but it didn’t make the anxiety swirling around inside my head go away. Despite that, everything was fine. Outside the bar, it was lit up bright as day. Taxi drivers waited in a long line for customers who were pissing on the bar’s wall, calculating how broke they were. A lot of girls came out of the bar wrapped in heavy coats with high collars that hid the fatigue that comes from staying out so late. None of them was named Naima. They fanned out into cars lurking next to the sidewalk and disappeared into them, laughing drunkenly—the laughter of a night at its end. One was being followed by a drunk whose last cent she had swallowed before taking off. Another sang because the echo of the cabaret’s singing still pursued her and surged inside her head. Yet another wavered between two rivals who were staggering and reeling, and ended up seeking refuge in a third car. None of them was named Naima. If there had been someone named Naima, or someone who looked like her, we would have known it right away. That’s what Kika said. He tried to hang on to Farah, talking to her about his house, which wasn’t too far away, pointing toward the old city where we lived. He looked at his watch in order to give an impression of balance and calm. At this time of night, his mother was somewhere else, whoring herself to other men. Under the lamplight I carefully examined his face, which betrayed his thinning patience. Kika has little patience. He gets angry for no reason. I keep pace with him so he doesn’t run out of what little patience he does have. I wasn’t sure why Farah ran from him, seeking my protection. I had grown up. Her face was small and round. The redne
ss of her lips was clean, tempting, like the red of a winter fig. Had we seen her before as Kika claimed? There are those cheerful faces that seem so familiar as soon as you see them, making you think, quite naturally, that you’ve seen them many times before. Was it possible that I had seen her on the beach last summer, or at the International Fair, or in some other place I couldn’t remember? It doesn’t matter whether I remembered or not. Farah held on to me as if seeking my protection, which made me genuinely confused. The square in front of the bar became completely empty and dark. After the last car took off, its noise having faded away in the distance and the silence of night having settled in, she walked off with us beside her, one on either side as if to protect her from some danger that might jump out at her at any moment. Then she came around me from behind and clung to me. She sought my protection once again. She held on to my arms. I thought to myself that she didn’t like Kika. He wouldn’t be taking her to his room like he did with the schoolgirls. This gave me a hidden pleasure. I stole a glance at him and saw that he no longer commanded the same sense of authority and power, satisfying himself by kicking a stone with his new shoe. He no longer walked as arrogantly or with as much self-importance. Middle-school girls and factory workers are easy to seal the deal with. They’re already won over. But Kika’s luck betrayed him this time when he saw her holding on to me. Perhaps his luck had been betraying him ever since Farah first set her eyes on the cabaret. Kika makes a habit of sleeping with young girls, whether or not his mother is around. He has a room all to himself, and he tries to provide us with every minute detail of the color of its walls, the type of lamp hanging above the bed, the starfish that adorn the ceiling. Fury steered his ship now, along with pride and gruffness, all because Farah hadn’t held on to him. A light breeze played about my head and I could see that Kika finally understood that even if she didn’t hate him, she was repulsed by the notion of getting anywhere close to him or his bedroom, despite the Adam’s apple upon which he hung so many great hopes. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders rocked back and forth, and his nose was high in the air. All of this meant a great deal. I remember the color of her dress, joking to Kika, “Maybe she walked by us last summer and we didn’t recognize her because the dress she was wearing hadn’t been blue . . .” but Kika wasn’t in a joking mood. He circled around to get next to her as she moved away to avoid him and held tightly to my arm. Derisively, he said that the way I was holding on to her was shameful. It was the first time I’d found myself in such a situation, in the company of a strange girl whose origins I didn’t know. With Kika behaving as if he had won her in a contest. Then we started to walk in front of him, leaving him standing on the side of the street. Her fingers squeezed my arm. She wasn’t comfortable with what was going through Kika’s head. She looked around, a little bit lost, a little bit frightened, not at all comfortable. I wondered whether I should grab her hand to comfort her, but I didn’t. Twice, and then a third time I wondered whether I should grab her hand, but I didn’t. Then Kika swooped in and grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her as he said threateningly, “What’s wrong? Scared?”

  “Let go of me . . .”

  “Scared of me? Am I scaring you?”

  “Let go of me or I’ll scream . . .”

  Kika’s hand was strong. He gripped her wrist as if holding onto a poor little kitten. It wasn’t the same hand that had patted me on the shoulder two days before in the mosque’s courtyard, or just a little while ago under the dim lights of the cabaret. Rather, it was the hand that had strangled the rabid dog, the hand with the deep scar, the one immune to rabies. And then, as if the poison in the hand gripping her wrist had seeped into her veins, Farah jumped in fright and let out a sudden scream—a single long, piercing scream that you wouldn’t have expected such a skinny body to be able to keep inside it. A disturbing scream. One capable of tearing the night in two. The kind that makes the hair on your head stand up on end. It was as if some other person had inhabited her body. Kika let go of her hand and backed off, shocked. He looked at her in disbelief, and only when there was a reasonable distance between them did she stop screaming. I put my hand in my pocket and counted the cash while Farah grabbed my arm once again without hiding her discomfort. Kika passed his hand over his hair very slowly, as if granting us a rare opportunity to see just how much he hated and despised us. His upper lip was quivering in a bitter sneer. I wondered how he saw me right then, with her hand holding my arm. What would my friend, Kika, say? I stared at him, overcoming my fear, with a measure of self-composure that, for the first time, didn’t betray me. This in itself was an overwhelming victory. As he rocked back and forth from one foot to the other, he said that I’d regret it, that there would come a day when I’d regret what I’d done. She began to scream again before he retreated, reiterating his threat as he walked off into the jet-black night. For a few moments after Kika left, I wondered why he hadn’t told us about his mother who was turning tricks at this time of night. Deep down inside I had a feeling of delight I hadn’t known before, and a hatred as well. Kika running off into the darkness. Ha! I’ll bet he pissed his pants he was so scared. Hee hee! And I’ll bet he’s never slept with a girl in his life—student or factory worker—even though he’s claimed to have slept with lots of girls! These are just claims, like the one that his father is in Spain and that he was going to join him there. Kika loves to boast!

  I noticed that, rather than screaming, she was laughing. The contempt she had for Kika made her laughter downright ecstatic. Soft, flowing laughter accompanied the calm that had suddenly set in, pushing aside the night’s disarray that the scream had caused. I slowed down a little to savor the moment, and to see if Kika was following us. No trace of him. He had disappeared. Vanished. The darkness had swallowed him up. Unsurprisingly, I found myself behind her, deliberately walking in step with her. Cheerful. My hands were moving along with hers. We walked according to a hidden rhythm that Kika would never know. I heard her say, “If we go . . .” but I didn’t hear the rest of what she said because it drifted off with the wind. Right then I told myself that I was going to place my hand in hers. My hand was sweaty. This wasn’t encouraging. Then I heard her again: “If we go now, we’ll find Naima at home.” She walked next to me and far from me at the same time, lightly, as if a breeze were pushing her along, as she repeated that she had come from Azemmour to see her friend Naima. We walked through narrow alleyways with few lights and lots of cats whose shadows were running silently behind one another. I watched all of this with keen interest, because a bit of her lightness had moved to me. I walked along like someone who, all of a sudden, felt reassured, like a person who was now heading in a specific direction. Farah skipped along next to me, repeating that she had come from Azemmour only because of Naima. And that her neighbor, the brown-skinned woman, had told her that Naima was most likely staying late at the lawyer’s place. If Naima didn’t stay out late at one of the places where she was singing, she would spend a good part of the night at the lawyer’s. “Do you know where the lawyer lives?” Farah asked. “I don’t know where the lawyer lives.” “Do you know who this lawyer is?” “I don’t know who this lawyer is.” Because there are lots of lawyers in Casablanca, and it had gotten so late, it was difficult to think. Then she said, “If we go now, we’ll find Naima in bed because the brown-skinned woman said that she didn’t make it a habit to sleep away from home, even if she does stay late at the lawyer’s.” That’s what she said. Nothing more, nothing less.