Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I told Fatima that I did not have the energy for such things any more. Her silence on the phone made me feel guilty, because I realised that her suggestion was a desperate cry for help.

At the end of the day I was walking in the crowded Al-Akary market, where all the activity connected to food reduced my anxiety, when I found myself face to face with the young man who resembled me. The first thing I saw was his wide smile, his happy expression. He surprised me with an exaggerated greeting. With a generous sweep of his arm, he stretched to embrace an embarrassed man walking past him.

He said, laughing, ‘This is my father, the one and only person legally responsible for this calamity,’ and pointed to himself proudly.

I too felt like laughing, but I controlled myself and said reproachfully, ‘That’s a cruel joke!’

He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Let go. Life is good. Let’s laugh.’

I lowered my head and left defeated, unable to pinpoint the nature of my feelings, which were a mixture of disappointment and boundless joy at my escape.

I told Layla part of the story in a somewhat humorous manner, but she found it very moving. She said she loved the young man as if he were my son or our son from a past relationship that had happened years ago. She liked the light-heartedness of the young man, who should have been burdened by the responsibilities of beginnings. When she asked me his name, I was surprised to realise I had neglected to ask him, as if I wanted the matter to remain a mere possibility. Layla — God knows what her feelings were — burst into tears and said she was very sad because we could not have a baby together. At that point, unaware of what made the issue so easy for me, I perpetrated the worst theft imaginable. I suggested to Layla, very simply, that we adopt a baby, with me as a hands-off father. I told her with neurotic insistence to keep the matter a secret, as if hoping secrecy would be tantamount to revoking the suggestion completely. She immediately busied herself with the most minute details of adoption, its rules and regulations and institutions, all the while asking the reason for my insistence on keeping it a secret, and wondering if I thought that revealing it would matter to her.

That was how Mai came into our life. We did not tell anybody that she was our daughter, but all our friends, including Fatima, understood. They refrained from commenting, except Bahia. She broached the subject indirectly with me two or three times, talking about Layla, expressing her strong admiration for her. She said that Layla had a certain purity that freed her of any doubt and that Mai was a symbol of that deep purity. On another occasion she asked me if I was convinced that a child could play a constructive role in a relationship. I told her that this might happen in reaction: when two people form a human being together, they indirectly re-form themselves. She told me that she had never felt that way either with me when we had Yacine or with Ahmad Majd and their baby daughter, Ghaliya. On another occasion she asked me if Mai had filled some of Yacine’s void.

‘No, never,’ I said, and I confessed to her that Yacine had not disappeared totally from my life. He had stayed with me for many years, taking part in some of my daily activities. When I saw her dumbfounded expression, I told her I did not mean it metaphorically, but that I really used to see and talk to him, before he disappeared again for good.

During this period of her life Bahia had settled into her new persona, a calm, relaxed woman who gradually put on weight until her body matched her new status. She put up a barrier of carefully studied interests, all dealing with charitable work, social ventures, and conservation of the malhoun heritage. There were also all the related social events, consisting of soirées in friends’ houses, in riyadhs and hotels, and everything else that burnished the halo around Ahmad Majd. Bahia did not seem enthusiastic about what she was doing, although she defended her husband and the real-estate boom that reflected the country’s excellent health. I saw her once adopt that position in her new house in Marrakech, and I was struck by how stridently she backed him. After the guests departed, I told her that nothing had called for such a response, especially seeing that Ahmad Majd was, as usual, countering the arguments with his usual caustic wit and sneering at his adversaries’ intellects. She nervously explained to me that she was not doing it for him but for herself.

Meanwhile, all Marrakech was talking about Ahmad Majd’s relationship with his private secretary. Going with her to hotels and restaurants was not enough any more, and she had started to accompany him on long trips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. She had returned veiled from her last trip to Saudi Arabia and had described at length and in a pious tone her umra with Hajj Ahmad.

Some of our friends were convinced that she was a second wife and that the concerned parties were keeping it secret. But Bahia did not reveal, either in her conversation or comportment, anything to confirm the existence of another marriage. Every now and again, all the players in the story — with its real and imagined aspects, the open and the hidden — would meet over couscous for Friday lunch, but no one seemed to know any more than anyone else.

Ahmad Majd told me about a real-estate scandal engulfing a luxury housing project in Tétouan built by the Sour al-Watani Group on land they had bought from a known drug dealer. After the project was inaugurated amid much fanfare, it was discovered that the land belonged to the state and had been sold using fake title deeds. This led to sweeping arrests in the ranks of the administration and courts ruled in favour of the state. The property developer had to pay for the land twice. That the elite inaugurated a project based on stolen land, as well as the involvement of numerous parties in underhand dealing, fraud and forgery, made the scandal blow up in public.

I said to Ahmad Majd that he must be happy with this turn of events, since the scandal involved his biggest competitor. He said quietly that he was not in competition with anyone, and added that his life and that of generations to follow him would not be enough to manage the success he had achieved. He said he had mentioned the issue because he was aware of the danger such corrupt deals posed to the future of democracy in Morocco. I could not help but bring up, laughing, the four hectares in the centre of Marrakech that he had bought from the state at a very low price, on the understanding that in return he would cover the cost of removing the inhabitants living on it. Once it was cleared, he sold the land at a price five times lower than the market value to a powerful group that did not dare acquire the land directly from the state. He did that in return for other sites in Marrakech and other cities at a token price. Was that not also a fraudulent deal? I asked him.

Nothing made him flinch. ‘In this arrangement,’ he responded, ‘is there a hint of forged contracts, legal skulduggery or hush money? Do you want to criminalise buying and selling for obscure political purposes, or stop human intelligence from breaking into the property market?’

I said, despondent, ‘I don’t want anything of the sort. I only want to save my skin!’ He laughed from his belly and said that I was the last person in this town who thought all that was done or not done aimed only at getting his skin.

I told him that I was not like that, but I understood that I could be that way, because this general mood of confidence disturbed me. The feeling that we had all made it to safety and that nothing threatened our negligence was a stupid feeling with nothing human about it.