Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

Silence returned to the room. I poked my head outside the bathroom and looked at Bahia apprehensively. She was sitting down, holding the paper in both hands and smiling, the smile of someone who understands and does not understand at the same time. When she turned her head and saw me staring at her, she quickly folded the paper and said in an irritated tone, ‘What wonderful bullshit!’

Ibrahim al-Khayati became the cornerstone of my relationship with the world for different reasons. When I was a member of the party organisation, he was both close to us and distant at the same time. He financed our cultural magazine and helped run it without seeking some of the minor glories that went with the territory. He was not affected by the arrests of the 1970s, but remained our strongest supporter. Generally, there was nothing in the practical part of my life that did not include Ibrahim. I could almost say that I never took a decision that needed insight without Ibrahim being a key factor.

It was natural, therefore, that he was the third person to read the letter on Yacine’s death, and then, as a lawyer, that he represent Bahia and me in the subsequent investigation into Al-Qaeda’s activities in Morocco. Since the letter had been delivered locally, it suggested that the group that had received the news was a local organisation. It also implied that Yacine had been in touch with this organisation before he left, and might even have been sent by that same organisation to Afghanistan. This clearly meant that other members of a sleeper cell were awaiting orders to depart or participate in attacks on home soil.

When a Fes group was arrested following the assassination of a French tourist, it was believed that someone from that group had brought the letter to my house. From the moment Ibrahim started providing me with information about Yacine’s direct links with flesh-and-blood terrorists — fellow citizens, not phantoms from Kandahar — I fell victim to destructive anxiety. I could not bear the idea that Yacine had joined Al-Qaeda while he was living with us, mad about electronic games, annoyed at our political discussions, always ready to poke fun at us and everything else. The possibility of that deception made me doubt everything. Ibrahim tried to make me stop believing that Yacine had deceived me, insisting that every one of us proceeds towards our fate unable to distinguish the things we use to deceive ourselves from those others use to deceive us.

In the early years of our acquaintance, Ibrahim had been the thread that bound our group. He had served as a romantic go-between, capable of solving the most complex love-related problems, particularly since the great esteem he enjoyed among women made them confide their secrets and stories in him. He was not known to have had a special relationship with a woman, and it was rumoured that he was gay. This did not upset him, and he did not deny it. He would bring his friend Abdelhadi, an ’aytah artist who sang at the Marsawi nightclub in Casablanca, to our soirées; both were welcomed with smiles that soon faded into a tolerant complicity that Ibrahim’s sparkling yet modest personality inspired. After a brilliant education in Rabat and Paris, Ibrahim had been able to set up a large law firm dealing in financial and corporate cases. He amassed a huge fortune that had allowed him to support a large number of painters, sculptors and actors.

Ibrahim chose to live with his mother, an extremely bright, traditional woman with multiple talents, and he was affluent enough to indulge his natural inclination to live in a house with open, complex spaces. We were very close. He was an avid reader, and there was not a book I read that he had not recommended.

Ibrahim would experience three serious traumas over as many years. The first was the suicide of Abdelhadi. He felt that the world had collapsed under his feet, and that he would keep endlessly plunging until he lost contact with everything around him. He felt he would continue falling, not quite touching something akin to the ground, until the void swallowed him anew. The reason for that feeling, as he explained to me later — after Yacine’s death — was not the death in itself, but his having failed to see it coming. He had not even once registered the suffering of someone close to him.

Ibrahim and Abdelhadi had created a kind of social accommodation that made it possible for them to coexist without serious compromises and without gratuitous stubbornness. Ibrahim arranged an independent life for his friend; he married him to a relative of his, and celebrated the birth of his twins, Essam and Mahdi, with boundless joy. Their relationship remained intimate and warm despite the sadness that resulted from the sensible arrangement of a life that defied organisation. Late at night, Ibrahim would swing by the club where Abdelhadi performed. He would sit in a discreet corner, soaring up to the heavens with his friend’s beautiful voice, amazed by the depth of the sadness revealed by a man who normally did not stop laughing and joking. As soon as he opened his mouth to sing, it was as if a dark breath filled with past tragedies rose within him and he would withdraw into the far regions of his inner self. At the end of his performance, Abdelhadi would stride across the hall filled with his fans, laughing resonantly, and walk towards Ibrahim’s table to spend the interval with him. They would make small talk, commenting briefly and elegantly on clothes, skincare products and seasonal dishes. They would talk about the twins and their mother Haniya, always silent and busy with the housework with a devotion that bordered on the religious. They exchanged tender words about absence and missing each other, and fixed or failed to agree on a date for an upcoming soirée. The following day Abdelhadi would stop by Ibrahim’s house and sit with his mother by the back door of the kitchen that overlooked the garden and tell her that artichokes were available at the central market. If Ibrahim’s name should come up, his face would light up, as if his blood were talking, not his tongue.

How could such apparent contentedness explode one day, to leave a hanged man dangling, and Abdelhadi of all people?

I, in turn, tried to convince Ibrahim that Abdelhadi would have done what he had done in any case, regardless of the simple or complicated nature of their relationship. He seemed to accept this, but his look was one of dark despair.

The second trauma occurred when Ibrahim was the victim of a vicious attack that almost cost him his life. He had left the commercial court building in Casablanca when two men stopped him. One said that he wanted to talk to him about an important and urgent matter, while the other wrapped his arm around his waist and pulled him forcefully towards him, saying, ‘An important personal matter.’ He was not fearful or concerned until he felt something sharp against his side. Things happened very quickly, but as Ibrahim attempted to shake free of the man, something cold pierced his stomach. Before he hit the asphalt like a heavy weight, something solid smashed into his face and another object caught his chest and head. As he was being kicked and stamped upon, he felt he was being shoved towards a thick fog which turned into darkness, stars and vivid colours. He heard someone ask for a stick, and the stick touched him or pierced him, he could not tell which. Soon he heard roaring laughter and had a distant impression that his whole body was coated in a stickiness that bit by bit turned into a confused consciousness within an extremely white and rainless cloud.

Ibrahim spent five weeks in hospital. All of us — his mother, Haniya and the twins, Ahmad Majd, Fatima, and myself — visited him every day, monitoring his condition that was critical until he had been through six operations. While he was in a coma, a leading newspaper published his photo under the headline: Lawyer Ibrahim al-Khayati Target of Assassination Attempt by Anti-Homosexual Group. When Ibrahim recovered, the police questioned him at length about his sexual orientation. He strenuously confirmed that he was straight, as he had done when interviewed after Abdelhadi’s suicide.