‘No, I’m speaking from a pay phone.’
‘Call me Thursday at noon.’
It so happened that later the same week, the alem gave Mohammed-Larbi a cellphone in preparation for the young man’s coming trip to Egypt, where he would be studying religion. His uncle had told him it was an excellent opportunity.
‘You have the alem’s trust: do not disappoint him. There will be ten or twelve of you leaving for Cairo, where our brothers in faith will take care of you. It’s beautiful, Cairo, you’ll see, and the brothers are fine people, good Muslims at war against corruption and immorality.’
The first call Mohammed-Larbi made was to Nadia. The alem answered, and recognized the number. He did not become angry, said nothing, simply shut himself up in his room and made some phone calls using coded language. On that day, Mohammed-Larbi’s fate was sealed. From Egypt he was sent on to a training camp in Pakistan and was never seen again.
12. Malika
LITTLE MALIKA was Azel’s neighbour. She had knocked on his door one day to ask him to show her his diplomas. Wondering at this curious request, he invited her inside and offered her a glass of lemonade. Hanging framed on the living-room wall were his two certificates for completed studies in the fields of law and international relations.
‘There,’ said Azel. ‘Five years of courses in Rabat. Five years of hope and then, no luck. My mother’s pride and her chief anxiety. But you — I hope you’ll finish high school, at least, and that you’ll go to university so you can get a good job. What do you want to do later on?’
‘Leave.’
‘Leave? But that’s not a profession!’
‘Once I leave, I’ll have a profession.’
‘Leave for where?’
‘Anywhere, across the water, for example.’
‘Spain?’
‘Yes. Spain, França — I already live there in my dreams.’
‘And you like it?’
‘Depends on the night.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Actually, it depends on the clouds: for me they’re the carpets I travel on at night; sometimes I fall off and then I wake up with a little bump on my forehead.’
‘You’re some dreamer!’
‘More than that. I’ve got ideas, plans, anyway you’ll see, I’ll get there.’
Azel gave her an apple and took her home, touched and astonished by the fierce determination of this spirited girl.
And girls like her, he saw them every day. He watched them go by in little bands, swathed in their headscarves, silent, courageous, ready to brave the chill of the shrimp factory.
Malika’s dream had the perfume of childhood. She’d had to fight to convince her parents to let her go to the Ibn Batouta Secondary School in Tangier. She walked to school there, often arriving late; there was a bus she could have taken, but she hadn’t enough money for the fare. She walked quickly, head down, and along the way she thought of so many things that she sometimes got lost. Her feet always carried her to the boulevard Pasteur, which ended at the Terrasse des Paresseux with its famous view of the harbour and, on clear days, the Spanish coast. Malika would stop to watch the boats coming and going; she loved to see the white ships and observed them for a long time, slowly forgetting where she was. Then suddenly she would ask a passer-by what time it was and dash off to school.
Malika never managed to get good grades in class. There wasn’t a proper place in her house to study or do homework. Sometimes she went outside to learn her lessons beneath a streetlight. Whenever he found her there, her father would hustle her roughly into the house. He was a peasant from the Fahs region who had come to the city after the drought of 1986. Working in construction, he earned very little money, and he saw absolutely no reason why his daughter should attend school. As far as he was concerned, girls stayed at home, and Malika would be better off working for someone as a maid while waiting for her family to find her a husband.
When she turned fourteen, Malika’s father decided that she’d learned enough. He pulled her out of school, telling her that it was useless in any case.
‘Look at Azz El Arab, the son of Lalla Zohra, our neighbour: he studied for a long time, and his mother made sacrifices so that he could finish up. He has diplomas, important ones, and you know, they don’t help him at all, you saw them in his living room, just like I did. It doesn’t matter that he looks everywhere, he can’t find a thing. So — you, and a girl besides! And don’t you dare cross me!’
Like her girlfriend Achoucha, the neighbour lady Hafsa, her cousin Fatima, and hundreds of girls in her neighbourhood, Malika went off to shell shrimp in the Dutch factory down in the free zone of the port. Every day refrigerated trucks brought in tons of cooked shrimp, caught in Thailand and shipped through the Netherlands, where they were treated with preservatives. In the factory, small hands with slender fingers shelled them day and night, after which the shrimp travelled to yet another destination to be canned before debuting at last on the European market. In Tangier, the girls were paid a pittance. Even with the best will in the world, only a very few were able to process more than ten pounds. Malika, in any case, had never managed it, and went home in the evening with around fifty dirhams at best, which she handed directly to her mother. She complained constantly of the cold. And her fingers had become almost permanently numb.
In the factory, she sorely missed her days at school and her little forays of escape to the Terrasse des Paresseux to look at the sea. At work she never raised her head. She moved like an automaton, without wasting any time. Walking home, she no longer took an interest in anything, although when she occasionally went by her school, she thought about what she might have made of herself. But her dream of leaving, of working and earning money, had become a cruel joke: her back hurt, and her fingers, all pink and battered, now resembled the shrimp she shelled all day.
Malika quickly realized that she could not last long in that factory. Their fingers eaten by eczema, girls were constantly leaving after six months, some of them stricken with pneumonia.
Seeing Malika weak and ill, her eldest sister, Zineb, took her into her own home to care for her. Malika had not given up her dream, but dared not speak of it to her sister, preferring to treasure it in her heart. One day, she was sure, she would finally take the boat to Algeciras or Tarifa, disembark in Spain, and find a job there. She would be a saleswoman for El Corte Inglés, for example — she’d heard a lot about that chain of department stores — or a hairdresser, or (but she hardly dared even imagine it) maybe a modeclass="underline" that way she’d wear lovely clothes of every colour, and be photographed, and be beautiful. First she would wait until she was eighteen to get a passport. But perhaps, like others, she wouldn’t wait that long. She would cross the straits in some old tub or the back of a shrimp truck…
Zineb’s husband was a fisherman, a kind and upright man. Bearded in the Muslim fashion, he never missed any of the five daily prayers. He was appalled at how the factory had exploited Malika, and had welcomed her into his home. For hygienic reasons, Malika had worn a headscarf when cleaning shrimp at work; now she wore it in her sister’s house to please her pious brother-in-law. She didn’t want to cause any problems, and besides, he was treating her as if she were his own daughter. Malika helped her sister, taking care of the children, and all the while she cherished her secret dream. She soon noticed that the fisherman didn’t care much for the Spanish, whom he accused of being prejudiced against los moros,* and of pillaging the Moroccan coasts by fishing with illegal nets. He had never been to Spain but had heard about it from his brother, who worked in El Ejido, in the province of Andalusia.