“But what did you do? What crime did you commit? They don’t show up in the middle of the night like this except to catch the most dangerous criminals. Tell me, son, what crime are you guilty of? When? Where? Answer me, I beg you.” His questions tumbled over one another while his son remained silent. He got out of bed and took him by the hand. “Tell me what happened, child, so I know what I should do.”
“I’ve committed no crime, Father,” Aziz whispered.
“So what did you do?”
“I dreamed, Father. I only dreamed. I dreamed of clean bread, and a new suit of clothes for everyone on Eid, and notebooks and pens for all the children.”
Bewildered, Mama Aicha was blotting at the tears streaming from her eyes with the hem of her nightgown. She tried to speak, but her words were choked. Aziz pressed his palms to her face, brushed away her tears, and kissed her cheek.
The pounding at the door continued, becoming more violent. Aziz loosened her arms from around his neck. “Don’t be afraid, Mother... Don’t be afraid, Father. I won’t let them get me, I’ll run away.”
The door couldn’t hold out long against their powerful fists. It soon gave way. Four men in black suits stomped across the threshold. Their chief led the way. To Mama Aicha, he looked like a wolf baring its fangs.
He bellowed in a voice like thunder: “Where’s Aziz?”
No answer.
He repeated the question.
No answer.
He made a sign to the others behind him. In the blink of an eye, they spread out through the house, throwing wardrobes to the floor. Clothing scattered everywhere. They dug their claws into the furniture, ripping it open and sending the stuffing flying into the air. Aicha’s tears mixed with the rain pouring down into the open courtyard of the house. She asked herself, What can my son Aziz have hidden in the furniture? How could he hide a weapon when a moth’s death makes him cry?
One of the men returned from Aziz’s room. “We found notebooks decorated with a rising sun, and these are the colored pens that were used to draw them.”
His mother returned to asking questions no one heard: “Drawings... since when is this a crime? And colored pens as well?”
The skinny, mean-faced man who seemed to be their leader ordered them to handcuff the father. They would hold him hostage until the fugitive son surrendered himself. They blindfolded him and threw him into a black car that took off like an arrow.
Mama Aicha tried to leave the house, but the agent who had been left behind to watch her blocked her way.
Time passed slowly. A terrible desperation arose in her chest. The seconds seemed like months, and the hands on the clock did not move. Who would hear the sound of her voice? Was there another mother anywhere on this earth afflicted by such a calamity? Who would bring her news of her son? Of her husband?
She sobbed and sobbed. She wandered aimlessly through the house. She pounded on the walls with both hands and shouted. Perhaps her friend Zahra would hear her. She could shout! This was the first positive thing to come from this ordeal. She had discovered that she possessed a mouth that could raise its voice.
Si Mohammed returned after a two-day absence, which felt like an eternity. He wept bitterly. He didn’t hide his tears from his wife. Mama Aicha cried out when she saw him, and a wail escaped her: “No! No, don’t tell me they got him!”
“Aziz couldn’t escape,” he told her. “They had security forces and spies on every road. I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth, leaving lines on the pavement. He opened his eyes. He saw me struggling desperately to get to him and embrace him, and the guards restraining me as I tried to throw myself on him and take him in my arms, to erase the whip marks on his chest.”
“Did he speak? What did he say to you?”
“He said in a strong voice, Don’t cry, Father. Don’t be sad. I won’t die. I’ll return... I’ll return.”
Mama Aicha waited for the return of her son. The first month passed, then a second and a third. There was no news. She decided to leave the house and track him down on her own.
Her friend Zahra asked her: “Where will you look for him, Aicha, my dear? Neither you nor I know the streets and alleys of Marrakech. Who will help us pick up his trail?”
“I’ll go to the fortune-tellers in Jemaa el-Fnaa. Will you come with me, Zahra? Perhaps one of them can tell us of Aziz’s fate, or point us in the right direction.”
Each woman put on a djellaba and pulled a veil over her face. They headed for Jemaa el-Fnaa Square. Mama Aicha’s steps faltered and she stopped, amazed and confused, in the middle of the square. Loud voices. Music. Singing. Prayers. Curses. Brazen laughter. Dirty words. Bodies pressing against each other in the throng. A male body attached itself to her from behind. My mother pulled her firmly away by the hand and turned toward the tall figure wrapped in an old winter djellaba. Like all the rest of them, he was hiding his face beneath the djellaba’s hood. They came to Jemaa el-Fnaa to rub up against the behinds of women in the crowd. “Goddamn you,” my mother said, uncertainty in her tone. Mama Aicha, for her part, although she was so worried about her son that she could scarcely think about what was happening to her body, was on the verge of collapse from the excessively crowded space and the feelings of shame and humiliation.
They sat down in front of the first fortune-teller they saw. She asked Mama Aicha: “Am I reading your fortune or is there a man in your life whose secrets you need me to tell you?”
“Neither. I only want to know where my son is.”
The fortune-teller looked at her cards for a long time, and then said: “Your son was bewitched by a woman and is lost to you.”
Mama Aicha went to another fortune-teller and the same exchange was repeated with only slight differences. It seemed to the two women that the fortune-tellers of Jemaa el-Fnaa were all programmed to say that women were a source of temptation and evil, and therefore that they would not find the solution they sought here. A woman who had been watching them instructed them to go to a fortune-teller who appealed to a higher power. Her hut was near the shrine of Moul el-Ksour, one of the seven saints of Marrakech. She was famous throughout the city and beyond for the accuracy of her visions. When the woman realized that the two friends did not know where the shrine was, she offered to accompany them.
The fortune-teller was very thin and tall. Her bug-like eyes squinted toward each other, with the pupil on the right swiveling left and the pupil on the left looking right. Were it not for the nose protruding between them, they would have run together to become a single horrible eye. Mama Aicha prayed to God to protect her when she beheld this ugly creature. The woman who had guided them told them that the fortune-teller had once been beautiful and charming, until one day the prince of the jinn noticed her and fell in love with her. He made her deformed so that no other being would desire her. To compensate her for the loss of her womanly beauty, the cost of his selfish love for her, he revealed to her all the secrets of the world beyond, and lifted the veils from her sight.
The fortune-teller asked Mama Aicha why she had come.
“My son has disappeared, ma’am, and I want you to show me the way to him.”
The fortune-teller lit incense and sprinkled the room with rose water. She invoked the names of the kings of the jinn and the righteous among men and uttered other words that they didn’t understand. She reached inside a small cupboard covered with a fine green shawl, and she took from it a wooden box painted with a lustrous yellow coating. Inside it were sand and seashells and agate-colored grains of coral. She placed it in front of her and put her hand in the sand. She moved her lips as though she were reciting something to herself, and her eyes flicked rapidly in opposite directions. A terrible fear crept into the hearts of the two friends when they heard sounds like the echo of cannons emerge from the belly of the fortune-teller, who suddenly opened her cavernous mouth wide and said in a harsh voice: “The cards... the cards. Yes, My Lord, the cards...” She scattered the playing cards in front of her but did nothing to halt the unsettling sound emanating from her abdomen. “Is your son wearing a state uniform?” she asked.