In the airplane that took her back to Meknes, Aïcha did not lean her head back against her seat. For the whole of the three-hour flight she kept her neck still and stared down at her hands to avoid damaging her new hairstyle. She suppressed the urge to run her hands through her hair, to wrap a lock of it around her index finger as she so often used to do when she was studying or daydreaming. She could feel the long, smooth hair caressing her neck and her cheeks, and she still couldn’t quite believe it.

  Aïcha landed at the airport in Rabat in the early afternoon. She walked slowly down the steps to the tarmac, dazed by the brightness of the sky. She looked up and saw on the building’s roof, behind red letters spelling out “AÉROPORT DE RABAT,” a few figures moving around, waving their arms and trying to recognize the passengers who were advancing toward them. The arrivals hall was in turmoil. Men were running about, shouting orders that nobody seemed to be following. Porters were carrying in luggage and handing it out to passengers, while policemen checked passports, customs officials opened suitcases, shook magazines, tossed bras and underwear to the floor. Aïcha watched all this through the glass partition separating the passengers from the waiting families. Among the children holding cuddly toys, the women in makeup, and the chauffeurs in djellabas, she spotted her father. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses so dark that she could not see his eyes. She was surprised by how elegant he appeared in that brown turtleneck sweater and that new-looking leather jacket. His hair was whiter now and he had grown a mustache. Hands crossed behind his back, he was staring down at the tiled floor, embarrassed by the excitement of the crowd around him. He had that lost, absent air that she knew so well. It really was him, her father, that silent bear, capable of the roughest tenderness and the harshest anger. Moved, she took a step to the side to separate herself from the other passengers standing in line. Amine took off his sunglasses and gazed at her for a few seconds. He raised his eyebrows when he noticed her very short skirt and the brown leather boots that came up to her knees. She was wearing an orange vinyl jacket and a pair of oversized smoked glasses like the ones worn by pop singers in magazines. She thought that it was seeing her there, recognizing her, his daughter, that seemed to wake him from his stupor. She assumed that it was his overflowing love for her, his sudden inability to control his own emotion, that led Amine to push past people, to shoulder his way through the crowd to the glass divider. He waved his hand at her and smiled. She stared at his white teeth and realized the truth. It wasn’t Aïcha he was looking at. It wasn’t her he was smiling at so winningly. He was smiling at a woman, a stranger he thought beautiful and desirable, and who had distracted him from the chore of meeting his daughter at the airport. Perhaps he had been expecting Aïcha to still be the same drab, shy teenager he had seen off four years earlier? Perhaps it never even crossed his mind that those legs he was staring at, those long, slim, bare legs, could be his own child’s. Aïcha touched her hand to her head, stroked her hair. Ah, yes, that was why he didn’t recognize her. It was that long straight hair hanging down to her waist. Her stupid Françoise Hardy hairstyle.

  Aïcha extricated herself from the queue. She walked toward the glass divider and took off her sunglasses. Amine was still staring at her, and for an instant he must have thought she wanted to get to know him, to arrange a date or hand him her telephone number. But abruptly his expression changed. His smile vanished, his eyes darkened, and his lips started to quiver. She recognized that look: it was the one he wore before fury took him, before he shouted, before he hit. He made an irritated hand gesture which meant: “Get back in line, you little idiot.” He tapped his watch. “Hurry up!” She had lost her place so she went to the back of the line. She was sweating now in this jacket that made an unpleasant creaking sound whenever she moved her arms. The next time she looked at the glass divider, her father had disappeared.

  Aïcha waited almost an hour before handing her passport to a policeman who wished her a happy return to her country. She couldn’t help turning around, unsure whether she was hoping to see Amine or whether, on the contrary, she was hoping he had vanished, that none of what had happened had actually happened, and that they could start again. She left the airport. A porter grabbed her suitcase from her hand and she didn’t dare tell him no. When her father appeared suddenly, she jumped. She acted as if nothing was wrong, laughing as she hugged him. She wrapped him in her arms and held him tight against her in a way that meant: “I forgive you.” She felt ashamed at having humiliated him. She wanted to remain hanging there from his neck to make him understand that she was still his little girl, but Amine freed himself to pay the porter. In the parking lot a gang of children were haranguing the tourists, offering to carry their suitcases, take them to a taxi, book them a hotel room. Soon Aïcha was surrounded by little boys in rags who laughed and made obscene suggestions. She didn’t need to see her father’s face to know that he was furious.

  Amine sat behind the wheel and raised a cigarette to his mouth. As he leaned toward the lighter, he shot a furtive glance at his daughter’s thighs.

  “What on earth do you think you’re wearing? You’re not in France now, you know.”

  Aïcha tugged at the hem of her skirt then draped her jacket over her lap to hide her naked flesh. On the way home they exchanged only a few words. He asked if her studies were going well. She asked about the farm. She remembered that people liked to talk about rain here and she asked if it had rained recently and if the peasants were happy. Then they both withdrew into silence. Occasionally Amine would put his arm through the open window and gesture angrily at other drivers. In the middle of a bend he almost knocked over a cart, pulled by a teenage boy and his donkey, that had abruptly emerged from a field. Amine slammed on the brakes and insulted the boy. He called him an idiot, an ignoramus, a nobody. “Another little murderer in the making!” And he rolled up his window.

  Aïcha gazed out at the landscape and was surprised by the wave of happiness that engulfed her. She was going home, she thought, and there was a sweetness, a comfort in being surrounded by others of her kind. She sank into a reverie as she stared at the vineyards and the rows of olive trees growing among rocks on this dry, yellow earth. At the foot of a hill she spotted a cemetery full of whitewashed gravestones with pale-green cactuses growing between them, their branches covered in prickly pears that had exploded in the heat, exposing their shiny yellow innards. The grass, almost gray, gleamed in the sunlight like an animal’s fur. They passed some modest houses with a few hens and a skinny dog running around in front. Aïcha knew exactly what the smell would be like inside those houses, where she had been many times as a child. The smell of damp earth and baking bread. It was of smells, too, that she thought of when they saw a car ahead of them packed with a family of eight, all sitting on each other’s laps. A little boy, standing on his mother’s thighs, waved at Aïcha through the rear windshield. She waved back at him.

  But that feeling of plenitude did not last. As soon as they entered the family estate she started to worry. So much had changed in the four years she’d spent abroad. She was amazed by how noisy it was: the rumbling engine of a combine harvester, the machine-gun crackle of automatic sprinklers. Then she saw, beside the house, the vast swimming pool and its border of red bricks shining in the afternoon sun. Aïcha knew that the farm had become more successful, that her parents were wealthier now. Even so, as she entered the house she was surprised by the bourgeois furnishings, the crocheted doilies, the fake-crystal vases, and, on the blue velvet sofas, the piled-up cushions stuffed close to bursting with foam. She walked through the corridor. On a pedestal table she recognized a few knickknacks dating back to her childhood: a copper candlestick, a porcelain box where Mathilde kept some keys, a small glass vase in which a red rose was wilting. She wanted to caress these objects, hold them in her hands for a moment, thank them for still being here. But already she could hear her mother’s voice, tense and high-pitched, giving orders to Tamo. Aïcha went past the living room and contemplated a series of still lifes on the walls. Above the fireplace hung an immense portrait of Amine in his Spahi uniform. Her father’s painting did not really resemble him: the artist had exaggerated the olive color of his complexion and the darkness of his eyes, making him look like a failed copy of Delacroix’s warriors. But Aïcha knew it was her father because she remembered that photograph she had seen as a child, with Amine straddling a white charger, his face hooded by a burnoose.

  Mathilde emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a blue apron and her hair was tied back. A strand of gray fell over her right eye. She wiped her wet hands on a dish towel then threw herself at her daughter, breathing in her smell. “Let me look at you,” she said. And for a few moments she gazed at her child’s face, her outfit, the orange jacket she was carrying. “You’ve changed so much. I wouldn’t have recognized you!”

  Mathilde had prepared a celebratory dinner in honor of this long-awaited reunion. For days on end this woman who had never gotten used to Moroccan cuisine cooked an assortment of traditional hors d’oeuvres, tajines, and even a pigeon pastilla sprinkled with cinnamon and icing sugar. Selma, Mourad, and their daughter, Sabah, who now lived in town, came for aperitifs. Sabah had just turned twelve. Seeing her and Selma together, Aïcha found it hard to believe that they were mother and daughter, so dissimilar did they look. Sabah had not inherited Selma’s smooth brown hair, nor her radiant complexion. She was a thin child with coarse features and bushy eyebrows. She was wearing a black cotton skirt that revealed her thick, hairy ankles.

  While Amine poured champagne, Sabah clung to Mourad. She put her arm around her father’s shoulders and hid her face behind his neck. Without a word he pulled her toward him, sat her on his lap, and whispered a secret into her ear. The child nodded and stayed where she was, in silence, her cheek leaning on Mourad’s shoulder. She called him “Papa,” and Mourad could not help feeling ashamed when he heard those two syllables. He felt as if he were lying to her, taking advantage of her innocence, and he worried about the day when she would discover the truth. The hate she felt for him then would be unassuageable. And yet, who else could claim to be her father? Who else would deserve the sweet and tender title of “Papa”? Were it not for him, she might not even have survived. He had saved her life, he had taken care of her, he had protected her from the madness of her mother. In the weeks following their wedding, Selma had done nothing but cry. She had lain on her side for whole days at a time, one hand on her swollen belly. After the tears came the violent tantrums, the escape attempts, the suicide threats. Selma tried to throw herself under the wheels of a truck. She threatened to drink insecticide. She swore she would stab herself in the belly with a knitting needle. The child was born but that did nothing to dampen Selma’s rage. On the contrary, the baby’s howls drove her crazy, and she would go out to walk in the fields, abandoning her starving child in the storehouse. Some of the things she said in front of Mourad were so violent that they chilled him, and he had lived through war, imprisonment, desertion. She said she might let the baby die then leave its corpse outside Mathilde’s front door. “That way, she’ll see what she’s done,” Selma reasoned. Mourad was living in a state of constant terror. One day, when Sabah was still only two, he had abruptly left his workers in the middle of a job and started running like mad toward the farm. There, he saw his daughter. She was alone. She was wearing a gray T-shirt that exposed her bare legs and was sucking the stones that she held in her little hands. “Papa!” she cried, and the stones fell to the ground.

  What was he doing with these two females? What was he doing in this family where nobody wanted him? Amine had never treated him like a brother-in-law or even like a friend. Amine was a gentleman now, a respectable person who organized poolside parties in his garden decorated with Chinese lanterns. A bourgeois who celebrated New Year’s Eve with others of the same class and who was unafraid of ridicule even when wearing a gold-colored cardboard hat, his shoulders wreathed with paper streamers. Amine was stuffed full of money and vainglory. He wore tailored suits and had learned to dance the waltz and the mambo. He had slept with half the town. For months after Mouilala’s death, Mourad’s boss had used her old house in the medina to meet his mistresses, screwing them on those moldy old benches. Sometimes, thinking himself alone, thinking himself invisible, Amine would park his car in a field of sunflowers and lick the breasts of another man’s wife. Once, coming home drunk from a party, he drove his car into the trunk of an olive tree. “I wasn’t drunk,” he told people afterward, “I was just tired. I yawned and I closed my eyes.” Mourad knew all of this. Just like he knew that, in this country, no one is ever alone. He wanted to warn Amine: “There’s always someone who knows what you’ve been doing.”

  * * *

  During the aperitifs, while Mathilde happily made conversation, Aïcha observed her family, their house, the comings and goings of Tamo as she brought dishes from the kitchen. She noticed that the maid was limping slightly, but Tamo refused to let her help. There was no connection, thought Aïcha, between this world and the student world of Strasbourg, no link between her life here and her life back there. These two existences were completely separate. They took place in two parallel dimensions, neither of which had any influence on the other. She even thought that a part of herself was still in Strasbourg, continuing its routine existence. She was seized by a feeling of unreality. She wasn’t absolutely sure she had lived through those four years. Maybe she had never left Morocco. Maybe it had all been a dream.

  Over dinner Amine did not join in the chorus of praise for the parade of dishes that passed before their eyes. He put his hand on Aïcha’s back—“May God keep you, my daughter”—and asked her how it felt to be the first doctor in the family. Aïcha imagined then that her father had forgiven her, that the unease of her arrival had faded, and she began to tell him what she’d been doing. She described the dissection of bodies. “Oh no, not when we’re eating!” Mathilde interrupted. She talked about her work at the clinic, the things her department head at the hospital said. She did not mention her friendship with David, but said vaguely that she’d made some good friends. While she was speaking, Selma and Selim kept their eyes lowered to their plates. Amine appeared to notice this and he made even clearer his joy at having such a serious, hardworking daughter. “A respectable daughter who doesn’t run around with boys and get into trouble. Who doesn’t waste her time skipping school and going to parties.” Aïcha had nothing to do with those communists, those revolutionaries who knew nothing about life and wanted to destroy their elders’ heritage. He said this in a mean voice but Aïcha didn’t realize he was saying it for the benefit of his sister and his son. He was reveling in his daughter’s success and independence to rub salt into Selma’s wounds. Rather than attempting to fix an injustice, he seemed to want to highlight it, to make it worse.

  When the meal was over, Selma stood up. Nobody asked where she was going. Perhaps she had gone to look after her daughter or wash dishes in the kitchen. Selim, on the other hand, knew exactly where she was. He walked through the living room, went out into the backyard, and climbed up onto the roof. Selma was sitting on the edge, feet dangling in the void, waiting for him.

  Selim took two cigarettes from his pocket and handed one to his aunt. It was Selma who had initiated him in the habit. Back then, she still lived at the farm, in the hideous storehouse that Mourad had converted. Selim must have been eight at the time, and he was playing in the garden. He had surprised his aunt as she leaned against the pebble-dash wall, blowing smoke through her nose. She had put a finger to her lips and made him promise to keep the secret. And to seal this pact, this pact against Amine and all the other men, she had added: “You want to try?” He had moved his lips to the cigarette and sucked. “Anyone would think you’d been doing it all your life.” And she had laughed. Selim knew all her hiding places. As a child he would pick up the stubs she left in the garden, each bearing traces of the crimson lipstick she wore. He would collect the discarded gray packets too, deciphering the single strange word upon them: “Marquise.”

  Selma lit her cigarette, and Selim saw her face in the gleam from the lighter, her forehead furrowed with irritation. He sat next to her. “If my father saw me here, he’d kill me.”

  Selma laughed sarcastically. “Fuck your father.”

  The phrase was like a punch. The words echoed endlessly inside him. For a few moments he just sat there on the roof of the house, speechless. In the distance the city lights were becoming visible. Tamo’s voice reached them from below, as did Mathilde’s. Selim noticed that Selma was crying.

  “Why did I come? I could have said I was ill. Or that Sabah was. She’s always got a stomachache. I should have found some excuse to stay home. But Mourad would have insisted. He’d have said it was impolite, that it’s only because of them that we have a roof over our heads and food on our table. That we should bless them for taking care of us and our kid. God, the way he talks about your father, you’d think he was the one with his face on every banknote in Morocco, not the king! Your father snaps his fingers and Mourad obeys. He’s like a dog. And bloody Mathilde, acting like a saint or something, slipping me an envelope on holidays. She always whispers, ‘For the little one’ or, ‘You’re allowed to have some fun too.’ And she smiles whenever I wear a new dress, because it makes her feel good that everything I wear, everything I eat, even the air I breathe, is thanks to them. One day I’m going to stop eating, I won’t talk anymore, I’ll hold my breath until I collapse. I won’t make any more effort at all. I’ll stop resisting. It’s like if a dog bites you, you shouldn’t struggle. If you move, it just tightens its jaws. That’s how things are here. You have to submit. They keep saying there’s nothing more important than family. Nothing. Just the king and queen in their beautiful house. But you’ll see . . . One day I won’t be able to take it anymore and I’ll have enough courage to tell them to go fuck themselves, them and their lies and their hypocrisy and their good manners and their perfect daughter. What the hell does Aïcha know about life? She still looks like a snot-nosed kid. A stupid little girl who worships her father. Ugh, the way she flatters him and adores him . . . But she has no idea what he is. Or she pretends to forget.”