by Yasin Adnan
Go to the nearest carpenter and convince him to make you a wooden sword. Buy new white clothes: a garment, turban, and slippers. Even the socks and underwear should be white. Purify yourself with reading the Koran, fasting, and praying. Start your fasting tomorrow and keep it up until God realizes something is taking effect. Stop by the cybercafé every three days to check your e-mail. We will let you know the next step in due time. May God protect you and guide your steps. Amen.
Every three days, Abu Qatadah visits the cybercafé, but in vain, only spending a few minutes there each time. At the café, the rumor is that he has stopped going to work. Rahal confirms to the other patrons that he has lost his mind.
Mahjoub dissociates himself from the maddening crowd, fully devoting himself to fasting, praying, and reciting the Koran in preparation for the holy e-mail. After more than a full month has passed, exclamations of “God is great!” can be loudly heard in Ashbal al-Atlas for a second time. Mahjoub is transfixed in front of the computer when the prophesied message pops up. Angel 8,723 finally appears, once again with extremely detailed instructions:
First, thank God for what He has predicted for us. Abu Qatadah, go to Jemaa el-Fnaa next Friday afternoon. Wear your new white clothes and unsheathe your wooden sword and carry your Koran under your arm. Once you are in the center, good servant, take out your Koran and pull out your sword and start shouting, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!” Then the miracle shall happen, God willing. Your wooden sword will be sharp and will cut ten heads; your Koran pages will turn into wings of light and will carry you slowly and become one of the winged horses of paradise. The blessed horse will fly high in the square and you will begin to reap the heads left and right. Your sword will harm only the indecent infidels and their careless hypocritical followers, but the righteous believers will not be hurt, God willing. This is your mission, message, and miracle, you good servant. Get to the holy war. See you Friday afternoon.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!” Mahjoub exclaims as he leaves the cybercafé.
Rahal laughs his head off. “It’s really happening: angels are calling the prayer up his ass! Check on Mahjoub, people. He’s really lost it.”
* * *
We can divide the youth of Hay el-Massira into two types: the locals and the newcomers. The latter are the ones who came to live in the neighborhood from the Old Medina, and who retain deep links to their original neighborhoods. Their families and childhood friends still live there, and it is normal that they stay in touch with them. As for the locals, they are the true neighborhood people, born and raised there in the late eighties and nineties. They only know Hay el-Massira. Some of the locals may leave their neighborhood for Daoudiate, where Cadi Ayyad University is, or Gueliz, where the cafés, restaurants, hotels, bars, and cinemas are, but they always return to the warm bosom of Hay el-Massira, while their experience of al-Moravid, al-Mohad, and al-Saadi Marrakech remains quite limited. They are not the crazy tourists who go to Jemaa el-Fnaa to take pictures of monkeys and snakes.
* * *
This time you have no choice, Qamar ad-Dine. You have to go. You need to be on-site to follow the last episode of the series. You have to be in the heart of the event.
Qamar ad-Dine arrives before ten. He crosses the huge Arset el-Bilk. The barouches are lined up next to the garden in perfect order, even the horses are well disciplined, calm, and barely moving. Maybe they anticipated a long day of wandering the streets of Marrakech, so they are saving their energy. The barouches’ owners are crowded in small groups around teapots and small plates of bissara, dried fava bean soup with olive oil. Qamar ad-Dine crosses the square, which is still empty of visitors and entertainers. He orders orange juice from one of the carts spread around its perimeter. The juice refreshes him. He walks around for a while, then goes up to the Argana Café. He orders a cup of coffee and he lingers upstairs, surveying the square from above. White clothes are not strange on Fridays. That is why Qamar ad-Dine doesn’t notice Abu Qatadah at first. But when hysterical screaming breaks out in the heart of the square, as people crowd around a crazy person brandishing the Koran and a wooden sword while shouting, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!” and threatening the enemies of God as infidels and hypocrites, Qamar ad-Dine rises to his feet as if he has been stung by a snake. He forgets to pay for his coffee. He runs downstairs and into the square to take a photo of his hero—no, Qamar ad-Dine, this is not the Mahjoub Didi you know. He has lost a lot of weight and his face looks stressed and pale, as if he hasn’t slept in days. The man is truly crazy, his eyes cloudy and distant, staring at the people in front of him without seeing them. “God is great!” he repeats, before continuing to rant and rave. Qamar ad-Dine distinguishes the words God the Almighty, Gabriel, Michael, and angel 8,723. Mahjoub announces the angel’s number in French as if he were talking to his colleagues at work about an electricity or water meter. No, Qamar ad-Dine, the man has gone far beyond the role you laid out for him.
Qamar ad-Dine panics. He wants to punish Mahjoub for his defamation with this trick. Perhaps pull his ear—no more and no less—but the man has lost it, Qamar ad-Dine. The man has lost it.
The police surround the square. It’s difficult to disperse the crowd. Visitors are enjoying the show, entertainment being the reason they come here in the morning and evening in the first place. And this is exceptional entertainment, unmatched by any of the halqas of dancers and storytellers. Fresh like the orange juice one gets from the carts around the square. Two journalists show up and begin to take pictures of the crazy man as he is arrested.
* * *
When Qamar ad-Dine walks past el-Massira Mosque on his way to the cybercafé, he hears Mr. Belafqih deliver the sermon. His brain is frazzled and he doesn’t pay it any attention. He thinks, They are all there listening in reverence: al-Sayouti, the teachers of Lycée Zerktouni, and Salim, who goes to the mosque only on Fridays. But Mahjoub Didi was not among them. For the first time Abu Qatadah has missed Friday prayer in the neighborhood mosque.
A tear runs down Qamar ad-Dine’s cheek. He thinks about going into the mosque to pray and seek forgiveness from God, but he can’t. So he proceeds toward the cybercafé. His face is pale and he feels weary. He tries to ignore everyone inside and bury himself in the first available PC. But the entire gang is there, crowded around one computer. Even the three Africans are among them.
“Come here, Qamar ad-Dine,” Samira calls out. “Come see the scandal!”
They are gathered around Rahal, watching a live video on Marrakech Press: a crazy Salafi is assaulting Jemaa el-Fnaa and terrorizing the tourists.
Translated from Arabic by Mbarek Sryfi
A Twisted Soul
by Karima Nadir
Amerchich
I don’t really know if I discovered life’s pleasures early on. Certainly I found the route to death ahead of time. I smoked my first cigarette on the roof of my friend Latifa’s house. We used to call her M’kirita, after the small cake glazed in honey, because she was so tiny for her age, with her pale chestnut hair and her hazelnut eyes. She lived in Mellah and was three years older than me; I was fourteen then. We bought five Marlboros, glancing around the whole time to make sure we hadn’t been spotted, and went up to the roof. It was autumn. We hid ourselves in an isolated corner and smoked, keeping keen eyes on the front door from above, so that we’d see when Latifa’s mother came home. The first drag of that first cigarette tasted like victory; of whom, over whom, I don’t know.
A year later, in the same corner, we smoked a joint I’d been given by my comrade Fattah. He was an undergraduate and I was a freshman in high school. After smoking half of it we stretched out on our backs, Latifa and I on the roof, laughing at anything and everything—until the laughter broke its hold over us a little and we let it go. We were writhing and squirming as though the very rays of the sun were tickling us. I didn’t become a true smoker until after I gave birth, but from the first time I tried hash I experienced a profound kind of pleasure. Later I would smoke wh
at Fattah gave me in installments: making, for every two drags, an attempt at poetry.
My son Selim, who is now seven years old, lives in Marrakech. I had him out of wedlock and in, so I thought, love. His father was a leftist—I adored his idealism: dreams of revolution, the cares of the proletariat, the Palestinian question, Guevara. I was a law school student back then, and had joined an organization on the far left. And since I loved poetry and literature and music, I turned easily into a dense bundle of romantic revolutionary attitudes. A year and a half into our relationship, I discovered I was pregnant. That revolutionary romance rendered abortion impossible: if I stole the right of this creature to life, I could never return to all those slogans I had recited so proudly, to myself and others, like sacred texts. I didn’t expect my partisan to evade his part of the responsibility—not he, who preached life as unending struggle! I had believed that in accordance with the ethics of the revolutionary, he would take a position of immediate gallantry. Instead he made it clear, over the phone, that this could not happen. He was not sure, indeed—he who mere seconds before had been glorifying my loyalty as his comrade—that he even had anything to do with my pregnancy, and said that I should call the real father. I resolved without hesitation to consider him dead. I would preserve his life for his successor.
* * *
One doesn’t picture a woman of nineteen carrying a child. She hides it away, after all, in her womb from her powerful mother, her conservative grandmother, in a society governed more by custom than law. All that matters is: What will the neighbors say? Hashouma! Shame! Still, I confronted my mother with it, but only after the end of the sixth month of a pregnancy that had been almost invisible. My body had barely changed and there was no sign of that telltale round belly below my breasts. I told my mother, and I convinced my sister, that I was prepared for everything required to raise a child. I made them both understand that if they tried to dissuade me, I would leave home at once and take refuge with a friend.
At that time I was working as a waitress in one of the guesthouses that had sprung up like mushrooms in the alleys of the Old Medina. The pay was low. But I was also giving lessons in French and English at a private school, and the salaries combined were enough to get by on, even with a child. I was determined to do this, as I had never been determined about anything in my life; I even seriously considered ending my studies. My mother only said, This is God’s will, and we’ll pay for it. My sister was silent—a speaking silence.
He visited me once, my partisan comrade, when I was three months pregnant. He called ahead to tell me he was at the Café de France in Jemaa el-Fnaa. I went to meet him still clutching a shred of hope, trying to tell myself he had been rash, that he regretted it. It doesn’t matter now. We drank our black coffee in near silence and then I took him to the Koutoubia Mosque. We smoked hash in the garden there and talked about mundane things, each of us evading a direct glance at the other, trying to dodge any mention of the pregnancy. When lunchtime came we went to Babylon Star Bar in Gueliz, not far from the Dawiya Bar. Babylon Star was one of those places that was difficult to comprehend—exactly what the situation required.
While I was on my fourth beer, I asked him drily, and without preamble: “Why did you come?” Later, upon leaving the bar, I realized I was stronger than this faltering comrade, who had stuttered as he searched for reasons to convince me to get rid of it, with, as he called it, a simple procedure. He’ll be biting his nails for years, I thought. Life would rattle and batter him, and guilt would deprive him of sleep.
During the months before the birth we slipped back into harmony with Marrakech, my fetus and I. I abandoned drinking and hash, and swapped my cafés for walking. Long, pondering walks. I wandered through Mowqaf Alley and Mouassine, Ksour and Riad Zitoun, and the little mass inside me each day came closer to life. I spoke to it a lot, telling it of my childhood and my adolescence, unfolding my dreams and desires. Once, as I passed by Arset el-Houta, memories of a spring day in 2000 came back to me like a dream. I’d snuck away from middle school that day, just for a while, with Yusuf, Ahmed, Fawzi, Hisham, and Said. I had always made friends with boys, they were better company. We took a trip to the Old Medina and ambled through its damp narrow alleys, shirking the sun that had dared to encroach on our spring. The smell of sewage was overpowering on the streets of Mellah, long since abandoned by its Jewish residents. And from Jinan Binshaqra we took the shortcut to Arset el-Houta, passing through Ba Ahmed Middle School and al-Farabi High School and the carpentry shops. In the midst of the vendors who rule the rest of that narrow space, we squeezed into an alley barely wide enough to fit a person. Fawzi pushed the door of one of the houses open and went in without knocking. Said and Hisham and the others followed. I wanted to go too, but Ahmed asked me to wait for them awhile, or to go back. This place was just for men.
They called the place Madam Kabora’s house, and would be received there in succession, to put their little pricks between the thighs of prostitutes their mothers’ ages in exchange for the dirhams extracted from them beforehand. I grew bored of waiting outside, so I went up. I found myself in a small hallway. There was a dirty table with a radio on it tuned to Radio Rabat, and I was taking in the vulgarity of the place when a voice, more vulgar still, addressed me: “What d’you want?”
I turned to see an obese woman waiting behind me, swathed in a kaftan and scarves. Her fingers were bare aside from a large gold ring. Unnerved, I approached the massive creature. I sat down beside her and told her, in a confused way, that I had come with my friends, and that I had to wait for them because I didn’t know the way back. In fact I was burning with curiosity. What was this place? Where were the boys? She said her name was Kabora and poured me a glass of tea. Without further introductions, and as naturally as if she were speaking with a grown woman, she began telling me about the troublesome police and the various other hardships of her life. I didn’t understand everything she said and I was baffled by that gruff voice, vibrating on like a tambourine.
After a few minutes the boys came running down. I smiled at Kabora and watched them without a word. They turned to me, perplexed. “What are you doing!?” they asked as one.
Cheerfully, I answered. “I met Kabora!”
* * *
Four years later, Hisham, my boyfriend through college, would tell me stories about Kabora, who lived next to his grandfather in Arset el-Houta. His aunt Safia hated her, claiming she brought disgrace to the whole neighborhood. He told me that Kabora housed girls from the Atlas Mountains and from Agadir and Safi, giving them food, shelter, and clothing, and putting them to work as prostitutes. Hisham also said he heard his father once tell his mother that Kabora had inherited the brothel from a glamorous aunt of hers who had, in the 1930s, been a concubine of Pasha el-Glaoui.
There were so many places I missed. As a child my father would take me around the ancient city on the back of his motorbike. I then infiltrated many of these places as a teenager, driven by a passion for discovery. The Sirsar Inn! I had heard my father telling my uncle its history. It had been a garage for cattle and trucks before it was sold by the guard employed by Sirsar’s son, Moulay Walid. The guard sold off the inn piece by piece for bottles of red wine and hash. Other times for dinner, or for someone to share his bed. After that, the place was colonized by carpentry workshops, metalworkers, bone carvers. Since most of the workmen were from another district, after using the workshops in the daytime they would often sleep there at night. Some of them married and had children, so the tight space grew even tighter and the inn gained another floor, creating conditions that perfectly defined the word slum. Cafés and grocery shops sprung up too. At six years old, I would travel with my father through the winding corridors of its lower level, dug out in all directions like dancing snakes, trailing behind him until we heard the sounds from the workshop growing louder.
Mr. Alal would always sit in a chair in front of his shop, his body draped in brown trousers, hands covered by the sleeves of a woolen r
obe that reached his knees. Mr. Alal had been a carpentry teacher. But after years of work, piling one rial on top of another, he got together enough to buy two more shops in the building. And then there were his two sons, who worked under his supervision. But his hands stayed perpetually busy, whether filling smoking pipes from a baggie or preparing a mashmouma, or bong. My father jokingly nicknamed him The Machine. Mr. Alal would greet us from his seat in his hoarse voice and would gesture at one of his sons to bring two chairs. We would sit, my father and I, in front of the shop and pull out a low wooden drum, upon which they would place the requisite teapot, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, and spare pipes. My father was always telling me what a healthy weed kif was for adults.
Mr. Alal was a round-faced man, thin, dark-skinned, with a thick beard, shaggy black hair, and bulging eyes. Pouring us tea, he would get up to call for donuts from Café Rubio in the alley. Inside the shop thrummed the harmonious rhythms of sawmill and hammer, along with music from the radio. It remains anchored in my memory like a first love, emerging and living still inside me years later: The leaf enchants its blowing or Tonight wine and desires sing around us / A sail that swims in the light watches over our shade—how could my young self have known the meaning of such lines? But I loved those songs. I was as used to hearing them as I was to smelling the smoke from that salutary plant.
* * *
Long walks were good for long musings. I shared with my fetus these thoughts and memories, as we also shared the smells and sights and rhythms of Marrakech.
Selim turned two. I had nursed him throughout, even though my nipples were flat; I bought artificial rubber tips from the pharmacy. What an invention! Every time I attached them and contemplated the sight, I burst out laughing. And when Selim was teething we stayed up watching television to drown out his cries.