The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  Al-Firsiwi’s personal path – the lives of his ancestors, the catastrophic years of Bu Mandara, the German period that culminated in his marriage to the beautiful post-office employee and his recent glories in the city of the founder of the Moroccan dynasty – did not qualify him to encounter the people and places of the site. How had it been possible for a person who witnessed the downfall of the Rif during war and famine and the death of Bu Mandara from poverty and immigration to end up in the ruins of Walili as a guide to a place that had died centuries ago?

  Based on those questions, Al-Firsiwi had developed a theory that immigration was a worm that gnawed at the soul. Ever since he had opened his eyes in Bu Mandara, he had witnessed people tortured by the place they had left behind in the countryside, tortured by the place that was dying in their arms and tortured by the places they dreamed about emigrating to. He himself had spent ten years digging in the rock to immigrate to Germany, and when he finally arrived one snowy morning, he sat on a bench at the railway station trying to recall for the thousandth time the name of the city he was heading for. Disslutet, Disselcorf, Disselboot, Disselcokhat, Dissel, Düsseldorf. By God, it was Düsseldorf where Hamady Burro would receive him with the intention of marrying him to his spinster sister whose bones had dried out from the cold. He could wait, Al-Firsiwi thought suddenly. When he got his papers and hid them safely in his military coat, everyone would hear about the escapades of Al-Firsiwi resounding in the skies of Disselbone, Dissoltozt, Dissolbuf, Düsseldorf, yes Düsseldorf! It was enough for him to pronounce the name of that city three times to give him a monstrous erection.

  Immigration was a dormant worm; it sucked and slept. When did it awaken? Al-Firsiwi believed it awakened when things settled down, when the winds were favourable, when the sails were full and the boat was gliding along. When Al-Firsiwi reached the highest heights, buying and selling and, after spending ten years at night-school, translating in the courts, buying property and earning as much as he could, and married the German Shajarat al-Durr!

  That was when the worm awakened and whispered in his ear: Do you want to ruin your health for the sake of this race? Do you want your son to grow up as a Christian while all his ancestors, as far back as Abraham, carry the Qur’an in their hearts? Do you want to let the Sherifs humiliate the remaining members of your tribe? Do you want the city that contains relics of the prophets to become a den of sodomites, drug addicts and beggars?

  The worm kept on whispering to him, day after day, and Al-Firsiwi put his trust in God and organised his reverse immigration. Diotima, who had kept the notebook of her grandfather who participated in Walili’s excavations with other German prisoners, also embraced the worm.

  There they were, my friend, in the vastness of the zawiya, climbing from the courtyard of the tomb in the inner market to the courtyard of Khaybar where the municipal office was located. They went from one to the other, writing contracts, training brokers, bribing the weak and distracting the malicious.

  Diotima embraced the new place like a forsaken paradise, sleeping with her grandfather’s secrets near the earth that he turned with his fingers, quietly cajoling the buried secrets, as if he had never crawled on his stomach in combat. Diotima wanted to take root in the blue mountain, and nurtured institutions in the city to help women, vaccinate children, improve education for girls and raise health awareness. She would go to the nearby villages and spend all her day visiting clusters of houses, where the inhabitants slept with their cows and goats and defecated behind their brick ovens while dogs and giant rats stole away the still-warm excrement from under them. There she supported projects for waste processing, fighting epidemics, treating spring water, collecting plastic and preserving the region’s orchards. Year after year, projects were born and died: new goat stock would arrive from the Iberian Peninsula, solar energy from charitable organisations in Germany, compost pits for waste that decomposed naturally. No matter who benefited, no matter who vandalised, no matter who resisted, Diotima failed to understand that this land would never accept the transplantation of her roots.

  Finally she gave up and sat cross-legged on the throne in the reception hall of the Zaytoun Hotel, succumbing to a crushing sadness that erased all signs of benevolence from her face. The ardour she had lavished on the geography of the place, its produce and its crippled people had not provided her with so much as one drop of human affection. Whether recipients of her bounty or not, not a single heart held a trace of fondness, gratitude, recognition or appreciation for her. She was rowing upstream in a river of disgust and hatred that people expressed in various ways, from turning their heads away to invoking God’s help. Even when she was helping the civil protection teams in the city during the campaign to cure the pox that had spread in the region, some of the afflicted deliberately shook hands with her with excessive warmth, having scratched their skin for hours until their fingers and nails were covered with pus and scabs, in the hope of seeing this Christian woman contaminated. Whenever they saw her safe and healthy, mixing the powder with water and helping to treat the women, their anger grew, and they poured all their rage on the Germanic race that had produced both exceptionally resistant human beings and steel.

  Even Al-Firsiwi, who revealed a kind of human purity that was almost romantic at the beginning of his relationship with Diotima, very quickly lost that purity as he pursued deals and projects, and planned tricks for the honest people and their allies. He would comment on the matter whenever he saw pity in his wife’s eyes for the spite that had being growing within him for ages. ‘Don’t worry,’ he would say. ‘We engage in the exchange of hatred necessary for our psychological and physical wellbeing! If you encounter a Rifi who doesn’t hate the Sherifs, it’s a sure sign that he’s from a long line of bastards, and vice versa! Despite that there are no dead, injured or war wounded among us!’

  At the start of their relationship, Al-Firsiwi was still capable of upholding the virtues of uprightness, seriousness, honesty and devotion as basic dimensions in his life. They gave his personality a certain gallantry, a mixture of haughtiness, shyness and modesty. He even made love with a certain distance and strictness, with a concern for perfection, accuracy and precision. It became a source of confused pleasure where there was no room for play, seduction or adventure. They were fast, trembling pleasures that almost resembled incestuous love.

  But after Al-Firsiwi and Diotima spent time in this storm, it all disappeared to be replaced by a pure aversion that rejected the needs of the body and the impetuosity of the soul. It was an aversion that combined regret and despair, and a feeling that they were bound together in a downward spiral. Whenever one sought safety, his or her nerves and random actions quickened the rapid push to the very bottom.

  This repressed aversion gave them immense energy that made it possible for them to go on living together, with a daily concern for improvising something that united them and led them to the end of the day in such an extreme state of fatigue that they were unable to even look at each other.

  My mother made sure to teach me everything she knew: the German language, the difference between poisonous and edible mushrooms and the basics of music and watercolours, but she never talked to me about Al-Firsiwi. Therefore, everything I said or will say about their relationship is solely my personal assumption and does not implicate anyone but me.

  Our family consisted of closed squares. One included my mother and me; another, tightly closed, included Al-Firsiwi and Diotima, and another, looser square was where we all gathered, or where I met Al-Firsiwi face to face.

  As far as I was concerned, my mother largely succeeded in purifying our relationship of all surplus emotional contam­inants. Her maternal attitude had almost no external demonstration; the most she manifested was a minimal smile and a quick touch of the hand. This sensory remove never involved a feeling of abandonment or neglect. Her daily presence and her eagerness to reach the best in me embodied the depth of her maternal feelings and reinforced my conviction that she was an
exceptional mother.

  When I went to Germany I hated my father and the country that had killed my mother. I longed to establish a life as far away as possible from an atmosphere charged with mystery and dormant intrigues. I spent the first years delighted by this accommodation, free of all nostalgia for any person or place, until I met a Rifi association and found through them another connection that led me to the left-wing group. One day, as I was thinking about the future of the revolution, I decided that my true place was in the field, in the midst of the people who would rise from their ashes and get rid of the thieves and the murderers.

  And so it went, at least as far as I was concerned.

  Dreamers and Others

  1

  Yacine, simply by being killed, became an eternal child. He transformed into a being who would accompany me, emerging from his dark world whenever he wanted, and with whom I would share the details of my daily life. He would sit at my table or on my shoulders, or he would nudge me unexpectedly to pass on a piece of news or a comment in confidence. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of my bed to greet me with a rowdy discussion as I woke up. In his daily appearances Yacine was no more than one year old, yet his voice was that of the young man who had bid me goodbye at the railway station. I would talk with him for hours as I crossed Rabat from Bab Tamesna to the edge of the river, passing through Al-Nasr Street, Moulay Youssef Street, Alawite Square, and then the flower market, all the way to Al-Jazaïr Street and the offices of the newspaper where I worked.

  Lots of people – who obviously could not see him – noticed me caught up in conversation and spread the rumour that I had begun talking to myself, and that it must have been because of Yacine. They did not know how right they were. Together Yacine and I commented on the roadworks we came across as we walked, or the demonstrations, or the beautiful women. Sometimes we delved into our old issues and talked about revolutions, betrayals and the death of illusions.

  I sat down in the Garden Café an hour before my appointment with Layla. I told Yacine that I wanted to jot down some ideas for my weekly piece. He laughed at this and made fun of my belated attention to the importance of love, but I did not respond to his sarcasm. I noted down that in the next column I had to talk about a film I could no longer remember apart from a dance connected to it that I imagined I had danced with Layla. I could not remember whether it had been in a dream or at a noisy nightclub on the beach. I also wanted to mention a violent incident I witnessed that conveyed the nature of the film. Once near the Alhambra cinema, on the outskirts of Yacoub al-Mansour neighbourhood, I had seen a man in a white car running someone over and killing him. Though I remembered the brutal nature of the accident, I didn’t recall the specific details.

  Huge cranes, bulldozers and cement mixers passed in front of the café, blocking the street and filling it with a buzz of activity. Yacine wondered if they were looking for buried treasure beneath the capital. I explained to him why large projects were underway in Rabat, why new neighbourhoods, plazas, tourist areas, museums and galleries were being built. This sudden change, I said, might be because the new king felt he was a native of this city and he had to rid it of the bleakness of a rustic suburb. Yacine argued that people needed food and medicine, not a beautiful capital.

  I blamed the Taliban for his comment and tried to rectify the matter by stressing the need to produce as much beauty as possible, that being the only way to overcome despair. He laughed again and reminded me of the long soirées at the homes of Ibrahim al-Khayati, Ahmad Majd and others, with their overwrought discussions that held out no hope for the future without a break from the past.

  ‘What’s happened to you lot?’ Yacine wondered.

  I repeated the question as if asking myself, ‘What’s happened to us?’

  Yacine asked again, ‘How did you come to believe that the future would be like a tramp’s trousers, made up of different coloured patches from various times?’

  I told him, ‘We were talking about this city, not a utopia!’

  Yacine believed that once the amusement park, the new roads, the furnished flats, the up-market hotels, the restaurants, the cafés, the cinemas and arcades were ready, Bou Regreg Park would be raided by the Zuhair and Zamur tribes, just like in the past. People would shut up their shops after the late afternoon prayer, as they had done in those far-off days in fear of incursions.

  I laughed at the idea, but then replied seriously. ‘On the contrary, the park will become a source of not-so-tragic stories, a hotbed for love, adventure, wealth and bankruptcy, nights out for celebrities and parties for high society, a hiding place for wasters and drifters, and those in search of something known or unknown. The river itself will be transformed into a fish that goes to sleep at the crack of dawn!’

  ‘In that case,’ said Yacine, ‘the inhabitants of Rabat won’t need to go to Marrakech in pursuit of a fleeting moment of freedom.’

  ‘Not to Marrakech or Casablanca. We’ll put a final stop to Ibrahim al-Khayati’s claim that having dinner in Rabat is like having dinner at a bus station.’

  ‘But all the inhabitants of Rabat – I mean the rich ones – have bought houses in Marrakech,’ remarked Yacine.

  ‘They will sell them when they receive orders to move straight back to the capital.’

  ‘Even that is by order!’ Yacine exclaimed.

  ‘Yes. And all the gossip will also be instructed to migrate to the capital.’

  ‘Never. That’s impossible. Marrakech couldn’t survive without gossip. You know what? I had a friend in Paris who said that once the tales of Jemaa al-Fnaa had almost faded into oblivion, Marrakech devised modern stories, a kind of One Thousand and One Nights played out in sports centres, nightclubs and discos. So with or without orders, Marrakech will never relinquish her throne, even if you were to rebuild Baghdad on the bank of the river!’

  ‘I didn’t know you were such a fanatic.’

  ‘Between you and me,’ he said, ‘Rabat is nothing but an old Andalusian hag, extremely fair skinned but sagging. No amount of embellishment can help her.’

  ‘Do you hate her so much?’

  ‘I neither love her nor hate her. I only find her “forward”, as my mother would say.’

  ‘As for me,’ I explained, ‘I find her fascinating, mysterious and dreamy, and she also has a river. I don’t like cities without rivers, as if they were cities that don’t cry. I don’t like Marrakech: always acting like a child and laughing for no reason!’

  ‘Shame! How can a writer dislike Marrakech?’ wondered Yacine.

  ‘Guess what? The writer Abu Idris has a theory on the subject. He says that Marrakech is anti-writing, that she’s a city for old people.’

  ‘I’m going to tell you something that might upset you,’ said Yacine.

  ‘Say it, anyway.’

  ‘It seems to me that you’ve changed for the worse.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It means you’re brimming with a harsh bitterness. You’re not fooled by any of life’s tricks any more. Don’t you expect anything miraculous? How can you bear life in such clarity?’

  ‘I don’t make any special effort. It’s life that puts up with me!’ I said.

  ‘But you’ve always lived with troubles, doubts, mistakes and blind conviction. I mean, weren’t all those things just masks?’

  ‘Yes, most of the time. Back then, I believed we had to resist despair by any means.’

  ‘And now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now, to some extent, I’ve become reconciled to despair. Those who have boundless hopes make me more despairing than those in despair.’

  ‘It seems like I’ll never understand you,’ said Yacine.

  ‘No one can understand anyone,’ I replied.

  At that moment, Layla arrived, her voice preceding her physical presence.

  ‘It looks like you’re talking to yourself!’ she said.

  ‘No, I was talking to Yacine!’

  Her face darkened and she mumbled, �
�I’m sorry for interrupting you.’

  She sat facing me. We looked at each other as if waiting for Yacine to leave. Once he had left, Layla began talking on the phone. I studied her face as she gave curt answers to end the conversation. Her whole face beamed with an inward smile, causing me unbearable pain because I would be unable to make her feel that way. Perhaps that pain cast its shadows over my gaze, for she asked me anxiously, ‘What’s wrong? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, almost everything.’

  Then I talked to her about the inner smile, and we came up with an amusing theory about having to create a sort of sieve in our internal spiritual space to sift the necessary in life (even if painful) from the useless (even if highly tempting). This process of sifting was the most eloquent expression of our balance, our strength and our mental and physical health. Without consulting us or even our being aware, our ultimate gratification, our most refined pleasure and our secret chemistry produced this inner smile. As the product of this marvellous sieve, this smile would be an aura around our bodies and souls, granting us luminous protection and invincibility in the face of life’s obstacles.

  We talked at length about this subject in a kind of race for words and thoughts. We hardly knew who was saying what. Layla was directing this exercise in order to make me feel the need to arrange a space I controlled all by myself, without leaving any margin, however small, for others’ interference. That space, like the living space of any creature in this world, would allow me to differentiate between need and desire, because, according to Layla, the matter depended on this particular capacity.

  ‘Look at yourself,’ she told me. ‘You’re a perfectly healthy machine! All the mechanisms necessary for you to function are working. There’s nothing wrong with any of your systems, yet you’ve broken down and are in paralysis.’

  We also talked about Bahia. I gave her an idea of our situation following Yacine’s death. I told her that deep down Bahia considered me responsible for what had happened and hated me for it. I hated her, too, for thinking that. Bahia believed Yacine had inherited the germ of rebellion from me and paid the price vicariously for my own political involvement and my neglect of the organisation. She would have preferred to see me settle this account personally, rather than making Yacine believe in my dreams, only to then find himself obliged to save me from the humiliation of my dreams’ disintegration by convincing me that extremism was the solution and that getting into bed with the enemy was not an option.