In turn, I tried to explain to Bahia that the baby would not save me or our relationship. I did not want to chase after something that did not exist. I did not want the child she talked about to see me so exhausted. I did not want to avenge anything. All I wanted was my share of calm, nothing more, nothing less. I wanted to chat in a café on the pavement of life, to comment on the weather, to talk about crimes and football matches. I wanted to go out at night to celebrate something beautiful I had read or seen. I wanted to travel without a reason, aimlessly, to travel for travelling’s sake.
Bahia cried in silence and then asked me, ‘Can’t you do that while being a dad over again?’
‘I couldn’t do it at all!’ I said.
At that moment she stood up and, without looking at me, grabbed her handbag with both hands. She put her sunglasses over her teary eyes, and asked as she was leaving what I would like to keep of Yacine’s things.
Distraught, I told her, ‘An item of clothing, a T-shirt, for example, or one of his shirts.’
She left, but I did not move.
Yacine appeared, coming to the table and asking if I had just returned from a funeral. I said, ‘Something like that.’
‘You must feel very light now. Weren’t you carrying this relationship like a huge mountain on your shoulders?’
‘It’s not so simple. What appears like salvation at first sight, once we’ve done it, makes us feel that we’ve buried part of ourselves.’
‘You always look for the drama in every story,’ he replied.
‘You’re right! Really I should be celebrating the happy event.’
‘Or at least you should admit that you’re relatively lucky compared to Al-Firsiwi, who is still carrying my grandmother’s corpse on his back.’
‘We all carry a corpse of sorts on our backs.’
‘I hope you’re not alluding to me,’ objected Yacine.
I was overcome by a sudden fear, so I rushed to explain, ‘You’re not a corpse, as you well know.’
‘What will you do now? Tell me,’ he said.
‘I’ll make space for myself.’
‘Before you do, I want to involve you in an important matter,’ he said.
‘I hope it has nothing to do with preaching and guidance.’
‘No, but it’s a question of life and death.’
I left the café and Yacine went off without his last sentence provoking me. I was busy digesting my new circumstances, which obliged me to take care of a large number of formalities, not least among them finding an apartment where I could move my occasional dreams. Before doing anything else, however, I had to spend most of that day transferring myself, one piece at a time, from the material and the symbolic spheres, where I had spent a quarter of a century, to a sphere I would have to navigate in an unfamiliar boat. At the end of the day I left my office at the newspaper with the same feeling that I had experienced when I came to Rabat for the first time. I had told myself then that if I could spend a whole night in this city, I could remain here for ever.
I was still walking aimlessly when I called Fatima. I hung on to her voice with all my force. I told her, ‘If you can remain on the line until we meet at a restaurant, you’ll save me.’ But she didn’t, and we met half an hour later, during which time I felt I had aged a little.
I told Fatima what Bahia and I had done that day. Her eyes bulged but she did not comment. When I returned to the subject while we were eating, she begged me to talk about something else, because, as she put it, she did not want to say something harsh that evening. She talked at length about her anxieties over moving to Madrid. While I considered this reassignment a way to pull her out of a demoralising situation, she explained to me that it would open the door to numerous fears: fear of the new world, fear of return, fear of separation, fear of adventure, fear of accidents and the fear of dying all alone in her apartment.
I told her that there was no connection between all those risks and where we were. Then she told me that she sometimes wished she had emigrated twenty years ago. ‘There are things that we do badly, if we do not do them early in life.’
I asked her to help me with some of the arrangements I needed to make for Bahia, and we agreed to meet the following day in the office of our lawyer friend, Ahmad Majd.
When I arrived for our appointment the next morning, Ahmad was not as cheerful as usual. Fatima sat on the sofa facing his desk, and it looked like she had been crying. As soon as I began talking, Ahmad assailed me with criticism and sanctimony, and ended up telling me that my relationship with Fatima shouldn’t have destroyed such a major thing in my life.
‘What does Fatima have to do with the situation?’ I asked.
‘You certainly know that Bahia never considered your relationship with Fatima to be innocent,’ he explained.
‘And what do you know about all this? What do you know about my private life that gives you the right to make judgments about innocence and guilt?’
I said that in a state of great anger, as I was struck by a pernicious idea regarding Ahmad. When I calmed down I explained to him, while Fatima listened without looking at us, the essence of my relationship with Fatima. I told him, since he wanted to interfere, that our relationship existed in the narrow border between love and other emotions, that neither of us was ever able to cross that line and that we did not regret it. This might have been because at heart we did not need a love affair, but only this liberated bond that allowed us to understand each other in a sea of misunderstanding, where everybody appeared to be right and wrong at the same time.
At that moment Ahmad stood up behind his desk, adopting the stance of an intellectual about to issue a final word of wisdom, and said, ‘Do you understand now why I prefer prostitutes?’
I looked at Fatima and saw her mouth wide open, like mine. As our silence persisted, Ahmad added, ‘Because they are real beings, not literary creations like you two!’
This joke alleviated, somewhat, the meeting’s prevailing tension. We started discussing the separation and the material arrangements and their impact with as little emotion as possible. I gave Ahmad all the documents he needed to deal with the situation and then left to rent an apartment, since I had to leave our shared dwelling. The obvious place for me was the Ibn Sina district, and I went directly there. I found an empty apartment through an estate agent, in the very same building where I had lived years earlier. As soon as I entered one of the rooms and opened the window, I saw the garden fence and the body lit by the streetlamp that had crossed my imagination.
When I told Layla that evening about all these events, she expressed deep concern at what had happened. She was not interested in my return to the neighbourhood; she was concerned about my new life and how I would manage it and whether I would be psychologically affected by the end of my marriage. She was worried whether I would fall into the trap of guilt and self-reproach and would be depressed as a result of the loneliness that would hit me. I assured her that loneliness would not be anything unusual for me, and that I was not heading for a breakdown.
‘But you’ll have to organise yourself in a different way and take care of things you haven’t done before. Listen to me. You must hire a housekeeper to look after the household. I’ll look for someone to do that. This new situation shouldn’t be a reason for your health, your appearance or your spirits to deteriorate. Do you understand? I won’t allow you to turn into a slovenly bachelor, living in a filthy house and wearing creased shirts!’
I tried to point out the romantic aspect of my return to the building. But she did not give up and preferred to list the things the new apartment needed. Half an hour later she gave me another list, and a third one while we ate dinner.
As we were leaving the restaurant, Layla said she wished I could have fulfilled Bahia’s wish to give her a new baby.
Upset, I said, ‘What the heck? Do you also think I’m just a mechanism for impregnation?’
She rushed to catch a taxi and waved her hand in a cold farewell.<
br />
2
My acquaintance with Ahmad Majd dated back to the time I was living in Germany. One of the members of the organisation introduced him to me during an exploratory trip back to Morocco in preparation for my final return. He was a first-year law student then and lived with his Marrakech group in a small apartment in the Qubaybat district. He spent the whole night making fun of my rural German accent, and I was convinced that he had invited me merely for his friends’ entertainment. We nevertheless became friends, although politics and life sent us in different directions. Our relationship remained strong, despite being soiled by a single dark spot – the passing and flimsy connection he had with Bahia before our marriage. It bothered me once in a while, but I bore it with a candid patience until I could ignore it completely. I did not think he held a grudge towards me as a result.
He and others were imprisoned at the same time as I. While there, we interacted, dealing with whatever the place imposed upon us in the form of break-ups and contradictory feelings. I was among the first group to leave prison after three years of incarceration. I went back to visit him with our other friends, and we did all the small assignments he entrusted us with.
Ahmad was a conciliatory, balancing element in the group, until he experienced a severe shock: his girlfriend had started dating someone else. The new boyfriend worked on human rights cases and continued to visit him regularly with her. We did our best to get him through the betrayal, but while in prison he was unable to form an emotional relationship that could have helped him get out of that wilderness, despite his meeting many women who visited the prison regularly as members of the organisation, which remained active despite being proscribed and under tabs.
In prison Ahmad completed his graduate studies and built his political life. He had no literary inclinations – though he was mad about opera and classical music – and paid no attention to his comrades’ published creative writings, which they considered gems of world literature. So he surprised everybody with a beautiful text he had written. It consisted of sarcastic dialogues between the prisoners and their visitors. It was brought out by a small publishing house and achieved great success under the title The Visiting Room. An insensitive film-maker adapted the book for the cinema and called it In a Headscarf in the Visiting Room, a title he considered funny. One critic described it as ‘the worst film in the history of Moroccan cinema’. Whenever the subject was mentioned, Ahmad would say, ‘Thank God it happened to the film and not the book.’
When he left prison Ahmad spent three years lost, like all prisoners who are stripped of the best years of their life. He opened an office to practise law which was neither a great success nor an abject failure. At the same time he exploited some land he had inherited from his father in Marrakech. He used the plots of land to establish a construction company that expanded amazingly fast. He renovated his father’s house in the old city, spending a great deal of money and time to transform it into the house of his dreams, the way he had imagined it since his childhood.
As soon as the house was at its most splendid and had become the weekly meeting place for our group, one of the city’s big-shots developed a taste for it and devised a number of reasons why Ahmad should sell it to him, either by force or voluntarily. He put pressure on Ahmad through his business acquaintances and his friends, using incitement and intimidation, as well as suggestions of attractive partnerships. He involved foreigners and people with power in these manoeuvres. Ahmad, who had never been scared of such underhand dealings, held out, sticking to his rights, manoeuvring and delaying, promising and temporising.
One day he went to the powerful man and said to him, ‘I won’t sell you the house even if you return to your mother’s womb.’
‘I’m not buying it for myself,’ the strong man replied.
‘Even if you were buying it for the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, I won’t sell it!’
‘Do you know that we have porn films that were shot in this house?’
‘You have nothing of the sort. No porn film has been shot in my house, as you pretend. As for pornography, say what you want and don’t hold back.’
‘We filmed it!’
‘You?’ asked Ahmad.
‘Yes, us. Through special means,’ he confirmed.
‘What did you think of our arses while undertaking this noble mission?’ asked Ahmad.
‘It was a mixed bag,’ he said, laughing, and then left.
When Ahmad returned from this strange meeting, he said to us in all seriousness that he would donate the house as an endowment for the Marxist-Leninists of Morocco and their descendants, from one generation to the other until doomsday.
I said, ‘The Sharia does not permit endowing a habous for the benefit of infidels and heretics. It would be better to assign it to us.’
He replied sarcastically, ‘That way we would guarantee its loss, sooner or later!’
‘Why would we lose it?’ I asked.
‘Tell me the case we’ve won so far.’
I replied, absent-minded, ‘We probably saved our souls.’
‘Well, say then that we won nothing but the wind!’
We laughed a lot, and Ahmad Majd remembered his father, who had died before seeing his son freed from prison. He said that the house was his way of asking for God’s mercy on his father’s soul. Then he said, as if continuing a previous conversation, ‘All the money in the world cannot bring back the lost years of our lives. Years are not sold in big or small markets. Such deceit! When I think about the years that were robbed from us, simply because one of us had forgotten a stupid book by Lenin in his luggage. Nowadays, terrorists in sleeper cells, with their belts and their explosives, spend only a few months in prison, during which time they enjoy multiple conjugal visits. It’s enough to drive one crazy!’
I said in consolation, ‘And all for the sake of Marrakechist-Leninism, we can’t even say for the sake of God!’
Ever since the old house was renovated, Marrakech became the city of our dreams the way Casablanca had been the city of our awakening. In the former we encountered fleeting pleasures and a cover to hide under. It put miles between us and the facts all around us. In the latter we encountered numerous probabilities and moments of illumination that helped us understand, in the blink of an eye, how things happened, before we lost the thread again and became unable to understand why or how they happened.
I got used to spending weekends in that house, and Ibrahim al-Khayati joined us at times. He did not spend the night there because he felt that old houses resembled tombs and he was afraid to sleep in a tomb.
The upper floor of the house was occupied by Ahmad’s sister, who had devoted herself to serving her brother before, during and after his imprisonment. She was a woman whose feelings had been purified by time and who had become a source of serenity. As soon as you met her, her embrace and smile erased any trace of the world’s claws, which might have touched you recently or long ago. She spoke laconically, one hand resting on the other, staring at you with two large black eyes, and you immediately felt sorry for those who did not know her. She was fifteen years older than her brother Ahmad, but she addressed him as ‘my dear’, as if he were older than her. She did it out of affection for him and, as she used to say, in consideration for him, because he was the only brother among seven sisters. Her name was Ghaliya, but among us, for our families, our lawyers and our rights groups, she was known as ‘Mother Ghaliya’. She had acquired the name for the many times she had stood at the gates of courthouses and prisons, for all that she endured on the roads and in trains and waiting-rooms, until she became one of those miracle women who, due to arbitrary detentions, were cast into the furnace of a world they never suspected existed. They then domesticated it until it became a fluffy cat playing at their feet. Because this was how she was, Ahmad would say, ‘She’s al-ghaliya, the precious one, neither selling nor buying.’ I think she liked the phrase which was taken from Al-Bidaoui’s ’aytah. Whenever anyone joked with her about it
, she blushed.
Ghaliya lived peacefully in the house until we arrived. She would then supervise the business of the kitchen, and cook so many dishes it seemed it was the last meal of our lives. Afterwards, she would retreat upstairs or go to visit one of her sisters, depending on the evening’s mood. At age sixty-five she did not appear to have totally despaired of trying her luck at building a home of her own. She did not seem to regret anything and lived her life believing that, in any case, only the best would happen to her. If Ahmad married and had children, she would devote her life to raising them, and this would be the best that could happen to her.
Ahmad, though, only ever got as far as the first few pages of his love stories, just like the books he read. We, on the other hand, watched every affair intensely fearful that a woman would appear at the house, thereby causing us to lose it, or even lose Marrakech completely. Whenever we joked with Ahmad about this, he claimed that the house was among the few liberated areas in a city that rich French people had reoccupied without colonisation or a protectorate.
Marrakech had, in fact, literally and figuratively lost its authenticity over the last ten years. Property prices shot sky-high; the old houses, the riyadhs and the hotels were lost to their original owners. An earthquake shook the city, wiping away historic lanes, alleyways and neighbourhoods, for palaces, restaurants, residences and guesthouses to sprout in their place. A property war broke out among the new owners, pushing them to compete in building amazing edifices suitable for their exotic dreams. They pulled ceilings, doors and mosaics from here and there, spreading fever in the joints of the old houses, which had to endure the sawing, chopping and extracting of their parts, which were then aggressively transplanted in palaces and riyadhs that remained hermetically closed to the city’s clandestine nights. The palaces mixed architectural styles that had no connection with Marrakech. These styles and forms were imported by the newcomers, collected during their trips and from films and paintings discovered in India, Turkey, Iran, Mongolia, China, Yemen and Zanzibar. In this jumble, for which they received official permits as a way to restore the memory of the city, that memory was totally and permanently obliterated.
The Arch and the Butterfly Page 10