Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

Si Mohammed returned after a two-day absence, which felt like an eternity. He wept bitterly. He didn’t hide his tears from his wife. Mama Aicha cried out when she saw him, and a wail escaped her: “No! No, don’t tell me they got him!”

“Aziz couldn’t escape,” he told her. “They had security forces and spies on every road. I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth, leaving lines on the pavement. He opened his eyes. He saw me struggling desperately to get to him and embrace him, and the guards restraining me as I tried to throw myself on him and take him in my arms, to erase the whip marks on his chest.”

“Did he speak? What did he say to you?”

“He said in a strong voice, Don’t cry, Father. Don’t be sad. I won’t die. I’ll return... I’ll return.”

Mama Aicha waited for the return of her son. The first month passed, then a second and a third. There was no news. She decided to leave the house and track him down on her own.

Her friend Zahra asked her: “Where will you look for him, Aicha, my dear? Neither you nor I know the streets and alleys of Marrakech. Who will help us pick up his trail?”

“I’ll go to the fortune-tellers in Jemaa el-Fnaa. Will you come with me, Zahra? Perhaps one of them can tell us of Aziz’s fate, or point us in the right direction.”

Each woman put on a djellaba and pulled a veil over her face. They headed for Jemaa el-Fnaa Square. Mama Aicha’s steps faltered and she stopped, amazed and confused, in the middle of the square. Loud voices. Music. Singing. Prayers. Curses. Brazen laughter. Dirty words. Bodies pressing against each other in the throng. A male body attached itself to her from behind. My mother pulled her firmly away by the hand and turned toward the tall figure wrapped in an old winter djellaba. Like all the rest of them, he was hiding his face beneath the djellaba’s hood. They came to Jemaa el-Fnaa to rub up against the behinds of women in the crowd. “Goddamn you,” my mother said, uncertainty in her tone. Mama Aicha, for her part, although she was so worried about her son that she could scarcely think about what was happening to her body, was on the verge of collapse from the excessively crowded space and the feelings of shame and humiliation.

They sat down in front of the first fortune-teller they saw. She asked Mama Aicha: “Am I reading your fortune or is there a man in your life whose secrets you need me to tell you?”

“Neither. I only want to know where my son is.”

The fortune-teller looked at her cards for a long time, and then said: “Your son was bewitched by a woman and is lost to you.”

Mama Aicha went to another fortune-teller and the same exchange was repeated with only slight differences. It seemed to the two women that the fortune-tellers of Jemaa el-Fnaa were all programmed to say that women were a source of temptation and evil, and therefore that they would not find the solution they sought here. A woman who had been watching them instructed them to go to a fortune-teller who appealed to a higher power. Her hut was near the shrine of Moul el-Ksour, one of the seven saints of Marrakech. She was famous throughout the city and beyond for the accuracy of her visions. When the woman realized that the two friends did not know where the shrine was, she offered to accompany them.

The fortune-teller was very thin and tall. Her bug-like eyes squinted toward each other, with the pupil on the right swiveling left and the pupil on the left looking right. Were it not for the nose protruding between them, they would have run together to become a single horrible eye. Mama Aicha prayed to God to protect her when she beheld this ugly creature. The woman who had guided them told them that the fortune-teller had once been beautiful and charming, until one day the prince of the jinn noticed her and fell in love with her. He made her deformed so that no other being would desire her. To compensate her for the loss of her womanly beauty, the cost of his selfish love for her, he revealed to her all the secrets of the world beyond, and lifted the veils from her sight.

The fortune-teller asked Mama Aicha why she had come.

“My son has disappeared, ma’am, and I want you to show me the way to him.”

The fortune-teller lit incense and sprinkled the room with rose water. She invoked the names of the kings of the jinn and the righteous among men and uttered other words that they didn’t understand. She reached inside a small cupboard covered with a fine green shawl, and she took from it a wooden box painted with a lustrous yellow coating. Inside it were sand and seashells and agate-colored grains of coral. She placed it in front of her and put her hand in the sand. She moved her lips as though she were reciting something to herself, and her eyes flicked rapidly in opposite directions. A terrible fear crept into the hearts of the two friends when they heard sounds like the echo of cannons emerge from the belly of the fortune-teller, who suddenly opened her cavernous mouth wide and said in a harsh voice: “The cards... the cards. Yes, My Lord, the cards...” She scattered the playing cards in front of her but did nothing to halt the unsettling sound emanating from her abdomen. “Is your son wearing a state uniform?” she asked.

Mama Aicha rejoiced and answered immediately, “Yes,” because she knew that a prisoner had his regular clothes taken from him and exchanged for a special prison suit.

“Was your son riding in a vehicle?”

Mama Aicha’s heart began to beat faster, as Si Mohammed’s voice rang in her ear once more: I watched as they hauled him out of an old car. They dragged him across the ground as blood streamed from his mouth . She answered, “Yes.”

“Is he with a group of others like him?”

“There’s no doubt about that.” In every alley of the city there was a bereaved mother — this she had heard from Yusuf, who had not stopped visiting her since those evil hands stretched out to snatch away her own flesh and blood from his very bed.

Then the fortune-teller said something that could scarcely be believed, after the accuracy of everything she had said before: “Give me a piece of his underwear. I will write a charm on it and you must burn a part of it each day for three days. After a time that is neither long nor short, you will find him returning to you, once he has tired of the nightlife and grown to hate the fornicator who seduced him.”

Mama Aicha stood up, all of her hope having drained away. “Is this what the jinn who possesses you told you? Tell him to go back to his cards,” she snapped. “My son is not seduced by the nightlife or taking shelter in the arms of women. My son, my love... I’ll look for him myself. Let’s go, Zahra, these women are nothing but frauds.”

“I knew that. I just wanted to bring you here because I thought it would do you good to get out of the house.”

“Don’t worry, Zahra. I’ll set him free myself.” She said this with a strange earnestness and determination, as if another voice, stronger than her own, were emerging from inside of her. The voice of a different woman, not the Aicha we knew.

Her husband didn’t forbid her to leave the house, but instead pointed the way himself to the secret cave in which all of the city’s most distinguished students, and the best of its high school teachers, were packed away.

When she arrived at the detention center, she saw that it wasn’t invisible, as she had previously believed. It was an imposing building with colonial architecture squatting at the northern corner of Jemaa el-Fnaa, not far from the circles of singers and the dancers and acrobats and magicians and food carts. Neither the singers’ melodies nor the voices of the storytellers — nor even the clamor of the monkey tamers — could capture Mama Aicha’s attention that day. She had always dreamed about the vast possibilities of this freewheeling square, but now that she found herself in the middle of it, she was scarcely aware of the entertainment and diversions that filled it. Her eyes were fixed on the dreaded building. She paused to look at the police station that had swallowed up her son, and she examined the faces of the officers and state security guards who surrounded it.