We arrived following the afternoon prayer, as the neighbors said we would. We pushed the cart up the hill with some difficulty. We were also pushing the donkey, which was exhausted by the trek. At the top of the hill, the buildings came into view. Our new buildings. Bright white in the sun. They remained bright as snow until we arrived. Karima jumped down from the cart and started to run between the ditches. Everything was brand new. We had arrived in the new neighborhood, but it seemed like there were a lot of things missing. The road running between the houses was all dug up, with large stones sticking up from it and metal poles coming out of the holes. Some of the walls were whitewashed—the front walls. Splotches of cement and cement color dominated the rest. The white that had blinded our eyes as we gazed at the neighborhood came to an end as soon as we entered. Cables and pipes were stuck into the houses, forming a bridge over the structures. And there was no sidewalk, or rather, it was a work in progress. The line of stones that would form the edge of the sidewalk was there. And it was nearly straight. As for the sidewalk itself, it was not there at all. The dirt extended right up to the houses’ doorsteps, filled with holes, metal, and pipes. Then there were the windows, side by side in a harsh-looking line. Small and dark. Forming a disturbing scene along with the sky up above. Anything can be fixed. After some weeks, life will change here. Much work awaits us. Work is necessary, and it’s the only thing we won’t lack. Today, tomorrow, and in the days after that. Everyone will find a job and a livelihood here. God won’t disappoint us. Good things lie ahead. The glory days are to come. Great days will come when our new neighborhood will be even whiter and more spectacular—thanks to our work and our efforts—and the peach and pomegranate trees that we will have planted will blossom. Parks and fountains too. In the evenings we’ll sit around the table in clean clothes eating food that we deserve, exchanging stories of those desperate days that are gone, never to return. The days of hard labor are done, leaving behind plenty of money that will be enough for the lean years, and good memories, and something magical floating in the air like everything the soul yearns for. Bread, honest work, a roof over our heads. Tomorrow will no longer be uncertain. Glory be to God! It is truly a gift from God that we’ve found a place to live so soon after the flood. “The blanca, mon amour, I’ll marry her without any magic allure.”
VI
36
The man sitting in the wicker chair, brushing the ground impatiently with his feet and listening to the strange roar, had noticed neither the two o’clock train, even after it had passed, nor the fog that had begun to obscure the horizon in a light purple veil a short while ago. He sat gazing at the gendarmes’ car approaching in the distance, not taking his eyes from it the whole time it traversed the distance, slowly and without a sound, as if it wasn’t approaching at all. It appeared small from so far away. The man stood up now and craned his neck as if to encourage it to move faster, but the car neither sped up nor slowed down. The man forgot about the skewers of meat on the fire. Perhaps the car was weighed down by its troubling cargo. The two lovers who had disappeared from his thoughts reappeared now. Was the car carrying some of their complicated story with them? The car didn’t say anything, nor did the two gendarmes. They were still far away. What was the young man thinking about right now? And the older woman? Were they thinking about the disastrous relationship they had stumbled into against their will? Did it warm their cold night as they were grabbing onto the embers of love for the first time? It wasn’t like the animal attraction that compels a man get up on top of a woman to empty himself into her, while he wonders whether the being that will come will be a criminal or a religious scholar. Rather, it was more like a one-time adventure with no past and no future; one they were forced to plunge into, knowing full well they wouldn’t emerge fully intact. The pure call of the body. The body has its own special rationale. Desire has its own timing, and it will always be that way. Children or no children. Marriage papers or no marriage papers. Despite the patrols, guards, husbands, wives, and judges, the forbidden and the permissible, laws and prisons, faqihs, astrologers, soothsayers, and pimps of every type. Even when it drove past the barbed-wire barrier, even as it got closer, even when it stopped and the two gendarmes got out, the car remained cloaked in secrecy. The man continued to wonder where the magic this car practiced sprang from, even though it was empty. Where were the two lovers? Had the gendarmes killed them and tossed them into the wild, or had reckless Bedouins killed and eaten them? No trace of what he was thinking about appeared on the gendarmes’ faces, or on the car. The man didn’t walk toward the car, nor did he look through its window to still the thoughts that had been burrowing into his mind for hours. He would have preferred another ending. Perhaps the two lovers had been saved, having found themselves quite by accident on a road rather than at a roadblock, and a truck passing by at just the right moment had carried them off. At just the right moment, they sat in the truck’s cab as it tore up the road, driving off into the distance, taking them away as they wiped their sweat away and smiled—the smile of someone who has been saved at the last possible moment. The young man would say to his lover, “Remember this moment. Remember that we got through this too.” The smile of someone who has been saved at the last possible moment—a moment infused with youthful thoughts. The smile of someone who has been saved at the last possible moment, which always had tucked away inside of it a little bit of pain that quickly turned to tears, burning tears of joy.
The two gendarmes greeted the judge but they didn’t greet his companion. They asked him about his family and children—about the one who works in the bank and the one pursuing his studies in America—about his wife who went on the hajj pilgrimage last year and who is thinking about doing the umrah pilgrimage this year, inshallah, and whether he will accompany her, God willing. The man stepped up to the grill and turned the skewers over, blowing on the flame. A cloud of ash rose up around him and got in his eyes before settling down on the sizzling meat. The meat started to crackle again on the fire. The smoke rising from the grill carried the smell of grilled meat to the two gendarmes. The scent rose to their nostrils. They grabbed the skewers and bit into the charred meat, lips parted, biting like animals, trying to avoid touching the hot metal. They chewed for a while as they held the skewers up in their hands. The gendarme with the yellow epaulettes on his shoulders turned to the judge. “D’ya wanna see them?” The judge didn’t understand what the gendarme was talking about, thinking that the meat in the gendarme’s mouth was preventing him from speaking clearly. The gendarme repeated, “D’ya wanna see them?” “Who?” “The boy and the woman.” It was enough for the judge to twitch his nose. As if a fly had just bitten him. The gendarme with no epaulettes on his shoulders went back behind the car. The man was no longer interested in the two skewers, or in his eyes, which had been blinded by the ashes. The judge let his companion’s hand fall. The young man stepped out of the car first, his clothes dirty, but not torn as the man expected, and you couldn’t even see the dirt unless you really looked closely. Then the woman. A story that wasn’t worth all of this anticipation and waiting. It seemed as if the man’s expectations had been dashed. Disappointment first. Then hatred—not blind hatred, but rather, blackness. That was what was pressing down on his chest. He felt as if he was going to cry, because hatred contains its share of gloom. The young man had lost the opportunity to save what could have been saved, and there wouldn’t be another opportunity. These sorts of opportunities don’t come around too often. All of this happened before the woman stepped out—between the moment when the young man emerged from the car and the moment when the woman appeared. Her coal-black hair fell down over her white forehead. Her white skin was clear. A high chest, generous, with curves that made the man’s mouth water—would make any man’s mouth water—as soon as she appeared, strangely unhurried and confident, as if she hadn’t just spent the night being chased by dogs, gendarmes, children, men and women, old folk, and bad luck. Her bright, beautiful wide eyes were milky
white, their lashes blackened with kohl. There wasn’t a trace of sleeplessness, fatigue, or regret in them.
A black butterfly with red, orange, and yellow spots fluttered in and out of the threads of smoke rising from the grill, darting toward it and then away again, flying up and down. It flew away from the smoke until you’d thought it had flown away, escaped with its skin intact, and then it reappeared, making the same dodging circles to get even closer to the fire, its fragile, brightly colored wings penetrating the smoke in a game that entertained both of them. The smoke and the butterfly danced with one another, touched one another, each tickling the edges of the other, embracing one another and then pulling away. Laughing together from afar then touching each other once again. Neither the smoke nor the butterfly knew how this deadly game would end. Would the butterfly end its life far away in a bird’s beak, or on top of a carnivorous flower, or would it end here, on the grill? Instead of swooping down into this blaze all at once, it tried to become one with it so it wouldn’t be struck by the flame. The woman who got out of the gendarmes’ car in bare feet continued to follow the butterfly’s flight. Her feet were clean, the toes slender, nails painted a light rose. The color made her walk look more feminine. Her feet showed no traces of dirt or wild berries, nor of stones or thorns from the road. Her feet looked as if they walked only on rugs, to melodies that rang in her ear all night long. An image of Farah passed by like a summer cloud as he watched the woman walk proudly toward him, sit down, then rub her right temple and kiss her finger as if today were her lucky day. A butterfly lives for one day, but it’s a full life that contains all possible happiness, all possible pain, and whatever else might come along to furnish the memory. The butterfly flew around some more, down, down some more. It was swallowed up by the smoke and didn’t reappear. In a little while, the judge and the two gendarmes would eat it in the grilled meat, and they’d smell it in the smoke that was making their mouths water. They wouldn’t know, nor would it interest them to know, that their lives were extended for a minute or two thanks to a butterfly that was just passing through. Farah had passed through just like the butterfly. The man didn’t think about whether Farah had any regrets when she left her small city to sing on television, or in front of a huge crowd in Honor Stadium, or in front of the cameras in the United Nations Plaza. All she had was this one choice. All she had was the few months she spent in Casablanca. Eight months, maybe nine. Whether it was a little less or a little more didn’t matter. During that time, she had gone from house to house, season to season, person to person, and passion to passion. But she didn’t sing. Maybe she just came to see what summer was like in Casablanca. But she didn’t get to see it. Maybe, for her to go away happy, all she had needed was that summer. She left before summer had begun. Despite that, perhaps her short life was enough. Full enough of love—and disappointment—to go away proud and impervious like the woman sitting next to him right now on the sidelines of the fury all around her, following the flight of a butterfly fluttering close to the fire that would swallow it, or that had swallowed it already.
Nothing changed. Things have desires too. What would have been different had Farah not entered the Saâda Cabaret that night? That young man with the tattooed arms, the one wearing the red leather wristband, blocked her way numerous times, trying to prevent her from entering. And in the end, he looked the other way, not knowing that she wouldn’t come out the same as when she went in. The mistake wasn’t so much his as it was in his unfortunately timed lapse of attention. Perhaps it was the mistake of that other young man, the anonymous one, unknown by anyone, no one knowing his address, face, voice, or clothes; that young man who had called for the waiter, called him over just to ask the time, providing the opportunity at just that moment for Farah to slip inside the cabaret after having come back from her room. He sat in front of the workshop drawing circles in the dirt, asking himself what he was going to do. The circles he drew were no longer done with the same expertise as before, and for the first and last time he spent the night writing a poem. Half a white sheet of paper with a few lines in blue. The next day, early in the morning, he went back and stood in front of the house with the folded piece of paper in his pocket, in front of the blind woman who was still sitting in the same place. Maybe Farah had woken up. Should he go in? He didn’t go in. He stood for a full hour in front of the old woman’s house, telling himself that he’d take out the piece of paper and read what was on it, but he didn’t. All of this seemed ridiculous. The poem wouldn’t change a thing, neither in his journey nor in hers. He imagined that he was married to her, that they had a child, and that the happy family was traveling to the south in the summertime. They continued along side by side, forming memories—that trip to the south, their son burning up with that fever on the first night, and them rushing back home. The following New Year’s, rather than going south, they would go up to Ifrane to ski, throw snowballs, and shout out at one another. Nothing like this happened, though. Because he wouldn’t equal the smallest bit of the afternoon during which he remained fixed in place in front of the old woman’s door, not knowing what to do, hesitating about whether to go up, the short poem in his pocket burning his thigh. Because basically what he wanted to do was say the words he didn’t say, and wouldn’t say. The words that he wrote down in the form of a few other words that contained only that meaning. Would the door be open if he went up the stairs? It would be better if it were closed so he could slip the paper underneath and run away. He was intent on not barging into her room as he had done the day before. The old woman didn’t see him. Or perhaps she saw him with that additional sense that only the blind possess. In her traditional clothing, embroidered straw taraza hat on her head over her finely wrinkled face, the black-and-red-striped haik around her waist. The little girl wasn’t there. If she had been there, she would have taken him by the hand and gone up with him to the door. Why not sit next to the blind woman and wait and make it look like he wasn’t waiting for a thing? He didn’t do this, or that. And this old woman, what was she waiting for, sitting here all the time on the doorstep? Why wouldn’t she be like him? Waiting for the man she loved? After all these decades, she could still love. The man would come. He’d say the sweet words she’d been waiting for, the sweet words that would cause her to let out a loud, flirtatious laugh, unconcerned with the street and who was passing by. She’d be expecting a gift. The man would take a bottle of perfume out of his pocket and hand it to her, and she’d smell it as she looked to him with all her heart, captivated, enchanted. She’d expect a kiss, so the man would lean forward and kiss her on the lips, long enough to quench the thirst of all the years that had passed. Then she’d get up and go back into her house—light, radiant, happy—and she wouldn’t come out again.
37
An Iris Bloomed
After twenty-eight days, which I marked off on the workshop wall, she left her room. In a dress embroidered with flowers this time. That’s why, as I looked at her standing in the workshop, I found myself thinking about the flowers as she walked. The slant of the flowers on the dress caused her walk to lose much of its radiance. Usually, when a tailor sews a piece of clothing, he makes it so the flowers stand straight up, rather than lean over or point downward, so as not to have the young woman’s future imitate her upside-down or slanted flowers. She took a few steps toward me, hardly making a sound. Her dress rustled lightly. The flowers appeared in its folds and weren’t altered by how she walked. She hadn’t put perfume on, which would have let me know it was her before she entered. I don’t really like perfume.
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 28