Abdellatif Laabi

The Bottom of the Jar

1

I WAS IN Fez when the fall of the Berlin Wall was announced. That morning, the family had come together at my father’s house, and the television was already on. But no one around me was interested in those historical images scrolling past on the screen.

If Europeans are obsessed with background music, Moroccans have invented the background image, and without skimping on decibels either. In our home, clamor and din seemed to be inextricably mixed with our joy at coming together as a family.

Oblivious to these events that were convulsing the world, our little tribe was focused on a far more pressing topic: the inexplicable and continuing absence of my older brother. Over the years, Si Mohammed had become a subject of controversy.

He had wanted to be admired ever since he had come into this world. At seventeen, after a brilliant career as a student, he took a position in the civil service. Then he got mixed up with the colonial authorities. Here, ideas began to differ. After his nuptials and ill-starred wedding night, all sorts of trials ensued — a divorce, another marriage, more trouble with the authorities (this time with the newly independent Moroccan administration) — all of which were perceived as being the outward manifestations of an intemperate personality, against which one had to guard oneself. Whatever evils my brother endured, he paid in kind with an incredible indifference toward our family affairs.

I should say that I was no stranger to the direction the conversation had taken. After the rosaries and jeremiads over issues of health, talk began to falter, when — the devil take me — I let slip the following question: “Any news of Si Mohammed?”

My little niece, malicious and as cute as one could wish for, replied tit for tat by repeating the refrain of a then-fashionable song: “No letters or phone calls!”

“You and your itchy tongue,” her mother reprimanded her. “One ought to rub your lips with paprika. Shut up when your elders are speaking, you little devil!”

My sister Zhor, who was wisdom personified, breathed out a sorrowful sigh and served up one of her ditties: “What can one do? So goes the world.”

My brother Abdel, usually quite reserved, got heated up and passed the following sentence: “His heart is dead!”

“Come now, come now,” soothed my younger sister, Hayat. “He too has his problems. The poor thing, his health has abandoned him. And things are not well with his new wife. There is no peace in life.”

Such self-indulgent talk didn’t please my sister-in-law, who possessed a remarkable vitality and was known for her clear-cut opinions.

“Who doesn’t have any problems? Come on! It has been years since he’s come to visit Sidi,” which is what she called my father. “Even dogs don’t forget their parents.”

My father, whose health and sight were failing, but not his hearing — let alone his conciliatory ways — let out a thin trickle of words: “Nobody wants to be feather-brained. May God endow him with wisdom and guide him onto the right path. I love every one of my children, and he is no exception.”

The silence we kept so that my father’s blessing could enter our bodies, and which hovered above our heads like a protective cloud, allowed me to lift my eyes toward the wall where a portrait of Si Mohammed was hung. His face is as vivid now as it was forty years ago.

In my mind, Si Mohammed was more or less exactly as the painter had depicted him. This painter, whose studio was deep in the heart of the Medina, never used models, preferring to work from a single photograph, usually that on the subject’s ID card. The greater care he put into correcting nature’s discrepancies, doing his subjects more justice than had otherwise been allotted to them, the more his art was appreciated. One could say that he had the foresight to realize plastic surgery could be achieved in more ways than one. In this way, Si Mohammed’s premature baldness was advantageously corrected. The few surviving stray hairs on his high forehead were replaced by a wavy tuft. Suddenly, his once prominent nose was chiseled down, refined. His bulging eyes were tucked neatly into their orbits. His lips seemed to grow more delicate. Only his chin had for some reason been reproduced with a degree of realism. All in all, the portrait managed to be both frumpish and alive. That’s what it takes for images to move up the incoherent ascent of time.

I AM SEVEN years old, maybe eight. Fez. In the district called Spring of Horses, the house where I was born. An Egyptian. This is what we called the little houses that flanked the vast mansions of the wealthy. The houses each had their own independent entrances that were accessed via a ladder. This layout assured a certain sense of discretion fit for a bachelor’s pad, which the owners could either rent out to poorer families or else keep in their possession, where they could organize soirées where the devil would be far from being stoned.

Ten of us would crowd into our Egyptian, and I believe I can say we were happy.

Si Mohammed burst on the scene, an old illustrated Larousse in his hands. He would pace arrhythmically around the patio, reading out the definitions of words. “Avanie: to give offense, to humiliate. Avarie: of Arabic origins. Damage done to a ship or the goods being transported on it. Avatar: metamorphosis, transformation. .”

My recollections do not extend beyond the letter A. But I know that Si Mohammed had put it into his head to learn all of the difficult words in his dictionary by heart — and in alphabetical order. I was in awe.

CROSS-FADE. Two years later. Si Mohammed has picked up his high-school diploma and has been awarded a medal by the Alliance Française for the high standard of his essays, where he’d let drop a quote from Marshal Lyautey’s book Paroles d’action. Haloed by scholastic distinctions, he passed his civil service examination and became an operating officer for the postal and telecommunications services. Following which he was posted to Tiznit, in the deep south of the country. This was the time of the “troubles” in Morocco. Resident-General Guillaume had threatened to make every Moroccan who opposed the protectorate eat straw — and a plot had been hatched to conspire against the sultan of the country, Mohammed ben Youssef, to overthrow him.

The new grave. My mother had come back to the house. She had brought a bag of walnuts. Ecstatic, my sister Hayat and I rushed to find a hammer with which we could open the nuts, when a cry burst forth from my mother: “My son, my son, my son!”

We turned around and, bewilderingly, my mother, who had not yet extricated herself from her djellaba, threw the bag of coveted nuts to the floor. Like a full handful of marbles, the nuts scattered across the patio. With this spectacle, my mother became more vociferous.

“My son, my son, my son!”

Indifferent to her cries, we had eyes for nothing but the nuts that continued to disperse; I threw myself to gather one that was rolling dangerously toward the ladder when a slap stopped me dead in my tracks.

“That’ll teach you, you sinner!” said my mother. “Your soul is in your stomach. You can’t spare a thought for your older brother, who’s rotting away in a prison at the end of the world.”

“What, what, what?” asked my sister Zhor, who emerged from the little storeroom that served as our kitchen, her stubby hands in the air, covered with the dough she had been kneading.

Contemptuous of her question, my mother fell on a mattress, took her scarf from her head, and started to strike the floor with her fists, uttering a mantra that gave me goose bumps:

My son, my son, my son

My little angel

Lost in the forgotten corners of the planet

Thrown down a bottomless well

In cold and nakedness

By the enemies of God

My son, my little angel

Apple of my eye

And no one can hear you

No one can come to your aid

In the desert and desolation

But God is everywhere

Who sees the black ant

In the blackest night

God is generous

And takes no pity on miscreants

Be damned, Nazarenes

Sons of dogs

Drinkers of alcohol

Eaters of pork

And of frogs

And long live the King

And Allal al-Fassi!

The house had meanwhile filled with a crowd as women and children had one by one come from neighboring terraces, having learned of the situation either from the cries or from the news bulletin issued by Radio Medina, a highly efficient mouth-to-ear station, completely independent of electromagnetic waves.

Instead of comforting my mother, who had begun to beat her thighs and tear at her cheeks, the neighborhood gossips threw fuel on the fire.

“Yes, Lalla,” said one of them, “the Nazarenes have become Pharaohs. No pity or mercy.”

“May the black typhus obliterate them and cast them into hell,” added another.

“May their children be cursed,” said a third.

“Poor Si Mohammed,” continued a fourth, who was more conservative, or at least less of a nationalist. “He didn’t deserve this fate.”

“A fawn,” concluded a fifth, “and so gentle. Incapable of upsetting a hen incubating her eggs.”

Was I insensitive, or oblivious, or simply overpowered by the strength of my own gluttony natural to that age when sweets are in view? The fact remains, I took advantage of the situation to gather those walnuts with care and put them back in their place, after having subtracted two of them by slipping them into my pocket.

At that moment we heard knocking on the door. It was my father’s apprentice who had been sent as a messenger. He emerged breathless at the top of the ladder and, mustering up a virile tone, addressed the female crowd: “Make way! The men have arrived.”

The busybodies, dragging their brats away, headed for the ladder that led to the terrace. My mother, having magically recovered from her outburst, replaced her scarf around her head and took refuge in the children’s room.

“Ahem!” was heard at the foot of the ladder. “Has everyone gone?”

I recognized my father’s voice. He soon appeared, followed by my uncle and an assembly of artisans, members of the guild of saddlers. Also present were the barber-circumciser and the master tanner, a strong-arm man, fireman, and the occasional removal man.

The discussion had already begun. My uncle, who was very much listened to because he was the eldest, had attended my brother’s preliminary hearing.

“How did you find out?” my father asked him.

“It was the policeman from the Nejjarine precinct who came to tell me. That one there, God keep us from him, only delivers bad news.”

“And Si Mohammed, what did he do exactly?”

“You know he’s a firebrand. How many times did we warn him? He was at the counter at the post office and got into an argument with a French lieutenant. The guy insulted him and the boy found no better solution than to punch him in the face.”

“And then?”

“After that, Si Mohammed took off. He went to the palace of the sultan’s caliph in Tiznit and asked for sanctuary. They shut the door in his face and the gendarmes came to arrest him. They beat him and threw him in jail. Something stinks here,” my uncle surmised.

“It really stinks,” echoed the master tanner.

“What to do?” asked the barber-circumciser. “One does not joke with the makhzan.”

“The makhzan has nothing to do with it. We will have to make recourse to the protectorate’s authorities. These are matters that can only be fixed at the highest of levels, at the resident-general.”

My father, taken aback by this analysis, replied submissively, “Whatever you say we will do.”

The plan of action was thus decided. My uncle laid out the groundwork by recalling a few aphorisms: “Lust is an epidemic. Wax a piece of thread and it will pass better. If you hate, pretend to love. You must kiss the hand that you cannot cut off.” Then, returning to more mundane matters, he proposed: “The Nazarenes are like everyone else. Greed leaves them defenseless. This is what we will do. Tomorrow I will make all the necessary inquiries. In the meantime, you go to the Kissarya souk and buy two golden belts. We’ll offer the first of these to the local military commander. The second must be of a higher caliber: We’ll go to Rabat and present it to the wife of the resident-general. And God will come to our aid.”

“God will come to our aid,” the assembly said as one.

“And now, the Fatiha,” my uncle concluded.

Everyone present opened their palms and struck up a chorus: “In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful. . It is You whom we worship and You whom we implore to help us. Direct us onto the right path: the path of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace, not that of those who have earned Your wrath, nor that of those who have lost their way.”

“Amen!”

“Amen!”

THE AFFAIR WAS thus put right along the lines envisioned by my uncle. The local military commander had “eaten” and facilitated a meeting with the resident-general, who had then “eaten” in his turn. Two weeks later, Si Mohammed was not only freed but also transferred to Fez, and more specifically to the post office in Batha Square, the most spruced-up one in town. There was, however, a flip side to the story. In order to buy the golden belts, my father, a modest artisan, had to sell the few trinkets of value my mother possessed and dip into my sister Zhor’s dowry — who, barely of marriageable age, had already been promised. Above all, he had to borrow the largest part of the sum from one of the more well-off members of his guild, who left him no other choice but to reimburse in kind with his labor. He had to slave away for this man for an entire year, without of course neglecting his ordinary duties.

Driss, which was my father’s name, was a saint. It took me some time to understand this.

THE PORTRAIT OF Si Mohammed again took its place on the wall. And by looking at it with eyes that had revisited the past, I rediscovered him with a half smile. Under the portrait, my father had fallen asleep. The conversation hadn’t stopped. I heard snatches of the conversation. Other images of Berlin in celebration continued to scroll by on the screen. But I had stalled. The sound and fury of the world was now receding and was slowly being put out. Another screen was superimposed on that of the cathode tube. The hand of the one who watches over the genesis of narratives has stripped away all colors. What follows will as a consequence be in black and white.

2

BEFORE SI MOHAMMED’s return from Tiznit, my mother had decided the time had come for him to fulfill his religious duties and become acquainted with marriage. For this woman, who was far from bigoted, this pious concern was an analysis that was not devoid of its psychological merits. Getting married, and taking up the responsibilities that came with it, was sure to act as a positive sort of therapy, calming the jinn that had taken hold of her mind, obsessed as it was with the thought of children. On the matter of jinn, she had moreover taken the initiative. A faqih^1 from the mellah,2 who was renowned for his abilities, notably that of freezing water inside bottles, had furnished my mother with the appropriate amulet.

“With this amulet,” he explained, “the evil spirits can either play hopscotch, play the fool, or else go packing. It’s an expensive piece of metallurgy, a viper-eating wild cat, a seven-bladed sword. May it never leave your son’s neck, not even in the hammam. Go now, Lalla, you won’t regret it.”

But my mother never left things half finished. Many other elements had to come together for her ceremony to go off without a hitch. She thus went to call on an herbalist-apothecary at the Achabine souk, who brewed up the concoction recommended for such cases. Let’s examine the contents of that concoction. It was not for the faint of heart. Regardless, on the eve of Si Mohammed’s return, my mother burned the whole lot in a brazier that she schlepped around the house, going into every nook and cranny. The cloud of acrid smoke that emanated from the brazier was meant to chase all the jinn away, including those who were underground and even those who lurked in the waste pipes and sewers. As for me, who had often been treated for jinn by my mother, I legged it out of there and sought refuge on the terrace, not, I’ll assure you, because I was afraid but to get away from the suffocating smoke.

As for the wedding, Ghita — it is time to call my mother by her name — began inspecting all potential candidates, turning her thoughts first to the young girls of our clan. Those whom nature hadn’t endowed with her gifts, and whose appearance, according to her, “frightened the sparrows,” were rejected out of hand. My mother’s taste was quite clear when it concerned a woman’s beauty, and she voiced it in a truly macho way.

My uncle’s eldest daughter was promptly rejected because her breasts were no bigger than apricots.

The same uncle’s youngest daughter was likewise bluntly dismissed as flawed because she was slightly cross-eyed and — shame of shames — her hands were shaped like paddles.

My aunt’s daughter was to prove a dilemma for Ghita, who got excited by her long, silky black hair, whose braids bounced off her buttocks. Her mouth, which was delicately rounded, as well as a little fleshy, was another plus. Her large eyes, whose circumference achieved that of a crystal chalice, very nearly swayed the vote in her favor. But there was a snag. This young Amazon, in the frenzy of her emancipation, rode a moped to run her errands and to go to school. And Ghita, who was anything but prudish, concluded that, with all that coming and going and the repeated friction caused by the saddle, the girl must no longer be a virgin, and that if irreparable damage had not yet occurred, her poor privates must therefore be quite stiff. So she too was rejected.

Only the daughter of Ghita’s stepsister was left. In her case, criteria other than beauty were considered. The young girl may well have had a bamboo-like figure, eyes so blue as to make even the most pious of imams mad with desire, and a stream of gold doubloons instead of hair, but it was all to no avail. Forgetting family ties and her own social standing, Ghita deemed the girl a bad match because her mother was a divorcée and, what was more, was living hand-to-mouth. I was taken aback by my mother contradicting herself here — she who in similar circumstances was fond of quoting the old adage: One poor person married another, and in doing so bothered everyone.

Long story short, it turned out the family was not fertile ground. Other fields needed to be cultivated, and my mother resigned herself to exogamy. And Ghita was not afraid of hard work. Inquiring among her neighbors, she undertook a vast search, and while waiting to hear the results, recruited the local hammam’s masseuses to her cause, promising them a handsome reward. They had to keep their eyes peeled for a flawless beauty (it was difficult to hide one’s flaws in the hammam). To them was entrusted the task of vetting candidates for bandy or hairy legs, any signs of lameness, plumpness, verrucas, dubious blemishes — all the way up to halitosis. And if the chosen one was devoid of these monstrosities, great care needed to be taken over the immaculate whiteness of her skin, the fullness of her buttocks, the shapeliness of her breasts, the straightness and smallness of her nose, the shininess of her teeth, and even the tone of her voice, which should not be husky, or overly virile (or not virile enough), with not so much as a trace of a country bumpkin’s accent.

This vast search, which was worthy of the finest sleuths, did not tarry in producing the longed-for result. Ghita set her heart on the eldest daughter of a sharif family, whose genealogical tree testified to their direct descent from the Prophet, peace be upon him. If only because of this distinction, the family was above all suspicion, and an alliance with them would be a blessing for ours, which was admittedly of common origins. Furthermore, according to my mother’s informants, she whom we would later have to call Lalla Zineb, as a sign of respect of her noble ancestry, gave assurances as to the flawlessness of her daughter’s physique, which met all the criteria. But Ghita was not the sort of woman who would make up her mind on the basis of an unconfirmed report. She practiced methodological skepticism. Hence she took steps to hire an emissary, tradition demanding that a visit by the suitor’s mother should be arranged by a professional matchmaker. The woman arrived unexpectedly, armed with a beautiful crystal vase, in which she had placed a bouquet of artificial flowers. Apparently her role was to make the marriage proposal and to fix a date for the visit. She took advantage of the situation, however, to surprise the family in the midst of their daily life so as to better spot any anomalies: poor housekeeping, sloppy appearances, questionable odors emanating from the kitchen, strained relations with the neighbors, or even worse, the unjustified absence of the girl in question at the moment of the intrusion.

The test was clearly passed since, three days later, Ghita presented herself in person.

GO FIGURE IF I was there or not. In theory, at that age I was able to take part in strictly female gatherings, whereas my eldest sister was already beginning to face difficulties in having me admitted to the hammam.

“Have a good look at him,” she had insisted to the lady in charge of the hammam on one of our last visits. “He still has his mother’s milk stuck between his teeth. Poor little thing, he’s barely started going to school.”

And just to prove her point, she didn’t hesitate to lower my trousers and exhibit my willy, and with an offended air exclaimed, “Have a look for yourself, there isn’t the slightest trace of hair on his little cockatoo!”

“All right, that’s enough for this time,” the proprietor conceded, visibly amused by the display.

Anyway, present or not at the interview, the sights and sounds are all there, regardless of whether I heard or saw them.

YOO-HOOS ACCOMPANIED my mother as she entered the house. After the initial hugging and kissing, she removed her veil, took a deep breath, and throwing convention to the wind declared, “They are killing us with this veil. They don’t leave us women a moment of respite, whether in or outside the house. May God help us!”

A little disconcerted by that speech, Lalla Zineb’s mother agreed out of politeness.

“Yes, Lalla, you are right. But what can we do?”

On that note, Ghita sat down in the place of honor in the middle of the couch. As soon as she sat down, she started casually feeling the brocade that covered the mattress. Her hand lingered on the material and prodded it in order to test the thickness of the wool and to flush out the likely presence of the harami, the mongrel. This was the name given to the layer of leaf fiber that families of modest means placed inside the mattresses to cheaply augment their thickness. Having encountered nothing but smoothness, with a knowing blink of her eyes, Ghita expressed her satisfaction.

The conversation began with a formal exchange of information, each party having conveyed the questions they wanted answered in great detail beforehand. Nevertheless, the official answers were no less intriguing. Accordingly, Ghita glibly maintained that our family — on my father’s side — was also related to the Prophet. That we were descended from the sharif of Jbel el Alam, whose shrine was still venerated in the country of the Beni Arouss. Whereas her family was originally from Andalusia, which I can confirm, and still possessed the key to the house where they had lived before the Muslims were expelled from that land, which rightfully belonged to Islam. In her version of the story, my father, a humble artisan in the Sekkatine souk, had been promoted to the status of a merchant, whom God had showered His blessings on. If this was the case, why did he not then enjoy the title of haji? The reply was simply: Health problems had prevented him from making the pilgrimage to Mecca the year before. But he will do so next year, inshallah!

Having finally arrived to the topic of my brother, Ghita rose to the art of the panegyric. From a mere office clerk, he had become a high-level manager of the Department of Postal Services and Telecommunications. There wasn’t a letter — or especially a money order — that reached its destination without first passing through his hands. It was he who was in charge of the teeleephoone. With expert knowledge of French and a handful of English words, he was presented as a polyglot genius who spoke a balbal of seven languages fluently. To conclude, Ghita began to list his more conventional qualities: He lacked nothing, neither respectability, nor youth, nor beauty. Nor kindness for that matter, nor reserve, respect for his parents, and faith in God. While reciting his praises, she curiously omitted his time in prison. Clueless about politics, she must have assumed that prison was just prison, and that it was nothing to brag about. And, as if chasing that unpleasant memory from her mind, she threw herself into lyricism: “The light shines on his face. May God keep him — and your daughter too — from the evil eye.”

Having thus cleverly engineered a transition in the conversation, she asked point-blank, “By the way, where is the little darling?”

“She’s coming,” her mother replied. “We are going to drink some tea that she herself has prepared — you’ll see, whatever she touches, turns to gold.”

As if she had been waiting for just that signal, Lalla Zineb appeared, carrying a tray of tea that she placed at her mother’s feet before taking a seat in front of my mother. Ghita’s eyes lit up, scrutinizing her from top to bottom and back again. A strange smile formed on her lips, the very same expression I had often seen adults make when a pretty woman passes them in the street.

The tea had barely been poured when Ghita took the initiative.

“Why, I’ve forgotten something — may death forget us — I’ve brought some walnuts, and some dates — may our days be as sweet as they are.”

And hoping to gain the upper hand in her future relationship with her daughter-in-law, she turned directly to Lalla Zineb.

“Go and put them on a plate, my daughter.”

The young girl did as she was told. A moment later, she had meticulously arranged the fruits and nuts on a plate of china, decorated in the taous style and adorned with a peacock. Encouraged to help herself, Ghita disdained the sweetness of the dates and instead chose a large nut, which she held out to Lalla Zineb.

“Would you open it for me, my darling? I have no teeth left to speak of, while yours — thanks be to God — should be intact.”

Faced with such an unseemly question, Lalla Zineb seemed to hesitate. Aware of this subterfuge — the “nut test” being a means by which the health of her teeth could be judged — Lalla Zineb’s mother encouraged her daughter with an air of amusement.

“Go on, my daughter, don’t disappoint our guest.”

Lalla Zineb once again carried out the instructions. The test proved conclusive. Ghita was delighted and was already half listening to the mistress of the house as she began to soliloquize.

“Now where was I? Ah yes, my daughter has had to stop her studies. There are far too many ruffians on the way to her college. Fez is no longer what it used to be. The country bumpkins have taken over. And with everything that’s going on at the moment, the military strut around thinking they can do as they like. Oh yes, it’s just like in the fourteenth century, there’s no peace to be had, no sleep either. Therefore her grandfather decided that the girl should stay at home since, you see, he is the one who makes all the decisions in this family.”

Put on her guard by that last detail, in which she detected a trace of hesitation, Ghita went on the offensive.

“Let’s be clear, Lalla, we need to make haste. We want Lalla Zineb to take her place in her new home before the end of the summer, in time for when Si Mohammed will be on leave.”

“We will do everything in our power to put you at your ease,” replied the girl’s mother, ever the diplomat.

Satisfied with having scored a point, Ghita had in the meanwhile come up with a second test. Rummaging in the pocket of her djellaba, she pulled out a scarf that she had prepared beforehand, having knotted it into a sort of ball, and without any warning, she threw it with a disconcerting precision toward Lalla Zineb’s belly. Comfortably seated on the mattress, the girl reacted swiftly and intercepted the ball by clasping it between her thighs with a goalkeeper’s dexterity.

These fine-tuned reflexes were a source of true relief for Ghita. Had the young girl opened her thighs while catching the ball, it would have signified a moral laxness. But her reactions had proved that she knew how to defend her honor.

“Come, my daughter, let me embrace you,” my mother said, thereby bringing her visit to an end.

Visibly satisfied, she got up and adjusted her veil, ranting once more against this constraint on her freedom.

“Couldn’t they have found anything better to stick to our faces than this rag? What is it with our faces? Leprosy maybe? Fine, I’ll leave you to it now.”

Ghita thought she had carried out her mission brilliantly. Now it was time for the men to take over.

3

THE PREPARATIONS FOR Si Mohammed’s wedding had coincided with particularly gloomy events in the history of the country.

The situation was serious. The conspiracy instigated by the French authorities with the complicity of the pasha Thami el-Glaoui and the traitor theologian Abdelhaï Kettani had succeeded. Mohammed ben Youssef had been deposed and forced into exile, first in Corsica and then in Madagascar. Mohammed ben Aarafa, an obscure and obedient member of the royal family, had been proclaimed sultan in his stead.

A mourning veil had descended upon our city. The wedding celebrations of Si Mohammed and Lalla Zineb took place without any fanfare. There were no orchestras playing Andalusian music nor taqtouqas by Jabaliyya musicians. The ceremony took place according to the strict regulations announced by Radio Medina, which had increasingly fallen under the control of militant nationalists who hadn’t contented themselves with the usual channels. A week before the happy event was to occur, someone slid a note written on a piece of blue paper — the sort used to wrap sugarloaf — under our door. It spelled out the threats of reprisals we would incur if we allowed ourselves to get carried away by the festivities. By way of signature, the paper was stamped with a crude bloodstain, which no doubt came from the fresh spleen of a calf or a sheep.

The message was not to the family’s taste, since they saw no need to have to prove their nationalist credentials. Ghita commented on this threat by opportunely emphasizing her son’s act of resistance, bizarrely adopting the royal “we.”

“We who were locked up in prison while others stood by and watched like spectators. And now that we want to celebrate our eldest, they want us to hire mourners.”

“Accursed Satan,” my father said, “these things are no laughing matter. We need to keep our heads down and not draw attention to ourselves.”

“In any case,” Ghita retorted, “no one is going to stop me from howling and dancing as much as I want.”

“Well then — go ahead and dance, why not, go out naked into the street if you must. After all, women aren’t held accountable.”

“As if you men were lions! If that had been the case, the sultan would still be sitting on his throne.”

Having no gift for debate — especially when it involved Ghita — Driss defused the situation, drawing from his sacred well of wisdom.

“Remember, woman, out of adversity comes ease.”

“May it please God,” Ghita concluded, skeptically.

THE IMPENDING MARRIAGE had prompted us to move to another house. As tradition demanded, when the couple came to live with us, they needed two rooms for their exclusive use: one for their sleeping quarters and the other for use as a drawing room. We therefore needed to leave our little house in the Spring of Horses and rent the ground floor of a large riad in the Siaj neighborhood. The first floor, which gave directly into our courtyard, was occupied by a discreet couple, who were — astonishingly — childless.

At first Ghita had resisted the idea of such a lack of privacy, which she deemed inconvenient.

“What sort of house is it that lets strangers hover over our heads all the time? Without even being able to move about as and when we please!”

Her feelings changed, however, as soon as she paid a visit to our new lodgings. She discovered the charms of these homes, built in the ancient style, where the artisans hadn’t skimped on the mosaics, the stuccos, the engraved woodwork, the painted panelings; where the high-ceilinged rooms were spacious and whose fountains, decorated with the utmost care, allowed a murmuring trick of water to escape from their leather spouts; where provisions had been made for a real kitchen, despite the fact it was dimly lit; and where there was a vast open-air courtyard in which one might find some fresh air and respite from the heat waves.

“It’s true,” she admitted, “the house is beautiful for those who have the time to while away on beauty. But it’s another matter for those who have to spend the whole day sweeping, scrubbing, kneading dough, cooking, and feeding hungry mouths. The courtyard is so huge you could gallop horses around it. An entire morning wouldn’t suffice to clean it. And the rafters are so high we’ll need to tie two ceiling brushes together to get at the cobwebs. But there we have it, what’s done is done.”

The house was readied for our move. Plasterers were called in to freshen up the walls. For the cleaning, Driss called on one of his friends, a tanner, who enlisted the help of a couple of colleagues. In no time, the three strapping lads, armed with leather-rimmed wooden buckets, had washed the house from top to bottom. Driss further ensured that the men took particular care with the courtyard, just so Ghita would find no cause for complaint.

AFTER HAVING MANAGED our own move, we looked forward impatiently to installing the furniture and personal effects belonging to Lalla Zineb, which should have been on par with the dowry that Si Mohammed had paid in hard cash, an amount that Ghita had deemed extravagant once the sum had been disclosed.

“They want to strip us to the bone and reduce us to beggary!” she’d exclaimed. “Curse them, as if we were marrying the sultan’s daughter! She’s made of flesh and blood, not gold after all. She acts like her shit doesn’t stink.”

Yet as soon as Lalla Zineb’s belongings arrived and were unpacked and set up in her rooms, Ghita had to admit that the money spent hadn’t been thrown out the window. Lalla Zineb’s family had at least matched the money we had spent to furnish the new lodgings. The traditional mattress for the living room as well as the “arm and back” cushions — according to Ghita — were filled almost to bursting with wool, and the brocade that covered them was in the latest fashion. My father, who knew his fabrics, reckoned they were from Loondoon, as in Britain. The benches were simply marvelous. They were exquisitely sculpted, and the delicate layer of varnish that had been applied to them wasn’t lost on Driss, who knew how to spot fine workmanship when he saw it, and noted: “These are craftsmen who really know what they’re doing. There’s no doubt as to the quality of the merchandise.”

And what could one say about the fittings, the red-and-green velvet wall hangings that few families could afford to own outright and therefore contented themselves with borrowing them for special occasions, the hand-embroidered curtains, the machine-woven carpets covered with a transparent protective plastic coating?

Praise and admiration soon gave way to amazement when it came to inspecting the bedroom. The bride’s father, a cabinetmaker by trade, had outdone himself. The furniture was all European, which was one way of saying it was modern. There, our eyes fell on something unique: a wooden wardrobe with a lacquer finish and a huge mirror set in its middle. Ghita, who applied her makeup using nothing but a small, round looking glass the size of a douro, couldn’t resist the temptation of immediately rushing toward it to gaze at her reflection, at which point she burst out in a guffaw. Each time she laughed, she instinctively raised her hand to her mouth, as if to hide — or so I assumed — her rows of golden teeth. Visibly disappointed, she shrank away, remarking, “There’s not much worth looking at in that face. Oh fair days of my youth, where have you gone?”

We remained spellbound as we discovered the other pieces of furniture: a chest of drawers that matched the wardrobe, and above all a peculiar sort of bed, which was far lower than the four-poster beds we were used to. It was “naked,” and the headboard and legs were made of lacquered wood. Highly innovative, it was flanked by a pair of nightstands, the purpose of which eluded us, and on each nightstand was a lamp, whose shade diffused a warm, wan light. This novelty left us flabbergasted since, when it came to lights, we were used to the sixty-watt bulbs that hung starkly from the ceiling, and did not figure out until much later in life how to hook up the green or red little nightlights by tying the wire around a nail. There were two finely wrought chairs situated in front of the bed. Even though we were not oblivious to their purpose, we did not find those chairs alluring and deemed them particularly uncomfortable. On this subject, we would always poke fun at the outsiders who came to the house. Perched on those chairs, the poor things had no idea of the delights prompted by their choice of seat. Sharing our opinion on the matter, Ghita summed up the oddity of the situation fairly well.

“Just who are those chairs meant for?” she observed. “Spectators? It seems like a crazy extravagance to me. .”

All in all, though everyone agreed that our family had made an advantageous and above all honorable match, our satisfaction came part and parcel with a certain apprehensiveness: Didn’t this flood of novelties betray a weakness on the bride’s part for liberties incongruous with our traditional way of life? We prayed for God’s protection from the devil’s works. .

4

THE WEDDING NIGHT finally arrived.

Nothing will be gleaned here about the unfolding of the wedding ceremony and its various protocols. There are plenty of films for that, as they say, full of colorful descriptions left behind by colonial authors of the old guard, not to mention by the nationalists that followed in their wake, who while sharing their prejudices were perhaps even less talented.

We will therefore elide the following details.

On the bride’s side:

the scene involving the ritual waxing and grooming

the henna ceremony: its application and removal

descriptions of the dress, jewels, and assorted fineries

presentation and “exhibition” of the bride, as well as the collection of the wedding gifts, either in cash or in kind

the singing of the neggafate^3 in honor of the bride, where the words are always the same, regardless of whether the woman in question is ugly or beautiful, tall or petite, skinny or rotund, clever or asinine

last but not least, the displaying of the sarouel splattered with the postcoital blood after the consummation (which is stipulated in the marriage contract)

On the groom’s side: nothing in particular. At most there is the night before the wedding, where it seems the groom is dragged by his friends to visit women of ill repute for a demonstration of their practical skills. Yet I never actually saw any of this — and like Ghita, I never speak simply on hearsay.

What I did see and hear, however, is this.

It had been two or three hours since the married couple had retreated to their bedroom, yet our pricked-up ears hadn’t detected any noises or reassuring cries. In the drawing room where we had all assembled, the tension had become unbearable. Ghita could no longer sit still.

“What are those kids up to?” she asked. “Playing leapfrog?”

Turning to one of the neggafa, she ordered: “Go and look in on them, Lalla, and see how they’re getting on.”

The kind lady did as she was told, and after a moment that seemed to last an eternity, she came back empty-handed, though optimistic.

“They are young, and the night is long. I made them drink some warm milk and gave them some walnut-stuffed dates to eat. The little one had forgotten to put a cushion under her pelvis like I’d recommended. As for the groom, he very much has his eyes on the prize but doesn’t dare take the initiative. We must empathize with them. But we should also do all that is necessary. All will go well, Lalla, I promise you.”

“Even so, it’s not that complicated,” Ghita remonstrated. “Even donkeys know how to do it.”

At the sound of this insolent remark, Driss nearly leapt out of his chair.

“Hush now! Children shouldn’t hear things like that.”

“Maybe it’s because they’re stifled by all this prudishness, cursed jinn! What the camel thinks he alone knows, the camel driver knows too.”

On the verge of turning sour, this exchange was happily interrupted by a series of moans, then an out-and-out cry coming from the direction of the bedroom. Before long, the door opened and Si Mohammed appeared, looking pale, confused, and out of breath.

“Fetch the tea,” Driss said in an attempt to create a diversion and liven up the atmosphere.

We surrounded Si Mohammed, who was catching his breath before launching into a bizarre narrative that felt like something between a sports commentary and a medical report. He bragged about gaining the upper hand after a veritable boxing bout. The frightened girl had at first put up a brave resistance. He then confessed that after he’d broken her resolve, his virility had failed him. It was only after the neggafa’s intervention that his senses came back to life. The light refreshments were most welcome, and the woman’s advice quite pertinent.

“Well then, why don’t you bring out the sarouel?” Ghita asked, since all this talk was making her very impatient.

“There’s nothing to show,” Si Mohammed answered sheepishly.

“How can that be?” Ghita cried. “Do you want to make us into a laughingstock?”

“Turn to God woman,” my father said, “let the boy explain himself.”

Si Mohammed explained. Talking expertly, as if he actually knew something about it, he claimed that, anatomically speaking, he had found the hymen highly unusual. Stopping several times to pick up the threads of his tale, he said that though he had pushed as hard he could, he’d only been able to force a small opening. But a few drops of blood had fallen onto the sheet.

“That’s all that God has seen fit to give me,” he concluded, without seeming too sure of himself.

“You have to go back in there immediately and finish the job!” my mother thundered.

DESPITE THE RISING tension, I believe it was at this time that I received a visit from the sandman.

I must have felt quite nostalgic for our old home in the Spring of Horses, since that was the house upon which my eyes opened in my dream.

Some will cry foul. What? Could they be so unaware of similar cases in The Arabian Nights and various cinematographic efforts? That is unless they happen to be followers of the late Bourguiba,4 who, before being overthrown in a medical coup d’état, had been famous for his harebrained ideas. One of them being to ban filmmakers in his country from using the flashback technique, deeming that it seriously compromised the feeling of suspense and was detrimental to the intellectuals’ obligations to instruct the moviegoing masses.

THAT SHOULD BE taken as a warning since all it takes is the blink of an eye for a clumsy bombshell to come out of nowhere (according to Ghita) and for the narrative to slide to the earliest days of childhood. Once again, the following themes will be skipped over:

the Qur’anic school, which I didn’t frequent for very long

my circumcision, which didn’t unduly traumatize me

the Festival of the Sacrifice, where the blood of sheep freely flows and spurts

the hammam, where little boys are initiated into the great mysteries of women

the tyranny of the paterfamilias, since I am not exaggerating when I say that my own father, Driss, was as gentle as a lamb

I am now well within my rights to return to my dream. . or rather my reverie — on that I will readily concede.

5

THE CHILD WHO opens his eyes on the house in the Spring of Horses must be around the age of six and has already been saddled with a nickname. His playmates called him Namouss (or Mosquito), not because he was smaller than the kids his age (Fezzis, people from Fez, generally have short legs) but because, aside from being rather frail, he was also a bit of a flighty creature who was unable to keep still. Bordering on recklessness, this sprightliness had earned him plenty of boo-boos (torn toenails, a head crisscrossed with scars) and was above all the reason Ghita had designated him as her emissary, charging him with relaying communications between her and Driss. Whenever the slightest problem arose — and something went wrong each God-given day — Ghita would bid him: “Namouss, go and tell your father to come daba daba” (immediately).

At the speed of lightning, Namouss would run straight through the Sekkatine souk, and once Driss had received the message, he would forget customers and merchandise, adjust his tarboosh, slip on his balghas, and head home pronto.

As far as Namouss’s sprightliness was concerned, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. In another time or place, Driss might have been a track champion. His sure-footedness made each obstacle in his path a fait accompli. Catlike, Driss snaked through the crowd, dodging the heavily loaded donkeys and mules coming from the opposite direction, all without failing to stop and exchange pleasantries with the shopkeepers and passersby he was acquainted with.

Trying to keep pace, Namouss followed in his slipstream. Little by little, he began to acquire the same stride that would later make him such an experienced surveyor of that gigantic open-air theater that is the Medina.

THAT DAY, GHITA had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. The previous day, she had dismissed the young girl who helped with the daily chores. When faced with the work that lay ahead of her, Ghita’s spirit had sunk.

Ghita’s track record with the help would make for an interminably long book and the conclusion of each chapter would come as no surprise. After a handful of incidents — always brief and stormy — the young girl or woman in question would be shown the door. The reasons for these terminations were always bountiful, as were the number of times Ghita contradicted herself. It was like squaring the circle, what else? Also the identikit of her ideal employee wasn’t easy to fulfill. The first criteria: age. The candidate in question shouldn’t be too young, as they would have to be taught from scratch; neither should they be too old, as they would lack the stamina to carry out their duties to Ghita’s satisfaction. The second criteria: physical appearance. Ghita didn’t want someone that “a brief glimpse of would cut one’s life short.” That meant no hunchbacks, eye patches, or skin infections, since any physical oddities were considered, according to widely held popular beliefs, retribution for past misdeeds. But neither should they be too good-looking, which might arouse the passions of Driss and the teenage boys whom Ghita kept under strict surveillance. “I can’t very well invite the devil into my own home. As soon as you introduced a piece of fresh meat, the men wouldn’t be able to keep their eyes off it.” The third criteria: manner of dress. Ghita wanted neither someone decked out in rags nor stylish flirts, who as Ghita put it, dressed like the dancers at the Circus Amar. The fourth criteria: honesty. That prerequisite proved impossible to fulfill since, according to deep-set beliefs found in modest and affluent families alike, by their very definition, servants were invariably thieves.

The result: Except for short periods of time, Ghita could therefore only count on herself, and — temporarily — on her daughter Zhor who, as she was well aware, would soon “run off” to her husband’s house to go “clean up after strangers.”

Before making a start on her day’s work, Ghita began by launching into one of her litanies, whose set themes were subject to periodic inflections.

“Oh dear Mother, my beloved, you have gone away to be with God now and I am bereft of everything. There’s no one now to push open my door and look in on me. I am alone, a stranger in my own family. Neither my husband nor my children take pity on me. I am everyone’s servant, a slave with scars carved into her cheeks. The housework is mine; the kneading of the bread, mine; the dishes and laundry, all mine. Even everyone else’s shit belongs to me, I’m the one who pushes it down the hole and rinses it with water. I feel like I might suffocate. The others come and go as they please, they’re off to the Kissarya, to Batha Square, to the Boujeloud cinema, while I remain a prisoner behind these four walls. I have to wait until my skin groans under the weight of its filth before I can go to the hammam. Have I ever stolen, murdered, or sinned? I am condemned to duck my head in shame, swallow my anxieties. Heart, oh heart of mine, you’re going to burst. Marriage is a cursed thing. Had I been an old maid, I might have at least had some peace. And who cares what they would have said. May those who know my father bring him to justice.

“But who’s going to listen to me? I’m talking to myself, as if I were a madwoman. Everything in the house is topsy-turvy. And that harlot maid of mine — whom I’ve treated like a daughter, and to whom I taught everything she knows — she couldn’t find her own ass with both hands! Couldn’t even tell the difference between an alif and a cudgel. A swindler, just like all the others. Shameless and from a shady background. A sinner through and through, always jiggling suggestively and emitting those peals of laughter when serving the men. Even Namouss isn’t safe from her covetous glances. Let her go ply her charms in the brothels of Moulay Abdallah! What takes her a whole day, I can do in the blink of an eye without hardly lifting a finger. I can only count on myself. My eldest daughter, the only one who doesn’t shirk her duties, is away all day at school. Big deal. What is she going to learn anyway? Magic tricks and little else aside from laziness. Oh dear Mother, my beloved, watch over me. I place my trust in God and our patron saint, Moulay Idriss. May he take pity on this small orphan girl, little bread crumb that I am, doomed to misfortune.

“All right, Ghita, you need to get going. Time flies and you haven’t even aired out the bedsheets yet.”

HAVING THUS EMPTIED her heart, she cheered up. Rolling up her sleeves and fixing them around her upper arms with an elastic band, and tucking the hem of her dress into her belt, she got down to work, from time to time cursing and ranting about invisible devils. She hung out the sheets, made the beds, beat the cushions, then swept the tiled floor before sloshing water over it and mopping three times rather than just one. Next, she moved on to the stairs, which she cleaned from top to bottom.

She’d barely had the time to take a breather when she heard a knock on the door. It was the porter Driss had sent with a basket full of the day’s provisions. “It’s about time!” she said before casting a suspicious glance over the contents: beef, cardoons, and watermelon. She sat on little stool and began peeling the spines off the cardoons, before chopping one stalk into chunks, and then a second. As she was about to cut into the third, she stopped and threw the knife on the floor.

“Is that all, cardoons? And to top it off they’re tough as wood, only fit for donkeys. Into the garbage, that’s where I’ll throw them, I swear to God. He calls himself a man and isn’t even capable of picking out a few vegetables! And just look at this meat, I knew it! It’s all fat, cartilage, and nerve endings glued to a piece of bone. That’s what I’m supposed to feed the barrack’s worth of soldiers that come swarming in here at lunchtime? Maybe he thinks that the watermelon’s going to fill them up! What’s in a watermelon anyway? Air and water — nothing else. By God, I can’t call myself a woman if I make a meal out of this chiata. And where is that little rascal Namouss? Namouss!”

“Yes, Yemma.”

“What are you doing on the roof? Get down here!”

“The floor’s still wet, Yemma.”

“Take your sandals off and get down here I said!”

“Here I am, Yemma.”

“Go tell your father to come here daba daba.”

Driss was a confident man by nature, who didn’t spend much time lingering over small details. He was quick to lose his cool at the butcher’s, for example, whenever he noticed a customer fussing over the piece of meat he was after, nitpicking over the way it was cut, whether it should be attached to a bone or how much fat should be left on it. All that quibbling about half a pound of meat. When his turn came, Driss only told the butcher the amount he wanted — usually a kilo — and left the rest up to him. He’d obviously never been sufficiently struck by the wise warning imparted by Houcine Slaoui’s song:

Better watch out

Sonny boy

Or you’re gonna get swindled

Butchers are crafty

Oh Lord they are nasty

A morsel o’meat

Hides a mountain o’bones

Now the joke is on you

Better watch out

Sonny boy

Or you’re gonna get swindled. .

Neither did Driss watch out at the market, where he chose to place his faith in his long-standing friendship with the shopkeeper. But when you take into account that the old fellow was half blind, you can at least understand the occasional mistakes weren’t made out of malice.

Followed by Namouss, Driss rushed back to the house. He quickly assessed the situation. He was used to it by now, and thanks to experience, knew how to turn the tide in his favor. Taking Ghita by surprise, he shifted the focus to another matter.

“Don’t worry, Lalla, you will have another maid soon. The sharif of the Idriss promised me. He has found us someone suitable. You’ll find nothing to fault her on, I promise.”

Taken aback by the news, Ghita almost completely forgot about the real matter at hand.

“And when is she getting here?” she asked.

“Tomorrow, or the day after, just enough time to make the necessary arrangements.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Ghita countered, regaining her composure and readying herself to switch the conversation back to the spoiled ingredients.

Yet Driss — whose reflexes had sharpened over time — was already one step ahead of her and put forward a compromise.

“You’re right, the cardoons are almost out of season. Throw them away if you like. You can put the meat into some harira soup and that will do for tonight’s meal. I’m going to go buy some kofta and have it sent over. That way, you won’t even need to cook anything. Now I really need to go back. I left a crowd of customers waiting in front of the shop,” he concluded, exaggerating so wildly that even Namouss, a skeptic, found it all perfectly believable.

Ghita was left speechless. Her fury had abated. Now that she didn’t need to make dinner, she suddenly felt lazy. She roamed around the courtyard for a moment or two contemplating what task she should set herself to.

“Hmm! There’s that pile of washing I need to get through. If I don’t do it, who will?”

There followed another litany. But Namouss had already vanished into thin air.

6

NAMOUSS WAS OLD enough to start going to school, but it was only the beginning of the summer and he would have to wait a few months before that leap into the unknown — an undiscovered world he’d been able to get a brief glimpse of when his sister Zhor had decided to take him along with her one day. This sort of practice was tolerated, especially when one considered that girls were expected to help their mothers, particularly when it came to looking after their younger siblings.

Putting his hand in Zhor’s without a peep, Namouss discovers a universe far removed from the one he’d seen during his daily jaunts around the Medina. What strikes him at first are the school’s gigantic double gates, just as imposing — if not more so — than the ones found at the city’s main exit points: the Bab Guissa or the Bab Ftouh. Once across the threshold, you feel as if you’ve stepped into a different city. No steep climbs and descents, no labyrinthine alleys here, only an open-air promenade stretching as far as the eye can see, where children and teenagers run around freely, calling out to one another without getting told off by the adults. On the contrary, there is an adult with a whistle keeping an eye on them, who seems visibly satisfied by the mayhem. The blare of the bell snatched Namouss, green with envy, out of his reverie. Never having heard it before, Namouss grew suddenly afraid. Zhor reassured him, explaining that the bell was a sign that it was time to go back to class. Indeed, order gradually began to be restored as the unbridled crowd filed into queues. At that point some men and women appeared, each beckoning a queue to follow them. One of the women particularly intrigued Namouss. She wore spectacles and her dress barely reached her knees. Her blond hair was cropped close.

“Tell me, sister, is she a Nazarene?”

“Yes, that’s Miss Nicole.”

“And what about the man we are following, is he a Nazarene too?”

“No, he’s an Algerian Muslim. His name is Mr. Benaïssa.”

They finally reached the classroom. Mr. Benaïssa ushered the students inside, who then went to stand by their tables, where they waited, quiet as carp. Taking their cue from a slight wave of their teacher’s hand, the students took their seats. The silence lasted for a few moments, during which time Namouss was overwhelmed by a weird feeling: a mix of apprehension and submissiveness, similar to what he felt every time he stepped into a mosque. Then the man in charge broke the silence. The first words he uttered plunged Namouss into bewilderment. Not only did they sound strange but even the way he moved his lips, hissed between his teeth — and the loud scraping noises that rose out of his throat — were gestures and gutturals that Namouss didn’t know how to interpret. For a long time, he wished that this nonsensical flood would recede and that, adopting a more reasonable disposition, the teacher would start making some sense. All in vain. Namouss looked up at Zhor and then at the others all around him. He could not understand how the students could follow that gibberish with such all-knowing looks on their faces. His astonishment thus gradually gave way to an irrepressible urge to laugh, thanks to which — and because he had been the only visitor admitted into the classroom that day — he grew convinced it was all one big joke the others had put on just for him. Soon enough, he could no longer restrain himself and burst out laughing, thinking he would trigger a chain reaction. But his cackling produced a solitary echo, and the teacher expressed his disapproval by slamming his ruler down on the table. Red with shame, Zhor tried to shut her brother up by heaping insults upon him. Things then took a turn for the worse. A barrage of exclamations on the teacher’s part were enough for Zhor to swiftly drag her brother out of the classroom, banishing him from that temple of the bizarre.

That had been — oh mother of all paradoxes, oh blind mistress of fortune — his first experience with the French language.

A few months later, Namouss’s indiscretion had been forgotten. Zhor, who had a heart of gold, had downplayed the gravity of the incident when relating the events to the family, who took it in stride and in their clemency lavished Namouss with a quality he’d never known he had. Henceforth, everyone referred to him as a coomique (a joker). Si Mohammed, who had on that occasion unearthed a fondness for state productions, took it upon himself to nurture his younger brother’s comedic talents. He sat Namouss up on a table, and using a text that even the surrealists would have disowned, began running the little comedian through the basics of diction and posture. Namouss was completely clueless as to the meaning of his brother’s ranting, and this confusion reinforced the screwball element in their act. How did it go again?

Tonio and Cabeza

And my uncle the haji

Curtain of balls

Right over their eyes. .

Needless to say, the performances were scheduled to coincide with our parents’ absences.

OCTOBER FINALLY ARRIVED and Driss went to the Franco-Muslim school in the Lemtiyine neighborhood — the very same school where Namouss had made his controversial debut — in order to register the latest member of his male progeny. It was a free-for-all outside the office of Mr. Fournier, the headmaster. One had to take the initiative and employ underhanded tactics to get ahead. They had already “come to an understanding” and “bent over backwards” a day or two in advance — visually loaded expressions they used to refer to bribes. Whereas the rest — the shortsighted and unsophisticated — were left to scramble as fast as they could to find gifts in kind: chickens with bound legs, plump turkeys, baskets of eggs, sugarloaves, oil, and other basic foodstuffs. No one knew what Driss had given, but Namouss’s registration was a done deal by morning’s end. Just in the nick of time, since the term was due to start the following day.

This time, Namouss went on his own, his eyes still heavy with sleep. The days of sleeping late were through, no more leisurely breakfasts of café au lait, pancakes coated in fresh butter and soaked in honey, or doughnuts, still steaming hot, that Driss had sent over when he knew everyone in the house was up and “beginning to boil.” Ghita, not a natural-born lark, nonetheless got up at the earliest opportunity and helped Namouss get washed and dressed. For his lunch, she filled half a loaf of bread with preserved meat.

“Here you are,” she would say, “something to fill your belly. And now off you go, scram!”

Imparting neither advice nor affection. In certain situations, Ghita is not very effusive. She, who has given birth to eleven children, has seen a few things in her day. As soon as one baby was born, she was pregnant all over again.

“I have become just like a cow,” she used to say over and over. “Oh dear Mother, why couldn’t I have been born a boy? At least men, thanks to their members, don’t have to worry about such things.”

Once at school, Namouss witnessed something unexpected. The students who had gotten there before him had lined up in the playground. One by one, they were called forward by a man who was carrying some kind of utensil on his back. Tied to the utensil was a little tube with a showerhead attached to its end. The children were required to undress and keep their eyes fixed on their underwear. Those wearing djellabas were very upset because they were usually naked underneath. They therefore had to expose their private parts for the whole world to see. The man put his utensil into action and sprayed each student from head to toe with a white powder whose smell began to make even those in the back rows cough and sneeze. This powder was actually DDT, though Namouss was none the wiser. He must have thought that it was only flour, maybe a little stale, and was surprised by such customs. As a result, when his turn came, he decided to laugh and surrender himself to the hazing.

After that rite of passage, the students were arranged back into groups as a prelude to the major event: the division into classes. Mr. Fournier, preceded by his reputation for strictness, came into view. The man was a giant, but a bony, skinny one whose clothes hung loosely from him. There were many stories about him, notably that he’d been badly wounded in a faraway war, that they’d had to cut off his buttocks and replace them with prosthetics made of rubber. That was the root of his legendary obsession for punishing students by giving them a kick up the backside. Rarely dealt out, this sort of punishment, christened “kickintheass,” was especially dreaded. Tradition in the home, as well as at Qur’an school, favored beatings imparted with rods carved from the quince tree, floggings by way of large leather belts produced by local craftsmen, or even the falaqa, where the soles are whipped while the feet are bound by an instrument that closely resembles a garrote. Aside from its strangeness, the kick up the backside is singularly intolerable due to a variety of social conventions. Contrary to female buttocks — the wellspring of all lust — male buttocks are, you might say, the repository and fortress of one’s honor. One must not go anywhere near them. At least in theory. Now in practice, it’s a whole other matter. .

Mr. Fournier went through the roll call systematically, mispronouncing everyone’s name. Despite the eccentric enunciation, Namouss at one point realized his name was being called out. He suddenly felt a great swell of pride. It was the first time anyone had spoken his full name out loud. It felt like a second baptism.

The class was established. Standing in front of a line traced with chalk, the students got into pairs by holding each other’s hand. Namouss gave his to Hat Roho (literally “he who has laid down his soul”), a boy from his neighborhood. Among so many strangers, he was happy to find a familiar face. The famous bell rang and the teachers came to look for their pupils. The one heading right for Namouss’s row was none other than Mr. Benaïssa, and this filled him with disquiet. Had the teacher forgotten Namouss’s indiscretion? Would he recognize him? Would he welcome him into his classroom after all? The nervousness lasted all the way into the classroom, right up to the point when the teacher bade them sit. Apparently Mr. Benaïssa hadn’t suspected a thing. Namouss deduced he had been saved by the powdery mask that still covered his face and hair. Disguised by that makeup, Namouss’s confidence came back, and he resolved to rise to the challenge, to see this new experience — into which, for better or worse, he had been initiated — through to the end. But this was only the first of many surprises involving Mr. Benaïssa. Sporting a big smile, he began by articulating a word (in fact two) that Namouss immediately recognized: “Sbah l-kheir” (good morning).

“Sbah l-kheir,” the class echoed back, all except for Namouss, who was convinced there had been a misunderstanding. What on earth is going on here? he asked himself. Aren’t we going to be learning Freensh? If we’re going to speak the same language we use at home, then going to school isn’t worth my time.

Mr. Benaïssa soon steadied the helm, however, and repeated the morning greeting in Arabic, then followed suit with its equivalent in the other language: “Bonjour!”

Taken aback, the students repeated after him, some better than others. In the midst of this cacophony, one could distinguish some bounjours, some bojors, and even some boujours. Having chewed over the word seven times in his mouth, only Namouss cried out like a man possessed: “Bonjour!”

The mysteries of languages and the unforeseeable ways in which they determine who speaks what all over the world!

“Bonjour!” Namouss yelled again at the top of his voice, at one stroke having the strange impression he was swimming against the tide. This not only earned him a number of filthy looks from his classmates but also incurred the teacher’s scrutiny.

Having spotted the boy genius, Mr. Benaïssa pointed his ruler at Namouss and called for everyone’s attention.

“Yes, you, repeat,” he said to Namouss.

“Bohjour!” Namouss repeated, a frog in his throat.

“Louder!” Mr. Benaïssa ordered.

“Bonjour!”

This time, the word rang out as clear as crystal.

“Good,” Mr. Benaïssa said, “you’ve earned yourself a gold star.”

Namouss could hardly contain himself. He teetered between an immense sense of pride and the feeling that he’d betrayed his classmates. He kept his head down for the remainder of the lesson, though his ears stayed wide open. He contented himself with quietly repeating the words whose correct pronunciation Mr. Benaïssa was taking great pains to impart to his pupils: Bonjour Ali, bonjour Fatima. Bonjour monsieur, bonjour madame. Bonjour maître, bonjour monsieur le Directeur.

HAVING COMPLETED THE exercise, Mr. Benaïssa decided to immerse his audience into a world of magic by taking a twinkling metal flute out of its case and beginning to play it. Namouss had only seen reed flutes before and so the instrument’s physical aspects, as well as the music it was spreading, produced the effect of a wonderful fairy tale in him. Yet this did not lead to the discovery of other places or the characters of myths and legends; rather, what fascinated him the most was that an instrument so seemingly simple could unleash such a wide range of notes, going far beyond the handful of boring nursery rhymes he and his friends used to hum to the tune of a simple la la lalala:

Oh wily little grasshopper

Where did you go a-roving?

What tasty treats have you had?

Only the sweet air that you’re breathing. .

Or even this one:

Oh rain rain rain

Oh children of plowmen

Oh wise Master Bouzekri

Quick! So that my bread rises

And my little ones can eat today. .

Putting his flute down, Mr. Benaïssa began to sing in a baritone:

By the light of the moon,

Pierrot, my friend,

Lend me your pen

So that I may write. .

He asked the students to repeat after him, and by God, it wasn’t such a bad harmony after all. The music began to work its magic. The students grew bolder. Namouss came out of his shell and joined in, and taking his first, feverish steps in this new art form, his tongue loosened to the point he felt it would split in two. He remembered a potion that magicians would give to the mute so they could recover the power of speech. But what about right there and then, what had he been drinking? Just Mr. Benaïssa’s words and the music whose notes came from a faraway elsewhere. Anyway, it was up to him to decide where exactly they came from; after all, he now spoke Freensh.

Before the end of the lesson, Mr. Benaïssa touched on other subjects: discipline, cleanliness, and appearance.

“I don’t want to see anyone ever wearing djellabas. We are not in the countryside or in the roads of the Medina here. Keep them for going to the hammam if you like. You are going to take part in gymnastics in school. Imagine trying to do your gymnastics in a djellaba! So starting tomorrow, everyone should be in shirts and shorts or trousers — and don’t forget to wear sandals or shoes. I will not tolerate any of you running around barefoot as if you were a baker’s boys. Off you go, get ready to leave, in pairs, and quietly. You” — he said pointing in Namouss’s direction — “come see me in my office.”

On that note, the bell rang out. The others carried on, while Namouss, who could barely feel his legs, made his way to the office as best he could. Mr. Benaïssa pulled out a pretty little rectangular piece of cardboard from his briefcase and gave it to Namouss.

“Here’s your gold star. By the way, haven’t I seen you before?”

“Yes. . No, sir,” Namouss replied.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“N. . no.”

“Very well, on your way now.”

Relieved, Namouss fled — running rather than walking — all the way back to the house. Ghita, who had seemed so distant when he’d left for school that morning, was waiting on tenterhooks.

“Well?” she said, brimming with joy on seeing him again.

Namouss held out his gold star, and he — who had never once dared be informal with his mother — heard himself adopt a sophisticated and exaggeratedly lofty tone and say, “Bonjour, madame.”

Ghita, who as soon as she stepped on a raisin could promptly feel its sweetness rise up into her mouth, or so she claimed, had understood.

“Is that Freensh or is it Freentasia, as they say?”

And she erupted into a roar of laughter.

7

NAMOUSS FOUND HE had a real passion for school.

On top of the lessons taught by Mr. Benaïssa, there were those by Si Daoudi, the Arabic teacher, a good-looking man who wore a large turban and was always immaculately dressed in a spotless djellaba with a black burnous thrown gracefully over his shoulders. Mr. Benaïssa taught the lion’s share of the lessons throughout the week, leaving Si Daoudi two or three sessions during which time the students learned a little Arabic and, above all, the Qur’an. The Franco-Muslim school lived up to its name. Engrossed in his new discoveries, Namouss had no idea of what lay ahead. The first of these discoveries was a new calendar, which gave time an unprecedented reliability.

Before that, time had been a somewhat foreign concept. Days and weeks had never really coalesced into a grand narrative, whereas months and years faded into a blurry haze. This was why he’d always felt he was living in expectation. Fridays were the only blips on the flat line. Friday, when parents are in a good mood, when the midday meal is bountiful, when we would “Friday” ourselves and pay visits to other members of our family, visit the graves of our nearest and dearest, and, even more exciting, go for walks in the Jnan Sbil gardens — not to mention the possibility of going to the cinema.

Since the first day of school, the train of time had come into view and set itself onto its rails. A fixed schedule of arrivals and departures. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so forth. The day of rest was switched from Friday to Sunday. What had happened? The Hijri calendar had simply been replaced by the Gregorian. Every morning, Mr. Benaïssa drummed the date into our heads by writing it at the top of the blackboard: Monday. . November 1949.

Thus regulated and signposted, time began to take giant strides, turning into a purveyor of information. With each passing week, Namouss amassed knowledge and marveled.

Case in point were the writing lessons, which filled him with wonder. Mr. Benaïssa and Si Daoudi were both bona fide master calligraphers. On seeing the letters drawn with such grace on the blackboard — and above all his own growing ability to slowly decipher them — the elation Namouss experienced rivaled what Champollion must have felt as he unraveled the mysteries of the Rosetta stone. Words began to acquire lives of their own, leaving their creator behind to begin adventures of their own. Namouss learned to read and write, and at the same time to discover the charms of objects hitherto unknown to him: books. He’d never seen any during his brief spell at Qur’an school, where the short verses of the holy book were scrawled on clay tablets and then wiped away soon after the verses had been memorized. Since he was too young, the faqih didn’t allow him to write, and so Namouss had made do with casting longing glances at an older student’s tablet, repeating phrases of which he understood only an inkling. At home, he’d occasionally seen one of his brothers reading a book — that enigmatic object whose use he’d thought was restricted to adults. He wasn’t frustrated by any of this. After all, he was free and had better things to do with his time, like “tramping and traipsing the streets,” for which Ghita used to reproach him, or playing with the neighborhood kids right up to nightfall, mixing with the crowds in the Medina and taking in the flow of its sights. And here he was, leafing through one of these very objects that the teacher would hand out at the beginning of the class and then collect again at the end. A shame he couldn’t take it home so as to prolong the pleasure. Yet day by day, the puzzle of the departure began to make a lot more sense. Not only could he understand what he was reading but he was even beginning to forge a connection between the written words and the images associated with them: images shrouded in mystery and which seemed to come from another world — houses unlike any he’d ever seen, with plenty of space between them, topped by chimneys where smoke rose like a snake into the air, and surrounded by gardens where blond, chubby-cheeked children played on a seesaw. A plane, a train. An ocean liner cleaving the waves. Namouss had certainly overheard people talk about such wacky contraptions, but to actually see them, that was something else! He’d never had the opportunity to leave the Medina, even if only to go to the new town, which he knew was populated by foreigners, who lived in houses that were five or six stories tall, drove through wide, paved boulevards, drank forbidden liqueurs in cafés where men and women mixed freely, without shame.

Namouss worked hard and applied himself, automatically raising his hand whenever the teacher asked a question, even if he didn’t know the answer, thinking he might come up with one at the last possible second, especially since he was convinced that it all came down to divine intervention, or baraka, anyway. He was obsessed with acquiring ten gold stars because Mr. Benaïssa had promised that the first student to reach ten would be rewarded with. . a book.

Ah, competition, that virus! Namouss got carried away to such an extent that the rest of the class faded into the background and his sole concern was his relationship with Mr. Benaïssa, who was God in the flesh, who gave and took, punished and rewarded, but who above all shepherded his flock into a new world teeming with life and perpetually in flux, a world where men were so accustomed to fables and legends that they became a part of everyday life.

AS THE YEAR progressed and Namouss settled into his new life, he began — for the first time in his life — to have the impression that he was different. This filled him with both joy and uneasiness. Starting from his first day in school, when Mr. Fournier had called his name out, right to that lucky day when Mr. Benaïssa had exchanged his ten gold stars for his very first book, one could say that the path he’d undertaken was that which separated being from nothingness. Namouss knew he was his own man. He began chafing under the stifling constraints that regulated life at home, in the streets, and even at school. The path he’d begun to walk was none other than the road to freedom, where his only true responsibility was to throw himself headfirst into adventures.

His first adventure wasn’t a strictly glorious one. The school owned a kitchen garden surrounded by wire mesh, where aside from a handful of trees, there were also various types of vegetables, as well as, unusually, a couple of turkeys that had been left to roam freely, though under the nominal supervision of a watchman who was rarely around. Two rascals in Namouss’s class had spotted a flaw in the fence: a small opening located away from prying eyes, where a predator had obviously already made an incursion without an alarm being raised. This lack of surveillance emboldened the two accomplices, who then offered Namouss the opportunity to join their wild caper. After much deliberating, Namouss accepted their offer, though he found the object of their desire a little laughable: the eggs laid by the turkey hen. How had his companions found out about the eggs? Probably because they were originally from the countryside, where children are able to read the movements and changes a bird makes when it’s brooding. So Namouss followed their lead, his heart racing wildly. The theft was carried out toward the end of the afternoon, just before the school gates were shut. A meager booty: there wasn’t even enough to go around; only a couple of eggs for all their troubles. Once outside, there was the problem of what do with them. Eating them or taking them home was out of the question. The solution they came to was to sell them to the local grocer and split the proceeds between them. In order to better incriminate Namouss, whose success in class irritated them, the two accomplices made a democratic decision — they were, after all, in the majority — that he was the one who should sell the eggs to the grocer. Having no choice, and with a heavy heart, he complied. How would the grocer react? Wouldn’t he just confiscate the eggs and blow the whistle on him? That was what he feared as he entered and repeatedly gave up his place in line until there was nobody left in the shop. Miraculously, though renowned for his avarice, the grocer reacted positively to the offer. Amused, the grocer looked at the little boy of pure Fezzi stock as he held out the eggs as if he were a peasant entering the Medina for the first time. He took the suspicious goods and in return handed Namouss a ten-cent coin — two douros. Hell, they were worth at least three times that! When Namouss caught up with his accomplices, they put their heads together and realized it would be difficult to split the sum equally between them. They therefore decided to use the coins to buy some sweets. Namouss went back to the grocer’s. The number of sweets the grocer proposed to give him was considerably lower than the usual going price. The grocer had come out a winner on both ends.

As they were about to part ways, Namouss was given the smallest share.

“We’re the ones who came up with the idea,” explained one his accomplices.

Namouss wound up with two miserable, stuck-together sweets. Only once did he try to determine the extent of the catastrophe. Though he’d committed an unspeakable crime, it seemed only fair to call a spade a spade: He had stolen. A villainy that would lead him straight to hell, but above all a villainy in the eyes of his family. Driss would never forgive him, that is if he could even conceive that one of his children could ever commit such an act.

Tears welled up in Namouss’s eyes. In a fit of rage, he threw the sweets into the gutter and ran home. It would take some time to get over this episode. He was obviously still too young to face the risks that freedom entails.

8

THE SUMMER HAD arrived, and contrary to all expectations, Namouss was not to remain in Fez.

Sometime before the end of the school year, Ghita had come to the end of her tether, and, adopting the royal “we,” had begun to hammer home her demands.

“We are suffocating inside these four walls. Home, always at home. . How can we get out of this house? Wait until the day we get carried out feetfirst? Regardless of age, we’re all tired and need to ‘feast our eyes’ and experience the world.”

Driss dithered for a while, claiming that it was too hot and that it was a vital time of year for his business. All in vain. He soon resigned himself to the idea of a trip, but only for a week, he insisted, and not a day more.

Word got out and, thrilled by the news, Namouss started daydreaming. He imagined himself aboard one of those vehicles he had seen in his textbook. Oh, neither boat nor plane. That was beyond his imagination. Just a car or a bus. A red car, actually, one as big as the house, which would take him. . where? He hadn’t the vaguest idea.

Driss came to the rescue. He announced that they would sojourn in Sidi Harazem, a spa town a few kilometers from Fez.

The big day finally arrived and the family made their way to Bab Ftouh, where there were a number of vehicles for hire. Instead of the longed-for car, Driss set his heart on a coutchi (horse-drawn carriage), a type of conveyance that was both cheaper and a more respectable way of traveling, especially with wife and daughters in tow. That would circumvent the lack of privacy one found in cars. The entire family piled into the carriage, along with a mattress, duvets, kitchenware, tagines, a brazier, and baskets of provisions. A real uprooting.

The coachman was having trouble getting the old nag — Abdelwahab — going. Namouss was entertained by this last detail, since the Egyptian singer, who bore the same name as the horse, had become an idol to most Fezzis. Women above all were ensnared by his voice, which had a sweet languor to it. The couturiers had sought to capitalize on this infatuation for the crooner by launching a new product called Abdelwahab’s Heart, which women squabbled over. Its only serious competitor was Asmahan’s beauty spot, named after the Lebanese chanteuse who sang like a nightingale.

“Giddyap, Abdelwahab!” cried the coachman, whipping the poor horse so relentlessly that it gave way under the strain and let rip a series of farts that stank up the immediate vicinity. And even though everyone was bothered by the smell, the situation was so obvious that no one dared bring it up. When this scenario occurred in polite society, and the culprit refused to own up to it, we made recourse to a little game in order to unmask them. An arbiter was designated, who would at random pick one of the people present to start reeling off a nursery rhyme, and the person on whom the final line fell was deemed the culprit:

Stila ntila

A little leaky bucket

T-qtar b-el-ma l-khdar

Spills its greenish water

Jani jitou

It comes and goes

Taq fech

Bang pffft

Fik el-ach

Dwells in you.

While aware the situation was clear, Namouss was nonetheless determined to exculpate himself and innocently said, “It wasn’t me, it was Abdelwahab who farted.”

“Shut your trap,” Driss barked, anxious to show the coachman that he’d raised his children to be well-mannered. But Ghita, who didn’t give a fig for social conventions, started giggling, her laughter spreading through the rest of the family — even Driss’s shaggy mustache began to twitch.

Reaching the halfway point in the journey, a place called Safsaf (the Poplars), the coachman decided to stop to allow the horse a moment to catch its breath and the family an opportunity to stretch their legs. Sensing that the fresh air had whetted the rascals’ appetites, Ghita laid out an impromptu picnic. She spread a blanket in the shade of a poplar tree and brought out the provisions: a chicken she had roasted in the wee hours before dawn, some bread, as well as some oranges, which she carefully peeled and placed on a napkin. A portion was set aside for the coachman, who had gone to sit at a distance from the family and had turned his back to them. Following suit, Ghita too had turned her back to the road and quickly removed her veil so as to be able to snack unencumbered. This made Namouss uncomfortable, as it was the first time he had seen his mother uncovered in public. Whenever he had accompanied her to the shrine of Moulay Idriss, where she would drink from the blessed fountain of Bab Loufa, she had restricted herself to lifting her veil slightly so as to bring the tumbler of water to her lips. She had never lowered the veil, not even past her nose. Namouss’s eyes drifted to Driss, whom he thought would surely react to this fdheha, this scandal. But his father seemed not to have noticed or — could it be? — wasn’t offended by what had happened. Driven by the morals that had been instilled in him, which demanded that men must guard the honor of their womenfolk at all times, Namouss thought it only right to remind his mother of the rules of polite society. Getting on his high horse, he told Ghita: “We are outdoors, Lalla, cover your face.”

Rather amused by his remark, Ghita quipped, “What are you, my husband? Go blow a snot rocket! That’s all I need — a boy the size of a chickpea telling me what to do!”

And in a gesture of defiance, she pulled down the hood of her djellaba and bared her head, which was now utterly naked without the scarf to hide her hair.

“Go ahead and die of shame,” she went on, “and if you keep pushing your luck, I’m more than ready to give you another earful.”

Driss followed the scene, embarrassed. Wanting above all to prevent a further escalation, the only solution left to him was to hasten the departure.

“Stop this pointless chatter,” he said. “We still have a long journey ahead of us.”

SIDI HARAZEM CAME into view: a verdant oasis in a ravine surrounded by barren hills.

The lodgings Driss had rented amounted to a large room with pink adobe walls. The beaten earth floor was covered in mats. There was no kitchen, let alone bathrooms. But no one complained, not even Ghita, who was already busying herself unpacking and putting the place to right.

“Don’t just stand around and get in my way while I’m trying to work,” she said to the children. “Go and have a wash.”

The children followed her instructions to the letter. They split into two groups according to gender and went on their way.

Namouss followed his brothers, who knew their way around the village. They stopped in front of the first public fountain, which was called Nakhla (the palm tree). Teeming with people, it was absolute bedlam, with everyone jostling and frolicking about. A few divers, or divers of sorts, were hanging from the branches of a slender palm tree overlooking the pool. From time to time, one of these daredevils would all of a sudden drop from the tree into a group of unsuspecting bathers below, where they were greeted by a flood of insults, often with a firm slap to the head mixed in for good measure. To calm things down, some wise bystanders began to sing a hymn in praise of the Prophet, with the rest of the swimmers joining in: “Blessings upon him, Oh emissary of God. .”

Namouss was dragged away from the scene by his brothers, who explained that there was another, more peaceful fountain called El-Ariane (the exposed one). On the way, they showed him the entrance to another fountain called Qobba (the dome), which the adults had decided to set aside for their own exclusive use to escape the frenzy of the young. Namouss asked about the fountain reserved for women but was only provided with a vague indication. He was soon to discover that it was located right next to the El-Ariane fountain, and that ruffians would gather to peep at the female bathers through a mysterious — or crafted? — crack in the wall.

Several merchants had erected tents inside their simple reed noualas on the perimeter of the El-Ariane pool, where they sold everything from peanuts to sweets, chewing gum, and bottles of lemonade, as well as spices, charcoal, and gas lanterns. Among those huts, they searched for the bathing-suit lender, since while all his older brothers had suits, Namouss didn’t because it was the first time he’d gone swimming. All the suits were enormous. The smallest one they managed to find was a dreadful pair of coarse woolen pants. Namouss was forced to put them on, despite his protests. They were so large they hung down to his knees and caused serious itching in his private parts. But the chance to swim was now at hand, and the disconsolate boy forgot all his troubles as soon as he hit the tepid water. Namouss found the water so delightful he was loath to leave it when his brothers decided it was time to go. Hunger had begun to gnaw at them.

Return to the “house.” Ghita was in a good mood. May it last! The smell emanating from the pot cooking on top of the brazier made everyone’s mouth water. Driss was there, stretched out on a mattress, eyes open, in seventh heaven. Namouss was taken aback by this newfound sense of peace, this harmony. He went to snuggle up against his mother, who stroked his hair before saying, “Your mop-top’s grown. You look like an ogre. It’s time to get it cut. Aha! You’ve got some color in your cheeks already! In just a few days you’ll go from being white as an egg to a black bernata, like a Negro.”

Knowing Ghita’s sense of humor, Namouss takes that statement for what it is, a burst of affection.

The girls had also come back. Ghita, still wrapped up in Namouss, now asked him to let go of her knees.

“All right, that’s enough snuggling now. It’s time I looked after your bellies.”

Lunch was served. Everyone huddled around the communal plate and ate, as usual, in silence. Ghita contented herself with dipping her bread in the sauce and having some vegetables. She pushed the few bits of meat from her side of the plate toward Driss or one of the children but was always careful never to eat more than her fair portion. They licked the tagine until it shone.

“There should never be any leftovers after you’ve eaten” was Driss’s motto.

After the siesta, it was time for new adventures. Namouss followed after his brothers, who were proposing all sorts of discoveries. This time the objective was a vast meadow at the foot of the village. Once they’d arrived, Namouss thought he was back on the school playground, except that this time it was the grown-ups who had the run of the place. They had broken off into groups, each of which was devoted to a specific activity and seemed unaware of the existence of the others. One group, led by a Mr. Muscles in sportswear, was doing gymnastics. Another was playing soccer. While the third was busy playing a game Namouss had thought was reserved for children: leapfrog. And in the middle of all this bustle, a group of impassive cardplayers, who carried on with their game using a Spanish deck.

Feeling excluded, Namouss tried to come up with something to do. His attention was drawn to a trickle of water snaking along the meadow. He decided to follow it to its source. His curiosity led him to a spot where there was a mass of boulders. And in a recess of the rock where he’d dared to venture, he found the object of his quest: a hissing waterfall. Alas, what Namouss had thought was a discovery turned out to be anything but. Other explorers had beaten him to it. There they were, leisurely washing themselves and snorting under the stream, mistaking the waterfall for a vulgar shower.

Return to the meadow. Namouss looks for a bit of shade. A palm tree generously offers him some. He lies on his back and loses himself watching the sky, stripes of which he glimpses through the foliage. Little by little, a ray of light begins to illuminate his face. After a moment, the palm tree starts to shake, then slowly twists upon itself, making the canopy of the sky dance with it. Namouss feels as if his body is being lifted by some unknown force, but instead of lifting him toward the top of the palm tree and beyond, up toward the eye of the sun, it transports him into another dimension. A window onto the future opens: Some time from now, he tells himself, I will go far, farther than my legs will be able to take me. And one day I will come to the foot of a waterfall as high as the minaret of the Qarawiyyin mosque. I will drink from its waters and forget everything. I will speak other languages, including those of animals. I will sail the seas, journey through deserts, and decipher the stars. I will no longer fear the blackness of the night or the sound of the thunder. Maybe someday I will learn to fly and from time to time come back to Fez and touch the summit of Jebel Zalagh and glide above the terrace of our house, tell Ghita and Driss “Behold my wings,” and then fly off toward new horizons.

“On your feet, Namouss, we’re making our way back.”

Return to reality. Namouss is loath to set aside his journey, but his brothers don’t want to wait for him. He gets up and falls in behind the assassins of his dreams.

9

THREE DAYS PASS, allowing Namouss to acquaint himself with his surroundings to the extent that Ghita entrusts him with small errands: buying bread or charcoal — if it was beginning to run low — or, more important, going to tell the girls to end their bathing sessions and come home. He’d also learned the basics of swimming. Denied the ability to fly through the air, he’d begun to appreciate the possibilities afforded by this new element — even if his exploits were limited to a few strokes and never straying far from the edge of the pool. The little he’d learned about swimming came courtesy not of his brothers but of Driss, and he was not about to forget the circumstances in which this had occurred.

The day following their arrival in Sidi Harazem, the sun had barely risen when his father had woken him up to take him swimming in the Qobba pool, which was usually reserved for adults. At that time of day, while it was still cool, the tepid water was even more delightful and not as crowded with bathers. The place also doubled as a hammam. A haziness prevailed, accentuated by a dense fog of vapors rising from the water. In one of the alleys, two masseurs set themselves to scrubbing their clients as well as “stretching their bones” until they cracked. At regular intervals, hymns sung in praise of the Prophet bounced off the walls and reverberated throughout. Only a few of the people there would be swimming. Some had propped their backs against the edge of the pool and would talk to one another in hushed voices. Others devoted themselves to the minutiae of grooming, including the brushing of teeth. A claylike paste that clung to the walls served as toothpaste, while the index finger served as a toothbrush.

It was in this atmosphere of complex rituals that Namouss learned to move in the water. Driss guided him. Sometimes he would hold him, others he would let him go, and even though his movements often caused the other adults to be amused, Namouss didn’t give up. The ability to float freely in space for a few seconds made him feel empowered, as if he had broken through a boundary and acquired a new faculty. Where did this new power of his come from? From him or from Driss? He didn’t know the answer to that. He only felt his father hold him close, which happened seldom. Moreover, on that day, Driss held him close against his naked torso, thereby also imparting his warmth. The child could feel his father’s heartbeat as well as his own. A tender connection that even oblivion and time could do little to destroy. A timeless thread. A taste of the eternal. Its smell.

“Don’t be afraid,” Driss murmured. “Move your arms and legs at the same time. Don’t stiffen up. There you go.”

Namouss followed his instructions to the letter. He applied himself even more than he did at school. He knew he had already earned his gold star the moment he had his father all to himself, a moment that might never again come to pass.

ON THE FOURTH day, a minor incident disrupted the monotony. Except for the baths and the ritual walks in the countryside, Sidi Harazem offered no distractions. At nightfall, a sort of curfew reigned. One went to bed not long after dinner so as to wake up when the cock crowed. Sleep didn’t bring much rest with it since, as luck would have it, one had to spend much of the night battling minuscule yet formidable invaders. Drawn by the city slickers’ sweet skin, the fleas and bedbugs feasted to their hearts’ delight. Even Namouss, who by virtue of his nickname was related to these bloodsuckers, didn’t manage to escape their greed. At the risk of suffocating, he’d had to wrap himself in his blankets in order to defend himself against their traitorous attacks. It was already dawn by the time the insects left, their hunger sated.

When Abdelkader, Driss’s youngest brother, arrived unannounced that morning, he was greeted as a liberator, especially by the children. They knew that, thanks to him, the nights would take a very different turn, and the time after the evening meal would stretch into the small hours, since Abdelkader’s talents as a storyteller would keep them entertained, delaying as much as possible the dreaded moment when the insects would swing into action.

Uncle Abdelkader was a real character. In terms of physique, while Driss wasn’t exactly a giant, his little brother seemed like a dwarf beside him. He had a funny protuberance on his forehead, not in the middle, like the prayer bump that regular mosque-goers took pride in, but on the left side, which meant it’d been there from the time was he born. Furthermore, he was as deaf as a doorknob. How had that come about? It was just one of the many mysteries about him.

He had also been saddled with a nickname, to the point that most people who knew him had forgotten his real name was Abdelkader. To them, he was Touissa and nothing else. But why Touissa, diminutive of tassa (cup)? When one said tassa, the first thing that came to mind was the expression “hitting the cup,” which in popular parlance in Morocco was equivalent to draining a glass (or rather many), hitting the bottle, getting hammered, going on a bender, or to put it plainly, getting drunk. What? Did Uncle Abdelkader drink alcohol? Once the feeling of indignation had passed, we listened to Radio Medina, which let nothing slip past it and had the habit of making a mountain out of a molehill. They would tell of how people usually beyond all suspicion, whether or not they were of some standing, would find any pretext to slip out of the Medina and go to the mellah, where they would frequent cafés called “cantinas,” where they served kosher wine and mahia, which was made by Jews from the Sefrou or the Demnate. Besides the profits they were reaping, the publicans took pride — and delight — in seeing the faithful of the dominant religion partaking in the pleasures that were permitted under their own religion. The radio also said that one didn’t need to go as far as the mellah since there was a cantina in the immediate vicinity of the old city, not far from Bab Boujeloud, where very respectable fellow Muslims could “hit the tassa” with the most exquisite brews. Ah, those Nazarenes, taking over the country and running it as they liked wasn’t enough for them, they had to go ahead and corrupt the souls of the faithful and damn them to the torments of hell!

Was Touissa mixed up in all that? It was all well and good for those with full choukaras, for whom such extravagances were only a trifle. But how could Touissa, who was poorer than Job, afford it?

Another mystery surrounding this good-natured man was his eternal bachelorhood, which at his age — he was well into his thirties — stood out as an anomaly. Hence the stories about him circulating in the family. Though only God is all-knowing, it seemed Touissa had disappeared from Fez for more than a year. Some eyewitness accounts placed him in Marrakech, where he had gotten married and even fathered a child. Then one day he’d reappeared, empty-handed, filthy, dressed in rags, and infested with lice. When pressed on the subject of his adventures, he made out as if he hadn’t understood the question. Whenever someone wanted to extract some detail or other, Abdelkader broke out in hysterical laughter as if he’d just been tickled — he was extremely sensitive to tickling, and knowing his weak point, the children took great pleasure in exploiting it. Basically there was no pinning him down on the subject.

Afterward Abdelkader continued to run away, but for shorter periods at a time. He always came back in the same sorry state, at which point Ghita would look after him as if he were one of her children. She’d clean him up, clothe him, and let him stay at the house until he got on his feet and was ready to go back to work.

Touissa’s activities were yet another bizarre facet of his character. Unlike his two brothers, he hadn’t followed in his ancestors’ footsteps and become a saddlemaker, a trade that had been passed down from father to son for many generations. Instead, after who knows what byway, he had taken up the craft of making slippers. A profession he only practiced in an amateurish way since at any given time this champion of laziness contented himself with a small presence in the Sekkatine souk, and in exchange for some services, his brothers looked after his basic needs. Yet not strictly all of his needs, since our man had a penchant for smoking kif. In order to procure it, he was obliged to take up irregular employment at a workshop in the Bine Lemdoune neighborhood. Namouss had seen him there once or twice. Now and again, Touissa would set himself hard at work in that tiny dark hole that he shared with a number of other craftsmen. While he was completely deaf, he must have had eyes like a hawk in order to be able to sew by hand in such conditions, and he did so with such skill and dexterity that his babouches were put on sale even in the Sebbat souk, where I can assure you such fine workmanship was held in extremely high regard by the shopkeepers. On another occasion, Namouss had come across him absorbed in a ceremony that he had elevated into an art: the preparation of the kif. Touissa would put a bunch of the herb on a plank he’d placed level on the floor. He would pluck the leaves from the stalks one by one and throw out the seeds. A little mound would begin to pile up, which Touissa then would take to with an extremely sharp knife, chopping up the leaves and reducing them to tiny pieces, at which point he’d sprinkle a small quantity of tobacco on it. After which comes the fine-tuning as he’d sift the mix and eliminate the chaff. The finished product is then poured into a leather tobacco pouch, at which point the tasting begins. Touissa would fill up the bowl of his sebsi pipe, light it, and close his eyes, drawing in a deep lungful. Then he passed the pipe along to his nearest colleague, who would take a drag and pass it on to the next. The experiment seemed conclusive since the man who must have been the master craftsman sent an apprentice out to the café to fetch some tea. But Namouss couldn’t hold on for much longer. The smell of the kif mixed with the odor of the chemicals used to treat the products in the workshop was making his head spin. With a few hand gestures, he made clear he had to leave. Happy that Namouss had come to see him, Touissa pulled out a coin that shone in his hand.

“Take it,” he said, “and give my regards to the lady of the house.”

Uncle Abdelkader was the subject of so many stories. The latest, for instance — just to send a smile his way, where he now lies next to his brothers in the Bab Guissa cemetery — occurred when Uncle Si Mohammed’s family was celebrating a great occasion, to which Namouss’s family had been invited. After the meal, the help began to fidget in a most unusual way before being overwhelmed by an outbreak of hysterical laughter. Touissa, who started chuckling as soon as he was addressed, began rolling on the floor and almost chocked on his own giggles. He was forced to leave the house so he could calm down and catch his breath. As the night wore on, he had yet to return to the house. Everyone came to the conclusion that he had left for good and the gates of the house were shut. In the meantime, the mystery of the mad laughter had been solved. Namouss’s aunt, who was rather stuck-up, had chosen that night to reveal an unexpected character trait: her mischievousness. She had put some maâjoun, a powerful stimulant, in the food in order to — in her words — make the monkeys sing and laugh. Well, well, the prank provoked mixed responses from the monkeys. But what worried them the most was what had happened to Touissa. Where might he have wound up in his condition? The following morning, the whole affair came to a happy — and quite comical — conclusion. When the gates were opened, Touissa was found fast asleep on the threshold. . with a large watermelon under his head. Why a watermelon, and how had he gotten his hands on one at such a late hour of the night? A small wonder that was added to the list of other larger wonders.

Ah, Touissa! The day he died, the family realized he didn’t have any identity papers on him, which meant a burial permit couldn’t be secured. Twelve witnesses were found to attest that the corpse that was to be put into the ground was in fact that of Abdelkader, the son of Haji Abdeslam bin Hammad Laâbi Rashidi and of Fatima bint Abderrahmane Shaqshaq, who it was presumed had been born in Fez in 1915.

This was how Abdelkader’s story came to an end. Touissa’s story, however, continues on.

TOUISSA HANDED OUT the presents he’d brought with him: jabane (nougat), sesame cake, dates, and walnuts for the children, and a yellow scarf for Ghita.

This time around, he had gotten back on his feet and was looking healthy and respectable. Namouss was struck by yet another detail: He was wearing shoes. In fact, he had always worn shoes, but it was the first time that Namouss had noticed them, amused by how paradoxical this was considering that Touissa made slippers. As one remark led to another, Namouss noticed that unlike his brothers — and here again there was nothing new — Touissa dressed in the European fashion. Trousers, a shirt, and over his shirt, even during the summer, a black overcoat that hung down to his ankles like a djellaba. People of Touissa’s ilk didn’t bother themselves about dressing elegantly, traditional clothes had become too onerous. They therefore made recourse to the American surplus stalls in Boujeloud’s Joutiya. In this flea market, which Namouss was well acquainted with, one rummaged through piles of clothes and usually found something you could be pleased with, and for a modest sum. This brings us to yet another bizarre enigma surrounding Touissa.

We celebrated the return of our prodigal uncle. The children were fascinated by his bohemian side. They could poke fun at him, outrageously so at times, without the threat of reprisals. Zhor, the eldest sister, took the initiative since she was better equipped to converse with Touissa. She’d learned the sign language used by the deaf and put it to wonderful use. One habitual game consisted in taking advantage of Touissa’s culinary phobias, since he was terrified of honey and okra. Zhor would therefore pretend to dip her index finger in a pot of honey and then place it in her mouth, accompanying the motion with a sucking sound while feigning delight. Even though she was only pretending, Touissa would begin shaking in fear. But Zhor would stay on the offensive. Pulling her finger out of her mouth, she would slap her forehead with the palm of her hand shouting: “Honey! Honey!” Touissa would then stamp his feet and shake even more, and attempt to escape. The children would then surround him and start to tickle him relentlessly, right up to the point where they feared he might start to suffocate. Giving him a little room to breathe and recover, they would then renew their assault, this time armed with okra. L-mloukhiya!

These games would last the whole day. Touissa was happy to spend time with Ghita and Driss, despite the fact that this intimacy would begin to wear thin the moment he felt the need to smoke his sebsi. He didn’t dare do it in front of Driss, since even though Driss wasn’t the eldest, he was nonetheless older than Touissa. He therefore owed him some respect. So he waited impatiently for Driss to leave so he could give free rein to his vice. Rather than getting offended, Ghita would encourage him.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Now that your belly is full, you can let your hair down!”

Night came and dinner was served. A simple meal of couscous flavored with sugar and cinnamon and accompanied by a glass of milk. Seeing the disappointment on the children’s faces, Ghita then announced there would be dessert — but only a chhioua (candy) — while winking in Touissa’s direction. The more cunning of the children sensed there was something fishy going on.

The sweets were brought out after the couscous. Ghita put a large raffia plate on the table, which was covered by a cone-shaped lid. Namouss didn’t get it at first. Zhor, one step ahead of him, had figured it out. Shouting in Touissa’s ear, she said, “Lift the lid!”

Touissa didn’t understand why Zhor had asked him of all people, but he did it anyway, and in uncovering the plate discovered there was a large rooster underneath the lid, which leaped on him, all the while beating its wings before flapping off to the other side of the room. This time Touissa wasn’t the only one who was laughing. Everyone in the room was in hysterics. Namouss’s clan certainly came up with some kooky ideas!

An hour after the meal, everyone moved to the couch. Driss lowered the flame on the gas lamp. A sense of peace reigned over the room, and Touissa knew the time had come for him to take center stage. He began by asking everyone to repeat some phrases that would serve as good omens, as well as inspire the storyteller.

“Curse you, Satan!”

“May you be cursed and cast down!”

“Blessed are you, oh Prophet of God!”

“Blessed are you,” the others chimed in.

“And again.”

“Blessed are you!”

“And again.”

“Blessed are you, oh Prophet of God!”

Then Touissa began: “It is told, ladies and gentlemen, that once upon a time, in a country blessed by the heavens, there was a king whose reign was just and compassionate. His fair-mindedness extended even to animals, so much so that the sheep got along with the wolves, and the lions and gazelles slept peacefully side by side. .”

We will content ourselves with this little taste, since Touissa’s stories were long, in fact very long, and Namouss had never been able to follow them to the end. Each time, the delightful stories would deliver him into the embraces of sleep.

A question, however, begs to be asked: How did Uncle Touissa, who barely spoke during the day, transform into such a formidable bard thanks to the power of the word? How had a deaf — and illiterate to boot — man come to acquire such culture and the ability to impart it? Yet, after all, wasn’t Homer blind? Long after these events, Namouss would ask himself these questions and answer in all honesty: Touissa was my Homer.

GHITA, WHO ONLY a week earlier had waged a war to go on holiday, wound up finding it exhausting.

“We came here to feast our eyes on some greenery and to relax, and what did we get out of it? Excess flab and work. And the holy month of Ramadan is fast approaching and I know what’s waiting for me back at home.”

Taking advantage of the situation, Driss approved enthusiastically.

“Your mother is right. It’s time to go home.”

“Hmm,” Ghita remarked, “you were just waiting for me to open my mouth so you could use my own words against me. You’re so honey-tongued you’d think I’d been throwing sweets at you.”

On that bittersweet note, the decision was made to go home. In his hurry to get back to work, Driss arranged to travel back to Fez by bus, partially fulfilling Namouss’s dream.

The vehicle that was to transport them home was a beat-up old bus — so rusty that its original color was indiscernible. As far as its size was concerned, it was just as Namouss had imagined it, happily so considering the number of people and the mountains of baggage it would have to carry. It took almost an hour to load everything on the roof and another hour for the passengers to come to an agreement as to who should sit where — there weren’t many places available — and there was also the business of putting the hand luggage on the overhead rails: sacks heaving with fresh vegetables, baskets of eggs, oil drums that threatened to spill, chickens that had been bound by their feet, cackling and flapping their wings, even slices of mutton, still bloody, that had been wrapped in rags. Once the seats had been filled, the conductor allowed the few visibly less moneyed passengers to perch on the roof for half the going fare. Namouss would have loved to join them. From there, he would have had a better view of the landscape, and with nose to the wind, could kiss the sky and steer an imaginary wheel, feel as if he were the one in charge of that crazy, traveling band. He put the idea to Driss, who refused him outright.

“Up there is only good for the country bumpkins, plus it’s dangerous.”

On that note, the conductor yelled to the driver, “Yallah, drive!”

The bus left Sidi Harazem, descending a road filled with twists and turns. The bus snored and swayed like a live beast. The motor emitted a strong gassy odor that reminded Namouss of the stench he’d experienced during the departure: the foul farts that Abdelwahab the horse had let rip. Looking for someone to share this memory, he turned to Ghita, but she, who had reacted so stoically the first time around, was now looking ostensibly indisposed. Mixed with the swaying of the bus, the smell of gas was making Ghita’s stomach turn. To keep from vomiting, she was smelling a bit of orange peel and reciting the usual list of saints and relations she used whenever she felt in peril.

Having made its descent, the bus rolled through a level stretch of countryside and the driver stepped on the accelerator. The uneasy silence that had pervaded gave way to deep sighs of relief, then grew into a chorus of encouragement directed at the driver. All the children and the adults — except the women — joined in:

Zid, zid, ya chefor

Go, go, driver

Zid nghiza fel-motor

!

Step on the gas some more!

Heeding the will of the people, the driver stepped on the accelerator until it was flat on the floor. The bus sped ahead, acquiring a velocity that made the male passengers even more excitable. Seeing the direction things were taking, Namouss, who had originally taken part in the chorus, now kept very still. Ghita was feeling even worse, and even Namouss was beginning to worry. He began to ask himself how a vehicle that was going this fast could ever come to a stop. Would it not instead continue on its trajectory until it lifted off the ground and took flight, slicing through the air to God knows where? As it happened, his anguish didn’t last much longer. Some signs began to emerge informing the travelers they were drawing near to Fez: The houses on the side of the road were now made of bricks. Cars and bicycles were coming from the other direction, and confusion began to grip the inside of the bus, as passengers started taking their hand luggage off the rails. When the bus came to a crossroad, Bab Ftouh came into sight. Coming back to its senses, the bus slowed down and came to a smooth stop at the foot of the city walls.

FEZ IN THE summer, at the beginning of Ramadan. A frenzy of activity. Craftsmen and shopkeepers double their efforts in advance of business slowing down during the holy month, as it usually does. It is also the time when households stock up on all essential goods — flour, oil, sugar, honey, clarified butter, spices, dried legumes, preserved meats — because this month of great abstinence also comes with great nocturnal feasts. The liveliness of the Medina is at its zenith. This suits the children just fine, who exploit the situation to their advantage. Parents reach into their wallets and the pocket money harvested is passed on immediately to the vendors of firecrackers, marbles, and whirligigs. The entire city resonates with the sound of crackling and explosions. The side streets next to the souks transform into the staging grounds of marble and whirligig tournaments, which the neighborhood kids follow attentively.

But things weren’t going so well for Namouss. Driss didn’t even want to hear about firecrackers, the sole object of Namouss’s desire since he wasn’t any good at the other games, which he limited himself to watching or on occasion to acting as a referee, a lackluster role in these circumstances. He was only able to get enough money from Driss to buy a whirligig. While he was at it, he decided to satisfy an old craving, since, when it came to whirligigs, Namouss wasn’t taken by the European varieties found in shops. Those factory-made whirligigs usually broke on first impact and their colors faded quickly. He preferred instead the handmade ones built by local artisans whom Namouss loved to watch while they worked.

The woodturner’s shop was located right at the end of Namouss’s street. The woodturner was always hard at work, with such. . how to put it. . loving devotion that nothing could distract him. Even when clients turned up with orders, they knew they would have to wait for the master craftsman to finish working on the piece he had in his hands. If the customer in question was a child, the wait became even longer. The craftsman had more important priorities, and when he eventually turned his attention to his young customer, it was more out of kindness than anything else, since making a whirligig wasn’t such a big deal. He would then take a piece of shapeless wood, sand it down, keep it in place with his toe, and start to chip away at it. The way he used his tools made him look like a violinist. His chisel flew through the air like a bow and — presto! — the whirligig began to take shape. The only thing left to do was to equip it with an iron tip. But that was not the woodturner’s job. For that, the child would have to go a stone’s throw away to the blacksmith in the El-Haddadine souk.

Total change of scene. Having accomplished the most pleasant part of his quest, Namouss was frightened by this next part. But he had no choice. The blacksmith’s forge was shrouded in darkness. The flames of the furnace barely lit the blackened faces of the master and the apprentice, who was blowing air into the fire with a bellow. The smell of burning was unbearable. The eyes of the blacksmith shone with a strange sparkle, and the smile out of the corner of his mouth froze Namouss with fear. All’s well that ends well. The iron tip was ready and it was then attached to the bottom of the whirligig, allowing Namouss to flee that dangerous situation.

Back out into the open air. Though he had his whirligig in his pocket, he didn’t feel like playing. The trip to Sidi Harazem had inspired new feelings in him. That first voyage had filled him with a sense of pride. Many of the neighborhood children he played with had never lived what he considered a great adventure. That shift in time and space had opened a window onto the future, there, in a place where he had seen himself equipped with wings, flying above the city of Fez, embracing horizons both known and unknown. All of a sudden — and perhaps because he has just evaded a great peril — the desire to rediscover his town took hold of him. To rediscover it with eyes that had gone traveling, with the need to commit to memory what was at risk of being lost, if ever he should acquire those wings, which would whisk him so high and far away to the point of no return. Right up until that moment, he had lived inside the Medina as if it had been a cocoon. He had never before asked himself how that cocoon had come to be and who had made it. A pupa among pupae, he waited with a vague sense of consciousness for the moment when he might break through the soft pod and step out into the light.

And this is where the journey begins.

10

NAMOUSS’S STOMPING GROUND was the size of a handkerchief. He kept within the bounds of the Qarawiyyin neighborhood, if that. As for the other neighborhood, that of the Andalusians, Namouss had never, in a manner of speaking, set foot in it. For him, as for most of his friends, it was almost a foreign country, where one should never venture. Hostile children lived in those parts, with whom they never crossed paths aside from the occasional scuffle. When those took place, the battles were regulated by strict rules of engagement. An emissary was dispatched to the enemy camp to deliver the declaration of war, to put forward a date for the commencement of hostilities, as well as to agree on the weapons that were to be used — usually belts and/or stones — not to mention techniques of impromptu hand-to-hand combat, where direct blows to the head were deemed dangerous and only permitted under certain circumstances. The neighborhood’s self-proclaimed Joint Chiefs of Staff then set to planning their strategy and commenced their recruitment drive. Barely a flyweight, Namouss was not among the children called up for duty. Even though he was entrusted with some small tasks, when the hostilities began he’d had to content himself with watching from the sidelines.

Admittedly, he felt comfortable with this role. Was it a case of cowardice or rather a precocious adherence to the tenets of nonviolence? The question remains unresolved. In any event, those wars did not leave a significant mark on him. By the time he would remember a battle was due to take place in his neighborhood, it would already be over, the dust settling — according the “official” version of the events — in triumph over the foreign invaders. Victories aside, what Namouss had learned was that he should not cross into enemy territory on his own. His neighborhood was enough for him, since it was after all the most prestigious one, home to both of the city’s leading mosques — the Qarawiyyin and the Moulay Idriss — and was also the liveliest, since the business activity of the city was concentrated there. Namouss knew his neighborhood souk by souk, square by square, street by street. He knew all the shortcuts to take through its alleys. More important, he knew how and when to meet the unusual characters that so fascinated him. Who were they? Angels or demons? Beggars or prophets? Who knows. Both the settings they were in and the way they spoke stood in sharp contrast to how demure most people usually were. The adults didn’t hold them in high esteem. They would stop and listen with half-amused, half-reproachful looks on their faces and then continue on without a word. The children, however, were torn between a vague sort of admiration and an instinctive hostility against those poor outcasts. As for Namouss, he was pulled in by their eccentricity; they reminded him of his uncle Touissa. The words that came out of their mouths had the same effect on him as his uncle’s stories. Through them, he discovered that words could be used in unconventional ways. Not unlike his first day of school, when Mr. Benaïssa had begun to play his flute, Namouss understood that there were words and words, music and music.

Speaking of words and music, the first character that took his place in Namouss’s pantheon was a rather gentle, taciturn man, and a regular feature in the Spring of Horses: Mikou. It was said he was a scion of a large family, which he had left behind in favor of a free, wandering lifestyle that had in turn led to his family disowning him. As a result, many homes opened their doors to him, where, depending on their mood, Mikou would be able to eat and sleep in exchange for a few chores: taking the bread to the oven, filling buckets of water at the public fountain, carrying heavy packages, or assisting with the spring cleaning. Somewhat simpleminded, Mikou had a glowing face and was particularly popular among the children, who occasionally paid him court throughout the course of his peregrinations. Mikou would then perk up and, surrounded by a small crowd of his followers, would use his beautiful voice to intone one of his own compositions:

Hear me, oh girls

They say Mikou’s dead

That a donkey bit him

And that’s why he’s dead.

Why did he address his song specifically to girls? Which Mikou was he singing about? Nobody asked themselves these sorts of questions. The song became a real hit among the children, who added it to their repertoire.

THERE WAS ANOTHER way in which Mikou was looked after in the neighborhood. Even though he was able-bodied and in the prime of life, he was the only man who could mingle among women in their homes. The men looked on this as normal and the women were delighted with his presence. They could go around unveiled and adopt a casual air with someone unrelated to them. A game that seemed to excite them. They didn’t hesitate to tease him about “below the belt” subjects, and poor Mikou, who had taken a vow of chastity, would blush a bright red right up to his ears.

Hear me, oh girls

They say Mikou’s dead. .

Namouss tried to wrap his head around it. Mikou was a man, and yet he wasn’t a man. Maybe he was a child that had grown up too quickly. And what about him — who never stopped mulling things over — was an adult trapped inside a child’s body?

WITH THESE QUESTIONS planted firmly in his mind, Namouss began making his rounds. On the right-hand side at the bottom of the street, in a place called Small Springs, there was a row of fine-leathers craftsmen, where he knew he would be able to observe another character in action. Unlike Mikou, whose renown did not extend beyond the neighborhood, this particular character, a woman, was known throughout the whole city. Her nickname Chiki Laqraâ (the bald spook) suited her well. Her skin was a shade whiter than most, while her head was almost completely bald, save for a few henna-colored tufts protruding from her forehead. This, coupled with the fact that she wore a simple dress and went about unveiled, meant she had everything she needed to draw attention to herself. It was during the afternoon, at rush hour, that she began to work. She would go from neighborhood to neighborhood, stopping in places where she was guaranteed to harangue the maximum number of people. Small Springs was one of her favorite haunts.

Her ranting had already begun by the time Namouss arrived. Hands on hips, head thrown back, eyes bulging, she was cursing and threatening an invisible enemy, sometimes even directing her booming voice at nearby shopkeepers and bystanders. The filthy language she used and her tone was not too dissimilar from Ghita’s litanies. Yet Chiki Laqraâ was clearly going much further. Moreover, while there was a coherent thread running through Ghita’s ideas, Chiki was instead a devotee of the art of the non sequitur. Whenever the subject of sex arose, she accompanied her words with gestures, whereas those sorts of words only came out of Ghita’s mouth inadvertently. How many times had Namouss overheard his mother shout “. . allocks!”5 whenever she blurted out something inappropriate.

Chiki was shouting herself hoarse in front of her dumbfounded audience.

“Who does that son of a bitch take me for? I am a woman, and the daughter of an honorable woman. My head is bare and I have nothing to hide. Let him come near me and I’ll show him which hole the fish piss out of. She’s got her eyes on him, that man. There ya go! I hope she gets hold of him and drags him down into the dankest depths of the planet. What good can come of man? He claims to act according to the laws of reason while his mind is actually governed by his balls. You’re keeping quiet, eh, you riffraff! I’m just something else for you to watch. Very well then, I’ll show you the henna on my hands. Look here” — lifting the hem of her dress and rocking her pelvis forward — “feast your eyes on that, and may you go blind! But you’re already blind to everything except the shine of gold. You eat what rightfully belongs to the orphans. You prize worthless coins above the lives of these innocents. Oh your hearts are made of stone! And that’s all you’ll be taking with you into the afterlife. In the meanwhile, try and stop me from speaking my mind, I dare you. Have me locked up in the Sidi Frej asylum. I don’t know who is the craziest one among us. The maddest one is she who has been cursed by her parents. That twat of a mother of mine, she thinks she’s got one over on me. She doesn’t know who Chiki is. Those who don’t know Chiki better watch out! Her curse is deadly. I am the black hen that will hound you until the day of Resurrection.”

Despite her threats and harsh accusations, some kind souls would slip a small coin into Chiki’s hand, who, suddenly appeased, would smile and respond to their generosity.

“They are nothing but sons of bitches. Bless you my children.”

Then she would leave the place, followed by a swarm of children.

Slightly stunned by her speech, Namouss decided to join the crowd. He took a left and headed toward Nejjarine Square, where another spectacle lay in store for him. The man who presided over this ceremony was also there and had chosen a good spot. Nejjarine Square was the intersection of three particularly busy souks: that of the carpenters, which gave its name to the square; that of the saddlers, where Driss had his shop; and finally that of the potters. Not to mention the fountain in the middle of the square, where nearby residents came to fetch their water.

They called him Bou Tsabihate (rosary man), and he was certainly covered in rosaries. He wore many around his neck, which dangled down his large chest. Others were strung around his arms, which he always kept outstretched before beginning to preach his sermon. He was magnificent. Slender, with a strong constitution. A thick beard framing the entirety of his face. His head covered by a yellow turban, impeccably fitted.

Namouss had heard contradictory reports about the man. Some took him for a madman of God, or in other words, a saint. Others suspected him of being a proponent of a religious sect in cahoots with the colonial authorities. That he had chosen to preach in Nejjarine Square where there was a police station lent authority to the second theory. Could everything he was shouting so vehemently be genuine considering there was an abundance of attentive ears waiting to catch him out?

Namouss didn’t know what to think. As it happens, he became indifferent to all this reasoning when Bou Tsabihate raised his voice and launched into his homily, making even all the unbelievers fall silent.

“Come back to God, oh slaves of God! Don’t allow yourselves to be corrupted by this fleeting world. It’s just another one of Satan’s tricks, since he loves nothing better than pissing in your ear and diverting you from the path of righteousness. Faith and prayer are the only remedy. But what is that I see? The mosques empty when it’s time to fill your stomachs. You are still snoring when the muezzin calls you to your duty. And what about orphans, what do you do for them? And what do you spare for beggars save crumbs and bones? And what about the hajj, how many among you hoarders of gold and silver have carried it out? Oh black sheep, you have been led astray, crossed into the land of the Pharaohs. Your children pay you in kind by forsaking all notions of decency and obedience. I say to you, the end of the world draws near. The goblins will soon come. They will come out of the basin in Moulay Idriss. Mules will conceive and give birth. The deluge will drown you. You will pay dearly for your sins when you stand naked before your Lord. Eternal hell will be your punishment. Come back to God, oh slaves of God!”

Unlike Chiki Laqraâ, Bou Tsabihate never begged for alms. Once his sermon was finished, he would vanish into the unknown, while the people who had gathered to listen would also disperse, with grave looks on their faces. The nearby craftsmen went back to work, with equally grave expressions.

Namouss, on the other hand, continued on his quest. He ran through the saddlers’ souk so that Driss wouldn’t see him. His destination, the horm, the sanctuary of Moulay Idriss.

LEANING ON THE guardrail that cordoned off the horm, as always, is Bidouss, the one-legged beggar. Despite his wooden leg, the man stands up to his full height. Like Uncle Touissa, he is wearing a black overcoat. While other beggars look miserable and try to outdo one another with their catchy laments, Bidouss remains sober and composed. His only request, which he delivers in a monotone, is astonishing, to say the least: “One hundred reals for God!” One hundreds reals, and nothing less, quite a sum! Such a claim astonishes Namouss. At the same time, he is deeply impressed. If Bidouss is asking for so much, it must mean that he’s worth it. Hence the respect he inspires. Besides, his reason for being there is that he’s on a quest. He could wait for hours on end — this did not happen every day — for a believer to pull out a large note and hand it over to our man, who would then pack up and leave, disappearing into the crowd only to return the next day.

Roaming around the horm, despite the throngs of people — or rather because of them — was a complicated pleasure for Namouss. There was a group of women there, some jostling for position, while others clustered around little boutiques to buy decorative candles, sandalwood, or orange blossom water, butternut bark, and kohl. Among the female population, there were also young girls, and thanks to the layout of the premises, one could meet their eye, unlike when they rushed through the neighborhood at such a pace that one could barely get a glimpse of them. But to actually speak to them? Hchouma (shame) — that was simply impossible. Curiously enough, however, moving around in this holy place often forced people to press up against one another, even though, out of politeness, everyone tried to slip past with the least possible contact. This did not prevent a certain amount of confusion, which was exacerbated by the stifling atmosphere and the fragrances the perfume-sellers burned in order to better intoxicate their customers.

Namouss was aware of these things. But this awareness did not extend to the torments of the flesh. What distracted him for the moment was his mischievous sense of humor. Alas, he would not be able to give free rein to it. While he was in the company of his neighborhood buddies, Namouss was able to become bolder and take part in a cruel game whose victims were exclusively female. The game consisted of taking advantage of the rush of people and the feverish touting of wares to attach the ends of two or three women’s djellabas together with a safety pin. The more adept ones would use a needle and thread and actually stitch them together. They would then follow their victims right up to the exit of the horm. When the women would attempt to go their separate ways, they would become aware of the problem, the nasty trick would be exposed, and hilarity would ensue. Curses would rain down on the children’s heads, and they would scatter like a flock of sparrows.

Namouss would then do the best he could to reach Bab Loufa, which would allow him access to the central basin of the mosque. This was where the children would rendezvous since their presence wasn’t tolerated in the prayer rooms. In order to lend weight to their supposedly pious intentions, they would pretend to perform their ablutions, a ritual that, thanks to the heat and resultant need to freshen up, quickly — and chaotically — devolved into a case of the sprayer getting sprayed. This would signal the entrance of a dreaded character, whose purpose for being there was to ensure the tranquillity of the worshippers and that the place was treated with respect. The children knew him by the name of the instrument he carried with him to keep the peace: Bou Souita, Father Whip — a boundless whip. A quince handle with a long, long leather lash attached to one end, which allowed him to strike the fugitives even in the farthest reaches of the square, dealing out blows in a most democratic fashion. Once the delinquents had been beaten and had dispersed, Bou Souita was free to attend to his other tasks, at which point the rabble-rousers would regroup, this time in a slightly more organized way. Lookouts would be designated in case Bou Souita should return unexpectedly. And the games would start over.

At this point in his peregrination, Namouss inexplicably felt a different sort of need. He therefore joined up with a few of the kids there and performed his ablutions with actual dedication. He wasn’t sure he was proceeding through the steps of the ritual in an orderly fashion, but he didn’t really care since, as Driss was found of saying, at least his heart was in the right place. He would then leave the group behind and head toward the room where the city’s patron saint was resting. His head held high, he took a few measured steps and assumed an inspired composure. If he was to be admitted into the holiest of holies, his face must show his heart was in the right place. And it worked. He went in and approached the grille surrounding the mausoleum. His heart was racing. Was it fear? Fear of what? Or was it that he was the only child in the midst of so many patriarchs, people who usually commanded respect but who were now kneeling submissively in front of the grille, murmuring prayers or expressing their weaknesses and their hopes for help in their time of need? He didn’t know. His legs buckled and he found himself on his knees. He reflected on what he would say. He didn’t feel particularly unhappy and had nothing to ask for. The only thing that came to mind was the beginning of the new school year. He really wanted to do well at school. He wanted to succeed. The words issued without a hitch. He formulated his vow, kissed the grille, drew back, and sat down cross-legged. He thought he had won the right to be there and to leisurely observe everything that was going on around him. The people there, either seated or reclining in Roman style, would abandon themselves to their reveries, indifferent to the passing of time. This despite the fact that the walls were decorated with large clocks whose swaying pendulums produced a subdued cacophony, even though all the faces showed the same time. Namouss was stunned by the array of timekeeping instruments juxtaposed with the people present who, having found refuge in the saint’s mausoleum, had wholly detached themselves from earthly concerns. He too had abandoned himself to a reverie. He grew wings once again. He rose up and up through the sky until he was blinded by a dazzling light. He forced his eyes open, because he knew the Face would appear before him. A moment later, he saw Him on His throne. A stern-looking old man with a magnificent beard, who held out His hand. Namouss kissed it and immediately an incredible feeling of strength flowed through him. But a voice brought his euphoria to an end.

“Have you performed your ablutions properly?”

Namouss fell from great heights since this question planted the seed of doubt in his soul. He came to the moment Bou Souita’s shadow fell across the room. Panicking, Namouss took off and went to warn his friends, who as it turns out hadn’t waited for him.

He found them conferring among themselves by the doors of the mosque. One of them had reported seeing Aâssala not far from there, beside the Qarawiyyin. The group decided to go and meet her.

Aâssala, the cat lady, virtual mute, vagabond. Namouss had a soft spot for her, despite his fervent denials. Fact was that she was tied to a story that had tormented him for a long time, something that began when he was very little. Who had inflicted this trauma on him, had it been Ghita or had it been Zhor, his sister? He couldn’t remember. It had all started when someone had alleged with the utmost seriousness that Namouss was in reality an orphan. That he had been found armed with a jug in the Jnan Sbil gardens selling water to passing strollers. The family had taken pity on him and brought him home. For Namouss, the whole story had transformed into a tragedy. He avoided getting into trouble, since each time he was caught out, the same old threat would resurface: If he ever did it again, they would give him his jug back and leave him in the garden so he could take up his old trade. Where did they keep the damned jug? Namouss had looked for it all over the house in vain. Even when happiness reigned in the family the doubt had never left him, despite the family trying its best to reassure him by saying the whole story had just been one big joke. But on less joyous occasions, the family would take their gag even further. Since he was a foundling, when it would later become time for him to marry, no one would want him. One day, while he was telling the children not to pester Aâssala, the cat lady, meskina, the poor thing, someone yelled, “Here’s an idea! Why don’t you marry her?”

It had taken Namouss some time to recover from this episode. Even now, doubts would take hold of him and his eyes would fill with tears, which he would be unable to hide. But nothing had changed his feelings in regard to Aâssala. He was still secretly very fond of her, and whenever he was out with his friends, he did his best to ensure no harm would come to her.

The group left the horm of the Moulay Idriss complex and headed toward the Qarawiyyin. A gathering crowd signaled Aâssala’s presence. Namouss squeezed through to the front row. There was his “betrothed.” A swarthy-skinned woman with pinhead eyes and wild, unkempt black hair. Even though she was dressed in old rags, she wore at least one ring on each of her fingers. She was holding a pretty kitten in her arms. Another was perched on her shoulder. She was surrounded by a few scrawnier-looking cats. Aâssala was not making a speech. Muttering between her teeth, she was addressing the cats rather than the curious people around her. Yet at the slightest threat, she would raise her voice into a croaky howl, forcing the bystanders to take a step back. Occasionally a child would launch a sneak attack and tug at her sleeve. At which point the child would be beset by the pack of cats, ready to defend their mistress. Thus warned, the children wouldn’t dare confront her head-on. They would content themselves with hurling jibes at her. Keeping at a distance, some coward would then throw a stone at her before running away.

Namouss was there, watching the scene with a mixture of pity and admiration. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. At the same time, he envied the relationship she enjoyed with her cats, who seemed entirely devoted to her. He would have loved to have a kitten of his own at home, to take care of it. A strict rule stood in his way. There were lines he simply couldn’t cross when it came to his family. These ranged from raising pigeons to distilling orange blossom water — all the way up to preserved lemons and olives. Even the slightest transgression would incur a beating. Ghita proved intractable on this point. Having a cat was therefore out of the question — akin to inviting a jinni into the home. Didn’t cats have seven souls?

Namouss was well aware that while Aâssala enjoyed this privilege, his own wish would remain unfulfilled. At least Aâssala was free to have the companions she wanted and go wherever she liked with them. Having reached this stage in his reasoning, he stopped and felt anxious. If he was drawn to freedom and a life of vagrancy, this must mean there was some truth in those stories that had so tormented him in the past. For the first time, he took courage: after all, it was possible for an orphan to have an altogether different life, perhaps even a better one. Why worry so much about it? He was consequently on his way to alleviating the troubles that had dogged him all these years.

And, as if canceling out these first awakenings of a desire for freedom, he surprised himself by saying, “I must get back. It’s getting late.”

11

IT IS THE month of Ramadan, when the mornings are long and spent in total seclusion. There’s no point in going outdoors. The Medina is deserted. One has to be careful not to make any noise in the house so as to let those who were fasting sleep as much as they wanted. Even Driss, who was not usually temperamental, would get nasty whenever he was disturbed from his rest.

Having been awake for a good long while, Namouss was growing impatient. He was hungry and wanted Ghita to get up and look after him. Satan began to whisper naughty ideas into his ears. He discarded a few of them, but his hunger got the better of him in the end. It followed that he couldn’t expect to have warm milk with his breakfast. He would therefore have to make do with the leftovers from the previous evening’s meal. Rummaging in the cubbyhole that served as a kitchen, he managed to lay his hands on a partially eaten quarter-loaf of bread and a small piece of meat coated in congealed fat. He had just begun to devour his meager snack when he heard the squeaking of mice coming from behind a row of jars. Panicking, he jerked back and bumped into a rack containing of number of pots and saucepans. With a crash, the kitchen utensils came tumbling down, scattering as far as the courtyard in a deafening racket. And the mice, who were even more scared than Namouss, leaped out of their hiding place and, after racing around the courtyard in mad circles, headed straight for his parents’ bedroom.

Soon enough, the house is turned on its head. Ghita’s terrified shrieks. Driss comes out in his pajamas still wearing his nightcap. Noisily throwing open the bathroom door, he grabs hold of a club and, giving Namouss a dirty look, enters the field of battle. Woken from their slumber, Namouss’s brothers and sisters rush into the courtyard, each brandishing a weapon they’d brought out just in case: a slipper, a sandal, a palm broom. The atmosphere is charged. Namouss knows he will not be able to get off scot-free. Unless. He starts thinking, fast. After all, no one could be sure that he had been the one to knock over the pots and pans. Why couldn’t it have been the mice? This version of the events could hold water. In any case, it would be best to disappear for the moment and wait for the breaking of the fast to show his face again. By that time, there’s a good chance the whole affair will have been forgotten.

HE ROAMED THE streets like a lost soul. Empty of people, the Medina was unrecognizable. The few passersby he crossed paths with looked sullen. Hardly any shops were open and the craftsmen inside worked at a leisurely pace. Only a handful of grocers attracted a few customers: some young maids, whom one recognized because of their humble attire and, above all, their faded, ill-fitting head scarves, which made them look like elderly spinsters. There they were, sniffling, their eyes heavy with sleep, waiting for the grocer to deign to serve them.

It was then that Namouss realized the full extent of the calamity that he’d brought upon himself. Unless a miracle happened, he would have nothing to eat for the whole day, and since he couldn’t very well go home before sundown, what could he do to fill the interminable hours that lay ahead of him?

He began roaming the streets aimlessly again. After a while, the empty streets made him feel as if he were in a different town altogether. Devoid of crowds, the souks seemed larger. One could take his time, look around, lift one’s gaze to the sky, watch the flight path of a stork, and there, where some reeds had been braided into a sheltering roof, observe clusters of grapes hanging heavy as wax from their vines, or listen to the chirping of birds that had made their nest in that cool spot.

Namouss continued on his way, prompted by a sudden desire to revisit all his favorite haunts, taking advantage of the exceptional tranquillity. His steps led him to the Joutiya market, where on normal days the crowds were usually thickest. Starting early in the morning, people gathered around the stalls run by butchers, fishmongers, vegetable sellers, and in the middle of the square, surrounded the traders selling olives, snails, and salt, who, lacking proper shops or stalls, sold their wares out of large, wide baskets on the ground. The cheap eateries serving harira were never empty. Namouss would sometimes slip inside the one in Ba Allal, taking care not to be spotted by someone who might be tempted to report him to his mother. This was because Ghita thought that dining out on what she called “street food” was beneath one. It was only suitable for beggars, those without families, and bachelors. When he flouted this rule, Namouss would eat his soup so quickly that he’d scald his tongue and then leave the eatery, skulking away like a thief in the night.

Today, however, there was no sign of soup anywhere, not even its aroma. Damn! The deserted square instead smelled of dung and piss. Some donkeys were there, slumped, their eyes half shut, nonchalantly shooing away some extremely persistent flies with their tails. Looking at them, one would think they too were fasting. Namouss would have to wait until noon for the square to spring to life a little. But he was wrong to think that. Because it was Ramadan, this would happen only much later, close to nightfall. Joutiya Square would then transform, as if by a miracle. There would no longer be any buying or selling. Rope dancers and storytellers would divide the square between them and hold the high ground until the first flicker of dawn, vying to outdo each other with their juggling skills and eloquence. The crowds around them would be thick, flabbergasted, and friendly. There were also pickpockets lurking about. Hymns praising the Prophet would fill the air when the collection plate was passed around.

Of all those shows, Namouss’s absolute favorite was the one performed by a character whose reputation extended far and wide, a storyteller who went by the name of Harrba. Physically, he was not particularly striking: a small head set on a scrawny neck, bleary-eyed, and half his scalp eaten away by ringworm. Fact remains that this puny-looking man was a great showman, a peerless narrator who, thanks to his varied repertoire, knew how to keep his audience in suspense. Harrba would sometimes improvise sketches inspired by daily life that made light of his fellow worshippers; other times he told variations of widely known stories, which had never been heard before. A little tambourine perched on his shoulder, and he used it to punctuate his story or to break into drum solos, which he excelled at.

Namouss would go to hear him on his own or with a group of friends. He would lose himself in the flow of his voice, a voice that could mimic those of men and women, the rich and the poor, city slickers and country bumpkins, masters and servants, the hard of hearing and stammerers, corrupt qadis and phony imams, a beggar feigning blindness, a merchant cheating his customers, and a whole other plethora of crooks and fakes. Shifting register, Harrba would allow Namouss to travel back in time and marvel at the miracles performed by ancient saints and prophets, to suffer as they suffered, be swept away by the exploits of heroes waging a relentless struggle against the forces of evil, to watch dumbstruck as Harrba brought a princess’s charms to life: a perfectly placed beauty mark, hair that reached down to the ankles, tits like grenades, and a waist so slender a single hand could clasp it.

Harrba would jump and twirl and about. He would mimic the sound of waves, the wind, thunder, rain, animal calls, evoking sounds as varied as explosive farts to the silent ones weasels make, and would stop — all of a sudden and without warning — to allow the audience to give credit where credit was due.

“Would you like me to carry on?”

“Yes!” they would yell in unison.

“Very well then,” he would say, “the show isn’t free. Dig deep into your pockets and let me hear those coins.”

The show would last up until it was time for the s’hour, the last meal before resuming the fast. Neighboring streets would resound with the songs of the “door knockers,” those messengers of dawn making the rounds from house to house. Using a hammer made out of leather, they would give the doors a sharp blow to let the people inside know it was time to eat. The crowds would then disperse in the blink of an eye. The performers would gather their belongings and follow suit.

NAMOUSS WAS COUNTING on finding Harrba again that night. From where he stood, his fate remained uncertain, so he continued wandering in the hopes that it might drive those unpleasant thoughts away. He started thinking about Driss, and this drew him like a magnet to the souk where the saddlers’ guild was located.

The Sekkatine souk! It felt as if this place was his father’s real home, while their abode in the Spring of Horses indisputably fell under his mother’s jurisdiction. The idea of splitting his life between two homes troubled him. Which one drew him in and comforted him more? One the one hand, Ghita ran the family nest in an orderly and reassuring way; on the other, while his father’s place also had its constraints, it was vitally linked to the city, teeming with life and receptive to echoes from the outside world: the countryside, other cities, the world beyond. And Driss, a respected craftsman, was at the center of all that.

The Sekkatine souk was deserted and all the shops were locked up. Only the watchman was there, lying half asleep on a sack of jute in front of the entrance. Though the watchman eyed Namouss suspiciously at first, he realized he was Maâllem Driss’s son and so asked after him.

“Yak labass? How is your father?”

“Labass, labass,” Namouss replied, albeit begrudgingly, feeling as though he was being spied on. Namouss had wanted the place all to himself on this most unusual of visits, whose purposes were unknown even to himself.

Turning his back to the watchman, he pushed on through the souk. The row of shuttered shops made him uneasy. Usually he could walk through the market blindfolded and know which shop belonged to whom: his uncle Si Mohammed; the stirrup-maker Meslouhi; the craftsmen Berdaï, Chardane, Amine Rabiî; the shopkeeper Tahiri brothers: Sid Louadi and Sidi Hafid; the Sebtis: Mohammed Lehsiki and his son Haji Mohammed the Younger, a.k.a. the “Screw”; the guild master Haji Abderrahmane Sekkat; etc. His father’s shop was situated right in the middle of the market, just in front of Doukkali’s, the barber-circumciser. Namouss could fill a whole gallery with the portraits of these men. There were kind and not-so-kind men among them, loudmouths and diffident ones, greedy ones and those happy just to make a living, jokers and suckers, those green with envy and those blessed by luck, bashful and cheeky ones, slow and speedy ones, drudges and perfectionists. There was never a dull moment when the Sekkatine was in full swing.

Very early in the morning, it opens. Each shop has an elevated door, with one shutter on the top and one at the bottom. After the lower one is unlocked with a large key, the top shutter is pushed up and fixed in place with the help of a thick wooden stick. A rope hanging from the ceiling allows one to hoist oneself into the shop like an acrobat. The workbench is set at chest level. Only the barber has succumbed to the sirens of modernity. His shop doors open sideways and — the epitome of luxury — are accessed via a series of steps.

That was where Namouss sat to catch his breath and once more lose himself to daydreaming. A smile began to form on his lips. He remembered the mornings when business was slow in the souk — and especially the pleasantries exchanged with the craftsmen who turned up late to work, rosy-cheeked and still wrapped in a towel. That they had just come from the hammam did not escape their co-workers. Once the man in question had opened his shop and laid his towel on the stick that held up the canopy, the jokes were rattled out in quick succession.

“Aha! Someone’s sure taken his time over his major ablutions!”

“I hope the water was warm.”

“Did the masseur look after you well then?”

“La-di-da, maâllem.”

“He must have worn out the lady of the house this morning. How will she get through all the day’s chores now?”

“And the midday meal will surely be ample. These things usually awaken the appetite.”

“May God give us just a bit of your zeal.”

“You must look after your health, maâllem.”

“We should keep an eye out for a second wife for him, just in case the first one throws in the towel.”

The fellow would take the teasing in stride and with good humor, seeming to accept it as an homage to his virility. He knew that the joke would be on someone else the following day. That was how the working day started off in high spirits.

Namouss didn’t understand any of this secret language when he first started frequenting the souk. He didn’t get why paying a visit to the hammam and having a passion for cleanliness should be so embarrassing. He didn’t know the difference between major and minor ablutions,6 that is until Si Daoudi, the Arabic teacher, shed some light on the matter. The lesson broached the subject of prayers and the ritual purification they required. Minor ablutions would suffice in this case, unless the worshipper in question invalidated them by urinating or breaking wind immediately preceding the hour of prayer. Major ablutions were only necessary in cases of “extreme filthiness.” The dutiful Muslim would then have to go to the hammam to cleanse himself. The teacher had limited himself to these cryptic stock phrases, but when confronted by a bold student’s insistence that he elaborate, he explained further that this “filthiness” occurred when a man got together with a woman.

“One shouldn’t be ashamed when it comes to religious matters. You bunch of philistines should keep in mind that without this sort of lawful intercourse, none of you would have come into this world.”

Ever since, while Namouss didn’t know all the ins and outs of these lewd innuendos, he at least could gather what they were about, and above all dreaded the day when it would be Driss’s turn to become the butt of everyone’s jokes.

Namouss would only go to the souk in the morning on rare occasions. That would only happen if Ghita sent him on an errand, or when he finally consented — and only after putting up a struggle — to having his hair cut, leaving his precious locks behind in Doukkali’s shop. Namouss had a bone to pick with Doukkali. The memory of his circumcision was still fresh in his mind. Not that he resented the operation. He had, after all, longed to be like all the other children. In the months leading up to the operation, the friends of his who had already been through the procedure began teasing him about the end of his willy that hung down a bit too far. What he rebuked Doukkali for was his underhanded ways. When Namouss had finally decided to put a brave face to the operation, the barber had resorted to subterfuge.

“Look at the little green bird chirping away up there!” he’d said.

As soon as Namouss had lifted his gaze to look for the bird with the rare color, Doukkali swooped down with his scissors.

Namouss also resented him for more mundane reasons. Namouss almost had a heart attack each time Doukkali cut his hair. Using stubborn tufts of hair as an excuse, he wouldn’t stop shearing until Namouss was almost bald. Namouss didn’t dare utter an objection, and the moment he got out of there, he was mortified to catch sight of himself, having been shorn like a sheep. He also couldn’t stand the noxious smell emanating from the barber’s hands, the man clearly never washed his hands after going to the bathroom. It was tough going. Namouss had to hold his breath to the point of near suffocation. It was a real relief when the barber sprinkled talcum powder on his head and around his ears, before giving him a once-over with a soft brush and standing back to admire his handiwork.

“Look at you, you look just like a newlywed!”

But bad memories of the Sekkatine were few and far between. The afternoons, for example, were splendid. Namouss used to love hoisting himself into his father’s shop just before rush hour and resting his elbows on the workbench to watch him work. From these moments, Namouss’s olfactory memory stored a variety of smells: goatskin, calfskin, hemp yarn, wax, natural or colored wool, bits and stirrup irons, wood, some flour-based adhesive, and of course snuff, which Driss, like the majority of people in the Sekkatine, consumed vast quantities of. His father’s smell was a subtle mix of all these odors. What fascinated him most, however, were Driss’s hands, which were large for a man his size and so agile that they seemed to act independently of his body. He wore leather thimbles on his thumb and middle finger, making them appear unusually long in comparison to the others. The callused hand he slammed down on the saddle to reinforce the seams was as strong as a hammer. Namouss admired these displays of Driss’s energy and ingenuity. He knew those hands were blessed, that they both fed and protected him.

When customers showed up, Namouss took a similar pleasure in following the minutiae of negotiations. Driss would begin by displaying the different types of saddles and explaining their specific uses. If the customer was a fantasia rider, Driss would show him the appropriate ceremonial saddle. The customer would then choose between the Fez style, with gold embroidery, or the Tlemcen style, with silver embroidery. If the saddle was meant for everyday use, then standard thread would suffice. The saddle would subsequently be fitted with a tarchih, composed of several layers of wool carpets sewn together, which would be placed directly on top of the horse’s back, before being equipped with a harness, a pommel, a cantle, a crupper, a throatlatch, and reins. They finally came to the most delicate part of the negotiations: money. The customer would then transform into a humble beggar, swearing up and down that the harvest had been bad that year and that he was on the brink of utter ruin. He beseeched Driss to take pity on his children and help him through this difficult patch.

“Let me kiss your hands, maâllem, don’t be so hard on me.”

This farce didn’t fool Driss, who’d seen some performances in his time. But the man’s speech seemed to have moved him, and he proposed, “All right, do you know what we’re going to do? We’ll leave the haggling to one side and concentrate on the profit margin. The base cost of what it is. Now what are you going to give me for my troubles?”

“A thousand, maâllem.”

“May Satan be cursed, my good man. Do you know how much work this is going to take?”

“Open your hand, maâllem, this is what I will give you: fifteen hundred and not a penny more. Were I to add even a penny more, my wife would throw me out.”

“Leave your wife out of this, my good man. Give me your money and take your saddle. Thanks be to God, oh He who looks after our needs and deals us our lot in life.”

On that note, Driss held out his hand and the customer pulled out a wad of bills and counted them: “One for God. Two” — and here he didn’t add a qualifier — “Three. .”

Namouss stared wide-eyed at the scene before him, rejoicing as each bill went into his father’s hand. Come the following Friday, he thought to himself, I will be able to ask him for a hefty tatriba (allowance).

THE SEKKATINE GREW more and more animated. The public auction had begun. The first items under the hammer were lbadis (small woolen carpets) handmade by the maâllmate, who entrusted their wares to hawkers like Ammour or Raïss, who went — carpets under their arms — from shop to shop to collect orders. The artisans paid close attention to the labels on each carpet; those made by Chérifa, the Berber woman Fdila, or Merqtani’s daughters were prized above all the others. They had even come up with a secret code to indicate the quality of the wares. Namouss eventually managed to decipher it, too. He knew that those marked chorba were of a poor quality while the opposite was true for those marked jrih.

After the woolen carpets, the secondhand saddles, stirrups, and moukhala guns made the rounds. It got to the point that items completely unrelated to saddlery were peddled: samovars, copperware, engraved daggers. . But eventually business slowed down and the souk would recover a little tranquillity. The shopkeepers did their paperwork and the craftsmen went back to work, albeit less energetically than before. The local café was flooded with orders, people asking Krimou, the owner, for coffees or mint teas, which were served in chebri glasses. Out came the nuts or the snuffboxes and everyone gave themselves over to pleasure. This was also the time when passing visitors were welcomed and gossip was exchanged: weddings, divorces, deaths, houses that had gone on the market, inflation, new products, and — naturally — the arm wrestling between nationalists and the colonial authorities. People made hushed references to Allal al-Fassi, Belhassan Ouazzani,7 Abdel el-Krim Khattabi,8 the sultan (may God grant him victory), and the corrupt caids who blighted the countryside. They weighed up the relative strengths of the Americans and the Russians (the two leading powers) and their support for Egypt, and prayed to God to take pity on Muslims as a whole and deliver them from evil.

Namouss hung on every word, scraping bits of knowledge together. Matters to do with other countries simply went over his head and he put these down to the natural order of things. History had yet to knock at the door of his consciousness. He waited impatiently for these serious discussions to come to a fortuitous end. If only Abdeslam Laïrini would suddenly show up with a suitcase in each hand! The man in question was a dedicated traveler originally from the north of the country, specifically from the town of Larache. Once a month he would go back and forth between Fez and the Spanish Zone, where he made a number of surprising purchases: soap bars in the shape of fruit (lemons, pears, bananas), Italian shoes, scarves and silk shirts, pajamas, bottles of Rêve d’Or and Tabu perfume, chocolate, tubes of toothpaste, toothbrushes, and — something that disconcerted Namouss — Spanish gargoulettes of unusual shapes and decoration. As soon as Abdeslam Laïrini entered the souk, many conversations came to an abrupt end. Everyone ran over to touch the merchandise, which for the most part sold out in a matter of minutes. For reasons unknown to Namouss, Driss rarely bought anything, so Namouss had to content himself with feasting his eyes. He was all ears too, since Abdeslam spoke with the singsong accent typical of the north. It was like hearing another language for Namouss, who had begun to develop a taste for new languages at school.

Yet there were days when nothing unexpected happened. The conversations dragged on. Becoming aware of how bored his son was, Driss would set him free.

“Go home,” he ordered him.

THE COMMAND JOLTED Namouss up from his extended reverie. He looked around to make sure Driss wasn’t anywhere in sight. A few shops had already opened. It was time to move on.

Where should he go now? It was barely noon, and he had to hold out until sundown. There was no choice but to continue on his peregrination. He left the Sekkatine souk, took a left, passed the Nejjarine fountain, and went down the alleyway that led to the rue des Pavés. Once there, he stopped in front of a shop that like the others was closed, though not for the same reason. In fact, the shop had been closed as long as anyone could remember and was shrouded in an aura of mystery. It was called the Prophet’s Shop, and it was said that God’s Beloved had once passed through there. The footprints he’d left behind were still etched in the ground. Namouss had often tried to peep inside the shop through a crack to see what went on in there but had never been able to make out anything in the pitch-dark. But today, distressed as he was, he was hoping for a miracle. He leaned against the door and looked through the crack. His need to be rescued was akin to a breath of air coming from inside the shop. He was moved by it. “Oh emissary of God,” he surprised himself murmuring, “get me out of this bad patch.” At that moment, he felt himself being shoved and violently crushed against the door. Grasping for something with which to catch his balance, his hand gripped the tail of an animal that had come out of nowhere. He realized that he’d come upon a heavily burdened donkey that had slipped on the cobblestones and had almost fallen on top of him. Luckily the donkey driver was there. Using his cudgel, the driver beat the animal until it got back on its feet, freeing Namouss, who was frightened rather than hurt. The driver, a little groggy, continued on his way.

Namouss needed some fresh air, and it was only natural he should think of the Jnan Sbil gardens. Namouss had a long walk ahead of him in order to get there, including a good uphill stretch: the rue des Pavés, then the Talaa Seghira, right up to Bab Boujeloud. “All the better,” he said to himself, “that will take up a few hours until it’s time for the Maghrib.” This new perspective invigorated him. He decided to stop loafing around and walk the distance to the gardens in a single go. Yet his overall vitality, though considerable, was now beginning to flag, standing in the way of his plan. At this time of day, thirst and hunger were making themselves painfully felt. Smokers and snuff-takers lose their patience when deprived of their vice. Their grouchiness becomes unbearable. They start to split hairs, fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, and vent their spleen. Altercations would break out here and there, which the idle followed with avid interest, idlers whose chief concern was to while away the hours until the breaking of the fast, an approach Namouss was already familiar with. Any distraction — in the strongest sense of the word — was welcome. There were two categories of idlers. First came the jokers, who loved adding fuel to the fire and who generally stood to the side so as to make a clean getaway if one of their jibes backfired and stirred a bruiser’s ire.

“Whose sebsi is this on the ground?”

“Whose snuffbox is this?”

“Light up and take a good drag.”

“The Maghrib is still far-far-far away and the maid is a piddling little child!”

The second category was made up of good souls who tended to break up fights and — thanks to copious quotations from the Qur’an — tried to bring the combatants back to reason. Although these mediators really did help keep the peace, this too was a means of whiling away the hours until the fast could be broken.

It was therefore curious to note the sudden interest a great number people took in being precise during this month when patience was celebrated as a virtue. From the time the sun passed its zenith, the questions people asked all circled the same pot.

“What time is it?”

“What time will Maghrib be today?”

“How long until the Maghrib?”

And, as if these weren’t enough, others who were even more anxious, would ask, “Are you sure your watch is working properly?”

Namouss had a hard time moving through that feverish crowd. He took care not to bump into anyone to avoid attracting the wrath of those mramden — as those “Ramadan sufferers” were called. He finally arrived at Bab Boujeloud. The way was clear.

THE JNAN SBIL gardens were a true haven of peace. The main avenue was lined with bushy Seville orange trees and flanked by two rows of basins where jets of water shot up and down, like dancers repeating an endless ballet choreographed by some invisible force. Namouss left the avenue behind and took a left. He crossed through a small forest of bamboo trees growing in the shadow of pines and giant palms. Here and there were some frail-looking datura sagging under the weight of their foul-smelling, bell-shaped flowers. A burbling brook could be heard, and at the end of the path, the garden’s majestic waterwheel came into view. It was turning slowly, as if stroking the surface of the water. Namouss sat on a bench and gave himself over to its movements, which soothed his heart. Lulled by the water’s swish, he wound up falling asleep. His dreams, alas, did not bring him any comfort, as they had little in common with the peace of his surroundings. An enormous weight pressed down on his chest while a series of images whirled through his head at breathtaking speed. Once again this nightmare.

This had happened a year ago. The episode had taken place in Aïn Allou, the road where the Small Springs were located. Unlike other times, he hadn’t gone there to see Chiki Laqraâ shower her invisible rival and assorted stone-hearted miscreants with insults. He had wound up there purely by accident. All around him were seditious murmurs. The crowd that had gathered in this back alley blocked the traffic. Men, children, and even young girls were chanting slogans.

“Down with colonialism!”

“Long live independence!”

Then something unimaginable happened: A young, unveiled girl was hoisted high above the crowd by two fellow protesters. Sweeping all objections aside, the girl launched into a song, which the crowd quickly echoed:

I have made a gift of my soul

To Morocco, my homeland

And he who tramples its rights

Will be made to taste death. .

The crowd grew larger and larger, and the excitement had reached its apogee when gunshots broke out from the top of the road.

“The goumiers! The goumiers!” someone shouted.

Panic ensued. Wave upon wave of protesters flooded the square, collapsing one after the other into a heap of bodies, crashing down like a house of cards. Trapped in a bottleneck, gesticulating wildly. Namouss felt the ground beneath his feet give away. The wave had overwhelmed him, swallowed him up, blowing him like a feather right into the thick of things. He reacted instinctively and did his best to neither move nor scream so he could concentrate on breathing. Keeping his mouth open, he tried to catch some air, but his lungs were being increasingly squashed and his heart started skipping beats. The thought that he might die crossed his mind, but strangely, this did not bother him much. Rather, he thought about how Ghita would throw a fit as soon as she heard the news — or about how Driss would be spared from having to give him his weekly allowance. But the more suffocating the situation got, the less he thought about these things. He was no longer able to breathe, and his throat only emitted a hoarse rattle. In a final burst of lucidity, he realized he was being pressed against a woman’s inert body, and that the woman was jamming her hand into his face. Without knowing why, he took the woman’s hand and, using all his remaining energy, bit down on it. He smelled blood. His or the woman’s? He couldn’t tell. The surrounding darkness gave way to a cold, white haze that worked its way into his brain and put him to sleep. All around him, the screaming and wailing began to fade away.

That was when he felt the hold over him loosen. Someone was dragging him away. He opened one eye, first seeing a policeman’s helmet, then a face and lips ordering: “Get the hell out of here!”

Freed from the vise, he landed, made his way to all fours before getting back on his feet as best he could — at which point his savior gave him a kick in the backside before he scuttled off.

“DO YOU WANT a drink?”

The boy yanking Namouss away from his agitated dreams was very small, in fact only knee-high to a grasshopper, and had hanging over his shoulder. . a gargoulette! With his free hand, he held out a cup, insisting: “Do you want a drink?”

Waking up in a daze, Namouss looked at this apparition. Having just left a nightmare behind, here he was staring at his doppelgänger. Would his suffering never come to an end? What evil jinni was forcing him to remember that story, especially on a day like this, when everything was going wrong? Recovering a little, Namouss grabbed the cup and emptied it in a single gulp. The child was amused by such great thirst.

“Did you fast today?”

Wary, Namouss answered his question with another: “What about you? Did you fast?”

“No,” the child retorted. “I’m younger than you.”

“I am the youngest in my family,” Namouss added. “I won’t be starting to fast anytime soon.”

The conversation went on like this.

“I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“What about parents?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Where do you live?”

“In New Fez.”

“In whose house?”

“Houses that belong to people. I work and give them money.”

“Did they find you here in the garden?”

“No, they said they got me in the countryside, but they’re lying.”

“Who gave you the gargoulette?”

“I bought it with my money.”

“Do you sell water everywhere?”

“I sell it here during Ramadan, otherwise in the mellah.”

“So why are you here now?”

“I worked enough today. I came here to rest. The water that’s left over I give away fabor.”

“Who drinks your water?”

“Kids, and women who are having their time of the month.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“When they bleed.”

“From where?”

“From where you came out.”

“Why?”

“That’s just the way it is. And so they have the right to eat and drink as they like.”

“Ah, so that’s why my big sister eats from time to time.”

“You’re a real kanbou. You don’t know anything at all.”

“Yes, I do. I learn a lot at school.”

“I learn more from the streets.”

“Like what?”

“Tricks. Also, I know how to defend myself.”

“So do I.”

“Yeah, yeah. You wouldn’t stand a chance against me.”

“Don’t push it. I wouldn’t hit you anyway because you’re younger than me.”

“Feel my muscles.”

“It’s true, they’re hard as steel.”

“You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?”

“How do you know?”

“You did something bad, I can tell just by looking at you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

IT WAS TIME for the evening prayer. Maghrib wasn’t far off. Namouss decided to go home, reluctantly leaving his companion behind. The initial hostility had disappeared completely. The thought that he might never see the boy again even made Namouss sad. He turned around to look at him one last time. The water seller was perched on the bench with his gargoulette close beside him, his naked, dusty little feet dangling in the air. Framing him from behind, the waterwheel was spinning away. With a last look at this somewhat disquieting image, Namouss headed toward the exit.

12

RETURN TO THE house. His apprehension is intact, and the state he finds his mother in is certainly not going to release his tension. At first, Ghita seems to be ignoring his presence. It then becomes clear she is just midstream in one of her memorable tirades, using the patio as her stage. Namouss, used to these performances, pricks up his ears, waiting to see what will come next. But what he hears astonishes him.

“Our religion sure is a fine thing! You have to spend all day chained up like a dog. Our throats parched and our bowels gurgling. Neither rest during the day nor sleep at night. And who — who’s left gathering the grievances? Ghita, that’s who, the servant of young and old — the orphan girl with no one to look after her. If only I had somewhere to go, I swear to God I wouldn’t stay here a moment longer. What is it that our ancestors used to say? ‘When your country humiliates you, leave it.’ It’s true, the world is vast. I can live anywhere, even in a nouala or a tent. I’m strong enough to look after myself. After all, bread and water will suit me just fine. I don’t need gold or caftans. I don’t need a man, or children, anything that will make my head ache. Head, oh head of mine, you’re going to explode. My head, my head, my head. .”

On that note, she made an about-face and, finally noticing Namouss’s presence, she began to scold him.

“You’re just getting home now, you sinful son! Where have you been all day? Who have you been gallivanting with? Everyone was worried to death. Your father almost hired a street hawker to go around the city shouting your name.”

Namouss was seriously starting to panic, but then Ghita abruptly changed her tone.

“Come here! Now tell me first of all: You haven’t eaten a thing since yesterday, have you?”

“No,” Namouss hastened to answer, her question filling him with hope.

“Wili, wili!” Ghita exclaimed, suddenly moved to pity. The boy was dying of hunger and there was no one there to rescue him. “Come here, my poor little one, come here. You can start by tasting that damn harira to tell me if it’s salty enough. I never know how much salt to put in. That dates from the time when your father and I were newlyweds and lived at your uncle’s house. Well, would you believe that when it was my turn to cook, your aunt — may God punish her! — would wait until my back was turned to throw a handful of salt into the pot. When the tagine was served it was almost inedible. All of that just to sow discord between your father and me. I was still a little girl, but one day I woke up at dawn, packed my things, and gave your father a choice: Either he would find us a house of our own, or we would go pay a visit to the qadi —”

“Let me taste the harira,” Namouss implored, his stomach howling like a wolf.

Ghita filled half a bowl. Namouss gulped it down and asked for more.

“Fill the whole bowl.”

“So? Is it salty enough?”

Not paying any attention to these nuances, he dodged the question gracefully: “Your soup knows no rival.”

Flattered by the compliment, Ghita uncovered a dish filled with honey cakes and said, “Take as many as you like. Eat, eat. At least your life is carefree. What happiness!”

Pondering as he ate, Namouss felt reassured. If he was ever punished, it would be for running away rather than for the mischief he’d caused earlier in the morning; nevertheless, he wanted to make sure. Recklessly, he asked, “And the mice?”

“What mice?”

“The ones that came out of the cupboard this morning. Did you kill them?”

“Hush now! They managed to get away. Wanting to crush them with the cudgel, your father missed his mark and wound up almost breaking my leg. But how did you know they came out of the cupboard, where you there or what?”

“No, Yemma, I swear.”

“Don’t swear. If you lie, you’ll turn into a monkey. Watch yourself. Now finish your cake and go to the ovens to bring back the bread. There are five big loaves and a small one, which I seasoned with sesame and aniseed. You see, I was thinking about you. Here’s the money for the baker. Make sure you hold on to it tightly so it won’t drop or get stolen. Go on, get going. The men will be back and the Maghrib will soon be called.”

Namouss found the whole family around the table when he came back from the ovens. Ghita had already poured the soup and laid out various plates filled with honey cakes, dates, and dried figs. With only a few minutes to go before the announcement of the breaking of the fast, faces wore sullen looks. Everyone stared at the food in silence, ears open. Finally the cannon sounded and the call of the muezzin filled the air.

“Bismillah,” Driss began.

Everyone lapped up their first bowl of harira, grunting with pleasure and smacking their lips. By the time the second bowl was served, the atmosphere had relaxed noticeably. Namouss decided to take advantage of the lull to make his move. The idea he had devised to pull the rug out from under Driss’s feet was daring.

“I fasted today,” he declared in a cocky way.

“You did, well at least until the middle of the afternoon.” Ghita corrected him, a smile forming on the corner of her lips. “You’ll do better some other day.”

“And where were you until then?” Driss inquired, clearly irritated.

“I was playing outside with my friends,” Namouss replied foolishly.

“Since when did you play in the Sekkatine, and all by yourself? The watchman at the souk told me all about it. You’ve become a chitane — a devil — you have. So finish up and get out of my sight. The soles of your feet deserve a sound thrashing.”

Namouss kept quiet. He knew that Driss’s threats were not to be taken at face value. At most, they expressed an anger that would abate as soon as he had finished his meal. The nightmare had therefore come to an end, and all things considered, he hadn’t done too badly. He was the first to leave the table.

HE RAN INTO a few of his friends while out on the street: Hat Roho, his blond, blue-eyed classmate; Hammad, who was such a cranky, snot-nosed crybaby he was barely tolerated by the gang; Loudini, who had the look of an outlaw about him and was by far the most cunning and always had a devilish idea running through his mind; and finally, Belhaj, who with his milk-white skin looked like a little old man, and whose head was even rounder than the rag balls with which they played.

Emboldened by his earlier feats, Namouss suggested the gang play a match of taïba (blindman’s buff). But Loudini, who didn’t want anyone to steal his thunder, was in favor of a riskier game: tafriq Nsara (doing splits like the Nazarenes). Hammad, who was not suited for gymnastics, campaigned for something a little more conventional: seb sebbout (leapfrog). Not wanting to remain on the sidelines, Hat Roho suggested a whirligig tournament. The debate got heated and threatened to result in everyone going their separate ways, at which point Belhaj, who was usually shy, put forward a compromise: They would begin with a race and then proceed to the other games. The great overlord Loudini gave his consent, thereby ensuring the others would follow suit. Only Hammad complained, and though he began to snivel and did not want to participate in the race, he agreed to organize the teams. He suggested that Namouss, against whom he held a grudge, would face the formidable Loudini, which left Hat Roho to race against Belhaj. And of course it was only logical that Hammad also act as referee.

It was on. The starting line: the middle of the square in the Spring of Horses. The two runners stood back to back. When the referee waved them off, they would dash in opposite directions: one on the left, the other on the right. The one on the left would go down Aïn Allou, climb the Tamisiers hill, go down rue Bouaâqda, tear down rue Ben Debbouz, and once there make his entry into the neighborhood. The one on the right would follow the same course, except in the opposite direction. Cheating wasn’t an option because the adversaries had to cross paths eventually. It would also provide a good opportunity to determine whether one was ahead or lagging behind. The next step: a final that would pit the winner of the first race against the winner of the second.

One can easily guess that, on that evening, Namouss lost the first race. Thanks to his day’s wanderings around the Medina and his blitz through to the Jnan Sbil gardens — coupled with his opponent’s sturdiness — it couldn’t have ended any other way. After a decisive defeat over Namouss, Loudini didn’t have any trouble beating Hat Roho, who’d initially had it easy with Belhaj.

The night wore on. A great many people had left their houses and the neighborhood to see what was happening elsewhere. Driss had been among the first, heading toward the Sekkatine to get back to work and later to join a late-night card game. The workshops in the Spring of Horses came back to life. Those in Ahl Touat that belonged to fine-leather craftsmen originally from the Sahara reverberated with songs accompanied by clapping. Namouss had never dared venture into the area. People from Touat were generally considered foreigners and were therefore kept at arm’s length. Yet their songs, though different from those usually performed in Fez, were of a rare beauty.

Namouss’s gang had run out of games to play. They stumbled into a character who was particularly fond of their company. Si Abdeltif was one of the few adults in the neighborhood who didn’t look down on children and was always willing to exchange a few words with them. Even though he belonged to a large sharif family, he didn’t seem to share any of their traits and was quick to speak his mind. In terms of his physique, the man was visibly corpulent. His ample djellaba didn’t quite manage to conceal a belly that, considering he was barely in his forties, was exceptionally large and forced him to use a cane in order to get about. Perhaps that explained why he was so fond of sitting on that stone bench in the middle of the lane and holding court for hours on end. Si Abdeltif’s family was one the neighborhood’s most influential and owned a great number of properties in the area. They also owned vast stretches of land in the surrounding countryside. Donkeys bearing the produce of these estates would often show up in the neighborhood. Their panniers would be heaving with sacks of wheat, olives, figs, and grapes. Whenever the produce was being unloaded, Namouss and his gang would take advantage of the situation and pocket anything that fell to the wayside: a handful of fresh figs or a generous bunch of grapes. His family’s wealth hadn’t gone to Si Abdeltif’s head, and he seemed to prefer mixing with more humble people — completely unlike his arrogant elder brother, who terrified the children. As soon as this brother came into view, the children would break up their game to clear the way for him. If they happened to be playing soccer, they would quickly pick up the ball lest he confiscate it, deaf to all their entreaties. It was surely Si Abdeltif’s sense of humor that had saved him from winding up like his elder brother. And he would make the most of it. Whether he recounted anecdotes or put forward facetious interpretations of dreams, it was evident that he gave in to the lighter, rosier side of life. Whenever he arrived, panting, easing his bulk down onto the stone bench, the first words he uttered usually set the tone for what was to come.

“All these climbs and potholes are killing my knees!”

Following this first salvo came the day’s anecdote.

“This afternoon,” he began, “I headed toward Batha and walked up the Lion. The grand dame walking a few yards ahead of me was shamelessly ripping one fart after the other. She suddenly came to a stop, turned around, and nonchalantly asked, ‘Sidi, can you tell me if the evening prayer has been called?’ ‘It has, Lalla,’ I replied, ‘just when you farted for the third time.’ ”

Si Abdeltif continued in this lighter vein when it came to the interpretations of dreams. In the evenings, an adult would tell Si Abdeltif about his dreams in the most minute of details and with the utmost seriousness.

“I saw myself as clearly as I see you now, walking through a kitchen garden where all sorts of vegetables were growing. What struck me the most was that I was dressed in a red burnous whose hems were green. I racked my brains but couldn’t make sense of those mismatched colors. Let us pray to God that this isn’t a bad omen. So tell me, Si Abdeltif, what does this dream mean?”

Who, allowing the air of mystery to persist, replied, “It clearly represents a green-topped radish.”

“And?” the man insisted, intrigued.

“And it’s going to go straight up your ass!”

But Si Abdeltif was not particularly gifted when it came to the interpretation of dreams. In the company of children, however, he was careful to fill his stories with some educational content. When bringing an evening to a close, he would offer them riddles, like this one, which no one had ever deciphered.

“What is the name of the street in Fez where a camel can pass right under a minaret? Does anyone know? It’s clear you’re all blind. When you go through the arch that leads to Aïn Allou, lift your heads. What lies under that arch? The minaret of our mosque. The road I’m speaking of, you nincompoops, is our very own the Spring of Horses. Now scram. I’ve taught you enough for today.”

Si Abdeltif would then depart and the evening would carry on, even if less animatedly. The Touat people had stopped singing. There were few passersby in the street. Namouss’s gang was running low on ideas when they heard the sound of Chahmout’s voice coming from below Lalla Abla’s window. Of all that went on in the neighborhood, this ritual particularly intrigued the children. What was it all about? Chahmout was a distant cousin of Si Abdeltif’s. No one knew whether he was single or married. Lalla Abla, who was either a widow or a divorcée, was one of Namouss’s neighbors, and he knew her well. She was certainly good-looking and voluptuous. Were the stories behind these lovebirds known by the adults as well as the children, who were watching them at that late hour? The fact remains that Chahmout would stand beneath Lalla Abla’s window and, calling her by a man’s name, would bellow, “Abdeslam, oh Abdeslam!”

Lalla Abla would take a while to reply, and when she finally came to the window, would stand hidden behind the lace curtains and emit a barely audible coo.

Namouss, who was usually slow on the uptake about these things, finally wised up to what was going on. His heart racing wildly, he would hide under a nearby house’s vestibule so as not to bear witness to those illicit meetings verging on sin. He would wait until they had come to an end to leave his hiding place, at which point he would go elsewhere so he could clear his head.

He left his comrades behind, and breaking the promise he’d made to himself in the morning to go see Harrba perform that evening, he opted instead for the sanctuary of Moulay Idriss. Was it boredom or a crisis of faith? All bets are off.

13

LIFE RETURNED TO normal following the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The long evenings and nocturnal activities ceased. As darkness approached, everyone ate their dinner quickly and went to bed with the sun. Uncle Touissa disappeared once again. With him gone, it was difficult tvwo kill time in the evenings. The beginning of the school year was still some way off and Namouss was starting to find the days tediously long. In the clutches of idleness, he fell prey to a type of lethargy that took away his appetite and made him prone to solitude. The rooftop terrace became his favorite refuge. Lying in the sun weakened his mind and body even further, and when he persisted in staring fixedly at the star, he felt as if he was melting inside a boiling cauldron. He was then torn between allowing himself to dissolve and a vague instinct of self-preservation. While walking this fine line, the images of the incident at Small Springs came back to mind. He was biting down on the woman’s hand until he drew blood as he lay on top of her. The woman let him bite her without reacting, without letting out a cry. The noise around them became deafening. Then the white cloud enveloped them before seeping into his flesh and pouring a freezing liquid into his organs.

Namouss never mentioned the incident to his parents. Neither did he confide in his friends. Knowing words would fail him when it came to describing what had happened, he kept it a closely guarded secret.

The lethargy that invaded him would sometimes be accompanied by a sensation of another kind. A peculiar sort of energy flowed through his veins, provoking a tingling sensation across his skin, from the tip of his toes to his head. A new feeling, which he’d never known before, awakened in him. Before that summer, he had hardly ever paid attention to his body. At the hammam, he had no choice, of course. When his mother undressed him to change his clothes, he wanted it to be done as quickly as possible. When his friends decided to hold pissing contests to determine whose jet could spray the farthest, it had been difficult not to sneak a look at his cohorts’ willies and compare them. But then things took an altogether different turn. His rooted sense of propriety was being sapped by an intense curiosity in his own body. And he made a few pleasant discoveries. First came his hands, which he deemed gracious, then his feet, which he thought rather pretty. Then he felt his cheeks, lips, and gradually progressed to his chest and belly. Having reached the middle, he hesitated, even though that’s where the tingling he felt was strongest, and where there was an enticing stiffness that just waited for him to grab hold and give free rein to it, to pull it out into the open and let it bask in the rays of the sun so it might ripen to its full potential. His audacity went no further. What Namouss drew from the experience was the feeling of being pleasantly in tune with his body. This was how he came to take full possession of it and finally reside in it, having hitherto felt a little bit like a stranger in his own body. At this stage in his explorations, the idea of good and evil didn’t even cross his mind. What he felt was his alone, and he counted on keeping it free of foreign intrusions. Namouss already had his own secret garden.

The garden grew thanks to yet another curiosity. Judging by where he was, how could he not take an interest in what was happening on neighboring balconies? Namouss had been something of a poet from the very beginning. He loved looking out over the city whenever he climbed up to the rooftop terrace. From his promontory, he could see the minarets of all the important mosques. His gaze drifted first to the southern fort, then to the northern one, and then beyond to the olive trees clinging to the foothills along the horizon. Wholly absorbed, he watched the clouds of steam dancing slowly above the grid of houses, and lent his ears to the noises made by workshops and street-sellers. Crowning this scene, the sky offered him another perspective on visual digressions, a canvas that an inspired hand was painting ceaselessly using colors that Fez held the secret to and had given original names to: zebti (flesh color), qouqi (artichoke-mauve), fanidi (bubble gum), hammoussi (chickpea), zaâfrani (saffron), fakhiti (azure), zrireq (violet). Colors Ghita was enamored with. She would make bouquets of caftans with them and then lift them to the sky, painting the flock of scattered, woolen clouds in a multitude of hues. What could one say about the palette of colors produced by the sunsets when the Maghrib prayer was called — or about how the minarets lit up like paper lanterns? The horizon was then striated with wild arabesques that drew with their movements a panoply of turbaned heads, fire-breathing dragons, and winged houris — all aboard an immense flying carpet, whose fringes fanned out like a peacock’s tail.

Yet with this artistic gaze soon came the desire to observe things in a more down-to-earth manner. This deliberately led his eyes to the immediate vicinity, and he began to spy on the neighbors’ terraces, an exclusively female domain. He observed the comings and goings of young girls doing their chores in their house clothes, arms bare and hair hanging freely. Among those girls were also some idlers, who lingered about to sunbathe and lose themselves in the scenery, not completely oblivious to the admiring gazes they were attracting. Sometimes a particularly bold girl — with a crude-looking face, Ghita would add — would take a piece of mirror, and while pretending to look at her reflection, angle it to catch the sun, treacherously bouncing the beam at Namouss, nearly blinding him. Occasionally the rooftops would play host to improvised female-only gatherings. Mattresses were laid out, tea sets and a plate of pastries were brought out, and they would start chatting, laughing, and singing together. During these parties, it was often the case that an outwardly respectable woman would pull out a cigarette and start smoking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Namouss was outraged by this, and his reaction, at least at the start, had been to flee from the sight of this abomination, since it could very well bring misfortunes upon him — even though he was just an innocent bystander.

These discoveries required considerable effort. And they didn’t help calm the volatility of his mood swings. So he would go back out into the streets in order to vent his frustrations.

DURING THE DAYS preceding the beginning of the school year, the games picked up again and were better than ever, but this time Namouss and his gang decided to make fun of passersby. One of the practical jokes required advance preparation. First they had to get the props: an old wallet, a hook, and a few yards of fishing line (a handful of strands pulled from a horse’s tail and tied together would also do the job). The wallet was stuffed with paper to give it an alluringly bulky look and then would be attached firmly with the hook to the fishing line. Once this was done, they set the trap: The wallet was placed in the middle of the street, where it would be easy to spot, while the cabal of conspirators went to hide in the vestibule of the nearest house, lurking behind a door that had been left ajar. The ringleader would then wrap the fishing line around one hand and lie in wait. A chump would invariably show up. Immediately after spotting the wallet, the chump would stop, look around, and after a moment’s hesitation, would bend down to pick it up. But the coveted wallet would then slip and evade his grasp. He would try to catch it, once, twice, three times — in vain — right until the thing vanished entirely out of sight behind the door, as if by magic. Faced with this supernatural phenomenon, the poor devil would be left flabbergasted and eventually walk away, cursing Satan and his evil doings. However, someone less naïve would occasionally see through the hoax, quickly locate its perpetrators, and rush toward the door to flush out the clowns, who would then — being quicker — slam the door in his face and make their escape by way of the terrace.

A variation of the same stunt consisted in making a hole in the middle of a coin and anchoring it into the ground with a nail. The chump would bend down to pick it up, but quickly realizing he was fighting a losing battle, would quit the field and walk away, shamefaced.

More often than not, Loudini was the mastermind behind these pranks. Even though Namouss didn’t always agree with him, he vaguely admired this outlaw who always had a vast store of adventurous and entertaining ideas. Loudini was also the orchestrator of less playful activities — for example, initiating the group into the world of commerce, the source of the city’s wealth. This consisted in minor business deals that could earn them a little pocket money. But Loudini took it all very seriously. Ever since Namouss had known him, Loudini had been a hustler. Every afternoon he could be found squatting outside the entrance of the El-Attarine souk. In front on him was a stool upon which he’d place a baking tray filled with chalaouane, a chickpea dish with a golden-brown crust that he prepared at home and then had cooked in the public ovens — a reasonably priced delicacy that got gobbled up by both adults and children alike. Armed with a knife, Loudini would cut a piece according to the customer’s wishes, half a slice or even a quarter. He pocketed the money in advance and, adopting a peremptory tone, would admonish the pushy customers and tell them to wait their turn and keep away from the work area. He would sell out in less than an hour, at which point he would pack up and leave.

Aside from this little business, where he monopolized both the production and supply chain, the budding capitalist also invested in another sector: the confectionery industry. For that, he had commissioned a tbila — a wooden display shelf with tapered legs, protected by an iron grille — from a carpenter in the Nejjarine souk. His stock, which he would renew once a week on average, was limited during the high season to two packets of chewing gum and about thirty or so sweets, all in different colors. The running of the shop was entrusted to Belhaj, a serious boy who inspired confidence. He received payment in kind for his work: the last rumpled pack of chewing gum and all the damaged sweets that hadn’t been sold throughout the week. Loudini would pocket all the income and move on to other investments.

The trade he managed to recruit the entire gang for was the manufacture of windmills. Loudini would supply the building materials — colored paper, pins, reeds — and supervise the cutting, folding, and assembly. Once the frafers were ready, he would test them out one by one and then tell each member of the group where they should sell them. At the end of the day, he would collect the proceeds, pocketing half and dividing the remaining half among the gang. He had come up with a cockamamie formula to justify the way he split the profits and explain why he should have the lion’s share, leaving his disgruntled business partners no option but to swallow the bitter pill: Suck an egg-egg and give me my share-share.

Why was Namouss mixed up in this? He was obviously not suited to business, neither when it came to selling chickpea pies, which required some knowledge of cooking, nor to running a candy shop, which required the gift of the gab and the patience of Job. As far as the making of frafers was concerned, the less said, the better. Even if he more or less got through the cutting stage, he always bungled the folding and assembly. How many times had Loudini scolded him and threatened to fire him because he’d wrecked some of the material or because all his work needed to be redone! When it came to splitting the profits, however, Loudini nonetheless allotted Namouss a share. At that point, Namouss received his honorable discharge. When he’d finished making the rounds in the part of the city he’d been assigned to, he’d only managed to sell two or three. But seeing how much effort this took on his part, it wasn’t long before he came up with a slightly bizarre idea. He hadn’t quite swallowed that whole “egg-egg, share-share” story. Why was Loudini entitled to such a large share? Fine, he provided the paper and all the rest. But then Namouss thought: I could simply buy the materials myself and find someone to help me assemble and sell them, so I could comfortably line my pockets too. This knee-jerk reaction to the logic of capitalism prompted him to come up with a plan whereby he would charge a slightly higher price for his windmills than Loudini did, which would allow him to pocket the difference. Alas, though the idea was instantly seductive, on further reflection Namouss abandoned it. The saying “Fez is a mirror” came to mind, and he realized that he would be found out. He tried to return to a more principled frame of mind, in truth motivated largely by the fear of being found out, resulting in disastrous consequences on his status in the gang.

No, no, he told himself — putting that idea definitively to rest. May God curse the religion of money.

THE SUMMER LINGERED on, and despite various activities, Namouss once again found himself in a languorous state. Something was missing and he couldn’t figure out what it was. School? Patience, that would start up again soon. Traveling? Of course, but he was realistic enough to know it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. His parents’ love? He had it, even if the outward signs of affection were few and far between, often indirect, and for the most part unexpected. Friends? He had the members of his gang, for what they were worth, who at least provided recourse when solitude weighed him down or when the atmosphere in the house became insufferable. What was it then? Maybe what he lacked was a kindred spirit in whom he might confide his big secret or, without even going that far, someone with whom he might share the crazy ideas that ran through his mind — the incomprehensible images that flashed past his eyes during his waking dreams, or the voices he heard, which came, as they say, from another world — or even talk with about the tingling that was electrifying his body, those sweet waves that flooded over him, the longing he felt for a hand, a truly tender hand, for someone whose scent and breath might mingle with his just before going to sleep. Having stirred all that up, nothing came of it. Having reached the limits of his imagination, he came down from the clouds and landed on the patio.

Ghita was there, seated on a little mattress, all dressed up, as if for a special occasion, with a saffron-yellow scarf wrapped around her head. She’d arranged all the sorry-looking scraps of makeup she owned on an embroidered handkerchief she’d spread out on the floor: a vial of kohl, a bit of souak (walnut bark), a terra-cotta saucer coated with a thin layer of rouge. She began the ritual by brushing her teeth very attentively with the bit of souak, stopping only once she’d reduced the bark to a few strings, which she then chewed before spitting them out. While her teeth had certainly become a lot whiter, her fingers were now black. Then came the actual makeup. She wet a tissue wrapped around her index finger with a bit of saliva and dipped it into the rouge. After quickly dabbing her cheeks three times with it, she spread it out evenly over the rest of her face. Then she went back to her cheeks, and by virtue of scrubbing away repeatedly at them, they attained a more natural color. Curiously, this modicum of discretion did not apply when it came to her lips, which she painted thickly, perhaps because they were thin and — in a burst of coquettishness — she wanted to emphasize what she considered one of the key features of beauty. She looked at herself in the mirror to ensure everything had gone according to plan and moved on to the next step, which she approached with caution. When it came to kohl, Ghita found herself swimming in a sea of contradictions. After becoming “blind to her hands,” as she was fond of saying, she would dry her tears and move on to her eyebrows. Once more, what little discretion she had flew out the window. Light and thin to start with, her eyebrows grew thicker and fuller until they hung above her eyes like bountiful crescents.

“Well, how do I look, you little jinni?” she asked Namouss, who’d followed the procedure from start to finish.

Not knowing how to answer her, he instead asked, “What’s all this for? Are you going out?”

“What’s it got to do with you? Don’t you know today is the day of Lalla Mira?”9

“Who is Lalla Mira? Some sort of ghoul like Aïcha Kandisha?”10

“May your lips go numb! I never want to hear you mention the name of that scrap of carrion again, otherwise she will come and eat you and pick her teeth clean with your bones. Lalla Mira is a real Muslim. She is the spirit that dwells within us and who watches over us. Oh Lalla Mira, taslim, I surrender to you. Here I am, just as you like, wearing your color on my head. Keep evil away from me and my children, and may the evil eye go blind before it manages to reach us. Taslim! Taslim!”

Failing to understand a single word of this gobbledygook, Namouss persevered: “So you’re going out?”

“Yes, I’m going out. So what?”

“I want to go with you.”

“Do as you wish. I need to ‘chill my jinn’ and so I’m going to a Gnaoua^11 hadra.”12

Thinking it would be a party with lots of musicians, Namouss’s resolve to follow his mother strengthened.

UNLIKE DRISS, WHO ran rather than walked, Ghita was so slow it was as if she were walking on eggs. From behind, Namouss was grumbling about the lack of progress. Moreover, judging by how indifferent she seemed, he wasn’t sure whether she had really agreed to his accompanying her. He therefore kept close, putting up with her impossibly slow pace and reminding her of his presence from time to time by gently tugging on the sleeve of her djellaba. This drama lasted until they reached the climb of the Grenadiers. Ghita, who already had a good deal of trouble walking on the cobblestones when they were flat, went wobbly at the thought of the difficult stretch ahead. She resolved to elicit Namouss’s help, who was only too glad to lend a hand. Bolstered by such recognition, he gave her his hand and stood to his full height to offer his shoulder.

“Where are we going?” he asked, hoping to cement the pact.

“Don’t muddle my mind with your questions,” she replied, “and careful where you put your feet, otherwise you’re going to make us fall.”

Panting, they reached the top of the climb. Prone to sudden reversals, Ghita took a left down Lemtiyine and said, “Let go of my hand now. I can walk by myself. You think my bones have crumbled away or something? I’ve still got my own wings and I can come and go, rise and fall. The blade’s still sharp enough to chop the onion. Let’s go, we’re almost there.”

Lemtiyine! That was where Namouss’s school was. Could that be where the hadra was being held? What were Gnaoua musicians doing in Mr. Fournier’s inner sanctum? Would Mr. Benaïssa join in and play his flute? Indifferent to her son’s speculations, Ghita passed by the school without giving it a second glance. Her stride grew more confident. She sped up, took the first corner on the right, and almost started running. Namouss chased after her. They wound up in a little square and Ghita immediately rushed into a gloomy alley, shouting, “I can’t hold it any longer. Stay where you are and keep a lookout.”

A moment later came a psss. ., then a char. . rr; and Namouss, taken aback at first, guessed what was going on. A sudden panic seized him. What if a “stranger” were to pop out of nowhere? Would his mother have to time to finish and make herself presentable? It would be a catastrophe! Barely had he formulated these fears when a big fellow came out of the alley holding up the ends of his djellaba while shouting, “Women have lost all sense of shame and decency. Satan holds full sway over their minds. Puh!”

He stormed off looking furious.

A few interminable seconds passed before Ghita reappeared, her expression cheerful, making this trivial observation: “Allah, I felt like I was going to burst! What a relief! Well then, get going. It’s just here.”

In the fever of the preceding event, Namouss hadn’t even noticed the noises that were coming from the house his mother was now pointing out to him. It was a sacred din, where he recognized the beating of drums and the gravelly clatter of rattles. Namouss had often witnessed impromptu performances and acrobatic displays by Gnaoua musicians in Bab Guissa and Joutiya. Their musical style was very different from the usual Andalusian tunes that saturated the airwaves on Fridays and holidays. If Gnaoua rhythms were rollicking and visceral, Andalusian ones were gentle and melodic to the point of being soporific. Caught between these two extremes, Namouss had a penchant for a third genre, the melhoun, where the singer at least told a story and did so in the colloquial spoken in Fez. But what had chiefly drawn Namouss to this genre had undoubtedly been a particular song from his repertoire: “The Ballad of Ghita.” He’d been disconcerted when he’d heard it for the first time. Someone was singing on the radio and addressing his mother by her name. What sorcery had he used to find out she was called Ghita? Driss, who had been there at the time, picked up the refrain and sang along, clapping his hands, throwing his wife knowing looks, drawing her attention to a certain verse that enchanted him: “Listen Ghita, pay attention to the sense and the subtleties.”

Ghita lowered her eyes in a gesture of feigned modesty and indifference, although she was in fact on cloud nine and had picked up on every allusion the song was making.

This is the lament of the lover

Who burned, just as I once did

With desire for his sweetheart,

And whenever he thought the flame

Had flickered and gone out

The slightest sight

Of the young beauty

Would restore the flame

And set him on fire,

Poor lover, deserted

By sleep and appetite,

Whenever he saw his damsel

It was as if he’d glimpsed

The gates of death,

She who so wholly possessed him

Cared not for his suffering

Blessed by life, she was

A ruler both cruel and just,

Standing before her door

He begs tirelessly for her favor

And will never give up.

Tell Lalla Ghita my sovereign:

Satisfy your lover when you meet him,

Oh you, mother rain. .

Tell Lalla Ghita: you are the blessing

He is looking for, take pity

On he who loves only you,

You have made him lose all sense and reason

So why are you throwing him on the embers?

Revive him, with just one kiss

Oh my dear, before it’s too late,

Don’t you know he’s a slave

That’s been entrusted to your care

Who observes all rules of decorum?

His desires are yours, you are all

He lives for. Your indifference

Will be the death of him,

His torment knows no equal

Just like your beauty!

Tell Lalla Ghita my sovereign. .

The unbridled, almost carnivalesque party taking place inside the large house they enter is a far cry from the intimate poetry and discreet melodies of that song. The crowd of spectators surrounding the Gnaoua is almost exclusively composed of women and children. The atmosphere is overheated. Clouds of incense smoke are rising from a number of braziers, gradually forming a thick fog where one can barely see anyone’s face. Volleys of ululations are unleashed at regular intervals as the rattles and drums play on. In the midst of this hubbub, Ghita suddenly leaves her child behind and, as if moved by mysterious forces, elbows her way to the front of the crowd. Namouss tries to catch up, but having opened for her, the wall of bodies quickly closes ranks again. Panicking, he tries to come up with a solution. Lifting his eyes, he notices that a number of other spectators are following the ceremony from the floor above by leaning on the parapet. He runs up. Moved to pity by how frazzled Namouss seems, a woman makes a little room for him, but in doing so squashes up against him, overwhelming him with the heavy smell of her perfume. Braving these nuisances, Namouss’s only desire is to find his mother again. He tries to make her out in the crowd by spotting the color of her djellaba. There’s no point. The cloud of incense has thickened and turned opaque. His gaze is then drawn to a group of women dancing in the middle of the room. Dancing is not quite the word for it. Their agitation has nothing to do with swaying arms and hips or quivering bellies and shoulders, movements Namouss associated with dance as he knew it, the sort that women threw themselves into with a coquettish air at fêtes and festivities. Instead, the only movement these women are making is snapping their heads back and forth in an increasingly staccato rhythm. The rest of their bodies remain immobile, except for when one of them sinks to her knees and begins shaking her torso back and forth with extraordinary strength. Freed from her head scarf, her hair would fall free and toss back and forth, then it began to fly around like a giant eagle experiencing turbulence in flight. Inspired by this ecstasy, the Gnaoua musicians play faster and faster, shouting hoarse sounds to egg the women on. The women reply by ululating in unison. At its climax, the ceremony takes an unexpected turn: A young female spectator leaps into the middle of the ring, and as if she’s been bitten by a scorpion, collapses onto the ground. Gripped by convulsions, she starts rolling and wriggling every which way on the floor. At this sight, a few dancers who haven’t yet lost all sense of reason run over to her, but instead of calming her down, they merely restrict her freedom of movement by surrounding her in a tighter circle. In doing so, these women look not only delighted but even envious of this “poor epileptic.” Moved to pity and racked by anxiety, Namouss pronounces the diagnosis. He knew all about epilepsy. Cases of it were not so rare in the Medina. Whenever they occurred, the first-aid workers immediately set to their principal aim: freeing these bodies of the evil spirits that had possessed them. They would put a large iron key in the victim’s hand and sprinkle a little water in his face. Whereas here no one was doing anything to stop the attack. The young woman continued to writhe while the women around her ululated, taking the girl’s affliction as a blessing.

And where was Ghita during all of this? She was nowhere to be seen. Namouss began to despair of ever finding her in this courtyard of miracles. He felt bound up and wanted to be sprung out of this cage. He decided to slip away and leave his mother to her stories of Lalla Mira.

This is how he blew his initiation.

14

THE BEGINNING OF the new school year rescued Namouss from a state of despondency. At the end of a summer marked by peregrinations — where he had gone from frightening discoveries to questions that only led to more questions — he had come to an unsettling conclusion: he had taken stock of his life and not only found the results disappointing but also didn’t have the vaguest notion as to what might constitute a better life — or a world without struggles or worries.

The big cloud of these heavy ideas burst while he was walking to school. The air on that October morning was bracing, the sun sparkling. After the climb of the Grenadiers, Namouss went down the rue El-Amer and walked alongside an orchard surrounded by a low wall topped with a hedge. The smell of caramel and musk invaded his nostrils. From inside the orchard came the aroma of freshly turned earth that had just been watered, of chopped cardoons, and of Seville orange blossoms. Among the intoxicating fragrances, a particularly enticing one began to insinuate itself. . something Namouss had forgotten but now quickly remembered. He picked up his pace and ran into the street vendor posted at the bottom of the staircase that led up to the school gates, which were already surrounded by a group of children. When his turn came, he didn’t know whether he should go through the turnstile or leave that to the vendor. Given the stampede, he opted for the latter.

“One!” the street vendor cried. Then he lifted the lid of his tin and — surprisingly — pulled out two waffles, which he held out to Namouss and smiling, added: “Here you go, the second is in case luck betrays you.”

Such generosity was welcome. It brought comfort to Namouss, who was starting to become superstitious. Thanks to the street vendor’s gesture, he cheered up.

Boy, were those waffles good! Leaning against the school gates, Namouss gobbled them up as fast as he could, partly because he couldn’t resist and partly so no intruder would show up and ask for some. He swallowed the last bite, the most delicious, just as the bell was ringing. Then immediately, the gate opened onto other trials and tribulations.

THE YEAR STARTED out auspiciously. The new teacher was French, a real Frenchman. He had a blond mop, a large mustache, and eyes so blue it hurt to look at them. Mr. Cousin, he was called. In his childish colonial mind-set, Namouss interpreted this as a setup. Here he was standing in front of a Nazarene, a mythical being with mysterious powers and the object of a confused fascination. Contrary to stereotypes, Mr. Cousin had a benevolent expression and from time to time a sincere smile formed on his lips. There he was, weighing his words carefully, walking around the classroom, going from one row of desks to the other, writing on the blackboard, and getting his fingers covered in chalk, and he didn’t mind wiping the board clean with a brush himself, once the students had copied the relevant parts of the lesson. The only thing that shocked Namouss was watching Mr. Cousin pull out a handkerchief from his pocket and blow his nose into it noisily. How to interpret this ill-bred behavior? Was this due to his coming from a different culture or was it a sign of the contempt in which he held his audience?

Despite this anomaly, the spell remained unbroken. As the weeks went by, Mr. Cousin proved himself worthy of the praise his coreligionists heaped upon him. He led the class into a whirlwind of knowledge and made everyone’s head spin with vertigo. It all began on the day he brought a globe to class and solemnly placed it on top of his desk. Seeing this multicolored balloon fixed on a revolving axis, the students expected to be given a lesson on their favorite pastime. The teacher immediately disappointed them by giving them explanations that left them completely flabbergasted: The globe represented the earth on which we all lived. As we could see, it was round, and as we could also see, it turned on its axis. Namouss let himself be submerged in this avalanche of revelations and posed himself the same questions that must have been racking the minds of his fellow classmates. How could people live on the bottom part of the world without falling off? If the earth spun on its axis, why couldn’t anyone feel the movement and why did everything remain fixed in its place? Mr. Cousin, however, seemed to be able to read their minds, and in order to convince his students of the validity of his theory, took out a bucket that he’d brought just for the occasion and began to give a presentation.

“Look, this bucket is two-thirds full of water. I’m going to spin it around as fast as I can and as you will see, not a single drop of water will fall to the floor.”

The demonstration was conclusive. What Namouss kept in mind — following an adage often quoted by his father — was that science was an ocean and this ocean only obeyed those who knew it well. As such, Nazarene or not, Mr. Cousin should be taken at his word. How would he tell Ghita? Taslim! Taslim!

All went well until that fateful day when Mr. Cousin introduced a new subject: the life sciences. For this, he had brought along a poster that he unrolled and pinned to the blackboard. Namouss had never seen a dead body before, let alone one where only the bones were left and that was still standing up. He was afraid. His teacher’s presence, however, did much to reassure him. Soon enough, Mr. Cousin’s explanations allowed him to turn his thoughts away from death and toward a new skill: the acquisition of new words. By the end of the lesson, he experienced the pride of someone who’d taken a plunge into this ocean of knowledge and had brought back with him a number of rare pearls. Curiously, however, Mr. Cousin did not seem to partake in this euphoria. By way of conclusion, he complained about the lack of suitable equipment.

“If only we had a skeleton, a real skeleton, I would have less trouble teaching you stubborn mules!”

The week had come to an end, and on leaving school, the older kids in the class decided to meet in the Bab Guissa cemetery on Sunday afternoon to play soccer. Namouss asked to join them. After talking it over briefly, they consented. It seemed as if his position on the margin of the team was about to change. His responsibilities had hitherto been restricted to fetching the ball as and when needed. This was to be expected since he was one of the youngest in the class, which for the most part was composed of guys of about the same age as his older brothers. One of them, it seemed, was married, or was at least engaged. From time to time, Namouss had been allowed to become a substitute goalkeeper whenever an opposing team forfeited or the regular goalkeeper didn’t show up. This promotion made him happy since he naïvely believed they must have recognized some talent in him. Little did he know that as far as this half-baked crowd was concerned, the position of goalkeeper didn’t mean much. The longer the score remained nil, the greater the chance there was of scoring. The matches took quite some time to kick off because the position of center forward was highly coveted and required lengthy discussions before being assigned. When there were two opposing teams, they would share one goal, so to speak. In absence of a net or goalposts, they got the job done using two stones as markers.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON. The Bab Guissa cemetery. A secluded corner, strewn with old tombstones whose topmost edges barely rise out of the earth. Worn down by time, by the sun, by inclement weather, but also by a herd of goats that regularly went there to graze. The field has therefore become flat and smooth for the players, who had to pay more attention to their shoes than their feet since here, just like in the Spring of Horses, they played barefoot. Shoes were considered a luxury item.

Turning to the highlights of the match, the arguments over hand balls and free kicks, or over whether the ball had been kicked too high above or too far to the side of the imaginary goalposts, or even over the purported laxness on the part of the goalkeeper, accused of being in cahoots with the opposing team. What was certainly true was that Namouss tried his hardest — in the spirit of justice and conciliation — to ensure there wasn’t too great a gap between the opponents. Sometimes he was simply distracted — the matches often lasted two or three hours — and some balls would sneak past him. Then, when he would eventually wake from his stupor and make a surprising save, he would inevitably incur the wrath of the opposing team, who had blown their chance.

The final score, 18 to 12, provided a perfect portrait of the match. Both winners and losers had scored their fair share. Namouss therefore didn’t prove himself completely unworthy. He left hoping they would call on him again.

Peace and calm were restored. The sun was starting to set and its last rays were bathing places in a cold light. In this dimness, the forgotten, dusty tombstones — looking like the ruins of ships half buried in sand — came into view once more. Namouss was in the process of putting his shoes back on when he noticed that something was happening around him. A group of his older classmates were talking to one another. Though they were speaking in hushed voices, Namouss was able to make out one word they kept repeating: skeleton! He didn’t immediately make the connection between that word and the life-science lesson Mr. Cousin had taught them a couple of days earlier. Yet he had the hunch that somewhere in a remote corner of the sky, his consciousness was taking a sinister shape, forming into a burning glacial cloud, equipped with an eye of fire, which was now starting to move toward him with the wild speed of raging elements. The wind reached and engulfed him soon enough, making his hair stand on end. The ember sparked in his troubled mind. Spotting his classmates around a tomb while one of them was kneeling with his hands deep inside it, he understood what was going on. He wanted to run away but his legs wouldn’t respond to his commands, and neither would his heart, which had slowed down to a suffocating rhythm. He wanted to shut his eyes to avoid having to watch the scene, but even his eyelids weren’t working anymore. It was as if someone had turned them inside out and glued them into place. Powerless, he watched the events unfold. His classmates were carrying out their task without any second thoughts whatsoever. The procedure was being executed as if it were a game, a game they had taken to with the utmost seriousness and concentration. The skeleton was pulled out of the tomb piece by piece, the skull last, intact. Namouss couldn’t help himself from comparing that skull to the one on Mr. Cousin’s poster. They were frighteningly similar. This brief tangent helped bring him a little relief and turned his mind to more mundane thoughts. After all, Mr. Cousin was going to be pleased by all this, he thought, surprising himself. The presumption of the Master of the Ocean’s consent did much to mitigate his distress.

The older kids must have planned the skeleton heist in advance. One of them had brought along a jute sack, while the one who seemed to be in charge filled the sack with the bones, making sure they were all accounted for. The sack was tied with a bit of string, and the order to move out was given alongside strict instructions: The secret must be kept. Not a word of it should reach their families or any of the other classmates. The skeleton would be delivered the following day to Mr. Cousin.

Namouss went home in a rush, making sure to avoid being seen by the rest of the household. There was no doubt in his mind that his crime was engraved on his face: an indelible cross etched in the middle of his forehead, scars on his cheeks, or pimples emerging on his nose. Above all, he must not look at himself in the mirror. He went to bed without dinner, pulled the sheet over his head, and tried to go to sleep. All in vain. The night was long and when he managed to doze off, the images of the skeleton being pulled out of the tomb flashed past him in scenes that were alternatively gloomy and comical. Stirred from his sleep, the skeleton came back to life, stood up, and brandishing a golden-yellow sword, cut off the heads of everyone around him. Their heads toppled from their bodies and rolled along the ground, which was swarmed by a throng of people that, mistaking the heads for balls, started knocking them about and scoring goal after goal. In another scene, the awakened skeleton wasn’t only made of bones but was also covered in flesh. He wore a beautiful djellaba and a black burnous, as well as a spotless turban. He resembled Si Daoudi, the Arabic teacher. As soon as he got up, a winged horse in a magnificent harness landed in front of him. He mounted the horse in a single leap and rode off toward. . the Sekkatine. Driss was waiting for him. Si Daoudi got off the horse and said, “I have come to speak to you about your son.” “Yes, Sidi, I know.” “So what are we going to do about it?” “You cut his throat Sidi, while I scalp him.”

The most grueling version of this dream was the one where Namouss pictured himself in the tomb. He and the skeleton were one and the same. He was dead without being dead. After a moment, he began to hear the confab of kids — who’d come to disturb his eternal sleep. He was unable to address them, to dissuade them from their mission, which he believed would be fatal for all parties. As they began to pull out his bones, he felt as if his soul was still hovering above the grave and was about to take flight and disappear forever. Nothing will remain of me, he told himself. They will forget about me — and, God forbid, I will be absent on Resurrection Day.

Early in the morning, Namouss was awoken by the sound of thunder and the heavy splatter of rain falling in the courtyard. The fury of the sky brought back to mind the nightmarish visions he’d experienced, and above all the anguish he felt at the thought of what might happen at school if the episode of the skeleton were to turn out badly. Who could he turn to in order to prevent dire consequences from arising? Whom could he speak with about the unspeakable?

Ghita was already up on her feet, or rather bent over double sweeping away the water that had accumulated in the courtyard and threatened to flood the bedrooms. Glancing at Namouss, she didn’t seem to read anything out of the ordinary on his face. She even smiled at him and prompted him to go wash up while she prepared his breakfast. Blessings upon you, Ghita, you who brings sunshine to bear on rainy days! Hope returns.

TWO DAYS WENT by at school without anything arising from the skeleton episode. Mr. Cousin had started up the life-science lessons once more. The new poster he’d brought to class depicted a man who’d been flayed, revealing the vivid, red surface of his muscles. Names even more complicated than those linked to the skeleton rained down on Namouss. He raked them in avidly. Words became a sort of drug that helped chase away the images of the cemetery, whether real or nightmare-induced. He nevertheless sometimes lost his train of thought and lapsed into those visions. A chill ran through his spine and made him want to shout: “It wasn’t me, sir! I swear, it wasn’t me!”

The reprieve was short-lived. On the third day, it was battle stations from the get-go. Mr. Cousin announced that Mr. Fournier, the headmaster, would be visiting the class. The latter arrived soon after, followed by Si Daoudi and another Arabic teacher who looked after the higher grades: Si Ben Jebbour. They had somber, menacing expressions on their faces. It was Si Ben Jebbour, whom the students didn’t know from Adam, who first addressed them, in Arabic to boot, thus letting the Nazarenes that were present off the hook and allowing them to leave while the going was good. The speech began, and it was harsh.

“I want to tell you little savages that you clearly lack any notion of faith or religion. You belong to the most vile and evil category of miscreants. Know that there are three sins that God cannot forgive his creatures: lying with one’s mother, doubting His existence, and desecrating the dead. Know that even in hell, your place will be in the seventh circle, the last, where no one will save you from everlasting suffering. Nothing will save a desecrater from his fate, not even if he prays and fasts for a century, nor if he distributes piles of gold to the poor. And if he thinks he shall cleanse his soul with a pilgrimage, he is bound to burst into flames before he can even reach the sacred Kaaba. We belong to God and to Him shall we return. If I have come here, it is to remind you of the tenets of our religion and to warn about God’s coming judgment. As for earthly judgment, this falls to the headmaster, who will soon inform your parents of the sanctions that will be taken against the culprits. My greetings to those of you who have followed the right path. Amen!”

Once the visitors had left, and after a heavy silence, Mr. Cousin wrapped up the episode by emitting an odd “Well, there we have it” and then smiling half in jest, half in earnest. Thanks to his reaction, Namouss concluded that once more he had been saved, even if he didn’t know why.

The sentence was passed the following day. Three students were handed a fifteen-day suspension, a punishment Namouss couldn’t find fault with. Among the three students was the presumed leader of the perpetrators and the one who had carried out the desecration. The third student was the one who had slung the bag of bones over his shoulder and carried it off. Had one of them willingly confessed or had one of the other boys who had been with them let the cat out of the bag? One thing was certain, it hadn’t been Namouss.

15

IT TOOK QUITE some time to get over the horrors of that misadventure. But the stream of life eventually got back on course, toward the new lands of the future, ensuring the growth of bones and desires, loosening the tongue and the spirit, pushing toward the discovery of what would be etched in the heart like the score of the music of being. Bouncing back, Namouss was now ready to explore new realms and continue on his way.

It wasn’t that school had lost the allure of its early days. Even though he’d occasionally landed himself in hot water, he still took much delight in that universe where knowledge remained an object of desire, despite unforeseen hazards. He had simply become a little skeptical. This distancing led him to getting back into the swing of life as it unfolded in his household, his neighborhood, and his city. He had a renewed taste for these places after having unjustly neglected them, he thought to himself. Fez hadn’t changed one bit and neither had his family, and he found the company of his friends soothing. He just had to let himself flow into the waiting mold. What tranquillity!

It’s springtime in Fez. We can dwell a little on this without sliding into lyricisms to describe its splendor. The sky opens its dance card, flips through its pages of fluid blue, its openness a purveyor of dew that invites the light to a dance where only the fingertips touch. The music is the work of the master of silence, skilled in the art of proportions and using only the lightest of touches, letting out only a few sounds and voices — happy harmonies that flow into the city to compose the eternal symphony of a world tightly wrapped in its own secrets.

It is the time when Fezzis — those incorrigible city dwellers — feel the need to air themselves, reconnect with nature, feast their eyes on something green, and gaze at God’s sky. They call this the nzaha. There were orchards to be found in the immediate vicinity of the Medina, where they could give themselves over to rustic pleasures without going out into the countryside. If someone didn’t happen to own such an orchard, there would surely be a friend who might lend them the use of one for a day. One had to take advantage of one’s extended family. Early in the morning, a donkey would be loaded with all the essentials — a mattress, blankets, provisions — and the whole family would head to the orchard.

The orchard Namouss discovered that particular spring could be found at the exit of Bab Lahdid, down the slope that led to Bab Jdid. It was a walled-off vegetable garden dotted with a number of fruit trees that were watered by the irrigation channels snaking alongside them, and it also had a well with stone foundations. In the shadiest spot was a spacious nouala, which resembled the one Driss had rented in Sidi Harazem. The entire family was there. Making an extremely rare appearance was Uncle Si Mohammed, along with his wife and children. Uncle Touissa was expected to arrive toward the end of the morning, when he would rouse from his kif-induced stupor.

Ghita’s mood, always unpredictable, on that day was particularly colorful. Abruptly deciding “not to get her hands dirty,” she folded her arms and assigned all her chores to Zhor, her eldest daughter, and to Zhor’s cousins.

“Why,” she asked, “should my shoulders bear all the burden? Am I not also a Muslim? At least for once in my life I have the right to sit and scratch my head and ‘heed my bones.’ Anyhow, it’s not like there’s much to do! The kofta and the kebabs are seasoned already. There’s nothing left to do but stick them on skewers and fire up the barbecue.”

Having said her fill, she stretched out on the mattress inside the nouala, indifferent to the commotion taking place around her and the bewitching spectacle of nature outside.

Namouss knew his mother’s sulk wouldn’t last long. Sooner or later her hands or tongue would get itchy. Eventually she would involve herself in this or that, discharge the girls from their duties, and take over the preparations of the lunch. Namouss knew Ghita like the back of his hand. Her behavior that day had a simple explanation: the presence of his aunt, with whom Ghita had never settled the score since their disastrous cohabitation many years earlier when she and Driss were newlyweds. Faced with the woman who had assumed the role of stepmother and had always treated her like a servant, Ghita now needed to make a show of the skills she had acquired and the independence she had won for herself. So there!

After formulating this diabolical analysis, Namouss decided to let go of his mother’s skirt and wandered off into the garden. Not far from the well, he stumbled on the spot where the men had assembled around his uncle, basking in the glow of his words while they waited to sip their tea. He stopped, out of politeness. Having noted his presence, Driss invited Namouss to sit down.

“Come listen to what the haji, your uncle, has to say about Mecca and Medina, my son, and may God not deny us the chance to visit these holy places.”

Haji Uncle Mohammed had actually just returned from his pilgrimage. Namouss knew all about it. He’d seen the gifts Uncle Mohammed had brought back for his parents. Ghita had received a vial containing holy water from the well of Zamzam. Driss was given a. . burial shroud. What a bizarre present, Namouss thought, on seeing that ordinary-looking piece of white cloth, exact replicas of which were to be found on sale every day at the Kissarya. But Driss, ecstatic, insisted it was the best present one could bring back from over there. So there you have it!

Haji Mohammed weighed his words carefully and intoned them with a baritone that came deep from within his chest. There was a catch in his throat as he spoke.

“If you have never gone near these blessed places, rest assured you’ve seen nothing yet. Over there, the heart opens so that it may be washed clean of earthly sins. The light of faith floods over it. You no longer suffer from heat, hunger, or thirst. That was when we’d left the valley of Mina heading toward Mount Arafat. We had passed through Muzdalifa and around noon were in sight of the Mount of Mercy. When we got there, we began to pray and to recite the Qur’an, carrying on until sunset. How can I express what we felt at this stage in our pilgrimage? Yes, dear ones, we had come closer to God and were surrounded by His glory, which in turn surrounded the whole world wherever Muslims would be found. After that, we quickly made our way back to Muzdalifa, where we camped out waiting for dawn. We no longer felt the need for sleep. On the following day, when we set out for Mina, we felt refreshed, as if we’d had a good night’s sleep. It was the tenth day of Dhu al-Hijjah, the Feast of the Sacrifice. We had carried out the stoning of the devil earlier that morning. With each stone cast against Satan, his oldest and youngest son, we freed ourselves of our sins and shielded ourselves from the ruses the devil and his descendants had in store for us. Then we all lined up to pray in unison, as if we were one. The songs of angels reached our ears, blending with the chorus of blessings our loved ones were sending us from the beyond. At that moment — and pay close attention to what I’m about to tell you — I raised my eyes to the sky and the face of Haji Abdeslam, my departed father, came before me, aglow in light. From his murmurs I understood he was calling for me to follow him. I felt very grateful toward him. My immediate and dearest wish was to prostrate myself and recite the Shahada and never get up again. Could a believer wish for anything greater than to bring peace to his soul and be buried in the land that had been privileged to see the birth of our Beloved, and which at the end of His life had welcomed His perfumed body?”

At the conclusion of this speech, the assembled men rose in a unanimous Allahu Akbar! Their eyes were wet, their spirits seized by a sweet reverie. A simple question, asked by Haji Mohammed’s eldest son, broke the spell.

“How are the Muslims from other countries?”

“There are whites and blacks, as well as Chinese, Indians, Persians, and even Russians. Not many among them spoke our language. We were obliged to use sign language to communicate. Neither do they eat like we do. I must say that when we Moroccans shared our food with our closest neighbors, they were full of admiration. You can find the whole world in Fez, gentlemen. Our cuisine knows no equal. Is there anything better than a beef tagine with stewed vegetables, roast chicken with pickled lemons and olives, pigeon pastilla with almonds, or our traditional seven-vegetable couscous? One day I allowed myself to be tempted by a group of Indians who had invited me to taste one of their dishes. I won’t let that happen to me again. One mouthful was enough. It was like the fires of Gehenna. I almost choked. On another occasion, a group of Tunisians offered me their favorite dish: mloukhiya. At first I thought it would be made with okra, which, unlike your uncle Touissa, I very much like. But when they served me the dish, I saw before me a blackish-greenish stew whose smell made my stomach turn. I dipped my bread in it out of politeness. It tasted like henna and the meat that came along with it was like rubber. May God protect us!”

“I hear one of their specialties is couscous with fish,” Haji Mohammed’s eldest added, apparently set on taking the conversation in an insipid direction.

“And why not with pork?” Haji Mohammed guffawed, provoking a general hilarity. “Nothing further need be said. If you want to eat well, don’t travel, stay home. Fez, my friends, with its big houses! Our women have a golden touch! They can make a finger-licking feast even out of dry beans.”

“And the water, let’s not forget the water of Fez,” Driss added. “It’s as sweet as honey.”

“That it is,” Haji Mohammed said approvingly, “one of the blessings bestowed upon us by Moulay Idriss, may his baraka last.”

NAMOUSS WAS BEGINNING to get tired. While his uncle had been speaking about matters to do with the sacred, Namouss had refrained from giving in to his desire to flee to the hills. But now that the conversation had turned to bizarre dishes, he was bored. He therefore felt free to slip off and explore the orchard.

The place was absolutely enchanting. Since the garden was on a slope, the clumps of trees and terraced vegetable patches offered the view of a vast stretch of flowers and greens extending all the way to the paved road at the lower end of the garden. What was more, this configuration made the orchard into a little labyrinth, allowing one to slip out of sight and stroll through it as freely as one liked. Bowing to an ancient instinct, Namouss picked up a broken-off tree branch and, thus armed, headed confidently into that luminous, aromatic maze. What struck him at first was the wide array of trees that he could not put a name to. White, pink, red, and violet flowers. Were they prune or pear or pomegranate trees? The only one he could identify for certain was the lemon tree, whose fruit was weighing down its branches. The extent of his ignorance of botany was even greater when it came to plants. There were too many. He consoled himself by inspecting a patch of mint whose smell he recognized before the lightbulb lit up in his mind and the name burst out of him: liqama! Oh, if only Mr. Cousin were here! He might have helped him read from that unfamiliar book. But he wasn’t, so Namouss would have to do his best to manage on his own. He figured the best way to learn about plants would be to pick some. No sooner said than done. The first he pulled out of the ground revealed a root in the early stages of growth. It was anyone’s guess as to whether it was a turnip or a carrot! That’s if it wasn’t a potato. Through trial and error, he carried on with his predatory work and wound up unearthing something that looked half decent: a sizable, bright-red radish, which he wiped clean and bit down on without a modicum of self-restraint, as if it was the first time. That radish was like nothing he’d ever tasted before. Aside from its vague peachy taste and its unparalleled freshly plucked freshness, there was the fact that he had discovered it and pulled it from the earth with his own hands. His taste buds were forever marked by that experience. From now on, as with the madeleine, we can speak of “Namouss’s radish.”

The exploration of the orchard continued and the foliage grew thicker. Imitating characters he’d seen at the cinema, our hero brandished his stick like a machete and cleared a path for himself. He didn’t know that what he was cutting down were cornstalks. After a time, other memories surged back, detracting from the flurry of his explorations. Could there not be some savage beast lurking behind one of these thickets, or one of those giant snakes that coiled around you and crushed your bones? At that thought, he pricked up his ears. The silence weighed heavily around him. There were no echoes coming from the direction where his family was gathered. He had gone quite a distance from them. Perhaps he should consider turning back. At that very moment, he heard a suspicious crackle from a cluster of reeds in front him. Showing off was out of the question. He beat a hasty retreat and didn’t stop until he’d escaped the jungle and reached a clearing reassuringly devoid of greenery. He sat down next to a patch full of what he thought was mint. Worn out, he stretched out upon it hoping to indulge in its aroma and closed his eyes. It certainly felt good, but there was no smell to speak of. Surprised by this, he got up so as to better inspect this anomaly. It’s definitely mint, he said to himself. Then why wasn’t it giving off any smell? His inquisitive nature led him to try to better understand this phenomenon. He plucked a few leaves, rubbed them on his palms, and brought them to his nose. The smell was revolting. It must be a weed, he figured, as he was beginning to feel a bizarre tingle start to tickle the palms of his hands and the tip of his nose. Soon enough, this transformed into a devilish, burning sting. He thought he was doing the right thing by waving his hands about and blowing on them. But the pain only got stronger. He rushed toward the nouala so he could tell his mother.

“I’ve been stung by something!” he screamed, writhing.

“By what, a scorpion?”

“No, the mint that’s growing over there.”

“You idiot, that isn’t mint. Those must be stinging nettles. Dip your hands in a bucket of cold water. It’ll go away soon enough.”

“And what about my nose?”

“What about your nose?”

“It’s stinging too.”

“Oh well, that’s a pity. That’ll teach you not to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

The burning began to subside fifteen minutes later. Namouss went back to the men’s circle. Looking like he could go on forever, Haji Mohammed was on the umpteenth chapter of his pilgrimage.

“A thousand thousands of us were circling around the Kaaba, chanting, ‘We have answered Your call. To convey blessings upon You!’ Our invocations made the ground beneath our feet tremble and lifted an immense flock of pigeons into the sky. Oh, dear ones, when this last rite had been performed and we had to start thinking about making our way back, our hearts almost broke. Saying goodbye to those holy places was more difficult for me than the suffering I’d felt when my mother breathed her last on her deathbed. But that was only a temporary goodbye. Inshallah, in two years’ time, I will perform my second pilgrimage.”

“May He bless us with His generosity!” Driss sighed, who so dearly wanted to partake in the privilege. To console himself, he quoted an old adage: “The eye sees far, but the hand falls short.”

“God is generous,” Haji Mohammed replied sympathetically.

A light veil of sadness hovered over this epilogue when Uncle Touissa made his appearance, preceded by his signature laugh. He was so gussied up that Namouss barely recognized him. Instead of his usual black overcoat, he was wearing a white djellaba and sporting new babouches. On his head was a gray felt watani with a tear down the middle, a fashion popularized by the nationalists, which was beginning to give the usual red fez stiff competition. Never one to come empty-handed, Touissa had brought with him two types of fresh cheese from the dairy. He’d strung them up on a branch to drip dry before joining the gathering. Even before he sat down, jokes came out from all sides.

“So Touissa, are these nice new clothes of yours meant to finally announce the happy occasion?”

“Is she Arab or Berber, your fiancée?”

“Is she a Fezzi or from Marrakech?”

“Must be a Frenchwoman.”

“What do you need, you who are naked? A ring, oh Monsignor!”

“Congratulations, you’ve come back to your senses.”

Touissa only picked up on a few bits and pieces of this banter, but since he was able to read their lips, he reacted with his usual chuckle. They made room for him and served him some tea. The sun was at its peak. It spilled gold dust over the orchard that the zephyr liked to lick up. A silence settled, allowing the birds to give a brief performance. A turtledove distinguished itself with its pious tremolos (is that not the word we use when someone evokes God’s name?).

Driss judged that the time had come to satisfy more earthly cravings.

“How’s it looking?” he called in the direction of the nouala. And, playing on words, he added, smiling: “Tell a baker his dough has fallen and you’ll get a rise out of him.”

“We’re coming,” Ghita replied, “everything’s ready.”

Soon enough the sun’s shower of gold dust was chased away by the dense smoke emanating from the barbecue on which the first round of kofta and kebabs were being grilled. Ghita was everywhere. She was supervising the grilling of the meat, filling each plate with a portion of salad, cutting the bread, and making the tea. She barely allowed the girls to set the table.

The meal, especially the kofta, was to everyone’s satisfaction. Driss explained: “I wanted you all to try camel meat today. It’s the best sort of meat for kofta. The secret lies in the preparation. Above all, one must never use those machines that are so popular these days. Nothing beats the traditional methods the maâllem uses to chop the meat; he takes his time, tasting it and adding the requisite spices when needed, without of course forgetting the herbs, especially marjoram, to get the flavor just right. As for the kebabs, if you want them really tender you have no choice but to use a leg of lamb. Eat up, eat up, there’s plenty where that came from.”

Driss wasn’t exaggerating.

After such a meal, a siesta was in order. Namouss wasn’t able to get out of it. When he woke up, he found the men had gathered once again, this time to play cards using a Spanish deck. They were playing tri, where they had the option to inform their respective partners of which cards to drop and which to hold on to via a series of complicated hand signals. They wore their poker faces and kept their wits about them. Driss was partnered with Touissa against Haji Mohammed and his eldest son. The teams’ abilities were clearly mismatched. The haji’s team was in the lead and Driss was fulminating against his partner, deeming him too scatterbrained.

One game followed another, broken up by regular intervals when tea and coffee were served. Keeping to its schedule, the sun began its inexorable decline. It was starting to get windy. Soon it would be time to pack up and leave. The nzaha had come to an end.

With a growing perspicacity, Namouss noticed that his parents and the other grown-ups, the very ones who had come here claiming they needed to feast their eyes on some greenery and marvel at the heavens, hadn’t budged from their seats all day, not once lifting their gaze to the sky. He concluded that adults were worryingly fickle.

16

THE SEASONS ROLLED on unabated. Summer took over from spring. It was the moment when the soccer season reached its climax. Fez was abuzz with rumors, live commentaries, and predictions of scores. MAS, the city’s team, was well placed that year. It was only two points behind Marrakech’s Kawkab, the league leaders. The match they were due to play that Sunday against Casablanca’s Roches Noires would give them a fighting chance, provided that Kawkab lost against Rabat’s FUS, who were almost at the bottom of the league. Yet another question gave cause for concern: Would MAS field a better lineup? A real drama had taken place just three weeks earlier: Couscous, a center forward and one of the team’s pillars, had been injured during a match against Meknes’s CODM. Damned Meknes! They’d avenged their defeat by fouling Couscous even though he hadn’t been in possession of the ball at the time. That act of aggression had been etched into the collective consciousness. This only entrenched the already low opinion Fez had of Meknes, its closest neighbor — a reputation that Meknes lived up to.

The headquarters that housed these debates was a fine-leather workshop on the Ben Debbouz, just opposite a guardhouse where idle auxiliary troops whiled away their time playing cards. The shop was tiny and had only a few three-legged stools that were reserved for the patrons, one of whom was Abdel, one of Namouss’s older brothers, who had just started playing on a local third-division team. The walls were entirely plastered with photos, posters, and newspaper clippings depicting the twists and turns of MAS’s history: the evolution of the team, the trophies it had won, and the official events visited by some prince or high dignitary. In this pantheon set up in honor of MAS, the observant onlooker would be able to spot something out of place: a photograph of the MC Oujda lineup. But this was easily forgiven, when one took into account that the shop owner was, after all, originally from the eastern part of the country, and there was nothing wrong with one of Fez’s adopted sons remembering his origins. The very same observer would also not fail to notice different signs of the fellow’s open-mindedness: portraits of Marcel Cerdan, Zátopek, and Fausto Coppi attested to his all-encompassing passion for sports, his knowledge of which commanded a great deal of respect. The leatherworker was unbeatable when it came to the names of players, managers, the dates of major matches, championship rankings, cup winners, the whole shebang. Keeping his eyes glued to his work (leather wallets), his hands always busy, he would extract minute details with the ease and confidence of a schoolteacher. When it came to making predictions, however, he was careful not to dampen the enthusiasm and optimism of the people he spoke to. Coining a saying that later became part of popular parlance, he would warn: “A match is never won before it is played.”

His audience was less susceptible to this sort of analysis. They were seeking reassurances since the stakes for the coming match that Sunday were high. MAS would play host to Casablanca’s Roches Noires, one of the few teams composed almost entirely of Nazarenes. Victory was the only objective. The match would pit nationalists against foreigners, Islam against Christianity. It smacked of jihad. The true faith must prevail.

“Yes, yes,” the leatherworker would say in an attempt to temper expectations, “all this is true. But let’s not forget the opposing side’s strengths. Their players will enter the field having just dined on pork and wine. Heaven forbid! That said — believe me — they’ll have energy to spare. And what will our boys have had? Only a glass of whey and a bowl of bissara, fava bean purée. Truth be told, that’s not the sort of nourishment that’s going to help them fend off their opponent’s attacks. It will only make them feel bloated. Let us nevertheless invoke our city’s patron saint, so that he may come to our aid and strengthen our faith, darken our visitors’ path, and ‘turn their knees to jelly.’”

Namouss was there. His presence during these knowledgeable and passionate discussions was tolerated only on the condition that he remain outside the shop and run the occasional errand, such as going to fetch a pack of Casa Sports cigarettes for one of the honored guests or placing an order for tea at the local café, services he gladly performed since he was receiving an education in return. Though his interest in soccer was only moderate, the unanimous passion for the game he observed all around him pushed him against his will into a spiral of local patriotism, which came part and parcel with all its blind spots and prejudices. Which is why he found himself smack in the middle of that group of excited fans on that long-awaited Sunday as they were going through Dar Dbibagh, headed toward the new town where the stadium was located. The procession was led by Mohammed Marrakchi, an acquaintance who often acted as the referee in the tournaments where the neighborhood kids played. Regardless of whether he was on the job or not, Namouss always saw him with a whistle glued to his lips. It must be said that he was a good guy, who was both patient and reasonable. He would have made a good teacher. Marrakchi took it upon himself to keep an eye on the procession to ensure it was orderly. At its head was an advance party of men with bendirs and other percussion instruments, followed by horn players, with a horde of confused-looking men and children bringing up the rear. As long as they were in the Medina, the musicians restrained themselves, while the MAS supporters limited themselves to chanting the following anthem from time to time:

We’re going to the stadium

Oh champions of ours

Pass us the ball

Don’t forget about us. .

Alongside everyone else, Namouss was shouting himself hoarse, filled with a sense of self-importance thanks to having made a common cause with them. He had no idea of the long walk that lay in store for him. Once they’d reached Bab Boujeloud, they would hit Bab Jdid, walk through the mellah, and still have a good deal of ground to cover before getting to the stadium. It didn’t cross anyone’s mind to take the bus or rent a horse-drawn carriage to save time. The walk to the stadium needed to be enthusiastic so as to send a message to all nearby inhabitants who might have been either indifferent or undecided. On reaching the gates of the municipal stadium, the crowd suddenly lost all discipline. It was every man for himself as people scrambled to buy tickets. There was nothing resembling a queue. People tried to slip around, above, and below one another. Elbows were employed, hips were used to create room, even the occasional punch when necessary. In that scramble for tickets, the strongest emerged victorious. As for the weaklings, the fainthearted, and those made effeminate by having been raised with good manners, they were left with no option but to deal with the scalpers, where they paid dearly for their ineptitude. It was a different story for children, who were divided into two categories. Those accompanied by their fathers or an older brother didn’t face any problems. Their entry was free as long as they were under ten. But this would give rise to issues with the ticket inspectors, who occasionally would turn a blind eye in exchange for a favor. As for those kids who weren’t accompanied, the feeling of suspense would last until the gates were finally shut. This would involve finding an adult on his own and then imploring him to take them by the hand so they could go in. It was the luck of the draw; one could chance upon a kind soul or a heart of stone. There was no way of knowing how it would turn out. The ones who got left behind were legion. They made do by following the match from afar, trying their best to interpret the booing, the cheering, the clapping, and the outbursts of music. Only when the second half of the game was well under way would the ticket inspector take pity on them and fling open the gates, allowing them to gather the crumbs of a mass that was nearing its end.

That day, fortunately, the ticket inspector was more than compassionate. The religious-nationalistic streak in him must have led him to a simple conclusion: The more Muslims there were to encourage the home team, the better. Namouss was admitted into the temple of temples without encountering any opposition: not into the grandstands, of course, but in the standing-only area, and not in the middle but at the very back, next to the woods. That’s where he followed the match from, looking through the wire fence surrounding the field, under the burning sun.

Following the referees, the players began to come out of the locker rooms. First came the Roches Noires players, who were greeted with timid catcalls. The players, however, did strike a fine appearance in their black-and-white-checked uniforms. They dispersed on one side of the field and started doing warm-ups. Their athletic build, suppleness, and imposing bulk were plain for all to see, inspiring an apprehensiveness that the spectators did their best to dispel. A sense of relief started to kick in once the first MAS players entered the field. Emotions were running high. It was a fateful moment. Had Couscous made the cut or not? Phew, there he was. He was greeted by thunderous applause followed by an uproar of bendirs and horns. The green-and-reds were all accounted for. MAS took possession of the remaining half of the field and gave a few acrobatic displays with their passing and dribbling, making the spectators even more enthusiastic. Zemmouri, who specialized in this sort of thing, and Cortès, who was renowned for his headers, took center field. Farina and Jamaï were puffing their chests and hot-footing it back and forth while hugging the sidelines. El-Manjra, the goalkeeper, who was idolized above everyone else, followed the display and scrupulously slipped on his gloves.

Only a few minutes after kickoff, something astonishing happened. An eerie silence descended over the grandstands and the standing-only area. The opposing team had gained the upper hand. What was more, the fact that the referee was both nit-picking and a Nazarene didn’t help things. He kept calling one penalty after the other, especially those committed by Couscous. The relentless persecution of a player who had just recovered from an injury provoked widespread anger. The catastrophe continued to unfold until Roches Noires succeeded in scoring a goal just before the end of the first half, despite a brilliant dive by El-Manjra. The crowd went into mourning. The musicians piped down. The halftime break saw analyses and counter-analyses made. The united front began to fall apart. Some stuck to their guns and fiercely defended their team and argued that the referee was biased and blamed the goal they’d suffered on bad luck. Others went over to the opposition and hurled torrents of grievous abuse. They were saying some pretty nasty things. Once the subject of adulation, Couscous was now considered the son of a slave — as if they’d just noticed that he was black. Thanks to having supposedly let the ball slip right between his legs, El-Manjra was called a pansy and a failure. While Cortès, the header virtuoso, was caricatured by the cartoonist as having a rotten melon instead of a head. Someone even ventured that the match had been fixed and that the MAS management had sold out to the enemy. The atmosphere was getting heated. Fights broke out. Mokhaznis armed with cudgels intervened to restore order. It was a bad day for people selling peanuts, chips, and fried sweets. They were forced to shout their heads off, and very few of their usual customers had the stomach for that sort of thing.

When the second half began, it was the home team’s turn to be greeted with boos and hisses, which were quickly drowned out by the applause of the loyalists, who were still in the majority. The second half started off with a surprise attack by MAS, allowing the public to see its team recover its proverbial punch. There was hope still, but time was quickly running out, and the Roches Noires defense seemed as impenetrable as a concrete wall. Then, during the last fifteen minutes, a MAS player was fouled right in the penalty area.

“Pinanti! Pinanti!” the crowd screamed.

The referee seemed to hesitate, but faced with the public outcry, he granted MAS the penalty kick. Couscous dashed up from the back of the field to transform it. And he scored.

So the match ended in a draw, the worst kind of outcome for the majority of the spectators, who saw no sense in a contest unless there were clear winners and losers. That was the law. The walk downhill back to the Medina was gloomy, and the post-match analysis that took place the following day in the fine-leather workshop was filled with dismay. Sticking to his guns, the leatherworker tried to reassure his audience with another dictum that ought to be etched in marble: “Up until the final match, a championship can be won or lost.”

Having been an honorary witness to the crazy events on that day and its mixed results, Namouss didn’t know what to make of it all. His knowledge of soccer was patchy. He still didn’t know the offside rule, for example. Why is a player, who manages to slip past the opposing team’s defense and take up the best position to score, sanctioned? These tricks were very much allowed during the matches they played in the Bab Guissa cemetery, so much the worse for anyone who got caught out by these wily tactics. Beyond these technical considerations, it was all too clear that Namouss’s interest in soccer remained lukewarm at best. Ever since the Small Springs incident, large crowds made him nervous. Especially when they shouted, shoved, and got all riled up for reasons that more or less eluded him. Sometimes, when he began to feel faint, he had the odd temptation to let himself be overrun and carried away by a black cloud right up to the point of losing all consciousness. What instinct, fascination, or denial was at play here? He was at a loss, and had yet to find his way within the dark forest of questions.

17

TIME WAS PASSING, and Namouss didn’t quite perceive it. He barely sensed the winds of change shyly blowing through his town, even though the signs were all there. What was happening to the Fezzis? Defying what people might say, some had recently started enrolling their daughters in school, even going so far as to allow the ones of marriageable age to go out in public without their head scarves and to dress in European-style clothes. Some married women also followed suit. They abandoned their head scarves, wore shoes with heels, and — scaling the heights of audacity — cut their hair short. Witnesses even reported seeing one of those Amazons behind the wheel of a car! An even more astounding rumor made the rounds regarding a young woman who had enrolled at a flight-training college and would soon qualify as a pilot.

This emancipatory momentum was accompanied by another phenomenon, which was considered more controversial for a different reason. Example: the sudden craze for imported household goods. Chinese ceramics began competing with traditional pottery. Bronze, silver, and copperware were progressively supplanted by plastics and tins. Namouss had witnessed this particular transformation when Driss decided one day to get rid of what he considered old junk: teapots, kettles, ewers, candlesticks, tea and sugar caddies, as well as antique trays. The whole lot was sold off to a shopkeeper in Nejjarine Square and replaced by newer items. While the proceeds of this transaction certainly added much-needed income to the meager family coffers, what was more astonishing was that Ghita raised no objections to this ransacking of her heirlooms.

Yet another change: While Radio Medina remained the preferred source of gossip and word-of-mouth news, many increasingly started turning to more reliable outlets. Once strictly reserved for the wealthy, radio sets began to grace most households, taking pride of place in the middle of the living room, and often decorated by beautiful embroidered cloths and crowned by a vase of artificial flowers. One steered clear of Radio Morocco, which was the colonial government’s mouthpiece, and instead tuned in to stations broadcast from Cairo or Moscow, as well as the BBC and Voice of America. People paid particularly close attention to the news but also took delight in listening to Oriental songs. Umm Kulthum, or the “Star of the East” as she was widely known, was already universally popular, but the radio facilitated the sensational rise of crooners such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Farid al-Atrash. It brought turmoil to formerly peaceful households, pitting brother against sister, sundering long-standing friendships — basically, it split society into two rival camps: those fanatics who pledged their loyalty to the Son of the Pharaohs and those equally fanatic fans of the Lebanese Druze. So it was no coincidence that moviegoing became astonishingly popular, and Namouss plunged headfirst into this craze.

THREE CINEMAS VIED for the patronage of the people of Fez. The most popular ones by far were the one situated in the somewhat rural neighborhood of El-Achabine and the one way out toward Bab Ftouh. The third, in Boujeloud, was frequented by a more sophisticated clientele and allowed women to while away their afternoons there. The competition between cinemas was stirred by which films were being shown. The El-Achabine specialized in detective films, Bab Ftouh showed Westerns, and Boujeloud practically had a monopoly on Egyptian films. Namouss ran with the hares and hunted with the hounds. He needed his weekly fix on Friday afternoons, which demanded much effort on his part. He was now too old to get in free with one of his older brothers. Making himself small didn’t fool the ticket inspector either. He had to pay. But securing the money was never a sure thing since Driss was the only one he could go to. The waiting game would commence at the beginning of the week and last right up until an hour before the start of the film on Friday afternoon. During this time, Namouss was on the lookout for any sign as to whether Driss was or wasn’t favorably inclined. Everything would depend on how business had gone for him that week at the souk: whether enough orders had come in, whether he had paid his rent arrears for the shop, and whether the cost of his materials had gone up or down. These considerations were augmented by others, most notably the pressures Ghita faced in setting aside enough money each day for the family budget, pressures that understandably affected her mood whenever Namouss got too insistent. But most difficult of all was Driss’s habit of taking a siesta right after the midday meal on Fridays. Was this a ruse to avoid dipping into his choukara? Namouss was sure of it. He was left with no option but to make his request at the most unpropitious time, running the risk of receiving a flat refusal. As a result, he would pester Ghita to intercede on his behalf. She would begrudgingly consent but then pull out at the last minute. Namouss would be forced to approach the foot of the bed where his father was fast asleep. Driss would then sit up and, muttering some incomprehensible curses, would thrust his hand into his choukara and pull out a horribly crumpled ten-douro note, toss it on the ground, and immediately go back to sleep. Namouss would sheepishly pick it up and hightail it out of the house.

His destination on that day was Bab Ftouh, and he set off at break-neck speed. Namouss got there without a minute to spare. Dakhcha, a muscular man whose face had been ravaged by the pox, was just about to close the doors. Before letting the latecomer in, Dakhcha warned him he would have trouble finding a place. He was right, the movie theater was at full capacity. There was no hope of finding a seat. Namouss was forced to make do with the benches right at the front, which were almost on top of the screen. Even there, he had to haggle with the children already tightly squeezed into a tiny space for a sliver of bench barely large enough for one of his buttocks. For better or worse, he managed to wedge himself in. Then later he’d maneuver himself to create a bit more space. An opportune moment came when the cinema’s manager walked in and was welcomed by a roar of applause and cheers.

“Long live Bel Mokhtar!” the spectators shouted.

Some of the people next to Namouss carelessly stood up to better express their enthusiasm, allowing him to nonchalantly make his move. Mr. Bel Mokhtar got up on the stage. He called for silence and launched into a speech.

“Gentlemen, you’re only going to hear good news. You will love this week’s film. We had it sent from America. It features great actors. No idle chatter in this one, only action, and plenty of it. A hundred fists and two hundred gunshots — with both revolvers and rifles — and seven kisses. Have no fear, laâribi is going to face great dangers, but he will escape unscathed. At the end, he will marry l-bent who stood loyally by him through all his challenges. Next week’s film, which you will see a trailer of, will also be to your liking. Don’t worry. The same hero will return to take you on new adventures. He will marry a new heroine since the last one, poor thing — may God protect her soul — died in an accident. One last thing: Please remain calm should the reel snap or catch fire. We’ll fix it right away. I don’t want any mayhem, otherwise we’ll cut the film short. There you have it, I’ll leave you to it and see you next time.”

More cheering followed the end of the speech. Before long, the lights went out. Pathé’s robust rooster appeared on the screen and sounded its triumphant cock-a-doodle-doo.

“May God cut your throat!” one of the spectators cried at the top of his lungs.

Another spectator took the joking further and belched, emitting a stupendous burp, letting everyone know — all messages were coded — how he would have loved to feast on such a fleshy-looking bird.

The images that followed made the audience shut their beaks. The magic of the incomprehensible. They spoke of troubles in faraway lands: a flawlessly choreographed military parade, a grand dame baptizing the hull of a ship with a bottle, important men shaking hands, a factory where machines had replaced workers, a castle ballroom where a dance was being held, an ancient street where a blind man was playing the accordion. The rooster then crowed again before moving on to local news, where the images became more familiar. The audience loosened up and reacted to the images ad hoc. The appearance of a fellow Moroccan astride a donkey that was trotting along in the open countryside caused an outburst of hilarity.

“Cha!” someone shouted at the donkey.

“Rra!” another shouted.

“Tikouk, tikouk!” cried a third with a straight face, convinced that he would be able to startle the beast of burden.

Snap! It rolled to another scene. The donkey driver was now in a room, bare-chested. A French doctor was examining him. He made him open his mouth, pressed down on his biceps, turned him this way and that, and then finally swabbed his forearm. Snap-snap! A ceremony taking place in front of a caid’s tent. An officer heavily decked out in insignias and with a kepi on his head was pinning a medal to an official sporting a djellaba and a burnous. The voice-over specified that the Moroccan man in question was a close friend of France.

“Boo! Boo!” resounded through the room, then followed by a “Hush!”

Unable to hold it in any longer, some foolhardy loudmouth broke the silence and shouted, “Long live independence!”

The audience held its breath.

The next reel brought some much-needed relief before sparking allout jubilation. Could it be? Fez’s municipal stadium came into view followed by a few highlights from the match between MAS and Roches Noires. The reel focused primarily on the goal scored by the visitors and accorded only five seconds to Couscous’s equalizer. The whole room broke into the MAS chant to celebrate his feat:

We’re going to the stadium

Oh champions of ours

Pass us the ball

Don’t forget about us. .

The trailer advertising the following week’s film restored a tenuous calm. Then came the long-awaited moment. The opening credits rolled, the atmosphere began to heat up. Thanks to his reputation as a man of the law, Gary Cooper was greeted as a hero. Regardless of his actions, as far as the public was concerned he could do no wrong. They urged him on whether he killed bandits or Indians. They warned him about gunmen lying in ambush that he hadn’t spotted, especially when they would sneak up on him from behind. When he gained the upper hand in a brawl and dealt his adversaries a decisive blow, they started to count the punches: five, six, seven. . Needless to say, they were impatient to see the kisses too. Whistles and sucking sounds could be heard as soon as the heroine made her appearance. And when she hit it off with Gary Cooper and their lips drew close, most either sighed longingly or made quick-witted remarks that were accompanied by heavy slaps on their thighs.

“Drink up, cousin.”

“Oh take pity on me, little mother.”

“It’s God who provides.”

Namouss didn’t join in with these verbal excesses, but neither did they bother him much. He was a prude, though without being conscious of it. He would get swept away by the action, sure, but in between the shooting matches and fistfights, he’d take in other elements offered up quietly during the horseback rides and the dismounts: breathtaking mountains and rivers, the chiaroscuro sculpting faces at a campsite, and — why not? — the feelings that emerged, knotting and unknotting as the characters interacted on an emotional level. How free they were, tied down to nothing but where their thirst for adventure might lead them next. Could he not compare them with Driss, Ghita, and all the others? Which of these characters did he resemble the most? Who should he aspire to be? Not for a single moment did he question the reality of what he saw on the screen. In that sense, he wasn’t that far removed from the others in the audience all around him, who took this theater of shadows at face value.

CHANGE OF SCENE. Destination: the Boujeloud cinema. A different kind of atmosphere, and the venue for a very special occasion: Ghita’s initiation into the world of cinema, which Namouss witnesses in the company of his sister Zhor.

Driss spared no expense this time. He gave his wife enough money to purchase tickets for balcony seats so she could avoid mixing with the clientele on the ground floor, which consisted only of men. Namouss could hardly believe his eyes when the usher led them into an honest-to-God box, where seats upholstered in velour were waiting for them, and where he had an armchair all to himself that was larger and softer than the mattress he slept on. This uncustomary luxury was not without consequences. For a good part of the show, Namouss had to struggle against falling asleep and was only able to follow the narrative — and his mother’s reaction to it — intermittently.

When the lights went out and the first images flashed across the screen, Ghita’s reaction to it made her cinephile son smile.

“Wili, wili!” she exclaimed. “A power cut! We’re off to a good start. Are we going to watch the show in the dark or what? It’s as if we were at the hammam.”

Displaying a remarkable aptitude for pedagogy, Zhor shed some light on the situation.

“They have to switch the lights off at the cinema, Mother, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see the images.”

“Oh good, I didn’t know that. But the dark makes my heart race, sweetheart.”

“Just be patient, dear Mother. Look, the film is starting. Here’s Farid al-Trash.”

“Is that him? That’s not how I imagined him. He has a crooked mouth. And he’s cross-eyed, too. You see that?”

“Stop it! He has a golden voice. Just wait until he starts to sing, then you’ll see.”

“What’s he waiting for then? He’s just babbling on and on and on. I can’t understand a word he’s saying.”

“He’s telling his friend that he’s going to meet a girl who has stolen his heart.”

“Where is she?”

“She’ll show up soon. It’s Samia Gamal, the dancer. You’ll spot her.”

“Finally someone’s going to show up! If you say he’s doe-eyed, then she must really be something.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait until she starts dancing.”

“Why didn’t they start with that? Singing and dancing is what I like, it soothes my heart. I’ve had my fill of idle chatter. Come on, fellas, get a move on and treat us to some hypnotic dancing!”

“Here we go! Look!”

“Allah, that’s what I wanted! Oh yes! We haven’t wasted our money. Give thanks to the Prophet! Her skin is like ivory and she’s as slender as bamboo. Look at how she sways her hips! It’s as if she didn’t have any bones. May God make sure her parents guard her. But, tell me, is she going to marry that man with the crooked mouth? What a shame! He doesn’t deserve her. His friend would be a better match for her.”

“He’s already married, Mother.”

“So what? All he has to do is get divorced and marry Samia Gamal instead.”

“But she’s in love with Farid.”

“Girls today don’t have any taste, even when real beauty is right in front of their eyes. But it’s true, greed can blind you. That Farid must be very rich, that’s why she prefers him.”

“No, he’s actually poor, but she’s in love with his voice.”

“What voice? He brays like a donkey.”

“That’s enough now, Mother. Plenty of people go crazy over his voice.”

“I prefer Abdel Wahab’s voice. Next time we’ll go see his film. At least he’s a handsome man. He wears a fez and it suits him. As for this Farid, well, his head is so enormous. No fez would ever fit on that.”

AN INTERLUDE. Namouss has fallen asleep with the story of the fez in his ears. Another screen unrolls in his dream. He is at the El-Achabine cinema, and the long, pockmarked face of Eddie Constantine has replaced the smoother one of Farid al-Atrash. Lemmy Caution is wearing his legendary hat. He is sort of in love with a dancer who is playing both sides in a plot strewn with dead bodies. A suitcase full of money is at stake. The villain is a casino manager who loves animals and drinks Cinzano. Constantine is masterful at landing punches on his adversaries, each one tougher than the last. But then things take a turn for the worse. Constantine is suddenly surrounded by a bunch of burly henchmen in a cellar. They remove his hat and tie him to a chair. One of his captors pulls out a switchblade and points it at him. Close-up on the blade as it draws nearer and nearer. Gunfire is heard just in the nick of time. All hands on deck. One barely has the time to see Constantine free himself from his constraints and jump back into the fray before the image starts to skip, blur, and finally go up in smoke. The spectators howl. His eardrums feel like they are going to burst, but then Namouss opens his eyes and finds himself once again in the calm, cozy surroundings of the Boujeloud cinema. He takes a deep breath.

Much had happened in the course of the film. There was a big problem between Farid and his lady love. Farid was unkempt and unshaven as he sang a soul-shattering lament. Zhor was sniffing and crying, wiping her tears away with a handkerchief. Ghita seemed to be going through the same motions. She unjustly blamed Samia Gamal’s father for opposing his daughter’s marriage to Farid. Though she’d initially disliked him, she’d eventually turned her vitriol against the stone-hearted patriarch.

“That man is an enemy of God,” she said. “He has no pity or compassion. What’s to become of the poor?”

The next image pulled her from these considerations. Having finished his song, Farid, now in a café, was leaning his elbows on the counter. The bartender was pouring him glass after glass of a dubious-looking liquid. Ghita didn’t fail to notice this particular detail.

“Wili, wili!” she exclaimed. “What’s that he’s drinking?”

“A cordial to make him forget,” Zhor replied diplomatically.

“Go ahead and call it what is: wine. You think I don’t understand anything? The Egyptians are clearly sinners. That’s enough, we’re leaving! Otherwise we’ll be corrupted too.”

“It’s only a film,” Zhor said, trying to explain. “Farid is actually only drinking water mixed with red pigments.”

“That’s fine by me, but I’m still afraid. Fine, how long is there to go until the end? This is getting rather gloomy. You’d think we were at a funeral.”

“Don’t worry, Mother, good will prevail.”

“So are they going to get married?”

“Of course.”

“Will Samia come back to dance?”

“No, Farid won’t want that. He’ll insist she look after the house.”

“You’re right. But what a shame.”

Namouss had once again fallen into the arms of Morpheus. He woke up just in time to see Samia Gamal in a wedding dress with Farid, looking much happier, seated beside her, while a new dancer was swaying her hips in front of them. On her way out, Ghita had one last comment for Samia Gamal’s father, who hadn’t been able to prevent the young couple’s union: “I hope you die of shame, you old baboon!”

18

THAT’S ALL FOR Namouss.

Allow me now to retrace his footsteps and place myself back in the house in the Siaj neighborhood where I stayed the night of Si Mohammed’s wedding. The sandman came at the moment when Ghita ordered my brother to go back to the bridal chamber and “finish the job” that by his own admission he’d botched. I don’t know what happened after that, not even if his efforts were crowned with success. I had mentioned at the time that I had nothing to say on the subject of that questionable ritual involving the display of the bloodied sarouels.

Over the course of the following days, I felt a sense of relief take hold around me. Not that anyone was actually cheerful. It seemed that one needed to exercise the utmost self-restraint during those dark days the country was going through. Ghita was of the opinion that something fishy was going on. It hadn’t quite slipped my mind that ever since we’d received those written threats, my mother had seriously begun to strain against the reins, giving vent to her anger against the nationalists who were standing in the way of her celebrating her son’s wedding in style.

I’d only understood dribs and drabs of the reasons for this change of heart. The most salient of these was her desire to make plain for all to see, from the very first days, how committed she was to her new role of mother-in-law. She needed to start her relationship with her daughter-in-law off on the right foot, ensure that their respective roles were firmly defined, and impress upon her who was boss. Gone were the smiles, the caresses, and the convoluted pleasantries. The only line she dared not cross was not addressing the girl by the title to which she was entitled by virtue of being one of the Prophet’s descendants. Ghita therefore continued calling her daughter-in-law “Lalla” Zineb. But that’s as far as it went. Having waited for three days, she announced on the fourth that it was time for her daughter-in-law to roll up her sleeves and take on her fair share of the domestic chores. She wanted to put the qualities the girl’s mother had raved about during that preliminary visit to the test. “Let’s see if her hands really are made out of gold,” she said. So Ghita — rather unimaginatively — made recourse to the classic test used in such circumstances: the preparation of shad. A veritable trap for someone with little experience in the kitchen. This was because the chabel was a noble fish and could not be handled as if it were a common sardine or whiting. Once scaled, one had to scrub the skin until it was smooth, carefully gut it, gather its eggs without breaking them, chop off the head and tail just at the right place, slice it into even pieces, then wash it three times with salt water in order to blanch the skin and get rid of the smell, which was considered too strong, and leave it to drip dry. One could then begin preparing the marinade: a lovely bouquet of coriander, cloves of garlic, capsicum, a pinch of hot chili pepper, cumin, salt, oil, and vinegar. One could spot the expert cook if she used the right proportion of ingredients, as well as by the consistency of the resulting paste. Assuming that the marinade went well, one would have to move on to the most delicate step: the actual cooking. One would have to coat the slices of fish just so and, before frying them, know how to get the timing just right so that they wouldn’t be too tepid or too scalding when they were finally served. While the slices were being cooked, one had to beware they wouldn’t lose their shape and retained a crisp, golden crust.

Poor Lalla Zineb more or less got through this test. Judging by the looks and taste of the result, as well as the unimpressed faces around the table, Ghita refrained from driving her point home. But she did indulge her daughter-in-law to the point of offering her an honorable way out of the mess. Even more treacherously, she chose to imply her verdict in the following manner.

“Well, one bite won’t kill you,” she said to Driss. “Today you sent us a nice fresh fish. Its gills were still oozing with blood.”

Make of that what you will. Now let’s leave that mess behind.

Outside of these housekeeping matters, the cold spell that set in after the fever of the wedding was due to a number of factors that I will try my best to elucidate. I was well aware that the complicated relationship between my brother and his wife was a source of irritation for Ghita. The newlyweds reacted quite strangely to the daily grind of our family life. They spent many hours — and not only during the holidays — holed up in their room, only making a sortie during mealtimes. Their cloistering seemed peaceful for the most part, but from time to time we could hear the sounds of an altercation taking place behind their doors, followed by sounds of a different nature. Si Mohammed usually emerged from those battles in a pitiable state: his shirt torn, scratch marks on his face, looking as if his body had been pushed to the limits of endurance. Ghita was outraged. For a husband to beat his wife, now that one thing, even if that was not the way things were done in our home. Driss had never dared raise his hand against Ghita. Quite the opposite, in fact, since whenever things got heated between them, Ghita always had the last word. But for a woman to defend herself and give tit for tat, that simply defied belief.

“It’s the end of the world,” she cried. “Give a dog too much rope and he’ll lick your lips and then sit on top of your head. Men should be men and women should be women. Otherwise, where are we going to end up? Or else men will be the ones wearing the veil and women the ones leaving the house to support them. You’re the one who’s responsible for this, Ghita. It was your feet that led you to that good family’s house and you are the one who lost your mind when you laid eyes on that young girl. You are the one who took disaster by the hand and brought it right to the threshold of your home, telling it: Come in! I’ll never do it again. Next time, if anyone wants to get married, let them arrange it themselves. Am I the one who’s going to cuddle the bride in bed? If you want to catch a fish you need to get your trousers wet.”

Outburst after outburst, Ghita put her cards on the table, laying bare the reasons behind her disaffection with her daughter-in-law. The fact that this new recruit wasn’t much of a cook took a backseat to other considerations. The fact she comported herself like a tigress when brawling with her husband also faded into the background. What Ghita really couldn’t get over was that her informants had failed right from the start. They hadn’t warned her that her future daughter-in-law had a serious flaw: that someone had already once asked for her hand and this previous engagement had been broken, though no one knew what the reasons had been or who had broken it off. A dark cloud thus hung over the past of the one Ghita had thought to be unblemished from the moment she’d left her mother’s womb.

The feeling that she’d been cheated deepened every time she paid a visit to Lalla Zineb’s family. Her three sisters, two of whom were of marriageable age, she quickly took a disliking to because (they too!) would run off and shut themselves away with their older sister so that they could no doubt spout malicious gossip behind Ghita’s back. To boot, those flappers would wear skin-tight dresses, giggle in the presence of men, and even took to sitting like men, with their legs crossed, thereby revealing a not inconsiderable part of their intimate anatomy. It was then their father’s turn to be subjected to criticism. Barely a presence, his voice inaudible, he kept a low profile. No wonder he hadn’t been able to father a single son. A father of such uncertain virility couldn’t be relied upon to keep his daughters in check. God knows what the poor devil had turned a blind eye to. Ghita’s verdict: The man was henpecked.

Happily, an event came to pass that allowed the tension to subside. The signs were all there. My sister-in-law was pregnant.

I hadn’t expected this turn of events would lead me to betray my mother and forge a rapprochement with the accused. Ghita’s defamatory campaign hadn’t swayed me. The fact was I liked Lalla Zineb and if I understood her correctly, she didn’t dislike me. I would often boldly go into her room, and she made me feel welcome. I would stay there and watch her as she admired herself in the mirrors of her wardrobe. She wasn’t embarrassed to change in front of me. What did I admire most about her: her well-rounded shoulders, her firm, perky breasts, or was it rather her lacy, see-through nightgowns, her dressing robes decorated with exotic motifs? I think I can safely say — though you are not obliged to believe me — that my infatuation was purely aesthetic. The feelings I had were not unlike those I experienced when I listened to Mr. Benaïssa play his flute for the first time.

During the course of my visits, I was able to witness a ritual that my sister-in-law carried out with zeal, consenting to my presence with an air of carefree amusement. Thanks to her, I discovered that applying makeup was an intricate and refined art, whereas Ghita had only ever shown me the messy side of it. Lalla Zineb was “painting.” Instead of “blinding” herself with the traditional stick of kohl, she used a little brush and mascara. With a few strokes, she curved her lashes and curled them up, accentuating them and giving them volume. Consigning that garish carmine to the museum of antiquities, she coated her lips with a glossy pink lipstick. The fragrant moisturizer she applied to her cheeks was kept in a round blue pot, though I refuse to mention the brand name. What else? Oh yes, the straightening brush she used on her hair, which was cut short in the fashion of the day, had a silver-plated handle and back, replacing the traditional sheep-horn comb, which under other skies was insidiously called a head-lice comb. But the most unexpected and fascinating part of her toilette was when she used little tweezers and started plucking her eyebrows. The gracefulness she displayed put me on cloud nine as I watched two waxing crescent moons, as the poet would say.

To be absolutely honest, I must admit that my visits weren’t exclusively prompted by erotic-aesthetic considerations. Lalla Zineb had known how to curry favor with me via another tactic. When I had to leave her room after having feasted my eyes, she regularly would stuff my pockets full of sweets: gazelle horns, roasted almonds, or even better, caramels and candies that she pulled out of her nightstand drawers. Was this an attempt on her part to bribe me? How could I in my tender years suspect such malice? Regardless, the warm welcome she extended would convert me to her cause.

THE DAYS PASSED, though they were never peaceful. In addition to conflicts in our home came the added pressure of those taking place outside it. The whole country was rocked by violence.

At first, the echoes we felt seemed to come from far away, but little by little things spiraled out of control until it finally sucked us into its vortex. The thunderclap announcing the coming storm was indisputably the assassination attempt on the illegitimate sultan, Mohammed ben Aarafa, as he made his way to the mosque for Friday prayers in Rabat. The knife-wielding man who had succeeded in jumping into the royal car hadn’t had time to deliver his fatal blow. He had been promptly neutralized and struck down on the spot. Despite the censorship enforced by the colonial authorities, the man’s name was soon on everyone’s lips: Allal ben Abdallah. From that point on, armed attacks began to increase: the Casablanca — Algiers train was derailed; a bomb was set off in Casablanca’s central market; policemen, moqaddems,13 stool pigeons, and imams who extolled the name of the illegitimate sultan in their sermons were killed in various parts of the country.

Despite these outbreaks of violence, Radio Medina had begun its regular broadcasts once again. Its analyses, at times contradictory, revealed in the Fezzis a paradoxical state of being where a variety of factors were at play. They certainly admired these shadow men who were striking at the French protectorate’s foundations, but it was an admiration that was mitigated by a mixture of wariness and jealousy — wariness because the matter had to be looked at from all perspectives, and the colonial authorities might respond by wreaking havoc on Fez, a hotbed of the nationalist movement; jealousy because it was difficult to take pride in acts of heroism achieved by people who didn’t belong to our ranks. Our pride was dealt a terrible blow, especially since we were still taking our first tentative steps when it came to resistance. The rallying cry that had begun to make the rounds called for a boycott of certain products, particularly tobacco. Tobacconists took their place alongside traitors and imams glorifying Ben Aarafa in their sermons almost overnight. As for smokers, they took to practicing their vice in secret. The stubborn ones paid for their pride by receiving blows to the body from a potato studded with razor blades. Funnily enough, snuff — which was by far the most widely consumed form of tobacco — was not included in the boycott. Neither was kif, which was more understandable since it was a genuinely Moroccan product.

Despite this restraint, the climate of oppression intensified. Roundups and detentions increased and the police station in Nejjarine Square was filled to capacity. Young and not-so-young people were herded there by the truckload to be interrogated and beaten, the echoes of which reached even the Sekkatine souk. Those who were released a few days later told stories of the unheard-of things that were being plotted there. They treated the scions of large, wealthy families like ordinary bastards. They subjected them to torture and abominable humiliations. They poured salt on open wounds and gave them only a few drops of water and a morsel of dry bread to survive on each day. One of them — unable to stand it any longer — took his own life by throwing himself from the top floor, unless he had been pushed into the void by one of his torturers.

In the face of such cruelty, the mosques played host to large gatherings where the Latif was recited: “Oh Gentle One, we implore You. Heap Your kindness upon us, treat us with gentleness, oh Gentle One!” These litanies would be chanted for hours on end, and though they were manifestly peaceful, they attracted the ire of the colonial authorities. Rather than an unforgivable act of defiance, they saw them as a kind of black magic, a means by which to cast an evil curse. As the repressive measures intensified, they triggered a long-overdue response. After the first reprisals, Fez finally took its place alongside the other hotbeds of the resistance.

IT WAS IN the midst of this atmosphere, which had reached a boiling point, when an event came to pass that turned our family life upside down. It was early afternoon when we heard an explosion just outside our house. Ghita jumped up, let out a loud cry, and without a moment’s hesitation blamed it on the neighborhood kids.

“Are they trying to burst our eardrums with those firecrackers? Is this the chaâbane^14 or what? Never a moment of peace with that nasty, ignorant bunch.”

More discerningly, Driss put forward another hypothesis, but didn’t dare follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion.

“Firecrackers don’t make such a ruckus. May God shield us from misfortune!”

On that note, Si Mohammed came in, having just left the Batha post office. He was pale as a ghost. His eyes, already prominent, seemed on the verge of popping out of their sockets. He was having trouble articulating and wound up whispering the terrible news: A man was just shot in the street, right in front of our door. On reaching the house, Si Mohammed had seen the man still writhing in a pool of his own blood and had had to step over him in order to get in.

Hearing this story, I don’t know what came over me. Heedless of danger, I rushed to open the door and poked my head outside. Wearing a white djellaba, the man was lying stretched out just a couple of steps from our threshold. One of his babouches had slipped off his foot and landed right next to the door. His turban had also fallen off, revealing a freshly shaved skull, which was bleeding heavily. A sugarloaf was still hanging from a piece of string tied to his right index finger. A bunch of mint was in his other hand, which was lying open. I didn’t have the time to investigate further and got very scared. That was when I felt someone grab me by the scruff of my neck; I began trembling all over. Driss was there, as panicked as I was. He yanked me away from the scene, taking the opportunity to shoot a furtive look around, then slammed the door, sliding both bolts shut.

“Get over here!” he ordered. “Do you want to bring disaster down on our heads? A curse upon this day!”

When I rejoined the rest of the family, as was to be expected, I found Ghita in a state.

“Wili, wili!” she inveighed, slapping her thighs. “We’re trapped, and we don’t know how to get out of it. Why did they choose us? If they wanted to kill someone, couldn’t they have done it somewhere else! The Medina is so big. Now they’re going to pin this on us. Oh Moulay Idriss, we place ourselves under your protection. Get us out of this fix! Oh little mother, come to our aid!”

After that, she leaped up and scurried off to the kitchen letting out another wili, wili.

“I left the pot on the fire. The tagine is burning!”

Aside from Ghita, we were all tongue-tied. We stayed seated for a long while, apathetic, devastated, with a vacant look in our eyes, unable to think straight.

Driss was the first to rouse himself from this general apathy.

“My children,” he said, breathing in deeply, “we have to be ready for anything.”

Then he ordered my sister Zhor: “Get the ladder.”

We only understood his request when he leaned the ladder against the wall of the living room where we were assembled. Nimble as a cat, he hoisted himself up the ladder and started taking the portraits hung up there off their pegs: portraits of Mohammed ben Youssef, Allal al-Fassi, Belhassan Ouazzani, and Abdel el-Krim Khattabi, which we had long ago stopped noticing.

“Go and look for the pestle,” he ordered me.

Running to the kitchen, I tried to understand the meaning of this sudden frenzy on his part, but it was no use. When I returned, pestle in hand, I found Driss rummaging through the large wooden chest where Ghita kept certain valuables. He pulled out two engraved silver daggers, tossing them on top of the haphazard pile of portraits that were lying facedown on the ground. This gesture was even more shocking when one considered how he venerated these people and had gone to great lengths to instill the same feeling in us. One could only assume that in light of the serious danger we were about to face, his emotions needed to adapt accordingly. Without a word, Driss tore the pestle from my hand and started to smash the glass panes covering the portraits. He was in such a hurry that he damaged even the red cedar frames. He tore the photographs to shreds. And the daggers — he banged away at them as much as he could but only succeeded in slightly bending them.

“We have to prepare ourselves for the worst, my children,” he finally explained. “The police inspectors will burst in here any moment now. So we can’t leave any traces of anything that might get us into trouble. May God forgive us for having desecrated these great men whom we hold in such high esteem. But necessity has its reasons. As for the daggers, they’re nothing but things, and things can always be replaced. Come on, let’s clean up all this broken glass and flush it down the toilet. So if the police inspectors come to poke their noses in here, they will find nothing but thin air.”

A few of us volunteered to accomplish the task. Once the debris had been cleared up, we dragged it to the kitchen, where the toilets, in a dark corner, were separated from the rest of the kitchen by a low wall, with a gaping hole in the middle. We had barely jettisoned our cargo when Ghita suddenly emerged from the shadows holding the pot that she’d forgotten on the stove. She was beside herself.

“If this carries on, I swear you’ll all go hungry.”

Splash! She poured the contents of the pot down the hole, leaving us stunned. Then her wrath exploded, in Driss’s direction first.

“You had to have it your way, didn’t you! Now you’re calm. While I — who am only a woman — would have said to those Frenchmen and their soldiers and goumiers: Shame on you! After all, what would they have done to me? Cut off my head? Locked me in a cage like Bou Hamara and dragged me through the streets of the Medina? Enough is enough. Fear is also a killer.”

“Stop this madness,” Driss retorted. “You know all too well that they take it out on men, and especially the young. We have to protect our children.”

This exchange took place in almost total darkness; there were no windows or air vents in the kitchen-toilet area. The words reverberated, ricocheting off the walls before heading down the drains where they blended with the stagnant water. I had switched off and was beginning to feel numb. I was running out of breath, swept away by that white, glacial cloud that had haunted me ever since the incident at Small Springs. I revisited the scene: the distant beat of cries, the hand that the woman I was pressed into had abandoned. The taste of flesh and blood of the hand I bit into desperately. The state between life and death where my chief concern had been how my parents would have reacted if they’d learned what had happened to me. The other hand, helping, that had reached for me, then the pitch-black.

When I came to, I found myself alone in a corner, stretched out on a mattress. No hubbub of voices in the house. Instead, there was a sharp hammering sound coming from outside. I grasped that someone was knocking on our door. But these weren’t the blows of the knocker. Someone was banging away using a tool, probably a hammer, and it was clear that they were not asking for permission to come in. I got up and went to join my family, who I found assembled. Nobody paid any attention to me. They had bigger fish to fry. The hushed conversations taking place allowed me to catch up on what had gone on in my absence. The situation: As predicted, the police inspectors had showed up, but they hadn’t barged into the house as we’d feared they might. Only Driss had been questioned and he’d told them that we hadn’t heard or seen anything. Meanwhile, Si Mohammed, who had been a witness and who had a criminal record, had holed up in his room. The victim was a khatib in one of the Medina’s mosques. If he had met with such a fate it was because he had persisted in invoking the name of the illegitimate sultan during his sermons despite being warned by the nationalists. His corpse had been carried off and the pool of blood washed away with copious amounts of water. The casing of the deadly bullet had lodged itself in our door and “they” were in the process of extracting it. So the nightmare had passed us by, at least for the time being. This reassuring turn of events only added grist to Ghita’s mill. She did not hold back and began to gloat, teasing Driss to lighten up.

“A shame about the daggers. Instead of destroying those, you could have turned your attention to the kitchen knives and the meat cleaver. Those are the true weapons!”

“And what about you? You took the tagine right out of our mouths,” Driss retorted, carrying on in the same jocular vein. “Was that so you could get even or because it had really burned?”

“May Satan be cursed!” Ghita replied, in a conciliatory tone. “Don’t hold it against me. I’m just like my mother. Sometimes I act a little crazy. I hear strange voices in my head. Well, at least we have some eggs and preserved meats. I’ll look after your bellies. This way, little scamp,” she said, turning to my sister Zhor. “I need some help.”

19

THE REPRIEVE DIDN’T last long. The black cloud that had plagued us and then drifted off, leaving us to breathe a sigh of relief after a close shave, came back with a vengeance, this time accompanied by a funereal detachment of soldiers. Our sky was about darken for good.

Other assassinations took place after the khatib’s murder. The press made inroads into our family. We were very fond of those headlines, even if the way they reported events was appallingly one-sided. Le Petit Marocain stressed the need for censorship laws and condemned the terrorist plots, guaranteeing they would fail. La Vigie, on the other hand, believed the affair bore the signs of the machinations of foreigners, especially by an organization whose name had been unknown to us until that point: the Communist International. The rebels were labeled as butchers, monsters, and — an odd qualifier — atheists. When we opened the dictionary to add this new term to our vocabulary, we were horrified. Could it really be that there were human beings who were capable of such ideas? How could anyone think that Muslims had been infected by such a malady of the soul? Despite the one-sided nature of official mouthpieces, we were able to glean some details that quickly allowed us to gain a full picture of the situation. Fez was a single stroke, a dab, one character among many. And it wasn’t the central focus. We discovered a country, with cities and diverse populations, a north and a south, an east and a west, and that the whole of it was bent back like a bow, overcome by the same worries, knocking on the same door, hoping for salvation, bleeding for the same cause, committed to making the same sacrifices. One magic word summed up all the expectations and the refusal to wait any longer for their realization: istiqlal! The walls of our Medina were festooned with slogans scrawled with charcoal, where the word “independence” was prominently featured. The recitations of the Latif resounded even more powerfully in the mosques. Demonstrations took place every day and were quickly repressed by the security apparatus. The police stations in Nejjarine and Boujeloud were filled to capacity. Additional detention centers were opened to accommodate the uninterrupted flow of nationalists taken in for questioning. Numerous horror stories were told about these places. The regulations banning festivities from taking place couldn’t have been stricter. Circumcisions were carried out in secret and marriages were continually postponed. The professions that relied on the extravagance of these celebrations suffered a heavy toll: adouls,15 neggafates, musicians, hairdressers, tailors and dressmakers, caterers, upholsterers, cabinetmakers, and so on. Only the tolba^16 were able to do nicely for themselves since it was difficult to dispense with their services when it came to funerals and religious wakes. Worst of all was the blanket ban on slaughtering sheep during the Festival of the Sacrifice. A group of religious leaders were up in arms over this issue, pitting the hard-line Orthodox faction against enlightened Salafists. This sowed discord among the simpleminded. They wound up striking a compromise: The slaughter of the sheep would be allowed on the condition that the hides were donated to support the struggle. And though many of the people who donated these hides did so grudgingly, they realized there were serious consqeuences if they refused to do so. The bans, boycotts, and all-around restlessness eventually began to affect the nerve center of our city: commerce. Business in the souks was visibly declining. Merchants wore long faces, with the exception of those involved in the food trade. The demand for primary foodstuffs was on the rise and those merchants rubbed their hands with glee. The winds of hope and the resurgence of pride therefore didn’t manage to lift spirits during this time marked by gloominess and hardship.

IN THIS CLIMATE, I dare say, our family life felt the strain as we hobbled across the grave conflicts and concerns of the hour. We had trouble getting past the fright caused by the murder of the khatib and the suspicions that surrounded our family as a result. But other matters presented themselves, giving us food for thought and causing further tension within our home, which if nothing else allowed us to bear the insufferable pressures outside the home a little better.

This is what happened: Though Driss wasn’t an activist, he had long since taken up the cause of the spearhead of the nationalist movement, the Istiqlal Party. He truly idolized their leader, Allal al-Fassi. But now there was a new political faction, ostensibly less popular, the Democratic Independence Party led by Belhassan Ouazzani. This schism was heartbreaking for the great many citizens of Fez that didn’t belong to either party. Weren’t both leaders true Fezzis, scions of illustrious families that were fighting to achieve the same objectives? If that was the case, why should one have to choose between them? Those who made such a choice, including my brother Si Mohammed, quickly found themselves in the minority. The reasons upon which he based his decision were not without appeal. Belhassan was more modern than Allal. He dressed in European clothes, spoke perfect French, and wore neither a fez nor a turban. As its name implied, Belhassan’s party furthermore advocated both independence and choura (democracy). Si Mohammed had once again turned to the Larousse dictionary, and this new word had swung his decision to join that party.

There would be an unavoidable showdown with Driss, who while very tolerant when it came to other subjects became intractable when this issue came to the fore. As far as he was concerned, one couldn’t follow two leaders at the same time. He had nothing against Belhassan, far from it, but Allal, as he put it, was Allal. A great alim, he had committed the sixty chapters of the Qur’an to heart. Another point in his favor: Out of the hundred members of the saddlemaker’s guild, not one was a follower of Belhassan. So as you can see, Driss would conclude, only someone who’s crazy could pledge loyalty to a leader who didn’t have any followers.

As a habitual spectator to these controversies, I must admit that my brother’s arguments were more effective in winning my sympathy than my father’s. But I kept this to myself, above all out of respect for Driss, especially since I didn’t know what to do with these new convictions of mine or how I would ever put them into practice. All the more so because, after looking around, I noticed that, first of all, none of my other brothers proffered an opinion and second, my sisters were excluded from these conversations among men. Then there was Ghita’s tendency to grumble, fidget, and rush in and out of the kitchen to make it known how these debates annoyed her. Unable to take it any longer, on one occasion she intervened, displaying her characteristic gift for metaphor and mockery.

“The more you rub it in, the more it rubs me the wrong way. One day it was about who would follow Abdel Wahab or Farid al-Atrash, and today it’s about who’s going to die for Allal or Belhassan. The way you talk would make one think that you were the ones who were going to bring about independence. This is best left to God and not His creations. It is He who is all-knowing and all-seeing, who will inflict on the Nazarenes what He did to the Pharaohs when they took it too far. He will put a single mosquito inside their mind that’ll make them lose their minds, paralyze their limbs, and turn them into sloths. At which point all we’ll need to do is grab a broom and sweep them out.”

Temporarily dizzied by this sledgehammer argument, the debate eventually got going once more.

This point of view got me thinking. I tried to imagine how my mother’s ideas could be put into practice. Would the mosquito — why had she chosen the creature I was named after? — also attack the only Nazarenes I knew: Mr. Cousin, who had been my teacher the previous year, and Mr. Fournier, the headmaster? If they were forced to leave, would the school have to close down? This troubling prospect distracted me from the conversation that was taking place. I needed to find other areas of interest so as to widen what was otherwise a fairly isolated life: going to school, playing in the neighborhood, excursions to the Jnan Sbil gardens or the cinema, and the occasional outing to the municipal stadium. Listening to the radio in an assiduous way was of great help. I left the news-focused frequencies to the adults and instead turned to the ones that played music and hosted game shows that people could take part in, lured by the prospect of winning prizes.

Radio Tangiers became my lifeline and a cherished source of happiness.

TANGIERS, THE INTERNATIONAL zone. Its name alone was enough to induce dreams. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a city but a distant country. According to Driss’s stories, one had to cross two borders to get to it. It took a whole day. When he’d gone there, he’d found Moroccans who looked just like us, even if there were more foreigners there than anywhere else in Morocco: Fraanchmen, Sbanishmen, Breets, Geermans, Eetalians, Mericans, and even Heendous. One could find unimaginable merchandise for sale over there. Some leaders of the nationalist movement lived there and were able to express themselves freely without worrying.

Tangiers the tall

Perched on its pillars

Awlaïlah!17

Radio Tangiers often interrupted its broadcasts to play this song to salute the city. Speaking of broadcasts, the one I most devotedly listened to was a game where you had to guess the name of a song — who wrote it and who sang it — after listening to a brief sample. One had to write in with the answers quickly. After which there would be a random drawing for prizes where the ones who had sent in the correct answers would be eligible. A few days later, the names of the lucky winners would be read out and they’d be sent a surprise gift in the post.

After numerous unsuccessful attempts and weeks spent in nerve-racking anticipation, I hit the jackpot: My name was drawn. Anticlimactically, I didn’t receive the good news in person. I was told by a friend, who’d heard it from a friend, who in turn had heard it from another friend. Though a little mispronounced, my name had been heard loud and clear. I blamed myself for not having been in front of the radio. Another failure, I chided myself. I began to think things seemed worse than they actually were. I was gripped by doubt. The fact my name had been mispronounced didn’t bode well. It couldn’t have been just a simple mistake — they had meant to announce someone else’s name, which was similar to my own. At least — and this was the most anguishing of my hypotheses — this meant I didn’t have a namesake living somewhere like Chaouen, for example, where it seems our family had originally come from.

I spent the following two weeks on tenterhooks. By the time I was beginning to calm down and lose all hope, something unexpected happened. One morning there was a knock on our door. I went to open it and found myself in front of a man wearing a uniform and a flat cap, carrying a large leather bag over his shoulder. I thought it was a man from the electric company who’d come to read our meter. We had been warned not to let anyone in on those occasions unless either Driss or one of my older brothers was in the house. I therefore parroted the response I’d been taught: “The master of the house is out.”

“What’s his name?”

“Driss.”

“The package isn’t for him. It comes from Tangiers. It’s for a certain. .” (He uttered my name.) “Is he here?”

“That’s me.”

“Well then, here you go, and please sign this for me.”

“What do you mean sign?”

“You know how to write, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So take this pen and write your name there.”

I got through this unforeseen exercise, tore the package from the inspector. . I mean, postman, and dashed back into the house. I took the steps to the terrace two at a time, feeling the need to be out of sight so I could discover the contents of the package. Once there, panting — as much from the agitated state I was in as from having flown up the stairs — I savored that precious moment slowly. It was the first time I had received anything in the post. My jubilation was similar to what athletes must experience as they cross the finish line to win a race. Except that there were no spectators, and as far as applause went, I heard nothing but the shrill sound coming out of a stork’s beak. I finally opened the package and pulled out the long-hoped-for gift: a bar of scented soap, whose brand name I cannot keep to myself this time, without which the magic of the moment wouldn’t be properly conveyed. Ah, the joys of Cadum! I was gripped by euphoria. Similar to the euphoria the baby depicted on the soap’s shiny paper wrapping seemed to be experiencing. A brilliant smile leaping from his chubby cheeks. I suddenly felt a sort of paternal love at the sight of that cherub. Oh, it was too much for my heart to take!

As I left the terrace and descended the stairs, I restrained myself from advertising this godsend. I hid the bar of soap and decided I wouldn’t use it until my next trip to the hammam. The little pink cloud upon which I was floating helped me brave the blows that fate had in store for us.

JUST WHEN WE’D thought that the threats menacing our family had passed us by, we discovered “one fine morning” that soldiers had been posted in front of our door. They weren’t there to “pay us a visit” or because of the investigation into the khatib’s murder. No, they were there for the long haul. How could we interpret their presence? Had we been targeted and placed under house arrest, or was this part of more widespread measures? Driss wanted to know more. For safety’s sake, he decided that no one should leave the house. He set out on a fact-finding mission. Ghita was at a loss, words failed her. Before letting him go, she made sure he had enough warm clothes on: one djellaba on top of another and woolen socks. She took to this with an uncharacteristic meticulousness, looking fondly at him with tears in her eyes. He left. We waited for him, our hearts in our throats, our ears glued to the door. When he returned to us safe and sound, anxiety was written on his face.

“What we feared has come to pass,” he said. “The soldiers have taken over the city. They have been posted to each square, each souk, and each road. They ask you who you are and where you are going before they let you through. If your hands are in your pockets, they order you to take them out. Make sure to walk slowly, even if you’re in a hurry. They have ‘red eyes,’ oh Latif, and their fingers are on the trigger. I don’t know what our leaders are going to do, but there is talk that they’re planning to respond in a way that matches the gravity of this provocation. They didn’t want to tell me more, their secrets needed to be kept. Now you’ve heard me and have understood what I’ve said. When you go out into the street, make your way slowly, as if nothing were wrong. Avoid running and don’t make eye contact with the soldiers. You won’t find anything in those troubling faces.”

We stepped in line and organized our lives accordingly. Fez was occupied! Nothing of the sort had been witnessed in living memory. Our instincts warned us that such a situation wasn’t made to last. No army had ever been able to control our labyrinthine Medina. What about the hanging labyrinth? Everyone knew that you could move across town by cutting through one terrace after the other. Our fedayeen had no qualms about traveling in such a manner, and as far as giving orders or advising precautionary measures, Radio Medina was up to the task, without antennas.

Little by little, this bleak, topsy-turvy sort of life became routine. The soldiers on sentry duty in front of our house were visibly bored. They even started knocking on our door asking for a glass of water or for a can opener for their tins of preserved meat. This situation became ridiculous. Ghita broke the all-time record for contradictions. We heard her say, “Those poor men, forced to stay outside as if they were dogs. Without any sleep or real nourishment. He who is a true Muslim has compassion in his heart.”

She therefore decided to send a plate of couscous, only on Fridays, that she had prepared.

Once the initial shock wore away, nobody resisted this new state of affairs, especially since the men who had been posted to keep an eye on us comported themselves discreetly. Driss even had a highly moral reflection filled with optimism: “As long as they’re believers, those who break bread with you can’t do you any harm.”

Our tolerant outlook was not exceptional. It was only in neighborhoods where the soldiers arrogantly and shamelessly demanded to be fed by the local inhabitants that relations turned sour. In these cases, the initial hostility toward the soldiers blossomed into outright hatred.

The leaders of the nationalist movement struck back in the midst of this poisonous atmosphere. Watchword: a general strike. The Fezzis turned out in force. Once all the shops had been shut, they filed into the mosques and recited the Latif once again in between prayers. The sanctuaries of Moulay Idriss and Qarawiyyin were particularly sought out. People felt safer there because the army couldn’t come too close. The arm-wrestling contest with the colonial authorities had reached its apex.

The particulars of those days were glossed over by the tragic outcome that severely affected us. The predators had made their move under the cover of night. Unable to break the strike, they resorted to attacking the properties of the strikers. We learned the news early in the morning. My father almost rushed out of the house barefoot. He ran to the Sekkatine souk and discovered that the shop had been broken into and its contents looted. Every shop in the souk — as well as those in neighboring souks — had met with the same fate.

On his return, and after he had given his account of the disaster that had befallen us, we felt the ground was being yanked from under our feet. The door of the future was slammed in our faces. How could we comfort one another? Each of us retreated into silence, and Driss’s was by far the loudest.

20

THE SKY WAS never quiet for long in Fez. You only had to bother looking at it. Why did it fascinate me so much, since I had never even heard the word “poetry” and could only muster “stars” to describe the myriad celestial bodies glittering in the night heavens?

My word-hoard was a meager, meager affair. The inability to pin down the objects in my mind and say “you are called this, and you that” infuriated me. And since I have recognized you and named you with my own mouth, come now, stop being so mysterious, follow me. Jump into my pocket and let’s go! You will be companions during my journey, my confidantes, and should we encounter danger along the road, you will become the tongue of my cry and the instruments of my courage.

The terrace of our home in the Siaj neighborhood was gargantuan in comparison to the Lilliputian one of our Egyptian in the Spring of Horses. The tiny theater of my first reveries had given way to a vast hanging amphitheater. From there I could behold the entire Medina, from the top of its head to the tip of its toes. Did the Medina reflect the sky, or was it the other way around? My eyes couldn’t make up their mind. They lost themselves in that mirror game and reveled in the feeling of loss. My city knew how to leave its mark on its patch of sky and my sky was the most eloquent poet of its city. I was the passive, diligent scribe of this learned discourse. I transcribed its music and gave myself over to it so as to get to know myself. My body rid itself of the ballast of its weight and for a while I felt I was capable of flying without wings.

A good thing no one ever saw me or heard the rosary of my ramblings click its beads inside my head. Because of the nature of the time we were living in, I would have been accused of being indifferent to the suffering that was being inflicted on us and labeled a defeatist. Ideas needed to be clear, practical, and put to the service of a decisive battle. That said, I had no idea the sky was about to deliver a wholly different message.

It was toward the end of July and there was a full moon on the rise. It had been a year since the king of the country had been forced to abdicate the throne and sent into exile. He was now living under house arrest in a distant African island that Driss insisted on calling Madame Cascar. Alongside everyone else in the family who was educated, I was amused by this eccentric way of pronouncing it. We had long since located the big island on the map of the dark continent and started to study it. We were less interested in Antananarivo, the capital, than we were in the more modestly sized city of Antsiranana, where Ben Youssef had been banished. There were numerous parallels between the histories of our countries. Both were protectorates. Once upon a time, the queen of the empire had also been made to abdicate and sent into exile. It was clear that our colonial masters didn’t like monarchs. It’s to be expected, one of the more erudite among us said, it’s been quite a while since they cut off their own king’s head.

“Who rules them then?”

“A leader that they choose every seven years. At which point it’s someone else’s turn.”

“Who picks him?”

“Everyone, men and women.”

“Even porters?”

“If they lived over there even Aâssala, Mikou, or Chiki Laqraâ would be able to choose.”

“And what do the ulama^18 think about that?”

“The ulama in France don’t concern themselves with these matters.”

“Who concerns himself with these matters then?”

“People like Belhassan Ouazzani.”

“Does he agree with the people who cut the kings’ heads off?”

“Not at all. He and the sultan go hand in hand.”

“What about Allal?”

“Him too. Even more so.”

“More than what?”

“You’re making my head ache with all your questions. Wait until you’ve grown up, then you’ll understand.”

It can’t be said that I didn’t make an effort.

BEN YOUSSEF HAD come back!

The rumor swept over our city like a gigantic wave rising from a raging inner sea. Since we weren’t experienced mariners, we were dragged to its depths and swept away by the current. We didn’t know what to clutch on to in order to welcome the good tidings without losing our minds. From the four corners of the city, clusters of human beings in every house formed chains to buffer the shock and begin to react. When we had finally recovered the ability to speak, all we could do was stutter our way through questions like excited birds: What, what, what? When? Where? With whom? How? By sea or by air? By a car or on horseback? Is it really him or is it a clone? Has he given a speech? Has anyone seen him with their own eyes or heard him with their own ears? What is the radio saying? Where can we find out more?

The wave continued to sweep over us and little by little Fez transformed into a sort of Noah’s ark. Belief won out and soothed our hearts. Having remained blue throughout the storm, the sky comes to mind as a happy memory. It saw to it that the sun offered us a glorious sunset. Its face blushed a deep crimson, with gentle fire. When the muezzins sang their call to prayer, their voices had such a sweet languor it was as if the words had transformed. All of a sudden, the swell receded. We continued floating in our ark, rocked by the lyrical call to prayer and the graceful light.

Did we dine that evening? There’s no way to be sure. We needed to talk, to pay visits to one another, to touch one another, to add to one another’s happiness, and to plan, to plan for our future with our pens and our ink, our own colors.

We rediscovered our hands, hands that had never stopped painting, writing, drawing, sculpting, engraving, illustrating, weaving, braiding, embroidering, hammering, sewing, gluing, paving, grinding, plastering, distilling, molding clay, iron, silver, leather, bronze, feeding children, the poor, orphans, guests, and God’s madmen. Our hands that we had doubted and that were now opening up, palms to the sky, so that it could bless them and bestow its manna upon them.

Upon that, night fell. We felt happiness glow within to the point that we didn’t need to switch on many lights. That was when we heard the first ululations. Others rose up in reply, then the trilling intensified, amplifying to the point that the walls began to tremble. Ghita gave vent to her frustration and joined the fray. My sister Zhor immediately replied in kind. At that moment, someone knocked on our door and gave this astonishing piece of news: Ben Youssef appeared on the moon!

“Let’s go up to the terrace!” Driss yelled.

We rushed up the stairs. The farther we climbed, the more the concert tore at our hearts. Once in the open air, we bumped into our first-floor neighbors. In the rush, none of the women had slipped into their djellabas or covered their faces. They were in house clothes. The men didn’t notice anything amiss. They were distracted, their necks craned toward the sky. The neighboring terraces were also crowded with people. It seemed like all of the city’s inhabitants were gathered on the rooftops to observe the phenomenon. Wave after wave of ululations rose, punctuated by invocations that had some trouble finding their tempo at first, before melting into a single mold and agreeing on a common slogan:

Moulana ya doul-jalal

Ben Youssef wa-l-istiqlal!

Oh Lord of glory

Ben Youssef and independence!

As this was happening around me, the moon-gazing produced several wholly different interpretations. Ghita, whose sight was deteriorating, asked whether the sultan was standing up or on horseback.

“What horse?” Driss scoffed. “Open your eyes, you can only see his face.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to teach me how to look? I tell you there’s a horse up there. I’m absolutely certain of it.”

“Return to God woman. It’s just the shadow of his djellaba’s hood. Can’t you see the sultan’s eyes, his nose?”

“What about his mouth, where is that then?”

“Where do you think it is? On his forehead?”

Employing her renowned gift for pedagogy, Zhor cut in and pointed at the moon.

“Let me show you, dear Mother. The face is right in the middle. Follow my finger.”

“Where is your finger? Think I’ve got cat’s eyes?”

“Here it is, hold on to it, and follow me as I show you. There, that’s the outline of the djellaba’s hood. There’s his round face, and here are his lips.”

“Ah yes, dear, it seems you’re right. Now I can see his mouth, and it’s as if it were getting ready to talk.”

While everyone was reaching a consensus, I tried my best to determine what I was looking at. Alas, even though I really applied myself — the moon as my witness — the results were hardly conclusive. It was certainly shining more than usual and some unrecognizable shapes could be glimpsed. Yet I could see nothing resembling a clearly defined face, regardless of whether it looked anything like the sultan’s. In any case, the portrait of his that I was familiar with — which my father had destroyed in his moment of panic — depicted him in profile, with a watani on his head, and everyone around me was speaking of a head rather than a face, and that it was covered with a hood. That said, how could I possibly doubt, even for a single moment, the reality of what everyone unanimously agreed they could see, a vision that was becoming increasingly detailed, and which they were waving at with great joy and devotion? I could only put my inability to see the sultan down to poor eyesight and other infirmities connected to my age. Adults had faculties that I clearly lacked. The simplest option was to blindly believe them. From there I’d be only a step away from a true leap of faith, and wanting to dispel my doubts, I took the plunge. I surprised myself by poking fun at Ghita, who was guilty of having dragged her feet before accepting the official interpretation.

“I guess your horse flew away, huh?”

“May he trample you under his hoofs and make mincemeat out of you!” she retorted.

Faced with that less-than-enviable fate, the solution I found was to shout myself hoarse, joining with the chorus of invocations: Oh Lord of glory, Moulana ya doul-jalal. .

Was it the meager contribution I spilled into the communal emotion that brought on the steel bird? I was so naïve I actually believed that. Announced by a frightening roar, the helicopter sprang out of nowhere, lit up the star-studded sky with red and green flashes, and began spinning above our heads. A short silence followed, after which people let out a flood of hostile rebukes and angry gestures at the helicopter’s occupants. Disappointed by the negative reception, the helicopter rose straight up and flew past the moon, “on the double” one would have said, so as to obscure the sultan’s face, and then disappeared into the distance. The people clapped, drunk with victory. It didn’t last long. The helicopter announced its return. It reappeared and some believed they’d seen flashing lights leave its cockpit, accompanied by sharp explosions. Driss, an expert in this field by virtue of having handled fantasia rifles, cried out: “They’re bringing out the big guns!”

Panic ensued. For once playing the role of mother hen, Ghita fussed over her chicks: “This isn’t a game anymore children. Go on, scram, kids, go downstairs.”

We resolved not to budge, especially since we really hadn’t seen or heard anything this time. The helicopter had gone away once more, giving us a reprieve. People let out a sigh of relief and went back to the object of their fascination. A thin veil covered the moon. Yet this mist didn’t impede the conversation that was dissecting each and every detail. Our neighbor’s wife raved about how handsome the king was.

“He is blessed by God,” she said, “an artist’s hand has drawn his eyebrows and endowed his eyes with the roundness of a crystal glass.”

“His face shines with the light of Mecca,” Ghita added. “Even the moon must be jealous of it.”

“Have you noticed how straight his nose is, how it’s neither turned up nor hooked?”

“Is that a beauty spot on his cheek?”

“Beauty spot or not, he has a rosy complexion. It’s as if blood were about to spurt from his cheeks.”

Zhor made a bizarre remark: “Happy is the woman who enjoys her baraka day after day!”

Faced with these tributes praising Ben Youssef’s physical charms, I would have expected the men to feel somewhat jealous. There wasn’t a bit of that. Leaving the women to their hackneyed attempts at poetry, the men brainstormed with the aim of producing some solid ideas. Our neighbor, who was keen on economics, came up with an analysis that made our mouths water.

“Are you aware that when the French leave, we’ll be left with enough phosphates to cover a family’s needs for three months without having to work?”

“It’s a steamed chicken served with its own cumin,” Driss exulted.

“I’m afraid so, Sidi, and as for the lands that belong to the colonial settlers, we will repossess them and use them to grow enough wheat to feed every single Muslim on Earth.”

“Barley will become something fit only for animal feed.”

“We won’t have sent our children to school in vain. It won’t be long before they will become administrators and distribute what needs to be distributed.”

“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

“Why not? We have emptied our choukaras so that they could become educated and climb to the top of the ladder. Now it’s time for us to put up our feet and relax.”

“We certainly deserve to. We’ve slaved away our whole lives and worn out our hands and eyes. It is time to rest our heads on a pillow and retire in comfort.”

“Istiqlal is a great thing,” our neighbor concluded emphatically.

The celebrations died down only very late when the crowds on the terraces started to thin out. We followed suit. Once we’d gone downstairs, I noted with bitterness that we had skipped dinner. Ghita must have thought that we’d eaten enough with our eyes, and after all, inshallah, thanks to independence, we would soon feast to our heart’s content. Less susceptible to these arguments than my head, my stomach started to grumble. But I didn’t have a choice. I was therefore forced to avail myself of the only refreshment that was readily available: sleep.

WHAT DID I dream of that night? Tales of gluttony, of course. It was a nzaha in the Bab Lahdid orchard. As with the previous occasion, the whole family was there, including Touissa, who was an early riser. The order of the day: a great feast. Ghita had secured the services of a caterer. There was the smell of barbecue in the air, as well as roast chicken, tagines, and the inevitable couscous. What was all this in honor of? It was twofold: We were celebrating Driss’s return from his pilgrimage to Mecca, and at the same time, we were waiting for a distinguished guest to make his appearance.

The images rolled on, too jumpy for my taste. Driss was seated at the place of honor in the middle of the garden. He was wearing traditional garb and emanating an air of self-importance out of keeping with his character. He was holding his hands out in a dramatic way. Each of us then presented ourselves in front of him and congratulated him on his journey by loudly pronouncing his new title of haji and then kissing both sides of his hands. Ghita did the same and then seized the opportunity to slip in a humble request: “What about me, haji? When will you send me to see the Prophet’s grave?”

“Soon, soon,” Driss replied in a lordly tone. “I won’t forget you.”

All this unfolded under the brightness of a. . lune de plomb. The image was fleeting but its materiality left not a shadow of a doubt in the dreamer’s mind.

Click click. The master of visions proceeded to the next slide. The whole gathering was seized with hysterical laughter. The reason? Me, sitting on a table with a watani on my head, reciting in an affected manner the nursery rhyme I had been taught by my brother Si Mohammed:

Tonio and Cabeza

And their accomplice, the bald one

Surrounded by woods. .

Click click. A bunch of us were shaking the branches of a tree. Heavy golden fruit fell down. I tried to bite into one, and my teeth encountered nothing but metal.

Click click. Ghita dashed toward the corner where the food was being prepared, shouting, “I smell something burning. What is that cook up to? May fever strike her down!”

Click Click. The khatib who had been murdered in front of our house was there, as if he’d been invited, and he addressed us: “I have brought you a sugarloaf and some good Meknes mint.”

Click click and knock knock. Someone knocked at the door of the garden. A commotion stirred outside, and Ben Youssef himself came in, flanked by two rows of dignitaries. His face looked exactly like it had on the moon. He stepped forward and we rushed over to kiss his hand. He took his seat at the place of honor and leaned over to Driss, asking him with a lisp: “Lithen up and tell me vere have I come from?”

“From Madame Cascar, Sidi, and Moulay.”

Ben Youssef broke into heartfelt laughter, and we joined in. My chuckle rose above all the others.

It was the laughter that woke me up in a start. Alas, the only thing I’d savored at the zerda were the enticing smells in the air.

THE SUN HAD risen on our city, which was in the grips of an altogether different dream. Dispatched by Ghita to buy some fritters — she made up for dinner by preparing us a kingly breakfast — I found everyone out on the street. People kept stopping — trying to outdo one another with eloquent greetings — to reminisce and delight in the vision they’d witnessed the previous night. Their faces were beaming, their breasts filled with a newfound pride. There was a crowd in front of the fritter vendor. Ghita hadn’t been the only one to have such an idea. I had to elbow my way through a little and stay alert so I wouldn’t miss my turn, while trying not to forget the orders I’d been given. I was to ask for a kilo of regular-size fritters, half a kilo of smaller ones, and three kilos of the ones glazed with eggs. It was all getting muddled up in my head when two kids approached the crowd and announced to whoever could hear: “Buy Ben Youssef on the moon!”

I thought they were talking about a newspaper that related the story. Prompted by curiosity, I foolishly gave up my place in the queue so as to get a closer look. Other dupes did the same. We then discovered what all the fuss was about, the object clearly spoke for itself.

SPEND APPROXIMATELY A minute looking closely at the three white dots at the center of the print. Then turn your gaze to a wall or even lift your eyes toward the sky, and if you look hard enough you will see His Majesty the Sultan.

All of the effigies sold out in the blink of an eye. I managed to secure one and immediately set myself to the task. The results were undeniable. Lifting my eyes to the sky, I was certain that the image I’d had so much trouble discerning the previous night exactly matched the descriptions of the face that the others had convinced me had been there all along. Any lingering doubts I might have entertained were definitely brushed aside. The scientific approach I had acquired at school had been useful after all. As far as I was concerned, Ben Youssef’s appearance on the moon was now a proven fact.

ABSORBED BY THESE scholarly experiments, I found myself pushed to the back of the queue and was obliged to cool my heels, while I was increasingly tortured by the enticing smell and sight of the crispy fritters that the vendor was stacking one after the other on a bunch of palm fronds that had been tied together.

Once back at the house, of the two trophies I was brandishing, the most popular by far — against my expectations — were the fritters. The familial atmosphere had cooled down. The adults thought only of stuffing themselves. Only my little sisters deigned to dart a glance at what I deemed the biggest prize, and out of sheer goodwill they consented to take part in the experiment, whose clear results had turned me into a believer.

The conversation that took place after the meal clarified why the family mood had shifted. I was stunned to learn that the radio, which they had tuned into early in the morning, hadn’t breathed a word about the miracle that the whole of Fez had witnessed the previous night. While one could overlook the fact that Rabat and Tangiers hadn’t said anything, the fact that the event hadn’t been reported by Cairo, Moscow, the BBC, Prague, or Voice of America had shocked us to the very foundations of our being. Had the entire world turned a blind eye to our future and the eloquent manifestations of our faith? Had they turned a deaf ear to the widely attested messages delivered by the sky? The same blackout extended to the official press. The morning papers that Si Mohammed had bought were still spouting the usual bile in regard to our fedayeen and the headlines glorified the deeds of the protectorate: a new road had been built, a dock had been enlarged, a free clinic opened, ten new police stations, a shantytown had been razed, free sacks of flour had been handed out to the needy, caids had been rewarded for their loyal service. Who could top that? We only found an allusion to the events that had so radically turned our lives upside down buried deep in the back pages. There was a humor column with a heading that read “A Race of Lunatics,” where the journalist, who’d only signed the piece with his initials — the coward! — addressed the issue in the following manner:

The ungrateful opponents of France’s civilizing mission have attempted to deceive their fellow citizens by propagating the preposterous idea that the old sultan, who was legitimately deposed — thanks to widespread support across the country and the efforts of its elite allied to our cause — made an appearance, hold on to your seats, on the moon! It seems this tactic of psychological manipulation, which these agitators learned from their puppet masters in Moscow, had an impact on some uncultivated, simpleminded souls. Instead of helping these people gain insight into the virtues of reason, which we brought into this country, the agents of this pointless and narrow-minded nationalism want to make even bigger fools out of them by pushing them into the arms of a collective hallucination, thereby transforming them into a race of lunatics. What a dirty trick! In light of this, it’s difficult not to be swayed by the argument put forward by one of our illustrious administrators (White Urbanite, no need to give him a name) who had once said in his time: “We’ll get nothing out of these Arabs so long as they write from right to left and piss sitting down.”

Dirty dog, curses upon his mother’s religion!

His barking didn’t stop our caravan from filing up the stairs that night. There was Ben Youssef again, making his appearance on the lightly dented moon. The top of his hood was leaning slightly to one side. During the course of the following nights, layers of darkness started to cover his face, first his right eye, then his nose, his mouth, his other eye, and so on. Oblivious to the barking guard dogs and the indifference of the world, we clung to our hope until the final stages of the moon’s “revolution.”

In the meantime, the “white days” of Shawwal came thick and fast, and one needed to come to terms with that. There was nothing on the horizon. No Ben Youssef in sight. Other torments were on the way, which announced themselves with flashes of lightning and storms prompted by the shockwaves of history.

Accordingly we dined on the dry bread crusts of expectation and drank the fresh water of stubborn hope. This went on for a succession of seasons, where “our summers became our winters,” before the great upheaval, the real one, came along and the diurnal star of freedom rose in our sky.

But that’s another story.

Epilogue

SINCE THEN, THE earth has continued to spin on its axis like a whirligig. Life too.

More lives than one. Thanks to the stories I have told, I find myself face-to-face with a set of Russian dolls. I pay close attention to the dolls all lined up in a row. From the smallest to the largest, there is a common thread, as the life force passes from one to the other, and each time I acquire a new lease on my soul. And to think that none of the dolls had the idea to run roughshod over the others and claim sole maternity rights over the whole set. I have tried to give a simple answer to the voice that claims to speak for memory, that pesters me and asks: Who is Namouss? The answer that rises in reply is happily unforeseen: Namouss is my ancestor and my child.

There’s nothing left for me now but to go back to the starting line and loop-the-loop.

But before that, there’s one question left that needs to be cleared up. What is this mysterious “bottom of the jar,” the emblem from which this story unfolded?

The origins of this expression can be traced back to an anecdote by the famous Joha,19 a mythical Mediterranean who was a master of practical jokes. Here it is.

After having been an imam, a judge, a lawyer, a porter, and a number of other professions — all leading nowhere — Joha was living hand to mouth. One day it occurred to him to give business a try. He would sell honey and butter at the souk. But there was a snag: He wouldn’t have much stock. Customers won’t crowd around me, he said to himself, if I don’t put my wares in plain sight. He purchased two jars, which he filled to the halfway point with excrement, before topping one off with honey and the other with butter. Then he took them to the souk. It didn’t take long for customers to crowd around him. Before making up their minds, each of his customers asked to sample the merchandise. First one came, then another, and so forth. It got to the point that they were drawing near the danger zone. Infuriated by how people sampled a lot and yet bought little, Joha yelled out this warning: “Keep licking away and you’ll get licked, if you carry on like this, you will land in shit. Beware of the bottom of the jar!”

The scatological element of the story diminished over time. The Fezzis, however, did hold on to the notion that by wanting to get to the bottom of things, one usually hit on distasteful truths, vile things that are best left unseen lest one winds up making sworn enemies. The flawless reasoning of the Jesuits! This also exists in the lands of Islam. But when it comes to the Fezzis, who are sophists at heart, this was interpreted differently and has now come to mean the exact opposite. In its newfound form, it designates a vast repertory of horrible words and idioms that are enjoyed in the company of a select few: double-edged words, metaphorical expressions, witty one-liners, and allusions that only the initiated can grasp, prompting them to burst into ecstasies, much to the chagrin of the laymen around them.

This “bottom of the jar” has spread far beyond the city of Moulay Idriss, and for that matter far beyond the reaches of the imperialism that the Fezzis often profited from — and still do — even though they believe that there’s a bottom as well as a rock bottom. Let’s be fair and leave to one side those who, admittedly, weren’t able grasp the full sense of the story unless they happened to have heard it related in their own accent, with their own expressions and gestures, their naïveté and endearing certitude, a conviction fairly common among tribes and peoples, of being the center of the universe.

But enough of these tiring platitudes. There’s still a little left in the jar for those with a taste for it.

NIGHT HAD FALLEN and the family was still gathered in the apartment that my father had rented in the new town after Ghita’s untimely death. An ironic twist: The apartment was part of the L’Urbaine complex, the flagship modern development during the days of the protectorate. It was where the upper crust of French civil servants and other influential people once lived. Despite the ravages of time, the building was in decent shape. At least to the casual observer, since once you got past the gates, the truth in the old adage “other times, other customs” emerged. The majority of the mailboxes were gone and those that had survived dangled loosely right in front of the diligent postman’s eyes. The elevator was nothing but a distant memory, attested to by a majestic, iron-clad cage that was irremediably empty. It was a good thing that Driss’s apartment was on the first floor. But let’s move on.

The television was always on and the lively conversations ignored the images in the background and drowned out its accompanying decibels. We were taking part in a ritual that always took place when we got together: bringing Ghita’s sayings and doings back to life, her unforgettably epic opinions.

“Do you remember what she said about fasting one day during Ramadan?”

“And when we moved to the house in Siaj and she couldn’t stand the fact that we’d be under the eyes of our first-floor neighbors?”

“And the time when she played a trick on Touissa when we were in Sidi Harazem?”

“And the pot that she emptied in the toilet the day the khatib was murdered?”

“What was it she used to say to express how nothing got past her?”

“If I step on a raisin I can immediately taste its sweetness in my mouth.”

“And the first time she went to the cinema.”

“The things she said about poor Farid al-Atrash!”

Speaking of the cinema, I still haven’t told you that beautiful story. I’d gone to see a film at the Boujeloud — I was wearing a coat that I’d just bought. When I got there, I took it off and hung it on the back of my seat. It was only after I’d come home that I realized I’d forgotten it. Ghita was beside herself. She promised she would light seven candles to Saint Sidi Abdelkader Jilani if he helped us recover the coat. I went back to the cinema and miraculously found the coat exactly where I’d left it. Ghita was ecstatic, but when I reminded her of the seven candles she’d promised to Sidi Abdelkader Jilani, without batting an eyelid she said, “So what? We have the coat in our hands right here, so the saint can go take a hike!”

Along those lines, television began to run the evening news. I used what influence I had to call for silence. I expected the fall of the Berlin Wall to be among the top headlines. How naïve I was. For almost half an hour, the wooden anchorman focused on royal audiences, foundation-laying ceremonies presided over by ministers who didn’t even know how to hold a trowel, and soporific debates being held before a mostly empty parliament. He then apologized that due to the “wealth of material” he could only gloss over the international news in brief. We were finally allowed images of the Berlin Wall, pieces of which were being grabbed by its brave dismantlers as if they were holy relics.

Driss, who still has a lively interest in politics, surprised us with the following remark: “Only Hikler could have ordered the destruction of that wall.”

“No, Father, Hitler is dead,” I said, thinking it was advisable to correct him.

“That’s only what they tell us. It seems he’s still alive. But God knows best.”

“Believe me, Father, he died when I was still crawling around on all fours.”

“If you say so. .”

Entertained as I was by this exchange, it only served to make Ghita’s absence more painfully felt. I thought about what she might have said in these circumstances. The sweet wind of her presence brought a smile back to my lips. Written by both our hands, it’s only fitting that our story comes to a close by giving the last words to her.

“Pahh, is that the only news they could find to tell us! A falling wall. . it can’t have been built very solidly. The walls of Fez are still standing after all.”

Créteil — Fez

May 2000 — June 2001

ENDNOTES

1Expert in Islamic law.

2Walled Jewish quarters in Moroccan cities, originally set up to protect its inhabitants from pogroms.

3Laâbi’s note: Neggafate is the plural of neggafa, women who more often than not are of black ancestry, and who provide a number of services. They are responsible for the bride from the ritual grooming right up to when she is led to the altar, where they proffer advice suitable to the occasion, including tips on various erotic techniques.

4Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) was Tunisia’s first president after independence from the French and led the country from 1957 until 1987, when his newly appointed prime minister, Zine El Abidine ben Ali, used a number of medical reports to declare Bourguiba unfit to rule, at which point he was deposed. Ben Ali was of course later the first leader to be overthrown during the Arab Spring in 2011.

5Laâbi’s note: The ellipsis isn’t meant to censor the word. The point was to demonstrate how the people of Fez pronounce words, usually dropping the first consonant, where instead of saying qaf they will say af.

6Minor ablutions are washing the face and hands up to the elbows, the feet up to the ankles, and rubbing water on one’s head. These are usually performed before prayers. Major ablutions are washing the entire body and must be performed after sexual intercourse.

7The nationalist leader of the Democratic Independence Party, formed in 1946 as a splinter from Allal al-Fassi’s Istiqlal Party.

8Khattabi (1880–1963) was a Berber political and military leader during the Rif War (1921–1926), who initially defeated and chased the Spanish out of northern Morocco but was later destroyed by the French. He was exiled to the island of Réunion and kept under house arrest from 1926 until 1947. He later sought asylum in Egypt, where he died.

9The “yellow spirit,” a jinni that loves perfume, music, and dance and leaves laughter and happiness in her wake. When she takes possession of an individual, she sharpens their wit.

10A Moroccan myth: a spirit that can inhabit the bodies of women or take the shape of women. In southern Morocco, Aïcha Kandisha takes the form of a goat, while her shapely, alluring legs remain human. In the north, however, Kandisha has the body of a woman but the legs of a camel. She entices men and then tears them apart.

11Gnaoua are descendants of former slaves brought back by the Moroccans after they conquered Timbuktu. They have a rich cultural tradition where music occupies a large place.

12A hadra is a ceremony where participants go into a trance while music plays around them. A specific color is worn to attract specific spirits.

13A low-ranking civilian officer appointed to represent a certain district as an informant and council assistant to the municipal authorities.

14Laâbi’s note: The month before Ramadan when children often play with firecrackers.

15Notaries for religious marriages.

16Students.

17“I swear to God!”

18A body of Islamic scholars that interprets sharia law.

19Laâbi’s note: Joha in classical Arabic, Goha in Egyptian, Khodja in Turkish, Guisha in Albanian, Giufa in Sicilian, Odja in Greek, Djahan in Maltese, etc.

Content

Abdellatif Laabi
The Bottom of the Jar

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Epilogue

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