Horses of God (8 page)

The shop consisted of two connecting rooms. The one at the back, which was tiny, dark, and airless, was where the boss lived. It had a bed and a table, on top of which, in pride of place, was a transistor radio, which blared from morning till night, and a suitcase for his clothes. A bare bulb, emitting a faint glow, hung from the low ceiling. We were always knocking our heads on it. The other room was our workshop: there was a crate full of tools,
some old tires, nuts and bolts, screws, and a mountain of ill-assorted scrap metal that could be reused. But in fact, except when it rained, we always worked outside. The bicycle held no mysteries for us anymore. And then we progressed to the next stage: mopeds. That was a whole different story, but we knuckled down. Moussa would give us easy jobs to start with, and more complicated ones as we went on. And if, when we made a mistake, he took the liberty of giving us a beating, it was for our own good. We knew that. You have to be tough on apprentices at times, even if Ba Moussa, when he was annoyed, could deliver a real drubbing. I learned to keep out of the way, but Nabil had a knack for being in range. He bore the brunt of it. But hey, that was the deal.

It took us a few months to get the hang of the work. We learned to strip an engine in next to no time, lubricate it, replace the faulty parts, and reassemble it. I'd be ecstatic when an engine started up first time; I'd take it for a trial run on the tracks over at the dump. My friends, seeing me roar past, would howl with jealousy. Some of them threw stones and shouted: “Bourgeois filth!” I'd give them the finger and keep going. The boss was proud of us. As was Hamid, who'd come to visit, bringing bread, a tin of sardines, and potatoes. It was great. In those days, I was stuffing myself, spending half my salary on food. The rest I'd give to Yemma, who'd give it back to me in different ways. She bought balls of wool and
knitted us jumpers, gloves, hats, and socks; she'd buy me a pair of espadrilles or anything else she could find at the souk that was cheap and useful. I'd put on weight and had grown about ten centimeters. It was all going so well. But in Sidi Moumen, the moment an engine is running smoothly, a bit of grit will get in to jam it. Without fail. It was woven into the fabric of our destinies.

If Nabil was a graceful creature, it wasn't his fault. If men did a double take as he walked by, he hadn't chosen to have a pert ass, or white skin, or silky curls. The older he got, the more desirable he became. I'm not saying I was immune to his charm. His feline, delicate beauty attracted me just as much as the others. I'm not saying I'd never considered it, but I'd quickly banish those appalling thoughts from my mind. The memory of that night in his shack with the Stars still makes my stomach heave. Nabil was dogged by bad luck, which is contagious. It was an easy life, for sure, now that we were no longer scavenging on the dump. We had a cushy job that brought in a hundred dirhams a week and elevated us to the rank of princes. Not for a moment did giving it up cross our minds. But that damned ass of Nabil's only ever caused us grief.

One evening, when he was staying late at the shop to fix a bike, Ba Moussa came back from prayers and lowered the metal grille. He took off his djellaba and went over to Nabil, who instantly recognized the look in his
boss's eyes. He stayed on his guard, going on with his work as if nothing were amiss. Ba Moussa's voice was soft and syrupy, quite different from his daytime one, which was harsh and grating. He leaned over him and pinched his cheeks: “You know you're a beautiful boy!” Without thinking for a second, Nabil grabbed the wrench in his grease-blackened hands and struck him violently on the temple. A muffled, frightening sound, and the man's full weight fell on the scrap metal. No doubt it was panic that had unleashed Nabil's strength, to make him knock him out like that. He might have left it there, pulled up the grille and walked out. Events might have taken a different turn. A reconciliation might have been possible the next day: a couple of slaps and order would have been restored. But Nabil was in the grip of some demon that made him go on with the attack and lay into his aggressor, who was lying on the ground, barely conscious. He bent over him and, blinded with rage, pounded him again and again, shattering his skull. And as if that weren't enough, he seized a hammer that was lying around and began to batter him furiously in the balls. He was battering the man but also the fate that had condemned him from birth. The spurting blood only excited him more. And he went on until he was exhausted, until he could no longer hold the tool in his hand; then he lay down on top of the boss and stayed there motionless a long while, like a wild beast, sated, slumped over its prey.

Seeing him a few hours later, not far from where we lived, I was afraid. His face was pale, his clothes were soaked in blood, and he was incapable of uttering a word. I brought him a glass of water and we sat down on the step by our door. It took a long time for him to pull himself together, then, with unnerving calm, he said:

“I've killed the boss.”

I was stunned.

“Are you sure?”

“I hit him hard, very hard, the disgusting pig.”

“Maybe you just knocked him out.”

Nabil looked down and didn't answer. I realized that he was serious and that that meant the end of our stint as mechanics. Together we went to explain the situation to my brother Hamid, who, once again calling on his garage friends, rescued us from that nightmare. Ba Moussa was buried in the dump that same night, near where Morad lay. And to avoid the risk of anyone finding the two corpses, they set fire to the whole area. We'd gone with them and it was a beautiful sight, the fire in the night. It crackled, it glowed red. The high flames pierced the black sky and, as we danced under the gaze of the silent stars, our deformed shadows trailed over the filth. Abu Zoubeir and Hamid said a prayer. I'd have liked to join in, but I didn't know the words. I was afraid the fire would spread and said so
to Hamid, who dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, since it had rained the day before. I wasn't entirely reassured. Thinking about it, he was right. He knew the dump better than anyone. Little by little, the flames died out, as if they were tired, over the ashes of Morad and the boss. On the way back, we barely spoke. Near Omar the coalman's shop, Abu Zoubeir turned to my brother and said: “You ought to invite them to the garage! It would do them good to be closer to God.” Hamid agreed.

Apart from a distant cousin who visited him once a year, Ba Moussa didn't have any family. So no one asked questions about his disappearance. Besides, the denizens of Sidi Moumen were used to people moving in and out in a hurry. People come and go without anyone really knowing why. Others take their place, make a home in an empty hovel, improvise, adapt, and maintain the general decrepitude, as if to ensure the survival of our species.

After he'd cleaned the shop, Hamid brought us the crate of tools, saying that it might be useful, seeing as we'd learned the trade. He advised us to clear off, make ourselves scarce until things settled down. Which we did. And life resumed its course, as if old Moussa had never existed.

GHIZLANE DID NOT
appreciate my going to live with Nabil. I reckon she was jealous; she'd have liked to take his place. Yemma, too, was hurt by my decision to leave. She cried the day I broke the news. My brothers had left, one after the other, heading for the city or joining the army; three of them had gotten married and built their own homes in Chichane. There was only Said left to support her. Said was a lovely boy. A bit simple, it's true, but he didn't bother anyone. You barely noticed he was there; he was almost transparent. Never the least complaint out of him. To him, Yemma's cooking was delicious even when she put far too much spice in it. We could gauge my mother's mood by the amount of salt she used. An oversalted tagine meant we'd better watch out: it had been a bad day and the slightest misdemeanor would lead to a beating. Said did all the hardest jobs
without ever making a fuss. Yemma wasn't fair to him, she was always shouting at him because he got everything wrong. Sometimes she'd feel bad about it and, by way of an apology, she'd slip a few dirhams in his pocket. “Clear off! Go outside for a bit! I can't have you under my feet all day.” Said would walk all round the shacks and come back a quarter of an hour later, sitting down next to my father to play checkers. The streets frightened him; he felt better at home with his transistor radio and his faded newspapers. He never tired of the mining stories my father endlessly regurgitated, which had different versions depending on how ill he felt. Said would follow the news with unswerving attention, as if the future of the planet depended on him. He commented on events, supplying his precious analysis, without realizing that Father was practically deaf and Yemma didn't understand a thing about politics. But at least he'd talk about issues beyond the usual concerns: “The roof's leaking,” “The water from the pump smells bad,” “The price of oil, sugar, or tea has gone up,” “The pirate stations have been scrambled . . .” Anyway, I was glad he'd stayed at home. I was sixteen and my shoulders were broader than Hamid's. It was time I started fending for myself like other boys my age.

Nabil and I had decorated the shack as best we could, the way we'd dreamed about in the old days. My brother and Abu Zoubeir had given us a substantial
sum of money to set ourselves up; a generous donation, which was deeply touching. It meant we could buy a straw mattress, a pillow, a woolen blanket, and a strong zinc sheet to reinforce the roof. We allowed ourselves one treat: a radio-cassette player, almost new, because the old one was well and truly dead. So we organized ourselves and shared the workload. Nabil was in charge of the cooking and I'd work as a mechanic. I'd picked up an old wheel from a cart and wedged it between two big stones on the street to show that repairs were done there. Since everyone knew us, we took over Ba Moussa's trade. If Nabil had finished his chores early and the tagine was simmering on the brazier, he'd come and give me a hand. He'd mostly patch up flat tires. And business was pretty good, thanks to the shards of broken bottles, scraps of metal, and sharp stones that littered the paths. I'd built up an impressive stock of equipment. We'd dismantle mopeds that had been stolen in the city and sell off the separate parts at prices that were absolutely unbeatable, so a large portion of our profits would be reinvested. I was a past master in the art of recycling and DIY. Whatever the problem, we had the solution. And we had a lot on our plate because Sidi Moumen's two-wheelers were in a hopeless state of disrepair. However old, however broken down, even falling to pieces, we'd find them happy owners who'd torture them for a few more years. They
made me think of the buses the French would sell on to us after a lifetime of good and loyal service in the motherland, which we'd use for at least a decade before palming them off on the Africans, who could eke out of them a few more fine days in the bush.

We played soccer less and less, but our shack was still the Stars of Sidi Moumen's HQ. Friends would come by in the evenings to hang out with us. We'd started drinking red wine. It was cheap plonk but it suited us. If we'd done well that day, we'd have a round of beers, which we'd buy by the case. Khalil the shoeshine had done time for stealing from a foreigner. He claimed he was innocent, saying he'd found the wallet on the ground after he'd polished the tourist's shoes. The police didn't see it that way and he got three months behind bars. Khalil was seething with rage. He wanted to leave, go to Europe, where people had rights. And if, by some mishap, someone was wrongly accused, they'd get a fortune in compensation. Yes, he was very seriously thinking of getting together the necessary amount to slip across to Spain and leave this godforsaken country. But there was that story his cousin had told us about what happened to illegal immigrants, which wasn't exactly encouraging. On a northern beach, as he waited for the crossing to Algeciras, he'd come across the corpse of a sub-Saharan hopeful, spewed up by the tide. A colossus of a man, whose facial features had
almost completely disappeared. He'd lost a shoe and the fish had nibbled away his toes. A small crab was clambering out of his left eye. Khalil's cousin had seen this and had given up the idea of leaving. He'd said: “You see, even the crabs wanted nothing to do with that African!”

Khalil didn't like that story; he said that you could die anywhere—on a sidewalk, by falling out of bed, or swallowing something the wrong way. In any case, he was sticking to his plan. He said the police were scum because they'd beaten him up to make him admit to his crime. He'd finally signed his confession, but it wasn't true at all. He'd have confessed to anything to make them stop punching him. They'd threatened to make him sit on a Coca-Cola bottle if he didn't spill the beans. They'd taken him down to a dark cellar and shown him the pliers they'd use to pull out his nails and the electric wires they'd connect to his balls. But a couple of hard slaps and a kick had done the job. So he'd signed and signed again because the tourist in question happened to be the French consul. In court, it had all been over in five minutes, and the judges were scum too. Just like the screws, who'd roughed him up all through his interminable stay in prison.

Khalil was raging at the entire world and after one too many he was a different animal. Between us we'd tear limb from limb the judges, the police, the screws,
and all the consuls on the planet. We let him talk because it made him feel better. When his face relaxed, we'd follow him in his reveries, over the Strait of Gibraltar on a makeshift raft, and Spain would be ours for the taking. Oh, those gorgeous Andalusian women, our long-lost cousins, all forlorn and yearning to be our future conquests. But Paris, only Paris really counted. Khalil would serve us up the “Champs-Elysées,” “Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” “Sacré-Coeur,” and the “Eiffel Tower”: garlanded names he'd picked up here and there, which we'd repeat all together, the way we'd learned our lessons in the Koranic school when we were small. We'd clap our hands when fortune smiled on us—when Khalil described the scene of his return to Sidi Moumen, in a brand-new station wagon with a blonde at his side and an electric guitar on the backseat. The idea of marrying a European woman, suitably fattened up on hormones, made him hard. He'd take out his stiff, fat cock and bang it on the table, saying: “And this, this is my passport to paradise!” And we'd fall about like kids. Khalil wanted to be an artist too. He'd gotten that from an American soap opera he must have watched on TV; he'd slipped inside the hero's skin and refused to get out. When the drink went to his head, he'd start singing in a strange new language, with an English accent, prancing around and playing air guitar. Nabil couldn't help jigging up and down
with him and said we ought to form a band; we'd be so famous the whole wide world would be open to us. Talent breaks down borders, everyone knows that, so we wouldn't need visas, or any other proof, to enter the Garden of Eden . . .