by Laila Lalami
“It’s not like that,” Amal said.
“How quickly you forget, my daughter. Do you remember your first year here, when you called me, crying, because someone taped a photo of Osama bin Laden on your dorm room door?”
“It was Halloween. Some idiot thought he was making a joke,” she said.
“And?”
“And nothing,” she said. “You’re right. I was very upset.”
When she went home that night, she huddled under the covers in bed and tried to quiet the pull of allegiances inside her. She closed her eyes, hoping for sleep, for escape.
IN THE WEEK leading up to graduation, Malika called every day. She asked Amal to go out, and each time they met, she chipped away at Amal’s resolve. Amal was so busy with her that she barely saw Fernando, instead staying out late with her mother, driving her around town, from Olvera Street to the Santa Monica Pier, from the Getty Center to Griffith Park, though what her mother really loved was Rodeo Drive. They often brought back shopping bags full of clothes to the apartment, and Malika would try on the new outfits, admiring herself in the mirror, while Amal lay across the bed watching her and offering comments.
Her father often joined them. He sat quietly in the backseat, and once, when Amal took a shortcut and Malika protested that they would get lost, he simply said, “Let her be. She knows what she’s doing.” They ordered pizza one night and stayed in, and when it arrived, Malika complained about the grease while Nabil got up and looked through the kitchen for napkins. He sat on the old sofa, balancing a paper plate with a pizza slice on his lap. How easily they fell into their old patterns, Amal noticed, Malika chatting away while smoking a cigarette, Nabil periodically contradicting her, and Amal sitting between them, alternately agreeing with one or the other, trying to keep them both happy.
WHEN GRADUATION DAY ARRIVED, Amal was too worried about lunch—to which she had insisted that Fernando come—to follow the commencement speakers, with their talk of new beginnings and their words of admiration for the grandness of youth. She was the first to get into the car when they headed for the restaurant. By the time Fernando walked in, five minutes late as was his habit, Amal and her parents were already seated at their table. He was wearing a green shirt that brought out the color of his eyes, and a dark-rinse pair of jeans that were a nice change from the frayed ones he usually wore. Malika stood up to welcome him and smiled at him with the practiced ease of a woman who could turn the charm on or off at will. “How are you?” she said in her accented English as she signaled to him to take a seat next to Amal. “Did you have trouble finding the restaurant?”
“I found it okay, it’s just that I couldn’t find parking,” he said, also smiling. He glanced at Amal with a look that seemed to say, Can you believe she’s actually making conversation with me?
“Oh,” Malika said, turning to look at the valet station outside the window.
Fernando leaned in to kiss Amal, but she offered him her cheek. He let his arm rest on the back of her chair. In halting French, he asked Nabil whether he liked the city so far. “It’s not the first time I’ve been here,” Nabil responded in English. “I have visited three times before.”
“Of course,” Fernando said.
The waiter came by and Fernando scanned his menu quickly. When his turn came, he asked, “I was wondering, what exactly is the consom?”
“Consommé,” Nabil corrected him. “It’s a light soup. Like a broth,” he explained with a half smile. “Do you serve it hot or cold?” he asked the waiter.
“We serve it cold, sir.”
“Oh, good,” Nabil said.
“I’ll have that, please,” Fernando said, handing his menu to the waiter. “And the grilled fish as well, please.”
They toasted Amal with white wine. Then Malika asked Fernando what he did for a living. Amal looked at her, surprised. Why was she asking a question whose answer she already knew?
“I’m a photographer.”
“A photographer? How interesting. And where do you work?”
“I freelance for a weekly paper in Santa Monica.”
“Freelance,” Nabil repeated, as if he were learning a new word.
Then he asked about Fernando’s family, whether they lived close by, and Fernando had to explain that his parents were divorced when he was very young and that his father lived in the Bay Area, while his mother lived in New York with his younger sister. Malika asked him how his parents had met, and he said they had both been students at Berkeley in the early 1980s, married in graduate school, and divorced by the time they started working. Her parents were carefully picking Fernando apart, Amal knew, demonstrating to each other and to her that he did not fit in their world.
“THAT WASN’T SO BAD,” Fernando said as he parked his car outside Amal’s apartment after lunch.
Amal gave him a dark look. “You think?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He sighed. “Why do you say “nothing’ when you don’t mean it?”
Amal opened the passenger-side door. “I should get going.”
“Wait,” he said, reaching over her and pulling the door shut. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She stared at her shoes for a while, then in a soft voice said, “They want me to go back.”
“I know. How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? Are you telling me you’re leaving for good?” His voice rose an octave.
“It’s all a mess,” Amal said, shaking her head, her own voice rising. “A huge mess, with my brother and everything. I’m going to meet him when I get there, and then, I don’t know, my mother wants my father to rework his will. It’s a mess.”
“So when are you coming back?”
“In the fall, maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Please,” Amal said angrily. “Don’t be like this. Don’t ask me to give you answers. Right now, I have no answers.” She opened her door again. “Look, maybe you can visit me there.”
“Yeah, like you say, maybe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” And then he chuckled at the word he’d used. He had his hands on the steering wheel, and now he let his head rest upon it.
Amal felt yearning for him light inside her. She touched his arm, but he didn’t look up. She was afraid to say something that would break her resolve. Now there was the task of saying good-bye, the task of being part of a family. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said softly. Then she stepped out of the car and walked up the steps to her building. She did not hear his engine start until after she had already gone inside her apartment and dropped, fully clothed, on her bed.
11
THE RETURN
“IT TOOK A WHILE to make all two hundred copies,” Youssef said as he entered Amina Benjelloun’s office. He had spent the past hour at the copy shop, where each machine the clerk used seemed to be afflicted with a different problem—low toner or malfunctioning feeder—so that the job had to be done manually. He placed the conference programs on her desk and was about to leave when she stood up. “I’m sorry to have to do this,” she said, “but I have to let you go.”
Was this a joke? He was only about thirty minutes late on this task, and in any case it wasn’t his fault. Perhaps the secretary was in on it, waiting behind the door, ready to open it and start laughing with Benjelloun at the prank they had pulled. He was already forcing himself to smile, to show that he could be a good sport, when Benjelloun picked up a sealed envelope from the desk and handed it to him. “Your pay for this month.”
“Wait,” he said. “You can’t be serious. Why are you firing me?”
“We just don’t need you anymore.”
Everything around him—the paper-covered desk, the diplomas on the wall, the potted plants—seemed to recede into the background. Her face suddenly appeared magnified. Mesmerized, he stared at her broad forehead, the scratch along the t
op of her tortoiseshell glasses, the beauty mark at the base of her neck, which he had never noticed before. It took a moment for words to form in his mind and to string together into a sentence. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Maybe not. But unfortunately we no longer need you. Don’t forget to turn in your badge on your way out.” He detected no satisfaction in the way she said this, even though she had never liked him and had not wanted him on her team. But this was unfair; he had worked with dedication, neglecting his studies to focus on his job, and now she was firing him. Without realizing it, he stepped forward and gripped the back of the chair before him. Had he looked down he would have seen his knuckles turn white from the effort.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong. I think you should reconsider.”
“Are we going to have a problem?”
“Your boss will find out.”
“If you don’t leave, I will have to call security.”
Maybe it was a mistake, Youssef thought. She was told to cut down on her staff, and forgot that Nabil Amrani himself had asked her to give Youssef a job. It had been a long while after all, and she had hired two other people since she took him on. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he asked.
She gave him a half smile. “I know exactly who I’m talking to.”
Youssef looked at her uncomprehendingly. When it was clear he was not going to move, Benjelloun picked up the phone and pressed a button, whispering into the receiver. A moment later, the door flew open and two security guards rushed in. Youssef turned around to face them. “A-’ibad allah!” he said, finally raising his voice. The guards took him out of the office and into the hallway. “What is this hogra?” he yelled. “She fired me for no reason!” He turned to look at the men who held him, but each one avoided his eyes, as if they had known all along that he was getting fired. They took off his badge and pushed him out into the street. He fell on the pavement, one knee under him, the other twisted in a painful arc. He limped across the street, feeling as though he were trapped in a film in which he was unable to deliver his own lines and was forced to say another character’s dialogue instead. Something was wrong.
The look on the doorman’s face when Youssef arrived home told him that what had happened at the hotel was not a mistake. The doorman stood up quickly, his red prayer mat sliding from the back of his chair to the ground. He picked it up with one hand and held the other up to stop Youssef from going in. “What is it?” Youssef said as firmly as he could. He walked past the old man into the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator. “I’m in a rush.”
“There’s no need to go up there, my son,” the doorman said, his voice tinged with weariness. “The locks have been changed.”
Youssef whipped around to face him, his worn beige suit hanging loosely on his thin body, his mouth nearly toothless, his eyes disappearing under the folds of his lids, his forehead marked by a round spot of piety. Even though Youssef knew that this poor, devout man would never have dared touch the locks without an order from his father, he could not help yelling. “Are you mad? How dare you change my locks?”
“It was the owner who did it,” the doorman said.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Madame Amrani called me from abroad. She told me a locksmith would come.”
So she was the one behind all this. Madame Amrani, his mother’s rival, and now his, too. “Does my father know about this?”
The doorman remained silent.
“He’s my father.”
The old man looked away.
“Do you know that? Do you know he’s my father?”
“Whatever you say, my son.”
It was useless. “What about my things?” Youssef asked. “Where are they?”
“I have them.” The doorman went inside his ground-floor office and fetched a large pillowcase filled with clothes. “Here.”
“This is it?” Youssef asked. “What about my books? My movies? All my shoes?”
“I only took what I could while the locksmith was waiting, my son. Don’t get angry with me. Take it up with her when she returns. And if you think I took anything from you, you’re welcome to check inside the office.”
Youssef felt like shaking this man, who had been nothing but kind to him, this helpless man, who was like so many other people in the country, completely disabused of the notion that there was much use fighting against injustice. The only thing that stopped Youssef was the look in the man’s eyes, a look that made it clear he would accept this indignity as he had accepted all the others life had dealt him.
YOUSSEF CARRIED HIS BAG to the nearest café and sat there all afternoon, his chin resting on his palm. He took out his mobile phone to call his father’s secretary. “Who is calling, please?” she asked in the nasal voice he remembered.
“This is … Driss Ayyadi,” Youssef said. “I’m a journalist.”
“I’m sorry, sir. He is out of the office.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I’m not sure.”
It annoyed Youssef that Fadila was so protective of her boss as to keep the date of his return a secret—unless, he thought suddenly, she had been told to remain quiet. “That’s too bad,” he said, trying to hit the right note of professional rather than personal disappointment. “I wanted to talk to him about a piece I’ve been commissioned to do for Le Monde.”
The mention of the French newspaper got her attention. She spoke quickly now. “He’s in the United States until the nineteenth. After that, he goes on vacation in Spain for ten days. He won’t be back until the end of June.”
Nabil had never mentioned that he would be gone for so long. Why the omission? And the way he had spoken the last time Youssef saw him had been so strange, so full of foreboding and sadness. Youssef had a sinking feeling in his stomach, yet he tried to keep his voice level. “So he’ll be back in the office on the thirtieth?”
“Yes, sir. If you’d like to give me a phone number, I will make sure he gets the message.”
Youssef made up a number and hung up. Although he tried to keep the thought out of his mind, it imposed itself upon him like light upon night: his father had left him. He smoked what remained of his pack of Dunhills while watching young people his age sitting in the café. They seemed so confident, so sure of themselves and of who they were. Just yesterday he might have been able to deceive himself into believing that he, too, was of their world, not just in it.
It had taken a little over an hour to undo all of his life, just as two years ago his life had been turned upside down in the same amount of time. Why was this happening to him? Why did God look on as His creatures went through such pain and not see fit to save them? Youssef felt the last vestiges of faith leave his heart, replaced by hate for Madame Amrani.
And there was, too, along with the hate, the shame that had been waiting at every corner for him, the shame of having failed in his endeavor, of having accomplished exactly what his mother had told him he would—which is to say, nothing. He realized now that he had only played the part of Youssef Amrani, but all along he had remained Youssef El Mekki.
As dusk fell, he began to shiver. He looked around him. Afternoon patrons had left, and now the evening clientele had begun to appear. He felt even more out of place. It was time to leave. But how could he show himself in Hay An Najat again, after everything that had happened? He dropped his face in his hands and tried to suppress his sobs for as long as he could, but it was useless. Soon he became aware of the other patrons’ stares, and he quickly wiped his eyes with his napkin. He held the pillowcase full of his belongings and walked, dragging his feet, to the bus station.
It was the smell that got to him first. He had forgotten about the stench of garbage mixed with the odor of car exhaust and the stink of old, refried sardines that permeated the street, but as soon as he stepped off the bus, he began to cough uncontrollably. The cart that sold boiled chickpeas still sat a
round the corner from the bus station, and so did the vegetable stand. Kids loitered at corners, leaning against walls. Discarded black plastic bags dotted the ground, and clotheslines crisscrossed the alleys. The walk from the bus station to his mother’s house, which had seemed so short to him when he lived here, now seemed to take forever.
The streets and alleys were full: women getting water, girls carrying shopping bags, drug addicts huddled in groups, merchants peddling their wares from rickety bicycles, teenagers hawking single cigarettes, children playing marbles. Youssef thought that all eyes were on him, that the entire neighborhood had found out about his return and had stepped out to watch the humiliated son return home to his mother. He tripped on a rock and fell down, his things spilling out onto the dirt. Several people stopped what they were doing to watch. Jumping up to his feet, he hurriedly collected his belongings, now covered with red dirt. Someone called out his name in the distance, but he pretended not to hear. He trotted the rest of the way to his mother’s house. To his immense relief, the door was unlocked.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, finally allowing himself a breath. The smell of mint tea hung in the air. There were dishes drying on the rack in the corner, right on the battered cement floor. Three housedresses in faded colors hung on the laundry line, against walls whose paint was cracked like broken eggshells. The corrugated tin roof over the bedroom was eaten by rust, and the satellite dish mounted on it was covered with bird excrement. The house looked the same as he remembered it.
His mother looked up at him from the divan where she was curled up. She shot to her feet now, and the bowl of sunflower seeds that had been nestled in her lap dropped to the floor. The seeds scattered everywhere. For a moment, it felt to Youssef as though time had suspended itself. He looked at her, wordlessly communicating that what she had warned him against had finally come to pass. She nodded once.
Looking down, he dropped his bag on the floor. She gave him a hug, her head barely reaching his chest. “My son, my son.”