Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits (5 page)

“W-what?”

“How will I ever be able to show my face at the Ministry?” he shouted. “My own daughter is caught cheating at the exams!”

“I was just trying to help Faten. She didn't know the answers—”

“Help her? You think this is a word game?” Salma asked. “You didn't help. You cheated.”

“I-I couldn't say no. She begged me.”

“You lecture us about right and wrong and then you cheat at your exams. Have you ever opened the Holy Book or do you get everything secondhand from Faten?” Salma asked.

“If I ever hear one more word about that damn girl, by God, I'll lock you up in your room,” Larbi said. “I won't have a word said about my reputation, do you hear me?”

“Everybody cheats. Everybody.” Noura looked him straight in the eye, and he couldn't hold her stare. He'd always kept the favors he did for his friends quiet, but now he suspected that she knew somehow.

“That doesn't make it right,” Salma said.

Noura disappeared in her room for two days after that, reappearing only to watch a TV program on religion and jurisprudence called
Ask the Mufti.
She'd never missed an episode. She would come in and sit in the family room when the program was on, her eyes riveted on the screen. People phoned in with various questions, from the serious (“What is the proper way of calculating the zakat alms?”) to the simple (“How do I complete the pilgrimage?”), and Noura watched it all. Today someone phoned in to ask,
“Is the use of mouthwash permissible even though it contains alcohol?” Noura looked at the old mufti with great anticipation. Salma abruptly took hold of the remote control and changed channels. When Noura called out in surprise, Salma said, “I can't believe you're interested in silly details about mouthwash when you can't even see anything wrong with cheating at exams.” Larbi laughed, but he was overcome by bitterness. If only he could get that damn girl away from his daughter, perhaps he might be able to convince Noura to go visit her aunt in Marrakech—a stay in the southern city might do her some good. But first he had to deal with Faten once and for all. He picked up the phone. The exams were still being scored, and there was still time to act. He needed someone trustworthy to deal with Faten, and he knew Raouf would not let him down.

L
ARBI SAT AT HIS
wife's vanity, trimming his mustache, while Salma folded the laundry. He suddenly felt nostalgic and wanted to ask her about those heady days in the seventies when they were both young and the world was open before them and they had big dreams of setting it right. He had started out as an educator and she as a lawyer, but while she still spent her days trying to help clients, he had moved on to administrative positions and
had been unable to resist the temptations that came with them. What had happened to him, he wanted to ask. He felt he had failed, though he didn't know when that had happened. He heard a knock on the door. It was Noura. “I passed my exams,” she announced, smiling.

“Mbarek u messud,” Salma said flatly, then resumed folding the clothes. Normally, she would have hugged Noura; she would have put her hand around her upper lip and let out several joy-cries, but now she sounded no happier than if her daughter had told her she'd successfully hung a painting.

“Baba, I have a favor to ask,” Noura said. Larbi put down his scissors and turned to face her. “There's been a problem. Faten flunked her exams …” Her voice trailed off.

“And?” Larbi asked, unsurprised.

“Well, she already flunked them last year, so this means she's expelled now. She doesn't know what she's going to do.”

Salma stood, hanger in hand, and pointed it at Noura. “Where are you going with this?” she asked.

“What's going to become of her? There are so many unemployed college graduates, but without a diploma, her chances of ever finding a job … It's so unfair—”

“I don't understand what that has to do with me,” Larbi said.

“I thought perhaps you could sort it out. You have connections, and she asked me to see if you could help out,” Noura said. Her eyes shifted away from him for a moment and then settled on him again.

Larbi smiled bitterly. Here she was, the purist, the hard-liner, the anticorruption activist, but in the end, she wanted her friend to get special treatment, just like everyone else. “No more talk of meritocracy?” he asked. Noura looked down. He paused to savor the moment, however fleeting he knew it would be. How many times had she rebuffed him when he asked her to take that damn scarf off and go back to the way she was? What of his dream to see her in cap and gown at NYU? His heart ached just to think of it. Now it was her turn to be on the asking end. “I don't think it'll be possible. It would require breaking the law. Utterly un-Islamic, as you well know,” he said.

“When you play with fire, you get burned,” Salma said as she closed the wardrobe doors. Noura stared at her angrily and then left the room.

Larbi turned around on the stool and looked at his reflection in the mirror for a while. He, too, had played with fire, but maybe he'd already been burned. When he
reached for the scissors again, he noticed a velvet pouch tossed in the middle of the perfume bottles. He took it in his hand and opened it. In it were the prayer beads that had broken, years ago, it seemed, and which Salma had saved here for him. He couldn't help but think about his mother, for whom virtue and religion went hand in hand, about a time when he, too, believed that such a pairing was natural.

“I know I shouldn't be happy about someone's misery,” Salma said. “But I'm glad Faten was expelled. At least now Noura won't be seeing as much of her at school.”

Where had he gone wrong? He had always had Noura's best interests at heart. What was so bad about her life before? She had it all, and she was happy. Why did she have to turn to religion? Perhaps it was his absences from home, his fondness for the drink, or maybe it was all the bribes he took. It could be any of these things. He was at fault somehow. Or it could be none of these things at all. In the end it didn't matter, he had lost her again, and this time he didn't dare hope for someone to return her to him.

“Do you think that'll help?” Larbi asked his wife.

Salma shook her head. “I don't know.”

T
HE DAY AFTER
M
AATI
beat her with an extension cord, Halima Bouhamsa packed up some clothes and took the bus to her mother's house in Sidi Beliout, near the old medina of Casablanca. The cord had left bubbly welts on her arms and face, and she couldn't hide them under her housedress. She arrived at the door of the studio apartment, a packet of La Ménara tea in her hand as an offering, and stood for a moment, hesitant. Her mother wouldn't be happy to see her, but she couldn't think of anywhere else to go. She knocked.

“Again?” said her mother, Fatiha.

Halima didn't even nod. She walked past Fatiha and into the studio, where the smell of camphor balls from the
previous week's cleaning lingered in the air. Stripes of sunlight came through the closed shutters, making a hazy grid on the bare floor. On the far wall was a sepia photograph of Halima's father, the only inheritance he had left behind after years of struggle with lung cancer. A portable TV sat in the corner, a gift from Halima's brothers, both emigrants to France. She dropped her bag on the floor and walked over to the narrow kitchen.

“What happened this time?” Fatiha asked.

“He drank the rent money.” Halima took off her jellaba, revealing her paisley-print dress and the blue belt encircling her small waist. She was twenty-nine, but the dark patches on her face and the stoop in her shoulders made her look much older. She sat down on a stool and let her chin rest in her hands.

Fatiha lit the Butagaz and put a kettle on it. “The Lord is with those who are patient,” she said.

Halima wondered whether all the Lord ever wanted from His people was patience. Hadn't she suffered long enough? She was sure that the Lord also wanted His people to be happy, but she couldn't come up with a stock expression as a retort, the way her mother always did.

The kettle whistled. Fatiha made a pot of mint tea and served it on the low, round table. Halima took her glass
and cradled it in her chapped hands. “If I don't give him money for drinking, he steals it from me.”

“A woman must know how to handle her husband,” Fatiha said reproachfully. She sat down, her ample bottom spilling over the sides of her chair. “Look, I'm going to get you a little something from a new sorceress I went to the other day. Make sure you put it in Maati's food this time. He'll become like a ring on your finger. You can turn it any way you want.”

“Your magic doesn't work.”

“That's because you don't follow my directions.”

“I want a divorce.”

Fatiha slapped her hand on her thigh, spilling tea on the table. “Curse Satan,” she said. “How are you going to feed the children?” She wiped off the spilled tea with a wet rag.

“I already do. Do you think they can be fed on what he gives me?”

Maati made a living driving a cab for a businessman uptown, but there was little of it left by the time his bar tab was paid. Halima had taken janitorial jobs two days a week and made extra money by selling embroidery to neighbors and friends. She looked at her mother with mixed defiance and expectation.

“Child, be patient with your man,” Fatiha said. “Look what happened to Hadda.” Hadda was Halima's neighbor in the Zenata shanty. Her husband had taken up with another woman but refused to divorce her. She'd gone to court, but he hadn't shown up at any of the hearings. “Now she lives alone. She's neither married, really, nor free to remarry.”

“Better than living with the son of a whore.”

“See? This is why he beats you. You talk back.”

Halima heaved a loud sigh, but her mother was unfazed. Fatiha got up and wiped off the new microwave that her sons had brought her on their latest visit. She readjusted the embroidered doily that she kept on top.

“I'm not like Hadda,” Halima said.

“That's right,” Fatiha said. “You've got children.”

Halima undid her hair and nervously tied it up in a knot. She refilled her mother's glass. “How much did that sorceress of yours want?”

“Fifteen hundred dirhams,” Fatiha said.

Halima chuckled. “I might as well give Maati the money. I could buy my divorce from him.”

“Even if you do,” Fatiha said, “he won't let you have the children.”

Halima gnawed at her thumb. “Then I'll bribe the judge,”
she said, her chin raised. She waited to see if her mother would say something, would discredit this idea as she had all the others.

Fatiha snorted. “You couldn't bribe a lowly clerk for that much.”

Halima stared ahead of her, resisting the tears that she felt were coming.

“Let me take you to this sorceress,” Fatiha said softly. “What do you have to lose?” Halima looked at her mother's face, at the sudden and gentle turn that her lips had taken, and wondered whom she should trust, the courts or the magicians.

I
T TOOK SEVERAL WEEKS
and another three beatings, the most recent only yesterday, before Halima managed to save the money to visit the sorceress her mother had recommended. She rode the bus back to Zenata and made it home in time to prepare the evening meal. She was going to make rghaif. The batter would be perfect for dissolving the pinch of powder that the sorceress had sold her. As Halima kneaded the dough, she heard the sound of the muezzins exhorting the faithful for the afternoon prayer. She winced at the thought of what she was about to do: a grave sin it was, the use of sorcerers. Nevertheless,
the money was already spent, and if indeed actions were judged by one's niyyah, then she had already sinned by intending to use sorcery, so she might as well go through with it. As soon as the first rghifa was ready, she tasted it, burning her tongue in the process. The powder made it look yellowish, but the taste didn't appear to be altered. She grilled the rest of the rghaif and prepared a pot of tea, a strong one, with more tea and less mint, just the way Maati liked it.

She unhooked the clothes from the line in the courtyard and took them into the only bedroom, a dark, humid space without windows. She put them away in the armoire that was tipped against the naked cement wall because of its wobbly legs, straightening the sheet that separated her bed from the children's as she walked out. She went to the kitchen and rolled the round table on its edge, setting it down in the courtyard, between the divan and the car seats the children had rescued from the trash heap a few blocks down. When it rained, the family had to eat in the kitchen, elbow to elbow on the cane mat, but today it was sunny and they could eat their dinner by daylight. No need to use the gas lamp.

Halima's daughter, Mouna, was the first to come home, her braids swinging on both sides of her head as she pushed
the metal door open. Halima caught her breath. With her high forehead and aquiline nose, Mouna looked so much like her father. Mouna asked if she could go to the neighbor's house for dinner. Halima slipped her arm around her daughter's waist. “Stay here with me,” she said.

“Can we eat dinner now, then?” Mouna asked, in a whining tone.

“We have to wait for your father.”

Mouna sighed, loudly, dramatically. The boys had gotten unruly—lately Farid had started talking back—but, Halima thought, Mouna was a good child, she would go far. She could have everything Halima had wanted for herself—if only the family could get out of the shanty-town, with its dirty alleys where teenagers sniffed glue by day and roamed around in bands at night.

Mouna's younger brothers, Farid and Amin, walked in and dropped their schoolbags on the floor. The three children decided on a game of cards. “Don't cheat,” warned Amin, the youngest. They sat on the ground in a patch of sunlight and started to play. Above them, flies danced in a never-ending circle.