‘Why would we lose it?’ I asked.
‘Tell me the case we’ve won so far.’
I replied, absent-minded, ‘We probably saved our souls.’
‘Well, say then that we won nothing but the wind!’
We laughed a lot, and Ahmad Majd remembered his father, who had died before seeing his son freed from prison. He said that the house was his way of asking for God’s mercy on his father’s soul. Then he said, as if continuing a previous conversation, ‘All the money in the world cannot bring back the lost years of our lives. Years are not sold in big or small markets. Such deceit! When I think about the years that were robbed from us, simply because one of us had forgotten a stupid book by Lenin in his luggage. Nowadays, terrorists in sleeper cells, with their belts and their explosives, spend only a few months in prison, during which time they enjoy multiple conjugal visits. It’s enough to drive one crazy!’
I said in consolation, ‘And all for the sake of Marrakechist-Leninism, we can’t even say for the sake of God!’
Ever since the old house was renovated, Marrakech became the city of our dreams the way Casablanca had been the city of our awakening. In the former we encountered fleeting pleasures and a cover to hide under. It put miles between us and the facts all around us. In the latter we encountered numerous probabilities and moments of illumination that helped us understand, in the blink of an eye, how things happened, before we lost the thread again and became unable to understand why or how they happened.
I got used to spending weekends in that house, and Ibrahim al-Khayati joined us at times. He did not spend the night there because he felt that old houses resembled tombs and he was afraid to sleep in a tomb.
The upper floor of the house was occupied by Ahmad’s sister, who had devoted herself to serving her brother before, during and after his imprisonment. She was a woman whose feelings had been purified by time and who had become a source of serenity. As soon as you met her, her embrace and smile erased any trace of the world’s claws, which might have touched you recently or long ago. She spoke laconically, one hand resting on the other, staring at you with two large black eyes, and you immediately felt sorry for those who did not know her. She was fifteen years older than her brother Ahmad, but she addressed him as ‘my dear’, as if he were older than her. She did it out of affection for him and, as she used to say, in consideration for him, because he was the only brother among seven sisters. Her name was Ghaliya, but among us, for our families, our lawyers and our rights groups, she was known as ‘Mother Ghaliya’. She had acquired the name for the many times she had stood at the gates of courthouses and prisons, for all that she endured on the roads and in trains and waiting-rooms, until she became one of those miracle women who, due to arbitrary detentions, were cast into the furnace of a world they never suspected existed. They then domesticated it until it became a fluffy cat playing at their feet. Because this was how she was, Ahmad would say, ‘She’s al-ghaliya, the precious one, neither selling nor buying.’ I think she liked the phrase which was taken from Al-Bidaoui’s ’aytah. Whenever anyone joked with her about it, she blushed.
Ghaliya lived peacefully in the house until we arrived. She would then supervise the business of the kitchen, and cook so many dishes it seemed it was the last meal of our lives. Afterwards, she would retreat upstairs or go to visit one of her sisters, depending on the evening’s mood. At age sixty-five she did not appear to have totally despaired of trying her luck at building a home of her own. She did not seem to regret anything and lived her life believing that, in any case, only the best would happen to her. If Ahmad married and had children, she would devote her life to raising them, and this would be the best that could happen to her.
Ahmad, though, only ever got as far as the first few pages of his love stories, just like the books he read. We, on the other hand, watched every affair intensely fearful that a woman would appear at the house, thereby causing us to lose it, or even lose Marrakech completely. Whenever we joked with Ahmad about this, he claimed that the house was among the few liberated areas in a city that rich French people had reoccupied without colonisation or a protectorate.
Marrakech had, in fact, literally and figuratively lost its authenticity over the last ten years. Property prices shot sky-high; the old houses, the riyadhs and the hotels were lost to their original owners. An earthquake shook the city, wiping away historic lanes, alleyways and neighbourhoods, for palaces, restaurants, residences and guesthouses to sprout in their place. A property war broke out among the new owners, pushing them to compete in building amazing edifices suitable for their exotic dreams. They pulled ceilings, doors and mosaics from here and there, spreading fever in the joints of the old houses, which had to endure the sawing, chopping and extracting of their parts, which were then aggressively transplanted in palaces and riyadhs that remained hermetically closed to the city’s clandestine nights. The palaces mixed architectural styles that had no connection with Marrakech. These styles and forms were imported by the newcomers, collected during their trips and from films and paintings discovered in India, Turkey, Iran, Mongolia, China, Yemen and Zanzibar. In this jumble, for which they received official permits as a way to restore the memory of the city, that memory was totally and permanently obliterated.
At the heart of this new style, the wealthy piled up the objets d’art they had collected all over the world: glassware, mosaics, carvings, vessels, rugs, musical instruments and even columns, marble and pottery from archaeological sites across the globe. Had all this been subjected to an investigation, it would have been the largest collection of stolen memory. The external layout of the city remained the way it had been, consisting of alleys and lanes bearing the names of the city’s saints, scholars and tribes. A secret city sprang up in its midst, selling the one thousand and one nights packaged in size and quantity to order. Marrakech disappeared and another Marrakech took its place that hid the loss.
Marrakech lived, grew, built and expanded; it attracted millions of tourists and hundreds of hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. It ate, drank, sold, bought and danced until the dawn call to prayer was heard from the Koutoubia. Everyone found their needs met in the revival; simple people found their subsistence, property tycoons found the fortune they dreamed of and white-slave traders found their clients. We too found our needs in a city years younger than us that accepted us and gave us protection and illusions of safety.
I found in Marrakech the elements that helped me quickly cover the distance between things, a significant achievement for someone like me who needed to exert a superhuman effort, like rowing against the current, to move from one condition to another. In Marrakech, I could put myself at the disposal of the city’s whims to do with me whatever it pleased. The city could decide what I did and did not deserve. When I scored an achievement, I told myself that this was what I deserved. At that point I was able to travel vast distances without feeling extreme fatigue, because it was not the distances that exhausted me but rather my burdens. I also found the remains of something alive that moved within me from time to time like a smouldering ember. I experienced that while walking and unexpectedly encountering faces that had not yet lost their primitive quality, faces that came from modest neighbourhoods within the city limits of Marrakech. They crossed the souqs carrying merchandise that would help them survive and keep them at the margins of life and at the margins of people who consume tons of costly things. When I saw the food carts, the spice and perfume shops, the vendors of medicinal herbs, vegetables and fruit, I remembered that all those things had a scent. Places were broken when they had no smell.