“Hello, boss.”

  “Hello, Hocine. Any news?”

  “All quiet, boss. Nothing to report.”

  “Is she here?”

  “Yes, boss. She came home two hours ago. She came back on foot, boss, and she was carrying her shoes. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to walk like that, in the middle of the night. I told her there are thugs around, but she said she didn’t care. She says nothing can happen to her.”

  Omar took a coin from his pocket and dropped it into Hocine’s callused palm.

  “Go buy yourself a coffee, my friend. And stop smoking. You’re not looking too good.”

  She opened the door and Omar looked at her ankles. Her slender, tanned ankles. He noticed she was bleeding.

  “Did you get hurt?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. New shoes. Are you hungry? Do you want a coffee?”

  “Later. Let’s sleep a bit first.”

  He went through the little corridor and into the bedroom. He took off his jacket and his shirt and lay on the bed barefoot in his undershirt and pants. A small dog with curly white fur was lying on a rug.

  “Don’t close the shutters.”

  Omar claimed he loved this room because of the sunlight that poured into it early in the morning to warm his bones, even in the middle of winter. He said it was good to sleep enveloped in those golden beams, like an old cat or a lizard on the wall of a house. The truth was he was afraid of the dark. He was frightened, like a little kid. Afraid of closing his eyes. Omar’s job was dangerous. Every day he risked his life and yet nothing, nothing at all, scared him as much as those moments when his eyelids grew heavy, so heavy that he couldn’t hold them open a second longer and he fell asleep. In his dreams he fought with the night, and in the deep darkness he felt something move, he sensed the furtive movement of a predator, the threat of a hidden attack. The doctor had warned him. He was going blind. It was inexorable, incurable. Soon the world would be nothing more than a dark, opaque expanse, his life an interminable journey through damp subterranean tunnels in the company of moles, snakes, and rats. Deprived of all light.

  “What cannot be seen does not exist.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Lie down next to me, Selma. Let’s get some sleep.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Selma couldn’t sleep. She had stomach cramps and a sour taste in her mouth. She would have liked to get up, take a long shower, eat something, but instead she stayed where she was, lying next to her brother’s body. She watched him, her big brother: he was so thin and his face, even in sleep, appeared nervous. She was holding his hand. This was the only way he could sleep, with his hand in hers, and she could feel Omar’s rough, scaly skin against her palm. Her brother had come back into her life and she couldn’t help believing that it was Mouilala who had driven Omar toward her. He often talked about their mother. He brought up childhood memories with a tenderness, a gentleness, that Selma had never sensed in him before. When he had knocked at her door a few weeks after she moved to Rabat, she had been afraid. She had thought he was here to punish her, dissuade her, drag her by the hair back to the bosom of the family. But he had visited her apartment in silence, his little dog tucked under his arm. The tiny kitchen with a view of the courtyard. The living room with its blue benches, its black varnished wooden table on top of which stood a large glass bowl filled with matchboxes. And then the bedroom bathed in sunlight. “So this is where you live?”

  Mouilala had warned her. Women had to be patient. Men softened over time. As they got older they became sentimental and sought consolation in the arms of their sisters or their mistresses. Mouilala had been right: Omar came to visit Selma several times a week. He asked her to cook him the meals he’d eaten as a child: split pea soup and carrot tajine. He gave her a record player and together they would listen to songs by Fairuz and Asmahan. He asked her to wear the same makeup as the Syrian diva, with thick black lines under her eyes, and he liked to watch her as she stood in front of the mirror, concentrated on her reflection, a kohl stick in her hand.

  First and foremost he taught her to speak. Subject, verb, complement, as the teachers at the colonial school had drilled into them. He taught her a new grammar—of things unsaid, insinuations, the grammar of fear and universal surveillance. He taught her to beware the telephone, confidants, metaphors. He repeated constantly: “Listen carefully and hold your tongue. What you don’t say belongs to you. What you say belongs to your enemies.” He bought her a small leather-bound diary in which, until the end of her life, Selma would record a brief summary of each day in a code known only to herself. She told him once about an air hostess she was friends with. People called her “the countess of the skies” because she put on airs and wore perfume bought in Paris. She smuggled forbidden magazines and books back to Morocco in her luggage and invited people to her home for clandestine reading sessions. That day, Omar softly stroked Selma’s head, like a master rewarding his dog for fetching a stick.

  Finally, her brother played the role expected of him. He protected her. Selma’s life was not without risks, and a few months before this she’d had to deal with a lover’s fierce jealousy. The man, from a noble family, spent his days smoking hash pipes, which made him violent and paranoid. He harassed Selma. Interrogated her while they had sex. Forced her to tell him who she had seen, what she had done, and if she had, even in the secret depths of her heart, desired any man other than him. One night, in a fit of rage, he sliced up all Selma’s clothes with a razor blade. And Omar found her like that, sobbing on her bed, surrounded by the shredded muslin of her dresses and blouses. “Think yourself lucky he didn’t test the blade on you. He must know you’re my sister so he didn’t dare.” Yes, she knew she was protected, but this feeling of security was mixed with a bitterness, a regret. Omar was no longer the severe, disapproving brother he had been before. He didn’t beat her anymore but he still gave her orders, still criticized her. Sit up straight. You smell of cigarettes. Don’t laugh so loud. And what are you going to do at this party? Remove that lipstick, the other one was better. You’re talking rubbish.

  * * *

  • • •

  Staring at the ceiling, she thought: I hate them, I hate them all. I wish I never had to see them again. The previous night she had held people in her arms, she had laughed and danced, lifting up the hem of her skirt. She had thrown out I love yous and I adore yous, phrases she spoke only, in truth, because she wanted to hear something kind in response. The evening had begun at the bar of the Hassan Hotel and had continued at a cabaret run by a former prostitute from Corsica. At midnight the happy little gang had gone to a bachelor pad belonging to a government minister whose own wife was unaware of its existence. “I should tell Omar that, but maybe he already knows.” The minister liked to have his friends over and to entertain them he would invite a group of cheerful, docile women. Air hostesses, hairdressers, beauticians, and dancers. One of them in particular he was addicted to. A fortune teller, her right eye blackened by a fist, who read cards all night and spoke in a low voice. He never made a decision without consulting her. Just then, he was nervous. The whole city was talking about the Pan Am affair and the arrest of a businessman accused of attempted corruption in a catering project. Ministers and senior civil servants had been fired. There were rumors of imminent arrests. On television the king had declared: “Moral integrity is the secret of all success.” And the entire country had burst out laughing.

  To see them at those parties, smiling and smartly dressed, you might have thought that these women were powerful. That they had the world at their feet. But, without husbands, they were nothing. Their lives were held together only by the grace of their lovers. Colonels and generals, businessmen and politicians’ sons, playboys who would fly to London or Rome on a whim. Selma was one of them. She had left Meknes two years earlier. A former schoolfriend, Hind Benslimane, had told her about a training course for hairdressers in the capital. And Selma went there the day after her arrival. The woman in charge welcomed her enthusiastically. She held her hands and brought her face so close that Selma thought she was going to kiss her. “You have the most beautiful skin I’ve ever seen,” the woman breathed ecstatically. Every evening the women who worked in the salon would throw handfuls of hair into trash liners. They cut them from the heads of old plastic dolls or sometimes from one another. “It’s for the police. They go through our garbage.”

  Selma quickly realized that she wasn’t there to brush hair or give manicures, and that most of their customers were in fact employed by the woman in charge. During the day the women would gather in the salon, where they would spend hours gossiping and filing their nails. They waxed each other’s pubic hair, swapping secrets with their legs spread. In the evenings they would go out in a group to the capital’s restaurants and nightclubs. The people who ran the disco paid them a commission.

  Selma danced on the tables of the city’s clubs. She danced until dawn at Jour et Nuit, Le Sphinx, and La Cage, and men whirled her around. Selma spent her vacations in villas at Cabo Negro and went swimming in the Mediterranean. She had gone skiing on the slopes of Oukaïmeden and had even slept in a room at the Mamounia in Marrakech. The following spring, Selma would go to Club Med and eat enormous juicy king prawns with her fingers. Selma shopped for clothes in the most expensive boutiques in the city center. Her lovers got their chauffeurs to drop her there and returned later to pay in cash for the silk dresses, the blouses, and the lingerie made in Paris. Selma wore shoes that matched her dresses and real leather handbags in which she kept her packs of Marquise cigarettes and a lipstick.

  Selma dreamed of having a passport and a plane ticket. She prayed that one day one of her lovers would take her to Paris or Madrid. But for now she had to be reasonable. Not ask for too much, not talk too much at all, show herself to be both discreet and amusing, superficial without being vulgar, not deny that she was a whore, and let the socialites take the spotlight. She had to pretend not to know, to play the innocent, the frightened virgin. At first, when she had sex, she didn’t close her eyes. Some of the men took offense at this. They thought it indecent. So she lay on her side, placed the man’s hand on her breast, and, as he entered her, stared at the window or the wall. They weren’t happy when she spoke either, when she told them what she liked. Some of them got angry: “Don’t try to teach me what to do.” She pretended to submit. She learned to behave like those dogs that lie on their backs, stick out their tongues, and beg to be tickled. She feigned not only submission but docility too. She did not feign desire because the men didn’t like that, but she hammed up her surprise, giving little moans. However, she knew what to do to give herself pleasure. She knew how to make her own body feel as light as a feather. From the soles of her feet to the roots of her hair she was a breath of air, a cloud of foam, a drop of liqueur slowly trickling down a throat and warming it. Alone, she came.

  * * *

  • • •

  The women often argued. About who would receive the most beautiful jewelry. Who would have the thickest wad of cash hidden in her bra. Who would be given an apartment or a car by her lover. They pulled each other’s hair, cursed each other with insults. Once, one of them even threw scalding sauce from a potato tajine into a rival’s face. They hated each other, then made up. Deep down, they had no one else they could depend on. They would slip each other the contact details for a backstreet abortionist or warn each other about a man who liked to hit them during sex. “And he doesn’t even pay well. I’d steer well clear if I were you.” And all of them drank. Because there were so many parties, all of them the same, and the joy was always faked, they drank. And, the previous night, Selma had had one too many. She had wanted to please the minister, who boasted about his imported champagne and whiskey and who snapped his fingers to summon a young maid to bring them ice cubes.

  She had drunk too much even though she knew it made her unpleasant, made her say harsh things, ramble on. Alcohol protected her from the shame but it always drove her to excess. At two in the morning the maid had left the kitchen, and one of the female guests had whispered to Selma: “She looks like a little bitch, don’t you think?” Selma had wondered if the girl was an informer too. If she listened at doors and called the police to deliver her report as soon as the house was empty. Selma would not say anything about the alcohol. She would not admit to Omar that she had been sick. She had taken refuge in a room at the back of the apartment, lying on the floor, her legs up against the wall. Her skirt had fallen around her hips, exposing her turquoise lace underwear. Now and again her stomach would spasm and she would hiccup as if she were about to throw up, but nothing came out. She made the same sound that dogs make when they are choking on a bone. First she had hoped that someone would come, and then she had prayed to be left alone, to be forgotten, for the party to end and for nobody to enter this room that, to judge from the clutter within it, was used as a sort of storeroom. She had fallen asleep, legs against her chest, head on the tiles. Someone had shaken her—“Come on, get up”—and she had opened her eyes. She had gotten on all fours. “Time to go home.” “I’m going, I’m going.” And she had made it to the door of this stranger’s apartment and gone outside, the door banging shut behind her.

  She no longer felt nauseated, but something was bubbling up inside her. It was anger. Hate, even. Yes, she hated them. She cursed them. She wished she would never see them again. She wished they would die and she could forget forever what they had turned her into. A pathetic, screeching actress in a bad film. She heard herself repeating the same phrases, the same jokes, and now that she was no longer drunk she remembered that one of them, the cruelest of them all, had said wearily: “Yes, we know, you already said that.” And it had been as if he had spat in her face, his words a veiled threat that she had become too boring to be invited anymore.

  Selma hated them and yet, as soon as she wasn’t with them, as soon as a day passed without hearing from them, she was seized by anxiety. She made resolutions. She believed herself capable of self-sacrifice and imagined becoming a real grown-up, wise and reasonable. She imagined finding a decent job, in a city-center office or shop. She would not owe anyone anything then; she would live without surveillance. Tidying the house, spending her nights watching television or smoking in the bath. She also swore that she would visit her daughter more often and that one day she would bring her back to this apartment where they would share the same bed. The thought of Sabah made her feel sick. Her daughter, whom she found impossible to love, whom she could not help considering an accident, a misfortune visited upon her. Sabah had always been a hindrance. Even when her daughter was just an embryo, growing inside her belly, Selma had thought of her as a curse preventing her from ever being alone. Men could not understand that. This propensity they had to colonize you from the inside. This desire they had to push themselves into you, to invade you. The fetus crowding your guts. The penises penetrating you, wanting you to be as deep as possible, as wet as a tropical jungle. Women, thought Selma, are like those countries devastated by foreign armies, the earth scorched, the inhabitants forced to forget their own language, their own gods.

  Then her telephone rang. She was invited to a party and the weight was lifted from her chest. She jumped for joy, opened her wardrobe, and began tossing dresses and silk slips onto the bed.

  In January 1971 Mehdi took the national exam for financial inspection and finished top of the year. Only five Moroccan students were given jobs. Three from Fès, one from Casablanca, one from Rabat. Mehdi was put in charge of the tax office. He moved into a large office on the fourth floor of a building in the city center. Janine, his secretary, was French; she had married a Moroccan man whom she had met in college in Lyon. She was a good secretary, rigorous and organized, but Mehdi avoided her. When she was in a room with him he tried not to meet her eye. She made him ill at ease. He hated her long red fingernails, which made a fast, sinister tapping sound whenever she used her typewriter. Her voice irritated him, as did the way she would take a deep breath before beginning an endless conversation. If you could even call it a conversation . . . The truth was that she generally just talked to herself, answering her own questions without giving Mehdi time to get a word in. He spoke to her through the half-open door of his office, where he recorded a list of instructions on a little Dictaphone. Janine called him “Monsieur le directeur” and so did Simo, the caretaker. Mehdi had imagined that this kind of deference—these submissive gestures, the way Simo had of holding the door open for him, bowing his head, agreeing with everything he said—would make him uncomfortable. When he parked his car outside the office building Simo would rush over to meet him. He would wait outside his car then follow him to the building, sometimes even daring to brush some dust off Mehdi’s suit with his fingertips. The first few times, Mehdi had slipped the old man a banknote and had responded affectionately to the blessings with which Simo, who smelled of squalor and tinned sardines, had showered him. But then this ritual, repeated a thousand times, had wearied him to the point of contempt. Nowadays he could not bring himself to smile at this servile, devoted man who tried every day to earn from Mehdi enough cash to buy himself a few beers at a bar near the central market.