Street of Thieves

I thought Paris would be more lenient. Paris or Marseille, the cities of books and detective novels. I pictured them as somewhat alike, populated with sons of grouchy Italians, fighting Algerians, gangsters who spoke slang. I was fifty years behind the times, but still, there must be something left, after all Izzo had written Total Chaos not long ago, I thought. I imagined visiting him, sending him a note saying Dear Sir, I am a young Moroccan fan and I would very much like to meet you. I looked at Wikipedia and found out he was dead. Manchette, too, had died a long time ago. Aside from a few remote and idiotic cousins I didn’t know anyone else in France.

The main thing was to get ready as fast as possible: find lodging that didn’t cost an arm and a leg like this dive, buy some clothes, start working. This business of copying out texts intrigued me. Ask for a passport, just in case. Wait for news from the police, which would certainly end up coming; read everything I could to train myself. Forget Meryem, Bassam, and Sheikh Nureddin.

Put a plan into action.

Have a program.

Work for the future.

After all, twenty is the finest age in life.

I got another email from Judit on Facebook, posted four minutes earlier, it said You’re not coming by, then? I replied — I’ll be right there.

LAKHDAR, Judit said to me in the middle of the night. Lakhdar, and I liked the way she said my name, her slight Spanish accent, her stress on the dad, that letter that exists only in Arabic.

“Lakhdar, that’s not very common, is it?”

My head was on her shoulder.

“No, it’s pretty rare in Morocco. But common in Algeria. My father liked the name, I don’t really know why.”

“What does it mean, other than ‘green’?”

“Actually Lakhdar has two meanings, ‘green,’ but also ‘prosperous.’ Green’s the color of Islam. Maybe that’s why my father chose it. There’s also a prophet who was important to mystics. Khidr the Green. He appears in the Cave Sura.”

“Lakhdar. I’ll call you the Green Hornet.”

“You’re more beautiful than Cameron Diaz.”

She gently caught my hand and guided it downward.

THE weeks and months that followed, before November and my start as a waiter on the Comarit ferries, went by so quickly that my memories are like them, brief and quick. Work for Jean-François was hard, dull, and mind-numbing; my room, halfway between the center of town and the Free Zone, cold and inhospitable; I shared the apartment with three workers slightly older than me but I felt they had never been my age. They seemed to be a bottomless fountain of stupidity. As soon as they got a few dirhams they’d blow them on a new tracksuit, sneakers, hash; they dreamed about a nice life, the high point of which would be the purchase of a double bed from the corner furniture store and a car from the Nissan or Toyota dealer; every day they surfed on voitureaumaroc.com and dreamed of luxury sedans they could never buy, look, here’s a 1992 Jaguar for a hundred thousand dirhams; they wore huge sunglasses that rounded out their faces and their Bluetooth earbuds were always in place. They were smooth, interchangeable, and noisy. But they were company, human activity next to me; they hit on garment factory girls, whose small soft hands ached from the throb of sewing machines, or if they couldn’t get them, then on the fish girls in the frozen-food plant, who smelled of grouper or shrimp from chin to innermost cunt, and all these girls were responsive to the vulgar advances of my fake-Ray-Ban-toting roommates who brought them in great ceremony, like princesses, to eat hamburgers in those big American chains that somehow gave them the impression of living life, real life, not the life of nerds, of hicks who didn’t have the luck to work in the Free Zone, and thus not only earned less, much less, but above all were much less distinguished, having neither sunglasses nor fancy phones; the whole performance made for a huge waste, far, far different from the neighborhoods where I had grown up, true, but also and especially from the ones where I wanted to live.