All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  And when she answered me, I understood her perfectly. “OK, no problem,” she said. “My cousin is from Port Said, so I learned to speak Ammiya. Now, yalla ndardish.”

  She used the very phrase that had been the title of my first Egyptian-colloquial textbook, from my first visit to Cairo all the way back in 1992: Let’s Chat in Arabic.

  “Yalla ndardish,” I said. It was the first time I had used the phrase in a natural context. Yes, let’s chat. The tram doors dinged, and the train eased into motion.

  “Where are you from? Europe?” she asked.

  When I told her I was from New York, her eyes lit up. “Oh! America! There are only two places in the world I want to go, Mecca and America.” She clapped her hands together. “Forget Europe—pfft.”

  She lived in Rabat, and she had been visiting her brother here on the edge of Salé. He was recently married and had a new baby, born not long after the wedding. “They did things a little backwards,” she said with a conspiratorial laugh.

  Her name was Houria—freedom. With her long face and big, dark eyes, she had looked serious when she sat down, but when she smiled now, she lit up and looked ready for anything. As the tram zipped along its route, Houria told me she worked at a fancy restaurant, but her mother didn’t approve because the place served alcohol. “My mother would prefer that I just sit in the house until I get married,” she said.

  “But how are you supposed to get married if you don’t leave the house? Just wait around?” I mimed looking bored, peering out the window.

  “Right—wait around. For my destiny!” She did a fake swoon. I was thrilled to get her joke.

  As we neared the main train station in Rabat, we swapped phone numbers. “Let’s meet tomorrow,” she said. “My day is empty every day after three.”

  Cairo had plenty of men-only spaces, but these social conventions had never chafed because I rarely wanted to be in their spit-and-sawdust coffeehouses. There was always somewhere nicer and more mixed to go. Morocco, though, was full of elegant old salons de thé and cheerful bargain restaurants where I could easily picture myself—until I saw the wall of men, smoking louchely and facing the street, as if to defend their territory. On my first day in Rabat, I felt a sudden surge of rage when I happened to walk past a chicken-and-rice restaurant. The men out front all seemed to be glaring. I glared right back.

  Now, the next day, Houria was marching us right toward that same restaurant, elbowing in among the men and sitting us down at the sidewalk tables. She waved at the waiter, who smiled in recognition. Inside, two women were chatting and nibbling chicken lunches. Apparently I had not looked closely enough at the clientele.

  “I love this place,” Houria said, “but for a long time I came here every day after work, and I got so fat!”

  Picking up where we’d left off on the tram, Houria told me that in high school she had run track, traveling with her team—Tunisia, Libya, all around Morocco. Her grades hadn’t been great, so she didn’t apply to college. Now, at age twenty-six, she was feeling stuck. She didn’t like her job at the restaurant, and she hadn’t met any good men.

  She showed me photos of her friends at her restaurant job—the hostesses in their tight-fitting, knee-length dresses, the bathroom attendant in her white smock, and Houria herself in black-and-white-check kitchen trousers and a white snap-front top. Morocco was filled with women in such uniforms, mopping hallways and pushing carts of cleaning supplies. I had been looking right past them, just as I had glossed over women in niqabs in the Gulf, not bothering to imagine them with any other life.

  Houria asked if I had any children. I told her no, and I probably wouldn’t.

  “Oh, but you have to!” she said.

  Families were different in America, I explained. We lived spread out across the country, without aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents (I used all the words I’d learned in class) around to help raise the kids.

  “I have the solution,” she declared with her brilliant, up-for-anything smile. “I will come to New York and be the nanny. Now, tell me what the weather is like there, so I can prepare.”

  In that moment, in which I understood both Houria’s joke and the personality behind it, I knew I had made a friend.

  When we finished eating, Houria proposed we go to her grandmother’s house—not far, and a nice place to kill time until her evening work shift. Walking to the corner, we passed two other cafés, and I noticed a handful of women at each one. At Houria’s side, Morocco looked different.

  “When we get to the house,” she said as we climbed into a cab, “I’ll give you a beejama, and we can take a little nap.” New cognate vocabulary, and an afternoon snooze! This was turning into an excellent date.

  Granny’s place was in a middle-class subdivision, and pajamas turned out to be a yellow cotton nightie. Houria handed it to me, along with plastic sandals, as soon as we arrived, and gestured for me to change in the side salon. Having finally grasped the importance of loungewear with my host family in Fes, I wasn’t going to resist. I wanted to make a good, properly relaxed impression with this new family. Still, it was awkward—there was Granny and the housekeeper, and no real wall between the salons, much less a door to close. Houria strode in and stripped down to her bra and underwear.

  If it seemed intimate to change clothes with someone I’d just met, it also seemed a bit intimate to lie down and take a nap in the same room with her. But Moroccan salon sofas are firm and wide, ideal for napping, and even the arrival of Houria’s two-year-old nephew didn’t keep me from sleep.

  When I woke up an hour later, Houria’s grandmother, clad in a big stretchy housedress with a hole in the armpit, had laid out a tray of sweets and tea. Houria was already dressed in her street clothes. “Go ahead and eat while I pray,” she told me as she arranged a prayer rug in the farthest sitting area.

  Over tea, we talked—or rather, Houria and her grandmother talked, and occasionally Houria translated to Ammiya for me. Our one-on-one lunch conversation had taken a lot out of me, and post-nap, I was having a hard time tuning in. I slumped back on the pillows, watching a dubbed Bollywood movie on TV, a swirl of color and syllables I couldn’t piece together.

  “Oh, Lalla Zora, you’re tired.” Houria patted my knee affectionately. “And it’s time for me to go to work. Yalla, habibti.”

  I smiled up at her. One afternoon, and I was not just her friend, but her habeeba, her darling.

  Sweet Sensation

  At what point had I agreed to go home with Houria? I rewound the day in my head, trying to find the turn in the conversation. We had met that morning, the day after napping at Gran’s, and strolled around Rabat together, stopping to admire the silvery sea from the ramparts of the casbah. We had nibbled almond cookies in a café, sheltered from the rain. Just after that, in a garden crawling with cats, we had definitely discussed going to her house—but with inconclusive results, I had thought.

  Then I had followed her across lanes of traffic, her arm firmly looped through mine, and into the front seat of one white Mercedes taxi, then another. And then we were walking down a poorly lit street in a part of the city that I could only identify as “uphill from the cemetery.”

  At the entrance to her apartment building, in a pool of dark where the streetlights didn’t reach, Houria had fumbled with her keys in the lock, and I had suddenly seen my situation from outside and thought, Have I done something very stupid? The door had opened, into further pitch-black, and Houria grabbed my hand and pulled me in. Perhaps.

  But I had not been jumped and robbed and knifed in a dark stairwell. Houria’s mother, a Berber woman with skin so pale and papery she resembled a Walker Evans portrait, had greeted me at the apartment door, squeezed me, and kissed me, tak, tik-tik.

  Now Houria and I were the picture of Moroccan domesticity, lounging on the banquettes in the central salon in our beejama (this tim
e, mine was a floral-print nylon caftan with red-and-gold brocade trim). It was 9:30 p.m., and I was yawning.

  “We don’t usually go to sleep this early,” my new friend said, her fair brow wrinkling. “Maybe we’ll have a little snack, but we won’t eat dinner until my dad gets home, about midnight. Then we can sleep.”

  Oh. Well. That was funny. I had been thinking her dad’s arrival was imminent, and then he’d drive me back down the hill, to a part of Rabat I vaguely recognized, in his taxi. That was, however, only a story I’d made up in my head, Dr. Badawi style, after we had arrived at Houria’s. I had taken a few language clues—father, taxi, dinner—and strung them together in a story. I couldn’t possibly be spending the night here, could I? Somewhere else in the city, my hotel room sat empty.

  Houria’s mother was in the kitchen, rattling pots and pans, and her brother, a skinny sixteen-year-old who looked about twelve, was flopped on the floor, studiously ignoring us. On the Arabic version of The Voice, a coach clambered up on his red chair and applauded, crowing theatrically, “Allahu akbar!”

  “Come to the roof with me, Zora,” Houria said, standing up from the sofa. She could see I was about to doze off. “I have to put my laundry out to dry.”

  We ventured into the dark stairwell again, Houria lighting the way with her phone screen. The apartment building was new, still unfinished, and we climbed over broken bags of cement. From the roof, I saw we were at the very edge of the city—to one side stood more housing blocks like this one, stretching down a hill toward a dense glow of light; to the other side was darkness.

  Houria’s family had moved here not long after she finished high school. She liked it; they had more room. Although they didn’t have a room for her, precisely. To change into our caftans, we first had to shoo her brother out of his bedroom, decorated with posters of Tupac and Bob Marley. Houria had folded her street clothes in a neat stack, then brought them out and set them on a banquette in a side salon, instructing me to do the same.

  When I had asked where she slept, she indicated the same banquette. Her parents hadn’t built her a separate bedroom, she explained, because they had been sure she’d be married soon. Six years had passed, and she was lobbying her father to wall off the side salon. “It would be easy—it would hardly cost anything!” She bent to smooth the folds in her blouse.

  Up on the roof, Houria pinned her work uniform to the laundry line. “Lalla Zora, come here,” she said. “I need to tell you my problem.” She pulled me past another pile of construction materials, into the shadows, and we squatted by the roof’s perimeter wall. She was saying something about a man, a difficult situation, a test. My energy was flagging—my brain could no longer process euphemism, or perhaps Houria had lapsed out of Ammiya and back into Darija.

  “I’m sorry, Houria, but I don’t understand. What did you say?” I asked her. Breathe, relax. Just listen.

  “I. Lost. My. Virginity,” she said.

  She had met a man at the restaurant where she worked, and they went on a few dates. He was older, and married, and a bit fat. But he was very nice to her, and one time he invited her to his apartment. “I felt a hass hilu”—sweet sensation—“with him,” Houria said meaningfully. “But I paid a very high price.”

  There had been some blood. Afterward, she had gone to two doctors to confirm what she feared: there was not enough of her hymen left for her to bleed on her wedding night. This had happened months ago, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was saving up money to have an operation. For now, she tried to pray and keep busy, to keep her mind off it.

  I muttered and stammered. Not, for once, because I couldn’t find the Arabic words, but because I had no counsel, in any language. “Well, at least you enjoyed yourself?” I finally said, lamely.

  “Oh, no, it wasn’t that good.” Houria pursed her lips. “But the man who was calling me today”—she had borrowed my phone a few times that afternoon, to talk to a second man she knew from the restaurant—“he has made me feel, you know . . . ’ishq and mut’a and everything.”

  These were juicy words: ’ishq was passion; mut’a, gratification. Far juicier than the hass hilu, the sweet sensation she had described with the fat man. She had already told me that the man she’d spoken with today was terrible, untrustworthy, also old and married. I was glad it was dark—she couldn’t see me gaping at her revelations.

  “What about with your boyfriend?” I asked. “In high school? How did he make you feel?”

  She had told me about this boyfriend earlier that day, when she pointed out a dark-skinned tourist in the café. “See that black one? I had a boyfriend like that,” she had said wistfully. He had been her first love. They had wanted to get married, but her father had said no; at sixteen, she was too young. After school had ended, the boyfriend went to work in Spain, where he met someone else. She still thought of him all the time, had even dreamed of him the night before: he had been wearing white and had taken her in his arms.

  “That was different too,” she explained. “With him, I felt hubb and farha”—love and joy. “We did things, but we had certain positions, you know, so I didn’t have to worry about my virginity. But I didn’t feel mut’a.”

  I admired Houria’s ability to identify what she felt. At her age, I had hopelessly muddled love and passion. Arabic and its wealth of synonyms was helpful here—precision was encouraged. And Houria hadn’t even touched on so many other possible words: maram, craving; huyam, love like thirst; hawan, love that feels like falling; shahwa, a greedy lust.

  “Sex is like food and water,” Houria went on, a little indignant. “It’s something everyone needs.” She only felt bad that she had taken it too far and ruined the evidence of her virginity, which created a problem for her whole family. “My parents would kill me if they found out,” she said. I was pretty sure she didn’t mean this literally—Morocco wasn’t known for its judgmental religious fanatics.

  But as if on cue, Houria pointed over the parapet, down to the street below. “Look, it’s our neighbors, the Shoulds.” She had used a funny adjective for their nickname, multazimeen, which I remembered from Egypt, where it meant dedicated. Its root suggested being morally obligated, but also a bit holier-than-thou. I peeked over the edge of the roof. The Shoulds dressed as they should, he in a beard and a just-above-the-ankles tunic and she in an all-encompassing black robe. The whole time I had been in Morocco, I hadn’t seen anyone in this fundamentalist uniform.

  Houria laughed. “They have the apartment there, across from ours. What they must think of my brother and his Tupac!” She didn’t seem concerned with what they thought of her. Why should she? She prayed five times a day, and she believed that Islam was the best religion, the one true path—she had told me this earlier, during our stroll around Rabat. She dressed modestly, though not as conservatively as her mother would have liked. Unfortunately, the very thing her mother feared had already happened.

  A cool breeze blew in the one small window in the salon. “Did the flies wake you?” Houria asked as I sat up, bleary and disoriented.

  She was already dressed, her hair brushed back neatly. The flies had woken me earlier, but I had pulled my sheet over my head and dozed another hour.

  “At first they annoyed me,” she said as she checked her outfit in a mirror outside the bathroom, “but now I think of them as my alarm clock. They come at exactly the time I need to get up.” She was like a fairy-tale princess before the magic happened, so utterly good.

  Houria’s mother emerged from the kitchen with a tray of breads and cheese and honey, a bowl of hearty beans, and thermoses of coffee and hot milk. As I ate and drank, I recalled brief flashes of the night before: a beef tagine with cardoons for dinner, a short exchange with Houria’s tired father, then flopping down to sleep on a banquette as the family chatted next to me. The feeling had reminded me of nights as a kid, when colorful friends of my parents would
show up at the house, mid–road trip or in between jobs. The grownups would stay up late telling stories, and I would listen as long as I could stay awake. Now I was both the overtired toddler and the exotic grownup guest, and not since I’d been a child had I given myself over to other people’s whims for so long. My brain felt empty now, but the passivity I felt in Houria’s home had helped me to stretch myself in Arabic, to really make a connection, as I had the previous night.

  When Houria and I set out for the bus, I had a better look at her neighborhood. The city had chewed up the countryside here, but not yet digested it. Between four-story apartment blocks sat a vacant lot, studded with neat rows of onion greens. Next to a goat pen stood a cement mixer. As Houria and I rode into Rabat on the bus, the city seemed to knit together in front of us, growing more whole. In her smart khaki pants, tailored blouse with a bow at the neck, and sheer headscarf, Houria had looked out of place dodging construction debris en route to the bus. Now she blended in with the morning commuters.

  At the central station, Houria kissed me goodbye, tak, tik-tik. The whole morning I had barely spoken—I was exhausted. “You’ll meet a good man soon,” I managed to say. “I know it.” It didn’t begin to convey all the good I wished for her.

  “I hope you are right, Zora. I pray to God you are right.”

  She walked into the crowd, and I lost sight of her among the other young women.

  Up in the Old Hotel

  Whenever people asked me what my parents were doing in Tangier before I was born, I would say, “Oh, you know. It was the sixties.” I didn’t know exactly what they had been doing, but the anecdotes I’d heard over the years added up to typical hippie-era bohemianism. It wasn’t as if my parents had been working, or anything as tedious as that.