I fell in love with my apartment that night. After that night I felt clearly that Layla would fill the place of the mysterious souls. She would live in this house the way she lived in my skin. She liked the idea of the books placed in the kitchen, and she would even help me get rid of books I used to consider essential in my life, such as the complete works of Hölderlin and Rilke, Henri Michaux and Pessoa. She said that poetry was not beautiful when it was easily accessible, and that when I wanted to read it, I should go to the library and read only one poem.
She developed a theory of minimalism and applied it to my music collection and my clothes. I was happy to find myself freed of the weight of the years that had made me attached to the insignificant things piled around me, in the belief that I was preserving the years themselves. I even felt that this renewal in the material domain gave objects a new soul. It was as if another person had come as reinforcements in the battle that I had been waging for survival.
4
My doctor noticed a general improvement in my condition, and recommended that to fully recover I take up a sport that would exercise body and soul. He suggested a yoga club that offered Pilates. I welcomed the advice with childlike enthusiasm. But I couldn’t stand the fact that the club was in the basement and that the regulars made fun of my jerky movements. I discreetly withdrew, but not without going through a transformational experience.
In the yoga club I met a young man who looked very much like me. He and Yacine were as alike as two droplets of water. When I told him that he said, smiling, ‘You might well be my father. I am the illegitimate child of a woman who died single. If twenty years ago you knew a young teacher from the city of Khenifra and you might have had a child with her, then I’m your long-lost son. From now on you have to make room in your life for me.’
When he noticed my anxiety and nervousness, he burst out laughing and said in a friendly tone, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t harass you. I don’t want a father that I’m supposed to kill in order to live at peace.’
His concise, joking sentences made it clear he was quite unaware of the bomb he was throwing into my life, for one summer, twenty-four years earlier, I had had a passionate affair with a woman called Zulikha. It ended, naturally enough, at the beginning of the new school year. There was nothing special about the story except that she looked like the French actress Romy Schneider.
Remembering her, it was almost like the only real tragedy in my life had been her disappearance one distant autumn, followed by her sudden death, which I knew nothing about. Then our potential son turned up — a broadcast engineer who liked yoga and comedies.
I was overcome with questions about whether Zulikha might have been the woman I had lost but could not remember. Perhaps news of her death had reached me without my realising. I charted all the accomplishments that might have been expected in her life and turned her into a vague object of loss. A suspicion tormented me: I had finally found an explanation for my being emotionally lost, yet I had not found the woman, not even as a distant memory.
Al-Firsiwi, if he were to reappear, could rest assured about his offspring. No matter how much we tried to get away from our seed, they plotted their own course, which, sooner or later, snared us in the net of paternity.
I spent a few weeks in a spin at this striking discovery. When I told Layla about it, she commented sarcastically, ‘You’d be stupid to think that being a father is simply sowing your oats!’
Fatima, on the other hand, advised me to take it easy and ask the young man if his mother’s name was Zulikha. I returned to the club for that reason, and when he left the hall I went up to him and asked.
He replied, smiling, ‘Of course her name is Zulikha.’ Then he asked me quite seriously, ‘Do you want to put your doubts to rest?’
I nodded, so he said, ‘Let’s do a DNA test. If it confirms that I’m your son, everything will be clear. You’ll have to pass by the club as soon as possible and pay my monthly membership!’
He walked away and then turned to look at me and laughed, his face joyful. I did not think then that he resembled Yacine or me to the degree I had imagined when I first met him. But I said to myself that he probably looked like Zulikha, whom I didn’t remember then, and never would.
On the way home I thought long and hard about what was happening to me, and I told myself that this was also one possibility among many others that could come along. Devastated by the loss of an only son, we suddenly find ourselves a father in a different story. We await the birth of a baby girl with great joy, and then she is born with a handicap; we think our life is over with the arrival of this baby, only to discover that life has become meaningful. No one could know which possibility might bring the greatest comfort. I told myself this because I felt calmer about the tragedy of Yacine’s loss than about this new story.
I shared my thoughts with Fatima, and she suggested that we adopt a child together. I tried to avoid the subject but she insisted. ‘The baby would only need you to be a father from a distance. You’d see, helping to shape a human being would only require a few years — perhaps less time than would be needed for a tree. That person would then become your heart’s delight.’ She also said, ‘Just imagine how many things we would put right with such a venture, even those things that time has spoiled.’
I told Fatima that I did not have the energy for such things any more. Her silence on the phone made me feel guilty, because I realised that her suggestion was a desperate cry for help.
At the end of the day I was walking in the crowded Al-Akary market, where all the activity connected to food reduced my anxiety, when I found myself face to face with the young man who resembled me. The first thing I saw was his wide smile, his happy expression. He surprised me with an exaggerated greeting. With a generous sweep of his arm, he stretched to embrace an embarrassed man walking past him.
He said, laughing, ‘This is my father, the one and only person legally responsible for this calamity,’ and pointed to himself proudly.
I too felt like laughing, but I controlled myself and said reproachfully, ‘That’s a cruel joke!’
He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Let go. Life is good. Let’s laugh.’
I lowered my head and left defeated, unable to pinpoint the nature of my feelings, which were a mixture of disappointment and boundless joy at my escape.
I told Layla part of the story in a somewhat humorous manner, but she found it very moving. She said she loved the young man as if he were my son or our son from a past relationship that had happened years ago. She liked the light-heartedness of the young man, who should have been burdened by the responsibilities of beginnings. When she asked me his name, I was surprised to realise I had neglected to ask him, as if I wanted the matter to remain a mere possibility. Layla — God knows what her feelings were — burst into tears and said she was very sad because we could not have a baby together. At that point, unaware of what made the issue so easy for me, I perpetrated the worst theft imaginable. I suggested to Layla, very simply, that we adopt a baby, with me as a hands-off father. I told her with neurotic insistence to keep the matter a secret, as if hoping secrecy would be tantamount to revoking the suggestion completely. She immediately busied herself with the most minute details of adoption, its rules and regulations and institutions, all the while asking the reason for my insistence on keeping it a secret, and wondering if I thought that revealing it would matter to her.
That was how Mai came into our life. We did not tell anybody that she was our daughter, but all our friends, including Fatima, understood. They refrained from commenting, except Bahia. She broached the subject indirectly with me two or three times, talking about Layla, expressing her strong admiration for her. She said that Layla had a certain purity that freed her of any doubt and that Mai was a symbol of that deep purity. On another occasion she asked me if I was convinced that a child could play a constructive role in a relationship. I told her that this might happen in reaction: when two people form a human being together, they indirectly re-form themselves. She told me that she had never felt that way either with me when we had Yacine or with Ahmad Majd and their baby daughter, Ghaliya. On another occasion she asked me if Mai had filled some of Yacine’s void.