As for my uncle Salim, our only connection was through the money my father sent him to support me during the early years of my exile. Family is not a matter of blood, it is a matter of birth and upbringing — I would console myself with this thought when it became clear that my uncle wasn’t going to worry himself about me in a country where sons became adults and took responsibility for themselves as soon as they started university. In Marrakech, where I had come from, sons could have gray hair and they would still be children in the eyes of their parents.
The phone rang again. Be patient, Mother, I can’t answer right now, I’m looking for a way out of this lousy garage that you directed me to. My poor mother. Perhaps she had wanted to come with me to Marrakech. Maybe that was what she’d been hinting at when we spoke yesterday, revealing a sadness that had spread and taken root like a tree in the depths of her eyes. “While you were gone I might as well have been dead,” she’d said. “Aicha was the bosom in which I sought comfort, but in the end, I left her to her tragedies and came to Casablanca to drink from my cup of sorrow alone.”
“But you used to spend school vacations at our house in Marrakech, and the majority of the time you were with her,” I replied.
She looked long and hard at my face, as though trying to find in it remnants of her seventeen-year-old son who had existed once, before he was torn away from the safety of her lap and flung into the dark spaces of a strange country. “That’s right. I couldn’t get used to living here in Casablanca. If the secret police hadn’t made our life miserable after you went abroad, we would never have left our house and relatives and neighbors. Your father wouldn’t have made us move to this noise-infested city.”
The phone continued to ring. I picked it up in one hand while the other kept a grip on the steering wheel. It was Aziz. I pulled over next to the curb. His voice sounded weak but animated, as though he were eager to talk. “Why didn’t you pick up? Were you still asleep? Or is your phone still set to Japanese time?”
“I’m already on the road. I’ll be in Marrakech in three hours,” I told him.
“I’ll be waiting for you at the Argana Café. From there, we’ll go to my mother’s house. We’re having lunch there, as we agreed.”
“I’ll drive as fast as I can so I’m on time for Mama Aicha,” I promised.
“How she cried when you left the country. Your being there by her side during the year before you left lightened the pain of my absence for her.”
How I, too, had cried...
We had promised each other that if either of us were arrested, we would die before we confessed the other’s involvement, so that one of us would remain to take care of our two mothers. Aziz kept his side of the bargain, but I didn’t. He stayed strong and never implicated me, even under torture. I abandoned them both and went abroad.
We were teenagers. My father’s bookshelves had taught me to love literature. Aziz and I would devour the novels that I filched from my father’s library without his permission. Then, at the Arset el-Hamd youth center, we met some other young men our age or a little older who were training themselves to dream — to look ahead to a more just future. They exchanged forbidden Red Books with us. We even joined the leftists in the March 23 movement. It was a secret organization, and we were part of the cell at the high school. There, we began training to dream collectively. This dream had started to grow inside of us when the police raids caught us by surprise.
“You have to leave. You have to give up on your dreams. You have no other choice,” my father had warned me the day he accompanied me to the airport. I’d been aghast. So I would set out alone on a journey into the unknown. A journey without meaning. I endured it as one endures torture. Deep inside me there was a howling, like trapped wolves. I felt like a traitor. I wanted my mother’s hand, wanted her to pass it over my chest, to thaw this cold. I had only this still-bleeding wound to remind me, and the fragrance of a city whose soil I smelled in the color of my own skin. That soil from land reclining upon the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, palm trees held in its embrace. When I was a child, the world as far as I was concerned began and ended there. After I grew up a little, I discovered that Jemaa el-Fnaa Square was the beating heart of the city, and Marrakech was the beating heart of the world. Don’t tourists flock to it from all over the globe, to dance to its songs and sing along under its glittering lights? Don’t they say that Marrakech lavishes a noisy tumult of joy and ecstasy on strangers, while for its sons and daughters it offers only a silent sadness? What is the good humor for which the people of Marrakech are known if not a proud mask concealing the bitterness of their days and the misery of their lives?
Marrakech was slipping away from me. I kept searching in vain for her radiant face in the postcards scattered across my desk and pillow, so that I wouldn’t lose my memory of her, so that I wouldn’t lose the colors of the city, which had begun to fade from my heart and mind. Words flared up inside of me whenever I thought about the organdy, that piece of fine silk cloth I had rushed to buy as a gift for Mama Aicha. The cloth had remained stored away in my cupboard all these years. I’d made a promise to myself and I hadn’t kept it. Marrakech was far away, and the freedom I had dreamed of had gotten tripped up along the way, arriving with its body parts damaged and mutilated.
Aziz and I were born the same year. Mama Aicha had nursed me along with Aziz. We drank the same milk, we studied at the same schools, and we read the same books. Together we dreamed of a cultural revolution that would bring prosperity to our humble families. A revolution that would stay its course until it had granted dignity to all the children of this nation. Mama Aicha’s home was next to ours, at the entrance of el-Rahba el-Kadima alley, only a few steps from Jemaa el-Fnaa. It was a beautiful house, overflowing with life. Pots of chrysanthemums, narcissus, jasmine, and crocus clustered along the walls of its interior courtyard, and basil and lavender spilled from trellises across the tiled floors.
In the middle of the courtyard was a large planter box that held a towering mulberry tree whose branches shaded the entire area. Toward the end of winter, the tree filled with magnificently colored migratory moths whose wings made a rustling sound like the ethereal music of sacred temples. As small children, Aziz and I would watch them for hours on end, and we were tempted to try to catch them so that we could keep listening to the music of their wings in private, while we read or studied our lessons. But Mama Aicha was always there to stop us from getting too close to them.
“These moths are going to lay eggs, and from their eggs hundreds of larvae will come out, and they will make cocoons,” she’d tell us.
Every time she repeated this our jaws would drop in amazement. She would laugh and explain to us each time how the larva was the silkworm and the cocoon was the ball of silk.
We would ask her: “Why won’t you let us play with the balls of silk?”
And every time she would answer: “Because I’m going to turn them into thread, and from this thread I’ll weave a purple cloth called organdy, to make a kaftan so fine that only a princess or a queen would wear one like it.”