Mehdi took no pleasure from the exercise of power, from observing the fear or respect he inspired in those around him. All he thought about was work, from dawn until night. He was still that studious schoolboy, obsessed with the idea of pleasing his teacher, and he set out to reform the bureaucracy he had inherited, to turn it into an exemplar of efficiency and modernity. He upbraided the civil servants in an attempt to rouse them from their torpor. Almost every day he would send a letter to his supervisory department suggesting innovations, fiscal reforms, training seminars for civil servants. His old friends from university saw him as a sellout and a traitor. He had given up his dream of writing a book, he had given up his ambition of becoming an important university lecturer, and now he had to prove he had been right. He wanted to convince them, and convince himself, that it was possible to change the system from within, without losing his way, without being corrupted.

  This job at the tax office had not given him the satisfaction he’d been expecting. Mehdi had to put up with the indifference of his superiors, but most of all with the complaints, the tears, and sometimes even the fury of taxpayers. Everyone considered themselves wronged, misunderstood. They reacted angrily to Mehdi’s coldness, his intransigence, which they regarded as a Western attitude. This chief taxman might be an Arab but he acted like a white man. Refusing their offers of compromise, their envelopes, their explanations. Asking in a severe voice, whenever he spotted a stack of cash hidden between two sheets of paper: “What is that? You’d better take it back. I’ll pretend I didn’t see anything.” The taxpayers took offense. They threatened to go over his head and boasted about having friends in high places who would punish him, this little shit, this nobody, who had dared treat them this way.

  Sometimes prominent figures from the provinces would come to his office to see him. Older men in woolen djellabas and saffron-yellow turbans who stared in astonishment at this young Moroccan in his ironed shirts and cuff links. They appeared to understand nothing Mehdi said to them, and they remembered that this was how the French had gotten what they wanted from them. Paperwork. That damned paperwork and all those big words they couldn’t read, humiliating them. Paperwork frightened them more than a whole gang of armed men. Nothing was more guaranteed to make them lose their composure. Mehdi felt ashamed. Ashamed of feeling so different from these men who looked like his father Mohamed, his father whom he never saw anymore. He played with his cuff links, he smiled at them. He said: “Janine will explain the process to you, okay?”

  One day he requested an audit on a man who, considering the scale of his assets and revenue, was paying very little in tax. He expedited the investigation, went through the man’s case file, and had no difficulty proving that he had been defrauding the government for years. The man’s name was Karim Boulhas but he was nationally famous as “the sardine king.” Boulhas came from a wealthy family that had made its fortune in commerce, and he ran the biggest canning factory in Morocco, at the port city of Safi. In recent years he had invested in property, bought up land, and he was planning to build a hotel, convinced as he was that tourism represented the country’s future. Mehdi sent him letters and took pleasure in imagining the fraudster’s reaction when he saw how much money he owed. Millions of dirhams. Karim Boulhas turned up at the headquarters of the tax office one afternoon. The summer heat had still not abated: Janine’s chignons kept collapsing and when she uncrossed her thighs they made a sound like suction pads. Boulhas entered Mehdi’s office accompanied by a plump, shy girl. Her black, oily hair was tied in a long braid that hung all the way down her back. Drops of sweat beaded on her upper lip and she slowly moved her tongue under her nose to lick them.

  The conversation began politely. Karim Boulhas asked Mehdi where he was from. He said he knew some people called Daoud, from El Jadida. Were they relatives of his? Mehdi said no. With his face blank and his eyes fixed on this wealthy man, he rejected all the unspoken rules of cronyism. Boulhas was sweating; he patted his shiny forehead with a handkerchief. Mehdi handed him a sheet of paper covered in figures. Boulhas glanced at the document before pushing it away. “Oh, but I don’t understand those numbers at all! You’re the educated man. You have the knowledge and I have the money, as they say. I’m sure we could come to an arrangement.” Nodding at the girl, he added: “This is my daughter. She’s eighteen.” Mehdi did not understand at first. He thought Boulhas was seeking his pity or simply trying to change the subject. Moving the discussion to a more emotional plane, as taxpayers so often did. “She’s a nice girl,” Boulhas said. That was when Mehdi noticed that the girl was smiling at him. Her features were rather coarse, her teeth crooked, but there was something sad and vulnerable about her that touched Mehdi.

  “This is between us, right?” Boulhas asked. “You are still young, full of life, and you must be exhausted from all your work. It’s obvious that you’re not the type of man to waste his time having fun. I’m thinking about you, you understand?”

  Mehdi sat back in his seat. The teenager’s hands were placed demurely in her lap. Docile as a mule, submissive to the desires that others formulated for her, used to nodding and obeying. She looked up at him with her lovely aubergine-colored eyes.

  “Maria,” her father ordered, “say hello to the gentleman.”

  A few days later Mehdi received a note from his superiors. Karim Boulhas was an important man and it was out of the question to create a scandal while the country was going through difficult times. “I’m relying on you, Monsieur Daoud, to find a solution that can satisfy all parties.” Boulhas returned to Rabat on several occasions. He gave Simo and Janine boxes of tinned anchovies and sardines. Mehdi could hear his secretary’s giggles through the door. He had to acknowledge that Boulhas was a pleasant, cheerful man whose charm was difficult to resist. When Mehdi told him the sum he had to pay, Boulhas slapped himself on the forehead. “Are you trying to ruin me, my son? No, no, you have to recalculate. I am happy to pay, as I told you, but I can’t let you take bread from my children’s mouths. You have to be reasonable, ya ouldi.”

  Boulhas proved himself a formidable businessman. After spending so long in his company, Mehdi began to take an interest in his plans. Boulhas was ambitious and clever and he had no intention of devoting his whole life to fish meal and tinned foods. Of course, he was proud that he was able to sell his products in France, Spain, Thailand, and soon he would be exporting to the USSR and Poland too. But what he wanted above all was to build hotels with swimming pools and resorts for sun-starved Europeans. In June 1971 they came to a settlement and Boulhas was so satisfied that he invited Mehdi to visit his offices in Safi. “There’s no need to discuss it. I’ll send my chauffeur to pick you up tomorrow. And don’t wear one of your bourgeois suits. You don’t need shiny shoes on a sardine boat.”

  The next day, at six in the evening, Boulhas’s chauffeur parked outside the tax office building. Mehdi got in the car, dressed as usual in his dark suit and his shirt with cufflinks. They drove for hours along a poor road and on several occasions Mehdi was afraid they were going to cause an accident. The chauffeur paid no attention to traffic laws or speed limits, overtaking trucks on narrow two-lane roads even when it was impossible to see what was coming in the other direction. He constantly honked his horn and insulted other drivers, and by the time they arrived on the outskirts of Safi, Mehdi was in a state of nervous exhaustion. It was the first time he had visited the former Portuguese trading post and he was disappointed to arrive after dark, not to be able to admire the impressive fortress overlooking the sea. As soon as they entered the Djorf El Youdi neighborhood, the smell of fish filled the car.

  Outside a café Mehdi spotted Boulhas’s imposing figure. The businessman was wearing khaki canvas pants, a thick woolen cardigan, and plastic boots. He got into the car beside Mehdi and started laughing. “Oh, my son, didn’t I tell you to wear comfortable clothes? We’re going fishing, you know, not swaggering around a cocktail bar in the capital!” Boulhas’s company owned its own sardine boats and Mehdi boarded one of them, wearing a pair of borrowed boots. “We’ll be barefoot anyway.” While the men prepared the cerco, the red net three hundred yards long that was used to catch fish, Boulhas drew the taxman into his cabin. He poured him a cup of tea then opened a tin of sardines swimming in oil. “For a long time, people from here were afraid of the sea. My grandfather, God rest his soul, told all sorts of legends about that. He said that Moroccan peasants were suspicious of the coasts. Those poor buggers believed water was the territory of genies and evil monsters. These people are not bad at their job,” he added, gesturing to the fishermen on the boat, “but they’re nothing compared to the Spanish or the Portuguese, believe me.” He explained to Mehdi that he planned to buy a bigger boat soon, one on which they would be able to freeze the fish they caught, permitting them to go farther out to sea. He was also going to order one of those ultrasound machines, a depth sounder, to locate shoals of fish and to read the profile of the sea bed on an echo sounder. The boat left the port. The fishermen walked along the wooden boards and Mehdi observed their feet, which were enormous and covered with wounds, their black toenails eroded by salt. Behind them the city disappeared, and the fishermen began searching for shoals of sardines. To spot them, they followed the groups of dolphins and seabirds that were in turn seeking out the phosphorescent reflections of fish scales on the water’s surface. They started to sing. It was a song that Mehdi had never heard before, and which surprised him with its cheerfulness and harmony. The men’s voices, as they leaned over the rail, were clear and powerful.

  “They’ve found some!” Boulhas announced. They tied the end of the cerco to a small boat commandeered by the chief fisherman and one of his crew and towed it toward the spot where the sardines had been detected. Then the ship began spinning slowly. Boulhas took Mehdi to the hold, at the front of the boat, and they watched as a vast number of sardines poured into it. The captain, back on board, patted Mehdi’s back. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Mehdi had to admit to himself that the captain was right: it really was beautiful, more beautiful than many of the things he had seen in his life. Day broke and the water took on a yellow tint that reminded him of wheat fields in the light of August, the year he had last seen Aïcha. His heart contracted. He had to write to her. He had to tell her about all this.

  They headed back toward Safi. The captain sent a radio message and when they arrived an alarm blared loudly in the port. This was the industrialists’ version of the call to arms. Vans were driven out to the fields of caper bushes and wheat to collect farmworkers who would come to the port to earn a few dirhams. Mehdi was sleepy and cold. He wished he could lie down in a bed, under a thick blanket, and dream of dolphins, their bodies shining in the moonlight. But Boulhas had no intention of going to bed. “This is the real life, my son! The sea, fishing, not that miserable office life you’re inflicting on yourself. Listen carefully and you’ll see: the two of us could found an empire together!” They sat in a café and Boulhas ordered two bowls of mushroom soup, some bread, and coffee. For a few months Boulhas had been traveling regularly to Marrakech. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy but I’m sure it’s the place to be. A city where it’s warm even in winter—that’s the dream, don’t you think? Believe me, if I do a good job, I’ll build a better hotel than the Mamounia and everyone will want to stay there. The Spanish figured that out before we did. Franco said it: tourism is the future. He is giving work to his people, and you should see the Andalusians who came to work here ten years ago, they’re opening hotels now, filled with English and German customers.” He belched softly, sucked his oil-covered fingertips, and led Mehdi into his factory, across from the café.

  An infernal racket filled the vast warehouse. All the workers there were women. There were at least two hundred of them, maybe more. They worked standing up, dressed lightly despite the cold. Their feet, most of them shod only in rubber sandals, were ankle-deep in brackish water, mingled with fish guts and blood. Some of them carried babies or toddlers on their backs and kept them quiet by swaying from side to side or clicking their tongues. They scaled the fish at top speed while foremen yelled at them to go faster. Mehdi felt ridiculous standing there in his suit, his damp trouser hems tucked inside his boots. He was falling asleep and could not follow Boulhas’s explanations. He fiddled nervously with his cufflinks and one of them fell from his wrist. He saw it gleaming among the fish heads that lay at the bottom of a plastic bin. He was about to bend down and retrieve the cuff link, which he had bought to celebrate getting his job at the tax office, when a white-coated foreman pushed past him and ordered the women to take out the dregs. Mehdi watched as one of the female workers leaned down and picked up the trash bin. She carried it to the back of the factory, and Mehdi didn’t dare ask for his silver cuff link.

  * * *

  • • •

  Before letting Mehdi leave, Boulhas insisted that the young tax inspector go home with him. The sardine king lived in a large house outside town. He ushered Mehdi into a reception room furnished with benches in bright, brocaded nylon. Boulhas slipped away then and Mehdi was left alone in front of a table covered with food. Almond cakes, briouats slathered with honey, aniseed-flavored biscuits like the ones he used to eat as a child. A maid walked through the room, lowering her head when she saw him. He felt as if he had been sitting there for hours, and in the end he stretched out his legs and rested his head against a cushion. He was close to falling asleep when Maria came in. The young woman greeted him, then picked up a plate of patisseries and held it in front of his face. Mehdi took one of the cakes but did not bite into it. He just held it in his hand and looked at Maria’s face, at the long braid of hair which snaked down over her breasts. He told her he had been feeling tired and apologized for lying down on the bench, his bare feet on the rug. “Do you know when your father will be back?”

  “My father has left,” she replied. “He asked me to tell you that the chauffeur will take you back to Rabat later. He wants you to feel at home here. He says you should take your time.”

  For a second Mehdi thought about getting up, thanking her for her hospitality, and rushing to the door to find the chauffeur. But Maria was staring at him with her pleading eyes, her aubergine eyes, and he was fascinated by their violet gleam.

  “Did you go fishing tonight?”

  “Yes. Have you been on one of your father’s boats before?”

  “Oh no!” she said, laughing. “Those boats are not for girls.”

  Maria had no gift for conversation. She agreed with everything Mehdi said. He asked her if she was a student and she explained that she had finished school and was now helping her mother at home. He wanted to know what she liked. Music? Films? She shrugged. “Do you like to read?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she answered. Finally Mehdi got to his feet and said goodbye. When he got in the car, he was still holding the uneaten piece of cake.

  In the back seat he thought that it would not be unpleasant to be married to a woman like Maria. A girl who would take care of him. Their children would be beautiful. She would withdraw to the kitchen whenever they had guests. When they made love, she would moan softly and keep her eyes closed. She would take him back to his roots, and during Ramadan, half asleep on a bench, he would hear her telling off the children and ordering them not to wake their father. It was as if Maria spoke an ancient tongue, a language Mehdi had once known, long ago, whose memory would be rekindled in his mind by her sweetness, her docility. And as he dozed in the car, Mehdi saw again the tall blond woman standing by the side of the pool on Aïcha’s farm. She looked at him. And she dived in.

  At the end of June 1971, Mehdi received an invitation to the king’s forty-second birthday party, to be held at his summer palace in Skhirat, by the ocean. His minister remarked upon His Majesty’s concern for the country’s young executives. He was insistent that all guests must come in casual attire, leaving their suits and tuxedos in their wardrobes. “Even the ministers and generals have been told to dress down.”

  Mehdi would never have dared admit this to anyone, particularly not his former college friends, but this invitation sent him into a state of nervous excitement. He had never been inside any of the king’s official palaces before. He had never attended such a prestigious reception, with all the country’s top diplomats, ministers, military officers, and friends of the royal family. He felt as if he had made it. Or, rather, as if he was about to make it. On July 10, the day of the king’s birthday party, he would take his place among the great and the good of Morocco. What excited and worried him was not the magnificence of the palace, the arcane rules of protocol, or the fact that he would not know anyone there. No, like a child about to meet a film star or a singer, what obsessed Mehdi was the idea of seeing the king up close. This is ridiculous, he kept telling himself: the king is just a man like any other; the power he possesses does not make him sacred or special. And yet now, whenever he walked past any of the dozens of portraits of Hassan II displayed in town, he would tell himself: “I’m going to see him in real life, maybe even talk to him. And he will smile at me and say my name. That means my future is assured.” He was ashamed of these thoughts, which he knew to be base and unworthy, but he couldn’t help rejoicing at the idea that he had been chosen, from among thousands of others. Singled out. In the most fashionable boutique in town he bought a pair of white pants and a pale-pink short-sleeved shirt. He paid a fortune for a pair of leather moccasins and went to a barber to have his hair cut and his beard trimmed.