AFTER THE MOVIE, Youssef walked out of the theater into the darkening afternoon, making his way around the puddles of water, heaps of trash, and pieces of metal. It was raining a little more steadily now, and the clouds hung low, shrinking the horizon in all directions. He always found it hard to go home after a movie. He needed time to adjust to real life, where heroes and villains could not be told apart by their looks or their accents, where women did not give themselves over on the first date, where there were no last-minute reversals of fortune.
He wanted to buy roasted sunflower seeds or chickpeas, but the cart vendors near the theater had all left because of the rain. Amin and Maati, who could usually be found at the street corner, had retreated under the blue awning of a hanout farther down the road. Standing between crates of wrinkled oranges and dark mint, they were arguing about the Widad and the Raja’, the odds of either football team at the national championship.
“What’s the difference between the Widadi goalkeeper and a taxi driver?” Maati asked, flashing a wide, gap-toothed smile. Even though it was cold, he wore a short-sleeved shirt. Youssef suspected it was because Maati liked to show off his biceps.
“What?” Youssef asked with a smile.
“The taxi driver only lets in three at a time.”
Amin clicked his tongue. “You won’t be joking like that when the Widad defeats the Raja’. And anyway, that’s an old joke. Tell us one we haven’t heard.”
“All right,” Maati said. “What’s the difference between a girlfriend and a wife?”
“What?”
“Twenty-five kilos.”
This time, Amin slapped his thighs and laughed.
“Here’s another one,” Maati continued. “What’s the difference between a bucket of shit and the government?”
“What?”
“There isn’t any.”
Youssef and Amin chuckled. Maati lit a cigarette and passed it around. A girl none of them knew walked up the lane, carrying a bag. They watched her pass them by. Her wet sweater clung to her body, showing the faint lines of her bra and the tips of her nipples. “Come here, kitten,” Amin said.
The kitten didn’t acknowledge him.
“Hshouma,” Youssef said. “You should respect the girl.”
“Come on, my brother,” Amin said. “Let us live a little. Didn’t you see those breasts?”
“Her name’s Soraya,” Maati reported. “Her family just moved in, three streets up that way. Stay away from her, or her brother might come find you.”
“Youssef’s bringing us bad luck,” Amin said. “She’d have talked to me if he wasn’t around, looking so serious, wanting to respect her.”
All three of them laughed. The year before, they had been taken by Amin’s brother Fettah to visit a prostitute, where their Eid money had bought them ten minutes each. Now they dreamed of doing it with a girl their own age, someone who would, unimaginably, let them go all the way.
“She wouldn’t have talked to you,” Youssef said. “She’s not the type.”
“And how do you know this?” Amin asked, narrowing his eyes in a playful way, already sure of the answer.
Youssef shrugged.
“That’s what I thought,” Amin said, laughing. “So let me try my luck.”
The rain grew heavy. Youssef walked hurriedly home and was soaked by the time he arrived. He found his mother struggling to move the divan, carefully covered with a plastic tablecloth, to the bedroom. “It’s just some rain,” he said. “Do we need to move everything inside?”
“It’s going to flood,” she replied. She had a habit of immediately thinking about the worst outcome to any situation, and Youssef had long ago learned not to argue when she got into one of these moods. He took the divan inside. “Can you put some more plastic on the roof?” she asked, and while he did that, she lined his side of the bedroom with pieces of cardboard to keep out the damp.
Inside, he changed out of his wet clothes. When he sat on his bed, his eye fell on his father’s picture, and immediately he noticed that a drop of water had seeped in between the frame and the photograph, darkening the print. He grabbed the picture, running his palm over the spot — his father’s forehead — as though he could dry it. In frustration, he put it back down on the floor and rummaged under his bed for his history textbook. His high school exams were just three months away. Amin and Maati always complained that they were required to learn things by rote, but Youssef told himself he was an actor. An actor could learn lines.
The weather forecast had said that it would clear up late in the evening, but it rained furiously all night long. Youssef could not sleep for the sound of the water drumming the tin roof and the wind thrashing the bathroom door. Halfway through the night, just as he had begun to drift into slumber, he heard a group of men splashing down the alley, arguing loudly. He pulled his blankets up to his chin and turned to the wall, where the cardboard had begun to smell of ink.
In the morning, he could not go out to meet his friends because it was still pouring. He studied by the yellow light of the lamp, fiddled with the radio for a while, and then grew restless. His mother was knitting a sweater, her eyes fixed on the Mexican telenovela showing on television. She was different from the other women in Hay An Najat, he knew. The widow, he had heard some of them call her, a scornful look on their faces, as though his mother were a leper, as though widowhood were contagious. The fact that she could speak flawless French somehow exacerbated their resentment; they said she put on airs. And she was not given to large displays of emotion. Aside from a few photographs, she had not saved any of his father’s relics — a ring, a watch, a book, some prayer beads.
Youssef, too, was different from the other boys. Until he was twelve or thirteen, he had never been left alone in the house while his mother was at work. Instead, his mother told him to play in the hospital garden or go across the street to the used-book store, whose cashier she knew. He spent all his summer days sitting between stacks of books, reading. He had grown five centimeters in the past year alone and towered over all his friends. And then there were his eyes — sky blue, bright turquoises — nearly out of place on his face, certainly out of place in Hay An Najat. You would expect his eyes on a Fassi, a descendant of the Moors, one of those pedigreed men who had for generations controlled the destiny of the nation. You might expect them on a tribal chieftain from the Atlas, though even there they might come with the freckled skin of Berber ancestors. You would not expect those eyes in the melting pot of misery and poverty that was Hay An Najat.
YOUSSEF HAD TO WRAP his shoes in plastic before going to school the next day, and in the unheated classrooms he regretted not wearing the additional pair of socks his mother had pressed into his hands that morning. When he came home, he found that water had trickled through an opening in the roof onto his mattress. He climbed back onto the roof to adjust the blocks of concrete, then stripped the sheets and blankets off the bed and set them to dry. But at least the television and the radio seemed to be in working order.
By the time his mother came home, the rain had at last faded to a drizzle. She asked him to go buy some flour, oil, and sugar, so he left the house and headed down the muddy road toward the hanout. At the first intersection, water pooled into a little pond, from which emerged a rusted old signpost, upright and persistent like a warning. In the next row of houses, the water ran into a rivulet. It quickly met with other tributaries to form a river, brown and fast and hungry. Youssef stopped at the bottom of the street. The river before him carried possessions away with it, like offerings to an ancient god — a suitcase, some tires, a broken bicycle, a few cinder blocks. A yelping dog swam helplessly in the middle of the debris.