by Mhani Alaoui
One day, their father called his two sons: “One of you molds himself to the earth as it changes through the seasons. The other ploughs the earth and tries to force the earth to mold to him. I am an old man, and I wish to retire from the world. I must choose an heir to my kingdom. Tell me, my sons, how would you rule the lands I will leave under your care?”
The eldest son, the farmer, replied, “I will rule my kingdom with an iron fist. I will plough, sow, and reap every piece of land, cut trees, and control the river’s flow. I will trade our wealth far and wide, build palaces and a strong army. I will make our kingdom the most powerful kingdom in the world.”
The youngest son, the shepherd, replied, “I will lead my people to harmony. I will lead them toward shelter, food, and safety. I will be their guide, and their well-being will be my sole mission as king. That is my answer, Abi.”
The father was quiet, deep in thought. He finally spoke: “Cain, my son, you would be a great king, feared by your enemies, respected by your allies and admired by all. You would build an empire. But that empire would destroy you as it would destroy the earth. And you, Abel my beloved, you promise to be the shepherd, to put happiness and the everyday above power and greed. My kingdom would never be a great one, but it would be a good one. My kingdom would never be envied by others but nor would it ever be craved. That is wise. A part of me yearns for power and glory, but my mind is made. As much as this decision breaks my heart, I choose your way, Abel.”
Cain roared his pain and anger into the moist earth. Mountains fell and rivers overflowed. Something inside him broke. In his rage, he plunged his sickle in his brother’s heart and killed Abel. His black hair became a flaming red. He then turned to his father, Adam, and declared, “I have death’s mark on me. But, do not be mistaken. You are the one to blame for choosing one son over another. You have brought the shadows upon us all. Heed my words, old man, for I will build an empire, my enemies will quake before me, and the earth, water, and skies will bow to me.”
And Cain left and built a great empire. But he carried the mark of death on his shoulder, and, it is said that on moonless nights when all are safe in bed, Cain can be heard weeping for his brother Abel.
Zohra fell quiet and wiped the tears flowing from Maryam’s eyes.
“Hush, my baby. It’s just a tale. There are many other tales and many ways of telling the story. Others say that the brothers had an older sister who was special above all. She had her answer too—an answer that was willfully forgotten by everyone, by her brothers, father, and by the world. An answer that was quickly erased from every manuscript, lip, and memory. But one day, she will return, her answer will be remembered, and she will change the very course of the universe.”
~
The doorbell rang and soon Zeinab returned holding a closed envelope in her hand. Aisha opened the envelope and read of the birth of Shams and Hilal of the house of Shawg and Adam Tair.
“We have received the news. The twins are born.”
“Have they requested her presence?”
“No.”
“Then we will not go. And God help us.”
“If only Hamza could guard us once more. If only he could protect this house from the evil that lurks.”
Zeinab turned toward Aisha with slow breath and tightened mouth. She stood there with her hands limp at her side, her body leaner than ever, and her heart empty of desire. When she pushed Hamza away three years ago, her inner self was revealed to her, bang, just like that. An arid wind blew through her entrails to echo her loneliness. Her sorrow was a drought burning her inside out. She understood, as she watched Hamza storm out of the house, that she had just missed her only chance at a good life.
Her reasons for rejecting him were not clear to her. She had the suspicion that it may not be him that she had rejected. No, she had rejected her own right to a dignified existence. A maid, a slave—what the world had decreed she would be. The dry winds rattled within, raising dust and uprooting Zeinab’s convictions about life. A stable roof, masters who in a certain light could be considered kind, food on the table, an eleven-hour workday with a twenty-four-hour rest day, during which she had recently found the courage to explore Casablanca, after more than a decade of living there. The search for, and recent attainment of, stability had been the thread woven throughout her years as a housemaid. All her efforts, her will, had been directed toward the achievement of this goal: stability. When Hamza came with his offer of a life of love-friendship-magic-freedom at his side, she pushed him away. How could that even be? But if the mind chooses to lie, the body cannot. And from the moment she turned away from Hamza, her body began to shrivel.
Aisha noticed Zeinab’s whitened lips and hollow frame, and asked her if anything was the matter. Zeinab said to her, “Lalla, I want to pick up reading and writing where I left it off, years ago when I asked you to stop teaching me. I want to become a literate woman.” Aisha nodded and promised to pick up their lessons where they had left them, all those years ago. When Zeinab left the room, Aisha smiled, for she had very few chances to do good. And what greater good is there than to teach a dependant how to read and write? I’m a good woman. Hierarchy is good, she told herself. Yes, but if only Hamza were here. But he is gone and his cycles are not our cycles.
~
Aisha and Ibrahim were getting old. They did not only feel it in their aging, escaping bodies, but in the knowledge that accompanied their every step. Old, old—we are old. Death walks with us, eats with us, sleeps with us. We may think it is our shadow the way it clings to us, but it is there even at night, especially in the dark.
If only Hamza’s cycles were our cycles. If only we regenerated after every winter and knew the rebirth of spring. But in Morocco, there is no spring or fall. There is winter and summer. Our cycles are not his cycles. We are engorged, we burn, then we die. Death is fully in the shadows, or we are fully in its shadow. Would you care to become ghosts, the world politely inquires of us? We know how inconsequential we have become with our crumbling walls, our copper pots, and our dried lavender sachets hidden in our djellabas.
We are fading, as are the oral historians who recite our country’s genealogies and the exploits of our heroes. We are fading because so few have written about us and even fewer have read about us. Our name, which we thought was eternal, is also fading. Yet they will find us when they least expect it. In some crooked alleyway or as they try to flee from the modern, an archaic reaction, more itch than instinct, will burst forward, take them back, to their greatest surprise. That is who we will become—satires of this country’s past, hated at best, or worse, forgotten. But we will remain there, in the deep furrows of this land, worms of decay singing of a past life.
So we are old, and we have lost our daughter. We see things we perhaps would not have seen earlier. We see these things without having to leave our house much. We hear of Adam, sometimes. He never comes by, and if he did, surely he would not survive our embrace. Adam believes it is possible to bury us. But you cannot bury people until they are dead, and even then...He has lost his way trying to forget his past. Far from us is Adam with his successful wife and his fancy apartment. We know about his apartment through busybodies who hurry to tell us news they think will hurt us. They sit and watch our faces to see if the color drains from it or if the eyes turn pale with envy. But we are old school. Our faces are unreadable as we express the customary good wishes and Godspeed.
Sometimes, Aisha would ask Ibrahim if he thought Adam was happy with his new wife. She had always believed that he was a man incapable of happiness. Yet a voice inside her repeated: what if he is? What if he is, would that mean your daughter always stood alone, in life as in death?
“But, there you have it, Ibrahim. Leila was capable of happiness. She was liquid joy before she met that man. Look at what he, at what they, did to her. She stood no chance against their powers of destruction. I want to go to his home and take his sons from him that he may know how it feels to lose a child,” thumpe
d Aisha’s heart. “This is what haunts me.”
Shawg and Adam
Shawg and Adam lived in a modern apartment building located between the luxurious residential area of Golden Hill and the bustling business avenue of Silver Dome. Their apartment screamed modernity and European magazine subscriptions. There was a TV and VCR at the center of the foyer, a large leather sofa, colorful love seats, floral wallpaper, wall-to-wall mirrors, blue ceramic vases, a plated-glass dining table and corresponding black chairs, short, round lamps with pink shades, and a grey carpet that covered the entire place, including the bathrooms. In the far end of the living room was an ornate desk covered in sheets of blank paper and dusty books, a hodgepodge of glorious asymmetry.
Their home was a screen for a cluttered TV commercial where the veneer of overripe elegance could shatter like glass. But, barely perceptible, beneath the pink lamps and the flowery fabric, was a roughness that rasped against their skins. A draft blew through the apartment and regularly sent a chill down their spines. Only a surrealist artist, inspired by nameless tortures in a country divided by civil war, could have imagined such a home.
Today, Adam, his hands in his pockets, watched a man speak on TV. This man was stunningly elegant and spoke like a Nordic Loki turned into an Eastern Lucifer. In an odd discourse, he laced subtle, paranoid analyses with threats in Moroccan street talk. He was addressing his words to people he seemed to know well, whom he called alternatively “my children” and “human waste.” His voice was soft and still. When the speech ended, the screen turned black, and a kindly man’s face popped up with the caption: “We are watching over you.” The blackness of the screen began to fade, and a flapping of wings could be heard in its greying distance.
Adam stood there watching till the very end. He had just seen the Great Patriarch on television. He felt nothing. He thought of the little girl who had given him the amulet in the Old Medina of Casablanca, and he tried to remember the love that he felt then. He felt nothing. Some deep, primordial empathy was weakened the day he lost his rib to passion. The day when he embarked on a new journey, only to fail in his attempted rebirth...As time passed, his late night deliria returned, and in the wilderness of his mind he believed that Shawg had taken his rib, his soul, his genius. Oh, it was people’s fault. It had always been people’s fault.
When he was young, people made him believe that he would be great one day. He worked and waited for that day when his value would be revealed to the world. Instead, his classroom turned into a cell, the university into a prison, and the streets into a labyrinth of loss. Maybe he would have done something with his life had he not been plagued by his potential greatness. He may have wanted power, but he insisted on excellence. In his country, power and excellence rarely went hand in hand. He had been pushed aside into a small classroom, a small life, and finally into the demons’ lair. So it was because of them, those people who had misunderstood and shunned him, that he had turned his back on those weaker than he. The muscles on the right side of his face began to twitch violently. He raised his hand to hide the tremor and thought, “Now I have my sons, Shams and Hilal. Their mother says they are the sun and moon, and we are their earth.”
Adam walked into the bedroom to find the twins sleeping on either side of their mother. Shawg’s bed was vast, and she was covered in a grey-and-white fur blanket. She held her hand out to Adam: “Come, my love. Come see your sons.”
Shams had flaming red hair, and Hilal was born with a splash of silver hair. Shams was golden like the Oum Er-Rbia river when it flows through the fertile valleys of the interior, and Hilal was white like the high snows of the Atlas Mountains before the herds come to feed at the first thaw. Adam did not come too close to his wife and sons. He was an outsider in a world of plenty, filled with want and emptiness. He could smell Shams and Hilal from where he was standing. They smelled of wet clay and earth. They had a damp, cold scent about them that called for a warming fire. But neither he nor Shawg had any fire to give their sons.
Shawg closed her eyes and smiled, her pale lips as luscious as that day when she first walked into the Nassiri house. She told Adam of a dream she just had. She dreamt she had seen Maryam. Maryam knew about their sons, and about the sun and moon.
“Ah...her soft orange-blossom scent, it was everywhere. How I have missed it. I think of it every day, Adam. Her scent has haunted me since her birth. The boys, they smell like mud, don’t they? But in my dream, with her there, they were heating up like clay baking in the sun. Pregnant with the brothers, all I could think of was her. What madness, this little girl who has bewitched me. Or perhaps it is her Saheli sorceress of a grandmother, her Jew of a godmother, or her demon father. In the dream, I craved her so, I breathed her so...as though she were near, as though she were here.”
Shawg continued.
“In my dream, I saw Maryam touch the boys with her hands and breathe in their scent of clay and earth. She was in great pain. I was flooded by the magic that emanated from her as she touched our sons and stared into the horizon. I felt she was here, and I wanted her here. I wanted to grab her and hold her prisoner in our house, that our sons may always feel warm and strong. So I asked her to remain near me, that I may bathe in her orange-blossom scent. I held out my arms to her, but Zohra appeared and stood between me and my desire. Her hair became uncoiled snakes, while her eyes burst into flames. I felt myself turning into stone, cold and hot all at once. My dream ended with Aisha leaning toward me, her eyes filled with hatred:
’Beware your desires, Shawg. It is in your nature to crave and want without respite. I should have killed you when I had a chance. Don’t give me a new excuse to destroy you.’
“Then I was released from the dream. But, you see, Aisha didn’t understand. I don’t know how I found my way dreaming of her. I don’t want Maryam. I only wanted to feel her tranquillity, to breathe in her scent. Perhaps I also wanted their big sister to watch over Shams and Hilal. She perceives things that you and I cannot. Now, go, let me rest. There is too much male in this room.”
Adam left without telling his wife that he knew she was lying. He did not believe her dream. He thought that she wanted him to take Maryam from the Nassiris and bring her to them.
Adam found Shawg’s desire for Maryam perverse. He thought that, like him, she would want to forget that Maryam Tair ever existed. He had never fully understood his wife. She was overpowering and highly ambitious. She would introduce him as her “genius, misunderstood husband,” but she would sway when another man came close. There were shadows in her thoughts and a dark logic to her words that made her increasingly enigmatic to him. She did not, he knew, crave Maryam’s innocence. No, what she wanted was to taste the mystery at the heart of Maryam’s existence. Shawg’s obsession with Maryam had grown with the birth of Shams and Hilal. It was a hunger that would keep her up at night, her entire body aching with that need. But Adam no longer understood that kind of irrational, destructive need. He now flattened any excess to a mad sidestep. He did not see...there was much he did not see and refused to see. He delved deeper into his own meanderings and pushed aside the anxieties that flapped around him.
Shawg remained with her sons. Her pride in having given birth to two boys was vast. Women would envy her status, and her past deeds would be forgotten. She was now wife, mother, and a woman of means. She was safely inside the door. She had arrived. She covered her mouth and hands with a scented handkerchief. The boys’ wet, earthen scent was overpowering. It draped over her body, seeking warmth and not finding it. She sniffed her sons, and her eyes widened in panic. She had just noticed it. If it were not for their hair and skin, she would not be able to tell them apart. Her eyes closed, using her nose only, that most primitive of senses, she would not be able to tell Shams from Hilal and Hilal from Shams. Shawg was ashamed. She wanted to reject her sons, push them far from her. She could not stand their skin on her skin. She thought of herself as an unnatural woman, a mother who could not bear to have her children at her breast. But
her anxiety went even deeper. She was trapped in an age-old story whose sequences were known before they unfolded. The boys she was nurturing would one day turn against each other to bring destruction upon the world. But there was something different this time around in this cyclical story of the world, and that difference was a threat to Shawg’s role.
With the birth of her sons, Shawg saw her life in a different light. She touched her dry skin, heavy breasts, and sagging stomach. Who would recognize the statuesque concubine in the high-strung, overweight mother she now was. Instead of frustration, Shawg felt relief. People would now leave her alone, at least for a while, while she put away her broken masks and painted new ones on. She had based her life on seduction, only to come to the conclusion that men’s penises were as weak as their minds. She could only now admit this to herself. She had wanted power and accepted submission to achieve it. She had wanted money and accepted sacrifice to accumulate it. She had wanted pleasure but had only known its craving.
Sex had often been a painful experience for her. At first, she thought that sex must either be brief or brutal. She let men take control of her and accepted that pleasure was a myth or a rare gift given to women she would never meet. When she gained power and began to choose the men she wanted for herself, she expected greater pleasure. There were some fleetingly tender encounters, but an orgasm, never. She wondered whether it was her choice of men or the molten lead that pressed upon them all, reducing the oxygen necessary to exude desire and breathe in pleasure. She tried every trick in the book. She brought another woman into the mix, let herself be handcuffed, tied, and whipped. She spanked, blindfolded, and dominated. She did cocaine and ecstasy, brought in props, went to specialized nightclubs and sadistic chateaux, strip-joints and seedy bars, peaty ports and cool airplanes. She experienced and let others experience with her, and still the elusive orgasm remained out of reach. She took potions prepared by witch doctors and visited shrines of saints famous for their ability to induce pleasure in cold women. By then, she was convinced that those who spoke of such things were either lying or exaggerating a small twitch of pleasure they may have felt.
