In the Country of Others

by Leïla Slimani

  The peach harvest had been good and he’d sold his almonds for a handsome profit. To the extreme annoyance of Mathilde, who needed money for school supplies and new clothes, Amine had decided to invest all his profits in the development of the property. “A woman from here would never dare stick her nose into that kind of thing,” he told her. He was going to build a second greenhouse, hire a dozen extra workers for the harvests and pay a French engineer to draw up plans for the construction of a reservoir. Amine had long been passionate about growing olive trees. He’d read everything he could find on the subject and had grown some densely packed experimental plantations. He was convinced that he alone could create new varieties, more resistant to the heat and the lack of water in this region. At the Meknes Fair in the spring of 1955 he gave a confused speech on his findings, reading from the notes in his sweating hands as he tried to explain his theory to a skeptical audience. “All innovations are mocked at first, aren’t they?” he said to his friend Dragan. “If things go as planned those trees will have a yield up to six times higher than the varieties I’m growing at the moment. And their need for water is so reduced that I could go back to traditional irrigation methods.”

  During all those years of labor Amine had grown used to working alone, not relying on anyone else’s help. His farm was encircled by those of colonists whose wealth and power had always made him feel inferior. At the end of the war the colonists in Meknes had still held considerable sway. It had been said that they could make or break a resident-general, that all they had to do was lift a finger and the politicians in Paris would do their bidding. Nowadays, Amine’s neighbors were more agreeable toward him. At the Chamber of Agriculture, where he requested subsidies, he was received with deference and—even if they refused to grant him the money he asked for—he was congratulated for his creativity and determination. When he told Dragan about this meeting, the doctor smiled.

  “They’re scared of you, simple as that. They can feel the wind turning, they know that the natives will soon be in charge here. They’re just covering their backsides by treating you as an equal.”

  “An equal? They say they want to support me, that they believe in my vision for the future, but they refuse to give me credit. And when I fail they’ll say I was lazy, that Arabs are all the same, that without the French and their work ethic we would never make anything of ourselves.”

  —

  In May, Roger Mariani’s farm burned down. The pigs were killed and in the days that followed the air all around was filled with the smell of charred flesh. The laborers, who didn’t try particularly hard to put out the fire, covered their faces with cloths and some of them threw up. “It’s haram,” they said, “to breathe this cursed air.” The night of the fire, Roger Mariani came up the hill and Mathilde took him to the living room, where he drank an entire bottle of Tokay on his own. This man who had once been so powerful, who’d threatened General Noguès at his office in Rabat and gotten what he wanted, now sat in the old velvet armchair and cried like a child. “Sometimes I feel like my heart is breaking. I can’t think anymore, it’s like my brain is lost in thick fog. I don’t know what the future holds for us now. Where is the justice if I have to pay for crimes that I will always deny having committed? I believed in this country, the way a saint believes in God: unthinkingly, unquestioningly. And now I hear that they want to kill me, that my peasants have hidden weapons in secret caches so they can shoot me, or that they’re going to hang me. So, all this time, they’d just pretended to stop being savages . . .”

  The relationship between Amine and Mourad had been stretched thin during the Christmas holidays, and for weeks afterward Amine consciously avoided his former aide-de-camp. Every time Mourad appeared on the dirt path that led from the farm to the douar, every time he saw that gaunt face, those yellow eyes, Amine felt sick. He looked at the ground when he gave orders, and when Mourad approached him to discuss a problem or celebrate a coming harvest Amine couldn’t keep still: he would stamp his feet and often he had to ball his fists and grit his teeth to prevent himself from simply running away.

  During Ramadan, which fell in April that year, Mourad refused to let the fellahin work at night or set their own hours based on the heat and their fatigue levels. “Watering and harvesting have to take place in the daytime! I can’t change that and neither can God!” he yelled at a peasant, who put his hand in front of his mouth and recited a prayer. He would let them take a nap in the afternoon, but afterward he would insult them, harass them, accuse them of playing on their master’s generosity. One day he attacked a man he’d found in the garden, a few feet from the house. He grabbed the man’s hair and punched him repeatedly, accusing him of spying on the Belhaj family, of following young Selma, of trying to sneak a look at the Frenchwoman through the mosquito nets in the living room. Mourad spied on the maid, whom he accused of imaginary thefts. He interrogated Mathilde’s patients, whom he suspected of taking advantage of her.

  One day Amine summoned Mourad to his office and, as he used to during the war, spoke to him in simple, martial terms, giving him orders without any explanation. “From now on, if a peasant from the region comes to ask for water, we will give him water. Nobody will be refused the right to use our well. If a sick person comes here to be healed, you will make sure that they are. Nobody will be beaten on my property and everyone will be allowed to rest.”

  —

  All day long Amine stayed on the farm, but in the evenings he felt compelled to flee his squawking children, his nagging wife, the angry glare of his sister who couldn’t stand living on this remote hill any longer, and he went to the village to play cards in smoke-filled cafés. He drank cheap alcohol in windowless bars with other men as drunk and ashamed as him. He would often bump into former army friends, silent soldiers who he knew would not try to engage him in conversation.

  One evening Mourad followed him there. The next day Amine couldn’t remember how his foreman had convinced him to let him tag along. But that evening, Mourad got in the car and the two of them went together to a bar north of the main road. Together they sat and drank, but Amine ignored his friend. Let him get drunk, he thought. Let him get so drunk that he ends up unconscious in a ditch. In the sordid place where they’d washed up, an accordionist was playing and Amine felt like dancing. He wanted to be someone else, someone with no one else depending on him, someone with a carefree, easy life, a sinner’s life. A man grabbed him by the shoulder and they swayed from side to side. His companion started laughing hysterically. The laughter spread through the room, contaminating all the other customers like some sort of enchantment. Their mouths opened wide, exposing rotten teeth. Some clapped their hands or stamped their feet in time with the music. A tall, underfed man whistled and everyone turned toward him. “Let’s go,” he said, and they all knew where they were going.

  They walked around the edge of the medina to El Mers, the red-light district. Amine was so drunk he could barely walk or see where he was going. Strangers took it in turns to help him stay on his feet. One of the men relieved himself against a wall and suddenly all the others felt an urge to piss. Amine stared, wild-eyed, at the long stream of urine that ran from the town walls to the cobbled street. Mourad went over to him and tried to persuade him not to go any further along this wide street lined with brothels run by cantankerous madams. The street turned into a dark, narrow path, then came to a sort of dead end where criminals lay in wait for men rendered careless by the relief of fucking. Amine shoved him away, glaring at the hand that Mourad had placed on his shoulder, and they stopped outside a door. One of the men knocked. They heard a clicking noise, the shuffle of oriental slippers on the floor, bracelets jangling. The door opened and half-naked women rushed outside, swarming around the men like locusts around crops. Mourad didn’t see Amine disappear. He wanted to reject the brunette who took him by the hand, but instead he let her lead him into a tiny room containing nothing but a bed and a leaking bidet. The alcohol had s
lowed his reactions and he found it impossible to stay focused on his objective of saving Amine. Already the anger was rising inside him. The girl, who was very young, wore a turban on her head, and her skin smelled of cloves. She pulled down Mourad’s trousers with a dexterity that horrified him. He saw her unfastening her slip. There were fresh scarifications on her legs, forming some kind of symbol, the meaning unknown to him. He wanted to poke his fingers into the prostitute’s eyes then, to punish her. The girl, perhaps recognizing that look on his face, hesitated for a moment. She turned toward the door before—clearly in a stupor herself, whether from alcohol or hashish—shrugging and stretching out on the mattress. “Hurry up. It’s hot.”

  Later, he wasn’t sure if it was this phrase or the sweat that ran between the girl’s breasts, if it was the creaking noises coming from other rooms or the vague feeling that he’d heard Amine’s voice. But suddenly, staring at this girl with her dilated pupils, images of the war in Indochina flashed into his head, images of those military whorehouses that the Native Affairs Bureau organized for the soldiers. Into his mind came the sounds of that place, the humidity of the air, the disheveled landscape, which he’d once tried to describe to Amine, who couldn’t grasp the nightmarish darkness of that jungle. Mourad ran his hands down his bare arms and felt a chill. He had the impression that a swarm of mosquitoes had filled the room, that his belly and the back of his neck were once again covered by those itchy red blotches that had kept him awake for nights on end. Behind him he heard the yelling of French officers and he thought that he’d seen them, the guts of those white men, that he’d seen Christians dying from diarrhea, driven crazy by the pointless wars. No, it wasn’t killing that was the hardest part. And as he thought this, the click of the trigger echoed in his head and he slapped his own temples as if to empty his mind of these dark ideas.

  While the madam kept yelling that they had to hurry up because there were other customers waiting, the prostitute wearily got to her feet. Naked, she walked toward Mourad. “Are you sick?” she asked, and when the man started sobbing and banging his head against the stone wall, she called out for help. They were all thrown out and the madam spat in the face of the delirious aide-de-camp. The prostitutes made gestures and yelled insults at him. “A curse on you. A curse on all of you!” Mourad and Amine wandered aimlessly. It was just the two of them now—all the others had fled—and Amine couldn’t remember where he’d left the car. He stopped by the side of the street and lit a cigarette, but as soon as he took a puff he felt like he was going to vomit.

  The next day he told the laborers that the foreman was ill, and he couldn’t help feeling sad when he saw the relief and joy on their faces. When Mathilde offered to look after Mourad, give him some medicine, her husband replied coldly that he only needed rest. “I think we should find him a wife,” Amine added. “It’s not good to be so alone.”

  VIII

  Mehki had spent twenty years working as a photographer on Avenue de la République. Whenever he had time—which was pretty often—he would walk along the Avenue, camera hanging from a strap over his shoulder, and offer to take pictures of the people he saw. In his early years he’d struggled with the competition, particularly from one young Armenian man who knew everyone from the shoeshine boy to the bar manager, and took all the customers for himself. In the end Mehki realized that he couldn’t rely on chance to find models. That it wasn’t enough to keep asking or to lower his prices or talk up his talents. No, what he needed to do was spot the people who wanted a souvenir of that precise moment in their lives. The ones who thought they looked beautiful, who were afraid of growing old or who kept looking at their children getting taller and repeating, “Time goes by so fast!” There was no point wasting his charm on old people or businessmen or harassed housewives. Children were always the best bet. He pulled faces at them, explained how the camera worked, and the parents could never resist the temptation to immortalize their toddler’s angelic face on a rectangle of thick, glossy paper. Mehki had never taken a photograph of his own family. His mother thought his camera was the devil’s work, that it would steal the soul of anyone vain enough to pose for it. At the start of his career he’d worked as a photographer for the local authorities and many grooms had refused to let their brides be photographed. Certain high-ranking Moroccans had even written threatening letters to the resident-general, explaining that they were fiercely opposed to the idea that the women of their town should reveal their faces to strangers. The French had given in, and after that there were numerous leaders and pashas who merely gave brief descriptions of their wives to be appended to their identity papers.

  But young lovers were his favorite prey. And on this particular spring day Mehki happened upon the most beautiful couple he’d ever seen. The air was sweet and full of promises. A creamy light flooded the center of town, caressing the buildings’ white facades, bringing out the vivid reds of geraniums and hibiscus flowers. He spotted the couple amid the crowd and ran toward them, finger on the button of his camera, and he was sincere when he said: “You’re so beautiful that I could take your picture for free!” He said this in Arabic and the young man, who was European, raised his hands to show that he hadn’t understood. From his pocket he took a banknote and handed it to Mehki. Young lovers are generous, Mehki thought. They want to impress their girlfriends. That generosity never lasts long, but in the meantime it’s good for Mehki!

  Such were the photographer’s thoughts and he was so happy and enthusiastic that he didn’t notice how nervous the young woman was, the way she kept looking around as if she were a fugitive. She started when the young man, who was wearing an American-style jacket, stroked her shoulder. They were so beautiful together, so terribly beautiful, that Mehki was dazzled. Not for a second did he think they were badly matched. He wasn’t perceptive enough to understand that these two lovers were not supposed to be together.

  What was she doing on the Avenue that Tuesday afternoon, this child from a good family, an honorable family that made her wear straight skirts and plain jackets? She was nothing like those floozies who paraded up and down the Avenue, who fled the vigilant eyes of fathers and brothers, who got pregnant after copulating in the backseat of a car. This girl had a freshness to her that took his breath away, and while he was setting up his camera Mehki thought that there would be something wonderful about being the one person on earth to freeze this instant for eternity. He felt swept up by a sort of grace. The moment was so fleeting, and that face had not yet been soiled by vice, or a man’s hand, or the harshness of life. That is what he would capture on film: the naiveté of a young woman and the spark of desire for adventure that he could already detect in her gaze. The man, too, was very handsome and the people walking past all turned to stare at his long, lean, muscular body, his solid neck bronzed by the sun. He smiled, and Mehki was a good judge of a person’s smile. His teeth and lips were immaculate, not yet stained by too many cigarettes or bad coffee. Thankfully most of his models kept their mouths closed when they posed for him, but this young man was so transported by joy and felt so lucky that he couldn’t stop laughing and talking.

  The girl refused to pose. She wanted to leave and she whispered something into the man’s ear, something that Mehki couldn’t hear. But her boyfriend insisted, he held her by the wrist, turned her around and said: “Come on, it’ll only take a second. It’ll be a nice souvenir.” Mehki couldn’t have put it better himself. A few seconds for a memory that will last a lifetime—that was his slogan. She stood there so stiffly, her face so blank, that Mehki approached her and, in Arabic, asked her name. “Okay then, Selma, smile and look at me.”

  When he’d taken the photograph Mehki handed them a ticket and the young man put it in his jacket pocket. “Come back tomorrow. If you don’t see me on the Avenue, I’ll leave your photo in the studio, just over there on the corner.” And Mehki watched as they walked away, melting into the crowd that moved along the pavement.

  The next day the
young man did not come back. Mehki waited for him for days; he even changed his routine in the hope of bumping into him. It was an excellent photograph, perhaps the best portrait he’d ever taken. He’d managed to capture the light of that May afternoon, and he’d framed it so that palm trees and the movie marquee were visible in the background. The two lovers were looking into each other’s eyes. The shy, waif-like girl had turned to face the handsome young man, whose mouth was half open as he smiled.

  One evening Mehki went into Lucien’s studio. Lucien developed his films and had let him buy a new camera on credit. They did their business, settled up, and at the end of their conversation Mehki took the photograph from his little leather knapsack. “It’s a shame they never came to get it,” he said.

  Lucien, who put all his energy into hiding his desire for men, bent over the photograph and exclaimed: “What a handsome boy! Yes, it’s a shame they didn’t come back.” Mehki shrugged and, as he reached out to take the photograph back, Lucien said: “It’s a very beautiful photograph, Mehki, really very beautiful. You’re improving, you know? Listen, how about this? I’ll put the photo in my window: it’ll bring in customers, which is good for me, and it’ll show everyone that you’re the best photographer of young lovers in all of Meknes, which is good for you. What do you think?”

  Mehki hesitated. Of course he was flattered, and it was true that this photograph could bring him quite a few new customers. But he also had a strange desire to keep the image all to himself, to make this young couple his imaginary friends, his anonymous companions. He was a little fearful of throwing them to the wolves on the Avenue. But Lucien was very persuasive, and in the end Mehki agreed. That evening, just before closing up the shop, Lucien hung the photograph in his window, so everyone in Meknes could admire the pilot Alain Crozières and his young girlfriend, Selma Belhaj. Less than a week later Amine walked past the window and saw it.