Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

I had made a habit of visiting her there over the last three years, whenever I came to the city. And one day I met Iman for the first time. Alice was making her daily rounds with the patients. She walked among the dried-up trees in the garden, greeting the lost souls there, people who would talk to themselves all night in a fog of questions and names and images. It was winter and there was a light rain. Our Gauloises cigarettes burned out fast; I shared mine with the wind. And that day in the garden I saw Iman. As if she had stepped out of an old film. Everything was bleak. She appeared to me between the trees like some dreadful corpse: body frail, back bent. She was dressed in a long black coat and her movements were slack. I could hear her humming an old Oriental tune, a classic, one of those songs that you think you don’t recognize until you realize that of course you know it well. When she turned, I stopped still. Her face was a pirate’s map, its length and width scarred in grooves scraped down to the muscle. When she saw me and realized my terror, she turned her face away quickly, groping at it as if reminded of its horrors. Then she hurried away.

I felt guilty, my stomach prickling. I knew this was nothing I hadn’t encountered before, and yet I’d been unable to keep myself from feeling fear and disgust. “Wait! Please wait!” She stopped but did not turn around. I paused two paces behind her. “What’s your name?” I asked hesitantly.

She was silent a moment. “Iman,” she eventually replied, in a whisper. As if she weren’t quite sure.

I stepped closer to her. She was hanging her head like she wanted to bury it in her chest.

She asked for a cigarette and I fumbled for the pack in my pocket.

“Gauloises,” she muttered. “Taste like burning hay.” Then she smiled. I tried to avoid eye contact, gazing over her head so as not to unsettle her. She smoked her cigarette away from my prying eyes, sitting at the foot of some stairs that led to a door that looked like it hadn’t been opened in a while. She took out a handkerchief from her pocket and laid it beside her. I stood in place for a second before I understood that it was for me, an invitation to sit with her. Something in her voice transported me to Tchaikovsky and Swan Lake . Something in her silence and her hesitation rendered me numb.

With some urging, Alice would tell me Iman’s story. I didn’t believe it at first. I thought my friend the doctor was trying to tease me — to titillate me, as a reader of novels, as a social scientist. But it was true. Iman had lost her memory. She didn’t know who she was. Her relatives did, but she wouldn’t put up with their visits, so her sister seldom came. She’d just sit with her a little while and then be off. They had brought her to the sanatorium seven years ago, when she was in a bad way. She cried all the time and wouldn’t speak. The scars on her face had just healed. Often she stayed huddled in her bed, face to the wall. She tried to kill herself several times, but as Alice said: “Death keeps postponing her.”

Alice knew Iman well. “She speaks very elegant French,” she told me. “But her English is immaculate — you’d think she’d spent years in the UK.”

Of all the sanatorium inhabitants, Alice was closest to Iman, to the extent that she almost no longer considered her a patient. “Quite often,” she added, “I’ll find myself talking to her about the things that bother me .”

As I sat near Iman, she began asking me about who I was and why I had come to the hospital. She knew even the most fleeting of the visitors, from the families of other patients to the transients who came in from time to time to be seen by the doctors. I told her I was a friend of Alice’s. “And a friend of mine also,” she said, grinning. I must have worn my emotions on my face — I couldn’t hide them — lighting one cigarette after another, as Iman was quick to point out.

“Are you smoking like that out of embarrassment? Or is it fear?” It didn’t sound like a question. She was making an observation and trying to calm me. Oh, how terribly strange it was!

We were quiet for a little while, but then she began to sing. Within seconds I felt a warmth wash over me, dispelling my unease. But it was a curious thing: Iman sang as if she were trained. Her performance was technically proficient. She kept rhythm with a small stone which she beat against the steps, a delicate movement, almost soundless. It was more curious still that she sang no wrong notes. Perhaps it was her extreme sensitivity that prompted her to explain in French: “Wrong notes avoid me.”

Even though I was there on holiday then, I ended up visiting the sanatorium every day. I would spend all afternoon listening to Iman’s tales. I was lulled by her voice as if by sweet wine, and her powers of storytelling astonished me. She knew almost every patient in the hospital and sketched their profiles brilliantly. Once she spent a whole afternoon telling me about the Algerian woman Fatima who had owned an art gallery in Tangier. She’d had a French education par excellence . “She speaks like a Parisian,” Iman said. She had a passion for contemporary pieces and installations. And as I listened to Iman I realized that she had been affected by Fatima, or at least by her knowledge of art. Since I don’t have Iman’s brilliance for detail, I remember little of Fatima’s story, except that her husband declared himself bankrupt and she was left with terrible debts after he fled to Spain. He told no one, not even his wife, his companion of thirty years, about where he was going. After that his possessions were seized, including the house and the gallery, which had been jointly owned. And when she had nothing left, she was forced to sell her stake in the gallery in order to pay rent and for treatment in a private sanatorium for her twenty-seven-year-old son Fahad, who had suffered severe depression after his father’s flight. Months passed, and after several failed attempts Fahad succeeded in taking his own life. They found him hanging in the sanatorium bathroom. Fatima, unable to withstand all that had befallen her, decided to follow in her son’s footsteps. By her good luck, or bad, her sister was visiting that same day. She arrived before the worst could happen. “Although,” Iman said, “I can hardly imagine worse than what Fatima had already lived through up until then.” Things went on this way for ten years, and Fatima was still no better. It was her sister in Marrakech who brought her to Amerchich. (Were a sister’s words law in this place?)

As the holiday came to its end I felt a strange tightness in my chest. I had quickly gotten used to Iman’s companionship; there was much of me in her. Or rather, to be more accurate, I resembled her. I was endlessly surprised that this woman could forget who she was while at the same time remember other people’s stories so precisely, and so much of what she had read: poetry, literature, music, history, philosophy. Perhaps she had a reason. Before leaving, I immediately knew what gift I should give her: five novels from Shatir, the bookstore in Gueliz, a beautiful diary with a leather cover, and some pencils. Alice said I’d fallen in love with her. And I think I had fallen, into the snare of her unknowability. Perhaps if I’d heard her story beforehand I wouldn’t have been drawn to her. We hugged warmly. I promised to visit her when I came back from America. She, in return, promised me she would write in the diary all the tales she hadn’t yet told me so we could read them together on my return.

I spent the full year in America — in the department of social sciences at the University of Chicago, and in libraries. Every time I entered a library I remembered Iman and her passion for reading; I often lay down at night to chase after her voice in the depths of my soul. A whole year passed in which I spoke to Alice on the phone only a couple of times. I was busy with the final draft of my thesis. Alice said that Iman had gotten better. She toured Amerchich daily with her pen and her diary, even helping the other patients with her “parallel treatment sessions,” listening to them for hours, telling them stories and singing to them. At the end of the year I booked my return ticket to Marrakech. I was excited: I had played out a hundred conversations in my head. I imagined dozens of stories. And I waited so eagerly to see Iman.