THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO

by Wafa Faith Hallam

  I bent over her face, kneeling on the ground, not noticing the women who had just performed the solemn ritual, and barely recognized my mother. She looked younger, relaxed, and peaceful. Her skin was flawless, nearly translucent, but also distended. Not a single wrinkle was visible, and yet not a trace of makeup or lotion had been used. An intimation of a smile was apparent on her lips. I couldn’t help but think the smile looked unnatural, forced almost, as if it had been arranged, her lips turned upward intentionally by mortal hands.

  What did it matter? This was but a shell, not my mother, I reminded myself. She had relinquished her earthly vessel, was no longer there. The thought struck me—not so much a spark of awareness as a stark realization that I too was a shell, filled but with an immense void encouraging me not to linger.

  Shaken, I hurried outside the room and gestured to Sophia to go in.

  “They’re going to take her body away in a few minutes. Do you want to see her one last time?” I asked, not without hesitation.

  “Yes, I do. Can you come in with me?” she asked.

  Like most females present, she was wearing a blue Moroccan djellaba borrowed from a cousin. She looked awkward and uneasy in her unfamiliar garb, but she did not complain. In a country where Western dress is widely used, important events are attended in traditional clothing. While Moroccan women favor richly decorated kaftans on festive occasions, they attend funerals wearing djellabas, garments which are understated and more modest in color and shape.

  We entered the chamber. I waited at the door while Sophia approached the body. This was her first real encounter with death, since that last hospital visit, and I worried about her reaction. She loved her grandmother deeply and throughout her young life had built a strong bond with her. I should not have been concerned; she stayed calm and collected through her tears and sorrow and demonstrated more maturity than I had expected.

  After Sophia, my brother and his wife went in briefly. We were being urged to speed it up. The body had to be taken away to be buried by noontime prayer. Finally, four men walked in and came out carrying the coffin. The religious psalms and praises to God and his prophet intensified, building into an intensely emotional chorus, a temple of invocations that filled even the least spiritual of listeners with unwitting awe and reverence.

  All of a sudden, the shrill, cascading yooyoos of women punctured the loud religious incantations. I was shocked to hear them. They were no different from the staccato ululations heard at weddings, and they prompted a weird analogy in the theater of my mind: The scene of my mother’s funeral had turned into an eerie departing party for her corpse; she was Death’s bride. And I couldn’t help but think that, while her terrifying wedding night had signified the death of her childhood’s innocence, her funeral meant the re-birth of her soul, which I suspected she had perhaps secretly longed for during her ordeal.

  Still, that image of deliverance was little consolation for us pitiable mortals left behind. As everyone rose to their feet to witness the procession moving toward the door, tearful faces mixed in the crowd with chanting mourners. I held on to Sophie and Nezha’s hands, all three of us sobbing uncontrollably, bleeding tears of grief.

  Someone behind me grabbed my shoulder.

  A woman’s voice urged me, “Please don’t cry. Don’t let your daughter and sister weep either. This is a time of celebration, not tears, don’t you know? Your mother’s soul is returning to God, her Creator, and her body back unto the earth it’s made of.”

  I shook my head as if to say, Yes, I knew that she spoke the truth, though my heart simply wouldn’t listen.

  “It’ll sadden her to see your sorrow in her moment of glory,” the woman insisted with compassion.

  At the small, scruffy cemetery, Mom’s body was buried in a little plot not far from that of Mohamed’s, her oldest brother, in the shadow of an unpretentious neighborhood mosque. Weeds and wild plants had invaded the graveyard, a vision of neglect and lack of upkeep. A tiny prayer room, a sayyed enclosing the tomb of a saint, had been built on the premises, and a few people gathered there after Friday prayers. There was no organization designated for the cemetery’s maintenance save for an old guard and destitute woman who watered the planted tombs and closed the gate at night to prevent unwanted access. They survived on public alms and charity, mostly from visitors. Poverty and an absence of civil and social structures were to blame.

  I was saddened by the shabby resting place we were offering our mother. It seemed unworthy of her somehow. Not that I would have preferred a rich mausoleum, just a tidier and better groomed graveyard. A few tombs were built with the top shaped as a basin the length of the crypt, filled with soil and planted with daisies and geraniums. My first thought was that I wanted the same for Mom, later, when, after forty days, her tomb was built.

  There were more prayers and incantations during the interment and after the coffin was covered with dirt. The space around the grave was so tight, we had to carefully watch where to put our feet not to step on other tombs.

  On the return to Fatima’s villa, the funeral had taken on the allure of a singular ceremony. People kept coming back for three long days and nights and were fed breakfast, lunch, dinner, and tea and coffee in between. Emotionally, it was a roller coaster of tearful and, oddly enough, joyful moments too as we reunited with people we held in deep affection and whom we had left behind decades ago.

  The massive show of support was a great comfort to all of us, but we were glad to regroup in the intimacy of our home. Larbi, Margie, and Jaad only stayed a few days and promised to return in the summer. Abdu extended his visit for three more weeks before going back to Florida. When everyone had left, Nezha and I felt like inflatables from which the air had gone out. We shriveled and recoiled, each in the emptiness of our hearts, unmindful as we were of the poet’s words of wisdom as he celebrated the oneness of all existence.

  “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one…

  For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?

  And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides,

  that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

  Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

  And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

  And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

  The Prophet, Khalil Gibran

  33

  Sleep Walking

  My mother’s sudden death had come at a time when I was convinced my dejection had finally ended. It was a short reprieve. My aimless walk in the all-too-familiar wasteland of my mind resumed anew. There were days when I was no more than a living corpse; carrying my ache and mourning my flesh, I went through the motions, pretending to be alive. That, in essence, was my life for the next four years.

  The only thing that kept me anchored in my sea of angst was my daughter, her well-being a constant concern to me. Even before her grandmother passed away, she had been homesick and, not unlike many teenage girls, subject to mood swings and periodic gloom. Suddenly, she had to cope with the unimaginable, death and its finality. On her fifteenth birthday, just a few days after the funeral, a friend offered her a three-month-old puppy, a tan female Labrador she called “Bonnie.” Alas, the instant love she felt for her new pet was not enough to ease her sporadic fits of unhappiness.

  We had frequent clashes that erupted without much warning, like rolling thunder in a clear sky, triggered by a little more than a nagging remark about her lack of studiousness, or discipline, or tidiness. And she would just look at me with unbridled anger, spitting with fury:

  “I hate it here. I hate it with all my heart. I want to go back home in America. I don’t want you to sell our apartment in the Versailles. My family is there, my best friend is there, I have no one here, especially now that Grandma is dead.” She’d choke and start crying.

 
; “Listen, baby, I know you feel lonely and hurt, I know that, and I’m really sorry;” I’d say to appease her. “I quite understand you don’t want me to sell our apartment, but I cannot afford it anymore! It costs me a fortune. Just so that you understand, it costs as much to keep it as to live a whole month here, all expenses paid. Not to mention the worries and maintenance problems. And I cannot go back to New York. After twenty years of living the rat race, I’m done.”

  It broke my heart to see her in such pain. Still I felt I had to stand my ground.

  “Then you can stay here,” she’d argue. “I want to go back home, live there. I can take care of myself, and it’s not like I’d be alone. My family’s right there also, only a few flights up. I’m ready to go to Memorial High School. It won’t cost you a dime. You’re always complaining about money, and now you’re looking to spend over fifteen thousand dollars a year on tuition again.”

  She had thought it all through. She was fed up with Morocco and the isolation of home-schooling.

  “I decided on the Rabat American School because it’s the best place for your education, regardless of the cost. Plus you’ll make friends, and you’ll feel a lot better about living here, I promise. In any case, only three more years and you’ll be going to college. So it’s not like this is a permanent move for you.” Far from soothing her, my words fell on deaf ears.

  “Mom, this is your country, not mine. I’m an American! I don’t feel at home here. The problem is, you don’t understand me, you never do… you’re so selfish!”

  Then I’d start shouting as loudly as her. “That’s not true! You know how much I care. It’s really quite unfortunate you can’t see what a great experience this is for you! You think everyone can have an opportunity like this?”

  “But I don’t care, don’t you see?” And, with that, she’d run to her room wailing, making sure to slam the door behind her and not reappear for hours.

  Sophia was right about one thing: Money was haunting me yet again, though nothing mattered more to me than her education. If necessary, I was ready to borrow to pay for tuition. The bigger worry was my vacant apartment in the States. It was depleting my resources and more than doubled our otherwise manageable expenses in Morocco. The business venture I had started with Nezha in January was fast turning into another drain. Not only was it slow in taking flight, it was very far from even sustaining itself, let alone generating any income.

  In Morocco, to build a successful venture one has to have a lot of influence, endless patience, and very deep pockets, on the one hand, and an essential acquaintance with the country’s mores and practices on the other. I thought I had that understanding. I was mistaken. Luckily my sister was far more adept. Still, we encountered multiple difficulties generally related to an overly laid-back temperament and a widespread lack of efficiency, expertise, or professionalism. These problems were made worse in our dealings with public officials and navigation of the bureaucratic maze by protracted corruption.

  Moroccans, like most Middle-Easterners, are genuinely warm, charming people, but their natural tendency is to more readily tell their interlocutors what they want to hear than keep to their word. Missed deadlines, poor quality controls, recurrent cost overruns, an unapologetic lack of punctuality, and endemic overpromises are but a few of the ills we encountered regularly.

  To be sure, suppliers, vendors, and government officials were often polite, even gracious, but they did not care for straight talk as much as they did for nuance, subtlety, and elusiveness, if not half-truths. God forbid I displayed any hint of frustration or aggravation with them, for they were most easily offended. I had much less patience with such nonsense than my sister, and the task of mending miffed feelings always fell to her.

  Thus the subject of money, fueled by our inability to get a business going, loomed like the darkest of clouds, more ominous every day, creating a huge wedge between my sister and me. I felt I was carrying the whole burden alone; she thought otherwise. Within a few months of our mother’s death, we turned on each other with ferocious indignation.

  On a warm and rainy May morning, I was going over my banking statements online and my anxiety was mounting with the amount of expenditure and my diminishing resources. My sister was moping around still in her pajamas asking me something when I lashed out at her.

  “I’ve been spending all my money to support us, and I think you should at least show some gratitude,” I complained bitterly pushing my laptop aside.

  “Hey! Where did that come from?” she asked stopping in her track. “I’ve been spending as well, not just you. Besides, you’re the one who insists on all the lavish expenditure on decoration, flowers, and what not,” she retorted.

  “You forget the house was new and needed a lot of fixtures to make it inhabitable. Plus I wanted to create the best environment for Mom. But I didn’t think I’d have no help from you at all.”

  “That’s not true. I got transfers from Sami. And all the money you’ve spent comes from the sale of Mom’s apartment, right? Well, then, I’m just as entitled to it as you are.”

  There, she’d blurted it out, laid out her assessment of a controversial subject we had been avoiding all along.

  “Yeah? And how’s that?” I shrieked. I had been dreading the time we would be sparring over that very issue.

  “Sure, you bought the apartment for her. But you also gave it to her, didn’t you? Then, as her daughter, I get to share in its sale. In fact, come to think of it, so do our brothers!”

  “Really, and who else?” I scoffed. “They never spent a penny to help her out, ever. Quite on the contrary, she was more often giving them money. The bottom line is this, and please put it in your head once and for all: I gave her the apartment to enjoy during her lifetime, certainly not to pass it on as inheritance to her heirs. I paid the mortgage and the maintenance. Not to mention, you have a husband to provide for you. I don’t. Why doesn’t he help out a little more?”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt abashed at my petty, pathetic self but swiftly covered my shame with outright hatred.

  “He does as much as he can. I choose to live here while he’s still in Tunis. If he lived here, he’d contribute his share. I can see how the shortage of money demoralizes you and undermines your judgment. I’ve seen you act like this many times before. I know those symptoms in you,” she hissed.

  “Well, I’m glad you recognize the symptoms of my dysfunction. I wish you could come up with solutions instead,” I spat out in disgust.

  “I don’t worry like you, Wafa. I feel sorry for you, really. Money doesn’t define me. We’ve never gone hungry or homeless; I know everything will be fine eventually. Besides, I never asked you to support me in the past and I don’t expect you to now.”

  Her words felt like insults, hitting all those sore buttons at once.

  “But you’re doing just that! In fact, the whole idea of coming to live in Morocco was your idea. Starting a business here was your idea. Hearing you, Morocco was the Promised Land. Look at the mess we’re in now. I’m so sorry I listened to you and your stupid dream!”

  I felt a searing pain inside and my head began hurting. I could now clearly see the disgust in her eyes.

  She lowered her voice but couldn’t hide the rage in her tone. “Nobody forced you. You were so depressed and confused, you jumped on it… Do not pretend otherwise.”

  She turned to leave the room but stopped, threw her head back and looked me in the eyes, fuming. “Why don’t you go back home with your daughter and stay away from me? I don’t need you here. I’m sick of your constant criticism. Your pessimism is sabotaging all our efforts to create something. Better you go back to America.”

  I very rarely saw that side of her. Her soft, gentle nature had been taken over by an incensed, peremptory woman.

  “You have no say in what I do. I have too much invested here financially and emotionally to just turn my back now. I really resent your arrogance.”

  She was gone already,
leaving me livid and trembling from head to toe. I closed the door, threw myself on the bed, and wept.

  On the surface, the cause of our mutual bitterness was money, though, of course, it was not only that. We were both filled with grief at the loss of our mother and had no one else but each other to blame it on. For Nezha as for me, Mom had been everything, our sole purpose in life to cater to her every need, fulfill her dreams. But for my sister, not having children of her own, Mom’s happiness had become her most pressing priority, almost an obsession. After the death, she had completely lost her drive and zest for life, had withdrawn, mostly kept to herself, and fallen ill often.

  Sophia and I returned briefly to the States that hapless year, she in mid-May and I at the beginning of June. My apartment was not moving, and I needed to change brokers or find a way to rent it if I couldn’t sell it. The trip, which took place at the time of the rift with my sister, turned out to be a source of infinite sorrow. Everything reminded me of my mother. I stayed indoors and went out only to visit close friends. Despite all their best efforts, I was a walking husk, alienated and forsaken, intensely hurt by my loss and my sister’s animosity.

  Back in Rabat at the beginning of the summer, I was glad to find Sami had left Tunis and agreed to join us in Morocco for good. Both my sister and I needed him to relieve the pressure of pursuing a venture in a patriarchal society that I, in particular, had lost touch with. He immediately endeavored to reconcile us and soon we had regained some of our lost trust, understanding that the pain of bereavement had contributed to our clash.