by Mhani Alaoui
What Zeinab found most unbearable was the realization that she knew very little and that it was too late for her. At times, she yearned for ignorance and its shadowy peace. But that ignorance, long before she could read, had been shattered by Hamza’s love. She was beginning to perceive that Hamza was not who she thought he was. She understood, one night, that he may have been a god, a mythical creature, a magical hero whose place was in a novel, not in the real world, and yet here he once was, standing awkwardly in her kitchen. She then began to wonder why a creature as powerful as Hamza had not simply taken her, as others before him had, except this time it would be an act of love. Finally, she became angry. Why did he not come back for her? Did he not see the pain and isolation she was in? He, so mighty and all-knowing, why did he not see her and come for her? Her anger turned to despair.
What she did not know is that giants like Hamza, eternal, forever green and forever grey, accompany the world in sadness and, as paradoxical as it may sound, were resigned to its many injustices and fallacies. He did not come for her because she did not call him back, and he found solace in his endless walks through the vast expanses of the world. Though he felt, in that most primitive side of him, how her dried heart still sighed for him, he could not go where he was not called.
Maryam felt Zeinab’s loneliness and loss. The archangel Gibreel had once ordered man to read: “Read. In the name of God that created humanity from an atom.” It was an epiphany, perhaps a raising of an ancient restriction. This order, which shattered a strict taboo against the availability of the text, was not a path to liberation for Zeinab. It was, Maryam could sense, a constant source of pain. She would never attain that level where her reading and writing skills could be a source of work and dignity. She was trapped in the grey domains between knowledge and ignorance, questioning and fatality.
Maryam went to Zeinab and placed a hand on her arm: “Ask. Ask for him, he’ll come. He loves you.” The paper in Zeinab’s lap fell to the floor, and she raised eyes filled with doubt.
“Hamza is not of this world. I understood that too late. Now that he is gone, he will not return. His cycles are not our cycles. When he returns, I will be an old woman. I already am an old woman. Look at me. Do you think I would dare call him back that he may see what time has done to me?”
Aisha watched as the paper slid from Zeinab’s hands to the floor. She could not hear their exchange, since Maryam had protected it with a fleeting wall of silence. But she knew that something beyond her comprehension had just taken place. Aisha had never felt close to her granddaughter. Maryam was special. She was not soft or lighthearted like other children. She seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders and would often retreat into a deep, impenetrable silence. Her presence was a constant reminder of a cherished daughter’s absence. Her imprint was everywhere. Walking through the old, decaying house, one would be surprised to find a room bursting with possibility or a window wide open on the outside world. There were also corridors as silent as Sufi retreats or walls lined with old books like an Italo Calvino story. Things were changing, and their house felt like a laboratory.
Then the door opened and Ibrahim walked in. He had spent all morning going from police station to police station, trying to find a solution for his brother, Mehdi. Mehdi had been charged by a court for degeneracy, abuse of a position of power, and sinful behavior. He was in his apartment when they came for him. Neighbors said that he was sitting in the dark when they broke in. The lights were off, but that may have been because Mehdi had not paid his electricity bill in a while. The situation was all the more complex, as Mehdi’s office was in the same building as his apartment. His neighbors knew his patients, and his regulars knew his neighbors and his habits.
Mehdi remembered the patient pulling his hand down toward his unzipped pants, but he could not be sure. His guilty conscience could be suggesting to him that he had been prey, not predator. His memory was perhaps frantically searching for an alternate story line in which he was not to blame for what had happened in his office that stifling summer day. But he was to blame: he had taken advantage of a patient who had come into his office in trust, and he had let a routine medical examination slide into a shameful and sinister act. Rumors of praxis gone awry spread through town like wildfire feeding on dry winds. Patients stopped coming, and the demons began to circle around his life like vultures around decay. Mehdi knew the fate that awaited him if ever the rumors were confirmed, if his darkest secrets were dragged into the public square. He had heard whispers of the humiliation and the endless prison sentences. He had heard of the demons that came to feed on the exposed suffering. The patient in question, a young man with smooth skin and golden eyes, sounded the alarm and alerted the doctor’s neighbors. He remembered, did he not, the patient pulling him down toward his trousers, or did he indeed take advantage of a trusting body waiting for a routine auscultation? Mehdi was still swooning from the warm embrace, the hot, erect penis under his trembling hand, in his mouth, his eyes closed, his body living. When Mehdi opened his eyes, instead of the satisfaction, or even slight, pleasurable guilt he expected to see in the young man’s face, he saw anger and hatred. It was pure, mad hatred, and it hit him hard in the face and through to the heart.
Mehdi stood there quietly as his world crumbled around him. He thought of all the walls he had built between his deepest secrets and his profession. He had plastered walls between his elegant apartment and his austere office. Brick by brick, he built serene waiting areas, neat bedrooms, and sober offices. He condemned the passageway between his apartment and his office and always had a traveling bag waiting by each front door. Behind the neat closets and aseptic chairs, he had allowed himself hidden corridors and secret attics. He spent his evenings listening to Bach or Rachmaninoff and smoking Montecristo cigarillos. He enjoyed golden cigarette cases and silk handkerchiefs. He was a regular in the small intellectual and artistic circles of the city. American writers and foreign artists, regulars of Tangiers and Marrakesh, enjoyed his company, and he inspired them. He read Marcel Proust and Albert Cohen repeatedly. Jazz was good, too. Then there were nights when he would get carefully dressed, close the door behind him, and disappear for hours and sometimes days. He was kind to his neighbors and taught the most intelligent of their children about literature and art. He invited the building concierge in for a cup of English tea on cold, difficult days and gave her warm blankets for winter nights. People thought of him as European and sophisticated, but he was respected for his gentle manners and unfailing politeness.
Mehdi had spent his life building walls, carefully and meticulously. That day, they fell like sand castles with the first wave of the high tide. That young man, his patient, he felt he knew him. He felt close to him, and safe. Mehdi was a man of experience, a prudent man who had never taken any unnecessary risks. But there was something about the young man in his office, something familiar and exhilarating. They may have met at one of those parties where the participants are masked and bodies are taken at will. There was an innocence and a freshness about him that made Mehdi’s heart break. And then the look of hatred and disgust in his eyes. Mehdi was taken aback, and shame, always there, right below the surface, overwhelmed him. He covered his face with his hands, but it was already too late. The nurse came in, the secret was found, and there was nowhere left to hide.
When the police finally came to his door, they found a dignified man in his early sixties sitting in the dark listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations with an unused razor blade in his left hand. After an initial investigation, they determined that the man was a Nassiri and a doctor. They questioned the patient, the nurse, and the neighbors. All corroborated the accusations. The neighbors even told the police that the good doctor would try to invite their children into his apartment and that they had always known he was a strange, queer man. It was no surprise to any of them that he was, well, found, discovered as it were. Only the concierge remained silent, remembering the warm blankets and peculiar tea Mehdi Na
ssiri would offer her when the cold season began. So she was quiet, retreating from the witch hunt but also from any unnecessary declarations of support. Yes, the winter season was upon them.
The police handcuffed Mehdi and were about to take him to the police station when the cold-eyed demons swooped down upon the scene. They stood in front of the policemen and with their mad cackle, they hissed:
“To the Madhouse, to the Madhouse will the son of the Nassiris be taken. For his sin is madness. But not any madness: a madness that dreams the destruction of our absolute power. To the Madhouse of Birsoukout will the Queer be taken.”
They held Mehdi between their claws, flapped their plastic wings, and were gone.
Ibrahim heard the rumors and went to look for his younger brother. He inquired, and money exchanged hands. He did not know precisely when his brother was taken. He did not keep in touch with him. Mehdi was an urban dweller, while Ibrahim was a failed feudal lord treating the city like a rural stronghold. During his search, he was caught in a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. A degenerate? His gentle, brilliant, caustic little brother a degenerate! If only he could make them fall to their knees and beg for a mercy that he never intended to give. If only they would see the blood that flowed in his veins and the wrath he was capable of, he so powerless and weak today, an old man still believing in old stories like a hermit dying of thirst believing a mirage. Fassis always dream of their childhoods, of the extraordinary gap between the city they grew up in, Fes, and the city they settled in, Casablanca. They often think of the little Arab boys they once were and the suit-wearing urbanites they became. They, who once caught old buses to indigenous schools, under the watchful eyes of a mother and sister left behind, under the suspicious eyes of the French administrators, and under the stern eyes of an authoritarian father who trained them in commerce in a small shop built into the walls of the Medina of Fes, taught them how to sell kohl and traditional Saudi lipstick to women, silver trays to aristocrats, and leather to soldiers.
Ibrahim would go with his father to the souk and take pride in the selling of wares. He was an apprentice eager to learn the secrets of the trade, chiseling every moment into the perpetuation of an ancient mercantilist code.
But not Mehdi. Mehdi was not weighed down by the desire to mirror the past. He had always been different. His childhood was like no other in the household. He would hide in his mother’s closet for hours, lingering in that delightful moment between sleep and wakefulness. He devoured books and welcomed all kinds of friends into the house. Sons and daughters of European administrators, musicians, girls and boys from every type of household would come by, sneak in, and cheerfully convene there. He did not care about politics or ethos. He was curious and brilliant, and yes...simply different. Did that make him a degenerate? Ibrahim was at a loss. Would they have him believe that the signs had always been there and he had not seen them? Lies, all lies, machinations to humiliate them, perhaps a jealous colleague reaping revenge or a jilted lover pushing him down. Mehdi was in Birsoukout. Oh, he would not survive. He was a finished man, Ibrahim knew. It was too late.
Ibrahim walked into the house that he still called his own, until that fateful day, God forbid, when he would have to leave, if the djinns did not kill him first. “We will never get him out of there. But if it is true what they say, what he did, Mehdi has brought shame upon himself and upon his family. And yet I cannot but pity him for he was only looking for a way to fill in the void of his difference.”
“It is impossible to get him out. The members of this family who can afford it have refused to help him. He is being made an example of. The state refuses to have degenerates out in the street, and he has marred our family name. The family feels that the shame he has brought upon us all is too great for forgiveness. Mehdi is a very sick individual. It is best he be forgotten. Now let us eat.”
Aisha spoke to her husband with scorn in her voice.
“There was a time when no one would have dared touch a member of this family.”
“And now justice is served. History has caught up with us, and it has chosen its martyr.”
“The best of you.”
“Yes, perhaps. Or just a man with his failures and faults. He is guilty of this crime.”
“Mehdi has committed no crime. His loves are not your loves, and your decision is to banish him. It is Yasmine’s husband who refuses to squeeze out a couple of pennies from his purse. That’s all.”
“No. This matter is deeper than that. It is about honor. It is done. Mehdi does not exist anymore. He has never existed. He too will soon forget he has ever existed.”
Ibrahim plunged his hand into the tajine set in front of him. With the first three fingers of his right hand, just as his father taught him, he cut the mutton and dipped his bread in its fragrant saffron sauce. Aisha looked at his hand as it delicately stripped the meat and curved around the heavy sauce. That is when they heard it: the faint, distant ringing of a bicycle bell and the clink-clank of axle wheels.
Maryam carried the bicycle out of the house, through the blooming garden, and into the street. She rode it faster and faster, ignoring the click-clack of the protesting bicycle chain. She rode toward Birsoukout. She did not know, or perhaps she did, that the road she used was a road famous for its harboring of dissenters, dreamers, and lovers. Almost fifty years ago, in the high heat of June, people rose against the first modern factory of the country, a factory producing sugar from sweet, syrupy molasses and whose darkening heart had already chosen those powerful enough to bend to its will. Maryam did not know that people had discovered a new kind of enslavement and a new kind of resistance simultaneously, all those years ago, and that the discovery had taken them to the road she was now so furiously riding.
She did not know because no one could have told her. Since those events half a century ago, this road had become a road of progress and development. It now led to new factories, crossed glistening railroad tracks, and pressed beyond the hamlets hidden from view. The violence of the process had exhausted itself with the passing of time. It was, for lack of a better word, fate. Progress was the acceptance that suffering must be forgotten. Progress was rational. It weighed cost against benefit and chose forward. Progress was fate. The only thing remaining of those days of uprising was the road, beaten down by the machines, whitened by the wind, and made hot by the sun.
Perception
So Maryam took an ancient road in a country that had chosen to forget its past. She let herself be filled with the knowledge that she too could be conjured away, as Aoud Errih carried her farther and farther from her home.
~
When the sun had passed high noon and begun to fade into the horizon, Maryam finally saw the small French-built school and shop that lay at the edge of the mental asylum of Birsoukout. The school and shop were bathed in the reddening light of dying day, and to their right lay Birsoukout. The gates were made of wood and were unguarded. Maryam did not know what to expect of a place whose mere name brought terror to people’s hearts and made heroes frail. “Dogs or mean guards, demons, but what do I know of them all? Aoud Errih, you have brought me to this place with such speed. You must be so tired. Rest here, you be the guard. I’m going in.” The small bicycle shuddered and fell to the floor, as in protest. “It’ll be okay. If I’m not back out by morning, go get Zohra.” She looked affectionately at the rusty little thing on the floor and put it gently against the wall by the gates. Then she whispered, “Thank you for bringing me here. I love you.”
The gates were half-open. The dreaded hospice had the easy approach of a simple rural house, harmlessly aging in the backroads of the Casablanca countryside.
Maryam walked in. The courtyard was empty and no one was in sight. She walked on, but still she encountered no one. The place seemed deserted. The air was too still. Maryam felt the brightness in her heart begin to drain away. She stopped and inhaled a long, deep breath. She wondered why the stillness and deserted aspect of the place filled her with such sad
ness. It was like no place she had ever been to. It seemed neither aggressive nor oppressive. The silence was not a full-bodied, heavy one. Instead, it was a silence made of emptiness. The place, she realized, was silent because it was in the business of producing nothingness. She stood there silently, her shadow long and delicate on the cracked pavement. Her eyes were very large and rimmed with blue. They always had been. They expressed every feeling or thought she had with the transparency of a pure mountain spring. Zohra often said that her eyes revealed too much. She should lower them often, she’d say, to protect herself against the outside world.
They grew even larger as she understood the peculiar silence that reigned in Birsoukout. It was an arid silence. The walls loomed high on either side of her. Twisted shrubbery grew on these walls surrounding the buildings and the courtyard within. Maryam looked under the greying plants to check her hunch. There she found the water faucet, brown and rusting from years of neglect. She turned the faucet, but no water came out. It was as she had suspected. There was no water in Birsoukout. In my house with the red brick walls, she thought, no matter how dark it may become inside, the fountain in the garden sings. The water trickles into the basin and sings. It is happiness itself. On hot days, I even plunge my head in the fountain. My eyes closed, I enjoy its freshness and coolness. Grandfather tells me that God proclaimed that water belongs to everyone. But this is not the case in Birsoukout. In Birsoukout, the water is taken away. It is a dry place and so very empty...
Maryam wiped the rust from the water faucet on her school uniform. There were buildings ahead of her and to her left. They all seemed deserted and lifeless. She began to wonder if she had not come to the wrong place. She hit the ground with her feet—thump-thump-thump-thump—and watched as the packed dirt rose around her. She opened herself up to this place that may not even be a place. Her legs ached, but the ache was becoming a familiar pain. It was a pain that accompanied her every transformation, understanding, and clarity of sight. It brought with it the necessity of resilience and patience. But it also deepened her solitude. In the midst of all the magic and story weaving, Maryam had always been alone. She was the suspended center in a swirl of maddening events. She had always felt different. She sensed that people did not react to her like they normally reacted to other children. Her vulnerability was not the kind that drove people closer but instead the kind that drove people away. Zohra was the only one who loved her unconditionally. There was something wild about Zohra’s love for Maryam. It was ferocious and, at times, brutal. It did not fulfill the craving for tenderness that Maryam had but instead intensified her sense of difference. Everyone else trod around her with care and hesitation, as though they feared she’d contaminate them or reveal to them an unbearable truth.
