Then two planes drilled their way into the heart of the Western world.
She watched as the little opportunity, the crack that had posed a possibility, sealed over; people looked away and kept their distance, as though her body had, from one day to the next, become a hostile object. The discussions ground to a halt, the bellicose language of the daily news trickled into everyday life. Either you are with us, said the most powerful man in the world, or you are with the terrorists. The plans, his words — they broke her world, the whole world, in two, into we over here and them over there. And Ilham became them. And her body became over there. She felt how the enmity nestled in her organs, how she became infected by the fear and the aversion of others. That is how she became what others thought they were seeing, a double transformation.
Ilham Assouline had become a bad name.
2
Algeciras. The ship nears the harbour, tucked back into the bay. Container wharves, freighters. The vast Spanish land behind. Cranes poke into the electric-blue sky. From the trip over, Ilham remembers the nerve-wracking swarm in the passenger terminal, the chaos there; the gates of Africa.
A voice over their heads says it is time to return to their cars.
They trundle down the metal stairs. The ship’s engines resonate in the bannisters, the walls, the floors. The car deck is low and dark; many of the sodium lamps are broken. Everyone clambers around the cars, parked with only inches between. They stand on bumpers and trailer hitches, and keep their balance with a hand on the low ceiling. Shouting, always shouting. Engines are started. Ilham chokes, the exhaust fumes bite at her airways, she has a hyperactive gag reflex. She follows Saleh and Thouraya between the cars; the other two have vanished.
Behind the windshields, the motionless fisheyes of men at the wheel, alone with their desires. She thinks about the emaciated stray dogs on the patch of lawn in Rabat, the one on top of the other, his hips trembling back and forth. Thouraya saw it too and laughed. Ilham remembers the desperation in the dog’s eyes: something overpowering had taken possession of him, he suffered. The bitch yelped and turned her head to snap at him, but he was beyond her reach.
Everything multiplies exponentially beneath the burning sun. Flies, dogs, people, bacteria in the meat hanging outside in the alleyways. The stomach linings of cows hanging in bluish strips, the flayed carcasses of rams, testicles still attached. One day she had vomited briefly and violently next to a pile of rotting garbage, beside a gate in the casbah; more often she was made only a little nauseous by all the manifestations of poverty she saw. The rotting, the cripples, their wounds, the filth. It was everywhere — it was the natural state of everything.
Sometimes they retreated into the McDonald’s, into the coolness there. The world as they knew it, the free Wi-Fi. It was there, one day, that they had run into Saleh; Ilham had recognised him. Amazement and joy at a familiar face so far from home. It was the first time Thouraya had met him; she laid her slender, limp hand in his for a moment. ‘What’s that you’re eating?’ she had asked.
Saleh had his mouth full, and pointed to the picture of the McArabia above the counter.
She laughed. ‘Oh man, a Morocco burger.’
Thouraya was ballsy; there wasn’t much she didn’t dare to do.
He took them to a beach outside town. There were girls in bikinis there, and boys in shorts scrounging around, gaunt as shadows. Ilham felt sorry for them, for their doggish suffering; along with her pity came contempt.
Thouraya gleamed like a bottle as she came out of the sea. Her head tilted to one side, she wrung the water from her hair. Polished toenails, mother-of-pearl. Fingernails the same. She knew it. The way she crossed the sand towards them, a performance.
‘Tfoo,’ she said, sinking gingerly onto her towel, ‘I thought the water would be warmer than that.’
At Club Amnesia, Saleh shook the doorman’s hand and shuffled in, the girls in his wake. They drank pink ladies and mai tais in no particular order. The boys who came here were different from the ones at the beach — they were prosperous and well dressed — but on the dance floor they still pressed their erections up against you, Thouraya said with feigned dismay.
There were moments when you felt like giving yourself away to a stranger, lightly and free of care. Ilham had tried, she really had tried, but her mother’s voice — ‘Ya msebty!’ — carried across the water. With her father’s rage on its heels.
She danced jerkily. She was made up of two bodies. Her collarbones arched elegantly beneath her skin, her shoulders were slender, and she felt that she had pretty wrists and hands, but the body below the waist did not seem to fit well with the rest. Her hips too round, her legs too short, like a figurine of Venus. She distrusted boys who found that attractive. There was something wrong with them. She was, she felt, her upper body. Anyone who lusted after her lower body lusted after someone else; it had nothing to do with her.
‘Hobi,’ Thouraya said a few days later, when she answered the phone. ‘So what’s the plan?’
Saleh had befriended them eagerly, and they were keen to be chaperoned by him. He was their guide, their interpreter, their fixer. They moved from place to place in their far-too-expensive car, an Audi A4, rented on impulse, just as the whole idea of going to Morocco had been an impulse. Ilham didn’t even have a passport. She had taken her sister’s; the photo looked passable. She had no money for the trip — Thouraya had loaned her everything. She didn’t even have a phone that worked.
They picked up Saleh close to the Tour Hassan, not far from where they were staying at Thouraya’s uncle’s home. They drove out of town, Thouraya at the wheel. Hedges of red oleander blossomed on the median strip. Moroccan flags flapped above the parade route. The satellite town of Témara, which supplied Rabat with a stream of inexpensive manpower, had more or less fused with the capital now. At Témara’s edge, half-0hidden among a stand of cork oaks, was a detention centre about which people spoke only in a whisper. Back in the leaden years, opponents of the king had been tortured there. These days, people said, the prisoners were terrorists. Officially, the centre didn’t exist at all. And because it didn’t exist, there could be no torturing. A scream no one hears has never been uttered.
They drove down the boulevard, the ocean glistening on the right. The gondolas of the big Ferris wheel on the beach hung fixed in midair.
They left the main road, Saleh directing from the backseat. They climbed, and came to a plateau. ‘So where are we going?’ Thouraya asked.
‘Turn in here,’ Saleh said. The asphalt became a sandy path beneath the trees. They left the sea behind, and the neighbourhood of white-stuccowork bungalows, all new, with bougainvillea blossoming in the yards, glorious orange, white, purple.
Thouraya slalomed around the potholes.
‘I’m going to show you two the real Morocco,’ Saleh said. ‘The way it really is, wallah.’ He pointed to where they should park, in the shade of the trees. Through a hedge of head-high reeds they saw an improvised settlement.
The car lock beeped. They entered the shantytown; the reed was a twilight zone, the crossing between the world of the owners and that of the disowned.
They passed a firepit where stray cats lay napping dustily in the afterglow. Tyre carcasses and a mattress spring, charred but not consumed; at the edge of the grey ring of ash, bags of garbage were smouldering.
Saleh led the way. The shacks were built of perishable material, wood, plastic sheets — prey to any storm. Corrugated roofs held in place by car tyres, chunks of cement, broken ceramic tajines, television sets. The houses were huddled together; Ilham peeked inside as they passed. How did these people live? How could you live like this, for god’s sake?
Here and there, rocks had been used to fashion flowerbeds. Hibiscus and bougainvillea, just like the newly built houses beyond the reeds. Seedlings were sprouting in plastic bottles.
They followed Saleh between the
houses, through the maze of alleyways. Thouraya, with her Miu Miu sunglasses and a rose-pink D&G bag over her shoulder, looked like a film star on her way to do charity work.
Where was Saleh taking them? Ilham didn’t like surprises. They tended to turn out badly. She drank the last bit of water from her bottle. She couldn’t stand the poverty, the heat, and the dust. It exhausted her. There was compassion in her, but beneath the surface also the conviction that poor people had only themselves to blame for living like this. A kind of payback for something. That thought bore her up a little, made it easier to tolerate what she was seeing.
Saleh stepped aside and let Thouraya go first through a low doorway. They entered a room, painted green, with a ceiling as low as the door. Seated on the sedari was an old woman with deep-set eyes, surrounded by a swarm of children. The mother animal in the midst of all. Weathered feet stuck out from beneath her skirts; she placed them on the carpet and rose with a sigh. She kissed her visitors’ hands and raised them to her furrowed brow. Old tattoos, a pattern of lines and dots. A cascade of greetings in Tamazight. It made them blush; they took her hand and said, ‘Shokran, shokran.’ She seemed to be the grandmother of a few of the children, though it was impossible to tell which ones. The children ran in and out. From behind the curtain in the doorway new ones appeared; they stared at the visitors for a while before disappearing again. The old woman left the room; the curtain blew closed behind her.
They sat down on the low sofas. The television was playing loudly.
‘Don’t be afraid, sweetheart,’ Thouraya said to the little girl beside her, who was staring at her wide-eyed. On the television was a bald kung-fu monk with a symmetrical face. ‘National Geographic Abu Dhabi’, the title in the upper-left-hand corner said. The fighting monk shot like an orange flame across the Manhattan skyline.
Ilham’s uneasiness grew. What were they doing here? Who were these people? Saleh’s friends? Family? A timid young man entered; he wore a t-shirt that read ‘Energie Cottbus’.
‘This,’ Saleh said, ‘is Murat.’
‘As-salamu alaykum,’ the young man said.
‘Alaykumu s-salām,’ Saleh replied. They stood. A hand of skin and flesh, no sinews. He had a handsome face, she thought, with perfect eyebrows. When he smiled, she saw his ruined teeth. The boys exchanged a few words, and Murat disappeared out the door again. Ilham was about to ask Saleh for an explanation when the old woman appeared from behind a curtain and settled back down on the sedari.
‘Saleh?’ Ilham said in a tone that barely masked her irritation. ‘Are you going to tell us what we’re doing here?’
He lay back on the sofa and began tickling one of the little girls. Be patient, he gestured with his free hand.
The monk made way for Tom and Jerry.
Murat came back with a serving tray with glasses, a pot of mint tea, and saucers with dates, pastries, and cactus fruit. He knelt and placed the tray carefully on the table, then poured the tea from a modest height.
‘A Moroccan,’ Saleh said solemnly, ‘will share even the last of his food with you. No matter how poor he is.’
Even he, Ilham thought, didn’t consider them Moroccans. ‘Murat,’ she asked, ‘parlez-vous français?’
He shook his head, a smile of regret playing at his lips. He lowered the teapot carefully and said: ‘Pas bien, madame.’
‘Un peu, peut-être?’
He nodded. Again, that shy smile.
‘Qu’est-ce que vous faites comme travail?’ The French she remembered from secondary school.
He didn’t understand. He looked at Saleh.
‘You know, what kind of work does he do,’ she said quickly.
Murat listened attentively to the translation. His hand swept back and forth in negation.
‘No work here,’ Saleh said. ‘There’s nothing here.’
Ilham nodded and asked no further.
Saleh started tickling the girl again, and said over the sound of her laughter: ‘He worked somewhere in France. They busted him.’ He spoke to Murat, then said: ‘In the Languedoc, he says. As a — what do you call that — commerçant?’
‘Salesman, or something,’ Ilham said.
‘He polished crystals for tourists. After a year, they kicked him out.’
The old woman kept nodding the whole time, as though following the conversation closely.
‘So how old is he?’ Ilham asked. ‘He seems so young.’
Nineteen, Saleh figured. He lifted the little girl off his lap and put her on the ground. When she jumped onto him again, the old woman shouted at her to behave.
The pastries were tasteless. Saleh sat up straight and said: ‘The Idrissis are very poor. France was their chance. It was really bad luck that he got picked up there.’ His gaze moved silently from Ilham to Thouraya. Ilham sensed what was coming. ‘They need us,’ he said. ‘We’re here to help each other, right?’
How long has he been working up to this? That was Ilham’s only thought.
‘It’s really easy,’ he said. ‘We take your car. Murat in the trunk, stuff piled on top of him, and that’s it. Lots of Moroccans cross like that. It happens all the time.’
Ilham shifted on the sofa uneasily; everyone in the room was looking at them.
Saleh’s voice: ‘It’s easy, really. I’ve never been checked, I swear to god.’
‘Saleh,’ Ilham said quietly, ‘you can’t do this.’
‘In our car?’ Thouraya said. ‘We can’t do that.’
‘I’ve done it so often,’ Saleh said.
‘What are you, a smuggler or something?’
Ilham shook her head. The old woman got up off the sofa and sank to her knees in front of her. The tattooed crosses, dots, and lines on her face must have been put there an eternity ago; the ink had faded to a pale blue and blurred beneath the skin. The woman seized Ilham’s calves and begged.
‘We have to help these people,’ Ilham heard Saleh saying. ‘Take a look around. We can’t just leave them like this, can we?’
The old woman’s laments mixed loudly with the soundtrack of Tom and Jerry. She took Ilham’s hand and rubbed it against her face, her temple. The closeness of that strange, ancient body; Ilham shivered. She realised what she represented to the old woman — a last resort, a way out, a future — and was ashamed. If her own parents hadn’t risked the crossing, she might be in the same situation as this woman on her knees, this desperate family that smelled of poverty. A bitter feeling of guilt rose up in her — she, the ingrate, who had been given every chance in life, was now denying that to someone else.
Murat spoke. He went on longer than before; this was his plea. His voice was quiet, compelling. The grievous bearing of the martyr.
‘He is prepared,’ Saleh translated, ‘to do anything for the two of you if you take him along. He prays to Allah that you … that we will take him along. He is grateful for all eternity if you give him that chance. He …’
The old woman rose to her feet and slapped her skinny ribcage with the flat of her hand. She spat out the words.
‘What’s she saying?’ Thouraya asked.
Saleh waited for a moment, then said: ‘She says she will kill herself if we don’t take her son along.’
Ilham groaned quietly. ‘Tell them we need to think about it,’ she said. ‘It’s dangerous. We’ve never done anything like this. We just don’t know yet. Right, Thour?’
Her friend blew into her glass and said: ‘The car isn’t ours, you know? We rented it. If we get caught, they’ll take the car. What are we going to do then?’
‘We won’t get caught,’ Saleh said.
Thouraya shook her head. ‘Fuck off, Saleh. You go to prison for shit like that. I’ve heard about it.’
‘It’s the way everybody does it,’ Saleh answered angrily. ‘Zero risk.’
Ilham stood up. ‘We have to go. Real
ly.’
Saleh communicated their thanks, their best wishes; the formalities back and forth took a long time. Murat followed them outside and watched them go. Ilham looked back. He waved.
3
‘He’ll never fit, you idiot,’ Ilham said. They were driving past the white bungalows, back to the sea.
‘If we take out the spare tyre he will,’ Saleh said from the back seat.
Thouraya glanced over her shoulder and shook her head. ‘You …’ she said, rolling her eyes behind the lenses of her big shades.
His million-dollar smile: Saleh Benkassem, made for the grey economy. After a year at bakery school in Wageningen, he had tried his hand as a strawman in the illegal lottery circuit, and at whatever else crossed his path.
Ilham remembered the rumour about the mentally challenged girl. Now they were the ones who had crossed his path, she realised, and he would use them to his own advantage. She felt powerless. He had wormed his way in between them and the rest of the world, and it seemed as though they couldn’t take a step without him. As a woman, you had so few alternatives here; they needed him. Also because they were flat broke. They cadged cigarettes from him and his friends; their drinks were paid for. After closing time at Café Maure, Ilham had let Douad touch her breasts for a moment, off in a corner. One evening, on their way to the amusement park down by the harbour, he had fingered her in the dark, between the fishing boats. His fingers were salty; they chafed at her vagina.
It all started, she thought, with that accident on the way down, at the Afriquia service station just outside Tangier. Thouraya had backed into another car. Fixing the damage had used up almost all the money they had.
When they’d told Saleh about it later, he said: ‘Seventeen thousand dirham? Not even half that … Don’t trust these skirts around here, man, really.’
Thouraya’s uncle, a carpet dealer with shops in Rabat and Al Hoceima, had slipped them a bit of money now and then during the last few weeks. Not enthusiastically, and far too little to get them back to Holland. He was a dripping faucet that refused to open all the way; they didn’t dare to ask for more.
The Death of Murat Idrissi Page 2