by Yasin Adnan
After a long discussion with my sister, I decided to leave my mother’s house. I would try to rebuild from the rubble accumulating inside me, to start afresh. To fashion a character and a life that might be suitable for motherhood: I wanted the child to be proud of me one day. But for now he would stay with my sister. She had a job, a tough one, and a house and car; independent and strong, she lived alone. The idea was hers from the beginning. She was wiser than me, and so much more patient. I left my son in her care, and though I did feel cowardly and selfish, I could already taste the breeze of freedom. It wasn’t hardness of heart—or was it? I thought I had a reason to live, a reason to challenge the world, to prove to everyone and to myself that I was worthy of respect, to return to give my son a life of pure light. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps these are excuses, attempts to tint the blackness of my memory, or to deny the things I can’t bear to face. Perhaps.
* * *
My friend Boushra got me a job in the Mamounia Casino and I moved with her into a small flat in Saada, on the road to Casablanca. Those new districts bore little trace of the city aside from the accents of some of their inhabitants, most of whom actually came from other cities or countries. The world took on new colors, as if I were in a city other than the one I grew up in. I worked nights, sometimes both days and nights. And along Red Beach, a kilometer outside of Marrakech, I was introduced to a vampire people. They gambled with their lives. I saw gay men and lesbians walking around unmolested, high-class sex workers on the lookout for dollars, euros, rials, dinars, and winning tickets, fluent in every language. I saw a people driven by desire, pleasure, money, adrenaline. And I saw the dregs upon whom the rich wiped their feet, and their other things. Climbers awaiting their prey, screwing whomever had anything to offer. In that period, I became friends with DJ Anas. From time to time I would go to his club, Theatro Marrakech, heading directly for the sound booth. I’d sit with him and watch from behind the glass while we smoked hash. I looked out upon that world with perfect neutrality as the DJ wrote the fates of its bodies in music.
* * *
A year passed and I grew bored, weighed down under a rhythm that stretched without a horizon. I was tired. And I needed to figure out what I wanted to be. In the past I had always imagined for myself another character, creative and distinguished, and yet here I was, locked into a repeating scene, the lights dimmed. I decided to go back to my studies, though my desire for that soon started to suffocate me. Even so, it didn’t take too much preparation. I moved to Casablanca after I’d figured out a living situation with Salma, another friend from those days of revolutionary dreaming. Soon after I arrived I found work in a translation agency. Not much pay, but enough to cover rent and food and cigarettes.
It was hard to get used to the new rhythm, and I waited anxiously for the beginning of the semester, when I would register to begin my BA in English literature. One ordinary weeknight I passed by Mohammed V Street and had a beer in a bar called Petit Poucet, in the courtyard of one of those colonial buildings that had always felt strangely familiar to me. It just so happened that a literary group was meeting that night to honor a Moroccan poet, dead of course. I was enchanted by the scene, the atmosphere—especially because they’d brought along an old-timer to sing Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab in his husky voice, and to play on an oud, worn out from so many nights like these.
And I met him. A dream made real, a love story I will never be able to write. I knew him before I knew him. Of course this sounds absurdly romantic, but it could not be closer to the truth; it’s certainly truer than anything else I’ve known. I had never thought that I could make a man the focus of my whole world. And Samir was the older brother of my old partisan comrade, unacknowledged by his father. What a world! Love at first sight, or rather the second. That hadn’t been the season for love. But this new evening gave us an excuse to begin the tale.
A week later I moved in with him, as if by prior agreement from long ago; as though he’d been waiting for me. We were married with uncanny speed. There was no need to wait, to get to know each other. We soon learned what the other liked and disliked. I was dynamic, eager, quick to yearn and to love. I loved to immerse myself in him. Samir was sober, a lover of life, a rationalist—sometimes more than was necessary. He had a lot of experience with women, as I had with men. We were brought together by something I’d read about in romance novels, and which until I met him I thought was just ink on paper. Perhaps our story was not that surprising. I really don’t know.
* * *
My name is Sara. I’m thirty-two years old. I’m getting my doctoral degree in social sciences at the University of Chicago on a scholarship. The story above is not my own.
Alice, a friend of mine, was a resident doctor at Amerchich Hospital, an institution that resembled nothing so much as a prison. All patients who were considered a danger to others were taken to Amerchich, to this secret medical facility in what had once been the suburbs, but which had quickly become central once the Cadi Ayyad University was built in the seventies, not far from the building. A dirty and ancient hospital. There was a special wing there for mentally ill patients, and another for skin disease; internal injuries were covered too. And so it wasn’t uncommon for the newspapers to report, every now and then, news of the suicide of one of its inhabitants. Alice specialized in mental illnesses, and so she found herself there, at the Amerchich hospital in Daoudite. Her parents were French but she was Marrakechi through and through.
I had made a habit of visiting her there over the last three years, whenever I came to the city. And one day I met Iman for the first time. Alice was making her daily rounds with the patients. She walked among the dried-up trees in the garden, greeting the lost souls there, people who would talk to themselves all night in a fog of questions and names and images. It was winter and there was a light rain. Our Gauloises cigarettes burned out fast; I shared mine with the wind. And that day in the garden I saw Iman. As if she had stepped out of an old film. Everything was bleak. She appeared to me between the trees like some dreadful corpse: body frail, back bent. She was dressed in a long black coat and her movements were slack. I could hear her humming an old Oriental tune, a classic, one of those songs that you think you don’t recognize until you realize that of course you know it well. When she turned, I stopped still. Her face was a pirate’s map, its length and width scarred in grooves scraped down to the muscle. When she saw me and realized my terror, she turned her face away quickly, groping at it as if reminded of its horrors. Then she hurried away.
I felt guilty, my stomach prickling. I knew this was nothing I hadn’t encountered before, and yet I’d been unable to keep myself from feeling fear and disgust. “Wait! Please wait!” She stopped but did not turn around. I paused two paces behind her. “What’s your name?” I asked hesitantly.
She was silent a moment. “Iman,” she eventually replied, in a whisper. As if she weren’t quite sure.
I stepped closer to her. She was hanging her head like she wanted to bury it in her chest.
She asked for a cigarette and I fumbled for the pack in my pocket.
“Gauloises,” she muttered. “Taste like burning hay.” Then she smiled. I tried to avoid eye contact, gazing over her head so as not to unsettle her. She smoked her cigarette away from my prying eyes, sitting at the foot of some stairs that led to a door that looked like it hadn’t been opened in a while. She took out a handkerchief from her pocket and laid it beside her. I stood in place for a second before I understood that it was for me, an invitation to sit with her. Something in her voice transported me to Tchaikovsky and Swan Lake. Something in her silence and her hesitation rendered me numb.
With some urging, Alice would tell me Iman’s story. I didn’t believe it at first. I thought my friend the doctor was trying to tease me—to titillate me, as a reader of novels, as a social scientist. But it was true. Iman had lost her memory. She didn’t know who she was. Her relatives did, but she wouldn’t put up with their visits, so her sist
er seldom came. She’d just sit with her a little while and then be off. They had brought her to the sanatorium seven years ago, when she was in a bad way. She cried all the time and wouldn’t speak. The scars on her face had just healed. Often she stayed huddled in her bed, face to the wall. She tried to kill herself several times, but as Alice said: “Death keeps postponing her.”
Alice knew Iman well. “She speaks very elegant French,” she told me. “But her English is immaculate—you’d think she’d spent years in the UK.”
Of all the sanatorium inhabitants, Alice was closest to Iman, to the extent that she almost no longer considered her a patient. “Quite often,” she added, “I’ll find myself talking to her about the things that bother me.”
As I sat near Iman, she began asking me about who I was and why I had come to the hospital. She knew even the most fleeting of the visitors, from the families of other patients to the transients who came in from time to time to be seen by the doctors. I told her I was a friend of Alice’s. “And a friend of mine also,” she said, grinning. I must have worn my emotions on my face—I couldn’t hide them—lighting one cigarette after another, as Iman was quick to point out.
“Are you smoking like that out of embarrassment? Or is it fear?” It didn’t sound like a question. She was making an observation and trying to calm me. Oh, how terribly strange it was!
We were quiet for a little while, but then she began to sing. Within seconds I felt a warmth wash over me, dispelling my unease. But it was a curious thing: Iman sang as if she were trained. Her performance was technically proficient. She kept rhythm with a small stone which she beat against the steps, a delicate movement, almost soundless. It was more curious still that she sang no wrong notes. Perhaps it was her extreme sensitivity that prompted her to explain in French: “Wrong notes avoid me.”
Even though I was there on holiday then, I ended up visiting the sanatorium every day. I would spend all afternoon listening to Iman’s tales. I was lulled by her voice as if by sweet wine, and her powers of storytelling astonished me. She knew almost every patient in the hospital and sketched their profiles brilliantly. Once she spent a whole afternoon telling me about the Algerian woman Fatima who had owned an art gallery in Tangier. She’d had a French education par excellence. “She speaks like a Parisian,” Iman said. She had a passion for contemporary pieces and installations. And as I listened to Iman I realized that she had been affected by Fatima, or at least by her knowledge of art. Since I don’t have Iman’s brilliance for detail, I remember little of Fatima’s story, except that her husband declared himself bankrupt and she was left with terrible debts after he fled to Spain. He told no one, not even his wife, his companion of thirty years, about where he was going. After that his possessions were seized, including the house and the gallery, which had been jointly owned. And when she had nothing left, she was forced to sell her stake in the gallery in order to pay rent and for treatment in a private sanatorium for her twenty-seven-year-old son Fahad, who had suffered severe depression after his father’s flight. Months passed, and after several failed attempts Fahad succeeded in taking his own life. They found him hanging in the sanatorium bathroom. Fatima, unable to withstand all that had befallen her, decided to follow in her son’s footsteps. By her good luck, or bad, her sister was visiting that same day. She arrived before the worst could happen. “Although,” Iman said, “I can hardly imagine worse than what Fatima had already lived through up until then.” Things went on this way for ten years, and Fatima was still no better. It was her sister in Marrakech who brought her to Amerchich. (Were a sister’s words law in this place?)
As the holiday came to its end I felt a strange tightness in my chest. I had quickly gotten used to Iman’s companionship; there was much of me in her. Or rather, to be more accurate, I resembled her. I was endlessly surprised that this woman could forget who she was while at the same time remember other people’s stories so precisely, and so much of what she had read: poetry, literature, music, history, philosophy. Perhaps she had a reason. Before leaving, I immediately knew what gift I should give her: five novels from Shatir, the bookstore in Gueliz, a beautiful diary with a leather cover, and some pencils. Alice said I’d fallen in love with her. And I think I had fallen, into the snare of her unknowability. Perhaps if I’d heard her story beforehand I wouldn’t have been drawn to her. We hugged warmly. I promised to visit her when I came back from America. She, in return, promised me she would write in the diary all the tales she hadn’t yet told me so we could read them together on my return.
* * *
I spent the full year in America—in the department of social sciences at the University of Chicago, and in libraries. Every time I entered a library I remembered Iman and her passion for reading; I often lay down at night to chase after her voice in the depths of my soul. A whole year passed in which I spoke to Alice on the phone only a couple of times. I was busy with the final draft of my thesis. Alice said that Iman had gotten better. She toured Amerchich daily with her pen and her diary, even helping the other patients with her “parallel treatment sessions,” listening to them for hours, telling them stories and singing to them. At the end of the year I booked my return ticket to Marrakech. I was excited: I had played out a hundred conversations in my head. I imagined dozens of stories. And I waited so eagerly to see Iman.
I arrived at the end of October. And though I was almost overwhelmed with exhaustion, I dreamed of her. Early the next morning I left Hotel Riad Mogador in Gueliz and walked to the Marché Central. I bought a bunch of beautiful roses, thinking Alice and Iman could give them out among the patients. I didn’t call Alice that morning to tell her that I was coming. I felt like a child—I wanted to give her and Iman a joyous surprise.
When I arrived at the hospital, I looked around for Iman. I couldn’t find her. I reached Alice’s office and waited outside while she dealt with the father of a patient. When I opened the door to greet her, she saw me and her face turned white. An odd fear overtook me. I took a step back. At last I went inside, quickly, and shut the door behind me.
Alice was not a demonstrative woman, but she hugged me very warmly that day. More warmth than even a long absence merited. Like someone apologizing for something. Like someone trying to calm an oncoming storm. Iman had killed herself two weeks before my return: death had not postponed her this time. When no one expected it, late at night in bed, she had sliced open the arteries of her wrists. With a marker she had written her last words on her arms. When they found her in the morning the bed was drenched in blood, tears black with makeup weaving tracks across her face, long like the rays of the night. That’s how I imagined her face. How had it happened? I couldn’t understand. How could she commit suicide when she had begun to recover, to settle down? Why should Iman die when she had such capacity to bring joy?
Questions jumped inside me. Iman was no relation of mine, and our friendship was not even long—it had been a month, at best, but that had been enough to send me into mourning now for her strange and extraordinary spirit. Perhaps I had needed a character like her in my life. A personality like that, breathtaking, an unknowable thing. Alice handed me Iman’s diary with a little note affixed to it: I hope you find these stories pleasant. I have missed the surprise of your heart, and of our meetings.
For three days I didn’t leave my hotel room. I thanked the chambermaids from behind the door and asked them to come back later. I had armed myself with two bottles of Absolut and some Marlboros from the duty free. And my best weapon was my weakness. Each time I opened the diary and began to read, Iman’s voice dragged me to a place where time stopped. It was a painful journey through those events and places. She remembered who she was. She remembered her son Selim, who had turned fourteen this year: He must be quite a handsome boy now. She remembered her beloved Samir, who had left her because she betrayed him on a whim. She remembered how she had returned to Marrakech, grieving and defeated, planning to take her son away to spend some time with him. I was broken. You could alm
ost see the cracks in me. Between guilt and sadness, failure and remorse, all my feelings were struggling inside me. And I was trying to keep them away, forever. Hash was the only thing that put a stop to this bleeding from my soul, and the only thing that made it worse.
Iman’s sister refused to allow her son to accompany her to Casablanca where she rented a room in a friend’s apartment. Iman understood her sister’s position. There was no evil intent there: she simply thought Iman was in a state in which she could not take care of a child, given that she was constantly smoking hash. That night Iman went out and met a friend. They went to a Tashfin bar close to Colisée Cinema. She drank a lot and smoked until the fog obscured her vision. They hung out in a car until five thirty in the morning. How could I think of going home at that hour? I wasn’t thinking, or I wouldn’t have done it. Her sister confronted her when she got back, accusing her of negligence. Iman was drunk and high, almost broken, and she slapped her sister. When she slapped me back, I didn’t stop to look at what I had done. I just felt that I had inside me some ungovernable anger that was going to tear out of me like a missile. Unfortunately, it hit my sister.
The following morning, Iman was determined to take Selim away. He began to get his things together to leave, but her sister was even more determined to stop her. When Iman realized it was impossible she grew violent and aggressive: she swore at her sister, and at a cousin who happened to be visiting, and they ended up having to restrain Iman, tying her hands and feet and gagging her to stop her screams. Iman’s eyes remained on the child the whole time as he begged his grandmother not to call the psychiatric clinic. “Wallah, nothing can help your mother but Amerchich!” Iman’s mother screamed.
Amerchich: not just the name of a neighborhood in Daoudiate. Not just a hospital for a particular class of illness. It was a curse. In Marrakech, Amerchich was the kind of insult you hurled at someone to accuse them of both foolishness and insanity, of being unable to live with other people—with well-adjusted, normal people. And it was Iman’s bad luck that her mother had been a nurse before she retired. Naturally, she had contacts at Amerchich.