A Palace in the Old Village

by Tahar Ben Jelloun

  And then there was young Nabile, who ran everywhere, fell often, hurt himself, but didn’t cry. His mother, Fattouma, sometimes called him Malak, “Angel,” or Baraka, “God’s Gift.” This child is different, she’d tell people.

  God has sent him to us, a sign of deliverance and future prosperity. We have to let him do as he pleases. He doesn’t know what evil is. To him, everyone is good. He walked at two years, talked at three; we couldn’t tell what he was saying but could guess what he meant. He made signs, precise gestures to express himself. The midwife told me that I’d eaten too much garlic and that’s why Nabile was born special. A young doctor in the hospital in Marrakech tried to explain to me once, telling me things I didn’t understand: You’re too old to have children, you shouldn’t have made this boy, but now you have to live with his slowness. He isn’t bad, he’ll even be quite affectionate, but it will be tiring. The doctor drew a picture to show me, a kind of branch with twenty-three rows of leaves, right and left, then underlined the twenty-first branch and said: You see, there, three leaves—that’s one leaf too many. It’s that tiny “too much” that causes the problem. I kept the drawing; I’m waiting for my son who’s at university to come home and explain it to me. Nabile is unique. After Koranic school (where he didn’t learn a thing), I agreed to give him to my brother Mohammed, who registered him with the state as if he’d been his own son. After everything had been arranged, Mohammed took Nabile off to France, where he goes to a school that has a class just for children like him. He likes school. He learns music, does theatre, and plays several sports. If I’d kept him with me, he’d have grown sicker and sicker, and I’d have gone crazy. Fortunately, Mohammed took charge of him. Today he’s a tall young man, elegant, funny, intelligent. When he comes back on vacation, he brings me presents and helps me with the housework. He’s healthy and especially loving, an angel, a baraka. The last time, he insisted I come back with him to France. I told him: I have no passport, no visa, no money! He didn’t understand. He grabbed a notebook, scribbled something, and handed it to me, saying, Here, bassbor, isa, and me with you. He made me cry. I hugged him tight and felt his tears trickling down my neck.

  Time. When very young, Mohammed had had problems with time. He didn’t know what it stood for, and he anchored it on important events during the year, but living to the rhythm of a wristwatch proved difficult because he didn’t have one. The day was divided up by the five prescribed prayers. His wristwatch was the sun and its shadow. Mohammed was sometimes able, however, to feel the real weight of time, to imagine it as a load on the back of a hobbling old man. To kill time, Mohammed would take that imaginary burden and kick it around. He’d till the soil especially slowly, and when he went to the mosque, he’d repeat the same prayer a few times. Animals had a better relationship with time, or at least with the rising and setting of the sun. Using the five daily prayers as reference points, Mohammed tried to fill the emptiness around them. Like everyone else in his village, he saw time as little more than something thought up by people in a hurry. He couldn’t figure out why they said, Time is money. On that score, he counted himself rich!

  One day his cousin, the one who limped because of a work accident in Belgium, suggested they open a shop on the road to Marrakech and sell time. How’re you going to do that? asked Mohammed. Simple: I sell tourists all the time we’ve got too much of around here! I know them—I’ve been around them in Europe. I’ll tell them, Come to our country; you’ll find lots of time available. There’s nothing to do: you’ll rest, you won’t check your watches anymore, and at day’s end you’ll wonder where the time went. Clever, no? And he told Mohammed, If you help me, we’ll make a fortune! Mohammed replied, Time is wind, the dust in the air, the sun, the moon, the stars, and Joha. You remember Joha—the guy who pretended to be an idiot when we were kids, to make us laugh?

  Another time the cousin proposed they sell ready-made memories to tourists. When Mohammed asked him what he meant, the cousin replied, It’s simple. (Everything’s always simple with him.)

  We bring the tourists to the village, invite them to tea, pass a bit of time with them, bring in our centenarian, old Hajji, who’ll read their palms while I translate, and then they’ll give us a little money for a small piece of sheepskin that will remind them of their visit. That’s the memory, the souvenir. The bigger the sheepskin, the more important the memory, hey? … You know, Mohammed, you’re a real wet blanket; you never believe in anything! It’s just impossible to get a business deal going with you. Hey, I’ve got another idea. You can’t disagree with this one, listen: I saw some rich people on the TV, Frenchies or Spanioolies who come to live with poor peasants. It gives them a change from their big buildings, cars, everything we haven’t got, so we’re going to sell the countryside. It’ll be a vacation village for rich people tired of being rich: they’ll come to us for the experience of nothing. Us, we’ve got nothing, no water, no electricity, big nothing, so they’ll come to live the way their really ancient ancestors did, going to the well, using candles; they’ll eat whatever there is without being allowed to complain, and they’ll pay us for it! More and more retirees are settling in Morocco, so a married couple … that means two retirees, two monthly checks, enough to live like a government minister—no, better … so we’ll go looking for clients among these carefree retirees. Isn’t that a great plan? We’ll have to go to Marrakech or Agadir to put the ad in their papers.

  When I was in the city of Mons, I knew some Belgians who retired and went off to India to be with a flimflam guru—you know, the real skinny kind of guy with a long beard, who sits cross-legged on a seriously uncomfortable mat, gazing into the distance while the Europeans at his feet soak up his silence as if it were a prophet’s blessing. Can you imagine, they’re ready to swallow just about anything, so I’ll take hundred-year-old Hajji, dress him up in a lovely white silk robe, dye his long beard with henna, hand him some prayer beads, and introduce him as the master of patience and silence, and it’ll work: they’ll come by the hundreds just to smell his perfume and venerate his serenity, plus we’ll tell them that Hajji is in communication with what awaits us on the other side, but he also knows how to prepare us to enter that other world, and then you toss in a few verses of the Koran, you burn the herbal incense Pa Brahim sells on the Jamaa al-Fna square in Marrakech, and it’s in the bag!*

  No? You’re not interested? You’re making a face. Too bad for you! I’ll go peddle my idea to one of those bandits in Marrakech, you know, like that guy who managed to sell the neighbourhood mosque to an American tourist by showing it to her between prayers, making her believe it was a ryad, so she took the bait, handed over a fat advance in dollars—not a check, oh no, wads of greenbacks.* When she came back six months later, she was so ashamed of having fallen for this scam that she burst out laughing with rage and left the city, saying Moroccans were the champions of cheating! The story made the rounds of Marrakech, to the crook’s despair, because he had other projects in mind as juicy as the mosque deal. He’d already sold the same property a few times, a real cash cow, like that parking metre he’d installed downtown for a little steady income. One day he even managed to palm off one of his wife’s caftans as an antique robe from the nineteenth century. He always manages to find suckers to swindle.

  Mohammed laughed for a good long while, then forgot about his cousin and his fantastic schemes.

  9

  ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1962, when the chief administrator of the village, the mokaddem, dressed all in white, arrived at Mohammed’s house to bring him his passport and inform him with solemn ceremony that in forty-eight hours he would set sail on his great journey, Mohammed found it hard to grasp how much time remained before he had to leave the village. The two men drank tea, ate a few honey crêpes, then took formal leave of each other as if that day were the most important one in Mohammed’s life. He showed his wife the precious document: With this, I’ll make you a queen and our son a prince! When she asked him the date of his departure, he stammered,
Early in the morning. No one slept that night. The women prepared honey crêpes, some dried meat, figs, and dates. Mohammed and the other men who were leaving spent much of the evening in the baths, as if they were getting ready to be married or make a pilgrimage to Mecca. After the dawn prayer, they left the village on foot, then travelled in a rattletrap van to Marrakech, where they took a bus operated by the CTM, the state-run transportation company.

  There were twenty men, some of whom came from neighbouring villages. Time was passing so quickly now that Mohammed no longer gave it a thought. He had become light, agile, and indifferent to time, even though a faint fear of the unknown was peeking over the horizon. Actually, Mohammed had lost his bearings. A veteran was in charge of the group, an old hand at making this trip.

  Remember this carefully, he told them: Wherever you go, whatever work you do, you can count on one thing, that Morocco will never let you go, will always be with you, impossible to forget, because Morocco is emigrating with you, following you, guiding and protecting you, sticking to your skin, so you must never get discouraged, never hesitate to talk to your compatriots when you feel homesick, and you’ll see, it’s very nice of LaFrance—I say Lalla França and yes, I know LaFrance is no princess or sherifa—to give us work and thus contentment. It’s cold there, but it’s cold back home in the winter too; over there, no friends, we’ll always be off by ourselves together, because we’re just guests, people invited in to do the hard work they don’t do anymore, but us, we’re strong, in good health, and we’ll show them that a Berber doesn’t fear cold or snow or fatigue because over there, you’ll see, there’s no time to be tired, and although you’ll hear things from other old hands, don’t listen to them; do your job and stick to that.

  Lalla França pays well, but you mustn’t think that on Sunday people will invite you home for dinner—that, no, never, because over there each person is in his house, the door is closed, the windows too, but that’s how it is, period! That’s the way they live: they’ll never come bothering you, knocking on your door to ask for some salt or oil, no; that’s not done. Everyone stays home and each to his own. There’s not much hospitality over there, whereas hospitality is part of our way of life, one of our strengths, and sometimes we overdo it. Our houses are open to strangers—that’s perfectly normal; it’s our morality, our religion, which is why we have such trouble understanding why other people don’t behave as we do.

  You’ll see, when you arrive you’ll be lost. It’s nothing like our countryside, nothing: climate, faces, landscapes, all different. You’d best get ready to enter a completely unknown world, as if you were in a dream in which we’re no longer ourselves. Over there, you’ll have free medicines and medical care, not like back home where there isn’t even a nurse looking in on you from time to time—of course when I say “free,” that means you cough up part of your paycheck every month, we all do, it’s like we say back home: “Hand in hand and God’s hand above all others.” That’s how the French understand solidarity, and if I weren’t afraid of asking for trouble, I’d say they’re almost Muslims.

  And finally, remember: to avoid trouble, don’t mess with politics, stay out of the way, and never intervene in a fight. Respect, respect. They lump Tunisians, Moroccans, and Algerians together, to them we’re all Arabs, plus they don’t distinguish between Arabs and Berbers, they know nothing about all that, so pay attention.* LaFrance will never be your country, that’s for sure! LaFrance is LaFrance, a country that’s rich but needs us just as we need it.

  The train station was between the beach and the harbour, and children were crossing the tracks, making obscene gestures at the locomotives. Arriving in Tangier in the early morning, Mohammed felt ashamed to be discovering the sea so late in life—a calm sea of limpid blue, transformed into a living mirror by the first rays of the rising sun. Mohammed also felt delighted. No one had ever told him anything about the sea. He’d known that Agadir was a seaside town, but he’d never been there, and now he had time to walk on the sand and even taste salt water. He was twenty and had never dipped a finger into the sea. Behaving like a child, he played with the sand, dabbled in the water, splashed some on his face, in his hair. It was a lovely day. He bought a bottle of Coca from a passing vendor, drank it, then filled the bottle with seawater and took it with him, knowing he couldn’t drink it, keeping it as a souvenir, to remind him of this particular day when he discovered the sea, the entire sea. When his companions made fun of him, he laughed. How could they understand, especially when some of them hailed from Casablanca or Bouznika, a little city right on the Atlantic coast?

  The crossing was long and rough, thanks to an east wind that came up around noon. In the Spanish port of Algeciras, Mohammed was struck by the number of policemen. They were suspicious and aggressive, circulating among the passengers with muzzled dogs at their sides. Occasionally they demanded that certain suitcases be opened, and dumped the contents carelessly on the ground. Finding nothing, they’d simply walk away laughing, saying things in which the word moros cropped up often.* Mohammed found Spain not much more modern looking than Morocco.

  The train trip was interminable: sometimes the locomotive sped up; sometimes it stopped dead because of work on the tracks. Mohammed tried in vain to sleep. Walking up and down the corridor, he watched the trees, fields, and houses streaming past. He thought about what their guide had said and prepared himself to live in a country where, no matter what happened, he would be alone. He couldn’t digest the fact that he would not find the tribe waiting for him, the family, the native countryside that was a part of his body and whole being. He sensed that something was leaving him, that the farther the train went, the smaller his village shrank and would go on shrinking, until it disappeared. When he thought about his family, their image became blurred; he did not realise that he was passing from one time to another, one life to another. He was changing centuries, countries, customs. He felt as if his head were too small to deal with all that, and he paced like a caged animal. Too many new and unexpected things. Too many changes.

  When the train stopped in the middle of some fields, he felt lost and thought back over his life, his small, orderly life, in which nothing special had happened. He’d seen his father and grandfather live that way, so it had been only natural for him to follow suit. He wasn’t the first of his tribe to emigrate, however. Gripped with anguish, he understood that he was becoming an MWA, a Moroccan worker abroad. In time he would become an MRA, a Moroccan resident abroad. Where was the difference? “Resident” sounded better. But the way people looked at you was the same.

  Mohammed still remembered precise images from his arrival in France: walls so grey they were almost black; impassive faces; a dense throng walking quickly, saying nothing; the strange smell of dust and stale perfume. People of colour swept the streets and the corridors of the métro. There were rich people, and others apparently not as rich, but all of them had cars that looked almost new. Large advertisements displayed scantily clad women; others showed animals praising the quality of washing machines. Mohammed couldn’t figure out what cats and dogs had to do with that. After stepping in some dog shit, he’d suddenly noticed that dogs were everywhere in this country. Why? Back home a dog was obviously an intruder, an animal to be driven away with stones. If a dog or cat walked in front of him while he was at prayer, he felt obliged to start all over again. To a Muslim, an animal is a carrier of dangerous germs, something to be avoided, and anyway there are no dogs in paradise. So this was Lalla França and its strange promise!

  Time had engulfed these people, and he found their mystery unfathomable. Where were all these men and women going? Why in such a hurry? Where were their children? Why so many dogs? Why didn’t they chat on the bus or in the métro? They ignored one another, read books or newspapers, but absolutely would not talk. He watched them and wondered if they noticed him. No, why would anyone pay attention to him? Was he special in any way? He looked at his face reflected in the window of the métro car and smiled faintly
. At the Saint-Lazare stop a huge woman, an African in colourful clothing, got on with her healthy, laughing baby in a stroller. The child was happy and so was she. Paying no mind to anyone else, she took the boy onto her lap and began breast-feeding him. She was right at home. The other passengers looked on goggle-eyed. The firm and massive breast almost covered the infant’s head! While the baby nursed, the mother talked to him as if she were alone under a tree back in her village. Mohammed envied her freedom. That woman was magnificent. Smiling and at ease. Mohammed began to grin. She looked up at him and said, Welcome to France!

  How had she known he’d just arrived? It must have been obvious from his posture, from his worried expression. He helped her get the stroller off at her station and walked with her to the exit, where she thanked him with a pat on the back. She was strong; Mohammed was thrown off balance, and now he was lost too, without any idea where he was. He’d come out of the métro just to take a little look at the city, to begin making the country’s acquaintance. He had to get back on the line going toward Gennevilliers, in the northwestern suburbs of Paris. He studied the métro map and felt even more confused. When a young man with long hair asked him where he wanted to go, Mohammed showed him a slip of paper with some words on it. He’d thought it was the name of a street, but it was a special housing project for immigrant workers, and on a weekday the place was almost deserted. A middle-aged man walking with a cane asked him grumpily, What are you doing in this country? Look at me: an accident at work, and no money. Go home, at least back there you’ll be with your folks, your family, whereas here—no family, no wife, no mosque, nothing, work, work, and then the accident! A bad omen, thought Mohammed. The other man went on his way, balancing a big suitcase on one shoulder. A Frenchman showed Mohammed to his room; it was tiny, gloomy, with a low ceiling and walls so thin he could hear his neighbours breathing. The man said, Room 38. Here’s the key, and remember: no women, no trouble, buy a lock or you’ll get robbed. The toilet’s over there, so’s the shower. Okay, Mokhamad, welcome! Mohammed later learned that he called all the immigrants Mokhamad.