* * *

  On Friday evenings boys would begin hanging around outside the boarding school. They would park their mopeds under the dormitory windows and wait. They would smoke cigarettes, laugh, and punch each other in the stomach while watching women walk by, the shapes of their buttocks visible under their djellabas. The headmistress did not seem unduly bothered by their presence. In fact, she had decided to try and take advantage of it. Hicham, the leader of the gang, would often give her packets of sugar, bouquets of mint, jars of smoked meat that he brought with him from Fès and that she adored. In exchange for these treats she agreed to turn a blind eye to the girls’ activities. She thought they were all lost causes anyway.

  Sabah was not the prettiest of them. And although she went outside with her classmates, she did so without enthusiasm. Just to pass the time. Even so, Hicham noticed her. He was only twenty and he wore blue jeans and immaculately clean shirts. He was always chewing something: a licorice stick, a toothpick, an ear of wheat. The first time he saw Sabah, he went up to her and reached out to her forehead with one hand. He gently caressed the roots of her hair, and the boys and girls around them all fell silent. Sabah had a long scar there, although she had no idea how she had gotten it because nobody had ever told her stories about her childhood. Hicham nodded and smiled at her. He patted her head with a tenderness that made her weak at the knees. She felt like she had just been adopted by him, like he recognized her.

  It was not until a few weeks later, while they were leaning against a car, that Hicham explained things to Sabah. That scar, he told her, must have been caused by knitting needles or an iron rod, the kind of tools that women would sometimes use to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. “It damaged your forehead. But the fact that you’re here proves that you’re tough and that God didn’t want you to die.” Sabah touched the scar with the tip of her index finger then covered it up with her hair. I will never tie my hair back again, she thought. She would have a fringe from now on, like some of the Frenchwomen she had seen in town. She burned with shame at the idea that everyone had seen that opprobrious mark, that they all knew she had survived an attempt to kill her.

  Hicham, though, seemed even more interested in her. Every time he came back to see the boarders he had something for Sabah. He had noticed her love of food so he would always bring a cake or an ice cream. He watched her eat coffee-flavored cream puffs and smiled like a satisfied father when she licked the cream from her fingers. The girls all fought to win Hicham’s attention and some of them were upset that Sabah, who looked like such a virgin with her ridiculous little pout, could have become his favorite. One Saturday night he parked under the dormitory windows and honked his horn twice. The girls laughed and waved at him. Leaning against a wall of the boarding school, Hicham smoked a cigarette. He asked Sabah about her family and she answered evasively. She thought he felt sorry for her, that he understood where she had come from. He told her: “I could be your brother, you know? You don’t have a brother, right?” She did not reply but Selim’s face appeared in her mind. She almost said: “No, I don’t have a brother but I have a cousin who’s like a brother to me.” But this struck her as too complicated and a bit embarrassing. She did not want to have to explain, never mind share with this man, this stranger, the fact of Selim’s existence. So she just nodded and he put his hand on her chin, forcing her to look into his eyes. “Well, you do now, okay? You can be my little sister and I’ll take care of you. But you’re going to have to listen to me because a brother is there to protect his little sister, to stop her from choosing the wrong path or getting mixed up in the wrong company.”

  She’s a little sneak, that’s what she is. You think I can’t spot girls like that? Twenty years I’ve been running this boarding school and I know what I’m talking about. The caretaker found her on the street, in the middle of the night. We were all frantic with worry and she was there, on the boulevard, sitting on her suitcase and waiting for some criminals. She’s a sneak and an idiot who swallows the lies of the first boy she meets and is ready to follow him anywhere. God protect us from that filthy mob! I am very disappointed, Madame Belhaj, and you must understand that I cannot continue sheltering such a scorpion in my school. Who knows what influence she might have over my other girls, what vile stories she might tell them. She might even be pregnant! If I were you, I would take her straight to the doctor. I bet that little pest still has some nasty surprises in store for you. This is a respectable institution and I have to protect my other boarders. Since she has already packed her suitcase, you can take her now. That girl needs to be punished. I’m sure her uncle can persuade her to stop trying to run away.”

  Several times Mathilde tried to interrupt the old headmistress as she was waving her hands in the air, the fingers deformed by arthritis. She tried offering her money—“a considerable sum to pay for any damage caused and to continue supporting this venerable institution”—and she invoked the good Lord, whose mercy should be extended to all, and especially to the youngest and most fragile among us. While Sabah sat there staring at the ground, Mathilde tried to plead her cause by reminding the headmistress that she was an orphan whose mother had abandoned her. But none of it did any good. Every time Mathilde uttered a word the headmistress shook her head frantically, put her hands in front of her face, and, like a child who refuses to listen, began heaping abuse on Sabah, insulting her. “I don’t want to know,” she said with an air of finality. “I don’t want anything more to do with you.” Mathilde picked up her handbag, rose to her feet, and headed toward the door of the office. She turned around and said in an emotionless voice: “Are you coming?” The girl followed her through the corridor to the lobby, suitcase in hand, shuffling along in her shoes stuffed with cotton wool. The other boarders watched them leave and some of them blew kisses to Sabah. She understood that there was no affection in the gesture and that they were not going to miss her. What they felt, however, was a kind of admiration that she had found a way out of that place, accompanied by the tall blond woman who spoke with an Alsatian accent that made them laugh.

  Sabah sat in Mathilde’s car, her head lowered. Her aunt got behind the steering wheel and sat motionless for a few minutes, eyes closed, trying to suppress the fury she could feel rising within her. Mathilde did not know who she was angriest with. The headmistress, who had been so contemptuous toward her, spurning her money and refusing to hear her excuses? Sabah, who, beneath her docile exterior, was just as slutty and sneaky as her mother? Or Amine, who had refused to let Sabah stay at the farm with them so that Mathilde could take care of her and educate her as if she were her own child? She started the engine, pressed down on the accelerator, and turned suddenly onto the avenue, provoking a volley of honked horns from the other motorists. “You’re a public nuisance!” one of them shouted at her. She drove fast, staring straight ahead, and after half an hour Sabah realized they were not heading toward the farm. She wanted to ask: “Where are you taking me?” but she was too frightened that Mathilde would yell at her.

  Her aunt turned to look at her. “I’m so disappointed in you,” she said. “Never would I have believed you could be so stupid, so irresponsible. Is that the life you want for yourself? Is that the kind of girl you want to be? A little slut who goes with the first boy she meets and who believes all the lies he tells her? Where were you planning to go, exactly? What did that boy promise you?” Sabah kept her eyes lowered and Mathilde started to shout: “Answer me! Where were you going?” But Sabah kept her mouth shut. “Anyway, I don’t care. It’s none of my business anymore. You’re the most ungrateful wretch I’ve ever met. If you knew all I’ve done for you . . . You don’t have the faintest idea how much you owe me. Thanks to you, thanks to your stupidity and your selfishness, I’m going to bear the brunt of your uncle’s anger. What am I supposed to tell him? Huh? Tell me, what should I say? Nothing to say? Well, good. I don’t want to hear you and I don’t even want to see you anymore. Your uncle was right, I should have listened to him. You’re a pair of ingrates and scroungers. I wash my hands of you. You and your mother can deal with this between the two of you. Since you don’t want our help, since you show contempt for everything we give you, you and your mother can learn to get by on your own.”

  So that was where they were going. To her mother’s house. Sabah’s heart sank. She would have preferred anything at all—another boarding school, a slap from her uncle—to finding herself face to face with Selma again. The last time she had come to Rabat, to the little apartment on Avenue de Temara, she’d had the impression she was disturbing her mother. Selma kept spying on her, told her not to touch her makeup, her clothes; she started yelling when she caught her daughter opening a drawer filled with old photographs. “Keep your nose out of other people’s things,” she had scolded. That Saturday, her mother had spent most of the afternoon locked in the bathroom. Sabah, bored, had sat alone in the living room and read magazines. Then Selma had appeared in the corridor and taken some cash from the pocket of her dressing gown. “Here, go and have fun, and don’t come back before two in the morning. I have friends coming over—you can’t stay here.” And Sabah had ventured out into Rabat’s dark and empty streets. She had sat in a café, ordered a glass of almond milk, and prayed for time to pass quickly, for her to get home safe and sound. “Your mother’s a whore,” one of the girls at the boarding school had told her once. Sabah had attacked the girl, punching her in the face, but that evening, in the empty café in Rabat, sitting in front of her glass of milk, it was Selma that she imagined hitting, locking up, hiding from the world. She was ashamed of her mother and did not want to see her again. “Mathilde, please, take me to the farm,” she begged now, but her aunt said nothing. For several miles she drove behind a truck transporting mules, the only parts of which she could see were their fat rumps. Mathilde, who liked to drive fast, began grumbling then honking her horn. In a thin voice, Sabah sang: “Lift up the horse’s tail, blow in his—”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  * * *

  “Selma isn’t home. She went to the hammam.” Hocine looked at Sabah as she stood there in the middle of the avenue, suitcase in hand, and pinched her cheek. “So you’re her daughter? Yeah, I can see the resemblance. But you’re too skinny. You need to eat more.” Mathilde, her arm firmly around Sabah, smiled hypocritically. “Mademoiselle is watching her weight. But she has never lacked for anything and she’s always had enough to eat, believe me.” Sabah sat down on the steps, her bag between her knees. Every time a woman crossed the street or a taxi stopped outside the apartment building, she jumped. What would she say to her mother? How would she react? Mathilde, who was pacing around on the sidewalk, bought a cigarette from a passing street vendor. She smoked it slowly, like a teenager who has not yet learned to inhale properly. Then Selma appeared. She was walking along the avenue, her wet hair rolled up in a beige headscarf, her face still red from the heat of the hammam. She was wearing a green gandoura with gold embroidery around the edges of the collar and the sleeves. Men turned to watch her walk past, and a motorist leaned on his horn.

  She recognized Mathilde first. Even from a distance, even on a crowded street, she would have recognized her sister-in-law anywhere, with her blond hair, her manly shoulders, her hideous legs swollen in the heat. Then she saw her daughter, slumped on the steps, head between her knees.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We should go inside,” Mathilde said.

  “Is there a problem? Did something happen?”

  “Let’s go to your apartment to talk about it. I have no desire to make a scene.”

  They walked upstairs in silence, and Sabah stared at her mother’s slender ankles, her calves, which were exposed under the gandoura every time she climbed to the next step.

  “Go to the bedroom and close the door,” Mathilde said in a stern voice.

  Sabah did as she was told. Then she sat on the floor, ear pressed to the wall, and tried to hear what her mother and her aunt were saying. In the living room the two women talked in whispers. Now and again one of them would raise her voice, annoyed. “It’s always the same with you. You’re completely irresponsible!” Mathilde shouted. “All of this is your fault!” Selma retorted. Then their voices would grow quieter again and Sabah could make out nothing but their tense whispering. She turned to look at her mother’s room. The large bed was covered with a thick pale-pink duvet. A handsome Venetian mirror hung on the wall, and on the lemonwood dressing table there were necklaces, bottles of perfume, a teacup filled with makeup brushes. The open wardrobe overflowed with dresses, coats, and high-heeled shoes. On the inside of the wardrobe door Selma had stuck a photograph and a postcard showing the Eiffel Tower, with the word “PARIS” written in golden letters. Sabah pulled the photograph off the door. It was a portrait of Mouilala, in her white haik, her eyes heavily made up, and five-year-old Selma, who seemed amused by the idea of having her picture taken. On the back of the photograph were the handwritten words: “Rabat, 1942.” Sabah stared at the little girl’s face and thought: She doesn’t look like her mother. Then Sabah crawled over to the bed and buried her face in the duvet. She sucked in deep breaths of Selma’s smell, that musky smell she had always associated with her, and which remained on her skin for hours after her mother had kissed her.

  “Come here!” Selma shouted, and Sabah slowly walked through the corridor and stood in front of the two women.

  “Is it true? You tried to run away from the boarding school?”

  Sabah did not reply.

  “Don’t try that with me, my girl. You’re going to answer me, even if I have to beat it out of you. Understood?”

  Sabah nodded.

  “Where were you planning to go? What did that boy promise you?”

  Sabah stammered something.

  “We can’t hear you. Look at me when you speak.”

  Sabah noticed her suitcase in the entrance hall. She crouched down, unzipped it, and took out a thick stack of letters, which she handed to her mother.

  “What’s this?”

  “I wanted to find Selim. I haven’t heard from him for weeks. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”

  Mathilde came up to Sabah and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “What are you talking about? What does my son have to do with all this?”

  “Go back to the bedroom!” Selma yelled. “Leave us.”

  Mathilde reached out for the packet of letters but Selma held on to them tightly. “Wait a minute.” She opened a small cupboard and took out a bottle of whiskey. “The glasses are behind you, on the shelf.” Mathilde grabbed two and they sat on the bench next to each other. After swallowing a mouthful of whiskey, Selma divided the stack of letters in two. “Here.” A photograph fell out onto the thick wool carpet. Selim, bare-chested on a beach, his blond hair hanging halfway down his back.

  Neither of them understood and both were jealous. Both mother and lover wondered why he had written to Sabah instead of to them. Why had he chosen that boring girl, that secondary character in their lives? Looking through the letters, they realized that this was in fact what united Sabah and Selim. This feeling that they were living on the margins of life, never fully valued. Both of them had been abandoned by Selma. Both of them had, albeit in different ways, suffered the wrath of Amine. The two women looked at the letters lying in their laps and thought: I wish they’d been for me. I wish they’d been love letters. He would have written that he couldn’t live without me, that my absence from his life was driving him mad with grief. He would have apologized for running away, and in heartbreakingly tender words he would have promised to come running back into my arms very soon. He would have signed the letter Selim who loves you with all his heart. Selim who cannot forget you. They were both disappointed. The first letters were from autumn 1969 and Selim merely described his life with Nilsa, Simon, and Lalla Amina. Mathilde recognized her son’s stuttering prose style. Selim wrote in short sentences. He did not use any punctuation and wrote things like: “How are you I am fine” and “So what about you tell me about the boarding school,” just like he used to when he would write to his mother from the camp where he’d spent his summers. Mathilde remembered his childish words: “I miss you maman the canary laid an egg it’s been raining for three days now.” Back then, she had been his everything. Whenever she spent longer than expected in town, he would wait for her at the entrance to their estate with tears rolling down his cheeks. If he watched her buckle her high-heeled shoes or try on a hat, he would exclaim: “How beautiful you are, Maman!” The adoration of that little boy consoled her for all her sorrows. But in these letters, the letters to Sabah, Mathilde did not even appear. She kept turning the pages over, examining each sentence, but not once did she find any mention of herself, Amine, or the farm. As if her son had forgotten her. As if he were indifferent to the pain his disappearance had caused her. “Have you finished? Pass me yours,” she told her sister-in-law.

  But Selma did not look up. She was reading a rather unhinged letter from early 1970 in which Selim talked about women’s bodies, about the lust to which he had abandoned himself, and now Selma wanted to kill him. What was this “free love”? With his vague, clumsy words, Selim tried to explain this new vision of a world where nobody belonged to anybody else. Where men did not possess women and there were no oaths of eternal fidelity. A world governed only by the whims of desire. Where you could reach out and draw a body toward you, where you could ride it in the coolness of the night. And all this loveless sex had hardened his heart. Everything he had believed in had been crushed and swept away like a sandcastle hit by a wave. Marriage, children, that life his parents had chosen, that childhood shaken by yells, curses, suppressed hate. “I will never marry,” he wrote. “Other people’s bodies do not belong to us and I do not belong to my parents I do not belong to this country.” The little shit, thought Selma. So full of himself, claiming that women wanted him more than they wanted other men. Maybe because he didn’t talk very much and, unlike the other hippies, wasn’t always spouting off about the world. He didn’t boast about reaching nirvana or pursuing a quest. He could sit for hours watching trees bend in the wind, and women were intrigued, charmed by his indolence. The little shit, daring to write such crazy things to a fifteen-year-old girl while decorating his letters with childish drawings of boats in the port. The little shit, swearing he had become a man. He knew what he wanted to do with his life: Selim, the ignorant, lazy, mediocre student, finally had a few ambitions. During the months spent with the hippies, he had listened avidly to their stories. Among them there were doctors, engineers, architects, intellectuals, whose vast knowledge he admired. “Over there on the other side of the ocean there’s America.” He wrote to Sabah about travel the way you might tell a slave about freedom, a world without fences. He had asked his friends to describe America for him. The hippies thought he would be disgusted by what they told him: “It’s the kingdom of money and violence, a country of vast vertical cities where girls sell their bodies and men dream of being rich and powerful.” After that, he was obsessed with New York. His most recent letters spoke of nothing else. He wrote about setting off soon for that distant land. He would find some money and leave behind this village of poverty and boredom where nobody did anything and the air was thick with the sickening smell of overripe tomatoes that emanated from Diabet’s only shop.