Tahar Ben Jelloun - A Palace in the Old Village

Brahim wouldn’t learn to read or write. He liked to drink beer and frequented Khadija, the whore who dyed her hair blond and called herself Katy. She wasn’t a bad woman, but she’d lost all her teeth, poor thing, in a fight with her pimp, and she worked as the cleaning lady in the bar where Brahim hung out. She was pitiful. Men didn’t want her anymore, so she drank to console herself, and on Saturdays she’d set herself up on the sidewalk at the Saint-Ouen flea market and use henna to “tattoo” girls’ arms and hands. She had a gift for delicately tracing arabesques on their skin.

Mohammed knew Khadija’s story but kept his distance, more from timidity than from any moral or religious disapproval. One day she came over to him as if she were drowning and desperate for help. He didn’t know what to do, especially when she kissed his hand. Seeing the anguish in her face, he slipped her some money, because he considered her an unlucky casualty of immigration. Then he thought about it and decided that her lot was her fate, that she would have gone bad even if she’d never left home. Everything is written. Nothing happens by chance — yet he also knew that people are responsible for their actions. He stopped and thought: If I go into this bar, get staggering drunk, and lose my human dignity, I am the guilty one, not God. If I do something stupid and make a ton of foolish mistakes, it’s my fault and mine alone; let’s leave God out of it. So if I keep walking along, if I slip on a banana peel and break my back, is it God who wanted me to crack in two? Or is the guilty guy the bastard who threw away the banana peel without a thought for passers-by who might snap their spines? No: one must simply be careful and watch one’s step. But after our ’tirement, aren’t we left in a bad way, in an unhealthy and woeful state? I mean, my muscles ache even though I don’t work anymore, my joints hurt, and my body feels battered by a strange fatigue, a tiredness I’ve never felt before, and it’s weird, because it comes from nothing: the nothingness that has taken over my life is beginning to eat away at my body. Life is hollowing me out. I’m in pain. I don’t complain, that’s not my style, but ever since I caught ’tirement, nothing goes right. I used to like my tiredness at day’s end when I came home. While I washed up, my wife would fix me a light supper; I’d see the children, and during the TV news programs drowsiness would steal over me. I’d fall into bed and a deep sleep. Now I miss that beautiful exhaustion. In its place is a more insidious, disturbing fatigue. I must be ill. One day the doctor at work told us, Listen carefully: if you wake up tired in the morning, that’s because something is wrong, it’s the sign of a hidden illness that doesn’t dare show itself. Maybe that’s it. But I don’t feel like consulting a doctor.

I’m a little ashamed when I think that I still rose at dawn when my ’tirement began, put on my work overalls, took my lunch box, and went off to the factory. It was automatic — I couldn’t break free of those actions I’d made part of my life, my body, my soul. (May God forgive me; I shouldn’t bring my soul into all this.) I’d get to the factory gate, stop short, and watch my comrades go in: happy, joking around, ready for a long and good day’s work. I felt mortified. They didn’t understand why I kept coming back, and I didn’t feel like talking to them, explaining or justifying myself to anyone. Then there’s my wife. She didn’t say anything but gave me peculiar looks. What was I going to do now with my grey overalls, my lunch box, my protective goggles, my papers, my endless days off, all this time crashing down on me like a pile of rubble? I can’t even bequeath it all to one of my children — not that they’ve noticed that I’ve fallen into ’tirement. They ask me no questions, drop by briefly and head out again without paying any attention to how I feel. Watching them, I can’t manage to see their own children treating them the same way. Everything changes. It’s hard to accept that we can find ourselves so quickly in a different world. Our forefathers didn’t prepare us, told us nothing. They’d never have imagined that men would leave their land to go abroad.

When Mohammed thought about it, he became convinced that ’tirement had killed Brahim. He’d seen him wandering the streets, drinking at Katy’s place, stumbling and weaving whenever he decided to go home. His wife had gone back to Morocco, influenced by that same Allam who’d had a hold on Mohammed’s wife and eldest daughter; the man was a marriage counsellor as well as a sorcerer, and he’d encouraged Brahim’s wife to go home to her village to protect herself against that man-eating witch Khadija: You see, she’s a wreck, poor thing, so you’d best avoid her, take your husband and go back home where at least there’s no bar, no alcohol, no Katy. Your husband is bored, and now that he no longer works he’s always shacked up with that pitiful woman, but you, if you want to get your man back, you must take things boldly in hand. Here is a talisman to put in your purse and here’s another to sew into the inside pocket of Brahim’s jacket: these should help the both of you. But as you know, everything is in the hands of Almighty God!

Brahim refused to follow his wife. He found, tore up, and stamped on the bit of cloth sewn into his jacket. You tried to cast a spell on me? Well, I piss on it, your spell! Go, get out! Go back home to your parents, leave me alone. I’m tired.

Brahim found himself all alone in their half-empty apartment. Dirty laundry piled up in a corner of the living room. His wife had taken the family photos, but one picture remained, hanging on a wall, a photograph of a snowy landscape, perhaps some Swiss or Canadian mountains, and it was nice to look at in that apartment stripped of every reminder of his native land. Both his children lived and worked abroad and used to call now and then, until the phone was cut off. Unpaid bills, unopened letters. Brahim was letting himself fall apart. When he had a liver attack and screamed in pain, neighbours called a doctor, who sent him to the hospital. There he called for his children, whose phone numbers were in a notebook, but he had no idea where it was. The pain was so awful he couldn’t remember things from moment to moment. When Mohammed came to visit, he found him frighteningly pale, thin, with jaundiced eyes and dry lips. Brahim had lost the will to live. Mohammed told him their religion forbade that and recited a few verses from the Koran that he knew by heart. Gripping the patient’s arm, he bent to kiss him on the forehead, and when he straightened up, tears coursed down his cheeks. After staying a moment longer, Mohammed went on his way, thinking about his own death. So much loneliness, ingratitude, and silence left him speechless. Where had the man’s brothers gone, his friends, his companions in misfortune? Was that how immigrants took leave of this world? That solitude stank like a mixture of medicine and whatever was stalking them, these poor souls whom no one had warned about the way they would end their lives.

MOHAMMED WAS THINKING about his retirement again and feeling sick. When his saliva dried up, he would drink a few glasses of water. It wasn’t diabetes that was attacking his body but his recent retirement, the idea of retirement, which obsessed him, bringing him dark visions. The Chaabi bank, on the avenue de Clichy, had just sent him the annual form to renew his insurance for “repatriation of the body,” and Mohammed took it as a sign, a bad coincidence. Haunted by his fear of dying far from his native land, he saw himself draped in a white sheet at the morgue, his body lying there for several days due to administrative problems, and then he saw himself in a coffin, sent to Morocco with other merchandise, and his friends collecting money for the family — he saw all this in such detail that his skin crawled.