The Lost Letter from Morocco

by Adrienne Chinn

  Addy clutches at the albums as they slide off her lap. ‘I never knew Dad took photos.’

  Philippa leans in for a quick air-kiss. ‘Who knew?’ She grimaces. ‘I hope they don’t charge the estate for the postage from Canada. Those albums weigh a ton. I’ve asked the solicitor to clear the house and sell off the contents.’

  ‘I might have liked to go out to Nanaimo and do that myself. I did grow up in that house.’

  ‘In your condition? Don’t be ridiculous. Trust me, I did you a favour. I’ve asked her to send me anything else she finds of value, though I can’t imagine there’d be much. Once the estate clears his debt, we’ll split anything left. Enough for a meal out at Pizza Hut, if we’re lucky.’

  ‘Were my mother’s or Dad’s Claddagh rings in with the things the solicitor sent? I haven’t seen them in ages.’

  ‘No, I have no idea where those are. But Dad’s pen’s in the envelope.’

  Philippa gives Addy another quick air-kiss then picks her way around the other patients, carefully avoiding the nausea buckets. She raises her hand and wiggles her fingers without looking back.

  Addy unties the string on the manila envelope and shakes out her father’s fat black Montblanc fountain pen with the silver nib. She flips open the faded red cover of the top album and flicks through the stiff cardboard pages. Parisian landmarks, the Coliseum in Rome, a red-sailed dhow bobbing on the water in front of the Hong Kong skyline, the evening sun silhouetting the pyramids. Images displayed like butterflies between cellophane and sticky-backed cardboard pages.

  A white envelope slips out of the album, its flap dog-eared and torn. She reaches into it. More Polaroids tumble from the folds of a sheet of thin blue airmail paper, its two sides covered in her father’s blue-inked scribble.

  She opens the letter:

  3rd March, 1984

  Zitoune, Morocco

  My darling Addy,

  I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. You know how crazy things can be when I’m over in Nigeria. I loved your letter about your initiation week at Concordia, but please tell me that was a purple wig and that you didn’t dye your lovely titian hair. Just like your mother’s.

  Well, I’m not in Nigeria any more. Things are still unsettled here with the politics and all that, and with the glut of oil on the market right now, they terminated my contract early. No need to have a petroleum geologist searching for oil when they have more of it than they can sell!

  The job down in Peru doesn’t start till May, so I’ve headed up to North Africa for a bit before going there. It’s dinosaur land up here, so I thought I’d do a little independent oil prospecting. Remember what I used to tell you when you were little? Where there were dinosaurs, there’s probably oil. I might try to stop by Montréal to see you when I get back before flying back to Nanaimo. Is The Old Dublin still there? They do a cracking pint of Guinness.

  Addy, my darling, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking up here in the mountains. It’s a beautiful place – you must come here one day. I know how much you love the Rockies. There’s something about mountains, isn’t there? Solid and reassuring. A good place to come when life wears you down.

  I know it hasn’t been easy for you since your mother died. You know there was no option but the boarding school, what with me having to travel so much for work. You made a good fist of it, though. Honour student. I never told you how proud you made me. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things … I hope you know how much I love you and your sister.

  There’s something I need to tell you. I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it. I’ve met someone here. Up here in a tiny village in the Moroccan mountains. You know they talk of thunderbolts? It was like that. I can’t explain it. Maybe you’ll feel it yourself one day. I hope you do.

  She’s a lovely young woman from the village. She writes poetry. She has such spirit. She’s only twenty-three, Addy – nineteen years younger. I only hope

  Addy peers into the envelope. Nothing. Where was the rest of the letter? What did her father hope? Who was this woman?

  She looks at the Polaroids fanned out across her lap. The colours faded – the red turning into orange, the purple into pale blue, the green into yellow. The images slowly disappearing into memory. The splayed imprint of the footprint of a large bird in red clay. Something that looks like prehistoric cave carvings. An old man on a bicycle in an ancient clay-walled alleyway. A circular stone opening in a seaside wall. The shadows of a couple silhouetted on a sandy boardwalk – their loose clothing billowing about them, caught by a gust of wind. A woman’s slender brown hands holding an intricately carved wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl veneers.

  Addy holds the photo up and squints at the fading image. The ring on the woman’s left ring finger. Golden hands clasping a crowned sapphire heart. A Claddagh ring. Her mother’s wedding ring. Hazel’s ring.

  One by one, she turns the photographs over. Her father’s handwriting. The blue ink from his fountain pen. Dinosaur footprints, Zitoune, December 1983 – with H and … Addy squints. She can’t make out the other initial. Cave art, near Zitoune, February 1984 – with H; Alley in the Marrakech medina, March 1984 – with H; On the fortifications, Essaouira, April 1984 – with H; Le Corniche boardwalk, Casablanca, May 1984 – with H.

  With H? Who’s H? Is she the woman in the letter?

  Addy shifts in the chair and a final Polaroid slides out of the envelope into her lap. Its corners crushed and bent, the gloss cracking. Her father. In his forties, still fit and handsome, standing in front of a fairy-tale waterfalls. He has an arm around a woman. She’s young, with long black hair falling onto her shoulders. Her skin is a warm brown, her eyes the colour of dark chocolate.

  They’re both smiling. Her father has never looked so happy. But it isn’t his smile that draws her gaze. It’s the round bump straining the fabric of the purple kaftan. Addy turns the photo over. The blue ink. The familiar impatient t’s and g’s. Zitoune waterfalls, Morocco, August 1984 – with Hanane.

  Chapter Two

  Zitoune, Morocco – November 1983

  ‘Higher, Hanane. You can do it.’

  Hanane glances down at the laughing boys, her fine black eyebrows raised in doubt. ‘You think so? It looks a lot higher when you’re up here.’

  ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ Omar grabs a low branch of the olive tree, swinging his lithe body up onto the bough. He jiggles a branch, raining fat black olives over his older brother, Momo, and their friends, Driss and Yassine Lahcen.

  ‘Stop! Stop, Omar!’ Momo yells. ‘They hurt!’

  ‘Don’t whine, Momo,’ Hanane says. ‘Get the basket and fill it up. We don’t want them to go to waste. They’ll make good oil this year.’

  Omar reaches down through the branches. ‘Take my hand, Hanane. I’ll help you.’

  Hanane peers up through the grey-green canopy of the olive leaves. ‘How did you get up there so quickly, Omar? You’re like one of the monkeys by the waterfalls.’

  ‘I’m the best climber in Zitoune, you have to know it.’

  ‘I’m not as small as you. It’s harder for me to squeeze through the branches.’

  ‘Is it true you will be married soon?’ Momo’s best friend, ten-year-old Driss Lahcen, shouts up to her.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I heard your brother talking in the café. He said your father made a deal with your uncle in Ait Bougmez for you to marry your cousin, Mehdi, after Ramadan, and Ramadan finished already.’

  Hanane grimaces and shakes her head, her long black braid swinging across the back of her blue djellaba. She’d never marry fat, ugly Mehdi, no matter what her father and Mohammed said.

  She had a plan. She needed to convince her father to send her to university in Beni Mellal to study as a teacher. The new school rising up on the hill would need teachers. She was lucky that her poor mother had demanded that she learn to read and write at the village school, even though it had meant sitting behind a curtain so as not to distract
the boys.

  It had been wonderful, learning the magic of transcribing her thoughts into words that she’d scribble with her mother’s kohl stick onto the scraps of paper she’d collect from the alleyways and hoard in her cupboard, rolled up in the folds of a hijab. Behind the dirty flowered curtain in the schoolroom, she’d discovered a talent that was hers and hers alone. Poetry. Short, sweet aches of life. The poems sprung from her like water flowing from the fountain of the garden of Paradise.

  Then her mother had died. The baby hadn’t managed more than two days of breath before he’d joined her. Her father had pulled Hanane out of school. A home needed a woman to cook the tagine and wash the clothes, he’d said. Someone needed to feed and care for him and her older brother, Mohammed. Even though she was only twelve. When her father had married the dull girl Hind the following year, nothing changed. Her education was over. But Hanane would escape her duties in the house whenever she could to range around the valleys and fields, helping the shawafa find the plants for her medicines and potions. In the mountains, she was free.

  She was twenty-three now and the world was changing. Even here in the mountains. She’d often pause from washing the clothes in the river to watch a group of giggling white-smocked girls heading up the hill to the old school, their slates and chalk clutched against their chests. And the tourists were coming in from Marrakech more and more often to see the waterfalls. She’d even seen a lady on a motorcycle not three weeks ago! But since her twenty-third birthday in June, all her father and her brother, Mohammed, could talk about was her marriage.

  ‘I’ll never marry Mehdi. Mohammed only says it because his stupid wife, Bouchra, wants her brother here.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon, Hanane,’ seven-year-old Yassine Lahcen protests. ‘We want to go to dance at a wedding.’ Yassine pokes his brother on the arm. ‘Look, Driss.’ He waggles his shoulders and wiggles his hips like he’d seen the women do at Mohammed’s wedding in the summer.

  Driss shoves his brother’s shoulder. ‘What are you, a girl? Stop it. Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being a girl, Driss?’ Hanane calls down from the tree. ‘You wouldn’t be here without your mother. You must be respectful.’

  An oily black olive smacks Driss on his forehead. He peers up into the branches just as Omar launches another one at him, hitting him square on the nose.

  Omar bursts into giggles. ‘It’s raining. It’s pouring. Driss Lahcen is snoring.’

  A deep chuckle wafts over from the river path. A tall, black-haired European man in beige trousers and a navy jumper rolled under his chin stands on the compacted earth, holding an odd black object.

  ‘May I take a picture?’ he asks in accented French.

  ‘Hey, mister,’ Omar shouts from his perch. ‘What’s that thing?’

  ‘It’s a camera. But it’s a special camera. It can make the pictures here, right in front of your eyes.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘Definitely serious.’

  ‘Let him take our picture, Hanane,’ Omar shouts down through the branches. ‘I want to see it come out of the magic box.’

  Hanane sweeps her eyes over the tall man. He’s much older than her brother, Mohammed, but there’s still a youthfulness about him, despite the lines that sweep out from his eyes when he smiles. His skin is very white and even from this distance, his eyes reflect the sharp blue of the November sky. His short, straight black hair shines blue where it’s caught by sunlight. He carries himself with assurance, she thinks, like a man who’s comfortable with his place in the world. What can he think of her, up here in the tree with a boy? What would her father think if he saw her talking to a foreigner?

  ‘I don’t think so, Omar. It’s not proper.’

  Omar breaks into a wide smile. ‘She says it’s fine, mister.’

  ‘Omar!’ Hanane hisses. ‘You’re a bad boy.’

  ‘For sure, I’m a bad boy. Even Jedda says it and she loves me a lot.’

  ‘I don’t believe that at all. Your grandmother thinks you’re the prince of Zitoune.’

  ‘Wait there,’ the man shouts up to them. ‘I’ll take a picture of you two first, just as you are.’

  Hanane bites her lip. Omar kicks her shoulder with his foot.

  ‘Your brother stinks of cumin.’

  She giggles despite herself.

  ‘Perfect.’

  The man presses a button. A whirring sound and a square of shiny grey-and-white card slides out of the camera’s mouth. The boys cluster around as the man waves it in the air.

  Momo wrinkles his nose. ‘It’s smelly.’

  Yassine pinches his nose with his fingers. ‘Like donkey piss.’

  Driss squints at the grey paper. ‘Nothing’s happening.’

  The man laughs. ‘You won’t see it until I peel back this piece of paper. We have to count one minute. Then you’ll see a picture appear’ – he waves his hands like a magician – ‘like magic.’

  Omar scampers down the tree. ‘C’mon, Hanane. Come see the magic picture.’

  Hanane peers through the leaves at the cluster of black heads huddled over the shiny square of card. She’d have to swear the boys to secrecy. Her honey cookies should do the trick.

  ‘Who wants to peel back the plastic to see the picture?’

  Omar shoots his arm into the air. ‘Me! Me, mister!’

  The man laughs and hands over the card. ‘There,’ he says, indicating a loose corner of the grey plastic film. ‘Pull there.’

  The boys huddle closer as Omar peels back the film.

  ‘It’s there!’ Momo shouts. ‘It’s you and Omar in the tree. Hanane, come see.’

  Hanane grabs a branch and shimmies down through the leaves. The man takes the photograph from Omar and holds it in front of Hanane. She’s there, laughing in the tree with Omar, in black-and-white. Like magic.

  ‘Take it. Please. So you’ll always remember your day up in that olive tree.’

  Hanane shakes her head. ‘You are kind, but I couldn’t.’

  Bouchra would be sure to find it, no matter how well she hid it. Only yesterday, Hanane had found her rifling through her scarves. Luckily, she’d hidden her poems in Jedda’s potion shed. If her lazy sister-in-law found the poems or a photo like this, Bouchra would frighten the devil Shaytan Iblis with her curses. Because, of course, Bouchra would betray her secrets, now that she considered herself the mistress of the Demsiri household. Bouchra would do anything to topple Hanane from her place as favourite.

  ‘Well, then, I’ll keep it. As a memento of a happy day.’ The man tucks the glossy photograph in his back pocket and turns to the boys. ‘Now, how about a picture of all of you boys there by the river?’

  Hanane watches the boys jostle for the best place, which is taken, naturally, by Omar.

  ‘I’m Gus Percival,’ he says to her as he squints into the viewfinder. ‘I’m a geologist. I’m staying in Zitoune for a few months doing some research in the area.’ He waves at the boys to squeeze more closely together. ‘Say cheese.’

  Hanane watches the shiny square of paper spew out of the camera’s mouth. The man waves it in the air to dry, out of reach of the excited boys.

  ‘Can I ask your name?’

  Hanane hesitates. Why would he want to know her name? He had no place in her world, nor she in his. But why, then, did she suddenly feel like the earth had tilted and everything she’d known, everything she’d dreamed, had shifted to an unknowable place?

  Omar jumps up and grabs the photograph from Gus’s hand. He peels back the grey film as the others fight to see. ‘Hanane! Come see!’

  ‘Hanane,’ Gus repeats. ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’

  Chapter Three

  Marrakech, Morocco – March 2009

  The reedy whine of the snake charmers’ flutes flutters through the baseline of African drums and the water sellers’ bells as Addy weaves through the crowds in Jemaa el Fna Square. Women with veiled faces sit on stools, bowls of green mud and syringes balanced on th
eir laps. They grab at Addy as she walks past and point to photo albums showing hands and feet covered in intricate henna patterns. A band of boy acrobats in ragged red trousers jumps and tumbles in the square. Addy snaps a string of photos as they leap from one tableau to another. A small boy grins a gap-toothed smile and thrusts a dirty wool cap at her. She digs into her pocket and grabs a handful of change, tossing it into the cap.

  ‘Shukran,’ the boy shouts, then he turns and runs along the line of tourists jangling the coins in his cap.

  Addy wanders into the shaded alleyways of the souks, clicking photos of anything that catches her eye: a green gecko sitting on lettuce in a bamboo cage, antelope horns hanging from an apothecary’s shop front, two men eating snails from steaming bowls by a snail seller’s three-wheeled stand. Overhead, loosely woven bamboo obscures the blue sky, and shards of sunlight slice through the dust and incense that clouds the air.

  Addy jostles against short, stout women in citrus-coloured hooded djellabas and hijab headscarves. Some of the women are veiled, but many of the younger women are bare-headed, with long, glossy black ponytails trailing down into the discarded hoods of their djellabas. There are girls in low-rise skinny jeans, tight, long-sleeved T-shirts with CHANNEL and GUCHI outlined in diamante, their eyes hidden behind fake designer sunglasses studded with more diamante. They totter arm-in-arm down the alleyways in high-heeled sandals, ignoring the catcalls of the boys who buzz through the crowds on their motorbikes. ‘How are you, baby? Come here, darling! I love you!’

  Addy stops in front of a stall selling tote bags and straw bowls. She points to a wide-brimmed hat hanging by a loop from a nail in the wall.

  ‘How much for the hat?’

  ‘You like the hat?’ The shop seller’s lips curl back, exposing large yellow teeth. ‘No problem, mashi mushkil.’ He grabs the hat and presents it to Addy like a crown.