Amine had grown in self-confidence and wealth. He no longer spent endless nights staring at the ceiling as he calculated his debts. He no longer ruminated over his imminent ruin, his children’s degradation, the humiliations they would be forced to suffer. Amine slept well now. The nightmares had left him, and in town he had become a respected man. These days he was invited to parties; people wanted to meet him, to be seen with him. In 1965 he’d been asked to join the Rotary Club, and Mathilde knew that he, not she, was the reason for this, and that the members’ wives, too, probably had something to do with it. Although silent and reserved, Amine was the center of attention. Women asked him to dance, they pressed their cheeks against his, drew his hand to their hips; and even if he didn’t know what to say, even if he didn’t know how to dance, he would sometimes think that this life was possible, a life as light as the champagne he smelled on their breath. Mathilde hated herself at these parties. She always thought she talked too much, drank too much, and afterward she would spend days regretting her behavior. She imagined she was being judged, that the others considered her stupid and useless, a coward for closing her eyes to her husband’s infidelities.

  But another reason why the Rotary members were so insistent, so welcoming and attentive toward Amine, was that he was Moroccan and the club wished to prove, by increasing its number of Arab members, that the era of colonization, the era of parallel lives, was over. Of course, many of them had fled the country during the autumn of 1956 when the angry mob had invaded the streets and abandoned itself to a crazed bloodlust. The brickworks had gone up in flames, people had been killed in the streets and the foreigners had realized that this was no longer their home. Some of them had packed up and left, abandoning apartments where the furniture gathered dust before being bought up by Moroccan families. Landowners gave up their estates and the years of work they had put into them. Amine wondered if it was the most fearful or the most clear-eyed who went back to France. But that wave of departures was only an interlude. A readjustment before life returned to its normal course. Ten years after independence, Mathilde had to admit that Meknes had not changed all that much. Nobody had learned the new Arabic street names, and when they arranged to meet someone it was still on Avenue Paul Doumer or Rue de Rennes opposite Monsieur André’s pharmacy. The notary had remained, and so had the haberdasher, the hairdresser and his wife, the owners of the fashion boutique on the avenue, the dentist, the doctors. They might show more discretion now, more restraint, but they all wanted to keep enjoying the pleasures of this chic, flower-filled city. No, there had not been a revolution, only a change in the atmosphere, a reticence, an illusion of harmony and equality. During those Rotary dinners, at tables where bourgeois Moroccans mingled with members of the European community, it appeared that colonization had never been anything more than a misunderstanding, a faux pas that the French now repented and the Moroccans pretended to forget. Some came out and said that they had never been racist, and that they had found the whole thing terribly embarrassing. They swore that they were relieved now, that things were clearer and they too could breathe more easily since the city had rid itself of the rotten apples. The foreigners were more careful about what they said. If they hadn’t left, it was because they did not want to precipitate the ruin of a country that needed them. Of course, one day they would vacate their place, they would leave, and the town’s pharmacist, dentist, doctor, and notary would all be Moroccans. But in the meantime they would stay and make themselves useful. And anyway, were they really so different from the Moroccans who sat beside them at their tables? Those elegant, open-minded men, those colonels or senior officials whose wives had short hair and wore Western dresses? No, they weren’t so different from those bourgeois Moroccans who, without any qualms, let barefoot children carry their shopping home from the central market. Who refused to give in to the pleas of beggars “because they’re like dogs that you feed under the table. They get used to it and lose what little motivation they have to get off their butts and work.” The French would never have dared say anything about the people’s propensity for begging and complaining. Unlike the Moroccans, they would never have dared accuse maids of dishonesty, gardeners of laziness, the working classes of stupidity. And they laughed, a little too loudly, when their brown-skinned friends despaired of ever constructing a modern country with a population of illiterates. Yes, deep down, these Moroccans were just like them. They spoke the same language, saw the world in the same way, and it was difficult to believe that they might one day not belong to the same side, might consider each other enemies.

  To start with, Amine had appeared mistrustful. “They’re hypocrites,” he’d told Mathilde. “Before, I was the dirty Arab, the crouille, and now it’s all Monsieur Belhaj we would so like the pleasure of your company blah blah blah.” Mathilde had realized he was right one night during a dinner dance at the hacienda. Monique, the barber’s wife, had had too much to drink and in the middle of a conversation let slip the word “bicot.” She raised her hands to her lips as if to push that abhorrent word back into her mouth, then sighed “Ohhhh,” eyes wide, cheeks crimson. Mathilde was the only person who’d heard, but Monique couldn’t stop apologizing. “Honestly, that’s not what I meant to say,” she repeated. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  Mathilde never knew with any certainty what it was that convinced Amine. But in April 1968 he announced that the swimming pool would be built. After the excavation they had to pour in the concrete walls then install a plumbing and filtration system; Amine supervised the work with an air of authority. He had a row of red bricks laid alongside the edge of the pool, and Mathilde had to admit that they gave it a certain elegance. They were both there when the pool was filled with water. Mathilde sat on the hot bricks and watched the water level rise, waiting as impatiently as a child for it to reach her ankles.

  Yes, Amine gave in. When it came down to it, he was the boss, the one who put food on the farmhands’ tables, and it was none of their business how he chose to live his life. Before independence the best lands had still been in the hands of the French, and most Moroccan peasants had lived in poverty. Since the protectorate, which had enabled immense progress in terms of health care, the country’s demographic curve had shot up. In the ten years since independence, the peasants’ plots of land had been divided up so many times that they were now too small to provide a living. In 1962 Amine had bought part of the Mariani domain as well as the lands belonging to the Mercier widow, who moved to a squalid apartment in town near Place Poeymirau. He had picked up her machines, livestock, and grain reserves for a modest price, and he’d rented out plots of land to a few farming families, who irrigated them with seguias. Amine had a reputation locally as a tough, stubborn, short-tempered boss, but nobody ever questioned his integrity or his sense of justice. In 1964 he had received a considerable grant from the government to irrigate part of his farm and to buy modern equipment. Amine told Mathilde many times: “Hassan II understands that we are first and foremost a rural country, and that he must support our agriculture.”

  When the swimming pool was ready, Mathilde decided to celebrate with their new Rotary Club friends. She spent a week organizing what she called, in English, her “garden party.” She hired waiters and went to a caterer in Meknes to rent silver platters, Limoges porcelain tableware, and champagne flutes. She had tables set up in the garden and arranged bouquets of wildflowers in small vases: the farmworkers were sent into the fields the morning of the party to pick poppies, marigolds, and buttercups. The guests were all very complimentary. The women kept repeating that they thought it all “charming, quite simply charming.” And the men slapped Amine on the back as they admired the pool. “This is it, Belhaj, this is success!” When the barbecued lamb was presented, there was a round of applause, and Mathilde insisted that everyone should eat it “Moroccan-style”—with their hands. They all gathered round and dug in, sinking their fingers into the creature’s flesh, picking off the grilled skin and tearing out pieces of the tender, fatty meat which they dipped in salt and cumin.

  The meal went on until midafternoon, by which point the guests were all drowsy from alcohol, the heat, the soft lapping of water against the sides of the pool. Dragan, eyes half closed, nodded gently. A swarm of red dragonflies hovered over the surface of the water.

  “This place is a real paradise,” Michel Cournaud told Amine. “But watch yourself, my friend. You’d better hope the king doesn’t come out here. Do you know what I heard the other day?”

  Cournaud had a belly as big as a pregnant woman’s and he always sat with his legs spread and his hands resting on his paunch. His face, flushed bright red, was extremely expressive, and there was still some spark of childhood in his green eyes: a mischievousness, a curiosity that made people warm to him. Beneath the orange parasol, Cournaud’s skin looked even redder than usual, and as Amine stared at his round face the thought occurred to him that his new friend was about to explode. Cournaud worked for the Chamber of Commerce and knew many people in the business world. He divided his time between Meknes and the capital, and at the Rotary Club he was famed for his sense of humor and above all for the entertaining stories he told about intrigues at the Court. He handed out gossip like sweets to starving children. Nothing much ever happened in Meknes, so the smart set there felt cut off from the world, stuck in a dull, provincial backwater. They knew nothing of what was really going on in the major coastal cities, where the country’s future was being decided. The Meknes elite had to make do with official communiqués and rumors of conspiracies, riots, and the mysterious disappearances of opposition leaders such as Mehdi Ben Barka and others whose names were never spoken out loud. Most of them were not even aware that for the past three years the country had been under martial law, with Parliament suspended and the constitution ignored. Of course, they all knew that the beginning of Hassan II’s reign had been difficult and that he’d had to face up to an increasingly radical opposition. But who could claim to know the whole truth? The heart of power lay in a distant, veiled place, a place that provoked in these wealthy provincials a mixture of fear and fascination. The women in particular loved to hear stories about the king’s harem of almost thirty concubines. They imagined that behind the walls of the mechouar the Prophet’s descendant presided over parties straight out of a Hollywood epic, with champagne and whiskey flowing like water. This was the kind of tale with which Cournaud liked to tantalize them.

  He tried to lean closer to the table and began speaking in a conspiratorial tone. The other guests listened in, all except Dragan who had fallen asleep, his lips vibrating softly. “So . . . I was told that a few weeks ago the king was being driven in a car and they passed a beautiful property. In the Gharb, I think . . . Well, actually, I’m not sure about that, but anyway, the point is: he liked this place. He said he wanted to visit the farm, to meet the landowner. And in no time at all he bought the place for an amount that he himself decided on the spot. The poor owner couldn’t do a thing!”

  The other guests laughed, but Amine didn’t. He didn’t like it when people spread rumors, when they said bad things about this monarch, who, since inheriting the throne in 1961, had made the development of agriculture the country’s first priority.

  “That’s just malicious gossip,” Amine said. “The king is being smeared by the lies of jealous people. The truth is that Hassan II is the only one who understands that Morocco is capable of becoming a new California. Instead of badmouthing him those people should be praising his policies: the dams, the irrigation project that will enable all the country’s farmers to make a living from their work.”

  “You’re deluding yourself,” Cournaud cut in. “From what I’ve heard, the king is far more interested in playing golf and having all-night parties at the palace. I hate to disappoint you, my dear Amine, but all that stuff about him caring about fellahin is pure propaganda. If he really cared about them he would already have launched real agrarian reform. He’d have given land to the millions of peasants who have nothing. But in Rabat they know the reality: there will never be enough land for everyone.”

  “What do you expect?” Amine demanded angrily. “You expect the government to nationalize all the colonial properties overnight and ruin the country? If you understood anything about my work you’d know that the palace is right to do it bit by bit. What do they know about it in Rabat? Our agricultural potential is immense. Cereal production just keeps rising. I myself am exporting twice as much fruit as I was ten years ago.”

  “You’d better watch out, then. They might come here soon and take your land off you so they can give it to poor fellahin.”

  “I have no problem with helping the poor. But not at the expense of people like me who spent years and years building viable businesses. The king knows that. The peasants are and always will be the most loyal defenders of the throne.”

  “I admire your optimism, my friend,” Cournaud said with a smile. “But if you want my opinion, this king only cares about his own little schemes. He leaves the country’s economy in the hands of the wealthy bourgeoisie who get even richer and thank him by telling anyone who will listen that the king is in charge of everything.”

  Amine cleared his throat. For a few seconds he stared at his guest’s ruddy face, at his hairy hands, and he imagined how it would feel to button his shirt all the way up to the collar and watch him suffocate.

  “You should be careful what you say. You could be deported for saying things like that.”

  Cournaud stretched out his legs. He looked as though he was about to slide off his chair and collapse to the ground. He forced his lips into a weak smile.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.

  “You didn’t offend me. I’m telling you this for your sake. You keep saying that you know this country, that this is your home. So you should know that, here in Morocco, you can’t speak freely.”

  The next day, Amine hung a photograph in a gilt frame on the wall of his office. It was a black-and-white picture of Hassan II in a flannel suit, gazing solemnly at the horizon. He hung it between a plate from an agronomy textbook about the pruning of vines and a newspaper article about his farm that described Amine as a pioneer in the cultivation of olive trees. Amine thought it would impress the clients and suppliers who came to visit him here, and the farmworkers who came to complain. They were always moaning, those peasants, with their filthy hands resting on his desk, their craggy faces wet with tears. They would complain about their poverty while looking outside, through the glass door, their eyes insinuating that Amine was one of the lucky few. That he could not understand what it was like to be a simple farmhand, a poor yokel with no means of feeding his family beyond an arid patch of land and a couple of hens. They would ask for an advance, a favor, credit, and Amine would refuse. He would tell them to pull themselves together and show some guts, just as he had done when he took over this farm. “Where do you think I got all this?” he would ask, sweeping his arm across the vista. “You think I was lucky? Luck has nothing to do with it.” He glanced at the photograph of the king and thought that the people of this country expected too much from the makhzen—the state and its agents, and more specifically the king and his entourage. What the king wanted were workers, strong peasants, Moroccans who were proud of their hard-won independence.

  His farm was growing and he had to hire men to work in the greenhouses and harvest the olives. He sent Mourad into the neighboring douars and even as far afield as Azrou and Ifrane. The foreman returned accompanied by a gang of malnourished boys who had grown up in the onion fields and could not find any work. Amine questioned the boys about their abilities. He took them to visit the greenhouses, the warehouses, showed them how to use the press. The boys followed him, silent and docile. The only questions they asked were about their wages. Two of them requested an advance and the others, emboldened by their colleagues’ courage, said they too would need an advance. Amine never had any complaints about the application of these young men who turned up at dawn and worked themselves into the ground come rain or burning sun. But after a few months some of them began to disappear. Once they’d received their wages, they were never seen again. They had no desire to move to the farm permanently, to start a family, to impress their boss enough to earn a raise. They had only one idea in mind: to earn a bit of cash then leave behind the countryside and its poverty. To leave behind the shacks, the smell of chicken shit, the anxiety of winters without rain and women who died in childbirth. During the days they spent under olive trees, shaking the branches to make the olives fall into their nets, they would whisper their dreams of going to the shanty towns around Casablanca or Rabat where each of them had an uncle, a cousin, a big brother who had gone off to make his fortune and who never wrote home.

  Amine watched them. In their eyes he sensed an impatience, a rage he had never seen before, and it scared him. These boys cursed the soil that they dug. They hated the work they did, even as they did it well. And Amine decided his mission in life was no longer just to grow trees or harvest fruit, but to keep the boys here. At that time, all of them wanted to live in a city. The city was an abstract, obsessive thought that filled their minds, something of which, very often, they knew nothing at all. The city kept moving closer, like a slouching beast, a growing threat. Every week its lights seemed brighter, eating up the darkness of the countryside. The city was alive. It twitched and quivered, creeping forward, bringing with it distant noises and disquieting dreams. Sometimes it seemed to Amine that a world was vanishing, or at least a way of seeing the world. Even the farmers wanted to be bourgeois. The new landowners, the ones who had acquired their properties after independence, talked about money like industrialists. They knew nothing of mud or ice, of violet dawns spent walking between rows of blossoming almond trees where the joy of living within nature seemed as obvious as breathing. They knew nothing of the disappointments meted out by the elements, or the obstinacy and optimism needed to keep trusting the seasons. No, they were content to roam around their domains by car, showing them off to visitors, boasting of their merits but learning nothing. Amine felt the purest contempt for these phony farmers who hired foremen to do their work and preferred to live in the city, surrounded by people. In this country that for centuries had known nothing but farms and war, all the talk these days was of cities and progress.