The Expelled

by Mois Benarroch

  But that was not enough, they wanted more, my complete self-denial, my disappearance, my nature. My own name and my self-being. My denial also denied me my manhood and my relationships with women ended without an erection. I had become a shadow of myself and I believed that I could survive. Then I met my wife who saved me from the abyss, from that last step that I couldn't take without falling in too deep, without dying, either physically or metaphorically. I was on the edge of the abyss and I couldn't see it, nor did I know it, and besides I thought it was the right road to follow to be an Israeli. Literature might have saved me, luck, love, and from there I began a long journey back to my name and to my Morocco. I am one of the few survivors of this shipwreck and the commanders who sank the boat want to annihilate me.

  Without realizing, a few years ago I became the new Erez Biton, who must be destroyed to be accepted in meetings, some change sidewalks when they see me, old friends pretend they don't know me, and the Ashkenazim say that I've written some good poems but that I'm a racist. Because being a racist in my country is saying that Ashkenazim exist. The Ashkenazim spend their days talking about the Sephardim and how they are, but they don't accept that anyone defines them as a group. Only the non-Ashkenazim exist. Once, they called them Bnei Edot Hamizraj literally the sons of the tribes of the East, and we still don't know which East they meant, like the Indian tribes in the Americas that were later called Eastern, sometimes Arab Jews, Sephardic, and other names considered derogatory, and Zionism always confirmed their hatred of the primitive East. In one sentence they would state the need to create a country that is not like the Arab countries, to later say that the Sephardim want an Arab country and continue by suggesting that they have to remove such ideas from their head, for their own good. The Ashkenazim want to save us from ourselves and from our history and our culture and the best way to get there is by making us poor, not giving us any kind of education and creating a new Israeli. An Israeli who knows very well that the Ashkenazi looks down on those poor Moors who do not understand what is right for them.

  That's why now I want to return to the Eighties, but I go back to 1972, to that month of August, between two continents, between Ceuta and Algeciras, between two seas, two worlds. And I can't recall that boat, that prow, the wood, those two hours between the two lands, I have lost those hours, they have disappeared from my mind, and between them it's like going from one world to another, from a wooden to a crystal landscape. From Africa to Europe and from Europe to Asia, where Herzl suggested creating a European avant-garde, and where I became a different person. Because others viewed me in their own way and with every glance I was becoming someone else. The destructive glance, the anxious glance, the distressing glance of the others.

  They were afraid that I, one of so many, would destroy their way of seeing the world. This world where they saw themselves as the rearguard of the European world and they saw me as the wild one coming from the trees. The savages had to see themselves as they were, look at their own violent faces in the mirror, and so they turned the mirror toward me and there they witnessed their violence, but they pointed it to my face. I was the violent one now, and I had to demonstrate the impossible, that it wasn't my face but theirs, that they couldn't see. They wouldn't see.

  Well, anyway. Someone decided to put an end to Moroccan Judaism, or no one did. In the twentieth century, things happen. There are no mighty kings who destroy, there is bureaucracy, democracy, different people do different things in their offices and suddenly an atomic bomb drops. The decision was made by many, some here and there, experts and politicians, and they turned us all into nomads. Hey, you, listen, it's your turn to leave, there is no more place here for the Jews; Because of Zionism, colonialism, nationalism and the possibility of making a few dollars. But how can one explain that the Nazis ended Judaism in Arab countries and not European countries and that Jews left Northwest Africa and headed to France or other European countries. What kind of domino are we playing?

  Time was playing a sick joke on me, damn it. I was facing a new inquisition, the worst that I could imagine. It was such an inconceivable inquisition that I'm afraid to see it even today, and nobody around me can see what I did. How could they? It took me fifteen years to begin to see it myself. Those who want to convert me today are the Jews themselves, and they want to convert me into a European and Christian version of Judaism, a very Christian version. And nothing is enough, but there is always a court that says I'm not a good Christian, that I still have to leave more parts of me behind to become a new Jew, this is how you create the new identity, a new Jew like the first Christians were the new people of Israel.

  I don't want to, I object, like my ancestors, those expelled, but I can't refuse, and my children don't even understand what Judaism I'm talking about, nor can I write about it in the new Hebrew kidnapped by that same new Judaism. A Judaism that wants to defend European values, the same values that led the Jews to Auschwitz. There is a complete exclusion of the Sephardic Jew in the society and it's what is considered most normal.

  And that brought me to a wall, a wall that I couldn't cross. A wall where I couldn't pray.

  3

  “Well, I can see that it makes no difference at all, I don't know if you're even listening to me or not.”

  “Yes we're listening and what you read was very interesting, but what we want to know is what happened next.”

  “We turned back. You really find this notebook interesting? Well, I'll leave it here as a gift, and if you can send me some more tuna sandwiches, I'm hungry again. I don't know if you give breaks here, but I've been here for six hours and I would like to take a shower and get some sleep, go home or to a hotel, anywhere.”

  “When you get to the accident.”

  “For the record, there is a lot more to tell, we were driving around for three more days.”

  “Be concise and don't tell us a lot of stupid stuff, and don't read notebooks from back people.”

  “You don't like back people either?”

  “We haven't said anything, nor are we saying anything about back or front people, we're just listening to your story.”

  “But I was reading the notebook of a back person.”

  “And now it's time to confess.”

  “Confess what?”

  “We don't know, to confess to something, there is always something to confess. Some secret.”

  “Secrets, we all have secrets, but do you want to know my secrets or what happened on the bus, you have to decide. If it’s a secret you want, well here's one, at twelve I stole my mother's gold ring and they accused the maid and fired her. I sold the ring to a gypsy, a street vendor, and kept this money that bailed me out of difficult situations for many years.”

  “Well, you better keep telling us about the bus and leave your childhood where it belongs.”

  “Can you send me some more sandwiches...?”

  “No.”

  “Then we turned back, which was not simple. The trees reached up to the road and the forest was so thick that it was hard to find a space the size of the bus, so we drove in reverse for one or two miles until we found a gap, or more or less a gap. The men got out and we cut some olive branches with our bare hands so the bus could turn around. The bus was still full, but I think one or two passengers stayed back in the mount of olives. I don't know who, I can't remember everything. I watched the landscape that had changed into an infinite Scottish green field after we turned back. Then a guy came and sat next to me and told me that what he wanted was to forget, to forget his brother’s death...”

  “Here we go again, let's try something new, can you tell us who you are? Your story.”

  “My story?”

  “Yes, your life. What you do, where you were born, where you come from.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, I believe you're the only one in this room. You.”

  “Alright, I was on the bus and I was going to my city. Or what is probably my city. I don't know where my city or my town i
s, somewhere. I was born in France, in Blois, my parents were Moroccan immigrants, in the Loire. I was born there but I was never French, I wasn't legal there, my father wasn't a legal migrant, and at school they called me the Moroccan, ‘le marrocain’, and they told me to go back to Morocco. My parents came from the Riff and sometimes they spoke to each other in Tamazight, but I don't understand a word of Tamazight. Don't tell me you don't know what Tamazight is, it's the language of the Berbers, but don't say that word to my parents, they would kill me, they are Imazighen, not Berber. Anyway, what happened is that when I was twelve the French government decided to clean up a little bit its streets from Moroccans and they offered a few thousand francs to those who wanted to return to their village. My parents were fed up with being Moroccan and having bad jobs so we went back to Morocco. Actually, they went back, because for me it was my first trip to Morocco. We went to Tangiers, where he had a brother who had a photography business that he built thanks to six years of work in Germany. Then I returned or I traveled or I moved to Morocco, and there everyone at school began calling me the French guy, ‘El Fransaui’, and it was true, I was el fransaui, I only spoke French. When I was twenty I went back to France and since then I travel around Europe in search of the boy I was when I was twelve years old, before history parted my life in two, the one before and the one after, I go from sea to sea, here and in Morocco, I go from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and I am the one who splits in two, I am the land that prevents the seas from becoming the world.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don't know, it's just what I say.”

  “But we believe that you are a terrorist from Al-Qaeda.”

  “The only attacks that I commit are attacks against myself.”

  “And that seems small to you?”

  “Well, it's cosa mía[5].”

  “Cosa Nostra[6].

  “It was a figure of speech, a metaphor.”

  “Me too.”

  “What?”

  “I am from Morocco too.”

  “Not me. I was born in France, in Blois. I already told you that.”

  “Well I was, I was born in Morocco.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Not really.”

  “Then, no.”

  “Well yeah, but I don't know, last night I dreamed that all my life had been a spirit, a nothing, that I hadn't lived. The dream begins in a castle, in an enormous hall and everyone is scared to get to the front part of the hall which leads to the garden, but they tell us that we have to go. And they are afraid because there is a shadow, an evil spirit, but at the same time they all try to seem very modern and they say they're not afraid, and when I get to that place something envelops me, and I hear the others say ‘he is flying’. Then it's 25 years later and there's a party in that same garden and I scare a few guests, but the others tell people not be afraid that I am a friendly ghost and that I won't hurt anyone, and then I say to myself or I tell someone, I don't remember precisely, I say that I wanted to get to the front of the hall, that it wasn't a coincidence, and that I had finally understood that the evil spirit was the result of the lies of those who were visiting the castle, and at that moment I realized I had to expose those lies, and I woke up.”

  “Why?”

  “That's the dream, the twenty-five years represent the years since I left Morocco, you see? You understand?”

  “The same twenty-five years since I've returned, and I don't stop returning.”

  “But it is not the same, I cannot return. I'm Jewish and the Jews can never go back, or if they can it's after hundreds or thousands of years. When they're gone, they're gone for good.

  “You’re probably exaggerating a little bit...”

  “Well, maybe a little yes, physically I can go to Morocco, but my community doesn't exist, which means my Morocco no longer exists, it's another country.”

  “I can return to France, and although there I am the Moroccan I can still go back, but you can go to Israel.”

  “That's where I went after Morocco, they promised the moon and they gave me the salt of the sea. Without water. And after two years I came here, and I cannot go back to Israel either.”

  “And where is here?”

  “Europe.”

  “Where in Europe?”

  “You don't need to know more.”

  “Let's see if we can finish now, I'll tell you the rest real quick, so the bus turned back and we drove for two hours to find another wall of about ten yards long, we saw a house next to it, well, half a house, the people who lived there told us that the wall passed in the middle of their house, and went up suddenly in the middle of the night so the children are on one side and the parents on the other, and they don't know how it all happened without any noise. So we turned back again and it took us two hours of trees to realize that the other wall hadn't disappeared, and something incredible happened, a young man with one of those laptop computers told the driver that, I think it was after six or seven turns, he said that it wasn't possible that gas wasn't depleted, that something wasn't logical, and he had made many calculations, and that he believed that the walls were imaginary, that they did not exist and that what we had to do was ignore one of them and keep going. I thought he was right, we discussed it and suggested that those who wanted to get off the bus should do it and the others would drive to the wall. We discussed that for hours, and the back people were also entitled to get off or to vote, and well in the end the kid was right, we crossed the wall but what happened was worse, we found ourselves between two trucks on the highway, stuck on both sides, we appeared right in the middle, and that was the cause of the accident.”

  “And you expect me to believe that just because your father was from Morocco?”

  “He still is, he's still alive.”

  “Whatever, but you think I'm going to believe your story?”

  “No, I can tell you other versions and make up a thousand things, but that's what I remember. That is if I'm still sane. Maybe I'm already delirious, or maybe I was before.”

  4.

  I told my boyfriend, well, Severio, I told him that I did not like it in the back, I like sitting in front, I want to see the road, but they were the last two remaining seats, and I told him, I told him a thousand times, that a couple sits together, but he was in a hurry, I don't know what for, we were both unemployed and had nothing to do, but the next bus was in twelve hours and Severio was suddenly in a hurry, I don't know what got into him, he was unbearable, well, he is unbearable when he gets nervous, you can't talk to him, and it must be that women's intuition or whatever but I saw that back and front people thing coming, like an arrow, because couples must travel together, if not, then the woman sits next to another man and they start talking, and maybe she even falls a bit in love and then her boyfriend is not the same boyfriend, he changes in her eyes, and I love Severio, and I hope he's ok, I haven't seen him since the accident. I hope he is alive, but nobody says nothing to me, neither here nor in the hospital, I have no clue what they want but I imagine that they would want to know about the crime, about who shot Cash, I say he committed suicide, that's what I believe, of course I didn't see anything, nobody saw, it was nighttime, and I heard the shot better than the others, because I was sitting next to him in the back seat, the one with the five joined seats, the last one, Severio was on my right, glued to the window, and he was sleeping too, well, at least that's what he claimed, although some said that he was the one who shot him, out of jealousy, although why would he even be jealous, I didn't even get to exchange one word with Cash, not a hello, nor a “where are you headed?”, or “where do you come from?”, absolutely nothing, but sometimes, of course, he heard me say love things to Severio, that must've turned him on, that is if he actually understood our language, I don't even know that, but the shot, you see, it woke me up and I jumped toward the exit door from fear, I jumped forward, and I only saw the body when I got to the door, and then I noticed it was the guy who was sitting next t
o me, and after a lot of commotion, and noise, the driver stopped the bus and ordered everybody to stay in their place, he said we had to go to the police, he ordered us not to move, and told the back people not to come to the front part of the bus, and the limit of the front part was the bathroom, that everyone called the can, because that way it made it sound more like a border. I was shaking and my boyfriend came and hugged me, and well, I don't know if I should say this, but he was so horny and he had a huge boner, so I told him to calm down, but only then did he understand what I meant, he hadn't realized he had a boner.

  That scared me. I had never seen him like this before. I saw him differently, like a wild animal about to devour a chicken, something like that. But you know when facing death there are all sorts of reactions, they say that men have boners at the time of death. There was a Japanese movie in which the woman drowned her lover little by little so he would have a bigger boner. It's physiological, something about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Maybe something like that happened to him, I don't know, but I thought it was very strange, and for a moment I feared that he was the criminal, but he said he wasn't and I believed him, and anyway there was no shred of evidence. They found the gun in the hands of one guy from the front, who couldn't explain how it got into his hands, nobody saw a thing, nobody knew anything, everyone was asleep, at least everyone but the criminal, or perhaps even the criminal was asleep and he or she did it in his sleep, nobody knew, but then we heard screams and arguments in front and suddenly we were stopping to bury the dead guy.

  And then all hell broke loose. For starters, before we stepped off the bus, a black cat walked by on the grass. That's not good at all, and I told Severio. And to top it all off the front people accused the back people of the crime, all of them, not only one of us had died, we were also responsible for his death. And he sang pretty well, someone said, maybe it was Severio, who had nothing to do with Severo, because he was a front person, and we were the guilty ones. I honestly can't tell you if he sang well or not, because I never heard a peep out of him, not talking nor singing, and I already told you, he didn't seem like a bad guy to me, but I'm so in love with my boyfriend and I only have eyes for him. I was sorry he died, but not for long, because for no reason I was guilty, a suspect among other suspects, but still guilty, so my sympathy faded off pretty fast.