–City softness, she said, waving her hand dismissively. –For women who sit around and do nothing all day.
Lalla tried to point out that she herself, living in a city, worked hard, but her mother just stared at her. –You speak to the people who come to the hotel, you give them rooms! How is that hard? Making that disapproving tzut sound against the roof of her mouth.
Her mother would never understand how the city was like a crouching cheetah, ready to pounce. At first the speed and confusion and crush of people had been bewildering. Lalla, who in the hills could read the sign of rabbit and jackal, could name all the stars and constellations — Dhat al-Kursi, the Enthroned, Fam al-Hut, the Mouth of the Fish — here stepped into the path of traffic, blundered everywhere with her country manners. Though surely persistence and politeness as she walked the streets, knocking on doors, would bring what she wanted?
By then, in her squalid room in the medina, she was thin and desperate, living on bruised fruit, stale khobz. It was an appeal to a relative, a distant cousin she’d never met, that saved her. The cousin owed her grandfather on her father’s side a favour, never repaid, and knew a wealthy politician whose wife’s family part-owned a hotel. The letter he sent, like the ice, turned out to be a magic talisman, bestowing what had seemed unreachable. In the hotel she marvelled at the softness of the sheets, the television in each room, the inlaid furniture. The few pieces in her own home, dragged from one mountain village to another when her grandmother married, were scarred and antiquated. Each scar carried a story, all of which she would inherit, like the pair of earrings in filigreed gold given to her by her mother when she began to bleed. Her first act when she arrived in Fez was to sell them. Along with the coins, tinkling one by one into her palms, she heard the distant sound of rent clothing, the ululations of grief.
By evening the woman said she felt better. Lalla sat outside with her, away from the men, who were smoking and telling jokes beneath the fig tree. The woman turned out to be Canadian, not American. Perhaps from the French part of the country, with that name, though she spoke no French. Grey eyes, tanned skin, brown hair cropped stylishly short — she might have passed, perhaps, for a European, except for the gestures, the way she moved her body. She was puzzled by Lalla’s green eyes. Not uncommon in the Rifi villages, Lalla told her.
–Teach me some Berber, the woman said.
–Not Berber, Tamazight. Lalla refilled her glass with mint tea, keeping her voice neutral. –Berber is what the Romans called us. Barbarians.
–Tamazight, she repeated, mangling it. –How do you say, I’m looking for a boy from these villages? Can you write it down?
–Why? Why are you looking for a boy?
–I found his body. On a beach in Spain. The woman looked off into the distance where the hills were indigo shadows. –I wanted to let his family know what happened to him.
For a moment Lalla’s heart clutched. But no, the boy had some sort of tattoo on his ankle, which Yunes most certainly had not had and would never have agreed to.
–Why? If he’s not a relative?
Cathérine stared at her. –I thought how they must feel, not knowing. How I would feel. It seemed like a — well, like an obligation.
–So it’s for you. You want to feel better. Scorn turned her voice harsh; foreign women could indulge every silly little whim. –You want to feel pure and noble.
Cathérine blinked as though Lalla had hit her.
–I was on holiday when I — when he spoke to me on that beach. I had a fight with my husband to come here.
Ah, the missing husband, of whom the only trace was the woman’s ring. She and the man were lovers after all. Would have met after she’d arrived. Perhaps he liked women as well as boys.
–You left your husband in Canada to come all the way here? And after Cathérine had explained –He was jealous, then, Lalla said, that you were interested in this other man. She jerked her head at the group under the tree, silhouettes in the darkness.
–No, no, not that. He thought it was a waste of time, my looking. He went back to Spain.
And this woman believed that? Believed that men, and especially husbands, always told the truth? The moon, an antique coin, rose above them. –Are you cold? Lalla said. –Would you like a shawl?
–You’re very kind. Cathérine got up, slowly, leaning on Lalla’s shoulder for support. –I think I’ll go back to bed. I think that would be best.
In the morning they went from house to house, Lalla explaining, Cathérine holding out the sheet of paper, now torn and faded. In each house, as Lalla could have told her, the answer was the same. No one knew of such a boy, though the villages had sacrificed many boys to the Bab al-Zakat, the Gate of Charity, the strait that lay between their own country and that richer continent to the north. They proposed names simply as offerings, as opportunities to say them aloud so that Allah himself might bless them, wherever they were.
–Pick a boy, any boy, Lalla said. –Go to Spain or France or Germany and find him.
But of course the woman would not do that. Dedicating one’s life to such a pursuit would be — well, madness. The kind of thing only a saint would do. –You are named for a Christian saint, aren’t you? Lalla asked. She’d learned her first English from an elderly priest who had retired in Morocco and spent a summer in the village, working as a translator with some archeological dig, long abandoned.
It was as her father said: Christians, unlike Muslims, observed their religion only on Sundays. The woman was explaining that her grandmother had gone on pilgrimages, that she herself was on a kind of pilgrimage.
–My own brother disappeared in Europe, Lalla said, glancing down; a spider had run across her sandal. –My father thinks he took up with some European woman. I think he drowned, like the rest of them. Or maybe he’s living in one of those camps. She had seen these on TV but had not told her mother. Such an ending was worse than death; it brought nothing but shame. –Mostly, now, I don’t think about it. It only makes me sad. Sad and angry.
Firhun came up then, swaggering a little. The man of the house, with his father and older brother gone, he was performing for the benefit of the foreign woman. –American? he said, one of the few English words he knew, and gave his heartbreaking smile. –Look, I dance for you!
Lalla gave him a push that almost sent him sprawling, adding in their own language –Get lost, monkey. Firhun gave an exaggerated moue of despair and sauntered off. –Now he wants to go, too, Lalla said. –English, she added bitterly, the language of the drowned, though Cathérine had walked ahead and didn’t hear her.
The last house was Riuza’s. She, too, had lost a firstborn son to that ravenous continent, though so long ago that Lalla didn’t remember him. Riuza took a framed photograph from an alcove, pressed it against her breasts, then held it out to Cathérine. The boy in the frame looked even younger than Firhun, with soft, almost feminine eyes and a thin face too serious for its years. –My first fruit, my lovely boy, Riuza said, kissing the cold lips. –My only child from my first marriage. I lost him when he was seventeen. He’s thirty-seven now, if he’s still alive, insh’allah. Have you seen him? Do you know him?
Riuza was not deterred by the fact, pointed out by Lalla, of Europe’s millions. –You take, you take, she said, thrusting the photograph at Cathérine. She gestured vigorously at Lalla. –She can find him, my Ahmed, no? You tell her I have a little money, I’ll pay. Better to look for a live boy than a dead one, no?
Ahmed, like Yunes, like hundreds of others, was keeping the fish and the seaweed company at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Lalla laid her hand gently on Riuza’s arm. –Keep your photograph, Riuza. Bring it to the wedding. To Cathérine, who looked as though she was going to dissolve, she said –Don’t you dare take him on. Go home. Find your husband.
They walked back through the village in the blistering heat. Lalla swept her arm across the dry brown hills below them. –You see, don’t you? That there’s nothing here? She looked at Cathérine wi
th a kind of disgusted envy. –And here you are, looking for a man who doesn’t belong to you! I can’t even afford to look for my own brother.
Henri was leaning against the tree, smoking, when they returned. Cathérine wiped her face with her scarf, said something about the heat, and went indoors. Henri ground out his cigarette in the dirt and took Lalla aside. –Well? Did she learn anything?
–Of course not. Lalla shook his hand off; hadn’t it lingered a little too long? –You knew that when you brought her here.
–I learned long ago that I know nothing in this country. Henri watched her levelly, his arms folded. –I thought there was a possibility. She was desperate.
–You encouraged her.
Finding the boy’s family would make her feel needed. Would make both of them, Cathérine and the man, feel needed. He sat down heavily in one of the rickety deck chairs she’d scrounged from the hotel. It was hard to tell how old he was — probably in his fifties, though he was fit and lean.
–If it had been your brother, wouldn’t you have been relieved? He ran a hand through hair too blond to be natural. –She wanted to help.
More than once, walking down a Fez street, Lalla had seen him, just a glimpse, getting out of a taxi, buying something at a stall. Her big brother, two years older, the one who’d carried her up and down on his back playing at donkey and rider. It was Yunes, so her mother said, who had rescued his two-year-old sister when she’d fallen into the stream that ran at the bottom of the hill. It was her turn, now, to carry Yunes. She’d been carrying him for eight years.
–If you found his family, was she going to sleep with you? She used the crude Arabic for fuck.
Henri stared at her and then away, across the hills, and she felt the briefest moment of shame. –She was blundering around pointlessly. She needed someone who knew the ropes.
–Lalla! It was her mother’s voice through the window, sharp, irritated. In the kitchen steam rose from a pot, a bowl of lemons sat on the table. –Here. Her mother waved a knife at her. –Work for a change, shameless one, instead of idling in gossip. Through idle words the devil slips in sideways.
The devil stuck his pitchfork into her all through lunch, showering fiery little sparks, though she didn’t know why. There was something, something… Perhaps they were simply here to buy kif and taking elaborate precautions. Or could the man be a paid informant for some European police unit investigating smuggling? The woman Cathérine was putty in anyone’s hands, that much was clear. Were they working together, and the story of the husband was just a ruse?
After lunch, Henri asleep in his chair outside, she went to the house of the Hasnaouis, where he was spending his nights. –The foreigner sent me here, she told Darifa Hasnaoui when she opened the door. –He needs something from his room.
His room had been offered by Darifa and her husband, now sleeping in their sons’ room while the boys slept on blankets in the kitchen. Lalla hunted swiftly through a faded blue knapsack leaning against the wall, a pair of jeans hanging over a chair. Only a wallet that held what appeared to be a legitimate driver’s licence, bearing the name Henk de Ruiter, a street address in Tangier, a date of birth: March 23, 1972. That made him forty-nine. There was nothing else to explain who he was, though the Moroccan flavour of his Arabic meant he’d lived here a long time. A wad of notes in dirhams had been stuffed under the mattress, but whether it was his or the Hasnaouis’ she didn’t know. She picked up the jeans again, sniffed the pockets for the scent of kif. Before she put the wallet back, a last rooting yielded a photo, wedged behind the driver’s licence. A young man, perhaps in his early twenties, dark-eyed, heavy-lidded, a sensual lower lip. Probably Moroccan, definitely Maghrebi. But so what? What was that to her? Perhaps Henri’s protestations about Cathérine were genuine after all.
–It’s not here, she told Darifa, what he sent me for. Perhaps he lost it.
Darifa offered tea and they sat drinking in the shade, backs absorbing the heat from the house’s walls. –Do you remember, Darifa said, that time we decided to take the goats out?
They’d gone early one morning, without permission, two girls of nine and thirteen. Darifa, promised in marriage the following year, was rebelling, but it had really all been Lalla’s idea. What did the boys do all day, out with the goats? Lay in the sunshine, wandered the hills, while she and Darifa and the other girls sweated in the kitchens beside their mothers. It was even harder, in her own case, since she had no sisters to share chores with. Of course they were punished when they got back — Darifa beaten, Lalla condemned to limited food and silence for a week — but oh, the day they’d had! The tiny waterfall where they ate lunch, a patch of rare pale-lemon narcissus, a cave that echoed away into darkness and where they dared each other to go deeper. On their way out, near the entrance, Lalla found the scattered blue beads of a necklace. –A couple must have come here to — you know, Darifa said, wide-eyed, and broke into nervous giggles. –Like what the male goat does to the female. To make babies!
Why anyone would want to make babies — they were heavy, they cried all the time, they were always dirtying themselves — Lalla had no idea. Darifa must be wrong. No woman would come here with any man but her husband, and why would they need to hide? She and Darifa collected the beads, divided them between them, and promised eternal friendship.
–You must marry among us, her mother said often, which meant a Rifi man, but where was she going to find one when they’d all gone to Europe? There had been two or three love affairs, brief ones, in Fez, though of course she did not tell her mother that. Besides, did it count if your heart was still intact?
–And who, she always retorted, am I to marry? Darifa’s crazy uncle? Or Jedira’s brother — you want him as a son-in-law? The brother had come back after five years in Germany, lamed, impoverished. No one knew what had happened — he no longer spoke.
Her mother shook a ladle at her. –May the wrath of Allah descend upon your impertinence! Know this — marry a Fassi and I won’t come to your wedding.
Which wasn’t true. It only meant that her mother wanted her to live in the village, to lead the life that generations of women before them had lived, a dim caravan stretching into some misty past. A life that was no longer possible, at least not for her. Lalla, transplanted elsewhere, was rooting herself in different ground. Her grandfather, deaf and mostly silent, had startled her once by saying –When a woman leaves a village for the city, she leaves them all. Was them her family, or the entire Rif? Or both?
–Is there a man? Darifa asked over the tea. –You can tell me. My lips are sealed.
Darifa, her old friend of the blue beads, had married at fourteen, had her first child nine months later. Had borne two sons, thereby guaranteeing the family honour, then a stillborn daughter, and just last year a third son, who slept in a cradle in the cool of the kitchen. Lalla was twenty-four and still single. Darifa admired her but, Lalla knew, did not envy. A woman of her age without a husband, much less a child!
–And you, she said to Darifa, can tell me what you think of the foreigner. What he’s doing here with the woman.
–Mezwar and I talked before he went out to the field this morning. Mezwar says it’s obvious — he likes boys. Anyone can tell, Mezwar says. Maybe the woman hired him as a guide.
But he had touched her, Lalla, in a way that had made the heat rise in her face, as though he’d crawled inside her. Did he like boys and girls? What was in it for him, that he’d brought a foreign woman to this out-of-the-way place, knowing it was a waste of time?
–You think so? Darifa said, as wide-eyed as she had been at thirteen, only now it was Lalla leading the way. –Could a man be so confused about what he likes? She considered for a moment. –Or perhaps he’s practising, the way the male kid goats do, mounting each other. She smothered a giggle behind her hand. –Only a foreigner could practise so long without getting it right.
In the evening the woman did not appear for dinner. Henri borrowed a flashlight and went off explori
ng on his own. Lalla sat with the other women by the fountain, where the generator powered a single streetlight. The talk today was of Jedira’s wedding to a widower of forty in a village fifty kilometres away; she would have two young stepchildren. Also of the planting — the tomatoes, the onions, the alfalfa — and the weather: always the weather, the portents in the sky. One or two of the women sat with the latest letter from son or brother or husband in their laps, but no one asked questions. It was bad manners and moreover dangerous. The evil eye might notice the one spoken of, so far away, so unprotected, and take revenge.
In the morning Cathérine was running a fever, burning up between the bed’s thin sheets. Lalla’s mother bathed her hands and face with rosewater while the Hasnaoui boys and Firhun walked the three kilometres to the next village to get the doctor. Not a real doctor — a medical student whose family had run out of money for his studies. For the twentieth time Lalla walked among the houses with her cellphone, trying and failing to get a signal. Firhun and the Hasnaoui boys came back not with the medical student, who was away, but with the midwife, the qabla, who knew the efficacy of touch and herbs and charmed sayings. Lalla, who in Fez had discovered the spotless white of doctors’ clinics, the power of those framed credentials on the walls, made a face but said nothing. The midwife was ushered into her mother’s bedroom and stayed there a long time.
–Perhaps it will help, Henri said, smoking again and staring up at the brassy sky. –The best medicine, when one gets sick, is that produced by the place, I’ve discovered. When I had bronchitis I went to a herbalist in Tangier.
That was what foreigners always did: succumbed to whatever, to them, was exotic. Lalla had cleaned foreigners’ shit from toilets, had stripped beds that still stank of their lovemaking, and knew that exotic was a thing of the mind, not an actual destination.
Hour of the Crab Page 7