Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

‘Such as?’ I asked her.

‘I’m reluctant to say. I’m afraid a malignant worm has settled inside me and makes me smell foul things from a distance.’

We sat on the edge of her bed trying to organise our thoughts. Essam hated Ibrahim. He hated the idea of interacting with him as a father, and of Ibrahim interacting with Essam’s mother as a husband. He knew about Ibrahim’s homosexuality and about his relationship with his father, and this was unbearably embarrassing to him. His only outlet was showering Ibrahim with insults, curses and contempt. Layla said Essam had even slapped Ibrahim one day while they were in the swimming pool, and told him never to go in the pool while he was there. ‘I don’t want your body ever to get close to mine,’ Layla quoted Essam as telling Ibrahim. ‘You’re not a body but a moving brothel.’

‘Did he really say that? Did he actually slap him?’ I asked, stunned.

‘He did even more than that,’ Layla said. ‘Mahdi said one evening they were sitting in the garden with the rest of the band, practising a new song, when Ibrahim returned from an evening out. A bit tipsy, Ibrahim greeted the young men from behind the glass door of the living room before going to his room. At that moment Essam got up and walked towards him. Mahdi asked him what he was doing. He said casually, “I’m going to kill the bastard.” ’

‘So much hatred. As if Ibrahim had bred poisonous snakes in his bed and not innocent offspring,’ I said.

With frightening calm, Layla said, ‘That’s why I believe Ibrahim killed Essam in the swimming pool and buried him in the garden.’

I shivered with horror. What Layla was saying was consistent with the vague misgivings I had had for days that posed a possibility as horrific as it was unexpected. Ibrahim had enjoyed a calm life, removed from our anxious worlds, busy with the details of the life he loved, unassuming and without exhausting assumptions. I found myself visualising him burying his victim, then glumly sitting with us and deploring this disappearance. I imagined all the minor agonies that must have assailed him as he watched Essam grow hostile and Haniya come out of her shell. We used to meet and talk, and he may have mentioned once or twice issues with the twins, but we never had any idea of the fire that must have been consuming them. It seemed so easy for the beast to be born, and so simple to cross to the shores of hell.

I was overcome with a feeling of despair at how life found satisfaction only in destroying us, and had an overwhelming fear of being alone. I shared my thoughts with Layla, and she tried to console me by caressing my face and head, but I felt nothing.

She said without much enthusiasm, ‘You can stay here if you’re willing to get out of bed before six in the morning.’

I quickly undressed and lay down on her bed, certain she had saved me from unbearable suffering.

At work the following morning, I was busy writing a short article on how property and tourism funds were recovering debts owed by the property mafia, and was looking into the secret behind the ability of three big-shots to avoid repayment. Banks appeared to be negotiating easy terms for the debts of some of their clients, thanks to the sky-rocketing prices of the land mortgaged by the banks. I was embroiled in a heated discussion with the editor-in-chief, trying to convince him to publish the names of the three big-shots who refused to pay their debts in good times and bad, when I received a call from Ahmad Majd. Like a bucket of cold water being poured over my head, he told me that Ibrahim al-Khayati had been arrested and charged with killing Essam. I asked him, spontaneously, if the police had found the body in the garden.

‘There’s no corpse in this story,’ Ahmad Majd answered.

Al-Firsiwi sank into a state of despair. When my half-sister and her husband returned from overseas, he quickly sold them the hotel. His only condition was that he be allowed to recover the blue Roman pieces of mosaic remaining in the halls and on the walls. To that end, he spent almost six months sitting in the lobby of the hotel passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers. He would place the pieces he believed to be of genuine Roman origin in a bag beside him. His actions provoked the pity and scorn of the employees and the new owners. During that time he overheard all the plans for repairs, extensions, additions and alterations around the hotel. He wished he had the right and the energy to come up with different ideas; he could have made a thousand suggestions for changes and replacements. His son-in-law had entered into a partnership with the wife of a well-known government official. He heard the wife’s voice one day as she talked to the contractor about using the mosaic. He did not say a thing, but sang for more than one hour and in all dialects and keys, ‘Read the contract, my cousin.’

When he had finished collecting the tiles from the Roman mosaic, he put the bag on the back of a donkey and descended from the top of the hill in a noisy procession with villagers he had brought along. The procession entered Walili from the side of the Tangier Gate, then continued down the main street in the direction of Caracalla’s Arch, as if it were in a victory parade, returning from war. As he went, Al-Firsiwi reminded people of every twist and turn of his personal epic, from the day he took over the market with his German wife on his arm to the moment he returned the mosaic to the state, the very entity that had abandoned Juba’s kingdom. However the state did not stop at neglect and turning a blind eye to thieves, Al-Firsiwi said, but gave the governor free rein to plough corruption and reap the fruits. The wife of the genius wanted to decorate her swimming pool with the Roman mosaics, but Al-Firsiwi swore to God that she would never do it.

‘It is not enough to be a thief, my dears,’ he said. ‘You must have brains enough to differentiate between Roman mosaic and the tesserae of Bab Bardayin. Old man Firsiwi can do it by touch. When you tried to rob me last year, I made a point of crying over what I had lost in front of rich and poor. In reality, as soon as I touched the empty spots you left after the theft, my gloating heart danced with joy. You had taken nothing but the mud of the region covered with Fes blue.

‘How stupid that was. They are not coins that you would recognise easily, though your honourable husband has often mistaken a glob of spit for a silver coin from the Saadi period. It is mosaic, in other words, the splinters of the human soul scattered in God’s earth. It is the meeting point between water, clay and fire. It is the creative power of the imagination that transforms inert matter into the light that glows in the faces of water nymphs. You don’t get it? I will pay you a day’s wages simply for making up this parade and testifying that I turned over to the Moroccan state a part of the great heritage it has neglected.

‘This bag is full of broken faces, those of warriors, heroes, gods, women and beasts. It will soon be added to other bags and boxes also filled with faces and fragmentary bodies, abandoned in storage rooms where rats and grasshoppers play. See how great civilisations with their brilliant shapes, colours and beauty end up in the dark corners of those sons of bitches. So will be Al-Firsiwi’s civilisation, my brother, “yamis oma”, in the Berber tongue of eloquent ignorance. Behold the State of Al-Firsiwi, the state that gave this land the electric olive press and petrol pump, sulphur to treat the pox, the carob trade, the Zaytoun Hotel, the Cantina of the esteemed Bacchanalians, the war on plastic, the treatment of solid waste, beekeeping and the condom. This will all end up in fathomless darkness. The state that made you, riff-raff of forgotten tribes, a people to be reckoned with, the great State of Al-Firsiwi is today undertaking its last official act in this region. It is preceded by a magnificent donkey with a bag of another civilisation and another state on its back. To hell, O defeated state. Diotima’s smile in her final resting place bids you farewell.’