The potter left the riad’s alley in Mawqif and headed for the workshop in Tabhirt, followed by a shadowy figure wrapped in a coat. The streets were deserted besides a few stray night creatures. The young potter was in a hurry, like an arrow shot from a bow. He felt a pain inside him, this burning need to work with the clay, and all the while the shadow was trailing him from a distance. When he entered the shop and turned on the lights, he spotted a lump of clay that seemed ready for kneading and shaping. He bent over it with all the enthusiasm of a lover. His soul was overflowing, his fingers were poised and ready, and the picture was still shining in his heart and imagination. Just as Badia’s body had been dancing a short while earlier, so now were his fingers dancing as they gently molded the body of clay. The statuette was gently stroked into shape, as though it were being formed spontaneously from his passion. One stroke and the basic features were in place; another stroke and the gesture was there; another and the pulse of movement was added; a series of concentrated, interlinked strokes and the statuette was finally ready, enveloped in its own halo of light. The potter was so happy that he burst into song in celebration of this heavenly presence, while the watching shadow sneaked a look through a crack in the door. The statuette did not look anything like its model, since the artist had been wary about his hidden passion being revealed. This was a statuette based on an imagined conception of love, keeping the real shape ambiguous while preserving the essence. Here was the symbol that embraced every conceivable aspect of symbols without revealing the inner secret.
With the approach of dawn the potter carried his new statuette — this symbol — to the oven for heating. He finally saw the person who’d been watching him.
“This statuette doesn’t look like me at all,” the shadow muttered. “So, it’s not for me. The wretch is still ignoring me in spite of the flame that I aroused.”
Underneath her coat, this relentless shadow was clutching the hilt of a dagger. The young potter had hardly emerged from the pottery’s threshold before the blade was thrust into his chest, aimed at his heart. His blood gushed out to moisten the new statuette, which he continued to clutch to himself in the fervor of his passion, as his life exerted itself fully in its confrontation with the finality of death. Then, everything collapsed and he crashed to the floor, the clay mixing with his freshly spilled blood. The shadow now slipped away, the bloody dagger concealed under the wrap. She disappeared into the gloom of the predawn morning.
Before the sun was even up the next morning, there were loud bangs on the merchant’s riad door. When he heard the news, he quickly left the house. There were two women in the household who bewailed Najib’s death in the most intense fashion. Rumors and speculation spread like wildfire: How could Najib the potter have been murdered? Was it a jealous lover for whom he had never made a statuette? Or was it a woman who had wanted him to make a statuette, and he had not done so? Or was it another craftsman who was envious of him? Or had Hasun hatched some plot against him, spiteful because of the attentions that his beautiful wife was paying to the young man? Was it this, or that, or something else?
On the very same day, both Badia and her servant Masuda vanished separately from the riad without any prearranged plan. Neither of them spoke to the other — or even knew where the other was going.
As the murdered man was laid to rest in the Bab el-Khemis Cemetery, inquiries had not yet identified the murderer or the location of the two women. The murderer’s shadow still managed to appear at the gravesite a few days after his burial, walking between the headstones until it reached his tombstone. Leaning over the grave, close to the heart of its owner, as it listened to the groans, the murderous shadow cried out: “Najib!”
“Yes?” he replied.
“Why are you groaning? Do you need anything?”
“Why did you kill me, Masuda?”
“Because I love you.”
“Does the lover kill their beloved?” he asked.
“If the lover is desperate, and the beloved has refused to make a statuette of her.”
“You treated me badly,” Najib snapped.
“It was no worse than watching you go to someone else,” Masuda snapped back.
“You were unkind, Masuda.”
“Forgive me, Najib. Death was the only way I could see of being joined with you.”
Walking toward the edge of the cemetery by Wadi Isil, she threw herself into the deep lake and disappeared into its depths, where she was to remain.
Summer was not yet over, and its steaming heat had not relented. Najib’s fingers no longer danced over the clay. And yet a woman of faded beauty kept searching for him. For days, no one knew where she had vanished, or from where she had emerged on that searing-hot noon, shoeless, her clothes in tatters, her body weak. She was clutching a statuette with bits broken off and her tangled hair cascaded like a waterfall. She stopped by the door of the pottery shop where the dead man’s fingers had danced over the clay, looked into its empty space, and called him by name. She laughed at first, and then she cried. She made the other workers cry as well, and passersby who gathered around her.
“It’s Badia,” some of them whispered to others. “Hasun’s wife. She’s gone crazy.”
That same evening, she was placed in a hospital for especially dangerous patients, even though the only people who believed that were the very ones who’d poisoned their own perceptions.
As though nothing had ever happened, Hasun had searched all over his house when the people in his riad had disappeared, and then changed his old bed for an even bigger one. Refilling his supply of kif and his hashish pipe, he got ready to remarry.
Translated from Arabic by Roger Allen
The Mummy in the Pasha’s House
by Mohamed Achaari
Dar el-Basha
Patti sat in the garden of the house in Marrakech that she had bought ten years ago — her first home. She was listening with a genuine Sufi absorption to al-Sharqawi recount the story of the mummy in the pasha’s house.
Al-Sharqawi had begun with the moment the governor’s entourage, the police, the historic buildings inspectorate, and the procurator-general had all arrived at the dwairiya — a small house that contained a kitchen, storerooms, and servants quarters on one side, with the finer and more lavishly decorated Turkish baths, lounge, and other living spaces on the other. The house also contained a lounge for female companions, which was accessible by climbing an ebony staircase from the lounge. In this velveteen area of the dwairiya, the pasha had installed a plaster mosaic of blue, yellow, and green tiles that he had specially imported from Istanbul — his own Sulaymaniyya from the Ottoman capital. He would often brag about the mosaic, even though he knew nothing at all about that particular Ottoman palace — people living in the dwairiya even called the house the Sulaymaniyya, their belief being that the use of the title implied that some demon followers of King Solomon were to be found there, all subject to the pasha’s instructions. In the dead of night, when the inhabitants could hear the sound of the pasha’s retainers and soldiers being lashed by a leather whip, they would put their fingers in their ears and their knees would knock together in horror as they listened to what the fiends were doing to the victims locked inside the vaults housed below the stables.