Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘Why are you looking at me like that? You have not been assigned a mission and you are not anybody’s messenger. You just gave birth to a naïve angel who flew from the Trocadero to Kandahar, certain of his return.

‘Tell me, you who understand everything, what are twenty years? Almost nothing! Why don’t we start from zero?’

I wanted to touch his cheeks, but I only caught the smile that accompanied the movement of my hands. I opened my eyes to the darkness of the room and distant voices coming from the ground floor. I forced myself to get up and go downstairs, but I was not able to answer my mobile phone, which had been ringing for more than an hour.

I drank a lot of water, then I asked Fatima and Ahmad if they had been talking from the moment we arrived. They said they had been.

Layla called at the same moment.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked tersely.

She replied meekly, ‘I’m just seeing how you are. Does that annoy you so much?’

I told her that I was very anxious because of the strange things happening to me with Yacine. She returned to the subject of Fatima and said she would like us all to meet in Rabat. I agreed and told her that I would have loved to be with her at that exact moment. I told her I missed her and I asked if she looked beautiful that day; she said she had done everything she could to look lovely. Then we said superficial things to each other that are usually said by teenagers. Before we even ended the call, I felt a heavy weight on my chest, as if I had failed to say or do something I should have. I found myself going towards the door, opening it and looking at the alleyway, which was filling up with new voices speaking various languages.

I looked at the wall opposite the big house and saw that the pigeon that had been agonising when we arrived had died. There was a green patch around its head from the fluid still oozing from its beak. I closed the door, and when I went through the kitchen I said to Ghaliya, ‘The pigeon has died!’ She told me that it had been folded in upon itself since the day before. I shook my shoulders and said, ‘At least it didn’t die by having its throat cut!’

She thought I was making a joke and replied, joking herself, ‘Unlike the pigeons I’m preparing for dinner. Sidi Ahmad spent the whole morning cutting their throats. They were flapping their wings and squawking, thinking he was about to feed them. Poor birds. Nothing frees them from the human except death.’

I collapsed on the sofa. I was about to ask Ahmad about his new property development projects when my phone rang again. It was Ibrahim al-Khayati, who told me in a shaky voice with a weepy tone that Essam had been missing for two days. I asked some questions and then shut up. Ibrahim said Mahdi was almost deranged and that he did not know what to do. I was upset by the news and told him that I would come either that same day or early the next.

Dinner was chilly. We talked in subdued voices as if we were afraid of waking someone up. After dinner we split into two groups: Ahmad Majd’s guests, who loudly discussed the fate of the land in the city centre that had been bought by the Jawhara Group, and a small group consisting of Fatima, Ahmad Majd and me, who briefly discussed various scenarios for Essam’s disappearance, including the more tragic ones. But Ahmad scolded us, saying we were the kind of people who would bury a person before he was dead. We did not disagree.

On her way to her room, Fatima said, ‘There’s no need to panic. Bad news always travels fast.’

We took the six a.m. train to Casablanca, and when it started off Fatima said she had not slept a wink the previous night. I told her, ‘Try to sleep. We have a long day ahead of us.’

I picked up the newspapers and saw Essam’s picture on the front page of the paper I worked for. I raced through the article and learned some details about the various possibilities the police were considering. Among them were kidnapping by a fundamentalist Islamic group, a settling of scores among alleged devil worshippers, or an escape abroad following a period of psychological instability. Then I read Ibrahim al-Khayati’s appeal to Essam, asking him to think about his mother, who had lost her ability to speak since hearing the news of his disappearance. I shared all this with Fatima, whose eyes were closed, but she did not react.

I was engrossed in reading an article about a property developer’s denial of reports he had bought state-owned land for a nominal price, when Fatima said, ‘I find Ibrahim’s appeal in the paper strange.’

I waited for her to elaborate but she did not. I said, ‘If Essam learns that his mother is in a critical condition because of him, he will return quickly.’

‘And if he doesn’t know?’

‘It would mean that something has happened to him.’

‘Or that he didn’t read the papers,’ she added.

‘Do you think Ibrahim concocted this on his own?’

‘I don’t think anything. It’s as if I were in a movie!’

‘But you’re right about there being something strange in Ibrahim’s appeal. Why does he say Haniya lost the ability to speak after her son’s disappearance? Have you ever heard her talk to anyone?’

‘Of course she spoke, gossiped, joked and laughed. She just didn’t do it with everybody or in a group.’

I wondered if the allusion to Essam’s psychological instability was not in fact a reference to the uneasy relationship between Ibrahim and the children of his former lover. Fatima said that people’s gossip would tear everything to pieces.

She then sat up, refusing to sleep, and said, ‘My problems seem so trivial compared to what happens to others!’

I smiled in an effort to encourage her to speak, but she digressed. She explained that her separation from her Kosovar lover was unbearably painful, even though she was determined and convinced, and her decision was final. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get over this hurt,’ she said. ‘It’s a feeling of profound loss that will mark all my life. Imagine, I got pregnant twice in succession. The first time I lost the baby ten weeks before the due date. There was no sign of anything unusual until I woke up one night, swimming in my waters. I visited the doctor ten times a month and everything was as it should be. There were no signs of anything being wrong, and the baby was fine. Then I suddenly went into labour and the baby was born alive and died before my very eyes. It was stretched out to its full length in that illuminated unit, awash with all the tears in my body.

‘You know what? My body rejected that baby of its own accord, without any interference from me, as if it knew the violence of this stupid impregnation.

‘Then one day I knew I had been wrong from the outset. It was as if I had gone down, very fast, from the seventh floor to meet a man I was waiting for. I went with him. I ate and drank with him and made love with him. Then I became pregnant and I had an abortion. I read, stayed out late, danced, travelled and then I suddenly discovered that he wasn’t the one!’

‘But where’s the man you have been waiting for?’ I asked her.

She looked long into my eyes and smiled. ‘You?. .?One day I will kill you!’ she said. We laughed for the first time in a day.

We entered Ibrahim al-Khayati’s house hoping that Essam had returned, ending the ordeal. But when we walked into the living room, we were overwhelmed by the gloomy atmosphere and abandoned our hopes. Layla was the first to greet us; her eyes were red and swollen. Ibrahim on the other hand remained in his seat, absent-minded, staring at the empty space of the room. When we greeted him, he did not seem to recognise us.

We spent the rest of the morning in anxious conversations with Mahdi and Ibrahim and some of the young men of the band who had not stopped visiting the family. As for Haniya, she remained in bed as if in a coma. The only time she lost her temper was when Ibrahim touched her cheek in an attempt to rouse her from her despondency.