TWELVE
Choosing to believe Ilham’s assurances that the storage lockers were safe, I left my pack at the hotel before starting on my way to the All Join Hands offices the next morning. It was the lesser of two evils, but the proprietor exuded extreme trustworthiness, and in truth, I didn’t have much choice. I said a brief prayer as I stowed all my worldly possessions in one of the wire mesh lockers and watched Ilham close the lock and pocket the key. Then I left the Hotel Ali and started for the Ville Nouvelle.
It being Saturday, and still fairly early, I had only the slimmest expectation of finding anyone at the All Join Hands offices. When I finally reached the Place du 16 Novembre, I found the building’s windows shuttered as they had been the afternoon before. The door, with its logo of multiracial hands conjoined to form an unbroken circle, was closed and locked. Two days, I thought, displeased at the idea of having to wait out the weekend, mad at myself for not having come earlier the afternoon before. I told myself I’d check back later. With any luck, I’d catch some ambitious soul burning the weekend oil.
My only other plan for the day was to head back to the Djemaa el-Fna to try and find my little thief and his Berber auntie. I had a hunch they were regulars at the square, and I figured if I waited long enough they’d show up there to ply their skills. A bad feeling in my gut told me someone had put the kid up to his crime, the same someone who’d enlisted Salim and his friend on the train. Perhaps the same someone who’d had the sisters killed.
It was late morning when I passed the landmark of the Koutoubia Mosque and turned up toward the Djemaa el-Fna. There were several dozen vendors out, and a school of djellabaed henna artists and fortune-tellers prowling the crowds of tourists like sharks looking for a meal. With their hair covered and their bodies draped in fabric, it was difficult to tell the women apart, but after a good fifteen minutes of looking, I was fairly certain the boy and his aunt were not among them.
When a young woman in a blue robe approached and offered in competent French to henna my hands, I agreed. Like the old auntie, she had a young boy with her, a gangly child who produced two squat stools for us to sit on. I took my place opposite the woman and offered her my hands. She pulled a paste-filled syringe from beneath her robe and, with the deftness of a surgeon, began an intricate pattern on my index finger.
“There’s a fortune-teller,” I said, as she progressed to the back of my right hand. “An old woman with one bad eye. Do you know her?”
The woman didn’t reply. She made the petals of a flower, then lifted the syringe and drew a curling stalk down toward my wrist. The henna paste was cool and damp. Where it was starting to harden and dry, the skin puckered beneath it.
“She had a boy with her,” I elaborated. “She was here yesterday. She read my palm, and I’d like to see her again.”
The woman shook her head, her eyes still intent on her task. “Ten dirhams,” she said. “I tell your fortune.”
“No, thank you,” I told her.
“Eight dirhams,” she countered.
I shook my head. “Twenty dirhams if you can tell me where to find the old woman.”
Making no comment on my offer, she finished her design and tucked the syringe back in her robe. “Finished,” she said. “Five dirhams.”
Standing, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a five-dirham note.
She took the money, secreting it into one of the many fabric folds that draped her body, then turned and, with the boy in tow, disappeared into the crowd.
I watched her go, then glanced around the square, surveying my options. A host of cheap cafés lined the Djemaa el-Fna on either side, each with a terrace overlooking the action. From where I stood, the best of these looked to be the Café Glacier, a large establishment next to the Hotel CTM, with a big second-floor balcony. I’d be in for a long day of coffee drinking, but if I got a table outside, I figured I’d have a good view of the square, and the comings and goings of the Berber ladies. Picking my way through the crowd, I made my way to the lobby of the Hotel CTM, bought a copy of Le Monde, then headed next door to the Café Glacier.
It was deep into the day’s fast, and the café’s clientele was made up exclusively of non-Moroccans. Hungry-looking waiters in blacks and whites circulated through the tables serving forbidden glasses of Ricard and pain au chocolate. The decor was French: caned chairs, marble-topped tables, white tiles, and airy café curtains.
I found a table on the terrace, a corner spot right next to the railing from which I could easily see the area of the square where most of the Berber ladies gathered. The woman who’d hennaed my hands had found a new client, and the two of them were hunched together on their little stools. The boy was nowhere to be seen. Gone off for a piece of candy, I figured, or some dates, like the other children too young to take part in the fast. I ordered a coffee and settled in for the duration.
In the chapel at the abbey were two very different depictions of Christ. One, of course, was the Christ we all know, the Christ on the cross, the gruesome sufferer, hollow-eyed and gaunt, each corporeal misery carefully sculpted and shadowed, wounds fresh and red, thorns so sharp they’d cut through leather. It was this Christ the sisters faced during worship, this Christ toward whom they prayed each prayer, toward whom each head bent in almost erotic supplication. The other Christ loitered in the back of the chapel, tucked high up in a dark alcove, a baby, an innocent, pink-cheeked and half-naked, riding his mother’s hip.
“He gave His only son,” Sister Magdalene used to say, to remind us of the magnitude of the sacrifice. But which son? I would wonder. Which Christ? My own gaze was drawn to the fat little boy, to the hand reaching toward Mary’s breasts, the two nipples tight and round beneath the pleated scrim of her dress. It seemed this was what a parent would remember, that Mary, there on Golgotha, would have looked up and seen her milk-breathed baby on the cross.
Here was the sacrifice, I had thought, not God’s but Mary’s. For how would you not offer your own flesh to the executioner instead?
A cruel God, I’d once said to Heloise. It was August, just after the feast of St. Mary the Virgin. We’d gotten up in the moonlit hours of the morning to begin the long, steamy process of canning the garden’s overabundance of green beans. Even with our early start it was sweltering in the kitchen, what was left of the morning’s cool defeated by the dozen large pots on the boil.
Heloise didn’t say anything at first. She finished loading the pot in front of her, carefully lowering each glass jar into the scalding water. When she turned away, her face and hair were damp with steam, her skin red and flushed. I’d expected her to disagree with me, to say something about the Light and the Salvation, but she didn’t.
“Yes,” she said, instead, “cruel.” Pushing her sleeves up above her elbows, she wiped her hands on her apron and pulled a crumpled pack of Gauloises from her pocket. Then she leaned back against the counter, put a cigarette to her mouth, and lit it.
“And yet here I am,” she said. She closed her eyes and took a long, slow drag off the Gauloise, savoring the taste, this brief moment of rest. The only sound in the kitchen was the clink-clink of the canning jars as they nudged one another in their baths.
My coffee came in a chipped cup, the little spoon dulled by dishwater, but it was a good French roast, thick and frothy. I sunk two cubes of sugar in the demitasse and took a sip, letting the sweet liquid linger in my mouth.