“That’s tomorrow!” she exclaimed.
They didn’t sleep that night. They went into the kitchen together and prepared Aziz’s favorite dish: tharid with chicken, onion, and raisins. They went to the wardrobe and selected some of his favorite clothes: his light summer shirt, a new pair of jeans which he’d worn only once or twice before his arrest, clean underwear, and his Adidas sneakers. Before dawn they were at the train station.
They arrived at the prison early in the morning and stood in the line of families which stretched along the whole length of the massive wall, waiting to be called to enter the visiting room. As the hours passed, Mama Aicha counted each second. She kept her eyes fixed on the mouth of the guard, following the movement of his lips with rapt attention, afraid that he would speak their names and they wouldn’t hear him. She was assailed by anxiety that the workday would end before they would be allowed to visit. Finally they reached the visiting room. She stuck her head between the bars on the outer window to search with her own eyes for the face of her son among the nearly identical heads behind the second window. Shaved heads, sallow faces that showed their bones, bulging eyes. Before she was able to speak to her son, the screen was lowered and the visit came to an end. She pounded her fist against the window and shouted with all her might: “I’m not leaving this room! I didn’t see my son and I didn’t speak to him!”
Her anger was contagious, spreading to the other remaining families so that they, too, refused to leave in protest of the shortness of the visiting time. Ten minutes was barely enough time to raise the screen and lower it again. The whole prison mobilized to deal with this emergency. The administrators bargained with the families, but they would not accept; they threatened the families, to no avail. A SWAT team surrounded the visiting room to force the families out at gunpoint. They arrested some of the fathers and forbade the rest of those waiting in line from visiting again. Immediately after that, the prisoners announced an indefinite hunger strike, demanding that the conditions of the prison be improved and the date for a trial be set.
The women resolved that the men should stay out of any active confrontations. They could watch from afar and help with communications. Mama Aicha went out into the streets, joining hands with mothers and wives advocating for the improvement of prison conditions and the acceleration of the announcement of a court date. They staged a sit-in at the Ministry of Justice. They forced their way into the meetings of political parties. They pressured their leaders to end their silence. They brought petitions and proclamations to the newspapers. They went to the colleges and universities to inform the students about the plight of their imprisoned sons.
A few of the prisoners were released to ease some of the tension. Then the trial came. The sentences ranged from five years to life. Aziz’s lot was twenty years in jail. After this, the prisoners launched another hunger strike, protesting the even worse conditions of the prison to which they were moved after the trial.
Mama Aicha’s house in el-Rahba el-Kadima alley became a regular meeting place for the mothers and wives of those imprisoned, where they strategized and planned counterattacks that would expose jails and jailers alike. In her small house in the heart of ancient Marrakech, a plan was formed to occupy Assounna Mosque, the largest mosque in the capital of Rabat. They staged a sit-in there one Friday immediately after prayers.
They made another plan to go to the Faculty of Literature in Rabat, and so they went. The students there joined forces with them in a demonstration the likes of which Mohammed V University had not seen since the Moroccan Student Union was banned. In Aicha’s house, they made signs to carry during the May Day marches. They raised their voices high to expose the truth about the prisoners of conscience who were denied the right to education and medical care. They camped out at the Ministry of Justice and the minister met with them. He made them promises that the demands of the prisoners would be met, and a committee traveled from his ministry to the prison to negotiate with the inmates to end the strike. The demands were met, but the sacrifices were great. All of them emerged from the forty-day strike as thin as skeletons. A young man from Marrakech named Selim el-Mnabhi had died during the strike. Mama Aicha was right there alongside her comrade Umm Fkhita, the mother of the martyred Selim, as she prepared to receive the corpse and carry out the burial according to custom. They held a martyr’s funeral — Selim’s funeral — a funeral in which old and young marched together, men and women. Leftist activists from every Moroccan city were in attendance, walking beside the two mothers, Fkhita and Mama Aicha, in a funeral that was unique in all the history of Marrakech.
The phone rang. It was Aziz.
“Hi, Aziz. I’ve arrived, my friend. I’m in Jemaa el-Fnaa now. I just parked my car. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
I wandered around the café looking for Aziz, but I didn’t see him. I stopped in the middle of the room and dialed his number, only to have his voice speak to me from a table right beside me. I saw an old man with haggard features and white hair searching my face as he tried to smile. But I didn’t know him. I approached him to ask him about Aziz. Maybe this was a friend of his. Maybe Aziz was in the bathroom and he would return in a moment. Instead, the old man raised his cloudy eyes to my face and addressed me by name: “At long last, Josef.” As he said this, he attempted to rise to embrace me. “At last.”
Damn! It was him. He used to address me as Comrade Josef, and I would call him Azizovitch.
“You didn’t recognize me, Yusuf? I’ve changed that much?”
What? Changed? You’re a completely different person, my friend. A person I don’t know. A different face. Features I don’t recognize. Only the voice still resembles the old Aziz, I thought. “What did they do to you, my friend, during all those years you spent in prison?”
“I don’t remember anymore, Yusuf,” he whispered. “I don’t remember anything. I don’t like to remember. Nothing makes me suffer now except the pain that my condition causes my mother and father when they see death creeping slowly over my body. If you only knew how hard Mama Aicha fought to get me out alive, Josef. Yes, if only you knew.”
“I do know, my friend. My mother told me all about Mama Aicha’s determination, alongside the mothers and wives of the other political prisoners. How they pressured the regime and embarrassed it in front of the international community before they were able to wring out a blanket pardon for their sons and husbands. Mama Aicha and her companions were behind many changes that this country has seen. When I was in Japan, I used to follow the news from here almost daily, before the Internet — and after. The justice-and-reconciliation initiative that brought about your release, along with the adoption of guidelines for making financial reparations to former detainees — this is what opened the airports and the borders to us.” I was proud that something good had come out of the tragedy. “But I didn’t come back right away. It was as though I was afraid of seeing you — all of you. I dreaded the moment when my eyes would meet yours. You especially, comrade.”
“Oh, my friend... whatever was in my eyes has been extinguished forever. You have nothing to fear from them. Forget your friend Aziz. He’s only a ghost now. Let’s go see your second mother, Aicha. She’s waiting for us with a seven-vegetable couscous she made in your honor.”