Amine had started to hate the city. Its yellow lights, its dirty streets, its stale-smelling shops and its broad avenues where boys strolled aimlessly, hands in their pockets to hide their erections. The city and its cafés whose open mouths devoured the virtue of young women and the desire for work in men. The city where young people wasted whole nights dancing. Since when had men needed to dance? How stupid it was, how ridiculous, thought Amine, this hunger for pleasure that had taken hold of everyone! In reality Amine knew nothing of the big cities and the last time he’d been to Casablanca the country had still been ruled by the French. He understood very little of politics and did not waste his time reading newspapers. Everything he knew came from his brother Omar, who lived in Casablanca now and worked for the intelligence services. Omar would sometimes come to spend Sunday at the farm, where everyone—from the employees to Mathilde and Selim—feared him. He was even thinner these days, and his health was poor. His face and arms were covered in blotches. And his Adam’s apple slid up and down his long, scrawny neck as if he couldn’t swallow his own saliva. Omar, whose sight was too bad for him to drive, would be dropped at the entrance to the property by Brahim, his chauffeur. The workers would crowd around his luxury car and Brahim would have to yell at them and shove them away. Omar was an important man now, but he didn’t like to talk about his work. He never went into any detail about his missions, although he did once let slip that he collaborated with Mossad and had been to Israel, where, he told his brother, “The orange plantations are every bit as good as yours.” To Amine’s questions Omar offered only vague replies. Yes, he had prevented plots against the king and arrested dozens of people. Yes, the shanty towns and universities and seething medinas of this country were home to thousands of fanatics and murderers calling for revolution. “Marx or Nitcha,” he breathed, referring to Nietzsche and the father of communism. Omar waxed nostalgic about the days of the struggle for independence, when everyone was united by a single ideal and driven by a nationalism that, he believed, ought to be rekindled. Omar confirmed Amine in his own beliefs: cities were dangerous places full of dangerous people, and the king was right to prefer the peasantry to the proletariat.

  In May 1968 Amine listened to the radio every night for news of what was happening in France. He was worried about his daughter, whom he had not seen in more than four years and who was studying medicine in Strasbourg. He didn’t fear that she might be influenced by her fellow students because Aïcha was like him, fully focused on her work, a quiet, relentless toiler. But he feared for her safety, his little girl, his pride and joy, lost amid the chaos. He never told anyone this, but Aïcha was the reason he had agreed to build the swimming pool. He wanted to make her proud of him. So she, the future doctor, would not be ashamed to invite her friends to the farm one day. He never boasted about his daughter’s success. To Mathilde he said coldly: “You don’t realize how jealous people are. They would pluck out their own eye if it made the others blind.” Through his daughter, through his child, he became someone else. She elevated him, she lifted him out of poverty and mediocrity. When he thought about her he was gripped by an intense emotion, a burning inside his chest that made him gasp for breath. Aïcha was the first member of their family to go to university. You could search as far back through their ancestors as you liked, you would not find anyone who knew more than she did. They had all lived in ignorance, in a sort of darkness and submission to other people or to the elements. All they had ever known was a life of immediacy, a life to be observed and endured. They had knelt before kings and imams, before bosses and colonels. It seemed to him that, ever since the birth of the first Belhaj, the family tree could be traced all the way back to its roots without finding a single existence of any depth, a single person with any knowledge beyond old wives’ tales and worn platitudes. Certainly none of them would have known the things found in the books that Aïcha read. Until the end of their lives, they would never have learned anything that did not come from their experience of the world.

  Amine asked Mathilde to write to their daughter, begging her to come home as soon as possible. Her exams had been postponed so she had no reason to stay there any longer, in that country where everything was collapsing. When Aïcha was here again he would walk with her through the plantations of peach trees, between the rows of almond trees. As a child she had been able to point out the trees that gave bitter fruit, and she had never been wrong. Amine had always refused to cut down those trees, to get rid of them. He said they had to be given another chance, that he should wait for the next bloom, continue to hope. That little girl with her thick, unruly hair had become a doctor. She had a passport, she spoke English. Whatever happened, she would be better than her mother; she wouldn’t have to spend her life begging favors. Aïcha would build swimming pools for her own children. She would understand the value of hard-earned money.

  When classes ended, Selim ran out of school and rode his moped to the sailing club. He went into the changing rooms and saw a group of naked boys playfully whipping one another with their towels. He recognized a few of them; they were fellow students at the Jesuit school. He greeted them, headed toward his locker and slowly undressed. He rolled his socks into a ball. He folded his pants and his shirt. He hung his belt on a coat hanger. Then, standing there in his underwear, he noticed his reflection in the mirror on the inside of his locker’s door. For some time now he had felt that his body was no longer really his. He had been transported into a stranger’s body. His chest, legs, and feet were covered with blond hair. His pectorals had grown bigger from swimming, which he practiced assiduously. He looked more and more like his mother, whom he now towered over by almost four inches. From her he had inherited his blond hair, his broad shoulders, and his love of physical activity. This resemblance embarrassed him; it felt like wearing a too-tight shirt whose buttons he could not undo. In the mirror he recognized his mother’s smile, the shape of her chin, and it was almost as if Mathilde had taken possession of him, was haunting him. Now he would never be free of her.

  It was not only his body’s appearance that had changed. It forced on him now so many desires, urges and aches whose existence he had never even guessed at before. His dreams were utterly different from the serene nocturnal fantasies of his childhood; they were like poison, penetrating his veins and intoxicating him for days on end. Yes, he was tall and strong now, but this man’s body had come at the cost of his tranquility. A constant anxiety gnawed at him. His body went haywire over nothing. His hands turned clammy, chills ran up and down his neck, his penis grew hard. For Selim, his physical development was not a triumph but a devastation.

  Long ago the farmworkers used to make fun of him. They would run after him in the fields, laughing at his skinny calves, his white skin that burned so easily. They called him “the kid,” “the weakling,” sometimes even “the German” just to annoy him. Selim was a kid like any other and he tried to blend seamlessly into the crowd. He got lice from rubbing his blond hair against the dark manes of the Berber children. He caught scabies, he was bitten by a dog, and he played obscene games with the local kids. The farmworkers and their wives let him share their meals, never worrying that the food they ate wasn’t good enough for the boss’s son. All a child needed to grow was bread, olive oil, and hot sweet tea. The women would pinch his cheeks and go into ecstasies over his beauty. “You could be a Berber. A real Rif boy with your green eyes and your freckles!” A child that wasn’t from here, in other words: that was what Selim understood.

  A few months before this, for the first time, one of the farmworkers had called him “Sidi,” showing him a deference he wasn’t expecting. Selim had been shocked by this. At the time he hadn’t known whether what he felt was pride or its opposite: shame, the feeling of being an imposter. One day you were a child. And then you became a man. People said: “A man would not do that” or “You’re a man now, behave like one.” He had been a child and now he wasn’t, and it had happened so suddenly, with no explanation. He had been expelled from the world of hugs and sweet nothings, from the world of indulgence, and thrown unceremoniously, without warning, into the world of men. In this country, adolescence did not exist. There wasn’t time, there wasn’t space for the hesitations and delays of that hazy, in-between age. This society hated all forms of ambiguity and it regarded these adults-in-progress with suspicion, confusing them with those frightening fauns of mythology, with their goat legs and human torsos.

  In the changing room, alone at last, he took off his underwear and reached into his bag for the sky-blue swimming trunks his mother had given him. As he put them on, the thought occurred to him that he had never seen his father’s penis. This thought made him blush and his face grew hot. What did his father look like naked? When Selim was a child, his father used to take the family to the seaside sometimes, to the beach hut belonging to Dr. Palosi and his wife, Corinne. Over time he had gotten into the habit of merely dropping them there and coming back to fetch them two or three weeks later. He never ventured onto the beach himself and he never wore trunks. He claimed he had too much work and that the vacations were a luxury he could not afford. But Selim had heard Mathilde saying that Amine was afraid of the water and that the reason he did not join in with their summer fun was that he couldn’t swim.

  Fun. Vacations. Just as he had no idea what his father’s penis looked like, Selim could not remember ever seeing him relax, play, laugh, or take a nap. His father would constantly rail against all those shirkers, idlers, and lazy good-for-nothings who did not understand the value of work and instead wasted their time whining. He found Selim’s passion for sport ridiculous: not only the sailing club but also the football team he played for every weekend. As far back as Selim could remember, his father had always worn a look of disapproval on his face.

  His father chilled him, petrified him. As soon as he knew that Amine was there, somewhere nearby, he could no longer be himself. Though, really, the whole of society had this effect on him. The world in which he lived wore the same expression as his father and he found it impossible to be free. This world was full of fathers who must be shown respect: God, the king, the military, the heroes of independence, the workers. Always, when a stranger approached you, they did not ask you your name but: “Whose son are you?”

  With the passing years, as it had become more and more obvious that he would not become, like his father, a farmer, Selim had felt less and less like Amine’s son. Sometimes he would think of those artisans in the alleys of the medina and of the young apprentices they trained in their basement workshops. The young boilermakers, weavers, embroiderers, and carpenters who forged relationships full of deference and gratitude with their masters. This was how the world worked: the old passed on their knowledge to the young; the past continued to infuse the present. This was why he had to kiss his father’s shoulder or hand, why he had to bow down in his presence, signaling his total submission. No one was free of this debt until the day he himself became a father and could in turn dominate someone else. Life was like that ceremony of allegiance, where all the dignitaries of the kingdom, all the tribal chiefs, all the proud handsome men in their white djellabas, in their burnooses, lined up to kiss the king’s palm.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the club, his coach always told him he could become a great champion if he showed absolute dedication. But Selim had no idea what kind of man he could be. He didn’t like school. His teachers, the Jesuits, castigated him for his laziness. He did not misbehave, did not talk back to adults, and he lowered his head when they threw his mediocre homework assignments at his face. He had the feeling that he was not in the right place, that he had somehow been born into the wrong world. As if someone had made a mistake and accidentally dropped him in this stupid, boring town, surrounded by the narrow-minded denizens of the petit bourgeoisie. School was torture for Selim. He always found it hard to concentrate on his books. His mind was drawn elsewhere, toward the trees in the courtyard, the dust motes dancing in a beam of sunlight, a girl’s face smiling at him through a window. As a child he had dreaded math lessons. He never understood a thing his teacher said. All the numbers and symbols swirled in a shapeless muddle that made him want to scream. The teacher would question him and Selim would stammer something in reply, his voice soon drowned out by his classmates’ laughter. His mother had read books about his speech impediment. She’d wanted to take him to a doctor. Selim had always felt tense, constrained, restricted. He felt as if his whole life had been spent in one of those torture devices where the prisoner can neither stand up straight nor lie down flat.

  In the pool, when he swam, he found a certain serenity. He had to exhaust his body. In the water, when his only goal was to breathe and move fast, he was able to gather his thoughts. As if finally he could find the right beat, the right rhythm to create a kind of harmony between his body and his soul. That day, while he swam lengths under the supervision of his coach, his mind drifted. He wondered if his parents loved each other. He had never heard them exchange words of affection or seen them kiss. Sometimes they would go whole days without speaking to each other and Selim could detect a torrent of hate and resentment flowing between them. When Mathilde became angry or sad she lost all sense of modesty and reserve. She used vulgar expressions, she shouted, and Amine had to order her to shut up. She threw all his betrayals and infidelities back in his face, and Selim, now that he was a teenager, understood that his father had affairs with other women and that his mother, whose eyes were permanently red, suffered as a result. The image of Amine’s penis surged into his mind again, so shocking that Selim lost his rhythm, and he heard the voice of his coach berating him from the edge of the pool.

  Amine did not care about his son’s bad marks at school. The day before, a teacher had summoned Mathilde to his office to tell her that Selim was a waster who would never pass his baccalauréat. Amine hadn’t passed it either. “And it didn’t do me any harm,” he told his son. Amine had taken him on a tour of the farm. In the humid warmth of the greenhouses, in the overheated warehouses where plants were loaded onto trucks, his father had listed all the things that would soon be his. As he did this he appeared to be watching his son’s face for signs of pride, even vanity, at the idea of one day being the lord of this domain. But Selim had not been able to hide his boredom. While his father was telling him about new irrigation techniques that they ought to invest in, Selim spotted a plastic bottle lying on the floor. Without thinking he gave it a kick, sending it flying toward a boy leaning against a wall, who laughed. Amine slapped the back of his son’s head. “Can’t you see these people are working?” He started cursing then, loudly bemoaning the fact that Selim lacked the seriousness of his sister, whose only fault was that she was a woman.

  Aïcha, Aïcha. His sister’s name alone was enough to send him into a rage. When she’d left for France four years earlier, Selim had felt an enormous sense of relief. The tree that cast him in shadow had been cut down, and, bathed at last in full sunlight, he could grow normally again. But tonight, Aïcha was coming home.

  In September 1964 Aïcha moved to the capital of Alsace. Before that, she had never imagined that winter could come so early, ruining October with its solemn cortege of ashen skies and rain-soaked days. During her childhood she had listened attentively to her mother’s stories about Alsace, but she had never thought that this place was hers too, that it was a part of her. In truth, she had always had the impression that the tales her mother told concerned an imaginary land, a fairy-tale kingdom where people ate plum tarts in little wooden houses. When she came here she was struck by Strasbourg’s beauty, by the wealth of its inhabitants, its cobbled streets, its dark wooden beams, and by the grandiosity of its monuments, foremost among them the cathedral, which would have towered over the highest mosque and where, in her first months, she often took refuge. She rented a small apartment in a soulless new housing estate on the edge of the city. The landlady, Madame Muller, greeted her with steely, unsmiling eyes. She had received a tearful letter from Aïcha’s mother explaining that she, Mathilde, was Alsatian and that she was entrusting her daughter to Madame Muller’s capable hands. But as soon as Madame Muller saw her new tenant standing in the lobby of the apartment building, with her frizzy hair and her golden skin, she felt cheated, betrayed. She didn’t like the French and she didn’t like foreigners. It made her uncomfortable to speak anything other than Alsatian, and the idea of welcoming a girl like this into her apartment was repulsive. As she showed the new tenant around the apartment, as she demonstrated the workings of the kitchen equipment, she asked her: “So, you’re Alsatian?”