The Arch and the Butterfly

by Mohammed Achaari

  ‘Listen carefully. Jamaa al-Fna, the Mediterranean Press Club, the medina entrance from the side of the seller of smoked heads, near the olive and falafel shop. Free yourself from the balcony of the café. Nothing deserves all this attention on your part. Listen to the call of someone looking from the narrow window of an old house. He is talking to another person on the roof of a nearby house, and asking, “Has the person concerned arrived?” The other replies at the top of his voice that he does not know. You, however, must stand exactly under the spot where the call originates or under the window. Look closely in the direction of those who leave the alley and melt into the throng of the square. You should not concern yourself with those entering the medina. You should know that in this narrow place it is difficult to distinguish between those entering and those leaving, but everything depends on this distinction. You will see a billboard that shades the alleyway with its dull glimmer. You will incidentally read on it that Marrakech welcomes cinema lovers. You will then see a large poster that covers a large area of the wall, and if you read it you will know the whole programme of the film festival. I beg you, do not read it. If you busy yourself reading it – and I know that an overwhelming temptation will push you to do so – you will miss the critical moment.

  ‘Why am I telling you all this? Why do I run to you specifically? It is either your fate or mine, we can’t escape it. The face is that of a child who grew up very quickly. His cheeks are those of a healthy baby and his eyes are the eyes of a tired man. It is a face that looks like many others, like the face of the greengrocer located near the fuel station in Al-Zizafon Street, the face of the teacher at the private school located behind the general’s house, or the face of your brother-in-law who lives in Germany, whom you haven’t seen in years. Look at his hands next. Why is there a blackness creeping up all his nails? Why does the silver wedding ring sit so lightly on his thick little finger, making the hand look dead? Where has the man sprung from? From Sidi Youssef Ben Ali? From Daoudiate? From a vault in the old medina? From the enclosure of Marrakech or from the night of Casablanca? Or from the nameless margins?

  ‘You told me once that you recognised people’s origins from their walk. Pay careful attention then to this unhurried gait, slightly off-centre as if the person were trying to avoid an unexpected obstacle. Can you tell where people are heading from the way they walk? No. No, you can’t know. No one can tell whether a person is going towards the centre of the square or to the Conference Hall, or the Hotel La Mamounia. His body stretches towards all those places without taking the direction it points to. It is the camouflage of a person who knows what he wants.

  ‘The sleek buses are lined up in the square, unloading hundreds of weary tourists. The sun covers this city like a tanjiya dish cooked over high heat. This is the end of the tour, after the tombs of the Saadis, Badie palace, Bahia palace, the Koutoubia, the house of Si Said, the Pasha’s house, the lighthouse, and the Almoravid Dome. Here, the scalded faces take a break before they are split among the hotels of the city. Do you think he is here, hiding in an obscure corner, waiting for the gathering of foreigners near the buses? Do you think he is observing the situation carefully from behind the cart of an itinerant vendor? Scrutinise his features closely, if you can get near him. If the designated moment has arrived, a vivid yellow colour will cover his face. In that case do not leave him at all. But if the time is still far off, the burning sun will turn his face bluish. So stay close to him but only look at his face occasionally. It would be better to look at his feet, the feet of a duck in a hurry wearing impromptu socks and knock-off trainers.

  ‘If he is not there? You will ask yourself if he wasn’t just an apparition that sprang from the fear present in each one of us. If, despite his socks, his Pakistani shirt and his uneasy look, he wasn’t just a simple construction worker on his day off, or a cleaner in foreigners’ houses who has just taken a quick shower before noon, for fear of being surprised in a state of impurity? At the exact moment when you ask that kind of question, a person’s colour might change from blue to yellow, the colour of death. Beware of falling victim to this suspicion when you can’t see him. If he is not where we left him a short while before, he is now at the entrance to the Mamounia, which is packed with cars, buses and taxis, and where the smoke of Cuban cigars extends from the restaurants to the Churchill Suite or Orson Welles Rooms. Do not take the risk of leaving this golden square. There, in the same square metre, huge fortunes compete and our friend can raise the pillars of paradise.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that? You have not been assigned a mission and you are not anybody’s messenger. You just gave birth to a naïve angel who flew from the Trocadero to Kandahar, certain of his return.

  ‘Tell me, you who understand everything, what are twenty years? Almost nothing! Why don’t we start from zero?’

  I wanted to touch his cheeks, but I only caught the smile that accompanied the movement of my hands. I opened my eyes to the darkness of the room and distant voices coming from the ground floor. I forced myself to get up and go downstairs, but I was not able to answer my mobile phone, which had been ringing for more than an hour.

  I drank a lot of water, then I asked Fatima and Ahmad if they had been talking from the moment we arrived. They said they had been.

  Layla called at the same moment.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked tersely.

  She replied meekly, ‘I’m just seeing how you are. Does that annoy you so much?’

  I told her that I was very anxious because of the strange things happening to me with Yacine. She returned to the subject of Fatima and said she would like us all to meet in Rabat. I agreed and told her that I would have loved to be with her at that exact moment. I told her I missed her and I asked if she looked beautiful that day; she said she had done everything she could to look lovely. Then we said superficial things to each other that are usually said by teenagers. Before we even ended the call, I felt a heavy weight on my chest, as if I had failed to say or do something I should have. I found myself going towards the door, opening it and looking at the alleyway, which was filling up with new voices speaking various languages.

  I looked at the wall opposite the big house and saw that the pigeon that had been agonising when we arrived had died. There was a green patch around its head from the fluid still oozing from its beak. I closed the door, and when I went through the kitchen I said to Ghaliya, ‘The pigeon has died!’ She told me that it had been folded in upon itself since the day before. I shook my shoulders and said, ‘At least it didn’t die by having its throat cut!’

  She thought I was making a joke and replied, joking herself, ‘Unlike the pigeons I’m preparing for dinner. Sidi Ahmad spent the whole morning cutting their throats. They were flapping their wings and squawking, thinking he was about to feed them. Poor birds. Nothing frees them from the human except death.’

  I collapsed on the sofa. I was about to ask Ahmad about his new property development projects when my phone rang again. It was Ibrahim al-Khayati, who told me in a shaky voice with a weepy tone that Essam had been missing for two days. I asked some questions and then shut up. Ibrahim said Mahdi was almost deranged and that he did not know what to do. I was upset by the news and told him that I would come either that same day or early the next.

  Dinner was chilly. We talked in subdued voices as if we were afraid of waking someone up. After dinner we split into two groups: Ahmad Majd’s guests, who loudly discussed the fate of the land in the city centre that had been bought by the Jawhara Group, and a small group consisting of Fatima, Ahmad Majd and me, who briefly discussed various scenarios for Essam’s disappearance, including the more tragic ones. But Ahmad scolded us, saying we were the kind of people who would bury a person before he was dead. We did not disagree.

  On her way to her room, Fatima said, ‘There’s no need to panic. Bad news always travels fast.’

  We took the six a.m. train to Casablanca, and when it started off Fatima said she had not slept a w
ink the previous night. I told her, ‘Try to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us.’

  I picked up the newspapers and saw Essam’s picture on the front page of the paper I worked for. I raced through the article and learned some details about the various possibilities the police were considering. Among them were kidnapping by a fundamentalist Islamic group, a settling of scores among alleged devil worshippers, or an escape abroad following a period of psychological instability. Then I read Ibrahim al-Khayati’s appeal to Essam, asking him to think about his mother, who had lost her ability to speak since hearing the news of his disappearance. I shared all this with Fatima, whose eyes were closed, but she did not react.

  I was engrossed in reading an article about a property developer’s denial of reports he had bought state-owned land for a nominal price, when Fatima said, ‘I find Ibrahim’s appeal in the paper strange.’

  I waited for her to elaborate but she did not. I said, ‘If Essam learns that his mother is in a critical condition because of him, he will return quickly.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t know?’

  ‘It would mean that something has happened to him.’

  ‘Or that he didn’t read the papers,’ she added.

  ‘Do you think Ibrahim concocted this on his own?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. It’s as if I were in a movie!’

  ‘But you’re right about there being something strange in Ibrahim’s appeal. Why does he say Haniya lost the ability to speak after her son’s disappearance? Have you ever heard her talk to anyone?’

  ‘Of course she spoke, gossiped, joked and laughed. She just didn’t do it with everybody or in a group.’

  I wondered if the allusion to Essam’s psychological in­­­stability was not in fact a reference to the uneasy relationship between Ibrahim and the children of his former lover. Fatima said that people’s gossip would tear everything to pieces.

  She then sat up, refusing to sleep, and said, ‘My problems seem so trivial compared to what happens to others!’

  I smiled in an effort to encourage her to speak, but she digressed. She explained that her separation from her Kosovar lover was unbearably painful, even though she was determined and convinced, and her decision was final. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get over this hurt,’ she said. ‘It’s a feeling of profound loss that will mark all my life. Imagine, I got pregnant twice in succession. The first time I lost the baby ten weeks before the due date. There was no sign of anything unusual until I woke up one night, swimming in my waters. I visited the doctor ten times a month and everything was as it should be. There were no signs of anything being wrong, and the baby was fine. Then I suddenly went into labour and the baby was born alive and died before my very eyes. It was stretched out to its full length in that illuminated unit, awash with all the tears in my body.

  ‘You know what? My body rejected that baby of its own accord, without any interference from me, as if it knew the violence of this stupid impregnation.

  ‘Then one day I knew I had been wrong from the outset. It was as if I had gone down, very fast, from the seventh floor to meet a man I was waiting for. I went with him. I ate and drank with him and made love with him. Then I became pregnant and I had an abortion. I read, stayed out late, danced, travelled and then I suddenly discovered that he wasn’t the one!’

  ‘But where’s the man you have been waiting for?’ I asked her.

  She looked long into my eyes and smiled. ‘You?. . .?One day I will kill you!’ she said. We laughed for the first time in a day.

  We entered Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house hoping that Essam had returned, ending the ordeal. But when we walked into the living room, we were overwhelmed by the gloomy atmosphere and abandoned our hopes. Layla was the first to greet us; her eyes were red and swollen. Ibrahim on the other hand remained in his seat, absent-minded, staring at the empty space of the room. When we greeted him, he did not seem to recognise us.

  We spent the rest of the morning in anxious conversations with Mahdi and Ibrahim and some of the young men of the band who had not stopped visiting the family. As for Haniya, she remained in bed as if in a coma. The only time she lost her temper was when Ibrahim touched her cheek in an attempt to rouse her from her despondency.

  At two in the afternoon I took Fatima and Layla out to lunch. As we walked through the garden, we crossed paths with the police team investigating the disappearance. They engaged us in a casual conversation that ended with them checking our identities. They pointed out that the investigation would benefit from every piece of information, big or small, we could provide.

  Once out in the street, Layla abandoned her unnatural calm and began discussing the disappearance, unconcerned by our search for a nearby restaurant. Her verbosity seemed to be her way of dealing with Fatima’s presence and controlling it. I took her by the arm and told her that I felt like I had not seen her for months. She said that there was no need for me to imagine as it had been ages since I’d last seen her. We entered an Italian restaurant hungry and agitated.

  The investigation was going in various directions. Essam and his band were in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, there was their entrenched conflict with various Islamist movements, because their songs poked fun at religious dress, beards and language. The matter had gone all the way to parliament, where the government was asked what it intended to do to put an end to this trivialisation of expressions like ‘in the name of God’, ‘there is no power but in God’ and ‘God suffices’ and their being used as terms of scorn and sarcasm.

  There was also pathological hostility between Arthritis and other bands associated with devil worship, not only because Essam and the others had denied the existence of any connection between them and the Satanist trend, but because they had gone so far as to dub themselves an Islamic singing group. This had led a local Muslim leader to invite Arthritis to perform in the city whose municipal council he headed. But the concert turned into a chair-throwing fight when the band gave in to the audience’s demands and sang provocative songs such as ‘Islam isn’t in beards and rags’. Despite all that, the Muslim leader had issued a statement condemning infiltrators at the concert who had provoked the fight and praising Arthritis for respecting the spirit of religion and rejecting its false façades. At the time, Essam thought of changing the name of the group from Arthritis to Lantern, but Mahdi and the rest of the group refused categorically, thus increasing the tensions among them.

  Essam had been profoundly shocked by his arrest in the devil worship affair. He and other band members had been accused of belonging to a worldwide Satanist movement, and the prosecutor had read passages from various publications and slogans. Essam was not religious, but he would never have joined a movement that promoted such ideas and spread them recklessly. When the judge asked him whether he was convinced that Satan was a friend of humanity who connived with them and shared their desires, he nearly answered: ‘Who is this new Satan?’ But seeing the stern look in his lawyer’s eyes he had replied very calmly, ‘I believe in God and His Prophet.’ From that moment on Ahmad Majd had turned his defence of Essam and the others into a torrent of sarcastic remarks that shook the court. He had talked about Satan’s relationship with music, young people’s relationship to Satanism, and the phobia of conservatives regarding anything beyond their own tastes. He had referred to the state that feared its own shadow, and about the rap songs that began with praise of the Prophet. People in the know had understood that the presence of Ahmad Majd – a friend of those in high places – in court to defend such a case constituted official support for the young musicians. Ahmad attributed the flyers and posters distributed by the young men to the foolishness and irresponsibility of youth and as a way to undermine the overzealousness of the security agencies. Essam’s acquittal confirmed the intuition of the ‘smart’ ones, whether they were right or wrong.

  Nobody knew for sure, but Essam’s extended period of isolation and his inclination for mixed-up, dervish-like practices that combined Sunni Suf
i traditions and popular rituals, together with various other religions and spiritual movements, probably went back to the impact of that trial. Among the immediate results of this sudden change in him was the increasing sharpness in the discussions he had with Ibrahim al-Khayati, discussions that were more like severe judgements. He frequently confronted Ibrahim over his relationship with his biological father. According to Mahdi, Essam never missed an opportunity to bring it up. Essam also attacked his mother with a barrage of double entendres that revealed scorn and disdain for her relationship with Ibrahim. This dramatic development appeared to have ended Haniya’s reserved and timid comportment in public, and she unsheathed an unequalled ferocity that she first directed at Essam and Mahdi, and then forcefully at Ibrahim.

  During those difficult months following the devil worship trial, things had kept happening, one stranger than the other. Essam had become openly religious, while remaining the main lyricist for Arthritis, which in turn went from success to success. Essam’s newfound religiosity had forced Ibrahim to submit, with a great deal of disguised depression, to a change in his private life, which until then had included enjoying festive dinners and Casablanca’s nightlife. He then crowned this house arrest with a quick umra. Upon his return, I had asked him if he had felt anything special while performing his umra. He had confessed the pilgrimage had not moved him in any way. On the contrary, whenever he tried to concentrate on the experience, it escaped him hopelessly. Haniya found strength in standing up to Essam’s attacks and decided to extend her control over the home. She was pitiful, though, despite her attempts to shout orders at everyone. She who had long lived submissively in the shadow of a tree called Ibrahim al-Khayati now appeared to be breaking the branches, picking the leaves and destroying the buds for no real reason.