by Laila Lalami
He was overcome now by a feeling of shame at having turned away Farid Benaboud when he had asked for support. He had heard from a friend that Benaboud was in trouble—and not just the usual harassment, like slashed tires, or tapped phones, or stolen mail, but something else altogether, something far more sinister. How long before Benaboud gave up and he, too, made politics the occasional subject of a game of golf? He would close down the magazine; or worse, he would keep it open and turn it into a sounding board, against which the praises of the most beautiful country in the world could be sung and amplified.
There was something in Benaboud that Nabil recognized—a part of his old self, a part of the past he had long betrayed. And it was in order to save that sliver of himself, in order to be loyal to that past, that he picked up the phone and called to say he would write a statement of support. He knew this would anger his friends in government. But it would make others like him pause, and perhaps they could help Benaboud’s magazine survive. This time, at least.
Youssef was lying on his bed when he heard his mother crying. Immediately alarmed, he ran to the yard. “Yak labas?” he asked. She pointed to the television screen; she was watching The Nightingale’s Prayer. “You startled me,” he said, his hand on his heart.
“It’s nothing,” she said. She wiped her tears and shook her head, embarrassed to have been crying over a movie.
“It’s all right,” he said softly. He sat down next to her, watching for a few minutes. Nightingale was not his favorite film by Henry Barakat—he preferred his earlier work. But the performances by Faten Hamama and Zahrat El ‘Ola made it worth watching.
“Tell me,” she said, clearly wanting to change the subject, “were you going out?”
“Oh, no. No, I wasn’t.”
“You’ve been staying home a lot.”
He couldn’t tell her why. Even if he could tell her, he would have been ashamed to.
Why had he agreed to Hatim’s plans? Even now, days later, he did not have a simple explanation.
His troubles had started when he had left Hay An Najat. He wished that he had never left the neighborhood, never dropped out of college, never said yes when Moussa came to the door to ask him to meet Hatim, never heard of Hatim’s plans. Hatim had given him the impossible task of choosing between his mother and his father, and in his shock at realizing that his secret was no longer a secret, he had found himself cornered and forced to make a decision. The words had escaped his mouth before he could weigh their meanings or their consequences. Hatim had seemed satisfied because that answer meant Youssef would agree to the operation.
But Hatim did not know what Youssef’s mother was like, or he would not have invoked her. Youssef’s mother hated politicians, people who showed up in Hay An Najat only in election years. She made no distinction between the Party and the others, saying they all cared about the same things. If she had been in Youssef’s shoes, she would already have reported Hatim to the police. How could he betray her now by doing the very thing she would never agree to?
Then there was Hatim’s insistence that the mission was part of a bigger plan, where each person had a role. Youssef was tired of playing a role; he wanted, for once—for just this once—to be himself: Youssef El Mekki, son to a loving mother, college dropout, movie fanatic, perpetual loser at chess. But there was no going back. He had made a choice, and if he recanted it now, Hatim would kill him—or his mother.
He was a coward. He was letting an innocent man be killed for fear that his own innocent mother would be murdered. Night after night, he lay on his bed, stared at the ceiling, willed his mind to be blank. It was the only way he had found to convince himself that nothing he could do would change the course of things, that nothing was under his control. The plot would be carried out with or without his involvement.
When on Saturday the new issue of Casablanca Magazine came out, Youssef was stunned to read Nabil Amrani’s article. He had come forward to support Farid Benaboud, to say that the intimidations had to stop. The old man has finally grown a backbone, Youssef thought, and despite himself he felt pride. Nabil Amrani’s support would surely help Benaboud, but how could it save him from Hatim? On his way back home from the newsstand, Youssef once again had the feeling of being watched, and he hurried home, where he would be safe, and silent.
Rachida had not meant to eavesdrop. In fact, she would not have paid any attention to Maati and the older man with whom he was talking if they had not switched from speaking Darija to Tamazight when they noticed her walking behind them. She was in a rush to get home to catch her Mexican soap opera, and the lane was narrow, so she had come up behind them at a quick pace, expecting they would step aside to let her pass. But instead they switched to Tamazight. Without knowing why, she slowed down and listened.
Maati’s companion asked him about the Party.
“Two men came to see Hatim yesterday,” Maati replied. “One of them is tall, about one meter eighty. Completely bald. Long beard. First name is Reda. The other one is about my height. Dark hair. Brown eyes. He has a lame leg. I don’t know his name.”
“We’re familiar with Reda, alias El Mdardag. I think I know who the other man is, but find out his name.”
They arrived at a fork in the road, and Rachida had to turn and head toward her house. She did not dare look back, though she kept listening to the sound of Maati’s flip-flops until it faded away, down the other road. Maati! The high school dropout, the failed boxer, the good-for-nothing whose smile made her wonder whether any thought had ever entered his head. She would never have guessed he was a police informant. Appearances were deceiving—and how.
Over and over, she had told Youssef to stay away from Maati and Amin, from the Party, from that cursed Oasis. If the police were monitoring Hatim, then something terrible was brewing, and there was no telling what would happen. She quickened her pace, eager to get home and tell Youssef.
She found him lying despondently on the divan. For the past few days, he had been like this—quiet, pensive, lost in a world she could not enter. “Youssef,” she whispered. He turned to look at her, and her expression must have betrayed her because he sat up immediately. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
She pointed to the bedroom. They went inside. She told him what she had heard, her right hand over her chest as if to still the beating of her heart.
“You’re sure it was Maati?” Youssef asked.
“Of course I’m sure it was him, my son. I’ve known him since he was ten years old.”
Still, he looked incredulous, unable to accept the idea that one of his closest friends was an informant. He paced in front of her, his fingers touching his temples, as if he could not contain all the thoughts that raced around inside his head. Then he made her repeat, word for word, the conversation she had heard. “But isn’t it strange,” Youssef said when she was finished, “that they spoke of such things openly, even though you were right there? Are you sure they weren’t just pulling a prank?”
His tone suggested absurd hope, and so Rachida realized that the only way to convince her son was to tell him the truth. She would never be able to save Youssef from Hatim and his people if she did not, at long last, tell the truth. “They spoke in Tamazight.”
“You understand Tamazight?”
She nodded. Tamazight belonged to a time when she still had a family, she began.
“A family?” Youssef asked. His face grew pale, and he sat on his bed and watched her with disbelief, his pupils dilated in the half-light of the bedroom. He seemed to her again like a child, no longer a grown man but just a child, and she wanted to wrap her arms around him and run her fingers through his hair and tell him that everything would be all right in the end. But there was no getting away from the truth this time. She told him first about her mother, Izza, whose face she could no longer recall after so many years. Rachida did remember, though, the shape of Izza’s body as she came through the doorway of their house, backlit by the bright mountain sun. She remembered the feel of
Izza’s hands as she brushed and plaited Rachida’s four-year-old hair. She remembered the weight of the stones when they played marbles together. She remembered the smell of lavender on Izza’s bed, even at the very end, when she was too sick to leave it.
A few months after Izza died, Rachida’s father, Hammou, had sent Rachida to the orphanage in Fès, where she could attend school. It would be good for her, he said, better than climbing trees and running around in the fields, picking daisies. In all her time at the Bab Ziyyat orphanage, Rachida’s father had visited just three times, and when he did, it was to marvel at how much she had grown and how well she could read. “He gave me up to the orphanage and told me it was for my own good.”
Rachida was in her first year of training to be a midwife when the head nun told her she would be working for Fatema Amrani, who needed someone to attend to a pregnant woman on bed rest. Rachida had taken care of Fatema’s daughter-in-law Malika Amrani, carefully noting her weight, temperature, and blood pressure in a notebook, and spent the rest of her time on the veranda, working on her embroidery or reading a magazine.
This was how she had met Nabil Amrani, who always spoke with passion, whether it was about music or movies or, especially, politics. His eyes sparkled with curiosity whenever he looked at her. He smiled at her every time she passed him in a corridor, brushed against her when she brought a tray for his wife, asked whether it was true the nuns at the orphanage had chartered a bus to go see Nana Mouskouri in concert in Casablanca.
His wife had never suspected anything, but his mother, Madame Fatema Amrani, had found out and had thrown Rachida out of the house. She had not even given her time to pack her suitcase. Nabil had entered her life and changed it for the worse, but also for the better, for had he not given her Youssef?
Rachida had to start over in a new place. She was no longer Rachida bent Hammou ben Abdeslam ben Abdelkader Ouchak. She was merely Rachida Ouchak, a widow and mother, living in the city, away from the mountains of her childhood, away from the orphanage of her adolescence, away from the mansion of her youth.
The relief of sharing a story she had waited so long to tell was intoxicating. She could not stop, now that she had begun. Her father came from a long line of horsemen. He owned land and was respected in all the villages in the area. To go back to him pregnant would mean the end of him. So she stayed away from him and took her baby to Casablanca, where everyone could start over.
As she spoke, she watched Youssef’s face for hints of his reaction. Would he believe her, or would he, once again, look at her with his heartbreaking skepticism? There was a time in his life when she could read the emotions on his face. Once, when he was eight years old, he had come home, his right hand bleeding, saying that he fell on a rock. She inspected his hand; he had a deep cut, in the shape of a paperclip, and she immediately set about disinfecting it. As she worked, she noticed the way his lips quivered when she pressed him for details, and she knew he was lying. “I told you not to play with the neighbor’s bicycle,” she said sharply. “You fell on the handle, didn’t you?” His eyes widened in terror and he confessed on the spot.
But all that was long ago. He had changed so much in the past three years that she could not claim to know what went on inside his head. She expected he would be angry with her, and she would not blame him if he were. What she feared, though, was that he would accuse her of hiding something—she had lied to him so often in the past—and that he would ignore her pleas to stay away from Maati and from the café. She needed him to believe her. She took a deep breath, and when she released it, she spoke in the language of her childhood, in Tamazight, the words rolling on her tongue like a declaration of love. “Hati lmaaqul aktinigh, aywi, amni.”
At the sound of this new language inside their home, the lines on Youssef’s forehead disappeared. His jaw relaxed. He spoke in a whisper. “It is true, then,” he said.
“It is,” she said, and put her hand on his. “Now do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you stay away from Maati?”
“Yes.”
All of a sudden, her knees felt weak and she sat down on her bed, across the room from Youssef. It seemed that he was listening to her this time, not just hearing her words and reluctantly speaking his own. But then he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, lost in his thoughts.
Youssef had wanted nothing more than the truth; all his quarrels with his mother had been because of it. Now she had delivered it, and as it sank in, he began to see what it might mean. He was an Ouchak from Sefrou on his mother’s side, and an Amrani from Fès on his father’s side. He was half-Berber and half-Arab; he was a man of the mountains, and a man of the city; a man of the people and an aristocrat; a full-blooded Moroccan, with the culture and the history of a thousand years—a rich identity, of which he could be proud.
But this truth was as invisible as air, as fleeting as breath itself. The real truth was what everyone around him saw: he was a slum dweller, the son of a hospital clerk, a man with no illusions about his place in society. Youssef had yearned for a father, and the yearning had led him on a journey to find him. His father had deserted him. His friend Amin had betrayed him. His friend Maati had spied on him. What was left? Who was left?
The only constant in his life was his mother. She had played the role of the widow, when she had never had a husband; the role of an orphan, when all along she had had a father. She had done it for him. She had lied her way through his life, and yet she had also given him the only certainty in it—her love. In the end, she was his only home.
It was an inexpressible relief to find out the whole truth, but suddenly it did not seem to matter as much as it once had. Farid Benaboud’s life hung in the balance, and that was more immediate, and far more critical, than any story Youssef’s mother could tell. Benaboud’s troubles, Youssef thought, began and ended with the truth, too. He had angered government ministers with his articles about the “bonuses” they received for privatizing state companies; he had engaged in a public battle with Parliament members over their corruption and dereliction; he had persistently criticized the Party for taking over the social life of Hay An Najat; he had exposed Hatim’s murky finances. He had written the truth, or at least what he thought was the truth. Now he would pay for it with his life.
Youssef was taken out of his reflections by his mother’s voice. It was best to do nothing, she said. To just stay away from the Party. Stay away from the Oasis. Stay home with her. The police were watching Hatim, and someday very soon they would arrest him for one crime or another. It was important not to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
If the police knew about the assassination of Farid Benaboud, then they would stop it before it happened. For three glorious days, that simple hope numbed Youssef’s guilt at having stayed quiet, and silenced his concern about Farid Benaboud. He watched satellite news channels constantly, expecting to hear news about an arrest. Then the eve of the “operation” came, and nothing had been done. Despite having an informant inside the Party, maybe the police did not know of Hatim’s exact plans, since Hatim had been so discreet. Youssef began to wonder whether anything, or anyone, could save Benaboud.
18
THE DAY OF THE MURDER
THE BOULEVARD WAS HEAVY with traffic. Drivers strained to make their way through the single open lane, while workers in blue uniforms fixed a billboard advertising a music festival. The sound of exasperated car horns abated at the roundabout, where the water fountain ran and where flocks of pigeons came to drink and rest in between their peregrinations. At the top of the street, the Grand Hotel sat, its gigantic glass doors closed, reflecting the rays of the sun. Standing on the pavement across from the building, Youssef was blinded by the bright light.
He had left the house early, quietly closing the door behind him. Moussa had given him the knife and the disguise—a woman’s flowing jellaba and veil—and then taken him downtown by car, dropping him off two blocks from the hotel. Youssef had to w
alk the rest of the way. Periodically he looked behind him; he was sure Hatim had sent someone to follow him all the way to the door. As he neared the hotel, he watched carefully for signs of the police, for signs that his silence would not cost a man his life.
Now, raising his hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight, he surveyed the scene carefully. Four men were seated in a parked Peugeot. The two in front wore dark sunglasses and turned their heads back, listening to one of their companions in the back. Youssef thought—he hoped—that they were plainclothes officers, but after a few minutes the driver started the engine and eased his car out of the parking spot and onto the street. In another minute they were gone.
He grew light-headed. Fear and hunger gripped his stomach like a fist—he had not eaten anything all morning. He retreated under the shade of a big oak tree and placed his hand on its trunk to steady himself. He took several deep breaths, inwardly repeating the mantra he had held on to for the past few days: Everything will be all right. He turned to watch the street once again. Time passed. Then a white van with no discernible logo pulled into an empty space on the right corner. The driver sat still, and no one came out of the vehicle. With each passing minute, Youssef became more convinced that it was the police. He was jubilant. This is it, he told himself. With the police here, everything would be all right. Farid Benaboud would be safe.
Just then a young man in a black suit walked up the street on the left, heading for the entrance of the Grand Hotel. Something about the way he carried himself seemed familiar. Youssef stepped out from under the tree to get a better look, his eyes straining against the white sunlight. As if realizing that he was being watched, the man in the black suit glanced back. It was Amin. Youssef’s hand covered his mouth, muffling a gasp that would attract attention. Amin had been persuaded to carry out Hatim’s plans, too. He was the second assassin.