After I returned from Marrakech I suffered more severe anxiety attacks and had to go to hospital and submit to a series of frightening tests. During this, Fatima contacted me a few times from Madrid and said she would not allow me to die. Once I was able to joke, I told her that I had not died out of respect for her wishes. She then filled me in on the latest developments in her relationship with the Kosovar.
‘I’ve moved in with him, but haven’t given up my apartment. I don’t want to take uncalculated risks.’
I told her that she had made a wise decision, because there was nothing better for our spirits than having a place to ourselves.
When I left hospital I knew that I was quite healthy in body – as shown by the medical equipment – but I also knew that I was not all right. My body carried me with difficulty, while I carried it with difficulty too. Layla visited me a few times in the hospital, and when I left it I tried hard to feel her presence. In the taxi we looked at each other and I knew from her expression that she was worried about me, but I could not make that connection internally and did not feel that she was doing it for my sake. I was not afraid that she might suddenly get out of the taxi and disappear for good. Had she done so, I am not sure I would have been saddened by it. I lived as if walking were my only activity, in the expectation of arriving at a specific place, or of not arriving. I simply did not care what would happen, except that in order to walk I had to remain standing and actually walk.
When we arrived at my apartment I was flabbergasted to find an entirely different space. Layla had transformed a colourless, almost dead apartment into a spacious, light-filled, dynamic place. As soon as I entered I felt something both dense and delicate within me, something I had not experienced for years. I realised, at that moment, that people who were able to tame places and give them new life were endowed with a special magic that gave them keys to the human soul and made them capable of growing spacious gardens within it. I extended my arm towards Layla and I walked, mesmerised, until I reached her body. I felt as if I understood something very deep, connected somehow to the transformation she had wrought upon the apartment. It was as if by choosing colours and pieces of furniture, by filling some spots and leaving others empty, she had drawn a map of her own body. This map had no connection whatsoever with the trajectory of a thinker or a visionary, but was the result of an instinctive interaction between bodies and places.
It was a momentous week. Layla told me that she loved me, even if she could not live with me under the same roof, and even if we had to organise our lives in an unusual manner without room for the day-to-day. I was unable to say anything in response. She was hurt and did not contact me or answer my phone calls for three straight days.
That same week the Ministry of Justice announced that a number of prominent people had been arrested for corruption involving property deals in Marrakech. While my investigation had not mentioned any of the implicated persons or projects, people believed I had played a small role in this heroic action.
Back from Rome, Ahmad called me from the airport to announce, without introduction or show of emotion, that Bahia was pregnant. I said half joking, ‘One more Muslim!’
He replied haltingly, ‘Another of our generation’s miracles!’
In the midst of all these events, I thought seriously about my relationship with Layla. When I thought of her like a distant gleam from a vague past, I was overcome with confused emotions and was on the verge of declaring my love for her. But as soon as she stormed the present with her youthful body, her language and her delicate presence, everything went dark and I was left only with her critical importance for survival on this planet. But that was not enough to declare my love. We do not declare our love for water, the blue of the sky or the rays of the sun. When I understood the situation in this way, I decided to share it with her, to let her know the difficult position I was in and to let her know that the problem, in the long run, would be our ability to set the clock of our relationship to the right time.
She listened to me until the end, and I had the fleeting impression that she understood the situation more clearly than I had explained it and was happy with it. When she said that only I needed to reset the hands of my clock, we laughed and indulged in what she used to call a reconciliation with the world, which was nothing but an unruly hour or so during which we pretended to quarrel violently before enjoying each other with passion.
The arrest of the big-shots gave the press free rein to take a substantial bite at the subject of real-estate corruption and chew it gluttonously. Newspapers went so far as to issue condemnations even before the trial started, and when it did begin in the midst of endless procedural battles, people had already spent their anger by talking about the issue. The case was buried under a thick layer of dust within days. For a while, the inhabitants of Marrakech joked about the demolished storeys, the unfinished buildings and the plots of land abandoned until forgetfulness allowed new projects to begin on them. Conversations would stop completely when people saw a driver hastily open the door of a luxury car and one of the major figures of the lawsuit step out.
I thought it only decent to call Bahia and be among the first to congratulate her. I did this with an honest sympathy that surprised and pleased me. We talked about the expected baby with a certain complicity that prompted me to say that, after all, I agreed with its arrival. She was quick to say that in any case she was going to consider it our baby. Those words put an end to any hope that this innocent affection might continue. I ended the phone conversation, struck by the complexity and fragility of the human soul.
This period was filled with expectation and apprehension. Bahia spent the pregnancy lying on her back following doctor’s orders, while in Madrid Fatima had one miscarriage and one abortion before she gave up, once and for all, the idea of having children. All of us were concerned about news of failed explosions in Casablanca, the death of an engineer in a bomb blast in Meknes and ambiguous threats that no one could confirm as either real or imaginary.
At the same time, and for unknown reasons, issues of morality dominated the media. These were not related to politics, management of public funds, bribery, random favours and the nouveaux riches, but were limited to sex scandals. There was the case of sex tourism, where indecent pictures appeared on porn sites advocating gay and lesbian orgies and child prostitution, particularly in Marrakech and Agadir. There were reports on gay marriage in Sidi Ali Benhamdoush, a fancy-dress party for gays in Ksar al-Kebir, transsexual nights in Tetouan, and cases of incest and rape of minors. Not a week went by without these charged subjects appearing on the front page of a national paper. Ahmad Majd claimed Moroccans had become so disturbed that they had begun exposing their genitals, the way women in low-class neighbourhoods did after a serious altercation.
We followed the news closely because our friend Ibrahim al-Khayati acted as defence lawyer in many of these cases – not because, as malicious tongues put it, he was homosexual like his clients, but because he was a true fighter for justice, defending the need to respect the law, to ensure a fair trial without discrimination on grounds of race, religion or sexuality, and to protect the legal system from the pressures of public opinion. The cases dominated discussion at our evening gatherings in Marrakech, Casablanca and Rabat. We agreed or disagreed only about what was fabricated about the stories that caused ink to flow and spawned editorials and comments both at home and overseas. It was as if Moroccans’ only preoccupation was their desire to know who was banging whom.
There was no convincing answer to why the subject dominated our lives. Some people attributed it to confusion over values, due to easily acquired wealth and excessive emphasis on material success. Others attributed it to the atmosphere of freedom, which encouraged involvement in all topics. Others blamed it on a sort of tourist morality, since some of the practices were not furtive and covert any more, but open and visible like the billboards promoting visits to ‘the most beautiful country in the world’.
Alo
ngside this was an overarching and inexplicable anxiety, despite the economic boom in some sectors and flourishing tourism. Although the country was emerging from years of stagnation, it was as if people had become more fearful of losing everything and more wary of the misery lurking behind surface success. We were trying to understand why we were anxious and calm at the same time. Ibrahim al-Khayati was the most anxious among us, and went so far as to say that the overall atmosphere was charged with something menacing, as if we were heading for a rupture or a storm that lay behind the calm.
Bahia gave birth to a baby girl. Ghaliya was the first to tell me. I did not feel anything special. I shut myself off from the news and tried to imagine what would happen to us with the arrival of this new being. As I tried to overcome my state of emptiness, I found nothing better to do than call Al-Firsiwi, who was very nice to me at the beginning until he exploded in rage.
‘The curse has struck!’ he shouted. ‘The Al-Firsiwi family line has been severed by our own doing. I knew that introducing new blood into the family would pollute it. It has fallen down a well, and we have buried it for good.’
‘Is that why you killed my mother then?’ I asked him. ‘To restore the line’s purity? You are nothing but a stupid, racist murderer!’
His voice reached me, hoarse with emotion. ‘You are talking to your father. Have you forgotten that you are talking to your father!’
He yelled like a deranged man, which forced me to end the call, leaving his gruff voice echoing in my ear.
When I put the phone down, I was trembling all over. I thought of one thing only, to call Layla and ask her to come round immediately, because something was about to happen to me. The more I thought about it, the weaker and more depressed I felt. My mobile phone was close to me, but I did not have the strength to pick it up. I felt a sudden regret for having failed to tell Layla that I loved her too and that it did not matter whether we lived under the same roof, since we did not need roofs and columns in order to live safe from the threat of collapse.
At that moment the scent reached me. I thought I was only remembering it, but it lingered in a distant and hidden way, before advancing as if someone were bearing it towards me. I felt something disperse before my whole being, and my pores opened to absorb the fragrance emanating from everything known or unknown to my life. As the scent invaded my body, it acquired an identity that I remembered and knew: it brought Yacine to his feet and pushed him towards me, as it had whenever he came through the door or walked down the hallway or jumped down the stairs. Here was the scent of his comings and goings, his presence and his absence, rising suddenly from everything that surrounded me.
I opened my desk drawer and pulled out the package Bahia had given me several months earlier. Trembling, I opened it, and the scent of his lost body reached me. I had found him or finished mourning him. I had mysteriously recovered my sense of smell. I placed his clothes over my face, inhaled deeply and wept.
We’re Pieces of an Eternal Mosaic
1
‘I’m Mohammed al-Firsiwi, your guide for this visit to the greatest Roman city of the Mediterranean basin. I speak German because I spent twenty years in Germany. I worked there and attended night school at its universities for more than ten years. I built there and destroyed, the way it befits a man who loves Germany. I earned a great deal of money there and lost it in this land where nothing flourishes except olives, carob and riddles.
‘Like most of you, I too would like to see Germany remain forever a glorious country, facing everything with unmatched power, succeeding at everything it does and maintaining, despite its apparent toughness, a tenderness known only to poets and philosophers. If you have noticed an accent in my speech, this is not due to the countryside, because, whether you know it or not, the rural language is a branch of Germanic. Yes sir, yes, you are right. It is a local Amazight dialect, but believe me, it has a direct connection to the language of Goethe.
‘Like most of you, I married a German woman who was most devoted to her conjugal duties. Perhaps she believed that taking this attachment to its extreme required that she commit suicide in this happy land. That is why she did it gladly, not far from this site, on the hill located behind you, immediately after the asphalt road. You will discover later that the place was very suitable. Of course, all places are suitable for suicide! What am I saying? I mean that this land is, in a certain way, the land of her ancestors. It was only fitting for her to relay her message to them near the ground they had trampled with their feet.
‘Some of you may wonder how a blind guide can lead you through the tortuous alleys of this great city! I must remind you that it is a city from the past; the ruins of a city from time immemorial. In other words, it is nothing but darkness and only the blind know how to walk through it well. By the way, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the period from 285 AD until the coming of Idriss I was known as the Dark Ages because we know nothing about it. But now that we know, I am happy to inaugurate another Dark Age that extends between Idriss I and me.
‘We will be going down the incline that stretches before us. Please take your hats and all the water you can carry. There is no shade on the site and not a single cloud at this time of year, and I have no desire to bury another German in this land. Before we walk down, look around the small square where we’re standing. Do you see the stone plinth to your right that still retains part of a small black foot? There stood Bacchus carrying on his shoulders bunches of grapes from my country, from the vineyards of Bab al-Rumailah, before the statue was stolen in mysterious circumstances. Some believe that an important government official took it to please his Italian mistress, and there are those who believe that the antiques mafia smuggled it abroad. Some even think that I personally stole it and sent it to a German antiquarian. Evil tongues say that Bacchus got drunk in Al-Firsiwi’s bar and lost his way back to his plinth, or fled in boredom from this tedious land. Personally, I will admit to you, and I hope you won’t report me to the police, that I stole it and buried it in the courtyard of a village mosque located on the foothills of the mountain behind you, as my contribution to bewildering archaeologists in the middle of the third millennium when they find him drunk in the ruins of an old Islamic building.
‘We will proceed very carefully down this slope, from where we will cross the River Fertassa, whose springs are located in Ain Fertassa. I fought a legal battle worthy of the war of Basus for that place. Nowadays it’s merely a tragic sliver of water, whereas in the past, the Romans used to catch fish there as big as the donkeys of this good earth!
‘Now that we have crossed the bridge, I want you to catch your breath, and then move to your right and proceed on the path parallel to the river. Don’t forget to drink even if you don’t feel thirsty. There is nothing more dangerous for the human body than dehydration. And I am talking from experience, as I forgot to drink for many years and my existence dried up completely.
‘Look towards the mountain from the path. There is a series of beautiful plateaus abutting the mountain that overlooks the city. At a certain time of the year, the sun rises through a gap between the blue plateaus and the white mountain, providing an extraordinary display of nature’s wonder. In any case, as these uplands greet the rising sun every day, they always have a light that cannot be extinguished. See how the forests at the top have shrunk like thick hair that has not been combed for centuries? Next, look at the gardens that stretch down all the way to the valley. The city eats its most delicious fruits from there, but I don’t know whether the Romans ate them before us. You can see that even if they did, this did not prevent their civilisation from vanishing.
‘Everything is fleeting. At this time of day, shortly before noon, the colour of the hills changes to navy blue. You will notice upon our return that it has changed to light green. The hills tend to adopt the colours of the time, and when night surrounds them, they stand out no matter the weather. Even in the darkest of nights, their soil glows.
‘No soi
l glows? No sir, indeed some does, and there are glowing trees and glowing forests! Please don’t argue! If you have not noticed that the Black Forest at Baden-Baden glows, it means you are blind like me!
‘We will begin our actual visit with the cemetery, as everything begins and ends with cemeteries. One can only properly understand a city through its graves. From there you can clearly make out the scheme of excavations. The war – your war, as you well know – was the key to this historical discovery. War is the other key to understanding cities and geography. For this city we are indebted to World War I, which razed many of your cities. Consider the creative fertilisation between intersecting ruins.
‘German prisoners of war, among them Hans Roeder, my wife Diotima’s grandfather, excavated Walili from the bowels of the earth with the help of the local inhabitants of this mountain, descendants, most certainly, of extinct Roman lines. All that matters is genealogy. All the destruction and the extinction that befall civilisations do not matter, as long as there are descendants to one day remove the stones and soil from whatever is left. Every being God has created on the face of this earth is searching ruins for something that has been or will be lost. It was Lyautey who brought the German prisoners here for this mission.
‘He was a sly fox and a clever manipulator of memory. But believe me, it was the children, especially Fertassa’s children, who dug up the first features of this city while at play. One of them might have even pulled out a stone with inscriptions on it or a piece of mosaic while looking for something to burn. Who knows!
The Arch and the Butterfly Page 13
