by Laila Lalami
The words formed short, simple sentences, but the propositions beneath them were filled with urgency and purpose: your husband has my son; take back your husband; give me back my son; and we can go back to the arrangement I made twenty-two years ago, with your husband’s mother, the other Madame Amrani. What mattered to Malika Amrani was what mattered to Rachida Ouchak: each wanted to protect her family. The two of them had come to an understanding because they had a common interest. All the other details were best forgotten, slipped under the rug of memory.
And all of it was Nabil Amrani’s fault, as far as Rachida was concerned. He should not have taken Youssef away and turned him into someone she barely recognized. She remembered walking into the back office at the hospital and finding Youssef standing by the detergent shelf, tall and handsome. He wore a polo shirt with the insignia of the Royal Golf Dar Es Salam, and a pair of fancy leather shoes. His posture had changed, his speech was peppered with words she was not used to hearing on his lips, and he had a new set of mannerisms, as if he were imitating someone. He was slipping away from her grasp. She might have been able to live through this loss if she had been sure he was going to make something of himself. But when he said he had stopped going to school, an animal rage awoke in her. She had worked so much, and for so long, to see him graduate from college, and now he had thrown it all away for the promises his father had made him. She had to do something.
Getting Youssef back had been the easy part; it was keeping him that turned out to be difficult. Although he tried not to let on, he was still yearning for his father, Rachida knew, and his sister’s visit would only heighten that feeling. She looked at Amal, at this girl who could have been her own, had the world been different. “I know you didn’t know about Youssef’s existence. But there isn’t anything you can do now.”
“And I think my father didn’t know, either.”
Why did she have to make excuses for Nabil Amrani? She seemed like a smart girl, a nice girl, but she was trying to defend the indefensible. Not only had Nabil Amrani known but he had also offered Rachida the same alternatives as his mother. Her choice had changed everything: she could go back to the orphanage, but she could never go back home, to Sefrou. When her mother had died, her father had placed her with the Franciscan nuns at Bab Ziyyat, and although he rarely visited her, it was understood that she would stay there to get an education, train in a profession, and then return home. Soeur Laurette, the head nun, had decided that Rachida would become a midwife; it would be a most useful profession in the village.
There was no question of going back home once she became pregnant. She would dishonor her father and bring shame upon his household. Just as Madame Amrani had safeguarded her son’s reputation, so, too, did Rachida Ouchak safeguard her father’s. She had not told him of the pregnancy and had chosen instead to disappear. She had to create a new life for herself. So it was that she became the orphan. She gave up her home; she gave up her father and her aunts and her cousins; she even gave up the language, for how could she explain to people that she spoke Tamazight? She was simply an abandoned girl raised by nuns, and she could only speak the languages of the city, not the idiom of her village.
“How could he not have known?” Rachida asked Amal. “Youssef is his son. He knew.”
“He told me he didn’t know.”
“And you believed him?” Rachida snickered and then looked down, slightly embarrassed at her reaction, for when she looked into her heart, she found her own lies to her child taunting her. Who was she to judge Amrani’s lies to his daughter?
There was another long silence as Amal appeared to think carefully about what to say next. “I wanted to tell Youssef,” she said finally, “that I was sorry about what my father did, and about what my mother did. About everything.”
All these years, Rachida had hoped for apologies, even prayed for them, but she had not expected that they would come from the most innocent of the Amranis, the one person who had nothing to do with what had happened. The apology was touching, but it was irrelevant, coming as it did from someone who had not wronged her. The universe had an odd sense of fairness; it took away things one did not want to give up, and then gave things one did not ask for. Rachida reached out and touched Amal’s hand. “Does your mother know you’re here?”
“No.”
So Malika Amrani had kept her promise. A relief. “Why did you come here today? Hasn’t it been a few months since you found out about Youssef?”
“I’m sorry. It took me a long time to … ,” Amal said. “I just wanted to talk to him.”
Rachida did not want to do this, but it was necessary. “My daughter, that is impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“Because he left for Tangier three weeks ago, and from there he went to Spain to find work.” She delivered this line with what she thought was conviction, but she was not sure she had succeeded until she saw the expression on Amal’s face—she looked like someone who had been running to catch a train and then missed it just as it left the platform.
Amal grabbed her heavy handbag with what seemed like reluctance. “If he calls, could you tell him I came to see him?”
“Insha’llah, my daughter,” Rachida said, getting up. She did not point out that she did not have a phone line.
Amal left, and Rachida finally allowed herself to take a deep breath. She waited a few minutes and then quietly unlocked the door and peeked outside, to make sure that Amal was gone. The noon sun glazed the whitewashed walls, and everyone’s door was shut. The laundry lines were filled with already-dry shirts and trousers, stiff like sentinels. The street was empty, thank God. Rachida closed the door and returned to her artichokes. Youssef would be home soon, and she thought about what she would say to him.
She needed to come up with a new plan for him, even though these days he seemed convinced he would fail at everything. The way he looked at her—those eyes, so painfully reminiscent of his father’s, boring through her—always made her feel she had failed at something. Although he never blamed her, he somehow managed to make her feel that everything was her fault. What did he want from her? Yes, it was difficult to make it out of Hay An Najat, but some people did manage to find decent jobs and move out, so why not him? He already had some work experience. Surely he could find something else. He needed to get away from that Oasis café, away from those good-for-nothings Maati and Amin. It was time he made something of his life.
• • •
RACHIDA WAS IN the bedroom when she heard the door creak. She listened for Youssef’s noises—the soft pop when he took off his shoes, the clopping of his slippered feet as he walked to the bathroom, the water running as he washed up, and finally the heavy thud when he flopped down on the divan. Amal’s visit had shaken her and she was worried she might betray herself. Still, she went into the yard and sat down on the divan next to her son. “I made a tagine of artichoke hearts.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
She said she would not eat, either, unless he ate, but that did not seem to have the intended effect on him. He just stared into space, lost in his thoughts. She watched him: the faint lines along his cheeks, the ashen complexion, the slightly trembling hands. He was in such obvious pain, and yet she felt powerless to help him. He drew his legs under him and lay back against the cushions.
In that position, he reminded her of her father, Hammou, how he would sit on the rug-covered seddari in the living room of their house in Sefrou with his pipe in hand, a bluish cloud of smoke rising above him. How she had missed her father. She was angry with him for placing her in the orphanage, even though he had told her repeatedly it was for her own good. The orphanage had been the beginning of her troubles. It had set everything in motion. She could still feel his presence sometimes, the way an amputee can feel the pain from a phantom limb. He would be sixty-five this year, if he was still alive. Had he ever looked for her after she disappeared? Did he remarry and have children? Did he still live in their old house overlooking t
he green fields? She caught herself—she was about to fall into one of her melancholy moods. Now was not the time for those questions about what should have been. She had to stay focused on Youssef.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
No answer came, but Rachida did not move. She sat on the divan in the yard for an hour or two or three, waiting for him to share his pain, waiting to help him. She had started to doze off when he spoke. “A-mmi, can I ask you something?” His voice trembled. She said nothing, intending for her silence to signify her agreement, but then he did not say anything, either, for a long time. At length, he continued: “Wouldn’t your life have been easier if you had gotten rid of me? You would have started over, gotten married, and had a good life. Why did you have me?”
She looked at him, startled by his question. He had never, in their worst arguments, asked her this. He wanted to know why he was alive, but who knew why any of us were? He wanted answers she did not have, and yet she had to try, because the moment demanded it. For the second time that day, she called to mind the moment she had gotten pregnant. When Nabil Amrani had suggested the abortion, she considered it, of course, but she also thought of the ten years she had spent alone in the orphanage, and how much she missed her mother, her father—her home. The baby inside her could give her that. Youssef could give her the home she had always wanted, and she could give him a home, too. How could she explain all of this without revealing the truth about herself to Youssef? Her son had suffered enough as it was without being burdened with more stories about his birth. “Yes,” she said, “it would have been easier, but it would not have been right. Besides, I wanted to have you.”
The answer seemed to satisfy him, for now at least.
16
THE MISSION
YOUSSEF WAS READING the newspaper while his mother, seated in a patch of sunlight, put henna on her hands. Using a syringe filled with the dark green paste, she pressed the plunger to draw thin lines on her hands. Starting on her palm, she outlined a fern whose leaves climbed up each finger in turn. It was a rare but welcome sight for Youssef—his mother making herself look pretty. She had been invited to a neighbor’s betrothal, and she had gone to the hammam early in the morning and spent the rest of her day primping.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Moussa. “Hatim wants to see you,” he said.
Youssef ran his fingers through his messy hair. “Right now?” he asked, then went back inside to put on his shoes. Syringe held up in the air, his mother asked, “What does he want?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find out.”
She sucked her teeth in response. She never attempted to disguise her dislike of the Partisans. Youssef liked Hatim, but out of respect for his mother he said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can, a-mmi.”
When they arrived at the Party’s headquarters, Youssef noticed that the Oasis was closed. He asked why. “We just wanted some quiet today,” Moussa replied, “because we have a lot of work to finish.”
It had been three years since the building that housed the Star Cinema had been turned into the headquarters for the Party. Walking through the lobby, Youssef could barely remember what the old theater looked like; it was part of a world that had been destroyed and that he no longer mourned. It seemed now as if the Party had been here forever.
“Let’s go. Hatim is waiting for you.”
The waiting area upstairs was bare, save for a clock in the shape of Al Aqsa Mosque on a corner table and the Qur’anic verses embroidered on black velvet, which hung ostentatiously on every wall. They knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Hatim sat at a large desk, leafing through papers. The computer hummed to his right; to his left a glass of coffee with milk gave out a faint steam. When he saw Youssef, he threw the sheaf of papers into a folder, which he held shut with a paperweight. Youssef was startled to see that it was the silver trinket he had sold to the bric-a-brac dealer. It was the last thing he expected to find here—one of his father’s knickknacks, another useless ornament, an object that could barely fulfill the function for which it was designed.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, yes,” Hatim said. “Please, have a seat.” He walked around the desk to sit across from Youssef, leaning with his elbow on the armrest of his chair. Moussa stood by the door as if he were keeping guard. “My son,” Hatim began, giving Youssef a deeply concerned look, “I don’t need to tell you how difficult things are for our neighborhood. Our men have no jobs. Our women are loose. Our children have turned to sin. They drink alcohol; they fornicate; they sniff glue; they listen to filthy, disgusting music; they watch filthy, disgusting movies.” He opened his palms. “Ya’ni, they have fallen.”
Youssef was taken aback. He had been called from home in the middle of the day, and this was what Hatim wanted to tell him? The sermon seemed no different from the ones he regularly delivered downstairs.
Hatim continued. “And things have only gotten worse since the attacks of May 16. The government promised that it would deal with unemployment, fight poverty, and increase safety and security. But look around you. Do you think anything has changed for the better? Even the so-called Islamic parties in Parliament play the political game, like all the other politicians. The Party is different, as you know. We Partisans are the only ones who chose to come here and help. Since we have set up our headquarters here, we have tried our hardest to provide for the material and spiritual needs of our people. The first-aid services, the Ramadan dinners, and the after-school programs have been good steps. Oh, and the soccer field—I think you’ve used it a few times, haven’t you?—it turned out quite well. All this is just the beginning; there is so much yet to be done.”
Hatim deserved credit for the work he had done around Hay An Najat, though it surprised Youssef to hear him point it out. Ordinarily he kept quiet about the Party’s past work and spoke instead about his goals for the future.
“If we are to truly succeed,” Hatim went on, “we must first return the community to the state of purity it has lost. That way, we can reform our society from the bottom up. Our morals have become completely muddled by our blind love for the West. They have to become unmuddled. We have to regain the purity we have lost, and we can do that through the Islamic values we have neglected. Until we can return to the roots of our faith, until we can apply the precepts of our faith to every single aspect of our life, we will never be able to rise above the sin, the poverty, and the misery that have befallen us.”
Youssef thought about what Hay An Najat could look like in a few years: real houses, good schools, safe roads—a new world in which someone like him might even have something to do and a place to call his own.
“But,” Hatim yelled, raising his finger upward and bringing Youssef back from the vision he was entertaining, “our problems run much higher. Our community’s fall into disgrace started with our political leaders. Oh, and what leaders! They promised to build schools and hospitals, create jobs for the young, and improve our economy. Of course they did none of that. The years come and go, governments follow one another, but our literacy rate stays the same, our hospitals remain ill equipped, and our economy still depends on agriculture and tourism. Like sheep, our foreign-educated elite want to do whatever France or America wants them to do, without regard for whether it is good for the rest of us. And in the process they waste or steal our money. They are a small number of people, those decadent few, but they are the real obstacles to progress. So you see, our society is rotten from the bottom up, but also from the top down. And only by purifying it at all levels will we be able to make tangible progress.
“Now, as you know, our efforts at reforming our society have been met with a lot of resistance. We expect this struggle. In fact, we welcome this struggle. After all, God is on our side, and He will not fail us. The battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil is upon us, and it is time, my son, for each one of us to choose sides. Are you with us? Will you side with
the fallen, those who promote the mixing of the sexes, cast their hungry eyes on women, listen to filthy music, watch indecent movies, and drink the forbidden drink? Will you side with those who line their pockets with our taxes, steal from the poor to give to the rich, falsify election results to suit their purposes, brutalize and torture everyone who dares stand up to them? Or will you side with your brethren, those who promote virtue and forbid vice, avert their eyes when they see women, and protect children from licentious magazines and television shows? Will you side with those who help the poor, give to charity, spend their time in prayer, and work for a better tomorrow?”
Youssef stared, unsure what to say. Was this why he had been called—to pledge allegiance to one side or the other?
Hatim looked at him impatiently. “Let me make it simpler for you, my son. Do you want to stand side by side with the people of Hay An Najat, with your friends and neighbors, the people you see every day? Or would you rather side with the people of Casablanca? Lord, I hate that city, that place of filth and sin, where men and women walk hand in hand in plain view, where our daughters prostitute themselves to foreigners, where the Jews control our businesses, where the rich are taking advantage of the poor.” He cleared his throat. “You must choose, my son. Are you on the side of your mother or your father?”