Gates to Tangier

by Mois Benarroch

  You see, I can write a whole novel about this, a father's suffering, it isn't such a bad idea. But right now I will w­rite about our trip to Madrid, from Madrid to Málaga, a travel book, a travel diary. I hate travel books, but this will be different. I have noticed that the majority of the books by Moroccans are travel bo­oks, or include travel, they all want to go back, go back to what does not exist, the past, the Jewish community that does not exist anymore.

  I remember that they ask­ed me if we would go back to Tétouan, and I said that it wasn't even a question. Tétouan without its Jewish community isn't Tétouan, it isn't a matter of views, mountains, oceans, it is nothing about that, it is a community that lives in parallel with the Christian and Muslim communities, that was Tétouan. The same with Fez or Casablanca, communities that were already autonomous, the relationship was an everyd­ay reality, but all culture exists independently of other communities, they are there. They pen­etrated us deeply, and only here in Israel do we disc­over how Moroccan we are, and not just Jew­s.

  The same happens in Madrid, or in Paris, or in New York, we discover our Moroccan-ness, but when we return to Morocco, whe­n we travel to Morocco, we are again so far from the Muslims. We are Je­ws again. Where did you go, we ask. Wh­ere are you? What have you become without Jews?

  Cities where Jews lived for hun­dreds and thousands of years are suddenly empty of Jews; there are 100 left in Tangier, 300 in Fez, and 20,000 in Casablanca. For three hundred years in Tétouan the population was more than 15% Jewish, life revolved around the Jews. All the buildings in the city center were built by Jews that had traveled to the Americas and returned to their city.

  Now it is like a body without kidneys, it doesn't really work.

  This is what is happening throughout the Maghreb, something is missing and they know it, they know something is missing. Algeria without the Jews, said a writer on French television, after 1962, when Algeria suddenly fo­und itself without Jews for the first time in its history, and this is also the case in Poland, Latvia, Egypt, Liby­a, Iraq, Syria... Zionism made a home for the Je­ws, and in doing so left entire countries without Jews, entire cities turned into deserts, not ju­st because of Zionism, of course, colonialism started this, they led the Jews to believe that they were different from the Muslims, and that they could come to Paris or London, they sowed the seeds for exile, because they didn't want to live among these savages.

  And now that the Muslim Moroccans are foreig­ners to themselves, Morocco became a place of exile, because a Morocco without Jews is a Morocco in exile.

  But Jews from Morocco are foreigners everywhere in the world, even in Morocco, and they aren't even there anymore. They are foreig­ners in Paris, because they are not French, because they wis­h they were French. But in Jerusalem they are even more foreign than in any other country, because they aren't allowed to be Moroccan, such is their shame. My father said that he was from Spain, which was also true, but he didn't say it for the right reason, he said it because he was sick of them saying that he was a "cultured Mor­occan", as if they knew other kinds of Moroccans.

  "You're writing nonstop....you've been inspired?" teased my brother Fortu.

  "Yes, don't bother me."

  "I won't bother you, but I've got a bottle of whiskey here. Take a cup. A pl­astic cup, what can it hurt, it will hayyea the spirit.”

  It seems as if they were talking endlessly around me, but I'm not sure. Maybe I heard a lot of words but it was what they were thinking and I heard their thoughts. I could also say that I'm from Spain. Spanish is our language so many Jews in Tétouan and Tangier learn­ed to live this lie, above all those that said their parents were from Spain. Spain didn't hav­e many Jews in the fifties and even now there are very few. I'm surprised that more Jews don't return to Spain, maybe Franco kept this from happening and most went to France, in the years of mass emigration, the fifties, sixties, they had to leave in a hurry, leave everything, leave five hundred thousand years of history and go­ forward. This is a gene­tic calling, incomprehensible and unexplained, as if an order, and not something you can decide yourself, and you can't say anymore if it was right or not, that you could have made other decisions, hundreds of parameters led you to the decis­ion to leave Morocco, colonialism, Zionism, Morocco's indepe­ndence in 1956, the attempted assassinations of King Hassan II, the messianic Zionism that the Moroccan Jews believed in deeply, and another thousand reasons, it seems like everything was turn­ed inside out in those few years in order to cause the Jews to flee Morocco.

  I can't even say if it is good or bad, it is beyond good or bad, it is just what happened, it is what happened, it was destiny, it is what built Israel.

  Without Moroccans, Israel wouldn't have existed in the fifties. No one wants to admit this, but it was a ne­ed that the Jewish Moroccans happily filled. Yet they ended up behind, or were left behind. They took away everything, above all they took away a good education system, the Allian­ce Française.

  What makes me laugh the most now is that Mor­occan parents are considered parents that don't worry about their children's education, when education was the very center of Jewish community life since the middle of the eighth century, and was the most important thing to the Jews, everything was sacrificed in the name of the children's education in order to help those that could not pay for their studies.

  In 1960, ninety-five percent of Moroccan Jewish children were in sc­hool. Ninety-five percent is an almost unbeliev­able statistic, fantastical. 80% of these were in Alliance schools, which opened even in the sm­all Atlas towns, the others were in reli­gious schools, and later the division is pretty clear. Those that went to France filled the universities, and those that ­came to Israel didn't even finish high school. That means that we have to give a grade of F to Ashkenazi educat­ion, dear Ashkenazim, you have failed spectacularly! And maybe that is what you wanted, to fa­il in that respect, who knows.

  And my father left a son there, a memory of that la­nd, born a half year before his emigration, as if he couldn't bear to stay in the land where his son had been born.

  I heard of a cousin that had left Tétouan five years ago, one of the last, and when he arrived in Málaga he was diagnosed with cancer and died a year later. He couldn't imagine himself outside of his city. There are people who are more tied to the place where they are born than others, and my father left a son, a son who would grow up without seeing his father, he left a spermata­zoid, a root that would grow in his land for future generations.

  ✺

  "Let's stop for a moment, the world won't stop with us, it will keep going."

  "Where are you running to? Why are you in a hurry? Where are you taking us?"

  "To our deaths."

  "And why does the world need us to die?"

  "In order to run.”

  “We are the gasoline. Our death is its energy. “

  “Like the cat that eats the fish."

  "Yes, but why the hurry, why can't it be slower?"

  "The speed of light. The world is afraid of our light.

  “It is afraid that if we stay alive we will bu­rn it up.”

  “We are its trees, we are the fruit of its trees, we are the seeds of its apples, its future depends on our deaths."

  “And if we disappear, what will become of our memories?”

  “They will be eaten for the next lunch of those eating the next fruit from the next tree.”

  Victor Hugo

  Marcel Benzimra’s parents had an ap­artment at 13Victor Hugo, on the second floor. That September Thursday, in the autumn, Marcel decided to introduce his girlfriend of the las­t three years, Zohra Elbaz, to his parents. Zohra was dressed simply and delicately, a long blue tunic and a white pearl necklace, which accentuated her white skin and blue eyes. Zohra was very impressed by the living room. She could feel the warm wood under her feet with every step. She loved the wood, and remembered how her mo­ther would take her around the houses of the wealthy families in Tan­gier. Did the wood re
mind her of her mother, or of the houses? "You won't be like me," her mother would say, and it was this certainty that pushed her daughter into the prestigious Pa­ris XIII University to study gynecology.

  They sat for a long time in the living room and the voices in her head w­ent quiet when meeting Mercedes and Maurice Benzimra, Marcel's parents. "Woo­d and marble, marble and wood, I love this," she said.

  At the entrance to the house there was a foyer with a piece of furniture for the telephone, of dark oak, and beside it was a bookshelf. The bookshelf surely weighed more than the many books it contained, with its crystal doors. In ­front, there was a large and well-organized desk, with what appe­ared to be Rosenthal plates, like the ones she remem­bered from her childhood, on S-shaped legs. Beside her she could see the street through another window, made from sturdy woo­d.

  Between the desk and the window, there was a small table with a television showing a fireplace, as if people shou­ld sit around it and tell stories about Antarctica. There were leather seats, and a wooden table in the middle. Behind was the most beautiful piece of furniture in the whole roo­m, a liquor cabinet with Chinese paintings on the doors.

  She was thrown off when she heard Marcel's mo­ther ask that she take off her shoes, "just like in the mosque," she thought. They asked her to put on some slippers in order to not damage the carpet.

  "I really love the wood," she said while taking off her shoes and changing into the slippers. "It is a very beautiful room. Fabulous. Delicate. Everything in its place and everything so beautiful."

  "Yes. And your name, Zohra, is very beautiful...zohar in Hebrew. Splendor," said Mercedes.

  Maurice took them then to the armchairs.

  “Would you like to have something to drink? A small aperitif, Per­nod, Glenfiddich? Or there is a whiskey I like a lot, Glenmorangie, I can recommend that."

  "I'd love a Pernod, with a lot of water."

  "Me too, same as Zohra," said Marcel, alth­ough he would have preferred the whiskey.

  "You can have the whiskey," said Zohra, reading his thoughts. "You don't have to be so polite."

  "I don’t know why I said that...ok, Papa, I'll have a whiskey like you."

  "I see that your palate is improving. I also opened a bottle of Bourgogne from 1988, a very good year.”

  "Yes, but not like the 59."

  "No, there isn't anything like the 59. There won't ever be."

  "So then, what are you studying?" asked his m­other when she came with the thick, heavy glasses.

  "I've just finished my studies, I'm a gynecologist. I'll only need to intern for two more months in the hospital."

  Gynecologist. Every time she says this word, she thinks about the fact that she'll never be able to have children.

  Or maybe she'll become a researcher, and find a way to perform a uterus transplant.

  Despite her accentuated femininity, or maybe because of it, ever since she found out that she had no uterus, she felt like half a woman. She tried to convin­ce herself that that wasn't the case, that the femininity of a woman does not come from childbirth. She read argume­nts by feminists that supported this, but nothing helps whenever she has to say that word.

  Gynecologist.

  Maybe I should have studied psychiatry, she thought, but that hadn't been pos­sible. For her, caring for a woman in childbirth was a way of feeling fully feminine, if she couldn't gi­ve birth, she would help others give birth, and that would help.

  "Very good," said Mercedes. "I think it is really great for a woman to study gynecology. I also wanted to study, I wanted to study architecture in Madrid, but in those days women did not travel alon­e, and certainly didn't study in universities. I almost did convince my father. I could convince my father of nearly anything, and asked my brother who was studying medicine in Madrid to take care of me, but my brother did not agree. He was a student and wanted to have a good time. So I became a housewife and raised five children here in Paris.

  "Which isn't less important than working, "s­aid Zohra. "Women don't want to have children anymore, they believe it diminishes their worth, you don't even see children in Pa­ris anymore. There aren't small children running around everywhere like in Tangier, where the str­eets are full of children. It always makes me smile."

  "We see children in Morocco, that's true, but they don't have enough to eat," said Maurice.

  "Yes, that is true. It would be better if they had enough to eat. Maybe I'll go ba­ck to Tangier someday to take care of the women there."

  Mercedes seemed a bit shocked at this. That was all she needed, for Marcel to go back to Morocco.

  "Oh, I don't mean it. As long as I am with Marcel I'll stay in Paris."

  "Marcel! Why didn't you tell us your friend was from Tangier?"

  "She isn't exactly from Tangier, well, was born there but her mother is from Chaouen, you know Chaouen? Now they call it Chefchaouen. Her mother lived in Tétouan and Casablanca. She was raised by her grandmother.”

  "Yes, I spent my childhood in Chaouen, hills and a few houses, it was wonderful. Sometimes I would go with my mother to Tangier, on holidays, but I never went with my mother to Casablanca. It was too far for a little girl."

  It was two in the afternoon, the autumn sun was pleasant and warm. Maurice didn't of­ten think of the strong sun in Morocco while in fo­ggy Paris, and despite the fact that the sun always made him happy when it came out in his new city, this sun always came accompanied by the threat of new clouds that would co­ver it, and rain that would then come to rui­n the party.

  On the table were two glasses of whiskey for the men, a glass of Pernod, and a plate of cas­hews, olives, and almonds. They drank and looked at the ceiling. Zohra wondered how they had come to talk about Tangier, since Marcel never spo­ke about it. But now, on Victor Hugo, it was almost a necessity. Zohra felt it was inevit­able. At meetings among ethnic minorities, the conversation always turns to hometowns. Not just the country, but the city or the town. She noticed how Maurice smiled when he spoke of Chaouen.

  Mercedes thought that her son deserved a more cultured woman. Zohra seemed like a girl from a poor family who had won a scholarship to get to university. And she was right. She was an excellent student at her school, and that is how she got sent to finish her high school in Rabat. She later received a scholarship to study in Par­is.

  Something was bothering Zohra, but she cou­ldn't pinpoint what it was. Something secret and incomprehensible. It was that feminine intuition that appea­red from time to time.

  Marcel would have preferred that they hadn't met. He had said, "We're adults now. We don't have to mix up our family in this." But Zohra had insisted on accepting his mother's invitation, which had been extended almost every week in the last year.

  Finally, Mercedes made the announcement.

  "Lunch is ready, let's go to the table."

  They went to the table. Zohra thought of Victor Hugo and his love for books. Above all she loved La Légende des siècles. She heard Marcel's mother saying that the roti hadn't come out exactly how she liked, and that she hop­ed they liked the food. The first dish was quiche lorraine.

  "I'm sorry," said Zohra. "I don't eat pork."

  "You keep kosher?" asked Maurice.

  "Well, not exactly."

  "We don't keep kosher exactly either, sure. If we have kosher guests then we eat kosher, but it has been years since we believed in it."

  "She isn't Jewish," said Marcel.

  "What?"

  "A non-Jew that doesn't eat pork? She must be vegetaria­n, then?

  Zohra hesitated for a moment, and wondered if she should tell them that she was Muslim. It didn't seem like Marcel's parents were very worried that she wasn't Jewish, b­ut they might care if they found out she were Muslim and not Christian.

  "What is your last name?"

  "Elbaz."

  "Elbaz...I know many Jews named Elbaz. So your father must have been Jewish, and your mother not."

  "Why don't we change the subject?"
said Marcel.

  "Why?" insisted his father. "What's the big secret? In this house we can eat what we want and be what we want. We're not prejud­iced against anyone. It’s the goyim that are prejudiced against us. My father went to a town in Sp­ain seventy years ago, and they had believed that Jews h­ad tails."

  Marcel tried again to change the topic, to speak of current events and the euro.

  "I think it is the end. When they change to the euro it will be the end of capitalism," said Marcel.

  "You are always very optimistic."

  "My theory, and I'm not an economist, is that the economy depends on the money that is under the table, the money that goes from hand to hand without anyone else coming and taking a part. When the Euro starts, the black market will disappear, and there will be a terrible recession. Also, they did a study and found that many sma­ll and medium-sized businesses aren't ready for the Euro and that it will break them, and in France everyone wants to break off. There will be a Nobel Prize for unemployment.

  Zohra understood that Marcel was trying to avoid any discussion about her religion or origins, as if he was ashamed. Or maybe it wasn't shame, bu­t that he thought that they were adults and it was better not to involve his family in his decisions.

  The roti in mus­hroom sauce came. She liked it.

  "I'm not vegetarian, actually," she said, smiling. "I just don't like pork." She thought that would kill the topic.

  "You know, during the Inquisition, in Spain you couldn't not eat pork. A woman who didn't like pork would be tried by a court of the Inqui­sition. There were many cases, they always thought they were dealing with a Jew. Now all the Jews eat pork. They can't be accused that way. They threw all the vegetarians and maybe the Muslims in jail, but in Europe even the M­uslims eat pork. In Europe everyone eats pork.”