* * *

  • • •

  The day was ending and the shopkeepers on the avenue were closing their shutters. Mehdi walked past a bakery and watched the flies hovering over pyramids of Ramadan patisseries covered with honey and sesame seeds. As he walked, the streets grew more and more empty. The government employees had already gone home and were probably taking naps on their living room benches while their wives stirred the soup and took care of the kids. The schoolchildren too had gone home, and now only a few stragglers were out on the streets, with their pale faces, dark-ringed eyes, and fetid breath. The whole city was hungry.

  For the first time in a long time, Mehdi thought about his family. He had burned his bridges with them, but now the memory came to him of those long Ramadan evenings in Fès, when he would watch his father play cards with some friends from the neighborhood. He remembered the way old Mohamed would sit at the table and pray before taking small sips from his glass of cold milk. “Hamdoullah,” he would say before opening a fleshy date for each of his children and handing it to them. Sometimes there would be a worm inside the date, a fat, white, shiny worm that Mohamed would flick away with the tip of his fingernail. On Fridays the patriarch would take his sons to the mosque. On the way he would stop at the grocer’s and buy round loaves of bread, bars of chocolate, and tins of sardines, which he would hand out to the poor people sitting in the square outside the temple.

  Mehdi jumped. He had been so lost in thought that he had not seen the man coming toward him. The man was about forty years old, tall and unhealthily thin. He wore sunglasses and a permanent smile. Mehdi noticed something moving under his beige raincoat. The man was carrying a small dog with white curly fur. He bent his neck and kissed the animal on its muzzle. During the conversation that followed, he never stopped stroking it.

  “Are you Karl Marx?” Before Mehdi could answer, the man started laughing. “You’re so clever! I went to your lecture this morning and I didn’t understand a thing.” He did not introduce himself or offer to shake hands. He just stared at Mehdi, smiling inanely. Mehdi started walking again and the man followed him, matching the rhythm of his footsteps. “I never even finished school. But I admire educated people. Your parents must be proud of you.”

  Mehdi threw a few threatening looks at the man, but he didn’t dare tell him to go away. He upped his pace a little, clutching his satchel to his chest. On the sidewalk a boy was selling a meat cleaver. An old, worn meat cleaver that was clearly worth nothing but that the boy had placed on top of an incongruously clean piece of cloth. Next to him was an elderly woman, her face as wrinkled as a fig. She was selling homemade pastries out of a little wicker basket. The man stopped and leaned slowly toward the old woman. Mehdi, who felt absolutely sure that the man was a cop, expected him to get angry, to kick the basket and the cleaver out of the way. Instead he smiled.

  “My compliments, el hajja,” he said to the woman. “You’re a good cook.”

  He staggered sideways and to stop himself from falling grabbed hold of Mehdi’s arm.

  “So, tell me, why do you write all those articles?”

  Mehdi could not stop staring at the man’s enormous Adam’s apple. It was so big he could imagine it slicing apart the thin red skin of the man’s neck.

  “It’s my job. I’m a professor and I publish my research.”

  “Ah, okay, I’m sorry. You publish your research. Of course.”

  The little dog was increasingly fidgety under the raincoat. It looked as if it wanted to escape its master’s arms and leap down onto the pavement.

  “And does it make much money, this research?”

  “That’s not really the point,” Mehdi replied coldly.

  “Hang on, I don’t understand. All that work you do, all those books you read, you don’t get paid?”

  “I told you, money doesn’t interest me.”

  “Did you hear that?” he asked the trembling poodle. “Money doesn’t interest him. But you must have a family, right? Everyone has a family. And they’d probably be happy if you sent them some money. You don’t look like one of those bourgeois types who can afford to work for free.”

  Outside an empty restaurant two men were setting out trestles and planks. Every evening, when the fasting ended, they gave out soup and hard-boiled eggs to the city’s poorest people. Mehdi came to a stop in front of a blown-up photograph of the king dressed for a round of golf.

  “It’s nearly time to break the fast. I have to go.”

  “Ah yes, that’s true,” the stranger said. He lowered his glasses, brought his watch very close to his eyes and nodded. “It’s a shame. We could have gone to the café and continued our conversation. Before, people used to eat at cafés during Ramadan, remember? Apparently there were arrests. What do you think of that?” And he fixed Mehdi with his dark, impenetrable eyes.

  “I have to go.”

  “Okay, of course, I’m not stopping you. You must have a lot of work to do. I can see you’re a serious man. This country is lucky to have young people like you.”

  II

  The carnival was over. Workaday humiliation had begun.

  Milan Kundera

  Omar undressed, as he did every evening before going on duty. He laid his pants out on the bed and tossed his shirt, the collar of which was stained with a few drops of blood, onto the floor. In the shower Omar used an exfoliating glove to rub at the blotches that covered his arms and legs. The doctor had told him not to do this. And he knew it would be even more painful in the next few hours, when the fabric of his shirt rubbed against his skin, when his pants irritated the sores on his thighs. But in that moment, under the jet of hot water, he felt powerless to stop himself. He scratched and scratched. His shoulders, his armpits, his skinny swollen neck. It was as if he were trying to erase himself. Or at least erase some trace that he bore on his skin. He put the glove to his face, rubbed his cheeks, pulled at his eyelids, mouth tensed. For a short while he stood there, naked, in the middle of the steamed-up bathroom. Then he wrapped himself in a big white towel and sat on the edge of his bed. He picked up the clippers from his bedside table and cut his fingernails and toenails, one little bit at a time, his gestures nervous but precise. He collected the nail clippings in his bath towel and dropped them into the trash.

  He left his apartment building and got into his car. He sat in the passenger seat, beside his chauffeur, Brahim. His men were waiting near Place de France; he saw them leaning against the back wall of a grocer’s. He had to let them into the car himself. They smelled of diesel and cheap beer and they kept noisily sniffing. They were dirty. And yet Omar had told them so many times that their appearance was a fundamental part of their work. How could they hope to be respected if they went around acting like boors? Was this how they expected to impress those little intellectual pricks who had been to Paris or Brussels and who would try to humiliate them with their knowledge, their theories about the future of capitalism?

  Omar took good care of himself. His pants were always perfectly ironed and his shoes so clean and shiny they might have just come out of the box. He fastened his shirt buttons all the way to the top even when the heat was stifling, even if the collar rubbed against his eczema rashes and made them bleed. He saw in this refinement a form of intelligence. An element of surprise that left his prisoners in awe. No, the police chief was no savage; he knew how to behave.

  “No smoking in the car.” In the back seat, the two men put the cigarettes behind their ears. No one argued with Omar’s orders. It started to rain and they drove through the city streets, the light fragmented into shards by the raindrops. “We can’t see a thing,” one of the policemen complained. Omar wondered if the man was trying to provoke him. Behind his back, his colleagues called him The Mole. Speccy Four-Eyes. They threatened the prisoners: “You’d better watch out or we’ll send for The Bat.” And the prisoners, their eyes blindfolded so tightly that the fabric tore at their infected skin, would start to shake. Omar’s reputation preceded him.

  “Open the window, then, you idiot.” The policeman lowered his window and stuck his head outside. He looked as if he were searching the sidewalk for a wallet or a bunch of keys that he’d dropped.

  “There!”

  The chauffeur braked suddenly. The two men in the back seat leaped out of the vehicle. It was true that Omar was, if not blind, then extremely short-sighted. All he saw now were figures running and others pursuing them. He heard men shouting insults. The sound of a leather boot against a body. A yell of pain. Something banging against the iron shutter of a shop doorway and the rain hammering on the car roof. He sat there, immobile, staring at the windshield streaming with raindrops that reflected the light from a street lamp and a few passing automobiles.

  Then the two men got back into the car. In their filthy, sodden suits and their mud-spattered shoes.

  “So?” Omar said.

  “The van’s here. They’re going to take them away.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Two tramps.”

  “You made a lot of noise. The neighbors saw you.”

  “Those fuckers were drunk. That’s why they put up a fight.”

  “I don’t want any noise. I don’t want any scenes. Understood?”

  The next day the king was due to welcome a delegation of foreign leaders, and, as was always the case for such events, Omar and his men had been ordered to clean up the streets. To rid the city of its population of homeless people, lunatics, troublemakers. That evening they were making one last round and in the morning the streets would be clean. There would be nothing to see.

  * * *

  • • •

  “What cannot be seen does not exist.”

  If someone had asked him what his work consisted of, Omar would simply have told them that. To make the things that should not be seen disappear. To swallow them up, erase them, suffocate them, bury them. To veil them. Build walls around them. Dig holes for them. Omar was a master in the art of burial. A secrecy artist. Nobody could respond to questions as well as he could with a calm, opaque silence. Nothing could make him weaken, not even the tearful faces of mothers searching for their children or the pleas of a young wife whose husband had simply vanished one morning. In 1965, during the student riots, he had played his part in erasing all traces of the massacre. He and his men had taken control of the Aïn Chock morgue and for days no one had been allowed to enter or leave without Omar’s approval. Families had gathered outside the building, demanding to see their children’s bodies. He had had them removed. Then, one night, he and his men loaded the corpses into the back of a pickup truck. The corpses were small and thin; they weighed almost nothing in the arms of the policemen who had to carry them. They drove without headlights to the deserted cemetery and Omar would never forget the reflection of the moon on the gravestones or inside those holes that had been dug in various spaced-out parts of the cemetery, in a pattern intended to look random. Someone had wanted to pray, but Omar had stopped him. God had no business there.

  In this poverty-stricken country all it took was a few small bribes. For the doctor who would testify that he had not seen any wounded people. For the gravedigger who, for a handful of dirhams, would forget the graves he had dug for the murdered children. Omar had been offered bribes hundreds of times, but he had always refused them. Often he would see his colleagues take brown envelopes stuffed full of cash. He saw them get rich and climb the ladder. They married rich girls from good families whose fathers were thrilled to have a son-in-law in the police. But Omar took nothing. He had only a modest apartment in town and a car, a beautiful Chevrolet that he had bought with his share of the inheritance Amine had passed on to him. Strangely, his integrity caused him only harm. His superiors considered him arrogant and puritanical; they resented the cold, proud way he displayed his austere life. They grew increasingly suspicious of this man who had never married or had children, this man who did not even appear to have affairs. He had no life beyond the police station. Who could trust such a man, a man with no vices? Omar knew they talked about him behind his back. His job was surveillance and he wondered who had been ordered to keep an eye on him.

  “We going to the station, boss?” Brahim asked, startling Omar from his thoughts. The chauffeur had stopped at a crossroads and was awaiting orders.

  Omar turned to the two men in the back seat and told them to get out. They concealed their rage at being made to walk through the rain and hail a taxi. When they had gone, Omar turned to the chauffeur: “Take me to her place, Brahim.”

  * * *

  As a young man Omar had been capable of going several nights without sleep. He would work in the basement of the police station, interrogating prisoners who were half mad from the lack of sleep and the physical violence. The questions he asked them were always the same, in Arabic and in French. He spoke in a calm voice, almost gentle and reassuring, which the prisoners found disturbing. But tonight he lacked the courage. He felt overwhelmed by fatigue, sickened by his colleagues’ stupidity. He felt as if he would never accomplish his mission, that he was forever doomed to keep silencing mouths, eliminating those who talked too much. He was tired of punishing, tired of violence. He was growing soft. For some time now he had been letting the prisoners speak and listening a little more attentively to what they said. One man in particular had made an impression on him. A man in his mid-twenties who printed a communist newspaper in his bathroom. Omar’s men had abducted him one day and taken him, blindfolded, to a secret detention center. There were dozens of such places all over the country. Labor camps and abandoned palaces. Townhouses and grimy basements. Places that nobody knew about, with walls so thick that the screams of the tortured would never be heard. Omar, though, heard everything. As his sight had deteriorated, he had become a giant ear, an immense ear capable of perceiving the faintest creak, the softest whisper. Even at a distance he could hear what people were saying on café terraces or in the back seats of public taxis. He had informers everywhere. Guards who feigned sleep in their wooden sentry boxes. Maids who rummaged through drawers when their employers were absent. Peanut vendors, shoe shiners, newsagents: they all had to report to Omar.

  But this boy, this young communist, was different. With remarkable courage he had come through the endless torture sessions. His face swollen, his hands and feet bloody from being whipped, he had told Omar that this country was heading to its ruin. “Can’t you see that they’re just using you to do their dirty work? They live in their grand palaces, drinking their whiskey, swimming in their pools, playing on the bright-green fairways of their private golf courses while our children die of hunger and thirst. Tell me, where does that water come from? Is that why your generation fought the French? Today’s bourgeoisie deserve nothing. They are corrupt neocolonialists who treat our people the exact same way the Europeans did. Open your eyes!”

  * * *

  • • •

  The rain kept falling and Brahim, who drove quickly, left the city and took the coastal road toward Rabat. Less than an hour later they had reached the outskirts of the capital. By the roadside, a wall was visible. “The wall of shame,” as it was called by the left-wing militants, the trade unionists, all those opposed to the government. In clandestine meetings and in articles for illegally sold newspapers, this wall was held up as an example of the country’s decadence. One month earlier Omar had learned that a documentary had been secretly filmed outside the shanty town of Yacoub El Mansour. “To start with, I didn’t understand,” explained the informer, a slum-dweller who made a little extra by talking to the police. “The car was parked outside the neighborhood, just in front of the wall. Inside there were three men. Two Moroccans and a European. The European was sitting in the back seat. He was the one with the camera.” The informer had done a good job: he had described the vehicle, noted down its license plate, and given detailed information about the physical appearance of the driver and his partner. It had taken Omar less than a day to discover that the Renault belonged to a communist activist who was being interviewed by a French journalist. They had tried to get into the shanty town to question the inhabitants, but the people there had been too afraid to talk. So they had had to make do with filming the wall. The journalist had been deported, his films destroyed, and the communist had disappeared. Nobody would ever see that film.

  The wall extended along part of the coastal road between Rabat and Casablanca, and it was high enough to hide the shanty town from passing motorists. Omar had supervised its construction. He had made the slum-dwellers build it themselves, explaining that it was to protect their children, who might wander out onto the road and be crushed to death under the wheels of some rich man’s car. The wall was for their own good, and for the good of their wives, who, like all women, could not help flirting with the pretty boys who drove past. This wall, he told them, is to protect you from the shame you feel at the ugliness of your existence, your corrugated-iron shacks, your muddy streets, your worn old clothes hanging from washing lines. Do you really want the whole world to see your wives’ underwear flapping in the wind, to see the holes in your children’s sweaters?

  His forehead pressed to the window, Omar thought about the young communist’s clear voice. One night the prisoner had told him the story of that queen of Russia whom her ministers had wished to spare the sight of poverty and desolation in the countryside. And while she traveled around her lands, among her subjects, within her vast empire, she had no idea that the beautiful villages she was contemplating were merely painted cardboard sets. Brahim parked the car on Avenue de Temara, a few yards from the Orthodox church. The first glimmers of dawn were illuminating the dome-shaped belltower and the golden cross atop it. The sidewalks were full of puddles and men were walking, heads lowered, rugs under arms, toward the local mosque. The caretaker was sitting on the front steps of the apartment building. He was a thin man of indeterminate age, his chin covered in stubble, whose cigarettes smelled of bleach. He wore a grubby woolen hat and a brown woolen sweater given to him by some bourgeois woman. He and his wife had six children and they all lived cooped up together in a single ground-floor room. So he often stayed here, on the steps, smoking cigarettes that left a grayish residue on his tongue. Occasionally he would sweep the steps or rub the guardrail with a dirty rag. When he spotted Omar’s car he rushed over to him.