A Palace in the Old Village (6 page)

MOHAMMED WAS THINKING
about his retirement again and feeling sick. When his saliva dried up, he would drink a few glasses of water. It wasn’t diabetes that was attacking his body but his recent retirement, the idea of retirement, which obsessed him, bringing him dark visions. The Chaabi bank, on the avenue de Clichy, had just sent him the annual form to renew his insurance for “repatriation of the body,” and Mohammed took it as a sign, a bad coincidence. Haunted by his fear of dying far from his native land, he saw himself draped in a white sheet at the morgue, his body lying there for several days due to administrative problems, and then he saw himself in a coffin, sent to Morocco with other merchandise, and his friends collecting money for the family—he saw all this in such detail that his skin crawled.

No, me, I’m not going home in a box, not like Brahim, no, I’ll get the jump on death and wait for it calmly in my village, I’m not afraid of it, I’m a believer, and
whatever
happens is always God’s will: God alone decides the hour of death, I’m sure of that, it’s written, and I even think it’s all settled for us on the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, a sacred night, worth more than a thousand months, so for death, I’ll arrange to escape the box, because even if I’m dying I’ll take the plane—and I hate
planes—to die at home, not with strangers, foreigners who know nothing of my religion, my traditions.

Aha! you’ll tell me. And your children? Well, that’s a sore point, very sore. No, my children will be saddened, but would they escort me back home? Would they wash my body in the Muslim way? If I’m buried in the village, will they come pay their respects at my tomb? Perhaps at first, but later they won’t bother to come all that way to visit a grave overgrown with weeds, strewn with
plastic
bags, empty bottles, old newspapers thrown there by visitors without any sense of propriety. Lots of
Moroccans
leave their litter in cemeteries as if the dead had no right to clean graves. I can’t see my children gathering to remember their father on some Friday just before the noonday prayer, raising their hands, palms pressed together, and reciting a few verses from the sura “
Al-Baqara
” to ask God to have mercy on my soul.* I don’t see them spending any vacation time to perform such seemingly useless actions. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t ever think of me; they’ll remember me in their own way, any way they like, but they’ll remember me. When I visit my parents’ graves, I get the shivers; I sit on a large stone and talk to them the way I used to, telling them about my life and the people they loved, going into detail, especially for my mother, who was always eager for news—I can still hear her demanding to know the name of the grocer’s fiancée and how many children he had with his first wife, and asking if my aunt is still so stingy and bad tempered and her children still dirty and greedy. I imagine all that and I smile. I love that ritual. Then I go pray at the little mosque and give alms.

Oh, enough of these black ideas—my children will never leave me! I’d rather not think that they might ever forget me. Last year a poor Algerian fellow was buried in Bobigny, where they had a hard time finding him a tiny spot in the Muslim cemetery. His children didn’t want to send his body back to his village: they said that Algeria wasn’t their country anymore and France wasn’t either, so what did it matter in which hole they buried the body? What counts is the soul, in any case, and once it leaves the body it goes off to God. But I wouldn’t like to leave my body in a French hole. It’s foolish, what I’m saying, but if I could be certain that my children would often visit my grave if I were buried in France, no problem, I’d give my body to Lalla LaFrance; I’d make things simpler for them.

I’ll be frank: black or grey thoughts aside, deep down I’d like my kids to come back home to gather a few Koranic readers at my tomb in my village, on a Friday, preferably, and they should give a little money to the many beggars. For some time now, it’s been Africans who beg around cemeteries. Poor things, they left their homelands to come work in Europe. They walked day and night, and then were abandoned. They beg to
survive
. They aren’t pushy; some of them are embarrassed to have sunk to this. Ever since I stopped working I’ve been obsessed by such ideas. Death, Hallab told me—he’s the one who claims to be an imam—death is
nothing
, you don’t feel anything anymore, and it’s as if you were sound asleep. If it’s nothing, I asked him, how come everyone is so afraid? If you’re at peace with yourself, he replied, and have nothing to reproach yourself for, you will be happy to go to God, whose infinite heavens are
full of goodness and mercy. Hallab’s a fine fellow, but what does he know? He repeats what’s in the Koran. I will never contradict the Koran, but I confess that
sometimes
, at night, I sit up with a start, drenched in sweat, and I see death. It isn’t a skeleton with a scythe, or an old lady all in black, either: no, death is an odour, a strong, asphyxiating odour announced by an icy draft that lifts the sheets to flow over the body trembling with cold, while the feet, growing numb with pins and needles, become rigid. I’ve imagined death so much that it can’t play any tricks on me. I know death; I saw it in Brahim’s face, I know what it looks like and how it operates. On that score, I feel calm. I know it’s still a ways off from my bedroom, far away from my life.

Hallab had found the solution: to pass himself off as a religious expert. So then religion helps us to leave this world behind? Of course: man is weak, he is nothing compared to the immensity of divine grandeur.

Hallab would talk and talk to me, quoting verses of Islamic poetry, but I could never manage to tear my thoughts and eyes away from that cheap wooden box I’d wind up in if I died abroad. Ever since I can remember, I’ve heard that we belong to Allah and to him we will return. That’s what we say over the body whenever we bury a Muslim. I belong to God, I am his property, and he takes it back when he pleases. There is no reason to be afraid or feel humiliated, no: death is not a
humiliation
even if it makes us angry, for we must understand that our anger is like a wisp of smoke, a bit of mist
wafting
up into the sky.

Personally, sickness is what frightens me. Suffering before going—that would be unbearable. Plus we say that the true believer, the man faithful to God, is often exposed to affliction and even injustice:
al mouminou moussab
. I don’t understand why good Muslims,
righteous
, honest, never straying from God’s path, would endure a harsher fate than crooks. And God knows
they’re
all over the place. They do well, make money without working, fill their bellies with other people’s goods, enjoy wonderful health, eat more than everyone else, say,
Al hamdou lillah! A chokro lillah!
[Blessings and thanks be to Allah!], then belch with self-satisfaction. I see them everywhere, those thieves disguised as men of good family; they are legion, and nothing ever happens to them, not even a tiny migraine or the slightest
indisposition
; they sleep well, do sports, and give the
zakat
, the 10 per cent Islam assigns to charity.

I’ll never forget the guy from Marrakech, sent, he claimed, by the Ministry of Water and Electricity to
collect
a tax to fund the installation of metres, thanks to which our women and children would finally get to wash in running water. He amassed a goodly sum, gave us receipts, lots of forms with the official heading, and that was the last we saw of him. A stocky man with
malice
in his eyes, smiling and laughing like a hyena, who spoke with the Marrakech accent. He had some sample metres in his van, and we all fell into his trap. He pulled the same scam in the neighbouring village. Never got arrested. Even better: I think I saw him on a Moroccan TV news program in the entourage of a minister of
public
works. It had to be him: that laugh, his squashed face,
the little chin tuft—that was his trademark. The sign of Satan’s spawn.

I am not a wicked man, but I’m a devotee of justice, cannot bear to see it perverted, and I do sometimes dream of vengeance. I would love to see that toadlike thief in the hands of the law, then released in our village where everyone would be waiting to demand their money back. I’d enjoy seeing him stripped of everything and imprisoned for life. Personally, I would have set him out in the sun in a cage with no food or water, long enough for him to learn what a daily ordeal it is to thirst for water and go without. But God will punish him! At least I hope so. Ah, divine retribution! Sometimes it’s magnificent, arriving in time to show that anyone who despoils the poor of what little they have will taste God’s wrath, watched by the victims. Doesn’t happen often, though; seems we have to be patient, learn how to wait while God tests us, and not render evil for evil but believe in his justice, for he avenges the robbed and betrayed orphan, and all who are wronged. If I were to meet that jolly Marrakechi dwarf and have the chance to run him over with my jalopy, would I? The thought of seeing him in agony is tempting, I admit, but I’m losing my mind: bastards are better left in the hands of God.

At the auto plant, the French and Portuguese workers welcomed the day when they could finally enjoy their leisure time, take trips, putter around the house and
garden
, read, even work on their own projects. They made plans, organised their lives as “young retirees.” As
Marcel
said: At sixty years we’re barely two-thirds of the way
through our lives, so why bury ourselves? Life is for living!

Marcel had arrived in France right after the war; he must have been all of ten years old. A bon vivant, a champion drinker and talker, he was the scourge of the shop foremen. Of Polish birth, a Jew and an atheist, he sympathised with the Palestinian cause and didn’t understand why the Arab states were doing nothing for their brothers in the occupied territories. When Mohammed, who grieved over the Palestinians’ fate, said he couldn’t figure out politics at all, Marcel offered to teach him, but Mohammed wouldn’t budge; even thousands of miles from his village, he still feared the Makhzen. It was in France that he heard about human rights for the first time and learned as well that in his own country men died under torture or rotted in prison without benefit of trial. Marcel kept him up-to-date,
telling
him, Your country is marvellous, but it’s in the hands of some unsavory characters: the Moroccan police were trained by the French, who taught them how to torture, but the Moroccan system is based on fear, and even you are afraid. I understand you: you’re scared of being arrested when you go back home. It’s the same thing in Algeria, Tunisia—as soon as you protest against the
politics
of repression you’re done for and they pick you up at the border; that’s why immigrants don’t move around much. You, you keep quiet, and I know that what goes on in your country pains you.

Mohammed remembered the Koranic school and drifted off in distant memories of days when everything was simple, when he didn’t even know there were roads,
tall buildings, lampposts illuminating streets where no one lived. The world was as big as his village. He had trouble imagining anywhere else. One’s native land always leaves a bitter aftertaste. Mohammed’s country was dry, bare; it had nothing, and this nothing had
followed
him even to France. This nothing was important. He had no choice: he couldn’t exchange it for another nothing that was perhaps a little more colourful, better equipped. He made do, with patience and resignation. In the end he’d stopped wondering about all that. What the police got up to in their far-off stations, well, he couldn’t imagine, and his village was light-years away from the city.

Did he want to live like the French? He considered his fellow workers at the plant and didn’t envy their lot. Each to his own life and way of life. He didn’t criticise them but was puzzled by how they treated their parents and children. The spirit of family, as he saw it, was no longer honoured in France. This slippage shocked him. He just couldn’t understand why girls smoked and drank in front of their parents and went out at night with boys. And why did huge billboards display half-naked women to sell perfumes or cars? Most of all, he was afraid for his own family and talked this over with his pals. They sighed, raising their arms to heaven in resignation. What could you do?

One Sunday he invited Marcel home to dinner. It was a holiday, and Mohammed told him, Bring your wife but no wine! Marcel agreed to skip his wine and merrily stuffed himself with the good things fixed by
Mohammed’s
wife. Marcel liked to tell his friend, Time, it’s us. It
isn’t the watch face, no. It’s you who make time: when you close your eyes you’re in the past; when you close them again you project yourself into the future; when you decide to open them it’s no mystery that you’re in the present, the one that’s as thin as cigarette paper. You follow me?

Before going home to their families after their
weekend
French lessons, some of the plant workers went to see women in trailers and waited their turn
shamefacedly
. Mohammed had always refused this kind of
distraction
. He was afraid of diseases and of what his friends and neighbours might say. Something like a
curtain
of fog half veiled one late-afternoon memory, on a Sunday when boredom had played out in what
Mohammed
considered a bestial instinct. He’d been dragged along by an acquaintance whose name he had forgotten and who told him, Listen, if you don’t empty your balls now and then, it goes up to your brain and you go blind. Another time he said, Even our religion allows us to empty our balls: you simply write out a document and tear it up afterward. You know, the marriage for
pleasure
. You get married long enough to fornicate, then you divorce, and you’re all square with God and
morality
.* Mohammed had chuckled to himself and gone off with his chatty companion.