“That must have reassured you.”
“It was a spot on a map!”
“That’s better than nothing.”
“Mmmmyeah. A Guide Bleu dating from the Protectorate, suffice to say from prehistoric times…So, a few months ago, during summer vacation, back in Morocco, I wanted to be sure. Without saying anything to anybody, I took the bus to Rabat and I went to see. I saw. In fact, Khzazna is not the name of any city, nor any village, nor any hamlet.”
“A ruin, then? A poet’s dream? At least a well?”
“No. It’s a beautiful land fifty miles east of Rabat, a rather pleasant countryside where time stopped long ago — in the age of the Guide Bleu perhaps. It’s swarming with cows, sheep, hens, and rabbits.”
“So far, nothing extraordinary.”
“Nothing extraordinary, certainly; but imagine my surprise when I learned, after approaching a local gnome and asking him a few questions, that there wasn’t even a hint of a hospital nor of a maternity ward in this place. There’s only a free clinic in the small neighboring village, constructed two years ago. I’m a little bit older than that, after all.”
He slouched in his chair, brow furrowed.
“The question you must be asking yourself now, that I asked myself a long time before you, is the following: where was I born, exactly? Between two trees? On a hill? There, next to the stream?”
“In a barn, like Jesus?”
“There wasn’t a single barn in the vicinity. (Do you mind? It’s my story.) When I returned to the house, in the grips of a great anxiety…”
“…of identity…”
“…I rushed to the kitchen and demanded that my mother enlighten me. She was kneading I don’t know what in the half-light. A good minute passed before anything happened. Then she replied, seemingly unbothered, that I was born in the maternity ward of Rabat, like everyone else…”
“…but…”
“…but that my maternal grandfather had beseeched my parents to write the word “Khzazna” in the family records, in the appropriate box.”
“The grandfather’s always to blame.”
“Indeed, but why? Why? You’ll never guess in a million years.”
“I give up immediately.”
The waiter appeared and placed on our table, in a brusque gesture, two cups of coffee (tintinnabulating as they knocked against each other); then he left, full of arrogance. The young man leaned toward me once again, as if he were about to reveal the third secret of Fatima.
“All because, at the time, he would often run as a candidate in the local elections in the district of Khzazna! Elections he sometimes won, but with the tiniest lead: one vote, one alone, could make all the difference.”
Now I really got into the discussion, my voice vibrating with incredulity (80 %) and indignation (20 %):
“You expect me to believe that in this land where there are only, according to you, cows, sheep, hens, and rabbits, they vote, they elect representatives of the people in real assemblies? There are congressmen? Councillors? County magistrates, perhaps?”
He drank a small sip of coffee then struck his fist against the table (an abundance of! followed).
“Exactly, monsieur! There is all that and perhaps even more! Laugh as much as you like!”
“But…why?”
“The first governments after Independence wanted it that way, probably in order to balance the weight of Rabat, that nest of leftists who voted like one single man for Abdallah Ibrahim and his friends. As I just told you, there were so few voters in Khzazna that one sole vote could make the difference. For my grandfather, I then represented not his grandson newly landed on earth (you-you-you! ululated the women), but a potential elector who would vote for him when I came of age, twenty-one years later.”
I was flabbergasted.
“Twenty-one years later?”
“Indeed!”
“And they say Moroccans don’t know how to plan for the long term?”
“Utter nonsense!”
“That they only live in the moment?”
“Baloney!”
Moved, we looked into each other’s innermost depths, proud to be part of a people so concerned with the future, and we ordered a pomegranate juice to drink to the health of triennial, and even quinquennial, plans.
The waiter insolently asked us if we really intended to sip pomegranate juice after drinking coffee. He seemed to imply that we were sinning against the spirit of the place, against the P*sian custom, against all traditions. We told him to get lost, which he did with a majestic step.
However, the young man was worried. He started up again, in a melancholic tone:
“This story has plunged me into a state close to nervous breakdown. (Yes it has! Yes it has!) To learn first of all that I’m not who I thought I was, which is to say a Rabati; to get used to this new identity as a citizen of Khzazna; then discover that this identity that I had ended up accepting was itself a fiction; and that this fiction was a political manipulation designed by my own family…”
“We cannot be betrayed but by our own.”
With a distracted finger he wiped the bottom of the pomegranate juice lingering in his glass; then he sucked his finger, becoming more and more heavyhearted.
“Well, I wasn’t yet at the end of my troubles. That same night, while I confided the discovery of my precarious stateless state to my uncle Brahim, how did my uncle respond? Comforting words, a fitting hadith, encouragements? Not at all! He pushed me even further into my distress by revealing to me an even more bizarre fact that concerned me as well.”
He squeaked:
“My own uncle!”
“Family, I tell you… But what did he say, exactly?”
“This: ‘My dear nephew, not only were you born nowhere, but, in a certain way, you were never born at all.’ Just like that!”
“Allow me to write that phrase in my notebook.”
“‘My dear nephew, not only were you born nowhere, but, in a certain way, you were never born at all.’ And he went on to recount a detail that everyone had forgotten — except him.”
“Uncles, they forget nothing.”
“It’s important to know that I was born (if we can call it being born) toward the end of December 1973. My father was summoned to a council where he was told the following: ‘My dear Abdelmoula’—did I tell you that my father was named Abdelmoula? — ‘if you declare the birth of your son today, or even tomorrow, he will lug around for the rest of his life a year reduced to a few days. Everyone will think he’s eight years old, when really he’ll only be seven years and five days old. Better to wait for the beginning of the coming year and only then go bother the civil registrar.’”
“Understandable.”
“For close to a week, and while I was wriggling about, innocent, in my diapers, nothing happened. I mean officially. In practice, my family probably slit the throat of some ram, or at least a rooster, and offered plates of couscous to the poor near the mosque; but I didn’t yet exist on paper. In my diapers, yes; but on paper, no. Then, around the 2nd or 3rd of January, my father went triumphantly to announce my birth to the authorities. The authorities, who are used to — the imbeciles — believing the word of citizens, thus noted that a certain X*, son of Abdelmoula Y*, was born in Khzazna January 2nd, 1974.”
“Fake birthplace, fake year! Bravo! You’ve got it all!”
“This avuncular revelation stupefied me. I went stumbling out into the night to wander in the little streets of Rabat. It was gorgeous outside…”