by Laila Lalami
A bearded young man was keeping watch outside the building, and when she passed him he started to follow her. “What are you looking for?” he asked, coming up close. She turned around to face him, noticing at once that inquisitive, confident, even cocky look she sometimes saw on plainclothes police officers at the airport. His eyes twinkled with curiosity.
“What business is it of yours?” she asked.
“I just wanted to make sure you found what you were looking for.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush. She wondered all of a sudden if he was a thief, if he had been after her purse, so she slid the strap down her arm and held her bag tightly with both hands.
She started to walk up the hill, toward the tin-roofed houses where thousands lived. There was poverty here the like of which she had never seen, and she averted her eyes as if she were looking at the most private, the most intimate of sights. How was it possible to live like this? The thought quickly vanished when she saw number 10, a little whitewashed house with a blue door. She knocked, and a middle-aged woman appeared. Her eyes widened in surprise at seeing Amal. “Are you lost, my daughter?”
“No. I am looking for Youssef El Mekki. Is this his house?”
The woman nodded. “Yes, it is. Who is asking for him?”
“I am Amal Amrani.” Upon hearing the name, the woman looked as if she was about to close the door in Amal’s face, until Amal placed her hand on the jamb and said softly, “May I come in, please?”
They sat in the yard, on an old, hard divan that was pushed up against a peeling wall. Youssef’s mother stared at Amal with such intensity that Amal grew uncomfortable. She did not know how to begin. The best she could manage was, “I think you know who I am.”
“No, I don’t,” Youssef’s mother said. “Who are you?”
Amal was taken aback by the question. It was as though Youssef’s mother wanted to force Amal to say the words out loud, like a confession. “I am Youssef’s sister,” Amal said. As the words parted from her lips, she could feel a shift in the air, like a sigh of relief after someone has managed to pull out a painful splinter, but she was not sure whose pain was relieved by those four words—hers or Youssef’s mother’s. “I wanted to talk to him.”
“He’s not here.”
When Amal had found out about Youssef, she had been jealous of him for taking so much of her place in her father’s heart. In time, jealousy became anger and anger turned into shame and shame became sorrow—for what could have been and never was. Now, sitting in his house, she felt she had to explain her absence. “I didn’t know about him until last June.”
Youssef’s mother sat up, as if she had suddenly decided that this meeting was taking too long. “It doesn’t matter.”
But it does, Amal thought. I want to meet him. “My father didn’t know, either.”
“And you believed him?”
Amal let the sarcasm slide. She continued with her penance. “I wanted to say I was sorry about what my mother did. But you have to understand what it was like for her, finding out about all this.”
“Did you come here to apologize for them?”
Youssef’s mother was becoming impatient; it was time to get to more pragmatic matters. “I want to meet him.”
“That won’t be possible. He left for Tangier three weeks ago. He’s going to start over in Europe.”
It was over before it had even begun. There would be no relationship with Youssef, and life in Casablanca would continue in the same way it had before. Sometimes, Amal felt like a fish that had been taken out of water and put back; she was finding it difficult to breathe. Her mother and father quarreled; her brother was gone; several of her friends were still abroad, finishing degrees or starting new ones. In a city of five million, she felt unaccountably, incredibly alone. What was left? Who was left?
The alarm clock on Amal’s nightstand showed that it was 9 a.m. already, which meant it was about midnight on Friday in Los Angeles. She imagined Fernando getting home from an evening out, alone or with friends. He would drop his keys in the metal bowl in the hallway, slip his shoes off, toss the mail on the kitchen counter. Maybe he would make himself dinner. Maybe he would just go to bed. Maybe he would think of her. They had called, e-mailed, and written, but she always said she needed more time.
“Time for what?” he would ask.
“I don’t know,” she would say.
It will pass, child, her mother said, it will pass. But it had not. It was love. It was still there, throbbing with life, and no amount of distraction seemed to have any effect on it. It was like a language she had learned to speak; how could she learn to unspeak it? Amal could still remember the way Fernando’s lips tasted, the heft of his arms around her shoulders, the sound of his voice when he laughed, his breath against her hair at night. Weekends were hard, and this one was hardest of all.
Once, she remembered, they had gone to a fancy restaurant in Santa Monica, where they were meeting some friends for a birthday dinner. Fernando had worn a black jacket and Amal was in a cocktail dress, and they stood on the sidewalk under a green awning, chatting with their friends, waiting to be seated. An old man pulled up in a luxury car and, leaving his door open, walked up to Fernando and handed him the keys. It took a few seconds for everyone to realize that the old man thought Fernando was one of the parking valets. There was contrite laughter, and the old man, teasing his false teeth with his finger, looked around him, suddenly noticing the real valets in red vests.
“That was strange,” Amal said when the man was out of earshot.
Fernando shook his head. “Not really. He’s just used to brown people waiting on him.”
Even though he had shrugged the incident off, Amal could see that Fernando had been upset by it. It was one of those little things that seemed entirely insignificant in isolation but over time made you feel you did not belong. She knew the feeling well. After all, her race had been the biggest signifier about her in America. “Are there many Arabic women who go on to study in college?” one of her TAs had asked. Amal did not know whether it would be too impolite to point out that Arabic was a language, not a people. “But you don’t look Arab,” a middle-aged school registrar had said upon finding out that Amal was from Morocco—and she said it in a tone that suggested it was a compliment. When Amal had sold her car, the used-car dealer had asked if the trunk was empty. “Yes,” she said. “No explosives or anything?” he replied, and laughed and laughed and laughed. These words added up over time, like grains of sand in a glass jar, telling her she did not belong. So she knew. She knew what it felt like, and she held Fernando’s hand and pressed it and said nothing.
Home and away. She had known both; found good in both; loved and hated both. She did not want to have to choose one or the other, because in every choice something is gained but something is also lost. And in any case, why was home thought of as a place? What if it were something else?
Youssef had never read Farid Benaboud’s Casablanca Magazine with much regularity, but two days after his meeting with Hatim, he went out and bought a copy from the newsstand. It contained the usual offerings—news, cartoons, reviews. There was an in-depth report about a bank buyout, an article on infighting ahead of a local party’s national convention, a column about the national team’s chance in the next World Cup, an interview with a popular hip-hop band. Then there was Benaboud’s editorial, in which he wrote about the failure of the latest literacy campaign to make significant gains. The picture that accompanied his piece showed him at his desk, his reading glasses perched on his nose, his chin resting on his palm.
Youssef remembered Benaboud’s visits to the apartment, the first time for an interview about the tourism business, the second to ask for help with the libel suit brought against him by a government minister. He had asked good questions about how Nabil Amrani ran his businesses, he had brought up the salaries of his employees, he had even defended the Party against Nabil’s accusations. What if the roles had be
en reversed, and Youssef had been the journalist while Benaboud had been the bastard son? Would Benaboud have agreed to Hatim’s plans, too?
At the headquarters of the Party, it had seemed natural to agree that Benaboud was a part of Nabil Amrani’s world and that he represented the worst it had to offer. But the more Youssef thought about Benaboud’s visits, the more difficult it became to think of him as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the country. What about everyone else—government ministers, political activists, industry heads, union leaders, university teachers, college students—what had they done for the country?
It was true that Benaboud should have been more thorough in his article. He should have spoken to Hatim; he should have visited Hay An Najat; he should have tried to see things for himself. On the other hand, was it not enough for Hatim that he had At Tariq, where he could write what he wanted? If he disliked what Farid Benaboud had to say, why couldn’t he respond in the same way?
Walking back from the kiosk, magazine tucked under his arm, Youssef had the feeling of being watched. The enormity of what he had agreed to do began to settle upon him.
Many years later, Nabil would still remember it as an ordinary day, a Saturday like any other: Amal ate breakfast, answering with shoulder shrugs and rolls of the eyes whenever he addressed her; went to the gym to work out; came back and then disappeared into her room; played some music on the stereo. Around lunchtime, as Nabil was trying to convince Malika to change their evening plans, Amal came down the stairs, dragging a suitcase behind her. He thought she must have been confused about the date of next Saturday’s meeting of the Association of Moroccan Hoteliers in Marrakech; he was going to make a joke that she had a worse memory than her mother. But then she turned toward them, he saw the expression on her face, and he understood. She was lost to him. She was going back to that man.
Nabil knew it was useless to stop her, but he tried anyway. He got up from the plush armchair and in five quick paces he had crossed the living room and was standing at the bottom of the staircase. He noticed at once that she was still wearing the turquoise necklace that man had given her. She looked so young, so innocent, so full of a kind of hope he had long forgotten, and he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her and never let go.
Behind him, Malika asked her chirpily, “Are you going to Marrakech?”
“No, Maman,” Amal said, moving slightly to the right so she could better see her mother. “To Los Angeles.”
“You’re not going,” Nabil replied in his sternest voice. “You belong here. In your country, with your family. What will you do there?”
“I will be with him.”
There it was, her choice. He wished he could go back in time and unhear those words, but it was like wishing the sun had not come up that morning.
His wife stepped up. “The Royal Air Maroc flight for the U.S. has already left. You have to wait till tomorrow,” she said. She sounded like someone who was bartering with the grocer, trying to get a better deal on a kilo of potatoes. Maybe she thought that one more day with Amal would make a difference and she could change her daughter’s mind, once more.
“I’m flying through London,” Amal replied.
Malika put her hand over her mouth.
“You will break your mother’s heart if you leave,” Nabil said, though he meant his own heart but could not say it.
Amal glanced at her mother, then bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Maman. I’m not leaving you; I just have to be with him. We’ll still see each other.”
Malika started crying, which at once irritated Nabil (did she always have to be so emotional?) and delighted him (surely the tears would affect their daughter and make her reconsider?). But nothing seemed to matter; nothing broke Amal’s resolve. She gave her mother a hug and went out to ask the driver to bring the car. When she came back for her suitcase, he took it away from her and grabbed her by the hand and tried to pull her toward the living room.
“Let go of me,” she said.
It was useless. In another minute, she was gone.
Nabil let himself slide into the armchair. He closed his eyes, and the first images that came to him were of a trip to the beach with Amal when she was five or six. It was a father-daughter weekend—Malika had gone to visit her mother. Amal sat in the backseat and sang songs and asked questions and kicked the passenger seat with her shoes. They were approaching Moulay Bousselham when a piece of gravel hit the windshield, cracking it into a cobweb of glass. Nabil stopped the car to inspect the damage. They were only fifty meters from their destination, so he decided to continue on; he would call the repairman from the house. Just as he parked the car in the driveway, the windshield gave in and a million pieces of glass fell, like rain, on the dashboard, on his arms, on his lap.
That was how he felt now, as if his already-fractured heart was at last and irremediably broken. It could never be put back together the way it was before. Amal had left him behind for the sake of that man, just as he had left Youssef behind for her sake. How could it be that he had given up the son for the daughter, and now he had neither the son nor the daughter? People always said that life was unfair, but maybe it was not. Life had caught up with him and dealt him a sentence of unendurable fairness.
He had betrayed all those he loved. When he had heard about Amal’s American boyfriend, he had yelled at her, stopped paying for her school, and pretended to give her up. He had wanted to win her back by force. The deal he had made with his daughter may have been unspoken, but it was firm; it was final: she had to apologize and return to the old ways, or she would lose his love. What he had not counted on was that she was proud and stubborn, just like him. She had refused the deal. Once she was on her own, it had been easy for that man (what kind of a name was Fernando?) to prey on her and take her away.
Youssef had appeared at AmraCo in the middle of all this, like an answer to a prayer. Nabil thought he had been given another chance. He had taken care of Youssef, tried to groom him, prepare him for his entrance into the Amranis’ world—not through the main door, of course, for there were still appearances to keep up, but through the side door, perhaps—get him to meet Amal and Malika, maybe have him come for dinner every once in a while. Then Malika found out, told Nabil’s brothers, and Nabil had to make another bargain. He gave up the son in order to keep the wife and daughter. He had not realized that the pain would hit him as sharply as that piece of gravel striking the windshield. For as long as he lived, he would never forget the look in the boy’s eyes when they stood by the car outside the company’s headquarters. The look of a child begging you to love him, and all you did was turn away.
Now even Malika would leave him. She had no reason to stay any longer. He had made a fool of her over the years. She had never cared because she had always believed that they were a family and family was more important than des affaires de cuisses. But today everything had changed. Her only daughter had left. She was standing by the window, staring outside at the road, as if she could still see Amal’s car in the distance. She had stopped crying. Her hands were folded over her chest. “Malika,” he said. She did not respond, did not turn, did not show any sign of having heard him. “Malika, we can get her back.” Nothing. It was as though she was no longer in the room with him. A kind of loneliness such as he had never known before entered his heart. If he did not have a daughter, or a son, or a wife, then who was he, in the end?
Over the next few days, he tortured himself with thoughts of a happier past, a time when he would never have made the bargains he made, a time when he still stood for something. What had happened to his world? When did things fall apart? Men of his generation were children of ’56, children of the independence. Like them, he had signed petitions for the release of Saida Menebhi, written articles for Lamalif, spent hours in Rafael Levy’s smoky living room discussing Frantz Fanon or Mehdi Ben Barka, closed down his law office during general strikes, denounced the imposition by the World Bank and the IMF of a structural adjustment plan, called thes
e institutions “tools of neocolonialism par excellence,” collected money for the families of those killed during the bread riots of 1981. Those were years when he still dared to dream, when he was still full of love for his country.
Some of his friends—journalists, professors, writers, artists—were forced into exile, in Cairo or Paris or Madrid. He knew people who had been imprisoned and tortured. One of his colleagues was made to disappear. Bit by bit, he began to lose hope, betray his ideals, trade his love of country for the comfort of home. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had given up. He told himself he was married, with a child on the way, that his wife—fragile as she was—would not be able to take care of Amal if something were to happen to him. He could no longer take the risk of wanting change. He started working for his father in the family business, like his father before him, and had been content to think of politics as something that was discussed every once in a while over a glass of whiskey or during a game of golf. Whatever happened in the nation or the world was not his concern any longer.
Now Nabil sat in his office in AmraCo, staring out the window at the city, with the minaret of the King Hassan Mosque at one end, the Twin Center towers at the other, and the vast, the incredible sea of homes and apartment buildings in between. What had he done with his life? The pain in his chest made it difficult to breathe, and in order to distract himself, he turned his office television on, watched a young journalist chatter on about the imminent danger of Islamic fundamentalism. He turned the TV off, tossing the remote on the desk. Young people these days seemed to have no idea what country they were from; they talked of Morocco as if its history had begun ten years ago, as if the issues they were facing had just appeared on the scene, lacking any provenance, devoid of any context.