Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

  The chief stood, placing a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of genuine commiseration. “May God have mercy on his soul,” he told Rezzouk.

  The old man was paralyzed with grief and could hardly move.

  “Now, you’ll have to go to the district attorney’s office with a copy of your national ID card. He’ll give you the authorization to collect the body of the deceased at the morgue in Ibn Tofail University Hospital—the civilian hospital, that is. If you don’t feel up to the task, you can designate a third party, a member of your family, preferably . . .”

  The old man stood, sputtering his thanks. As he turned to leave, the chief called him back. He held out some banknotes, four or five of them, folded in half. The old man politely declined the offering; the chief insisted.

  “It’s my contribution to the funeral,” the chief said. “And I assure you, sidi, I’m more than glad to help.”

  Rezzouk finally accepted the money, less out of conviction than in deference to this chief who was so kind and respectful; the few cops the old man had previously dealt with were all washed-up brutes, totally insensitive to the hardships of ordinary people like himself. He must be an exceptional policeman, he said to himself as he left the office.

  * * *

  The funeral service was held the next day at Bab Ghmat Cemetery, one of the oldest in the medina. The coffin was trailed by a great procession. Practically all the men of Derb el-Boumba were there, women being prohibited from attending burials on Islamic soil. In addition to the imam and his chosen readers of the sacred text, dressed all in white, there were many strangers who had come out of this sense of Muslim solidarity—or maybe pure idleness. Rezzouk believed that the crowd was proof that his departed son had been greatly respected in the neighborhood.

  Once the burial was over, the crowd dispersed. The old man remained at the foot of the grave: hunched over, eyes closed, palms held to the sky, he murmured a long prayer for his lost child, imploring Allah, the most merciful and compassionate, to forgive the boy his sins—those committed in words, in deeds, and in thought—to spare him the terrible trials of the last judgment, and to reserve a place for him in paradise, alongside His chosen prophet, His loyal companions, and His blessed faithful. As soon as the old man had pronounced the final amine, a young man approached him.

  “My sincere condolences, s’di Rezzouk!” the young man said, clutching his shoulder in a formal embrace. “I am so very saddened by this painful event!”

  The young man was tall and dark with gray, sparkling eyes and hair cropped close—so close that you could see his scalp. A long diagonal scar ran across his right cheek. The old man looked at him, trying in vain to put a name to his face. He was sure that he’d seen him before, two or three times, maybe more. But where? When? He had no idea.

  “You probably don’t remember me, s’di Rezzouk,” the young man went on. “My name is Noureddine, Noureddine L’Guebbas. Abdeljalil and I were good friends a few years ago.”

  “He was a good man, wasn’t he?” the old man replied, his voice choked by tears.

  “A very good man,” Noureddine said. “And a loyal friend too!” After a silence, he added: “May his murderers be condemned to eternal Gehenna!”

  The old man’s eyes widened as he looked up, suddenly alert.

  “God knows I warned him,” Noureddine continued, “and many times over! But Abdeljalil wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Warned him?” the old man repeated, taken aback. “Of what?”

  “Of the fact that he’d been—for some time already—in the crosshairs of the drug squad!”

  “What? Why?”

  “Abdeljalil refused to pay the current fee for the dealers in our category, a few hundred dirhams per week. And he tried to persuade those who paid it to stop.”

  “Then my son didn’t die in a traffic accident?” the old man asked, stunned.

  “No, s’di Rezzouk.”

  “Do you know how he died?”

  “I don’t know, s’di Rezzouk, but . . . but I heard that they smashed his skull against a beam in a jail cell.”

  The old man’s heart tightened, his legs grew weak, and the world went dark around him; everything had taken on a look of sinister unfamiliarity. He collapsed at the edge of an old grave, his head in his hands, devastated.

  “Are you all right, s’di Rezzouk?” the young man asked.

  The old man raised his head with a sorrowful expression, his forehead creased with two deep lines. “Remind me of your name, young man?”

  “Noureddine.”

  “Would you like to help me, Noureddine?”

  “Of course, s’di Rezzouk!” he answered, vaguely anxious, wondering what the old man was going to ask of him.

  “I’ll surely need your help to uncover the circumstances of my son’s murder.”

  “What can I do for you, s’di Rezzouk?”

  The old man reached into his pocket and took out a Bic pen and a small notepad with yellowing pages. “For now, I’ll need your phone number.”

  “What do you plan on doing, s’di Rezzouk?”

  “I’ll bring charges. I’ll alert the press, the human rights organizations in Morocco and abroad. I’ll write to the governor, to the wali, the minister of justice, the prime minister! I’ll even write to the king! Yes, I’ll write to the king! Is he not our nation’s commander in chief?”

  Noureddine suddenly became aware of the danger he might face if he got mixed up in this thorny affair. A real danger, perhaps even with fatal consequences. Resting a finger on his temple, he was silent for a moment, growing pensive. The risk was great, certainly, but that shouldn’t stop him doing something for the man who’d been his best friend in the underworld. So he gave his phone number to the old man and, just before leaving him, reiterated his condolences.

  Now that’s what you call a true friend! Rezzouk thought to himself, following Noureddine with his eyes all the way to the cemetery gates. You don’t meet a brave man like that every day.

  * * *

  That night was a sleepless and cruel one for the old man. In the morning, he returned to the police station.

  “What can I do for you, cherif?” Chief Zeghloul asked politely.

  “I want to know the truth about my son’s death!” Rezzouk blurted out in a rage. “The whole truth!”

  The chief just stared at the old man.

  “My son didn’t die in a traffic accident!”

  “Just what are you saying, cherif?” the cop asked.

  “The truth, chief! My son was killed by members of the drug squad.”

  “What you’re saying is serious,” the chief replied, his tone suddenly menacing. “Very serious. Do you have proof?”

  “Proof, no. But I have a witness.”

  “Who’s this witness?”

  “A friend of my late son’s.”

  “His name and address?” the chief requested. “I want to question him as soon as possible.”

  “His name is Noureddine . . . Noureddine . . .” The old man was silent for a few seconds, searching his memory for a surname. “It will come to me later . . . I have his phone number, though.” He took the notepad out of his pocket and flipped through its yellowed pages. “Here it is.”

  The chief pushed the desk phone toward Rezzouk and pressed the speakerphone button. “Go on,” he ordered. “Call him and tell him to meet you somewhere. In a park, for example.”

  The old man dialed the number and heard a woman’s voice at the other end of the line: “Maroc Telecom, bonjour! The number you have dialed is not in service.” He tried again, got the same message, and hung up, stupefied.

  “Tell me, cherif,” the chief said after a silence.

  “Yes?”

  “Where did you meet this Noureddine?”

  “At Bab Ghmat Cemetery, near my son’s grave.”

  “There were others around, I imagine?” the chief asked.

  “No, no one.”

  “No one came to the ceremony?”

&n
bsp; “Oh, yes. Lots of people,” Rezzouk told him. “But after the burial, they all left.”

  “And you stayed there alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing alone by the grave?”

  “I was praying for my son’s soul,” the old man shared, sorrow filling his voice again.

  “And how were you praying? Standing up? Kneeling? Describe it to me as carefully as possible,” the chief pressed.

  Confused and suspicious, the old man stared at the chief. “Those are pointless details.”

  The chief stared back with a faint, sneering smile. “You must know, cherif, that in our work, the truth is like the devil: it hides in details that the average person finds unimportant. A gesture, a look, a trifle, a mere nothing—yes, sometimes the truth hides in nothing at all! Believe me: if I told you all the crimes we’ve solved thanks to an insignificant detail, I’d be here all day.”

  Though unconvinced by the chief’s argument, the old man relented: “I was there, standing at the foot of the grave, my hands raised to the sky, eyes closed—”

  “You had your eyes closed?” the chief interrupted.

  “Yes, to better concentrate on the prayer.”

  “And it was then that this Noureddine approached you?”

  “Yes.”

  The chief swiftly pushed his swivel chair back from the desk, nodding his head up and down as if he’d found the key to the mystery. “Go home, cherif!” he urged the old man. “You’re very tired.”

  Rezzouk got up and, without saying a word, began walking toward the door.

  “Some advice, cherif!” the chief called after him with the self-satisfied air of a man who understood life better than most. “The next time you visit the cemetery, be careful not to pray with your eyes closed.”

  Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef

  Mama Aicha

  by Halima Zine El Abidine

  Jemaa el-Fnaa

  As I was getting ready to leave the furnished apartment that I’d rented in the heart of Casablanca, I realized that I had forgotten the most important thing: the organdy. This length of purple silk from Kawamata that I’d spent half my scholarship money to buy during my first year of university in Japan was part of a memory that had been boxed away for twenty years. When I’d arrived there as a teenager, I could think of nothing but the disappointment of it all, the crushing defeat. In my hand I carried a small satchel of clothing, and from my shoulder hung a wallet containing my passport, my registration certificate for the university, and postcards showing scenes from the city I loved more than anything: Marrakech. Marrakech opens her gates to the world, but she had driven me—her own son—out.

  My father insisted that I seek refuge in the most remote corner of the earth, where the hurricane winds sweeping our country could not reach. “This is a time of fear and death. I can bear your distance, my son, as long as you’re safe,” he told me. “I could not keep you here knowing you might be taken at any time by the secret police and the men with whips—seized by treachery or coercion. Though Japan, where your uncle Salim lives, may be far away in the east, it’s still closer than the corridors of the commissariat in Jemaa el-Fnaa. Leave your glorious dreams of revolution behind, son, and do something with your youth, and when you are a grown man, you will realize that no revolution in the world was ever led by inexperienced students.”

  That is what my father said as he bid me goodbye at Marrakech Menara Airport one day in the late seventies. The stern headmaster who terrified everyone in the high school, teachers and students alike, seemed sad, diminished. When he gave me a final parting look, his eyes were full of tears.

  Alone with my thoughts as I sat in the window seat on the plane, I let my own tears flow. All of the words that had died on my tongue repeated themselves in my head. Everything I hadn’t said to my father. What had we done that we should be either sent to prison or driven out of the country?

  * * *

  My phone rang, and I ignored it as I attempted to find my way out of a garage that was like a maze. Maybe it was my mother, although I’d told her—when I had dinner at her house last night—that I was going to Marrakech today to see Aziz and his mother Aicha.

  I’d been gone from Marrakech for twenty years. For twenty years I’d been the cause of my mother’s tears. Distracting myself, immersing myself in books and theories. It was true that I had done very well and had become an instructor at a Japanese university. But these were successes without savor. I had no one to celebrate with, no one to whom I could speak in my native tongue about the black misery that blotted out my name from the diplomas I had earned with such distinction. Regret gnawed at every part of me. If only I had not obeyed my father and emigrated to this much larger prison, allowed myself to be torn out by my roots. I had no friends or companions except the postcards that I’d brought with me. I kept them close to my heart, and with them the piece of organdy silk. I saw the faces from my country in them. I talked to them and they spoke back to me. I passed the nights in their company.

  As for my uncle Salim, our only connection was through the money my father sent him to support me during the early years of my exile. Family is not a matter of blood, it is a matter of birth and upbringing—I would console myself with this thought when it became clear that my uncle wasn’t going to worry himself about me in a country where sons became adults and took responsibility for themselves as soon as they started university. In Marrakech, where I had come from, sons could have gray hair and they would still be children in the eyes of their parents.

  The phone rang again. Be patient, Mother, I can’t answer right now, I’m looking for a way out of this lousy garage that you directed me to. My poor mother. Perhaps she had wanted to come with me to Marrakech. Maybe that was what she’d been hinting at when we spoke yesterday, revealing a sadness that had spread and taken root like a tree in the depths of her eyes. “While you were gone I might as well have been dead,” she’d said. “Aicha was the bosom in which I sought comfort, but in the end, I left her to her tragedies and came to Casablanca to drink from my cup of sorrow alone.”

  “But you used to spend school vacations at our house in Marrakech, and the majority of the time you were with her,” I replied.

  She looked long and hard at my face, as though trying to find in it remnants of her seventeen-year-old son who had existed once, before he was torn away from the safety of her lap and flung into the dark spaces of a strange country. “That’s right. I couldn’t get used to living here in Casablanca. If the secret police hadn’t made our life miserable after you went abroad, we would never have left our house and relatives and neighbors. Your father wouldn’t have made us move to this noise-infested city.”

  The phone continued to ring. I picked it up in one hand while the other kept a grip on the steering wheel. It was Aziz. I pulled over next to the curb. His voice sounded weak but animated, as though he were eager to talk. “Why didn’t you pick up? Were you still asleep? Or is your phone still set to Japanese time?”

  “I’m already on the road. I’ll be in Marrakech in three hours,” I told him.

  “I’ll be waiting for you at the Argana Café. From there, we’ll go to my mother’s house. We’re having lunch there, as we agreed.”

  “I’ll drive as fast as I can so I’m on time for Mama Aicha,” I promised.

  “How she cried when you left the country. Your being there by her side during the year before you left lightened the pain of my absence for her.”

  How I, too, had cried . . .

  We had promised each other that if either of us were arrested, we would die before we confessed the other’s involvement, so that one of us would remain to take care of our two mothers. Aziz kept his side of the bargain, but I didn’t. He stayed strong and never implicated me, even under torture. I abandoned them both and went abroad.

  We were teenagers. My father’s bookshelves had taught me to love literature. Aziz and I would devour the novels that I filched from my fathe
r’s library without his permission. Then, at the Arset el-Hamd youth center, we met some other young men our age or a little older who were training themselves to dream—to look ahead to a more just future. They exchanged forbidden Red Books with us. We even joined the leftists in the March 23 movement. It was a secret organization, and we were part of the cell at the high school. There, we began training to dream collectively. This dream had started to grow inside of us when the police raids caught us by surprise.

  “You have to leave. You have to give up on your dreams. You have no other choice,” my father had warned me the day he accompanied me to the airport. I’d been aghast. So I would set out alone on a journey into the unknown. A journey without meaning. I endured it as one endures torture. Deep inside me there was a howling, like trapped wolves. I felt like a traitor. I wanted my mother’s hand, wanted her to pass it over my chest, to thaw this cold. I had only this still-bleeding wound to remind me, and the fragrance of a city whose soil I smelled in the color of my own skin. That soil from land reclining upon the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, palm trees held in its embrace. When I was a child, the world as far as I was concerned began and ended there. After I grew up a little, I discovered that Jemaa el-Fnaa Square was the beating heart of the city, and Marrakech was the beating heart of the world. Don’t tourists flock to it from all over the globe, to dance to its songs and sing along under its glittering lights? Don’t they say that Marrakech lavishes a noisy tumult of joy and ecstasy on strangers, while for its sons and daughters it offers only a silent sadness? What is the good humor for which the people of Marrakech are known if not a proud mask concealing the bitterness of their days and the misery of their lives?

  Marrakech was slipping away from me. I kept searching in vain for her radiant face in the postcards scattered across my desk and pillow, so that I wouldn’t lose my memory of her, so that I wouldn’t lose the colors of the city, which had begun to fade from my heart and mind. Words flared up inside of me whenever I thought about the organdy, that piece of fine silk cloth I had rushed to buy as a gift for Mama Aicha. The cloth had remained stored away in my cupboard all these years. I’d made a promise to myself and I hadn’t kept it. Marrakech was far away, and the freedom I had dreamed of had gotten tripped up along the way, arriving with its body parts damaged and mutilated.