That was when the worm awakened and whispered in his ear: Do you want to ruin your health for the sake of this race? Do you want your son to grow up as a Christian while all his ancestors, as far back as Abraham, carry the Qur’an in their hearts? Do you want to let the Sherifs humiliate the remaining members of your tribe? Do you want the city that contains relics of the prophets to become a den of sodomites, drug addicts and beggars?
The worm kept on whispering to him, day after day, and Al-Firsiwi put his trust in God and organised his reverse immigration. Diotima, who had kept the notebook of her grandfather who participated in Walili’s excavations with other German prisoners, also embraced the worm.
There they were, my friend, in the vastness of the zawiya, climbing from the courtyard of the tomb in the inner market to the courtyard of Khaybar where the municipal office was located. They went from one to the other, writing contracts, training brokers, bribing the weak and distracting the malicious.
Diotima embraced the new place like a forsaken paradise, sleeping with her grandfather’s secrets near the earth that he turned with his fingers, quietly cajoling the buried secrets, as if he had never crawled on his stomach in combat. Diotima wanted to take root in the blue mountain, and nurtured institutions in the city to help women, vaccinate children, improve education for girls and raise health awareness. She would go to the nearby villages and spend all her day visiting clusters of houses, where the inhabitants slept with their cows and goats and defecated behind their brick ovens while dogs and giant rats stole away the still-warm excrement from under them. There she supported projects for waste processing, fighting epidemics, treating spring water, collecting plastic and preserving the region’s orchards. Year after year, projects were born and died: new goat stock would arrive from the Iberian Peninsula, solar energy from charitable organisations in Germany, compost pits for waste that decomposed naturally. No matter who benefited, no matter who vandalised, no matter who resisted, Diotima failed to understand that this land would never accept the transplantation of her roots.
Finally she gave up and sat cross-legged on the throne in the reception hall of the Zaytoun Hotel, succumbing to a crushing sadness that erased all signs of benevolence from her face. The ardour she had lavished on the geography of the place, its produce and its crippled people had not provided her with so much as one drop of human affection. Whether recipients of her bounty or not, not a single heart held a trace of fondness, gratitude, recognition or appreciation for her. She was rowing upstream in a river of disgust and hatred that people expressed in various ways, from turning their heads away to invoking God’s help. Even when she was helping the civil protection teams in the city during the campaign to cure the pox that had spread in the region, some of the afflicted deliberately shook hands with her with excessive warmth, having scratched their skin for hours until their fingers and nails were covered with pus and scabs, in the hope of seeing this Christian woman contaminated. Whenever they saw her safe and healthy, mixing the powder with water and helping to treat the women, their anger grew, and they poured all their rage on the Germanic race that had produced both exceptionally resistant human beings and steel.
Even Al-Firsiwi, who revealed a kind of human purity that was almost romantic at the beginning of his relationship with Diotima, very quickly lost that purity as he pursued deals and projects, and planned tricks for the honest people and their allies. He would comment on the matter whenever he saw pity in his wife’s eyes for the spite that had being growing within him for ages. ‘Don’t worry,’ he would say. ‘We engage in the exchange of hatred necessary for our psychological and physical wellbeing! If you encounter a Rifi who doesn’t hate the Sherifs, it’s a sure sign that he’s from a long line of bastards, and vice versa! Despite that there are no dead, injured or war wounded among us!’
At the start of their relationship, Al-Firsiwi was still capable of upholding the virtues of uprightness, seriousness, honesty and devotion as basic dimensions in his life. They gave his personality a certain gallantry, a mixture of haughtiness, shyness and modesty. He even made love with a certain distance and strictness, with a concern for perfection, accuracy and precision. It became a source of confused pleasure where there was no room for play, seduction or adventure. They were fast, trembling pleasures that almost resembled incestuous love.
But after Al-Firsiwi and Diotima spent time in this storm, it all disappeared to be replaced by a pure aversion that rejected the needs of the body and the impetuosity of the soul. It was an aversion that combined regret and despair, and a feeling that they were bound together in a downward spiral. Whenever one sought safety, his or her nerves and random actions quickened the rapid push to the very bottom.
This repressed aversion gave them immense energy that made it possible for them to go on living together, with a daily concern for improvising something that united them and led them to the end of the day in such an extreme state of fatigue that they were unable to even look at each other.
My mother made sure to teach me everything she knew: the German language, the difference between poisonous and edible mushrooms and the basics of music and watercolours, but she never talked to me about Al-Firsiwi. Therefore, everything I said or will say about their relationship is solely my personal assumption and does not implicate anyone but me.
Our family consisted of closed squares. One included my mother and me; another, tightly closed, included Al-Firsiwi and Diotima, and another, looser square was where we all gathered, or where I met Al-Firsiwi face to face.
As far as I was concerned, my mother largely succeeded in purifying our relationship of all surplus emotional contaminants. Her maternal attitude had almost no external demonstration; the most she manifested was a minimal smile and a quick touch of the hand. This sensory remove never involved a feeling of abandonment or neglect. Her daily presence and her eagerness to reach the best in me embodied the depth of her maternal feelings and reinforced my conviction that she was an exceptional mother.
When I went to Germany I hated my father and the country that had killed my mother. I longed to establish a life as far away as possible from an atmosphere charged with mystery and dormant intrigues. I spent the first years delighted by this accommodation, free of all nostalgia for any person or place, until I met a Rifi association and found through them another connection that led me to the left-wing group. One day, as I was thinking about the future of the revolution, I decided that my true place was in the field, in the midst of the people who would rise from their ashes and get rid of the thieves and the murderers.
And so it went, at least as far as I was concerned.
Dreamers and Others
1
Yacine, simply by being killed, became an eternal child. He transformed into a being who would accompany me, emerging from his dark world whenever he wanted, and with whom I would share the details of my daily life. He would sit at my table or on my shoulders, or he would nudge me unexpectedly to pass on a piece of news or a comment in confidence. Sometimes he would sit on the edge of my bed to greet me with a rowdy discussion as I woke up. In his daily appearances Yacine was no more than one year old, yet his voice was that of the young man who had bid me goodbye at the railway station. I would talk with him for hours as I crossed Rabat from Bab Tamesna to the edge of the river, passing through Al-Nasr Street, Moulay Youssef Street, Alawite Square, and then the flower market, all the way to Al-Jazaïr Street and the offices of the newspaper where I worked.