Dirty dog, curses upon his mother’s religion!
His barking didn’t stop our caravan from filing up the stairs that night. There was Ben Youssef again, making his appearance on the lightly dented moon. The top of his hood was leaning slightly to one side. During the course of the following nights, layers of darkness started to cover his face, first his right eye, then his nose, his mouth, his other eye, and so on. Oblivious to the barking guard dogs and the indifference of the world, we clung to our hope until the final stages of the moon’s “revolution.”
In the meantime, the “white days” of Shawwal came thick and fast, and one needed to come to terms with that. There was nothing on the horizon. No Ben Youssef in sight. Other torments were on the way, which announced themselves with flashes of lightning and storms prompted by the shockwaves of history.
Accordingly we dined on the dry bread crusts of expectation and drank the fresh water of stubborn hope. This went on for a succession of seasons, where “our summers became our winters,” before the great upheaval, the real one, came along and the diurnal star of freedom rose in our sky.
But that’s another story.
Epilogue
SINCE THEN, THE earth has continued to spin on its axis like a whirligig. Life too.
More lives than one. Thanks to the stories I have told, I find myself face-to-face with a set of Russian dolls. I pay close attention to the dolls all lined up in a row. From the smallest to the largest, there is a common thread, as the life force passes from one to the other, and each time I acquire a new lease on my soul. And to think that none of the dolls had the idea to run roughshod over the others and claim sole maternity rights over the whole set. I have tried to give a simple answer to the voice that claims to speak for memory, that pesters me and asks: Who is Namouss? The answer that rises in reply is happily unforeseen: Namouss is my ancestor and my child.
There’s nothing left for me now but to go back to the starting line and loop-the-loop.
But before that, there’s one question left that needs to be cleared up. What is this mysterious “bottom of the jar,” the emblem from which this story unfolded?
The origins of this expression can be traced back to an anecdote by the famous Joha,19 a mythical Mediterranean who was a master of practical jokes. Here it is.
After having been an imam, a judge, a lawyer, a porter, and a number of other professions — all leading nowhere — Joha was living hand to mouth. One day it occurred to him to give business a try. He would sell honey and butter at the souk. But there was a snag: He wouldn’t have much stock. Customers won’t crowd around me, he said to himself, if I don’t put my wares in plain sight. He purchased two jars, which he filled to the halfway point with excrement, before topping one off with honey and the other with butter. Then he took them to the souk. It didn’t take long for customers to crowd around him. Before making up their minds, each of his customers asked to sample the merchandise. First one came, then another, and so forth. It got to the point that they were drawing near the danger zone. Infuriated by how people sampled a lot and yet bought little, Joha yelled out this warning: “Keep licking away and you’ll get licked, if you carry on like this, you will land in shit. Beware of the bottom of the jar!”
The scatological element of the story diminished over time. The Fezzis, however, did hold on to the notion that by wanting to get to the bottom of things, one usually hit on distasteful truths, vile things that are best left unseen lest one winds up making sworn enemies. The flawless reasoning of the Jesuits! This also exists in the lands of Islam. But when it comes to the Fezzis, who are sophists at heart, this was interpreted differently and has now come to mean the exact opposite. In its newfound form, it designates a vast repertory of horrible words and idioms that are enjoyed in the company of a select few: double-edged words, metaphorical expressions, witty one-liners, and allusions that only the initiated can grasp, prompting them to burst into ecstasies, much to the chagrin of the laymen around them.
This “bottom of the jar” has spread far beyond the city of Moulay Idriss, and for that matter far beyond the reaches of the imperialism that the Fezzis often profited from — and still do — even though they believe that there’s a bottom as well as a rock bottom. Let’s be fair and leave to one side those who, admittedly, weren’t able grasp the full sense of the story unless they happened to have heard it related in their own accent, with their own expressions and gestures, their naïveté and endearing certitude, a conviction fairly common among tribes and peoples, of being the center of the universe.
But enough of these tiring platitudes. There’s still a little left in the jar for those with a taste for it.
NIGHT HAD FALLEN and the family was still gathered in the apartment that my father had rented in the new town after Ghita’s untimely death. An ironic twist: The apartment was part of the L’Urbaine complex, the flagship modern development during the days of the protectorate. It was where the upper crust of French civil servants and other influential people once lived. Despite the ravages of time, the building was in decent shape. At least to the casual observer, since once you got past the gates, the truth in the old adage “other times, other customs” emerged. The majority of the mailboxes were gone and those that had survived dangled loosely right in front of the diligent postman’s eyes. The elevator was nothing but a distant memory, attested to by a majestic, iron-clad cage that was irremediably empty. It was a good thing that Driss’s apartment was on the first floor. But let’s move on.
The television was always on and the lively conversations ignored the images in the background and drowned out its accompanying decibels. We were taking part in a ritual that always took place when we got together: bringing Ghita’s sayings and doings back to life, her unforgettably epic opinions.
“Do you remember what she said about fasting one day during Ramadan?”
“And when we moved to the house in Siaj and she couldn’t stand the fact that we’d be under the eyes of our first-floor neighbors?”
“And the time when she played a trick on Touissa when we were in Sidi Harazem?”
“And the pot that she emptied in the toilet the day the khatib was murdered?”
“What was it she used to say to express how nothing got past her?”
“If I step on a raisin I can immediately taste its sweetness in my mouth.”
“And the first time she went to the cinema.”
“The things she said about poor Farid al-Atrash!”
Speaking of the cinema, I still haven’t told you that beautiful story. I’d gone to see a film at the Boujeloud — I was wearing a coat that I’d just bought. When I got there, I took it off and hung it on the back of my seat. It was only after I’d come home that I realized I’d forgotten it. Ghita was beside herself. She promised she would light seven candles to Saint Sidi Abdelkader Jilani if he helped us recover the coat. I went back to the cinema and miraculously found the coat exactly where I’d left it. Ghita was ecstatic, but when I reminded her of the seven candles she’d promised to Sidi Abdelkader Jilani, without batting an eyelid she said, “So what? We have the coat in our hands right here, so the saint can go take a hike!”
Along those lines, television began to run the evening news. I used what influence I had to call for silence. I expected the fall of the Berlin Wall to be among the top headlines. How naïve I was. For almost half an hour, the wooden anchorman focused on royal audiences, foundation-laying ceremonies presided over by ministers who didn’t even know how to hold a trowel, and soporific debates being held before a mostly empty parliament. He then apologized that due to the “wealth of material” he could only gloss over the international news in brief. We were finally allowed images of the Berlin Wall, pieces of which were being grabbed by its brave dismantlers as if they were holy relics.