Everyone was in a rush to marry before Ramadan. I had been instructed to catch a taxi at the plaza, and I arrived in the middle of several small weddings that had the cumulative effect of one large, polyamorous affair. Brides, mounted high on small castles, were carried through the streets like plundered treasure. Spectators below could only distinguish their black curls and painted eyes swirling like smoke through the veils, as if the handmade gowns worn by each bride contained beneath their stitching a trench of hungry fires. It took four strong-shouldered men to hoist one bride up in the air, and they carried her all the way from the plaza to the ceremony, past the street cats crouched beneath fruit carts, past the roundabout and the crumbled stone king in the center. The woman beside me paused in her shopping to glance up. She held two pimply chickens by their feet and frowned, unruffled, as the last bridal procession sailed on. I stood at the mouth of the medina, brought an almond covered fig to my lips and bit into the skin.
After three flights and one restless night in a hostel, I longed to close my eyes for twenty uninterrupted minutes. I wondered if my mother stood on this same corner when she arrived in Morocco in the 1980s, waiting for a cab in a similar half-reality where dreams push through to the waking world. I wished, for the first time since her death, I could ask my mother what she remembered. She appeared untroubled in the old photograph. The picture was taken the year before she returned to the States, married my father, and gave birth to me. My mother stands outside a squat building with one hand on the back of a young student. Her name is painted on the door of the school. She wears a loose-fitting dress and men’s Moroccan slippers, and she is smiling to the camera. She looks elegant and sure with short hair tied back in a low ponytail. We look nothing alike, which made it harder for me in airport security today than it ever would have been in her lifetime. I argued in my head about the privileges European features grant a traveler while the TSA agent ran her hands the length of my legs and torso.
But the tint in my skin and bounce in my hair was beginning to work in my favor. I finished my snack and flagged down a grand taxi—an ancient Benz—and flashed the driver the photograph. He sat squashed down in the worn bucket seat and flipped the photo back and forth, reading the text and looking at the picture of my mother in front of the school.
“Tétouan,” he said, understanding where I wanted to go. “Very good.”
I tucked the photograph into my pocket and climbed in the back of the taxi. The car smelled like leather and chickpeas, fleshy and earthbound in a way that was not unpleasant. He pulled out a map and traced his finger along the route we would take, a trailing voyage through the Rif Mountains that ended at the edge of the blue Mediterranean Sea. I would arrive by evening.
Nobody told me olive trees were silver. They shimmered on the mountainsides, mirages seen from the speeding car as we traveled in silence. Scalloped air rose hot off the earth outside, a rising curtain between me and the world as foreign as a different planet. The driver passed back a bag of dates. I dug one out with my fingers and let the date melt on my tongue. I sucked on the pit, moving it around my mouth until the sweetness dissolved and all that remained were the stringy fringes stuck to the seed. We passed the bag back and forth as we drove, spitting the pits out the open windows towards the donkeys, packed with hawker merchandise, standing patiently at the edge of the road. I knew only a few words in Arabic: yes, no, thank you, and goodbye. Everything else I wanted to say was written on the back of the photograph, once in English and once in the slopes and tides of Arabic. Tilda Arthur Academy, 1987. Tétouan, Maroc.
When my marriage ended, my mother said, “You made a terrible wife.”
I reminded her it was his transgressions, not mine, that split us up.
“That’s what we in the mystery business call a clue, Elizabeth,” she said, her words corroding what little good-will I had cultivated toward her since her last outburst. I stopped visiting her after that. Stopped calling to check on her. I only intended to give it a month, but she died three weeks after the last time I saw her, those awful words the last thing she ever said to me. After we buried her and set about the task of distributing her wealth of junk, my sister found her passport. Tilda Arthur-Gilmore, our dear mother, had renewed it three months earlier without our knowledge. It turned out to be the most recent picture of her in our possession. I compared her passport photo to the one I slipped off the bookcase, the one of her in Morocco in 1987. She was not smiling in her passport photo. Her grey hair had been smoothed down, I guessed, with one of the plastic combs she kept in her purse that was caked with whatever grime collected at the bottom of her bag. She looked frail and mean. I imagined the young man behind the camera, confused and probably hurt by the hateful old woman in front of the lens.
“Get your hands out of your pants and take the goddamn picture,” I imagined her saying. (All her favorite phrases chided her target for an imagined sexual or physical reason. My personal favorite from homecoming weekend: “Guys would take you out if you bleached your mustache.”) Sometimes, maddeningly, our mother would utter a lurid phrase in fluent Arabic that escaped my understanding. Old age and the progression of time made her angrier than ever. But sometimes, her indignation faltered and she slipped into moments of quiet introspection. Before she pissed me off, I spent days with her where all she wanted to do was thumb through a box of postcards and read them silently, one by one. She wouldn’t let me see them, but I couldn’t read what they contained even if I tried. Since I never bothered to learn Arabic—why would I?—she made a big show of sighing after each reading, just to remind me of what I was missing.
My ex-husband came to her funeral and stood in the back of the room, not interacting with the family and only approaching her after the rest of us had our time. He was a little hunched in his black suit, eyelids tinted pink as if he had been crying. His hand gripped the edge of the casket, and he looked down at the permanent scowl my mother would take to her grave. Was he, like me, looking for clues to her life, looking inside the map of her expression, through the translucent skin of her hands for something in this world that made her happy? I didn’t ask him to leave. I didn’t have the energy. Besides, he was one person she sort of liked.
We drove. I slid down in the back seat and pressed my forehead against the cool window, wanting badly to fall asleep. The citrus air gave way to the warm smell of cattle. Mosques everywhere came alive for midday prayer. Buzzed from the sugar of the dates and the vibration of the window as we bumped along the stony road, I listened to the voices from the towers rise and fall. My mother was with us, haunting the landscape as if she had come back looking for the life she left behind. The dry, desert smell of her surrounded the car when we drove through the empty, rocky spaces between the small villages.
For most of my life, my mother wore the same combination of sandalwood and grassy oils, with a barely perceptible tint of something salty, more mineral, as if the landscape of her scent rounded a fertile corner and came upon a basalt wall. After she stopped wearing scented oils, I smelled the rock formation on her stronger, unmasked by the gentle elements she used to soften her volcanic heart. Hers was a land where no plants grew and no pilgrims descended the mountains to make peace with a merciful God.
The driver motioned to a restaurant on the side of the mountain above a cluster of trees.
“Hungry?” he asked. “For lunch?”
“God, yes,” I said and straightened up in my seat. He gave me a thumbs up and steered the Benz up the road until we reached the sandy parking lot overlooking the town below. Black flies hopped between leftover crumbs on the oilcloth tables, and we picked a seat where the driver could keep an eye on his car. A boy in sandals came out of the back with a silver teapot and two small glasses and set them before us. He addressed me with a question, and I looked at him expectantly, as if he would repeat it in English. The driver interjected, and the boy, now understanding my lack of vocabulary, poured two glassed of fragrant mint tea and motioned to the menus. I thanked him in Arabic, and he raised his eyebrows high on his forehead before turning around and ducking behind the beaded curtain that led into the kitchen. The driver removed his hat. His black hair was sweaty and pasted down to his forehead. The chair protested with a creak as he settled in for a look at the menu. I picked one up and flipped it over.
One side was written in Spanish and the other in French. I understood enough to order a meal I could translate: fish with lemon. The boy returned to our table, and I enunciated the words slowly so as not to trip over my own accent. The driver ordered his meal in rapid Arabic, and I wondered if he had translated my order, too, since I was as helpless as I was illiterate now. The young boy nodded and disappeared behind the beaded curtain once more. Soft percussive music sputtered from an unseen radio. After a moment of awkward silence, the driver pulled out his phone and turned the screen my way. Four adolescent boys posed in front of a wooden fence, studying the camera with the practiced carelessness of youth and pop stars.
“Sons,” he said, pointing to his chest. “Very strong.” His mouth bent in a prideful frown, lips pressed and folded out. I could see the resemblance in the boys. They had the same noses, the same eyes hovering above half-moons a shade darker than their skin. Each boy had thick hair the color of the blackest espresso and long arms that ended in thin, delicate fingers. I smiled and pulled out my phone. I showed him a picture of my niece and nephew—my sister’s family photo—the closest I ever came to having children. The driver held the phone close to his eyes, then moved the screen back to focus his vision. A wide smile spread across his face.
“Children?” he said. “Husband?” he tapped my brother-in-law’s face on the screen, accidentally zooming in on his eyes. My sister, three years younger, didn’t look a bit like me. Once, I longed for a pair of handsome children of my own, with my tangled hair and my husband’s blue eyes. We didn’t try very hard.
“My sister,” I said. “Her husband.” The driver nodded and looked at the faces of the two grinning children. A part of me hated how perfect they were, like a family in a pajama commercial. Our mother called my sister “the pretty Gilmore,” and me, dark-haired with thick eyebrows, “swarthy.” My sister resembled my father, and I, she claimed, a distant, ugly relative.
“Very good,” the driver said and handed my phone back across the table. The food landed on our table, and the sight of it reminded me I hadn’t had a real meal since the morning before. I nosedived to the plate and did not raise my head until dust clouds rose outside our window, accompanied by a deep mechanical growl.
A man with a thick, black beard parked his motorcycle at an angle and swung his leg off the bike. He tramped into the café and sat down at a table across from ours, clapping the dust off the shoulders of his jacket. He did not look like other Moroccan men I saw on the edge of the roads, leading donkeys or sitting on the stairs of the mosques. He was not wearing the long-hooded robe and boxy hat of the religious men, nor the modest blue-collar outfit of my taxi driver. He wore jeans, sunglasses, and a tawny T-shirt; his denim jacket covered his broad shoulders and muscular arms. The wind had swept back his inky hair, revealing a prominent widow’s peak, the point of an arrow aimed between his thick eyebrows. His voice was low when he ordered, and he gulped hot mint tea from the glass without scalding his fingertips on the cup, as I had done moments before. He caught me staring at him and winked over his glass. I turned back to my clotted fish and hoped the taxi driver hadn’t seen me blush.
We were back on the road, driving with the windows down to cool ourselves in the hot afternoon. Villages whipped by. Stands crammed with terracotta tagine bowls crowded beside overflowing watermelons and pineapples. We slowed for a line of mountain women crossing the road. They ambled by with colorful pom poms on their hats and red and white striped wraps tied around them like skirts. I soaked in the air of Morocco, the twice-baked smell of the earth in the heat, as if the country itself were a vessel just removed from the coals. I leaned out the window enough to feel the air through my hair, cooling the sweat on my head. The driver relaxed in his seat and hung one hairy arm out the window as he wound us through the mountain roads.
A rumble popped our heat-induced reverie. The driver looked in the rearview mirror and said something in Arabic to the familiar inflection of “dammit.” I twisted around to look out the back window, to see a motorcycle coming up the road behind us. As the bike approached the car, I recognized the man from the restaurant. He passed us on the road, and as he did, looked inside the taxi. I suddenly felt like a child on an errand confined to the rear. The rider flashed a handsome, toothy grin. He sped down the road before us, whipping up the dirt and sand in little red clouds that spun up from his wheels. The driver rolled his window up, then reached back and cranked the handle until my window closed too. We drove on into the early evening that way, in the still interior air, in silence.
We arrived in Tétouan in the evening when the color of the sky was a silky blue, and the driver recommended a riad at the edge of the medina where I could stay at a fair price. He pulled up to the mouth of an alley and pointed to a tall wooden door painted a vibrant blue. I paid him and tried to add a tip, but he held up his hand in a gesture of refusal. I thought of his boys and tried again to give him the money again, butchering the word “al’atfal,” the word for “children.” This time he accepted. He shook my hand and patted my arm, thanking me and parting with a praise for God. I waved goodbye and watched as he turned off his service light and drove away.
My legs were stiff as I hoisted the door open and stepped into the open courtyard. Fresh flowers lined the room and made chaotic patterns against the showy tiles that covered every architectural surface. After some translating, the woman at the front desk showed me to a room on the second floor with a view of the tapered alley below the window. I watched the foot traffic on the street for a moment and closed the red-and-gold curtains. I passed underneath the bug-darkened light fixture and splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom. Grains of dust fell from my hair and scattered across the blue-and-white patterns underfoot. Each tile repeated the same blooming flowers in the flat, angular way only math equations seem to generate. I was beginning to notice everything in Morocco was turned up several volumes, from the excessive interior opulence to the abrupt way locals spoke to one other, even on friendly terms. I changed out of my loafers and into tennis shoes and pulled a cardigan over my shoulders, prepared for the Mediterranean breeze. I fingered the sleeve, remembering with a sudden wash of heartache the occasion my ex-husband gave it to me.
Outside the riad, I could smell the ocean beyond the medina and wondered how long it would take to find the rivers that snaked into the old town. I took a taxi ride to a restaurant where I could see the far away blue string of the river embedded in the landscape from the window. My laminated menu was printed on a faded photograph of the water. A trickle of Arabic crossed the gap like a bridge of text. On the back of the menu was a sepia photo of a woman, flinty expression hardened on her face. I read the accompanying text in Spanish, slowly, losing every third word to the language gap, a chasm where understanding slipped beneath an unbroken shelf. Back when the river used to usher boats in from the sea, ships sailed into Tétouan and back out again to the blue Mediterranean. The region was dominated by Sayyida al-Hurra, the pirate queen of the eastern seas. I gathered the story of the river piece by piece, of her control over the Mediterranean and marriage to the King of Morocco. Beyond these facts, I couldn’t interpret much else about her life or history, but it matched what little I knew about the geography of the country from familiar stories: it was an accurate version of my mother’s lies. She could twist obscure histories to suit her narrative just as easily as she could rattle off items on a shopping list. In my mother’s version of the Tétouan river history, the last pirates came to shore just as she was leaving the country and dropped a newborn baby in her arms. I’m sorry to say I believed her for far too long.
A woman came to my table and asked what sounded like a question. I pointed to a picture of chicken tagine on the menu. The woman nodded and set down a small dish of chili-flecked olives on the table before she walked away. I was reaching for the tip of the oily pyramid when the table rumbled and shook from a disturbance on the other side of the wall. I looked up from the olives and wondered if we experienced a small earthquake when a man sat down across from me. He smelled of motorcycle fuel and the hot, powdery sun.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in impatient English. “Where is your father?” I stiffened. His jacket was dirty again, and light reflected off the drops of sweat woven through his beard, like dew in a thicket. My brain fumbled for a grip. Had he followed me all the way here from the restaurant? But he sped ahead of us on the road. Maybe he found a place to park and wait, then followed us at a distance. But his motorcycle was so loud! It must have been us who followed him. And how could he possibly know my father, who died when I was ten?
I realized he was talking about the driver.
“Parlez vous français?” he tapped his thick fingers on the table, waiting for me to answer. My answer to his question dried up and crumbled in my mouth like a dead flower. “Español? Habla español?” He was getting more agitated the longer he sat there, staring at me as
I bumbled for an answer.
“I’m here alone. I’m looking for a school built by my mother, Tilda Arthur,” I said. It slipped out. Her name on my lips was clumsy, like I was practicing words in another language. He raised an eyebrow. I pulled out the photograph and handed it to him across the table. He studied the image and the writing on the back and scratched his chin underneath the thick beard. I expected him to dismiss my mission as another wayward Westerner in search of something that no longer existed. It was a criticism I was waiting for someone to confirm. Was this how the last pirates felt? Like they were scouring the seas for treasure that had already been unearthed, distributed, or destroyed? He inspected the photo and handed it back to me.
“So have you heard of it?” I asked as my bowl of food and a basket of short, pale rolls landed on the table. Thick steam rose between us, and the man said something to the waitress. While they conversed, I tore off a chunk of bread to soak in the stew. Crumbs scattered to the floor as Arabic words spoken between the man and the woman fell on my ears like so much unreachable information. I chewed and turned my attention back to the menu, to the story of the women pirates who ruled the town and wished I could conjure their fearless guile. Whoever this man was, he was too cocky and full of himself to be of any use to me. I could find the school on my own if it took me all summer.
“I know where it is,” he said. I stopped dipping my bread in the food and looked up at him. The man reached for the olives and popped one in his mouth. He chewed it slowly, staring me in the eye as he made his evaluation. “But we have to go tomorrow before the holiday.”
“What holiday?” I asked.
He looked at me like I had just stepped off a pirate ship. All of a sudden, he made me feel naked.
“Ramadan,” he said. “It’s Ramadan.”
His name was Mustafa. I let him order us a pot of mint tea when the olives were gone and the tagine was gone too. He poured the tea out of the ornate silver pot into the lace-patterned glasses.
“Moroccans are not subtle people,” he said, tracing a finger along the countryside scene etched onto the warm teapot. “Even our humility is showy. You have seen a mosque, correct?”
“Only from the outside,” I said. “How many languages do you speak?”
Mustafa leaned back in his chair, making a display of his contemplation. “Four or five. Arabic and Derija, almost the same. French, Spanish. And I learned English for fun.”
“We don’t know anything in the States. Anyone who doesn’t speak English is considered a threat.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “You don’t look like other American women. You are not so blonde.” He reached out one big hand and grabbed mine off the table. He turned it over to examine the color of my palm, the darkened veins that climbed up my wrist and ended at the pale bend of my elbow. “You could be Moroccan if you were a little darker.”
“My parents were white. I think my father was Czech, but my mother was Irish-English.”
Mustafa set my arm gently back on the table. “I wish I could take you into a mosque. They are beautiful places, even if you do not pray. The evening prayer is very lovely this time of year.”
I accepted his offer for a ride back to the riad. The bike leaned on its kickstand in the parking lot. It was classic looking: all dust-covered steel and gritty leather handles, maybe rebuilt a couple times to keep the engine running. The mint tea left a sweet aftertaste on my tongue and a light-headedness I attributed to too much sugar. The engine quivered between our legs. Mustafa wrapped my hands gently around his stomach and I clasped my fingers together. I gasped as the bike lurched forward. With my hands around Mustafa’s waist, I felt his belly laugh. We circled around the edge of town as the yellow lights lit up the city. He’s showing off, I thought as he took a hairpin turn down an unpaved road and almost knocked me loose. Each time he pulled another stunt, I squeezed tighter and pressed closer to him. I wondered if he could feel my breasts from the other side of his denim jacket. Even if he could, I did it anyway. The soothing effects of the tea were forming a union with the adrenaline from the ride. We flew between the mountains under the pink sunset. Swifts darted loud and wild as black boomerangs above us, snatching bugs out of the sky.
We turned down a narrow passage, and he slowed his bike in front of the aquamarine riad. Mustafa killed the engine and insisted on taking my hand to help me off the back. I was shaky with exhaustion, so I let him take my waist with one large hand while the other steadied the bike. Mustafa pulled me to him and kissed me, tentative at first, but I didn’t push him away. It had been a long time since I was physical with someone, and his touch surged hot inside me. For a moment we stood outside the thick wooden door that opened on a square courtyard with a clear harmonious fountain. He slipped his tongue in my mouth and touched mine, gentle and warm, sweet from the tea. I found his hands on my waist and moved my fingers up his arms, slid them under the sleeves of his denim jacket.
“Stay,” I managed to whisper in the moment our lips parted. Don’t be loose, I heard my mother’s voice in my mind. Shut up, I answered. Shut the hell up.
“I’ll see you again,” he said. “Ghadda. Tomorrow. I will take you to your mother’s school.” He whispered something else in Arabic, softer, and even though I didn’t know the words, I knew from the heat that burned at their edges exactly what it meant.
My mother kept a copy of the Quran in her home, but I never read it or any of the other leather-bound tomes on the shelf they all shared. What little I knew about Islam I learned in pieces over time, from her artifacts and mementoes she thought I’d never uncover. I knew school children memorized verses of holy text before they learned math or writing. I knew prayer, fasting, generosity, and pilgrimage were among the pillars of Islam. I knew women were not supposed to remarry. But none of this knowledge felt relevant to our lives, and so these tenets stayed tucked away in her past, only visible to us when my mother opened up about her life for a few rare, unguarded moments. One day, on my way out of the house to join my sister in the yard, something my mother said stopped me in the doorway. She was staring at the rug we wiped our feet on—just a regular rug to me—wool with embroidered patterns curling from the middle to the edges. I couldn’t remember if we bought it, or if it had always been there. She was looking at the brown muddy smear ground into the fibers and said, “So many lives I could have led, and this is the one I should’ve left.”
I was sure she knew I was halfway in the room, and still young, and hurt by her admission that she was not happy, nor would she ever be happy in our home. For a long time, I couldn’t accept that there was a side of her with such deep regrets about her permanent life. We were used to her temper, her bouts of unforgivable anger and words like razorblades. We could look the other way when she packed up all the pictures of our father and put them in a box in the basement after his death. I didn’t let it bother me that she stuck a foreign name in between my first and last to disrupt the flow of my belonging—Elizabeth Safaa Gilmore—but the glimpse into her sorrow was too much for me to bear on my own. I closed the door and joined my sister in the raised bed of cherry tomatoes. She pinched another ripe one from the stalk and laid it carefully in her upturned baseball cap.
“Mom said she wishes she didn’t have us,” I said. My sister looked up when my shadow hung over her work, and her long hair swept through the jagged green leaves on the plant.
“What did she say?” she asked. I crouched down in the dirt and turned over a smooth spotted stone. In my retelling, I dampened the dangerous jealousy I felt—which I was certain had no logical origin—because it threatened dissension between us. My sister would not see the admission as a betrayal, and shrugged it off and went back to her harvest, as if I had just described an unfair rule she already knew how to follow. I’m sure these were no accidents.
Mustafa’s motorcycle revved outside the riad as fruit sellers unwrapped their produce and began their sleep-heavy chants. I stuck my head out the window. He stretched his arms above him, yawning, balancing himself on the seat of the bike beside a mountain of black plums. I threw on a pair of jeans and pushed the picture down into my back pocket.
“Good morning,” he said, smiling his disarming grin. “Did you sleep well?”
I lied. “Yes, thanks.” I had spent the entire night trying to sleep, trying to erase the physical memory of his back, his waist and forearms, the textures and pressures of which never left my body as I tossed and turned in bed. “Did you?” I asked.
“I tried,” he said and pinched my waist with one hand as I climbed on the back of the bike. The bike lurched forward and Mustafa sped towards the edge of town, towards the Rif Mountains under a sky the color of pearls, towards the answer to the question I held against my chest since she died: What did my mother leave behind? She left us clues many years ago, and in her own obstinate way tried to impart life lessons before it was too late. Her greatest gift, perhaps, was her willingness to say exactly what she meant, and I saw her staring at the rug again, her children’s footprints nearly black against the emerald green, and I saw her in a new light. Life, she struggled to say, needs direction. Either you choose one or life chooses for you, one of a hundred possible ways to be in the world, each its own adventure and tragedy. I clasped my hands tightly across Mustafa, and he took one hand off the motorcycle and laid it gently over mine.
We came to a crossroad lined with brush and sickly-looking palm trees, yellow and twisted in the early afternoon sunlight. Mustafa swung his motorcycle left toward the base of a dry and dusty mountain. A square, one-story building rose in the distance where the road broke right and snaked up a foot hill. I didn’t need to pull the photograph from my pocket to recognize the academy. I tapped Mustafa on the chest, and he pulled the bike up and cut the engine on the side of the road. Silence poured into the space left by the rattling engine, and we sat on the bike together staring at the shabby building.
“This is it,” he said. “I’ll wait here if you need me.”
The old sign was still there, but the letters were faded beyond recognition on the weathered surface. The building was painted blue, a new piece of information the black and white photograph couldn’t convey, but the color was uneven and chipped to show a different shade of blue underneath, as if it had once been repainted. Some trees that appeared in the background of the photograph were missing from the real thing, but there was no mistaking the Tilda Arthur Academy. It all appeared quite unremarkable. Rugs hung to dry off a clothesline in the back yard, heavy, unmoving, and identical to those I saw in the market the day before. There was a bucket with a rag hanging off its lip outside the door and a pair of sandals leaning haphazardly against the wall. Two black footprints dimpled the leather soles. I glanced back at Mustafa. Questions swam in the back of his cool eyes. I made up my mind. I rapped on the door and stood back on the doormat, feeling both elated and foolish to have come all the way across the Atlantic Ocean for this moment to feel so quotidian. As I was about to give up and turn around, the door swung open and a short, bulky man stood in the entrance and he exclaimed something loud in Arabic. I stood on his doorstep, a little stunned at his sudden appearance and regretting once more my lack of the language. A curious look crossed his eyes, like he had been waiting for a visitor who had just arrived.
“Assalam aiaikum,” he said. Before I had time to react, the little man reached out and pulled my cheeks to his face and kissed each one in rapid succession.
“Um, hi,” I said and smiled, not knowing what else to do or say. “My mother built this school.” I had lost the eloquence of the speech I had practiced in my head over and over, the speech that would unite me with my mother’s past. I swept my arm up toward the sign as if this would convey the reason I crossed the world to show up unannounced on this man’s property. “Ahlan,” he said. Then, he spoke quickly while gesturing with his hands. He stopped when he realized I had no idea what he was saying. I waved to Mustafa and he leaned off his bike and walked over.
“Salam,” he said to the short man, who was already ushering us inside the old school. The room hardly resembled an academic setting. It was decorated with white cactus silk curtains and brass bowls filled with an assortment of marbled stones. A map of the Mediterranean coastline hung against the far wall, surrounded by the alien shapes of Berber wares mounted in a dotted line around the framed edge. Mustafa and the man exchanged rapid words, and I surfaced from the daze of our encounter and turned toward the conversation. Of course, it was useless. Mustafa’s eyebrows lifted when the short man began to talk excitedly. They both looked at me.
“Tell me what he’s saying,” I begged. Mustafa held up a hand for me to wait when the man started speaking again, listening and nodding to show he understood. I tugged his shirt sleeve, like the desperate child I had become.
“He says….” Mustafa trailed off in a low voice and flicked his eyes in my direction. “He says he remembers when this school was built in the ’80s. He was a teacher here for many years.” Mustafa shifted his weight and looked around the small room, up towards the ceiling and down the far wall. I remembered my photograph, my only way to communicate how on earth I ended up in this strange place. I pulled it out and handed it to the man. He held it in both hands, walked with it over to a brass lamp in the corner of the room and tilted the picture into the light. A kind smile appeared on his wide face, like a sail unfurling in the wind. He tapped the photo with one finger and spoke wildly to Mustafa, who pressed his lips together under his thick beard and inhaled sharply through his nose.
“Tell me!” I said. I was so close to the truth I couldn’t stand it.
“He says he remembers that day. He says he took that picture. With an old Canon, he says.”
“Ask him about her, please.” I didn’t know what I had come for, but I thought I would weep with defeat if I left with nothing. Outside the window, manic seagulls cheered over the crusty palm trees. Mustafa spoke softly to the excited fellow. The man held the photograph up to the light once more, then shook his head. He returned the picture to my limp and clammy hand and disappeared into another room.
“Elizabeth,” Mustafa leaned toward me. “Elizabeth. Do you understand?”
“No! Of course I don’t understand. You need to tell me what he’s saying.” I waved the photograph in front of his beard for emphasis.
“You know how I learned all those languages?” he asked.
“How? You’re a genius? You have no social life?”
He stepped forward. We heard the little man shuffle from one room to another, muttering as he opened and closed what sounded like drawers in a heavy wooden dresser. Mustafa stood by my side and leaned over to whisper as the man tottered back into the room.
“Elizabeth. I learned to listen.”
A thin layer of dust covered the unframed photograph. It was my mother, inside the school, with children around her, and a man with his arm across her shoulder. She was smiling. They were both—all—smiling. The man had dark stubble around his chin and a handsome mop of hair. My mother looked better than I had ever seen her, tan and tranquil in the muted room, caught in a genuine moment of happiness. In fact, she was practically glowing. I stared at the image. The man put his finger to the photograph, on the handsome man who had his arm around my mom.
“Me,” he said, smiling with pride. I looked from him to the photograph. His face was fatter, nose and ears larger, stubble gone grey, but it was him. He was the man in the photograph, and he was in love with my mother. And the longer I looked at the image, the more I understood that it came into my life many years too late.
In my own selfish way, I thought I could chase her ghost to Morocco. If there was nothing to keep her there all those years ago, there was nothing to keep me, either. I thanked the man, who smiled and nodded and said things I couldn’t understand. I looked out the window to the yard behind the old school. I tried to imagine my mother chasing kids or planting one of the tall almond trees that grew in a neat, curved row. I tried to imagine drawings hanging on the walls and children with their eyes turned on her, awaiting instruction, approval. But I could not summon these fantasies any more than I could interpret my reflection in the pane, emptier than blue skies. The old man was quiet. Was he waiting for her to return, to pick up where she left off in the old photographs? He was just an old man from her past, who loved her once and she, like she did with so many people in her life, had left him behind. He reached across the gulf between us and closed my hand over the photograph. I tried to push it back, but his pleading eyes told me it was important. I pressed my finger to her body and met his eyes with the bottomless fount of envy and despair the woman he loved had cultivated, nurtured, injected like a poison strain into her children.
“She’s dead,” I said. “She died, and I barely knew her. She never talked about you or the school, so I don’t know what you’re waiting for here, but she was a terrible person. A terrible mother.” I turned on my heel so the stranger would not see the tears roll down my cheeks.
Mustafa muttered something to the man that could have been a translation, an apology, a cavalier farewell. None of the above. They shook hands and we left him in the converted schoolhouse to live among his memories and his love affair with the cruel, remote facts of the past.
We rode back to the riad in silence, my arms limp around Mustafa’s waist, loosened and lighter than before, like I wanted to be flung from the motorcycle. In the room, I pulled the two photographs out of my pocket and set them on the dresser. The open windows let in the smell of burning leaves and the Mediterranean coast. Mustafa said he was sorry again, and for a moment my memory and his regret felt like two strips of smoke from the same flame. Mustafa stroked my hair and kissed my forehead in a way so unfamiliar, the touch of his lips felt like a new word. I gripped his arms, the ropes that kept me on a sailing ship, gliding across the sea with a rare treasure in my possession. I felt an intersection of all of us, living and dead, link together across the vast distance of time. Was I careless? Or did I carry on a tradition of women who let themselves be swept into dangerous opulence? The sun went down at the corner of the world one last time before Ramadan, and our words collided in the empty space between us answers could never fill.
“The man said something you might like to hear,” Mustafa whispered. He rolled onto his back. “He said he’s—”
I stopped him before he could say it.
“In Arabic,” I said. He continued.
And then, like that, I understood.