Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

I said, as if talking to myself, ‘Life as a whole is a pre-arranged story!’

‘What? Do you mean to say that everything is governed by divine will? It is indeed so. If you only knew where I was going before I decided on this direction.’

I looked down at the runway and saw it surrounded by high vegetation. I was absent-minded to the point of thinking that the plane was taking off for Madrid. It sometimes seemed to me that life required that we listen again to some of its elements by replaying the record. Then, when the plane reduced speed and banked right towards the airport, many scenes came to mind.

My neighbour was getting ready to leave the plane and said nervously, ‘Don’t forget to call me. A coincidence is better than a thousand appointments. We might never have met. One of us might have died without ever having known the other existed!’

I thought that would have been much better than this suspicious encounter.

I called Layla many times, but she did not answer. That evening I knocked at the door of her apartment, but she was not there. She called me late and told me her daughter was spending part of her vacation with her father in Marrakech. She had had to take Mai and stay there, to be close to her.

I said somewhat stupidly, ‘I’m back!’

‘I know. I too will be back in two days. Do you know, Mai cannot stand being separated from her sister? Here, we all go out together, like this evening. It would be very nice, were it not for the attitude of the “first lady”.’

‘I’ll come to Marrakech tomorrow,’ I said.

She replied angrily, ‘That’s all we need! Listen, I can’t see you here anyway.’

I was angry as well. ‘I can’t see you either. I will be busy with another mess!’

When I arrived in Marrakech, I went to see Bahia. She had lost her hair due to the chemotherapy, but she dealt with the situation with studied elegance. I had the impression that she was on her way to recovery. Even more than that, she had regained her confidence in her ability to defeat the illness. As we were eating lunch, she said that she talked to Ibrahim al-Khayati by phone, since new rules allowed this. The three of us talked at length about what should be done for Ibrahim now that the date had been set for the start of his trial. Ahmad Majd said we would ask for his temporary release and then see what would happen.

Bahia returned to her conversation with Ibrahim and told me privately, while we were drinking our coffee, that he wanted to talk to me regarding an important matter related to Yacine. My heart convulsed, and I would have told Bahia about my appointment with the man from Bu Mandara in the afternoon if Ahmad Majd hadn’t interrupted to tell me it was better to visit Ibrahim in person than talk to him on the phone.

I left the big house for the Nahda Café, but as soon as I got into the taxi, I realised that there was still a whole hour before the four o’clock appointment. I decided to walk a while before going to the café. As I walked I remembered Ibrahim’s message and wondered what he could tell me about Yacine. I imagined he might have met someone in prison who had known Yacine, or that he had obtained information from someone who knew me. I imagined that someone was using him in a case related to Yacine’s friends. Then I considered how these separate elements had coincided by chance, one in Salé prison and the other in the Madrid airport, and whether there was any possible connection between the two stories. Or rather, how there could not be a connection between them.

At that moment I thought that my encounter with the man from my village would be more productive after I had talked with Ibrahim. I might learn from Ibrahim something that would help me in my meeting with this person. I returned home, but unfortunately was unable to reach Ibrahim on the phone, no matter how much Bahia and I tried, and I was almost fifteen minutes late for my appointment. When, out of breath, I arrived at the café, I did not find anyone there. I sat down, depressed, and waited half an hour, then I got up heavily and left the place, preferring to think he had come by earlier and, not finding me there at the agreed time, had left.

By seven o’clock in the evening I had called him over and over, reaching only his answering machine. I thought a thousand times about Layla and wandered the streets aimlessly for more than two hours. I was convinced that what remained of my destiny on that difficult day was for a car to hit me and put an end to my inadequacy. At that very moment Layla called.

‘Tell me please,’ she said, her voice loud over the phone, ‘I beg you, say you are in Marrakech.’

‘Let’s meet immediately,’ I said.

I needed time to get ready for this encounter — not to make the logistical arrangements but to prepare for those first moments when we do not know whether we are about to begin one thing or resume another. There are those other moments when we have to submit every gesture to a precise test to understand what is coming back to us whole, unabridged, and what might have been diminished or exceeded its familiar limits, or has simply become the gestures of a different person.

We were in a room in a quiet tourist hotel and every now and then we heard the mumbling of people drinking around the swimming pool. We made love with shy movements as if we were doing it for the first time, but also with a devout intensity, as if we were apologising for something that had happened to us or something we had done. At some moment of our pleasure, I was overcome with a desire to do something more than love, something that would make Layla seep into my breath and my pores, into every part of my existence and settle there for ever.

I was kissing her, looking deeply into her eyes, following the vibrations of this desire to its end. I did not notice in the eruption of passion that she was crying. It might have been because she detected everything that raged within me, or maybe because she had found me again after a temporary loss.

I got a call from the man from Bu Mandara around midnight. He apologised for missing our appointment, but Yacine’s friend lived very far away. I was certain I would apologise to him as well and tell him I was not interested in this encounter any more — which I had not wanted in the first place — but he suggested meeting at ten the next morning at the entrance of the Club Med Hotel. I agreed reluctantly. After my experience with Layla that evening, I did not need anything else. When Layla asked me about the matter, I told her about it, purposely filling it with humour and irony. She got upset, wondering whether I was aware of all the dangers lurking in a contact of this kind.

‘Consider this,’ she said. ‘By chance you meet a young man at Madrid airport, and by chance he becomes the intermediary for an encounter with a possible friend of Yacine’s. Don’t you smell a trap of sorts?’

I told her, ‘I don’t have any logical reason to suspect that.’

Sleep allowed us to resume something that had nothing to do with the strange meeting. For long hours, no dream, no tossing or turning, no stray movement succeeded in separating us, until daylight bathed the two of us under our veil of anxiety.

As I was getting ready to leave, Layla asked me, ‘What do you expect from this encounter?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I only want to hear from someone who knew Yacine what happened. How he adopted this cause and how he lived in its worlds, how he was exposed to what he was exposed to, how they handled his corpse and what they did with it. I want to hear all those details and more. I want to be filled with them and with the truth those details represent. If this happens, I will go through true mourning and the subject will be closed for ever.’

Layla took Mai from me and went to the other room. She called back, ‘I don’t know what will be closed, but I’m not reassured at all.’