Laila Lalami - Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Tawfiq looked disappointed, and he stared at Larbi for a long minute. “I understand,” he said. “That’s why I’ve come to you.”

Larbi sighed. He didn’t want to disappoint his friend, and anyway, what sense did it make to refuse a favor to a department head in the Sureté Nationale? “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Moving Tawfiq’s niece up the list would require creative handling of the paperwork. He’d have to be discreet.

Afterward, Larbi swiveled in his chair and put his feet on the desk, crossing them at the ankles. He looked out the window at the row of eucalyptus trees outside and thought again about his mother, her benevolent face appearing in his mind’s eye. He lit a Marlboro and inhaled slowly. Times were different now. He didn’t create the system; he was just getting by, like everyone else. He turned to face his pile of dossiers.

WHEN LARBI GOT HOME that night, there was a nice surprise waiting for him on the console — a rare letter from his son, Nadir, who was studying electrical engineering in Québec. Larbi stepped inside the living room and sat on one of the leather sofas, moving a white-and-pink silk cushion out of the way. Two years ago, Larbi’s daughter, Noura, had taken up silk painting and, besides cushions, had made scarves, handkerchiefs, and watercolors. The results of her labor were scattered around the house. Larbi had thought that she’d taken a serious interest in decorative arts, but it turned out to be nothing more than a high school fad, and all the brushes and bottles of paints she’d insisted on buying were now in a plastic bag somewhere under the kitchen sink.

Larbi opened the letter. These days, Nadir sent only hurried e-mails with scant details of college life. Whenever he wrote real letters, it was to ask his parents for money. This one was no different — he wanted 10,000 dirhams to buy a new laptop. Larbi shook his head. Nadir would probably spend it on CDs or a weekend out of town. But he didn’t mind, so long as the boy did well in school, and he always did. Larbi loved to think of his son’s future and of the position Nadir would be able to get with an engineering degree, especially one from abroad.

Larbi walked through the corridor to Noura’s room. He thought for a moment that she wasn’t home, because her stereo wasn’t blaring rock music, as it usually did, but he heard voices and so he knocked. Noura opened the door. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt with glittery letters spelling out the name of a rock band. Her hair fell in curly cascades on her shoulders. She looked at her watch. “It’s already six-thirty?” she said, sounding surprised.

“Look what I got for you,” Larbi said, handing her some magazines he’d bought on his way home.

“Thanks, Papa,” Noura said. She took the magazines from him, and when she stepped aside to drop them on her desk he saw her friend, a girl who sat on the chair by the window, her hands folded on her lap. She wore a gray, pilled sweater and an ankle-length denim skirt, and her hair was covered in a headscarf. Noura introduced her as Faten Khatibi, one of her classmates at the university in Rabat. Noura was supposed to have gone to NYU, but her scores on the standardized TOEFL exam were not high enough, and so she had to take a year of English at the public university. She was going to apply again in December. The delay had left her somewhat depressed, and the feeling was compounded by her loneliness — most of her friends from the private French lycée she’d attended had gone on to universities abroad.

Larbi stepped into the room and cheerfully extended his hand to Faten, but Faten didn’t take it. “Pardon me,” she said. Her eyes shifted back to Noura and she smiled. Larbi dropped his hand awkwardly by his side. “Well.” There was unpleasant pause; Larbi could think of nothing to say. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

As he went toward the kitchen to get a drink, Larbi heard the key turn in the lock. His wife, Salma, walked in, her leather satchel on one arm and a set of laundered shirts on the other. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “The judge took a long recess.” Larbi took the shirts from her, dropping them on a chair in the foyer. He asked her who Noura’s friend was. Salma shrugged. “Someone she met at school.”

“She’s not the type of girl I’ve seen her with before.”

“You mean she’s not an enfant gatée?” Salma gave him a little ironic smile. She had little patience with Noura’s friends, private-school kids who spent most of their time worrying about their clothes or their cars. Years ago, Salma had disapproved of the idea of Noura’s going to a French school, and Larbi himself had occasionally felt guilty that his own daughter was not part of the school system he helped to administer. Yet he had insisted; his daughter had so much potential, and he wanted her to succeed. Surely even an idealist like Salma could understand that.

“I just don’t want her to mix with the wrong type,” he said.

“She’ll be fine,” Salma said, giving him that woman-of the-people look she affected from time to time and which irritated him supremely — just because she took on several cases every year for free and was active in the Moroccan Association of Human Rights didn’t mean she knew any better than Larbi.

FATEN BECAME A REGULAR visitor in Larbi’s home. He grew accustomed to seeing her hooded figure in the corridor and her shoes with their thick, curled soles outside Noura’s door. Now that Noura spent so much time with her, Larbi watched Sunday-afternoon football matches by himself. This week his beloved FUS of Rabat were playing their archrivals, the Widad of Casablanca. Salma, for whom football was only slightly more exciting than waiting for a pot of tea to brew, went to take a nap. When Larbi went to the kitchen at halftime to get a beer, he heard Faten’s voice. “The injustice we see every day,” she said, “is proof enough of the corruption of King Hassan, the government, and the political parties. But if we had been better Muslims, perhaps these problems wouldn’t have been visited on our nation and on our brethren elsewhere.”

“What do you mean?” Noura asked.

“Only by purifying our thoughts and our actions …”

Larbi walked a few steps down the hallway to Noura’s open door, which she promptly closed when she saw him. He retreated to the living room, where he smoked his Marlboros, drank more beer, and barely paid any attention to the rest of the match.

Immediately after Faten’s departure, Larbi knocked on Noura’s door to ask what their conversation had been about. He stood close to her, and she wrinkled her nose when he spoke. His breath smelled of alcohol, he realized, and he stepped back.

“Nothing, Papa,” she said.

“How can you say ‘nothing’? She was here for a while.”

“We were just talking about problems at school, that sort of thing.” She turned around and, standing over her desk, stacked a few notebooks.

Larbi stepped in. “What problems?”

Noura gave him a surprised look, shrugged, then busied herself with inserting a few CDs in their cases. On the wall above her desk was a silk painting of a peony, its leaves open and languid, its center white and pink. Larbi stood, waiting. “She was just telling me how last year some students didn’t even sit for final exams, but they passed. I guess they bribed someone on the faculty.”

“What would she know of such things?” asked Larbi, frowning.

Noura heaved a sigh. “She has firsthand experience. She flunked last year.”

“Maybe she didn’t work hard enough.”

Noura looked up at him and said in a tone that made it clear that she wanted him to leave after this, “The kids who passed didn’t, either.”

“She can’t blame her failure on others.”