“Tell me,” she said, clearly wanting to change the subject, “were you going out?”
“Oh, no. No, I wasn’t.”
“You’ve been staying home a lot.”
He couldn’t tell her why. Even if he could tell her, he would have been ashamed to.
Why had he agreed to Hatim’s plans? Even now, days later, he did not have a simple explanation.
His troubles had started when he had left Hay An Najat. He wished that he had never left the neighborhood, never dropped out of college, never said yes when Moussa came to the door to ask him to meet Hatim, never heard of Hatim’s plans. Hatim had given him the impossible task of choosing between his mother and his father, and in his shock at realizing that his secret was no longer a secret, he had found himself cornered and forced to make a decision. The words had escaped his mouth before he could weigh their meanings or their consequences. Hatim had seemed satisfied because that answer meant Youssef would agree to the operation.
But Hatim did not know what Youssef’s mother was like, or he would not have invoked her. Youssef’s mother hated politicians, people who showed up in Hay An Najat only in election years. She made no distinction between the Party and the others, saying they all cared about the same things. If she had been in Youssef’s shoes, she would already have reported Hatim to the police. How could he betray her now by doing the very thing she would never agree to?
Then there was Hatim’s insistence that the mission was part of a bigger plan, where each person had a role. Youssef was tired of playing a role; he wanted, for once — for just this once — to be himself: Youssef El Mekki, son to a loving mother, college dropout, movie fanatic, perpetual loser at chess. But there was no going back. He had made a choice, and if he recanted it now, Hatim would kill him — or his mother.
He was a coward. He was letting an innocent man be killed for fear that his own innocent mother would be murdered. Night after night, he lay on his bed, stared at the ceiling, willed his mind to be blank. It was the only way he had found to convince himself that nothing he could do would change the course of things, that nothing was under his control. The plot would be carried out with or without his involvement.
When on Saturday the new issue of Casablanca Magazine came out, Youssef was stunned to read Nabil Amrani’s article. He had come forward to support Farid Benaboud, to say that the intimidations had to stop. The old man has finally grown a backbone, Youssef thought, and despite himself he felt pride. Nabil Amrani’s support would surely help Benaboud, but how could it save him from Hatim? On his way back home from the newsstand, Youssef once again had the feeling of being watched, and he hurried home, where he would be safe, and silent.
Rachida had not meant to eavesdrop. In fact, she would not have paid any attention to Maati and the older man with whom he was talking if they had not switched from speaking Darija to Tamazight when they noticed her walking behind them. She was in a rush to get home to catch her Mexican soap opera, and the lane was narrow, so she had come up behind them at a quick pace, expecting they would step aside to let her pass. But instead they switched to Tamazight. Without knowing why, she slowed down and listened.
Maati’s companion asked him about the Party.
“Two men came to see Hatim yesterday,” Maati replied. “One of them is tall, about one meter eighty. Completely bald. Long beard. First name is Reda. The other one is about my height. Dark hair. Brown eyes. He has a lame leg. I don’t know his name.”
“We’re familiar with Reda, alias El Mdardag. I think I know who the other man is, but find out his name.”
They arrived at a fork in the road, and Rachida had to turn and head toward her house. She did not dare look back, though she kept listening to the sound of Maati’s flip-flops until it faded away, down the other road. Maati! The high school dropout, the failed boxer, the good-for-nothing whose smile made her wonder whether any thought had ever entered his head. She would never have guessed he was a police informant. Appearances were deceiving — and how.
Over and over, she had told Youssef to stay away from Maati and Amin, from the Party, from that cursed Oasis. If the police were monitoring Hatim, then something terrible was brewing, and there was no telling what would happen. She quickened her pace, eager to get home and tell Youssef.
She found him lying despondently on the divan. For the past few days, he had been like this — quiet, pensive, lost in a world she could not enter. “Youssef,” she whispered. He turned to look at her, and her expression must have betrayed her because he sat up immediately. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
She pointed to the bedroom. They went inside. She told him what she had heard, her right hand over her chest as if to still the beating of her heart.
“You’re sure it was Maati?” Youssef asked.
“Of course I’m sure it was him, my son. I’ve known him since he was ten years old.”
Still, he looked incredulous, unable to accept the idea that one of his closest friends was an informant. He paced in front of her, his fingers touching his temples, as if he could not contain all the thoughts that raced around inside his head. Then he made her repeat, word for word, the conversation she had heard. “But isn’t it strange,” Youssef said when she was finished, “that they spoke of such things openly, even though you were right there? Are you sure they weren’t just pulling a prank?”
His tone suggested absurd hope, and so Rachida realized that the only way to convince her son was to tell him the truth. She would never be able to save Youssef from Hatim and his people if she did not, at long last, tell the truth. “They spoke in Tamazight.”
“You understand Tamazight?”
She nodded. Tamazight belonged to a time when she still had a family, she began.
“A family?” Youssef asked. His face grew pale, and he sat on his bed and watched her with disbelief, his pupils dilated in the half-light of the bedroom. He seemed to her again like a child, no longer a grown man but just a child, and she wanted to wrap her arms around him and run her fingers through his hair and tell him that everything would be all right in the end. But there was no getting away from the truth this time. She told him first about her mother, Izza, whose face she could no longer recall after so many years. Rachida did remember, though, the shape of Izza’s body as she came through the doorway of their house, backlit by the bright mountain sun. She remembered the feel of Izza’s hands as she brushed and plaited Rachida’s four-year-old hair. She remembered the weight of the stones when they played marbles together. She remembered the smell of lavender on Izza’s bed, even at the very end, when she was too sick to leave it.
A few months after Izza died, Rachida’s father, Hammou, had sent Rachida to the orphanage in Fès, where she could attend school. It would be good for her, he said, better than climbing trees and running around in the fields, picking daisies. In all her time at the Bab Ziyyat orphanage, Rachida’s father had visited just three times, and when he did, it was to marvel at how much she had grown and how well she could read. “He gave me up to the orphanage and told me it was for my own good.”
Rachida was in her first year of training to be a midwife when the head nun told her she would be working for Fatema Amrani, who needed someone to attend to a pregnant woman on bed rest. Rachida had taken care of Fatema’s daughter-in-law Malika Amrani, carefully noting her weight, temperature, and blood pressure in a notebook, and spent the rest of her time on the veranda, working on her embroidery or reading a magazine.