“My father?” Youssef said breathlessly. Only one thought raced in his mind now: Amin told him about me, Amin betrayed me. “What would you know of my father?”
Hatim gave him a quick smile. “I know more than enough about Nabil Amrani, my son. I’ve known for a long time.” The Al Aqsa clock suddenly went off, broadcasting the call to the afternoon prayer, but Hatim, leaning forward in his chair, stared unblinkingly at Youssef. “Well? Are you on your mother’s side, or your father’s?”
“My mother’s,” Youssef whispered.
Hatim sat back in his chair and smiled. “Of course. How could it be otherwise, when you look around you, when you consider what the others have done to us?” he said, thumb pointed at his chest. “I know what you have gone through. You have studied, you have worked hard, you have played by the rules, and all for what? Here you are, jobless, with no prospects, no way to support your mother or to start a family of your own. Meanwhile, those who are responsible for what happened to you are sitting in their fancy houses in Anfa. Do you think it is right that your father should live in a mansion and you and your mother should live here? How long can we tolerate this kind of injustice? How long before we rise up and demand that things change?”
Youssef had still not recovered from the shock of hearing his father’s name on Hatim’s lips. He was mesmerized, unable to stop his anger toward his father and his father’s world from kindling in his heart once again. This time it was taking the shape of a star, and he had trouble keeping it from radiating in all directions.
“I have been thinking for a while about how this senseless situation in our community is allowed to continue. And I have come to see that it is all because there is no perception about what is going on. I read a lot of these papers.” He pointed to a pile of newspapers and magazines on the floor beneath the window. “And I am always appalled at how journalists conduct their business. They do not report the truth. They may promote the views of the government, or the views of their parties, or the views of the West. But they always lie. They never give us voice. They don’t listen to our grievances. They ignore what we have to say about how we can reform our ways through our faith. They want to keep God out of everything. Let me tell you something: they can’t. So the time has come to send them this message: Enough of your lies!” He slammed his fist on his desk, spilling some coffee on the papers.
Hatim’s words were like a labyrinth in which Youssef was losing his way. His anger blinded him; he could not find the exit on his own and instead began to take each turn that presented itself without question. When the Al Aqsa clock broadcast its second reminder, he was so startled that he stood up. “The call to prayer,” he said. “You will be late for prayer.”
Hatim pulled him back down by the wrist. “Prayer can wait, my son. There are times for prayer, and there are times for action. We are having an important conversation. Moussa?”
Moussa came around the desk to the computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, he had connected to a video-sharing Web site and was already playing a clip, made up of still photographs, grainy and unfocused. An unseen man read a long series of names of students and activists, men and women, young and old, who had been killed in prisons and torture centers during the Years of Lead. “You are told,” Moussa said, “that Derb Moulay Cherif and Tazmamart belong in history, that you’re living in a new age now. But watch this.” He played another video clip. This one had hidden-camera footage of riot police beating demonstrators on a campus in Meknès, customs officers stopping cars on the freeway in order to get bribes, judges rendering sentences on hundreds of young bearded suspects at once. It was true, Youssef thought. Too little had changed in the country.
Afterward came images of thugs beating up student protestors. For a moment, Youssef thought that this was another sample from a campus somewhere in the heart of the country, but when one of the men spoke (“ana ma ‘amiltish haga”) he realized the demonstrators were Egyptian. Suddenly he felt a new kinship with the young people of Egypt, whose struggles were so similar to his own.
Then Palestine: people waiting in line for food in Gaza, families walking single file down a rocky hill in order to get to a checkpoint, the burial of a twenty-day-old baby with a gunshot wound to the head, an officer slapping a toothless old man in the West Bank. The images were no different from those shown on any given day on twenty-four-hour news channels, and usually they would have stirred feelings of anger in Youssef. Today, though, the anger was already there, and the images merely sharpened it.
The last series of photographs were from Iraq. Men, naked and barefoot, without faces or names, their hands cuffed to beds, rails, and doors, standing in their own urine or sitting in their own feces. Their heads were covered with black sandbags or with pink, frilly women’s underwear. One stood on a box, wires taped to his hands, his arms spread out in a crucificial pose. Another was made to bend, as if he were in ruku‘, while a soldier sat on a chair in front of him. Men were piled like stones in pyramids of varying heights or dragged on a leash like animals.
The horror gave rise to fury, and suddenly Youssef felt unable to decide what to do with himself. Cry out in pain or stay quiet? Stay here in this musty office or run as far away from it as possible? He put his fingers on his temples, trying to follow each thought to its conclusion, but each one vanished before he could.
“The point that Brother Moussa is trying to make,” Hatim said, “is that our stories are the same. We get injustice, repression, and torture, and somehow we’re supposed to stay quiet? To say please and thank you?” He shook his head. “Not us. We say no.”
Youssef had walked into that office preoccupied only by his own troubles, but after hearing Hatim’s words and seeing Moussa’s pictures, he felt as though he were losing touch with himself, becoming part of something much bigger. The injustice he had suffered was small and insignificant compared with these others, yet they were all made of the same fabric, the same disregard for human dignity.
“Everyone knows we are at war,” Hatim continued, “but the Party doesn’t fight the war with the same weapons. Some people think that strapping themselves up with explosives and killing fifty people is a good way to win, but I think that’s inefficient, not to mention outdated. Any fool can blow himself up. A smart man has to worry about winning the image war, too. We want to hit very specific targets that will have maximum effect. This is why we set our minds on Farid Benaboud — you remember him, I’m sure. He wrote the first article denouncing our work here, and of course many of his colleagues have since followed him, like the Ben Oui-Ouis that they are. In the past, he has defended the whores who were caught with foreign tourists and has even suggested we must stop teaching religion in schools. Enough, I say. It is time we send a message to him and to those of his kind, to let them know we will not be intimidated, that we will continue our work regardless of their efforts to stop us. Imagine what eliminating him will do to the rest of his useless class of writers and journalists! The time has come for an operation against him.”
“An operation?” Youssef repeated. The radiating star inside him numbed all other senses, so that his own voice sounded faint, as if it came from a faraway place and not from his own mouth.