Marriage isn’t a good idea. Marriage in general. Because the married man forgets all about the desire he once felt—the passion, the sleepless nights. He no longer waits impatiently for that appointed time that comes around every day or week when he’ll see his beloved’s face. He no longer waits for anything. That possibility has disappeared from his life altogether. He won’t be going to the hammam, putting on cologne, and donning his finest clothes. He won’t be watching the clock hands, which seem to stand still rather than move toward that appointed hour, because the face of the woman he will have been waiting for has now become familiar. In front of his face when he opens his eyes in the morning, and there when he closes them at night. He might even start looking for another woman as soon as he gets married. No sooner does a man sleep with his wife than his respect for her diminishes. He no longer cares whether she stays or goes. She becomes extraneous. A hidden tingling sensation (like that of creeping ants) shamefully struck the lower part of my body as I thought about all of this. Other than Azemmour, what more was there for us? If only a person were like a mountain goat in the forest, waiting for spring to come and spark his appetite. Once a year. One time. Satisfied. Enough, and then some. Afterward he roams around the forest filling his time by climbing trees and diving into lakes, rolling around on his horns (rather than walking around on two legs) until the following year, and then, at the end of his life, climbing a mountain to die there. With peace of mind. No scars. No missing leg. No funeral or mourners. No crying or weeping. No mourners faking their sadness. Why don’t we do as doves or cats do? Life would be less tiring. I saw her grab a piece of cloth as if getting ready to wash the floor. I tried to prevent her from doing so, but she ran away with the cloth in her hand, and I ran after her. We ran as far as the beach. She stopped for a moment, panting as I approached. Our breaths mingled and she asked me whether her breath smelled bad. I laughed because I hadn’t thought about it before. She blew into my face and ran off, while I remained standing there thinking about the stolen kiss she had planted on my lower lip. I stood there thinking about the scent of that kiss, wondering how I hadn’t yet tasted the scent of her mouth! Then we came to do something else impulsive, not knowing how we found ourselves rolling around in the sand, her grabbing my head and putting it on her chest. I imagined rather than actually saw her chest. Two ripe oranges rising up underneath my head. A delicious dizziness seized me. She pressed down on my head and let out her resplendent laugh, insisting I listen to her heartbeats. “Do you hear it?” But up until that moment I could only hear the beating of my own excited heart. Then my head started to pound violently, so I went back to where I had been lying before. I didn’t like playing around like this. I lay down on the sand. She seized the opportunity to run away again. I let her run away toward the mosque so that I’d miss her. I wasn’t missing anything, now. Now that I’d found her. Farah whom I loved. Just as she was, and just as I had wanted her to be since the first day. Exuberant—exuberant in the way she lived, drunk with life, light as a butterfly. Then I heard the singing. By the time I heard it, it may have been wafting over me for a long time while I was stretched out on the sand. Her voice. I lifted my head a little and turned around. The voice was coming from the direction of the mosque, pure and trembling and wounding, filling the night, flooding it.
There’s no one there
Don’t call out
There’s no one there
There’s only darkness, and a road, and a bird that quietly flies . . .
Never in my life had I heard a voice like the one I was hearing now. Sure, I had heard her sing before—singing that wasn’t too exciting. Closer to humming. Now all of my extremities trembled. My blood roiled and a deliciously intense tingling washed over my skin as I watched her in her white dress sway under the beams of light shining in through small openings in the ceiling.
Who do you want to return with in the darkness of the road?
You haven’t lit a fire and you don’t have a friend . . .
She was like something not of this time, surrounded by her purple flowers. I know the voices of many singers—Oum Kulthoum, Muhammad Abdel-Wahhab, Najat al-Saghira, but that’s not what I was hearing now. Not even close. I even knew the voice of Fairouz. But Fairouz at this range? Open and closed at the same time, between the marble columns, under the silver moonlight coming in from the dome and the sides of the mosque, all of which enriched and infused the voice with a magical echo. I felt nothing except for my eyes filling with tears.
I wish we could have lit the old lamp in El Kantara
Maybe someone would have found their way.
I knelt and remained frozen there.
Two wings fluttered above us, causing her to jump in fright. She came close to me, her face having changed color. “We’re not alone.” “It’s just us, you and I.” “No, we aren’t alone. There’s someone watching us.” Why someone would be watching us, I didn’t know, but some person or people were watching us. The magic was gone. The sweetness of the song evaporated. Two kids were standing outside the mosque. In the courtyard. Under the light of the moon. You could only tell that they were children by their shapes. I walked toward them and saw that I didn’t know them. Perhaps they were children of one of the families that hadn’t left the old city. That was my guess. They hadn’t found me in the workshop. What did the two kids want? A man came asking for Mother. Where is he? Carrying a letter for her. Where is he? He asked for her at the old address.
“We have a new address.”
“He doesn’t know it. He only knows the old address.”
“Where is he?”
“The man? He left.” But, before leaving, he said that my brother Suleiman was on his way, but that he didn’t know our address in the new neighborhood.
“Suleiman?”
“No, the man.”
39
The soil is black, churned up by the machines. The new white buildings appear behind them and the fields like a forest rising up from the ground all at once. Gigantic spools are rolled and black wires are strung by workers over an open space the size of a football field. There were more of them than there were the last time I visited the new neighborhood. They came from surrounding villages. Working for twenty dirhams a day. They didn’t know what was going on inside the heads of the men lined up on the edge of the field, watching them. Angry. Furious because of the unsuitable new housing. The doors fell apart the first time you knocked on them, and the sewage lines were blocked. The shoddy walls had cockroaches coming out of every opening. Same with the locks and the zellij tiles. The window frames were lopsided from the get-go. The faucets provided no water and flicking the light switches did nothing. The smell of deceit oozed from every hole in the walls. The new residences wouldn’t do at all, Mr. Employee. They’d rather go back to their old homes, despite how rundown and dank they were.
As soon as I got there, the angry men lined up on the edge of the field stopped watching the bulldozers. Now that I was standing there they no longer needed to protest. They weren’t angry anymore about the new and unsuitable housing. They had a look of indignation they didn’t know how to express. Take, for example, the young man who asked me about whether Suleiman had come back. He wasn’t actually asking me about Suleiman at all. And I wasn’t going to respond to his question anyway, even though he waited for a response. Just as I wasn’t going to respond to the others who walked toward me with the same hateful looks. Perhaps they were waiting for me to enumerate the gifts Suleiman was bringing with him, or the fortune he had stuffed in his bags. Perhaps they were expecting me to count out their share of it. Instead, I disappointed the mob that was forming a circle around me when I didn’t answer at all. I had the same hateful look in my eyes. For a moment I thought they were going to pounce on me. These things happen every day—in markets, at weddings, and even at funerals. Just standing there can incite a deeply buried anger in people, or at least a desire to cut you down to size. Without the slightest provocation. Just because you don�
�t hold the same views they do, or wear the same clothes, or walk the same way, it puts them into this incomprehensible tribal state. They forgot all about the employee. They forgot about the unsuitable housing and the faulty doors. They forgot about the blocked sewage pipes and the crummy walls and the cockroaches that had begun to nest in the cracks. Instead of berating the employee, they proceeded to pour their anger onto the newcomer, whom they hadn’t taken into account just moments before. And when looks were no longer enough, and asking about Suleiman was of no use, they remembered the mosque. The mosque was what really concerned them. Everything else was just a distraction. They continued to discuss at length the work they had done, the efforts they had expended for the sake of the mosque, and their friends who were buried beneath its rubble. And these machines were witness to it all. These same machines. With their bright yellow color, their noise, and their murky plans. Machines operated by these very hands for five years. They were with these people the whole time. They listened to their complaints and took short naps next to them in the mosque’s courtyard. Years that were neither too long nor too short. Just enough time for a mosque to rise up over the water; enough time for the toil, the sweat, and the blood. And the result? They never imagined that they did all of this work and made all of these sacrifices, only for prostitutes to sing in it!
I turned toward the machines, my mind burning with anger, disregarding their talk about the mosque and the singer in the mosque. The young man who had asked me about Suleiman—but who didn’t really want to know about him—said that he knew her. A girl who stripped in cabarets and danced at weddings. She came from a broken family. Her father was a drunk, and her mother a witch who spent her life separating men from their wives, and fathers from their sons. While scoffing to myself and turning away from them toward the machines, I said that this wasn’t the Farah I knew and surely they were talking about some other girl. Facing their hatred with an even greater hatred. And rather than think about them, I started to think about Rihane. Would he have stood idly by in the face of all this insolent behavior? Would his reaction have been anything other than violent? A pit bull’s reaction never conceals how much it loathes something, and it seizes any opportunity to show its hatred for this sort of person. Even when they went back to the bulldozers, forming a circle around them, the hateful looks didn’t disappear completely. Shards of that hatred remained scattered here and there. I think my stern stance was what pushed them to retreat and hunker down behind their previous worries and questions about the affordable housing. Their eyes, which had spewed such hatred for a girl they didn’t know and whom they had never even seen in their lives, came back to stare once again at the machines and the National Department of Electricity employee.
The National Department of Electricity employee wasn’t bothered by them standing there, nor by their silence, which was louder than the clamor of the machines. Their unasked questions didn’t bother him. This was his field of expertise. His new workers rolled a large spool over and flipped it on its side so that the employee could be higher than them and prevail over their silence. The employee knew very well what went on in the minds of the poor. Poor people didn’t produce a single sound thought. They produced nothing but tricks and ruses, and if you gave them free rein, they might carry away the bed you slept in. That was why the employee asked them to calm down. Better to calm down and think about things that are useful. They weren’t looking at him now. They were staring at their feet, which traced their vague intentions in the dirt. Up on his improvised podium, the employee told them there was damage everywhere, so why wouldn’t it also be so in this neighborhood after all the rain they’d had? “The electricity was cut off, but it will come back. All this work we’ve been doing for the past two weeks, that’s so the electricity can come back on. Don’t you see those high poles coming from the Sidi Said Maachou Dam? Or the Massira Dam? That’s high current. Higher than what your small minds can imagine: twenty-two thousand watts.” Their eyes turned, glaring unconvinced at the high poles. Did they even know what twenty-two thousand watts meant? “It’s enough to burn down the entire city. And when the new transformer arrives and is erected on this piece of land we’re leveling out right now . . .” Eyes moved back and forth between the high electrical poles and the transformer, which right now only existed inside the employee’s head. Their feet hadn’t decided yet whether to storm the field or wait. “Do you know what will happen when the electrical transformer is put up on the edge of where you’re standing? You’ll see the electrical current transformed into a standard current with your own eyes. It’ll run before your very eyes like a dependable stream. After that, the thought of going back will never occur to you. Once you’re able to store your meat in the refrigerator so it doesn’t rot. That’s right. Electricity is good for that too.” What did the angry men do now? They walked back and forth along the edge of the field, satisfied to watch the machines smoothing the dirt, and the high black poles with the electrical wires stretched above them all the way to the horizon. In a final episode of anger, they fixed their hostile glares on the National Department of Electricity employee. Not everything was going as it should, Mr. Employee.
40
Father’s condition had improved and he no longer sat in the same chair. He was delighted with his new decorated chair. But in fact it was the same chair Mother had bought at the flea market, the one he had been carried in on, but now it had drawings on the back and sides that made him think he was still sitting cross-legged on his old throne-like chair with its two snakes descending to the ground and its high back resembling the wings of a soaring eagle. Father looked like a general in exile after losing his final battle. His entourage, which no longer understood what he wanted, circled around him like out-of-control animals. They were imprisoned in an apartment that resembled a cell. He himself looked like someone who no longer had any desires. His last wish was to get a haircut so that he could welcome my brother Suleiman, like a general receiving the last soldier of his defeated troops as he sits on his throne. His desires had been soaring above our heads for years like birds of prey. No one worried about or was proud of them anymore. All of this was over. They no longer interested anyone. He didn’t have anything else to take care of, except for this single desire—to get a haircut—in order to forget about the crack that had been left behind, stretching across the entire length of the mosque’s ceiling like a viper in clear daylight, like a sword threatening to come down on his neck at night while he slept. Khadija and I looked at his head. The razor was in my hand. Khadija was a bit too enthusiastic. She wanted to shave his head for him. Like a child wanting to play. The anxiety I was feeling didn’t come from the razor blade in my hand, or from the sight of Father looking like someone getting ready to shave his head for the last time before descending into his grave. The anxiety I was feeling emanated from this very place, from its suffocating atmosphere and from the depressing thoughts it evoked. First and foremost, it came from the new neighborhood. When I walked through it, I saw that the women—the same neighbors from our old neighborhood—had spread their covers out over the rocks, sunning them and their brittle bones. They sat on the sidewalk that wasn’t there or on the hills formed by dirt and rocks that no one had gathered up. They warmed their bones, which had been penetrated by the moist air of the previous rainy nights, while at the same time looking at the shadows being traced by the sun over the holes left behind by the construction workers. The walls were still dripping and they had holes in them here and there. The sun’s heat heralded an early summer, as if these places have only two seasons, as if in places where the poor settle they only have a choice between a rainy season and an extremely hot season. The children emerged from the ditches, brandishing pieces of metal and yelling at one another. The houses’ stairs were too narrow. Long, bare hallways echoed with the sound of the wind and children’s shouting. Then there was the house itself. One bedroom, a salon—square like a box—with two small windows that looked like those of a prison cell. The
sewing machine was gone. There was no bazaar where Mother could sell her goods or buy things from the north, so her hands sat practically idle. There were no customers. Instead of buying and selling, her hands satisfied themselves by monitoring Father’s head (the same desire that ate away at the other hands ate away at hers). Everyone had a score to settle with the head—Father’s head, which he generously offered to us with a sudden, never-before-seen humility. And finally, perhaps most essentially, there was the thought that hadn’t left me since I had first looked at the neighborhood: that I would run into Kika. I remembered him prior to this moment. My heart seized even before looking at the neighborhood, when Kika was nothing other than one possibility among many, like a project, like an image that passed by while I faced the hateful glares that united the people who were angry at a girl they didn’t know, who protested against singing they’d never heard; a girl who made my heart flutter—it started to beat embarrassingly harder. When he heard the news of Suleiman’s return, Kika came by the house asking about him too. He asked many times a day. But, really, he wasn’t knocking on the door with the intention of asking about him. Rather, he hadn’t forgotten about Farah. He came to add his wickedness to that which had spread out all around the girl who sang in the mosque, because what did Suleiman have to do with a girl singing in the mosque? It was the same spite he had been carrying inside him ever since he first saw her in the cabaret. He wasn’t given the pleasure of a single nice word from her mouth. That’s why. Farah had ignored Kika as if he were a mosquito. Then he talked about her everywhere. It was best that I avoided Kika. Really, he was no more and no less than a mosquito. Relinquishing Kika came to taste like deliverance. It didn’t matter that Kika had once been a friend. A friend, yes, but not like being friends with the color red or cedar wood, for example. Those are true friends; friends you can rely on and be a companion to without question. Without feeling an anxiety you can’t respond to. With some joy, I remembered that I had forgotten him these last few weeks, and I felt even more joyful and reassured when I didn’t see Kika among the young men leaning up against the walls all day, watching the sun and the moon go around in the sky. I didn’t care about the fact that he’d gone, nor did I have any desire to know where he went or what happened to him after the visa fiasco. I could picture him anywhere. At the port waiting for a truck he’d never find to take him away. In front of an embassy where a policeman stood at the door threatening him with his truncheon. But always without the visa. Why would he deserve the visa? Why did he want to emigrate anyway? Just to copy Suleiman? And why would he get to Spain or somewhere besides Spain? Kika didn’t deserve to go anywhere.
A Shimmering Red Fish Page 30