Well, anyway, I watched Le Pen: he’s scary, he has fat hands, and slaps from those hands must make a guy see stars, fake stars, but I can’t take him seriously, I don’t know why; he makes me laugh, and I always imagine him in rather unflattering positions, the nasty kind, yet I know there are other Le Pens in this country who may not talk the way he does but they don’t like us just the same, and how come? How come no one likes us? What terrible thing did we do to be objects of suspicion and even abuse in the street? Our reputation isn’t exactly spotless, which must come from way back, maybe the Algerian war or even longer ago, and obviously there’s the rotten-apple-spoiling-the-whole-barrel business, so what can we do? Keep a low profile? We are low-profile experts, my companions and I—we hunker down, don’t raise our voices even when we’ve been the victims of some injustice or everyday racism because we don’t want any trouble. What can we do? Disappear! Cease to exist, become transparent while still slaving away—in fact, that would be ideal: to be here, being useful, efficient, but invisible, without having children or cooking with our smelly spices, and I’ve often thought about that, how to be as low-key as possible and work as if we didn’t exist. Before, or at least when I came to LaFrance, no one mentioned us; we started off in projects housing immigrant workers, then later hardly ever ventured into town, but when our children came along the noise level rose, and quite a bit, so why attract even more attention by asking for citizenship? I’m fine with my green passport, my ten-year residence permit. I don’t need a different colour passport.
Seems the people of LaFrance prefer us Moroccans; the poor Algerians, they’re out of luck: their country’s been occupied for so long, and nowadays Algeria is rich, I saw that on TV. They’ve got oil and gas, underground treasures that will feed them for centuries, yet they’re emigrating—more and more are coming here. It’s awful, such a rich country with such poor people! (It’s not me saying that but a human rights activist in Algeria.) It’s different in Morocco. We’re poor and always have been. City people live better than country folk. But us, we have the Makhzen: the caïd, the pasha, the governor—representatives of the central power that governs us. We don’t know how it works, but the police and the army do whatever the Makhzen wants. The poor person has no rights, submits, and keeps quiet. Whoever hollers gets “disappeared.” That’s the Morocco I left in 1960, to take the train then the boat then the train to Lalla França. I never talked politics. I know, however, that both sons of the butcher in Imintanout went missing. A couple of plainclothesmen who said they were from the Darkoum Real Estate Agency asked the two young men to show them some land their father had for sale, and the car they drove off in had a temporary license plate even though it was basically a jalopy. The youths never returned. The father went to Marrakech to find the agency, which had never existed. The mother went mad, and the father shut up shop. That was in the summer of 1966. They were high school kids in Marrakech. Whenever I visited in the summer, people would tell me about all the youngsters in prison, almost whispering even though there was no one near us.
Fear, yes, I have known fear. Fear that they would take away my precious passport, fear that I would be arrested for no reason. That happened to Lahcen, who was held in the police station at the airport for more than two days; they had forgotten him. When they gave him back his passport, the officer said, Since you’re lucky to live over there, think of your brother, empty your pockets—we have to help one another, it’s only natural, because some have everything and others almost nothing but suffering, and you won’t let your brother suffer, so take a hint, my friend! Lahcen gave him whatever money he had and left the police station suffering from a wicked migraine.
Fortunately, that Morocco no longer exists. It’s over, the time of fear, when the Makhzen acted without respect for the law and what’s right. I discovered this going through customs in Tangier. Overnight the customs agents had become polite, no longer suspecting us of smuggling drugs or weapons. It seems the new king ordered them to stop harassing us. He’s a good fellow, this young king, not at all like his father.* At the time, some of our immigrants worked for the consulate or the police in Rabat, and we could identify them because they would loudly criticise the king and the government. Me, I always said Long live the king, long live Morocco! Then they had nothing to report to their bosses. It was Marcel, the union rep, who warned me: You know, watch out. That Sallam, the guy who just arrived from Roubaix, well, he never worked there; he came directly from Rabat and funnels information about the Moroccan immigrant community to the police. There’s him and the other one, the really skinny guy who calls himself FelFla, “Pepper.”
The CGT, the labor union federation, has always helped us. They’re the ones who organised literacy classes on Saturdays and Sundays at the Labor Exchange, run by young students from Paris and French-speaking guys from our cities—Fez, Marrakech, Casablanca—who would take turns coming to teach us. We enjoyed those afternoons, found them relaxing—we’d talk about home; our teachers explained things; sometimes the French students would help us write letters to our families and, most importantly, fill out official forms for our retirement, bank accounts, and so on. Even if I did have trouble learning the language, I preferred being there to spending the day in a café, watching people come and go. At my age, learning to read is no joke. I did pick up driving pretty easily, though. I’d stare at the signs and imprint them in my head. I’ve always been a prudent man. I know the highway code by heart. Where I run into trouble, it’s with detours: there I screw up and choose some road that takes me back to where I came from. Roadworks and those detours, they terrify me. I know the France–Morocco trip by heart. I never speed. I stop now and then for rest breaks. I get backaches, so I do exercises. Often it’s having to pee that makes me pull over. That’s how we found out I’ve got the sugar—a young Moroccan doctor explained to me about diabetes. Now I’m careful, although back home I do let myself go, I admit. That’s what it’s for: letting go, not worrying, forgetting about rules. It’s hard to say no to a glass of our sweetened mint tea; that hurts people’s feelings, so I drink the tea and ask God to help me deal with all that extra sugar in my blood.
Brahim wouldn’t learn to read or write. He liked to drink beer and frequented Khadija, the whore who dyed her hair blond and called herself Katy. She wasn’t a bad woman, but she’d lost all her teeth, poor thing, in a fight with her pimp, and she worked as the cleaning lady in the bar where Brahim hung out. She was pitiful. Men didn’t want her anymore, so she drank to console herself, and on Saturdays she’d set herself up on the sidewalk at the Saint-Ouen flea market and use henna to “tattoo” girls’ arms and hands. She had a gift for delicately tracing arabesques on their skin.
Mohammed knew Khadija’s story but kept his distance, more from timidity than from any moral or religious disapproval. One day she came over to him as if she were drowning and desperate for help. He didn’t know what to do, especially when she kissed his hand. Seeing the anguish in her face, he slipped her some money, because he considered her an unlucky casualty of immigration. Then he thought about it and decided that her lot was her fate, that she would have gone bad even if she’d never left home. Everything is written. Nothing happens by chance—yet he also knew that people are responsible for their actions. He stopped and thought: If I go into this bar, get staggering drunk, and lose my human dignity, I am the guilty one, not God. If I do something stupid and make a ton of foolish mistakes, it’s my fault and mine alone; let’s leave God out of it. So if I keep walking along, if I slip on a banana peel and break my back, is it God who wanted me to crack in two? Or is the guilty guy the bastard who threw away the banana peel without a thought for passers-by who might snap their spines? No: one must simply be careful and watch one’s step. But after our ’tirement, aren’t we left in a bad way, in an unhealthy and woeful state? I mean, my muscles ache even though I don’t work anymore, my joints hurt, and my body feels battered by a strange fatigue, a tiredness I’ve never felt before, and it’s
weird, because it comes from nothing: the nothingness that has taken over my life is beginning to eat away at my body. Life is hollowing me out. I’m in pain. I don’t complain, that’s not my style, but ever since I caught ’tirement, nothing goes right. I used to like my tiredness at day’s end when I came home. While I washed up, my wife would fix me a light supper; I’d see the children, and during the TV news programs drowsiness would steal over me. I’d fall into bed and a deep sleep. Now I miss that beautiful exhaustion. In its place is a more insidious, disturbing fatigue. I must be ill. One day the doctor at work told us, Listen carefully: if you wake up tired in the morning, that’s because something is wrong, it’s the sign of a hidden illness that doesn’t dare show itself. Maybe that’s it. But I don’t feel like consulting a doctor.
I’m a little ashamed when I think that I still rose at dawn when my ’tirement began, put on my work overalls, took my lunch box, and went off to the factory. It was automatic—I couldn’t break free of those actions I’d made part of my life, my body, my soul. (May God forgive me; I shouldn’t bring my soul into all this.) I’d get to the factory gate, stop short, and watch my comrades go in: happy, joking around, ready for a long and good day’s work. I felt mortified. They didn’t understand why I kept coming back, and I didn’t feel like talking to them, explaining or justifying myself to anyone. Then there’s my wife. She didn’t say anything but gave me peculiar looks. What was I going to do now with my grey overalls, my lunch box, my protective goggles, my papers, my endless days off, all this time crashing down on me like a pile of rubble? I can’t even bequeath it all to one of my children—not that they’ve noticed that I’ve fallen into ’tirement. They ask me no questions, drop by briefly and head out again without paying any attention to how I feel. Watching them, I can’t manage to see their own children treating them the same way. Everything changes. It’s hard to accept that we can find ourselves so quickly in a different world. Our forefathers didn’t prepare us, told us nothing. They’d never have imagined that men would leave their land to go abroad.
When Mohammed thought about it, he became convinced that ’tirement had killed Brahim. He’d seen him wandering the streets, drinking at Katy’s place, stumbling and weaving whenever he decided to go home. His wife had gone back to Morocco, influenced by that same Allam who’d had a hold on Mohammed’s wife and eldest daughter; the man was a marriage counsellor as well as a sorcerer, and he’d encouraged Brahim’s wife to go home to her village to protect herself against that man-eating witch Khadija: You see, she’s a wreck, poor thing, so you’d best avoid her, take your husband and go back home where at least there’s no bar, no alcohol, no Katy. Your husband is bored, and now that he no longer works he’s always shacked up with that pitiful woman, but you, if you want to get your man back, you must take things boldly in hand. Here is a talisman to put in your purse and here’s another to sew into the inside pocket of Brahim’s jacket: these should help the both of you. But as you know, everything is in the hands of Almighty God!
Brahim refused to follow his wife. He found, tore up, and stamped on the bit of cloth sewn into his jacket. You tried to cast a spell on me? Well, I piss on it, your spell! Go, get out! Go back home to your parents, leave me alone. I’m tired.
Brahim found himself all alone in their half-empty apartment. Dirty laundry piled up in a corner of the living room. His wife had taken the family photos, but one picture remained, hanging on a wall, a photograph of a snowy landscape, perhaps some Swiss or Canadian mountains, and it was nice to look at in that apartment stripped of every reminder of his native land. Both his children lived and worked abroad and used to call now and then, until the phone was cut off. Unpaid bills, unopened letters. Brahim was letting himself fall apart. When he had a liver attack and screamed in pain, neighbours called a doctor, who sent him to the hospital. There he called for his children, whose phone numbers were in a notebook, but he had no idea where it was. The pain was so awful he couldn’t remember things from moment to moment. When Mohammed came to visit, he found him frighteningly pale, thin, with jaundiced eyes and dry lips. Brahim had lost the will to live. Mohammed told him their religion forbade that and recited a few verses from the Koran that he knew by heart. Gripping the patient’s arm, he bent to kiss him on the forehead, and when he straightened up, tears coursed down his cheeks. After staying a moment longer, Mohammed went on his way, thinking about his own death. So much loneliness, ingratitude, and silence left him speechless. Where had the man’s brothers gone, his friends, his companions in misfortune? Was that how immigrants took leave of this world? That solitude stank like a mixture of medicine and whatever was stalking them, these poor souls whom no one had warned about the way they would end their lives.
7
MOHAMMED WAS THINKING about his retirement again and feeling sick. When his saliva dried up, he would drink a few glasses of water. It wasn’t diabetes that was attacking his body but his recent retirement, the idea of retirement, which obsessed him, bringing him dark visions. The Chaabi bank, on the avenue de Clichy, had just sent him the annual form to renew his insurance for “repatriation of the body,” and Mohammed took it as a sign, a bad coincidence. Haunted by his fear of dying far from his native land, he saw himself draped in a white sheet at the morgue, his body lying there for several days due to administrative problems, and then he saw himself in a coffin, sent to Morocco with other merchandise, and his friends collecting money for the family—he saw all this in such detail that his skin crawled.
No, me, I’m not going home in a box, not like Brahim, no, I’ll get the jump on death and wait for it calmly in my village, I’m not afraid of it, I’m a believer, and whatever happens is always God’s will: God alone decides the hour of death, I’m sure of that, it’s written, and I even think it’s all settled for us on the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, a sacred night, worth more than a thousand months, so for death, I’ll arrange to escape the box, because even if I’m dying I’ll take the plane—and I hate planes—to die at home, not with strangers, foreigners who know nothing of my religion, my traditions.
Aha! you’ll tell me. And your children? Well, that’s a sore point, very sore. No, my children will be saddened, but would they escort me back home? Would they wash my body in the Muslim way? If I’m buried in the village, will they come pay their respects at my tomb? Perhaps at first, but later they won’t bother to come all that way to visit a grave overgrown with weeds, strewn with plastic bags, empty bottles, old newspapers thrown there by visitors without any sense of propriety. Lots of Moroccans leave their litter in cemeteries as if the dead had no right to clean graves. I can’t see my children gathering to remember their father on some Friday just before the noonday prayer, raising their hands, palms pressed together, and reciting a few verses from the sura “Al-Baqara” to ask God to have mercy on my soul.* I don’t see them spending any vacation time to perform such seemingly useless actions. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t ever think of me; they’ll remember me in their own way, any way they like, but they’ll remember me. When I visit my parents’ graves, I get the shivers; I sit on a large stone and talk to them the way I used to, telling them about my life and the people they loved, going into detail, especially for my mother, who was always eager for news—I can still hear her demanding to know the name of the grocer’s fiancée and how many children he had with his first wife, and asking if my aunt is still so stingy and bad tempered and her children still dirty and greedy. I imagine all that and I smile. I love that ritual. Then I go pray at the little mosque and give alms.
Oh, enough of these black ideas—my children will never leave me! I’d rather not think that they might ever forget me. Last year a poor Algerian fellow was buried in Bobigny, where they had a hard time finding him a tiny spot in the Muslim cemetery. His children didn’t want to send his body back to his village: they said that Algeria wasn’t their country anymore and France wasn’t either, so what did it matter in which hole they buried the body? What counts is the soul, in any
case, and once it leaves the body it goes off to God. But I wouldn’t like to leave my body in a French hole. It’s foolish, what I’m saying, but if I could be certain that my children would often visit my grave if I were buried in France, no problem, I’d give my body to Lalla LaFrance; I’d make things simpler for them.
I’ll be frank: black or grey thoughts aside, deep down I’d like my kids to come back home to gather a few Koranic readers at my tomb in my village, on a Friday, preferably, and they should give a little money to the many beggars. For some time now, it’s been Africans who beg around cemeteries. Poor things, they left their homelands to come work in Europe. They walked day and night, and then were abandoned. They beg to survive. They aren’t pushy; some of them are embarrassed to have sunk to this. Ever since I stopped working I’ve been obsessed by such ideas. Death, Hallab told me—he’s the one who claims to be an imam—death is nothing, you don’t feel anything anymore, and it’s as if you were sound asleep. If it’s nothing, I asked him, how come everyone is so afraid? If you’re at peace with yourself, he replied, and have nothing to reproach yourself for, you will be happy to go to God, whose infinite heavens are full of goodness and mercy. Hallab’s a fine fellow, but what does he know? He repeats what’s in the Koran. I will never contradict the Koran, but I confess that sometimes, at night, I sit up with a start, drenched in sweat, and I see death. It isn’t a skeleton with a scythe, or an old lady all in black, either: no, death is an odour, a strong, asphyxiating odour announced by an icy draft that lifts the sheets to flow over the body trembling with cold, while the feet, growing numb with pins and needles, become rigid. I’ve imagined death so much that it can’t play any tricks on me. I know death; I saw it in Brahim’s face, I know what it looks like and how it operates. On that score, I feel calm. I know it’s still a ways off from my bedroom, far away from my life.
A Palace in the Old Village Page 5