Mathilde and Selma were drunk. “He’s a kid!” Selma said angrily.

  “An ungrateful and irresponsible kid,” Mathilde added. Her tongue was so heavy, she found it hard to articulate.

  “Maybe I was a lazy student, but at least I could spell. Do you remember? You made me work at it. Selim makes the kind of mistakes a five-year-old would make.”

  Mathilde asked for a cigarette, then went out onto the little balcony to light it, blowing the smoke noisily from her mouth. Yes, of course she remembered the classes she’d given on spelling, history, and geography in that damp house in Berrima. She remembered Selma as a child, insolent and capricious, but generous too. The little girl who would come back from school and copy out her Arabic lessons for her sister-in-law. Afterward she would make Mathilde recite it and she wouldn’t laugh when the Alsatian woman struggled to pronounce an R or a K.

  “I’m sure he’s on drugs.”

  “Oh, stop,” said Selma. “It’s not that big a deal, believe me.”

  “What do you know about it? Maybe that’s why he’s stopped writing to her. Something could have happened to him. I saw a television documentary the other day. It said they’re all junkies, that they eat food from trash bins and some of them have died from overdoses.”

  “I know your son. He’s not like that. I could criticize you for many things, but you raised your children well.”

  “It didn’t stop him from running away.”

  “He’ll come back. Trust me.” There was a small wooden box on the table. Selma opened it and said: “You want to try some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Hashish.”

  “You smoke that stuff?”

  “No, not really. Someone left it here the other day. But we could try it.”

  One night, lying on a bench in Selma’s apartment, Omar listened to a radio program that fascinated him. It told the story of a young Turkish actress at the start of the century who, because she was a Muslim, was not allowed to perform on stage. But this young woman was so talented and driven that she succeeded in joining a theater company. Every night she would go on stage in the theaters of Istanbul. The audiences loved her and her fellow actors supported her. Sometimes the police, tipped off by an informer, would burst into the theater, and the young actress would have to escape across the rooftops, aided by her accomplices, and the audience would jeer the policemen as they left empty-handed, glancing back angrily at the vacant stage.

  This was what the town of Essaouira was like when Omar arrived there in February 1972: a stage set abandoned by a theater company or a film crew who had, for some strange reason, been forced to pack up and leave in a rush, leaving behind a few worthless objects—a painted sunset, a fake living room that still showed the traces of a party. Omar was welcomed like some eminent government official. In the shabby police station of that abandoned town, the officers had washed their uniforms and had set out, on an old desk, a plate of cakes and a steaming teapot. “Please sit, Chief!” The man who addressed him was called Ismaël. A detective in his early thirties who had never been beyond the confines of this backward region. A handsome young man with clear skin who slicked back his hair with argan oil and smelled of burned hazelnut. He stared at Omar, smiling nervously, his eyes expressing an anxiety that the police chief found quite touching. “It must make a change from Casablanca,” the detective added, raising the teapot into the air and pouring the hot, foaming liquid into two glasses. “Nothing much happens here. Apart from the hippies . . .”

  For the previous four years the authorities had turned a blind eye to the hippie camps in the forest. Pagan ceremonies. Half-naked dancing in the ruins of Dar Soltane. Fornication in sordid brothels where you could get a girl for less than ten dirhams and where Western men would beckon over young Moroccan boys and teach them to say “cum” and “hard-on” in French. Occasionally the police would raid the houses and hotels of Diabet to arrest a hippie whose visa had expired. Foreigners were permitted to stay in the country for only three months, and the ones who were arrested were sent back home. For a long time such problems had been solved with a bit of cash or an imported object. After all, it was their business if they wanted to get high or live in filth.

  But since the attempted coup in Skhirat, the government had decided to take matters into its own hands and halt the corruption of Morocco’s youth. The drug dealing. The stolen passports, which drove the foreign consulates to distraction as filthy young foreigners descended upon them in tears to report the latest theft. In Tangier the authorities were told not to allow young men with long hair to enter the country. The customs officers became part-time hairdressers, threatening the arriving hippies with clippers. On television a reporter made them his favorite target: “The hippies’ time is over!” Morocco wanted real tourists now, wealthy and respectable people who would pay in cash for a camel ride and offer shameful sums for a Berber rug or a felt fez.

  All colors had vanished from the town. The murals had been removed from the walls and the Hippie Café had been transformed. The owner now wore a suit bought at a flea market and he turned up the volume on the radio when a certain popular song came on, the chorus to which went: “Hippie, we don’t like you, go home.” “Just last week some young guy died in Diabet,” Ismaël went on. “Nobody in the village wants to talk about it, but according to our information he overdosed. All those hippies care about is getting high. They’re as skinny and toothless as tramps.” Omar did not touch his glass of tea. He gazed at the wall and Ismaël found himself wondering what he was thinking about, this strange man with skin as red and blotchy as the fishermen on the coast. Abruptly Omar stood up and buttoned up his jacket.

  “I’m looking for a boy,” he explained. “A Moroccan who lived among them.” He took a photograph from his pocket showing a bare-chested young man with hair bleached almost white by the sun. His green eyes seemed to blaze even brighter in comparison.

  “Him? He’s a Moroccan?”

  “He’s as Moroccan as you and me. Have you seen him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. They all look the same, those hippies.”

  “Send your men onto the beaches, into the forests, into the houses of the medina. Send them anywhere he might be hiding, you understand?”

  The next day Omar was driven to Diabet. The wind was cold and wet, with a tang of salt, and Omar had to make a superhuman effort not to rip the buttons off his shirt and scratch himself until he bled. There was a rotting smell in the air, as if the ocean were merely an immense swamp. The villagers kept their shutters closed whenever the police arrived, and the men, when they were interrogated, gave only vague, fearful answers. They regretted having abetted such debauchery, having welcomed drug addicts and vagrants into their homes. One woman, in an old beige kaftan, began weeping in front of the police chief. She swore she had been cheated and humiliated and she asked if there was someone in Rabat who could investigate her case and pay her compensation. Surely Omar had friends in the ministry? Ismaël shoved the old peasant woman away.

  Omar went to see the few remaining hippies. Four skinny, sickly boys lying at the back of a freezing room. One of them kept scratching himself, infested with stink bugs or scabies. Some of the others had caught hepatitis and went to relieve themselves behind a tree in the tamarisk forest. It was there, in the forest, that three of the hippies had been buried. Omar kept asking questions but was given no clear answers. Who were they? What had they looked like? Had one of them spoken Arabic? He wondered if the people here simply didn’t care about him; they seemed strangely indifferent to the authority of the police. The villagers talked about voodoo ceremonies, trancelike states, foreigners found dead with bulging eyes and enigmatic smiles. “Where did the drugs come from? Who sold them the drugs?” Omar yelled at a terrified peasant. A former postman explained that the hippies received letters soaked in LSD, which they cut into little pieces and ate. Others whispered about suicides—may God preserve us—and they talked in particular about a Moroccan girl, impregnated and abandoned by an American man. That was the real crime. That was the real betrayal. The hippies had lied when they promised to keep their distance from Moroccan women. They had converted a few of them to free love and artificial paradises. They had injected poison into those poor young souls.

  Throughout the investigation Omar kept his arms down by his sides and his mouth tensed, as if afraid he might be infected by some virus circulating in the air. He asked to wash his hands and Ismaël, embarrassed, led him to a drinking fountain near where a donkey was grazing. Omar stood with his hands in the jet of water for a long time, his face suddenly relaxed.

  “I was told about a certain Lalla Amina, who lives in the medina. I’m sure you know who that is.”

  Ismaël smiled. For the first time since Omar’s arrival, he was going to be able to satisfy him.

  * * *

  • • •

  It wasn’t difficult for Omar to reconstruct Selim’s last days in Essaouira. He acted like a competent policeman, a meticulous detective, not like a worried uncle or jealous brother. First he paid a visit to Lalla Amina, who seemed unimpressed by his occupation and rank. As this tall, thin Black woman led him into the house, he wondered if she was feigning senile dementia or if she was, like the rest of the town, genuinely descending into madness. She would begin a sentence, stop halfway through it, then run her tongue over her gold teeth, which were now a copperish color. She pointed with her bony fingers at a door. “He slept in there!” The tiny bedroom contained only a bed, a wardrobe, and a small wooden table on which stood a stack of books, their cardboard covers falling to pieces. Poetry collections, novels about travels in America, and essays on the condition of Black people. Omar picked up one of them. He took off his glasses and lifted the book very close to his eyes. It was a short work on Buddha, a strange Indian god who, having given up everything, had reached nirvana. Inside this book were some photographs of Nepal and India, and of men with shaved heads, their bodies enveloped in orange fabric. He put it down on the bedside table. “These books belong to you?” Lalla Amina howled with laughter. “I can’t read! I looked at the pictures, though. They’re pretty.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Omar penetrated the mystery of the photographs and his investigation led him to Karim. He had the boy brought to the police station. Karim kept swallowing. He looked terrified. Ready to confess to anything in exchange for a little mercy. When Omar explained what he was looking for, Karim exhaled. He sat up in his chair and began talking, very quickly, about this funny blond Moroccan boy who had lived with his aunt for three years. He heaped insults on his former friend, presumably thinking this would please the half-blind police chief with his perfectly filed fingernails, like a woman’s. He called Selim ungrateful, secretive, twisted. “Who abandons his parents and never bothers telling them where he is?” he demanded indignantly. “That kind of thing is okay for foreigners, but here, there’s no greater shame.”

  “So, do you think he went home?” Omar asked.

  “I’d be surprised. All he ever talked about was going to America.”

  “I see. But it’s expensive, traveling to America. Do you have any idea where he might have found the money for such a trip?”

  “An idea? Yeah, maybe.”

  In Diabet everyone knew that Selim had a gun. “He should have been more discreet,” Karim said. “One day he took the pistol out of his bag and used it to threaten this gang of hippies who were completely off their heads. Apparently it was because of a girl. The Moroccan girl that some American man had gotten pregnant. Selim wanted to defend her honor. But girls like that don’t have any honor to defend. Anyway, he always kept the gun on him. He put it under his pillow when he went to sleep. And one day he asked me if I knew anyone who might be interested in it. He wanted to sell the pistol, you understand?”

  “It’s not a pistol,” Omar interrupted.

  “Oh yes, sir, it was, I can assure you of that. I saw it. He had a pistol—”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not a pistol. It’s a revolver with central percussion. An eight-millimeter with a six-cartridge cylinder and walnut grips.”

  * * *

  “Walnut grips.” At the time, Omar had not had any idea what those words meant, but he thought they sounded beautiful and he would repeat them as if reciting a poem. Amine had returned from the front at the end of 1945, and one night, in the house in Berrima, he had pulled a revolver from its leather holster. There, in the darkness of the patio, lit only by a few candles, he had begun playing with the gun, spinning it around his index finger, aiming at an upstairs window as if ready to fire. “Here, take it, it’s not loaded.” And Omar, still a teenager, had held that weapon of war in his hand. Amine told him how it worked. The cylinder, which opened to the right (“it’s a cavalryman’s gun”), the button you had to press to eject the cartridges, and the way you had to hold it to be sure of hitting your target. Emboldened, Omar had asked: “Have you killed people with this?” And Amine had replied: “What do you think? It’s not a toy. Come on, give it back to me.” The years had passed and Omar had given it no further thought until the day he joined the police and was presented with his own gun. It had all started there, he realized then. His vocation as a policeman had begun in the garden in Berrima, at the precise moment when his brother had grabbed the gun from his hands, contemptuously returning him to his status as a child.

  That night, Amine joined Mathilde in her bed. They had been sleeping apart for several years now. Amine said it was because he didn’t want to disturb her with his snoring and the sound of the radio which he listened to until late at night. The truth was that he often came back late from his secret excursions, his clothes steeped in the scent of another woman, and he could not bear the thought of having to justify himself to his wife. But that night, that searingly hot night in July 1972, he quietly opened the door to Mathilde’s bedroom. His wife was not asleep. She was lying naked in the darkness. Amine had always found it strange, this obsession she had with sleeping unclothed. He himself couldn’t do it. She turned her face toward him. It was her husband—yes, just her husband—and yet she felt frightened. She was seized with anxiety, as if this were the first time he had seen her naked. As if, through the magic of that summer night, she had become a young, innocent virgin once again. He lay down beside her. She let him kiss her, stroke her hair. Amine’s warm, strong hands held her by the hips. It was not unpleasant. He was not a brutal or clumsy lover. Even so she could not manage to feel anything at all. She was outside her own body, looking down at herself being taken, a limp rag doll stretched out on the bed. She even felt a sort of prudishness, thinking how ridiculous it was after thirty years of marriage, after two children. But that was the thing. All that time spent together, all those habits, those secrets, and her aging body, it was all this that held her apart from him. She prayed. Please don’t let him do anything embarrassing. If he tries to flip me over or put his tongue inside me, I will scream. From outside, she could hear the perpetual, infernal croaking of toads. Ever since they had had the swimming pool built the garden had been infested with toads, which made such a racket that it kept Amine and Mathilde awake at night. Perhaps, she thought, she should grab the rifle, as she used to do with the rats, and shoot at those ugly creatures. Their sticky bodies would explode in a hail of bullets. But no, what was she thinking? Her daughter was getting married the next day: everything was ready, and the last thing she needed was bloodstains all over the paving stones in the garden.

  Amine kissed her neck. He said something and she pretended to smile. “I love you more than anyone. You’re everything to me.” She swallowed. This declaration was so strange, so out of character. Why now? And what would remain of this passion tomorrow, after the sun had risen? She wanted him to get off her now. She wanted him to finish up. Mathilde knew what she had to do to speed things up, to make him come at last. But she didn’t want to have to start moaning or to slide her hands between Amine’s thighs, to use all her old tricks. There was no spite or selfishness in this unwillingness, simply a feeling of shame. A fact that bewildered her. Nearly thirty years earlier she had felt ready to do anything with Amine, and her nudity itself had seemed like a liberation.