A Riffians Tune (35 page)

That day, Mr Marjosi looked tired. Throwing his head back with a gaping yawn, he traipsed lazily off to the bathroom. Stealthily following him, I pushed the door open and found him standing, pissing into the urinal, struggling to hold his trousers up.

As loudly as I could, I shouted, ‘
Arriba la mano!
', an expression feared and lethal with gangs. At the speed of light, Mr Marjosi turned and found me clutching a pistol with both hands, my face intent and set, one leg lunged forward toward him. With lightning reflex, Mr Marjosi came alive. His trousers below his knees, he jumped very high, dodged to the left and kicked, aiming at my face, and with two fingers pointed, flew at my eyes. Unfortunately for him, the floor was very wet with water and urine. He missed his mark, slipped, fell back and knocked himself unconscious. With the pistol still in my hand, I spat on his butt. I decided not to empty my gun into his head.

In a panic, I rummaged through his pockets, but sadly, it hadn't been a good business day. I knew Mr Marjosi would get up at some stage and launch a search to kill me, so I ran out and avoided public transport.

I arrived home late that evening, safe, but deeply shaken. Still with my pistol loaded with one single bullet, I felt comforted by two dogs, each at my side, and ready to maul any undesirable intruder. When my blood pressure came down, I counted the notes and coins from Mr Marjosi's pockets. A loss! I had reaped less than a tenth of what I had paid for the pistol, let alone the bullet. Angry with myself, I hurled the pistol against the wall, and it went off! I heard a yelp and realised the ricocheted bullet had hit the white dog, Dina. I sank into despair. It was the power of vengeance, the feeling of pride, that had killed my dog.

Horrified by the accident, I endeavoured to find a home for the remaining dog. Mrs Zinab had taken the donkey, and I thought she might want the dog. I went to see her, and she was shocked at the sight of me. Probably she thought I had come to take the donkey back, but although I smiled to reassure her, she didn't seem relaxed.

‘Would you be interested in our black dog?' I asked, hoping to hear ‘yes'.

‘Alas,' she said, ‘I can't feed a dog.'

‘Can't you feed him with husks?' I asked.

‘If I had husks to feed the dog, I would have enough flour to feed the boys,' she replied.

Now what?
I wondered.

If Dargan were left to wander among farmers, he would be stoned to death, so I took him to the wide valley dividing the two high mountains Makran and Tassamat, and abandoned him to fight for his own survival. I hoped Dargan would baptise himself into nature, join the foxes, and become a strong wild dog.

Back in my empty home, in the past full and noisy, my conscience began to thump.
Was abandoning Dargan in the valley the best thing I could do?
I wondered, feeling the burden of guilt. At night, sleep deserted me. I wondered where Dargan might be. Was he sleeping on this chilly night, or fighting other animals, stronger than himself and less hungry? What the night aroused, the day swept away. As dawn shook the night, I heard a faint barking nearby. As it was windy, blowing south, I thought it was the bark of Uncle Mimoun's dog, Sobbi, carried and distorted by the intermittent gusts. I hoped the wind would stop and the barking would die, but it continued, disturbingly.

The barking voice began to be clearer and nearer. Still undecided about what to make of the confused sound, I moved slowly to locate a scratching noise. I opened the main door and there was Dargan, using all the power his paws could wield to get in. His presence broke my heart, but I was leaving soon and had to find a home for him.

At the shrine of Sidi Mimoun, far, far away, was a small oasis, where water could be found and birds could be heard singing. Dargan had never been there before and I thought it would be a good place for him to live.

One early morning, still intending to get rid of him, to set him free, I trekked with him to the oasis. While he was sniffing the ground, I turned around and took a twisted road home, thinking he would never be able to find his way. The night was long and lonely without Dargan, but before the sun rose, empowered with an intrinsic compass that I had failed to trick and confuse, he was back.

The time to return to school neared, but I had failed to find a home for Dargan and he refused to be independent. I locked my room, the house, and trailed by Dargan, left to catch the coach to Nador, to leave behind the boiling, dusty summer and the bleeding memories of Mr Marjosi. Standing on the side of the road, waiting for the coach, Dargan became frightened of the cars and their noise. When the coach arrived, I jumped in and Dargan made no attempt to follow. The companionship ended there, at Moulay-Rachid checkpost, but not the sadness.

W
hen my coach arrived at Bab Ftouh, the gate to hell, I found Faissal waiting desperately for his brother, who was on his way to Meknes and had promised to bring him pocket money. Spotting me stepping off the coach, Faissal rushed towards me and gave up on his brother. We hired a French Simca, a small car with an underpowered engine at the back, which struggled to climb even the small, twisted hill from Bab Ftouh to the New Town.

Faissal had arrived at the very start of the term. I wanted to know about the new pavilion, what dormitory we were in, and the new professors, but Faissal had far more intriguing news to tell. ‘Do you know what?' he said. ‘We have six girls in our class. They're the only girls in the entire school!'

‘Wow!' I exclaimed. ‘Are they beautiful?'

‘They joined our class because their school could not afford to pay professors for just six girls,' said Faissal.

‘They must be clever,' I replied, my mind still occupied with what the rector might ask me about my late arrival. ‘Are they modern?'

‘Four are veiled and provincial, one is semi-modern and the other is ultra-modern.' Still excited, Faissal added, ‘Tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock we will have a meeting with the rector – our first instruction in sexual behaviour. Aren't you lucky not to miss lessons in how to … Ha! Ha! Ha!'

Arriving at the school, Faissal entered his dormitory and I went to the office. ‘Rumours have circulated that you might not come back, and that you had already joined the military school,' the officer said.

‘Where did you get that from, sir?' I asked.

‘Your class mates,' he answered.

The dinner siren sounded, and I scurried to the refectory. As a baccalaureate student, I joined the private table, separate from the junior students. Faissal and I were on different planes; his mind was full of girls and sexual fantasies, and my mind was still drowsy. I was happy to leave the table and find my bed.

The following morning, the rector called my class to have sex education in his office, a large room furnished with a red rug, a world map on the wall and a wooden desk with a telephone system on it. We stood in a semi-circle, facing the rector.

Full of energy, the rector stood, faced us and peered at me. ‘You're late,' he told me from behind his green-tinted glasses. Then he addressed the whole group. ‘It is the first time in the history of this prestigious school that we have had both sexes in the same class, with the same professors, and facing the same important exams – the baccalaureate,' he said. ‘The six girls in your class could be a deadly distraction. Some of them, I am told, are motor-mouthed. The professor of Arabic rhetoric has already filed a complaint against two of them. That, however, is my problem. A big mouth is a medical condition, and I will deal with it. Some of the girls are modern, some semi-modern and the rest just like your stone-age granny; I beg you to treat them all the same. As for your careers and your exams, those girls could be a dangerous distraction, so God help you all.'

Faissal, standing beside me, was gob-smacked by the lesson. He had seen some pictures in men's magazines and had expected an exposé, picture-based. We left the rector's office and the girls were ushered in for their lesson in sex education. They were secretive about what they had learned except the semi-modern girl, who wasn't embarrassed to tell everything. ‘In the rector's own words, “be wary of the beasts”,' she told us.

* * *

THERE WERE RUMOURS CIRCULATING
that anarchists and anti-regime activists would force the school into a strike. On the twenty-first of December, mid-morning, while we were in class, a large group of agitators gathered outside the school were gaining momentum. We didn't know why they were there; they would have looked just like a group of unhappy tourists if it were not for their massive numbers. The gatekeeper, seduced by his tiny transistor radio, noticed nothing. The anarchists craftily concealed sticks, knives and slingshots in their pockets and tucked into their trousers.

Like an Indian chief, the ringleader whipped through the gang, whispering and readying his troops. They swarmed like wasps, entirely flooding the school grounds, and were immediately followed by a second and bigger mob. Reminiscent of Indians attacking a fort in the Wild West, they kicked everything in their way, knocked the gatekeeper out of his chair and stamped on his hands. Filling the school grounds, they shouted, ‘Out! Out! School's closed!'

The noise of shouting filled the air. Listening to the professor's lecture, but drawn by the noise, I shoved my chair back and peered through the window. Hundreds of men were pulling students and motioning them out of their classes. Horrified, I watched as one boy was dragged out by his long hair, a passing group of thugs kicking and beating him with their heavy boots and wooden sticks. A few brutal minutes later, the boy was silent and still. While groups of thugs were roving through the buildings, others ran off to find fresh quarries and pound them into submission. As though hit by an earthquake, students, like sheep, rushed out of their classes and flooded through the open school grounds, while professors scurried to take refuge in the rector's luxurious office. The thugs met no resistance and gloriously continued their scourge unabated.

In a flash my class, refusing to leave, became the thugs' focus; two windows were shattered by slingshots, and the air was suddenly thickened with threatening, angry voices. ‘Scabs! Scabs!' shouted the mob.

‘Here they are!' responded a swarming crowd with sticks, knives and chains.

Shocked and terrified, the professor was the first to jump through the window, leaving us to face the peril. A few of my classmates and I imitated the professor and escaped through the second back window, but a student called Larbi was caught by the back of his shirt and held by three pursuers, who mercilessly competed to stomp on his head.

‘Pass me a knife!' shouted one of the crowd.

‘Kill him! Kill him!' shouted another.

A few of my classmates ran and took refuge in neighbouring houses where, luckily, they were hidden and smuggled out by the workers' wives. Some boys and I ran in confusion past the dormitories and the laundry, then took refuge in the school kitchen, a huge complex. The mob stampeded behind us and destroyed everything they came across as they stormed the kitchen. They pulled down the water tanks and flooded the grounds. Those who were unarmed picked up kitchen knives, forks and whatever else they could grab.

Hassan and I slipped into a narrow closet with a white door, the same colour as the wall. Inexplicably, the mob kept passing us by. I crouched down, but Hassan, unable to control his nerves, kept mumbling and watching through a small window at the top of the closet door.

‘Get down! Get down!' I whispered. ‘They will spot us!' Hassan entirely lost control, fainted and dropped to the floor of the closet.

During the mêlée, one of my classmates, Mehdi, was caught and a knife plunged into his eyes, but another classmate, Shamlali, was able to put his hand on a knife when he was caught, turn on his attacker and split his face in two.

Najib pretended to be one of the mob, grabbed a long stick, and started swinging and shouting, ‘Show me the scabs! Show me the scabs!' Within half an hour, the kitchen was in a shambles with the injured lying around the room, and the mob, like a sea wave, disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Taking advantage of the dying storm, Hassan and I ventured out of the closet, and I ran straight to the rector's office. The rector was standing in the courtyard with his boss, the Regional Director, watching without moving a finger. I hurried to the boss and shouted, ‘Sir! Sir! They would have killed us if they'd found us!'

‘With no doubt! With no doubt!' he replied.

‘Don't we have the right to be protected?' I demanded angrily.

Butting in, a classmate's father who was a high court judge, advanced aggressively and shouted to the rector, ‘Sir! If you are not able to protect these boys, then it is our duty to protect them!' He thrust his hand into his pocket, pulled out a pistol and waved it in the air.

‘Put that away!' shouted the rector, a metre away. He rushed toward the judge, grabbed him by the shoulders and led him away.

Knowing this was just the beginning, my roommates and I packed up and left the dormitory immediately, each going his own way. Some went into hiding and some went home for good, badly traumatised.

With nowhere to go in the town, I headed to Ali, a young grocer I had met through Abdu, and who rented a small room on a bridge over the river. By the time I reached Ali's room, it was dusk. The door was closed and there was no sign of him. Nervous, I knocked harder and louder.

‘Wrecking the door won't open it!' shouted a passing tramp with a thickly bearded face, while picking food from his bowl.

Standing on the dilapidated bridge, I jumped at any noise from up above or underneath. Ali arrived an hour later and the sight of me gave him a fright. ‘You look awful!' he exclaimed. ‘What's the matter?'

‘Could I stay with you for three or four days?' I asked.

‘Sure. You've been expelled, haven't you?' he asked.