“Jourge? Jourge?” the adoul said, then began to chew his pen. Behind him the young man fidgeted.
“I’m just going to write it the way it sounds,” the man of law concluded, and his young assistant looked relieved.
The adoul stared at Mathilde for a few seconds, examining her face then her hands, which she held clasped together. Then Aïcha heard her mother reciting, in Arabic: “I swear that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is His prophet.”
“Very good,” said the man of law. “And what name will you take now?”
Mathilde didn’t know what to say. Amine had told her about the need to be rebaptized, to adopt a Muslim name, but she’d been so weighed down by other worries recently that she hadn’t given it a thought.
“Mariam,” she said finally, and the adoul appeared very satisfied with this choice. “Let it be so, Mariam. Welcome to the community of Islam.”
Amine came close to the door. He saw Aïcha and told her: “I don’t like the way you spy on people all the time. Go to your room.” She stood up and walked through the long hallway. Her father followed her. She lay down in bed and saw Amine grab Selma’s arm, the same way the nuns grabbed girls at school when they were going to be punished and the Mother Superior wanted to see them.
Aïcha was already asleep when Selma and Mourad entered the office and—witnessed by Mathilde, Amine, and two laborers who’d been summoned for the occasion—the adoul pronounced them man and wife.
Selma wouldn’t listen. When Mathilde knocked at the door of the storeroom—where Selma now slept with her husband—her sister-in-law refused to open it. Mathilde kicked the door, she banged on it with her fists, she yelled, and then, resting her head against the wooden slats, she began speaking very quietly, as if she hoped Selma too would press her face against the door and listen to her advice, the way she always used to. In a gentle voice, without thinking, without calculating, Mathilde asked her sister-in-law to forgive her. She spoke to her about inner freedom, about the need to resign herself to her fate, about the illusory dreams of true love that lured young girls to the rocks of despair and failure. “I was young once too, you know.” She spoke to her about the future. “One day you’ll understand. One day you’ll thank us.” It was important, she told Selma, to look on the bright side. Not to let her sadness contaminate the birth of her first child. Not to brood over the loss of a young man who, although handsome, had also been cowardly and thoughtless. Selma didn’t reply. She was crouched against the wall, far from the door, her hands covering her ears. She’d confided in Mathilde, she’d let her touch her aching breasts, her still-flat belly, and Mathilde had betrayed her. No, Selma wouldn’t listen. She’d pour tar into her ears if she had to. Her sister-in-law had done what she’d done out of jealousy. She could have helped her run away, kill this baby, marry Alain Crozières. She could have put into action all those pretty speeches she’d given about the emancipation of women and the right to choose love. Instead she’d let the law of men rise up between them. She’d denounced Selma, and her brother had immediately turned to the old ways to solve the problem. She probably can’t stand the idea of me being happy, thought Selma. Happier than her and with a better marriage than hers.
—
When she wasn’t locked in her room Selma stayed close to the children or to Mouilala, making it impossible to have a private conversation. This was torture for Mathilde, who was desperate to be forgiven. She ran up behind Selma whenever she saw her alone in the garden. Once, she grabbed the back of her blouse and almost strangled her. “Let me explain. Please stop running away from me.” But Selma spun around and began hitting Mathilde with both hands, kicking her in the shins. Tamo heard their yells as they fought like children, but she didn’t dare get involved. They’d find a way to blame me for it, she thought as she closed the curtain. Mathilde protected her face and begged Selma: “Try to be reasonable. Your pilot disappeared anyway, as soon as he found out about the child. You should think yourself lucky that we found a way for you to avoid the shame.”
At night, while Amine snored beside her, Mathilde thought over what she’d said. Did she really believe it? Had she become that kind of woman? The kind that encourages others to be reasonable, to give up, to choose respectability over happiness? But ultimately, she thought, there was nothing she could have done. And she repeated this, over and over, not because she felt sorry for herself, but in an attempt to convince herself, to alleviate her guilt. She wondered what Mourad and Selma were doing at that moment. She imagined the aide-de-camp’s naked body, his hands on the young woman’s hips, his toothless mouth pressed against her lips. She envisioned them together in such detail that she had to force herself not to scream, shove her husband out of the bed, and weep over the fate of that child they’d abandoned. She got out of bed and started pacing up and down the hallway to calm her nerves. In the kitchen she ate leftover Linzer Torte with jam until she felt sick. Then she leaned out of the window, convinced that she would hear a moan or a grunt. But all she heard was the rats running up the trunk of the giant palm tree. She understood then that what tormented her, what revolted her, was less the marriage itself or the morality of Amine’s choice than the simple act of that unnatural copulation. And she had to admit that the real reason she kept following Selma around was not to apologize but to ask her questions about that vile, monstrous coupling. She wanted to know if the teenager had been frightened, if she’d felt a shiver of disgust when her husband’s penis penetrated her. If she’d shut her eyes and thought about her young pilot to blot out the reality of that ugly old man.
* * *
One morning a pickup truck parked in the courtyard and two boys unloaded a large wooden bed. The elder of the two couldn’t have been more than seventeen. He wore a pair of trousers that only reached halfway down his calves and a canvas cap faded by the sun. The younger boy had a doll-like face that offered a strange contrast with his massive, muscled body. He stood back and waited for the older boy to give him orders. Mourad pointed out the storeroom but the boy in the cap just shrugged. “It won’t fit through the door.” Mourad, who’d bought the bed from one of the best artisans in town, exploded. He wasn’t there to have a discussion. He ordered them to take the bed in sideways, dragging it along the ground. For more than an hour they shoved the bed, carried it, turned it over. They hurt their backs and their hands. Sweating and red-faced, the two boys laughed at Mourad’s stubbornness. “Come on, old man, be reasonable!” said the younger boy. “If it’s too big for the hole, you’ll never get it in there.” The foreman was disgusted by the boy’s lewd double entendre. Exhausted, the teenager sat on the bed base and winked at his companion: “It’s his missus who’ll be disappointed. This is a really nice bed for such a small house.” Mourad stared at the boys as they jumped on the bed and laughed. He felt stupid and he wanted to cry. When he’d seen this bed in the medina it had seemed perfect. He’d thought about Amine then, and how proud of him his boss would be: a man capable of buying a bed like this would be the best possible husband for his sister, Amine would think. “I’m an idiot,” Mourad muttered, and it took a huge effort of self-control not to beat the boys and take an ax to the bed. Instead he watched the truck vanish in a cloud of dust, his heart filled with a calm despair.
For two days the bed stayed where it was and nobody asked any questions. Amine said nothing, nor did Mathilde. They were both so embarrassed and ashamed that they pretended it was perfectly normal for a double bed to sit there, in the middle of a sandy courtyard. Then, one morning, Mourad asked for the day off and Amine said yes. The foreman picked up a mallet and smashed down the wall of the storeroom that faced the fields, then pushed the bed through the gap. After that, he got some bricks and mortar and began enlarging the room where he would live from now on with Selma. All day and long into the night he built a new wall. He intended to install a bathroom in the house for his wife, who currently had to use the outside toilets. Tamo stood on tiptoe to wa
tch through the window as the foreman labored. Mathilde told her to mind her own business and get back to work.
When the house was ready Mourad felt proud, but it didn’t change his habits. At night he left the big bed to Selma while he slept on the floor.
To find Omar they had to follow the smell of blood. That was what Amine said, and in that summer of 1955 there was no lack of blood. It ran through the streets of Morocco’s cities, where more and more people were murdered in broad daylight, where bombs exploded in the streets. The violence spread through the countryside: crops were burned, plantation owners beaten to death. These killings were a mixture of politics and personal vengeance. People were killed in the name of God and of country, to wipe out a debt, to pay back a humiliation or an adulterous wife. The white authorities responded with racist attacks and torture. The only thing the two sides had in common was fear.
Every time he heard about a killing Amine would wonder if Omar was involved. Was he dead? Was he a murderer? He thought about it when an industrialist was assassinated in Casablanca, when a French soldier died in Rabat, when an old Moroccan perished in Berkane and when a town planning officer was the target of an attack in Marrakech. He thought about Omar when—two days after the murder of the pro-independence newspaper owner Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil by counterterrorists—he listened to the resident-general, Francis Lacoste, give a speech on the radio. “Violence, in all its forms, is horrifying and contemptible.” A few days later Lacoste was replaced by Gilbert Grandval, who arrived at a moment of high tension. At first Grandval sparked hopes that the terrorism could be brought to an end, that a dialog could be reestablished between the two communities. He reversed a number of convictions and distancing measures. He stood up to extremists in the French community. But on July 14 an attack in Place Mers Sultan in Casablanca destroyed all those hopes. Grieving women, their faces veiled in black, refused to shake hands with the French representative. “We have no attachment to mainland France and now we’re going to lose what we spent years building: the country where we raised our children.” Europeans rushed into the medina of the white town, grabbing all the French flags that had been put out to line the streets for Bastille Day. They pillaged shops, set fires, and committed all kinds of atrocities, sometimes egged on by the police. A chasm filled with blood now gaped between the two communities.
On the night of July 24, 1955, Omar reappeared. He came to Meknes hidden in the backseat of a car driven by a Casablancan teenager. They parked below the medina, in a dead-end road that smelled of urine, and smoked cigarettes while they waited for the sun to rise. Gilbert Grandval’s retinue was supposed to drive through Place El-Hedim around nine that morning, and Omar and his companions considered it their duty to welcome him. In the trunk of the car, hidden inside large bags filled with rubble, were two revolvers and a few knives.
The sky lightened and the square filled with French troops in ceremonial uniform. They were going to present arms as the retinue passed and then escort the resident-general to the Mansour Gate, where he would be given dates and milk. Women stood behind barriers. They waved cross-shaped dolls in robes made of cloth and small bouquets of flowers. In exchange for their presence they’d been given a few coins, and they were laughing among themselves. Despite their cheerfulness it was obvious that their fervor was fake, that their chants of “Vive la France” were nothing more than a sad farce. Some amputees tried to get as close as they could to the passage of the procession in the hope that the people of France would be alerted to their fate. When the police pushed them back, they shouted: “We fought for France and now we’re living in poverty!”
At dawn special protection groups began setting up blockades in front of each gate leading to the old town. But soon they were overwhelmed by the massing crowds. A van parked on Place El-Hedim and the police, in a panic, ordered the passengers to get out and drop the Moroccan flags they were waving. The men refused and began stamping their feet in the back of the van, making it sway. The sound of those stomping feet galvanized the crowd. Boys and old men, peasants from the mountain, bourgeois businessmen, and shopkeepers all gathered in the vicinity of the square. They carried flags and photographs of the sultan and they chanted: “Youssef! Youssef!” Some held clubs, others carving knives. Near the tribune where the resident-general was due to give his speech, local worthies looked anxious and their white djellabas were stained with sweat.
Omar gave a signal to his companions and they leaped out of the car. They walked up to the increasingly agitated crowd and melted into it. Behind them veiled women had climbed on to trestles and were shouting: “Independence!” Omar made a fist and started yelling along. To the men who surrounded him he gave out bags filled with rubbish. They threw rotten fruit and dried shit at the policemen’s faces. Omar’s deep, vibrant voice was like a flame in a forest. He stamped his foot, spat on the ground, and his rage spread around him. Young boys and old men all swelled with courage and pride. One teenage boy, wearing a white vest and a pair of trousers that revealed his hairless calves, started throwing stones at the security guards. The other protesters imitated him and soon the police were caught in a rain of stones. All other sounds were drowned out by the clatter of rocks on the cobblestones and the shouts of the policemen, calling—in French—for calm. One of them, bleeding from his eyebrow, grabbed his submachine gun. He fired into the air and then—jaw tensed, eyes filled with fear—aimed his gun at the crowd and fired again. In front of Omar, the boy from Casablanca fell to the ground. Despite the chaos of people running and women crying, his companions gathered round him and one of them started looking around frantically. “There are ambulances coming. We have to get him out of here!”
But Omar made a commanding gesture with his hand and said: “No.”
The young men, used to their leader’s coldness, stared at him. Omar’s face was totally calm. He smiled. Things were going exactly as he’d hoped. This disorder, this confusion, was the best thing that could have happened.
“If we take him to the hospital and he survives, they’ll torture him. They’ll threaten to send him to Darkoum or somewhere and he’ll talk. No ambulance.”
Omar squatted down and with his skinny arms he picked up the wounded boy, who screamed in pain.
“Run!”
In the panic Omar lost his glasses, and later he would believe that it was this blindness that enabled him to run through the crowds, avoiding bullets and making it to the gate of the medina, where he could lose himself in the maze of backstreets. He didn’t look round to see if the others were still with him; he made no attempt to console the injured boy, who was calling for his mother and praying to Allah. He also didn’t see, on his way out of the square, the hundreds of abandoned slippers strewn across the ground, the bloodstained fezzes, the weeping men.
In the streets of Berrima he heard the ululations of women gathered on roof terraces. He felt as if they were encouraging him, guiding him toward his mother’s house, and like a sleepwalker he found his way to the hobnailed door and knocked. An old man opened it. Omar pushed him out of the way and ran on to the patio. When the door had been closed behind him he asked: “Who are you?”
“Tell me who you are first,” said the old man.
“This is my mother’s house. Where are they?”
“They left. Weeks ago. I’m looking after the house for them.” The caretaker glanced uneasily at the body slumped over Omar’s shoulder and added: “I don’t want any trouble.”
Omar lay the wounded boy on a damp bench. He put his ear close to the boy’s mouth. He was breathing.
“Keep an eye on him,” Omar ordered, then went upstairs, feeling his way with his hands. All he could see were vague shapes, haloes of light, disturbing movements. He smelled smoke then and realized that houses all over the city were burning, that the protesters had set fire to traitors’ businesses, that the revolt was really happening. He heard the roar of an airplane flying over the medina and the
sound of gunfire in the distance. His heart filled with joy as he thought that right now, outside, men were still fighting, and that France—in the person of Gilbert Grandval—must be trembling before this uprising. By late morning gendarmes and uniformed goumiers had surrounded the medina of the new town. Near the Poublan Camp three tanks took up position, aiming their guns at the native town.
—
When Omar went downstairs again the boy had fainted. The caretaker was with him, sniffing and tapping his forehead. Omar told him to shut up, and like a cat the old man walked across the patio and went to hide in Mouilala’s old room. All afternoon Omar sat on the hot patio. Sometimes he massaged his temples and opened his wide, owl-like eyes as if hoping that his sight would miraculously return. He couldn’t risk going out and getting arrested. The police were prowling the medina’s backstreets now, knocking on doors, threatening to break in and pillage everything if the inhabitants didn’t open up. Jeeps drove through the streets, picking up the few Europeans who still lived in the old town and evacuating them to the fairground or the Bordeaux Hotel, which had been requisitioned for that purpose.
After a few hours Omar fell asleep. The old man, who started at the slightest noise, began to pray. He looked at Omar and thought how coldhearted and amoral he must be to be able to sleep in such a situation. During the night the wounded boy started twitching and groaning. The caretaker went over, held his hand and tried to hear what the boy was whispering. The boy was just a poor peasant who’d fled a life of deprivation in the mountains to try his luck in the slums of Casablanca. For months he’d looked for work on one of those building sites that people were always telling him about. But nobody had wanted him and, like thousands of other peasants, he’d gone to work the quarries, at the edge of the white town, too poor and ashamed to even think of going home. It had been there, among houses with corrugated-iron roofs, in that shantytown where fatherless children shat in the street and died from throat infections, that a recruiter had found him. The man must have looked at the hate and despair in that boy’s eyes and thought: Perfect. Now, feverish and in terrible pain, the boy was begging for someone to contact his mother.
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