by Laila Lalami
The worst of it, of course, was that when they finally managed to reach Amal, she did not show any remorse, nor did she have the wisdom to deny the relationship. Nabil could have said he believed her, even though he didn’t, and the matter would have been closed. But his daughter had never been the deceiving type. She readily admitted that she was dating an American, a photography student. Naturally, Nabil had to do what any sane father in his position would have done: He fumed, he yelled, he threatened. Then he hung up.
Malika wanted to get on a flight to Los Angeles immediately, to talk some sense into Amal, but Nabil forbade her categorically. It was up to Amal to apologize. The days wore on, their stay in Paris ended, and still she did not call. When they returned to Casablanca, Nabil told his bank to stop automatic transfers to Amal’s account in Los Angeles. His reasoning was simple. Amal claimed that she was old enough to make her own decisions, and if she was old enough for that, then surely she was old enough to pay for her own studies. Malika, of course, was furious. She called him morning and evening to argue that he should “stop the nonsense,” that he needed to “get on with the times.”
Nabil knew better, though. If he let Amal get away with this, then what next? She might get the idea that she could marry an American. Whom had he been working for all this time? And to whom would he leave his share of the business? Some foreigner who would take her away to his country, away from her family, her home, her homeland? A few lean weeks would convince Amal of her mistake, and she would fly back home and ask for his forgiveness.
But Malika did not—or refused to—understand. She said that their nephews, Tahar’s son and Othman’s son, were dating American girls while studying in New York, without the slightest risk of being cut off. But it is not the same, Nabil wanted to scream. They are young men, and that is what young mendo. Of course, none of this would be an issue if Amal had been a boy. Things would have been so much easier for him if she had. When Malika was pregnant with Amal, he had not been concerned about the baby’s sex at all. They had their whole lives ahead of them. Even during Malika’s second pregnancy, he had not cared whether the baby was a boy or a girl. But after four miscarriages, after the doctors said that he and Malika needed to stop trying, that her uterus would not carry another baby to term, he had caught himself wishing that Amal had been a boy. By then she was already six years old, still just a baby, but the realization that she would be his only child had changed everything. He had pushed her, yes, but she always did well under pressure. She outscored her cousins on all the standardized tests, loved to read, spoke fluent Spanish, played a mean game of tennis, shared his love of Laabi’s poetry and his passion for Andalusian music. She was his prize. He would not lose her to some American.
Nabil’s secretary Fadila buzzed him again. A young man downstairs was refusing to leave, she said, even though he had been told that Mr. Amrani was too busy to see him. “What’s his name?”
“Youssef El Mekki.”
Nabil thought for a moment, running the name through his memory. “I don’t know him.”
“Sir, he says that you know his mother.”
Nabil sighed; he knew where this was going. These days, young people were getting pushier, coming up with all sorts of strategies to find a job, even if they had to shame you into offering them one. On his last trip to Rabat, he had seen the famous sit-ins in front of Parliament. Every day, a couple of hundred young men and women stood under the palm trees across the street, waiting for the representatives to come out so they could hassle them for a solution to their “situation.” Nabil’s leftist days were not that many years behind him, and he still prided himself on having a liberal fiber, but when he saw those young people in front of Parliament, he could not help but wonder: Did they seriously expect that jobs would be handed to them? And how effective was it, anyhow, pestering MPs like that? How different this generation was from his—thirty years ago, opportunity was to be taken, not asked for like a favor or demanded like a right.
And now, this Youssef fulan. Nabil figured he had to be one of the desperate ones, the kind that staged showy stunts to get attention. Just the other day, Nabil had heard a young man on the radio turn a request for a pop song into a plea for a job, hastily giving out his mobile number before the DJ cut him off. Nabil felt terrible for these young people, but he could not talk to just anyone who stalked him in the lobby. Imagine how many would follow. “Have security escort him out,” he ordered.
Now he dialed his home number. Before he could hear one ring at the other end of the line, Malika had picked up. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
This was how their arguments always started. She wanted him to do things, she simply could not stand by and let things be. She had no patience—and why should she, when she always got what she wanted? Nabil deferred to her on most decisions, but when his honor was at stake, she had no voix au chapitre. “Nothing,” he said. “Just give her some time to think about what she’s done.”
“I already spoke to her this morning.”
“What?” He felt like smashing the receiver against the desk. A set of silver-framed family photographs stared back at him. Suddenly they seemed to him testaments of a historical era, a bygone time when his wife and daughter still had love and respect for him, rather than the contempt they seemed bent on showing him now. He had fallen into disgrace: a man whose wife disobeyed him and whose daughter made a fool of him. He had to exercise all his self-control not to scream—the two secretaries might hear him. “I told you that I would deal with her,” he said between clenched teeth.
“She’s my daughter.”
“So what? This is for her own good.”
“Do you want me to tell you what she said or not?”
“What could she say?” Nabil said, raising his voice despite himself. “What could she have to say for herself?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “You two are so alike,” Malika said with a sigh.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re both so stubborn. She said if you weren’t going to send her money, she’d do it on her own.”
Nabil chuckled. “This I’d like to see, Malika. How is she going to pay for college?”
“I don’t know. But if you don’t call her, she might do something drastic.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Use your imagination. She could marry the boyfriend. Have you thought about that?”
“Of course I’ve thought about it. Don’t worry; it won’t come down to that. I have a plan,” he said. But he did not, simply because he had not expected Amal to call his bluff. He muttered something about having to get back to work and hung up. He dropped his head in his hands. How dare she? And for whom? For some useless boyfriend? Because that’s what it was—he was sure of it. He was sure it was nothing but defiance. If she had really cared for the young man, she would have called and tried to work something out, apologized, asked that they meet him. Or if she had not cared for the young man at all, she would have prevented her father from finding out. Other girls would have been more discreet about their relations, then gotten a doctor to sew them back up. But his daughter had made a declaration. It was his turn to respond, and at least he had responded in the proper way.
He scratched his chin, even though he had shaved in the morning and his skin was smooth. Maybe Malika was right. The only reasonable thing to do was to book a flight to Los Angeles and sort it out himself. He would have to invent some excuse for why he was visiting Amal in the middle of May, out of the blue. But it wouldn’t do any good, because she could still go back to seeing the young man after he left. On the other hand, if he brought her back home to Casablanca, something might transpire. People would ask why she had returned home before finishing her degree. And if anyone found out about what she had done, he would be the one shamed. He would have cried had he not thought it unseemly for a man to let himself go. The loud, hostile buzz of the interoffice phone startled him. “What now?” h
e barked.
“I’m really sorry, sir. It’s about that young man. He said to tell you that he is the son of Rachida Ouchak.”
Nabil’s eyes watered, despite his efforts. It’s just the shock, he told himself, the high emotion of this morning. He blinked forcefully and cleared his throat. He had not heard that name in so many years. A lifetime. Rachida Ouchak. She had been the young nurse, hired to care for Malika during her delicate pregnancy. Rachida was one of his egregious mistakes, he was sure; he should not have looked at the help at all. Most of his escapades (if you could call them that) had been with other students at the university in the late seventies—girls who, in the liberal wave that was sweeping the nation, did not care about what people thought of them, or at least could afford not to care—but never with someone in Rachida’s position, and certainly not with someone who worked in the house. But she was different from the other girls his mother hired from the countryside; she spoke French fluently and had the manners of one of his station. He remembered her long brown hair, her green eyes, her freckled skin, how he had enjoyed teasing her every time he saw her, just to watch her face turn pink. After a while, she had started to run into him on purpose. It had been a bit of a victory to get her to give in to him.
“What should I do, sir?”
The worried tone in his secretary’s voice unlocked another memory. His mother had fired Rachida, saying that she had stolen something, though he knew it was because his mother had found out about the afternoon trysts in the pool house. He stood up, looked around the room, as though the answer could be found hidden somewhere on the leather armchairs, the red Berber rug, or the ugly glass sculpture in the shape of a treble clef that his wife had bought for him.
“Give me a minute,” he said.
He turned around and, facing the window, looked out at the street below. He could see the parking lot of his building, filled with cars, and the attendant directing someone out of a spot. This boy downstairs, what did he want? A favor, probably. His mother must have sent him here to ask for one. Nabil’s father always warned him that one should not be too kind to the help, the workers, the common people, lest they lose respect for you. When Nabil had started out in business, he had dismissed his father as just another conservative, a member of the old guard, someone who did not understand the new Morocco that was being shaped by the children of independence, people like Nabil. But over the years, bit by bit, he had come to see that there was some wisdom in his father’s view of the world.
Still, this was a different case. The least he could do for Rachida was help this son of hers. He buzzed his secretary and told her to send him up and have him wait. Cracking open a side window, he lit a Dunhill, savoring it slowly. He considered calling his old friend Rafael Levy and asking him what he thought of the situation with Amal, but he was too embarrassed to admit what had happened; and in any case, Rafael didn’t have any children, so perhaps he wouldn’t understand.
He looked at his watch; it was almost lunchtime. Maybe he should go home early to see if he could talk some sense into Malika. He called his secretary. “What’s his name again?” he asked.
“Youssef El Mekki, sir.”
“Send him in.” The argument with Malika had made him break into a sweat, so he loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. The door swung open, and Nabil stood up to face the young man. The blue eyes, almost as bright as his own, caught him by surprise. How could it be?
They shook hands. “How are you?” Nabil asked, more out of habit than out of concern.
“Je vais très bien, merci.”
Good elocution, Nabil noticed. “What can I do for you?”
Youssef cleared his throat. “I am not here to ask for a favor.” He wore a white button-down shirt and a pair of beige pants that, on someone else, would have given the impression of respectable poverty, but on him somehow came across as casual chic.
“Then what are you here for?”
“I think you know.”
Nabil stared. It could not be. Again the tears came, unbidden. He blinked furiously and cursed himself. If he did not watch it, he might soon turn into one of those effeminate men whose wives boss them around. In his shock, he reserved a moment of wonder for the work that memory could do, and for the fact that it could preserve as well as erase details of the past. When he had heard that Rachida Ouchak’s son was downstairs, he had simply assumed that she had married and had had children by this El Mekki whose name Youssef bore. He simply did not think about her pregnancy or about the abortion she was supposed to have had.
In truth, even back then, he had not thought about it very much. By the time Rachida had gotten pregnant, he had already tired of her and moved on, and anyway he was preoccupied with his political work, with the petitions he and Rafael were drafting, the cases they wanted to bring to court, the articles on workers’ rights that they were trying to publish. He had given Rachida the money for the abortion, and she had disappeared from the house almost overnight. Of course, he had never asked his mother about it—it was not something you talked about—and Malika had no idea; she was on bed rest. In this way, Nabil had willed himself to forget about this pregnancy, relegating it to a deep, dark corner of his mind that would have remained unexplored had this young man not come today to point the light of his existence in its direction.
They sat at a corner table at La Mouette, with a view of the Atlantic. La Mouette was one of the few places he went to on his own or with friends, but never with his wife—it was a refuge from the world over which Malika presided. He looked at his menu in silence, reading and rereading the seafood specials without being able to parse the phrases. What was happening in the world? One minute he was bemoaning the fact that he had an only daughter, and the next this young man walked in. If he were a religious man, he might have called it a miracle, but he liked to think of himself as a rational man: it was a coincidence.
The waiter came, and Nabil ordered the first item on the list. Now, with the menus out of the way, there was nothing to do but look at Youssef. There was so much he wanted to ask: where he had grown up, where he lived now, what he studied, what he liked to do, whether his mother had married—so much to find out about this young man, his son. (The words forced themselves on his brain like intruders breaking open a door: My son.) Yet, selfishly, the most pressing question on his mind was the most prosaic. “How did you find me?” he asked. “Did your mother send you?”
“The phone book,” Youssef said with a contented smile. “And no, she didn’t send me. She doesn’t even know about this.”
The reassurance filled Nabil with relief. Whatever it was that this boy wanted, it would be more easily handled if Rachida was out of the picture. For a moment he reveled in the thought that they were the only two people who knew about their filial bond. He began to relax.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
Nineteen years. And all this time—
“What about you?” Youssef asked.
How impertinent. Asking an older man like him about his age. He answered nonetheless. “Forty-nine.”
“So you were thirty when …” Youssef’s voice trailed off.
Nabil looked away. He did not know what to say.
The waiter arrived with their drinks. Youssef took the straw out of his glass of Coca-Cola and set it aside, while Nabil rattled the ice cubes in his scotch and soda. “How do I know you’re who you say you are?” he asked, still unable to use the words that banged around in his head. My son. My son.
Youssef frowned. “Are you calling my mother a whore?”
“No, no, no,” Nabil said, raising his hands and leaning forward, as though to signal to Youssef to keep his voice down. “I am just asking.”
“When did my mother leave your employ?”
This boy liked to use complicated expressions. Why couldn’t he say “her job,” like everyone else? Nabil rubbed his chin, making a show of thinking. In truth, he had no idea. He remembered Rachida wel
l enough, but he was fuzzy on the details.
“It was in November,” Youssef said.
“Okay,” Nabil said, ready to accept this date as easily as any other.
“And I was born June 25.”
Six months younger than Amal, Nabil thought. Good Lord.
“What do you do?” he asked. “Do you go to school?”
Youssef nodded. “I’m about to finish my first year in college, going into my second.”
“And what are you studying?”
“English.”
“Oh,” Nabil said. Almost by instinct, he wanted to boast about Amal’s studies in America. Then he restrained himself. He was not sure how much he wanted to tell the boy yet.
“I’ve been top of my class so far,” Youssef added in a casual tone, though his eyes fixed Nabil’s.
Nabil could not suppress a smile; at least the boy wasn’t an imbecile, like so many young people these days. The door of the restaurant swung open and a woman entered, her tight-fitting black dress showcasing generous breasts and round hips. She went to sit at a table with a friend. Nabil turned his attention back to Youssef and found him staring at the woman with the same expression of lust he knew must have been on his own face only seconds before. There was nothing unusual about a young man of Youssef’s age looking at a pretty girl, and yet Nabil could not help seeing something of himself in that lust for the fairer sex, which, despite his being a husband and father, had consumed him for many years. It did not have to be the result of heredity; it could just as easily be a coincidence, but now Nabil was starting to believe he could not dismiss every detail as happenstance. In a whisper, he asked, “How is your mother?”