by Laila Lalami
“My father?” Youssef said breathlessly. Only one thought raced in his mind now: Amin told him about me, Amin betrayed me. “What would you know of my father?”
Hatim gave him a quick smile. “I know more than enough about Nabil Amrani, my son. I’ve known for a long time.” The Al Aqsa clock suddenly went off, broadcasting the call to the afternoon prayer, but Hatim, leaning forward in his chair, stared unblinkingly at Youssef. “Well? Are you on your mother’s side, or your father’s?”
“My mother’s,” Youssef whispered.
Hatim sat back in his chair and smiled. “Of course. How could it be otherwise, when you look around you, when you consider what the others have done to us?” he said, thumb pointed at his chest. “I know what you have gone through. You have studied, you have worked hard, you have played by the rules, and all for what? Here you are, jobless, with no prospects, no way to support your mother or to start a family of your own. Meanwhile, those who are responsible for what happened to you are sitting in their fancy houses in Anfa. Do you think it is right that your father should live in a mansion and you and your mother should live here? How long can we tolerate this kind of injustice? How long before we rise up and demand that things change?”
Youssef had still not recovered from the shock of hearing his father’s name on Hatim’s lips. He was mesmerized, unable to stop his anger toward his father and his father’s world from kindling in his heart once again. This time it was taking the shape of a star, and he had trouble keeping it from radiating in all directions.
“I have been thinking for a while about how this senseless situation in our community is allowed to continue. And I have come to see that it is all because there is no perception about what is going on. I read a lot of these papers.” He pointed to a pile of newspapers and magazines on the floor beneath the window. “And I am always appalled at how journalists conduct their business. They do not report the truth. They may promote the views of the government, or the views of their parties, or the views of the West. But they always lie. They never give us voice. They don’t listen to our grievances. They ignore what we have to say about how we can reform our ways through our faith. They want to keep God out of everything. Let me tell you something: they can’t. So the time has come to send them this message: Enough of your lies!” He slammed his fist on his desk, spilling some coffee on the papers.
Hatim’s words were like a labyrinth in which Youssef was losing his way. His anger blinded him; he could not find the exit on his own and instead began to take each turn that presented itself without question. When the Al Aqsa clock broadcast its second reminder, he was so startled that he stood up. “The call to prayer,” he said. “You will be late for prayer.”
Hatim pulled him back down by the wrist. “Prayer can wait, my son. There are times for prayer, and there are times for action. We are having an important conversation. Moussa?”
Moussa came around the desk to the computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, he had connected to a video-sharing Web site and was already playing a clip, made up of still photographs, grainy and unfocused. An unseen man read a long series of names of students and activists, men and women, young and old, who had been killed in prisons and torture centers during the Years of Lead. “You are told,” Moussa said, “that Derb Moulay Cherif and Tazmamart belong in history, that you’re living in a new age now. But watch this.” He played another video clip. This one had hidden-camera footage of riot police beating demonstrators on a campus in Meknès, customs officers stopping cars on the freeway in order to get bribes, judges rendering sentences on hundreds of young bearded suspects at once. It was true, Youssef thought. Too little had changed in the country.
Afterward came images of thugs beating up student protestors. For a moment, Youssef thought that this was another sample from a campus somewhere in the heart of the country, but when one of the men spoke (“ana ma ‘amiltish haga”) he realized the demonstrators were Egyptian. Suddenly he felt a new kinship with the young people of Egypt, whose struggles were so similar to his own.
Then Palestine: people waiting in line for food in Gaza, families walking single file down a rocky hill in order to get to a checkpoint, the burial of a twenty-day-old baby with a gunshot wound to the head, an officer slapping a toothless old man in the West Bank. The images were no different from those shown on any given day on twenty-four-hour news channels, and usually they would have stirred feelings of anger in Youssef. Today, though, the anger was already there, and the images merely sharpened it.
The last series of photographs were from Iraq. Men, naked and barefoot, without faces or names, their hands cuffed to beds, rails, and doors, standing in their own urine or sitting in their own feces. Their heads were covered with black sandbags or with pink, frilly women’s underwear. One stood on a box, wires taped to his hands, his arms spread out in a crucificial pose. Another was made to bend, as if he were in ruku‘, while a soldier sat on a chair in front of him. Men were piled like stones in pyramids of varying heights or dragged on a leash like animals.
The horror gave rise to fury, and suddenly Youssef felt unable to decide what to do with himself. Cry out in pain or stay quiet? Stay here in this musty office or run as far away from it as possible? He put his fingers on his temples, trying to follow each thought to its conclusion, but each one vanished before he could.
“The point that Brother Moussa is trying to make,” Hatim said, “is that our stories are the same. We get injustice, repression, and torture, and somehow we’re supposed to stay quiet? To say please and thank you?” He shook his head. “Not us. We say no.”
Youssef had walked into that office preoccupied only by his own troubles, but after hearing Hatim’s words and seeing Moussa’s pictures, he felt as though he were losing touch with himself, becoming part of something much bigger. The injustice he had suffered was small and insignificant compared with these others, yet they were all made of the same fabric, the same disregard for human dignity.
“Everyone knows we are at war,” Hatim continued, “but the Party doesn’t fight the war with the same weapons. Some people think that strapping themselves up with explosives and killing fifty people is a good way to win, but I think that’s inefficient, not to mention outdated. Any fool can blow himself up. A smart man has to worry about winning the image war, too. We want to hit very specific targets that will have maximum effect. This is why we set our minds on Farid Benaboud—you remember him, I’m sure. He wrote the first article denouncing our work here, and of course many of his colleagues have since followed him, like the Ben Oui-Ouis that they are. In the past, he has defended the whores who were caught with foreign tourists and has even suggested we must stop teaching religion in schools. Enough, I say. It is time we send a message to him and to those of his kind, to let them know we will not be intimidated, that we will continue our work regardless of their efforts to stop us. Imagine what eliminating him will do to the rest of his useless class of writers and journalists! The time has come for an operation against him.”
“An operation?” Youssef repeated. The radiating star inside him numbed all other senses, so that his own voice sounded faint, as if it came from a faraway place and not from his own mouth.
Hatim placed his fingertips together in a steeple. “Nabil Amrani owns the Grand Hotel, which we have been monitoring for quite a while now. You are familiar with it since you worked there for a year. It is a place of filth and sin, so it is perhaps fitting that it turned out to be Farid Benaboud’s favorite place to get a drink. We will conduct the operation there, so we can strike two birds with one stone.” Now Hatim picked up the silver paperweight and turned it around in his hand. “My son, I think you know where I am going with this. You have been chosen for this operation—a great honor for you and your mother. Your people’s future is on your shoulders. The question is, What will you do? How will you choose?”
“But why Benaboud?” Youssef managed to say. “He doesn’t deserve this.”
Hatim chuckled wi
th incredulity. “So you think he is innocent? What about you? Are you not innocent? Do you think that you deserved what happened to you?”
Youssef drew his breath, but he had no response to that question. He was innocent. What had he done? He had been condemned to a life of poverty and alienness, and those who had pronounced the sentence were not even aware of his existence. Why should innocence belong only to those on the other side?
Hatim raised his eyebrows. “My son, think of this as a big play. We all have a part in it. Your mother. Nabil Amrani. Farid Benaboud. Me. You. All the actors have taken their places, and now it is your turn. Will you do it?”
Youssef had not thought there could be a way out of the labyrinth of words; his anger had imprisoned him there, but now Hatim was leading him to the exit. He was at once exhausted and relieved to see it. “Yes,” he whispered. “I will do it.”
Hatim exchanged glances with Moussa, who left the room at once, closing the door behind him. “I always thought you were smart, Youssef. You have not disappointed me. Now, listen to me carefully. We’ll set up a meeting with Benaboud at the Grand Hotel, and we’ll drive you there on the appointed day. Your job is to slit his throat. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Have you ever slaughtered a chicken or a sheep? It’s not that different. All you have to do is aim for the jugular vein, right here”—he pointed to his neck—“and make a neat, unhesitating cut. It’s quick and effective. He will barely feel anything.”
From a desk drawer, he pulled out a knife so small it could easily be hidden in a sock. He demonstrated its sharpness by running its tip against a piece of paper, cutting it neatly in half, then gave it to Youssef to hold in his hand. Until this moment, Hatim’s proposal had remained theoretical, maybe even hypothetical, but the cold knife in Youssef’s hand turned the theory into practice, and the plan into plot.
“After you complete your mission, I want you to leave the hotel through the back doors, where the car will be waiting for you. Do you understand me?”
“But people will see me. They’ll recognize me.”
“They won’t,” Hatim said, “because we’ll provide you with a disguise. No need to worry about that. Frankly, my biggest concern is discretion. We have two weeks to set everything up, and a lot can happen in that time. I don’t need to tell you about the gossip in this town. I know you’re not the type to talk, but all the same, I have to stress that you cannot speak to anyone—not your mother, not your friends—about the mission. The only people who know so far are the people in this room. We have to keep it that way.”
Youssef nodded. Not long ago, he had asked his mother why she had not aborted him, why he was alive. Now it seemed to him he had finally found the answer to that question: to stand up to all those who had wronged her. This, at last, was the purpose of his existence.
“I want to warn you that we’ll also be using one other person for this operation.”
“Who?”
“Who doesn’t matter. What matters is why. The reason we’re using a second person is that we can’t leave anything to chance. Think of it as a contingency plan. For example, what if Benaboud tries to get away? We want to make sure we get him the first time around. This is just a backup plan, nothing for you to worry about. All you need to worry about is your own part.”
17
HEAVENS AND HELLS
IN THE END, it came down to one word. One word thrust Youssef to his fate. One little word: Mmi. My mother. The choice was forced upon him, but once it was made, it brought a strange sense of order to everything: he would leave his mark on his father’s world, his mother would start over without the burden of supporting him, his own struggles would be over. Lying on his bed that night, he thought about the images he had seen in Hatim’s office. What could one man do against all the injustices of the world? It was too awesome a task, but Hatim had shown him that trying to change everything at once was futile; it was better to focus on small acts of great significance. Youssef turned the idea around and around in his head, seduced by its brilliant simplicity.
His mother’s voice came to him from far away. “I brought some sweets,” she said. “Do you want some?” She had returned home from the neighbor’s betrothal, and he had not even heard her come into the room. Mmi. Mmima.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
He would do this for her—for all those who were victims of people like his father. He turned to face the wall. Hatim was right. One man could restore some balance to this imbalanced country. Youssef would be that man.
On weekdays, Amal was able to distract herself with work—her duties at the company, the dinners and cocktail parties she had to attend nearly every night, the occasional trips to Paris and Madrid for supplier conferences—but Saturdays and Sundays stretched themselves out before her, long and uncertain, like a treacherous river she had to cross. She never knew if she would be able to make it to the safety of Monday, to the numbing comfort of her desk. The slatted light fell on her bed, but she turned away from it and tried to go back to sleep. Weekends were hard, and this was one hardest of all.
Today marked the anniversary of their meeting, at a symposium in the Geography Department at UCLA, which she had attended not because of any particular interest in the study of the earth, but because The Daily Bruin had said that the event would feature a Lebanese buffet lunch. Fernando had seen her pile her plate with stuffed grape leaves and pita bread, and he leaned in and whispered that there was an even better buffet in the History Department that week. She had been too embarrassed to say anything, and she mumbled something about having to catch her 2 p.m. class and walked out. Of course she had run into him the next day, when he was escorting one of the guest speakers out, and she had been mortified to be seen hovering over the food, once again. Weeks went by. One day, she bumped into him at an antiwar rally on campus. He asked whether she wanted to get a cup of coffee, and she said yes, if she could pay for both of them—after all, it was thanks to him that she had found the treasure trove of buffets. On the way over, he asked about the paperback that poked out of her purse. “Imaginary Homelands,” she said.
“I love the part about growing up kissing books and bread,” he said, running a finger on the spine.
They went on their first date the next day, decided to move in together two years later, and shortly after that, she left him behind, trading his love for the love of father and mother, the love of country, the love of home. She had been told to make a choice, and though she still had no idea why, she had chosen. On the way from the airport to the house, she had lowered her window and stuck her head out. “I invoke God,” her mother shrieked, pulling strands of her no-longer-perfect bob from her eyes, “what are you doing?”
“I’m smelling the city,” Amal said, taking a long, deep breath—but it was hard to detect anything over the powerful odor of diesel gas and the particles of dust and soot.
“It’s cold,” her father complained. “Close your window.”
Amal pressed the button and sat back in her seat. Maybe her olfactory senses were weakened by her jet lag; she was dehydrated; she was getting a cold. That was why Casablanca did not smell to her like it used to, like a cocktail of odors: tea and coffee, sea breeze and fritters, fresh bread and cigarette smoke, human urine and animal excrement. As she settled back into her old life, everything struck her as different about the city—the unbreathable air, the constant sound of construction, the ubiquity of mobile phones and pickpockets, the luxury-brand stores on all the major streets. Foolishly, she had expected Casablanca to remain as she had left it, as if it had been frozen in time in her absence. But the city had grown: Parts of it had flourished; others had festered, afflicted by the combined cancers of greed and corruption. (Or were those things there all along, and she had never noticed? She did not know.)
The few friends she saw, those who had never left to study abroad, teased her that she acted differently now. When she tried to pay for her own ticket to the movie theater, the response would quickly come: You
think this is America? I invited you; I’m paying. When she complained that the company driver who picked her up from the train station in Rabat to take her to a business meeting was late, she was told with a chuckle, Was’i khatrek. This is Morocco, not America. When she expressed outrage at the threats made against Farid Benaboud after another article denouncing corruption in the government, she was scolded: The trouble he finds himself in is his own fault. Where does he think he is? Home was Morocco. America was away. And there was not much more to it than that. You are back home now, they said, everything will fall into place soon.
Over time, though, it seemed to her that the different loves to which she owed an allegiance were being tested against reality. Her parents fought more than ever before—not about important things, but about insignificant ones, like who sent an invitation to Madame Ilham, that insufferable bore; who was always hidden behind a newspaper; who bought another painting without consideration for where in the house it would go; who preferred to watch a movie rather than talk to his daughter. Amal grew tired of keeping score. She wondered why her parents chose to stay married when all they did was bicker.
It took her several months to gather up the interest and the courage to find her brother. She had to coax Omar to tell her what he knew. (“Not much, lalla Amal. I once heard him say something about Sector Five. I don’t know that area very well. You should not go. It’s not safe there.”) She had driven around Hay An Najat until she found the right sector, parked in front of a hanout, and asked the proprietor for the right block number. She had given him twenty dirhams to watch her car and headed out to find Youssef El Mekki’s house. As she came to a bend in the road, she noticed a white two-story building with huge flags that flapped in the wind. On them were the words, THROUGH GOD. WITH GOD. BY GOD.