Street of Thieves

We hadn’t left the hotel much during those three days, aside from a few excursions, Cape Spartel, the caves of Hercules, the Kasbah Museum and the Marshan Cemetery to see Choukri’s grave; the remarks of the café waiters, the museum employees or even the passersby, when they saw me alone with Judit, didn’t encourage me to go out: it was as pleasant as a kick in the ass, that mixture of scorn, jealousy, and crass vulgarity that made me want to give them the finger with a heartfelt phrase about the sisters or mothers of the parties concerned. Walking with Judit was to receive, at every street corner, a serious quantity of symbolic gobs of spit, because I was a young Moroccan, and strolling in the company of a European girl without, seemingly, belonging to the social class that visited the private beaches or bars of luxury hotels, a class that could allow itself anything. Judit herself realized it, and I felt she was sorry for me, which made me even sadder. Even at Choukri’s grave, a moron my age came over to bother us; he asked me in Arabic what we were doing there, which is a funny question to ask in a cemetery — I replied, we’re coming to get ourselves buried, of course, when I wanted to say “We’re coming to your funeral, ass,” but I didn’t dare. After all, he might have been sincere, maybe he wanted to help us.

I’d become a little savage, in fact, I think. Locked up with my books, in my solitude, alone with Judit, I no longer had any contact with the outside world, aside from my three co-renters, who couldn’t really be called the “outside world.”

In the meantime, I had read For Bread Alone, and even the next one, The Time of Errors; I had to apologize to Judit: this Choukri was something else. His Arabic was dry as the sticks his father beat him with, hard as famine. A new language, a way of writing that seemed revolutionary to me. He wasn’t afraid, he told his story without hiding anything — sex, violence, or poverty. His wanderings reminded me of my months of vagabondage, at times; the feeling was so strong that I had to close the book, the way you walk away from a mirror when its reflection doesn’t suit you. Judit was happy I had seen the light; she told me about the unique history of the text of For Bread Alone: published first in translation, banned in Morocco in Arabic for almost twenty years. It wasn’t hard to see why: poverty, sex, and drugs must not have been the taste of the censors of the time. The advantage is that today the books have so little weight, are so little sold, so little read that it’s not even worth banning them anymore. And Choukri was buried in great ceremony, with ministers and representatives from the Palace, in Tangier about twenty years ago — as if all those higher-ups were celebrating the fact of his death by accompanying him to the grave.

Judit’s departure, after our three days and three nights, had plunged me into sadness and solitude; I fought them as usual, by work, reading until my eyes were burning with fever, and love poetry. I thought about the forty-five days that separated me from my trip. I looked at pages and pages of information about Tunisia, about the Revolution. Ibn Battuta just devoted a few lines to Tunis, where there were, he said, many important ulemas; he was there at the end of Ramadan, and took part in the celebration. I myself would be there just before the start of the fast, which meant I was barely a month behind my illustrious predecessor.

AS if on purpose, a new blow of fate, I received the first email from Bassam two days before my flight. I confess I was thinking a little less often about him and Sheikh Nureddin, that I hadn’t returned to the neighborhood since the fire at the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, that I was living a little like an exile, and one morning, glancing over my inbox as always just after getting up, to see if I’d already gotten a reply from Judit to my missive from the day before, I noticed a bizarre message, which I took at first for one of those emails offering to effortlessly lengthen your virility by five centimeters, or to buy Viagra at a discount price to strengthen it, with the sender’s name as “Cheryl Bang” or something like that. What intrigued me was the subject line: News, and I opened it — the note had just three lines:

My very dear brother, how are things with you? I’m far away here and it’s hard but Inshallah we’ll find each other again on this earth or in Paradise. Take care of yourself khouya, think of me and all will be well.