A funeral was organized, a funeral without a body. That day Selma, Sabah, and Mathilde, all dressed in white, sat together on the living room sofa. Every time someone entered the room they would stand up, almost at the same time. Mathilde kept adjusting her headscarf and Sabah wept. Tears rolled over her acne-ridden face. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, she demanded to be taken to the well. “I want to see where my father is.” But Amine dissuaded her. “I am your father now. You will always be able to depend on me.” What? How did he dare say that? She didn’t want him to be her father. She would never have a father again, because hers had died. Selim, standing there in front of her, could not be her brother. She didn’t love him like a brother. She stood up, pressed her face against his chest, and, using her grief as an excuse, held him tight.

  Selma could not have explained the feelings she experienced in the days after Mourad’s death. Strangely, her husband had never been as present in her life as he was during that time. Since he was dead and had gone to heaven, she imagined that he knew everything about her. From his new location he could see down into the depths of her heart and she no longer had any secrets from him. He knew about Selim, and Selma—even when she was alone—would blush at the idea of her private life being exposed to his eyes. As a dead man, Mourad became a confidant, almost a friend, who no longer judged her. And she understood then what it had been impossible for her to see while they had lived together: this man’s loneliness. His suffering. His absence of desire for her, which she had for a long time simply been happy about instead of wondering at its cause.

  One day, as she was making Sabah’s dinner, a memory came to her. They had just moved into the apartment that Amine had rented for them, and one night Selma was woken by screams. At first she thought something must have happened to Sabah. Mourad adored that child and worried ceaselessly about her. Selma stood up and went into her daughter’s bedroom. Sabah was sleeping peacefully. She went into the living room and saw Mourad’s body, stretched out on the bench. His face was pouring with sweat. He screamed again and she was so frightened that she almost ran back to her bed. But she forced herself to move closer. Her husband was like a stray dog dreaming that it is running, paws twitching frantically as it lies there in the street. She touched his shoulder and whispered: “Wake up.” Mourad’s eyes opened wide, like a drowned man coming back to life. She warmed up some milk and sat beside him, and that night, for the first time, he talked to her. He told her that he had a recurring nightmare. He was lost in a dense, suffocating jungle, his skin bitten by swarms of parasites, and in the distance he could hear men yelling, the whistling of bullets. He ran desperately, knowing that he had left behind him his dying comrades and his own sense of honor. In his dreams he could smell the thick odor of blood and mud, he could feel the tree branches scratching his face. He saw the boat where the corpses were piled high and the abandoned villages where their enemies lay in wait. He heard harrowing screams and the word “Mama,” which he understood even though he didn’t speak that foreign language. The men, their guts spilling through their hands, the naked and abandoned children, were all calling out for their mothers the way you might pray to Jesus or Allah to come and save you. He told her that these nightmares did not come to him only at night when he was sleeping on the bench in the living room. Sometimes he would have visions in the middle of the day, in the middle of a field, on a country road. He would hear a tractor engine and see a tank. The peasant farmers appeared to him as enemy soldiers. Once, seeing a flock of birds attack the orchard and eviscerate peaches with their beaks, he had started sobbing loudly. “I deserted. Me and my men, we killed the captain and we fled. We left his body in the camp and we all went our separate ways. That’s the truth. I wanted to save my own skin, so I ran away. Sometimes there is nothing else you can do.”

  In the days after remembering this, Selma was haunted by Mourad’s words. It wasn’t merely a memory, she felt sure, but a message from her dead husband. He was trying to tell her something and she fretted over what it might mean. “Run away—there is nothing else you can do.”

  Aïcha was like her father. Touchy, violent. “Soupe au lait,” Mathilde would say, and what annoyed Aïcha was not the accusation itself but the idiocy of that expression. Why did “milk soup” mean short-tempered? The phrase always made her think of those soups that Mathilde used to make, with pieces of boiled vegetables floating around in them, stringy bits from turnips that had so disgusted Aïcha when she was a child. In Strasbourg she had fought against her own nature, following her parents’ advice, and she had forced herself to be discreet. “We don’t want them saying that Arabs don’t know how to behave themselves.” Aïcha had behaved herself.

  Aïcha felt a mix of excitement and fear when she began working at the hospital in Strasbourg and was put in charge of her first patients. She knew all the theory, of course, and was practically infallible when it came to reporting a pathology, but she feared the questions of her patients who wanted to know exactly what was wrong with them but who did not listen when she tried to explain it to them. The patients did not take her seriously, and often, when she left a room after her morning visit, one of them would say: “But I haven’t seen the doctor yet. Could you call for him?” She had to get used to being mistaken for a nurse, while male nurses were often presumed to be doctors.

  One day she saw a female patient complaining of stomachaches who told Aïcha that she had thrown up copious amounts of blood-red vomit. Aïcha immediately thought it might be a perforated ulcer. She ordered blood tests, put the woman on a drip, and asked about the possibility of a transfusion if the woman lost too much blood. When her department head was informed of this by the laughing nurses, he took her aside. “You may be a brilliant student, mademoiselle, but maybe you should get your nose out of your books for a while and take a look at the world around you. It’s strawberry season, didn’t you know? And here people like to mash up strawberries with pots of cream. So don’t be surprised if you have quite a few patients coming in over the next few days with acute indigestion.” She had to learn to recognize the effects of unsanitary lifestyles, and of alcoholism too. In the end she got used to the lies told by young women who came in with their pants covered in blood, followed by a parent shaking their head and repeating: “The shame . . .”

  But what most struck Aïcha, and what raised a torrent of questions in her mind, was her superiors’ advice that she not tell her terminal patients that they were soon going to die. They recommended ignoring the facts and giving these doomed patients hope, and Aïcha could not accept this. She could not see the benefit in what she regarded as a lie, an act of dissimulation, and, worst of all, the denial of a precious piece of information that the patient might have used for good in his life. During a department meeting she raised this subject with regard to one of her patients, a woman called Doris of whom she had become very fond. Doris had lung cancer and the marks that had recently appeared on her skin showed that the disease had spread. Doris kept asking if she would be cured by Christmas, wanting to know when she would be allowed to leave the hospital and live with her husband and their three-year-old son again. Doris died one night when Aïcha was absent, and in the morning she met Doris’s husband in the corridor. He was forty years old and he was wearing a sky-blue sweater over a checkered shirt. He hadn’t shaved for at least two days and his hair was lank. All her life she would remember, almost word for word, what this man said to her and the lost look in his eyes as he stared at her and at the salmon-colored corridor walls. “Excuse me, Doctor. I’m sorry to bother you. I know you must be very busy, but I just wanted to ask you a question. Could you tell me what Doris died of? Could you explain it to me?” Aïcha kept her head lowered and tried to hold back the tears that were welling behind her eyes. They were tears not only of compassion but also of rage, because she knew she had been guilty of lying. And the husband went on: “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. I tried to remember what you told me and what the other doctor told me, the tall gentleman with the white hair. I know you did your best and I won’t forget your kindness toward me. But I’m finding it hard to understand. Just yesterday you promised me that she would be well again soon, that you were going to try that new medicine, I can’t remember what it was called. You said everything was under control and that I could go home to take care of our son. You told me that but when I came back this morning, with a clean sweater for Doris in my bag, she wasn’t in the room anymore. I know you’ve already explained it to me and I know what she had was serious. And I know these things happen, but I need you to tell me again, Doctor. I need you to tell me why my wife is dead.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Was it this contact with her patients? Or was it Karl Marx’s words, which continued to obsess her? In any case, something in Aïcha had changed. During the winter and then the spring of 1969 she felt an anger, a rebellion, rising inside her, along with a desire to open herself up to the world, to understand it. It seemed to her that she could not do her job properly unless she knew what life was like for other people, unless she understood what they were going through. Once, when she and David were smoking a cigarette in the hospital lobby, he raised his eyebrows and smiled when he noticed a copy of The Second Sex in the pocket of Aïcha’s white coat. “You’re reading that?” he asked, incredulous. Aïcha replied coldly: “Yes, why? Did you think I couldn’t read?”

  Just as she used to do when she was at school in Morocco, Aïcha would sometimes fly off the handle. One day a girl approached her at the hospital cafeteria. The girl had a very small face and her blond hair was tied in a sophisticated bun. When she spoke, the movements of her chin and the way she kept sniffing made her look like a shrew. She sat across the table from Aïcha and told her that she too was Moroccan. Well, she was born in Morocco anyway, although her parents had eventually returned to France. She didn’t remember anything about it because she had been very young when they left. Then she leaned over her plate of sliced ham and whispered: “My father often tells me about his memories. He says there were lepers in the cities, begging for money.” Aïcha stared at her, then laughed contemptuously. The shrew looked taken aback. “You’re not Moroccan,” said Aïcha, “and those weren’t lepers that your father saw. They were poor people.”

  But the person who irritated her more than anyone, the person who drove her mad with rage, was Madame Muller. Aïcha knew that her landlady went into her rooms when she wasn’t there. She could only imagine what that almost bald Alsatian woman did there behind her back. Perhaps she lay in Aïcha’s bed to inhale the smell of the African on the sheets. No doubt she rummaged through the fridge, curious what this skinny girl ate, and she must have grimaced with disgust when she saw those open sardine tins and the moldy carrots at the back of the vegetable drawer. Maybe she even inspected the toilet bowl to see if the rumors were true and Africans really did leave black stains on the shiny white enamel. One day Aïcha went home and found Madame Muller sitting on a chair in her kitchen. She was startled by the sight of that solid body in the half-dark. The woman was holding a white tissue in her hands and she unfolded it in front of Aïcha, who leaned down and saw what looked like a wet, gray strand of hair, covered with a phlegm-like residue. In an outraged voice Madame Muller said: “This is why the pipes are blocked! Although, with hair like that, it’s hardly a surprise. Didn’t they ever teach you that in Africa, to clean up after yourself?” She placed the damp tissue on the table and left, slamming the door behind her.

  Aïcha nursed her anger for weeks, imagining scenarios in which she would knock at the landlady’s door and tell her exactly what she thought of her and her nosiness. But she knew she would never find the courage to do it, and when she passed the old woman in the corridor or the street she just pretended not to have seen her. One day in June 1969, about six in the afternoon, Madame Muller came to Aïcha’s door and handed her an envelope. “You have a letter.” Aïcha knew that the landlady opened her mail. It was easy to picture Madame Muller in her office, holding envelopes over a saucepan of boiling water. She resealed them afterward but in such a careless way that Aïcha could have no doubt that her privacy had been violated. She grabbed the letter without a word and shut the door in the Alsatian woman’s face.

  Then she sat down and, smiling, read Monette’s letter. Monette had moved to Casablanca a few months earlier and was now working as a secretary at the Moulay-Abdallah secondary school. Throughout the winter Monette had been sending her friend beautiful postcards, which Aïcha had stuck to the kitchen wall, just above her desk. The Corniche beach, vivid with sunlight, with men in white pants strolling along its promenade. Young people diving, undaunted, from the high board into the biggest swimming pool in the world. Women in bikinis lying on orange deck chairs. This time she had sent not a card but a long letter; Aïcha had instantly recognized the jerky, messy handwriting that had so upset the nuns at their boarding school years earlier. Monette was writing to announce her decision to move in with Henri. They had rented a beach hut at Sable d’Or, between Rabat and Casablanca. They had no intention of getting married. They were just living together, without any concerns for the future, with no other aim than to enjoy their love. Monette’s mother was furious. “But she’ll come round.” Monette had included a photograph on whose glossy surface Madame Muller’s fat fingerprints were clearly visible. In the picture Monette was lying on the sand and reaching out, palm upward, as if she didn’t want to be photographed. Three other people were sitting around her: two young suntanned women and Henri, who had a football between his feet. Empty beer bottles were lying on a tablecloth and in the distance you could see the front of a cheap hotel and a few tents under which some vacationers were lying in the shade. At the end of her letter Monette wrote: “Come and spend the summer with us. I think this is the most beautiful place in the world and there’s nowhere you could be happier.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A week later Aïcha moved out of her apartment. Madame Muller watched as she loaded her belongings into a car driven by a young Jewish man with curly hair. She did not say goodbye to her tenant or wish her good luck. As far as she was concerned it was good riddance: the African had packed her bags and was returning to her own cursed continent. Madame Muller was relieved. She knew she would have no trouble finding someone else to rent the room. The city was full of students and it would take less than a week to find a decent candidate, preferably an Alsatian whose parents would be prepared to pay six months of rent in advance. Of course, it would need a big cleanup. She would have to air the room, tidy the cupboards. The day after Aïcha’s departure Madame Muller entered the apartment, bucket in hand. As soon as she opened the door, a foul stench assailed her nostrils. A smell she would remember to the end of her days as the smell of humiliation. She pinched her nose, walked through the living room, and when she came to the bedroom she saw, above the stripped bed, written on the wall in fecal matter: “The African shits on you.”

  Karl Marx saw the world as a succession of scenes in which extras repeated gestures they had learned by heart. He was convinced that a destiny would be accomplished through him and that he had no choice but to yield to it. Sometimes he felt annoyed with himself for his failure to mask this sense of certainty, with the consequence that he came across as arrogant and pretentious. His life, he believed, would have the density, the logic, the grandeur of a novel. He would be a character and watch himself live, eager to find out the next scene in which he would play. In his mind a series of heroic stars jostled for the lead role and when he thought about himself it was not his own face he saw but that of John Wayne or Marlon Brando.

  He would haul himself far above his friends and family. So high that they would not be able to follow him. Of course he would send them money and let them know that he had become someone. He thought about this constantly: what were you if you weren’t someone? His family understood nothing about the future. They lived in Fès, in the bowels of the imperial city, petrified—like the city itself—in a nostalgia for past glories. All they cared about was satisfying their immediate desires. They were the exact opposite of the characters in the films he watched, who were always working toward a goal. Who knew that, sooner or later, something important was going to happen to them.

  Mehdi had grown up in Fès, in a cramped apartment above the Rex Cinema. His mother, Farida, would never let him buy a ticket, take a seat among the other moviegoers, and watch a film. She said the dark theater was a den of iniquity populated by criminals and fallen women. He would learn things there that were not suitable for a boy of his age, and it was not good for children to believe in what did not exist. She would spit on the sidewalk, whenever she saw those big black-and-white posters of velvet-lipped, long-haired actresses insolently staring at her.

  In their apartment, Mehdi could hear laughter from the theater below. He could hear gunfire during the action scenes. In the living room, when they ate dinner in silence, they would hear the spectators impatiently yelling: “Turn off the lights! Start the film!” They whistled at the pretty girls on the screen, applauded the cowboys, and booed the Indians. Mehdi soon discovered that the bathroom was the best place to hear the lines of dialog written thousands of miles away, in the Hollywood Hills. The oh mon amours that Mehdi would repeat uncomprehendingly under his breath, his ear glued to the cold zellige tiles. One day, when he was about twelve years old and had been staring at the mirror, inspecting the first hairs to sprout from his chin, Mehdi decided to remove one of the tiles. Then another. Then, using a screwdriver, he scratched at the damp-rotted wall until there was a hole through which, miraculously, he could see the projection screen. At first, he did not tell anyone about this. Certainly not his two brothers, who would have fought to steal his place from him, who would have pulled at his shirt and, despite the respect they owed him as their older brother, showered him with prayers and pleas. For a few months this pleasure, this source of delight, remained his alone. He would lock himself for hours on end in that bathroom, freezing in winter and stifling in summer, gazing one-eyed at the Warner and Paramount classics. The women’s hair, always uncovered, looked diaphanous in the black-and-white flicker of the projectors’ light. In the streets of those great American cities, the women would run to their cars in high heels. They would kiss men in packed restaurants or at the top of the Empire State Building. They would drink cocktails, holding the martini glass in a silk-gloved hand. He loved all of this so much that he never even noticed the pain in his bent back, the pins and needles in his calves.