by Mhani Alaoui
“But you, Adam, will be rewarded for your submission. You will be the one through whom the story is created. You will start a new family whose triangle will be suspended from the heavens with golden strings. You will have sons, and your new wife will be as beautiful and gentle as the sleeping dove. Her name will be Eve, she will make you forget about Lilith and Maryam, and she will teach you that the world is about domination.”
Adam remained silent. But Lilith—cheated, betrayed, her heart broken—lashed out. “I’m here. I will always be here. I’m the dream of the unfulfilled. You want me gone, but I will always be here. So will Maryam, and she will come back when you least expect it. When you think the world is fully asleep under your dominion, she will dream the world anew.” Only then did she go into the night.
Sheherazade hesitates, then stops.
“I must confess something to you. I have been sitting here for centuries, wondering why did Lilith not bow her head in submission to the Lord.”
“Perhaps she was going to. Perhaps Adam moved faster,” replied the little girl.
“Imagine that an infinitesimal unit of time may have forged our history and defined our future. What would the world have been if Lilith had bowed down first? Or again could it be that he who bows becomes Adam and she who thinks becomes Lilith? Or maybe she called God’s bluff and understood that if neither bent to the Lord’s will, they would remain free for all eternity.”
“Perhaps God was not Himself that day,” said the girl.
Sheherazade bristles with excitement.
“Yes why not? A faded shadow enacting a story of loss and betrayal that is older than time itself, a broken mirror reflecting a past history through its crystal shard. In the holographic memory of the world, there lies an old God who no longer is, one whose light still bounces off the stars he once created and that are now dead. This God conflicts with every other God that once was, is, or will be, and it is He who appeared to Adam and Lilith that day.”
“Or perhaps it was not God at all?”
Sheherazade gazes admiringly at the child.
“Well, that is the question. It’s actually a fascinating theory. So...I heard that God wasn’t alone that day, and that he wasn’t quite himself either.”
“He wasn’t?”
“No, not at all. Apparently, someone was with him. A snake. They say that there was a hissing in God’s voice when he spoke to Adam and Lilith. Something He of course would never do if He were himself.”
“So we’re here because of a snake?”
“Let’s blame the snake, that works for me.
The Old Woman stops. She sees how affected the child is.
“It’s just a story. Don’t read too much into it, darling.”
“But why did Adam betray Lilith and Maryam?”
“God only knows.”
“What happened to Lilith?”
“She was punished for her disobedience by being written out of the book.”
“How strong she must have been. Where is this story from?”
“It’sfrom my wild delusional mind.”
“If you say so. But perhaps one day you’ll tell me the truth.”
“The truth?”
Finally, the little girl asks the question she has wanted to ask all along, but only now finds the courage to.
“And...Maryam?”
“Ah, that’s where you come in. There’s something that you must do. It’s a dangerous thing.”
Sheherazade leans forward and whispers in the child’s ear.
The Lair
The light rises once more on the house in the middle of the world. Sheherazade has let down her dark, beautiful, jasmine-studded hair. She is wearing a long black kaftan and bright red stiletto heels, which she is quite proud of. She is strumming a Fender guitar, which she claims she found in the depot for lost and found objects on the other side of the hill. The little girl, too, has changed. She seems older and less frail. She is wearing boots and a military jacket that is too large for her.
“Your feet are muddy and you are soaked, little one. Come by the fire. Tell me what you’ve seen.”
“I went to the lair where Adam and Leila are held. I became a falcon but couldn’t enter because I was too large to squeeze through the demon gates. I became a small bird, and only then could I fly in. The lair was a labyrinth of stone and steel. I began my journey and flew into eternity. Finally, I found Adam’s prison cell. His hair was long and white, and he looked a thousand and one years old.”
“Did you give him the message?”
“Yes. I told him that he would be out soon and that his trials would be behind him. I told him that his suffering wasn’t in vain. But he just smiled and turned away, as though the sight of me was too painful. Then I flew another eternity across the sea of darkness and into a lunar mountain range. There I found Leila. Her suffering was much greater than Adam’s, for she wasn’t allowed to find peace and forgetfulness. Her belly was round. I curled myself around her neck and whispered in her ear that she would be out soon and that we would be together again. She too smiled but with infinite tenderness. She touched my feathers and gave me orange seeds to peck on. They were most delicious, but bitter. I don’t know where she found them, but the scent of oranges in her cell was overwhelming.”
“You did well, my darling.”
Zohra
After three months, which translated to a thousand and one years in the demons’ lair, Adam returned. He went to his in-laws, in the old house in the Polo, because he had nowhere else to go. Their large gate opened for him. No one had seen or heard word of Leila. He himself had not seen her since that night when the cold-eyed demons came for them. Adam and the Nassiris had no other choice but to wait. Meanwhile, in the lair, two demons looked up into thin air and blinked their cold eyes once. They stopped working Leila and, to their own confusion and for no reason they could fathom, grabbed her, loaded her into one of their white vans, and threw her out onto a dirt road leading to the Central Quarries. They had obeyed an order, or so they thought. Then they filed their papers: “death under interrogation.”
~
The Central Quarries was Casablanca’s oldest, most infamous slum. It was the place where things were sent to die, where nothing was ever mined, but where beginnings abounded. It lay at the heart of the Prophet’s Cave, a vast, sprawling workers’ district. Men and women from all over the country left their families and tribal homelands to become the new workers of Casablanca. They believed that one day they would return to their tribes and pastures, but they were wrong.
Where once their lives had been lived to the beat of the herd, the mosque, or the crop, they were now regulated by the siren and the alarm clock. The French bosses had arranged lodgings for a certain number of local workers and for their foremen—rough men who had left their native Greece, Italy, or Spain to try their luck in the African colonies. Foreign, industrial, and brand new, these lodgings—called the Cites—were imaginary replicas of traditional homes. Whitewashed and with small inner patios, they echoed the delusional utopia of the colonials.
But the vast numbers of rural migrants who came to work, or wait for work, in Casablanca needed more. The Quarries was the local, spontaneous, and irrepressible answer to the Cites. It rose from the ground in a matter of days, built from necessity and industrial waste, to become the labyrinthine entrails of a modern city. It was the other Casablanca, neither white nor enclosed, a city of tin cans and vibrating plastic.
Sheets of grey iron were welded together to become walls and ceilings, wooden crates torn up for windows and doorways. In the cold half-winters of Casablanca, rain sang softly on the flat roofs and seeped into the endless twilights of the bidonville, Casablanca’s version of the shanty town. Electricity, when available, was poached from the city’s electric poles, gas bottles were shared, and water was pulled from nearby pumps and sometimes boiled. Carts, mules, chicken, and sheep meandered on the dirt roads. Children played in dark ponds, and animals survived on thin
air. Vendors sold their wares and brought news from beyond the margins. Rooms were added to backyards, squats popped up like mushrooms during a wet night. A happy few even became rich—landlords of hectares of previously unclaimed, unwanted land.
Here was the new working class—created in a day, scrambling to be defined and regulated, with hearts still dreaming of tough mountains and starlit nights, and nostrils still breathing in the scent of wild flowers and of hair coiled around henna and musk, forgetting that it was from their poverty that they had fled. Here was the Central Quarries, where nothing but tin and plastic were ever mined, where things brought to die breathed life anew. The Quarries that became central without anyone knowing for whom they were central. And it was here, at her doorstep, that Zohra of the Ait Daoud stood waiting for the demons to bring Leila Nassiri Tair to her.
~
Zohra took Leila in and nursed her body with herbs and ointments. As the herbal fumes twisted up the walls of her hut, she felt a ferocious bond to the devastated body that the demons had brought her. But truth be told, Zohra had always known Leila. She had been dreaming of her since Leila was a little girl. She did not know where the dreams came from, but she had always known that they were not like other dreams. They were a thread tying Leila’s destiny to hers. This was all she could be certain of. A fortnight ago, she dreamt of a small bird entering the demons’ lair and curling itself around Leila. She pushed behind it and penetrated the impenetrable. She saw Leila at the hands of two cold-eyed demons, and she understood that Leila was drawing her last breaths. Zohra—dream-Zohra—was now a soberly dressed bureaucrat who ordered the immediate release of one Leila Nassiri Tair.
Now here she was, in wounded flesh and fragile bone. Zohra saw the explosion of violence, the bandaged nights and cold floors that had swallowed Leila up. She looked to the signs for answers—the cards, the coffee mark, and the animal entrails all told of grief and sterility. But Zohra saw something else there. Deep within the quivering entrails and the mark, she saw what she had secretly hoped to find. It was something she remembered from old wives’ tales and ancient songs that the men and women used to sing long ago when the young slum still smelled and breathed of exile and loss, green and potent songs that held the promise of miracles, freedom, and a world healed.
While Leila was deciding whether to live or die, Zohra shared her knowledge of the place they were in. She told her the story of her family and the Central Quarries. And this story would help Leila heal by infusing into her veins the pulsing, working-class resilience of a place that was the city’s heart.
~
My world, where you have come to fall, is the Central Quarries. My family was among those who founded the Quarries. I was a hundred fifty years old when my tribe decided to leave our ancestral homeland. The youngest and ablest of our young men and women were chosen to lead the way, and I was one of the elders who guided them. My tribe’s homeland is the land of the Seven Saints, seven brothers who came from the Mashreq, the Muslim East, to found the holy city of Abou Jaad and its seven guardian shrines. There, in that magical, mystical land, everyone is a Sharif, rebellion is a way of life, and the outlaw is protected. Or so they claimed.
My own clan, the Ait Daoud, was believed to have an even more ancient descent. They too came from the Mashreq, but word had it they were Hebrews. It was said that they came to the Maghreb after the destruction of the Second Temple, twenty-five hundred years ago. No one knows for certain. But this I know. In my grandfather’s house hung a key. This key, he said, could open the gates of the ancient Jewish shrine tucked away in the Atlas Mountains.
Why did the grandfather have this key? The elders said that when the Jews left the valley for Israel, they entrusted their keys to their Muslim friends and made them promise to look after their shrines and holy places. Others said that the Ait Daoud had always held this key, that they brought it with them from the Mashreq, along with a rose-colored Jerusalem stone that would be used to build the shrine. My mother Hafsa, heeded and feared for her strange powers and acute mind, and one of the few women to sometimes sit in the men’s circle, believed that the Ait Daoud were descendants of the oldest tribe in the world.
But that was then. Now they too had to leave their tribal homeland for the city. They gave up their bodies for paid work and machine time at the thermal power station of the Roches-Noirs, then at the cement and sugar factories of Lafarge and Cosumar. Some proved exceptionally smart at handling the machines, while others immediately understood how to harness the new power. When the colonial bosses decided to lower the wages and put greater chains on worker and colony, we, the makeshift inhabitants of the Quarries, were the first to rebel. Angels black as soot hovered above our heads as we stood up against factory, town, and administration. It is here, in this urban swamp, that our independence from the colonials was won.
Resistance began with us—old, young, man, woman. Sometimes colonial workers themselves joined the strikes and coined words to echo those of workers and slaves around the world. Once our independence was won, we were told to return to our mines and factories. We, who expected to rise from the ashes of the burning colonial town, were forced aside and pushed down. We were dispersed throughout the city, and our neighborhoods were destroyed. Only the Quarries was slow to transform, slow to bend. We remained the beating heart of the margins, the living reminder that the city had never completely absorbed us, the rurals who came to stay.
Zohra continued her story long into the night, watching as Leila warmed to her touch and as her heart became stronger.
~
Zohra Ait Daoud had her own shack in the central land of the Quarries. Her walls were of corrugated iron and rotten wood. But don’t be mistaken. She understood, quite early on, the potency of books. One day, when she was very young, she heard of the vast Green Book that engulfed many minds and created forests, mountains, and citadels. She became so fascinated by this book that she decided to steal it. She was caught and publicly beaten by the bearded old man who guarded it. He warned her to stay away from it. Did she not know that it was the most sacred of all sacred emanations? She was an insolent, ignorant girl. He said to her that one day she may be given the permission to learn by rote some of its verses, but she would never be able to read it for herself. Though she was made to kneel in penance to the man and the book in the dusty square of the slum, it was too late, for her mind had already taken in the book’s symbols and signs.
Her mother taught her how to create talismans from discarded words and objects. And Zohra knew, instinctively, that the small pieces of paper or raw leather that were given to barren women and impotent men were covered with the very signs and symbols that she had glimpsed in the Green Book and that were forever inscribed in her memory. She poached in the green pastures of endless phrases and wisdoms with her own chants and incantations. She transformed old men’s fortresses into wild pastures where jealousy, love, and revenge acted out their own tragedies. She conjured magic by dismantling the text, cutting words and sentences out, creating fury out of order. Symbols became portals to the wild green pastures of long ago, to the golden sands below, and to the high mountains to the east and north. When she ripped words out or scribbled letters on animal hides, she felt life rush through her veins and voices thump against her temples. The corrosive smell of iron and sewage that permeated her slum was forgotten, and the scent of roses filled her nostrils to oblivion.
But Zohra also knew that roses had thorns and that a talisman once made could unleash both good and evil. Perhaps she relished that spiraling out of control, where life came to claim its banal chaos. She warned her clients of a talisman’s unforeseen consequences. But the soft husband wants an erect penis and the shunned lover her revenge. The conned associate wants to see his old partner burdened by debt, and the unjustly accused wants her predator lost at sea. The mother looks for ways to heal her child, and the servant dreams of becoming the master. People came to Zohra looking for revenge, fortune, or love. They trusted talismans and
enchantments to make right a world that had gone wrong. Men and women were haunted by the quest of their own uncompromising justice—that ultimate, most sensuous of pleasures. But one day, perhaps not immediately, the client would have to pay the price. Zohra always warned her clients of the unforeseen consequences or great bitterness that would hold their days and nights if they resorted to magic, but none ever cared.
~
At the time when Leila was brought to her, Zohra had become a solitary being. But there had been a time when she had plunged into the heart of the world head first. She took lovers as she pleased, sometimes those very men who came weeping at her doorstep. She slept with them in the half-glow of her home, wrapping her legs tightly around their backs. It was whispered that she was Aisha Kandisha herself, that she-devil who played with men and took them with her to hell. It was even rumored that she was indifferent to men and had once been in love with a foreign woman who left her behind.
She refused to marry. Her freedom, however, came at a price—there would always be a man with a long beard and a closed mind pointing a stick at her, telling her to stay away. But this type of man never came too close. He had learnt to stay away. He warned against her but feared her all the same. He took her money as protection taxes but never took it all. He insulted her, his rage heightened by his terror of the otherworld, but he never dared destroy her completely.
For this man’s religious faith had been nurtured amid stories of phantom trees and invisible beings, and he knew that Zohra’s world was never too far from his own. Upon hearing the wolves howl, had not his grandfathers once crouched in the snows of the Atlas Mountains, shaken with premonition of the forces at bay? And did not the Green Book itself speak of spirits and djinns, and their constant interference in human affairs? His mind was a confused swirl of fear—fear of women, of spirits and djinns, and of God. Fear made him angry, and his anger was in turn deafened by a glass cage of burning hatred.
