Laila Lalami - Secret Son

“I’m really sorry, sir. It’s about that young man. He said to tell you that he is the son of Rachida Ouchak.”

Nabil’s eyes watered, despite his efforts. It’s just the shock, he told himself, the high emotion of this morning. He blinked forcefully and cleared his throat. He had not heard that name in so many years. A lifetime. Rachida Ouchak. She had been the young nurse, hired to care for Malika during her delicate pregnancy. Rachida was one of his egregious mistakes, he was sure; he should not have looked at the help at all. Most of his escapades (if you could call them that) had been with other students at the university in the late seventies — girls who, in the liberal wave that was sweeping the nation, did not care about what people thought of them, or at least could afford not to care — but never with someone in Rachida’s position, and certainly not with someone who worked in the house. But she was different from the other girls his mother hired from the countryside; she spoke French fluently and had the manners of one of his station. He remembered her long brown hair, her green eyes, her freckled skin, how he had enjoyed teasing her every time he saw her, just to watch her face turn pink. After a while, she had started to run into him on purpose. It had been a bit of a victory to get her to give in to him.

“What should I do, sir?”

The worried tone in his secretary’s voice unlocked another memory. His mother had fired Rachida, saying that she had stolen something, though he knew it was because his mother had found out about the afternoon trysts in the pool house. He stood up, looked around the room, as though the answer could be found hidden somewhere on the leather armchairs, the red Berber rug, or the ugly glass sculpture in the shape of a treble clef that his wife had bought for him.

“Give me a minute,” he said.

He turned around and, facing the window, looked out at the street below. He could see the parking lot of his building, filled with cars, and the attendant directing someone out of a spot. This boy downstairs, what did he want? A favor, probably. His mother must have sent him here to ask for one. Nabil’s father always warned him that one should not be too kind to the help, the workers, the common people, lest they lose respect for you. When Nabil had started out in business, he had dismissed his father as just another conservative, a member of the old guard, someone who did not understand the new Morocco that was being shaped by the children of independence, people like Nabil. But over the years, bit by bit, he had come to see that there was some wisdom in his father’s view of the world.

Still, this was a different case. The least he could do for Rachida was help this son of hers. He buzzed his secretary and told her to send him up and have him wait. Cracking open a side window, he lit a Dunhill, savoring it slowly. He considered calling his old friend Rafael Levy and asking him what he thought of the situation with Amal, but he was too embarrassed to admit what had happened; and in any case, Rafael didn’t have any children, so perhaps he wouldn’t understand.

He looked at his watch; it was almost lunchtime. Maybe he should go home early to see if he could talk some sense into Malika. He called his secretary. “What’s his name again?” he asked.

“Youssef El Mekki, sir.”

“Send him in.” The argument with Malika had made him break into a sweat, so he loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. The door swung open, and Nabil stood up to face the young man. The blue eyes, almost as bright as his own, caught him by surprise. How could it be?

They shook hands. “How are you?” Nabil asked, more out of habit than out of concern.

“Je vais très bien, merci.”

Good elocution, Nabil noticed. “What can I do for you?”

Youssef cleared his throat. “I am not here to ask for a favor.” He wore a white button-down shirt and a pair of beige pants that, on someone else, would have given the impression of respectable poverty, but on him somehow came across as casual chic.

“Then what are you here for?”

“I think you know.”

Nabil stared. It could not be. Again the tears came, unbidden. He blinked furiously and cursed himself. If he did not watch it, he might soon turn into one of those effeminate men whose wives boss them around. In his shock, he reserved a moment of wonder for the work that memory could do, and for the fact that it could preserve as well as erase details of the past. When he had heard that Rachida Ouchak’s son was downstairs, he had simply assumed that she had married and had had children by this El Mekki whose name Youssef bore. He simply did not think about her pregnancy or about the abortion she was supposed to have had.

In truth, even back then, he had not thought about it very much. By the time Rachida had gotten pregnant, he had already tired of her and moved on, and anyway he was preoccupied with his political work, with the petitions he and Rafael were drafting, the cases they wanted to bring to court, the articles on workers’ rights that they were trying to publish. He had given Rachida the money for the abortion, and she had disappeared from the house almost overnight. Of course, he had never asked his mother about it — it was not something you talked about — and Malika had no idea; she was on bed rest. In this way, Nabil had willed himself to forget about this pregnancy, relegating it to a deep, dark corner of his mind that would have remained unexplored had this young man not come today to point the light of his existence in its direction.

They sat at a corner table at La Mouette, with a view of the Atlantic. La Mouette was one of the few places he went to on his own or with friends, but never with his wife — it was a refuge from the world over which Malika presided. He looked at his menu in silence, reading and rereading the seafood specials without being able to parse the phrases. What was happening in the world? One minute he was bemoaning the fact that he had an only daughter, and the next this young man walked in. If he were a religious man, he might have called it a miracle, but he liked to think of himself as a rational man: it was a coincidence.

The waiter came, and Nabil ordered the first item on the list. Now, with the menus out of the way, there was nothing to do but look at Youssef. There was so much he wanted to ask: where he had grown up, where he lived now, what he studied, what he liked to do, whether his mother had married — so much to find out about this young man, his son. (The words forced themselves on his brain like intruders breaking open a door: My son .) Yet, selfishly, the most pressing question on his mind was the most prosaic. “How did you find me?” he asked. “Did your mother send you?”

“The phone book,” Youssef said with a contented smile. “And no, she didn’t send me. She doesn’t even know about this.”

The reassurance filled Nabil with relief. Whatever it was that this boy wanted, it would be more easily handled if Rachida was out of the picture. For a moment he reveled in the thought that they were the only two people who knew about their filial bond. He began to relax.

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

Nineteen years. And all this time—

“What about you?” Youssef asked.

How impertinent. Asking an older man like him about his age. He answered nonetheless. “Forty-nine.”

“So you were thirty when …” Youssef’s voice trailed off.

Nabil looked away. He did not know what to say.

The waiter arrived with their drinks. Youssef took the straw out of his glass of Coca-Cola and set it aside, while Nabil rattled the ice cubes in his scotch and soda. “How do I know you’re who you say you are?” he asked, still unable to use the words that banged around in his head. My son. My son .