ONE
Maison Blanche
I was taking a pee in the bathroom when I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My face looked so beautiful that I turned to look more closely, spraying the tiles round the toilet in my hurry. I shook my zib and put it back inside my boxers so I could study my face. It was like someone had drawn a faint shadow beneath the cheekbones, then put a touch of mascara on my lashes. The eyes had a depth I’d never seen before. I put my head to one side and smiled, then furrowed my brow as though I was being serious, but the eyes stayed the same—twinkling with a kind of humor and experience. This was the face of someone old beyond my years.
How could it be I’d never noticed before just how beautiful I was? Not regular handsome maybe like an old-time film star and not indie blank like a modern one. More a mix of soul and sexiness. With noble bones.
I flipped the glass to magnifying and back to normal. I held a hand mirror up to turn the reflection on itself, so it sat right-way-on. I backed against the wall, then went fisheye close. It made no difference. True, I’d smoked a little kif, but only a little, which was all I liked, and I’d had a Coke to keep my sugar level up (a tip from a boy in my year). I felt happy to think this person was me. No harm could come to someone who looked like that. The ways of peace and righteousness were ours. Not to mention soft-skinned girls and travel to distant places.
We stared into one another’s eyes for a few more minutes.
Then he spoke.
He said, “You got to get out, man. You gotta get out.”
I felt myself nodding in agreement.
Because I’d known this anyway, for quite a while. There was nothing shocking in what he said, it was more of a relief.
“Go now.”
“I will. Any day now.”
* * *
We lived just outside the medina, the old town, in a whitewashed house. There was another family on the ground floor, but an outside staircase led to our front door. We had the top two floors and a roof terrace with a view towards the sea. My stepmother used to hang the washing up there, which pissed my father off. “How can I bring people home when they have to sit next to a row of wet shirts?” I had nothing against my stepmother except that she was not my mother. That, and the fact that she always repeated herself. Once she’d locked on to a piece of news or a point of view, she couldn’t let it go. “All our problems are caused by the Arabs of the Gulf, especially the Saudis,” she told us one January. In September she was still saying this like something she’d just stumbled on.
In the middle of the terrace was a taifor, a kind of low table. It had a woven cloth, orange and red, and small shiny discs that reflected the sun. On it was a box of cigarettes and colored glasses for tea. My father asked men he hoped would invest in his business to come up and admire the view while he unlocked his supply of whiskey. He offered it round with a leer that made me feel sick. There were tons of places in town you could buy liquor. Some of them had only boxes of tissues or cat food in the window, but everyone knew you couldn’t run a specialist tissue shop. You only had to go a few paces in, past the Kleenex, and there were rows of Johnnie Walker and Glenmorangie above the lager and Moroccan wine.
Then my father told me to go and do some studying. Down in my room at the back of the house, I opened my books. I was studying economics, though “studying” may be too strong a word. True, I’d done well at school when I was young, but it was only because I was good at languages. I’d learned French from my mother, who was half French herself. Her father was from a French settler family in Algeria—one of those they called pieds noirs, or black feet, because the original ones (a hundred years before) had had shiny leather shoes. Normally the generations of settlers married others of their own, French people, but my grandfather took a liking to an Algerian woman in Oran (Algerian Granny) and they were married, though in what religion I don’t know. They moved to Morocco and then to Paris, where my mother, Hanan, was born one day in the early fifties. I don’t know why they had such itchy feet. Maybe they saw trouble coming in Algeria. I guess the Arab name was a gesture from my French grandfather to his Algerian wife now they were stuck in Paris. Hanan, any dictionary will tell you, means “mercy” or “clemency,” so maybe he was trying to be nice.
It was in Paris that Hanan, my mother, was brought up and where perhaps she should have stayed. But in her early thirties she went to Morocco on a visit to some cousins and it was there she had the misfortune to meet and marry Malik Zafar, a would-be businessman, who, in 1986, became my father.
My mother died when I was ten. Or maybe I was nine. I wasn’t aware at the time how ill she was and went off to school one day telling her I hoped her “cold” would be better by the evening. She did look thin and had trouble speaking. I was later told she had had cancer of the esophagus, though I hardly knew what either word meant. Her legacy was my ability to speak French.
For a time, I went to the American School of Tangier, where the lessons were all in English and the girls wore Western clothes. There were daily doses of classical Arabic, as well, but it got too expensive for the son of a flaky businessman. I was sent instead to a school in the Ville Nouvelle, where I got distracted, stopped reading and only just scraped into college at the end of it.
And at college there were more girls. There was also a woman who taught politics, Miss Aziz. She had hair so black it had a purple glow in the light that came through the lecture-room windows. It was thick, with a slight wave, chopped off just above the shoulder. Like other women, she wore trousers most of the time, but once she wore a black skirt to the knee with a white shirt and three rows of big red beads. Towards the end of class, I noticed that a thin strip of white lace had slipped below the hem of the skirt and settled on the black nylon that covered her legs.
We were all majoring in economics. It was a dull subject, but my father made me do it. Miss Aziz’s politics class was a compulsory module in the course and it had a bit of history in it too. One day she told us about the wars of the last century and how the Europeans came to North Africa. She talked about the colonizers as though she wasn’t sure they were quite human. They were cultured all right, the way she told it, but they were addicted to killing in a way that no number of symphonies could make up for.
All this was new to me. I didn’t know exactly when the Europeans had first come to my country or what they wanted from us. But they’d left a lot behind in the names of boulevards, squares and churches. Listening to Miss Aziz describe the Spanish and the French as creatures of a slightly different species, I wondered if this was how they’d seen us, too, when they first arrived in North Africa—primitive bandits on a coastal strip above an endless desert. Bandits with religion.
Miss Aziz, at first glance, seemed to do the right things. She was patient with the questions of the class, and when Dr. Ahmed, the head of department, put his head round the door and asked her for a word she placed her book facedown on the desk and hurried after him. But what was different about her was that she seemed to carry a world in her head that was not the world we knew. She never returned an essay late and she was polite to Hamid, the toothless janitor who swept the courtyard while the rest of us just laughed at his fat ass when he wasn’t sitting on it. And I can’t imagine Miss A. ever raised her voice in the staff room. So why did she give off this sense of rebellion?
Laila, my girlfriend, noticed the same thing. She used to call Miss Aziz “the Messenger.” It was the name of an American television show in which an average family had adopted a boy who turned out to be an alien. It was a comedy aimed at children, but it was a cult at our college. The kids in the family were always begging to be taken away to his home planet, but the Messenger, who was like an ordinary boy except for two extra fingers (and some telekinetic powers), was too grateful to the mom and dad for rescuing him to take the children away, even on a day trip. For all I know, it was a hidden message, sponsored by some religious group—however shit your life is, you’ve got to keep believing; don’t run away.
While my father poured his whiskey down the throats of his guests (they never invested, they just drank), I sat on my bed and opened a course book. I was bored. Who cares about history, even if Miss Aziz is teaching it? What’s the point of remembering stuff that happened before you were born? We weren’t “remembering” it anyway. We hadn’t been there—neither had our teachers, nor anyone else in the world—so we couldn’t “remember” it. What we were doing was “imagining” it.… And what was the point of that?
If I wasn’t distracted by thoughts of escape, it was by thoughts of Laila. In my room, pretending to study income distribution, I used to send her text messages on the fancy phone she’d given me when her father bought her a new one. Sometimes she sent me back a picture of herself, playing with her dog or drinking Fanta on the veranda of her house.
I hadn’t slept with Laila. I was nineteen, and I hadn’t slept with anyone. When she first arrived at college, I’m not sure the other guys noticed how pretty she was. At that time, she had very short dark hair, almost like a boy’s, and they all drooled over pictures of blond girls with hair to the shoulders. But I spotted the weight under her white shirt when she leaned across a table, even though everything was properly buttoned up. Girl students were allowed to wear pretty much what they wanted. Laila’s clothes were modest, but somehow you could tell they were good quality. Maybe she got them sent from abroad or bought them online. After a week or so settling in, she became more confident. She was always laughing. For a while I was afraid she was laughing at me, but then I decided she was just carefree. She didn’t like computer games as much as I did, but she was crazy about The Messenger. That was the moment we clicked. “I love it, I love it, don’t you?” she said when the subject came up. “I love the way he’s always sneaking up on people. And when he’s amazed by something in our world he doesn’t understand, he just says—”
Copyright © 2018 by Sebastian Faulks
