Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

  * * *

  The phone rang. It was Aziz.

  “Hi, Aziz. I’ve arrived, my friend. I’m in Jemaa el-Fnaa now. I just parked my car. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  I wandered around the café looking for Aziz, but I didn’t see him. I stopped in the middle of the room and dialed his number, only to have his voice speak to me from a table right beside me. I saw an old man with haggard features and white hair searching my face as he tried to smile. But I didn’t know him. I approached him to ask him about Aziz. Maybe this was a friend of his. Maybe Aziz was in the bathroom and he would return in a moment. Instead, the old man raised his cloudy eyes to my face and addressed me by name: “At long last, Josef.” As he said this, he attempted to rise to embrace me. “At last.”

  Damn! It was him. He used to address me as Comrade Josef, and I would call him Azizovitch.

  “You didn’t recognize me, Yusuf? I’ve changed that much?”

  What? Changed? You’re a completely different person, my friend. A person I don’t know. A different face. Features I don’t recognize. Only the voice still resembles the old Aziz, I thought. “What did they do to you, my friend, during all those years you spent in prison?”

  “I don’t remember anymore, Yusuf,” he whispered. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t like to remember. Nothing makes me suffer now except the pain that my condition causes my mother and father when they see death creeping slowly over my body. If you only knew how hard Mama Aicha fought to get me out alive, Josef. Yes, if only you knew.”

  “I do know, my friend. My mother told me all about Mama Aicha’s determination, alongside the mothers and wives of the other political prisoners. How they pressured the regime and embarrassed it in front of the international community before they were able to wring out a blanket pardon for their sons and husbands. Mama Aicha and her companions were behind many changes that this country has seen. When I was in Japan, I used to follow the news from here almost daily, before the Internet—and after. The justice-and-reconciliation initiative that brought about your release, along with the adoption of guidelines for making financial reparations to former detainees—this is what opened the airports and the borders to us.” I was proud that something good had come out of the tragedy. “But I didn’t come back right away. It was as though I was afraid of seeing you—all of you. I dreaded the moment when my eyes would meet yours. You especially, comrade.”

  “Oh, my friend . . . whatever was in my eyes has been extinguished forever. You have nothing to fear from them. Forget your friend Aziz. He’s only a ghost now. Let’s go see your second mother, Aicha. She’s waiting for us with a seven-vegetable couscous she made in your honor.”

  * * *

  Mama Aicha greeted me with a warm hug. She kissed me and kept kissing me as though I were a sweet child. Her eyes were shining. The house was just as it had been when I left it. Flowerpots still surrounded the courtyard. The mulberry tree was still ripening. Mama Aicha seemed younger than her son. She must have been around fifty-four by now. Were it not for the traces of sadness that lingered in the depths of her eyes, I would have said that she had not changed. She was as radiant and pure as she had been when I last saw her twenty years before.

  I handed her my gift, wrapped in rose-colored cellophane paper. She removed the paper with a huge smile. “Cloth made from the purple silkworm. Organdy. My first dream. This is wonderful, Yusuf, my son. How fine and beautiful it is. This is cloth for a sultaness, Aziz. I’ll take it to the tailor tomorrow, and within a month at most he’ll make me a dress from it. When will you get married, Aziz? When will you get married, my son? I want to wear it in your honor.”

  Translated from Arabic by Anna Ziajka Stanton

  PART III

  Outside the City’s Walls

  Frankenstein’s Monster

  by My Seddik Rabbaj

  Sidi Youssef Ben Ali

  Marrakech is known for its seven patrons; we call it the city of the Seven Saints. Devout visitors all make the same pilgrimage from one mausoleum to the next, exploring the most intimate corners of the medina. This peregrination begins with the shrine to Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, born Abou Yacoub Senhaji, the revered sage who chose to live outside the walls of the Red City until his death in the year of the hegira 593—more than a century after the capital of the Almoravids was built. It was because he had leprosy that he secluded himself, even digging a deep cellar where he could pray in isolation. Little did the holy man know that a community would form around this place in his honor, growing with the centuries to become Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, a neighborhood defined not only by its borders—it’s situated in the zone between the city and its suburbs—but also by the character of its inhabitants. Anywhere in Marrakech, when you introduce yourself as a son of Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, people react with an odd mixture of admiration and suspicion. These “sons” are known for their street smarts: they are cunning almost to the point of crookedness.

  Long after his death, the saint continued to watch over his children, preparing them for life by instilling in them a certain self-sufficiency. Here, especially to the north, near the sanctuary, we start to earn our keep at an early age. Several businesses have sprouted up around the marabout’s tomb and we all take part in them, we children of the neighborhood. We begin by selling candles in front of the sanctuary, around the age of nine. Poor women who can’t afford to buy a full packet as an offering to the saint are content to bargain for a few of the singles that M’kadma, the sanctuary guard, collects and gives us to resell. This business allows us kids—and our supplier—to go home at night with a bit of cash in our pockets. And just as in ancient Rome, when slaves gradually accumulated wages to put toward their emancipation, this modest savings lets us buy our freedom. Our parents leave us to our own devices. We look after ourselves from childhood—or, rather, the saint looks after us.

  As we grow up we take on new responsibilities. We become porters, not of luggage but of children—two- and three-year-olds, usually—who we carry down to a sort of underground hovel. We lock the child in there alone for a long while, listening with satisfaction as their screams pierce the darkness. Our saint is known all over the city for his power to cure fitful babies. Mothers bring their little ones who suffer from this particular curse—toddlers who cry for no reason, to the point of seeming possessed—and leave them with one of us. Our task is to place the ailing child in the hands of the saint before bolting up the stairs like a cat, leaving him or her lost in the blackness of the narrow cellar as if at the bottom of a well. The child wails and wails with all its might, and soon rids itself of its affliction.

  In the summer we sell jujubes to the tourists visiting the shrine. It’s the same fruit we give to children instead of candy, and we also use it to treat coughs. In almost all our families we make it into a jelly that we store for the winter. Summertime is the season we love the most. There’s the school vacation, and we also earn good money. We pick the fruit in the Bab Ghmat Cemetery and sell it near the sanctuary in the afternoon.

  Our mornings aren’t without fun. The cemetery becomes our playground, the ideal setting for our favorite game: hide-and-seek. An endless number of hiding places offer themselves to the connoisseur of this place. There are wild plants and jujube trees sometimes as tall as men, graves exposed by erosion and deep craters of mysterious origin. You would think meteorites had carved them out.

  We have a tacit agreement never to let pieces of the dead lie around outside their graves. As soon as we find a shoulder blade, a tibia, a fibula, a phalanx, a rib, a skull, or any bone of the human body, we bring it to a designated hole in the ground that must be either an emptied grave or one of those craters of the necropolis. We have no idea who left the first bone in this place, but we continue to repeat the gesture as if it were our duty, a religious act or a ludicrous rite of passage for frequenters of the cemetery.

  Here, in the summer, we become freer than in any other place. We roam the cemetery’s overgrown pathways, doing thing
s we can’t do anywhere else: chasing stray dogs, talking to birds, masturbating in groups. We indulge in secret eccentricities, no longer inhibited by traditions and rules we don’t understand.

  This is also the time of the year when we go to el-Hilal cinema. After the mausoleum closes we return home for dinner, bringing a watermelon, a cantaloupe, some peaches, or any other seasonal fruit, or simply a few dirhams to slip into our mothers’ hands. This contribution is obligatory as soon as we start to earn money. What we give to the household is always proportional to what we’ve made. After dinner we’re free to come and go as we please. When you’re a son of Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, you can revel in your freedom day and night. Usually we go in groups to see the double feature—most often kung fu and Bollywood movies—but if we’re short on cash we can resell our ticket to some other penniless filmgoer after the first show, and go out and buy a snack.

  Once I went with some friends to the late-night screening and, bizarrely, a different sort of film was showing that night. It was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Stefano Massini, based on the Mary Shelley novel. The story tells of Dr. Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque monster without a name or a family, a being built from the parts of several corpses, one who revolts against his maker and becomes capable of terrible crimes.

  We didn’t need much French in order to understand the film; the images were eloquent enough on their own. We watched the events unfold before us, hunching forward in our seats. At the moment when the monster runs straight toward the camera and seems to want to jump through the screen, the electricity cut out. Voices rang out from all around the room—cries of protest at first, but then of fear and panic. We had no idea what was happening. Had the monster in fact come out from behind the screen to spread all this chaos and confusion, or was it the terror the film had awoken in us that made it seem so? We were used to these prolonged blackouts in Sidi Youssef Ben Ali—they often happened at wedding ceremonies and other important occasions, but never had a blackout seemed as strange to me as at that moment. I clung to a friend and tried to follow the line of spectators weaving their way through the crowd to the exit. I jumped at the slightest contact with other people, and could sense that my friend did too.

  * * *

  The next morning, as usual, we started the day by picking jujubes. We were hard at work when a friend came by to tell us that the bones we’d recently collected in the crater had disappeared. We stared at each other in silence. Cinema el-Hilal was directly opposite the Bab Ghmat Cemetery. We of course assumed the film must somehow be connected to the disappearance of the bones. Had they been cobbled together, like Dr. Frankenstein’s body parts, to form a single being? Or was it the monster who had climbed the wall to seek shelter in the necropolis? Did he feed on human bones? A thousand questions flashed through our minds, distracting us from the work we’d begun.

  “Look! Look!” a fearful voice cried out. An arm pointed to a large creature, seemingly human, but of exaggerated proportions. He was tall and very thin, with a tuft of hair at the top of his head, and dressed all in rags—mostly old djellabas whose tattered ends flapped behind him like wings. Slowly but surely the heavy footsteps approached us. At this hour, the cemetery was usually empty. Neither gravediggers nor the tolba—the Koranic scholars who come to recite verses to soothe the souls of the dead—ever show any sign of life before nine o’clock. We knew them all, for that matter, and by their first names. And so the creature there among the dead, on that morning, was a stranger. The moment we realized this, we ran out from the shade of the jujube trees like a flock of wild birds chased by a predator. We took off toward the exit, paying no attention to the graves we trampled over, nor to the thorny plants that scratched our ankles. We left our harvest behind us, abandoning the only place where we felt truly at ease.

  We described what we’d witnessed to all the children in the neighborhood, connecting it to Frankenstein. A few of them who hadn’t yet seen the film climbed the cemetery wall to get a look for themselves before returning glassy-eyed, pale, barely able to nod to confirm the existence of this bizarre creature who resembled a human yet wasn’t quite one.

  Over the next few days, the news quickly spread throughout Sidi Youssef Ben Ali. Our parents were the first to voice their concerns. They were afraid for us, yes, but also worried that they might be deprived of our necessary help. We’d been out of work since the incident: the cemetery, our training ground in the jujube business, was now off-limits. We no longer dared set foot in that earthly paradise, not at any time of day or night. Not one of us was capable of facing the terror that took hold as soon as we thought of it. We kept visiting the saint every day, we prayed for him to set us free from the monster, but we would return home with empty pockets. We weren’t yet old enough to sell candles, or to bring little children down to the cellar near the saint’s tomb; at our age, selling jujubes was the only job we could do.

  The adults in the neighborhood were growing increasingly concerned about the monster’s presence. One of the gravediggers claimed to have seen a bizarre creature in the cemetery that spoke to no one and hid there all day long. We wondered what he ate, how he survived, how he spent all those hours in this place of absolute rest.

  “We can’t keep our children away from there forever,” the parents agreed. And so they went to the district’s police chief to report the existence of a creature in the neighborhood, an inhuman creature—Frankenstein’s monster. They didn’t dare say the name, even if some were sure of it, for fear of being mocked.

  The police chief reassured our parents, promising them to put Inspector Chaloula on the case. Everyone in the neighborhood feared Chaloula. He knew all of us, right down to the ants that circulated in his territory, and even then he could tell the males from the females. When Chaloula was in charge of a case, he refused to sleep until it was solved. Our parents were satisfied, for they knew very well what Chaloula was capable of. The inspector was glad too, as he sensed this case would bring his reputation up another notch. But no one could have predicted what happened next.

  * * *

  Once he’d been briefed on his new mission, Chaloula went home to lunch. His plan was to have his squad burst into the cemetery early the next morning; this way, they would surprise the creature in his sleep. But around two o’clock, as he was walking along the cemetery wall on his way back to work, Chaloula doubled over as if he’d been shot. A few people saw and ran to help him, trying to pry his hands from his stomach and wipe away the foam coming out of his mouth as if he were a rabid dog, but their efforts were in vain. His soul had left his body to join the others behind the wall, his bulging eyes fixed on the necropolis.

  The mysterious death of Chaloula terrorized the entire neighborhood, not to mention the police chief, who felt his own end approaching. He spent the whole night awake, tossing and turning, horrible images flashing through his mind. He no longer feared for himself but for his children; he was tormented by the thought that some harm would come to them.

  The next day, before Chaloula’s burial, the chief brought his entire unit together, including the sentinel, and, like a swarm of bees, they invaded the cemetery. They looked behind every gravestone and up every tree, left no crater unexplored, no bush undisturbed, but it was no use—the monster had vanished.

  One by one the chief called us into his office, all of us kids who’d seen the strange creature, and asked us to tell him about it. We all related the same story and described the creature in the same manner. He was able to accept that our monster was more than two meters tall—but that he’d escaped from behind the screen at el-Hilal cinema to go live in the Bab Ghmat Cemetery, or that he was somehow made from the bones we’d collected in the crater, seemed highly improbable to him. And yet, something in him began turning toward a supernatural explanation. He was Moroccan, after all, and he couldn’t shake off what he’d been taught from a young age: that the magical and the rational can and do coexist in our world.

  While he was investigating
Chaloula’s death, the chief got word that a strange creature had been seen in Bab er-Robb, the cemetery where Imam Abderahim Souhaili, one of the seven saints of the city, is buried. The description of this creature was nearly identical to the one we had given. And so the chief, escorted by two of his most trusted officers, rushed over to Bab er-Robb to arrest Frankenstein’s monster.

  This wasn’t an easy affair. The demon resisted, kicking and throwing punches in all directions. He was so agile that, for a moment, the chief thought he might actually have a supernatural being on his hands. But the men were finally able to corner him, get him into the car, and drive him to the Sidi Youssef Ben Ali station.

  As it turned out, this so-called monster was only a poor vagabond. A man who’d been so disappointed by the living that he now preferred the company of the dead.