I quickly undressed and lay down on her bed, certain she had saved me from unbearable suffering.
At work the following morning, I was busy writing a short article on how property and tourism funds were recovering debts owed by the property mafia, and was looking into the secret behind the ability of three big-shots to avoid repayment. Banks appeared to be negotiating easy terms for the debts of some of their clients, thanks to the sky-rocketing prices of the land mortgaged by the banks. I was embroiled in a heated discussion with the editor-in-chief, trying to convince him to publish the names of the three big-shots who refused to pay their debts in good times and bad, when I received a call from Ahmad Majd. Like a bucket of cold water being poured over my head, he told me that Ibrahim al-Khayati had been arrested and charged with killing Essam. I asked him, spontaneously, if the police had found the body in the garden.
‘There’s no corpse in this story,’ Ahmad Majd answered.
The Ravens
1
Al-Firsiwi sank into a state of despair. When my half-sister and her husband returned from overseas, he quickly sold them the hotel. His only condition was that he be allowed to recover the blue Roman pieces of mosaic remaining in the halls and on the walls. To that end, he spent almost six months sitting in the lobby of the hotel passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers. He would place the pieces he believed to be of genuine Roman origin in a bag beside him. His actions provoked the pity and scorn of the employees and the new owners. During that time he overheard all the plans for repairs, extensions, additions and alterations around the hotel. He wished he had the right and the energy to come up with different ideas; he could have made a thousand suggestions for changes and replacements. His son-in-law had entered into a partnership with the wife of a well-known government official. He heard the wife’s voice one day as she talked to the contractor about using the mosaic. He did not say a thing, but sang for more than one hour and in all dialects and keys, ‘Read the contract, my cousin.’
When he had finished collecting the tiles from the Roman mosaic, he put the bag on the back of a donkey and descended from the top of the hill in a noisy procession with villagers he had brought along. The procession entered Walili from the side of the Tangier Gate, then continued down the main street in the direction of Caracalla’s Arch, as if it were in a victory parade, returning from war. As he went, Al-Firsiwi reminded people of every twist and turn of his personal epic, from the day he took over the market with his German wife on his arm to the moment he returned the mosaic to the state, the very entity that had abandoned Juba’s kingdom. However the state did not stop at neglect and turning a blind eye to thieves, Al-Firsiwi said, but gave the governor free rein to plough corruption and reap the fruits. The wife of the genius wanted to decorate her swimming pool with the Roman mosaics, but Al-Firsiwi swore to God that she would never do it.
‘It is not enough to be a thief, my dears,’ he said. ‘You must have brains enough to differentiate between Roman mosaic and the tesserae of Bab Bardayin. Old man Firsiwi can do it by touch. When you tried to rob me last year, I made a point of crying over what I had lost in front of rich and poor. In reality, as soon as I touched the empty spots you left after the theft, my gloating heart danced with joy. You had taken nothing but the mud of the region covered with Fes blue.
‘How stupid that was. They are not coins that you would recognise easily, though your honourable husband has often mistaken a glob of spit for a silver coin from the Saadi period. It is mosaic, in other words, the splinters of the human soul scattered in God’s earth. It is the meeting point between water, clay and fire. It is the creative power of the imagination that transforms inert matter into the light that glows in the faces of water nymphs. You don’t get it? I will pay you a day’s wages simply for making up this parade and testifying that I turned over to the Moroccan state a part of the great heritage it has neglected.
‘This bag is full of broken faces, those of warriors, heroes, gods, women and beasts. It will soon be added to other bags and boxes also filled with faces and fragmentary bodies, abandoned in storage rooms where rats and grasshoppers play. See how great civilisations with their brilliant shapes, colours and beauty end up in the dark corners of those sons of bitches. So will be Al-Firsiwi’s civilisation, my brother, “yamis oma”, in the Berber tongue of eloquent ignorance. Behold the State of Al-Firsiwi, the state that gave this land the electric olive press and petrol pump, sulphur to treat the pox, the carob trade, the Zaytoun Hotel, the Cantina of the esteemed Bacchanalians, the war on plastic, the treatment of solid waste, beekeeping and the condom. This will all end up in fathomless darkness. The state that made you, riff-raff of forgotten tribes, a people to be reckoned with, the great State of Al-Firsiwi is today undertaking its last official act in this region. It is preceded by a magnificent donkey with a bag of another civilisation and another state on its back. To hell, O defeated state. Diotima’s smile in her final resting place bids you farewell.’
People listened and exchanged complicit smiles, and they proceeded scared and surprised. All the while Al-Firsiwi was immersed in his hallucination, holding the tightly closed bag with care. He headed in the direction of the blue mountain until he reached the governorate building, where the informal handing over of the bag took place, as if it were a passing joke. The joke did not stop the governor handing Al-Firsiwi the receipt he requested, one that included the number of pieces after they had been counted. The governor asked Al-Firsiwi to specify the number of pieces, and he said 13,624. The governor wrote the number down on the receipt and loudly stamped it, and Al-Firsiwi left totally satisfied with the procedure.
After Al-Firsiwi surrendered and placed his treasure of Roman mosaics in the hands of the governor, things began to happen quickly. Authorities ordered Al-Firsiwi’s arrest. But Al-Firsiwi had left the city — people saw him though he did not see them — after eating breakfast at the marketplace café. The man seemed to melt into the blue mountain, as he used to call it. He left unconcerned by anything, while the police were quick to announce their failure to find him, as if the inability to find a blind man were a remarkable success. All the TV news bulletins showed the face of an officer announcing with a smile that his forces had looked for the fugitive from justice in every fold of the mountain without finding a trace of him.
When matters had gone that far, I decided to get involved in the search for my father, fearful that his disappearance was due to a fatal accident rather than exceptional cunning. The day I arrived in Bu Mandara, expecting to hear news about his disappearance, Al-Firsiwi contacted me from a mobile phone number I did not recognise. He told me that he did not want me to look for him or rescue him from oblivion. He said that the warrant for his arrest had no foundation because the pieces of mosaic were nothing but soil, and he was the only one who had declared that they were Roman. Think about this great country, he said. A blind man sitting in the lobby of a ruined hotel, passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers and then declaring that this one was a pre-Christian Roman piece, and that one was the work of potters from the dawn of the third millennium, while those were from the ovens of Tajmouati in Fes and dated back to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those imbeciles believed that and issued arrest warrants, he said. Confession was the best evidence, and as long as Al-Firsiwi himself believed that, he had no fear that the most modern labs would prove he was making fun of all of them.