A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me Read online

  We play for some time. I tell him he won’t trick me by talking about his wife and he laughs again. “What’s wrong with you, Benghazi?”

  “I beat you.”

  I leave the room. Where’s the sound coming from? From the kitchens? The courtyard? Behind the palm trees in the courtyard? The well to the south of the casbah? A big wing extends south of the casbah. The pasha’s kitchens. The dog follows me. She doesn’t like Sergeant Benghazi either. I don’t hear a sound from the kitchens. Or from anywhere else. I say: In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate, and step forward. I don’t like crossing the courtyard at night. It’s full of the dead. I don’t like the night here. I like the day. During the day, I see the sky. And the palm trees. I’m calm. But at night? You don’t know what you’re treading on. There isn’t a spot you can put your feet without there being a dead body underneath. Or dead bodies. We’ve been burying them for twenty years. One on top of another. Dead on top of dead. For twenty years or more. No one knows how many. Because we don’t bury them as they bury the dead in cemeteries. We toss them on top of each other. You can’t be sure about this kind of dead. They can leave their holes at any moment. Tfu! May God curse them at night. This dog’s following me. She slips between my thighs, almost throwing me on the ground. She’s scared too. She also knows the dead leave their holes at night. They leave from every place, since they’re everywhere. Under every palm tree. In every hole and in every crack. Without graves, as in the rest of the world.

  I stand in the middle of the courtyard. As if someone put his hand on my shoulder, I stop. Something like a high-voltage current travels through my body. I take refuge in God from Evil Satan. I stop. The damned dog jumps back and forth and circles me. I don’t know if she feels what I’m feeling. Did some of the current lighting up my blood and making the hair on my head stand on end hit her too? I try to grab her but she flees. If I’d grabbed hold of her, I’d feel safer. Me and the dog, it’d be two of us. But she took off. I kicked at her to make myself feel better, but only hit air. I left Sergeant Benghazi smoking his hash pipe and blowing smoke on his dreams. And here I am in the courtyard, kicking the darkness. Even the dog’s disappeared. I turn in a circle and say: I take refuge in God from Evil Satan, and I step toward the kitchens.

  This time, it’s as if the ghost passes in front of me. The ghost’s shadow passes before me. I stop again. It does the same thing and it stops too. What I see I don’t see. I mean, I can’t grasp its details. As if I see only its shadow. Something’s shadow. The shadow of a body not of this world. The shadow of a person who died but didn’t die completely. There remained of him the essential. The important. The hair on my head stands up. The blood freezes in my veins. Every thought disappears from my head. Should I run toward the kitchens or go back to the room? The kitchens are safer and closer. My legs abandon me at that moment. They refuse to move from their spot. Should I ask for forgiveness from the dead man? Even if I don’t know if I was the one who buried him. Should I ask forgiveness from them all? The ones I tossed into their holes as well as those I didn’t? For twenty years. Benghazi and me. Benghazi in the room, lighting up hash pipe after hash pipe. The dead don’t scare Benghazi. He’s not interested in anyone’s forgiveness. And the noise that sounds like crying? Is it the crying of the shadow? Do shadows cry? Am I crying? Tears swell in the corners of my eyes. Instead of crying, I call the dog. Hinda? Hinda?

  My tongue’s heavy. I don’t know how the sound came out. Did I really call out as you would call to a dog? I don’t think so. I didn’t hear my voice clearly enough to say the call was convincing. And the dog doesn’t come. Hinda! Hinda! I’m not hoping she comes. I’m thinking about the shadow. My voice might scare it and it might disappear. I keep shouting as I run toward the building. Hinda! Hinda! As I run.

  Aziz is still on the bench, just as I left him. The bench is a cement slab that in the past was a basin for washing dishes and utensils before the kitchen was turned into a cell, before the casbah kitchens were all turned into cells. The door is narrow. There are lots of cracks in it. I look at the prisoner through them. He looks more emaciated than before but he isn’t crying. It’s as if he’s shrunk a bit. He’s less than what he was yesterday. A child not yet ten years old. He was bigger yesterday. He was moving. Spread out on the bench, his body was moving. Today he’s shrunk even more. And his movements have disappeared. The little energy and the good intentions his body showed yesterday have disappeared. His eyes are open. But they’re frozen. Like the eyes of the dead. Should I go in and touch his hand to see if he still has a pulse? For twenty years, it’s been enough for us to look at him through the cracks. And at the others when they were alive. His eyes are open but is his jugular throbbing and pulsing with blood? He’s the last prisoner. Relief will come to him soon. We’ll all relax after he’s buried.

  I look for the key as if I was meaning to go in. I don’t find it so I don’t go in.

  4

  Benghazi

  10:30 p.m.

  1

  WE’RE CASBAH GUARDS. WE DON’T have anything to be jealous about. We’re not like ordinary people, as they say. And that’s inevitable. Our job gets us appreciation and respect. Not to mention, as Baba Ali says, we eat food and we wait for death. No one will say I don’t do my duty completely, either at work or at home. Food, drink, clothes, and other things. But when you have seven girls, and the oldest has vanished into one of the houses of Tighassaline or El Hajib or some other city to do those disgusting things with men, you say in the end there’s nothing you can do, brother, when it comes to fate. Boys, at worst, they’ll just be unemployed. But girls are born from a crooked rib. The best you can expect is she brings you a swollen belly. And that’s if she didn’t take off with the first freethinker who talks to her about getting married, the wedding and the ring, and then dumps her on the side of the first road. Everything I say is the truth. May God reward everyone for what they do.

  I heard she’d settled down in Tighassaline so I sent someone to bring her back, and all of a sudden she disappeared. Then I heard things about her in Tangier or Marrakech. Only He, God the Sublime be praised, knows all I did to bring her home, to ignore all the gossip. I swear to God, if He wants to punish a living being and deprive him of sleep, He inflicts a series of girls on him. One after the other. But no one can say I didn’t do my duty completely for them.

  Baba Ali went to check out the prisoner because I beat him. I always beat him, in checkers and in other things. When I hear my uncle calling from his office, I say I’ll beat him at other things too. My uncle is the commander, that’s what they call him. He’s in his office chewing tobacco or smoking. In his light khaki clothes, he’s like an athlete without a sport. He fiddles with his black sunglasses or puts them on because it’s nighttime. I always know what’s going on in my uncle’s mind. Today he’s thinking about my wife, who might be in labor by now. He hopes the baby will be a boy. So we don’t fall further into this pothole of girls. My uncle doesn’t have kids. God didn’t bless him with offspring to hold on to his memory after his death, because you won’t find anything to remember him by. I think he’s actually thinking about my wife, not about the baby that’ll come out with his penis and his little testicles with which he’ll compete with other men. But there he is putting on his sunglasses and walking toward me, asking: “How many are left?” I go back to thinking about my wife in labor. She’ll have her eighth baby. After seven girls, I hope it’s a boy. After this series of girls. In the end, he wasn’t thinking about my wife and I hear him ask again: “How many prisoners are left?”

  I call him my uncle, but he’s not actually my uncle. I call him that so I seem like someone who likes him. But I don’t like him. I pretend to respect him. Do you respect a man who’s seventy, gets drunk, and doesn’t pray? There is no power and no strength save in God. He doesn’t visit the prisoners either. He only asks: “How many are left?” Baba Ali and I tell him: “Two hundred.” He counts on his fingertips but that doesn�
��t help him so he asks again: “How many?” The amount of money he’ll get if the number of dead goes up is turning in his mind. And if the number goes down . . . He doesn’t know which is better: That they die so his income goes up or that they stay alive so his job continues. There is no power and no strength save in God. My uncle doesn’t know arithmetic, because he was in the military. He doesn’t know the difference between sixty and a hundred and sixty, because he didn’t go to school. He became a commander like someone becomes the leader of a union or a minister. Or like I became a guide who doesn’t guide anyone, or like Baba Ali became a cook who doesn’t cook anything. Through connections, through people you know. Sometimes we tell him one hundred sixty-seven for fun, to laugh at his confusion. So they stay alive in his mind. As long as they stay alive, he’s happy. And we’re happy. They don’t eat, they don’t wear clothes, and they don’t bathe. My uncle believes they’ll stay alive thanks to the All-hearing and All-knowing. It doesn’t dawn on him that they need the least bit of food or cleanliness to stay alive. I also don’t want them to die out entirely. At least one of them has to be left for us to keep our jobs.

  What can someone do if God has decreed that he should die in a particular way? It’s God who gives life and death. So what’s the use of asking questions about it? What can I or Baba Ali or anyone else do? We’re only a guide and a cook, and my uncle told us to come here to Glaoui’s casbah. That’s what we did. Are we accountable for this? Both of us will die anyway. Before God the Almighty and Sublime, we’ll be held to account, tomorrow, on the Day of Judgment.

  I tell my uncle the number’s still the same. How many? One hundred seventy-five. I think he’ll bow his head as if a big rock fell on him at this news. But he just shakes it.

  2

  My uncle didn’t go to school, but he’s got experience. He learned everything in the military. He became a commander thanks to his intelligence. He learned, thanks to his intelligence, that the Makhzen is the most important thing in the world. I call him my uncle because he’s the boss. And we always need the boss. Yes, my uncle’s lucky, he’s got a mind to think with. Even without school. Without the intelligence God Almighty on high granted him, the intelligence with which humankind thinks, there’s no luck. That’s what I always say. My uncle’s mind is full of tricks. Women. Money. Is there anything more important in the world? His fortune began when his luck called him. Not before, not after. When God granted him the good fortune to become a commander. A commander and a dealmaker at the same time. There isn’t a commander without a deal. There isn’t a deal without a commander. He’s about seventy and he’s building his houses on the outskirts of Meknès, with the money allocated for the prisoners. There is no power and no strength save in God.

  My uncle’s office is cold because of the air conditioner. Wide and cold. The curtains are drawn day and night. The breeze from the air conditioner plays with the hem of the curtain, so you know the breeze is real. It’s always nighttime in my uncle’s house. My uncle loves the night. He doesn’t want it to end. During the daytime, when he looks outside, he covers his eyes with thick black sunglasses. When he goes back to the office, he lowers the curtains. So night doesn’t leave his mind. This is the life he likes. He’d like it if the entire world were night. My uncle comes to life at night. Like a bat, as he says. The color of his pupils at night is yellow, like the eyes of cats. His teeth are an odd yellow, from his chewing tobacco.

  The glass is in his hand as he looks away from the girl. The girl’s beautiful. Her wide eyes and her voluptuous mouth would entice him, you, me, or any other man. But he thinks she’s ugly. My uncle asks for beautiful girls but he always thinks they’re ugly. I traveled seventy kilometers to bring him the most beautiful girl in the region. But he always thinks the girls are ugly. Instead of checking her out, he checks out the wall, and instead of smelling her, he smells the wall. There is no power and no strength save in God. My wife’s in labor and I don’t know what her giving birth will bring us. I hope it’s a boy. Before I leave the office, I hear him tell me to take the girl back tomorrow to where I brought her from. There is no power and no strength save in God.

  When I return, I find Baba Ali’s just come back. I ask him, “Did he die?”

  He says, “He’s dead.”

  Then I ask him if he’s still breathing, and he says, “He’s still breathing.”

  I say, “Sit down and play.”

  “I’m not playing.”

  “I’ll let you win next time.”

  “Next time, we’ll both go.”

  “Play now.”

  “Don’t talk to me about your uncle.”

  “Play.”

  “Or about your wife who’s going to give birth.”

  5

  Zina

  11 p.m.

  HERE I AM ON THE road again, on the nine o’clock bus from Fez that arrived after ten. I think about all the times I went looking for Aziz. Will this be my last? At the end, at the end of this night, will I see him? It’s dark outside and inside the bus. I see shadows moving in the aisle between the rows of seats and from time to time I hear the muttering of a passenger dreaming. The travelers are sleeping, certain that their trip isn’t so important as to be the first or the last, relaxed in the knowledge they’re just coming from one place and heading to another. They aren’t bothered by the heat inside the bus or the weather outside. Most are traveling to obtain some official document or to visit family or take a vacation. Their faces show signs of the calm future waiting for them. They aren’t rushed or anxious. However I try, I won’t be like them. But they don’t know that, which is for the best.

  What are the passengers dreaming of? Would I dream if I fell asleep? I wonder where they’re going. Nothing indicates they’re heading to the wedding festival. No singing, no scent of henna, no girls laughing, no women crying. Could any of them be so eager to make it to the festival that they took the night bus that came late? I wonder what my sister Khatima is doing right now. It’s closing time. No doubt there are one or two asking for one more drink. They become like children, those drunks, at the end of the night. Then I wonder if there’s someone on this bus, a man or a woman, heading to the same place I’m going. Someone like me, looking for a husband, a father, a son, who disappeared twenty years ago. The man who came to the bar might be knocking on other doors. If he’s gone to all this trouble and taken all this risk, it must be for all the abductees. Or at least for more than one. I’m sure this person’s on the bus. Maybe he’s sleeping now in one of these seats. What’s he dreaming of? I look around to find this person who’ll lead me to the casbah, but I don’t see anyone. I then turn a little to see the driver but I can’t see him either. I watch the night through the glass. The humming of the engine is evidence we’re moving. I see the wheels in my mind as they turn and swallow up the road and the night, swallowing up everything in front of them. We pass the time minute by minute. I relax at its rocking. A small moon is suspended in the empty space ahead of the bus. The small moon and I are going in the same direction. Sometimes a cloud comes between us but it doesn’t cover it. The moon is ahead of us and sometimes we’re ahead of it. It’s also busy with the road and the hours that pass slowly. It also wonders how many hours are left until day breaks and it sleeps.

  I imagine scents I don’t smell. Scents of soil, plants, and different animals the night attracts. I feel a lot better after the anxiety of the past hours. I don’t know why but I’m relaxing inside my skin in a strange way. Then, as in a dream, Aziz appears before me, in the pilot’s uniform I kept seeing him in. A young man, as he was. Or an old man, as he’s become. Always in the new pilot’s uniform with the gold buttons.

  I might have dozed off because, when I turn to the other side, I find the seat is now occupied. I don’t dare turn to see who’s occupying it. I can see out of the corner of my eye that it’s a man. And that there’s a plastic bag on his knee. And that his knee doesn’t stop moving. The plastic bag is making an annoying rattle because his kne
e is shaking. I put my forehead on the window and stare at the night passing by outside to forget him. And to forget his knee and the rattle of the bag, but they’re moving nonstop. As if there’s something in him seizing the rhythm of his trip. The glass of the window is cold. Through it I watch the darkness outside and I think, here I am traveling again. If the bus keeps going at this pace, I’ll get there at dawn. If I’d imagined myself a month ago hitting the road alone, again, traveling like this at night on a bus where I don’t know anyone, to a place where I don’t know anyone, I wouldn’t have believed it. I had forgotten this custom. It’s been at least four years since I left Azrou. I think about all this to forget the man and his plastic bag. But I can’t forget either. A man like him can’t be heading to a marriage festival. A disturbed man, carrying only a plastic bag because some news surprised him, as it surprised me. He took the first thing he got his hands on so he didn’t miss the bus. Maybe he’s the person I’m looking for. He might be the same man who came to the bar, but without the sunglasses, djellaba, or pockmarks. Or he might be someone like him. I imagine him as a shadow running behind his lost son. I imagine the doors he knocked on and the forests he crossed. And the hands he kissed.

  I hear him let out a deep sigh so I turn to him. As if I’d been waiting for his sigh to turn around. The man realizes I’m looking at his knee, which shakes faster, and he says that it’ll calm down after a bit and that he forgot to take his medicine when he should have. He grabs his knee and presses down firmly on it and it stops. It stops completely. As if he too feels the sense of comfort, he lets out another long sigh. I then hear him say he’s been on bus after bus since the morning because he’s come from Salé. He stops talking for a moment and then asks me why I didn’t ask him what he was doing in Salé. He answers his own question, saying he’s coming from Razi Hospital, a hospital for mental illnesses. He pulls a bottle of water from under his seat and empties half of it. I see only the shadows of his features, nothing to indicate who he is or where he’s going. This morning he was in the hospital. He turns to me this time, but I don’t know if he’s looking at me or outside, and says, “You can’t see my face in the darkness but I’m a senile man, very old, more than eighty.”