Laila Lalami - Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

“Cheating at the exams? This is how you repay us after all the sacrifices we’ve made for you?” Larbi said.

“W-what?”

“How will I ever be able to show my face at the Ministry?” he shouted. “My own daughter is caught cheating at the exams!”

“I was just trying to help Faten. She didn’t know the answers—”

“Help her? You think this is a word game?” Salma asked. “You didn’t help. You cheated.”

“I–I couldn’t say no. She begged me.”

“You lecture us about right and wrong and then you cheat at your exams. Have you ever opened the Holy Book or do you get everything secondhand from Faten?” Salma asked.

“If I ever hear one more word about that damn girl, by God, I’ll lock you up in your room,” Larbi said. “I won’t have a word said about my reputation, do you hear me?”

“Everybody cheats. Everybody.” Noura looked him straight in the eye, and he couldn’t hold her stare. He’d always kept the favors he did for his friends quiet, but now he suspected that she knew somehow.

“That doesn’t make it right,” Salma said.

Noura disappeared in her room for two days after that, reappearing only to watch a TV program on religion and jurisprudence called Ask the Mufti. She’d never missed an episode. She would come in and sit in the family room when the program was on, her eyes riveted on the screen. People phoned in with various questions, from the serious (“What is the proper way of calculating the zakat alms?”) to the simple (“How do I complete the pilgrimage?”), and Noura watched it all. Today someone phoned in to ask, “Is the use of mouthwash permissible even though it contains alcohol?” Noura looked at the old mufti with great anticipation. Salma abruptly took hold of the remote control and changed channels. When Noura called out in surprise, Salma said, “I can’t believe you’re interested in silly details about mouthwash when you can’t even see anything wrong with cheating at exams.” Larbi laughed, but he was overcome by bitterness. If only he could get that damn girl away from his daughter, perhaps he might be able to convince Noura to go visit her aunt in Marrakech — a stay in the southern city might do her some good. But first he had to deal with Faten once and for all. He picked up the phone. The exams were still being scored, and there was still time to act. He needed someone trustworthy to deal with Faten, and he knew Raouf would not let him down.

LARBI SAT AT HIS wife’s vanity, trimming his mustache, while Salma folded the laundry. He suddenly felt nostalgic and wanted to ask her about those heady days in the seventies when they were both young and the world was open before them and they had big dreams of setting it right. He had started out as an educator and she as a lawyer, but while she still spent her days trying to help clients, he had moved on to administrative positions and had been unable to resist the temptations that came with them. What had happened to him, he wanted to ask. He felt he had failed, though he didn’t know when that had happened. He heard a knock on the door. It was Noura. “I passed my exams,” she announced, smiling.

“Mbarek u messud,” Salma said flatly, then resumed folding the clothes. Normally, she would have hugged Noura; she would have put her hand around her upper lip and let out several joy-cries, but now she sounded no happier than if her daughter had told her she’d successfully hung a painting.

“Baba, I have a favor to ask,” Noura said. Larbi put down his scissors and turned to face her. “There’s been a problem. Faten flunked her exams …” Her voice trailed off.

“And?” Larbi asked, unsurprised.

“Well, she already flunked them last year, so this means she’s expelled now. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do.”

Salma stood, hanger in hand, and pointed it at Noura. “Where are you going with this?” she asked.

“What’s going to become of her? There are so many unemployed college graduates, but without a diploma, her chances of ever finding a job … It’s so unfair—”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with me,” Larbi said.

“I thought perhaps you could sort it out. You have connections, and she asked me to see if you could help out,” Noura said. Her eyes shifted away from him for a moment and then settled on him again.

Larbi smiled bitterly. Here she was, the purist, the hard-liner, the anticorruption activist, but in the end, she wanted her friend to get special treatment, just like everyone else. “No more talk of meritocracy?” he asked. Noura looked down. He paused to savor the moment, however fleeting he knew it would be. How many times had she rebuffed him when he asked her to take that damn scarf off and go back to the way she was? What of his dream to see her in cap and gown at NYU? His heart ached just to think of it. Now it was her turn to be on the asking end. “I don’t think it’ll be possible. It would require breaking the law. Utterly un-Islamic, as you well know,” he said.

“When you play with fire, you get burned,” Salma said as she closed the wardrobe doors. Noura stared at her angrily and then left the room.

Larbi turned around on the stool and looked at his reflection in the mirror for a while. He, too, had played with fire, but maybe he’d already been burned. When he reached for the scissors again, he noticed a velvet pouch tossed in the middle of the perfume bottles. He took it in his hand and opened it. In it were the prayer beads that had broken, years ago, it seemed, and which Salma had saved here for him. He couldn’t help but think about his mother, for whom virtue and religion went hand in hand, about a time when he, too, believed that such a pairing was natural.

“I know I shouldn’t be happy about someone’s misery,” Salma said. “But I’m glad Faten was expelled. At least now Noura won’t be seeing as much of her at school.”

Where had he gone wrong? He had always had Noura’s best interests at heart. What was so bad about her life before? She had it all, and she was happy. Why did she have to turn to religion? Perhaps it was his absences from home, his fondness for the drink, or maybe it was all the bribes he took. It could be any of these things. He was at fault somehow. Or it could be none of these things at all. In the end it didn’t matter, he had lost her again, and this time he didn’t dare hope for someone to return her to him.

“Do you think that’ll help?” Larbi asked his wife.

Salma shook her head. “I don’t know.”

THE DAY AFTER MAATI beat her with an extension cord, Halima Bouhamsa packed up some clothes and took the bus to her mother’s house in Sidi Beliout, near the old medina of Casablanca. The cord had left bubbly welts on her arms and face, and she couldn’t hide them under her housedress. She arrived at the door of the studio apartment, a packet of La Ménara tea in her hand as an offering, and stood for a moment, hesitant. Her mother wouldn’t be happy to see her, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. She knocked.

“Again?” said her mother, Fatiha.

Halima didn’t even nod. She walked past Fatiha and into the studio, where the smell of camphor balls from the previous week’s cleaning lingered in the air. Stripes of sunlight came through the closed shutters, making a hazy grid on the bare floor. On the far wall was a sepia photograph of Halima’s father, the only inheritance he had left behind after years of struggle with lung cancer. A portable TV sat in the corner, a gift from Halima’s brothers, both emigrants to France. She dropped her bag on the floor and walked over to the narrow kitchen.

“What happened this time?” Fatiha asked.