A Shimmering Red Fish Read online

  Award-winning Moroccan novelist and screenwriter Youssef Fadel was born in Casablanca in 1949, where he lives today. During Morocco’s ‘Years of Lead’ he was imprisoned in the notorious Moulay Cherif prison, from 1974 to 1975. A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is his tenth novel, and the final part in his modern Morocco series that included A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me and A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me.

  Alexander E. Elinson is an associate professor of Arabic at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and the translator of A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me by Youssef Fadel.

  A Shimmering Red Fish

  Swims with Me

  Youssef Fadel

  Translated by

  Alexander E. Elinson

  This electronic edition published in 2019 by

  Hoopoe

  113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

  200 Park Ave., Suite 1700 New York, NY 10166

  www.hoopoefiction.com

  Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press

  www.aucpress.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Youssef Fadel

  First published in Arabic in 2016 as Farah by Dar al-Adab

  Protected under the Berne Convention

  English translation copyright © 2019 by Alexander E. Elinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978 977 416 937 3

  eISBN 978 161 797 936 1

  Version 1

  Foreword

  His throne was on the water

  —The Quran 11:7

  Inspired by this Quranic verse, Morocco’s King Hassan II first announced his plan to build a grand mosque on the edge of Casablanca overlooking the Atlantic Ocean during his 1980 birthday celebrations. Designed by the French architect Michel Pinseau and built by the Bouygues Group of France, work on the mosque began on July 12, 1986. The original plan was for construction to be completed in 1989, to celebrate Hassan II’s 60th birthday, but due to construction delays, the formal dedication was held on August 30, 1993—the 11th of the Muslim month Rabi‘ al-Awwal, AH 1414—which corresponds to the eve of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth. From the Quranic inspiration for building the mosque over the Atlantic Ocean to the timing of the project’s announcement and proposed completion date, the construction of the Hassan II Mosque was a bold assertion of the king’s power and religious authority.

  The Hassan II Mosque is truly a dazzling edifice. Over thirty thousand laborers worked on it, including six thousand artisans who cut and set the zellij tiles, carved the marble and granite, shaped the stucco moldings, and meticulously fashioned the cedarwood that made up the decorative woodwork and elaborately crafted ceilings. The mosque has a retractable roof that allows worshippers to pray under the sky’s vault. At 690 feet high, the minaret is the tallest religious structure in the world, with a laser beam at its tip which points toward Mecca. The mosque and the patio surrounding it can accommodate up to 105,000 worshippers. It is the largest mosque in Africa and among the ten largest in the world.

  Beyond the sheer size and scale of the work, the mosque is an architectural and artistic gem that references much of Morocco’s Islamic history, which includes that of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) as well. As then minister of cultural affairs, Mohammed Allal Sinaceur, wrote in the book published for the mosque’s dedication in 1993,

  This synthesis is not the result of chance. It is born from accumulated experience, determined by time and inscribed in the project of a new al-Andalus. The Hassan II Mosque comes at the end of a long line of Islamic buildings, Moroccan in particular. In its general design and beautiful perspective it borrows its nobility from the centuries-old Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fes. It inherits the sober elegance of the Hassan Tower in Rabat, the Koutoubia of Marrakech and the Giralda of Seville, all three having been built by the same Almohad ruler, Yacoub al-Mansour. Like the Merinid madrasa schools, the Hassan II Mosque has a library as well. But the museum that tops it off makes it an authentic cultural complex that enriches the entire building and orients it toward a spirituality for the future. *

  * Ploquin, Philippe and Mohammed Allal Sinaceur. La Mosquée Hassan II. Photography by Philippe Ploquin and Françoise Peuriot; assisted by Mustapha Kasri, Ali Amahane, and Houceïne Kasri (Drémil-Lafage: Éditions Daniel Briand, 1993), 4. Translated from the French by Alexander E. Elinson.

  And just as the mosque is built as the culmination of a proud legacy of Islamic works, King Hassan II places himself at the forefront of great Islamic rulers, those who built the Qayrawan Mosque in Tunisia (the Muslim general Uqba ibn Nafi in 670), the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (the caliph Abd al-Malik in 690), the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (the caliph al-Walid in 706), and the Great Mosque of Cordoba (the emir Abd al-Rahman I in 784), among others.

  Despite the grandiosity of the project and its political, historical, and religious significance, the financial and human costs to build the mosque were enormous. While Hassan II’s vision and aspirations were grand, Morocco is not a wealthy country by any stretch of the imagination, and carrying the large cost of this project (585 million Euros; well over half a billion US dollars) was beyond the state’s means. Therefore, the financial burden fell mainly to Moroccan citizens who were required to help pay for it through a public subscription program. This was controversial at the time as this burden was quite substantial for a great many Moroccans, and the mosque’s dominance of the Casablanca skyline ensures that people never forget it. Stories of public shaming, defamation, and even imprisonment of those who didn’t, or couldn’t, pay are not uncommon; many families had to pay the equivalent of a month’s wages or more in order to fulfill their obligations. In addition to the financial costs, many laborers died during construction and many people’s homes were razed to the ground. The mosque is located between the Port of Casablanca and the El Hank Lighthouse, a site that used to house an old and densely populated residential neighborhood, along with the Casablanca municipal swimming pool. When one looks at aerial views of the area, it is quite clear that the mosque, its surrounding esplanade, and associated buildings, displaced a great many residents whose houses were cleared to make way for construction.

  A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me is Youssef Fadel’s tenth novel, the final book in his series on modern Morocco, preceded by A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me and A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me. It deals with many of the themes of the earlier two novels, including government corruption, emigration, crime, unemployment, and love; all of this with a masterful attention to detail and focus on the working classes. In all three novels, Fadel uses a fragmented narrative structure that moves backward and forward in time, and that results in a suspenseful unrolling of plot from one section to the next. This novel’s narrative moves between the present and various points in the past as Fadel examines life in Casablanca in the 1980s and early 1990s, a period when Moroccan society was buckling under the economic pressures of a failing economy, an unsustainable and unwinnable war in the Western Sahara, and a regime intent on vain self-preservation at all costs.

  The original Arabic title of this novel is simply Farah, which means “joy.” It is also the name of the eponymous teenage girl who runs away from her hometown of Azemmour to Casablanca to follow her dreams of becoming a singer. The mosque and its construction dominate the novel which follows Farah and the ill-fated love story between her and the novel’s main narrator, Outhman. The building is always there, wherever one turns, and it embodies the beauty and tragedy, the resentment and hope that permeates a world where life is cheap, an
d dreams and memories are all that exist to keep people moving forward. The lives of the characters are not particularly filled with joy, yet it pays tribute to those who seek to overcome adversity and attempt to find some measure of success and happiness with, or in spite of, the hand that they have been dealt.

  Alexander E. Elinson

  I

  1

  The man is stretched out on his bed. He’d rather not know who the woman is whose body is underneath it. It’s been a while, a long while, since the man has had any dreams, unsettling or otherwise. He usually wakes to a chirp from the magpie sitting on one of the posts that stretches the barbed wire around the field not far from the railroad tracks. The magpie is black during the day, white at night. Its beak is gray regardless. When it lets out its lone chirp, its tail moves to the same rhythm, as if it is singing with its entire body. It always lets out just one chirp. This bird comes to sing a song just for him, so the man waits for a few moments—savoring or rushing them depending on his mood, and on what the bird expects, so taken it is with this exceptional attention—so that he can respond with his own drawn-out note: tweeeet. Just like that. This time, the nightmare wakes him up before the bird sings, so he gets out of bed wondering what time it is. It is close to three in the morning. He hasn’t been asleep for more than two hours. He tiptoes across the hall. The light burns in the next room. He stops for a moment and looks in through the crack of the open door. His wife, expecting their first child, isn’t sleeping. Her mother is sitting on the edge of the bed holding her hand and wiping the sweat from her forehead. There’s a wicker chair in front of the house. The man collapses into it, weighed down by this recurring nightmare. The field is in front of him. The moon spreads a greenish turquoise glow over it. The field stretching out before him pulses with nocturnal life. The field does not sleep. Because of this, the nightmares don’t completely overwhelm him. Once in a while, the flapping of a bird that has just woken pierces the silence. The bird hasn’t woken up because of a nightmare or a calm dream, or because of a drop of dew falling gently to the ground; rather, it’s woken up because that’s what birds do. So, let him forget the nightmare that has so unnerved him. His mind is occupied with what minor worries the new day may bring. Daybreak is coming, and he still doesn’t have a story to tell the judge when he arrives. And the baby that’s on its way? He also asks himself whether he’s happy with the baby’s imminent arrival, but he doesn’t wait for his own response. He wonders for the sake of wondering, just to pass the time, so that he doesn’t have to go back to the corpse. He hopes to go back to the dream without the corpse. But there it is, waiting, in the brightest part of his thoughts, underneath the bed. Her name is Farah, meaning “joy,” if you didn’t already know. Burns obscure the features of her face. Her hair is blue. In the dream, in the moonlight that streams in through the window and envelops them—him, the bed, and the dead girl underneath the bed, dressed in a sheer purple robe—in the dream the man is always frozen in place with his legs stretched out in front of him, a distorted image of what’s under the bed ever-present in his mind. He tells himself that the only thing for certain is that he killed her and threw her body underneath the bed so no one would see it. This is a fact. Still in his dream as he lies stretched out there in the same position, nervous and unsettled, with the dead body underneath him. Imagining the hubbub that will rise up outside in a little bit while he wishes for the day not to come, so they won’t discover the body. He also wonders whether he has seen this dead body before. He doesn’t dare look too closely at the face to determine whether he had had a previous relationship with her. Her name is Farah, if you still had any doubts! What are these burns on her face and arms? Is there a knife or a cleaver lurking next to her, or any other weapon that might tie him to the victim? He doesn’t dare look underneath or around him for blood, or the deep wounds the sulfuric acid left behind. Still in the dream, he opens his eyes and realizes he has dragged a part of the nightmare along with him, so right away he closes them again, because he isn’t sure whether he has actually woken up. And now, sitting in front of the door, having seized upon this story, he remembers the judge who loves stories. This is a story that deserves to be told. It will amuse him. His friend, the judge, loves to listen to stories on Sundays.

  Farah. He used to sit for hours contemplating her small feet with their perfectly arranged toes, elegant, like fishes brimming with life even out of the water. Once he’d asked her to get up on a chair to grab a hammer from the shelf. She laughed because she could see in his eyes how much he wanted to stare at her white toes. This happened twenty-three or more years ago. They met and they parted in a game the meaning of which neither had understood. She appeared when he had least expected, only to disappear after a day, or a few days or weeks. Like the chaos that was filling her head at that time. The man tries to gather the scattered pieces of a life that had not been lived for very long. Farah used to love blue, the color of the dress she appeared in the first time he saw her. And she loved to sing. Once she said that she liked the sound of Naima Samih’s voice. Afterward, when they were in the carpentry shop he and his father had built in order to construct one of the ceilings that would furnish the mosque, she said she had come to Casablanca to sing. While waiting to become a singer like Naima Samih, Farah used to love to roam between the mosque’s towering columns, walking around the marble fountains, listening to her singing echo all around: “There’s no one, no use in calling, there’s no one . . .”

  Another time, this happened: In Casablanca there is an old lighthouse not far from the mosque, at the farthest corner of the city overlooking the ocean. It’s a hundred years old now. Its stairs go way up. Farah was unable to make it all the way to the top. At the halfway point she went back down. When he looked down at her from the top of the lighthouse, she had gone back to the ice vendor’s cart where they had just bought some sweet-tasting scoops. He smacked his lips and the berry flavor flowed over his tongue. Lemon, berry, and apricot. All the fruits were drawn on the sides of the cart. He remembers all of this—the ocean, the wind, the lighthouse and its dizzying height, the seagulls flying around it—and he specifically remembers the moment when he heard her scream. A long, painful scream at the side of the road. She raised her head to the sky, not knowing where to put her hands. She stumbled around like a drunk, turning and turning with her hands over her eyes as if she had been blinded. Then she disappeared, swallowed up by the gathering crowd. Before rushing down, he could still hear her screams ringing in his ears, something between wailing and weeping. The passersby gathered quickly. Where had they been before? They hovered around her with every possible explanation, every possible insult, and every possible expression of hopelessness, coming over from every direction. He turned around, trying to cut a path through the growing crowd. He saw the men and their unsettling movements. With difficulty he broke through and finally looked at Farah on the side of the road, stretched out unconscious. Her face was badly burned, as were her neck and arms, cut deeply by the acid. The fiery heat of the sulfuric acid was eating away at her. The ambulance, and the sound of its siren—he hadn’t heard it until the vehicle stopped. A woman threw a towel over her face, and Farah disappeared. He can hear it now—the ambulance’s siren—as it moved into the distance, rushing off with its dreadful cargo. He doesn’t remember if he actually saw all of this—the woman who covered her face; the two paramedics who lifted her into their ambulance. He may have seen it all without realizing it at the time, like someone who finds it hard to ride the bus because he keeps thinking it will never come. He continued to search for her, for Farah. After the ambulance disappeared, he continued to look for her among the other cars and trucks that had stopped there, among the fruit sellers and shaved-ice vendors, in front of the lighthouse, then behind it. The passersby who were still coming took the place of those who had left. Summer lovers (in a summer that had begun unusually early) were coming from behind the lighthouse or up from the beach—relaxed, the sun’s gleam still washing ov
er their tan skin—wondering what had happened, as if they were asking about whether the bus had passed by yet. And him? He still believed in miracles, imagining Farah sitting in a small blue car like the ones she loved so much, applying lipstick to her lips, or under the trellis near the lighthouse, singing, “There’s no one, no use in calling, there’s no one,” with the red, berry-flavored ice having melted and dripped over her hand.

  The man sits on the house’s doorstep in the dark rather than wait in bed for the bird’s chirp like he usually does. Now he is sure he has a story worth telling. It is Sunday, dawn. He has a story that isn’t new, but he’ll tell it to the judge when he’s asked to. There is no longer a corpse or a dead person or blood or a cleaver. Farah has taken their place. As long as the sun rises. But why is daybreak so late to come? Farah is like a bird perched on a balcony looking out over the wide, verdant life spread out all around it, ready to jump. Farah remains at the ready, flapping her blue wings, prepared, all set to jump, but she doesn’t. She waits for a good wind—ready, trusting, optimistic, prepared to go. The only thing that happens, though, is that the wind never comes. Then the first traces of dawn shoot up. Not in the form of pale lights tracing their way across the horizon; not in the form of a captivating red that mutes the sharpness of a glaringly bright day. Rather, in the form of a chirp that comes from somewhere close by. Tweet. The man turns to where he is accustomed to meeting the eyes of the white bird, before it turns into a black bird. It’s there, on the same post, moving its tail as if singing with its entire body. A hymn comprised of one note. Tweet. As if written in letters known only by him. The man leans over a little and sees the grass glistening at his feet. He says to himself, “In a little while, another hot day will dawn. This is what its heat smells like.” He chirps as he always does in response to the bird. This time, for reasons he does not understand, its echo fills him with delight. Perhaps it delights the bird also—tweet—because today he has this story. He is looking forward to the judge’s visit so he can tell it to him.