Tahar Ben Jelloun - A Palace in the Old Village

WHEN THE TRAIN STOPPED in the middle of the countryside, putting an end to his dream, Mohammed stood up to stretch his legs and looked out at the sky. The moon shone so intensely that some of the shooting stars seemed, in its brilliant whiteness, like drops of water from a summer rain shower. Mohammed began to pray, to thank God for having helped him escape ’tirement by giving him a good idea to keep him busy. He felt proud and, above all, impatient. Time was flying by; he had to get to the village quickly and immediately call the master mason, Bouazza, to set him building again. When the train began to move once more, Mohammed sank into a contented drowsiness in which he saw himself surrounded by all his dear ones as the seasons rolled by. He gave a colour to each season: white for summer, a greyish blue for autumn, luminous green for winter, golden yellow for spring. He liked painting time with colours. Now that he’d left France, the colours had come back. And music, too.

When Mohammed disembarked at Tangier, he had to wait a while for the afternoon bus to Casablanca. Leaving his suitcase in a locker, he took a walk along the sandy coast road. Everything had changed since his first discovery of the sea. Young men were playing soccer or loitering nearby; a few beggars stopped him, and he gave them some coins. Around him he saw more and more buildings under construction. Mohammed sat down at a café and was approached by a salesman: You want to buy an apartment in one of these fine buildings? Ten thousand dirhams a square metre! It’s a good buy: you choose from the blueprint, then move in a year later with everything — running water, electricity, television, telephone, and even the Internet, everything! You give me a down payment, I give you a receipt, and next year we meet again in this café, right here at this table. Is it a deal? No, thanks.

In the meantime, at least ten beggars had passed by with their hands out: women with babies, cripples, healthy young people, elderly folks showing him crumpled old drug prescriptions. There are more and more of them, Mohammed thought. This country has lost its pride — it’s overwhelming, there are too many beggars, too much corruption and injustice, and the longer it goes on, the more it becomes too much.

Thinking about the journey still ahead of him, Mohammed figured he would arrive home at last in a day and a half, thirty-six hours if all went well: Tangier to Casa, wait; Casa to Agadir, wait; Agadir to home in a taxi. Wait, wait, patience, patience! That’s what he’d been told in Mecca: As-sabr ya Hajj! Patience, Hajji! The magic formula. He had learned patience during the pilgrimage but had lost it over time, becoming anxious and trying hard to hide it. Now Mohammed felt a tiny flame of anger flare up in him again: Why did they burn my car? Why didn’t the insurance company give me anything, not even enough to rent another one while the government found a way to help those thousands of people who lost their cars, which they often needed for their jobs? Then Mohammed remembered that he hadn’t had the presence of mind to correct the insurance guy when the fellow had put the blame on immigrants. Those youngsters who torched cars and set public buildings on fire are not immigrants! They’re probably — maybe definitely — the children of immigrants, but they aren’t immigrants ! Even the TV had talked about immigration. There was nothing normal, nothing fair about all this. The only thing Mohammed knew for sure was that he’d had nothing to do with it, and neither had his children.

Bouazza, the master mason, had moved to Marrakech and was busy with several building sites at the same time. He had grown rich and hard to get hold of, having evidently forgotten where he came from. Once he reached home, Mohammed forgot about Bouazza and called upon his many nephews and cousins, who set to work. He recovered the energy of his youthful days, and his worries were erased by concrete and whitewash. Neighbours came to see this strange, shapeless building so unlike their own homes, and after asking a few questions, they went away wondering if Mohammed had lost his mind. He was definitely losing weight, sleeping next to the building materials, not taking care of himself. He had paid an architect to draw up plans, but instead of using them the mason was following the instructions of Mohammed, who wasn’t managing to explain very well what it was he wanted.

He kept saying, I want a big house, bigger than all the poky houses in the village, a house as big as my heart. People should be able to see it from far away and say that’s where Mohammed lives with his whole family — I mean, with all his children. Yes, my children will come live with me here, in these infinite spaces. My children and grandchildren. It will be the house of happiness, of harmony and peace!

Mohammed would fall silent, wondering if he’d gone too far. He had become unrecognisable, while the house had lost all sense of proportion, all logic, except, perhaps, that of Mohammed’s obsession: to reunite the entire family beneath this roof resembling the lid of a giant cooking pot in which nothing was in its right place.

After five months, the house was almost ready, although it still needed painting, shutters, windows, and all those details that make a place habitable. To keep it a surprise, Mohammed hadn’t told any of his children about the house. Actually, he’d been afraid they might discourage him, since they were used to speaking their minds and would have wounded him with their words, so he didn’t want to know what they thought, preferring to astonish them.

His wife had rejoined him, and she knew that her husband was making a mistake, feeding on illusions, but she kept quiet, as usual. She had realised long ago that her sons and daughters did not belong to them anymore: the children loved their lives and felt neither remorse nor regret. They had been whisked away by the whirlwind of France, and she had watched them go, knowing that she had no way to hold them back, to keep them close to her and her husband. She’d looked around and seen that, in one way or another, France swallowed up the children of foreigners. Actually, the reality was simpler: there was no plot, no trap, no aggressive wish to rob immigrants of their children, but it was only natural for kids to love their native land, and Mohammed’s wife knew she stood no chance against such an attachment. She did try to talk to her children, advise them, warn them to be careful, but they barely listened. The streets swept them away into adventure, toward new people and things and a life quite different from that of their parents: the auto plant, shift work, sadness and fatigue, the five or six weeks back in the village, the routines and cramped space of that life — none of it was really worth keeping, so they’d kept almost none of it. Find your own luck, choose your own fate.

But you don’t think about that if you’re a parent, you just get on with life, and then one day you realise the damage has been done. Fell off the truck! That was their mother’s favorite expression. She’d learned it by heart without knowing exactly what it meant. To her, it evoked the tiny accidents, the wounds of life, as if the family had been riding on a truck with a tendency to skid. Problems? Fell off the truck! And Mohammed, all the while, had been dreaming of building the biggest house in the village, just as in the old days. Forty years in France hadn’t changed him. Not one whit. He remained intact, inviolable, impeccable: naturally and hermetically sealed. Nothing of France had found a place in his heart or his soul. It hadn’t even been a conscious, deliberate decision. He was what he was; nothing could change him. There were millions like him. They emigrated as if encased in armour, fiercely resisting all outside influence: we have our lives, our ways, and they have theirs. Each to his own — no intrusion, no meddling. Mohammed never even lifted a finger to defend himself against what he called the contamination of LaFrance, for he was foreign, utterly unreachable. The village and its traditions back home lived on in him, coming between him and reality. He was in his world, where he lived without much introspection. His touchstone for everything was Islam: My religion is my identity. I am a Muslim before being a Moroccan, before becoming an immigrant. My refuge is Islam, which calms me and brings me peace; it is the last revealed religion, destined to close a lengthy chapter that God began a long, long time ago. Here they have their faith, and we have ours. We are not made for them or they for us. The contract is clear: I work, they pay me, I raise my children, and then one day we all go home to our house, yes, because the house is my country, my native land.