When I told Kika that it would be better to go someplace else, and he responded, “We’re good here,” it was too late, because the girl had already lodged herself in our minds a while ago, like a spotlight that shone brightly tonight. Kika repeated, “We’re good here,” as he turned toward her. Her dress was blue. I saw it before I saw her. Then I saw her looking into the room, scrutinizing the faces there. A thin girl you wouldn’t say was older than fifteen, although her eyes shone with the spark of a mature woman. She stood between the door and the counter, blinded by the blazing light coming in from the hallway. Even before Kika put his hand on my shoulder, he asked, “Why is she looking at us?” I pretended not to hear or see, even when he leaned toward me and whispered tensely while squeezing my shoulder excitedly, gleefully even, “She’s been looking over here for a while.” Tense. Excited. Squeezing my shoulder. Yet relaxed at the same time. As if the cords that kept him balanced had slackened slightly.
I said to him, “Since when, Kika? She just showed up.”
“Then why would she look at us this way? Not like how women normally look at men?”
“And how do women normally look at men?”
Instead of answering, his eyes continued to mull it over while I looked at his pants pocket to see if it was bulging as much as a pocket with a wad of cash should be. Perhaps she was looking at us through the color of her blue dress. He took two steps toward the door, then walked back. I told myself that Kika wasn’t limping because he wasn’t still carrying the pipes he had been yesterday. Still, he was limping a little, and it was then that I saw and confirmed that he had the money in his pocket, the money we had gotten from the pipe deal. I think I had come to trust Kika ever since he first put his hand on my shoulder and I had lost all fear. Like someone absolutely comfortable with his future. She was closer to the door than to the counter. She moved hesitantly as her eyes flitted about, like a ewe that has lost its way from its pen. Sometimes the shadow of a girl passing by blocked her, or the head of a man leaning toward his friend. Other times it was the body of the bouncer who stood between her and the room, not letting her move forward. A young brown-skinned man, tall, with an excessively ample belly, an eagle tattoo on each bare arm, and around his wrist a wide red-leather wristband. The eagle occupied the uppermost part of each arm, its large wings outstretched and facing downward on the sweaty skin, creeping toward a woman and a forest. There were symbols and numbers surrounding them, and delicate drawings resembling flowers. The young woman behind him continued to look at us. I wasn’t close enough to say for sure that she was looking at us. There were lots of men getting drunk, with an equal number of girls laughing, and there was music and the sound of clinking glasses. A singer in the middle of the room beneath a colored spotlight sang out into the darkened room. The singer’s presence under the colored light made the surrounding darkness seem a little less dreary. The people in the light were like shadows being moved by a drunken wind, as if the singer and his voice were trying to light up a darkness in the customers’ souls, but couldn’t. I fixed my gaze on Kika’s legs and saw that they wouldn’t stop moving. One leg went up as the other went down, out of his control. In their own way, they were thinking about the girl. “There she is again,” Kika said, running a hand over the back of his neck, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the other, wondering if he’d go and bring her over. He looked at me, and at her, with what appeared to be a confrontational glare. I was content with looking at Kika’s back pockets to try and guess the amount of money they were hiding, because the amount we got from the pipes was in one of them. Sometimes the bulge was visible in one pocket, sometimes the other. Kika is usually unaffected by young women in bars. They’re not his type. It’s schoolgirls and factory workers that get his attention. For them, he’ll wear the fancy clothes his mother, Kenza, buys for him. He’s tall. He says it’s the Adam’s apple that sticks out of his throat that attracts the girls. The girl behind the guard’s tall frame looked inside, craning her neck this way and that, ceaselessly talking and gesturing. When Kika wondered, in simultaneous protest and anger, “Why doesn’t he let her be?” squeezing my shoulder with his trembling hand, I noticed that she was looking all around, and that I was looking at her as if she were disoriented, lost, a stranger to us and the place where we were—me, Kika, the men, the young women, and the singer. As the moments passed, his body leaned over more and his legs sped up. Now I lit a cigarette because his agitation was contagious. I drew on it nervously and exhaled a cloud of smoke from my nostrils in order to forget about Kika and the cash (I still didn’t know which pocket Kika had put it in). I saw him put his hand into his pocket. I waited for the bills to appear, knowing that they wouldn’t right then. Maybe they’d never appear, because I no longer trusted him as I had just a short while ago. I was amazed at the amount of smoke coming out of my nostrils. In the meantime, the girl had disappeared. She left through the cabaret’s entrance with the guard, but what seemed like a shadow of her presence lingered. I told Kika that it would be better if we went somewhere else. He replied, echoing what he had said before, “How come? We’re good here.” I bit down on my cigarette and turned toward the counter. Finally, Kika took out the cash that the copper pipe deal had netted us and began to count it. Then he raised his glass, laughing, pointing to the bills scattered on the counter in order to give the impression that he had forgotten all about the girl. The girl, her dress, and the memory of her dress were all behind us now. The clock hanging among a row of different sized and colored bottles in front of us pointed to quarter to nine. The two hands were stuck to one another, and there was no way of knowing if they were going to stay that way. I focused on them. Instead of looking, I listened closely, but I didn’t hear them ticking. Then I heard them, tick tick tick tick. As I kept looking, I realized the clock had only one hand, and it had stopped. I think I saw her even before turning around. Even before Kika yelled, “There she is again!” with the same determination, the same eagerness, without surprise, with the same agitated joy, without the least bit of shock. As if I had been expecting her to show up at any moment. She appeared without the guard, neither in front of her or behind her. I turned toward Kika, imploring, “Better we go somewhere else.”
Unlike before, the girl with the blue dress didn’t stop between the door and the counter. The music stopped. She moved toward the middle of the room, approaching the spotlight, as if this time she knew which way to go. We were interested in her now— she was someone who had just entered an unfamiliar place, with lots of movement and noise, under the circle of light that, just a little while ago, had enveloped the singer. Kika was no longer interested in anything other than the girl. Kika seems like a thirty-year-old man with his deep voice and Adam’s apple that juts out from under his jaw like a real apple. Suddenly, the girl was alarmingly close to us. The blue of her dress bloomed near us in an elegant blaze. The color of her dress reminded me of the blue in Father’s ceiling. The dress brought me back again to the mosque, which I had forgotten all about. I almost placed my hand on the dress. Maybe, after all, she came back on our account. We didn’t know her and hadn’t seen her before, but nonetheless, maybe she came because of us, or because of an idea she had in her head about us. Why else would she wear a blue dress—the same blue that floated across the sky of the ceiling? Why would she be wearing a blue dress if she weren’t thinking the same thing you and I were? Why else would she be looking at us that way as soon as she came in? I noticed that I had started to think like Kika, and I too wondered why she had disappeared and then come back. Why was she walking so slowly toward us that we could see her dress, and see that it was blue? And why was she looking at us as she approached to make sure that we saw her? “This girl isn’t looking for anyone. It would be best if we went somewhere else,” I said to Kika. Just then she was grabbed by a young man close to her, who was wearing strange leather clothes. He had a line of hair sticking straight up like a rooster’s comb. The girl trembled like a frightened goose and backed away until she almost bumped into the counter. When she made it clear that she intended to retreat, he grabbed her forcefully by the arm. This time she didn’t retreat. She remained looking at him, determined not to be scared of him or his threats. He leaned over close to her face and whispered a few words that were enough to make her blush. Her eyes filled with fear. Then he began to pull her toward the door. She looked around with pleading and terrified eyes that said this was the first time she had entered the bar in her life. As this was happening, Kika was gripping the counter with his fingertips, wondering why the man wouldn’t just leave her alone. I knew what was going to happen when I saw his fingernails dig into the countertop. Then I saw Kika moving forward in a deliberate manner between the other customers. A sudden uneasiness came over everything; the shadows stopped dancing around the anxious patrons. He walked out. I was no longer as concerned with his pockets as I had been before. I turned toward the stopped clock and, in my head, proceeded to count the money Kika had taken out of his pocket and then put back in, telling myself that Kika was my friend no matter what. I saw him come back with the girl, his hand in hers. Then I heard him say proudly, “I present to you Farah. She’s come looking for her friend Naima.” Farah gave a light, bashful laugh. She had spent the entire day looking for her friend, but hadn’t found her anywhere. She didn’t know anyone in this city. Casablanca is like a huge island. And in the end, they pointed her to this place! Kika happily handed me my share of the proceeds from the pipe deal as if he were making up for the fact that his other hand was holding on to the girl’s. Then he began to count out his share like someone well practiced in counting money.
I began to count my money just as Kika did. I looked at Farah, moistening my finger and moving my lips so she’d see that I was counting real money, just like Kika, but better. I may not have actually been counting it, though, because I was nervous, really nervous. When I’m overly nervous I can’t do anything, especially something that requires focus such as counting money. Kika is better at this than I am because his fingers are long, and long fingers are good for counting money, no question about it. When he finished counting his money, he put it in his back pocket with his usual overconfidence. Farah was content to smile a bit wider and attach herself to me, putting some distance between herself and Kika and the way he was looking at her. Every time he tried to get closer to her, she became uneasy and backed up. I thought to myself that this girl was just like me. She didn’t know anyone in this bar, and Casablanca must have seemed like a huge island to such a lonely girl. She wasn’t used to places like this. She didn’t go into bars—she didn’t generally even go into coffee shops—and now she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. I asked her if she wanted to see the mosque. At that hour I didn’t think it was the right time for that. I took a piece of paper from my pocket, put it on the counter, and began to draw circles and squares on it, explaining the work Father and I were doing. Kika stood behind us. I could feel the heat of his breath on the back of my neck as he looked at the piece of paper. I wondered what he was thinking. He carefully studied the circles I was drawing. Then he grabbed the pen angrily from my hand and violently drew a line across it, tearing the paper in two. With his other hand, he scrunched the paper into a little ball and threw it into the air, hitting it with his head while letting out a strange laugh. He walked toward Farah. She walked around me to stand further away from Kika. I told myself that maybe the time had come. The time had come to leave, because Kika had changed. Kika was definitely giddier than he should have been. This time she didn’t let him hold her hand as we crossed the room to go outside. The angry flash I saw in his pupils changed my mood, and I was no longer feeling as cheerful as I had been before. The place got louder—clinking glasses, chairs, and tables scraping the floor, girls laughing. In place of the other singer there were now women singing whom I hadn’t seen get up on stage. A group of cheikhat were singing songs while they danced, clapped, smoked, drank, and shook their fat bellies like bears, all to the drunks’ delight.