Keys to Tetouan

by Mois Benarroch

  Yes, on the first day of October, or sometimes a few days later, on my call, we fast, it's Yom Kippur, I know it's a Jewish thing, that's none of my business, we pray for a year with little rain, that the nearby river doesn’t get flooded and cause any damage, and we pray the army won't get in our way and let us live our lives, maybe that's what's left of it, we also rest on Sabbath, and light candles one day a week, ask the women about that, they know more about thatthan me, but I also know that none of us is Jewish, as our mothers are all Indians, so don’t try to convince me to become Jewish, there was one gringo who came over here to convert me, we're Indians, Indians from Tetouan but still Indians, you can join us for dinner if you want.

  6

  - Mom, but why are we going to Israel? Why are we leaving our home?

  - What, do you want to live with Arabs the rest of your life?

  - But in my house I do, it is my house

  - It will be your house there as well

  - But it will be a different key

  - Sure it will be a different key, every house has a different key, but it will be your house just like the one in Tetouan,

  - That's not possible, that won't be the house where I was born, or laughed for the first time, or cried for the first time, and it will have a different key

  - You're talking nonsense, so, there's going to be a different key, that's exactly what we want, a different key. A different country, where the Arabs won't call us El Yahud, where no one will throw stones at you on your way home from school

  - Are you sure we will have a house there, a big house

  - Big or small, we will build our lives in Israel, we will be Jews, In Israel every house will be big enough for all of us

  Rio Martin 1948

  Thank you for taking me to the sea, the sea was very calm, it used to take hours to get here riding donkeys not so long ago, and we had great fear of the Arabs lurking in the roads, now we fear the Christians too, Nuestros Hermanos, fear they will try to associate us with the Republicans or with the Frankists, listen carefully, Mimon, don’t ever say you're with one side or the other, don’t forget, you’re a Jew, just keep saying you're not interested in politics, you just do trades, oil, sugar, flour, that's all you know about, you disregard any questions, I don’t even know your opinion and I don’t want to know, I remember two years ago you used to listen to the Russian radio station, and that you became vegetarian, we never heard about that in Tetouan, we heard about it when we didn't have money to buy meat, when we used to eat lentils and dream of meat, once a year, but a wealthy man who avoids eating meat... no wonder your mom lost it, and your dad didn't know what to do with you, you have good arguments for everything, you really should have become a lawyer, but that cursed civil war ruined everything, civil wars are so unnecessary, at the end, all countries are the same, Republic or Generalissimo, what's the difference, but the sea, the sea was so calm and loved, it's like a kiss, like covering yourself in golden prayer shawl, like a hug of god while praying, yes I know you don't like that, but you'll brace religion again, even if you didn't fast on Kippur one time, you'll be religious again, and if you don't, your son will, 'And you shall tell your son on that day', it's already starting to turn the other way around, maybe the Torah didn't speak of four boys only, but of four fathers, all these new ideas, everything I saw in Brazil, all those mulatto women, so beautiful, and I'm telling you Mimon, you need to get married already, you're twenty five years old, build a home for yourself, I married when I was eighteen, and your grandmother was thirteen then, they say that they are just girls today, back then, you would have had your own house with two children by the time you reach sixteen, without all the maids you have now, and the ones your parents had, those were women, not girls, strong women, seven eight children by the age of thirty, a woman of valour, and you tell me you want to have fun first, have fun with what, with what exactly, with freedom, what freedom, you want to fool around, to drive your parents crazy, to rebel, right, Mimon, OK, maybe it's the name, because in my times rebellion meant leaving to Brazil, but your rebellion hurts you parents, you are an only child, and your mother suffered a lot and didn't give birth, and your parents expect you to prolong our surname, Benzimra, your father's seed, what will the world be like without Benzimra, who will sing, the sea will sing, our sea will always be the most beautiful sea of all the Mediterranean beaches, I know what I'm saying, here the water are clear, the sand is clear, here in this place the Shekhinah looks at us from time to time, she knows we're here, that we came from Spain, that we came from Jerusalem, and that we're going back to Jerusalem, don't laugh, you're going back to Jerusalem too, you will witness it's construction, it may sound irrational to you but I know things, I've seen it in my own two eyes, I've seen Jerusalem, but don’t hurry, you don’t need to, we have time, time is on our side, on the side of the Benzimra family, the longer it takes the more certain they're coming.

  7

  - Mom, what's wrong with Leon?

  - He is happy we're going to Israel.

  - He doesn't look happy to me.

  - Jerusalem will cure him.

  - Jerusalem will cure him, he cries a lot, why is he crying?

  - We don't know, he can't speak

  - Maybe he's crying because he's leaving home.

  - Maybe

  - Maybe he doesn't want to leave his land.

  - He is going to Jerusalem, we've been on our way there for two thousand years, that's a great privilege.

  - Great privilege, that's what the Rabbi taught me for the Bar-Mitzvah, that's a great privilege to live in Jerusalem, he told me that between reading verses, he taught me the Passover Hagadah too, Jerusalem.

  - Jerusalem.

  - And it will cure Leon

  - He suffered enough, this little boy, God will have merci on him in Jerusalem and cure him.

  Tetouan 1996

  They are calling me from the graves, from the depths of history, asking me to write them down, their story, the story I don't really know, occasionally I hear bits of it here and there, the Amazonas Benzimra tribe, Mois Benzimra in Caracas, the brothers, and far away cousins, the living ones and the dead, and they ask me to write them down, as if it was my calling, as if there is any significance for one of many families from Tetouan, and I ran away from Tetouan, I was not just moved out of there at the age of thirteen, for years later I ran away from that city, ran away from the memory, and it hunts me down, it hunted me down until that day, that day I went for a visit there, in 1996, exactly a year after Rabin was murdered, here I am, I'm coming to town, to tell its story, to tell its dreams, to see her last Jews, to see Simi Hatchwell who married Levi Bentata, and the Asayags, the synagogue collector, who looks as old as he did twenty four years ago, same bad flatfoot walk, same slightly crying look in his eyes, and he does, he does remember me from the "Yagdil Torah" synagogue, he remembers me and the exact place I used to seat, and remembers my brother and the mess he used to make, and the streets, and the school who has now become Institut Francais, how surprising, or maybe not so surprising, the Alliance school was as if it was back in France, Like it always belonged to France, and my Grandmother's house that turned into a hotel, Immediate Room and Board, twenty four rooms with no personal bathroom, a pension for the many workers coming down from the mountains to break their bread in the big city, because it became a big city populated with seven hundred thousand people, it grew way beyond my imagination, and here I stand on Muhammad the Sixth street, the former Generalissimo, standing in the middle of the street staring at a vague memory of a writing on the wall, The Benzimra Passage, here are the houses my grandfather and his brothers built, here they are, who lives there now, amazing, people just like me, just like everybody, people who search for a living, promotion, for more money, these are the richer ones, that is the richer area, what once was the end of the world turned into the center of town, the places kept their Spanish names, "La Glacial" which still makes the same ice cream, "Las Campanas" that changed a bit and no
w has seats and not just cakes to take away, and the sea...

  No, no I didn’t get to Rio Martin, that was the old beach, now it holds a city, named Martil, I arrived to Kabila, I arrived to my beach, there I found true freedom, it wasn't just like a school vacation kind of freedom, it was freedom from my parents, the freedom of running in the sand, running in the alleys, riding my bicycle, and after the first night there I woke up at the break of dawn to watch the sunrise in the sea, same sunrise my grandmother woke me up to see when I was only eight, at the same place, and I couldn’t wake up, the same wonderful sunrise, as the sun rises above the water, burns the water, and slowly burning the eyes as well, and these pool-like standing water, my blue Mediterranean sea which is not like any other Mediterranean sea, a Mediterranean sea that wants to be a part of the ocean, the last corner of consciousness, and from both sides of it, two mountains enter the sea and a little peer with young fishermen that that was their daily living and indolence, they don’t catch many fish, and the waves of the Levant, these small waves that go into the sea, as if they're trying to swallow it, and it goes further and further inside, and the little waves that beat into the sand, in a steady and unsteady rhythm like the heart, there, exactly there where the water and sand meet I heard my own heartbeats, the footsteps of my walk, my traces in the water, the trail of the little boy I used to be, there in the sand, full of freedom and love, which I knew was still there, that little me is still there, he still walks, dreams of becoming a physicist, mathematician, dreams of becoming a Doctor, dreams of getting rich, dreams of cars, dreams of love, dreams of the big world, and doesn't know that this sand is the big world, not the big cities he will visit, nor Paris neither Rome, but this sand that connects the Mediterranean sea to the ocean, that sea whose waves make the sounds of his heartbeat, the little waves, they themselves are the big world, and home...

  The house with the granite walls, the walls I talked so much about, the house is still there, the external plaster peels away just like life itself and no one fixes it, the Arabs don’t believe in fake exteriors, if the building is sixty years old, then it should show it is sixty years old, and if it's new then it should look new...

  I can't write your story, ancestors, I can only write my story, and it is a mosaic missing hundreds of pieces too, how can you ask me, the people of Tetouan, to write about you, how can you ask me that while I was the last one to be born there, the last one of those who saw and remembered, why didn't you ask someone that was there before me, somebody who spent his whole life there, need a man leave a place so he can miss and understand it, can't someone live in a place and love it, live there and miss it at the same time, just like me in Jerusalem now, but I won't say no, Isaac Benzimra, Mois Sananes, and Moises, Mimon Benzimra, and David Hatchwell, Mois Benarroch, and Simi Bibas, no, I won't say no, I will write the stories, they will not be documentaries, documents always lie, these will be my own lies, and the lies I was told, the truths I thought I discovered, as relative truths as they are, so tied to the winds of time, tied to the our prejudices of today, the ones that will be denied by someone in a generation or two, that’s a volatile story, a story that makes anyone who tries to tell it slip on oil, slip and not get up, even before I started it my family casted me out, they won't talk to me, they are mad at me for writing the pains of my childhood in my poems, they are mad at me for not going to my grandmother's funeral, but I had to run away from it, had to run away from everybody so I could see, see my mom's attempts to connect me to the Hatchwell family, and disconnect me from the Benzimra family, the dynamics of those things, that big unity, that false wholeness, that stupid pride, this is why I had to leave, run, run to find there's nowhere to run to, run so I can feel that uncontrollable urge to go back to the house I was born in, to go back to see it standing there, upright and tall, with peeling plaster maybe, but standing upright, not like my back which bends with time, not like my head that stayed low for so long, that wants to look at the ground, to see if one can see other grounds through it, maybe the sea, maybe little hugging waves, waves sounds that are my pulse, but I will write you down, I'll write down the lie, and maybe that lie I write about you and me will enable some truth to flourish, some kind of understanding, maybe I'll find a few more pieces of the mosaic, the mosaic that keeps getting bigger with every piece I find.

  Our parents wanted to forget and we wanted to remember, we asked about every piece of memory, "and what was the name of that street?...", "what was the name of the grocery owner?"..., and they kept avoiding the questions, what's with all these questions, they didn't want to touch their past, they didn't want to see the mistake, and maybe there was no mistake, what's left of Tetouan? A big city with unemployed people walking the streets, waiting for a tourist to save them, waiting for some Dirhams, a lot of Arabs and few Jews, on the other hand, if the Jews stayed, maybe there were plenty of them, once twenty percent of the city's population, in other cities in Morocco maybe even fifty percent. However, there's a lot left in Tetouan, a lot, fresh air, clear sea water, fresh fish on the table that were caught in the morning, tasty milk, streets that weren’t demolished so someone can build higher buildings and businesses, certain innocence, a feeling that everything will work out tomorrow, because that is the feeling we carry with useverywhere we go, that it’s all going to be fine kind of feeling, that is what makes us really bad revolutionists, that is what makes the Moroccans a group of sunburnt optimistic people, hopeless in an insecure western society that keeps looking for things to break everywhere,there in the sun, and in the indulging rain, the vegetables that grow with no effort, the easy life, nobody thought there's anything to be rebellious about, nothing was worth shouting for, the food will reach our mouths one way or the other, and if not today, tomorrow, no, it was not always like that, no, of course, there were times of famine, but that was in the nineteenth century, a century neither my father nor me can remember, even then it was for short periods, the sun always came back, hence our optimism, so when we came to Israel we didn't realize that the Ashkenazim are waging a war, not particularly against us, they have a war with the rest of the world, against nature, and against mankind, because that was the way they lived, that was the way they were oppressed for a thousand years, because they didn't see the sun, because they don't believe tomorrow will be better, because they can't believe the others, and here came us, from Morocco, and we were their doctors, but they didn't understand, and the patients started treating the doctors until the doctors themselves got sick, and we still kept believing tomorrow will be better, it's in the genes or something, hopeless, so did the Palestinian Arabs, as they didn't realize they are dealing with a different kind of Jews, by the time it was already too late, those were not the Sephardim Jews who settled in Jerusalem, those were not, as they were used to be called, the Palestinian Jews, and all of the four or five hundred thousand Moroccans who came from years of coexistence, couldn't help the great warriors understand that coexistence is possible, not simple, but possible, and even today we can't explain to them that the other can be just the other, and not the killer, and how can we, as they always saw the gentiles as the ones who came to execute the pogroms after coming back from church, and in that great horror, with the Nazi, how could we explain that? They only wanted separation, they wanted fences, so the Arabs won't come anywhere near them, but those fences prevent passingfor them as well, that is a ghetto where there is no need for a ghetto, but the ones who grew up in the ghetto, only know ghettoreality, and the state of Israel, in any way you look at it is simply a big ghetto, but, tell me this Moroccan Jews, how can we explain, can we figure out the meaning of our fifteen hundred years in Morocco, in the Maghreb, haven’t we been brain-washed with these western ways of thinking through enlightened France, haven’t we become semi-ghettoists after dealing with the Israeli-Ashkenazi experience, haven’t we become Arab-haters as well?

  And here I walk the streets of Tetouan again, as the child I once was, and I know today that all the Arab-intimidation was nonse
nse, I know that there were no pogroms here since 1868, and the one beforehand in 1790, and it's really hard to call them pogroms too, very hard, those were individual murders who were never supported by the authorities, so neither my grandfather, nor my father were never oppressed by the Arabs, on the contrary, they welcomed me with expressed love, even when it was clear I was the "other", as it was clear that they were my "others", but how "other" are they really, are they more different from me than the Ashkenazim who tell me I don't look Moroccan as if it was a compliment, as if there's something wrong with looking Moroccan, are they more different than those scared Jews that we and our fathers didn't have any connection with for more than five hundred years, that is Zionism biggest question, because I always thought they were my brothers, because I always thought they were my people, because I always included them in my collective being, but they never did, for them I was always the Mizrahi, I was always the Jew that came from a Muslim country, the primitive, for them I'm still the other, after all those years I hoped they realize I'm not the other, I am beginning to feel that they are my "other", maybe even more than the people of Tetouan, maybe even more than the owner of the grocery, Dris, who couldn’t stop telling me about my grandfather and his brothers, and about the work he did for them, the sacks he carried, his back pains, and he gave me a souvenir lighter, so I would torch my past, and he sent best regards to relatives I didn’t see for the last twenty years, to Dora who lives in Miami, and all kinds of cousins I never seen who lived in Venezuela, and told me about my brother who died, and about my father that came to him once and started crying, "that boy has something wrong in his head", and he got everyone messed up, my father became my uncle, and an uncle he talked about was the grandfather, and the aunt he thought that lives in Netanya is actually in Caracas, and all of that just made everything much more vivid, he also told me about my cousin, Moises Benzimra who married the prostitute, and passed away a year ago, a man I never met, a shame, because I carry his name, the same name, what does it mean to have the same name as someone? Same life, same destiny, I ask and I can't find the answer, I just really do think that if the Moroccan Jews reached decision-making positions in the Israeli society, and not as submissive puppets, our existence here would have been very different, and coexistence with the Arabs was possible, but maybe that's just a dream...