“Enough, we’re finished. We’ve reached the end of our rope. Throw away my number and we’ll both go our own ways.”
For the first time in her life, Noura — who’d lost her father when she was a child — felt the injustice of Bilal shunning her true love for him. Sleep avoided her. She could no longer stand chatting with her mother as she had before. She started spending more time in her room, which was decorated with pictures of Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, and 5 °Cent. She had been infatuated since her earliest days with work by black artists. Her passion for the songs of Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Rihanna led her to study English literature in college. She would stand for hours in front of the mirror, putting on makeup and swinging to the rhythm of the music before school, comfortable with her own style and nonconformist tastes. Her mother never understood how she could waste all that time in front of the mirror and leave with hair wild as a bird’s nest. Noura loved to toss locks of her hair in every direction. She would put a lot of effort into fixing her unruly hair with gel so it would stay beautifully chaotic throughout the day. She wore baggy clothes in bright colors, very fitting for a twenty-one-year-old. Noura would buy used clothing from the Sidi Maimoun market. She got pleasure in not being ordinary, searching for clothing not from the best brands, but found in secondhand stores that suited her limited university scholarship.
No one knew how Hay Saada, in Gueliz on the road to Casablanca, had turned into a fortress for immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. This neighborhood was relatively modern, and it developed faster than anyone could have imagined. Within ten years the first apartments were put up for sale for around 200,000 dirhams. They were cheap apartments, despite this surge in development, yet the real estate developers didn’t target the vulnerable groups or low-income communities there. The important thing was that they found buyers willing to put up 50,000 dirhams under the table. And with this the door was opened to real estate speculators, as well as smaller local buyers who relied on renting out rooms in their apartments to supplement their incomes and improve their living conditions. This drew admirers of Marrakech — most of them from Casablanca — who looked for ways to spend the weekends and holidays in the Red City.
Perhaps that is what made the neighborhood, first and foremost, a magnet for prostitutes who could find new apartments for reasonable prices. Then, because it was a new neighborhood, no one knew anyone there, and no one was interested in anyone else’s business. So it was possible for girls coming from the neighboring cities and villages, claiming that they worked in hotels or for textile companies or plastics factories in the industrial area nearby, to live their illicit lives without question. Other apartments were set up entirely for faire l’amour — this was the neighborhood where tourists from around Morocco would go to seek sexual gratification at affordable prices, worlds apart from the exorbitant riads and expensive Gueliz apartments that the Gulf and European tourists monopolized.
Bilal’s store, where he sold cell phone accessories, was on the ground floor of his building, directly below his apartment. On the other side of the building’s entrance was Afro Beauty, the salon of the sensuous and alluring Fatimata al-Rasta.
Though unlicensed, the salon grew gradually until it extended onto the pavement. Fatimata found female associates, experts in weaving and braiding hair, for her clientele from sub-Saharan Africa. And they weren’t shy about flashing their private parts to passersby to generate additional business. For Fatimata, it was a salon and a shelter — two in one. She didn’t compete with the other beauty salons that spread like fungus throughout Hay Saada — salons filled nightly with restless girls who wouldn’t leave for a festive night on the town until they had been fully made up. Fatimata decided, after establishing the place, that she would offer her experience in the service of her countrywomen. Not to mention she was the only one on the street who opened her salon first thing in the morning.
Bilal lived with his mother in a corner apartment on the first floor. There were seven other apartments on their floor. Across the hall lived Hafidh, a young employee of the textile company, together with his veiled wife Badia and their two kids, Anis and Nada. He was a quiet and solitary man who didn’t interact with the neighbors. Sometimes he climbed up the stairs talking on the phone in fluent French, his voice low like a whisper, as if this embarrassed him. He always walked right alongside the wall. Hafidh had a feeling that his presence in the building was an accident. He treated the apartment like a tomb. With his small family, he would spend the weekends at his mother’s in the Sidi Ghanem neighborhood, not far from the grave of Abu al-Abbas al-Sabati, guardian of the city and the most famous of its seven great men. Completely different was Tamou’s apartment, a perpetual screaming factory. Her apartment door was always open, and Tamou was never concerned about transforming the building’s hallway into an extension of her kitchen. She had five boys, all close in age, as if she had pushed them all out at once. The youngest one traveled to Syria to be an Islamist mujahid immediately after his release from prison, where he had spent a full year for an attempted rape. There in the haven of the East, he had all the Christian, Alawi, and Kurdish women he could desire to practice his beastly arts on, while waiting for his dark-eyed virgins in paradise — unless his faith proved unworthy. As for the two oldest brothers, Majid and Chakib, they didn’t communicate with anyone in the building except their mother. They worked together selling odds and ends. Only their car, a black Renault Kangoo, announced their presence at home. Meanwhile, Farid and Said would simply loiter all day in front of the building. An idleness that bothered Bilal, who, despite himself, was their friend.
The next apartment was occupied by Igor and Irina, a young married couple from Poland who both worked in a casino. Every night at seven thirty, the company car would pick them up in their elegant work clothes. Irina’s skirt was carefully cut to expose her thighs to the gluttonous eyes inside that lustful club, eyes that would later fantasize about the rest of her body. Outside of these brief moments when Irina spread happiness among the misery of Hay Saada, one could hardly find a trace of them. In the wee hours of the morning only the sounds of the car could be heard, in order to sneak the blond Pole into her resting place. When Igor went shopping by himself at Marjan Supermarket just outside Hay Saada, he carried all the goods in a taxi, avoiding contact with the neighborhood grocers and other locals.
To the left of the stairs was an apartment crowded with young men from Mali. It was barely noticeable to someone passing through the building. In front of it was Naima’s apartment. She slept all day, and under the cover of darkness she would go out fully made up into the sleepless nights of Marrakech. She had initially come from Safi to work in a massage parlor in Hay Saada. But she quickly discovered that the clients wouldn’t relax at the end of a session until their main limb was massaged, in exchange for a generous tip. She soon left the parlor to be free to massage that privileged organ on her own time. Naima the Masseuse — that’s what the neighbors starting calling her. Until one day they woke up to her screams. She had allowed a drunken client into her home and he had proceeded to beat her with his shoe. He struck her across the face, drawing blood. He dragged her around cruelly by her hair. A rational person wouldn’t have believed how violent he had become given how intimate they had been just moments before. He claimed that she had taken advantage of him and stolen his money while he was in the bathroom. This was when Farid and Said had pulled him away from Naima. After this, however, she wasn’t able to escape her new nickname: Naima the Whore.