Street of Thieves

I was hungry, I wolfed down some rotten fruit the market vendors left for beggars, I had to fight for gnawed-on apples, then for moldy oranges, fight off all sorts of nutcases, one-legged men, retards, a horde of half-starved wretches who prowled around the market like me; I was cold, I spent nights soaking wet in the fall, when storms beat down on the city, chasing away beggars under the arcades, in the far corners of the Medina, in buildings under construction where you had to bribe the guard to let you stay dry; in winter I left for the south, finding nothing there but cops who just roughed me up in a crumbling station in Casablanca to encourage me to return home to my parents; I found a truck headed for Tangier, a nice guy who slipped me half his sandwich and a doughnut because I refused to play the girl for him, and when I went to see Bassam, when I dared set foot again in the neighborhood, I had lost God knows how many pounds, my clothes were in rags, I hadn’t read a book in months and I had just turned eighteen. Not much chance I’d be recognized. I was exhausted, shivering. I was half clean, I washed in mosque courtyards, beneath the disapproving eye of the custodians and Imams, then I was forced to pretend to pray to warm up a little on the comfortable rugs, I took a Koran into a corner and slept sitting up, the volume on my knees, with an inspired air, until a real believer would get annoyed at seeing me snoring over the Holy Text and would throw me out, with a kick in the ass and sometimes ten dirhams so I’d go hang myself somewhere else. I wanted to see Bassam so he would go visit my parents, tell them I was sorry, that I had suffered greatly, and that I wanted to come home. I remember, I thought often of my mother. Of Meryem, too. During the hardest times, the horrible times when I had to humiliate myself in front of a parking lot guard or a policeman, when the atrocious stench of my shame escaped from the folds of their clothes, I would close my eyes and think of the perfume of Meryem’s skin, of those few hours with her. I was stunned by the speed at which the world could change.

You become the human equivalent of a pigeon or a seagull. People see us without seeing us, sometimes they give us a few kicks so we’ll disappear, and few, very few, imagine on what railing, on what balcony we sleep at night. I wonder what I thought of, at the time. How I held on. Why I didn’t simply go back after two days to my father’s house and collapse on the living room sofa; why I didn’t go to the town hall or God knows where to ask for help, maybe because there is in youth an infinite force, a power that makes everything slip by, that makes nothing really reach us. At least in the beginning. But then, after ten months of being on the run, three hundred days of shame, I couldn’t bear any more. I had paid my dues, maybe. And no poems came to me, no philosophical considerations about existence, no sincere repentance, just a mute hatred and a deeper mistrust of all that was human.