Mahdi, on the other hand, had watched his world collapse with a great deal of patience and wisdom. At the time, he wrote his famous song, ‘Enter the Valley’.
If you are caught
And go to and fro
Without finding a way out
Enter the valley
Stay in the middle
And wreck their plan.
After Essam’s trial and new religious fervour, the media had portrayed him as a shining example of repentance. There had been further arrests of young musicians, amid persistent – though false – rumours that Essam had revealed the identity of one of the devil worshippers to the police. All of this had lit the fuse of hostility between Arthritis and most other Casablanca bands. As a result, the investigation into his disappearance veered in that direction, and we endured a whole week of contradictory reports about the arrest of a devil worship group that had kidnapped Essam, followed by the arrest of a terrorist cell that claimed to have abducted and murdered him. Ibrahim al-Khayati meanwhile received a phone call saying Essam was fine and needed some cash and medicine, but since the call was not repeated, all hope of finding a related lead evaporated.
Mahdi, meanwhile, was preparing to travel to Paris to begin his studies. We all thought, without knowing why, that he might find his twin brother there, in the city of miracles. We repeated this possibility so frequently that it almost became a certainty which eased the pain caused by the disappearance. We even began to find remnants of the old ambiance in Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house, a mixture of levity, joy and consolation.
One evening Layla began remembering how much Essam loved her and lamenting bitterly that the investigation had not achieved anything and that oblivion had gradually permeated the case. When I reminded her of the complexity of cases of kidnap, abduction or murder, she grew even more fearful, and admitted that she manically envisioned frightening possibilities.
‘Such as?’ I asked her.
‘I’m reluctant to say. I’m afraid a malignant worm has settled inside me and makes me smell foul things from a distance.’
We sat on the edge of her bed trying to organise our thoughts. Essam hated Ibrahim. He hated the idea of interacting with him as a father, and of Ibrahim interacting with Essam’s mother as a husband. He knew about Ibrahim’s homosexuality and about his relationship with his father, and this was unbearably embarrassing to him. His only outlet was showering Ibrahim with insults, curses and contempt. Layla said Essam had even slapped Ibrahim one day while they were in the swimming pool, and told him never to go in the pool while he was there. ‘I don’t want your body ever to get close to mine,’ Layla quoted Essam as telling Ibrahim. ‘You’re not a body but a moving brothel.’
‘Did he really say that? Did he actually slap him?’ I asked, stunned.
‘He did even more than that,’ Layla said. ‘Mahdi said one evening they were sitting in the garden with the rest of the band, practising a new song, when Ibrahim returned from an evening out. A bit tipsy, Ibrahim greeted the young men from behind the glass door of the living room before going to his room. At that moment Essam got up and walked towards him. Mahdi asked him what he was doing. He said casually, “I’m going to kill the bastard.” ’
‘So much hatred. As if Ibrahim had bred poisonous snakes in his bed and not innocent offspring,’ I said.
With frightening calm, Layla said, ‘That’s why I believe Ibrahim killed Essam in the swimming pool and buried him in the garden.’
I shivered with horror. What Layla was saying was consistent with the vague misgivings I had had for days that posed a possibility as horrific as it was unexpected. Ibrahim had enjoyed a calm life, removed from our anxious worlds, busy with the details of the life he loved, unassuming and without exhausting assumptions. I found myself visualising him burying his victim, then glumly sitting with us and deploring this disappearance. I imagined all the minor agonies that must have assailed him as he watched Essam grow hostile and Haniya come out of her shell. We used to meet and talk, and he may have mentioned once or twice issues with the twins, but we never had any idea of the fire that must have been consuming them. It seemed so easy for the beast to be born, and so simple to cross to the shores of hell.
I was overcome with a feeling of despair at how life found satisfaction only in destroying us, and had an overwhelming fear of being alone. I shared my thoughts with Layla, and she tried to console me by caressing my face and head, but I felt nothing.
She said without much enthusiasm, ‘You can stay here if you’re willing to get out of bed before six in the morning.’
I quickly undressed and lay down on her bed, certain she had saved me from unbearable suffering.
At work the following morning, I was busy writing a short article on how property and tourism funds were recovering debts owed by the property mafia, and was looking into the secret behind the ability of three big-shots to avoid repayment. Banks appeared to be negotiating easy terms for the debts of some of their clients, thanks to the sky-rocketing prices of the land mortgaged by the banks. I was embroiled in a heated discussion with the editor-in-chief, trying to convince him to publish the names of the three big-shots who refused to pay their debts in good times and bad, when I received a call from Ahmad Majd. Like a bucket of cold water being poured over my head, he told me that Ibrahim al-Khayati had been arrested and charged with killing Essam. I asked him, spontaneously, if the police had found the body in the garden.
‘There’s no corpse in this story,’ Ahmad Majd answered.
The Ravens
1
Al-Firsiwi sank into a state of despair. When my half-sister and her husband returned from overseas, he quickly sold them the hotel. His only condition was that he be allowed to recover the blue Roman pieces of mosaic remaining in the halls and on the walls. To that end, he spent almost six months sitting in the lobby of the hotel passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers. He would place the pieces he believed to be of genuine Roman origin in a bag beside him. His actions provoked the pity and scorn of the employees and the new owners. During that time he overheard all the plans for repairs, extensions, additions and alterations around the hotel. He wished he had the right and the energy to come up with different ideas; he could have made a thousand suggestions for changes and replacements. His son-in-law had entered into a partnership with the wife of a well-known government official. He heard the wife’s voice one day as she talked to the contractor about using the mosaic. He did not say a thing, but sang for more than one hour and in all dialects and keys, ‘Read the contract, my cousin.’
When he had finished collecting the tiles from the Roman mosaic, he put the bag on the back of a donkey and descended from the top of the hill in a noisy procession with villagers he had brought along. The procession entered Walili from the side of the Tangier Gate, then continued down the main street in the direction of Caracalla’s Arch, as if it were in a victory parade, returning from war. As he went, Al-Firsiwi reminded people of every twist and turn of his personal epic, from the day he took over the market with his German wife on his arm to the moment he returned the mosaic to the state, the very entity that had abandoned Juba’s kingdom. However the state did not stop at neglect and turning a blind eye to thieves, Al-Firsiwi said, but gave the governor free rein to plough corruption and reap the fruits. The wife of the genius wanted to decorate her swimming pool with the Roman mosaics, but Al-Firsiwi swore to God that she would never do it.
‘It is not enough to be a thief, my dears,’ he said. ‘You must have brains enough to differentiate between Roman mosaic and the tesserae of Bab Bardayin. Old man Firsiwi can do it by touch. When you tried to rob me last year, I made a point of crying over what I had lost in front of rich and poor. In reality, as soon as I touched the empty spots you left after the theft, my gloating heart danced with joy. You had taken nothing but the mud of the region covered with Fes blue.
‘How stupid that was. They are not coins that you would recognise easily, though your honourable hu
sband has often mistaken a glob of spit for a silver coin from the Saadi period. It is mosaic, in other words, the splinters of the human soul scattered in God’s earth. It is the meeting point between water, clay and fire. It is the creative power of the imagination that transforms inert matter into the light that glows in the faces of water nymphs. You don’t get it? I will pay you a day’s wages simply for making up this parade and testifying that I turned over to the Moroccan state a part of the great heritage it has neglected.
‘This bag is full of broken faces, those of warriors, heroes, gods, women and beasts. It will soon be added to other bags and boxes also filled with faces and fragmentary bodies, abandoned in storage rooms where rats and grasshoppers play. See how great civilisations with their brilliant shapes, colours and beauty end up in the dark corners of those sons of bitches. So will be Al-Firsiwi’s civilisation, my brother, “yamis oma”, in the Berber tongue of eloquent ignorance. Behold the State of Al-Firsiwi, the state that gave this land the electric olive press and petrol pump, sulphur to treat the pox, the carob trade, the Zaytoun Hotel, the Cantina of the esteemed Bacchanalians, the war on plastic, the treatment of solid waste, beekeeping and the condom. This will all end up in fathomless darkness. The state that made you, riff-raff of forgotten tribes, a people to be reckoned with, the great State of Al-Firsiwi is today undertaking its last official act in this region. It is preceded by a magnificent donkey with a bag of another civilisation and another state on its back. To hell, O defeated state. Diotima’s smile in her final resting place bids you farewell.’
People listened and exchanged complicit smiles, and they proceeded scared and surprised. All the while Al-Firsiwi was immersed in his hallucination, holding the tightly closed bag with care. He headed in the direction of the blue mountain until he reached the governorate building, where the informal handing over of the bag took place, as if it were a passing joke. The joke did not stop the governor handing Al-Firsiwi the receipt he requested, one that included the number of pieces after they had been counted. The governor asked Al-Firsiwi to specify the number of pieces, and he said 13,624. The governor wrote the number down on the receipt and loudly stamped it, and Al-Firsiwi left totally satisfied with the procedure.
After Al-Firsiwi surrendered and placed his treasure of Roman mosaics in the hands of the governor, things began to happen quickly. Authorities ordered Al-Firsiwi’s arrest. But Al-Firsiwi had left the city – people saw him though he did not see them – after eating breakfast at the marketplace café. The man seemed to melt into the blue mountain, as he used to call it. He left unconcerned by anything, while the police were quick to announce their failure to find him, as if the inability to find a blind man were a remarkable success. All the TV news bulletins showed the face of an officer announcing with a smile that his forces had looked for the fugitive from justice in every fold of the mountain without finding a trace of him.
When matters had gone that far, I decided to get involved in the search for my father, fearful that his disappearance was due to a fatal accident rather than exceptional cunning. The day I arrived in Bu Mandara, expecting to hear news about his disappearance, Al-Firsiwi contacted me from a mobile phone number I did not recognise. He told me that he did not want me to look for him or rescue him from oblivion. He said that the warrant for his arrest had no foundation because the pieces of mosaic were nothing but soil, and he was the only one who had declared that they were Roman. Think about this great country, he said. A blind man sitting in the lobby of a ruined hotel, passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers and then declaring that this one was a pre-Christian Roman piece, and that one was the work of potters from the dawn of the third millennium, while those were from the ovens of Tajmouati in Fes and dated back to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those imbeciles believed that and issued arrest warrants, he said. Confession was the best evidence, and as long as Al-Firsiwi himself believed that, he had no fear that the most modern labs would prove he was making fun of all of them.
‘Why wage these fake wars then?’ I asked.
He replied angrily, ‘Give me an honest war to end my life with. Do you want me to die in peace like any other dog?’
I talked with Al-Firsiwi for more than an hour, as if I were meeting him in a dream. Every now and then he pointed out events that linked me to him, as if everything had ended a long time ago, as if he had really disappeared for good. I was listening to a voice talking to me about the Firsiwi who did not kill Diotima, the Firsiwi who had mysterious love affairs and wrote poems about the death of love, the Firsiwi who buried Bacchus in the courtyard of an obscure mosque in the blueness of the mountain. He talked about the Firsiwi who did not like his life at all.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the name or the family it connects me to or the village where you’re looking for me. I don’t like the Rif, which is supposed to be a lost Eden but is nothing more than a passage for wind. I don’t love Diotima who stole her means of death from me, or Hans Roeder who swallowed my poems. I only like this blindness that protects me, this darkness that resembles a huge gate that the Creator closed on me to make it possible for me to do as I please, far from spies and the curious.’
At some point I ended the conversation, but the voice stayed close by, as if Al-Firsiwi were standing behind the disintegrating wall of his old family home.
‘Are you here?’ I asked him.
After a moment’s silence he replied, ‘Yes, I am here in the heart of darkness.’
I jumped into the house through the collapsing window and ran in all directions, entering rooms without doors and ceilings and making formless birds fly away in fright. I asked him again, ‘Where are you, are you here?’
His voice reached me from afar, through the phone held tight to my ear. It said, ‘I’m in the courtyard of the mosque where Bacchus is hiding, lying down after having spent a long time standing on hard stone. One day my remains will be mixed with his: me, a representative of the human race in its eloquent rags, and him a representative of forgotten imagination, of the relationship between dreams and granite. Don’t forget to visit me from time to time. Not for my sake but yours, for the sake of the frail thread that mocks us.’
When the call cut off, I was in the middle of the ruined house. I was overcome by a feeling of fear and desolation that compelled me to quickly head out to the nearby field, to collect my strength and get away from the place as fast as possible. I wanted to get rid of the phone, but I felt as if it were stuck to my ear and had become part of my facial features.
I walked in the road that ran through the village all the way to the cemetery. As I got in my car, I felt I was looking at this place for the last time.
When the storm surrounding the manhunt for Al-Firsiwi abated, I was able to see things somewhat realistically. He had put an end to a period of struggle and violence, both overt and covert, replacing it with a period of calm that was suitable for a time when so many people were scheming and profiting silently, with a kind of belittling indifference.
The Zaytoun Hotel reopened during the tourist revival when it did not matter who benefited behind the scenes. What counted were the newly opened roads around, outside and within the city. Guesthouses multiplied, as did business in traditional crafts. Buying power grew and property revived. Troupes to perform religious songs and chants were formed in this forgotten city. There might have also been some hidden scandals that made people pronounce the hawqala, appealing for God’s help, without the sparks of anger in their eyes disappearing. Eventually, Al-Firsiwi’s disappearance marked the withdrawal of the tragic from public life. There was also a large-scale movement in the city to please those who whimpered and whined. Yet I was not tempted to return to the hotel, despite my half-sister and her husband’s insistence. I could not forget the sight of my mother sitting in the hotel lobby nor get rid of the sense of Al-Firsiwi’s spirit controlling the place. It seemed to me that a return to the hotel under its new direction would put me in direct confrontat
ion with two gigantic beings I would be unable to face.
Reality, however, is not always as simple as expected. In this flood of changes that brooked no challenge or opposition, the state saw fit to submit Al-Firsiwi’s mosaics to forensic examination in Italy. A delegation of well-known archaeologists travelled to Rome, taking Al-Firsiwi’s bag with them. There the pieces were individually examined, and the final report categorically concluded that each of the 13,624 pieces was from a genuine Roman mosaic that had originally represented Hylas, the companion of Hercules. It was different from the mosaic currently located in Walili, which showed Hylas in a struggle with two nymphs, one holding his chin and the other his wrist. In this mosaic, one nymph gave him a drink from a decorated cup while he embraced the other and looked angrily at a tiger about to pounce on the two nymphs. The design also showed a scene similar to the mosaic visible to this day: the creeping hunter, the dead bird, the trial, and the hungry tigers savaging the guilty hunter. About 2,000 pieces were missing to complete the design and assemble it again.
The Arch and the Butterfly Page 21
