I learned from the radio that Driss’s mother had left the hospital where the shock of her son’s death had landed her.
I decided to pay her a visit.
After assuring myself that the coast was clear, I went to her place, late at night.
She had aged all at once, the divorcée on the ground floor. When she recognized me outside her door, she yanked it open and fell into my arms. I had to help her walk to the living room.
“What have they done with my child?” she sobbed.
“Your son is in Paradise.”
“And I’m in hell.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’re not the one who’s lost a child. You’re too young to measure how deep my grief is. I miss Driss. It’s true he was away a lot, but he always came back to me. The world’s not the same without him. I want to die too.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What’s left for me on this earth?”
“You ought to be proud of him.”
“I’m his mother. I don’t need to be proud of him because I still love him, more than anything in the world. He was the reason I was able to accept all my misfortunes.”
She blew her nose in a fold of her dirty dress. Her stockings were torn. She didn’t smell good and seemed not to have taken a shower for days, maybe weeks.
“Is it true the supermarket laid you off?”
“Who wants to work with a terrorist’s mother?”
“Driss wasn’t a terrorist. He fought for justice. You had nothing to do with it, it wasn’t your fault, but they fired you anyway. It’s because there’s a double standard in this country that Driss is dead.”
“Losing your job and losing your son are two different things.”
“As we speak, Driss is in the arms of the Lord. You ought to be thrilled. He didn’t kill himself, he sacrificed himself to rid the earth of God’s enemies.”
“God’s enemies are the people who lied to my son. I curse the man who turned my child’s head. Not a day passes when I don’t curse him.”
Her pain was making her talk nonsense.
I got up to take my leave. She held me back by the wrist. “You were his friend,” she said. “Why didn’t you look out for him?”
“God was looking out for him, madame.”
It was the first time I’d ever called her that.
I left her with the certainty that I’d never see her again.
She’d disappointed me.
My twin sister met me in a little park, not far from the Cathedral of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula. She arrived about forty minutes late because of a false alarm in the subway. She threw her arms around my neck and hugged me close, as if we hadn’t seen each other for ages. The smell of her hair and her perfume did me good. I had the feeling I’d been returned to my element. My sister and I were cut from the same cloth. We achieved a kind of fulfillment just by being together.
“I brought you some of the beignets you like,” she said, handing me a paper bag blotchy with oil stains.
No star in the heavens could equal Zahra’s smile. When it tugged at the corners of her lips, little dimples embellished the petals that were her cheeks, and she became a garden unto herself.
“So how was your job training in Antwerp?” she asked enthusiastically, sitting on a bench with me.
“It was a refresher course.”
“In what?”
“Woodworking. I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“You plan to go back to work for your old boss?”
“He won’t hire me again. The last time, he accused me of going through his drawers. In reality, it was a pretext for replacing me with his nephew. I think a workshop is interested in me. They contacted me, I dropped off my résumé, and now I’m waiting.”
“Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
She took my face in her white hands and gazed affectionately into my eyes. Because she was my elder by a few minutes, she thought she was obliged to mother me.
“You’ve lost weight. Are you getting enough to eat?”
“Of course. I do odd jobs here and there. I couldn’t afford a banquet, but I don’t lack for hot meals.”
“I dreamed about you yesterday. You remember the hotel swimming pool in Nador. Well, I dreamed we were there again, except there was a patch of lawn where the pool used to be. You had your bathing suit on, and you were angry, yelling at the manager.”
“There was no swimming pool at that hotel.”
“It was a dream.”
“I don’t like dreams.”
“Wait till I finish telling you mine.”
“Spare yourself the trouble. I can’t even bear reality.”
I opened the bag and started nibbling on a beignet.
“I worry about you, Khalil.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“You have to make up with our father.”
“I don’t have any desire to go back home. That would just make things worse. The old man would get back on my case all the time, as usual. He wants me to help him at the grocery. Can you see me selling vegetables? Besides, I’ve done it before, and he’s never paid me.”
“He’s very sick, did you know that? His heart is hypertrophied, abnormally large, according to the doctor’s diagnosis. And that’s not all. He has trouble urinating. And last week, he lost consciousness in the street. Mama still hasn’t come home from Morocco, and it’s really hard for me to take care of everything by myself, the house, our father, and all the rest.”
“Why did she go to Morocco?”
“She accompanied Aunt Najet. Anissa was buried in the tribal cemetery, beside the patriarchs Ba-Shérif and Hajj Sidi-Amrane. Then Grandmother had a stroke, and Mama was forced to remain at her bedside.”
Zahra stared at the tips of her shoes and plunged into a deep silence.
“Have the police come to the house?” I suddenly asked.
“Why would we get a visit from the police?”
“How should I know? It seems that everybody’s being summoned to go down to the police station.”
“Not us. There’s no reason. Do you know of one?”
“Driss grew up in our home.”
“So what? Rayan grew up in our home too. And a bunch of other kids Mama looked after. We’re simple people. We have trouble making ends meet, and we’re not interested in complicating our existence.” Zahra became sad again for a while, and then she said, “I was thinking about Anissa. It wasn’t fair, what happened to her. It wasn’t right. And to think, it was her office colleagues who took her to the Bataclan for her birthday. How’s that for a twist of fate?”
A piece of beignet got crossways in my throat.
“I liked her a lot, Anissa,” my sister went on. “Our mothers didn’t get along, but the cousins had a connection. On summer vacations in the village, when we happened to run into each other, she’d take me to the ice-cream man and buy me these giant sherbets. She always paid. Even when I had money. She was a really nice girl. So young, and so well educated. She didn’t deserve to end up like that. Nobody deserves to end up like that.”
“It’s God’s will.”
“That’s true,” she admitted with a sigh. “It’s God’s will.”
All at once, the little park felt sinister to me. The green of the trees darkened; an odor of piss mingled with vomit began to pollute the air around us.
“Let’s take a little walk, all right?”
“I have to go back home. I lost too much time because of that false alarm in the subway.”
She took my face in her hands again and looked lovingly at me with her soft eyes. It was like a caress.
“Think about what I told you, Khalil. Try to make it up with Father. He needs it, you understand? You’re his son, his boy, his only boy.”
She pressed her lips to my forehead, slowly, cautiously. She was so affectionate, so good, so beautiful. I would never understand why her oaf of a husband repudiated her.
“I wish you’d stay with me a little longer.”
She looked at her watch.
“Please.”
She pressed her lips together. The way she did every time I asked her for something that made her uncomfortable.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s walk a little.”
We crossed parc de Bruxelles and wound up in front of the Musée Magritte. Then we separated in a bus shelter. She got on a streetcar; I continued on foot to Manneken Pis.
The world suddenly seemed as oppressive as a straitjacket.
Zahra called me up three days later. Our mother had come home from her trip to the village. Zahra said, “She’s done nothing but talk about you since she got back.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? She’s been on the lookout for your silhouette in the doorway for months now.”
“I don’t want to run into Father. It’s all over between him and me.”
“He isn’t always home…Why not come tomorrow? He has a ten o’clock appointment at the hospital. That’ll take him the rest of the morning. Please come. If you could only see what a wreck our mother is. She breaks my heart. Do it for God and his Prophet. A true believer can’t remain indifferent to his mother’s distress.”
I promised to see what I could do.
At eleven the next morning, I went to the house. My father had left for the hospital very early. My mother nearly fainted in my arms. She kissed me on the cheeks, on the head, on the shoulders, on the backs of my hands. Weeping the whole time and intoning I don’t know what Berber incantations. Zahra hadn’t exaggerated; my mother was nothing but a bundle of bones wrapped in rags.
She—my mother, I mean—had never been beautiful, and the pathetic life she’d led had taken a further toll on her. Forced to marry at sixteen, she’d experienced one pregnancy after another. First Yezza, then Mariam and Aisha, two-year-old twins carried off by meningitis, followed by Rokaya, who died at six months, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. Next came three consecutive miscarriages, the last of which nearly killed her, and then—since my father wanted a boy at any cost—Zahra and I were conceived, despite the gynecologist’s reservations. My arrival in the world wasn’t enough for my father, who hoped for another male child. My mother couldn’t take it anymore. She feared for her health. As my father pestered her, she shut herself up in a kind of impermeable carapace and surrendered to the sly impassivity of melancholy.
I’m sure my main reason for fleeing the family home was to escape the misfortune that she embodied. My disagreements with my father stemmed chiefly from that: I bore a deadly grudge against him for treating my mother like a beast of burden.
“Sit here next to me, my son. Let me touch you again and again, let me assure myself that you’re really here with me.”
“You’re not dreaming, Mama.”
“Yes I am. You’re my dream, Khalil. Tell me what’s going on with you, where have you exiled yourself to, how do you live?”
“I was doing job training in Antwerp. I’m trying to improve my woodworking skills so I can start my own business.”
“Is that a reason to act as though I don’t exist? A telephone call doesn’t cost very much. I’ve been worrying about you, you know? I heard nothing from you, so I was imagining all sorts of accidents, all kinds of trouble.”
“Come on, he was checking in with me,” Zahra reminded her. “He was very busy, that’s all. And today he’s back. Make the most of it.”
Zahra had prepared some mint tea and beignets. While she was filling our glasses, I lingered in front of the faded walls and contemplated the few rudimentary, deteriorating pieces of furniture scattered here and there. The curtains on the windows were collecting dust. I couldn’t remember how long they’d been there. Maybe forever. An old portrait of our patriarch Hajj Sidi-Amrane, dead for half a century, looked down on us, hanging from a nail. No one had given a thought to replacing the cracked glass in the picture frame. On top of a stunted dresser, a black vase displayed a bouquet of artificial flowers.
A malaise too deep to measure came over me like a gruesome fog.
I had never been happy in this dump.
My mother began to talk about family news and her recent sojourn in the village: Grandmother, condemned by a stroke to rot in her bed; Anissa’s funeral, which had shaken and moved the tribe; our paternal uncle, who had doctored some documents to register our ancestral lands in his own name, thus dispossessing us of our part in the inheritance; our other aunt’s two sons, lost at sea while trying to reach Spain…
“Come on, Mama,” Zahra interrupted her. “The Rif isn’t all bad luck and trouble. People are still getting married down there, they’re still celebrating happy events, building gorgeous houses, and winning bets on sports.”
My mother readily admitted Zahra was right, but she couldn’t come up with a happy tale to tell us, and so she fell silent.
I was in a hurry to leave. The minutes seemed like hours.
I reached into my pocket and took out some of the money Lyès had sent me.
“This is for you, Mama.”
“No, keep it. You need it more than I do. I have everything I need.”
“Take it, please. Buy yourself whatever you want. I know my skinflint father keeps a padlock on his wallet.”
“Don’t talk about your father like that. He does what he can. It’s hard to make ends meet by selling vegetables. You ought to make up with him. He’s not bad, he’s unhappy. He misses you, you know. He’d like so much to be proud of you.”
I wanted to tell her that my father was nothing but a heartless troglodyte, but I preferred not to spoil our visit. I forced the few banknotes into her hand. She made a show of rejecting the money, out of delicacy, before accepting it.
I didn’t stay for lunch with my mother, in spite of Zahra’s insistence.
I had no intention of letting my father take me in his arms.
Before I left, I went to my room and gathered up my identity card, my passport, some articles of clothing, and my watch, which I’d bought at a discount.