Driss was the first to rouse himself from this general apathy.
“My children,” he said, breathing in deeply, “we have to be ready for anything.”
Then he ordered my sister Zhor: “Get the ladder.”
We only understood his request when he leaned the ladder against the wall of the living room where we were assembled. Nimble as a cat, he hoisted himself up the ladder and started taking the portraits hung up there off their pegs: portraits of Mohammed ben Youssef, Allal al-Fassi, Belhassan Ouazzani, and Abdel el-Krim Khattabi, which we had long ago stopped noticing.
“Go and look for the pestle,” he ordered me.
Running to the kitchen, I tried to understand the meaning of this sudden frenzy on his part, but it was no use. When I returned, pestle in hand, I found Driss rummaging through the large wooden chest where Ghita kept certain valuables. He pulled out two engraved silver daggers, tossing them on top of the haphazard pile of portraits that were lying facedown on the ground. This gesture was even more shocking when one considered how he venerated these people and had gone to great lengths to instill the same feeling in us. One could only assume that in light of the serious danger we were about to face, his emotions needed to adapt accordingly. Without a word, Driss tore the pestle from my hand and started to smash the glass panes covering the portraits. He was in such a hurry that he damaged even the red cedar frames. He tore the photographs to shreds. And the daggers — he banged away at them as much as he could but only succeeded in slightly bending them.
“We have to prepare ourselves for the worst, my children,” he finally explained. “The police inspectors will burst in here any moment now. So we can’t leave any traces of anything that might get us into trouble. May God forgive us for having desecrated these great men whom we hold in such high esteem. But necessity has its reasons. As for the daggers, they’re nothing but things, and things can always be replaced. Come on, let’s clean up all this broken glass and flush it down the toilet. So if the police inspectors come to poke their noses in here, they will find nothing but thin air.”
A few of us volunteered to accomplish the task. Once the debris had been cleared up, we dragged it to the kitchen, where the toilets, in a dark corner, were separated from the rest of the kitchen by a low wall, with a gaping hole in the middle. We had barely jettisoned our cargo when Ghita suddenly emerged from the shadows holding the pot that she’d forgotten on the stove. She was beside herself.
“If this carries on, I swear you’ll all go hungry.”
Splash! She poured the contents of the pot down the hole, leaving us stunned. Then her wrath exploded, in Driss’s direction first.
“You had to have it your way, didn’t you! Now you’re calm. While I — who am only a woman — would have said to those Frenchmen and their soldiers and goumiers: Shame on you! After all, what would they have done to me? Cut off my head? Locked me in a cage like Bou Hamara and dragged me through the streets of the Medina? Enough is enough. Fear is also a killer.”
“Stop this madness,” Driss retorted. “You know all too well that they take it out on men, and especially the young. We have to protect our children.”
This exchange took place in almost total darkness; there were no windows or air vents in the kitchen-toilet area. The words reverberated, ricocheting off the walls before heading down the drains where they blended with the stagnant water. I had switched off and was beginning to feel numb. I was running out of breath, swept away by that white, glacial cloud that had haunted me ever since the incident at Small Springs. I revisited the scene: the distant beat of cries, the hand that the woman I was pressed into had abandoned. The taste of flesh and blood of the hand I bit into desperately. The state between life and death where my chief concern had been how my parents would have reacted if they’d learned what had happened to me. The other hand, helping, that had reached for me, then the pitch-black.
When I came to, I found myself alone in a corner, stretched out on a mattress. No hubbub of voices in the house. Instead, there was a sharp hammering sound coming from outside. I grasped that someone was knocking on our door. But these weren’t the blows of the knocker. Someone was banging away using a tool, probably a hammer, and it was clear that they were not asking for permission to come in. I got up and went to join my family, who I found assembled. Nobody paid any attention to me. They had bigger fish to fry. The hushed conversations taking place allowed me to catch up on what had gone on in my absence. The situation: As predicted, the police inspectors had showed up, but they hadn’t barged into the house as we’d feared they might. Only Driss had been questioned and he’d told them that we hadn’t heard or seen anything. Meanwhile, Si Mohammed, who had been a witness and who had a criminal record, had holed up in his room. The victim was a khatib in one of the Medina’s mosques. If he had met with such a fate it was because he had persisted in invoking the name of the illegitimate sultan during his sermons despite being warned by the nationalists. His corpse had been carried off and the pool of blood washed away with copious amounts of water. The casing of the deadly bullet had lodged itself in our door and “they” were in the process of extracting it. So the nightmare had passed us by, at least for the time being. This reassuring turn of events only added grist to Ghita’s mill. She did not hold back and began to gloat, teasing Driss to lighten up.
“A shame about the daggers. Instead of destroying those, you could have turned your attention to the kitchen knives and the meat cleaver. Those are the true weapons!”
“And what about you? You took the tagine right out of our mouths,” Driss retorted, carrying on in the same jocular vein. “Was that so you could get even or because it had really burned?”
“May Satan be cursed!” Ghita replied, in a conciliatory tone. “Don’t hold it against me. I’m just like my mother. Sometimes I act a little crazy. I hear strange voices in my head. Well, at least we have some eggs and preserved meats. I’ll look after your bellies. This way, little scamp,” she said, turning to my sister Zhor. “I need some help.”
19
THE REPRIEVE DIDN’T last long. The black cloud that had plagued us and then drifted off, leaving us to breathe a sigh of relief after a close shave, came back with a vengeance, this time accompanied by a funereal detachment of soldiers. Our sky was about darken for good.
Other assassinations took place after the khatib’s murder. The press made inroads into our family. We were very fond of those headlines, even if the way they reported events was appallingly one-sided. Le Petit Marocain stressed the need for censorship laws and condemned the terrorist plots, guaranteeing they would fail. La Vigie, on the other hand, believed the affair bore the signs of the machinations of foreigners, especially by an organization whose name had been unknown to us until that point: the Communist International. The rebels were labeled as butchers, monsters, and — an odd qualifier — atheists. When we opened the dictionary to add this new term to our vocabulary, we were horrified. Could it really be that there were human beings who were capable of such ideas? How could anyone think that Muslims had been infected by such a malady of the soul? Despite the one-sided nature of official mouthpieces, we were able to glean some details that quickly allowed us to gain a full picture of the situation. Fez was a single stroke, a dab, one character among many. And it wasn’t the central focus. We discovered a country, with cities and diverse populations, a north and a south, an east and a west, and that the whole of it was bent back like a bow, overcome by the same worries, knocking on the same door, hoping for salvation, bleeding for the same cause, committed to making the same sacrifices. One magic word summed up all the expectations and the refusal to wait any longer for their realization: istiqlal! The walls of our Medina were festooned with slogans scrawled with charcoal, where the word “independence” was prominently featured. The recitations of the Latif resounded even more powerfully in the mosques. Demonstrations took place every day and were quickly repressed by the security apparatus. The police stations in Nejjarine and Boujeloud were filled to capacity. Additional detention centers were opened to accommodate the uninterrupted flow of nationalists taken in for questioning. Numerous horror stories were told about these places. The regulations banning festivities from taking place couldn’t have been stricter. Circumcisions were carried out in secret and marriages were continually postponed. The professions that relied on the extravagance of these celebrations suffered a heavy tolclass="underline" adouls,15 neggafates, musicians, hairdressers, tailors and dressmakers, caterers, upholsterers, cabinetmakers, and so on. Only the tolba16 were able to do nicely for themselves since it was difficult to dispense with their services when it came to funerals and religious wakes. Worst of all was the blanket ban on slaughtering sheep during the Festival of the Sacrifice. A group of religious leaders were up in arms over this issue, pitting the hard-line Orthodox faction against enlightened Salafists. This sowed discord among the simpleminded. They wound up striking a compromise: The slaughter of the sheep would be allowed on the condition that the hides were donated to support the struggle. And though many of the people who donated these hides did so grudgingly, they realized there were serious consqeuences if they refused to do so. The bans, boycotts, and all-around restlessness eventually began to affect the nerve center of our city: commerce. Business in the souks was visibly declining. Merchants wore long faces, with the exception of those involved in the food trade. The demand for primary foodstuffs was on the rise and those merchants rubbed their hands with glee. The winds of hope and the resurgence of pride therefore didn’t manage to lift spirits during this time marked by gloominess and hardship.