“Why?” we’d ask again.
“Because no one in the whole world knows how to make this kind of silk cloth from a worm except a queen in far-off China. Since she’s a queen, she won’t sell her cloth to anyone but other queens, and for a very high price. Though I’m not a queen or a princess, I want to wear it too. I’ve promised myself that one day I’ll have my own kaftan of organdy silk.”
Every year Mama Aicha gathered the cocoons. And every year she told us about the Chinese queen who owned fields of white mulberry trees. In their branches lived millions of moths, and their cocoons became the silk thread used to make the organdy.
The years passed, and Aziz and I were no longer children. Maybe because we ceased to ask her about the organdy kaftan, Mama Aicha whispered to us once with deep sadness: “I have only a single mulberry tree from which a few larvae feed, and it gives me just a little thread each year. How many years will I have to wait? It won’t suit me to wear this kaftan when I’m old.” She was silent for a moment, and then her face brightened again and she went on: “But anyway, I’ll keep taking care of the mulberry tree and my larvae. If I don’t wear the cloth myself, your wife will wear it, Aziz; and yours, Yusuf.”
She continued to sit on the edge of the planter. She drank her midday tea there once she had finished the housework and fed her son and her husband, after the first had gone to school and the other to his shop in Souk Semmarine. She hummed along with whatever was playing on the radio fastened on a hook above the window grate in her bedroom: the songs of Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Abdelwahab Doukkali, and Naima Samih. She had an angelic voice that poured sweetly from her throat like the breeze in Marrakech at the beginning of spring. Yet no one heard her except the mulberry tree and the birds that came seasonally to hunt the moths or their larvae, and Aziz and I on our days off from school. When the songs on the radio stopped, she would tell us captivating stories about her childhood in her Amazigh village. Stories with which our imaginations would roam to strange and wonderful worlds. When we left her to go study our lessons, she would converse with the mulberry tree instead, talk to it, ask it questions, confess her secrets to it. She told it of her kaftan, which was still not finished. She raised her eyes to the sky, wandering in her thoughts far from the orbit of her domestic space. The sky was closer to her than Jemaa el-Fnaa, which she had never seen. Only its sounds reached her. She listened to them furtively and with a great deal of curiosity, trying to find connections between them and what Aziz and I told her about the square. We were children. We told her about our adventures and our small acts of mischief, about the storytelling circles there, about the singers whose voices were not as fine as Mama Aicha’s, about the fortune-tellers surrounded by sad women, about the famous street performers Bakchich and Tabib el-Hasharat, and the spectacle of the donkey who could read.
We would take a detour from el-Rahba el-Kadima alley toward Derb Dabachi in order to cut through Jemaa el-Fnaa. Then we would take Prince Avenue until we reached the Hotel Tazi, then veer left in the direction of Arset el-Maach. We spent our day at the Ibn el-Banna Middle School. When we returned home in the evening, we always paused for a few minutes at the edge of a storytelling circle that had just formed so that we could bring back fresh tales from the square, embellished by our own imaginations, for Mama Aicha. Our accounts of the square made her happy. She listened to us with bright eyes and asked for more. Once we moved from the middle school in Arset el-Maach to the Mohammed V High School in Bab Ghmat, Jemaa el-Fnaa was no longer the only wellspring of stories for us. Other sources erupted between our adolescent feet, their stories drawn from the sufferings of the Moroccan people and from accounts of popular revolutions. Our new stories were only for us and our comrades at the high school, and at the Arset el-Hamd youth center. For this reason, we hid them from our mothers.
Mama Aicha knew nothing of the world around her beyond her husband, Si Mohammed el-Blaighi, her only son, Aziz, my mother, who was her friend and neighbor, and me. Only a single wall separated our two houses, and even if this wall prevented my mother from going over to her friend’s house to drink a cup of tea with her in the shade of the mulberry tree, it did not stop the two young mothers from communicating. As for Mama Aicha, her feet never crossed the threshold of her own front door. She had not left the house since her husband brought her there as a bride from Souss, a girl of only fifteen.
“A graceful posture and a shapely body like none other. God must have been in a state of the highest pleasure with creation when He made it. I’ve never seen such blue eyes and such long eyelashes in all of Marrakech. Her gaze is soft, suited to a world of refinement and happiness. When I looked at her face for the first time, I thought it was the round disk of the sun itself,” my mother had said when she told my grandmother about her.
Si Mohammed was infatuated with her. He feared the least gust of wind might carry her away. When he left the house, he locked the door with an iron key as thick as the arm of a small child. To keep her from suffering from loneliness in his absence, he brought her first a radio and then the seedling of a tree. As he planted it, he told her about the emperor’s wife who discovered a white worm eating the leaves of her mulberry tree, secreting luminous threads in which to wrap itself as it did so. From them, the emperor’s wife wove an enchanted silk fabric fit only for queens: organdy.
The seedling became a tree. She was pregnant, and the movements of the fetus filled her with dreams and love and wonderment. One spring morning she gave birth to Aziz. When they celebrated the aqiqah afterward, joy radiated from Si Mohammed’s eyes as he served food and drink to the well-wishers. He didn’t lock the door when he went back to his shop afterward. He handed over the key to Aicha. She believed that she was finally free. She was happy because her husband had entrusted her with the key to the house.
Despite all of this, she was content with the warm, calm monotony of her small space. Content with hearing our stories about what happened outside. She never thought about going out.
Her days passed happily, her mind filled with thoughts of her son, her husband, and the mulberry tree. There was nothing to trouble her. She watched as Aziz grew up, and her dreams grew with him. He was a diligent student, and his success in school made her heart brim with pleasure.
One winter night there was a windstorm. It snapped branches off the mulberry tree and ripped flowers from their beds. The earth dissolved into muddy pools beneath the downpour of rain. The family members huddled in their beds, trying to sleep.
Aicha heard the rapping of claws on the door and voices like the howling of wolves in the mountains where she’d spent her childhood. She reached out to her husband sleeping beside her and cried out with all her might: “The wolves are coming for us, Sidi Mohammed!”
Si Mohammed slept on and did not hear her strangled cry.
An apparition of her son appeared before her, trembling as he ran. Behind him, a wolf bared its fangs. She awoke terrified and dripping with sweat. Her husband finally opened his eyes and asked: “Who’s knocking on our door in the middle of the night, and in this storm?”
“Don’t answer them!” Aziz shouted, coming into their room dressed in his winter clothes and sneakers.
“Weren’t you sleeping?” his father asked him in surprise.
“The knocking woke me up. Don’t open the door for them, Father, it’s the police.”
“What?”
“It’s the police. They’ve come to take me away,” Aziz moaned.