In a panic, Amine grabbed his wife by the arm. He pointed out the peasants. “They have to go. I don’t want them watching us.” Mathilde stroked his hand. “Most of them have already left, can’t you see?” And it was true: only a few children remained under the rubber tree, holding big glass bottles of soda in both hands and blowing into the necks to make noises. Their parents were visible in the distance, heading back to the douar. One man had his arm draped around his wife’s waist. Amine slowly nodded, like a child waking up after a nightmare. Mathilde understood then that her husband had spent his whole life terrified that everything he had acquired might one day be torn away from him. For him, happiness was unbearable because he felt he had stolen it from others.

  Amine had advanced, step by step, slow as a tortoise, a dignified and hardworking creature. He had advanced toward an apparently modest goal—a house, a wife, children—but he had not understood that this goal, once he had reached it, would transform him. As long as he was struggling, menaced by other people, by nature, by his own despondency, he felt strong. But an easy life, a life of success and abundance, frightened him. His body was corrupted by a poison, swollen by bourgeois self-importance. He felt like a piece of fruit that had macerated in its own juices too long and had lost its firm roundness. People thought he was rich. People thought he was lucky and they wanted him to share what he had. To make up for the carelessness and injustice of fate.

  How could they have been so happy? Thirty years after his wedding, sitting in a prison cell in Salé, this question would haunt Mehdi. He would think back to his early years married to Aïcha with a mixture of nostalgia and shame. Such happiness would strike him then as inexplicable. He would regret all the time that had passed and would be filled with remorse that he hadn’t suffered, hadn’t fought, hadn’t risen up against the dark forces that were taking possession of the country.

  Most of the prisoners in his cell were younger than he was; they had not lived through that period. They could not understand. Nor could they possibly have suspected that what obsessed this discreet gentleman, dressed in a suit, smoking cigarette after cigarette as he sat behind bars, was not so much his future as his past. Mehdi, leaning back against the mold-covered wall, ran through his trial in his head. He was simultaneously the judge and the accused, and the crime that he was investigating bore no relation to the one that had landed him in this prison cell. It was a far greater and more terrible crime. A crime that was hard to define. For mitigating circumstances he could plead youth, recklessness, ambition, the desire to do the right thing. They had all acted the same way, he told himself, but the self-justification was hypocritical and he did not really believe it. It was true, all the same: he knew because he had seen them. He had shared with them those years of happiness and frivolity, of work and fun. The New Year’s Eve celebrations on the beach. The sack races in the countryside. The hunting parties and boat trips. The second homes, from a simple hut to a luxury villa. That damned elite that everyone had always harped on about. For years he had told himself stories. Always the same stories, as fragile and unsound as a house of cards. He had told himself that he was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, between the predators and the sheep. There were those who stole and those who were robbed, and he stood between them like a sheep dog, his task to guard the herd, to protect the power of his masters. Up to a certain point this compromise had struck him as acceptable. But the question kept returning, like a throbbing pain, a pulse in his temples, a punch in the stomach: how could you have been so happy? Happy despite the assassinations, the arrests, the deportations to secret labor camps? Happy despite the injustice, the fear, the whispers, the threats of public disgrace? Blissfully happy with that woman whose face came back to him now in dreams. Her smile, which he had photographed so many times. Her dark eyes, as determined as a soldier’s. The vast expanse of her smile. The infinite grace of her hands.

  He should have chosen another life. A life in which he would have been content to teach and to write. Ah, if only he had written, in the secrecy of his room, everything that had flowed through his heart! Tears rose to his eyes at the thought that he had betrayed his dream, that his soul had been impure, his heart false. He had raised his children in the cult of discretion and truthfulness. He had told them what his own father had told him: “The makhzen is like a camel: it crushes what is under its hooves and stares always at the horizon. Keep your distance from it.” In the final months of his existence Mehdi would feel nostalgic for a life he had never led. Not the life of a hero, but of a simple man. Deep down, he would think, perhaps we didn’t deserve to be free. At almost sixty years old, reduced to the company of rapists, drug dealers, and murderers, he would make a strange observation. Age was not enough to rid one of illusions. Everything would have been so much easier if ideals truly died. If time could permanently erase them, expunge them from the depths of your conscience. But the illusions remained there, lurking somewhere inside. Damaged, withered. Like a regret or an old wound that flares up in cold weather. You can never be free of it, you can only pretend you don’t care anymore. All those years he had been condemned to a sort of inner exile. Inside him there survived a clandestine personality, silent and immobile now, which he would allow to escape only on rare occasions. All his life he had been wary, less of others than of himself.

  How was it possible to live like a coward? To wake up like a coward, to get dressed like a coward, to eat like a coward, and to love a woman while knowing, always, in your innermost heart and mind, that you were a coward? How was it possible to live with that knowledge? And to be happy?

  Mehdi and Aïcha moved into a two-story house in the hills of Rabat. From their bedroom they could look down on the Bou Regreg valley and, on clear days, the small town of Salé. To furnish it they went to the joutiya—the local flea market—and bought an old leather sofa, a long wooden table with sculpted feet, and a bookcase for Mehdi’s books. They weren’t rich but that didn’t matter. They spent most of their time working, and, as far as their leisure time was concerned, their salaries were sufficient for them to have parties with friends and to organize a few trips to the mountains or the seaside. The future did not worry them. They knew they were on the right side.

  After months of hesitation Aïcha decided to specialize in gynecology and obstetrics. Perhaps this choice owed something to the example of Dr. Dragan Palosi, who had, when she was a child, helped her quench her thirst for knowledge. Or perhaps it was the memory of the woman whose stillborn baby she had delivered in the douar years earlier. Mehdi tried to dissuade her. He said he was concerned about the onerous work hours and the late-night emergency calls. The truth was that he did not think this specialty sufficiently noble. He was revolted by the idea of his wife always having her head between other women’s legs, stuffing her fingers into their vaginas. All those years of study to do something that illiterate women had been doing for centuries: bringing children into the world. On the day they moved to their new house, Mehdi gave her a copy of Doctor Zhivago. She didn’t really like it when he gave her books. She felt he was trying to educate her, to fill the gaps in her culture, and these presents, instead of bringing her pleasure, left her feeling hurt. One evening, when she came home from the hospital, he asked her if she’d had time to do any reading. She apologized: it wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to, but it was exhausting being on call, and, besides, this book was so difficult. All those characters with their complicated Russian names and all those stories of war and revolution left her bewildered. She kept having to go back to the previous chapter to remind herself what was happening. “Ah,” Mehdi sighed, “I thought you’d be interested in that book. The main character is a doctor, after all.” Aïcha was not swayed by this argument, and Mehdi was left to reflect on just how stubborn and tough-minded his wife could be. Nothing could make her deviate from the path she had chosen.

  Dr. Zhivago was a poet, and so was Aïcha’s department head, Dr. Ari Benkemoun. In Rabat it was said that he had delivered half of the city, and Aïcha thought how strange it must be to keep passing people in the street to whom you could truthfully say: “I was the first person to see your face.” He welcomed Aïcha with an enthusiasm that took her by surprise. On her first day he gripped her shoulder and guided her through the department at top speed, talking constantly. He was midway through an anecdote about his student years in Paris when he stopped to greet a nurse. “She’s the real boss here—never forget that,” he told Aïcha, who nodded. They went into a room and for ten minutes Dr. Benkemoun held a patient’s hand between his own large, hairy hands. “Thank you, Doctor,” the woman said to him. “I’ll never forget you.” He asked Aïcha to have lunch with him: “You have so much to learn and I have so much to impart!” And, while eating marinated anchovies with his fingers, he told her about his memories of one extraordinary birth (“The woman swore she was as virginal as Jesus’s mother!”) before assuming a more serious expression to warn Aïcha about septicemia and the tubal infections that often killed their patients. “All over the city we face dangerous, insidious competitors: chouafas, butchers, unscrupulous midwives who carve women up. By the time they come to us it is often too late. Maternity is a mysterious thing, mademoiselle. Nothing is stronger than a woman’s determination to have a child. Well, nothing except a woman’s determination to get rid of a child she doesn’t want. You will see patients with burned thighs from melted lead because someone has convinced them that their vagina has been colonized by a djinn. You’ll see women who have drunk the blood of a cockerel or touched a dead man’s penis.” Aïcha’s eyes widened. Benkemoun licked oil from the corner of his lips. “Don’t look so shocked, mademoiselle! Our colleagues too, however well qualified they might be, sometimes resort to brutal practices. Have you never seen a clumsy curettage that has caused an infection?” Aïcha nodded, remembering the face of a twenty-year-old woman who had come to the hospital in Strasbourg late one night. She had been a political science student, dressed in a blue silk blouse and brass bracelets. To judge from her wounds, the doctor who had treated her had wanted to punish her in the place where she had sinned. Yes, Benkemoun was a poet who did not look down upon the numerous legends surrounding the mysterious act of procreation. To bear the pain of labor and to protect their baby, some women would cut up little pieces of paper on which they wrote verses from the Quran and then eat them during their contractions. Being a doctor, he explained to Aïcha, also meant facing up to the irrational, to this idea that women were connected to the cycles of the moon and that everything they imagined or fantasized during their pregnancy would have consequences for the well-being of their child.

  During Aïcha’s first weeks at the hospital Dr. Benkemoun behaved as if possessed by an urgent need to teach. As if he were about to die from some terminal illness and had to pass on all his knowledge to his heir before expiring. In reality Dr. Benkemoun had only one thought in mind: retirement. He wanted to move as far away from this little town as he could, away from all his patients, all the children he had brought into the world. He’d had all he could stand of simpering as young women told him ecstatically: “You delivered my mother and one day you will deliver my daughter too!” Dr. Benkemoun would rather die, frankly. He was so sick of the screaming of women in labor, of their never-ending contractions, of those telephone calls in the middle of the night. Wherever he went he feared the ringing of that cursed device. “Dr. Benkemoun!” would shout some maid or maître d’. “They need you at the hospital!” How many card games had been interrupted by that sound? How many meals ruined by his inability to drink more than a single glass of wine, his departure before the desserts were served?

  In Aïcha he had found his successor. He liked her, and not only because of her brilliant academic record or her somewhat old-fashioned politeness toward him. He watched her with the patients and was impressed by the aura of authority she emitted for one so young. To women whose husbands had forbidden them to take the pill she would say: “Just do it anyway—he doesn’t have to know.” One Friday evening he told her that he had to go out of town and he was leaving her in charge of the department until Monday morning. “And when I get back I only want to hear good news. Understood?” That weekend, six children were born.

  It wasn’t easy living with a woman. There were certain things—in Aïcha’s physical presence, in the reality of sharing a house with her—that disgusted Mehdi. The hair products she used and the peculiar smell, like furniture polish, with which they filled the bathroom. Her bedtime ritual of pulling her hair to one side, pinning it in place, then tightly knotting a scarf around her head. The boxes of sanitary napkins that she no longer even bothered to hide from him, and all the pills she would take even before she was ill, “because I can tell I’m about to get a migraine.” He didn’t want to know about any of that, just as he had no desire to get involved in housework. He obstinately refused to accompany her to the shops, because what if he saw someone he knew? What would they think of him, walking around carrying a basket of vegetables? He rarely entered the kitchen and when he did it was only to ask her to bring him a drink. Try as she might to stare meaningfully at the fridge and invite him to help himself, he pretended not to understand.

  He soon realized that he did not understand women at all. And what Aïcha told him when she came home from the hospital struck him not merely as uninteresting but positively repugnant. All his life he had been told what girls were allowed and forbidden to do, the rules for a virtuous existence, and he felt perfectly justified in being repulsed by women who talked too loudly or flirted with other men. As for everything connected with the mysteries of the female body, it revolted him to his very core. All this, he thought, was the fault of Cyd Charisse and those other actresses who had haunted his dreams as a child.

  Aïcha was often absent but Mehdi did not criticize her. As the chief of staff for the Minister of Industry, he worked all week, often late into the night. On weekends he would spend hours at the golf course in Dar Es Salaam, opened with great pomp a few years earlier. Important decisions regarding the country’s future were made on the green, and anyone who wanted the ear of the king and his Court needed to know how to handle his woods and irons. In Rabat everyone dreamed of being a golf champion. Mehdi bought himself a traditional English golfing outfit: tartan plus fours, plum leather shoes with metal studs, and a woolen cap that made him itch whenever he sweated. To all those who asked him for a favor or a discreet chat he would answer: “Come and find me at the golf course on Sunday morning.” And the petitioner would walk down the fairways alongside him, hardly daring to speak as Mehdi addressed the ball and stared into the distance to calculate his shot. With his friends, his colleagues, and sometimes even with Aïcha, he would talk about swings and bunkers, and he would buy books in which the great champions gave their advice on the game. Occasionally Aïcha would find him in the bathroom or the living room, legs apart, hands joined, swinging his arms back before striking an imaginary ball.

  One evening they attended a reception organized by the king’s chamberlain. Mehdi kept telling his wife: “There will be some very important people there.” The inhabitants of Rabat always did that. They informed you about people (“She is the minister’s mistress. He is a very influential man”), and they advised you to pay attention to what you said, the way you behaved, how much alcohol you consumed. They did it in an easygoing, casual way, but it changed everything. Aïcha wore a black dress with a velvet bow on the right shoulder. She tied her hair into a chignon at the back of her neck. Mehdi liked it when she tied back her hair. “Don’t tell everyone you’re a gynecologist. It makes people uncomfortable. Just tell them you’re a doctor.”

  That evening Aïcha stayed close to Mehdi, who seemed happy, at ease, as if all these people were old friends of his. They sat on the terrace. Mehdi ordered a whiskey from a waiter in a Western-style jacket. He pontificated about traveling, his childhood, the importance of education in building the Moroccan of the future. He himself was the perfect example of this, having come from nothing, having—he claimed—lived in the direst poverty and extricated himself from it through sheer hard work and determination. Aïcha let him lie. She did not contradict him. She did not highlight the inconsistencies in his account or question his version of events. At one point he turned to her and asked: “Do you remember?” and she bore witness to an imaginary scene. She said that she had been there, that she had seen it with her own eyes, and she laughed, as if this memory invented by him was as true as her love for him. She thought that was what loving someone was. Being loyal. Letting the other person reinvent and reconstruct his own life, not opposing his desire to turn himself into a fictional character. It would have been petty of her, she thought, to force him to smell the putrid stench of reality. It was not for others that Mehdi made up these stories—stories of distant voyages, comical encounters, heroic barroom fights; it was not because he wanted to win anyone over or impress them. He himself was the only person he wanted to impress. He wanted his existence to be larger than life. He imagined himself a giant, and he expected Aïcha to take part in the creation of his personal epic.

  It was true that Mehdi invented stories, but—to Aïcha’s great regret—he was not a writer. He expressed himself not with the words of a poet, but with the clumsy, complacent, self-congratulatory words of a bourgeois man. Those words that crush everything in their path, that have no meaning other than to dominate the world. Among these people, sitting beside her husband whose eloquence was dazzling them all, she thought back to the silent dinners of her childhood, to the fragmented, limping conversations between her parents. Mehdi used grandiose expressions. He said: “It’s a fundamental principle.” When he began to speak he sat back in his chair and, sure of his audience’s attention, started his speech with “the first point” before moving on to the second point. What Aïcha loved were the words of peasants, the frightened, inarticulate words of her patients. Poor words that tasted of ruin and a draft of air. Timid words that did not claim to understand the world, that offered no answers.