A silence fell over the creature again. None of the policemen dared to prod him, for they knew that the man before them was searching for his words, grasping for the power of speech he’d nearly lost after keeping his silence for so long.
Finally he spoke: “A woman and two men came to the cemetery in the middle of the night. Twice. They dug up a dead body and put it back in its rightful place. Then, the next night, they came back to the same grave, and under the full moon they exhumed the body and buried it again.”
His interrogators froze. They were certain that what they’d just heard was true: experience had taught them to read the truth in the faces of witnesses. But they couldn’t see the connection between this story and the death of their colleague.
“Let’s suppose that what you say is true. But what about Inspector Chaloula? You haven’t told us about that yet,” the chief said abruptly, hoping to catch the vagabond by surprise.
“Who’s Inspector Chaloula? I don’t know him, I’ve never even heard of him.”
“Chaloula is the man you killed before you disappeared.”
“I didn’t kill anyone, I’ve never killed anyone, it’s the others who’ve killed me many times over,” the vagabond asserted.
“And the bones that disappeared from the cemetery?”
“I buried them. Those who are in the ground should stay there,” the man added before retreating back into his silence and refusing to answer any more questions.
The chief gave the order to put the poor devil in preventive detention. He called in several other eyewitnesses to the inspector’s death, all of whom claimed that they’d never seen the vagabond, and that Chaloula had been walking alone when he’d suffered his fatal attack.
The results of the autopsy put the chief to a new test; it seemed his colleague had been poisoned.
After he’d briefed the squad, they decided it would be wise to go back and trace Chaloula’s movements on that fateful day. They learned that he’d had breakfast and lunch at home and a black coffee at work. And so they procured some of the coffee beans from his office and sent them to a lab that confirmed they were of good quality and contained no harmful chemicals. Then they called in Chaloula’s wife, who was still in mourning and barely able to respond to the interrogators’ questions. Although they knew her well, they didn’t spare her the discomfort of testifying. She described the meals she’d prepared for her husband that day, which the whole family had eaten. But the chief noticed that each time the word poisoned was spoken, the widow’s face went ashen and her lips trembled uncontrollably. He decided to risk everything and ask his next question with utter conviction.
“Why did you kill your husband?”
Those few words were all it took to make Chaloula’s wife burst into tears. She explained between sobs that an old woman, a charlatan, had sold her a fruit jelly that had spent the night in the mouth of a dead man. It was supposed to make her husband docile, incapable of raising his voice. She could then do with him as she pleased — that was how the old woman had explained it.
They brought in this charlatan who, seeing the widow’s tears, confessed her crime.
It turned out that the dead man in whose mouth the jelly had spent the night was a snake charmer. He’d forgotten to remove the pit viper’s venom gland after capturing it, and as he was putting it into a basket he carried on his back, the serpent took advantage of a moment’s distraction to sink its fangs into the man’s neck.
Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef
An E-mail from the Sky
by Yassin Adnan
Hay el-Massira
Ashbal al-Atlas Cybercafé: the name is so beautiful — the Atlas Lion Cubs. An extremely successful name. It is true there are no more lions or tigers in the Atlas Mountains near Marrakech, but there are still monkeys. Monkey and boars, as well as some wolves. It’s all right. The name is only a metaphor. A metaphorical name for a virtual space. The café is very spacious, Rahal. Not like the other narrow téléboutiques where you buried dozens of years of your life. Since you obtained your BA in Arabic literature from Cadi Ayyad University in 1994 you have tried, in vain, to join L’Ecole Normale Supérieure for teachers. The results are announced at the beginning of October and your name is never among the successful. And, like a mouse, you retreat to your corner in the téléboutique to eavesdrop on the lives of others from behind your old wooden desk.
“Hello, Fatima.”
“Hello, Lhaj.”
“Hello, Lhajjah.”
“Hello, cutie.”
“Hi, love.”
“Hello. Hello! Hello? You hung up on me, you bitch. Wait until I get my hands on you! Wait and see.”
Endless conversations. You provide coins for the customers, as you enjoy spying on their conversations and lives. But things began to change. With cell phones, the customers waned and the téléboutique income deteriorated, and life in this small place became boring. Things have gotten better now. The space has more potential than what you had been dreaming about. The screens now spread all around this place you have built, Rahal. The new mission you have been engaged in is to open doors for your customers on their midnight journeys to a refuge, toward morning lights and ports of virtual blue ether — a mission filling your heart with great pride.
Congratulations! Computers crammed deep to allow the customers to navigate, spellbound, to the screens anchored to the walls. Rahal, you’re able to spy on them all from your own computer. You are the only one with your back to the wall, so you can control the room and watch what goes on. And whenever you get tired of spying on the screens of others, you find your private computer in front of you. You can open your Hotmail account and up pops your happy virtual life, just like those of your customers. Life is better on the Internet, Rahal. Life is more beautiful and bright.
New cybercafés have proliferated along Dakhla Avenue and all over the streets of Hay el-Massira, an area that the government launched as a huge residential project in the mideighties. In the beginning, they were intended as houses for the middle class. Later, more economical apartment buildings spread like mushrooms — instead of the green spaces that were planned — bringing a great number of low-level employees before el-Massira was able to assimilate people from the neighboring villages. Provincial villages whose inhabitants practiced agriculture and shepherding in the lands west of Marrakech alongside the road to Essaouira. The lands that were turned into subdivisions and housing developments. Restructuring projects will eventually succeed in integrating these small villages whose children have mixed with those of the middle-class employees at Lycée Zerktouni to become, in turn, the “kids of the sector.” These kids are so proud of belonging to Hay el-Massira and patronizing the cybercafés on Dakhla Avenue.
Customers come and go. But a small group slowly begins to form around Rahal. Salim, a high school student spellbound by the new virtual world, has two e-mail accounts so far: a Hotmail and a Yahoo. He sometimes comes with his father and at other times with his little sister Lamya. Salim was the first to point out to Rahal that he should have a printer. He always looks for new sources of information on the Internet and needs to print his findings daily, which he uses to brag to his friends at school.
Samira and Fadoua always arrive, sit, and leave together. Their specialty: chat rooms. Together they merge into one virtual personality. They love to chat with young men in Arabic, French, and English. Their handle: Marrakech Star. Two in one: like shampoo and conditioner. Qamar ad-Dine al-Sayouti picks on them whenever they show up at the café. Qamar ad-Dine, the son of Shihab ad-Dine al-Sayouti, the most famous of Islamic education teachers at Lycée Zerktouni, and the one the students tell the most jokes about.