Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

  * * *

  Aziz and I were born the same year. Mama Aicha had nursed me along with Aziz. We drank the same milk, we studied at the same schools, and we read the same books. Together we dreamed of a cultural revolution that would bring prosperity to our humble families. A revolution that would stay its course until it had granted dignity to all the children of this nation. Mama Aicha’s home was next to ours, at the entrance of el-Rahba el-Kadima alley, only a few steps from Jemaa el-Fnaa. It was a beautiful house, overflowing with life. Pots of chrysanthemums, narcissus, jasmine, and crocus clustered along the walls of its interior courtyard, and basil and lavender spilled from trellises across the tiled floors.

  In the middle of the courtyard was a large planter box that held a towering mulberry tree whose branches shaded the entire area. Toward the end of winter, the tree filled with magnificently colored migratory moths whose wings made a rustling sound like the ethereal music of sacred temples. As small children, Aziz and I would watch them for hours on end, and we were tempted to try to catch them so that we could keep listening to the music of their wings in private, while we read or studied our lessons. But Mama Aicha was always there to stop us from getting too close to them.

  “These moths are going to lay eggs, and from their eggs hundreds of larvae will come out, and they will make cocoons,” she’d tell us.

  Every time she repeated this our jaws would drop in amazement. She would laugh and explain to us each time how the larva was the silkworm and the cocoon was the ball of silk.

  We would ask her: “Why won’t you let us play with the balls of silk?”

  And every time she would answer: “Because I’m going to turn them into thread, and from this thread I’ll weave a purple cloth called organdy, to make a kaftan so fine that only a princess or a queen would wear one like it.”

  “Why?” we’d ask again.

  “Because no one in the whole world knows how to make this kind of silk cloth from a worm except a queen in far-off China. Since she’s a queen, she won’t sell her cloth to anyone but other queens, and for a very high price. Though I’m not a queen or a princess, I want to wear it too. I’ve promised myself that one day I’ll have my own kaftan of organdy silk.”

  Every year Mama Aicha gathered the cocoons. And every year she told us about the Chinese queen who owned fields of white mulberry trees. In their branches lived millions of moths, and their cocoons became the silk thread used to make the organdy.

  The years passed, and Aziz and I were no longer children. Maybe because we ceased to ask her about the organdy kaftan, Mama Aicha whispered to us once with deep sadness: “I have only a single mulberry tree from which a few larvae feed, and it gives me just a little thread each year. How many years will I have to wait? It won’t suit me to wear this kaftan when I’m old.” She was silent for a moment, and then her face brightened again and she went on: “But anyway, I’ll keep taking care of the mulberry tree and my larvae. If I don’t wear the cloth myself, your wife will wear it, Aziz; and yours, Yusuf.”

  She continued to sit on the edge of the planter. She drank her midday tea there once she had finished the housework and fed her son and her husband, after the first had gone to school and the other to his shop in Souk Semmarine. She hummed along with whatever was playing on the radio fastened on a hook above the window grate in her bedroom: the songs of Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Abdelwahab Doukkali, and Naima Samih. She had an angelic voice that poured sweetly from her throat like the breeze in Marrakech at the beginning of spring. Yet no one heard her except the mulberry tree and the birds that came seasonally to hunt the moths or their larvae, and Aziz and I on our days off from school. When the songs on the radio stopped, she would tell us captivating stories about her childhood in her Amazigh village. Stories with which our imaginations would roam to strange and wonderful worlds. When we left her to go study our lessons, she would converse with the mulberry tree instead, talk to it, ask it questions, confess her secrets to it. She told it of her kaftan, which was still not finished. She raised her eyes to the sky, wandering in her thoughts far from the orbit of her domestic space. The sky was closer to her than Jemaa el-Fnaa, which she had never seen. Only its sounds reached her. She listened to them furtively and with a great deal of curiosity, trying to find connections between them and what Aziz and I told her about the square. We were children. We told her about our adventures and our small acts of mischief, about the storytelling circles there, about the singers whose voices were not as fine as Mama Aicha’s, about the fortune-tellers surrounded by sad women, about the famous street performers Bakchich and Tabib el-Hasharat, and the spectacle of the donkey who could read.

  We would take a detour from el-Rahba el-Kadima alley toward Derb Dabachi in order to cut through Jemaa el-Fnaa. Then we would take Prince Avenue until we reached the Hotel Tazi, then veer left in the direction of Arset el-Maach. We spent our day at the Ibn el-Banna Middle School. When we returned home in the evening, we always paused for a few minutes at the edge of a storytelling circle that had just formed so that we could bring back fresh tales from the square, embellished by our own imaginations, for Mama Aicha. Our accounts of the square made her happy. She listened to us with bright eyes and asked for more. Once we moved from the middle school in Arset el-Maach to the Mohammed V High School in Bab Ghmat, Jemaa el-Fnaa was no longer the only wellspring of stories for us. Other sources erupted between our adolescent feet, their stories drawn from the sufferings of the Moroccan people and from accounts of popular revolutions. Our new stories were only for us and our comrades at the high school, and at the Arset el-Hamd youth center. For this reason, we hid them from our mothers.

  Mama Aicha knew nothing of the world around her beyond her husband, Si Mohammed el-Blaighi, her only son, Aziz, my mother, who was her friend and neighbor, and me. Only a single wall separated our two houses, and even if this wall prevented my mother from going over to her friend’s house to drink a cup of tea with her in the shade of the mulberry tree, it did not stop the two young mothers from communicating. As for Mama Aicha, her feet never crossed the threshold of her own front door. She had not left the house since her husband brought her there as a bride from Souss, a girl of only fifteen.

  “A graceful posture and a shapely body like none other. God must have been in a state of the highest pleasure with creation when He made it. I’ve never seen such blue eyes and such long eyelashes in all of Marrakech. Her gaze is soft, suited to a world of refinement and happiness. When I looked at her face for the first time, I thought it was the round disk of the sun itself,” my mother had said when she told my grandmother about her.

  Si Mohammed was infatuated with her. He feared the least gust of wind might carry her away. When he left the house, he locked the door with an iron key as thick as the arm of a small child. To keep her from suffering from loneliness in his absence, he brought her first a radio and then the seedling of a tree. As he planted it, he told her about the emperor’s wife who discovered a white worm eating the leaves of her mulberry tree, secreting luminous threads in which to wrap itself as it did so. From them, the emperor’s wife wove an enchanted silk fabric fit only for queens: organdy.

  The seedling became a tree. She was pregnant, and the movements of the fetus filled her with dreams and love and wonderment. One spring morning she gave birth to Aziz. When they celebrated the aqiqah afterward, joy radiated from Si Mohammed’s eyes as he served food and drink to the well-wishers. He didn’t lock the door when he went back to his shop afterward. He handed over the key to Aicha. She believed that she was finally free. She was happy because her husband had entrusted her with the key to the house.

  Despite all of this, she was content with the warm, calm monotony of her small space. Content with hearing our stories about what happened outside. She never thought about going out.

  Her days passed happily, her mind filled with thoughts of her son, her husband, and the mulberry tree. There was nothing to trouble her. She watched as Aziz grew up, and her dreams grew with hi
m. He was a diligent student, and his success in school made her heart brim with pleasure.

  One winter night there was a windstorm. It snapped branches off the mulberry tree and ripped flowers from their beds. The earth dissolved into muddy pools beneath the downpour of rain. The family members huddled in their beds, trying to sleep.

  Aicha heard the rapping of claws on the door and voices like the howling of wolves in the mountains where she’d spent her childhood. She reached out to her husband sleeping beside her and cried out with all her might: “The wolves are coming for us, Sidi Mohammed!”

  Si Mohammed slept on and did not hear her strangled cry.

  An apparition of her son appeared before her, trembling as he ran. Behind him, a wolf bared its fangs. She awoke terrified and dripping with sweat. Her husband finally opened his eyes and asked: “Who’s knocking on our door in the middle of the night, and in this storm?”

  “Don’t answer them!” Aziz shouted, coming into their room dressed in his winter clothes and sneakers.

  “Weren’t you sleeping?” his father asked him in surprise.

  “The knocking woke me up. Don’t open the door for them, Father, it’s the police.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the police. They’ve come to take me away,” Aziz moaned.

  “But what did you do? What crime did you commit? They don’t show up in the middle of the night like this except to catch the most dangerous criminals. Tell me, son, what crime are you guilty of? When? Where? Answer me, I beg you.” His questions tumbled over one another while his son remained silent. He got out of bed and took him by the hand. “Tell me what happened, child, so I know what I should do.”

  “I’ve committed no crime, Father,” Aziz whispered.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I dreamed, Father. I only dreamed. I dreamed of clean bread, and a new suit of clothes for everyone on Eid, and notebooks and pens for all the children.”

  Bewildered, Mama Aicha was blotting at the tears streaming from her eyes with the hem of her nightgown. She tried to speak, but her words were choked. Aziz pressed his palms to her face, brushed away her tears, and kissed her cheek.

  The pounding at the door continued, becoming more violent. Aziz loosened her arms from around his neck. “Don’t be afraid, Mother . . . Don’t be afraid, Father. I won’t let them get me, I’ll run away.”

  The door couldn’t hold out long against their powerful fists. It soon gave way. Four men in black suits stomped across the threshold. Their chief led the way. To Mama Aicha, he looked like a wolf baring its fangs.

  He bellowed in a voice like thunder: “Where’s Aziz?”

  No answer.

  He repeated the question.

  No answer.

  He made a sign to the others behind him. In the blink of an eye, they spread out through the house, throwing wardrobes to the floor. Clothing scattered everywhere. They dug their claws into the furniture, ripping it open and sending the stuffing flying into the air. Aicha’s tears mixed with the rain pouring down into the open courtyard of the house. She asked herself, What can my son Aziz have hidden in the furniture? How could he hide a weapon when a moth’s death makes him cry?

  One of the men returned from Aziz’s room. “We found notebooks decorated with a rising sun, and these are the colored pens that were used to draw them.”

  His mother returned to asking questions no one heard: “Drawings . . . since when is this a crime? And colored pens as well?”

  The skinny, mean-faced man who seemed to be their leader ordered them to handcuff the father. They would hold him hostage until the fugitive son surrendered himself. They blindfolded him and threw him into a black car that took off like an arrow.

  Mama Aicha tried to leave the house, but the agent who had been left behind to watch her blocked her way.

  Time passed slowly. A terrible desperation arose in her chest. The seconds seemed like months, and the hands on the clock did not move. Who would hear the sound of her voice? Was there another mother anywhere on this earth afflicted by such a calamity? Who would bring her news of her son? Of her husband?

  She sobbed and sobbed. She wandered aimlessly through the house. She pounded on the walls with both hands and shouted. Perhaps her friend Zahra would hear her. She could shout! This was the first positive thing to come from this ordeal. She had discovered that she possessed a mouth that could raise its voice.

  Si Mohammed returned after a two-day absence, which felt like an eternity. He wept bitterly. He didn’t hide his tears from his wife. Mama Aicha cried out when she saw him, and a wail escaped her: “No! No, don’t tell me they got him!”

  “Aziz couldn’t escape,” he told her. “They had security forces and spies on every road. I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth, leaving lines on the pavement. He opened his eyes. He saw me struggling desperately to get to him and embrace him, and the guards restraining me as I tried to throw myself on him and take him in my arms, to erase the whip marks on his chest.”

  “Did he speak? What did he say to you?”

  “He said in a strong voice, Don’t cry, Father. Don’t be sad. I won’t die. I’ll return . . . I’ll return.”

  * * *

  Mama Aicha waited for the return of her son. The first month passed, then a second and a third. There was no news. She decided to leave the house and track him down on her own.

  Her friend Zahra asked her: “Where will you look for him, Aicha, my dear? Neither you nor I know the streets and alleys of Marrakech. Who will help us pick up his trail?”

  “I’ll go to the fortune-tellers in Jemaa el-Fnaa. Will you come with me, Zahra? Perhaps one of them can tell us of Aziz’s fate, or point us in the right direction.”

  Each woman put on a djellaba and pulled a veil over her face. They headed for Jemaa el-Fnaa Square. Mama Aicha’s steps faltered and she stopped, amazed and confused, in the middle of the square. Loud voices. Music. Singing. Prayers. Curses. Brazen laughter. Dirty words. Bodies pressing against each other in the throng. A male body attached itself to her from behind. My mother pulled her firmly away by the hand and turned toward the tall figure wrapped in an old winter djellaba. Like all the rest of them, he was hiding his face beneath the djellaba’s hood. They came to Jemaa el-Fnaa to rub up against the behinds of women in the crowd. “Goddamn you,” my mother said, uncertainty in her tone. Mama Aicha, for her part, although she was so worried about her son that she could scarcely think about what was happening to her body, was on the verge of collapse from the excessively crowded space and the feelings of shame and humiliation.

  They sat down in front of the first fortune-teller they saw. She asked Mama Aicha: “Am I reading your fortune or is there a man in your life whose secrets you need me to tell you?”

  “Neither. I only want to know where my son is.”

  The fortune-teller looked at her cards for a long time, and then said: “Your son was bewitched by a woman and is lost to you.”

  Mama Aicha went to another fortune-teller and the same exchange was repeated with only slight differences. It seemed to the two women that the fortune-tellers of Jemaa el-Fnaa were all programmed to say that women were a source of temptation and evil, and therefore that they would not find the solution they sought here. A woman who had been watching them instructed them to go to a fortune-teller who appealed to a higher power. Her hut was near the shrine of Moul el-Ksour, one of the seven saints of Marrakech. She was famous throughout the city and beyond for the accuracy of her visions. When the woman realized that the two friends did not know where the shrine was, she offered to accompany them.

  The fortune-teller was very thin and tall. Her bug-like eyes squinted toward each other, with the pupil on the right swiveling left and the pupil on the left looking right. Were it not for the nose protruding between them, they would have run together to become a single horrible eye. Mama Aicha prayed to God to protect her when she beheld this ugl
y creature. The woman who had guided them told them that the fortune-teller had once been beautiful and charming, until one day the prince of the jinn noticed her and fell in love with her. He made her deformed so that no other being would desire her. To compensate her for the loss of her womanly beauty, the cost of his selfish love for her, he revealed to her all the secrets of the world beyond, and lifted the veils from her sight.

  The fortune-teller asked Mama Aicha why she had come.

  “My son has disappeared, ma’am, and I want you to show me the way to him.”

  The fortune-teller lit incense and sprinkled the room with rose water. She invoked the names of the kings of the jinn and the righteous among men and uttered other words that they didn’t understand. She reached inside a small cupboard covered with a fine green shawl, and she took from it a wooden box painted with a lustrous yellow coating. Inside it were sand and seashells and agate-colored grains of coral. She placed it in front of her and put her hand in the sand. She moved her lips as though she were reciting something to herself, and her eyes flicked rapidly in opposite directions. A terrible fear crept into the hearts of the two friends when they heard sounds like the echo of cannons emerge from the belly of the fortune-teller, who suddenly opened her cavernous mouth wide and said in a harsh voice: “The cards . . . the cards. Yes, My Lord, the cards . . .” She scattered the playing cards in front of her but did nothing to halt the unsettling sound emanating from her abdomen. “Is your son wearing a state uniform?” she asked.

  Mama Aicha rejoiced and answered immediately, “Yes,” because she knew that a prisoner had his regular clothes taken from him and exchanged for a special prison suit.

  “Was your son riding in a vehicle?”