HAVING COMPLETED THE exercise, Mr. Benaïssa decided to immerse his audience into a world of magic by taking a twinkling metal flute out of its case and beginning to play it. Namouss had only seen reed flutes before and so the instrument’s physical aspects, as well as the music it was spreading, produced the effect of a wonderful fairy tale in him. Yet this did not lead to the discovery of other places or the characters of myths and legends; rather, what fascinated him the most was that an instrument so seemingly simple could unleash such a wide range of notes, going far beyond the handful of boring nursery rhymes he and his friends used to hum to the tune of a simple la la lalala:
Oh wily little grasshopper
Where did you go a-roving?
What tasty treats have you had?
Only the sweet air that you’re breathing. .
Or even this one:
Oh rain rain rain
Oh children of plowmen
Oh wise Master Bouzekri
Quick! So that my bread rises
And my little ones can eat today. .
Putting his flute down, Mr. Benaïssa began to sing in a baritone:
By the light of the moon,
Pierrot, my friend,
Lend me your pen
So that I may write. .
He asked the students to repeat after him, and by God, it wasn’t such a bad harmony after all. The music began to work its magic. The students grew bolder. Namouss came out of his shell and joined in, and taking his first, feverish steps in this new art form, his tongue loosened to the point he felt it would split in two. He remembered a potion that magicians would give to the mute so they could recover the power of speech. But what about right there and then, what had he been drinking? Just Mr. Benaïssa’s words and the music whose notes came from a faraway elsewhere. Anyway, it was up to him to decide where exactly they came from; after all, he now spoke Freensh.
Before the end of the lesson, Mr. Benaïssa touched on other subjects: discipline, cleanliness, and appearance.
“I don’t want to see anyone ever wearing djellabas. We are not in the countryside or in the roads of the Medina here. Keep them for going to the hammam if you like. You are going to take part in gymnastics in school. Imagine trying to do your gymnastics in a djellaba! So starting tomorrow, everyone should be in shirts and shorts or trousers — and don’t forget to wear sandals or shoes. I will not tolerate any of you running around barefoot as if you were a baker’s boys. Off you go, get ready to leave, in pairs, and quietly. You” — he said pointing in Namouss’s direction — “come see me in my office.”
On that note, the bell rang out. The others carried on, while Namouss, who could barely feel his legs, made his way to the office as best he could. Mr. Benaïssa pulled out a pretty little rectangular piece of cardboard from his briefcase and gave it to Namouss.
“Here’s your gold star. By the way, haven’t I seen you before?”
“Yes. . No, sir,” Namouss replied.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“N. . no.”
“Very well, on your way now.”
Relieved, Namouss fled — running rather than walking — all the way back to the house. Ghita, who had seemed so distant when he’d left for school that morning, was waiting on tenterhooks.
“Well?” she said, brimming with joy on seeing him again.
Namouss held out his gold star, and he — who had never once dared be informal with his mother — heard himself adopt a sophisticated and exaggeratedly lofty tone and say, “Bonjour, madame.”
Ghita, who as soon as she stepped on a raisin could promptly feel its sweetness rise up into her mouth, or so she claimed, had understood.
“Is that Freensh or is it Freentasia, as they say?”
And she erupted into a roar of laughter.
7
NAMOUSS FOUND HE had a real passion for school.
On top of the lessons taught by Mr. Benaïssa, there were those by Si Daoudi, the Arabic teacher, a good-looking man who wore a large turban and was always immaculately dressed in a spotless djellaba with a black burnous thrown gracefully over his shoulders. Mr. Benaïssa taught the lion’s share of the lessons throughout the week, leaving Si Daoudi two or three sessions during which time the students learned a little Arabic and, above all, the Qur’an. The Franco-Muslim school lived up to its name. Engrossed in his new discoveries, Namouss had no idea of what lay ahead. The first of these discoveries was a new calendar, which gave time an unprecedented reliability.
Before that, time had been a somewhat foreign concept. Days and weeks had never really coalesced into a grand narrative, whereas months and years faded into a blurry haze. This was why he’d always felt he was living in expectation. Fridays were the only blips on the flat line. Friday, when parents are in a good mood, when the midday meal is bountiful, when we would “Friday” ourselves and pay visits to other members of our family, visit the graves of our nearest and dearest, and, even more exciting, go for walks in the Jnan Sbil gardens — not to mention the possibility of going to the cinema.
Since the first day of school, the train of time had come into view and set itself onto its rails. A fixed schedule of arrivals and departures. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so forth. The day of rest was switched from Friday to Sunday. What had happened? The Hijri calendar had simply been replaced by the Gregorian. Every morning, Mr. Benaïssa drummed the date into our heads by writing it at the top of the blackboard: Monday. . November 1949.
Thus regulated and signposted, time began to take giant strides, turning into a purveyor of information. With each passing week, Namouss amassed knowledge and marveled.
Case in point were the writing lessons, which filled him with wonder. Mr. Benaïssa and Si Daoudi were both bona fide master calligraphers. On seeing the letters drawn with such grace on the blackboard — and above all his own growing ability to slowly decipher them — the elation Namouss experienced rivaled what Champollion must have felt as he unraveled the mysteries of the Rosetta stone. Words began to acquire lives of their own, leaving their creator behind to begin adventures of their own. Namouss learned to read and write, and at the same time to discover the charms of objects hitherto unknown to him: books. He’d never seen any during his brief spell at Qur’an school, where the short verses of the holy book were scrawled on clay tablets and then wiped away soon after the verses had been memorized. Since he was too young, the faqih didn’t allow him to write, and so Namouss had made do with casting longing glances at an older student’s tablet, repeating phrases of which he understood only an inkling. At home, he’d occasionally seen one of his brothers reading a book — that enigmatic object whose use he’d thought was restricted to adults. He wasn’t frustrated by any of this. After all, he was free and had better things to do with his time, like “tramping and traipsing the streets,” for which Ghita used to reproach him, or playing with the neighborhood kids right up to nightfall, mixing with the crowds in the Medina and taking in the flow of its sights. And here he was, leafing through one of these very objects that the teacher would hand out at the beginning of the class and then collect again at the end. A shame he couldn’t take it home so as to prolong the pleasure. Yet day by day, the puzzle of the departure began to make a lot more sense. Not only could he understand what he was reading but he was even beginning to forge a connection between the written words and the images associated with them: images shrouded in mystery and which seemed to come from another world — houses unlike any he’d ever seen, with plenty of space between them, topped by chimneys where smoke rose like a snake into the air, and surrounded by gardens where blond, chubby-cheeked children played on a seesaw. A plane, a train. An ocean liner cleaving the waves. Namouss had certainly overheard people talk about such wacky contraptions, but to actually see them, that was something else! He’d never had the opportunity to leave the Medina, even if only to go to the new town, which he knew was populated by foreigners, who lived in houses that were five or six stories tall, drove through wide, paved boulevards, drank forbidden liqueurs in cafés where men and women mixed freely, without shame.