The ground isn’t above or below. It’s in one direction sometimes, then another, depending on the plane’s intentions. Sometimes upright like a wall, sometimes level as if its good sense has come back to it. Sometimes the sky becomes an earth and the earth becomes a sky. Then it seems as if a sudden spring comes over it. A summer follows it more suddenly. The plane wants that. Despite the pilot. The sudden summer comes to the edge of the window, looking over the pilot, and then flees. Its scent stays long enough for the pilot to say: A nice summer’s passed by me alone. The sky lights up little by little. It becomes golden. It ignites more, as if a universal flame is devouring it.
The plane comes back to earth, the sound of the radio having disappeared a while ago. But I haven’t come back with it. Evening’s here but I haven’t returned to earth yet. I still carry the day in my blood. This is its color, and its calm is opening up even the arteries of my heart. Should I land? I wait a little. After a moment, people will be sleeping. Look, they’re getting ready. We’re up above, we’re tending small animals walking on all fours below. After a little, they’ll be sleeping. Lights come on here and there. Dense in one direction and sparse in another, few animals are dreaming of the next day. Their dreams shine interrupted and continue at the same time.
4
Strange ideas are filling my head this morning, since I got to the tower. Since before I got there. My place isn’t here. I try to forget the plane. To forget Captain Hammouda. I leave the tower. I walk on the ground in the airbase. It’s hard to breathe. I approach and touch the surface of the plane. Its touch eases my soul. I go back to the snack bar. I remember the pilots have returned. Mbarek, Qasim, and Siddik. The dizziness of the sky they just returned from envelops them. Its scent and its alchemy envelop them. Unseen envelopments of the sky they returned from laughing shroud them. I alone see it. I hear their happiness and I understand. They drink their beer and tell stories. They wait for me to appear, then drag out their stories longer than necessary.
“What’re you doing, Aziz?”
“You’re good at taking off but not landing?”
“One day, Aziz, you’re going to take off and not come back.”
I cross the snack bar. I don’t turn toward them. I avoid looking over to where they are. I move away from them and their joy. I find myself in the parking lot and I throw myself inside my Simca 1000. I get moving and soon find myself outside the airbase, not knowing where I’m going. I let the car lead me without knowing where it’ll take me. I don’t care. Needing air, I move away from the tower. And from the plane and pilots. I think Captain Hammouda might have come out of his hiding place. After a little, I’ll sense him flying above me. I raise my head but I don’t see him. I hear a sound behind me and I raise my head, believing it’s the plane’s engine. I know the sound of its engine like I know my own voice. But it’s all mixed up. I think its sound might have changed after it moved to another pilot.
I drive aimlessly, at the beginning at least. A few cars pass. I don’t care about them. The sky’s blue and there’s no trace of a plane flying above. Captain Hammouda’s my friend but I think I won’t talk to him after today. I’ll avoid him. When our eyes meet by accident, I’ll pretend like I’m tying my shoes so I don’t have to say hello. As for the colonel, I have to flatter him. Not for much longer, though, because maybe I won’t go back to the base. I don’t have to. I’m still young, twenty-seven. My whole future’s in front of me. What’ll I do in the observation tower at twenty-seven? Watch others fly? Set lanes for them to take off and land? My respect for him has run out. I’ll still flatter the colonel, yes, but as for appreciation and respect, I won’t ever respect him like I used to. Bad thoughts crowd my head. Thoughts that don’t usually come to me as I don’t like to find my head full of them. But despite that, they overwhelm me completely. I open the car windows. A cold, invigorating air hits my face but it doesn’t take away my anxious ideas. I recognize the hills around me and I say to myself: “We’ll cross Wadi Baht now.” After a little, we cross it. I say out loud: “Here we’ve crossed it, the car and me.” If I’d been flying in the plane, I wouldn’t have said something like this. I now say the words of those moving on the ground. Here we’ve crossed the river. At this time of year, it’s calm. It has eaten its share of people and animals and it sits relaxing. After two hours, I recognize the Azrou woods and I know I’m going toward Azrou.
I park the car next to the sidewalk and go into the Stork. The only bar I know. It’s empty at this time of the afternoon. A few customers drink beer and play the horses. Joujou’s playing pinball, hitting the flippers and chewing tobacco. I don’t like this guy. I turn my back on him and share Madame Janeau’s food. Bread, a piece of ham, and olives. Khatima comes in, says hi, and sits near me. Usually she sits far away. Maybe she sits near me to piss off the pimp. I think we’re like each other, Khatima and me. We’re both in a bad mood this morning. Joujou walks by behind us. She doesn’t pay attention to him and he doesn’t pay attention to her. He then goes back to the pinball machine and starts hitting it. Madame Janeau asks me why he’s hitting the pinball machine so hard. Khatima’s the one who responds to her.
The pimp passes behind us shaking his butt, and leaves the bar. I think about my fleeting luck and my situation seems miserable to me. Then I tell myself I’m exaggerating and that my situation isn’t worse than the pimp’s. Afternoon beer is a good thing, and I gulp from the bottle. Madame Janeau puts a beer in front of me and says it’s from Khatima. She smiles at me and I thank her and go back to the anxious thoughts overwhelming me. I only come to when I hear the pimp next to me making threats. I turn toward him, where a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl is sitting. She’s looking around, terrified. My anger at the pimp grows as I see him point at the girl menacingly. Her name’s Zina. I learn her name when I hear him say: “Zina, from this moment, she’ll enter the business.” He then goes back to his table, shaking his butt. I think about the terrified girl, who hasn’t become a woman yet and who looks around with eyes whose clarity makes their terror more intense. Her terrified eyes look at me. She begins crying and the clarity of her eyes disappears. All the anger I accumulated during the day courses through my hand. I knock the pimp to the ground. Unconscious. As if I’d hit him with a bomb. A lot of blood runs from his mouth. And from the back of his head, which hit the corner of the table as he was falling. I take Zina’s hand and the fear disappears from her eyes. Tears disappear but their clarity hasn’t come back yet. I turn toward her and say: “What’re we doing now?” She says: “Let’s play.”
9
Zina
Around 1 a.m.
1
I WAKE UP FROM A nap confused, not knowing how long I was asleep. I look at my watch. It’s a few minutes before one o’clock. There’s complete silence on the bus. I amuse myself with the sound of the engine rumbling through the night. The seat next to me is empty again. The eighty-year-old man who hadn’t found a family to take him didn’t come back. Is he still on the bus or did he get off at the last stop? I try to find a comfortable position to fall asleep again. Clouds gather above us and the moon disappears from the part of the sky above me. Maybe it’s lighting up the other side of the bus. I put my leg on the empty seat, not wondering anymore if there’s a moon or clouds. My stomach feels like there’s a big hole in it. I remember I haven’t eaten anything since lunch with Khatima, and I try in vain to remember what I ate. I remember distant things but I don’t remember what I ate.
The bus finally stops in front of a building whose walls rise up into the darkest part of the night. It looks abandoned, with a thick darkness enveloping the garden in front of it, except for rays of light escaping from the blinds. The travelers protest again and the driver says he’s got to stop to ask about the condition of the river before crossing it. There isn’t anywhere open right now except for this inn, the Chinese man’s inn.
At that moment, the inner door opens and the light escaping from behind it casts thick shadows in the garden. Ther
e appears at the door the shadow of a man waving at us, gesturing that we should enter. He begins yelling not to pass by the pool since it’s empty. At the door, the man welcomes us, saying storms have raged all week, with water flooding them from every side. We might find the road cut off at the bridge. The hall we enter is wide. The window blinds are drawn and the hall is crowded with different kinds of furniture: dilapidated couches, tables with cut-open chairs around them, glass cupboards with reliefs of wooden sailboats and huge oysters on them, mounted boar heads on the wall, datebooks blackened from all the dust covering them, and five big wall clocks, none of them working. Plants hang from the ceiling, many of them, different kinds. It’s as if we’ve entered a kind of bazaar. The man who welcomed us seems a part of the place with his short stature, unshaven face, narrow eyes, and rotten teeth. He might be the Chinese man the driver told us about. He looks like he’s from China. In the hall, he tells us that the day before yesterday, the river waters swept away the body of a man whose family was crossing with him to bury him on the other side and they haven’t found a trace of him. He turns toward the corner where a man and woman are sitting. This man agrees with a shake of his head and the woman next to him laughs. The Chinese man says he’s a judge who knows more about these things than we do. He’s drunk, and so is the woman next to him. There’s a big plate of grilled meat in front of them. The woman is excessively fat and, like a balloon, is sinking into the couch. She’s wearing an embroidered caftan and eating without stopping, laughing in a loud voice at every word coming out of the judge’s mouth and every movement he makes.
The travelers spread themselves out at the tables. I don’t see the old man among them. A woman sitting by herself catches my attention and I sit down at her table. She doesn’t notice me because she’s busy with a small package, untying its knot and taking some chicken and bread out of it. She puts it on the table and breaks her bread into small pieces. She lifts her head and looks at me, smiling as she hands me a piece of bread and pushes chicken in front of me. I remember my mother, because this woman looks like what remains of her in my memory. She has the same excessive beauty, persisting despite the forty years she lived or because of them. Her face is white and round, her skin clear, her eyes big and lined with kohl, and her lips prominent and inviting in a way that stirs inside me a feeling I’m ashamed of. Like a strong, overwhelming desire you don’t know where it comes from.
My mother might have had the same lips. She’d tell Khatima and me she was the most beautiful girl in her village. Her parents forbade her to go out. She stayed forgotten at home until no one remembered her beauty. After that, our father married her. He was, by chance, passing by, not knowing her story.
My confusion hasn’t gone away since I woke up and it increases sharply after sitting at the woman’s table. The painful images she inspires in me. I head to the toilets and wash my hands and face with soap and water. I sit eating, busy with her more than with anything else around me. Her hand nearly touching her face as she devours small pieces of chicken and chews them so slowly you’d think she wasn’t eating. She finishes chewing. She wipes her fingers. Now she’s peeling an orange distractedly. Her fingers are doing the work but her mind is roaming elsewhere. I fix my eyes on her face and my confusion increases. I try to imagine things. Time doesn’t erase beauty like this. It’ll watch over this beauty her entire life. Whenever I look closely, I become more certain she might be my mother’s younger sister, as I don’t know if my mother had a sister or not.
Without thinking, I touch the slip I’m wearing. I find it wet and remember the dream I had during my nap on the bus. Aziz was running in wide, barren land, heading toward the woods after climbing the tall walls of a casbah, fleeing from the cellar where they put him. He hears voices following him. He runs faster. He goes into the woods where I’m hiding behind a tree. I take his hand and open a door for him in the tree. We go into a wide place without a horizon, like a sky, perhaps. We find ourselves naked and sitting on clouds. He looks around him, out of breath, his penis erect like a shaft. I grab hold of his penis and begin playing with it. I massage it with my hand, up and down. I ask him if he likes how I’m playing with it. He closes his eyes and lies down on the cloud. He feels his penis go cold despite his erection, so he apologizes, saying: “It’s the cloud.” I ask him if he wants me to warm it up and I get on top of him and feel his cold penis moving up into me, up to my cervix, as I press down to push him farther inside, then I move up and down more forcefully. He too is moving under me, up and down, and we stay like that, rocking in the cloud as I wonder if I’m awake or asleep. I look at him to know. His eyes are closed and I don’t know if he’s awake and enjoying the moment in his own way or if he’s sleeping. Then suddenly he turns me over on my back and his penis hits against my insides violently, with a delicious savagery, and I grab hold of him and pull him to me roughly as his sweat pours down on my face, like rain, and enters my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. It tastes sweet in my mouth. I feel his semen spray the sides of my vagina mercilessly, like a violent waterfall. I touch the liquid but realize what I’m touching is blood. I wake up confused, and my confusion has stayed with me.
In the tavern’s hall, as I sit in front of the woman with the nice face, going over my dream, I think it’s lucky the woman’s oblivious to me, peeling an orange absentmindedly. Lucky for me they’re all oblivious. The travelers are eating. The judge is getting drunk with the fat woman, who’s laughing as she devours the grilled meat. The Chinese man’s moving between the tables, putting down plates and picking up others.
This idea occurs to me: Is she going to the casbah too?
I ask where she’s going and she asks me the same thing. I then ask her if she knows the casbah where I’m heading and I tell her my story, of our marriage, Aziz and me, and his disappearance and the years I’ve spent looking for him. It’s as if I’m seeking her affection. Quickly, I ask God to let her stay with me. (Other unhealthy ideas occur to me. I hope, for example, that the trip will last longer than the hours that are left. I hope I’ll put my hand on hers and keep holding it for the entire trip.)
On the bus, we sit pressed against the other to the right of the driver. Her shoulder against mine. I feel her warmth piercing my body like a delicious current making my saliva flow. She asks me if I have kids. “No,” I tell her, taking the opportunity to turn and look at her face.
She’s understood my bodily curiosity and maybe my exposed ideas so I tell her she reminds me of my mother and that she resembles her a lot. I tell her my mother was beautiful. She says she has eleven kids. That she used to be beautiful. The most beautiful girl in her village and in all the villages, near and far. Except for her beauty, there was nothing else to attract men. Young men went to great lengths to get engaged to her. They’d shoot at each other with rifles for her. There was the one who divorced his wife for her, the one who swore he’d renounce marriage if it wasn’t with her, and the one who killed his neighbor, his friend. Before she got married to the man who’d be the father of her eleven children—he was a poor famer who could barely earn his daily bread—a hashish trafficker won her. On the day of the betrothal, he came in a white Mercedes, bringing with him polished words and a procession of luxury cars and carts carrying all sorts of gifts. Immediately after the marriage, in order to take revenge against her beauty, he started staying up all night with his girlfriends in their bedroom. Then he abandoned her and left her for years, neither married nor divorced. And if it hadn’t been for people intervening to help her get a divorce, she would have remained like that.
Once again, the dream I had comes over me. I try to forget it but whenever I try, I remember its details and I feel more embarrassed. Do I remember the number of times we slept together, me and Aziz? Five? Six? Was it with the excitement and desire and harshness of the dream? I’ve had this dream a number of times before. Almost the same dream, and whenever I wake up from it, I shed blood. Thankfully for me, this didn’t happen in the tavern hall or now, on the bus, a
s I cling to the beautiful woman.
2—Spring of 1972
I like being happy. I’ve never been happy like I am now. Sitting in the airbase, in the pilots’ café, looking at Aziz. It’s the fourth time we’ve met here. I look at the pilots coming and going in their blue uniforms, talking with nonchalant liveliness. Coming and going, as at home. Aziz isn’t coming or going because he’s sitting with me. He looks at the plane that’s not there. The plane took off a while ago but his eyes are stuck on its spot, on the ground, behind the glass façade, near the storehouses. Under the ashen sky. His presence next to me is like calm music warming my heart. It’s been two months since we met at Stork Bar. I think about him all the time. Night and day. Aziz is looking in the same direction. His mind is busy with the plane. I think he’s waiting for his turn to fly. He didn’t say it directly. He told me: “When I fly, I can’t land anymore.” He said it in front of the pilots, who laughed a lot. I laughed too.
A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me Page 8