A Palace in the Old Village (10 page)

WHEN THE TRAIN STOPPED
in the middle of the countryside, putting an end to his dream, Mohammed stood up to stretch his legs and looked out at the sky. The moon shone so intensely that some of the
shooting
stars seemed, in its brilliant whiteness, like drops of water from a summer rain shower. Mohammed began to pray, to thank God for having helped him escape ’tirement by giving him a good idea to keep him busy. He felt proud and, above all, impatient. Time was flying by; he had to get to the village quickly and
immediately
call the master mason, Bouazza, to set him
building
again. When the train began to move once more, Mohammed sank into a contented drowsiness in which he saw himself surrounded by all his dear ones as the seasons rolled by. He gave a colour to each season: white for summer, a greyish blue for autumn, luminous green for winter, golden yellow for spring. He liked painting time with colours. Now that he’d left France, the colours had come back. And music, too.

When Mohammed disembarked at Tangier, he had to wait a while for the afternoon bus to Casablanca.
Leaving
his suitcase in a locker, he took a walk along the sandy coast road. Everything had changed since his first discovery of the sea. Young men were playing soccer or
loitering nearby; a few beggars stopped him, and he gave them some coins. Around him he saw more and more buildings under construction. Mohammed sat down at a café and was approached by a salesman: You want to buy an apartment in one of these fine buildings? Ten thousand dirhams a square metre! It’s a good buy: you choose from the blueprint, then move in a year later with everything—running water, electricity, television, telephone, and even the Internet, everything! You give me a down payment, I give you a receipt, and next year we meet again in this café, right here at this table. Is it a deal? No, thanks.

In the meantime, at least ten beggars had passed by with their hands out: women with babies, cripples, healthy young people, elderly folks showing him
crumpled
old drug prescriptions. There are more and more of them, Mohammed thought. This country has lost its pride—it’s overwhelming, there are too many beggars, too much corruption and injustice, and the longer it goes on, the more it becomes too much.

Thinking about the journey still ahead of him, Mohammed figured he would arrive home at last in a day and a half, thirty-six hours if all went well: Tangier to Casa, wait; Casa to Agadir, wait; Agadir to home in a taxi. Wait, wait, patience, patience! That’s what he’d been told in Mecca:
As-sabr ya Hajj!
Patience, Hajji! The magic formula. He had learned patience during the
pilgrimage
but had lost it over time, becoming anxious and trying hard to hide it. Now Mohammed felt a tiny flame of anger flare up in him again: Why did they burn my car? Why didn’t the insurance company give me
anything, not even enough to rent another one while the government found a way to help those thousands of
people
who lost their cars, which they often needed for their jobs? Then Mohammed remembered that he hadn’t had the presence of mind to correct the insurance guy when the fellow had put the blame on immigrants. Those youngsters who torched cars and set public buildings on fire are not immigrants! They’re probably—maybe
definitely
—the children of immigrants, but
they aren’t
immigrants
! Even the TV had talked about immigration. There was nothing normal, nothing fair about all this. The only thing Mohammed knew for sure was that he’d had nothing to do with it, and neither had his children.

Bouazza, the master mason, had moved to Marrakech and was busy with several building sites at the same time. He had grown rich and hard to get hold of, having evidently forgotten where he came from. Once he reached home, Mohammed forgot about Bouazza and called upon his many nephews and cousins, who set to work. He recovered the energy of his youthful days, and his worries were erased by concrete and whitewash. Neighbours came to see this strange, shapeless building so unlike their own homes, and after asking a few questions, they went away wondering if Mohammed had lost his mind. He was definitely losing weight, sleeping next to the building materials, not taking care of himself. He had paid an architect to draw up plans, but instead of using them the mason was following the instructions of Mohammed, who wasn’t managing to explain very well what it was he wanted.

He kept saying, I want a big house, bigger than all the poky houses in the village, a house as big as my heart. People should be able to see it from far away and say that’s where Mohammed lives with his whole family—I mean, with all his children. Yes, my children will come live with me here, in these infinite spaces. My children and grandchildren. It will be the house of happiness, of harmony and peace!

Mohammed would fall silent, wondering if he’d gone too far. He had become unrecognisable, while the house had lost all sense of proportion, all logic, except,
perhaps
, that of Mohammed’s obsession: to reunite the entire family beneath this roof resembling the lid of a giant cooking pot in which nothing was in its right place.

After five months, the house was almost ready, although it still needed painting, shutters, windows, and all those details that make a place habitable. To keep it a surprise, Mohammed hadn’t told any of his children about the house. Actually, he’d been afraid they might discourage him, since they were used to speaking their minds and would have wounded him with their words, so he didn’t want to know what they thought, preferring to astonish them.

His wife had rejoined him, and she knew that her husband was making a mistake, feeding on illusions, but she kept quiet, as usual. She had realised long ago that her sons and daughters did not belong to them
anymore
: the children loved their lives and felt neither remorse nor regret. They had been whisked away by the
whirlwind of France, and she had watched them go, knowing that she had no way to hold them back, to keep them close to her and her husband. She’d looked around and seen that, in one way or another, France swallowed up the children of foreigners. Actually, the reality was simpler: there was no plot, no trap, no aggressive wish to rob immigrants of their children, but it was only
natural
for kids to love their native land, and Mohammed’s wife knew she stood no chance against such an
attachment
. She did try to talk to her children, advise them, warn them to be careful, but they barely listened. The streets swept them away into adventure, toward new people and things and a life quite different from that of their parents: the auto plant, shift work, sadness and fatigue, the five or six weeks back in the village, the
routines
and cramped space of that life—none of it was really worth keeping, so they’d kept almost none of it. Find your own luck, choose your own fate.

But you don’t think about that if you’re a parent, you just get on with life, and then one day you realise the damage has been done. Fell off the truck! That was their mother’s favorite expression. She’d learned it by heart without knowing exactly what it meant. To her, it evoked the tiny accidents, the wounds of life, as if the family had been riding on a truck with a tendency to skid.
Problems
? Fell off the truck! And Mohammed, all the while, had been dreaming of building the biggest house in the village, just as in the old days. Forty years in France hadn’t changed him. Not one whit. He remained intact, inviolable, impeccable: naturally and hermetically sealed. Nothing of France had found a place in his heart
or his soul. It hadn’t even been a conscious, deliberate decision. He was what he was; nothing could change him. There were millions like him. They emigrated as if encased in armour, fiercely resisting all outside
influence
: we have our lives, our ways, and they have theirs. Each to his own—no intrusion, no meddling.
Mohammed
never even lifted a finger to defend himself against what he called the contamination of LaFrance, for he was foreign, utterly unreachable. The village and its
traditions
back home lived on in him, coming between him and reality. He was in his world, where he lived without much introspection. His touchstone for
everything
was Islam: My religion is my identity. I am a
Muslim
before being a Moroccan, before becoming an immigrant. My refuge is Islam, which calms me and brings me peace; it is the last revealed religion, destined to close a lengthy chapter that God began a long, long time ago. Here they have their faith, and we have ours. We are not made for them or they for us. The contract is clear: I work, they pay me, I raise my children, and then one day we all go home to our house, yes, because the house is my country, my native land.

When his wife had first set eyes on the huge house, she’d let out a loud whinny of surprise, and then,
thinking
he might turn it into an amusement park for the children when they came on vacation, she asked him what he was planning to do with it. Live in it, he’d answered. You, me, and all our children. It’s simple: this house is our star, our most precious treasure, since each stone is a drop of my blood, every wall a slice of my life, and we will finally be reunited to live as before, as I lived,
as my father lived, for I am only following the path laid out by those who came before us and who know better than we do what is good for our offspring. I’ve provided for everything: everyone has a bedroom with a
bathroom
, wardrobes for storing winter clothes, and I’ve bought a giant television for the patio, where together we’ll watch entertaining shows, you’ll see, plus I’ve built a hammam and a prayer room, so this will be the house of happiness, and I’m even thinking of installing an intercom, like the one we have in the building in LaFrance, because it would be nice to ring the children in their rooms before going there, and I’ve also planned—right next door—a poultry yard with the best roosters and hens, and although there won’t be any
rabbits
because I know you don’t like them, there will be other animals: ewes, lambs, one or two cows. So no more reason to go to the supermarket—that’s nice, right? I’m very pleased. And you, you’re pleased, I’ve done well, don’t you think? I’ve sunk almost all my
savings
into this and even borrowed a bit. Stone, land, they’re solid, much better than money. Look around you: no one has a house as grand and beautiful as this. I’ve succeeded, yes, I’ve made a success of it—proof that a man can go abroad and return to his village unchanged; it’s wonderful. Me, I figured it all out: to work and save money we needed LaFrance, but LaFrance is good for the French, not for us. We don’t belong over there. They have their religion, they marry and divorce like
anything
, but then there’s us, who have our religion, and when we marry, it’s for life, for always. So you
understand
: I’m going to save our children, I’ll rescue them
from the other religion, bring them back to us to keep living the life our parents and grandparents did, because the solution is definitely nowhere else but here, where there is plenty of space, and besides, here the earth is good. See how those plants have grown. The drought is over; there’s no reason for our children to live far away from us. No, no reason…. He kept saying that, with a strange gleam in his eyes. He was possessed, haunted by an obsession, repeating words endlessly, talking to
himself
, scratching his head, stopping only to gaze at the sky and talk to the rare clouds drifting by.

Afraid of shattering his hopeful enthusiasm, his wife said nothing. She had nothing to say. As usual. She was not supposed to contradict her husband: that was their pact. Perhaps he was losing his wits, but how could she help him, bring him back to reason? She didn’t know. She placed her problem in the hands of God, because she knew that he never abandons those who worship and pray to him.

THE HOUSE WAS BIZARRE.
It looked like an
overloaded
truck or a poorly tied-up package. It was a blot on the landscape. Tilting to one side, it seemed about to fall and crush Mohammed, whose disorganised
instructions
had been closely followed by the mason. Right, he’d say. Here we need a nice, big room for my oldest son and his wife. She’s a foreigner and I’d like to please them, show them that even though we’re poor we have large hearts, so the bedroom must be as big as my heart, you understand; then next door we need more rooms, everyone gets one, and don’t forget the hammam, the oven, a place for the hens and the sheep because, you see, the house should be like a little palace, a poor man’s palace but handsome, welcoming, spacious,
magnificent
, so go to it, draw, do your work, and don’t forget the windows and the fans for summer, since the children come mostly in the summer. See if you can make me a small swimming pool—I know, there’s no water, but by the time you finish building it the water will be here.

What a house! A mistake, a folly. The balconies were narrow, the windows tiny, and the front door immense. In the middle was a courtyard, a sort of Andalusian patio, where Mohammed had planted a shrub doomed to certain demise in that arid climate. The floor was of
the finest quality concrete but still waiting for the
zelliges
, glazed mosaic tiles that had been ordered from Fez, or at least that’s what the mason claimed. The walls were of
tadelakt
, a gleaming, moisture-resistant plaster, and some of them were whitewashed. From the ceiling hung electric wires without bulbs; electricity was one of the village
caïd
’s promises. The bathrooms were fully equipped, but running water was another of those promises. That said, no one importuned the
caïd
for anything anymore, knowing that results did not depend on him and, in any case, everything came from Rabat.

But who could he be, this improbable character off somewhere in an air-conditioned office, who one
morning
would entertain a tiny thought for the inhabitants of this hardscrabble village, and who then might actually help out Mohammed in his quest to remedy the absurd injustices of a life in exile? Best not to think about that! The image of that petty bureaucrat in Rabat bedeviled Mohammed. He imagined him, saw him, smelled him. He wears a dark brown suit, a grey shirt he hasn’t changed in four days, a black tie. He raises an arm occasionally to sniff his armpit. He perspires and has no deodorant to dispel the odour of accumulated sweat. Once he tried a bottle of perfume bought from a
specialist
in fake luxury goods; it gave him an itchy rash of pimples. This bureaucrat smokes and complains
constantly
about his meagre salary. Less gifted than his
colleagues
, who have managed to build up nice little nest eggs by selling promises here and there, he doesn’t know how to lie and is unfamiliar with the tricks of his trade, for making money on the side in the Ministry of Public
Works. This gives ammunition to his wife, who wages domestic guerrilla war on him every day. So how do you expect this man, a decent sort on the whole, to consider the problems of a thousand peasants who’ve acquired the habit of living without water or electricity? He thinks instead about earning himself a little money and his wife’s respect, which are more important than the house of Mohammed Thimmigrant.

The petty bureaucrat scratches his head, rubs his hand over his greasy hair, picks at a pimple, opens a file, flips through the pages, pretends to search for a word, looks up, notices a spiderweb in a corner of the ceiling, looks down, resigned, then underlines Mohammed’s request with a red pen. He wants potable water! And why not enough to fill a swimming pool! Water! Do
I
demand champagne when
I
get home? These peasants who don’t realise that the state can do nothing for them—they emigrate, make a pile of money, and
arrogantly
demand water and electricity from us as if they lived in the city! Since time immemorial the country people have lived with well water and used candles for light, a bottled-gas generator to run the TV, and just because they’ve lived in Europe doesn’t mean they have the right to pester us. I mean, I’m willing to make an effort, but they don’t understand that they must
contribute
to the expense. I’d like to emigrate too. My wife would be delighted; she could even consult some fancy doctors and finally have children. She says it’s my fault—I had to knock up the maid to get her to give up that argument. Luckily, the maid had a miscarriage, and my wife fired her after a detailed interrogation. Well, that’s
another story. I’m assigning this dossier to the “on hold” pile, which will soon be five years old! It’s part of the furniture, the landscape; I can’t imagine this office
without
that pile.

What can I do to make my wife be nice to me? Give her a present? But it would have to be something special: the keys to a new car, the deed to some property, or at least a gold necklace or a diamond ring, a trip to Turkey, maybe camping out by the pyramids under a starry night sky—or, better yet, a briefcase full of money. Ever since she saw that in an Egyptian film, she’s been
dreaming
of it.

Watch how the other men get on, she keeps telling me, the real men, not limp noodles like you! Study them, at least try to learn from them, and don’t come near me, don’t try to cry on my shoulder, because in that movie it’s only after handing over the little briefcase full of money that the husband took the liberty of resting his head on his wife’s shoulder. Don’t count on me to wash your hair. Leave it greasy with dirt; that’s you in a
nutshell
. My husband—or shall I say my alleged husband?—has greasy hair because his pockets are empty, because he can’t satisfy his wife either sexually or financially. His wife is frustrated! She would willingly have gone off with someone else, but she has principles.

The petty bureaucrat begins to count the number of files on hold. Two hundred fifty-two files. Not one has a chance of getting anywhere. He scratches his head, looks at his fingernails clogged with dandruff. Turning toward a colleague, he suggests they go out for a coffee.