He kept saying, I want a big house, bigger than all the poky houses in the village, a house as big as my heart. People should be able to see it from far away and say that’s where Mohammed lives with his whole family—I mean, with all his children. Yes, my children will come live with me here, in these infinite spaces. My children and grandchildren. It will be the house of happiness, of harmony and peace!
Mohammed would fall silent, wondering if he’d gone too far. He had become unrecognisable, while the house had lost all sense of proportion, all logic, except, perhaps, that of Mohammed’s obsession: to reunite the entire family beneath this roof resembling the lid of a giant cooking pot in which nothing was in its right place.
After five months, the house was almost ready, although it still needed painting, shutters, windows, and all those details that make a place habitable. To keep it a surprise, Mohammed hadn’t told any of his children about the house. Actually, he’d been afraid they might discourage him, since they were used to speaking their minds and would have wounded him with their words, so he didn’t want to know what they thought, preferring to astonish them.
His wife had rejoined him, and she knew that her husband was making a mistake, feeding on illusions, but she kept quiet, as usual. She had realised long ago that her sons and daughters did not belong to them anymore: the children loved their lives and felt neither remorse nor regret. They had been whisked away by the whirlwind of France, and she had watched them go, knowing that she had no way to hold them back, to keep them close to her and her husband. She’d looked around and seen that, in one way or another, France swallowed up the children of foreigners. Actually, the reality was simpler: there was no plot, no trap, no aggressive wish to rob immigrants of their children, but it was only natural for kids to love their native land, and Mohammed’s wife knew she stood no chance against such an attachment. She did try to talk to her children, advise them, warn them to be careful, but they barely listened. The streets swept them away into adventure, toward new people and things and a life quite different from that of their parents: the auto plant, shift work, sadness and fatigue, the five or six weeks back in the village, the routines and cramped space of that life—none of it was really worth keeping, so they’d kept almost none of it. Find your own luck, choose your own fate.
But you don’t think about that if you’re a parent, you just get on with life, and then one day you realise the damage has been done. Fell off the truck! That was their mother’s favorite expression. She’d learned it by heart without knowing exactly what it meant. To her, it evoked the tiny accidents, the wounds of life, as if the family had been riding on a truck with a tendency to skid. Problems? Fell off the truck! And Mohammed, all the while, had been dreaming of building the biggest house in the village, just as in the old days. Forty years in France hadn’t changed him. Not one whit. He remained intact, inviolable, impeccable: naturally and hermetically sealed. Nothing of France had found a place in his heart or his soul. It hadn’t even been a conscious, deliberate decision. He was what he was; nothing could change him. There were millions like him. They emigrated as if encased in armour, fiercely resisting all outside influence: we have our lives, our ways, and they have theirs. Each to his own—no intrusion, no meddling. Mohammed never even lifted a finger to defend himself against what he called the contamination of LaFrance, for he was foreign, utterly unreachable. The village and its traditions back home lived on in him, coming between him and reality. He was in his world, where he lived without much introspection. His touchstone for everything was Islam: My religion is my identity. I am a Muslim before being a Moroccan, before becoming an immigrant. My refuge is Islam, which calms me and brings me peace; it is the last revealed religion, destined to close a lengthy chapter that God began a long, long time ago. Here they have their faith, and we have ours. We are not made for them or they for us. The contract is clear: I work, they pay me, I raise my children, and then one day we all go home to our house, yes, because the house is my country, my native land.
When his wife had first set eyes on the huge house, she’d let out a loud whinny of surprise, and then, thinking he might turn it into an amusement park for the children when they came on vacation, she asked him what he was planning to do with it. Live in it, he’d answered. You, me, and all our children. It’s simple: this house is our star, our most precious treasure, since each stone is a drop of my blood, every wall a slice of my life, and we will finally be reunited to live as before, as I lived, as my father lived, for I am only following the path laid out by those who came before us and who know better than we do what is good for our offspring. I’ve provided for everything: everyone has a bedroom with a bathroom, wardrobes for storing winter clothes, and I’ve bought a giant television for the patio, where together we’ll watch entertaining shows, you’ll see, plus I’ve built a hammam and a prayer room, so this will be the house of happiness, and I’m even thinking of installing an intercom, like the one we have in the building in LaFrance, because it would be nice to ring the children in their rooms before going there, and I’ve also planned—right next door—a poultry yard with the best roosters and hens, and although there won’t be any rabbits because I know you don’t like them, there will be other animals: ewes, lambs, one or two cows. So no more reason to go to the supermarket—that’s nice, right? I’m very pleased. And you, you’re pleased, I’ve done well, don’t you think? I’ve sunk almost all my savings into this and even borrowed a bit. Stone, land, they’re solid, much better than money. Look around you: no one has a house as grand and beautiful as this. I’ve succeeded, yes, I’ve made a success of it—proof that a man can go abroad and return to his village unchanged; it’s wonderful. Me, I figured it all out: to work and save money we needed LaFrance, but LaFrance is good for the French, not for us. We don’t belong over there. They have their religion, they marry and divorce like anything, but then there’s us, who have our religion, and when we marry, it’s for life, for always. So you understand: I’m going to save our children, I’ll rescue them from the other religion, bring them back to us to keep living the life our parents and grandparents did, because the solution is definitely nowhere else but here, where there is plenty of space, and besides, here the earth is good. See how those plants have grown. The drought is over; there’s no reason for our children to live far away from us. No, no reason…. He kept saying that, with a strange gleam in his eyes. He was possessed, haunted by an obsession, repeating words endlessly, talking to himself, scratching his head, stopping only to gaze at the sky and talk to the rare clouds drifting by.
Afraid of shattering his hopeful enthusiasm, his wife said nothing. She had nothing to say. As usual. She was not supposed to contradict her husband: that was their pact. Perhaps he was losing his wits, but how could she help him, bring him back to reason? She didn’t know. She placed her problem in the hands of God, because she knew that he never abandons those who worship and pray to him.
14
THE HOUSE WAS BIZARRE. It looked like an overloaded truck or a poorly tied-up package. It was a blot on the landscape. Tilting to one side, it seemed about to fall and crush Mohammed, whose disorganised instructions had been closely followed by the mason. Right, he’d say. Here we need a nice, big room for my oldest son and his wife. She’s a foreigner and I’d like to please them, show them that even though we’re poor we have large hearts, so the bedroom must be as big as my heart, you understand; then next door we need more rooms, everyone gets one, and don’t forget the hammam, the oven, a place for the hens and the sheep because, you see, the house should be like a little palace, a poor man’s palace but handsome, welcoming, spacious, magnificent, so go to it, draw, do your work, and don’t forget the windows and the fans for summer, since the children come mostly in the summer. See if you can make me a small swimming pool—I know, there’s no water, but by the time you finish building it the water will be here.
What a house! A mistake, a folly. The balconies were narrow, the windows tiny, and the front door imm
ense. In the middle was a courtyard, a sort of Andalusian patio, where Mohammed had planted a shrub doomed to certain demise in that arid climate. The floor was of the finest quality concrete but still waiting for the zelliges, glazed mosaic tiles that had been ordered from Fez, or at least that’s what the mason claimed. The walls were of tadelakt, a gleaming, moisture-resistant plaster, and some of them were whitewashed. From the ceiling hung electric wires without bulbs; electricity was one of the village caïd’s promises. The bathrooms were fully equipped, but running water was another of those promises. That said, no one importuned the caïd for anything anymore, knowing that results did not depend on him and, in any case, everything came from Rabat.
But who could he be, this improbable character off somewhere in an air-conditioned office, who one morning would entertain a tiny thought for the inhabitants of this hardscrabble village, and who then might actually help out Mohammed in his quest to remedy the absurd injustices of a life in exile? Best not to think about that! The image of that petty bureaucrat in Rabat bedeviled Mohammed. He imagined him, saw him, smelled him. He wears a dark brown suit, a grey shirt he hasn’t changed in four days, a black tie. He raises an arm occasionally to sniff his armpit. He perspires and has no deodorant to dispel the odour of accumulated sweat. Once he tried a bottle of perfume bought from a specialist in fake luxury goods; it gave him an itchy rash of pimples. This bureaucrat smokes and complains constantly about his meagre salary. Less gifted than his colleagues, who have managed to build up nice little nest eggs by selling promises here and there, he doesn’t know how to lie and is unfamiliar with the tricks of his trade, for making money on the side in the Ministry of Public Works. This gives ammunition to his wife, who wages domestic guerrilla war on him every day. So how do you expect this man, a decent sort on the whole, to consider the problems of a thousand peasants who’ve acquired the habit of living without water or electricity? He thinks instead about earning himself a little money and his wife’s respect, which are more important than the house of Mohammed Thimmigrant.
The petty bureaucrat scratches his head, rubs his hand over his greasy hair, picks at a pimple, opens a file, flips through the pages, pretends to search for a word, looks up, notices a spiderweb in a corner of the ceiling, looks down, resigned, then underlines Mohammed’s request with a red pen. He wants potable water! And why not enough to fill a swimming pool! Water! Do I demand champagne when I get home? These peasants who don’t realise that the state can do nothing for them—they emigrate, make a pile of money, and arrogantly demand water and electricity from us as if they lived in the city! Since time immemorial the country people have lived with well water and used candles for light, a bottled-gas generator to run the TV, and just because they’ve lived in Europe doesn’t mean they have the right to pester us. I mean, I’m willing to make an effort, but they don’t understand that they must contribute to the expense. I’d like to emigrate too. My wife would be delighted; she could even consult some fancy doctors and finally have children. She says it’s my fault—I had to knock up the maid to get her to give up that argument. Luckily, the maid had a miscarriage, and my wife fired her after a detailed interrogation. Well, that’s another story. I’m assigning this dossier to the “on hold” pile, which will soon be five years old! It’s part of the furniture, the landscape; I can’t imagine this office without that pile.
What can I do to make my wife be nice to me? Give her a present? But it would have to be something special: the keys to a new car, the deed to some property, or at least a gold necklace or a diamond ring, a trip to Turkey, maybe camping out by the pyramids under a starry night sky—or, better yet, a briefcase full of money. Ever since she saw that in an Egyptian film, she’s been dreaming of it.
Watch how the other men get on, she keeps telling me, the real men, not limp noodles like you! Study them, at least try to learn from them, and don’t come near me, don’t try to cry on my shoulder, because in that movie it’s only after handing over the little briefcase full of money that the husband took the liberty of resting his head on his wife’s shoulder. Don’t count on me to wash your hair. Leave it greasy with dirt; that’s you in a nutshell. My husband—or shall I say my alleged husband?—has greasy hair because his pockets are empty, because he can’t satisfy his wife either sexually or financially. His wife is frustrated! She would willingly have gone off with someone else, but she has principles.
The petty bureaucrat begins to count the number of files on hold. Two hundred fifty-two files. Not one has a chance of getting anywhere. He scratches his head, looks at his fingernails clogged with dandruff. Turning toward a colleague, he suggests they go out for a coffee.
15
THE DAY MOHAMMED MOVES IN, the house is not completely finished, but nothing stops him. He’s obstinate—that’s built into him, part of his character. There’s an expression, “stubborn as a mule,” but a mule can’t hold a candle to Mohammed and his tribe. He refuses to face facts, forges ahead as if permanently locked on to rails. Doesn’t talk things over (forget that!), plunges in headfirst and eyes closed, convinced he’s absolutely right. Hardheaded, headstrong, strong willed. Impregnably and single-mindedly devoted to the idée fixe, inflexible to the end. No, a stubborn man is a nut impossible to crack because he clings with everything he’s got to what is primitive and archaic. Mohammed doesn’t know it, but his obstinacy is at the core of his being.
In his house there is a room for every child, but they all have different dimensions. Some connect to each other through a low, awkward door. The small windows are of various sizes. The prayer room takes up too much space; carpeted with mats, it awaits an imam and the faithful. Mohammed never thought about whether his children were good or bad Muslims, whether they observed Ramadan, prayed, drank alcohol—no, impossible to imagine. On the contrary, he envisioned them all there and himself up front, leading the prayer, while they submitted dutifully to God’s will. He saw them, heard them asking God for help and good fortune—and at that very instant, draped in black from head to toe, a dark silhouette appeared, wearing black gloves and babouches, a moving mass, perhaps a woman, or else a thief hiding behind that veil, a shadow circling the house again and again, a strange, heavy, enigmatic presence. Who’s there? asked Mohammed. Silence. He felt a cold wind blow by as the shadow swelled up and vanished. Mohammed was afraid, not of being attacked, but of meeting a messenger of misfortune. Like all those of his tribe, he was superstitious, although he would never have admitted it, since only women believe such nonsense.
That black thing did not augur well; it could have been a message from the devil, or from some evildoer, a jealous neighbour trying to frighten him or cast a wicked spell. Mohammed knew that envy and hypocrisy thrived in his village, and his wife had even given him talismans to wear against the jealousy of his own family. It’s only natural, she’d told him, that when someone manages to climb out of a hole, people do their best to pull him back in. They can’t bear it that others enjoy good health and manage to emigrate, because to them emigration is a fantastic stroke of luck, so watch out: your own nephews and cousins see you as the sacrificial lamb of Eid to be shared among themselves when you arrive in that car full of presents. Be careful: it’s the people closest to you who are the most envious, and dangerous, for they mean you harm.
Mohammed said prayers, then said them again, but he had an uneasy feeling of foreboding. Although he was physically courageous, this was beyond him. Seized with uncertainty, he felt a painful emptiness burning in the pit of his stomach and wondered if he was having a touch of after-dinner heartburn, but his emotional turmoil grew as he heard the black thing murmuring, grinding its teeth as it came and went.
Mohammed recited the shahada several times: Ach hadou anna la ilaha illa Llah, Mohammed rassoulu Llah…. He watched the phantom flit off, a cloud of dust in its wake. Then he made his ablutions with the water in the bottom of a jar and said a few prayers as if to erase that grim vision, or at least keep it at a distance. When a bat crisscrossing th
e courtyard brushed by him, he stumbled. Then he fell so deeply asleep that he did not dream at all.
The following evening, after sunset, he climbed up a lopsided ladder to the roof terrace, where he had pitched a tent that in summer would provide a place for sleeping in the cool night air. He thought some more about the thing in black. And again it appeared, this time with part of its face uncovered. It addressed him as if it were a member of his family, and although Mohammed called on God and his prophet, praying for their protection, the thing grew bigger as it spoke to him, now in Berber, now in Arabic.
Pour soul! Meskin! Alas for you! You have spent all your money on this building, to dance on your head, walk on your hands, eat spiny hedgehog, and drink milk full of sand! You will choke and die smothered because no one will come to your aid: you have built a house on the only land that does not belong to humans. You have violated the secret of the masters of this place; you have disturbed them, hurt them, and this house will remain empty, empty, for no soul will ever enter here, and yours is kept outside, because you did not know what you were doing, but from the next night of Destiny onward, you will go hence. You will leave the house to the masters of this place, those who live in the depths of wells and the vaults of the sky, those who burn all that their eyes behold, those who leave no trace and know neither fear nor shame, those who are stronger than Satan because they have always been here, for hundreds and thousands of years, those who love not the imprudent, the foolish, the careless who think to drive them away by reciting a few prayers. Meskin! Alas for you! All that for naught! Gaze not upon me or you will become dust, to be blown by a gust of wind into the distant sands! Listen well to what I tell you, and do as I command! You, men of foreign countries, you have abandoned your lands, and you return to cover them with stones. You are lost and your descendants are lost: they no longer know you; they have already repudiated you; they have escaped from you; and so it has been decreed by the masters of this place, who do not want them, for they are sons of foreign soil, ingrates without roots, without religion. The roots of those shrubs have been cut, burned into cinders and ash. Go to the cemetery to meditate on the tombs of your ancestors, and hearken well to what they will tell you, for they are just and wise: they will say that this house is a mistake, and that one does not live in a mistake—especially when it is immense. One does not come to disturb the masters of this place, because they are invisible: you do not see them but they—they watch and pursue you! To be quit of them, you have only one solution: leave and abandon this house to them, which they will make a place of penitence for those, like you, who have gone astray, those from foreign lands who no longer know who they are or where they came from. One last counsel: do not bother summoning the white-robed men who endlessly chant beautiful words when they think only of the feast to follow.
A Palace in the Old Village Page 10