The Prince of Bagram Prison (18 page)

Disappeared. Jamal had heard the word whispered uneasily by some of the older residents of the orphanage, and from this he had been able to glean that it was a punishment of sorts, something much worse than the narrow stick the director kept in his office. “Disappeared to where?” he asked.

The old woman touched a swab of iodine to the cut on his cheek, and Jamal tried not to flinch at the pain.

“To the desert,” she said, conjuring in Jamal's mind a cartoon image of a palm-shaded oasis and a pack of lazy camels.

“Could I visit her sometime?”

Rachida laughed mirthlessly. “Where she has gone, you would not want to visit.”

“Yes, I would,” Jamal insisted.

But the old woman was firm. “No one goes to the desert who wishes to come back,” she said, moving away and busying herself with a large pot of lentils that was cooking on the stove.

“But what did she do wrong?” Jamal asked. “Who took her there?”

Rachida clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “You ask too many questions,” she said, brandishing her wooden spoon. “It was the king who took her. Now shoo.”

The king. Later that night, lying awake in the fetid darkness of the dormitory, Jamal had not been able to keep himself from repeating to his friend Nordine what Rachida had told him.

But Nordine, one year older and ten years wiser, had only laughed. “Why would the king take your mother to the desert?”

It was a fair question, and one that Jamal could not answer. He shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Disappeared or dead,” Nordine said. “What is the difference? You are still here like the rest of us.”

To Jamal there was a great difference, a confirmation of what he had suspected all along: that he was different from the others, that he did not belong in this place, after all.

He did not say this to Nordine, but when he closed his eyes he saw his mother in splendid wedding attire, her bride's caftan and headdress heavy with gold-thread embroidery, her hands elaborately hennaed. Not a whore, then, but pure as a virgin, as he'd always known she was. Her eyes were downcast to preserve her modesty, her feet delicate in white leather slippers. Beneath her, carpets of the finest wool had been spread out over the sand.

I
N HIS NEW DREAM
, Jamal's mother put her hand up to beckon him forward. There were intricate patterns on her fingers and palms, whorls and eddies like the design of moving water or the twisted branches of a tree, the stain of the henna still fresh on her skin. Her hair was dark and uncovered, falling loose around her shoulders, over her white marriage dress. All around them stretched a vast plain, red sand and blue sky. The sun was a pure white fire overhead.

Jamal climbed down and started toward her, walking with difficulty over the shifting ground. He would have to get used to this, he told himself, if he was going to live in the desert. His progress now was slow, and she was moving quickly ahead of him, intent on something in the distance.

“Wait!” Jamal called out.

Her dress was white linen, like the
ihram
of a pilgrim, made from two pieces of seamless cloth. She turned and looked briefly back at him, smiling.

“Stop!” Jamal called again.

“Hurry!” she replied, motioning once more for him to follow. She smelled like lotus and rainwater, like the earth of the grave. Her linen shroud was tight against her body, the cloth wound five times, as the hadith said it should be for burial, her feet and head covered.

“Hurry!” Not his mother's voice now but that of a man. Then a second voice and a third, each in rapid Arabic.

“He lives?”

“Hurry!
Zid! Zid!
”

Jamal felt himself being lifted up and carried forward. He could smell the ocean, the brine stink of it mingling with the coppery odor of burned phosphate. It was the unmistakable smell of home. In the distance, the muezzin was singing the first call to prayers.

“Brother!” one of the men said. “Wake up, brother!”

Slowly, Jamal opened his eyes. “Where am I?”

The man grinned, showing rotten teeth, then clamped his hand on Jamal's shoulder. “Casa,” he said. “Where else?”

D
RIVING WAS ONE
of many skills Manar had forgotten during her time away. She knew the city transit system well, had spent many hours since her return riding the crowded buses, often with no destination in mind. But today she knew exactly where she was going. She had made her plans meticulously the night before, tracing and retracing the route she would take, setting aside her fare in exact change.

Anfa was not a neighborhood from which people commuted by public transport. Those who were able to live here could afford not just cars but drivers as well. At this early hour, no one was leaving. Instead, the influx was of workers from the city's poorer quarters—cooks and maids, gardeners and chauffeurs—and the bus stop on the Boulevard d'Anfa was accordingly deserted. The boulevard itself was empty as well, the storefronts all dark. All except for the French bakery on the far corner, in whose light-flooded interior Manar could make out opulent rows of
pains au chocolat
and
apricotines.

Manar glanced at her watch as she sat down on the bench to wait. Her nerves had pressed her out of the house earlier than necessary. Now it would be a good ten minutes before she could expect the bus. She took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to calm herself for what lay ahead.

It was here, she could not help recalling, that she had waited for the bus that would take her to meet Yusuf and the others so many years ago. Here, that last afternoon, on the same bench, with the same perfume of butter and sugar in the air. Only then the smell, rich as it was, had made her sick.

It had been two weeks since she'd first known for certain that she was pregnant, since she and her sister had huddled anxiously around the contraband home test in her sister's bathroom. Two weeks and she had still not found the courage to tell Yusuf, though she knew that he would be overjoyed. They had already spoken of marriage. Now there would be no question about the matter. And Manar should have been happy as well, though as much as she loved him, she had not been ready to compromise the person she was.

She had planned to tell him that evening, after the demonstration. But by the time she arrived the strike had turned violent, and she was unable to find him before being swept up in the chaos herself.

It would be years before she knew what happened to him. On her first day home, her mother told her.
That boy you were seeing. They killed him, you know. Shot him in the street like a dog.
As simple as that. And Manar had felt a flood of relief, knowing he had not been made to suffer, knowing her worst fears, all those dreams of his ransacked body, were only that.

From the street, the Ain Chock Charity House looked no different from the rest of Casablanca's state-built apartment blocks, looming, soulless structures that had been built to replace the squalor of the bidonvilles, but which had managed only to reduce poverty to its basest level. Whatever small redemptions the slums offered—the community of others, the culture of place, the simple gift of individuality—were all but negated by the architectural fascism of the government buildings, the relentless repetition of gray cement and soot-darkened windows, the surrounding aprons of hard-beaten earth.

It was midmorning by the time Manar descended from the last of three buses that had carried her from the privileged world of Anfa to this dismal industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. She should have been nervous as she walked the last few blocks to the orphanage and approached the building's imposing front gate. Should have been, but wasn't. Beneath her loose djellaba and dark scarf, her body buzzed with an almost ecstatic sense of calm. It was something, she imagined, like what a Sufi dancer must feel, or someone standing in the eye of a scouring sandstorm. The kind of peace that came from being at the very nadir of the world, with everything else in revolution.

Inside the front gate, in what had once been a courtyard, a squatters' village had sprung up, more miserable than any slum Manar had ever seen. Not just children but the old and sick and lame had congregated within the walls of the orphanage. In the doorway of the shanty closest to the gate, an old woman, blind and legless, sat tending a pitiful fire. Farther inside, a young girl with the moon face of Down syndrome held a screaming baby. Beside her, a boy was skinning a rat.

The settlement itself had the runaway look of an organic being, some kind of wild cantilevered fungus that had grown forever out and up, the new obliterating the old, until the entire organism appeared ready to collapse beneath the weight of its own ambition.

Manar had not gone more than a few meters before she found herself surrounded by some dozen boys. “Dinars,” one of them pleaded. He was the oldest of the bunch, though he couldn't have been more than nine or ten. He lifted his shirt and pointed to his sunken stomach, then made the universal sign for food. He was a seasoned beggar, the gestures, Manar thought, pure theater. But the look on his face said there was nothing contrived about his hunger.

Manar reached into her robe and pulled out a single ten-dinar coin. She would have fed them all if she could have, but as it was she could allow herself neither pity nor compassion. She would accomplish nothing if she did. “Take me to the director,” she told the oldest boy, holding the coin just out of his reach.

He turned and hissed at the others, who disappeared almost as quickly as they had come, scattering into the series of narrow alleyways that branched chaotically off the settlement's main artery.

The boy glanced at Manar, then started off ahead of her. Sizing her up, she thought, for maximum profit. And how many times had she done the same? Trying to gauge each new guard, trying to guess just what it would take, just how much more of her waning self could be pared off and sacrificed, just what could be gotten in return. An extra piece of bread. A single wedge of an orange. The comfort, just once, of having her name spoken aloud by another human being.

The boy was fast, his bare feet deft at navigating the piles of rotting garbage and smeared feces, and Manar was out of breath by the time they reached the building's front portal.

“Here, sister. This way.” The boy stopped in the open doorway and beckoned her forward.

Manar crossed the threshold and stepped inside, then shrank back, gagging at the unmistakable stench of death. The nose, she knew from experience, can acclimate to almost any smell: urine, feces, rot, the tang of the unwashed body. But never the stink of a human corpse. Never. No wonder the residents had moved outside.

Covering her nose and mouth with a corner of her djellaba and moving slowly, Manar forced herself to step into the darkness of the building's foyer. There appeared to be no electricity. Most of the light fixtures and wire had been ripped from the walls and ceilings for sale in the junk bazaar, leaving only rough holes. The more tenacious fixtures had merely been stripped of their bulbs.

Through the open doors of the rooms off the corridor, Manar could make out rows of moldy mattresses and mounds of filthy bedding, the skeletal remains of a few sad toys. It seemed utterly impossible that any child could live in such squalor, and yet here and there huddled figures showed themselves—a single boy or a group of boys. Not children but the ragged ghosts of children.

Undeterred by the squalor, Manar's guide darted forward, pausing frequently to allow her to catch up. The floor beneath his bare feet was littered with broken glass and cracked tiles.

“Be careful!” Manar called out ridiculously.

He glanced back at her with a look of exasperated patience before ducking into a small alcove at the very end of the main hallway.

“Here!” he declared triumphantly, once Manar had joined him. He beamed up at her, his smile all teeth in the gloom, then indicated a peeling door marked “Director.”

The door was half ajar. Manar stepped forward and nudged it with her foot, revealing a broken desk and two steel cabinets adrift amid a sea of scattered papers and dusty files.

The boy reached for the ten-dinar coin in Manar's hand. “Where is the director?” she asked, holding the money just out of his reach, needing him still.

A shrug. “He has not been here for many months now.”

“And the staff? The other adults?”

Another shrug.

“You are on your own, then?”

“The king has sent you?” the boy asked hopefully. “You have come to help us?”

Manar shook her head. She could not lie to him. “How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.”

“I'm looking for someone,” she said. “A child who was sent here to live many years ago. You might know him.”

The boy regarded her suspiciously. Surely no one with good intentions would need such information.

Manar reached into her robe once more and pulled out a second ten-dinar coin.

“How old is he?” the boy asked.

“He would be nineteen now.”

“And his name?”

“I don't know his name.”