We can divide the youth of Hay el-Massira into two types: the locals and the newcomers. The latter are the ones who came to live in the neighborhood from the Old Medina, and who retain deep links to their original neighborhoods. Their families and childhood friends still live there, and it is normal that they stay in touch with them. As for the locals, they are the true neighborhood people, born and raised there in the late eighties and nineties. They only know Hay el-Massira. Some of the locals may leave their neighborhood for Daoudiate, where Cadi Ayyad University is, or Gueliz, where the cafés, restaurants, hotels, bars, and cinemas are, but they always return to the warm bosom of Hay el-Massira, while their experience of al-Moravid, al-Mohad, and al-Saadi Marrakech remains quite limited. They are not the crazy tourists who go to Jemaa el-Fnaa to take pictures of monkeys and snakes.
This time you have no choice, Qamar ad-Dine. You have to go. You need to be on-site to follow the last episode of the series. You have to be in the heart of the event.
Qamar ad-Dine arrives before ten. He crosses the huge Arset el-Bilk. The barouches are lined up next to the garden in perfect order, even the horses are well disciplined, calm, and barely moving. Maybe they anticipated a long day of wandering the streets of Marrakech, so they are saving their energy. The barouches’ owners are crowded in small groups around teapots and small plates of bissara, dried fava bean soup with olive oil. Qamar ad-Dine crosses the square, which is still empty of visitors and entertainers. He orders orange juice from one of the carts spread around its perimeter. The juice refreshes him. He walks around for a while, then goes up to the Argana Café. He orders a cup of coffee and he lingers upstairs, surveying the square from above. White clothes are not strange on Fridays. That is why Qamar ad-Dine doesn’t notice Abu Qatadah at first. But when hysterical screaming breaks out in the heart of the square, as people crowd around a crazy person brandishing the Koran and a wooden sword while shouting, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!” and threatening the enemies of God as infidels and hypocrites, Qamar ad-Dine rises to his feet as if he has been stung by a snake. He forgets to pay for his coffee. He runs downstairs and into the square to take a photo of his hero — no, Qamar ad-Dine, this is not the Mahjoub Didi you know. He has lost a lot of weight and his face looks stressed and pale, as if he hasn’t slept in days. The man is truly crazy, his eyes cloudy and distant, staring at the people in front of him without seeing them. “God is great!” he repeats, before continuing to rant and rave. Qamar ad-Dine distinguishes the words God the Almighty, Gabriel, Michael, and angel 8,723. Mahjoub announces the angel’s number in French as if he were talking to his colleagues at work about an electricity or water meter. No, Qamar ad-Dine, the man has gone far beyond the role you laid out for him.
Qamar ad-Dine panics. He wants to punish Mahjoub for his defamation with this trick. Perhaps pull his ear — no more and no less — but the man has lost it, Qamar ad-Dine. The man has lost it.
The police surround the square. It’s difficult to disperse the crowd. Visitors are enjoying the show, entertainment being the reason they come here in the morning and evening in the first place. And this is exceptional entertainment, unmatched by any of the halqas of dancers and storytellers. Fresh like the orange juice one gets from the carts around the square. Two journalists show up and begin to take pictures of the crazy man as he is arrested.
When Qamar ad-Dine walks past el-Massira Mosque on his way to the cybercafé, he hears Mr. Belafqih deliver the sermon. His brain is frazzled and he doesn’t pay it any attention. He thinks, They are all there listening in reverence: al-Sayouti, the teachers of Lycée Zerktouni, and Salim, who goes to the mosque only on Fridays. But Mahjoub Didi was not among them. For the first time Abu Qatadah has missed Friday prayer in the neighborhood mosque.
A tear runs down Qamar ad-Dine’s cheek. He thinks about going into the mosque to pray and seek forgiveness from God, but he can’t. So he proceeds toward the cybercafé. His face is pale and he feels weary. He tries to ignore everyone inside and bury himself in the first available PC. But the entire gang is there, crowded around one computer. Even the three Africans are among them.
“Come here, Qamar ad-Dine,” Samira calls out. “Come see the scandal!”
They are gathered around Rahal, watching a live video on Marrakech Press: a crazy Salafi is assaulting Jemaa el-Fnaa and terrorizing the tourists.
Translated from Arabic by Mbarek Sryfi
A Twisted Soul
by Karima Nadir
Amerchich
I don’t really know if I discovered life’s pleasures early on. Certainly I found the route to death ahead of time. I smoked my first cigarette on the roof of my friend Latifa’s house. We used to call her M’kirita, after the small cake glazed in honey, because she was so tiny for her age, with her pale chestnut hair and her hazelnut eyes. She lived in Mellah and was three years older than me; I was fourteen then. We bought five Marlboros, glancing around the whole time to make sure we hadn’t been spotted, and went up to the roof. It was autumn. We hid ourselves in an isolated corner and smoked, keeping keen eyes on the front door from above, so that we’d see when Latifa’s mother came home. The first drag of that first cigarette tasted like victory; of whom, over whom, I don’t know.
A year later, in the same corner, we smoked a joint I’d been given by my comrade Fattah. He was an undergraduate and I was a freshman in high school. After smoking half of it we stretched out on our backs, Latifa and I on the roof, laughing at anything and everything — until the laughter broke its hold over us a little and we let it go. We were writhing and squirming as though the very rays of the sun were tickling us. I didn’t become a true smoker until after I gave birth, but from the first time I tried hash I experienced a profound kind of pleasure. Later I would smoke what Fattah gave me in installments: making, for every two drags, an attempt at poetry.
My son Selim, who is now seven years old, lives in Marrakech. I had him out of wedlock and in, so I thought, love. His father was a leftist — I adored his idealism: dreams of revolution, the cares of the proletariat, the Palestinian question, Guevara. I was a law school student back then, and had joined an organization on the far left. And since I loved poetry and literature and music, I turned easily into a dense bundle of romantic revolutionary attitudes. A year and a half into our relationship, I discovered I was pregnant. That revolutionary romance rendered abortion impossible: if I stole the right of this creature to life, I could never return to all those slogans I had recited so proudly, to myself and others, like sacred texts. I didn’t expect my partisan to evade his part of the responsibility — not he, who preached life as unending struggle! I had believed that in accordance with the ethics of the revolutionary, he would take a position of immediate gallantry. Instead he made it clear, over the phone, that this could not happen. He was not sure, indeed — he who mere seconds before had been glorifying my loyalty as his comrade — that he even had anything to do with my pregnancy, and said that I should call the real father. I resolved without hesitation to consider him dead. I would preserve his life for his successor.
One doesn’t picture a woman of nineteen carrying a child. She hides it away, after all, in her womb from her powerful mother, her conservative grandmother, in a society governed more by custom than law. All that matters is: What will the neighbors say? Hashouma! Shame! Still, I confronted my mother with it, but only after the end of the sixth month of a pregnancy that had been almost invisible. My body had barely changed and there was no sign of that telltale round belly below my breasts. I told my mother, and I convinced my sister, that I was prepared for everything required to raise a child. I made them both understand that if they tried to dissuade me, I would leave home at once and take refuge with a friend.