13

I can’t think of the house Father settled into without remembering the smell of wood everywhere. It was originally an inn with lots of interconnected rooms. It was built about a century ago on the edge of the old city, ﬂush against the walls surrounding it on the western side. I pass through the doorway at Bab Marrakech and plunge deeply into the alleys of the old city. A plucked chicken—wounded, without feathers, with broken wings and paralyzed legs, blue spots on its yellowed skin, bare, miserable—looks out from between the bars of a battered cage. It doesn’t seem to be in the slightest bit of pain. Despite its injuries, it seems calm and clearheaded, waiting for whoever will end up eating it as if waiting for a savior. I don’t like how it looks at all, nor how those yelling at it so wretchedly look, either. I forget about it. I try to forget its repulsive smell, that disgusting smell that hits you as soon as you enter the alley. Bab Marrakech begins right here. At this smell. I speed up in order to move past it. Luckily, after a little bit, the smell of ﬁsh will allow me to forget all about the chicken and its miserable life. To forget about it, I think about Maymouna too. I call her Aunt Maymouna so as not to think about her in any other way. Sometimes I consider her Father’s new wife. She lives with him without any documentation, like all the women who came before her. Ever since the woodworking tools went silent and we left this house ﬁve years ago, women have come and gone with no set schedule. They live with him for six or seven months, without ululations or rituals or marriage papers or anything of the sort, and then they go back home the same way they came—without papers, pockets empty, their heads ﬁlled with the stupid stories he tells them, always the same stories. He tells them about the years he had lived the easy life and about the inﬂuential people whose palaces he has worked in. I’m not sure what appeals to them about a man older than sixty. His hands shake. His teeth fell out a quarter century ago. No money or status. The only thing he knows how to do is tell stories about his past glories, along with tales of things that had never occurred, adding details that never happened. He has an old set of dentures in his mouth, left over from more prosperous days, which he places in a cup of water before going to sleep. The women enjoy these made-up stories. They’re enthralled by the lies. They picture themselves sitting at his make-believe gatherings with princes and ministers and other men of high standing, warming themselves like he does in front of the ﬁre of their false greatness. I think they picture him sitting atop a great fortune that someday, they’ll inherit some or all of it. That’s the impression he gives, which is why they stay with him for so long. There can be no other reason. Also, I call her his wife so as not to call her by another name that would only make Father mad. Instead of the invigorating smell of ﬁsh, I ﬁnd myself surrounded by the smell of mint. This is the biggest disappointment I have felt all morning.

The paint has worn off and many of the ceilings have caved in. The house’s interior resembles a small, ravaged village with its deteriorating walls, pockmarked pillars, and exposed steel that look like the ribs of a corpse. Window frames have fallen out. Chickens have left droppings everywhere. When we were small, the woodworking tools ran day and night before they ﬁnally fell silent. Suleiman and I stopped hiding behind the thicket of wood that ﬁlled all the ﬂoors of the house. The smell of cut wood remained nonetheless, but without the refreshing moistness it used to have. Now, mixed with the droppings of chickens and birds that came in from everywhere, the smell has turned humid, rotten. The strong smell sticks in the throat like a tiny germ, and that’s what I feel rising from it now as I look at the house. Between me and the house there’s an open area covered with dirt, cactuses, and wild thorns, along with an old barbed-wire fence. Our echoing footsteps used to ﬁll the yard with happiness, but now it is empty and silent, ﬂoating in a depressing calm under a light mist.

Father isn’t there. In the middle of his room there’s a desk and two chairs. I picture him sitting there. A large, imposing desk constructed of good, thick wood. Heaped on top of his desk are pens, torn-up papers, inkwells, and folders, along with a cup of stale coffee and some crumbs. There are pieces of dried cookie all over the desk and scattered on the ﬂoor. A long line of ants takes advantage of the emptiness to carry their booty back to their storehouses. Maymouna sits on one of the chairs painting her nails, with her foot on the edge of the other chair. She’s the one who said that Father isn’t there. Her arms are bare, just as I’d imagined they would be when I was in the market a little while ago. What are her pinched lips doing? Are they tracing the brush’s movement as she applies the red polish to her nails? Should I keep looking at her nails with the smell of alcohol wafting up from them? Then Maymouna gets up. She casts a not-so-innocent look in my direction. She says that two days ago, my father had picked up his tools and left. Her words suggest the opposite of what she is saying, as do the way she walks and looks at me. Her clothes are practically see-through, her panties visible. This Maymouna is still young and alluring, and she is lying. She likes to play like a kitten, and she looks like a cat as she jumps up from the chair and leaves the room with me hopping along behind her like another cat that wants to play with her. I’m not at all surprised to see that the hallways have been invaded by black-skinned renters: by their women and children; by their brightly colored clothes; by the strong odors of their cooking; by the smell of onions and blueﬁsh. I ﬁgure Father has disappeared into some corner or another of the house. I tiptoe carefully. I turn the doorknob to one of the rooms and it opens up. From inside, large eyes peer out. Doors are open. Many doors, and just as many shining white eyes. I ask her how much rent Father is charging for the rooms. She doesn’t respond. I walk ahead of her so I can look for him on another landing. The rustling of her clothes catches up to me. Then I hear her say, “The old man. No one knows where he went.” She says she doesn’t even know if he’s coming back because he took his clothes with him too. Her tender years make her lies acceptable, likable even. Her clothes, behind me, then in front of me, don’t stop swishing. I’m not thinking about my father or his disappearance. Like her, I’m no longer searching for anything. For the time being, I’m not concerned with Father. I move through these twisty hallways and decrepit stairways that are brimming with bare-chested black people. An entire African tribe has taken up residence in this abandoned inn, but nothing matters to me anymore other than her body undulating behind me, in front of me, all around me, in my head. This morning I left the ocean behind, and here I am returning to it with a practically naked woman, swaying in the shadows of ancient hallways that are ready to collapse. Her waves shake me, throwing me onto the sand, and then they come back to drag me down into the depths of the crashing sea. The rooms are ﬁlled to capacity, there isn’t a single room free of them and their eyes that shine from deep in the darkness, or their boisterous naked children. And me? What do I want from her in the end? I ask her if she likes children. She rushes off. Her body in front of me urges me to ask again. She moves ahead, swaggering like one of the queens of ancient Ethiopia. I catch up to her like a king from the same timeworn Ethiopia. A bunch of clucking chickens runs between our legs. When she stops at the door of the room she has just come out of she raises her skirt above her knees and says, “Come look at my toenails.” But instead of looking at her nails, I look at her knees that shine in the darkness, my blood boiling as I count one, two, three. I’m about to pounce on her but I don’t, because the children burst in. She laughs loudly. We go into a second, empty room. Father isn’t anywhere in the room or in my thoughts. It doesn’t seem like she’s looking for him either. She just wants to lose herself. I hear her say, “Over here, over here,” but I can’t see her. I hear her clucking, and see her lying down on a box motioning for me to come closer. That’s when I realize that the chicken under the box is what’s making the clucking sound. She puts her hand out and in it there’s an egg that the chicken sitting underneath the box has just laid. She giggles and runs away. I search for the egg in another room until I forget about it. I hear her cursing Father, calling him the devil. I don’t know why she calls him that. I go into a dark room. It’s so dark I can’t see her. I can hear her moving behind me, or in front of me, or in my mind. Enthusiastically, I do as she does. I count one, two, three. I’m about to pounce, but I don’t. I feel her hand on my shoulder. This time I’m the one who moves back toward the door. I hear her say, “Come.” I don’t move. I hear what sounds like a cat’s groan when it twists and stretches, or it could be a snake. She stops under a beam of light and pulls her skirt up high. She moans and ﬂicks her tongue in her mouth like a young viper. In the other room she sat crying next to the window where I could see her and the black kohl from her eyes running over her cheeks in long, crooked lines. Was her nail polish also running? I walk over to her. I touch her. “Everything all right?” “Don’t take pity on me.” She says she’s miserable in this dump and that she’s going to leave Father today. I hear her say that Father is working in the back garage, and she wipes her face and lets out a loud laugh. I think about jumping her—I count one, two, three—but I don’t because she’s left the room. This third room is dark too, or is it the fourth? Then I hear the tools, so I stop playing around. I pause for a moment with my eyes closed in order to listen more closely so I don’t lose the music of the tools as it penetrates the walls and ﬂows through the halls.

I rush down the stairs with the ﬂock of chickens and their chicks running in front of me. Loudly they cross the courtyard that’s grown over with boxthorn. They remain in front of me as if to guide me along the path to the wooden garage that stands behind the house. Their tail feathers dance to a rhythm I don’t hear. The noise of the tools grows louder the closer I get to the slanting garage door. The chickens and their chicks disappear behind the boards leaning against the wall. I stand by the window rather than the door. I see him sitting in his old chair, covered in sawdust; a chair that looked like a throne, which he had spent long weeks carving before tossing it behind the piles of wood when his skills had become obsolete. The back is high, and there are curved lines on it, between which are the words “Allahu akbar”—God is great. Underneath them on either side there’s a long ﬂoral design with the same words, then another ﬂoral design, running all the way down to the bottom. The chair’s two arms are shaped like snakes with their mouths open, going down the sides as if in search of an elusive prey on the ground. All of this is in front of me. The noise of the tools, the sawdust, the chirping of birds that ﬂutter above our heads ﬂying in and out of the pane-less windows, the chickens and their chicks searching around him for food somewhere among the twenty-ﬁve thousand pieces of wood that had disappeared from the workshop. All of it had made its way here. Father studies a large drawing that’s hanging on the wall. This also faces me. The ornamentation that Father had carved in wood is drawn on pieces of paper hanging on the wall, a second version of the ceiling topped with celestial drawings; others are in red and white like the hallways. Some shapes are square; others are like stars. Then arches shaped like eyebrows underneath which are bulls’ eyes, scorpions, and beehives colored Roman red, which Father calls Casablanca red. I stand next to the door. Instead of looking at me, he moves around the forest of wood that’s standing up and strewn about all over the ﬂoor amid a chaos of birds and the din of machines. He holds a steel ruler that he waves around in every direction, as if threatening someone he can’t see. He’s in his old djellaba, not caring that I’m standing there watching him. When he turns around, it will be too late for me to turn back. He goes back to the pieces of wood and begins to count them rather than look toward where I’ve been standing for three minutes. I distract myself by thinking again about the shapes he draws, so as not to have to see my own confusion. On the wide table there’s a pile of muqarnases shaped like beehives and ﬁligree. He walks around the table, hair disheveled, sawdust covering him like snowﬂakes. Then he stops to examine them from another angle. He takes a red pen from behind his ear and draws an arch on the wood, then examines it while chewing on the pen. I stand at the door, unsure whether he knows I’m standing there. He walks away, recoiling from the chicken as if allowing me the chance to leave, or to come closer. I can’t move, thinking only that I am behind him now, able to see the back of his neck and the arch of his back. I take satisfaction in the fact that he has aged and that the ceiling won’t turn out as he had been picturing it. Nothing good will come out of this head from now on.