by Mhani Alaoui
First published in 2015 by
Interlink Books
An imprint of
Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
46 Crosby Street
Northampton, Massachusetts 01060
www.interlinkbooks.com
Text copyright © Mhani Aloui, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic/digital means and whether or not transiently) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.
This is a work of pure fiction, and any resemblance between the characters and real people is unintended and purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alaoui, Mhani.
Dreams of Maryam Tair : blue boots and orange blossoms / by Mhani Alaoui. -- First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-56656-091-7 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PR9170.M53A53 2015
823’.92--dc23
2015014303
Cover illustration by Pam Fontes-May
Printed and bound in the United States of America
CONTENTS
I
Sheherazade and the Little Girl
Leila
Adam
Leila and Adam
The Myth of Adam, Lilith, and Maryam
The Lair
Zohra
Aisha and Ibrahim
The Garden
The House
Crossroads
Hamza
Birth
Three Gifts and a Curse
II
Rebellion
Sheherazade
Desire
Shawg and Adam
Fire and Water
Grand Tribunal
School
Perception
Disillusionment
Grand Tribunal
Yasmine
The Journey
Thought
Mourning
III
Departure
Grand Tribunal
Betrayal
Innernet
Shams and Hilal
Cain and Abel
Aisha
Heart
Al-Batina
Power and Shame
Revelation
Atlas Mountains
To my parents
I
Sheherazade and the Little Girl
The Old Woman is smoking a long wooden pipe. She is sitting with folded legs on a rock in the Atlas Mountains. Footsteps draw near, dragging her away from her dream-state. She raises her head. There, standing in front of her, with bright blue eyes and delicate frame, is a little girl. The Old Woman smiles.
“Here you are, my daughter.”
“Here I am, Old Mother.”
“I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”
“I’ve been looking for you all this time.”
“And now you are here, and we can begin. The story cannot wait any longer.”
“So we must begin. I’m listening, Old Mother.”
The Old Woman puffs and puffs on her pipe until the fumes penetrate her lungs and mind. She sets down the pipe, which continues to smoke and cough on its own. Though she is now a weathered woman who lives in a small house hidden in the rough North African mountains, she was once a great queen known to all as Sheherazade.
It is said that before the Old Woman became a great queen, she had been the mad king Shahriar’s bride. Shahriar was known to decapitate his brides the day after their wedding ceremony. But Sheherazade led Shahriar to forget about cutting off her pretty head. Every night, Sheherazade told Shahriar a story but stopped before the break of dawn. Little did the Sultan know that his new bride had an imagination forged in a cage of ice and gold, and that, in her mouth, words became bastions against his death-desire. “Kan ya makan...Once upon a time, there was...oh there was not,” she would begin every night. Night after night, for one thousand and one nights, Shahriar listened to Sheherazade’s stories and fell in love with them. Night after night, Sheherazade ended a story and began a new one, and night after night, he postponed her beheading. After one thousand and one nights, Shahriar married Sheherazade. And after one thousand and two nights, Shahriar died and Sheherazade became queen. She reigned for hundreds of years and brought prosperity to her people. But every night, she would sit by the window and look at the stars, moons, and planets, and dream of other worlds. Finally, one night, she mounted her steed, Silver Moon, and left the palace, never to be seen again. That is, until today, when a little girl finally finds her.
The Old Woman empties her pipe, throws the ashes into the air, and watches as they rise. Then she cradles the little girl in her arms and begins.
“Here is the story of Adam and Leila, and of their daughter, Maryam, a child most extraordinary, hidden in the folds of time and now about to be born. Listen to how she came to be and to the story without which you wouldn’t be here.”
She lowers her voice.
“Kan ya makan…Once upon a time, in Casablanca...”
Leila
Summers were always hot in Casablanca. And that summer of 1981, the summer of the Bread Riots, was one of the hottest the city had ever known. Wave upon wave of heat hit the city, the price of bread soared, and the balance tipped.
While the old Centre Ville tried to slumber through its remaining days, students and factory workers, dreamers and the unemployed raised their banners and voices in front of its white walls and gardens. They rose against a world that had forgotten about them. They left behind them their blackened homes in the slums and working-class districts, in the Old Medina, the Sultan’s Hub, the Prophet’s Cave, and in the Central Quarries, where nothing was ever mined, and they marched into the city. And so the city burned.
There was no joy and barely any hope in their uprising. In Casablanca’s streets, raw life was at stake. This was not a celebration of a world to come but a grim march against a failed way of life. And the riots—because this was Casablanca—were doomed to fail.
For this was a city where history surprised itself, a city that never saw a triumphant victory or a clear defeat. Grey were the days, years, and eras. Ups and downs, climaxes and nadirs were all suppressed under a monotonous rhythm that could kill time itself. Things simply disappeared or ceased to be relevant. Casablanca was a city of shades and shadows aspiring toward forgetfulness and dreamless sleep. Already, since that morning, the cracks on the elegant prewar buildings had deepened, and an ashen residue had settled on the facades. In a matter of hours, a dark green moss had grown on the newly formed crevasses. Soft and inviting from afar, the decaying Centre Ville had aged a hundred years in one day.
~
On that hot June day of 1981, at the height of the Bread Riots, Leila Nassiri had a vision. It seized her, moments after she stood in front of the window and stared at the gathering storm below. She saw the riots failing. She saw them quelled in blood and tears. Then she saw an old woman telling a story. The old woman beckoned to Leila and asked her to see behind the words. And behind the wall of words, Leila saw a little girl, a child whose destiny was unlike any other. Radically different and as old as the universe itself, she was a child with extraordinary powers and the ability to alter the course of worlds and stories. And Leila knew that this little girl had once been hers.
Leila emerged from the vision, drenched in sweat. She had trouble breathing and seeing. Her senses in disarray, she longed for fresh air and blue sky. This longing deepened into a nostalgia for happier, simpler days. She
put her fingers in her mouth and, closing her eyes, tasted the acrid bitterness of the orange rind and the sticky sweetness of the ripe orange. She braced herself for the brutality to come and mourned for a world she knew was already lost.
She picked up her black cigarette holder and lit a cigarette. Feeling stronger, she walked slowly, barefoot, around the apartment. The wooden floor creaked lazily as she paced back and forth.
Leila had never felt at peace in this apartment that had been her home for the past thirteen years. She had let it slip away from her, untended and uncared for. The place, with its lacquered wood floors, black mosaic-tiled hallways and bathroom, its arabesques and granite fireplace, had once been beautiful. Now, the furniture was worn, the mirrors were blackened, and the brass doorknobs had an uneven red color from overuse. It felt like a borrowed home. And in many ways, that was what it was. An apartment given to her by an aristocratic father who, upon her return from Paris with a poor man at her arm, could not bear to see his daughter struggle too hard or too long in life.
Her father, Ibrahim Nassiri, had sat quietly at his desk while she asked for his legal permission to marry Adam Tair. There were many ways to treat daughters in Ibrahim’s world, most of them profoundly cruel. But he knew that Leila would never survive his cruelty and that he would therefore lose her forever. That would surely kill him. So he gave her this old apartment, a remnant of his past wealth, situated on a high floor of an art deco building, with a wide veranda overlooking the Wilaya and the old post office to the right, the Park of the Arab League ahead, and the decaying cathedral at the end of the boulevard.
When Leila was much younger, she believed that she controlled her life. She believed in greatness beyond the curb. There was nothing spectacular about the way her life had settled into a groove. There was no fire-to-ashes chronicle, no secret unveiled to crush her spirit, no visible oppression pushing her down into her daily routine. Like a singer lowering a key, Leila had let her life quiet down. Here she now was, an empty life and an empty womb, and the riots were hitting the hot asphalt Casablanca streets.
Thirteen years already, Leila thought to herself. Thirteen years of her own prohibition, her not so roaring twenties of gradual detachment, of growing old without ever maturing. What now roared was not her spirit but her unspoken regret. She blamed herself for being back in Casablanca, all because of a dream she had one night, thirteen years ago, of the orange tree and the pure, incomparable scent of its flowers. When she woke up from that dream, she knew that they, Adam and she, had to come back home. It was a dream, and a desire, that should have been hushed, no matter what the burning need for home pressed her to do. And Adam had agreed to come with her, leaving everything behind. She was to blame for the way their lives had turned out.
She walked to her bedroom, stood in front of the mirror and observed the lost years on her face and body. She held in her disappointment and sadness. Looking into the mirror, she unleashed her longing to return to the past, to the small Parisian apartment, and to purity. Leila was elsewhere, restless, unfulfilled. Her life was a constant denial of the present.
She stared at her flat stomach and understood why her belly wouldn’t fill with child. It was rumored that she was bewitched, whispered that the evil eye was playing tricks on her. But the truth was that Leila was not sure she even wanted a child. She too began to believe that she was cursed. Yes, sometimes, in the dead of night, when her husband succumbed to one of his seizures and her belly curled in upon itself, she believed in the curse. And yet she could still smell, as she did now, the orange blossoms of her childhood over and beyond any sense of a dream deferred.
She opened the large glass windows that led to the balcony and stepped out. Hidden behind the plants and birdcages, Leila watched as the central plaza became an arena of violence. A fog descended on the plaza. The sky swirled into a dark grey cloud, and the air thickened. Leila froze. Unmarked white vans had begun to circle the plaza, while giant-looking blackbirds hovered above. The doors of the vans broke open, and the blackbirds swooped down from the sky. Large creatures, with red eyes and fur-covered bodies, formed a tight battalion. The sheep-skinned demons had come, and they were hungry.
They burned, crushed, and ate whatever they found. They danced around fires they had built for their pleasure, they dug great holes, threw bodies in with rubbish, made their witnesses insane. With their massive fists, they hit children, killed with glee, and disappeared men and women into their white vans. The demons grabbed protestors and, flapping their wings of dank wool, rose with them into the sky.
No one ever found the bodies of the disappeared. Thousands dead, thousands arrested, few would ever return, and they would never be the same. The demons had injected a leaden poison into their blood to dull their spirits and lull them into weary resignation.
The demons exist. They are real. They are here. Leila shuddered, chilled to the bone. She wondered where Adam was and if his body would ever warm hers again. She saw people surrendering to the demons and knew that the uprising had failed. The uprising failed for it resembled the city that was its home—beautiful, sprawling, cocky, and already defeated.
As Leila was about to close the balcony doors, a demon looked up at her. Instead of lowering her gaze and hiding, she looked into its cold, unfeeling eyes. She would never know why she looked into its eyes. A sparkling moment of recklessness, a jolt of courage in a woman who had forgotten what courage meant, a flicker of remembrance for a paradise lost before it was ever created. Come for me, her eyes flashed. Come, lest you regret me.
And now, the demon was looking deeply into her. Slowly, it smiled its terrible smile.
Adam
Adam taught math at the University of Science of Casablanca. He had been teaching there for thirteen years, ever since he and Leila had returned from Paris. Day in and day out, he stood in front of his students and taught them math. It’s possible that at first he did get through to them. But as the days and years passed, the gulf between Adam and his students widened. It became more and more difficult for him to look his students in the eye. Most of his students were poor. Their families had placed their dreams in their education. But they soon realized that the bridges between the university and the real world had long since crumbled. The classroom was, for Adam and his students, a prison they willingly checked into every morning.
Fog and a grey vapor seeped, unchecked, into the classroom. The walls were humid, and the windows filtered a dirty light from outside. The large blackboard was hard. The chairs and tables were unstable and the paint rotten. At regular intervals, a high, shrill sound interrupted the professor’s lecture or the students’ musings. It was the drill of a factory that had been built near the university. It called the workers to work, to break, to lunch. Feeling the blues deep in his bones, a student once cried out to Adam, “How can we be expected to study when all we can hear is our brothers and sisters trudging off to the factory?” Adam saw talent fizzing out of them, just as it was fizzing out of him.
He roamed the deserted university halls and encountered peculiar characters. Men with dark glasses leaning against walls, taking notes; young boys and girls who pretended to be students but who rarely attended classes; university rectors in heated conversations with military officers. Boots hit the ground, and words were spoken beyond meaning or restraint. Students and professors were escorted out by the police, never to be seen or heard from again. Some students buried their hair under black veils, others grew austere beards and muttered strange incantations, still others debated politics and class warfare, abandoning probabilities and complex numbers. His balance tipping, Adam could only think to himself, What a masculine classroom...A cold sweat rolled down his spine. The university—far from the universal, far from tolerance and knowledge, a jail for the unwanted, a pit for the extremes, a political game for brutes.
There were rare times when he saw a light in one or two of his students. He would recognize it in a paper, an argument, or a comment. The fury in his head would s
ubside, and he would be filled with deep, quiet respect for the fleeting balance of things. When discovering this light, he would frantically write to an old professor or to a colleague in Paris, encouraging them to offer the student a position in a lab or an institution. Indeed, he had started to believe that brilliant minds must be saved by sending them abroad and that it was his mission to do so.
He wrote these letters like a prisoner planning an escape, feverishly, in secret, with pounding heart. In his small office with the high, barred windows, Adam wrote like other men prayed. A scientist trapped in a world of fogs and wolves, he had found a glitch in the system, a way out. He wrote, stamped, and mailed letters that were odes to talent and hope. He felt the walls closing in on him and the floor tremble beneath his feet, and still he wrote, trying to make sense of things, imagining what the world out there must taste like.
~
That hot June day in 1981, at the height of the Bread Riots, and at the very moment of Leila’s vision, Adam left his office, closed the door behind, and headed home to Leila and to the apartment they shared in the plaza of the Casablanca Centre Ville. Adam was going home, like he did every night, because he had nowhere else to go to. At first, he had been attracted to the woman he went home to. His heart beat and his footsteps rang on the sidewalk. He was in love with her. As time passed, however, something inside him began to quiver, and he became filled with want. Adam’s desire for Leila was too normal, their love affair too banal. He never possessed her, he communed with her. He never dominated her, he communicated with her. Hidden from view was a deep craving for sexual possession. He thirsted for a carnal knowledge that Leila could not, or would not, give him. He desired desire, the objectifying fantasy of man on top. He never tried another woman, though perhaps he should have in light of future events, and his want grew, unchecked and unbalanced. But today, as he was walking home, Adam heard a voice call out his name.
“Ustad, Professor. Ustad Tair.”
He stopped and turned to see a young man standing in front of a mint and vegetable stall. The peddler’s smiling face and lanky build looked familiar to Adam, but he could not quite place him.