“Let go of me,” she said.
It was useless. In another minute, she was gone.
Nabil let himself slide into the armchair. He closed his eyes, and the first images that came to him were of a trip to the beach with Amal when she was five or six. It was a father-daughter weekend — Malika had gone to visit her mother. Amal sat in the backseat and sang songs and asked questions and kicked the passenger seat with her shoes. They were approaching Moulay Bousselham when a piece of gravel hit the windshield, cracking it into a cobweb of glass. Nabil stopped the car to inspect the damage. They were only fifty meters from their destination, so he decided to continue on; he would call the repairman from the house. Just as he parked the car in the driveway, the windshield gave in and a million pieces of glass fell, like rain, on the dashboard, on his arms, on his lap.
That was how he felt now, as if his already-fractured heart was at last and irremediably broken. It could never be put back together the way it was before. Amal had left him behind for the sake of that man, just as he had left Youssef behind for her sake. How could it be that he had given up the son for the daughter, and now he had neither the son nor the daughter? People always said that life was unfair, but maybe it was not. Life had caught up with him and dealt him a sentence of unendurable fairness.
He had betrayed all those he loved. When he had heard about Amal’s American boyfriend, he had yelled at her, stopped paying for her school, and pretended to give her up. He had wanted to win her back by force. The deal he had made with his daughter may have been unspoken, but it was firm; it was finaclass="underline" she had to apologize and return to the old ways, or she would lose his love. What he had not counted on was that she was proud and stubborn, just like him. She had refused the deal. Once she was on her own, it had been easy for that man (what kind of a name was Fernando?) to prey on her and take her away.
Youssef had appeared at AmraCo in the middle of all this, like an answer to a prayer. Nabil thought he had been given another chance. He had taken care of Youssef, tried to groom him, prepare him for his entrance into the Amranis’ world — not through the main door, of course, for there were still appearances to keep up, but through the side door, perhaps — get him to meet Amal and Malika, maybe have him come for dinner every once in a while. Then Malika found out, told Nabil’s brothers, and Nabil had to make another bargain. He gave up the son in order to keep the wife and daughter. He had not realized that the pain would hit him as sharply as that piece of gravel striking the windshield. For as long as he lived, he would never forget the look in the boy’s eyes when they stood by the car outside the company’s headquarters. The look of a child begging you to love him, and all you did was turn away.
Now even Malika would leave him. She had no reason to stay any longer. He had made a fool of her over the years. She had never cared because she had always believed that they were a family and family was more important than des affaires de cuisses. But today everything had changed. Her only daughter had left. She was standing by the window, staring outside at the road, as if she could still see Amal’s car in the distance. She had stopped crying. Her hands were folded over her chest. “Malika,” he said. She did not respond, did not turn, did not show any sign of having heard him. “Malika, we can get her back.” Nothing. It was as though she was no longer in the room with him. A kind of loneliness such as he had never known before entered his heart. If he did not have a daughter, or a son, or a wife, then who was he, in the end?
Over the next few days, he tortured himself with thoughts of a happier past, a time when he would never have made the bargains he made, a time when he still stood for something. What had happened to his world? When did things fall apart? Men of his generation were children of ’56, children of the independence. Like them, he had signed petitions for the release of Saida Menebhi, written articles for Lamalif, spent hours in Rafael Levy’s smoky living room discussing Frantz Fanon or Mehdi Ben Barka, closed down his law office during general strikes, denounced the imposition by the World Bank and the IMF of a structural adjustment plan, called these institutions “tools of neocolonialism par excellence,” collected money for the families of those killed during the bread riots of 1981. Those were years when he still dared to dream, when he was still full of love for his country.
Some of his friends — journalists, professors, writers, artists — were forced into exile, in Cairo or Paris or Madrid. He knew people who had been imprisoned and tortured. One of his colleagues was made to disappear. Bit by bit, he began to lose hope, betray his ideals, trade his love of country for the comfort of home. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had given up. He told himself he was married, with a child on the way, that his wife — fragile as she was — would not be able to take care of Amal if something were to happen to him. He could no longer take the risk of wanting change. He started working for his father in the family business, like his father before him, and had been content to think of politics as something that was discussed every once in a while over a glass of whiskey or during a game of golf. Whatever happened in the nation or the world was not his concern any longer.
Now Nabil sat in his office in AmraCo, staring out the window at the city, with the minaret of the King Hassan Mosque at one end, the Twin Center towers at the other, and the vast, the incredible sea of homes and apartment buildings in between. What had he done with his life? The pain in his chest made it difficult to breathe, and in order to distract himself, he turned his office television on, watched a young journalist chatter on about the imminent danger of Islamic fundamentalism. He turned the TV off, tossing the remote on the desk. Young people these days seemed to have no idea what country they were from; they talked of Morocco as if its history had begun ten years ago, as if the issues they were facing had just appeared on the scene, lacking any provenance, devoid of any context.
He was overcome now by a feeling of shame at having turned away Farid Benaboud when he had asked for support. He had heard from a friend that Benaboud was in trouble — and not just the usual harassment, like slashed tires, or tapped phones, or stolen mail, but something else altogether, something far more sinister. How long before Benaboud gave up and he, too, made politics the occasional subject of a game of golf? He would close down the magazine; or worse, he would keep it open and turn it into a sounding board, against which the praises of the most beautiful country in the world could be sung and amplified.
There was something in Benaboud that Nabil recognized — a part of his old self, a part of the past he had long betrayed. And it was in order to save that sliver of himself, in order to be loyal to that past, that he picked up the phone and called to say he would write a statement of support. He knew this would anger his friends in government. But it would make others like him pause, and perhaps they could help Benaboud’s magazine survive. This time, at least.
Youssef was lying on his bed when he heard his mother crying. Immediately alarmed, he ran to the yard. “Yak labas?” he asked. She pointed to the television screen; she was watching The Nightingale’s Prayer. “You startled me,” he said, his hand on his heart.
“It’s nothing,” she said. She wiped her tears and shook her head, embarrassed to have been crying over a movie.
“It’s all right,” he said softly. He sat down next to her, watching for a few minutes. Nightingale was not his favorite film by Henry Barakat — he preferred his earlier work. But the performances by Faten Hamama and Zahrat El ‘Ola made it worth watching.