We brought the wood for the ceiling from the workshop to the mosque’s courtyard, all the wood that we had cut, polished, and smoothed. Moving it all took the better part of the morning because the workshop is outside the mosque grounds, pretty far away. The whole encampment of woodshops, metalworking shops, and storage sheds for the building and excavating tools is located some distance from the mosque, so we crossed the empty expanse between the two locations, having to go around the mosque’s walls from east to west numerous times. Many of the storage sheds were locked, and the giant excavating machines were still. Their work had been done for some time. Now they crouched on the ground like animals with nothing to do. I held the compass and leaned over the piece of wood. My father approached. I heard him above my head saying, “Hold the compass firmly.” I held onto the compass firmly. I drew a messy circle. He took the compass out of my hands and squinted in contempt. I felt a strong desire to go to sleep, so I yawned. Right then, Father came back carrying a piece of carefully sanded wood with freshly painted colors on it. I examined my splattered fingers. Father followed my fingers’ movements uneasily. He didn’t like the way I worked. Kika had worked for a week at another carpenter’s shop. The guy he worked for was a homosexual who spent his days singing melhouns and checking out the asses of kids who passed by the workshop. Kika feared for his ass, so he stopped going to work. Father walked away toward the niche that was going to be the mihrab and sat cross-legged on a box, like someone who had lost all hope. I began to gather up a piece of the ceiling that was going to be the principal dome. I added some new drawings that weren’t in Father’s sketches—two horseshoes, and above them some floral designs. Improvised drawings. Why had I put them there? To make Father angry? Perhaps. Or maybe it was because I was distracted. I was thinking about my brother, Suleiman, who had run away to avoid having to work with Father. He was mending sails in the Gulf and wouldn’t be back anytime soon—that is, if he was even thinking about coming back at all. When he disappeared at the beginning of the year, Father said he no longer had a son named Suleiman. He had gathered up all of his scorn and placed it into that single sentence. There was no longer a son named Suleiman in his family. Before that, when Mother had decided to move to the house she rented in the old city, she said to us, “I’ll buy you a color television set and a refrigerator so you can drink ice-cold water.” She said that so we’d follow her there. And follow her we did, the whole tribe—Suleiman, my two sisters, Khadija and Habiba, and I, along with her numerous suitcases and boxes. And she really did buy us a television set, but not a color one. Our humiliated father said that in order for him to join us, we’d have to return to the home we had left and apologize to him. For five years we didn’t know whether he would live with us or whether he would tenaciously hold on to his dilapidated house that threatened to collapse on his head someday (while Mother asked God to make that happen on a daily basis). She knew he stayed there because of the women, and for no other reason. As it was, he came and went as he pleased, as if our move to the old city had granted him another life, one that didn’t include us.
When I meet up with Kika, I’ll tell him about Father, mainly about his hands. My father’s hands have always been large, with crooked fingers and rough skin like a crocodile. The blood that used to flow through them dried up long ago, and on the top of them there are veins knotted like an old palm tree. The hands of a man who has lived with wood for a long time, who’s married to it. Kika has no father. He says his father is in Spain and that he’ll join him when he gets his visa. But I know that he was born without a father, in the desert waste like a snail (and this is the best part of his story). God gave my father two skilled hands. With care and patience, they create something out of nothing, bringing form to something that had no form before. They steal secrets from colors. Sometimes he applies it to the wood like an adversary, as if pushing it to give up its mysteries. Other times he uses fine, delicate strokes. Either way, what was nonexistent is now there, embodied in a delicate form that possesses beauty and splendor. All of this happens outside of his own will. My father doesn’t think about the drawings he does. They come to him all on their own. They race with one another to appear first on the wood. All of a sudden, what you think is the wing of a butterfly appears. And then, just as a rose has opened before your eyes, its full meaning manifests itself: attractive, brilliantly colored, complete. Everything that comes from his hands is beautiful. He spends hours drawing a field of colored butterflies. Little by little he detaches himself from the world around us, as if he has left us for gardens we cannot see, where there are creatures we could never imagine existed except in the disorder he takes control of. As the minutes and hours pass, as the sun moves across the sky, Father’s feverish excitement appears ever more clearly in his fingers, as if intoxicated by the nectar of the plants they tame. He takes the brush and fixes the drawings I had thought were butterflies, then thought were a field of roses. He uses his brush to dab at them with some final, violent strokes, and lo and behold, in front of me there’s a beehive brimming with activity.
I put the paint can down when I heard him ask me to bring him the adze. It was then that I remembered the dog. It might have been sitting in the courtyard waiting. I wasn’t worried about it when I was with Kika, but I remembered it now that he wasn’t here. Maybe he had gone to the embassy with his mother. I left for the courtyard thinking about how much I had come to love Kika and hoped that he would stay with me forever. The sky was just as depressing as it was yesterday. The mosque’s courtyard was a wide-open stone expanse covered in water. A large workshop opened onto the ocean—columns and countless arches scattered about; large, bare rooms and stables with what remained of the metalworkers’ workshops erected inside them, their work adorning the balconies and stairways; what remained of the carpenters’ workshops where doors, windows, and mashrabiya that would separate the women’s prayer space from the rest of the mosque’s pavilions were to be built; workshops for the gypsum and marble that would adorn the floors, hammams, and fountains; and leftover stone, alabaster, wood, metal, sand, and dirt, as well as the wind blowing over it all. The minaret rose in front of me on the north face of the mosque. It was still wrapped in steel and had holes in it where, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, some seagulls had built their nests. High cranes were moving all around it, its tip almost disappearing in the fog. My eyes followed a worker who was climbing the scaffolding fastened to the minaret, and I was sure he was going to fall. Would he be the latest one? I stopped, waiting for his end to come. The worker stopped too. He looked down as if measuring the distance or listening for the thwack of himself hitting the ground. For reasons I don’t understand, people are drawn to death as moths to a flame. I’ve been thinking a lot about death these days. The difference is that moths don’t actually think about death and what goes along with it, as if they’ll rise from the ashes after the fire has consumed them and they’ve disappeared completely. Moths aren’t concerned with such things. All they care about is the distance that ties them to the flame. The worker continued to look down into the abyss, as if to test the wisdom of the thoughts swirling around in my head. I ignored him for a moment, then followed him out of the corner of my eye as he climbed. Now he was going to fall. No, he wouldn’t. Or, and this would be more likely, he’d fall as soon as I forgot about him. That was how suicides went. They loved to remain hidden. A feeling of shyness overtook them when they felt like they were being watched. I followed him as he climbed, in order to give him the chance to reexamine the course of his miserable life. I followed the unspooling tape in my mind, then I stopped again, intent on surprising him, determined this time to follow the path of his about-to-be-extinguished life to its very end. Other workers had fallen before, from the same place, the same height—or even from lower down—and they died immediately. Why should he be an exception? Not to mention the fact that we were building the mosque over the old municipal pool where the custom of death was deeply rooted; rooted in the very idea of the pool. It was in this pool, when it was there, that our relatives, friends, and neighbors’ children drowned. And now we were erecting a mosque on top of their bodies. So why should this worker be the only exception? There’s no height from which people don’t fall. There’s no place where people don’t die, especially when it’s a mosque built over the bodies of our friends. Work on the mosque was in its final stages. All that was missing were two more dead bodies, three at the most. So rather than being empty, the courtyard had been invaded by architects, carpenters, metalworkers, gypsum and zellij craftsmen, electricians, sewer cleaners, and builders, as well as those who hadn’t mastered any craft at all. Everyone who had worked before on the mosque and was no longer needed still insisted that the work was not finished. They still insisted that there was plenty of work awaiting them. And why so insistent? For death to continue its work, nothing more. Even those who hadn’t worked a single day sat, their arms outstretched on the rock overlooking the ocean, or along the road. They played cards, waiting for the need for their death to arrive so that construction could continue and the mosque could finally rise up high in all its glory. When I turned around this time, the worker had disappeared. Had he fallen, or had he climbed up to the sky?
A man parked his old car in the middle of the courtyard. He said he wanted to see Father. It was the National Department of Electricity employee who had taken off his cap and khaki coat so I wouldn’t recognize him. His bare face now resembled that of a frog. His short body was stuffed into a green suit, and underneath it was a red-and-white plaid shirt. His head was bald, with a deep groove running down the middle of it, as if he had two heads—he’d pushed one to the front, and the other to the back. Perhaps he had come in disguise, with two heads and wearing the clothes of someone who works in a circus. Because of the stolen pipes, he was wearing clothes unbefitting of a respectable employee of the National Department of Electricity. Thus, when I saw him, I told myself that this face was one I didn’t know, one I hadn’t seen before, to allow him to continue his ruse of disguising himself. I think his disappointment became even greater when he saw that I had met him before, and that the ruse he had cooked up to surprise me didn’t bear any results. That’s what disappointed him. We left the car behind and crossed the mosque’s courtyard, moving between the intertwined columns that provided little shade because the sun had risen so high in the sky. The employee shuffled his dusty shoes through the thicket of steel, with me in front dragging my feet lazily as I ignored him and looked at today’s life all around me with greater optimism. The smell of cedar wood rising up around my father didn’t surprise me the same way it surprised the employee. The accumulated smell of long years surrounded by wood, by entire forests of cedar. Perhaps it was surprising to the employee who didn’t know that wood has a life, and that it has good times and bad. I looked at the frog’s face, waiting for the effect of the smell to show on it as I walked between the columns underneath the prayer room’s ceiling until we arrived at the mosque’s interior. I chuckled to myself: “Who is this man walking behind me?” Father was standing on a high bench and satisfied himself with turning his paint-spattered beard in our direction. His nose was also dabbed with paint, as was his forehead. However, it wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. I told him that this was an employee from the National Department of Electricity, then I plunged my brush again into the can of red paint. Father stepped down from his bench without giving the impression that he had noticed the employee was there. He stood over me watching, while I waited for his torrent of dissatisfaction and nagging, along with his steady flow of disappointed observations. I saw him roll up his sleeves, take the brush from my hand, and plunge it into the paint. Then he walked away for a few moments, deep in thought. He wasn’t concerned with us standing there in front of him. Father recalled his glory days. He retook the lead. He took the bull by the horns as if this unexpected observer was all that was needed to spark his enthusiasm. His legs were slim and graceful. He walked away from the pieces of wood, then walked back toward them. He took some measurements and recorded them, and then he started drawing. But his two steady hands had been replaced by two shaking hands; the confidence they once possessed was gone. They weren’t as delicate as they once were. I could see the top of his head as he leaned over the wood. A red circle shone in the middle of a little bit of white hair that fell over its sides. In his hand he had his brush that had been plunged into the red paint. He held it upright at an odd angle, as if he were holding a red line, trying unsuccessfully to find a place for it between the lines he had already drawn. I repeated, “This is an employee from the National Department of Electricity.” The frog’s face came closer. He placed his hand on Father’s shoulder and tapped it gently, nodding and saying that building the mosque where the municipal pool had been was a nice idea, providing Father with this job after such a long period without work. He continued to rub his shoulder with the same calm, reminding him that he would always be a great carpenter, adding that the ceilings he had done in the past were at one time exemplary models their owners would show off, and that still, to this day, adorn the rooms of great palaces in Fez and the ancient mosques of Marrakech. In the good old days . . . Father began to nod, saying, “Great days, ha!”—dazzled by the moment, adding, “Yeah, yeah. When the work deserved it.” Father put his brush into an empty pail next to him. Perhaps he felt that this would be an opportune moment to tell of his past glories. The employee took advantage of this unexpected moment of relaxation to tell Father that his lines were no longer as straight as they once were, that his hands shook, and that permanence belongs only to God, as if his hands had forgotten the craft they had once mastered. Yes, that was what I thought too. That in itself was embarrassing. I no longer worried about him. I was only going to be worried if it had to do with the stolen pipes, and I would have been more worried if it had something to do with the employee playing his private investigation game with Kika and me. As it was, the employee was talking about lines that weren’t straight, shaking hands, and slow work. Father wiped his brow with his sleeve several times. I looked again at his gnarled hands. I saw that the red-splattered fingers were trembling, and that his clothes were splashed with other colors. A look of severe disappointment came over his face, which also had paint on it. A sound like a whistle rose from his chest, and then I saw him walk around the ceiling examining the work we had done over the past months. He grabbed a piece of ceiling we had spent a week arranging, ripped it from its place, and broke it apart. He raised his finger. He extracted a splinter from it and blood shone on its tip. He looked at the splinter, dazed. It was as if he considered it to be the embodiment of all the blood wasted on this work. Calmly, the employee returned to pick up the brush and put it back in the pail, leaning over the piece of wood. He stood there for a while following Father’s lines and curves, the unpleasant surprises that his colors had imprinted on the wood. As he continued to examine the work, he said, “They say that your hands are no longer as skilled as they once were, that the craftsmanship is gone from them. There is no power nor strength save for in God.”
For a long time after the National Department of Electricity employee had left the mosque’s courtyard, Father didn’t get up from where he had been sitting. His paint-smudged nose looked as if it were mocking a situation he hadn’t been expecting. His nostrils were moving to the rhythm of the wheezing coming from his chest. With exaggerated calm he grabbed the saw and began to cut the wood we had spent six months smoothing, drilling, and cutting. Six months of hard work, and many more months drawing, calculating, assessing, examining, appraising, and reappraising; all of it coming apart bit by bit before my eyes with calm, patience, and a strange pleasure. The smell of sawdust grew strong around him. The forest smell still emanated from his body. His hands, even as they were destroying what they had built, no longer obeyed him as they once had. I went as far as the door to the mosque’s courtyard. I watched the seagulls fly across the square of sky there. Were they black or white? When the birds landed on the roof of the mosque I couldn’t see them anymore. I pictured their feet scratching the roof, their annoying sound getting on my nerves even though I couldn’t hear them. Everything about these birds gets on my nerves! What were these birds that live in marinas and on deserted beaches doing on the mosque’s roof?