Suddenly, in front of the cabaret’s entrance, I remembered her name—Farah. It was as if I were hearing it for the first time. As if I hadn’t heard Kika utter it just moments ago. Farah! Standing on the sidewalk across the street, Farah fixed her gaze on the door as if she had already forgotten us. She was waiting. Her friend Naima might show up. I thought about the cash Kika had given me, and the uncomfortable situation we now found ourselves in. The bills sat in my pocket in place of the green stone that was no longer of any use. I touched my pocket and thought, “There, now it’s bulging like Kika’s pocket.” I put my left hand in and touched the bills, knowing each denomination by how soft it was. A calmness passed through my fingers, but it didn’t make the anxiety swirling around inside my head go away. Despite that, everything was fine. Outside the bar, it was lit up bright as day. Taxi drivers waited in a long line for customers who were pissing on the bar’s wall, calculating how broke they were. A lot of girls came out of the bar wrapped in heavy coats with high collars that hid the fatigue that comes from staying out so late. None of them was named Naima. They fanned out into cars lurking next to the sidewalk and disappeared into them, laughing drunkenly—the laughter of a night at its end. One was being followed by a drunk whose last cent she had swallowed before taking off. Another sang because the echo of the cabaret’s singing still pursued her and surged inside her head. Yet another wavered between two rivals who were staggering and reeling, and ended up seeking refuge in a third car. None of them was named Naima. If there had been someone named Naima, or someone who looked like her, we would have known it right away. That’s what Kika said. He tried to hang on to Farah, talking to her about his house, which wasn’t too far away, pointing toward the old city where we lived. He looked at his watch in order to give an impression of balance and calm. At this time of night, his mother was somewhere else, whoring herself to other men. Under the lamplight I carefully examined his face, which betrayed his thinning patience. Kika has little patience. He gets angry for no reason. I keep pace with him so he doesn’t run out of what little patience he does have. I wasn’t sure why Farah ran from him, seeking my protection. I had grown up. Her face was small and round. The redness of her lips was clean, tempting, like the red of a winter fig. Had we seen her before as Kika claimed? There are those cheerful faces that seem so familiar as soon as you see them, making you think, quite naturally, that you’ve seen them many times before. Was it possible that I had seen her on the beach last summer, or at the International Fair, or in some other place I couldn’t remember? It doesn’t matter whether I remembered or not. Farah held on to me as if seeking my protection, which made me genuinely confused. The square in front of the bar became completely empty and dark. After the last car took off, its noise having faded away in the distance and the silence of night having settled in, she walked off with us beside her, one on either side as if to protect her from some danger that might jump out at her at any moment. Then she came around me from behind and clung to me. She sought my protection once again. She held on to my arms. I thought to myself that she didn’t like Kika. He wouldn’t be taking her to his room like he did with the schoolgirls. This gave me a hidden pleasure. I stole a glance at him and saw that he no longer commanded the same sense of authority and power, satisfying himself by kicking a stone with his new shoe. He no longer walked as arrogantly or with as much self-importance. Middle-school girls and factory workers are easy to seal the deal with. They’re already won over. But Kika’s luck betrayed him this time when he saw her holding on to me. Perhaps his luck had been betraying him ever since Farah first set her eyes on the cabaret. Kika makes a habit of sleeping with young girls, whether or not his mother is around. He has a room all to himself, and he tries to provide us with every minute detail of the color of its walls, the type of lamp hanging above the bed, the starfish that adorn the ceiling. Fury steered his ship now, along with pride and gruffness, all because Farah hadn’t held on to him. A light breeze played about my head and I could see that Kika finally understood that even if she didn’t hate him, she was repulsed by the notion of getting anywhere close to him or his bedroom, despite the Adam’s apple upon which he hung so many great hopes. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders rocked back and forth, and his nose was high in the air. All of this meant a great deal. I remember the color of her dress, joking to Kika, “Maybe she walked by us last summer and we didn’t recognize her because the dress she was wearing hadn’t been blue . . .” but Kika wasn’t in a joking mood. He circled around to get next to her as she moved away to avoid him and held tightly to my arm. Derisively, he said that the way I was holding on to her was shameful. It was the first time I’d found myself in such a situation, in the company of a strange girl whose origins I didn’t know. With Kika behaving as if he had won her in a contest. Then we started to walk in front of him, leaving him standing on the side of the street. Her fingers squeezed my arm. She wasn’t comfortable with what was going through Kika’s head. She looked around, a little bit lost, a little bit frightened, not at all comfortable. I wondered whether I should grab her hand to comfort her, but I didn’t. Twice, and then a third time I wondered whether I should grab her hand, but I didn’t. Then Kika swooped in and grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her as he said threateningly, “What’s wrong? Scared?”
“Let go of me . . .”
“Scared of me? Am I scaring you?”
“Let go of me or I’ll scream . . .”
Kika’s hand was strong. He gripped her wrist as if holding onto a poor little kitten. It wasn’t the same hand that had patted me on the shoulder two days before in the mosque’s courtyard, or just a little while ago under the dim lights of the cabaret. Rather, it was the hand that had strangled the rabid dog, the hand with the deep scar, the one immune to rabies. And then, as if the poison in the hand gripping her wrist had seeped into her veins, Farah jumped in fright and let out a sudden scream—a single long, piercing scream that you wouldn’t have expected such a skinny body to be able to keep inside it. A disturbing scream. One capable of tearing the night in two. The kind that makes the hair on your head stand up on end. It was as if some other person had inhabited her body. Kika let go of her hand and backed off, shocked. He looked at her in disbelief, and only when there was a reasonable distance between them did she stop screaming. I put my hand in my pocket and counted the cash while Farah grabbed my arm once again without hiding her discomfort. Kika passed his hand over his hair very slowly, as if granting us a rare opportunity to see just how much he hated and despised us. His upper lip was quivering in a bitter sneer. I wondered how he saw me right then, with her hand holding my arm. What would my friend, Kika, say? I stared at him, overcoming my fear, with a measure of self-composure that, for the first time, didn’t betray me. This in itself was an overwhelming victory. As he rocked back and forth from one foot to the other, he said that I’d regret it, that there would come a day when I’d regret what I’d done. She began to scream again before he retreated, reiterating his threat as he walked off into the jet-black night. For a few moments after Kika left, I wondered why he hadn’t told us about his mother who was turning tricks at this time of night. Deep down inside I had a feeling of delight I hadn’t known before, and a hatred as well. Kika running off into the darkness. Ha! I’ll bet he pissed his pants he was so scared. Hee hee! And I’ll bet he’s never slept with a girl in his life—student or factory worker—even though he’s claimed to have slept with lots of girls! These are just claims, like the one that his father is in Spain and that he was going to join him there. Kika loves to boast!
I noticed that, rather than screaming, she was laughing. The contempt she had for Kika made her laughter downright ecstatic. Soft, flowing laughter accompanied the calm that had suddenly set in, pushing aside the night’s disarray that the scream had caused. I slowed down a little to savor the moment, and to see if Kika was following us. No trace of him. He had disappeared. Vanished. The darkness had swallowed him up. Unsurprisingly, I found myself behind her, deliberately walking in step with her. Cheerful. My hands were moving along with hers. We walked according to a hidden rhythm that Kika would never know. I heard her say, “If we go . . .” but I didn’t hear the rest of what she said because it drifted off with the wind. Right then I told myself that I was going to place my hand in hers. My hand was sweaty. This wasn’t encouraging. Then I heard her again: “If we go now, we’ll find Naima at home.” She walked next to me and far from me at the same time, lightly, as if a breeze were pushing her along, as she repeated that she had come from Azemmour to see her friend Naima. We walked through narrow alleyways with few lights and lots of cats whose shadows were running silently behind one another. I watched all of this with keen interest, because a bit of her lightness had moved to me. I walked along like someone who, all of a sudden, felt reassured, like a person who was now heading in a specific direction. Farah skipped along next to me, repeating that she had come from Azemmour only because of Naima. And that her neighbor, the brown-skinned woman, had told her that Naima was most likely staying late at the lawyer’s place. If Naima didn’t stay out late at one of the places where she was singing, she would spend a good part of the night at the lawyer’s. “Do you know where the lawyer lives?” Farah asked. “I don’t know where the lawyer lives.” “Do you know who this lawyer is?” “I don’t know who this lawyer is.” Because there are lots of lawyers in Casablanca, and it had gotten so late, it was difficult to think. Then she said, “If we go now, we’ll find Naima in bed because the brown-skinned woman said that she didn’t make it a habit to sleep away from home, even if she does stay late at the lawyer’s.” That’s what she said. Nothing more, nothing less.
A light rain started to fall on our faces and the asphalt glistened under our feet in a way that made me feel sad. After walking around the old city, the mosque appeared in front of us, the gray water stretching out behind it. She passed her hand over her wet face and laughed gaily. She continued to walk a few steps in front of me, not far from the low wall that surrounded the mosque’s courtyard, differently than she had been walking just a short while ago, as if finding her friend no longer mattered to her. This sparked an additional bit of enthusiasm in me as I told myself that now I would take her hand, but I didn’t. She kept on going in the rain, in her blue gypsy dress, talking like someone singing. A feeling of delight returned to me as I looked at her. I saw the minaret’s shadow rising up between us. The wind howled around us, carrying our words every which way so that the girl only heard half of what I said, and I only heard half of what she said. I made do with sign language. The wind became more ferocious in the exposed area where we were standing. I strained to think of something entertaining to say to her—a funny story or an amusing piece of news, something about actors or singers. I discovered that we both loved Fairouz and hated Farid al-Atrash, not because of his singing, but because of the name Wahid (meaning “lonely”) that he would use and that would always appear in the movie credits. That really made us laugh. As if the night had invigorated me and I was an actor who had finally found his role, I began to skip on top of the short wall that ran alongside us, forgetting about Kika and what might happen with him. My emotions told me that I should thank her for that rare opportunity that allowed me to see Kika defeated, destroyed, humiliated. I turned to see her walking alongside the wall. I asked her how old she was and she jumped up delicately, ending up in front of me on the wall. Now both of us were skipping along the wall. Farah was in front of me, spreading her arms to the wind, unfurling her wings like a dove pursuing its dream of flying away. As if she had become reassured, and this was really the strange thing! I skipped past her. She stopped and saw that I was now ahead of her. I also stopped and let her come closer. Should I grab her hand before she passed me? Or should I describe the different types of wood to her and explain the different ways they look until she laughed some more? I didn’t do either of those things. I mean, what would a girl do with such knowledge about different kinds of wood in the wee hours of the morning? Farah was seventeen years old.
We were approaching the workshop when I heard her say, “If we go now, we’ll find Naima in bed.” This time I didn’t think about whether to hold her hand to help her inside. Farah wasn’t the type who could be easily held. That was what I was thinking. Farah hesitated before crossing over into the workshop, as if she were apologizing for the problems she had caused. I lit a candle and we sat looking awkwardly at one another, and at the shadows dancing around us. Farah told me that her friend had left Azemmour two years before to sing. The brown-skinned woman told her that she now sang in lots of places, in fancy cabarets and rich people’s houses. Naima had always loved to sing. She’d sing at home and in the street. In class too. Naima knew nothing other than singing. At that moment, I wasn’t interested in Naima or anyone else. All I was interested in was Farah. In the candlelight, I’d swear she didn’t look seventeen years old like she said she was. We remained silent for a long time. As if we were wondering, both she and I, what to do with this young girl who had come to stay in the workshop. The clock indicated that it was past three in the morning. She sat under the window. I lay down far away from her. I hid myself among the pieces of wood inside the workshop in order to go to sleep, and at the same time to make her realize that Kika and I were different. When I opened my eyes, I saw that dawn had broken—a gray-blue dawn, as light as it was dark. Everything was strewn around the room. And the money I had made from the pipe deal was gone! I looked out through the open window and remembered that I had locked it before going to sleep. And Farah? She had disappeared as well, without a trace. All that remained was the memory of that strange night, which followed me around for days. Still, it had been a beautiful night that left a scent somewhere between lavender and wild thyme in my memory. Her scent! I spent days thinking about the strange perfume that had entered my room and my head that night, like a breeze passing through into a dream. Other thoughts filled my mind too. Something of that night did remain, something I didn’t say. It might not have occurred to me to mention it at the time—the light that fell on her round breast as she walked toward the counter had colored it a warm purple.