THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO Read online

  1

  The Virgin Bride

  She was shivering in the dark but not from the cold. It was a warm night, in fact, but she couldn’t keep her body from shaking. She had a long, white sleeping gown on and no seroual, the traditional underpants she had worn all evening. Her sister and his mother had made sure of that when they took the wedding clothes off her, slowly and delicately, one piece at a time. She had pleaded for them to do it and not the neggafa who had dressed her and undressed her all through the night as she changed from one costume to the next, looking exquisite in her colorful and elaborate headdresses and jewelry.

  She started crying a little, but Zhor, her sister, scolded her, whispering in her ear to behave herself and not make a fuss. She held a trembling hand out to Lalla, her sweet mother-in-law. Save me! Her eyes were imploring. Lalla gazed for a brief instant at the anguished, frail-looking thirteen-year-old with tears in her clear gray eyes. Ever so lightly, she touched her cheek with the back of her hand, letting her fingers linger.

  “It’ll be alright, baby, don’t worry. It will be okay, I promise,” she said softly.

  And then they left the room hurriedly, taking the wedding kaftans with them and closing the door behind. She was trapped then and utterly lonely.

  The joyful chanting of the women assembled outside grew louder, and he entered the nuptial chamber, dressed in a magnificent white djellaba which oddly made him look even older and wearier than his thirty-three years. She was sitting in the bed, pale and frightened and so small. She appeared to him like a lovely painted doll, a little skinny doll—smaller than he remembered her, he said later. Her dark hair was pulled back, and she still had her festive make-up; rouge on the perfect lips and cheeks, kohl lining the already-black, fiery eyes, hands and feet decorated with henna in intricate designs intended to bring good luck and protect her against evil spirits.

  Ironically, she thought, her luck had just run out and she was looking at evil straight in the eyes. But she was not looking at him, she was too afraid to. Her heart was pounding hard in her chest, and she felt nauseous. He turned off the lantern set on the table in the middle of the room. She heard him move in the dark, undressing himself quickly. That’s when the quivering began; she couldn’t help it. She lowered herself on the bed, crossing her arms on her chest, stiff as a corpse. If only the darkness could swallow her into oblivion.

  She felt him crawling in the bed next to her.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said gently. He didn’t touch her at first, and she kept very still, her legs stretched tight, hoping, praying that he would just go to sleep and let her be. She could hear the noises outside, the voices of women and their laughter.

  The celebration was still going on; they were going to be serving the traditional harira for breakfast soon. For a while, he just lay there next to her, motionless. She could hear him recite a short prayer, and he repeated in a whisper, as if to reassure himself as much as her, “Don’t be afraid.” He smelled of musk oil and soap and tobacco.

  Finally, he seemed to be taking a deep breath and he extended his hand under the sheet, touching her arm. She unconsciously shielded herself from him. Her fear was palpable, her breathing short and fast paced.

  He moved closer to her, repeating again, “Don’t be afraid… you know we must do this… It’s God’s will.”

  He reached for her leg, fumbled a little with her gown, his long shirt. She could feel his hand on her thigh and she let out a sob. No, she thought, I hate you… don’t you know? And she tried to coil away from that prowling hand.

  He stopped short, as if he had heard the howl in her head, and he sighed. “Saadia, we must do this, they’ll be waiting. It is God’s design.”

  He grabbed her more firmly, trying to spread her legs apart, and moved his hand up her thigh, reaching upward toward her groin and her soft and warm, hairless femininity.

  The day before, her older sister, Fatma, had taken her to the hammam and helped her wax herself clean, leaving her smooth as a baby. This was not the first time, to be sure; Fatma had started waxing her ever since she’d discovered pubic hair growth on her young sister’s mons a few months before in the hammam. It hadn’t been pleasant the first time, but she’d gotten somewhat used to it since.

  Suddenly she felt him grow harder against her leg and instinctively grabbed his hand and pulled it away from her in sheer revulsion.

  “Saadia,” he said patiently, “you can’t fight me. This has to be done… just relax and it’ll be all right.”

  Raising himself on one elbow, he tried to caress her. He touched her face and wiped the tears streaming down her cheeks. He lowered his head to kiss her softly on the lips but she turned away in disgust, sobbing now, a tight knot in her stomach and what she guessed was his penis pressing against her skin. She knew she had to let him take her… she was told he would, this was the normal course of things, there was no escaping. She closed her eyes and wished to be dead right there, right then.

  When she opened those eyes again, it was all over. He had turned on his side, away from her, and gone to sleep, just like that.

  She was wide awake and strangely relieved that it was over, feeling the intense burn and soreness in her loins and the wetness between her legs and on the sheet. She didn’t dare touch herself, just pulled her gown down, curled her legs up against her chest and wept quietly. She was mourning the innocent child, forsaken by her loved ones into the crypt inside the earth’s core, only to be desecrated.

  Later that day, the women would be pleased to display the bloodstained sheet and gown in a big round copper tray—proof of her virginity, her sacrifice at the altar of family honor, which would thence be preserved. She had done her daughterly duty. She had endured this unspeakable humiliation as was expected of her, allowed him to pull her legs up, felt his awkward fingers inside her, spreading her and guiding himself within her, and the sudden intense, searing pain as he thrust his way deeper with a small grunt.

  She was thankful for the obscurity, that she couldn’t see his face. Besides, she had kept her eyes shut, savagely biting her lower lip so as not to scream, her head turned to the side, clenching the sheet in her fists, feeling his weight crushing her in silent, helpless resignation. He was not a big man, thank God, rather thin and slender, not at all imposing, and he was done in minutes. Panting, he had let out a curious groan and then pulled out of her.

  “I’m sorry,” he had finally mumbled. “It had to be done.” And that had been all-pretty fast, really. To her surprise, she had survived her wedding night.

  These were the post-war years, the early fifties, and Morocco had been divided into three zones since 1912. Most of the Moroccan territory was under the authority of the French protectorate—a euphemism for colonization. A smaller zone, made up of the Northern provinces, was under Spanish control. And then there was Tangiers, at the northwestern tip of Africa, gateway to the Mediterranean, on the shore opposite the Strait of Gibraltar: Tangiers, once Portuguese, then British, and finally “liberated” under a multinational statute that turned it into a free zone and an International port in 1923.

  My mother was born in 1939, at the onset of World War II, in a kingdom with a fragmented soul held together by the French shortly before Germany invaded Poland and before France yielded to the Nazi invasion. Slowly but surely, a Moroccan consciousness began to surface. All it needed was a charismatic leader to drive it forward. That emblematic figure materialized in the realm’s young sultan, literally on the eve of my mother’s wedding, as he was taken away from his home and thrust into the night of exile.

  All her life, my mother had repeated, at every opportunity, and to everyone that would listen, that she had been forced into marriage when she was just thirteen to a man twenty years older than her, forever outraged by the revolting immorality and injustice of it. This, in truth, was not all that unusual in those days, and her parents were far from being horrible tyrants. Quite to the contrary, they were devoted and caring, very protective of their chil
dren, and she loved them dearly, and never blamed them.

  She was the next-to-last child in a family of ten surviving children, four girls and six boys. Her parents had been married for thirty-five years by then and, when her father was diagnosed with lung cancer, it was decided that they had to marry the little one off before his passing. Unlike her sisters, who were already wed and entirely illiterate—to the point of not being able to write their names or dial a phone number—my mother had been attending an elementary school for girls for a few years and could read and write Arabic. She also had a basic knowledge of algebra. She loved reading Egyptian romance novels and spent long hours, after her chores, dreaming of Prince Charming.

  Her parents were already well acquainted with her future in-laws, since one of their daughters was happily married to one of their sons. My mother’s family was a mirror image of my father’s. They also were ten brothers and sisters born of the same mother, and both my grandfathers had been married only once and had all their children with a unique wife. This was very unusual then in Muslim families. My mother was the youngest sister, my father the oldest sibling—and a consummate bachelor.

  My dad enjoyed his single life thoroughly. He was well educated and spoke French fluently in addition to his perfect knowledge of classical Arabic. He was a devout Muslim, which did not prevent him from enjoying good wine and poetry and the company of like-minded men in blissful religious festivals and in private. Publicly, however, my father displayed a permanent frown on his face and looked eternally grumpy and stern. Upon his father’s passing, he became even more of a grouch as he assumed the role of elder and head of the family. Tellingly, his next of kin all called him “Bahssidi,” meaning “grandpa” in Moroccan Arabic.

  My mother was familiar with him and his siblings and had been lampooning him behind his back with the complicity of his own sisters during family gatherings and holidays. In fact, my mother was rather happy when she and her mother paid her sister a rare visit. Furthermore, she had a crush on Hassan, my father’s youngest brother, a handsome and gentle young man with a smiley face and delicate features. So when she learned she was to wed one of the brothers, she immediately thought of Hassan. That would have been a match made in heaven, a natural one since they were not very far apart in age and he was still unmarried.

  Alas, to her great shock and despair, they had decided on the old grump of the family. Apparently, he had to take a wife first to confirm his status within his clan. But why her? She could not believe they would choose her for his consort. By what tragic turn of event had they come up with such a horrifying plan?

  Two of her older brothers expressed their disagreement and tried to get their father to change his mind, but no one fought very hard for her, for whatever the patriarch decided was to be: as simple as that. She was taken out of school immediately in preparation for her new life. She cried day and night and even contemplated running away a few times, but in the end she could only submit to her destiny.

  In the tradition of Morocco, right after the wedding, she went to live in her in-laws’ house in the old medina of Meknes, where her sister Zhor was already living with her husband and his siblings and their wives—those who were still without children. Two of my dad’s sisters and two of his younger sisters-in-law were about her age, so she was made to feel at home immediately.

  Her mother-in-law, Lalla, was a saint of a woman, a soft-spoken lady who never raised her voice or lost her temper and who welcomed her with open arms. The young women all helped Lalla with the household, while the men went to work or school. What made the first years of her marriage bearable for my mother was the fact that she lived in the company of women in the big traditional patriarchal home in the medina, serving all the men of the house their meals and attending to the daily chores.

  The house was a typical Moroccan riyad, and all the couples lived upstairs, on the second and third floors, in big private chambers with high ceilings, each furnished with a full bed with a commode and armoire in one corner and a sitting area at the opposite corner. Downstairs, Lalla shared her room with her unmarried daughters while the rest of them, the young unwed brothers, slept together in another large room, also on the first floor.

  Additionally, there were a couple of large ornate salons reserved, firstly, for entertaining and guest lodging, and, secondly, for daily dining and gathering with the immediate family. All the rooms were furnished with big sofas lined up against the walls and facing the inside patio with a multitude of pillows and cushions. The sofas were used both for sitting and sleeping when needed. The rooms had no windows on the outside, all the light came in from the large, open-squared tiled central courtyard. Hence the life of the women was sheltered from the outside world and hidden from prying eyes.

  My mother met my father alone only at night in their private room, often at the urging of her beloved mother-in-law.

  “It’s time to go to your husbands,” she whispered to her sons’ brides, reminding them of their primary roles. My mother followed the others with much reluctance and disappeared in her quarters, where she waited in bed to find out if her husband was in the mood for intimacy, which, thankfully, was seldom the case. When that happened, he would roll over her, press his lips on hers in a feeble attempt to kiss her, and do his business quickly and silently, and always in the dark. It was not much different from her wedding night, lacking the physical although not the emotional pain.

  She loathed his inept and dispassionate embrace but submitted to it without protest, even facilitating it so that it would end almost as soon as it began. Her marriage took on its full significance only after she became pregnant with me and everything she had known suddenly changed. She was only sixteen.

  Until then she had been playing games along with her sisters-in-law on the sun-baked roof top of the riyad while taking the dried clothes off the line. They rolled up a sheet into a ball, stuffed it under their dresses, and pretended they were with child, giggling their silly heads off, imitating a pregnant acquaintance’s mannerism. But this was the real thing now. As her belly grew bigger, so did her standing. Her girly status changed overnight to that of “mother-to-be.” Because two of her older sisters were childless, the entire family had been anxiously waiting for her to become a mother. So there was considerable joy, mixed with relief, at the news.

  To her delight, she earned instant respect and admiration and became the object of much care and attention. This event also somewhat tempered the enormous regret brought about by the news of Hassan’s upcoming nuptials to a dazzling red-haired, milky-skinned young beauty, issued from a respectable family from the imperial city of Fez, who was soon to take her place in the family. Hence my birth, combined with the latest betrothal, meant that my father had to set up his own house with his young bride and soon-to-be-mother, marking in the process the beginning of a new era of discord in my parents’ marriage.

  They settled in a house in the Jewish quarter, the Mellah of Meknes. Around that time, and during the years that followed the founding of the state of Israel, many Moroccan Jews sold or abandoned their homes in their old neighborhoods throughout the kingdom for the Promised Land. My father rented his house from a man whose son and daughter-in-law had emigrated against his wishes and whose wife, Rachel, later became a close friend and confident to my mother.

  It was a small house with no running water or electricity, but it was clean, bright and cheerful, and it had a pleasant patio with a small well in its central courtyard and an orange tree. When the orange blossoms were in full bloom, the whole house was filled with their sweet, musky scent. In that house, on a warm summer day in July 1956, I was born into the hands of a midwife, one of Rachel’s acquaintances, assisted by my two adoring and infertile older aunts.

  2

  The Blessed Child

  What a year 1956 was for Morocco—nothing less than the complete unification and independence of the country! Indeed, my father had been living in the midst of massive political transformation before the news o
f my mother’s first pregnancy was even announced. On November 16, 1955, King Mohamed V and his family returned home from their two year exile in Corsica and Madagascar in a delirium of widespread exultation.

  Women, being permanently confined to the sheltered universe of their traditional family homes, were entirely ignorant of anything that did not have a direct link to feeding and caring for their loved ones. Consequently, only men had any notion of the world around them, and rare were those who bothered to share the news or otherwise inform their wives and daughters of any development outside their households.

  The triumphal return of the king, however, was acknowledged and celebrated by every woman, man, and child in the kingdom. Literally millions poured into the streets of the imperial cities to catch a glimpse at their beloved sovereign during his tour of the nation. My mother, like all the inhabitants of Meknes, would remember for a very long time indeed that extraordinary occasion-but she also had to think about a more pressing matter.

  My father was transported by the rapid changes of the political landscape and its actors. He spent long hours after work in the city’s French cafés, in oblivious disregard of all else. He had a close circle of friends who shared the same interests and with whom he enjoyed debating the major political parties’ agendas and other significant events of the day.

  My mother was almost six months pregnant when Morocco was declared free of the Spanish occupation in the north of the country in April of 1956. Shortly thereafter, this critical event was followed by the end of the French protectorate in the rest of the kingdom and by the abrogation of the international status of Tangiers.

  My father came home late at night, often inebriated, and left in the morning for his job as a government functionary in the town hall. He also returned home for his lunch and habitual nap in the middle of the day. Overall, he took little interest in the progress of his wife’s condition; she was, he knew, attended by Rachel or one of her sisters almost day and night, and there was nothing that was asked of him. Yet he welcomed my birth with an enormous optimism, greeting me as the blessed child of the Independence, born in a free and unified land. The world was full of promise, he felt, and his daughter would have the greatest of destinies.