Morad paid us visits at mealtimes, bringing a basket of food and several cases of beer. He brought news from the outside too, which was quickly becoming frightening. The police were indeed looking for us. Two inspectors were making rounds of the souk, stall by stall, asking for leads about where we might be. I didn’t understand any of it. I knew we hadn’t killed anyone; I’d been there at the scene of the accident, and much less inebriated than Kamal. As word spread, I felt Morad’s anxiety growing. He wouldn’t have abandoned us for anything in the world, I was sure of that, but he was afraid. Doubt gradually came over me, piercing me with its cruel venom. I couldn’t see the logic in this story. Why in the hell would the police be looking for a drunk who’d fallen off his moped in a deserted alley? Because they’re bored to death down there, and to pass the time, the demons were amusing themselves by toying with our fears, our anxieties, our lives. I know something about that, having frequented the likes of them inside Kamal’s feverish body. A body I didn’t choose, and that was, so to speak, my purgatory.
If only it hadn’t been so horribly sad, the end of this story would have seemed right out of a burlesque farce staged at some provincial theater. But no, our end was unjust: we didn’t deserve it.
After rallying the entire family to join in her search, Mama Rosalie, worried sick, had finally alerted the police to her son’s disappearance. The inspectors were simply doing their job, trying to bring Kamal back to his mother. That’s why they were looking for us. Morad would only understand it much later, after we were gone. Even then, the thought of it all still made Morad gnaw at his fingers as if they were ripe dates.
Kamal’s visions were becoming more and more frequent, happening now in broad daylight. Morad couldn’t take any more of the screaming; even muffled by the carpets, the noises were frightening the tourists, causing them to flee the bazaar. “It can’t go on like this,” Morad told us one night, when he brought us our dinner.
His pride injured, Kamal decided to take off right away. He thought of Mama Rosalie saying: I would rather not be there than outstay my welcome! And so, without anger, he got back on his moped and abandoned his hideout with dignity. He seemed almost normal, his expression serene; I started to feel reassured. He rode out of the Old Medina, along the ramparts, not sure which direction to take. We had missed the fresh air. We were euphoric, flying with the birds that were still awake at this hour of the night. I heard him murmur that he was happy to breathe air free of carpet dust and of the fetid odor of rats. Our gandoura billowed around us in the wind. For a moment, we felt an odd kind of weightlessness. Seeing a child crossing the road in the middle distance, Kamal turned sharply toward a patch of open ground. Instead of braking he accelerated, following in the direction of a flock of birds. Then silence, a silence like that of the sea, at the bottom of a cesspool where we found ourselves with a shattered skulclass="underline" a bit drunk, a bit dead. We looked at each other for the last time, and I saw him smile. A shiver ran through us when we glimpsed, on the surface of the water, the silhouette of a dancing child.
Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef
In Search of a Son
by Mohamed Nedali
Bab Ghmat
Old Rezzouk and his wife showed up at the police station at eight o’clock in the morning. Their son Abdeljalil hadn’t come home in three days. It was true that the young man occasionally stayed out all night, but never twice in a row, and never without first telling his parents.
The cop at the desk, a man in his forties with a cold, severe expression, asked Rezzouk to describe the missing person. “Name, age, address, and occupation?”
The old man swallowed the frog in his throat. “Abdeljalil Rezzouk,” he began. “Twenty-six years old, number eleven, Derb el-Boumba, Bab Ghmat.”
“Occupation?” the cop grumbled.
Not knowing how to answer, the old man said nothing.
“Well? Spit it out!” snapped the cop.
Confused, Rezzouk started rambling: “Our... our son was... he was, for a few years.... a cigarette vendor, first here in Bab Ghmat, then in other parts of town. And then he... he—”
“He moved up the chain!” the cop cut in, jeering. “A classic promotion, no doubt.”
The old man and his wife looked at each other, perplexed. “What do you mean by chain, sidi?” Rezzouk asked.
“You don’t know, or you’re pretending not to know?” the cop inquired, a suspicious look in his eyes.
“In the name of Allah, the Most High, I don’t know!” Rezzouk roared.
The cop stared at him, one eyebrow raised, an incredulous sneer on his lips. “I’m not taking the bait,” he muttered under his breath.
“Pardon, sidi?” the old man said. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Come back in an hour!” the cop barked. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a cell phone — a Samsung touch screen, very sophisticated, with a black leather case, worth three thousand dirhams at least — and started playing with it.
Rezzouk and his wife hobbled out the door and crossed the street. It was eight fifteen a.m., and the sun was already beating down hard; it was going to be another hot day in the Red City. The old man found two large squares of cardboard next to a garbage bin. He handed one to his wife.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“Waiting!”
The couple sat down in the shade of a giant eucalyptus tree opposite the station. They had forty-five minutes to kill.
“Isn’t that a call shop over there, on the corner?” his wife asked, her voice trembling.
“How many times do I have to tell you, he isn’t answering his phone!” the old man replied. “Are you deaf, or do you have amnesia?”
Two fat tears formed in the woman’s eyes and pooled there for a moment before streaming down her pale cheeks. She wiped them away with the frayed sleeves of her djellaba. The old man watched her out of the corner of his eye. A moment later he stood up again, as if overcome by remorse or pity, and began walking in the direction of the call shop, fiddling with a piece of paper. His wife watched him until he reached the entrance. May God finally give us a sign of our son’s life, she implored silently, peering up to the sky. Deliver us from this unbearable agony! Two minutes later, the old man returned.
“Well?” she asked him, her gaze fixed on his lips.
The old man sat back down on the square of cardboard. “He isn’t answering his phone,” he sighed, throwing his hands in the air. “For three days I’ve been repeating the same thing to you like a broken record.”
His wife began silently crying again. Chin in his hands, face crumpled, the old man just stared at a random point on the ground, absorbed in shadowy thoughts. If misery were one day to take a human form, it would find none better than this old couple from the medina, seated here in the shade of a giant eucalyptus wholly indifferent to their plight.
Every five minutes, the old man glanced at his digital watch, a gray Casio with a stainless steel band. At nine o’clock sharp he stood up. His wife joined him and they returned to the station.
“Come along!” said the cop at the desk, still in a foul mood.
They followed him down a long corridor that reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The offices they passed all looked the same, like high school classrooms. People stood, waiting in front of the doors, anxious and silent. A few crouched down, their backs to the wall, and others paced around the doorways; a young woman was crying alone in a corner. At the end of the corridor, the cop led them up a staircase covered in tarnished mosaic tiles, faintly lit by a fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. On the upper level he stopped in front of the first office on the right. Chief Hamid Zeghloul, read the nameplate on the door. The officer bent his index finger and gave two light knocks, barely audible. A “Zid!” could be heard from the other side. He went in, touching two fingers to the visor of his cap, and closed the door behind him. Two or three minutes later, he came out again.