The judge grabbed the bottle, but rather than open it, he asked the man what time the afternoon prayer was. The man looked up at the sky as if he understood things such as prayer times. He didn’t add a thing, as if this gesture was enough. Without moving from where he was, the judge said, “Prayer comes at its appointed time.” The judge was well versed in religion. The man held him dear for this reason too. He enjoyed matters of religion simply because they came from the judge’s mouth. Because the judge—in addition to his jokes, his saucy stories, his drunkenness, and the lovers that he exchanged every four months—was always happy to dive into matters of religion with rare enthusiasm, with all of his friends, lawyers and defendants alike. These are the things the world should revolve around. The noblest form of knowledge is knowledge of God. Attaining it should be the goal of all people, animals, inanimate objects, and every creature on the face of the earth. Always with new additions. The judge is a religious scholar and the man holds him dear because of his knowledge too. “A time will come when everything will disappear, with nothing remaining except for His exalted face. And this time has started to manifest itself. Don’t you see that God is stronger than everything? Inside and outside. Stronger than walls, cars, and storefronts. Hands, foreheads, and mouths. Perfumes and clothing. Humankind has disappeared because time belongs to Him, the Exalted One.” The man listened, nodding, so the judge would see that he realized the importance of what he was hearing. No longer was he that child who would walk naked into the hammam, not caring what people said, or the one who, along with Kika, used to steal the babouche slippers that those praying had left on the mosque’s doorstep, running away with them and laughing. No, the man had become serious. He listened to the judge. He listened to the gendarme. He said, “Amen.” He was tolerant. They could enter his house anytime they wanted, and leave anytime they wanted. They used his kitchen. They used his cookware. They used his bed for their afternoon naps, and when they left, their smell remained behind in the house. Deep down, he realized that there was no other way. Deep down, he knew that he was prematurely older than his forty-three years. Praise God, his life had passed with hardly any problems. He was comfortable.
Following the afternoon prayer, and after tossing back half a glass, which allowed sufficient time for his veins to swell up and his face to become flushed, and after a long fit of coughing to cover up his sudden lapse, he took out a small camera and asked Najat to take a picture of him like she always did on the Sunday afternoons they spent together—one time with a thick beard, another time with a short beard, once with a moustache and once without one, wearing sunglasses and with no glasses at all, with his judge’s robe on and without it. The judge hadn’t yet found the right look. After the photo session, Najat leaned over the judge’s neck to search among the hairs on the back of his head for the black spot. She knows just where it is, when it first appeared, and the stages of its development. She couldn’t find the black spot because of the grease, the sweat, and the strong smell. She told him that his hair smelled like a goat, and this comparison made him laugh for a while. Then the judge fell silent, his head comfortably resting on Najat’s thigh in anticipation of the pleasure he’d been longing for, saying, “I’m your goat,” and scrunching himself up like a cat does when you pet its head. His face had disappeared between her thighs and, with eyes closed, he waited for the erotic purring that would start at the knees and move ever so slowly upward through his tendons and veins until it reached his nostrils, putting him at the edge of bliss. He’d ask her to slow down a little bit so as to savor the pleasure drop by drop before it faded away. Najat knew all of this. And she knew where the other black spots were on the judge’s body. Here was one on his shoulder, and on his buttock was a bigger one. And two above his rump. When she got to this point, she’d tell him that the flesh was fatty, which made it difficult to grab onto the two black spots, as he waited for her hand to move down to that place that was closest to his heart.
What pleasure does illness derive from awakening our pain at night? When a person is sleeping, he is less resistant, less prepared. No more than a night had passed since Farah had come back from the hospital. As he sat beneath the window watching her fitful sleep, she let out a scream that made him jump and hit his forehead on the window sill, causing it to bleed. There’s nothing worse than illness ambushing you at night. Death and sickness swoop down at night for reasons that, to this day, are unexplainable. It wasn’t really a scream. Less powerful, yet more severe than a scream. It was more like a thick rattle in her throat, as if Farah had exerted a great effort to remove a rock that had been blocking her windpipe. He lit a candle. Blood covered the pillow. No, not blood. Rather, it was small black bits of flesh floating in a sticky mixture of blood and nasty chunks. Everything she had swallowed since this morning was now all over the pillow. She continued to sleep. The small piece of cloth that had been covering her face had slipped off, but she continued to sleep. It was as if the burns caused by the acid had cut through not just her skin, but her internal fibers as well. The burns, after having caused so much external damage, were now attacking her insides. His testicles contracted with a sharp, quick sting that made him jump. Was she asleep? He might have been able to forget all of this. He might have been able to forget the shock he felt in his testicles. He might have been able to forget the thunderous rattling that came with the nerve-wracking images. He might have been able to forget the face sleeping in a pool of dirty blood. However, the crow and its chicks that were perched over the gap in the window—what was he supposed to do with them? He went over to the door to fetch a bucket of water, and even before lifting the bucket up, he wondered where the sound of rustling wings was coming from, and he also wondered who had opened the window after he’d closed it. They were craning their necks from the window opening, the black bird and its three chicks, surrounded by a halo of translucent light. It was only then that he realized dawn had taken him by surprise. The light gave their feathers a purple sheen, which made them look a little less gloomy. Even now, after the passing of all of these years, he didn’t remember whether it was really a crow or that bad-luck seagull that had lost all of its color the day he had gone with Kika to steal the pipes. The bird hopped onto the pillow and proceeded to peck at the bits of flesh, bringing them back to its three chicks as they hopped around it chirping ravenously, their wings flapping boisterously, their beaks opened cavernously wide as if they were smiling, gladdened by the rare feast. They flitted around their mother’s open beak with childish impetuousness. Then the sound of birds chirping rose up all around. Birds of every color thrown into the first feast of the day by the rising dawn. All of a sudden the workshop was filled with their noise. Did they want their share of the feast? Or did they just want to provide their own musical accompaniment? They flew around the workshop without landing on anything, flying over the crow and its chicks. Over the pillow that was, little by little, going back to how it had looked before. Over a sleeping Farah. Was she really sleeping, and was what he was seeing actually her dream? The reflection of the dawn’s first rays of light on the flapping feathers gave the workshop and everything in it additional color. When he went back to stand beside her, everything was over. There were traces on the pillow, the pale remains of blood, some spots that were no cause for concern. She was looking at him with quizzical eyes—or what remained of them—leaning on her forearm, which had put a small indentation in the pillow. “When did you wake up?” He no longer needed the bucket that was still dangling in his hand. Even before he put the bucket down, even before he thought of putting it down, everything had ended. Except for the silvery smile that continued to shine between the two of them.
At that moment, the man got up. He walked toward the slanted door, but for the first time, he noticed that the door wasn’t slanted. It was because the man was walking with his head cocked to one side because of the strange footsteps that were attracting his attention. As if his ear were moving ahead of him. They weren’t footsteps that he recog
nized. Something more lively, with more vitality, brutality, and stubbornness, like the buzzing of a forest full of bees moving forward slowly, with an unbearable calm. Even so, they were still secretive. He stopped, waiting at the door. The blueness of the sky had become even more overbearing. The spikes of grain had turned completely yellow as if they had shrunken and faded. All the fertilizer that had been spread out had either been absorbed by the thirsty soil or evaporated. But now there was a cold wind blowing in the air. It might rain tonight. Little by little, the footsteps turned into what sounded like horses trotting in the distance, approaching insistently. The sound reverberated under his feet. Then he saw what it was. A human throng was coming toward him like a gray cloud creeping over the earth—with all of the contracting and expanding that distinguishes a cloud, and with all of the running, dashing forward, people racing with one another, pushing and pulling that distinguishes a human throng. He could see all of this, but not completely clearly. Then what had been a buzzing sound changed into a complex noise that was difficult to decipher, and what had been a cloud turned into thick swirling dust as it moved forward. The gendarmes’ car passed by first. Yes, before the human throng appeared, the car passed by, coming back from someplace or heading someplace. That was how gendarmes’ vehicles moved. You didn’t know which direction they were heading. The two gendarmes asked the man about the two rabbits. Had they shown up? They let out a piercing laugh, but the car didn’t stop. In their haste to rush out of there, their laughter didn’t have time to clearly express what it meant. The car disappeared, but the roar of its engine didn’t. That was because it was barely there in the first place. The whole area was filled with the other roar. The continuous roar. The human roar. But they weren’t approaching as quickly as the man thought. Crowds always move slowly. The dust dances above them as if swirling in place. Then a part of it began to move, the part closest to the hill. With its dust, its commotion, its jostling. His in-law Salih, the cistern guard, who had come back with the crowd, stood beside him, his rifle on his shoulder, clearing the way for the torrent so it could continue to flow and flood onto the dirt road. Then they all stopped at the same moment before crossing the railroad tracks, a blind sense driving them as precisely as a clock, definitive, even more intense in their silence. The cistern guard said that the children hadn’t slept since the previous night. They wanted to catch them. Jokingly, or responding to a joke he had heard before, the man said, “Maybe it has something to do with the two rabbits.” The guard responded, “None of them have slept, nor have their children, or their cattle, or their grudges.” Children’s grudges are blind. That was what betrayed them, at dawn, hiding in the thicket. Maybe they weren’t hiding there. In the same joking tone, the man said, “Or maybe it’s connected to the two thieves. No thief can remain hiding in the same place until dawn, especially not a cow thief!” The cistern guard said, “This has nothing to do with thieves or cows. A man and a woman. The woman is married and has children. And she does such a thing with a man younger than her children! And where? Out in the open like cats. There is no power nor strength save for in God.” They all turned around together like a single person and went back the way they had come, with the same enthusiasm, the same persistence.
He saw them now, gathering in a circular motion at the top of the hill. A mixture of colors, signals, riotous sounds, and what looked like hats flying in the air, as if the hats were doing the yelling. Then, at the bottom of the hill, the crowd appeared to be parting. Like two hills being pushed apart by opposing currents. There was only one prey. The first group disappeared behind the hill, but the second continued to move along the path it had been following. Then the two met in a more coherent current, one moving with greater conviction. The current flowed in front of him now like a river whose tributaries had finally come together. It flowed silently toward the same goal, toward the thicket where the children said they had found them at dawn—the young man and his lover, who was old enough to be his mother. Disheveled hair and dusty beards. Eyes white because of the suspense and excitement. Really, they were looking for the woman. Because Salih, the cistern guard, told him before joining the crowd himself that the poor young man was no older than eighteen and that the woman had seduced him. Women are devils, and she’s the cause. It was as if they had regressed decades in time. Mouths were opened by an explosion that hadn’t yet left their throats. Anticipating the moment they had been waiting for, the moment when the prey would bolt out of its hiding place. All feet were loudly crunching the dirt and stones on the ground with rare resolve. A single cohesive crowd with the image of the anticipated, coveted prey in its sights. The crowd was attracted by the smell even before it spotted and recognized it. The two lovers were out there someplace trying to elude their fate, eyes shining with fear, their faces betraying the same agitation, the same anticipation, in the thicket of trees or in the middle of the forest’s dense growth, or by the dam. They hadn’t yet determined their whereabouts. The children passed by them at dawn and taunted them with their sticks and stones. They might have thought that they were two young foxes waiting for their mother to come back. And the man? He stood by the gate picturing it all. The fate of the two lovers. Their corpses that would be ripped apart, and their skulls that would be crushed. The crowd disappeared momentarily, and along with it the threat it posed. The man went back to his chair, the judge still lying facedown, pressing his nose between the woman’s thighs.
24
The King’s Drums
I close my eyes and open them again. I close my eyes and tell myself that it will be there, but when I open them all I see is fog. It also happens that, in a dream, I see that the minaret has disappeared. I’m not sure why that terrifies me and I jump out of bed to see if it is actually gone. The thick ocean fog really has swallowed up quite a bit of it, or else the ocean has washed over it. Some time passes between it disappearing and then reappearing. A lot of time. It might have been an entire morning. After Farah drowned, I went regularly to the mosque and slept in the workshop. Sometimes I slept in the mosque, in the main prayer hall. I noticed that my relationship to it was improving little by little. I spent the morning hours watching the changing colors of the minaret. From here, I don’t see it, even when I close my eyes and open them three times in a row; nor can I see the mosque. Usually the minaret is there to welcome me at this time in the morning, though there are mornings when it refuses to do so. Like this morning. This isn’t at all connected to the weather. It might disappear even when the weather is clear, as if it had just picked up its stonework and gone to the other side of the ocean, but this rarely happens. Right now, it’s obscured by fog and nothing else. I let it take its time. Maybe it has plunged into the ocean’s depths to bathe itself, to shake off the steel that’s still wrapped around it. It will need a lot of time to wash away its worries and reappear looking clean. When this happens it’s always accompanied by the squawking of seagulls. The squawking seagulls drown out all other sounds, including the crashing waves. As long as it remains hidden, the squawking doesn’t stop. From time to time, instead of closing my eyes, I crane my neck to extend my gaze, but I don’t see it. It has completely disappeared. After an hour of looking for it, not a trace of the minaret can be seen. Maybe it’s getting ready to surprise me. And what is Father doing right now? It’s been a while since he visited the mosque. What scheme is he cooking up? The cemetery dog showed up three times in the past few days, but then it disappeared. It didn’t show up after that. Maybe it was another dog. These kinds of dogs all look the same. And they’re there on every street. I’m not that worried. There are many ways to get rid of it should it continue to pose a threat, the most preferable of which is to contact the gang that specializes in snatching dogs, as I said before. Except for the time in the cemetery, and the three times it appeared after that, it has stayed away. Like all the dogs that fill the streets. It keeps its distance as it follows me, far enough to dispel any suspicions, like a spy practicing his craft. Is it the same dog I s
aw in the cemetery? I slow my pace in order to get as close as possible, trying to get a better look, but it’s no use. I have forgotten what the dog looked like. I no longer have the slightest memory of him. All I remember is how he limped as he ran away from the rocks the mourners threw at him. Perhaps there is no connection between the mosque and the monetary contribution, because in the end, with or without the dog, the goal is to crush your spirit bit by bit, as Rihane had told me. To ultimately push you to commit suicide, or toward despair, which is just another form of suicide. That’s the plan. To push you little by little to hate life, family, your neighbors, and all of humanity. And even if you don’t reach that level of despair, you’ll still feel that fear has occupied a distinct place in your heart. I’m not talking about regular fear, human fear. I’m talking about another type of fear known only by the defeated and the oppressed, who can’t put a specific name to it. You become a big skeptic, your full-time job being to doubt everything and everyone around you. As you walk down the street or through the market, or when you stop at the tobacconist or the fishmonger, you ask yourself whether any of these people walking alongside you or standing in the same line as you know about you and the mosque. All the while you think they’re looking at you differently, suspiciously, hatefully, in a way that’s missing something because the matter will have grown larger along the way, and rather than just being about the money you haven’t paid, you have become a cursed atheist who mocks the Quran or insults the mysterious sanctities of the state. Their first and last hope is that terror will settle deep inside your very being, that the dog will occupy the deepest recesses of your mind to destroy anything you might set out to do during the day and haunt you in bed at night until you go to their office of your own accord and place a handful of bills on their desk as you apologize for being late, apologizing for everything that you might be responsible for, begging their forgiveness and wishing them and their bosses perpetual good health and long lives. In order to forget about the cemetery dog, I think about Father. And in order to forget about Father and his unfinished ceiling, I think about Kika. And just when I find that I’m feeling fine, I go back to hoping that he has gotten his visa. In the thick silence that wraps itself around me, I picture him in his long coat—the Columbo coat he bought at the flea market last year for just this occasion—hitting the pavement of distant capitals, collar raised and cigarette butt hanging out of the side of his mouth like Columbo. A thin line of smoke twisting upward like a steam viper. And to forget him as well, I begin to count off the capital cities he would visit: Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm. I watch the minaret appear in New York, Moscow, and Amsterdam. He won’t get any farther than Rabat. And to forget the capital cities he’ll never visit, I begin to mockingly name the cities he does know: Boujad, Khouribga, Tan-tan, and I burst into laughter. Then I jump! Instead of the minaret I hear the loudspeaker. I had forgotten about the minaret and its loudspeaker. Its siren had never shrieked that way before. Maybe a ship has gotten lost at sea because of the fog. I stand, craning my neck toward where the minaret usually is. Through the fog, I see a specter approaching. It could be the dog. No, from the way it’s walking, I think it might be Kika. But instead of Kika, the National Department of Electricity employee appears. He has come to ask for Father’s address and request that I go with him to his house. I remain silent. The only thing missing besides some final touches here and there is Father’s ceiling. The ceiling—where is it? It seems to me that an opportunity to take revenge on the employee has presented itself to me. That, in and of itself, is too much for me to imagine. I tell him that my father is traveling, as Maymouna had told me.
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 19