At that moment Ahmad stood up behind his desk, adopting the stance of an intellectual about to issue a final word of wisdom, and said, ‘Do you understand now why I prefer prostitutes?’
I looked at Fatima and saw her mouth wide open, like mine. As our silence persisted, Ahmad added, ‘Because they are real beings, not literary creations like you two!’
This joke alleviated, somewhat, the meeting’s prevailing tension. We started discussing the separation and the material arrangements and their impact with as little emotion as possible. I gave Ahmad all the documents he needed to deal with the situation and then left to rent an apartment, since I had to leave our shared dwelling. The obvious place for me was the Ibn Sina district, and I went directly there. I found an empty apartment through an estate agent, in the very same building where I had lived years earlier. As soon as I entered one of the rooms and opened the window, I saw the garden fence and the body lit by the streetlamp that had crossed my imagination.
When I told Layla that evening about all these events, she expressed deep concern at what had happened. She was not interested in my return to the neighbourhood; she was concerned about my new life and how I would manage it and whether I would be psychologically affected by the end of my marriage. She was worried whether I would fall into the trap of guilt and self-reproach and would be depressed as a result of the loneliness that would hit me. I assured her that loneliness would not be anything unusual for me, and that I was not heading for a breakdown.
‘But you’ll have to organise yourself in a different way and take care of things you haven’t done before. Listen to me. You must hire a housekeeper to look after the household. I’ll look for someone to do that. This new situation shouldn’t be a reason for your health, your appearance or your spirits to deteriorate. Do you understand? I won’t allow you to turn into a slovenly bachelor, living in a filthy house and wearing creased shirts!’
I tried to point out the romantic aspect of my return to the building. But she did not give up and preferred to list the things the new apartment needed. Half an hour later she gave me another list, and a third one while we ate dinner.
As we were leaving the restaurant, Layla said she wished I could have fulfilled Bahia’s wish to give her a new baby.
Upset, I said, ‘What the heck? Do you also think I’m just a mechanism for impregnation?’
She rushed to catch a taxi and waved her hand in a cold farewell.
2
My acquaintance with Ahmad Majd dated back to the time I was living in Germany. One of the members of the organisation introduced him to me during an exploratory trip back to Morocco in preparation for my final return. He was a first-year law student then and lived with his Marrakech group in a small apartment in the Qubaybat district. He spent the whole night making fun of my rural German accent, and I was convinced that he had invited me merely for his friends’ entertainment. We nevertheless became friends, although politics and life sent us in different directions. Our relationship remained strong, despite being soiled by a single dark spot — the passing and flimsy connection he had with Bahia before our marriage. It bothered me once in a while, but I bore it with a candid patience until I could ignore it completely. I did not think he held a grudge towards me as a result.
He and others were imprisoned at the same time as I. While there, we interacted, dealing with whatever the place imposed upon us in the form of break-ups and contradictory feelings. I was among the first group to leave prison after three years of incarceration. I went back to visit him with our other friends, and we did all the small assignments he entrusted us with.
Ahmad was a conciliatory, balancing element in the group, until he experienced a severe shock: his girlfriend had started dating someone else. The new boyfriend worked on human rights cases and continued to visit him regularly with her. We did our best to get him through the betrayal, but while in prison he was unable to form an emotional relationship that could have helped him get out of that wilderness, despite his meeting many women who visited the prison regularly as members of the organisation, which remained active despite being proscribed and under tabs.
In prison Ahmad completed his graduate studies and built his political life. He had no literary inclinations — though he was mad about opera and classical music — and paid no attention to his comrades’ published creative writings, which they considered gems of world literature. So he surprised everybody with a beautiful text he had written. It consisted of sarcastic dialogues between the prisoners and their visitors. It was brought out by a small publishing house and achieved great success under the title The Visiting Room. An insensitive film-maker adapted the book for the cinema and called it In a Headscarf in the Visiting Room, a title he considered funny. One critic described it as ‘the worst film in the history of Moroccan cinema’. Whenever the subject was mentioned, Ahmad would say, ‘Thank God it happened to the film and not the book.’
When he left prison Ahmad spent three years lost, like all prisoners who are stripped of the best years of their life. He opened an office to practise law which was neither a great success nor an abject failure. At the same time he exploited some land he had inherited from his father in Marrakech. He used the plots of land to establish a construction company that expanded amazingly fast. He renovated his father’s house in the old city, spending a great deal of money and time to transform it into the house of his dreams, the way he had imagined it since his childhood.
As soon as the house was at its most splendid and had become the weekly meeting place for our group, one of the city’s big-shots developed a taste for it and devised a number of reasons why Ahmad should sell it to him, either by force or voluntarily. He put pressure on Ahmad through his business acquaintances and his friends, using incitement and intimidation, as well as suggestions of attractive partnerships. He involved foreigners and people with power in these manoeuvres. Ahmad, who had never been scared of such underhand dealings, held out, sticking to his rights, manoeuvring and delaying, promising and temporising.
One day he went to the powerful man and said to him, ‘I won’t sell you the house even if you return to your mother’s womb.’
‘I’m not buying it for myself,’ the strong man replied.
‘Even if you were buying it for the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, I won’t sell it!’
‘Do you know that we have porn films that were shot in this house?’
‘You have nothing of the sort. No porn film has been shot in my house, as you pretend. As for pornography, say what you want and don’t hold back.’
‘We filmed it!’
‘You?’ asked Ahmad.
‘Yes, us. Through special means,’ he confirmed.
‘What did you think of our arses while undertaking this noble mission?’ asked Ahmad.
‘It was a mixed bag,’ he said, laughing, and then left.
When Ahmad returned from this strange meeting, he said to us in all seriousness that he would donate the house as an endowment for the Marxist-Leninists of Morocco and their descendants, from one generation to the other until doomsday.
I said, ‘The Sharia does not permit endowing a habous for the benefit of infidels and heretics. It would be better to assign it to us.’
He replied sarcastically, ‘That way we would guarantee its loss, sooner or later!’