The Death of Murat Idrissi

by Tommy Wieringa

  At the harbour, it was the customs men.

  Even as a young girl, Thouraya had looked down on her father. He was, she felt, as tough as he was stupid. She had inherited the former from him. He knew what it was to bear up. He bore up under the scraping of tanker holds in the harbour and a family with six children when he got home, his wife as she pined away. His own father, in turn, had borne up under the years of starvation in the Rif, when the birds fell dead from the sky. She knew the stories about the people who, before they could reach the city, were buried where they fell beside the road. Time had erased the stories’ sharp edges — only the solid core remained, a volcanic monolith: the suffering, the hunger, the dying.

  When you see her, you can’t help but realise that she is proud of being a Berber, hard and rough as the mountains of her forefathers. But she looked down on her father. His endurance was that of a beast that did as it was told, and that bore up until its legs buckled and collapsed.

  One day he had fallen forty feet and shattered his hip. ‘God was out to kill him, but got the height all wrong,’ Thouraya said. Drawn into the gearwheels of the labour-disability machine, he lived on to terrorise his family in their single-storey flat in Delfshaven.

  The first time she ran away from home, she was sixteen. She did it two more times before leaving for good. She preferred the shame of the family’s lost honour to a forced marriage. While staying at the young women’s shelter, she took the opportunity to finish high school; she now worked as a beauty consultant at a salon on Nieuwe Binnenweg in Rotterdam, where she fitted Cape Verdean and Caribbean women with hair extensions and long nails. Someday she was going to start her own hair and nail salon. That was how her future looked: a strictly materialistic vision.

  The road’s surface shimmers in the afternoon heat. It is thirty-six degrees out. Whenever Thouraya smokes a cigarette she opens the window a crack. Her hair floats up in the rush of hot air.

  ‘So what are we going to do, Thour?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘I can’t ask him.’

  Thouraya grimaces. ‘How should I know? We have to get rid of him, I guess.’

  ‘How were you going to do that? Just dump him along the road somewhere?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She’s already thought about all of this. The orange lights in the roof of a tunnel slide by rhythmically.

  Two highways run parallel along the Costa del Sol; they’ve taken the southern one, the one with no toll.

  It is, Ilham thinks, disgraceful to feel hungry when you’re travelling with a dead person. Still, she feels hungry. They’ve barely eaten a thing since they left Rabat that morning. She can smell her own breath.

  Her friend nods. ‘We’ll stop somewhere in a bit.’

  ‘He was nice,’ Ilham says. ‘Even though you couldn’t really talk with him. He seemed really nice to me.’

  ‘Don’t think about things like that. You’ll only make it harder for yourself.’

  ‘I can’t turn off my mind, can I?’

  No reply.

  Ilham asks for a cigarette.

  ‘But you don’t smoke during the day,’ Thouraya says.

  ‘I do now.’

  The cigarettes are packed tightly together; she worms one out of formation. She had smoked on board too, while the boy was suffocating in the hold. Her life had been the same back then, his perhaps already over.

  Thouraya hooks up her iPod to the car stereo. ‘Aïcha.’ Comme si je n’existais pas, elle est passée à côté de moi. She turns up the volume, and Cheb Khaled’s fragile voice fills the car. She sings along loudly, as though trying to drown out her thoughts. J’irai ou ton soufflé nous mène dans les pays d’ivoire et d’ébène. Thouraya makes sounds without knowing what she’s singing, like a child, and Ilham has tears in her eyes because the nice boy’s ears will never hear lovely music like this again. J’effacerai tes larmes, tes peines …

  The coast is built up: gravel drives, hotels. Golf courses of green silk. Every once in a while, a viaduct spanning a mountainside wadi. All those dreary tourist lodgings, one after the other, and everywhere the turquoise sparkle of pools. She longs to float, her ears underwater, her closed eyes turned to the sun, to make the heaviness disappear along with the sounds.

  Days long ago — the heat of the sun on her skin, the light’s embrace. The mesmerised stare at the nimble glistening of water in the pool. What she liked most was to float on her back and listen to phantom snatches of sound, the shout of children’s voices, bodies hitting the water. A huge distance between her and the rest. She heard her own deep breathing. She drifted; she was not afraid.

  At times, they drive right beside the sea. The car parks are full; the high season is running full throttle. Ilham experiences the exhaustion that overtakes her sometimes when she walks into a round-the-clock service station, the fatigue in everything, transferred to her, too.

  She sees bathers, their dark heads far out at sea. How will they ever get rid of him? There are people everywhere. Cranes sling their loads through the air; cars, vans, trucks everywhere; it is as though all those eyes can look right through their car. Hey, did you see that dead guy in the back?

  The nerve-wracking milling about of people, descending from the mountains to the coast, which they have colonised, occupied, right down to the last square metre. From outer space this coastal strip can be seen as a long, stretched-out haze of stars, jammed between the blackness of the sea and the mountains; in the mountainous interior there glistens only here and there a single, feeble star, surrounded by deep darkness.

  Their future consists of a couple of hundred kilometres and scarcely a hundred euros. Never have her chances been so slim. On the far side of those kilometres and euros, a wall looms.

  ‘We could sell the cigarettes,’ she says suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Thouraya turns down the music.

  ‘We could sell the cartons of cigarettes.’

  Thouraya turns the music back up again. She’s alone with herself.

  Why doesn’t she drive a little slower? If they get pulled over, they’re done for. Again, Ilham wonders: do they have the death penalty in Spain? Is being an accessory to the boy’s death enough to get you the death sentence? How would they carry out that sentence here? She remembers a sura about retribution: a soul for a soul, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth … On Al Jazeera she’d heard that punishments like that were still imposed sometimes: the surgical removal of both eyes for someone who had attacked a woman with acid. She has taken Murat Idrissi’s life. She took it by giving in. Her ‘yes’ was his death sentence. A soul for a soul: symmetrical retribution. He descends from heaven to fetch her. Together they rise up. His teeth are straight and clean.

  At Fuengirola they exit to a McDonald’s. At the top of the incline, cars tear by on the A-7. The car park is lined with palms and rubber plants. They manoeuvre up to the McDrive.

  ‘Chicken nuggets,’ Thouraya says into the intercom. ‘And a milkshake. Strawberry.’

  A question is asked.

  ‘Six nuggets,’ Thouraya says, as though arguing with the two-way speaker. She listens intently to the voice coming back, then turns to Ilham. ‘They don’t have milkshakes — I think that’s what she’s saying. Ridiculous.’

  Then Ilham shouts her order from the passenger seat.

  As they wait at the pick-up window, Thouraya says: ‘A McDonald’s without milkshakes … come on.’ And, after she’s been handed the paper bag with food and beverages: ‘Without milkshakes, they shouldn’t even be allowed to call it a McDonald’s.’

  They find a spot to park the car and unpack their meal. Ilham puts the paper cup of cola down at her feet and unwraps her hamburger. Thouraya stares for a while at the box of chicken nuggets on her lap, then says: ‘Hey, I’m not going to sit in here and eat with that in the back.’


  She climbs out; the car door slams.

  ‘I’m not scared of you, man,’ Ilham says over her shoulder. She eats her hamburger calmly. In the shade, beneath a stretch of canvas that spans the terrace, Thouraya is sitting with the untouched cardboard box on the table in front of her.

  We would have been better off buying petrol with this money, Ilham thinks.

  She gets out and crosses the road. The heat bites; she slips under the shade of the canvas. She shakes the ice in her cup, the cola draws a cold trail through her innards. Then she sees it: a light-blue Polo — the boy in the backseat: Mo, with his camel face, looks out the back window at her just as she looks at him, in a moment of extreme sharpness and clarity, then it is over.

  ‘Thour!’ she stammers. ‘That was them, there! There they are, there …’ She points; they catch a glimpse of the back of the Polo as it disappears up the ramp towards the highway.

  They run to the car. The energising desperation — they have to catch up with them; it’s their only chance.

  The rotunda, the turn-off, and they shoot back onto the highway. A tourist bus blows clouds of diesel fumes; they can’t get past it. Then, with a hard twist of the wheel, Thouraya dives into the tight space between two cars in the left lane. The Audi has the most powerful engine — it can do 280 — but the traffic is skittish. The coast road has one exit after another; it’s stop and go. The boys, if that’s who it was, might take any exit and lose them for good.

  Ten kilometres, twenty kilometres. Fuengirola is far behind them now, and the two highways merge into one. They realise that it’s hopeless: they’ll never find the boys again. The country is huge and endless, and the roads fan out in all directions.

  ‘I’m positive that I saw him,’ Ilham says sheepishly.

  They have enough petrol for 450 kilometres. They have almost 2200 to go.

  6

  The A-7 turns north, and they leave the sea behind. The road lies in the shadow of a leaden mountain range that rises steeply on their left. There is a brief moment of eclipse as they disappear into the mouth of a tunnel, the black second in the transition from light to darkness. Ilham’s shudder at the entrance to the underworld. She is alert, her senses heightened.

  Thouraya looks at her phone while she’s driving; she steers with her knees.

  ‘You’re allowed to go a hundred here,’ Ilham says.

  Thouraya looks up. ‘I’ll do the driving, okay? I go nuts when you try to tell me how to do it.’

  ‘Well, then, keep at least one hand on the wheel.’

  The whites of her eyes. ‘What’s with you?’ She holds the phone to her ear.

  ‘Fuck, Saleh,’ she says after a few seconds, looking at the blank screen. ‘Fuck …’

  They glide over smooth asphalt, black as freshly laid. Vistas once in a while, the revelation of chalk-white settlements in the valleys. Utility towers follow the ridges. The slopes are covered in thousands upon thousands of olive trees, in neat formation, one hill after the next; Ilham never knew there could be so many olive trees.

  It’s almost five o’clock. The temperature, now that a mountain range separates them from the sea, has risen to thirty-nine degrees.

  The illusionless hour, its cheerless light, like a nightclub at closing time.

  Thouraya opens the window. She shoves her nose into the current of air. Then she shakes her head and says: ‘It’s not coming from outside.’

  Ilham says nothing. She has smelled it too. His odour drifts through the car like a djinn.

  ‘Light a cigarette for me, please,’ Thouraya says.

  Ilham lights two at once. She inhales deeply. The loud whoosh of the cracked window hurts her ears.

  Only for a moment does the smoke drive away the smell. They know it isn’t really gone, only waiting to reappear once the cigarette smoke has dispersed.

  With each breath they smell his rotting body. Now that his immune system has shut down, bacteria in his intestines have turned against their host; his dead cells serve as the bacteria’s food. The greasy stench seems to stick to everything — it is a physical presence. The heat speeds up the decay. The boy has left his body and communicates with them through a ghastly stench. Don’t forget me, his smell says.

  How Ilham longs for the innocence of the early morning, when they drove out of Rabat. The cool morning, almost motionless, the smells and sounds of the city not yet in motion. They come past the Oudayas Casbah; men pushing rattling handcarts disappear through a huge gate in the medina.

  As they drive out of town, Ilham sees a little mosque; masons are busy replastering its ancient walls.

  In Témara, the ocean looms like a darkness. Murat is waiting under the trees. He is alone. A minimum of baggage — nothing but a plastic bag, really. He fishes a little bundle of banknotes from his trouser pocket. Saleh counts it, adroit as a moneychanger.

  Ilham hears roosters far away and close by; above the hovels hangs a thin mist of woodfires. The smell of smoke gives her a sense of security. At the edge of her conscious mind, memories rise up, mornings like this one — the coolness, the crowing of cocks, the smoke, but they remain with neither time nor place.

  The mood in the car is elated. Cigarettes are passed around. Murat is cheerful and talkative. She hasn’t seen him like this before. He’s beaming; this is his day. Saleh translates only a portion of the conversation they carry on in the backseat.

  They take the new toll road to Tangier; there’s almost no traffic. The sun comes up in a wash of peach-coloured light. They pass greenhouses and plantations, the fields full of sweet, round watermelons, ready for the harvest. The melons rest nakedly beside their furrows, like eggs the earth has pressed out.

  ‘What is he planning to do in Holland?’ Ilham asks. ‘Does he know people there or something?’

  ‘He knows how to repair shoes,’ Saleh interprets, ‘and he can carry loads. Those are always in demand. People who can carry loads.’ He nods. ‘And he knows us — that’s what he says.’

  Thouraya sniffs loudly. ‘As long as he doesn’t come knocking on my door.’

  Eucalyptus trees rise up on both sides of the road, bark hanging in melancholy strips from their trunks.

  He has long lashes for a boy, Ilham thinks. Maybe someday he’ll earn enough to pay for a dentist. Maybe he’ll even find a wife — if he sends home for a cousin, for example. She imagines a tightly circumscribed life, rather like that of her own parents. A life constantly on the edge of want, and the eternal complaint that everything is so expensive in this country — that even though you may earn more than you would in Morocco, you spend it all right away on a contribution for this or coverage for the other.

  At a tollbooth, they wait in line behind a truck loaded with watermelons. Atop the pile of fruit is a boy. He laughs and waves to the vehicles that follow. The truck takes off, rattling loudly in a black cloud of exhaust. Thouraya takes the ticket from the machine, the barrier gate opens, she honks farewell to the boy on the melon truck.

  It’s tempting to mimic Saleh and Murat’s lightheartedness. As though all they’re doing is getting up to a bit of mischief, and later, when it’s over, they’ll all call it a good gag. But if you listen carefully you hear traces of their anxiety; it’s in the higher tones of their laughter, the quickness of their conversation.

  Ilham wishes she were alone with Thouraya, so they could talk about whether they were doing the right thing, whether they weren’t doing something incredibly stupid. But for as long as they have been friends, Thouraya has always drawn her into things she would never dare to do herself. ‘Don’t be such a old biddy’ is about the worst thing she can say to you. When Ilham had gone to school to study financial administration — against her parents’ will; they figured it was time for her to marry — she had called Thouraya every day. Thouraya was a fantastic scold. The hearty disgust with which she talked about ‘those farmers’. ‘They just w
ant to keep you as dumb as they are. Well, forget it. It’s your life.’

  In the fields, the farmers are working the ground with hoes. Most transport here goes by horse and wagon. The occasional donkey. Long-armed spray installations do the watering.

  Ilham looks over her shoulder. ‘Would you ask him if he’s scared?’

  ‘Scared of what?’ Saleh asks.

  ‘About later on. The boat. If he gets caught …’

  ‘Il, come on, knock it off.’ That’s Thouraya.

  ‘I’m just asking.’

  ‘Why should he be scared?’ Saleh says. ‘He’s happy, right? Believe me.’

  ‘He’s not afraid of getting caught?’

  Thouraya shakes her head.

  ‘So just ask him,’ Ilham says to Saleh.

  ‘Ask him what?’

  ‘Whether he’s scared.’

  ‘I’m not your slave or something.’

  ‘Okay, just do it,’ Thouraya says wearily.

  Murat nods once he’s understood the question, and speaks directly to her. He talks for a while, and Ilham lets herself be carried along absentmindedly by his flow of words. When he is finished, Saleh says: ‘He’s not scared. He trusts in Allah.’

  ‘Was that all?’ Ilham says. ‘Come on, he said a lot more than that!’

  Saleh shrugs.

  ‘Saleh, really!’

  ‘Okay, relax … He has some kind of pouch with him. With herbs and stuff. How should I know? His mother got it from the marabou. For good luck — you know what I mean.’

  Ilham looks back and forth from one boy to the other, then nods, a sadness tugging at the corners of her mouth. ‘Shokran, Murat. Shokran.’

  He smiles, showing his grey teeth.

  They drive past forests of cork oak. A pouch with herbs and stuff, the life breathed into it by magic … She stares out of the window. The trees flash by. It’s the world of her mother, a world she can’t accept. It depresses her, the quick prayers whenever death is mentioned, when there are portents. All those dos and don’ts. The countless fears her mother covers up with invocations. The things you’re not allowed to say, not allowed to think, not allowed to do. Her mother is a farmwoman — she went to the airport on the back of a donkey, as Thouraya puts it; she has a certain control over the new language. She is fairly independent, but there is no use trying to combat her primitive ideas — her reply is always that her daughter is rude, and that rude girls end up badly.