by Yasin Adnan
Kamal and I made a small fortune each week, half of which ended up in Mama Rosalie’s purse, and the other in the till of the potbellied owner of Café Atlas.
Once our morning work at the souk was done, we’d spend most of the day drinking beer by the case, in this godforsaken hole in the wall where we found a kind of peace. Our secret squabbles would die down; we’d admit to the snag in our argument on this or that subject, each of us conceding a point in the debate, even flattering each other, becoming affable and easy. If only we’d had two distinct bodies, we’d have embraced one another like a couple of drunks.
Come nine o’clock sharp—just this side of an alcoholic coma—we’d climb onto our mopeds and fly straight to Mama Rosalie’s. That we made it home safe and sound every night was no less than a miracle. If we sometimes took a spill in a narrow alley between buildings, it was rarely serious. We’d get to our feet and bravely continue on our way. As soon as we arrived, a good warm meal (the only one of the day) was served to us by a young housekeeper with sumptuous curves who we always swore we’d take advantage of, though we never had the energy to go through with it. Mama Rosalie stayed shut away in her room, refusing to cross paths with the pitiful wrecks that came stumbling through the door every night of her life. She’d wait until the next morning, at coffee, when we’d become human again and speak intelligibly. We loved these moments of reprieve, loved resting our heads on her knees and letting her fuss over us like in the old days, when she’d spend hours picking our hair for lice. We couldn’t get enough of her caresses or her half-soothing, half-reprimanding words. Just knowing she was there beside us gave us the strength to face another day, to face the chaos of the souk and its hordes of tourists. We’d recharge our batteries, laughing at the same old jokes we’d told a thousand times. That just about sums up our existence, Kamal’s and mine.
* * *
Café Atlas was a world teeming with the dregs and mold of the city, a lure for all kinds of human distress, an island of survival on a sea of torment, engulfing you in its smoke: stories sung by vagabond dreamers, the humid air filled with joyful chatter, and tears that fell from a thousand bursts of laughter. It was a place where you could be without really being there, a place closed in by dirty, smoke-stained windows that hurried passersby would brush against on their way to somewhere else, where the din of life was a faint, distant sound, drowned out by the omnipresent voice of the divine Umm Kulthum, and where the beer and wine flowed freely. Ah! Café Atlas was our paradise . . . or our hell, depending.
On that particular night, riding home on our mopeds, we’d suffered a brutal fall. Our face was covered in blood. We couldn’t move so much as our little finger. Kamal opened his eyes to see a dead child laid out beside us. A crowd had gathered, the people’s accusing looks like so many blazing pitchforks ready to stab us. He saw horned serpents and yellow scorpions flowing from gaping mouths, the sleeves of the crowd’s djellabas billowing around us in a ghostly danse macabre as people screamed and screamed. The child, dressed all in white, stood and began to join in the dance.
“He’s dead!” Kamal told me.
“Who?”
“The dancing child. Black blood is flowing from his ears.”
“I don’t see any child,” I said.
“He’s lost in the crowd, that’s why you don’t see him.”
“There’s no crowd! We’re alone in the street,” I insisted.
“You don’t hear them screaming?”
“I can only hear you.”
“And the blood on the ground?”
“It’s ours. Look closely, we’ve just fallen. It’s not the first time!”
“You’re lying. You refuse to see what’s in front of your face!” Kamal shouted. “You never want to see anything!”
“Come on, get up. Let’s go home. A warm meal is waiting for us.”
“I hate you!”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I’ve always hated you,” Kamal said.
“Because I see you. I don’t judge you, but I see you. You don’t like to be watched.”
Kamal went silent. I’d never seen him in such a state. His fixed expression raised a kind of invisible wall between us. I tried to change my tone, to soften my words, to reason with him in every possible manner, but he wouldn’t listen. It was as if, by some obscure trickery, he’d caused me to vanish from our existence. He’d turned his back on me—on me, his companion for better or worse since childhood. My protests were in vain. I could see my words driving straight into that wall of silence, then rolling down it like drops of condensation.
He stood up, got back on his moped, and rode straight to the souk. Most of the stalls were already closed. The muezzin was calling for the evening prayer. He stopped at Morad’s—a friend who owned our go-to bazaar.
“Hide me,” he sobbed. “Hide me!”
“What’s going on?” Morad asked.
“I hit a child,” Kamal whispered. “I killed him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m a murderer!” he bellowed.
“Calm down and come inside.”
“The kid was no more than ten!” Kamal trembled, and his bloodied face seemed to confirm his story.
Morad asked no more questions. Where we’re from, we stick together and we take care of each other first and worry about the consequences later. He brought Kamal into his bathroom and made him take a shower. Kamal let himself be taken care of, his expression blank, his movements slow. Morad came back with a first-aid kit and attended to his wounds. The sting of the alcohol didn’t even make him wince. Then Morad went to find him a clean gandoura and some babouches, which didn’t take long in the bazaar. He led him to a cramped room at the back of the shop where a mountain of carpets rose up to the ceiling.
“Stay here,” he said. “We’ll talk it over in the morning.”
He came back with a sandwich, closed and double-locked the door behind him, and was gone.
We stayed there for several days, in the shadowy half-darkness, not speaking a word to each other, like a surly old couple. Kamal went from bad to worse. He began to cry, playing the film of his imaginary accident over and over again in his mind, filling gaps in the scenes with hallucinatory details. Sometimes snakes would coil themselves around his body to keep him from escaping, or scorpions would form a blockade like a fakir’s bed of nails. Sometimes there was a blinding light, and ghosts surged toward him, grasping at his face. It was very painful for me not to be able to save him from this nightmare. But what could I do? He was ignoring me. I’d become persona non grata, a stranger as dangerous as the menacing beasts that closed in on him.
Morad paid us visits at mealtimes, bringing a basket of food and several cases of beer. He brought news from the outside too, which was quickly becoming frightening. The police were indeed looking for us. Two inspectors were making rounds of the souk, stall by stall, asking for leads about where we might be. I didn’t understand any of it. I knew we hadn’t killed anyone; I’d been there at the scene of the accident, and much less inebriated than Kamal. As word spread, I felt Morad’s anxiety growing. He wouldn’t have abandoned us for anything in the world, I was sure of that, but he was afraid. Doubt gradually came over me, piercing me with its cruel venom. I couldn’t see the logic in this story. Why in the hell would the police be looking for a drunk who’d fallen off his moped in a deserted alley? Because they’re bored to death down there, and to pass the time, the demons were amusing themselves by toying with our fears, our anxieties, our lives. I know something about that, having frequented the likes of them inside Kamal’s feverish body. A body I didn’t choose, and that was, so to speak, my purgatory.
If only it hadn’t been so horribly sad, the end of this story would have seemed right out of a burlesque farce staged at some provincial theater. But no, our end was unjust: we didn’t deserve it.
After rallying the entire family to join in her search, Mama Rosalie, worried sick, had finally alerted the pol
ice to her son’s disappearance. The inspectors were simply doing their job, trying to bring Kamal back to his mother. That’s why they were looking for us. Morad would only understand it much later, after we were gone. Even then, the thought of it all still made Morad gnaw at his fingers as if they were ripe dates.
* * *
Kamal’s visions were becoming more and more frequent, happening now in broad daylight. Morad couldn’t take any more of the screaming; even muffled by the carpets, the noises were frightening the tourists, causing them to flee the bazaar. “It can’t go on like this,” Morad told us one night, when he brought us our dinner.
His pride injured, Kamal decided to take off right away. He thought of Mama Rosalie saying: I would rather not be there than outstay my welcome! And so, without anger, he got back on his moped and abandoned his hideout with dignity. He seemed almost normal, his expression serene; I started to feel reassured. He rode out of the Old Medina, along the ramparts, not sure which direction to take. We had missed the fresh air. We were euphoric, flying with the birds that were still awake at this hour of the night. I heard him murmur that he was happy to breathe air free of carpet dust and of the fetid odor of rats. Our gandoura billowed around us in the wind. For a moment, we felt an odd kind of weightlessness. Seeing a child crossing the road in the middle distance, Kamal turned sharply toward a patch of open ground. Instead of braking he accelerated, following in the direction of a flock of birds. Then silence, a silence like that of the sea, at the bottom of a cesspool where we found ourselves with a shattered skull: a bit drunk, a bit dead. We looked at each other for the last time, and I saw him smile. A shiver ran through us when we glimpsed, on the surface of the water, the silhouette of a dancing child.
Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef
In Search of a Son
by Mohamed Nedali
Bab Ghmat
Old Rezzouk and his wife showed up at the police station at eight o’clock in the morning. Their son Abdeljalil hadn’t come home in three days. It was true that the young man occasionally stayed out all night, but never twice in a row, and never without first telling his parents.
The cop at the desk, a man in his forties with a cold, severe expression, asked Rezzouk to describe the missing person. “Name, age, address, and occupation?”
The old man swallowed the frog in his throat. “Abdeljalil Rezzouk,” he began. “Twenty-six years old, number eleven, Derb el-Boumba, Bab Ghmat.”
“Occupation?” the cop grumbled.
Not knowing how to answer, the old man said nothing.
“Well? Spit it out!” snapped the cop.
Confused, Rezzouk started rambling: “Our—our son was . . . he was, for a few years, a . . . a cigarette vendor, first here in Bab Ghmat, then in other parts of town. And then he . . . he—”
“He moved up the chain!” the cop cut in, jeering. “A classic promotion, no doubt.”
The old man and his wife looked at each other, perplexed. “What do you mean by chain, sidi?” Rezzouk asked.
“You don’t know, or you’re pretending not to know?” the cop inquired, a suspicious look in his eyes.
“In the name of Allah, the Most High, I don’t know!” Rezzouk roared.
The cop stared at him, one eyebrow raised, an incredulous sneer on his lips. “I’m not taking the bait,” he muttered under his breath.
“Pardon, sidi?” the old man said. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Come back in an hour!” the cop barked. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a cell phone—a Samsung touch screen, very sophisticated, with a black leather case, worth three thousand dirhams at least—and started playing with it.
Rezzouk and his wife hobbled out the door and crossed the street. It was eight fifteen a.m., and the sun was already beating down hard; it was going to be another hot day in the Red City. The old man found two large squares of cardboard next to a garbage bin. He handed one to his wife.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“Waiting!”
The couple sat down in the shade of a giant eucalyptus tree opposite the station. They had forty-five minutes to kill.
“Isn’t that a call shop over there, on the corner?” his wife asked, her voice trembling.
“How many times do I have to tell you, he isn’t answering his phone!” the old man replied. “Are you deaf, or do you have amnesia?”
Two fat tears formed in the woman’s eyes and pooled there for a moment before streaming down her pale cheeks. She wiped them away with the frayed sleeves of her djellaba. The old man watched her out of the corner of his eye. A moment later he stood up again, as if overcome by remorse or pity, and began walking in the direction of the call shop, fiddling with a piece of paper. His wife watched him until he reached the entrance. May God finally give us a sign of our son’s life, she implored silently, peering up to the sky. Deliver us from this unbearable agony! Two minutes later, the old man returned.
“Well?” she asked him, her gaze fixed on his lips.
The old man sat back down on the square of cardboard. “He isn’t answering his phone,” he sighed, throwing his hands in the air. “For three days I’ve been repeating the same thing to you like a broken record.”
His wife began silently crying again. Chin in his hands, face crumpled, the old man just stared at a random point on the ground, absorbed in shadowy thoughts. If misery were one day to take a human form, it would find none better than this old couple from the medina, seated here in the shade of a giant eucalyptus wholly indifferent to their plight.
Every five minutes, the old man glanced at his digital watch, a gray Casio with a stainless steel band. At nine o’clock sharp he stood up. His wife joined him and they returned to the station.
“Come along!” said the cop at the desk, still in a foul mood.
They followed him down a long corridor that reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The offices they passed all looked the same, like high school classrooms. People stood, waiting in front of the doors, anxious and silent. A few crouched down, their backs to the wall, and others paced around the doorways; a young woman was crying alone in a corner. At the end of the corridor, the cop led them up a staircase covered in tarnished mosaic tiles, faintly lit by a fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. On the upper level he stopped in front of the first office on the right. Chief Hamid Zeghloul, read the nameplate on the door. The officer bent his index finger and gave two light knocks, barely audible. A “Zid!” could be heard from the other side. He went in, touching two fingers to the visor of his cap, and closed the door behind him. Two or three minutes later, he came out again.
“Come in!” the cop ordered the old man. “You, lalla, wait on the bench over there!”
His wife reluctantly obeyed.
Chief Zeghloul was a solidly built man with a thick forehead, bulging eyes, a Saddam-like mustache, and a prominent jaw—he didn’t look a day over fifty.
“Hello, sidi!” Rezzouk said as he stepped through the doorway.
“Hello, cherif! Please have a seat,” the chief said.
The old man sat down in one of the two chairs facing the desk. His deep suspicion of the police force—a sentiment largely shared by his countrymen—only added to his anxiety over his son’s sudden disappearance.
“I’m sorry—profoundly sorry—to inform you that your son, Abdeljalil Rezzouk, died yesterday, around two o’clock in the morning, in a traffic accident.”
A pallor spread instantly over the old man’s face, but he didn’t say a word.
“The police found his body on the side of the road,” the chief continued. “The criminal had fled the scene—a drunk driver, presumably. An investigation is underway to determine the exact circumstances of the accident . . . You will be kept informed of the results, of course. Once again, I’m deeply sorry, cherif.”
“May I have the exact location of the murder, sidi?” old Rezzouk asked when he’d recovered enough to speak.
“The accident took
place . . .” the chief began, caught off guard by the question. “The accident took place . . . the accident took place on . . . Excuse me a moment, I’m going to look for it in the report.”
The chief opened a drawer, closed it again, opened another, took out a green folder, extracted a sheet of paper, and skimmed it. “The accident took place on the road that runs parallel to the wall of the Menara gardens,” he said. “Near the Larmoud District, to be precise. Do you know where that is?”
The old man parted his lips to speak, but nothing came out. He stayed speechless for a long moment.