Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits (7 page)

A
FEW DAYS LATER
Halima took the bus downtown to her janitorial job, where she cleaned the offices of Hanan Benamar, a translator who specialized in immigration documents. Halima had gotten the job through the center where she'd taken literacy classes, and where a big banner, which she was able to read at the end of the yearlong program, proclaimed in red block letters: Work for Your Future—Today. So far, the only use she had gotten out of the classes was that she could now read the rolling credits at the end of the soap operas she watched every night.

Halima knocked on the door twice before inserting her key and letting herself in. She pushed the gauze curtains to the side and opened the French windows, letting in the fresh air. She took in the view of the city, which was dominated by the King Hassan mosque, the three gilded balls of its minaret shining in the morning sun. Halima began emptying the trash cans. She was mopping the mosaic floors dry when Hanan came in. “Sabah el-khir,” she said. She dropped her briefcase on one chair and her jacket on another.

“Sabah el-khir,” Halima said, forcing herself to be cheerful as she said hello.

Hanan wore a dark pin-striped skirt and a white buttondown
shirt. Her hair was blown straight, her eyelids darkened with gray eye shadow, her lips a flattering red. I could have been her, Halima thought, as she did almost every time she was in Hanan's presence. I could have been her, had my luck been different, had I gone to a real school, had I married someone else. She wondered now whether Hanan thought the same thing of her and had given her the job only out of pity.

Hanan shuffled through her papers while Halima went about her work. When she finished cleaning up the receiving room, she put the mops in the kitchen cabinet and washed her hands. “I'm done,” she announced, and put her jellaba on to leave. Hanan didn't hear, busy as she was staring at her papers.

“Lots of work?” Halima asked.

“Me? Oh, yes,” Hanan said. “As long as people want to emigrate, there'll be plenty for me to do.”

Without realizing it, Halima slid into the chair opposite Hanan. She thought about her brothers, Tarik leaving one morning when she was still a young girl and Abdelkrim following him only months later, and how there had been no word from either of them for a year. Then the money had started coming, sporadically at first, and later with addicting regularity, and while her mother managed on
the payments, Halima, who didn't benefit from their largesse with the same consistency, still lived in the same cement house with the corrugated tin roof and brown water streaming down the middle of the street. She wondered now what would have happened had she, too, gone to Europe like her brothers. Would she have an apartment, a washing machine, maybe even a car? Would she have Maati?

She sat still, and Hanan looked up, a question in her eyes. Halima folded her hands and looked at her shoes. “I was thinking …” She wet her lips with her tongue. “How difficult would it be to emigrate?”

Hanan's shoulders dropped. She grabbed a pencil and began tapping it nervously between her fingers. “I'm not a lawyer. I translate documents.”

Halima shrugged. “Still,” she said. “You'd know.”

“Have you seen the lines at the embassies?” Hanan asked.

Halima nodded, even though she hadn't seen them. Maati had told her about them, though, about people queuing up for an entire night just to get a spot inside the buildings, never mind an actual application. He liked taking customers to the embassies because cab fares were higher in the evening, when the lines formed. “But I have my brothers in France,” she said.

“Ah,” Hanan said. She looked away, as though she was
too embarrassed to say anything, and then drew her breath. “Still, they don't give visas to …”

Halima knew what Hanan meant, knew that people like her, with no skills and three children, didn't get visas.

“Take the bastard to court,” Hanan said with a sigh.

“I already have.”

Hanan blinked, sat back in her chair, at a loss for what to say. The room was quiet, the only sound that of the pencil, still tapping between Hanan's fingers.

“But isn't there some way to get a visa?” Halima asked.

Hanan shrugged. “You have to have a full-time job, a bank account, a ticket, a place to stay—it's complicated,” she said, as though Halima couldn't understand anything that required more than three easy steps, like wash, lather, and rinse. I know so much more than that, Halima wanted to tell her. She suddenly felt sorry for having said anything at all to Hanan. It was a mistake to have thought that Hanan or that judge or that magic powder could get her out of her situation.

“There must be some other way,” Halima said.

“You mean, go illegally?”

Halima shrugged. She knew what she would say the next time her mother rehashed that old song about being patient: She had to do something for her future—today.

A
ZIZ
A
MMOR HAD SPENT
the week saying goodbye. So far, he'd visited two sets of aunts and uncles, four friends, and several neighbors, but none of them offered him good wishes for his trip. When they'd found out about his plan to try his luck on a patera, they'd tried to disguise their shocked looks, tapped his back to offer encouragement, and shaken their heads in commiseration. He was getting tired of the silence that his announcement provoked, so he was relieved when, upon hearing the news, his friend Lahcen knocked the table over as he stood up.

“Have you lost your mind, Ammor?” he said. Even though Lahcen and Aziz had known each other since elementary school, Lahcen still called Aziz by his last name,
the way schoolboys often did. Aziz and Lahcen had been friends for nearly twenty years now. Together they had snuck into movie theaters, shared their first cigarette, split their first bottle of beer—a Heineken left behind on the beach by a group of preppy teenagers celebrating a graduation. They had also picked up girls together, although it was usually Aziz who did the picking up. Lahcen, Aziz had noticed, never seemed to have much luck with women.

Aziz set the table back on its legs, stealing a glance at his wife, Zohra, who sat on the divan opposite him. She had tried many times to dissuade Aziz, and she watched the scene with the detachment of someone who'd already heard all the arguments, yet who was still curious to see whether they would be resolved any differently this time. Aziz and Zohra had dropped in on Lahcen shortly after the ‘asr prayer on Sunday. Lahcen lived with his parents and four sisters in a two-story house in Derb Talian, in the old medina of Casablanca. The window was closed, but the occasional sound of car horns and bicycle bells could still be heard through the glass panes.

“Calm down,” Aziz said.

Lahcen opened up his palms and raised his voice. “How can you tell me to calm down? You could drown!” He was like that—he always thought of the worst right away.

“I'm a good swimmer,” Aziz said. “And anyway, these days they have motor boats. They'll drop me off on the beach.”

“And you think Spain's going to be great? It's all just hard work and ghurba and loneliness.”

“At least he'll make a living,” Zohra said. Aziz was surprised to hear her jump in with the very words he'd used to persuade her a few weeks earlier. Her family had never liked him—they had let Zohra marry him only because she had been going out with him for three years and the gossip from the neighbors about their “loose daughter” had finished them off. But the marriage didn't help Aziz's tense relations with his in-laws. They had been nagging Zohra about his joblessness, and their comments had grown more persistent after she'd managed to find a job at a soda factory.

When the idea came to him, Zohra had tried to dissuade him, but she gave in after another few months of his unemployment. She said she'd wait for him and when he came back they could move out of his parents' house, have a place of their own, and start a family. In short, she said, they could start living.

“And what about you?” Lahcen said, pointing at Zohra. “He's going to leave you behind?”

“I'll be back in two or three years,” Aziz said.

“Haven't we all heard this before?” said Lahcen, his finger on his cheek in a gesture that made him look like a woman. “No one comes back.”

“
I
am coming back,” Aziz said, his thumb on his chest.

“He will,” Zohra said. She took her handkerchief from the sleeve of her jellaba and blew her nose in it. Aziz felt his guilt at leaving her behind pick at him again, and he put his hand on her knee and squeezed it gently.

“Why are you so against this?” Aziz asked Lahcen. “What do you want me to do?”

Lahcen's sister Hakima came into the room, carrying a tray of tea and cookies. Lahcen reached for his pack of cigarettes and walked out. Aziz looked back and forth at the two women, his wife and his best friend's sister, and feeling a little awkward about being left alone with them, got up and followed Lahcen outside.

“So, what do you want me to do?” Aziz asked, as he sat down next to his friend on the steps. He was genuinely curious what the answer would be.

“Try something else,” Lahcen said, as he lit his cigarette.

“Like what?”

Lahcen shrugged. “Look at me. I get by.” He had invested four hundred dirhams in a few phone cards, and he
resold individual minutes at a higher price to people who wanted to make calls at pay phones. He worked out of the central post office in downtown Casablanca. His net gain was tiny, but it paid for his bus fares and his cigarettes. Besides, he declared that he liked it this way, that he always charmed people into buying from him, so he didn't mind the competition from the other phone-card sellers, whether men, women, or children.

“It's different for you. You're single.”

“Then why did you get married?”

“What?”

Lahcen pulled on his cigarette. “If you hadn't married, you wouldn't have to do this.”

Aziz clicked his tongue. “Leave my wife out of this.”

“I'm just saying.”

“What do you want me to do? Sell minutes like you?”

“At least I'm doing something. And I don't even have a diploma, like you.” The diploma in question was a piece of paper that lay in a folder by Aziz's bed, gathering dust. Both Lahcen and Aziz had flunked their high school exams a few years back, and so they'd been unable to get into a university. Lahcen had started his phone-card operation, but Aziz had gone to trade school, and after two years he was given a degree in automation—which basically
meant he could work as a repairman. He hadn't found work.

“Diploma or no diploma, makes no difference.”

“You talk like that because you have one.”

Aziz sighed. “What is it with you today?”

“I should be asking you that, my friend. You come to me, telling me you're going to get on a boat, risk your life to go to Spain, where you're probably going to get caught anyway, and you want me to congratulate you?”

This version of Aziz's future was one he'd heard before from his parents. They'd warned against the best (a farm job for slave wages!), the worst (a horrible death!), and everything in between (a life of inescapable delinquency!). But he had weighed their warnings against the prospect of years of idleness, years of asking them for money to ride the bus, years of looking down at his shoes or changing the subject whenever someone asked what he did for a living, and the wager seemed, in the end, worthwhile. “Do you have an extra cigarette?” he asked.

Lahcen handed over his pack of Olympique Rouge. “Look, maybe I can help you.”

Aziz lit his cigarette and took a long pull. The creaking sound of the door being opened behind them made them turn around. Hakima poked her head out and asked
if they were coming in for dinner. Lahcen waved at her and said they'd be in soon. “Go get some bread,” Hakima said. “We're out.”

Lahcen and Aziz got up and walked to the store, dragging their feet. It was cloudy outside and the wind had picked up. They crossed an empty lot where children played football under a rising cloud of red dust. The piceri had sold most of its bread for the day and had only a few loaves left. Lahcen carefully selected the best-looking one and handed a bill to the cashier, who looked back and forth at the two men, gave them a nasty look, but took the money nonetheless.

“What's his problem?” Aziz asked when they left.

“He's a strange fellow,” Lahcen said. “He doesn't like people from outside the neighborhood.”

“Ya, what a donkey,” Aziz said. This shopkeeper reminded Aziz of his grandmother, who always seemed to find fault with people she barely knew. She found the mailman, a ‘arobi from the countryside near Casablanca, to be uncultured and uncouth. To the tailor, a Shamali from the north, she granted slightly higher status, but she often commented that he was too crafty to be up to any good. The Chleuh who sold her mint at the market was often the subject of her invectives about avarice. It had gotten to the point that Aziz had started to have some affection
for the very people his grandmother would have disapproved of. Aziz told this story to Lahcen, adding a joke or two to cheer his friend as they headed back to the house for dinner.

“H
E'S NOSY
,” Z
OHRA
said, frowning. They were walking back home to the medina. Around them, shopkeepers were locking up for the day.

“He's just concerned,” Aziz said.

“So is everyone else.”

Aziz didn't answer. He was thinking about what Lahcen had said.

“Do you think he can really do something?” Zohra asked.

Her question was exactly what he feared—that Lahcen's assurances of help would give Zohra hope, a hope that he knew would eat away at her determination to let him go, a hope he knew would eventually be crushed anyway. He held her hand and gave it a squeeze. “If Lahcen could help,” he said, “he'd have helped himself.”