Monette looked at the oval face of the slender gold watch she wore on her wrist. “We should get going if we want to find a parking space near the movie theater.” Aïcha heard herself saying “Okay,” and, like an automaton, she followed her friend out the door while listening to Mathilde’s advice about alcohol, boys, and bad drivers. Monette, who never seemed bothered by anything, kept saying “Yes, yes,” and Aïcha let herself be led to the car.

  Behind the wheel, Monette gave a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness! I thought she was never going to stop nagging us.” Mathilde stood on the front steps and waved, gradually becoming tiny before disappearing from their field of vision. The vehicle turned onto the narrow dirt path that ran across the farm. The branches of olive trees tapped the windows as they passed and this noise reminded Aïcha of the car journey they used to take to her school on cold winter mornings. To the right of the path some farmworkers were crouching inside the vast greenhouses. Beneath plastic sheeting, their slumped bodies and their dark clothes were visible among the bushes. To the left, the stables had been transformed into garages for the machines. A child had fallen asleep, his face resting on the steering wheel of a tractor.

  “The danger’s over. You can come out now.” Aïcha stared in astonishment at Monette, then turned around to see two men huddled in the back seat.

  “What the hell! You said it’d only take a minute. I’m going to have a backache for a week now . . .” A man in his forties carefully stretched his limbs. He moved his head from side to side. He looked a bit like Cary Grant, with tanned skin, dark hair cut short, and a muscular neck. On his left wrist he wore a gold chain; Aïcha was able to observe it quite closely when the man put his hand on Monette’s neck and caressed it. Through the rearview mirror Aïcha tried to make out the boy sitting behind her, who had said nothing. She could not see his face, only a thick mass of black hair and a bushy beard. Eyes turned to the window, he seemed completely absorbed by the passing landscape.

  “All this is yours?”

  Aïcha did not realize he was speaking to her.

  “Is this your farm?”

  “It’s my father’s.”

  “Ah, the father we had to hide from. Is he really that scary?”

  “He’s just my father.”

  “And how big is this farm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Two men were walking along the roadside. Two farmworkers in rubber boots and woolen sweaters with holes at the elbows. When the car passed they looked up and greeted Aïcha by putting their hands over their hearts. She felt ashamed. Her shame deepened when they passed the huge sign at the entrance announcing, in blue painted lettering: “Domaine Belhaj.”

  “Your father’s a colonist?”

  “No. He’s Moroccan, and this land belongs to him.”

  “Moroccan or not, it’s the same thing. Your father’s not so different from the Russian landowners with their serfs. You live like Europeans. You’re rich. You don’t have to be a colonist to treat people like natives.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Monette started laughing, then said: “Aïcha, allow me to introduce Karl Marx. And this,” she added, stroking her lover’s fingers, “is Henri. They paid me a surprise visit today, and I didn’t know what to do with them. But I couldn’t leave them with my mother. We’ll try to find them a hotel.”

  During the trip Monette explained that Henri lived in Casablanca, where he was an economics lecturer. Marx was one of his students. She had met them two years earlier, during a Jacques Brel concert at the Rif Cinema in Meknes. Henri interrupted her a few times to add an amusing detail or remind her of something she’d forgotten to mention. Like the fact that she had been wearing a blue dress and crying when Brel sang “Ces gens-là.” That night, after the show, they had gone to the Hôtel Transatlantique and had seen—yes, seen with their own eyes—Jacques Brel himself, sitting at the bar and staring into space, his long sad hands resting on the countertop. Monette slapped the steering wheel.

  “But I haven’t told you the news! Aïcha delivered a baby last night, in the middle of the countryside . . . with a fork! Tell them!” Monette urged. Aïcha’s lips moved but no sound came out. “She’s being shy. But I always knew she’d be a great doctor. Even back in school she was miles ahead of the rest of us.”

  Karl Marx sniggered. Annoyed, Aïcha turned around and stared at the boy’s face. His hair was just like hers, only darker, and it looked as though he’d back-combed it to make it even frizzier. His cheeks were covered by a dense beard and he wore a pair of glasses with very thick lenses. His huge, bulging forehead gave him a serious and vaguely disturbing look. She could not have said if he was handsome or not, but she was instantly gripped by his presence, by the aura of sadness and violence that he emitted. He was frighteningly alive, she thought.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “Only the bourgeoisie can be doctors. Your father must have loads of money if he can afford to pay for all those years of studies.”

  “So what? He worked hard for it. Earning money isn’t a crime.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” Henri reassured her. “That’s why we call him Marx. But he’s not a bad person, believe me. So, have you chosen a film?”

  * * *

  • • •

  They did not go to the movies. Monette said they should make the most of the mild night air instead, so they sat on the terrace of the Café de France. Monette couldn’t stop touching Henri. She put her hand on his thigh, then on his arm, and finally intertwined her fingers with his and did not let go. The look she gave him was filled not only with love but with the desire she felt to get away from this place, the hope of being lifted at last out of her rut. She asked him about his life in Casablanca and did her best to listen to his answers. But her mind kept wandering: she found it hard to think about anything other than Henri’s naked skin and the moment when he would kiss her. He had come for her. She kept repeating this to herself. “He came for me.” Since their first meeting in 1966 they had kept up a regular correspondence. Henri wrote letters of such beauty and intelligence that Monette found them intimidating, and she spent days on end staring at her yellow letter paper without ever managing to say what she felt in her heart. He had phoned her at Christmas and on her birthday, and in January 1968 they had gone walking in Ifrane, amid snow-covered cedar forests where Barbary macaques swung from tree branches. Now he was here and, like those dreams that come true only after we have stopped hoping, his presence left her confused and speechless. They paid little attention to Aïcha that evening, and she sat there, arms crossed, chewing her straw, her tangled hair making her look like a grumpy little kid. She had no intention of making conversation with the pedantic boy who sat across the table from her, tapping his foot. “The music is really terrible here. Hasn’t anyone in Meknes heard of jazz? Or rock ’n’ roll, maybe?” Aïcha shrugged. Beside her, Henri and Monette whispered to each other. Her friend giggled and twisted in her chair, and Aïcha felt embarrassed. Monette kept touching her hair as if worried that her bun was about to collapse. Unlike Aïcha, Monette had always liked boys and she had given herself to them carelessly, uncalculatingly, perhaps thinking that her sincerity, the gift of her body, would make them love her. People talked about Monette; they said she wasn’t shy. She had often used Aïcha as her alibi and as her lookout; Aïcha would sit on the ground or on the trunk of a car while her friend let some boy caress her breasts. Aïcha had never felt any jealousy about this. In fact, what she felt was closer to pity. It seemed to her that Monette was giving away pieces of herself to boys who did not love her.

  Marx cleared his throat. “Um, you know, I didn’t mean to offend you earlier. I’m sure your father is a good man. And he must be very proud of his little girl becoming a doctor.”

  “And you’re studying economics?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So what will you become?”

  “Me?” he asked, smiling. “I want to write.”

  Before going to bed, Aïcha locked herself in the bathroom. While she untangled her hair and slowly pinned big blue curlers in it, she thought about what Karl Marx had said. The boy’s words obsessed her and cast a shadow over her parents in a way that made her shiver. She could not believe that her father was an exploiter, or even that he could be indifferent to the poverty that surrounded him. She would have liked to prove to Marx that she was not the bourgeois airhead he had described, but the more she thought about it the more it seemed to her that his depiction of her was accurate. She knew nothing about the world, about her own country. She lived only for herself, in a sort of shameful individualism. Never in her life had she rebelled against anything. She asked no questions, disputed no orders. She had never looked at—really looked at—those men and women around her, living in such destitution. Those lines of men who went to war for others, who died for others, who used up their youth and their strength in work. For others. All of this struck her now, but in a confused way: more a feeling than a thought. She felt remorseful but not outraged. Had she dared, she would have asked Karl Marx to explain things to her; she had so many questions. He must have thought her stupid, and that bothered her.

  “I want to write,” he had said, and every time she thought about this phrase she was bowled over by it. She did not think anyone had ever described to her such a beautiful dream, such a noble ambition. If she’d been less gauche and ignorant, she would have asked him what kind of books he would write, on what subjects. If he would invent his own stories or tell the truth. He had told her that his name was Mehdi. Mehdi Daoud. And from that day forth, she had only one hope: to see him again.

  Selim failed his exams, and in September he had to go back to school. He felt humiliated when the headmaster greeted him at the door with the words: “So, Belhaj, have you decided to start doing some work?” The other students looked at him with expressions that mingled their admiration for this older boy and his athletic prowess with a dash of contempt because he was now reduced to being friends with people in the year below. But his position had certain advantages too. He knew the syllabus already and persuaded himself that he could wait until springtime to start studying. He would devote the first term to sport and to his few friends who had not gone abroad to college.

  In October he took part in a swimming tournament and won the gold medal for the 100-meter freestyle. “It’s strange that such a clumsy boy can swim so fast,” his coach remarked. Yes, Selim was slow and he had been mocked for it many times. He was slow to learn his lessons, slow in his speech, slow even in the way he got dressed. All his movements were awkward, numb-limbed. You had the impression that his mind was forever elsewhere, busy solving an equation so complex that it prevented him from reacting to anything that happened to him. The words Selma had uttered a few months earlier, on the roof of the house, had slowly wormed their way into his mind, gradually infusing his thoughts, and one autumn evening, after smoking a cigarette on the roof, he decided to find out the truth for himself. When his parents went to bed and the house was plunged into darkness, he went out to the corridor and took the terra-cotta vase from the shelf. He reached in with his hand and his skin encountered the cold metal edges of the revolver. He cautiously picked it up as if it were a grenade, primed at any moment to blow up in his face. Then, after discovering that the revolver was not loaded, he stuck the barrel in his mouth, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

  He kept the weapon with him day and night. He hid it at the bottom of his schoolbag, beneath his books and pens, and sometimes he would look inside to admire its partially obscured gleam. He placed it under his pillow before he went to sleep. He fetishized the gun in a way that bothered him, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. He imagined pulling the revolver suddenly from his bag and threatening his teacher. Selim would aim at him and his terrified classmates would finally realize what he was capable of. He wasn’t just a man now, he was a man with a gun, and he understood that this transformed him. This simple metal object, its butt fitting perfectly into the palm of his hand, awoke in Selim desires for vengeance, destruction, power.

  One day at the end of Ramadan in 1968, Mathilde asked him to give Selma an envelope. “She deserves to spoil herself a little,” she said. Selim took the envelope, containing a bundle of cash, and after school he went to Selma’s apartment and knocked on the door. His aunt lived in Rue d’Oujda in the Boucle neighborhood. It was a well-maintained building between the train station and the little park where Sabah went to play in the afternoons when school was over. On the ground floor of the building there was a grocer’s and a shoemaker’s. On the third floor was a Jewish dressmaker’s workshop, where Mathilde often went despite her repugnance for its lack of cleanliness, its floor littered with rusty pins and balls of dust. The dressmaker, a chatty, nosy woman, had told Mathilde about an apartment recently vacated by a French family. Mathilde, weary of Selma’s stony expression and mood swings, had long dreamed of moving her away from the farm. Seizing this opportunity, she had convinced Amine to rent the apartment.

  Selim rang the doorbell early that afternoon. Selma opened the door. She was wearing a turquoise silk kimono and she kept tightening the belt as if afraid that the robe might slip from her shoulders at any moment and reveal her naked body. She welcomed her nephew into the apartment and put Mathilde’s crumpled envelope on the table next to an overflowing ashtray. She gave him a cup of coffee so strong that he took only one sip. They smoked in silence. Through a small window they could look down on a courtyard where children played and women in worn clothes beat rugs. In the kitchen sink he saw a dirty saucepan, a plate, and a glass. Selim wondered why Selma had not had any other children. They might have brightened her life a little, or at least kept her busy. He had heard rumors, of course, but he knew better than to believe the farmworkers’ gossip. They all hated Mourad, so that was why they had claimed to see him, on the Azrou road, picking up boys and leading them in secret to fornicate in the cedar woods. Was it possible that any man could be indifferent to this woman who, even now, in a kimono, her slippers hanging off the ends of her toes, was almost unbearably beautiful? Selma swept her hand across the table, gathering crumbs and ash into her palm. And for the first time in his life Selim acted impulsively. He grabbed his aunt’s hand and held it. He could feel the crumbs digging into his skin. Perhaps he wanted this gesture to be simply a sign of tenderness, compassion, proof of the complicity that had connected them for years. But as soon as he looked up at her, he knew it wasn’t that. Holding her hand in his, gazing into her eyes, he felt the same excitement as when he pressed the revolver to his temple, alone in his bedroom. His penis grew hard and he felt ashamed of himself and of all men. Were women fortunate or cursed in their ability to keep their desires invisible?

  Later he would revisit the memories of that afternoon until they became worn and faded, until they disappeared, until he no longer knew what was true and what wasn’t. Did he pull her toward him, or was it perhaps she who stood up and pressed her cheek against his? She moved her lips closer and when he felt her tongue, cool and damp, inside his mouth, he thought he might faint or eat her alive. He wasn’t afraid. He abandoned himself to her as he abandoned himself to water and felt the same rightness and lightness as he did when swimming. He slid his hand under her kimono and touched her small breasts, the nipples hard against his palm. He stroked the warm, soft skin of Selma’s belly. He stared into her feverish, misty eyes, those eyes that expressed her desire to be impaled, and he thought she had never been as beautiful as she was in that instant. Without letting go of his hand she drew him into the corridor and then into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Was she thinking about the possibility of Mourad returning or about Sabah coming home after school? She did not seem worried. She lay down and undid the belt of her kimono. Her skin was the color of the cannabis resin that the farmworkers would crumble between their fingers. She watched in silence as Selim undressed. His movements were calm, almost childlike, as if this was the first time he had ever taken off his clothes on his own. She could see the bulge of his erect penis under his boxer shorts. From outside came the sound of the call to prayer.

  To Selim it seemed that he was the one penetrated that day. She entered him. She unfolded him like the fingers of a hand. Selma’s body was fragile, creamy and cloudlike. She enveloped him with an overpowering softness. This woman was his destiny. Her body had been made to melt into his and he wanted to disappear into her hollows, to hide there from all the horrors of the world. There were no words for this, no explanations for the intense happiness that filled him, for the joyful rage that made him gasp and moan. She tamed him and he had no desire to resist. No words were spoken. They loved each other, cradled in a solemn, tranquil silence.