11. THE RETURN
“IT TOOK A WHILE to make all two hundred copies,” Youssef said as he entered Amina Benjelloun’s office. He had spent the past hour at the copy shop, where each machine the clerk used seemed to be afflicted with a different problem — low toner or malfunctioning feeder — so that the job had to be done manually. He placed the conference programs on her desk and was about to leave when she stood up. “I’m sorry to have to do this,” she said, “but I have to let you go.”
Was this a joke? He was only about thirty minutes late on this task, and in any case it wasn’t his fault. Perhaps the secretary was in on it, waiting behind the door, ready to open it and start laughing with Benjelloun at the prank they had pulled. He was already forcing himself to smile, to show that he could be a good sport, when Benjelloun picked up a sealed envelope from the desk and handed it to him. “Your pay for this month.”
“Wait,” he said. “You can’t be serious. Why are you firing me?”
“We just don’t need you anymore.”
Everything around him — the paper-covered desk, the diplomas on the wall, the potted plants — seemed to recede into the background. Her face suddenly appeared magnified. Mesmerized, he stared at her broad forehead, the scratch along the top of her tortoiseshell glasses, the beauty mark at the base of her neck, which he had never noticed before. It took a moment for words to form in his mind and to string together into a sentence. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Maybe not. But unfortunately we no longer need you. Don’t forget to turn in your badge on your way out.” He detected no satisfaction in the way she said this, even though she had never liked him and had not wanted him on her team. But this was unfair; he had worked with dedication, neglecting his studies to focus on his job, and now she was firing him. Without realizing it, he stepped forward and gripped the back of the chair before him. Had he looked down he would have seen his knuckles turn white from the effort.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong. I think you should reconsider.”
“Are we going to have a problem?”
“Your boss will find out.”
“If you don’t leave, I will have to call security.”
Maybe it was a mistake, Youssef thought. She was told to cut down on her staff, and forgot that Nabil Amrani himself had asked her to give Youssef a job. It had been a long while after all, and she had hired two other people since she took him on. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he asked.
She gave him a half smile. “I know exactly who I’m talking to.”
Youssef looked at her uncomprehendingly. When it was clear he was not going to move, Benjelloun picked up the phone and pressed a button, whispering into the receiver. A moment later, the door flew open and two security guards rushed in. Youssef turned around to face them. “A-’ibad allah!” he said, finally raising his voice. The guards took him out of the office and into the hallway. “What is this hogra?” he yelled. “She fired me for no reason!” He turned to look at the men who held him, but each one avoided his eyes, as if they had known all along that he was getting fired. They took off his badge and pushed him out into the street. He fell on the pavement, one knee under him, the other twisted in a painful arc. He limped across the street, feeling as though he were trapped in a film in which he was unable to deliver his own lines and was forced to say another character’s dialogue instead. Something was wrong.
The look on the doorman’s face when Youssef arrived home told him that what had happened at the hotel was not a mistake. The doorman stood up quickly, his red prayer mat sliding from the back of his chair to the ground. He picked it up with one hand and held the other up to stop Youssef from going in. “What is it?” Youssef said as firmly as he could. He walked past the old man into the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator. “I’m in a rush.”
“There’s no need to go up there, my son,” the doorman said, his voice tinged with weariness. “The locks have been changed.”
Youssef whipped around to face him, his worn beige suit hanging loosely on his thin body, his mouth nearly toothless, his eyes disappearing under the folds of his lids, his forehead marked by a round spot of piety. Even though Youssef knew that this poor, devout man would never have dared touch the locks without an order from his father, he could not help yelling. “Are you mad? How dare you change my locks?”
“It was the owner who did it,” the doorman said.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Madame Amrani called me from abroad. She told me a locksmith would come.”
So she was the one behind all this. Madame Amrani, his mother’s rival, and now his, too. “Does my father know about this?”
The doorman remained silent.
“He’s my father.”
The old man looked away.
“Do you know that? Do you know he’s my father?”
“Whatever you say, my son.”
It was useless. “What about my things?” Youssef asked. “Where are they?”
“I have them.” The doorman went inside his ground-floor office and fetched a large pillowcase filled with clothes. “Here.”
“This is it?” Youssef asked. “What about my books? My movies? All my shoes?”
“I only took what I could while the locksmith was waiting, my son. Don’t get angry with me. Take it up with her when she returns. And if you think I took anything from you, you’re welcome to check inside the office.”
Youssef felt like shaking this man, who had been nothing but kind to him, this helpless man, who was like so many other people in the country, completely disabused of the notion that there was much use fighting against injustice. The only thing that stopped Youssef was the look in the man’s eyes, a look that made it clear he would accept this indignity as he had accepted all the others life had dealt him.
YOUSSEF CARRIED HIS BAG to the nearest café and sat there all afternoon, his chin resting on his palm. He took out his mobile phone to call his father’s secretary. “Who is calling, please?” she asked in the nasal voice he remembered.
“This is … Driss Ayyadi,” Youssef said. “I’m a journalist.”
“I’m sorry, sir. He is out of the office.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I’m not sure.”
It annoyed Youssef that Fadila was so protective of her boss as to keep the date of his return a secret — unless, he thought suddenly, she had been told to remain quiet. “That’s too bad,” he said, trying to hit the right note of professional rather than personal disappointment. “I wanted to talk to him about a piece I’ve been commissioned to do for Le Monde.”
The mention of the French newspaper got her attention. She spoke quickly now. “He’s in the United States until the nineteenth. After that, he goes on vacation in Spain for ten days. He won’t be back until the end of June.”
Nabil had never mentioned that he would be gone for so long. Why the omission? And the way he had spoken the last time Youssef saw him had been so strange, so full of foreboding and sadness. Youssef had a sinking feeling in his stomach, yet he tried to keep his voice level. “So he’ll be back in the office on the thirtieth?”
“Yes, sir. If you’d like to give me a phone number, I will make sure he gets the message.”
Youssef made up a number and hung up. Although he tried to keep the thought out of his mind, it imposed itself upon him like light upon night: his father had left him. He smoked what remained of his pack of Dunhills while watching young people his age sitting in the café. They seemed so confident, so sure of themselves and of who they were. Just yesterday he might have been able to deceive himself into believing that he, too, was of their world, not just in it.