A Shimmering Red Fish

by Youssef Fadel

  I was in the taxi, crammed in the back with three other travelers who were laughing nonstop as they discussed football, Morocco’s preparations for the Africa Cup, and the opportunity other nations would have to make fun of us and our preparations. With a burst of laughter they recalled the parachutist who, during a previous game, rather than landing in Honor Stadium, found himself hanging from a lamppost near Ain Diab beach. Their laughter grew even more hysterical as they beat their chests and pulled at their hair, so much so that they paid no attention to me and how annoying their moving and writhing bodies were. Maybe they couldn’t see me, even though I was glaring at them with visible contempt. And I didn’t understand what was so funny and interesting about being made fun of by other people. I attributed it to the fact that they were old, past forty, maybe even fifty. This added to their bizarre way of hating one another. Never in my life will I befriend men their age. Were they heading to the same city I was? If so, I’d rather head somewhere else than remain with them in the same car. I had never set foot in Azemmour. Hatred for them had infected the driver at the same moment and he began to hit the steering wheel with his two large hands, shaking like a bear. The older a person gets, the more feebleminded he becomes. What he says becomes increasingly trivial. That’s what I think. That’s why I don’t place any importance on what they’re thinking. I’m not thinking about the parachutist hanging from a pole on the beach, or his friend who landed on the roof of City Hall. I’m not thinking about Africa or its Cup or the other nations getting ready to laugh at us, just as I’m not interested in the hysterical laughter of my fellow travelers, so preoccupied am I with the girl who burst into the cabaret that night. What was her name? I tried to forget her name, but then I called it back to mind so as not to have to think about the noise rising up around me.

  I spent the last few days thinking about her. For many long weeks I couldn’t think of anything but her and the way she had appeared and stood there between the door and the counter in her blue dress, and the way she had disappeared. I wasn’t thinking about how much money she had taken with her; the money we had made from the copper deal wasn’t enough to cover even one week’s expenses. Besides, contributing to the cost of building the mosque was no longer on the table after I’d seen the maggot-filled hole in the lower part of my uncle’s belly. Still, there was an alarm going off in my head, telling me that she hadn’t shown up only to disappear. She hadn’t spent a whole night with me for nothing. Quite simply, she had come to stay. The cash she had taken with her was proof that her disappearance was temporary. That’s how I had come to think over the past few days. If her intention had been to disappear for good, she wouldn’t have needed to leave behind any sign. Like other women, she would need to meet multiple times before becoming intimate, to get used to me, and to stay. That was how I thought about it, and it seemed reasonable. She may have taken the money to get back at Kika and the bizarre way he had behaved toward her. I thought about all the possible paths she might have taken. The morning she disappeared I shaved, put on cologne, donned a clean shirt, and stood at the window waiting for Farah. All day I saw signs in her disappearance that indicated she would come back. I told myself that when she did come back, I’d repaint the workshop and buy a new suit. And what happened? Nothing happened for two full days, for a whole week. As if the workshop and the thought of painting it, and the suit would be enough to bring her back. How funny was that? It was the first time in my life something so strange had happened to me. A girl I didn’t know before and barely knew save for a couple of hours we spent together in a dark room and in even darker roads and alleyways. Despite that, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She might not even go by that name that smells so sweetly optimistic—Farah. I’m not sure how I started this morning thinking she was close by, living in the neighborhood with or without her friend, Naima. Maybe she was waiting for me, seeing my search for her as some sort of amusing game, following my footsteps as I followed hers, watching me from behind a crack in the door so I wouldn’t see her, expecting me to find her the whole time, or something like that. But I didn’t find her. It was enough for me just to think about her. This was how I’d get to her. Because she’d notice. A sign would come to her and she’d appear, or she’d be satisfied with some other sign. I remained standing at the door of the workshop waiting for plenty, but not expecting anything in particular. I’d spend whole days in the mosque’s courtyard, forgetting about work, forgetting about Kika and his odd behavior, forgetting about Father and his ceiling that was scattered all over the courtyard. Sometimes I’d climb the sand dunes and find myself on the coastal road pretending to watch the truck drivers while they followed the progress of the mosque as it took its final form before they headed toward the marina. For a few moments they’d bare their muscular forearms, which looked like ships’ masts, before heading off. I’d remain standing in the middle of the road, directionless, without a signal, without a sign that she was anywhere around. And so, little by little, without thinking about it, without any forewarning, I found myself preoccupied with the letter that was going to come from her. I continued to wait for the letter, and for the mail carrier who would bring it, dressed in his dark uniform and carrying his heavy satchel, coming up from the ocean like someone emerging from the clouds. I anticipated what my response would be: Would I write some lines of poetry like the ones I wrote in elementary school? Sometimes I’d picture the mail carrier before he appeared, with the letter sitting at the bottom of his satchel bouncing around to the rhythm of his steps. Because he would have so many letters, I would always imagine him walking slowly. When I didn’t see him at the usual time, I’d leave the workshop and wander around the neighborhoods behind it for an hour or two to give him the chance to show up, for his sack to reveal what was inside it. Then I’d go back. I’d turn to see if the mail carrier had left any footprints in the sand on the beach as he passed by. I’d walk toward the mailbox with dread in my heart. A small box made of colored wood that I had constructed the morning she disappeared. Gentle, friendly. Its mouth yawning wide. Dark and laughing innocently. I looked inside, trying to make out in the deep darkness of the box whether anything might indicate that there was a piece of paper there, something resembling paper, a bit of an envelope, yellow or white, lurking in its depths. Anything that might possibly indicate that a sign had arrived.

  This time the entire car shook. In fact, the laughter had become a veritable earthquake. Since I was an outsider to their world, I didn’t know the reason for all of this violent shaking and the frightening sounds that went along with it. The driver almost went through the car’s roof, as the contagion had stricken the passenger seated right next to him as well. Rather than bursting into hysterics like the others, he chose to get out of the taxi, covering his mouth with both hands. Then, for a long while, they didn’t even have to say anything. It was enough for one of them to raise his brow or twitch his nose. Even without these signs, a mere glance from one to the other was enough to cause them all to burst into irritating fits of laughter. I asked the guy sitting next to me to let me out. He turned toward me, but couldn’t see me because of the tears in his eyes, and my words didn’t reach his ears. The demons of laughter had completely overtaken his senses and he went back to it, turning his face toward the window. The other two passengers had pulled the hoods of their djellabas over their heads, unable to regain their composure. They laughed, guffawed, and shook the car, shaking my skinny body along with it. They laughed because an hour of rainfall had inundated an entire city due to faulty sewage lines. Then they laughed because of a man who tripped over his djellaba and fell down. In the end, they laughed for no reason whatsoever. Could there be anything worse than this? There was no way I’d go with them. For his part, the driver leaned on the door of his car chewing on his moustache, having remembered that it was up to him to call over the passenger who would save him from waiting, from the laughter coming at no charge, from his own bad luck. He didn’t know anymore whether he needed two or thr
ee more passengers.

  Before the letter, I stood like a night watchman for two nights in front of the Saâda Cabaret until the last drunk stumbled out and the last taxi drove off, until the last light was turned off. No trace of Farah. Two bitterly cold nights waiting, wrapped only in the hope that she would appear with her short hair, blue dress, and that little bit of fear and shyness on her face. That’s Farah. Before that, the night before, I stood where she had been standing, between the door and the counter, scrutinizing the singer with the light shining down on him and the drunks swaying all around. All I was missing were the short hair, the blue dress, and the terrified face. All I was missing were the two narrow eyes. I stood there struck by this thought. Her eyes looked Asian. Two small, cheerful almond-shaped eyes that prompted delight and lust at the same time. I thought that perhaps what had attracted me to her so intensely were her foreign-looking eyes. They didn’t look like any other girl’s eyes in that, despite the fear etched on her face, these eyes held an eternal tenderness. That gave me enough of a reason to think about her the whole time. Other customers, another singer, other music. But the same girls and the cheerful atmosphere that lifted the day’s burdens helped me feel a sense of release, of freedom, of rapture. I did almost exactly what she had done. I asked the guard about Naima, the same guard she had asked and who had tried to keep her from entering. I told him that it was my first time in this city. I had come from the city of Azemmour asking about a friend named Naima, a fun game that allowed me to move around the counter and all over the place asking about Naima. I was talking to the customers just as she had spoken with me—about the lawyer, about Azemmour, about the Oum Errabia River, about the father who had lost his leg in the war in the Western Sahara and who spent his time sitting on the riverbank waiting for an extinct fish to return. At a certain point, I became her. I wished I could have been wearing her blue dress so I could have seen myself the way I had seen her. I put on a feminine face, an embroidered dress, a bouncy walk, narrow eyes, and a little bit of fear, because we girls are born with our fear. It grows with us just like our hair or our fingernails. We trim them as we please, but they always grow back, even continuing to grow after death. Did I seem handsome and friendly to her that night, unafraid of a reckless hand or a vicious tongue? I’m only two years older than her. It’s easy for me to pretend to be a girl. It wasn’t the first time such ideas had entered my mind—that I saw myself as a girl. Could this be attributed to the fear that overwhelms me for no reason so much of the time? Sometimes I call it fear, sometimes shyness, and sometimes it’s a tactic. Whether I’m walking or sitting down, my heart always beats quickly, as if it’s on the verge of jumping out of its cage, and I don’t see any reason for it other than the fear of something that hasn’t yet happened. If not for this feeling, I wouldn’t have hung out with Kika, I wouldn’t have been afraid of the dog, I wouldn’t have feared Father or any old person who might take his place.

  Why didn’t she show up now? Going back to Azemmour or coming from there? Just like that, all of a sudden, in her blue dress, or not in her blue dress? What surprised me was seeing Kika with his mother, Kenza, slinking around a group of travelers whose numbers had dwindled, just when I had been waiting for a pleasant surprise. They were still chasing after the visa. For her son’s sake she was going to knock on the doors of other people she knew after having exhausted all of those in Casablanca. Kika was wearing a brown coat and wiped his sweat with the sleeve. He bought it last summer, a coat like Columbo’s that he’ll take with him to that country. From that very moment he’s been picturing himself waiting in front of the Metro for the blond girl he’s been dreaming about ever since we were in grade school. Blond and slender, with green eyes like those of an angel. The passport, the working papers, the residency permit, and everything. But he’s not going anywhere because he’s always had bad luck. He looks ridiculous strutting about in his long coat. It would have been better if the carpenter boss had fucked him and knocked him down a few notches. I made myself small and buried my head between my shoulders, happy to wait there for as long as it would take to avoid running into them, so as not to have to say hi to them. I remained in that uncomfortable position for a while. It became clear to me that night that I should not expect anything from Kika anymore. The time had come for me to put a definitive end to that friendship. In fact, he had never been a friend in the first place, even though I’d tried to show him otherwise. Maybe the time had truly come for Kika to go to Sweden, or Hungary, or Hell. Why was I even worrying about him? Was he my brother? Or my cousin? I have one brother named Suleiman and he’s in Abu Dhabi making lots of money. He wouldn’t worry about Kika if he were around. Anyway, like I said before, he doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere. He’ll stay here scratching at the walls and wasting away until he vanishes completely. I felt safe because it had suddenly become silent inside and outside the car. This allowed me to sit back up. When I straightened up, Kika and his mother were gone, along with the loud commotion of the passengers who had been in the car with me, because they had gotten out of the taxi. The driver and I remained, waiting for them and for five passengers now, rather than one. The taxi stand was pulsing with travelers, none of them going to Azemmour. This was completely understandable, because none of them had met Farah. Most of them were wrapped in more than one coat or djellaba because of the cold weather.

  Suddenly, I found that I was all right. Not because Farah had appeared or because Kika was gone, but rather because a small sun had emerged from behind the clouds, cheerful and sending out calm, cool rays on this morning that had begun so depressingly. This small, cool sun filled my eyes completely and I thought that surely my eyes were smiling too. Neither the noisy passengers nor the driver whose annoyed voice was still chasing after other elusive passengers would see it. Then, for no apparent reason, the blood rushed to my heart with a force I hadn’t known before, as if rising and falling in my throat rather than pulsing playfully in my heart. I got out of the car, trying hard not to think about Farah anymore, just as I had done before with Kika, and the dog. This was also significant, extremely significant for someone like me who didn’t know anyone.

  11

  On the one hand, I started to see lots of dogs at night, their howling getting to me even with my head under the pillow. On the other hand, during the day I acted like someone who needed to take every precaution, like going out the window instead of the door, for example, and constantly following the headlines on the front page of the Le Matin to see if anything had changed there, not to mention closely watching the work being done on the mosque. With each step that the work moved toward completion, it became more certain that the dog would disappear from my life. Because after the work on the mosque was completed, the shaykhs, the officials, the police, and the gendarmes wouldn’t be able to justify taking people’s money anymore. That’s what I was thinking. The headline on the front page of the Le Matin continued to be the proof by which I would measure the path toward this end. Does it still occupy the uppermost part of the page? Are its letters still prominent and green?

  With these thoughts, I get up this morning in a foul mood. Wavering between searching for the man who made my sister Khadija’s head spin and going to the mosque to finish the work Father had abandoned. His hands had betrayed him. My brother Suleiman, whom we relied on a lot, was of no help to us at all. Why he had abandoned us, I didn’t know. Right when Father had landed the contract to construct one of the most prominent ceilings in the mosque (maybe two or even three, depending on how quickly and expertly he could work), just when he had begun to see the future a bit more brightly after years of being fully unemployed, just when he had declared that our days of destitution were behind us and that he was truly ready to abandon his days of wanton depravity and come home. It was then that Suleiman chose to set off, or as Father put it, to run away to the Gulf. So I said to myself that the least I could do was gather up the scattered bits and mend them as best I could. I walk toward the bedroom door and
open it gently, expecting to see Mother leaning over the sewing machine. Scattered all around her are the little things she sells in the back alley: washcloths, veils, undergarments. There’s also a cardboard box that contains things she bought in the markets up north or in Derb Sultan, along with goods smuggled in from Ceuta and countries as far away as India, China, and even Korea. Abdullah, my sister Habiba’s husband, prays behind a wall of cardboard boxes that Mother has erected between the two of them. To each their own world. Mother sews the smuggled goods, Abdullah prays, and his daughter, Karima, walks back and forth between them. Mother asks me about Suleiman. She doesn’t wait for a response. “Suleiman will come back with all the beautiful things we’ve been dreaming of. When Suleiman comes back we’ll have enough money to pay off our debts and contribute to the mosque just like our neighbors . . .” She doesn’t wait for any commentary on what she says, continuing to weave her small dreams. “If we don’t pay our share, they’ll prevent us from praying there. What will I say to our Lord on the Day of Resurrection?” I nod, agreeing and not agreeing at the same time. Then she remembers the landlord. “The landlord is a good man. He’ll give us an extension until the end of the rainy season.” She had promised to pay him all that was due when Suleiman came back. “Suleiman will come back when he sees that the time has come. That’s what migrants always do. They come back when they’re needed.” Habiba is my older sister. She’s lying down on the straw mat in the bedroom next to her nursing son. She’s always hungry. So are her husband and daughter, Karima. My sister Khadija’s skin is pale and yellow like pomegranate skin. She’s four years older than me, and she’s always been kind. She never leaves the house except on the day she goes to the hammam. Khadija is like my second mother. I call her my second mother because she used to take me to school. When I came out she’d be waiting for me and would buy me a piece of honey cake, and then we’d go back home together. Another reason I call her my second mother is because she is all grown up even though she’s only twenty-three years old. She has grown up and gone gray, and she looks like Mother. Now she’s walking back and forth across the foyer, humming a tune, preoccupied. She’s been preoccupied for two months or more by a man we don’t know. We’ve never seen him. She—Mother, I mean—casts a glance at the goods scattered around her, pretending to be unconcerned with what is happening to her daughter. Suddenly, just like that, as of two months ago, she was no longer herself. Her sadness had disappeared. She had calmed down. Her face had become noticeably less pallid. Her nonstop menstrual bleeding became lighter—sometimes it would go on for two full months before allowing her a few minutes of limited rest, to the point where I wondered how much blood she could possibly have that it flowed so freely (women must store up unimaginable amounts of blood). Her breasts no longer hurt her like they had before. And the sharp pain that had lodged itself in her lower abdomen for so long had disappeared too. She no longer paced while holding her belly in her hands, grimacing in pain. This used to go on for a long time until she would collapse and completely lose consciousness. No more. She calmed down as she waited for the man who had changed the course of her life, as she put it. Now she sings. But perhaps the pain hadn’t completely disappeared. Every once in a while she lets out a sigh or a scream or a moan, depending on the sharpness of what remained of the old pain. It might have been another form of singing for her.