Streetwise

by Choukri, Mohamed; Emery, Ed;

  Hamid and I had no way of earning money. My 1,000 pesetas soon ran out, and Hamid had already been broke when he arrived from Tangier. One morning he told me:

  ‘I want you to wear your best clothes today.’

  It was Sunday.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll explain in a minute.’

  I had a jacket and a pair of trousers that I only wore at weekends – and only then if it wasn’t raining. I chose a white shirt and a brightly coloured tie.

  ‘Don’t forget to bring your school bag with you and your pen, the one you write your lessons with.’

  ‘But why all this dressing up?’

  ‘I’ve had a great idea.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’s plenty of unemployed people coming to town from the countryside, looking for work.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I’ll go out and grab a couple and I’ll tell them that you’re a personal friend of the pasha’s private secretary. Then you write a letter for each of them, saying: “The bearer of this letter is looking for work, and hopes that you are in a position to oblige.”’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And supposing they catch us …?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The police. Or our victims.’

  ‘We’ll just deny everything. Have you forgotten how to play dumb? What happened to your days in Tangier?’

  ‘And how am I supposed to deny the evidence of my own writing?’

  ‘Just write in a different handwriting to your normal one … They’re hardly going to call in the experts for a case like this.’

  ‘If this all goes wrong, I’m blaming you.’

  ‘The hell you are … You swallow your tongue!’

  He set off in search of likely victims. I made my way to the Café Etoile, wearing my best clothes. I sat and read for a while – The Nymphs of the Valley by Gibran Khalil Gibran. When Hamid finally appeared, he was accompanied by a couple of peasants. They were extremely respectful to me as we exchanged greetings. I felt embarrassed, so I asked them to sit down. By the looks of them they were very poor. Hamid sat next to me and explained what they wanted. I wasn’t used to this sort of scam. I drank my black coffee while they ordered a pot of green tea. Hamid had no scruples when it came to getting money, even though in this kind of situation the victims were inevitably going to be from the same class as ourselves.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, everyone and everything is fair game. You and I have to find the money to complete our studies. If they want to get money, they’re going to have to go out and steal too …’

  This was Hamid’s comment once he’d sent our victims on their way. He’d charged them 100 pesetas for the letter-writing and all they got for their money was the following: ‘I, the undersigned [ … ], being a Moroccan citizen from the village of [ … ], am looking for work. I hope that you can help me to find employment. Allah smiles on his servants when they go to the aid of their brothers.’

  They hadn’t been able to sign their names, so I dribbled some ink from my pen onto a sheet of paper and got them to sign with their thumbprints.

  The following Sunday we were hanging out in Calle Real. We had no money to buy anything at the café. All we had was some cigarettes, which we smoked one at a time, taking turns, a drag each. Hamid was dawdling behind, looking in shop windows, so I stopped and looked in another shop while I waited for him.

  Suddenly I heard him yelling. Our two victims had appeared. One of them had already grabbed Hamid and the other had spotted me and was heading my way, shouting and yelling. I ran off as fast as I could. Ducking down an alley, I found myself at the back door of the big university mosque. It occurred to me that I might be able to escape by hiding in there, so I ran straight in, without stopping to take my shoes off. In the ablution area I slipped, but managed to regain my balance. I turned and looked behind me. The son of a bitch was right there, taking off his shoes. No chance of hiding there! Unlike him, I kept my shoes on. It was the hour for midday prayers. I hurdled over the backs of the men at prayer and ran right through the middle. They reacted angrily. I went flying out of the main door, and found myself in the square of Souq el Kubaybat.

  I yelled at the silly bastards:

  ‘Go back to your prayers. Nothing’s happened!’

  Stupid damn sheep, they didn’t listen! They all started running after me. Some of the store holders in Souq el Kubaybat started running too, so that by now I had a whole gang breathing down my neck. It was a case of ‘run rabbit run’. I headed for Aïn Shaqa and stopped at the wall overlooking the sea. Just behind me I could see my pursuers stopping too, out of breath and looking completely stupid. I tried to catch my breath as I leaned against the wall and watched them. There were fewer of them now. They were intent on revenge, but they also looked nervous – a fear of the unknown. They started coming towards me again, more slowly this time; then they stopped to rest for a moment. And then they started running again, so I started running too. They stopped and talked together briefly, and then came closer. I stopped, coughing and out of breath, and leaned against the wall. The sea breeze seemed to revive me and in the end I managed to give them the slip.

  In the evening I went back to the granary. There I found Hamid with Saida looking after him. His left eye was swollen and he had a plaster on his nose. Saida had the air of a nurse in a convent – like one of the Sisters of Mercy, nursing a wounded soldier somewhere back in the Middle Ages. Hamid and I looked at each other for a moment. Then we burst into raucous, hysterical laughter. He said:

  ‘You’re lucky, you got away from the bastard chasing you. He was a lot stronger and a lot meaner than his pal. He came back and started knocking me about. His friend tried to break it up. Some passers-by stepped in and it was only thanks to them that I didn’t end up being hauled off to the police station. If they catch you, they’ll knock hell out of you.’

  There was a light knock at the door. The knock of a timid person, I thought. Hamid opened the door. It was Fatima. She asked if I was in. I wondered what she wanted. I said hello and we smiled at each other. She was looking agitated, though. She was wearing ordinary clothes and no make-up, so her face looked different to how I’d seen her at the Café Central. I introduced her to Hamid and asked her to come in.

  ‘Not today, thank you. I wanted to talk to you.’

  I excused myself from Hamid and went off with her. He watched us go, showing no interest.

  ‘Don’t you remember I invited you for supper at my house? You haven’t been to the Café Central for days. I was expecting to see you there and I’ve been asking the waiter where you were.’

  ‘There last few days I’ve been going straight back from the Institute to the granary to get my homework done.’

  She lived in Calle Real. A small flat: one room, a kitchen and a toilet. The decor was neat and simple. On the walls hung some framed pictures, their edges trimmed with red ribbon. Supper was cooking – a mouth-watering smell of meat and spices that made me even hungrier than I was before. She’d left the lights on when she came to get me from the granary. There was a bottle of vermouth and some lemon juice. I reckoned that Hamid was probably cursing women by now.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  We drank a toast. Then she put down her glass, as if suddenly remembering something.

  I studied the photos on the walls. There were some of her on her own and another with two Spaniards. There was a photo of an elderly man and woman. Her parents, presumably. And a picture of her with a child.

  She came back.

  ‘This is my daughter, Salwa.’

  A shy, smiling child.

  ‘Give the gentleman a kiss.’

  Salwa’s lips planted a warm kiss on my cheek. I kissed her lightly on the head. I hate the kind of low-life characters who kiss children on or near the mouth after they’ve been kissing prostitutes on the mouth, and other places besides. As Hamid says, there’s no such thing as a God-
fearing man, and there’s no such thing as a clean pussy either.

  ‘She’s 7. She’s at primary school.’

  I smiled at the child and sat her next to me.

  ‘This is the gentleman who’ll be teaching you when you come back from school.’

  She brought me the child’s exercise books and I flicked through them.

  ‘Excellent work.’

  ‘I want her to study so that she can be a doctor or a teacher when she grows up. That’s right, isn’t it, Salwa? I don’t want her to end up like me. The only schooling I ever had was three years at the Spanish convent. They taught me needlework and dressmaking when I should have been learning to read and write.’

  This was the first time I’d met a Moroccan child with the name of Salwa. She smiled and seemed lost in her thoughts. As we ate supper, Fatima was tearing off pieces of meat and either putting them in Salwa’s mouth or handing them to me. We clinked glasses. Fatima was a bit high on her happiness. After supper, she said she had to take Salwa to a neighbour who would be looking after her for the night.

  ‘Why don’t you let her sleep with you?’

  ‘I get back late at night and I don’t wake up early. She has to be up at 7 so as to get to school by 8.’

  I asked Fatima where she was from.

  ‘I was born in Larache but my parents are from Ithnain Sidi el Yamani. My mother died and my father went back to the village. Since then he’s remarried and now he spends his time farming our land.’

  The fact that we’d been drinking created a kind of intimacy between us. She wasn’t the brazen sort; she flirted with me a bit, in the same way as she did at the Café Central. Shy in her movements and softly spoken. When we ran out of conversation, she seemed overwhelmed by a kind of sadness, but it was a sweet sadness, so I let her be and amused myself by looking at the pictures on the walls. When the sadness passed I shared in her happiness.

  On my way back, I ran into the mukhtar Haddad. He was making his way down the street on his own. I stopped him. He reached out and felt me, and then transferred his hand onto my arm, sliding it down till he gripped my hand:

  ‘Ah, Choukri. I’ve been looking for you. I was hoping to find you at the Café Central. Shall we go there and read?’

  He’d probably recognized me by my smell. He was carrying a book – Laila Who is Sick in Iraq – by Zaki Mubarak.

  ‘I don’t have the price of a drink,’ I said. ‘All I’ve got is cigarettes.’

  He put his arm into mine and we went off together to the hostel at the Religious Institute, intending to borrow money from a bedouin student who was staying there. However, as we entered the front hallway, he turned left and began to feel his way down the corridor. He stopped at the third door and knocked. No answer. The door wasn’t locked. He opened it and went in. When he came out again, he cocked his head to left and right, as if he was seeing with his ears. He had his hand through the slit in his djellaba, and was obviously carrying something under the garment.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sh! It’s an oil stove. We’re going to sell it. I hope we don’t run into him on the way out.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The owner of the stove, of course. I give him Arabic lessons.’

  I left him to wait for me, near one of the arches of Souq el Kubaybat, and I called round to see Salahami at his restaurant. I found him holding up a live chicken by one wing.

  ‘O mighty cockerel! Your hour of destiny has arrived. Dictated not by my hand, but by the hand of those whose wish is to eat you. Verily I have no choice. Your time has run out and verily I mourn for you. After today, no more will you dream of making love and jumping on the hens as they scratch around for food. What a head you have – so high and mighty! You look at the sky more than you look at the ground. Farewell, O mighty one, O delicate one, O handsome one!’

  Then he cut its throat with a razor and tossed it to the ground, where it thrashed about in the dust. Its eyeballs were bulging from its head as it leapt and jerked about. It was Salahami’s custom to make a ritual address to every chicken that he butchered. He never killed hens. In his opinion, hens were only fit for laying eggs. He claimed that their meat was fatty and tasteless, because they wore themselves out producing so many offspring and worrying about them. That was his opinion. Also, he always killed his chickens with a razor instead of a knife because he didn’t want them to feel pain: a chicken isn’t a violin, he’d say, it has a soul. I sold him the oil stove for 30 pesetas. When he inquired whether it was stolen, I swore that it had belonged to a student friend of mine who needed the cash to buy a schoolbook. The mukhtar and I split the money between us. Before we went on to the Café Central he asked if I would mind making a detour down the road where his sweetheart lived – the ‘Virgin’. As we came to the door of her house, he stopped and sighed. Then we carried on. I wondered whether he had smelt her presence. The mukhtar was the kind of man who still believed in the old principles of platonic love. This frail lover was to die during an operation for a weak heart, some time in 1974.

  ‘Does she love you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does she know that you love her?’

  ‘I think she does, but it doesn’t worry me whether she knows or not.’

  ‘Have you ever spoken to her?’

  ‘Not just the two of us on our own. When she’s with her friends at the Institute, we say hello, and sometimes we talk a bit.’

  We found a seat in the Café Central and I set about reading him Laila Who is Sick in Iraq. He sighed as I read and carefully explained the words I didn’t know.

  At the Institute I found that my name was on the list of those who had been admitted to the boarders’ class. It was Saturday and term would be starting on the following Monday. Fatima was delighted for me and kissed me on both cheeks. It was Sunday when I arrived, and she was making herself pretty to begin her day around the bars.

  ‘Mind you don’t ever stop visiting me … And make sure you keep up the lessons with my Salwa. I’m relying on you.’

  ‘Your Salwa is my Salwa.’

  She slipped 20 pesetas into my hand and smiled. I didn’t refuse the money. After all, she had a job, whereas I was facing the prospect of being more or less broke for the whole school year until the time came for the summer holidays and my return to Tangier. I gave Salwa her lesson for the day and took her out for a while. I bought her some chocolate with the money her mother had given me. We went for a walk and played for a while in the park. Then I took her back to Lilafatina, her childminder.

  When I got back, I found Hamid reading a book while Saida was frying some fish. On the trunk stood a bottle of wine and two half-empty glasses. Saida must have bought the wine because Hamid was broke.

  Being admitted to the boarders’ class was not exactly a privilege – although the beds were decent and we had food from the elementary school canteen, the fact of having to obey the harsh rules laid down for boarders made me as restless as a caged animal. I was in a room where the majority of boarders were middle-class kids from towns in the north. I thought of asking the headmaster to transfer me to another room with poor country people like myself, but who was I to ask for something like that? They’d ask for an explanation and I’d probably get into trouble.

  They were all bunk beds. Mine was on top and the bed below was occupied by a boy from Qasr el Kebir. He didn’t mix with the other boys. His only interest in life seemed to be arithmetic. In other subjects, he did his homework, but he never bothered going over it again. He was scruffily dressed and only shaved once a week. Wherever he went, he took an exercise book with him, full of algebra and geometry exercises. He’d write on the floor of the room, on the toilet doors, and anywhere the chalk would work. On the wall next to the bed he wrote with a lead pencil. He kept a candle in his pocket, and it was not unusual for him to light it several times during the night to solve one of his algebra problems, writing on the floor.

  He never slept right through the night bec
ause he needed to get up and go to the toilet several times – first soon after he got into bed and then again several times before morning. He usually skipped breakfast in the Institute dining hall, but I’d heard that he was from a well-to-do family, so perhaps he had his own food. He regularly had nightmares, which kept me awakes at night. He used to talk in his sleep, too. Short, meaningless sentences. Sometimes he seemed to be answering someone who was talking to him. He’d reply with a shrug of his shoulders, or a tight-lipped smile, and then he’d stop. I reckoned that this boy was somehow different from the others in the dormitory, even if he was from the same social class.

  One day all these boys would end up as smart, well-dressed young men who shaved every day. Maybe even twice a day if they had a date with a girl in the evening. At the weekend, they’d all crowd round the mirror in the washroom to shave. I couldn’t be bothered to wait for my turn, so I filled a bucket with water, leaned over it and used the reflection as a shaving mirror. One of them asked me:

  ‘How did you learn to shave like that without cutting yourself?’

  ‘I practised on my pubic hair. I nicked myself plenty of times, but that’s how I learned not to cut my face.’

  The headmaster used to come and inspect us in the canteen and in the dormitories. He had studied in Cairo. We respected him because he was willing to help us when we had problems. He never complained when people asked him questions, and I asked more questions than most. Once I met him in the street and asked him to explain a verse by Abu el ‘Ala el Ma’arri: ‘People were born to live, but certain people wrongly thought that they were born to die.’