What could Mohammed do? His entire village practised this kind of magic. His wife occasionally burned herbs with a suffocating smell and asked him to stand in the smoke for seven minutes. Because he avoided conflict, he did as she asked instead of arguing; he had no choice if he wanted peace in his home. He walked around and around the little brazier so the nauseating herbal odours could affect the course of his life. His wife was a good woman, though; illiterate perhaps but intelligent, courageous, and thrifty. She never became angry, patiently put up with her children’s behaviour, and served her husband without grumbling, of course: protest was useless. She’d seen what had happened to Lubna, a young village woman who married too young and was taken to France by her husband. Lubna had tried to rebel, refusing to cook and clean the house, but her husband had boxed her ears so hard that she’d been deaf for a good hour. When she went to the police, the husband denied everything, then sent her back to the village as a repudiated wife. He’d written ahead to ask her father to take away her passport and throw it in the fire.
Mohammed preferred the Book. He liked things to be simple and obvious. He was fond of the olive oil and pure honey his elderly uncle brought him. Although Mohammed was diabetic, his uncle had persuaded him that pure honey was completely compatible with diabetes: You can eat as much of this as you want; honey is wonderful for the health. What you should avoid is white sugar, city sugar. Honey can only do you good! Allah talks about it in the Koran: there will be exquisite honey in paradise, rivers of honey — it can’t be bad for you. So Mohammed ate some every morning before going to the plant. His diabetes was getting worse, drying his mouth, but he would not give up his honey. Hot bread soaked in olive oil then dipped in a bowl of honey — that was his treat, his pleasure.
Mohammed took medications, and his wife had given him a talisman tightly sewn up in a scrap of grey cloth, probably the same kind his daughter carried. It will protect you against illness, the evil eye, and even against the heat in the plant! He pretended to believe her; he didn’t want to give up his morning feast. As for the Book, enveloped in a swatch of the paternal shroud, every day he slipped it inside a plastic bag bearing the logo of a local supermarket. Whenever he opened the book and brought it to his lips, he was no longer alone. No need for the services of al-Hajj, the sorcerer of the Porte de la Chapelle neighbourhood in Paris; no, he refused to go see him, and although Mohammed carried the man’s talismans around with him, that was because he didn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings.
Avoiding arguments with his wife or colleagues was a priority, and he found disputes over material things particularly pointless. He minded his business, quietly, inoffensively. When there was a strike, he went along with everyone else, never took the lead, followed Marcel’s orders, waited for the whole thing to blow over. It’s not my problem, he said. The French are used to going on strike, so I do as they do, and sometimes I don’t even know why we’ve stopped work, so Marcel explains it to me, and while I’m listening I think about something else, like my childhood back home, and I smile, because if I’d stayed home no French fellow would ever have taken the trouble to tell me the reasons for a strike, political or whatever, and no European would have asked for my opinion! It’s really your decision, Marcel tells me. You can vote against the strike, that’s your right; we’ve got a democracy here.
The first time Mohammed had heard that word was in a café in Marrakech, one day while he was waiting for the bus to Tangier. Someone on the radio was shouting, “Demokratia al hakikya!” Democracy and truth. Later, on the bus, a man sat down next to him and began explaining what it was all about: You see, we who live out in the country, when we go to the city we feel like we don’t belong, but with demokratia we’ll get better treatment — that’s what a guy said on the radio the other day, that we’ll all be equal and our children will go to public school for free, like hospitals and medicines will be too, but to get that you have to go vote, even if you can’t read, so you just put your fingerprints in a notebook, then you vote, that’s demokratia, and then we’ll get water, electricity in the village, plus we’ll have roads and even streetlights because you see, we want to be like Europeans and that’ll take time and lots of effort, but we’ll get there, so anyway, right now I need to smoke this cigarette. Got a light?
4
MOHAMMED HANDED all bureaucratic paperwork to his youngest daughter, who spent hours filling out forms for the welfare and health insurance agencies, the bank, and the tax authorities. Although Mohammed had learned the alphabet back in Koranic school and could write his name in Arabic, his signature was a drawing of a tree — an olive tree, he said, the very one (and the only one) that grew in his village. He drew two vertical lines topped with a circle full of crosshatching: an original signature, unlike the traditional X used by his friends.
I can’t write, but I like to draw. The children don’t know this; they’d make fun of me, so I draw in secret. Don’t need school for that. In fact, I have a notebook full of drawings, which I’ll leave to my children or, rather, to my grandchildren. I draw trees and houses. That’s all. Trees with fruits of every colour, big trees, middle-size ones, squat ones, trees thin as sticks, others that are bushy; I draw groves of them and even a forest, and I can walk in the forest, lose my way, stop and sit down with my back against an immense tree trunk, and though I don’t know the name of this tree, it offers cool shade to rest in, gives me fresh air, and it does me good, this tree that exists only in the forest I draw, for I know it doesn’t exist anywhere else. I draw trees and forests because we don’t have any back home, up country where it’s all dust and stones, dryness everywhere, and among the large or small stones there are scorpions that sting children while they sleep so that they die asphyxiated, sometimes, when people forget to raise the beds high enough, as with my four-year-old niece who was killed by a scorpion one night: in the morning she was swollen, her eyes shut, she had stopped breathing. If only we’d had water, some small streams, the scorpion wouldn’t have stung my little niece.
I draw playgrounds, slides, mazes in an English garden like the one I saw one day on the TV: the whole movie took place among these crisply trimmed rows of trees, where all the grass was as smooth as carpet — I can’t remember anymore what the characters said. They wore old-fashioned clothes. It was pretty, orderly, strange. I draw the automobile plant seen from a distance, all splashed with phosphorescent colours, looking like an amusement park with lights that never stop twinkling; I also draw houses with roof terraces free of all satellite dishes and television antennas, terraces draped with rugs and fabrics of shimmering hues. I don’t appear to like colour, and my children have often reproached me for always wearing grey, but really I adore natural colours, the tints of spring, and I don’t need to wear them on my back because they’re in my head, where they make music when my mind is tired but they stay inside me, that’s why people say I’m sad, but being sad is being frustrated: nothing happens the way I’d hoped, so since I can’t do a thing about it, I keep my face closed up tight and watch the world run around as if it were in a frenzy or had some incurable fever, and I’ve been sad ever since I came to France, a country that has nothing to do with my sorrow but hasn’t managed to make me smile, to give me reasons to be happy, that’s simply how it is, I can’t help it and I’m not the only one — look at the men when they leave the plant, they’re all sad, especially ours, the guys from the Maghreb, leaning slightly forward while they walk as if weighed down, although perhaps I’m imagining things and they aren’t sad but spending their time having fun, while me, I just can’t. So yes, I love colours and I keep that to myself. I can’t make my children understand it, but I don’t even try, don’t feel like talking, explaining myself.