by Mhani Alaoui
Shams and Hilal
The two young men stood in front of the apartment building, looking at the piece of paper in their hands. After they assured themselves that this was the right place, they rang the doorbell. One of the young men was tall and beautiful. He was informally dressed, and his hair had a striking splash of silver hair down the middle. His skin was white and smooth. The other young man was short and stocky, with flaming red hair and golden skin. Where one radiated kindness and serenity, the other was the living image of strength and self-confidence. No one would have guessed that they were exactly the same age, twenty-five years old, and that they were brothers, twins to be precise. They were as different as the sun and moon. They were here for her.
The two men stood on their heels as they waited to be buzzed in. They conversed casually on the doorstep, oblivious to the fact that soon one would destroy the other. As it was early Sunday morning, the residents were still asleep, while Maryam was concentrated on her storytelling and did not hear the doorbell. To pass time, they inventoried her characteristics.
“This is what I remember. I’ll list the inner traits, you do the outer ones, Shams.”
“Okay, I’ll do the outer.”
“Inner: Prodigious, perceptive, psychotic, creative, imaginative, a witch. Enigmatic, intelligent, introverted, ill-adapted. Solitary.”
“Outer: Monstrous, insignificant, banal, unimpressive, short, slightly deformed. Curly black hair. Huge eyes with blue pupils. Blue boots and orange blossoms. Rarely smiles. Skin burns. Odd Superheroine, if you ask me.”
“Well, I guess we’re ready. No one’s answering.”
“Okay, knock.”
“No, you knock.”
Shams knocked and waited. They heard movement on the ground-floor apartment on the other side of the door. Hilal turned to his twin:
“A girl we’ve never seen…and now we have to bring her back, convince her to come with us.”
“We must. Mum will be so proud.”
“And Father does seem restless.”
“He always seems restless.”
“Old age…What can you do? It happens to the best of us.”
“He must have been something special if Mum chose him. Just can’t see it.”
“Be nice, bro. He’s never done anything wrong.”
“He hasn’t done anything, period.”
“Knock again.”
“You knock.”
“We’ll both knock. On three, go!”
The door finally opened, and Maryam stood there, looking at this odd pair.
“May I help you?”
“We are looking for one Maryam Tair who resides on the ground floor, Apartment Building Nine of the Rue des Anglais?”
Maryam felt a prickling of the skin and an odd premonition.
“I am she.”
“Greetings to our sister!”
“May we introduce ourselves to you? The twins, Shams and Hilal, at your service.”
They bowed exaggeratedly and kissed her loudly on her two cheeks. Maryam hesitated before inviting them in. They paused at the building’s threshold as though afraid to enter.
“We trust we are not intruding upon you at this ungodly hour?”
“Not at all, I was about to make coffee if you would like share a cup with me.”
As she walked in, she glanced at the desk. She was relieved to find the farsighted laptop had hidden itself from view. The brothers glanced around at her home and, though surprised at its commonness, were too polite to mention it. Maryam smiled to herself for she could sense their confusion.
“Not too impressed with the witch’s lair, are you?”
“We don’t mean to be rude, but it’s so...common.”
“Yes, commonness works for me.”
“But there’s this scent everywhere…”
“You’re referring to orange blossoms. That would be me.”
“Are you truly a witch?”
“Witches do not exist, Hilal,” scolded Shams. “Stop your nonsense!”
“It depends on what you mean by witches. There’s no evil here.”
“They say you’re possessed.”
“Possessed? I’m everything but possessed.”
Shams’s face was closed. He had left this superstitious nonsense far behind him when he moved to Palo Alto, in northern California. In fact, he firmly believed that all magical occurrences would one day find a logical, scientific explanation.
She offered them black coffee and sat in front of them. She decided to wait for them to give her a reason for their visit. She had not seen her brothers since their birth twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years already. She had not seen anyone from the Tair household for twenty-five years. Certain nights, she saw their mother Shawg dreaming of her, and she could feel the intensity of her desire. She remained quiet, struggling to keep the images and experiences of her childhood at bay lest they drown her.
“We are here because our father is very ill. He has asked for you.”
“He wants you at his bedside.”
Maryam’s entire body froze. She felt the ice enter through her mouth, down her dry throat, and into her heart. Who was this man who was making demands on her after twenty-eight years? Why did he think he had a right to even say goodbye to a daughter he had never been able to love? She didn’t know much about Adam. She had heard, or perhaps even read, that he was once a celebrated mathematician, perhaps even a good professor. But that was all before the great fall. Before he and Leila were taken to the dungeons, and he returned a changed man. The Nassiris blamed him for Leila’s death. The hatred between them ran deep. Zohra had shielded her from the hatred and bitterness that was their daily bread at the Nassiri household. She showed her that there was a different path. But today, in front of joyful, beautiful Hilal and the strong, well-adjusted Shams, she could not but feel a bitter taste in her mouth, an acquired taste it is said, after a life of loveless encounters. She felt cheated somehow. So she remained quiet for a while longer, her eyes lowered.
It was not sadness that prompted her silence. It was an unexpected shame. Negative, evil thoughts, angry, resentful feelings had unexpectedly swept over her and held her prisoner. In the wake of the negativity and pain erupting inside her, came endless waves of regret and darkness. She breathed and slowed herself down. She reached out to the cedars, to the tree growing in the yard and changing the very air they breathed, and to the goodness that had always accompanied her. She struggled against the hate and primal fear, and remembered who she was. Oh, but it hurt to do so.
She looked at Shams and Hilal. She saw through them into their very souls. What she saw in Shams filled her with fear and foreboding. Once again, she wanted to turn her back on this family who had only caused her suffering. But then she looked at Hilal, and what she saw there filled her with wonder and sadness for him. If life had been kinder, they could have been close. When she finally felt ready, she raised her wide, ever-translucent blue-rimmed eyes and said softly:
“After twenty-eight years...he remembers he has a daughter?”
“People remember things on their deathbeds. They try to leave this world with as little loose ties as possible. We’re here to ensure a dying man’s last wish.”
“Will you come see him, sister?”
“Yes, I will.”
The twins rose from the sofa, and after two more hearty kisses on her cheeks, they left. Maryam watched them leave. Not a care in the world, she thought. How different our lives have been. Her skin started to prickle, and her entire body shuddered under a premonition of terrible things to come for Shams and Hilal.
Cain and Abel
Their task completed, Shams and Hilal returned to their car and drove home. Shams had already forgotten about Maryam. He knew that it would be easy to convince her. After all, it was part of his job qualifications to convince people. As for Hilal, he was intrigued. He had seen the hesitation and the furious desire to refuse, to bring pain to one who had denied her all her life. Bu
t just when he thought that she would turn her back on them, something in her expression changed, and, to his surprise, she agreed to come. He found the change confusing and atypical. Indeed, he had caught but a glimpse of her inner struggle and only knew her through the myths and tales that circulated about her. But he was satisfied with the positive outcome and deemed the timing was right to have a talk with Shams.
Hilal was an architect. He didn’t choose to be an architect to build stunning towers or original homes. Since he was a boy, he had always wanted to be a builder. As a child, he would draw, color, or stack up row upon row of small houses and large gardens, joyous schools, and serious hospitals. Everyone agreed about his talent, and his mother, who loved him more than anyone else in the world, supported all his ideas and dreams, no matter how impossible. In a family defined by money relations, Hilal was a mysterious exception. He wasn’t interested in wealth, status, or reputation. He never pursued money and thus ensured that he would never have any. His mind was filled with cutting edge-technologies, building proportions, and rational geometries. He would look at any landscape and imagine what it could become.
Everything had always come easy to him. His peers and teachers adored him. He thought of architecture as the possibility of utopias, and of architects as the artisans of these utopias. He had big dreams, and he believed in their realization. His prime ambition was to build holistic neighborhoods in the poorer regions of the world, starting with his own. He imagined these new neighborhoods as perfectly autonomous villages, all linked together through wireless networks and codependent strategies. He also worked on viable plans for developing these new suburban or subrural neighborhoods without displacing the people who were already living there. That was why he wanted to talk to Shams. And that was the real reason he had returned to Casablanca. Convincing Maryam to go see a father who had abandoned her as a child was a complicated task for him. He felt uncomfortable asking a stranger, whom no one in his family ever mentioned, to come help a guilty man die in peace. But he thought that it would be a small price to pay for the chance to speak to his more successful twin brother about his project.
~
Shams was impervious to his brother’s current state of mind. Though they were twins, he had never felt any affinity with Hilal. In fact, Hilal had always exasperated him. Hilal never had to fight for what he had. Talented, charming, and handsome, things had always been easy for him. Their mother had spoiled him, satisfying his every whim. That’s why, Shams thought, he hadn’t ever done much with his life, while he, at only tweny-five years old, was already extremely successful. He was a venture capitalist working for a firm specializing in new technologies located in Palo Alto, California.
He traveled constantly, and his was a self-proclaimed postmodernist lifestyle. He was sophisticated and worldly—if you consider having been to all the five-star hotels and restaurants in the world a mark of sophistication and worldliness. He considered globalization as an affair of the rich and dreamed of a world dominated by a monolithic understanding of luxury and service. At eighteen years old, he had read The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. He then wrote a paper arguing not only that Marx’s “workers of the world, unite” vision was an unattainable dystopia, but that we were clearly heading toward a “bourgeoisies of the world, unite” kind of world. And that was a fine thing. At twenty-five years old, he was already a cynical middle-aged man.
Shams had a secret, one that he hid under his stocky legs, strong arms, and gold Rolex watch. He owed his great success to this secret. He was a master of the great, forbidden secret: that you may murder and profit. Once, not that long ago, a colleague came up with a genius idea for their company, an idea that Shams could never have come up with; Hilal yes, but he never. The colleague disappeared and was never found again, and Shams got a lightning promotion. After this first promotion, and his first million dollars, he decided to get a tattoo. It was a bundle of twigs on his left shoulder. He had heard that the bundle of twigs was the mark of Cain. But he didn’t mind. He quite liked Cain—Cain was a winner.
The tattoo and the money made him feel like a man. But there was a darker side to Shams. He had tremors like his father, uncontrollable, sudden tremors that would seize him when he least expected them. He also had erectile dysfunction. He considered the tremors and the erectile dysfunction to be Adam’s legacy. He created a story for himself to render his life more bearable, and in that story Adam, his father, was a weak man who had passed on to his sons all his faults and defects. Shams was an enigma to all those who knew him. Yes, even to his mother, who chose to keep her distance from him. No one could have guessed that everything he did, everything he said, was fueled by a deep-seated envy. He, Shams, the successful twin, envied his brother Hilal to the point of obsession.
Hilal glanced at his brother, his perfectly manicured fingers and immaculate cuffs. He relaxed and gathered his courage. He knew, like only a twin can know, that his brother loved him and would help him.
“I’m glad we’re here together, Shams. It’s been a long time.”
“Indeed.”
“You and I, we’ve always worked well together. Do you remember when, as kids…”
An expression on Shams’s face made Hilal pause. “I’ve been around long enough to know when someone needs something from me. Go on, tell me what it is.”
Hilal told him that he had a vision for a new type of housing project. It was based on a utopia of egalitarianism for the precarious classes in the country. It was inspired by the great modernist utopias of the fifties and sixties but on a smaller, more humane scale. He knew of available land in the rundown peripheries of Casablanca. He had foreign investors who trusted him. He had a plan. With the new materials and technologies now available, he could build homes of the future in less than a year. He would build integrated villages and use half the land for housing and parks, and the other half to build schools, hospitals, ecological waste systems, community spaces, and cultural hangout areas. They would be self-run and environmentally friendly.
Well, why does he need me? Shams wondered. It seems he has it all figured out. But there was one problem. He couldn’t afford to buy it. His investors were willing to back him for the creative architectural dimension of the project but were only willing to pay for half the land. He was expected to buy the other half. That’s where he needed Shams.
Shams asked for time to decide. The car continued its smooth passage from the Centre Ville to the luxurious apartments of the Boulevard d’Anfa and the Boulevard Franklin Roosevelt. Shams and Hilal got out of the chauffeured car and walked across the green marble floors, eager to deliver the good news to Adam and Shawg. Their driver sat in the car staring at them as they disappeared inside the elevator.
~
What happens to Shams and Hilal is another story. Suffice it to say that, soon afterwards, Shams asked to see the land in question and found other reasons to stall before finally agreeing. He struck a deal with his brother, bought the land in his own name, and convinced the foreign investors that a utopia in a kingdom like theirs would never be sustainable. He then pushed his brother out and erected dinky, already rusty, leaky apartments for the lower classes. Hilal watched as his dream and reputation shattered around him. He stopped eating and became wafer-thin. He had lost a dream to a beloved, trusted brother. Hilal was shocked, not only by the betrayal and disillusionment, but also by his own blindness. What kind of man doesn’t know his own twin? He can only be a naive, worthless man who deserves his own misfortunes. Perhaps, one day, Hilal will emerge strengthened from this tragedy, or perhaps he will belong to the forgotten legions of men and women who went under hopelessly. But that is another story.
As for Shams, his success was short-lived. In 2011, he would travel to the Yemen to negotiate a business deal and disappear in one of the uprisings. Some say that a wild man can be seen roaming at night in the deserts of the Hadramaut, mourning for a brother beloved and betrayed. The shame and guilt had turned his flaming red hair grey, a
nd his once strong, upright body now drags upon the hot desert sands aimlessly. The exile of Shams would last centuries, and who can guess how and when it will end, for that, too, is another story.
Aisha
The night that Shams and Hilal came to Maryam, her grandmother, Aisha, could not find sleep. Ibrahim had severed most of the ties that bound him to reality, and she was often alone, haunted by a life that was nearing its conclusion. That night, when both Mehdi and Ibrahim were asleep, she went to the garden seeking comfort. The crescent moon was red as blood, while the clouds stretched across the sky. In the midnight mist, she heard the cackle of a she-demon and the suggestion of peace in endless revenge. She swore it was the demon-queen Qandisha herself. Aisha let in the demon-queen’s words. In the dark night, surrounded by the heavy foliage, she cried for a beloved daughter and a granddaughter she had been unable to care about.
In the garden, she could forget the ghosts that still haunted her house and her nights. The ghosts were all women: wispy, pathetic little things who had stood no chance against her power. She had sworn not to kill women anymore, not to yearn for another’s death, and not to envy another’s life. But tonight, she felt differently. She felt great evil creeping Maryam’s way, and she heeded the Qandisha’s call. The bloodred moon and the sighing leaves indicated coming sorrow. The orange-blossom tree was no longer there to drug her with its scents and promises of goodness. She saw Adam’s and Shawg’s shadows where the tree once stood. She heard the she-demon’s laughter once more. She knew that these were all tricks to get her mind reeling, but the rage they conjured was real.
In her old age, she could still remember fragments of the Timbuktu manuscripts, the most precise of arcane manuscripts. She still knew how to split a person’s soul from his body, cause one to whither and the other to wander. She thought again of the death she could bring to Shawg, but she remembered her promise to Leila. The she-demon hissed and Aisha’s anger multiplied. All was quiet around her, and suddenly she found a way to unlock her rage. Killing a woman was out of her range now. But a man—no one had said anything about a man! The idea of killing a man made her heart blood beat. The idea of killing a man would be something new, exhilarating, dangerous, and oddly...just.
