The next morning, as usual, we started the day by picking jujubes. We were hard at work when a friend came by to tell us that the bones we’d recently collected in the crater had disappeared. We stared at each other in silence. Cinema el-Hilal was directly opposite the Bab Ghmat Cemetery. We of course assumed the film must somehow be connected to the disappearance of the bones. Had they been cobbled together, like Dr. Frankenstein’s body parts, to form a single being? Or was it the monster who had climbed the wall to seek shelter in the necropolis? Did he feed on human bones? A thousand questions flashed through our minds, distracting us from the work we’d begun.
“Look! Look!” a fearful voice cried out. An arm pointed to a large creature, seemingly human, but of exaggerated proportions. He was tall and very thin, with a tuft of hair at the top of his head, and dressed all in rags — mostly old djellabas whose tattered ends flapped behind him like wings. Slowly but surely the heavy footsteps approached us. At this hour, the cemetery was usually empty. Neither gravediggers nor the tolba — the Koranic scholars who come to recite verses to soothe the souls of the dead — ever show any sign of life before nine o’clock. We knew them all, for that matter, and by their first names. And so the creature there among the dead, on that morning, was a stranger. The moment we realized this, we ran out from the shade of the jujube trees like a flock of wild birds chased by a predator. We took off toward the exit, paying no attention to the graves we trampled over, nor to the thorny plants that scratched our ankles. We left our harvest behind us, abandoning the only place where we felt truly at ease.
We described what we’d witnessed to all the children in the neighborhood, connecting it to Frankenstein. A few of them who hadn’t yet seen the film climbed the cemetery wall to get a look for themselves before returning glassy-eyed, pale, barely able to nod to confirm the existence of this bizarre creature who resembled a human yet wasn’t quite one.
Over the next few days, the news quickly spread throughout Sidi Youssef Ben Ali. Our parents were the first to voice their concerns. They were afraid for us, yes, but also worried that they might be deprived of our necessary help. We’d been out of work since the incident: the cemetery, our training ground in the jujube business, was now off-limits. We no longer dared set foot in that earthly paradise, not at any time of day or night. Not one of us was capable of facing the terror that took hold as soon as we thought of it. We kept visiting the saint every day, we prayed for him to set us free from the monster, but we would return home with empty pockets. We weren’t yet old enough to sell candles, or to bring little children down to the cellar near the saint’s tomb; at our age, selling jujubes was the only job we could do.
The adults in the neighborhood were growing increasingly concerned about the monster’s presence. One of the gravediggers claimed to have seen a bizarre creature in the cemetery that spoke to no one and hid there all day long. We wondered what he ate, how he survived, how he spent all those hours in this place of absolute rest.
“We can’t keep our children away from there forever,” the parents agreed. And so they went to the district’s police chief to report the existence of a creature in the neighborhood, an inhuman creature — Frankenstein’s monster. They didn’t dare say the name, even if some were sure of it, for fear of being mocked.
The police chief reassured our parents, promising them to put Inspector Chaloula on the case. Everyone in the neighborhood feared Chaloula. He knew all of us, right down to the ants that circulated in his territory, and even then he could tell the males from the females. When Chaloula was in charge of a case, he refused to sleep until it was solved. Our parents were satisfied, for they knew very well what Chaloula was capable of. The inspector was glad too, as he sensed this case would bring his reputation up another notch. But no one could have predicted what happened next.
Once he’d been briefed on his new mission, Chaloula went home to lunch. His plan was to have his squad burst into the cemetery early the next morning; this way, they would surprise the creature in his sleep. But around two o’clock, as he was walking along the cemetery wall on his way back to work, Chaloula doubled over as if he’d been shot. A few people saw and ran to help him, trying to pry his hands from his stomach and wipe away the foam coming out of his mouth as if he were a rabid dog, but their efforts were in vain. His soul had left his body to join the others behind the wall, his bulging eyes fixed on the necropolis.
The mysterious death of Chaloula terrorized the entire neighborhood, not to mention the police chief, who felt his own end approaching. He spent the whole night awake, tossing and turning, horrible images flashing through his mind. He no longer feared for himself but for his children; he was tormented by the thought that some harm would come to them.
The next day, before Chaloula’s burial, the chief brought his entire unit together, including the sentinel, and, like a swarm of bees, they invaded the cemetery. They looked behind every gravestone and up every tree, left no crater unexplored, no bush undisturbed, but it was no use — the monster had vanished.
One by one the chief called us into his office, all of us kids who’d seen the strange creature, and asked us to tell him about it. We all related the same story and described the creature in the same manner. He was able to accept that our monster was more than two meters tall — but that he’d escaped from behind the screen at el-Hilal cinema to go live in the Bab Ghmat Cemetery, or that he was somehow made from the bones we’d collected in the crater, seemed highly improbable to him. And yet, something in him began turning toward a supernatural explanation. He was Moroccan, after all, and he couldn’t shake off what he’d been taught from a young age: that the magical and the rational can and do coexist in our world.
While he was investigating Chaloula’s death, the chief got word that a strange creature had been seen in Bab er-Robb, the cemetery where Imam Abderahim Souhaili, one of the seven saints of the city, is buried. The description of this creature was nearly identical to the one we had given. And so the chief, escorted by two of his most trusted officers, rushed over to Bab er-Robb to arrest Frankenstein’s monster.
This wasn’t an easy affair. The demon resisted, kicking and throwing punches in all directions. He was so agile that, for a moment, the chief thought he might actually have a supernatural being on his hands. But the men were finally able to corner him, get him into the car, and drive him to the Sidi Youssef Ben Ali station.
As it turned out, this so-called monster was only a poor vagabond. A man who’d been so disappointed by the living that he now preferred the company of the dead.
“What’s your name?” the chief asked, his tone forceful.
“I forgot my name and I don’t want to remember it,” the creature replied, staring at an invisible point on the station’s wall.
“Why do you live in cemeteries?”
“No one bothers you in the kingdom of the dead,” the creature said.
The policemen soon learned that the monster survived on plants and the few animals he managed to catch in the necropolis. To him, all animals were good to eat: dogs, cats, birds. When asked why he’d left the Bab Ghmat Cemetery, he replied after a long silence — a silence that clearly irritated his listeners — that the living had come there to disturb the dead, and he didn’t like that. He thought the living should mind their own business.
The chief felt his blood boiling in his veins. He wanted to give this fool a good hard smack for daring to mock them, but managed to restrain himself for fear of losing precious ground in his investigation. “Explain to us what you’ve just said,” he demanded.