by Mhani Alaoui
“Goodbye, Maryam. A thousand times goodbye.”
Maryam sensed a slight hesitation, a passing regret in her goodbye to her.
“Am I nothing to you?”
Then Maryam, ashamed of her sudden heated reaction, asked the question she knew to be the right one.
“No, that’s not it. It’s not because of a man. You’re hiding something from me. What is it?”
“Let me go. It’s too late.”
The young woman got up, picked up her designer bag, and, with an expression that resembled pity, or compassion or even empathy, she told her: “I’ve never been good at anything. But this—landing a man—this I’m good at. It’s a skill that fades with age. Look, I tried to warn you. Forgive me...”
Maryam unlocked the door to the apartment and held it open. She watched her lover step over the threshold and disappear from her sight, her blonde hair flowing down her back. Maryam knew that she had already forgotten about her. Her last words, however, puzzled her. She felt that the forgiveness required of her had nothing to do with the brutal break up but with something else. She sensed an even graver betrayal ahead than the one she had just been subjected to. She felt the familiar prickling in the legs and a dull ache course through her body. In the darkened sky, she could now clearly see the demons amassing, their wings and their metallic horses ready to descend upon the earth. The demons were hovering above, she could feel them. But she now suspected that they may be here for her, too. Soon, she knew, soon they would be here. And they would come for her.
Aoud Errih, old and rusty as ever, rolled toward Maryam and fell gently on her knees. It rang its tin bell and grumbled its discontent at the sight of its melancholic mistress. Maryam held the handle bars close to her and stayed still, listening to the demonstrations below. She casually rang the bicycle’s tin bell once more and remarked to it: “Dissonance. That is what I am. That is what I seem. But dissonance can only work when there are others around. You combine me with others and, there you have it, discomfort, disruption, cacophony. But when I am alone, I’m not so. I’m another being altogether. I struggle to remain true to myself, to find harmony. So which person am I?”
Peace finally descended on the square. Maryam was alone now. She knew that she would never see her lover again. She knew, as well, that the doll-like world her ex imagined did not exist. Behind the gifts, the house, and the travels lay a perverse, pseudo-modernity where most women are little more than trophy wives or bartered commodities.
Maryam left her apartment and turned the key in the lock. Apartment building number nine, located on the once chic Rue des Anglais, was a quiet building with yellow walls and grey floors. The studio given to her by Mehdi was a neat, tidy little place, scantily, but efficiently, furnished. In a building full of teachers, bureaucrats, low-to-middle managers, it was no surprise that Mehdi had chosen to host his activities on the ground floor. He could come and go as he pleased, in exchange, of course, for one hundred dirham bills distributed to the concierge to ensure greater discretion. “I’ve seen much worse, Mr. Nassiri, trust me, I’ve seen much worse,” the little man would excitedly tell him after every generous donation.
Innernet
Maryam was a teacher of American and English literature at the most famous all-girls’ high school of Casablanca, the Lycee Tolban. She rode Aoud Errih to school and back every day. In days of particularly high Casablanca traffic, Aoud Errih would develop a small engine and speed between the blocked cars like any other moped in the city. Neither of them ever dared fly over the traffic. Maryam had in her class many brilliant, creative young women who, with every passing day, became more anxious as to the kind of future that awaited them once their high school days were over. Maryam advised them to keep thinking, to hold on to their independence as long as they could. But she saw many of her students succumb to the men waiting outside the high school with their fancy cars and thick wallets.
Maryam liked her new place. She liked its simplicity. She was also grateful to her uncle for providing her with a place to live. A studio in a decent building in the Centre Ville was far above the means of a schoolteacher in a Casablanca high school. She counted her blessings. The other residents, however, were not too pleased at the idea of a single woman living alone in their building. When she first moved in, they used to regularly spit when she passed by or dump their trash in front of her doorstep. But strange things began to happen. The spitters found themselves subjected to an unknown condition: excess saliva. Their mouths would fill to the brim with acrid saliva, and they would be forced to spit every few seconds. No matter how much they spat or how many doctors they saw, the saliva continued to overfill their mouths. After a few weeks, and after they started becoming cordial with the new resident, the condition suddenly stopped. As for the trash dumped on Maryam’s doorstep, it began exuding the most delightful and enchanting of scents. When the culprits, overcome with curiosity, peered into the black plastic bags, they saw orange blossoms where previously there had been filth. And when, their hearts beating, they returned to their apartments, they found a great amount of trash covering all their apartment floors. “Witch,” they all whispered, “she’s a witch.” And, “It’s true what they say about her.” And finally, “Single women should be forbidden to live on their own. Single women living in apartments on their own are all witches.” But, of course, they could never quite prove it had been her doing. After that, they avoided her and, when they had to, greeted her politely and hurried along.
They couldn’t help notice, however, that the building, once a desolate, bland place, now constantly smelled of orange blossom. It was wonderful. Furthermore, flowers began to grow on their windowsills, when previously, despite the residents’ best efforts, nothing could be grown there. The sickly trees in the narrow courtyard became big and strong, providing a welcome shade in the hot summer months and green loveliness in the colder, greyer winter months. At the center of the courtyard there now was a glorious orange blossom tree that no one had ever noticed before. With Maryam’s arrival, the building became a place, not exactly happy, but certainly serene.
~
That early Sunday morning, when Maryam’s heart finally broke, she decided to go for a walk. There was no time she liked more than Sunday in the early morning when the city was still asleep and the streets were deserted and she felt transparent, invisible, her shadow paper-thin on the streets. It was the only time of day she could hear the city’s voice telling its story through the concrete and granite. That particular Sunday morning, as she walked through the United Nations Plaza, she told herself that the violence and disregard that she had been subjected to by a person whom she had held in her arms for many years, was only a speck in the ambient violence and disregard that the inhabitants of this city were subjected to every day. To be a Casablancais was to become intimate with violence and shame.
So she walked, her hesitant, uneven step resonating unhindered on the deserted sidewalk. She walked toward the Wilaya, and the Tribunal de Première Instance at its right. She breathed in the exquisite white Casablanca of the past that perhaps only existed in the minds of its inhabitants who, despite its everyday cruelty, still believed it could be redeemed. She passed by the Tour de l’Horloge, a minaret-like tower dominated by a clock and built in 1910 by French colonial officer Dessigny to bring in “French colonial time and order” to the natives. Its initial purpose was now conveniently forgotten by all.
She then passed by the block where Adam and Leila once lived. She didn’t know that, right in front of her studio, on the other side of the park, was the home her parents once shared. She walked by the now demolished apartment that Adam and Leila lived in when they loved each other, when a glass of red wine was enough to paint their walls with the color of life, and when poetry made and unmade their bed. But she knew none of this. She didn’t know, for there was no one to tell her. The city itself had chosen to destroy that memory. Where the graceful art-deco building once stood, and after its invasion by the weeds tha
t appeared in the wake of the Bread Riots of 1981, there now stood a skyscraper made of blue glass and white steel.
Maryam let her feet guide her through the city streets. Her steps took her deeper and deeper through Bab Marrakesh and into the Casablanca Medina. She passed by children, some only as high as her knee, sleeping in street corners or huddled behind trashcans. Casablanca was filled with these “street kids.” In recent years, and this made many people angry, their number had risen at an alarming rate. For you must know that single mothers in this land were still put in jail, following the Old Law. Children may be abandoned for many reasons: lack of support, despair, fear of jail, or perhaps the gnawing realization that life, in the end, is worthless. The belief that certain lives were doomed, and that the world was too powerful for an individual to fight against it, had become pervasive. Maryam watched the sleeping children, and she too wondered about meaningfulness.
She roamed farther inside the Old City and inhaled its salt and peat, until she found herself facing a dead end. As she was preparing to turn back, she noticed a small brown door with a bronze hand of Fatima beckoning her inside. She placed her hand on the cool, sculpted talisman and pushed. She had entered a cavelike room. Standing by the fire in the dimly lit room were two women. They were dressed in red cotton dresses and appeared to be waiting for someone. The older woman, who had the matter-of-fact expression of a successful businesswoman, spoke.
“Welcome, Maryam Tair. We have been waiting a long time for you.”
“Was I expected?”
“We’ve been waiting for you since the dawn of time.”
“The past few days have been most strange...Time has stopped. Everything is a haze.”
“That’s the broken heart talking.”
“How do you...? How dare you...?”
“Quiet, love. We know everything.”
“Forgive her bluntness, sister. It’s difficult sometimes to remember that this tactless woman is in fact Sheherazade.”
Maryam’s eyes widened.
“You are Sheherazade?”
“Look what you’ve done. You’ve shocked the poor girl. Well. It’s one of my many names. But yes, ahem, it is I.”
“You have many names?”
“As mad people often do, and, ooh child, I am madder than anyone you’ve ever met or will meet! That’s how I cope…and hide. Sometimes I push the envelope, dangerous people come after me, and I need to hide for a couple of centuries.”
“Sometimes, you think the story she’s telling is going in one direction, and then you see it’s going in a completely different direction, and when you are about to protest, you look at her and see that she is as surprised as you are at the turn it took.”
Maryam stared at the two women, who in turn smiled at her.
“But look, something else happened when your heart was breaking. Something you did, that’s tied to a breaking heart and whose importance you can’t begin to fathom.”
“What happened?”
“You too coped. You told her a story.”
“Yes, not for the first time.”
“It’s not any story.”
“It’s a story that’s half-myth, half-reality that I tell myself to ease my solitude.”
“It’s much more than that.”
“It’s a forbidden story.”
“Every time the story is told, the demons become restless, and a human being’s eyes open.”
“It’s a magical story filled with dissent and mystery.”
“It’s not any story. The power of disobedience is hidden within it.”
Maryam remained silent. She was thinking.
“Have we met before? It seems to me that I know you...”
“Yes. You know us from the time when you were but a dream in the sleep of the world.”
She then noticed an intensity in their eyes, a tension in their postures that had escaped her earlier.
“Why am I here?”
“Ah....finally. You are here because we have a message for you. We must warn you that the sacrifices you have made so far are nothing compared to what is expected of you.”
“I know.”
“I’m sure you don’t!”
“Be nice to her, follow the plan.”
“You will soon receive your third power, and it will be in the most unexpected of ways. Once you receive your third power, there will be no turning back. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“You can still stop everything.”
“No, I’m ready for what lies ahead.”
“May we ask why you are agreeing to this?”
“I don’t think I’ve been given a choice. It’s the right thing to do. In a world of lies, the truth must be told, equality must be restored. That’s all there is.”
“And how do you know it’s the truth?”
“I know because it’s just.”
“Ah, ethics. An ethical super-witch. A woman appropriating ethics and willing to risk everything for her ideals. Grasping the full complexity, the chaos of the world, and sticking to an absolute.”
“Stick to the story.”
“The globalized female. I love that. I bow to you respectfully.”
“It’s more than ethics. It’s about honor and being honorable. I too bow to you with respect.”
“You could have the entire world. That, too, is inscribed in your destiny. What would you do with all that power?”
“Power that proclaims someone as the ruler of the world is a dangerous illusion. The world belongs to no one.”
“It appears we may not be mistaken this time. She’s the one and she’s ready.”
“I am. I can’t remain transparent forever. And I have nothing left to lose.”
The walls shook and trembled. Dust fell on the floor, and sand cracked through the ceiling. Sheherazade and the young woman at her side were watching her excitedly.
“It’s happening. She understands.”
“She’s taking her destiny in her own hands. She’s finally here.”
“But the walls are crumbling.”
“Listen beyond the crumbling walls to the changing order. That’s the real noise. People are listening, waking, rising. They’re hungry, but for more than food. It’s delightfully apocalyptic.”
“There’s another sound, Old Mother. Listen well.”
“Are you suggesting my hearing is bad?”
“The demons are close. I can feel their presence, and it’s her they want. We must get her out of here.”
“Yes, I just need to get one thing done first.”
Sheherazade proudly presented Maryam with a laptop. She whispered excitedly.
“Write, Maryam. Take matters in your hands. Your old auntie Sheherazade wants to see a good spectacle. Write the manuscript that flows in your veins. Write the story of the first true family and the unquestionable equality of men and women. Write how this first family was hidden from history and wiped from our collective memory. Write what the people of this land refuse as heresy. Write as resistance, write it all on this laptop, using the Innernet.”
“You mean the Internet.”
“No, the Innernet. It was invented by djinns who hacked into the system of a US company specialized in new technologies. As soon as you write your words down, they go viral. And not just on the web. It’s a direct connection between worlds. It’s highly disruptive. You’ll understand when you use it.”
With these words, Sheherazade and her companion disappeared, and Maryam found herself standing in front of her apartment building. It was early in the morning, that time of Sunday when she usually left her apartment to go for a walk. She began to doubt the events of the past twenty-four hours, but looking down, she saw she was holding a laptop in her arms. After a slight hesitation, she returned to the apartment.
~
She sat at her rickety desk and saw, mixed in with her pens and pencils, a thin smoking pipe. She picked it up and the pipe lit up, its fumes rising to the ceiling. Mary
am put the pipe to her lips and inhaled deeply. Then, she opened the gleaming laptop. It wasn’t like any laptop she had ever seen. There was a screen but no keyboard or charger. Hesitantly, she put her fingers on the screen and it lit up. The letters floated above the screen, so she raised her hands slightly and touched the elevated letters. As she wrote, so to speak, on thin air, the words became three-dimensional and plunged deep inside the screen.
The connection established between the computer and Maryam was not a casual one, the unquestioned use of an object by a consumer. It was a synergetic relation from which she sensed that the machine and herself would come out transformed. And the reason, she was beginning to see now, was that the laptop was not a machine at all. It was a portal between words and the unconscious, between the physical and the invisible. As she was writing the story of a failed, deromanticized equality, the portal was inscribing it directly onto people’s unconscious. It shot words into the collective unconscious like a syringe shoots up vodka in a vein.
The stories little boys and girls grew up listening to in this land, a specific dream of existence, a belief in right and wrong, began to fade. What once was instinctive and natural now was becoming troublesome and even impossible. Ancient fears and repressed anxieties resurfaced to be battled in the open. Maryam’s story was fast leaving her fingers as an offering to a multitude of individuals, all paralyzed by the same archaic nightmares of domination and power. A closed flap in their minds opened up, and they began to imagine another possibility, a multiplicity of other possibilities. It was dissonance at an all new level—as exquisite cacophony and honed resistance. Cities, towns, and remote villages began to wake up and question the unquestionable.
Upon completion of her tale, the computer screen died out once more, and the detached letter-board disappeared from sight. The pipe was nowhere to be seen, but perhaps it was hiding among her many pens.
At that very moment, out on the street, two young men were stepping out of a long black Mercedes and walking toward Maryam’s building.
