Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘You always look for the drama in every story,’ he replied.

‘You’re right! Really I should be celebrating the happy event.’

‘Or at least you should admit that you’re relatively lucky compared to Al-Firsiwi, who is still carrying my grandmother’s corpse on his back.’

‘We all carry a corpse of sorts on our backs.’

‘I hope you’re not alluding to me,’ objected Yacine.

I was overcome by a sudden fear, so I rushed to explain, ‘You’re not a corpse, as you well know.’

‘What will you do now? Tell me,’ he said.

‘I’ll make space for myself.’

‘Before you do, I want to involve you in an important matter,’ he said.

‘I hope it has nothing to do with preaching and guidance.’

‘No, but it’s a question of life and death.’

I left the café and Yacine went off without his last sentence provoking me. I was busy digesting my new circumstances, which obliged me to take care of a large number of formalities, not least among them finding an apartment where I could move my occasional dreams. Before doing anything else, however, I had to spend most of that day transferring myself, one piece at a time, from the material and the symbolic spheres, where I had spent a quarter of a century, to a sphere I would have to navigate in an unfamiliar boat. At the end of the day I left my office at the newspaper with the same feeling that I had experienced when I came to Rabat for the first time. I had told myself then that if I could spend a whole night in this city, I could remain here for ever.

I was still walking aimlessly when I called Fatima. I hung on to her voice with all my force. I told her, ‘If you can remain on the line until we meet at a restaurant, you’ll save me.’ But she didn’t, and we met half an hour later, during which time I felt I had aged a little.

I told Fatima what Bahia and I had done that day. Her eyes bulged but she did not comment. When I returned to the subject while we were eating, she begged me to talk about something else, because, as she put it, she did not want to say something harsh that evening. She talked at length about her anxieties over moving to Madrid. While I considered this reassignment a way to pull her out of a demoralising situation, she explained to me that it would open the door to numerous fears: fear of the new world, fear of return, fear of separation, fear of adventure, fear of accidents and the fear of dying all alone in her apartment.

I told her that there was no connection between all those risks and where we were. Then she told me that she sometimes wished she had emigrated twenty years ago. ‘There are things that we do badly, if we do not do them early in life.’

I asked her to help me with some of the arrangements I needed to make for Bahia, and we agreed to meet the following day in the office of our lawyer friend, Ahmad Majd.

When I arrived for our appointment the next morning, Ahmad was not as cheerful as usual. Fatima sat on the sofa facing his desk, and it looked like she had been crying. As soon as I began talking, Ahmad assailed me with criticism and sanctimony, and ended up telling me that my relationship with Fatima shouldn’t have destroyed such a major thing in my life.

‘What does Fatima have to do with the situation?’ I asked.

‘You certainly know that Bahia never considered your relationship with Fatima to be innocent,’ he explained.

‘And what do you know about all this? What do you know about my private life that gives you the right to make judgments about innocence and guilt?’

I said that in a state of great anger, as I was struck by a pernicious idea regarding Ahmad. When I calmed down I explained to him, while Fatima listened without looking at us, the essence of my relationship with Fatima. I told him, since he wanted to interfere, that our relationship existed in the narrow border between love and other emotions, that neither of us was ever able to cross that line and that we did not regret it. This might have been because at heart we did not need a love affair, but only this liberated bond that allowed us to understand each other in a sea of misunderstanding, where everybody appeared to be right and wrong at the same time.

At that moment Ahmad stood up behind his desk, adopting the stance of an intellectual about to issue a final word of wisdom, and said, ‘Do you understand now why I prefer prostitutes?’

I looked at Fatima and saw her mouth wide open, like mine. As our silence persisted, Ahmad added, ‘Because they are real beings, not literary creations like you two!’

This joke alleviated, somewhat, the meeting’s prevailing tension. We started discussing the separation and the material arrangements and their impact with as little emotion as possible. I gave Ahmad all the documents he needed to deal with the situation and then left to rent an apartment, since I had to leave our shared dwelling. The obvious place for me was the Ibn Sina district, and I went directly there. I found an empty apartment through an estate agent, in the very same building where I had lived years earlier. As soon as I entered one of the rooms and opened the window, I saw the garden fence and the body lit by the streetlamp that had crossed my imagination.

When I told Layla that evening about all these events, she expressed deep concern at what had happened. She was not interested in my return to the neighbourhood; she was concerned about my new life and how I would manage it and whether I would be psychologically affected by the end of my marriage. She was worried whether I would fall into the trap of guilt and self-reproach and would be depressed as a result of the loneliness that would hit me. I assured her that loneliness would not be anything unusual for me, and that I was not heading for a breakdown.

‘But you’ll have to organise yourself in a different way and take care of things you haven’t done before. Listen to me. You must hire a housekeeper to look after the household. I’ll look for someone to do that. This new situation shouldn’t be a reason for your health, your appearance or your spirits to deteriorate. Do you understand? I won’t allow you to turn into a slovenly bachelor, living in a filthy house and wearing creased shirts!’

I tried to point out the romantic aspect of my return to the building. But she did not give up and preferred to list the things the new apartment needed. Half an hour later she gave me another list, and a third one while we ate dinner.

As we were leaving the restaurant, Layla said she wished I could have fulfilled Bahia’s wish to give her a new baby.

Upset, I said, ‘What the heck? Do you also think I’m just a mechanism for impregnation?’

She rushed to catch a taxi and waved her hand in a cold farewell.

My acquaintance with Ahmad Majd dated back to the time I was living in Germany. One of the members of the organisation introduced him to me during an exploratory trip back to Morocco in preparation for my final return. He was a first-year law student then and lived with his Marrakech group in a small apartment in the Qubaybat district. He spent the whole night making fun of my rural German accent, and I was convinced that he had invited me merely for his friends’ entertainment. We nevertheless became friends, although politics and life sent us in different directions. Our relationship remained strong, despite being soiled by a single dark spot — the passing and flimsy connection he had with Bahia before our marriage. It bothered me once in a while, but I bore it with a candid patience until I could ignore it completely. I did not think he held a grudge towards me as a result.

He and others were imprisoned at the same time as I. While there, we interacted, dealing with whatever the place imposed upon us in the form of break-ups and contradictory feelings. I was among the first group to leave prison after three years of incarceration. I went back to visit him with our other friends, and we did all the small assignments he entrusted us with.