(1960)
A Friend of the World
SALAM RENTED two rooms and a kitchen on the second floor of a Jewish house at the edge of the town. He had decided to live with the Jews because he had already lived with Christians and found them all right. He trusted them a little more than he did other Moslems, who were like him and said: “No Moslem can be trusted.” Moslems are the only true people, the only people you can understand. But because you do understand them, you do not trust them. Salam did not trust the Jews completely, either, but he liked living with them because they paid no attention to him. It had no importance if they talked about him among themselves, and they never would talk about him to Moslems. If he had a sister who lived here and there, getting what money she could from whatever man she found, because she had to eat, that was all right, and the Jews did not point at her when she came to visit him. If he did not get married, but lived instead with his brother and spent his time smoking kif and laughing, if he got his money by going to Tangier once a month and sleeping for a week with old English and American ladies who drank too much whisky, they did not care. He was a Moslem. Had he been rich he would have lived in the Spanish end of the town in a villa with concrete benches in the garden and a big round light in the ceiling of the sala, with many pieces of glass hanging down from it. He was poor and he lived with the Jews. To get to his house he had to go to the end of the Medina, cross an open space where the trees had all been cut down, go along the street where the warehouses had been abandoned by the Spanish when they left, and into a newer, dirtier street that led to the main highway. Halfway down was the entrance to the alley where he and his brother and fourteen Jewish families lived. There were the remains of narrow sidewalks along the edges of the wide gutter, full of mounds of rotten watermelon-rind and piles of broken bricks. The small children played here all day. When he was in a hurry he had to be careful not to step on them as they waded in the little puddles of dishwater and urine that were in front of all the doors. If they had been Moslem children he would have spoken to them, but since they were Jews he did not see them as children at all, but merely as nuisances in his way, like cactuses that had to be stepped over carefully because there was no way of going around them. Although he had lived here for almost two years, he did not know the names of any of the Jews. For him they had no names. When he came home and found his door locked, because his brother had gone out and taken both keys with him, he went into any house where the door was open and dropped his bundles on the floor, saying: “I’ll be back in a little while.” He knew they would not touch his property. The Jews were neither friendly nor unfriendly. They too, if they had had money, would have been living in the Spanish end of town. It made the alley seem less like a Mellah, where only Jews live, to have the two Moslems staying among them.
Salam had the best house in the alley. It was at the end, and its windows gave onto a wilderness of fig trees and canebrake where squatters had built huts out of thatch and hammered pieces of tin. On the hot nights (for the town was in a plain and the heat stayed in the streets long after the sun had gone) his rooms had a breeze from the south that blew through and out onto the terrace. He was happy with his house and with the life that he and his brother had in it. “I’m a friend of the world,” he would say. “A clean heart is better than everything.”
One day he came home and found a small kitten sitting on the terrace. When it saw him it ran to him and purred. He unlocked the door into the kitchen and it went inside. After he had washed his hands and feet in the kitchen he went into his room. The kitten was lying on the mattress, still purring. “Mimi,” he said to it. He gave it some bread. While it ate the bread it did not stop purring. Bou Ralem came home. He had been drinking beer with some friends in the Café Granada. At first he did not understand why Salam had let the kitten stay. “It’s too young to be worth anything,” he said. “If it saw a rat it would run and hide.” But when the kitten lay in his lap and played with him he liked it. “Its name is Mimí,” Salam told him. Nights it slept on the mattress with Salam near his feet. It learned to go down into the alley to relieve itself in the dirt there. The children sometimes tried to catch it, but it ran faster than they did and got to the steps before them, and they did not dare follow it upstairs.
During Ramadan, when they stayed up all night, they moved the mats and cushions and mattresses out onto the terrace and lived out there, talking and laughing until the daylight came. They smoked more kif than usual, and invited their friends home at two in the morning for dinner. Because they were living outside and the kitten could hear them from the alley, it grew bolder and began to visit the canebrake behind the house. It could run very fast, and even if a dog chased it, it could get to the stairs in time. When Salam missed it he would stand up and call to it over the railing, on one side down the alley and on the other over the trees and the roofs of the shacks. Sometimes when he was calling into the alley a Jewish woman would run out of one of the doors and look at him. He noticed that it was always the same woman. She would put one hand above her eyes and stare up at him, and then she would put both hands on her hips and frown. “A crazy woman,” he thought, and he paid no attention to her. One day while he was calling the kitten, the woman shouted up to him in Spanish. Her voice sounded very angry. “Oyé!” she cried, shaking her arm in the air, “why are you calling the name of my daughter?”
Salam kept calling: “Mimí! Agi! Agiagi, Mimí!”
The woman moved closer to the steps. She put both hands above her eyes, but the sun was behind Salam, so that she could not see him very well. “You want to insult people?” she screamed. “I understand your game. You make fun of me and my daughter.”
Salam laughed. He put the end of his forefinger to the side of his head and made circles with it. “I’m calling my cat. Who’s your daughter?”
“And your cat is called Mimí because you knew my little girl’s name was Mimí. Why don’t you behave like civilized people?”
Salam laughed again and went inside. He did not think of the woman again. Not many days after that the kitten disappeared, and no matter how much he called, it did not come back. He and Bou Ralem went out that night and searched for it in the canebrake. The moon was bright, and they found it lying dead, and carried it back to the house to look at it. Someone had given it a pellet of bread with a needle inside. Salam sat slowly on the mattress. “The Yehoudía,” he said.
“You don’t know who did it,” Bou Ralem told him.
“It was the Yehoudía. Throw me the mottoui.” And he began to smoke kif, one pipe after another. Bou Ralem understood that Salam was looking for an answer, and he did not talk. After a while he saw that the time had come to turn off the electricity and light the candle. When he had done this, Salam lay back quietly on the mattress and listened to the dogs barking outside. Now and then he sat up and filled his sebsi. Once he passed it to Bou Ralem, and lay back down on the cushions smiling. He had an idea of what he would do. When they went to bed he said to Bou Ralem: “She’s one mother who’s going to wet her pants.”
The next day he got up early and went to the market. In a little stall there he bought several things: a crow’s wing, a hundred grams of jduq jmel seeds, powdered porcupine quills, some honey, a pressed lizard, and a quarter kilo of fasoukh. When he had finished paying for all this he turned away as if he were going to leave the stall, then he said: “Khaï, give me another fifty grams of jduq jmel.” When the man had weighed the seeds out and put them into a paper and folded it up, he paid him and carried the paper in his left hand as he went on his way home. In the alley the children were throwing clots of mud at one another. They stopped while he went by. The women sat in the doorways with their shawls over their heads. As he passed before the house of the woman who had killed Mimí he let go of the package of jduq jmel seeds. Then he went upstairs onto his terrace, walked to the door, and pounded on it. No one answered. He stood in the middle of the terrace where everyone could see him, rubbing his hand over his chin. A m
inute later he climbed to the terrace next to his and knocked on that door. He handed his parcel to the woman who came to open. “I left my keys in the market,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.” He ran downstairs, through the alley, and up the street.
Behind the Gailan Garage Bou Ralem was standing. When Salam passed him, he nodded his head once and went along without stopping. Bou Ralem began to walk in the other direction, back to the house. As he opened the gate onto the terrace, the woman from next door called to him. “Haven’t you seen your brother? He left his keys in the market.” “No,” Bou Ralem said, and went in, leaving the door open. He sat down and smoked a cigarette while he waited. In a little while the talking in the alley below sounded louder. He stood up and went to the door to listen. A woman was crying: “It’s jduq jmel! Mimí had it in her hand!” Soon there were many more voices, and the woman from the next terrace ran downstairs in her bathrobe, carrying a parcel. “That’s it,” Bou Ralem said to himself. When she arrived the shouting grew louder. He listened for a time, smiling. He went out and ran downstairs. They were all in the alley outside the woman’s door, and the little girl was inside the house, screaming. Without looking toward them he ran by on the far side of the alley.
Salam was inside the café, drinking a glass of tea. “Sit down,” he told Bou Ralem. “I’m not going to get Fatma Daifa before eleven.” He ordered his brother a tea. “Were they making a lot of noise?” he asked him. Bou Ralem nodded his head. Salam smiled. “I’d like to hear them,” he said. “You’ll hear them,” Bou Ralem told him. “They’re not going to stop.”
At eleven o’clock they left the café and went through the back passages of the Medina to Fatma Daifa’s house. She was the sister of their mother’s mother, and thus not of their family, so that they did not feel it was shameful to use her in the game. She was waiting for them at the door, and together they went back to Salam’s house.
The old woman went into the alley ahead of Salam and Bou Ralem, and walked straight to the door where all the women were gathered. She held her haïk tightly around her head so that no part of her face showed, except one eye. She pushed against the Jewish women and held out one hand. “Give me my things,” she told them. She did not bother to speak Spanish with them because she knew they understood Arabic. “You have my things.” They did have them and they were still looking at them, but then they turned to look at her. She seized all the packages and put them into her kouffa quickly. “No shame!” she shouted at the women. “Go and look after your children.” She pushed the other way and went back into the alley where Salam and Bou Ralem stood waiting. The three went upstairs and into Salam’s house, and they shut the door. They had lunch there and stayed all day, talking and laughing. When everyone had gone to bed, Salam took Fatma Daifa home.
The next day the Jews all stared at them when they went out, but no one said anything to them. The woman Salam had wanted to frighten did not come to her door at all, and the little girl was not in the alley playing with the other children. It was clear that the Jews thought Fatma Daifa had put a spell on the child. They would not have believed Salam and Bou Ralem alone could do such a thing, but they knew a Moslem woman had the power. The two brothers were very much pleased with the joke. It is forbidden to practice magic, but the old woman was their witness that they had not done such a thing. She had taken home all the packages just as they had been when she had snatched them away from the Jewish women, and she had promised to keep them that way, so that in case of trouble she could prove that nothing had been used.
The Jewish woman went to the comisaría to complain. She found a young policeman sitting at his desk listening to a small radio he had in his hand, and she began to tell him that the Moslems in her haouma had bought charms to use against her daughter. The policeman did not like her, partly because she was Jewish and spoke Spanish instead of Arabic, and partly because he did not approve of people who believed in magic, but he listened politely until she said: “That Moslem is a sinvergüenza.” She tried to go on to say that there were many very good Moslems, but he did not like her words. He frowned at the woman and said: “Why do you say all this? What makes you think they put a spell on your little girl?” She told him how the three had shut themselves in all day with the packages of bad things from the market. The policeman looked at her in surprise. “And for a dead lizard you came all the way here?” he laughed. He sent her away and went on listening to his radio.
The people in the alley still did not speak to Salam and Bou Ralem, and the little girl did not come out to play with the others. When the woman went to the market she took her with her. “Hold on to my skirt,” she would tell her. But one day in front of the service station the child let go of the woman’s skirt for a minute. When she ran to catch up with her mother, she fell and her knee hit a broken bottle. The woman saw the blood and began to scream. People stopped walking. In a few minutes a Jew came by and helped the woman carry the child to a pharmacy. They bandaged the little girl’s knee and the woman took her home. Then she went back to the pharmacy to get her baskets, but on the way she stopped at the police station. She found the same policeman sitting at his desk.
“If you want to see the proof of what I told you, come and look at my little girl now,” she told him. “Again?” said the policeman. He was not friendly with her, but he took her name and address, and later that day on his way home he called at her house. He looked at the little girl’s knee and tickled her ribs so that she laughed. “All children fall down,” he said. “But who is this Moslem? Where does he live?” The mother showed him the stairs at the end of the alley. He did not intend to speak with Salam, but he wanted to finish with the woman once and for all. He went out into the alley, and saw that the woman was watching him from the door, so he walked slowly to the foot of the stairs. When he had decided she was no longer looking, he started to go. At that moment he heard a voice behind him. He turned and saw Salam standing above him on the terrace. He did not much like his face, and he told himself that if he ever saw him in the street he would have a few words with him.
One morning Salam went early to the market to get fresh kif. When he found it he bought three hundred francs’ worth. As he went out through the gates into the street the policeman, who was waiting for him, stopped him. “I want to speak with you,” he told him. Salam stretched his fingers tightly around the kif in his pocket. “Is everything all right?” said the policeman. “Everything is fine,” Salam replied. “No trouble?” the policeman insisted, looking at him as if he knew what Salam had just bought. Salam answered: “No trouble.” The policeman said: “See that it stays like that.” Salam was angry at being spoken to in this way for no reason, but with the kif in his pocket he could only be thankful that he was not being searched. “I’m a friend of the world,” he said, trying to smile. The policeman did not answer, and turned away.