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By heart. I made Mahmoud learn them by heart. All of them. The ninety-nine names of Allah. With the correct pronunciation. The correct rhythm. In classical Arabic.

He lay all day and night in his bed at Brugmann Hospital in Brussels. And he never took his eyes off me, clung to me like a baby who recognizes no one in the world but his mother.

“Jallal, my friend, my brother, say them again, the ninety-nine names. Again and again.”

In truth, he knew them well, those sacred names. But in French.

Before, his name was Mathis.

Now he had an Arab name, Mahmoud, but didn’t speak the language. That’s what he told me.

We were patient.

I was very patient with him.

Our relationship lasted two months in all.

To experience everything with him, both Mathis and Mahmoud. As if it were the first day of my life. The last day of my life. To the point of total osmosis.

I taught him to write Arabic. I finally helped him enter that mysterious language—complicated, impossible, according to him. The language of his new religion.

For an entire night we studied the alif, the letter of all beginnings. Alif as an isolated letter at the beginning of a word, in the middle of a word, at the end of a word. How it’s written, how it transforms. A letter, always the same and always different.

In the past, long before meeting me, alif had been a problem and had driven him to abandon the language in which one thing has multiple faces, multiple skins.

Why? Why the constant shifts? That perpetually elusive quality? Several languages within the same language?

I had no answers to these questions that I’d never asked myself. I didn’t give much thought to Arabic. The language was in me long before there was a me.

I gave it to him as it was inside me.

I gave him what I knew and what I didn’t.

He lay on his hospital bed. He always fixed me with a gaze both harsh and tender.

I didn’t know how to respond to his gaze. But very quickly, I gave him my hand. Right from the third letter, taa.

I must be clear. I let him take my hand.

Taa caused him great fear. A panic attack. Suddenly he was no longer himself. The form of this letter, which he saw as a little basin with two hallucinating eyes, sent him back to a traumatic past I knew nothing about.

He took my left hand and squeezed it very hard.

I asked him if he wanted us to give up on taa. Closing his eyes, he said yes.

And we moved to the next letter.

Mahmoud was weak. So weak. He was leaving. Somewhere in his sick body, the pain was unbearable.

With my hand in his hand, he eventually passed out. Fell asleep. For a quarter of an hour.

My eyes did not leave his strange, white face. I put it all over inside me, inside my body and my soul.

Later taa became our letter. The letter symbolizing our connection, the dizzying things that were happening between us. The sacred things. We moved beyond the panic attack. We entered slowly into taa and left our mark there. Traces of ourselves.

He was the one who found the first word with taa. He was sleeping. He opened his eyes and he said the word. Tawbah.

How did he know that word? Where did it come to him from?

I didn’t ask him these two questions. I didn’t have time. He asked me:

“What does tawbah mean in Arabic?”

Strangely, I didn’t know.

He repeated the question by adding a little detail at the end—my name.

“What does tawbah mean in Arabic, Jallal, my friend?”

To hear “Jallal” spoken in his soft voice helped me. He inspired me. I knew then what to say.

“To repent. To return to the true, the pure, the First.”

“We’ll both repent at the same time, won’t we, Jallal? By the same near and far door that slowly opens before us.”

His hand had not left mine.

Yes, we’ll do things together, Mahmoud, I promise you. I swear.

I confirmed this pact without uttering a word. He hadn’t said anything either. Everything happened in silence. Our eyes spoke for us.

I didn’t force myself to do anything with him. It was as if everything that happened between us was a matter of course.

Mahmoud was ill. I met him that way. And without a second thought, I caught his illness. I needed it. That illness and that love. Since I’d left Cairo with my mother’s last husband, Mouad the Belgian, I’d searched Brussels for a savior. A soul to comfort me, understand me, guide me, make me lighter. A special being, a chosen being, a brother and a stranger. Mahmoud, ill, was this exceptional person. The visionary who forced me to drop everything and follow him in his view of the world, his way of loving, and his plan to leave his mark on earth.

I understood this from the start. As soon as I gazed into his eyes.

I didn’t know Mahmoud. And nothing had prepared me to meet him.

For a year I’d been living alone in Mouad’s apartment in Brussels. He had more or less abandoned me. He’d gone back to his job in Saudi Arabia. He felt that at my age, twenty-two, I was able to fend for myself in Brussels. In the West. He left me the apartment, too big for me, and sent me five hundred euros each month. On leaving, he told me: “It’s time you became a man. Without me. You can’t become a man sticking to me like glue. Do you understand?”

I understood nothing.

Meeting Mahmoud at Brugmann Hospital in Brussels helped me to understand. Not loneliness or abandonment, but the deep meaning of my life, my existence. With Mahmoud, sick and beautiful, frail and powerful, I’d found a mission. Love and a mission. To love and be angry. To finally get even with the world, which had never given me a thing and, what’s more, had taken my mother, my Slima away from me. To give others a taste of the cruelty they’d instilled in me. The self-contempt they’d forced on me. To get my revenge. To avenge Slima.

Mahmoud was a stranger. I met him when I went to the hospital with Steve, Mouad the Belgian’s nephew, who was an old friend of Mahmoud’s.

Steve came to visit me at Mouad’s apartment. He said: “Mouad called. He says hello. And he says you have to call him from time to time. He wants to know how you are. Are you doing alright?” I had nothing to say, either to Mouad or Steve, whom I barely knew.

Steve spoke again. “Mouad asked me to stop by once in a while. To get you out of the house. Do you want to do something? Catch a movie?”

We left the apartment together. Before the movie, we went to the Brugmann Hospital. Mahmoud was waiting for us. Waiting for me.

Steve had insisted, “It won’t be long, Jallal. I have to visit him. He’s not really a friend. We went to college together and apparently he’s very ill. You don’t mind coming?”

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, my mother Slima taken from me, I lived in Cairo in the care of Lalla Fatma.

She was abducted, tortured, imprisoned, damaged. She told me once, only once, about that disappearance, the unspeakable violence they’d inflicted upon her. She told me on the eve of her departure to Mecca with her husband Mouad.

Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, years after Slima had left Morocco for Cairo, I was reunited with a mother who was no longer my mother, no longer capable of it. She didn’t see me. She expected something else from life.

Slima had become a torn and shattered woman. Completely destroyed. Another person. But she was forced to keep working at her first profession, that of her mother and hundreds of thousands of other Moroccan women. Prostitution.

Quite in spite of myself, I became her friend. Her confidant. I pretended to be.

Before she joined me in Cairo, I had grown used to living without her. The endless din of the Egyptian capital was enough to fill me, to keep me away from my mother, away from the woman I still loved, but without understanding. In Cairo, by my side and at the same time absent, she talked politics quite often, too often. She was becoming part of another story, which didn’t include me. She needed an ear. I played that role. She needed to retrieve her dignity in another way.

Her men, wealthy clients she met in posh Cairo hotels, paid for everything, including my schooling at the French Lycée.

I never really understood how, from her prison in southern Morocco, near Ouarzazate, she’d managed to have me sent to Cairo and into the care of Lalla Fatma, a Moroccan woman, a bit of a witch. How had she kept watching over me from that terrible, nameless prison far away?

I’ll never know.

Even living under the same roof as my mother Slima again, I couldn’t reconnect with her and our past in Morocco, in Salé. The hammam. The house in Hay Salam. The soldiers. The soldier. The movie, River of No Return.

Cairo possessed me. The crowds, twenty million, kept me company. Protected me. Separated me a little more each day from my mother Slima.

I learned solitude in Cairo.

Solitude in the midst of an angry but remote, unfeeling humanity.

I grew away from my mother.

I waited a year for her. For the first year, in Lalla Fatma’s apartment, I still had hope and fervor, belief in her return. The second year, sad, heavy-hearted, I deliberately cut all ties between us. Every connection. Every last thread. I’d decided she was dead. She wouldn’t be back. One day, someone would announce her death.

Just as well to kill my mother right away, let her go that very moment.

Adolescence is a time of power. Every day is a tragedy. Every day is war. We become ruthless. We forget quickly. Zap things quickly. Kill in cold blood. And keep on living. Without any guilt.

I became a monster.

Without my mother.

Even when she came back, her absence continued to haunt me. She really was another woman. In an opaque world.

We lived side by side. We drank the same water from the Nile. I saw nothing. I played the stupid boy. The blasé, vacant teen.

Desperate and fearful till the end, until death, living without her. Needy.

I’ve been without a mother for ten years now.

I’m a little over twenty-three now.

I want to spit. Like when I was little, in Salé.

I walk the streets of Brussels. And I spit.

I look up at the black sky. And I spit.

I go to the door of Mouad’s apartment. And I spit. I spit.

I remember what I told him, the man who accompanied my mother to her death in Medina, Saudi Arabia. “You’re my father, Mouad, yes, yes,” I told him several times to reassure him. He was falling asleep. “Yes, you can leave for Saudi Arabia with your mind at ease.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. I swear. You’re right, I’m old enough to become a man. Twenty-two is the age of manhood. I’m a man, Mouad. I’m strong. I know my way very well around Brussels. I can manage alone. I’ll go back to university. Yes, yes. This time you can believe me. You did what you could for me. You saved me. Thanks to you, I have a roof over my head. I won’t starve to death. You’re right, I’m grown up now. You can go.”

Just before entering the apartment in Brussels, I hawk and spit.

I lied to Mouad. All I did was lie, wear a new mask every day.

Brussels is killing me. Smothers me. Never talks to me.

Where am I? What am I doing here? How do you read the codes of this city? How do you approach people, read the signs? How do you live without color?

I spit. Again and again.

Spit renewed I renew my ties with childhood. With the ill-mannered boy I was in the city of Salé.

Brussels makes me want to close all the windows and all the doors. To become ill. End it once and for all. Escape, cross the river. Join my mother.

And that’s what happened when Steve, who wanted to take me to the movies, took me first to Brugmann Hospital to visit a school friend of his. A Belgian, four or five years older than me, who was a patient there.

His name was Mathis. But like Mouad, he’d changed his name and religion.

A coincidence?

Later I understood that it was anything but a coincidence. Without having decided to do so, I’d followed my mother’s road. Like her, I met a Belgian convert to Islam who would play the role in my life that Mouad had played in hers. With him, I entered the Revolution. With him, Mahmoud, I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change, for my heart to open and let in the light.

Mahmoud was in his hospital bed. In another bed, next to his, was an old man.

Mouad’s nephew had brought flowers.

I’d brought a single candle, small and white. Bought long ago in Cairo. I had told myself that if this unknown sick person was nice, I’d give it to him. If not, too bad for him.

He was not only nice. He was radiant. Sick and radiant. Sick and so peaceful.

So gentle. So gentle.

He was the brother I was desperately searching for in Brussels. I knew it right away. So did he.

I kept the candle for another day. I didn’t dare give it to him in front of Steve, the gift that was so important to me and came from a town where my life was so different.

I said nothing in front of him that day.

As we were leaving, Steve and I shook hands with him.

He said:

“You’ll come back to see me, won’t you?”

It was not an order or a prayer. It was understood. A voice from On High. Neither of us had any choice.

I had to go back. To continue what had begun. Become close very quickly, he and I. And in some way reproduce, replay the story my mother lived with Mouad the Belgian at the end of her life.

Yes, I had to go back. Every day. Without Steve, of course. Without revealing anything to him. Without revealing that I’d made my decision long before Mahmoud shook my hand.

It was written in stone. The Cairo candle was for him.

Later, for the two of us.

At first, I didn’t dare reply to his invitation. But after a few seconds, trembling, I uttered a little “yes.”

“I’d be very happy to come back and see you!”

He had the power to say things, decide things. Enter deep inside me. Read my heart. My soul. Give me food and water.

I returned two days later. The old man was asleep.

Mahmoud said:

“Do you see the sky? Are you looking at it the right way? And the Moon?”

I answered:

“Here in Brussels, everything seems black to me. I don’t have anything. I wander aimlessly. I don’t see anything. There is no sky.”

“That’s not true, Jallal. The Moon is there. Always. You have to go beyond the blackness. Beyond the veils. You’re wrong, Brussels isn’t black.”

I didn’t dare contradict him.

And he made the following proposal:

“Do you want to climb up on the Moon? Do you want to? We’ll cut it in half. Half for you and half for me.”

I realized this was an initiation into Mahmoud’s inner language, his way of using words, connecting them to each other, reinventing, breathing new life into them.

I made an effort. I answered him in kind, trying to be inspired like him:

“One day, Mahmoud, we’ll find a tree together and carve the first letters of our names in the bark.”

“In what language, Jallal?”

“Do you know Arabic?”

He’d converted to Islam a few years ago but he didn’t know Arabic.

“Will you teach me, Jallal?”

“Here, in the hospital?”

“Yes, here in this room. I have to stay almost two more months.”

I immediately accepted.

I had not spoken Arabic since my arrival in Brussels with Mouad the Belgian, but the language was still alive and strong in me. I was going to know it more and more deeply in the two months I had left on this earth.

Mahmoud continued speaking like a poet.

“And so we’ll go the Moon. We’ll ride the mythical winged horse, Buraq, like the prophet Mohammed. He’ll take us there. We’ll look for a tree and carve the first letters of our names in Arabic. What do you say?”

How could anyone resist?

I didn’t resist. He was ill. It was important to make him happy.

After a moment of silence, he said my name. Jallal.

Following a silence of exactly the same length as his, I said his name. Mahmoud.

The next day, I started to teach him Arabic. To write and speak it.

The old man watched us. Sometimes he participated in these very special courses. And in that way, he joined us on the journey to the Moon. To the light.

It was Mahmoud who told me one day about the ninety-nine names of Allah in Islam.

I was not really a good Muslim but I still knew them by heart. Quietly reciting, chanting every single one of them each day, brought you closer to God, of course, and kept death away.

I told Mahmoud all that.

“Are you afraid of death, Jallal?”

Yes, I was still afraid of death.

Not he.

“So each time you come here to see me, we’ll say the ninety-nine names of Allah. I don’t want you to die, Jallal. Not right away. You’ll start. You’ll chant a name. Then another. In Arabic. I’ll follow you. And one day, we’ll say them at the same time, from the same heart. Without opening our mouths. Just by looking into each other’s eyes. Does that suit you?”

It suited me perfectly.

He knew how to sweep me away. Guide me. Carry me along with him into a new cycle of life.

When I was with him I forgot all the rest, the better to find myself.

Finally I loved God. Allah.

Mahmoud said:

“Where is God in you?”

I didn’t know.

He said:

“Do you know of the poet Jalal al-Din Rumi?”

I didn’t.

Three days later, I knew everything about him.

Jalal al-Din Rumi was a Muslim poet, Sufi, who lived in the thirteenth century. He celebrated God and love for God in his poems, which Mahmoud considered sublime and others considered too free, blasphemous.

“Read the poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. You will know God. You will know love. And you will come to me with greater understanding. Jalal al-Din Rumi will be our witness. The witness of our meeting. Our reunion with God, His Hidden Mystery, His Eternal Word.”

Miracles exist.

Faith can return.

As it was for my mother at the end of her life, Islam could be something besides prohibitions on thinking, existing, freeing yourself.

Mahmoud and I gradually reinvented Islam. We found love there. Love. In our own small way, we made it progress.

I never dared to ask, “How did you come to Islam?”

One morning, after taking his many medications, he began to speak.

“I went to Afghanistan. I learned everything. Learned it again. I was a rookie journalist. It was an excuse to go there. I lived there for two years. I returned transformed. A different person. On my Belgian identity card I’m still Mathis. But since my Afghan emir chose Mahmoud as my name, I’ve given up my past life. I’m someone else now. Do you understand? Do you understand?”

Did I understand? What had he really been doing in Afghanistan? And who was this emir who’d revealed him to himself? A Taliban? An Islamist from another group? A terrorist? Was Mahmoud like that emir?

I kept my doubts to myself. It wasn’t the time to share them, to talk about them.

It was my turn to speak.

“My mother died in Medina. Her last husband, Mouad, brought me back to Brussels. And he left. I can’t do anything here. I’m horribly lonely here. None of it was my choice. Here everything looks black. This land is blackness. I want to go to the Moon with you. Ride the winged horse Buraq with you. Pass through the seventy thousand veils with you, the veils of light and darkness that separate us from the Creator. And take along the white candle I bought in Cairo.”

He took the candle.

And he smiled. He looked like an angel. He was an angel.

“We’ll go to the Moon. We won’t be afraid of the dark . . . Tonight you’ll stay here, you’ll sleep in my bed. I’ll hide you. We’ll light the candle in a secret corner. We’ll wait. Finally the sky will open.”

I hid in his arms. I slept, traveled, supported by his arms.

We never spoke of the past again. All that interested us were God, His Love, and the Moon.

I ended up buying an orderly’s apron. That way I could enter the hospital whenever I wanted.

The old man slept almost all the time. Dying a little more each day. He seemed to be at peace. He’d accepted the idea of the end. Of leaving. Across the sky. Mahmoud and I liked to watch him sleep; he was in some other place right beside us. Sometimes we witnessed the reawakening of his childhood fears. He was seized by panic though he was sound asleep.

He woke with a start. He quickly got out of bed. His arms flailed every which way, seeking a direction and finding it; a dark corner behind an empty little white cabinet, where he curled up in a ball. Clutched his head in his hands. And began to talk, whisper. Maybe pray.

The old man never wept. At that moment he was in a state of terror. Horror. Paralysis.

“Peace does not exist. Will never exist in us. We were wrong. We’ll always, always be afraid.”

The old man told us this as if pronouncing an oracle.

If his attacks came on when I was in the room, Mahmoud and I went to him without conferring. We each took one of his hands and talked to him. Every time, when he was back in bed, he asked for a lullaby. Mahmoud didn’t know any. I still had the song in me somewhere faraway. River of No Return.

It was only when I found myself standing in front of his bed—empty, this time for good—that a slightly crude question crossed my mind.

What did he die from? What was his illness?

“He’d had cancer for several years. Widespread cancer.”

I didn’t dare pursue my curiosity to its logical conclusion.

What was that old man doing in the same room as Mahmoud?

Mahmoud had told me he was in hospital because of a car accident. He’d received a blow to the head. The doctors kept him under observation, just in case.

I’d believed him. I’d always believed him.

The death of the old gentleman helped me to finally understand. Mahmoud suffered from the same problem. Widespread cancer.

Allah is visible and hidden. Mahmoud too. He showed his inner truth and threw a veil over his profound suffering, his illness.

The old man’s bed remained empty until the very end.

I slept as much as possible in the arms of my sweet and desperate patient.

I wasn’t afraid.

I continued to sing. The ninety-nine names of Allah. River of No Return by Marilyn Monroe.

I discovered a passion in myself. Two passions. Love, reinvented. The ability to take care of another person. Assist him. Be him.

Without ever having learned how, I became a nurse. I knew what to do, naturally. Knew the right tone. The selflessness. The necessary attentiveness. Discreetly I watched the other nurses at the hospital. I envied them. I stole the things I didn’t know from them to give to Mahmoud. To bring relief. A little relief. Love. More and more. And I accepted that I’d never really know everything about Mahmoud. Here. On this earth. In this life.

I’d found my place in Brussels. A small place. At last. A vocation. To touch. To heal. Take someone’s hand. Feel their pulse, listen to their breathing. Draw closer to a heart. Listen to it. Follow its rhythm. Enter its mystery. Mahmoud’s overwhelmed me. I was ready to follow him everywhere. To the end. Beyond the seventy thousand veils. Explode. Explode with love.

The two of us. Spreading the light. Entering into the light. Into the white. Into the farthest depths of darkness.

I’ve made my decision. I won’t leave him. I’ve been growing attached to him. Since the beginning. Every day and every night a little more. I’ll scream. I’ll love. I’ll become ill. Am already ill. Ill, and I’m leaving too. Mahmoud isn’t forcing me. I’m leaving of my free will. With Mahmoud, I speak Arabic. I’m reunited with an origin. God. I give him the language. He takes it. He changes it. He returns it to me.

I was lost.

I found the way. Faith. Love. Death. Vengeance. The ultimate union. The sublime explosion.

In the terrible blackness of Brussels, I found Mahmoud. He is in me. He knows where to go. Where to sleep. Where to die. As brothers.

I followed him. I follow him. I have a brother. We are Muslims. Very soon we’ll mount the winged horse Buraq. Flee Brussels. Go to the end of love. Stop doubting. My hand in Mahmoud’s, to join my mother.

Long before going into hospital, Mahmoud had carefully planned everything. His illness would not prevent him from going to the end of his mission. To plant a bomb where he was told to do so. Therefore, go to North Africa. Casablanca. Blow up. Destroy. Shock. And through this extreme act, speak. Make others speak. Leave a legacy. A message. Which?

I don’t know if he was right to want to carry out an attack. I knew, however, that at some point we are forced to challenge, spit hard, stop being polite, stop being small. Do service. Sacrifice. Die violently for others. For Islam and its glory?

Mahmoud said:

“Not only for Islam.”

For us, then? And who else?

I meditated on these questions for an entire sleepless night. Had I understood everything about Mahmoud and his mission? Did we have the same concept of Islam? Was I ready, confident and sincere, to go with Mahmoud to the end of his road of no return?

I couldn’t answer that. And Mahmoud wasn’t going to help me. But the blackness of Brussels was more than I could bear. The lack of my mother, great, immense. I had to find her by going down the same road as she had. Avenge her through an act of love. Avenge her on this earth that had hurt her so much. Morocco.

Inside me, everything was confused.

At Mahmoud’s side, I saw clearly. I was going.

We felt no contradiction, then. Inside us, it all seemed true. Obvious. What other Muslims said, what they were going to say and do, judge us, cast aspersions on us, predict damnation for our souls, did not interest us. Did not concern us.

We were free now.

Free Muslims.

In the Brugmann Hospital room that protected us from the outside world, we prayed in earnest. Side-by-side. Facing Mecca. Facing my mother. Facing God. Accompanied by His ninety-nine names.

We recited the same suras of the Qur’an. The same phrases. The same magic words. Our movements synchronized. Standing. Doubled over. Standing again. Kneeling. Prostrated. Arms joined over the heart. Eyes open. Closed. Five times a day. Sometimes more.

Mahmoud said the doctor had told him there was nothing more they could do. He was cured.

Really?

One day, we left.

The mission awaited us. I knew exactly what we would do. Carry out a suicide bombing somewhere in Casablanca. Kill ourselves. Certainly kill other people with us. Innocent people? But only Mahmoud knew the details, the steps to follow, the where and how.

Casablanca isn’t far from Brussels. Just three hours by plane.

Mahmoud took care of everything. To reassure me, he told me it wasn’t the first mission he’d been assigned in a city he didn’t know at all. He knew where to go. How to get by. Get across Casablanca unnoticed. He had two addresses. One for the hotel where we’d stay a night. The other for a cyber café.

I trusted him, of course. Always. I continued to take his hand. Even in Morocco. He guided me in my own country. I didn’t know anyone there anymore.

Casablanca had eight million Moroccans inside her, in her belly. They came from everywhere. Rif. Atlas. Fez. Taouirt. From Errachidia. Chaouia. Doukkala. Arabs. Berbers. Drunks. Power-mongers. Prostitutes. Lots of prostitutes. Lost souls. The jungle. Madness. Injustice everywhere, day and night. Arrogance. Perversion. The Money King. Crime as Law. Nothing romantic. Everything dirty. Everything rotten. Everything disappearing, collapsing. Everything failure. Everything closed. Including God’s doors. Everything was murder. Murders. Casablanca was a vale of grief. More than any other place in Morocco, the city was permeated by deep and incurable sorrow. Hope no longer existed. Free, open Islam no longer existed. Love was unknown, alien and desperate.

That was our mission, to make people see love. Through death. Through an extreme act. Perform an action to make people think. To stand firm against the plague spreading through Morocco. Banality. Narrowmindeness. Confinement. Submission. Mired in falsity and ignorance. The programmed destruction of individuals, of people like my mother Slima who dare one day to try for freedom, resistance, a different road.

To rise up against an entire country.

An entire people.

Finally, to try to ask the real questions. Who brought us to this point, this state of collapse, this misfortune, this self-negation, this infectious blindness? Who is preventing our souls from taking flight and writing another History with a new messenger? Who is blocking us, turning us to stone and denying us the right to be what we are: men, standing?

The hotel where we were supposed to sleep the first night no longer existed. In its place was a gaping hole.

We went to the Hassan II Mosque. A grandiose monument, empty, adrift by the sea.

We hid inside.

It was there, in the darkness, in the night by the raging sea, that Mahmoud told me everything.

And, in detail, the plan for carrying out our mission.

How to prepare ourselves for death.

Perform our ablutions. The last ones. The ones for death.

The Hassan II Mosque was haunted. Its jinns were not Muslim. Its smell was strange, icy, cold, terrifying.

We were cold.

Mahmoud shivered all night. My arms and legs were not enough, I could not pass on what little heat that remained in my body. He was afraid. His teeth were chattering. He hadn’t really recovered from his illness as he’d claimed.

I asked him to recall the ninety-nine names of Allah. To bring them to the front of his mind. Before his eyes.

He did.

I did the same.

In the black vastness of the mosque, I began. Quietly at first. Then more loudly. I said a name. He said the next one. Until the end.

And then we started again.

For an hour, maybe a little more, these sacred names reassured us, helped us to stop feeling the icy cold of the mosque, the emptiness of this mosque so loved and hated by Moroccans.

It was going to be a very long night. And apart from reciting the magical names, I didn’t know what to fill it with, how to make it less harsh.

What could I do to help Mahmoud?

We sat on the ground facing each other. I could barely see him. But I sensed his warmth, his smell, his shadow.

I searched for his left hand. I found it. I took it, squeezed it in mine.

He searched for my left hand. I helped him find it, take it in his, talk to it.

The two of us formed a circle now.

I brought my head close to his. He did as I did.

He touched my forehead. I touched his.

Our heads were joined.

He entered me.

I entered him.

We stayed this way for some time, united, communing, waiting for what would happen next, what the night would bring. In the same direction. A single body.

Suddenly he raised his head and without releasing my hand, he stood.

He’d received a signal. An inspiration. Someone was speaking to him.

Without thinking, I followed his movement toward the sky.

I got to my feet at almost the same moment. I drew closer to him. He was cold again. His teeth chattered. I took him in my arms. He let me.

He whispered in my ear:

“Say your mother’s name!”

Slima.

“Five times!”

Slima. Slima. Slima. Slima. Slima.

He was inventing a ritual.

Now I searched for his ear.

“Say the name of your mother five times!”

Denise. Denise. Denise. Denise. Denise.

“Say my name now, my new name! Five times!”

Mahmoud. Mahmoud. Mahmoud. Mahmoud. Mahmoud.

“Now you say my name! The name I’ve always had! Five times!”

Jallal. Jallal. Jallal. Jallal. Jallal.

He bent down and kissed my feet. He gave each foot five kisses.

He rose again.

Now I bent down too. I found his bare feet. And I kissed them five times.

When I stood up, he wasn’t there anymore. He’d disappeared into the darkness.

A great fear invaded my entire being. An extreme solitude. An urgent longing to cry my heart out.

I’m going to die alone. I’m going to die alone.

A voice called out. It came from everywhere.

“Turn around!”

It was his voice, a little elated.

“Raise your arms in prayer, and spin. Around and around in circles. Now spin around me.”

Darkness and cold still reigned in the Mosque of Hassan II.

I still didn’t see Mahmoud.

“Where are you? Mahmoud, where are you?”

After a moment of silence that seemed an eternity, the answer came from afar.

“Spin, Jallal. Around and around. Spin like me. Around and around in circles, and come to me.”

I raised my arms to heaven, to God. I still saw nothing. Mahmoud’s voice was my only guide.

“Come . . . come . . . Around and around in circles . . .”

I followed.

I turned slowly, without moving from the place where I was standing.

I felt nauseous almost right away. I nearly stopped and vomited.

Mahmoud’s voice came again. In a trance. Soft. Violent. Female. Male.

“Spin . . . Spin . . . Don’t stop . . . Around and around . . . And come to me . . . I’m coming to you . . . Spin . . . Open yourself . . . Open up . . .”

I forgot my pain. I continued spinning. And moving across the floor.

Suddenly the darkness no longer existed. Like Mahmoud, undoubtedly, I’d decided to close my eyes.

We danced all night. We chanted the ninety-nine names of Allah without stopping. I searched for him. He searched for me. We brushed against each other. We met. We separated.

Our voices guided us throughout the endless night. Our bodies no longer existed. Union was possible, Mahmoud was right.

There were three of us. We were at the very beginning. Light would burst forth. A great explosion. A great echo. Two bodies. A single force.

We climbed very high, beyond seventh heaven, and pushed past all the boundaries, all religions, all sexes. We became stones, clouds, stars, galaxies. We saw everything. Listened to everything. History was revealed to us. The Hand of God appeared. His face came closer to us. A breath of fresh air carried us along. Spinning had become our way of being, of communicating, penetrating each other. Spinning without stopping. Until the ultimate intoxication. The ultimate union. Death.

Faith is beautiful. God calls out to us. We were sleeping.

The next morning when I woke up, Mahmoud was staring at the explosive belts on the ground.

“Don’t be afraid, Jallal. Come. Look. The belts will help us carry out our plan, our journey.”

Where had he found them?

While you were sleeping, I went to get them from one of our faithful. A sleeper agent. He lives in a miserable douar. The Chechnya shanty town. Do you know that douar? Have you ever heard of it?”

I hadn’t.

I went to the explosive belts and with no hesitation touched them.

Then we went to the hammam. It was empty.

I let Mahmoud wash me. I lay on the hot ground and gave my body to his hands. They knew what to do. Redrawing my body. My being.

Then I did the same for him. I reproduced his actions detail for detail. His itinerary.

We weren’t washing because we were dirty. We were preparing for the final journey.

Before leaving the hammam, in a dark corner of the rest room, we got dressed and we put the explosive belts around our waists.

It was Friday. We wouldn’t go pray. There was no point.

Later, the prophets would pray for us. Somewhere in Casablanca, we had to go blow ourselves up. Burn. Pass on the message we’d received.

Everything must be destroyed.

We didn’t yet know exactly where and when to perform the sacrifice. Act of vengeance. Sound the alarm. Die of love.

Mahmoud took me to a cyber cafe downtown, not far from the Café de France.

It was 11:30.

He logged on to a strange site. The words were written in Arabic letters but I didn’t understand them. Persian? Hindi?

I was sitting next to him. I saw everything. And I understood. It was an Islamist website. I looked away for a moment. Now I had confirmation that Mahmoud had another mission. Apart from ours.

He was sick. Dying. That’s why they’d chosen him.

He knew Arabic. To keep me, he’d pretended not to. I was teaching him what he already knew, what he already mastered perfectly.

Was he a traitor?

Why had he lied to me? Why hadn’t he told me he was an Islamist, as I’d suspected for one fleeting moment? Why hadn’t he told me clearly and frankly that he’d been assigned a mission that had nothing to do with the plan we shared, our sublime explosion?

Why was he using me this way?

By following Mahmoud, had I unknowingly become an Islamist terrorist too?

How could I keep following this path? With him? Without him? And what could I do with my disappointed, bruised heart?

A thousand contradictory questions invaded my mind at that moment. I kept them to myself.

Suddenly I was afraid of Mahmoud and all he’d never told me about his past.

Who was he really? What had he really understood and retained about Islam? Was that what Islam was, this plan for terrorism, not for love?

I lowered my head. An unknown sadness took hold of me. A dizzying uncertainty. An unfamiliar abyss. And also an urgent desire. To spit. Spit hard. From anger. Disillusionment. Distress.

What was I to Mahmoud? Did he really love me? Was he the saint that I’d seen in him, imagined him as?

He very quickly realized what was going through my head. The questions. The bitterness. The desire to flee. Give up. Close the door.

While searching the Islamist website for the secret message, he took my left hand. Gentle. Love.

I looked up at him. He looked at me, waiting for me, his tear-filled eyes watching over me.

Bewitched by his aura, almost divine, and everything powerful and magnificent emanating from him, I closed my eyes to what I’d discovered about the ideology that stood between us. I forced myself to find my truth again, our truth. Our trust. The fond memory of the bed at Brugmann Hospital in Brussels, where we met and learned to reveal ourselves to each other, naked and sincere.

How could I have doubted him, doubted his love for me? I was the traitor, not he. Not him. I was ashamed.

Now it was clear. He was an Islamist terrorist. The real thing. Programmed that way for a very long time. But meeting me, without dropping the initial plan made with people I knew nothing about, his thinking changed. Exploding at my side took on another meaning. A friend and brother, he would accompany me right to the bitter end of my desire for vengeance on the people who had destroyed my mother Slima. He would return to the light with me. My mother’s light.

Despite the waves of doubt bearing down one after another on me, on my heart, I kept walking down the path invented by Mahmoud and me. On a bed. A drifting raft.

That’s what Mahmoud’s eyes were saying to me.

Moved, I gazed into their depths. Tasted their tears. Loved their light.

Everything had been decided. Why speak of it again, stop or hesitate?

Mahmoud moved a little closer. He reassured me.

“Death is not death. Do you know that?”

I didn’t know. I believed it—believed him—now.

“You won’t be alone, Jallal. We won’t be separated. It’s in the contract. I insisted on it. I’m with you. I’m yours.”

These last words seemed cold.

He added:

“You know better than me, Jallal. It’s you who will open the door of the sky for us. You. Not me.”

I couldn’t think anymore. I didn’t know how to think. Or go back in time. I was overwhelmed. But Mahmoud’s words helped me regain my self-control and stop hesitating. Stop baulking at the borders of the known, the visible. Give myself to Mahmoud and the mad, suicidal power that had taken hold of us.

Trembling from head to foot, I said:

“I believe. I believe in us. I believe in you. You are my God. My religion. You’re mine. I’m yours. Let’s go . . .”

Just as we were leaving the café, the owner blocked our way.

“I know everything. I received an alert. You were logged onto a very dangerous site. I know where you’re going. I called the police. They’ll be here any moment. Stay calm and no one will get hurt. Go to the back of the shop . . . Go . . .”

Without a word we went to the back of the cyber café. Three boys were still there, glued to their screens. The owner ordered them to get out, fast! He tried to shut us in by lowering the metal blind.

I didn’t have time to think. Or be afraid. It all happened very quickly.

Mahmoud took my hand, we looked at each other and made a run for it.

We jumped on the owner. The blind was half down, the owner on the floor. Mahmoud gave him a blow to the head and I gave him one in the gut.

He passed out.

We went out the door. To our great surprise, a large crowd was waiting.

One of the three boys who’d been in the café shouted:

“It’s them, the terrorists! Terrorists and fags . . . See? Look under their clothes . . . They’ve got explosive belts . . . Look! . . .”

The crowd looked at us.

We looked at the crowd.

For an eternity.

Just like in the movies.

What were we going to do?

Mahmoud found a solution. He shouted:

“Stand back! Stand back! . . . We’re not fags . . . We’re brothers . . . Stand back, or we blow up our belts! . . . You’ll all die with us . . . Stand back! . . . Stand back . . . We’re not fags . . . We’re brothers . . . Two brothers joined by Love . . . God is with us . . .”

He was strong, firm, fair. A leader.

The crowd, who understood he wasn’t joking, took off in a flash.

Sudden emptiness. The sea. The ocean. A door in the distance slowly opening.

We ran. All across Casablanca. Ran. Ran. To hide?

The police were closing in on us. By now, through rumors and the media, probably all of Morocco knew of and was following our flight, the whole country wondering the same thing we were.

Where were we going to blow ourselves up?

Certainly not at the place indicated on the Islamist website that Mahmoud had consulted. Now everyone knew where it was.

Then where?

We didn’t talk.

There was nothing more to say.

That great big city of eight million people was empty. Completely. Totally. It was afraid. Of us.

We kept running.

Police sirens were everywhere, followed us everywhere.

And then, without a word, we headed to the mosque of Hassan II.

It was a bad idea, of course. During the day, it was heavily guarded.

We stopped.

We were cornered. The sirens were getting closer. The world was closing in on us. Failure closing in.

What could we do?

A miracle, my God! A miracle! Now! Now!

An abandoned movie theater saved us. It was me who spotted it. It looked exactly like the one from my childhood, in Salé. The An-Nasr cinema. The Victory Theatre.

Nobody saw us go in the back door.

It was dirty inside. Dirty, dark, peaceful. Inhabited. Haunted.

We dropped slowly and gently to the floor. Exhausted. Completely spent. Terror in our hearts. Still together.

And oddly, we fell asleep. Out like a light. Both of us.

It was the end. The real end. Behind the curtain. The white screen took in neither shadows nor images now. We could leave. Now. Just the two of us. Mahmoud. Jallal. Mahmoud and Jallal. Without taking anyone with us. Taking nothing but the memories we shared. Failing in Mahmoud’s terrorist mission. Mad with Love, succeeding in ours.

The winged horse descended from heaven. Silent and unreal, mythical Buraq, waiting in the darkness of the theater.

I had a dream. I saw a movie. The same one as always. River of No Return. For the first time in a movie theater.

Mahmoud joined me in the dream. We sang the song from the movie twice, and went to look for my mother, the soldier, and ourselves in another life.

But also in the dream, just before leaving on this new journey, we accomplished our mission. We delivered the message. Morocco knew now. People knew us. Through our courage, our faith, our love and despair.

We speak another language, but we are not madmen.

We are two brothers.

Two names in Arabic.

Mahmoud and Jallal.

Osmosis. Poem. Breath. Heart. Fire.

The sublime explosion will occur.

We won’t kill anyone.

Nobody will get hurt.

The theater was very dark.

In a single movement, twins in a single body, two strangers in one faith, one God, we created the light.

Boooom!

Booooom!

BOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!