Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

It was my discovery of the Rif, its language, its places, its history and its people, in the heart of Frankfurt that took me back to the country I had left. I returned overflowing with forgiveness for Al-Firsiwi, his new wife and a half-sister who loved nothing more than contemplating my blue eyes and declaring them a glorious link with the civilised world. But after months in prison, the closure of his hotel and the myriad court cases, Al-Firsiwi had become a difficult man to deal with. After he went almost totally blind, he grew hot tempered, ready to engage in violent fights for the simplest of reasons. This made me consider him an integral part of my difficult return. I tried to spare him from becoming engaged in a new, tragic role, and I attempted to immerse myself gradually into his world without receiving from him the keys to that world.

Of all his ordeals, Al-Firsiwi’s arrest in what became known as the Bacchus case was the nearest thing to a personal mythology. On its account, he spent six months in prison and was subjected to torture during interrogation (which he could never face talking about) before the court acquitted him.

My father said that being found innocent was prima facie evidence of the justice system’s stupidity. He backed those words with a thousand arguments that incriminated him and proved his amazing success in pulling off a masterful theft that no one could solve. It was an honest robbery which he had not undertaken for monetary gain, but simply to humiliate the Romans and their modern allies.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what people say about you having stolen Bacchus and selling it to a rich German to ward off bankruptcy is a plausible explanation?’

‘Bullshit!’ replied my father. ‘Did I steal it? Yes I did. But sell it? No! I’m not a dealer in idols.’

‘What did you do with it?’

‘I buried it!’

‘Oh, Firsiwi, there’s no bigger idiot than you. Bacchus had been buried for centuries until French archaeologists and German prisoners of war came and excavated the city from the depths of the earth, and excavated Bacchus from the depths of the city. Then you come and steal it only to bury it again!’

‘Yes. And if I could have, I would have buried all of Walili and Zarhoun too!’ He added, laughing, ‘I buried it in the courtyard of an obscure mosque. I can just imagine the puzzlement of archaeologists in a few centuries’ time asking themselves what Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, was doing in the courtyard of the twenty-first century mosque of the Muslims of Zarhoun!’

Al-Firsiwi obtained a permit to work as an accredited tour guide for the ancient city of Walili thanks to his being found innocent of the Bacchus theft and his profound knowledge of Walili’s history and archaeology. He had painstakingly read ancient and modern texts and dig reports in search of — or so he claimed — a direct or indirect cause, foreknown to God, that had pushed him to undertake the robbery. Or to be unjustly and vindictively accused of having committed the robbery, as stated in the court’s verdict of innocence.

Al-Firsiwi’s personal path — the lives of his ancestors, the catastrophic years of Bu Mandara, the German period that culminated in his marriage to the beautiful post-office employee and his recent glories in the city of the founder of the Moroccan dynasty — did not qualify him to encounter the people and places of the site. How had it been possible for a person who witnessed the downfall of the Rif during war and famine and the death of Bu Mandara from poverty and immigration to end up in the ruins of Walili as a guide to a place that had died centuries ago?

Based on those questions, Al-Firsiwi had developed a theory that immigration was a worm that gnawed at the soul. Ever since he had opened his eyes in Bu Mandara, he had witnessed people tortured by the place they had left behind in the countryside, tortured by the place that was dying in their arms and tortured by the places they dreamed about emigrating to. He himself had spent ten years digging in the rock to immigrate to Germany, and when he finally arrived one snowy morning, he sat on a bench at the railway station trying to recall for the thousandth time the name of the city he was heading for. Disslutet, Disselcorf, Disselboot, Disselcokhat, Dissel, Düsseldorf. By God, it was Düsseldorf where Hamady Burro would receive him with the intention of marrying him to his spinster sister whose bones had dried out from the cold. He could wait, Al-Firsiwi thought suddenly. When he got his papers and hid them safely in his military coat, everyone would hear about the escapades of Al-Firsiwi resounding in the skies of Disselbone, Dissoltozt, Dissolbuf, Düsseldorf, yes Düsseldorf! It was enough for him to pronounce the name of that city three times to give him a monstrous erection.

Immigration was a dormant worm; it sucked and slept. When did it awaken? Al-Firsiwi believed it awakened when things settled down, when the winds were favourable, when the sails were full and the boat was gliding along. When Al-Firsiwi reached the highest heights, buying and selling and, after spending ten years at night-school, translating in the courts, buying property and earning as much as he could, and married the German Shajarat al-Durr!

That was when the worm awakened and whispered in his ear: Do you want to ruin your health for the sake of this race? Do you want your son to grow up as a Christian while all his ancestors, as far back as Abraham, carry the Qur’an in their hearts? Do you want to let the Sherifs humiliate the remaining members of your tribe? Do you want the city that contains relics of the prophets to become a den of sodomites, drug addicts and beggars?

The worm kept on whispering to him, day after day, and Al-Firsiwi put his trust in God and organised his reverse immigration. Diotima, who had kept the notebook of her grandfather who participated in Walili’s excavations with other German prisoners, also embraced the worm.

There they were, my friend, in the vastness of the zawiya , climbing from the courtyard of the tomb in the inner market to the courtyard of Khaybar where the municipal office was located. They went from one to the other, writing contracts, training brokers, bribing the weak and distracting the malicious.

Diotima embraced the new place like a forsaken paradise, sleeping with her grandfather’s secrets near the earth that he turned with his fingers, quietly cajoling the buried secrets, as if he had never crawled on his stomach in combat. Diotima wanted to take root in the blue mountain, and nurtured institutions in the city to help women, vaccinate children, improve education for girls and raise health awareness. She would go to the nearby villages and spend all her day visiting clusters of houses, where the inhabitants slept with their cows and goats and defecated behind their brick ovens while dogs and giant rats stole away the still-warm excrement from under them. There she supported projects for waste processing, fighting epidemics, treating spring water, collecting plastic and preserving the region’s orchards. Year after year, projects were born and died: new goat stock would arrive from the Iberian Peninsula, solar energy from charitable organisations in Germany, compost pits for waste that decomposed naturally. No matter who benefited, no matter who vandalised, no matter who resisted, Diotima failed to understand that this land would never accept the transplantation of her roots.

Finally she gave up and sat cross-legged on the throne in the reception hall of the Zaytoun Hotel, succumbing to a crushing sadness that erased all signs of benevolence from her face. The ardour she had lavished on the geography of the place, its produce and its crippled people had not provided her with so much as one drop of human affection. Whether recipients of her bounty or not, not a single heart held a trace of fondness, gratitude, recognition or appreciation for her. She was rowing upstream in a river of disgust and hatred that people expressed in various ways, from turning their heads away to invoking God’s help. Even when she was helping the civil protection teams in the city during the campaign to cure the pox that had spread in the region, some of the afflicted deliberately shook hands with her with excessive warmth, having scratched their skin for hours until their fingers and nails were covered with pus and scabs, in the hope of seeing this Christian woman contaminated. Whenever they saw her safe and healthy, mixing the powder with water and helping to treat the women, their anger grew, and they poured all their rage on the Germanic race that had produced both exceptionally resistant human beings and steel.