‘Would you like to visit Bo-jaama?’ I asked Oujdi at lunchtime.
‘No,’ he replied with a grimace. He had been put off by the shocking scenery of the hospital: men, women, young and old, either lying, weak and pale, in bed, or the fit ones wandering around in striped pyjamas, not much different from those worn in prison.
I went to see Bo-jaama on my own. On my way to the hospital, I bought three big, good-looking oranges. It was about three o’clock when I arrived. I went straight to ward three, where Bo-jaama had been bedded. The ward’s French doors were open wide, but there were few visitors. The ward was uninviting, and the patients were unshaven, looking jaundiced and deeply depressed. Searching for Bo-jaama on the left, I couldn’t find him. Going back to the main door and looking right, I didn’t find him there either. Searching frantically, darting around the room while some patients were watching me, I thought, Bo-jaama is not here. He has either changed wards or gone home.
As I emerged from the basement, I saw the Sister, a mature woman with grey hair, holding a pile of paper in her arms, her pockets stuffed with medicine. Her look and walk inspired confidence. As she was walking fast, I sprinted to catch up with her. ‘Sister, Sister,’ I pleaded. She looked, but didn’t stop. She wore tinted glasses and I wasn’t sure if she had noticed me. ‘Sister!’ I called again, now beside her. ‘Could you help? In which ward is Bo-jaama?’ I asked, while she was still walking.
Abruptly, she stopped, turned to face me, peered straight into my eyes and said, ‘Is he your brother?’
‘No,’ I replied.
She gave the impression of confusion and wondering. ‘Come to my office,’ she said in a grave voice.
I followed her to her office, situated at the very end of the corridor and, once in, she asked me to take a seat. No one had ever asked me politely to ‘take a seat’ as she did. ‘I will be back in a few minutes,’ she said.
I didn’t know where she had gone, but she came back in the promised time. She didn’t sit behind her desk as the rector had. She sat beside me, close to me – too close. ‘What is your name?’ she asked. ‘Where did you come from?’ The Sister was as pleasant as she could be, but her face alternated between relaxed and tense, happy and sad.
‘My name is Jusef. I’m from the north,’ I uttered, lips pursed. ‘Bo-jaama is my friend’s brother. We go to the same school,’ I added.
Like a bullet, the truth emerged from her lips. ‘Bo-jaama is dead,’ she said. ‘Nobody was beside him when he died; the nurse discovered him at ten o’clock in the morning. We don’t know the exact time he passed away. We kept him in the mortuary for three days, but no one claimed him, so the council took over and buried him. As far as we know, he was buried in the nearest cemetery,’ she continued.
Listening to her, I felt my chest tighten and the room change position. The Sister pulled a bundle of keys from her pocket and yanked a tiny one. With it, she opened a drawer in a small cabinet. She pulled out two pages, looked at them patiently, and came back to sit where she had been, beside me.
‘Bo-jaama left a will,’ she said. ‘He left you his watch and a gold ring. I have some papers for you to sign, then the watch and the ring will be your property.’
It was too much for me to take in. Just as the Sister was fiddling with papers, a tall young black doctor came in. ‘Madame Omlil had high blood pressure last night,’ he said.
‘Go and test her again,’ she told him. ‘If it is any higher than yesterday, instruct the nurse to medicate her and make sure the nurse carries out your instructions.’
The doctor wasted no time and waltzed out of the room. I was struck by his dark black skin and long white teeth.
‘Sign this paper for me,’ the Sister asked me, but my French was not good enough to understand medical or legal jargon. Fearful, I refused to sign.
‘I don’t need Bo-jaama’s watch or ring,’ I said. ‘I have a watch. Look!’ I showed her the watch on my wrist.
The Sister realised how nervous I was. ‘It’s a gift,’ she said. ‘You can do whatever you want with it.’
I thought I would never be able to dig myself out of the hospital, but the Sister shook my hand and showed me the door. I scrambled for a while to find the main door and went straight back to school, hoping against hope to see Abdu. Back earlier than planned, I went to the library, not to read, because my mind was spiralling wildly, but to hide and collect my feelings. My presence in the library, however, didn’t please the librarian.
‘Where are your friends?’ the librarian, thin as a pencil, asked me.
‘Some are in the medina and others in the New Town,’ I replied.
‘Why aren’t you with them?’ he said.
He wants the entire library to himself, I thought. Librarians are a strange kettle of fish. They know where books are, but never what’s inside, I thought to myself. With no one to shush but me, sitting and fiddling with books and papers, the librarian spent all his time looking out the window, yawning. To take a break and kill his boredom, he patrolled empty aisles.
By six-thirty, the library was shut. Like lemmings, boys flooded to the toilet room. I searched for Abdu, but there was no sign of him. Oujdi appeared with a big smile on his face, trying to absorb a French poem by heart.
While we congregated in small groups, jittering and waiting for the refectory doors to open, I kept searching for Abdu. The siren sounded, and Abdu appeared, trudging. I held back and waited for him; we were the last to the table. Sitting at the same table, Faissal looked morose, but no one bothered with him. Oujdi was in a manic mood, and no one could stop him talking or make sense of what he said.
After dinner, Abdu reached into his bag and threw on the table two balls of yarn and two knitting needles. That brought Faissal out of his mood. Abdu started to knit, but he kept dropping stitches. I demonstrated how to keep from dropping them by blocking the stitches with one finger, as I had knitted my own hat while shepherding.
‘Where did you get the yarn?’ I asked him.
‘From a wool shop owned by an old but attractive French woman with grey hair. “Do you know how to knit?” she asked me. “No,” I replied. She showed me how to knit and gave me two needles and two balls of yarn.’
I wondered who this generous woman was and remembered the French woman who had paid for our breakfast.
Before Abdu had finished his story and demonstration, the bursar came in and saw our dining table turned into a knitting workshop. Abdu stepped out, and I trailed behind him.
He went far down the slope ahead of me. I caught up with him, and we slowly ambled down to the library. Abdu’s legs moved heavily, as he was certainly exhausted.
‘Abdu,’ I said in a soft, sad voice, ‘it pains me to tell you Bo-jaama has died.’
Abdu didn’t doubt me and didn’t ask any questions. He stopped and squeezed his head between his hands.
‘Let us move,’ I said. Abdu moved on, but took refuge against a tree and wept quietly to himself. Standing behind him, I felt powerless. It felt as though the tree had hugged Abdu forever and time had stopped. ‘It is the will of God,’ I said, tapping Abdu’s shoulder.
‘It is also the will of man,’ replied Abdu in a strange voice.
Abdu had no choice but to travel home to inform his father and stepmother. But first, the school needed to know and he needed permission. The office was closed. We went to the chief prefect, not to get permission, as he was not credited with such authority, but to inform him.
Days later, Abdu arrived with his father and his stepmother. Although I wasn’t introduced to them immediately, I could see they were a provincial couple. His parents looked like Adam and Eve dropped into a twentieth-century city. Abdu’s father was exceptionally tall and thin, his wife two-thirds his height. He had a beard with two contrasting colours, black and white, that competed for visibility. A very long turban first choked his head, then what was left of it covered his ears and was used as a scarf. His shoes were made-to-measure with straw, supported by tyre rubb
er. His wife looked half his age and was strikingly beautiful, with no veil, no headscarf, and no jellabah either. She wore a long dress, tightly tied at the waist with a masculine belt. Her youth and beauty couldn’t hide her distress. Everything was dazzling for her. She wanted to know about her son’s life and death, but neither she nor her husband spoke French, Spanish, Arabic or even Moroccan Darija – just Tarifit.
Bo-jaama’s parents relied solely on Abdu; they believed he could tell them when and where his brother had passed away, and would certainly know in which cemetery Bo-jaama had been buried. Abdu knew nothing of all that, and what he knew of Bo-jaama’s private life, he couldn’t reveal to his parents. He told me he felt squeezed between an unjustified guilt and duty to his father and his stepmother. He had to take care of his father and the wife he had never liked, yet his baccalaureate exams were only a few weeks away; he felt terrified and had already missed two important tutorial revisions and even the mock exams.
Abdu rushed to the rector and begged to resit the mock exams. It was the first time that the rector had heard about Bo-jaama’s death, but, unsympathetic, he told Abdu to clear off.
When Abdu took his parents to the hospital, no papers relating to Bo-jaama’s admission or his death could be found. His parents were pushed and rattled between doors and corridors and left feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.
Abdu’s stepmother, intelligent but wrapped in tradition, murmured loudly, ‘Is Bo-jaama really dead? Has he ever been here? If he is dead, who killed him and why?’
‘She is an embarrassment. She and my father should hurry home,’ mumbled Abdu. He asked me to give him the name of the ward sister, as with her name in his hand, his stepmother would get some of the information she was seeking.
Abdu’s hopes, however, were dashed. I hadn’t taken the name of the sister; it had never come to my mind that such a need would occur. But I remembered her distinctly.
It was Friday morning. A refreshing breeze poured through the windows and got lost in the dormitory. I was looking forward to my French lesson that afternoon with Michelle.
Abdu was on the brink of a mental breakdown. ‘Nothing can get into my head; I can’t pull anything out of it either. All the lessons are gibberish. The more a professor repeats, the more deaf and dull I get,’ he told me over lunch.
‘There will be no sunrise if you mess up your baccalaureate,’ I told him.
Listening to me made Abdu even more agitated. An avalanche of resentment toward his stepmother engulfed him – even more than Bo-jaama’s private life had shocked him. Hoping to put the lid on Abdu’s emotional lava, I offered to go with him and his parents to the hospital.
Friday lunch was expected to be better than on the other weekdays, to be tasty and certainly filling, but that day the spaghetti was watery with a few pieces of cheese floating here and there. On the plate, it looked like a high and fatty hill, but its height didn’t quench the hunger. Abdu and I didn’t stay for the dessert, though we saw it coming, a trolley full of small oranges, one for each boy.
Abdu’s parents were waiting for him and surprised to see me, as Abdu had never mentioned my name. Abdu’s mother addressed me as ‘My son’, a sign of respect, affection and the difference in our ages. All the way to the hospital, Abdu dodged his parents.
‘How are the crops this summer?’ I asked Abdu’s father, to make conversation.
‘We are plagued by the wrath of drought with wind and dust,’ he replied. ‘We would have perished but for my eldest son, who is now working in a Roman country.’ (He meant Europe.)
I knew Abdu’s parents had already spent two nights in a funduq nearby. Abdu’s stepmother couldn’t sleep. ‘My legs are prey to fierce and mysterious insects,’ she told me. ‘My legs are covered with itchy, red bites.’
It didn’t take long to reach the hospital. Visitors didn’t look particularly happy to be there; their faces said it all. The door and corridors were familiar to me, and we went straight to the ward sister’s office. The door was closed, so no one dared to knock. While waiting, Abdu’s father could hardly stand up. He leaned against the wall and, from time to time, cushioned his back with his hands. Abdu was silent, and I worried I might miss my French lesson or keep Michelle waiting. It took a while before a young nurse came and opened the door; there was no one inside. Before I was able to ask her for help, she was already away.
‘Coming here would make the healthy unhealthy,’ said Abdu’s father, peering at the nurse. A while later, a male nurse came, opened the door and sat down. Abdu and I forced our way in, and the nurse immediately understood our frustration. By a stroke of luck, the black doctor with the white teeth entered and nodded to me.
‘Doctor, where could I find the nurse who was here just last Friday?’ I asked.
‘She is no longer here,’ he said. ‘She’s in Jerusalem.’
‘These are Bo-jaama’s parents. He died here. They want to know more about how he died,’ I explained.
‘Speaking from memory, I saw Bo-jaama twice. He didn’t respond to the penicillin. That’s all I could confirm,’ said the doctor.
‘Where did you come from?’ he asked me, avoiding more questions.
‘From the North,’ I responded. ‘And you, Doctor?’
‘From Senegal, Dakar.’
That was all the information Bo-jaama’s parents could get. From the hospital, I led them to the cemetery nearby. Bo-jaama’s mother wanted to know where her son’s grave was, but nobody knew. There was an abundance of fresh new graves to choose from. Bo-jaama’s mother looked at them all, cried and grieved at each grave as if they all belonged to her son.
Bo-jaama’s father spoke very little. His wife was his spokesman; he appeared overwhelmed by the cemetery. ‘It’s a city under the city,’ he sighed.
Bo-jaama’s mother succumbed to the reality; Bo-jaama was dead. ‘He is here, somewhere, but no one knows where,’ she said, tears flowing. A few hundred yards away, a voice filled the air; a man, unbearded, sat on a cemented grave and recited the Holy Koran. Bo-jaama’s mother saw the man moving from grave to grave, reciting. She understood that he had been hired to sanctify the dead, and decided to hire him to do the same for Bo-jaama.
Abdu thought it was a waste of money. Against his wish, I beckoned the man to Bo-jaama’s mother, and having no bargaining spirit, she unfolded her second belt, yanked out a few coins, and without counting, filled the man’s hand.
‘Which grave is yours?’ asked the man, graciously. His question prompted more tears from her eyes.
‘Sit anywhere you like,’ she said. ‘He will hear you.’
The man was confused. ‘Do all those graves belong to her? Was her family hit by a plague?’ I heard him mutter to himself. He sat between two fresh uncemented graves, closed his eyes and began quietly reciting the Holy Koran. The reciting didn’t last any more than ten minutes.
Watching Bo-jaama’s mother weeping, I remembered with sadness Miloda buried in Algeria on the top of a hill, and now no one would know which one. She would be dust and part of Algerian soil.
There was not much time left for me to tarry. I thought Bo-jaama’s mother should have his watch and ring. I would have preferred to hand them to her in a private place, but thought I might never see her again.
‘Lalla,’ I said. ‘I have two mementos that belonged to Bo-jaama.’ I thrust my hand into my pocket and pulled out the watch and ring.
She looked at them, and the ring puzzled her. Her cheeks wet, she fondled both and looked intently at the ring. ‘He was getting engaged!’ she said. ‘This is the ring that he bought for his fiancée, the girl he loved, but his journey was cut short. I wish I knew this girl. I would go and hand it to her.’ As it happened, I knew that Bo-jaama had stolen the ring from his brother Abdu, who had stolen it from a Jewish jeweller when he and I had gone into the Jewish quarter for a stroll.
I left Abdu to take care of his parents and rushed to my French lesson. Michelle was in the Franciscan library, reading a road map, facing a
wide, open window, when I arrived a bit late that day. On the table in front of her was a pile of photos of all kinds: landscape, flowers, trees, donkeys, young boys and girls, and women carrying heavy jugs on their heads. She had shown the photos to Father Paul and was waiting for me to see them.
‘Are you a photographer?’ I asked.
‘I did all that with my little Kodak,’ she said, proudly. As if I didn’t believe her, she yanked it out of her bag and held it up. ‘I had a fabulous holiday! If my fiancé would agree, Marrakesh would be the spot for our honeymoon, but he’s allergic to the sun; it makes his skin crack and ooze blood.’
Michelle was a real chatterbox and very bubbly that afternoon. I had left Abdu’s mother and rushed in order not to miss my French lesson. Michelle, however, had come to say goodbye.
‘I won’t be able to see you next Friday, or for the next few weeks. I’ll be busy. Organising my wedding takes all my time. My parents are expecting me on Saturday and my wedding is on Sunday,’ she said.
Father Antoine walked in while she was laughing. ‘Are you inviting Jusef to your wedding?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But, I am inviting him to stay with my parents for two or three weeks. My father will teach him how to make wine. He is the best wine producer in Bordeaux.’
The telephone rang next door, and Father Antoine disappeared. ‘I will give you a lift to Bordeaux if you wish,’ she offered. For me, this was a dream beyond hope, but I didn’t have two coins to rub together. Michelle had provided me with a living window into a sophisticated mind and culture, plus the French language. The end of French lessons meant the end of the vision.
Returning to school, heavy-hearted, I took refuge under a small tree almost my height and waited for the siren to ring. Faissal and Oujdi joined me under the tree. We talked over each other like bees.
A Riffians Tune Page 22