6.

In Casablanca, Barek now found it unpleasant to spend much time, in government offices. Day after day, he waited hours outside the dingy office of some petty official or clerk, only to be told to come back tomorrow or that some post office stamp or new paper was required. He would wait hours in a queue at some window in the dim, cavernous halls of the Prefecture, only to be told to return on Friday or perhaps next week, for the legalization of a signature. Sometimes he would have to discreetly pass a few dirhams across the counter so that a clerk would discover he had made a mistake, the paper had not been incorrectly filled out after all. Then there was the Mukkadam of Barek’s neighborhood on the waterfront, a fat, fair Arab in a brown jalaba and red fez who had to sign Barek’s certificates of residence and employment. First, the, Mukkadam was absent on holiday, then he returned but decided the papers were not in order. Finally, Barek reached the inner sanctum of his arrondisement, the office of the Khalifa, a thin, clean-shaven official in a neatly pressed panama suit who told him, “All these papers are not enough. You must go to Rabat and get the permission of the Ministry of Labor. We can do nothing with these papers until you have that.” The Khalifa rang a bell on his desk to summon a clerk, telling him, “Don’t give this man any more applications until he brings permission from Rabat. But take care of the stamps and seals on his papers. They belong to him.”

In the capital city it was mach the same story; signatures to be legalized at the Prefecture, stamps to purchase, days to wait while papers were presumably scrutinized and returned, long waits until Barek reached the senior officials who knew the regulations. More photo-copies required, additional stamps, more certificates, more queues, more petty clerks asking him for cigarettes, Barek went round and round until sometimes it seemed he would be forever tangled in this skein of bureaucratic red tape.

Ten days passed, then twenty, and thirty, and still Barek had to go back to the offices, had to wait in line in dim corridors hour after hour, and afterwards, the whole day and night, exhausting himself thinking of nothing but getting a passport and getting to Europe. He seldom was able to earn money now, but occupied himself solely with his attempt to get the necessary papers. Sometimes he thought of giving up the idea entirely and in the evenings he began to drink more heavily.

It was an April evening; still twilight, but here and there lights had already been lit along the Boulevard Mohamed El Hansali, and from behind the jumble of tall houses, hidden courtyards and narrow, twisting lanes in the Medina a pale moon was rising.

Barek sat at an outside table in front of the Cafe Brasserie du Maghreb sipping a glass of cheap red wine. He was counting on Zora, his girl of the past five years, going by toward the Cannabiere Bar across the street where she worked. Zora was only nineteen and she still went home to Rabat to visit her mother, whom she supported, every two weeks. In Casablanca, she lived in the Neptune Hotel, a rambling, no-questions-asked building near the waterfront and often, when she had no customers; Barek spent the night there with her.

The Cannabiere Bar had a jukebox, dancing in a dim back room smoky with hashish, and never closed. No matter what time of day or night it was always crowded with foreign sailors, Arab pimps and some of the nearly fifty girls who worked there. The girls got a 100 franc commission on every drink they could get out of the sailors. Drinks were expensive at the Cannabiere, eight dirhams, or about five times what they cost in bars without girls or music. Some of the girls lived only from their earnings in the bar. Many were prostitutes.

Barek had been sleeping with Zora off and on ever since she had first arrived at the Cannabiere at the age of thirteen. He knew she sometimes took other men to her room, white men, sailors from the freighters, but he pretended ignorance. “I’m not your watchman,” he once told her. “If you make the business, I don’t care.”

He also tried to close his eyes to the other hazards of her life in Casablanca. The woman who managed the Cannabiere, a tall Jewess-with dyed blond hair who looked like a male wrestler in a yellow wig, was a Lesbian who sometimes forced the girls to go home and spend the night with her. The woman had been married and had eleven children, seven of whom had survived, but now professed a hatred of men and she hustled drinks and tried to squeeze the last penny out of the sailors without mercy. It was not uncommon for a sailor to spend thirty or forty dollars on drinks for one of the girls, only to be thrown out, into the street when his money ran out. Another danger faced by the girls was the police. Under the Moslem law, unless they had been married and had the papers to prove it, the police could arrest them on their way home at night. Sometimes the police took the girls to jail but more often, under threat of arresting them; they would take to some dark and lonely place and rape them. Bands of soldiers, some, armed with revolvers, also roamed the streets of Casablanca late at night and if they caught a girl from the Cannabiere, three or four of them might use her by force.

Zora was plainer than most of the girls at the bar and with her freshly washed face, no lipstick or rouge and plump peasant figure seemed oddly out of place, like a village girl who had somehow wandered in from the streets by mistake. She wore her black hair pulled by in a little ponytail; simple, washable cotton dresses, and had the longest, smoothest legs Barek had ever seen in Casablanca. In her fashion, Zora loved Barek, giving him money sometimes and occasionally, when the need of him became too strong, taking a taxi and searching him out in the bars along the waterfront. Simply being known as Barek’s girl afforded Zora an unusual amount of protection in the arrondisement since no one had a tougher reputation as a street fighter.

Barek waited almost an hour, calling for glass after glass, of the sour, vinegarish “rouge.” Finally, he decided to take a round of the waterfront and signaled to Rodani, his favorite waiter. It was dark now and all the night people were beginning to appear. With strained attention, Barek scrutinized the dark figures. A group of Spanish sailors passed, hurrying toward the Cannabiere Bar, and a few tourists from the big luxury hotels down the boulevard were still moving among the souvenir stalls, buying carpets and Moroccan leather. But mixing among them now were the pickpockets, robbers, beggars and pimps searching for their nightly prey. Still more and more continued to appear on the street, sauntering, talking together and loitering beneath the date palm trees. At last Barek heard a familiar voice but it was not Zora, only Bareka Baksheesh, one of the three prostitutes, who, like Barek, made the Maghreb Bar their base of operation. Like him, they lived in poor tenements in the Medina, and Rodani always kept mail and telephone messages for them.

Of the three prostitutes, only Bareka Baksheesh affected Western dress; she wore tight knitted sweaters and mini-skirts and her harsh but pleasant laughter usually carried above the other voices in the bar. One of the other two always wore a jalaba and a black veil; with sad, heavily mascared eyes and a glass of lemonade before her, she gave the impression of a respectable Moslem lady who had suddenly fallen upon bad times and been forced to sell herself. As Barek knew it was a calculated effect; despite her veil and air of desperation, she could be just as raucous as Bareka Baksheesh after a few drinks. The third prostitute was older, a plump, kindly Jewish lady who had lost her husband and had a leg amputated in an accident many years before. She sat at the bar until late in the night, telling jokes, laughing and gossiping with the old Spanish fishing boat captains until one of them, no longer cared whether she had just one leg or not.

“Hey, Barek,” Bareka Baksheesh greeted him, taking a chair at the next sidewalk table.

“Oh, Baksheesh, honey,” he joked with her. “Let’s go. Let’s go sleep together.”

“Yes, if you have money, Barek. We go now.”

“No, I don’t have no money. I like to go free with you.”

Bareka Baksheesh shrugged. The conversation was almost a nightly ritual. “I don’t go for no money. I come look for money. Buy me a beer, Barek. I need one.”

“Well, have one drink. Rodani!”

“Give me one cigarette too.” Barek offered her a Casa Sport but let her light it herself.

Bareka Baksheesh stared moodily down the Boulevard Mohamed El Hansali. “You know, Barek, I dreamt last night I had one hundred million dirhams. I think I was going to buy a house, maybe some little restaurant or cafe. I think about my boyfriend. I buy him a motorbike, some shoes. I think I’m going to have enough money to live. I don’t need to worry about how I’m going to eat tomorrow. I think I don’t have to make this business any more. Then I wake up.”

Barek laughed.

Behind them, inside the bar, three young white men, with long hair, beards and beads, were passing around a hashish pipe. When the pipe went out it was relit by a small Arab in a white raincoat who was sitting with them. Bareka Baksheesh glanced at them and shrugged. “Americans.”

“Maybe just off the boat from Marseille, Barek said in an undertone. “You better get to them before that Arab in the white coat takes all their money.” Barek laughed and just then there was a scraping of chairs inside and the white raincoat flashed by with the three young Americans following him at a fast walk. As they disappeared down the sidewalk, one of them could be heard complaining to the others, “But why did you give him all the fucking dollars?”

Barek paid his check, deciding to wander down to the docks. About a hundred yards down the boulevard, was a large, cement-walled enclosure. Although it was dark inside, Barek could see the shadowy figures of several hundred men along the sides, many, seated along the wall and talking, others bent over or curled up on newspapers, sleeping. The queue was beginning for the six o’clock work call tomorrow morning. Some ten thousand men, mostly villagers from the overcrowded countryside, had come to Casablanca to seek work on the docks. Each morning only several hundred were taken and thousands turned away. The men and boys would then fan back into the Medina, some trying to earn a few cents at the fish market, others giving up and spending the day seeking oblivion over a pipe in one of the hashish shops.

Barek recognized a friend near the end of the queue.

“Salaam Aleik. Labas?”

“Labas.”

“Long time no see,” Barek said. “How you been? How’s the boys?” The man had three small sons.

“Well, Barek, this is a bad life,” his friend complained.

“We have nothing to do any more in this city. Because no work.”

“What are you gonna do?” Barek replied. “Just take it easy. You must find something anyway.”

“Well, what we gonna do? We spend’ oar time for nothing. I gotta enter the traffic just to keep my boys fed. * It’s a bad life. So long.”

Barek crossed the boulevard to a large enclosed garden with a shed and bar at one end; it was the most popular place with dockers since the pier was just down the street and the wine was very cheap, only two dirhams a bottle. In the shadows of an alley on the side, Barek could see two men standing up and wrestling against the wall. He recognized one as a veteran docker; the other was no more than a youth, probably fresh from a village and seeking work on the docks. Some of the older stevedores, unable to afford wives or even prostitutes, would take such boys and try to get them drunk on cheap wine and then drag them into some dark place to use their bodies. Barek saw the youth was struggling to get out of the other man’s embrace and he turned away quickly. It was too dangerous to intervene; you’d have ten more dockers on top of you. He shrugged, telling himself, that is the life.

On the sidewalk he passed another docker he knew, Abdullah.

“Salaam Aleikum. La bas.”

“La bas.” Abdullah, a tall, hawk-nosed Arab in a black overcoat, passed quickly, his arm around a young blond sailor, who looked Scandinavian. Barek didn’t like Abdullah and tried to avoid him when he could. Like the docker in the alley, Abdullah also would try to get the sailor drank but besides sexually using him, he always would take the money and clothes of his victims and beat them up, leaving them in some alleyway bloody and naked to be found in the morning. There were some things Barek hated in Casablanca.

He saw none of his close friends in the bar and walked back away from the pier, passing an expensive restaurant where high officials and the French went. From inside he could hear the lush, international sound of a dance band playing, “A Time for Us.”

Further down the boulevard, past the Dauphin Bar, Barek entered the Rue du Marche aux Grains, a small, short lane that was the real heart of his world in Casablanca. It began just after the gendarmerie post, where one or two constables also stood on guard with a rifle. Beyond was a small lane leading to the two hamams, or Arab bathhouses, one for men and one for women. A little further down was the poor but clean and respectable Continental Hotel and its little restaurant that sold soup and bread for a few pennies, a laundry run by “Mama,” a Jewish woman who always looked after Barek’s clothes, and two shops where young boys made Moroccan leather hassocks and luggage for the tourist shops on the boulevard. Across the lane were three tailor shops side by side, one advertising oddly, “Fournitare Pour” but not saying what. Next door was the Cafe Bouchaib where unemployed dockers came in the morning if they failed to get hired on a labor gang. There they spent the entire day playing cards, smoking hashish or just sitting on the erode benches in the front staring into space. Down the street was a second hashish parlor, Arab fashion, with only carpets on the floor; virtually its entire clientele was made up of elderly retired sailors. Two barber shops; four small grocery stalls, a bicycle repair shop and an Arab bakery completed the street, which opened onto the medina proper at the farthest end.

To some the Rue du Marche aux Grains was the end of the road, the ultimate dead-end. Such men, beyond hope or despair, could be seen seated bent over in some cranny along the sidewalk, heads down, muttering to themselves, usually a smoking hashish pipe in hand.

*”the traffic” is a euphemism for peddling drugs

Almost all of them had arrived at the Rue do Marche aux Grains along the same road. It had begun, as Barek’s had, as young men coming from the villages to seek work in the city. Eventually, finding no employment elsewhere in a city with only three or four major industries, they found their way to the docks and queued up every night in hopes of getting chosen for stevedore gangs. When this failed they tried to pick up a few dirhams helping the Spanish and Arab fisherman unload their nightly catches. As their numbers grew, even this menial work was not enough and many turned to selling souvenirs to tourists and sailors. From this it was only a step to selling hashish or girls or themselves. And finally the need for escape became overpowering for most of them and what few pennies they did earn went for hashish or cheap wine. By then it was only a matter of years until they could be found on the sidewalks or in the gutters of the Rae du Marche, babbling delirious dreams or mattering incoherently. Sometimes the desperation, if the man did not go too far, turned to anger and then perhaps the hashish pipe was exchanged for a knife or a club. Bat mostly this did not happen and the street remained quiet, a cemetery of hopes and dreams and decency.

This night Barek strolled up and down the Rue du Marche aux Grains without entering any of the haunts instead returning to the Cafe Dirmuke next to the gendarmerie post. Here one passed through a dingy corridor into a large, dimly-lit, blue-painted hall bare of all furnishings except a few wooden tables where the veteran dockers, the tough, reliable stevedores who could almost always count on three or four days of work each week, played cards in their free time.

In one corner of the Cafe Dirmuke sat three Negroes, one of them an old silver-haired man who had started peddling hashish since the Prefecture had banned souvenir vendors from the pier. The second was a youth who carried a bottle of wine in a straw basket and from time to time surreptitiously refilled the dusty glasses on the table. The third was a giant Negro with very black skin who might have been handsome except that he had no teeth. He wav a regularly employed wiper on a French ship whose grin had once been a glittering flash of gold teeth. A year before the African had been down on his luck and had sold all the gold.

“Hey, Barek,” he grinned, after they had greeted one another and shook hands, touching their hearts each time in the Moslem fashion, “I’m going to Germany next month. I got a job with the shipping company in Hamburg. The company says I gotta get my teeth fixed first and I’m going just as soon as I can get a false set made.”

“I hear Germany’s good.”

“Yeah. A lot of fucking in Hamburg. Plenty.”

The old man lit up a hashish pipe and passed it around. Although he had began only peddling the staff, which the Casablancans called, “kif” he had like most pushers become an addict and passed it around as was the custom among the Arabs. Barek took a couple of long drags, socking in the air along with the sweet smoke.

“Who wants to play?” he asked.

“What? Tooti? Runda? Ou Biaoochara?”

“Wakha. Sure.”

“Where’s the other two? We need four boys to play.”

“Not me.”

“Not me either, Barek.”

“We need four boys to play. If it’s only me and you, we have, to play runda.” The tall African dealt a hand and Barek bet him for a cup of coffee.

The old man passed the pipe around a second time.

“How you gonna make any money?” the African asked him. “You must move with the tourist people.”

“Well, this is life,” said Barek. “If it’s his friend, he know he smokes, he must give him also.”

“Abdullah came in here earlier. With some white boy. They bought some kif.”

“That son of a bitch,” Barek told his friends. “If he sees, a foreigner, he most give him hashish, make them sleep with him. If the foreigner don’t have enough money, he must take something, maybe his clothes, beat him up and throw him in the street.”

“He’s no good, that Abdullah. Why he make like that?”

“I heard six Arabs jumped one sailor on Mohammed Hansali tonight. Took his watch, money, passport,” the old man said.

“In my life, I never steal,” Barek said. “I don’t want.”

The big African grinned. He took a gold watch out of his pocket. “Hey, Barek, how’d you like to buy? Six bucks.”

Barek said he didn’t have the money but he observed the watch was worn and old and looked expensive.

Just then Mustafa, Barek’s best friend, entered the Dirmuke. Both of them had come to Casablanca at about the same time and both were about the same age. But Mustafa, a muscular, hardworking docker, who neither smoked nor drank outside his room, seemed rather as if he had just come from the village.

“Salaam Aleikum,” Mustafa greeted them, embracing Barek and kissing him on both cheeks. “How was the village?” Good or not?”

“Not so bad.”

“One of these days I must go see my mother,” Mustafa said. “You know I have land, five hectares. Only beans and wheat now bat the harvest is coming up. I’ll stay home a week, two weeks, look at the land, see if its good or not. I gotta see how much I’ll get for my crop.”

“Mustafa, you are still a farmer,” Barek joked with him “Why don’t you go back and stay in your village?”

“For a farm man, he must have money, enough capital to work his farm. I know how to work all right but where do I get the capital? We got only rain, no irrigation. Sure, I’d like to go back and stay in the village.”

“Why?”

“It’s different from the big city in the village. There, maybe sometimes you gotta buy cigarettes, you have to go to the suq once a week, but you eat milk, butter, good food, you become strong. Here maybe sometimes you make good money and can go cafes and movies, but you have to work for it. I like life in the village better.”

“La,la!” Barek disagreed. “If you’re a working man in the city, you most work all day but you’re free at night. You can walk around; go to a movie, drink. If you’re in the village you go to bed. You must always look after the cows, whether sick or not, whether grass or not.”

“Okay, you got cows, sheep, camels, yoa0re happy to look after them. I’ve got a white horse in the village.”

“Mustafa,” the big African said. “How come I never see you in the bars anymore? You sick or something?”

“Hell, all Casablanca says, Mustafa come, Mustafa come, have a drink. But I don’t like to drink any more. You get drunk and some bastard on the way home, maybe he wants to fight and make trouble. I don’t like anybody to see me if I drink. I take a bottle to my room, then nobody sees. I never drink in a bar. Just with you boys. I’ll tell you what happened to me just two weeks ago. I had this sore foot, I cut my leg on a crate unloading fruit out of this ship’s hold and instead of going to a doctor I went and drank some wine with some boys. This next morning, I went to this Danish woman doctor and she gives me a paper, an assurance, that I can’t work for 15 days. I’m supposed to get paid but only get five dirhams a day instead of twelve from the company.”

“You tried to collect yet?” Barek asked.

“I went to the crew chief yesterday but he said they won’t pay until the fifteen days are up this week. The boss of our gang saw me this morning down at the hiring yard and he was mad. ‘Why’d you go to the company?” he asks. ‘To get money.’ I told him. ‘You don’t get until your fifteen days are up.’ ‘I’m broke. I don’t have no money.’ I told him. ‘What am I going to do?'”

“The boss, he asks me, ‘Can you come from 2:30 to eight o’clock today for eight dirhams?’ I says, ‘Yes, I’d like to.’ So I got a job unloading this ship.”

“What about your sore foot?” Barek asked.

“La, baba, he’s all right.” Mustafa took a puff on the hashish pipe. “This half day I work is not company. I worked in a hold unloading cargo. Oranges, tomatoes, cases of fruit. They take from here. From France it goes to Russia. We only had three men in the hold. Abdullah; he’s one of them.”

“He was in here tonight. With some white guy.”

“Abdullah he says, ‘Why we gotta work like this? The boss, he’s taking four dirhams out of the twelve the company’s paying and only giving as eight.”

“Okay,’ says the third man. “Maybe we only get work one day a week. What kind of life is this?’ ‘Mustafa,’ Abdullah asks me, “What you do last night? You drink or not? You fuck some girls or not? You go to movie?” I don’t tell him nothing, I just say, “If we don’t work for eight dirhams, they’re gonna find somebody else and then what are we going to do?’ Abdullah, he was always complaining, ‘Bad, job. Bad country. Maybe work one day in a week. Maybe not.’ This other man, he had two sons. He asks me, ‘How am I going to feed my boys? What am I gonna do with them?”

“I got the same problem,” said the old Negro. “Who’s gonna help me feed my wife and children if I don’t go into the traffic?”

“Look,” Mustafa went on. “I’m by myself’. If I don’t work what am I gonna do?’ We’re all in the same boat, but a man has to really try and look to find some work. There’s ten thousand men on the docks every morning looking for work. Every week there’s a couple of hundred more.”

“I go there every morning and stay until nighttime and I don’t find a damn thing,” said the boy with the wine bottle. “What more can I do?”

“Well, look,” said Mustafa. “I’m only myself. Some of these men they have a wife and two, three kids. They cook for four or five. But I must cook for myself, just like they cook for four. It almost cost as much for me alone to live as it does for a family.”

“Well, this is the life anyway,” Barek said.

“Like this morning,” Mustafa said “I went to this place on Boulevard Hansali and had a glass of coffee. It cost 40 francs. I watched the people in the street, walking, talking, pleasant, rich people going by. Then I think of my clothes. They’re no good. I had this Moroccan vest for fifteen years now and it’s a god dam rag. I think I spend my life for nothing. How am I going to find work? I think it’s better to try and get a passport and go to Europe like you, Barek. I was so ashamed of my clothes for two days now I don’t eat good. I like to be propre in front of the people anyway. So I don’t eat. Only soup and bread. Tomorrow I’m gonna buy a new sweater for seven dirhams.”

“You ought to be a seaman,” the African told him.

“How am I gonna get a seaman’s book? You gotta slip the government a hundred bucks at least.” [a hundred dirhams]

The talk seemed to depress them and for some minutes they were silent as the hashish pipe was passed around again. Barek felt his spirits gradually rising and then the African jumped to his feet end started to sing:

“My heart…come in…well…my heart….now come in please….my heart….please come in, make love to me….you make me weary…come back to me…you make me weary and you make me run away…come back darling, please tell me if you love me or not.…tell me the truth from now on…I must know if you are my great love or note….”

Most of the words were improvised’ but the song was a familiar one from Radio Cairo and the other men joined in.

“Don’t you leave me to waste time for nothing…tell me the truth…Are you my great love?”

The men started to clap in time to the beat and when the song ended the African launched into another one:

“Marakesh likes the Sultan to be happy; please, oh come to Marakesh, your people want you to be happy…. Do you like Marakesh, yes or not? Please tell me. You have come to see the people who love you. Just come. We’ll help you, we the people of Marakesh….”

Barek was high when he and the African stumbled out of the Cafe Dirmuke. Mustafa wanted to go home and said goodnight.

Barek remembered Mustafa’s girl, a pretty eighteen-year-old who lived in the same tenement and sometimes cooked for him. Although Mustafa did not like to talk about her, Barek suspected they slept together.

“How’s Sadija?” he asked.

“Who’s that? Your mistress?” the African asked.

“No,” Mustafa scowled. “She is only one of a family in my house. Sometimes she cooks for me. Maybe I give her one or two dirhams to go to the movies.”

“Is she good or not?”

Mustafa made a face. “You know that job she had? Cooking for these Americans? She’s been there six months. The man is American but his wife is Jewish, born in Egypt. Anyway, one day while you were gone she told Sadija, she was too intelligent, she wore too good clothes. She asked Sadija, what did she think she was, a European? So after six months there she says, ‘You don’t have to work in my house any more.”

“The bitch,” Barek cursed. He always liked Sadija and she was nice to him. But Mustafa didn’t want to talk about her and he hurried down the street. Barek guessed he wanted to marry her and he was ashamed because he didn’t have the money. Or maybe he was afraid to take on the responsibility. Still, he’d never find another girl like Sadija and if he waited too long her parents could probably arrange a profitable match for her. Sadija, under local custom, might leave the man if she didn’t like him but out of deference to her parents she would have to consummate the marriage first.

Together Barek and the African went to Bolero, a nightclub with Berber women dancers; the noise and music and pall of hashish there always seemed to blot out thinking. The shrill voices of the Berber women, their castanets and jingling bangles, getting faster and faster until they reached a frenzied climax, always seemed to Barek like the end of the world. He always went there if he got too drunk or smoked too much kif.

Somehow, without knowing how he got there, Barek was back at the Cannabiere Bar. He was looking for Zora. He needed her very badly. The bar was jammed and when he found her, Barek pulled Zora out of the smoke and noise and roar of the jukebox to a table, outside, on the boulevard. “Anyway, I got to go home with you tonight,” he told her.

“All right; let’s just have a coffee first.” Zora vanished inside and returned with two espressos. She came around the table and pulled her chair close to his. “Where were you tonight, Barek? I was going to take a taxi and try and find you.”

“You were? No, you was probably having a good time here.”

“No, Barek. Oh, don’t be like that,” although Zora knew he often became belligerent just before making love. She had learned it was also a dangerous time; he was apt to turn aggressive and get into a fistfight with someone. “We’d better go.”

They might have risen but just then a policeman passed by on the sidewalk and stopped at their table. At first he seemed friendly and wanted to shake hands with Barek but then Barek saw he was drunk. The policeman was big but with a flabby unhealthy face and he drew a chair over to their table and before they knew it had his arm around Zora. Zora giggled and gently tried to remove it but the policeman was persistent and his hand slid down the small of her back, tugged on her leather belt and then began moving below her belt. “You come with me tonight, Zora,” he said. “Don’t you go with this black boy.”

Barek was on his feet in an instant, tipping the table and sending the coffee cups and saucers crashing to the floor.

“Why, you son of a bitch? You don’t think I’m a man in front of you!”

“No, Barek, no! Not a policeman!” Zora cried but the next moment Barek was on the policeman, his arms flailing into him. The policeman swung with his left fist, momentarily sending Barek back. Then Barek was on top of him again and the two of them went down, rolling over and over on the sidewalk. Zora was screaming now and people began pouring out of the bar. “Stop them! Stop them!” But Barek was like a madman and it took five of them to pull him away. The scream of a police jeep came down the boulevard. It drew up in front of the bar and four gendarmes jumped out. In a moment they were punching Barek and pushing him into the jeep, one of them jabbing him, repeatedly in the back with his knee. Zora’s cries were the last thing Barek heard as the sirens rose.

Then the jeep passed between the gates of a big station and he was in a small room under a very bright electric light bulb. Three policeman were slapping him in the face with their hands and once he felt someone kick him with the toe of a heavy boot. As he felt to his knees, he managed to sputter, “Go ahead. Because you’re policemen. I’m not.”

The beating stopped then and another policeman, a sergeant, took Barek’s identification card. Then he asked Barek his mother’s name, his father’s name and his grandfather’s name. He brought a box and put inside it Barek’s billfold, his money, a package of cigarettes, his house keys and his watch. Then he was led into a cell where seven or eight other men were sleeping on the floor.

“When you come back?” Barek called after the guards.

“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after tomorrow,” one told him.

The cell was about eight feet by ten feet and lit by an extremely bright ceiling light. Several of the men appeared to be drunk and snored heavily. It was very hot and there were only two blankets in the cell, which were each shared by four or five men. To one side was a water faucet and an open floor toilet. Barek crept over to the edge of one blanket and slept.

When he awoke in the morning, his head, hurting from the wine and the beating, he found most of the other prisoners were awake and seated against the walls. The boy nearest him appeared very scared and was well dressed, like a student. The boy said his name was Ali and he had been arrested the night before for not having a light on his bicycle. Next to him was another prosperous-looking youth who introduced himself as Ahmed. He said he had stolen a car. Not for money but just to drive. He had done it twice before and both times been caught and sent to jail for a few days. He didn’t know why he kept stealing cars like that, he said, he just loved to drive.

“What they going to do with me?” Barek asked the one, called Ahmed. “I fight with a policeman. How long I’m going to spend in jail?”

Ali guessed one month. Ahmed two or three.

Barek was scared. He had never been in jail before. In the cell door there was a small window and when a guard passed Barek called out and asked for a cigarette.

“If you got money and if there’s a good guard he might get you a pack of Casa Sports for ten dirhams,” Ahmed told him. [Casa Sports are the most popular brand of cheap cigarettes]

“How you get money in here? They took mine,” Barek said.

Ahmed grinned. “Hide it.”

The next day Barek was called into an office. A clerk at a typewriter asked him to tell his story. “You must tell the exact truth,” the clerk told him. “Otherwise you’ll be in real trouble.”

“Well, I was in this bar with my girl friend. This policeman came. He was drunk also. He want to take my girl. I say, ‘Why? You don It think I’m a man in front of you?’ See, I was drinking in a bar with one girl friend of mine when this policeman came after me, to shake hands with me, to talk with me like a drunk man. Afterward he tried to take my girl friend.”

“He said it was you who were drunk, not he, and that he asked for your ID card.”

“He’s lying.” But Barek had a sinking feeling and he watched the clerk type his story, thinking, “He’s going to write that I’m a bad man, a dangerous man.”

“He want to take my girl anyway,” he repeated to the clerk. Barek was taken back to the cell. In the next four days he grew to hate it; the worst was the open toilet, you had to go in front of’ the other prisoners and it stank all the day in the hot cell.

Four days later Barek was called into the court for a hearing. The judge asked him, “Why you fight with this policeman? He came and asked to see your ID card and you fight him like this? Tear his shirt? Knock him down?”

Barek repeated his story, ending as before, “He want to take my woman.”

The judge sentenced him to 45 days in the city jail. He spent his last night in the same cell and in the morning was taken down several corridors to a clothing room where he received a pair of brown pants and a blue, short-sleeved shirt with no collar. He was allowed to keep his own shoes and underwear.

His new cell was known as Number Three. It was a long, very large but narrow hall with several windows on the courtyard. There were about ninety other prisoners and each was given a few blankets and a handbag for their personal possessions.

Barek was assigned to work in the jail kitchen, stoking the fires to heat boiling water for the prisoners’ tea and coffee, four hundred liters in the morning and six hundred liters in the afternoon. It was hot work, from six in the morning to six at night; the stoves burned up three hundred and sixty kilos of wood each day. Another prisoner, Mohammed, who had three months to serve, worked alongside Barek and he often spoke of his fear of being transferred to the prison farm, where convicts with life terms and death sentences were sent. Tales of the farm – about the heavy physical field labor, the filthy clothing and what happened at night – circulated in the jail and Barek also came to fear going there. “Don’t worry,” Mohammed would reassure him. “You have only forty-five days. They can’t take you, down there. Only if you got more than three or four months.”

Six days after receiving his sentence, Barek wrote a letter to his mother. He asked her to bring him some cigarettes, his black boots, an undershirt and some undershorts, a towel, his toothbrush and toothpaste. She came on the next Friday, visiting day, and stood in front of the jail gate in her jalaba and veil, giving a guard Barek’s name and his father’s name. Barek was called to the polwar, the visiting room, and sat across bars from his mother, who started to cry as the guards led him in.

“Well…” Barek began but she interrupted him, pulling aside the black veil as tears poured down her wrinkled cheeks. “No, no, Barek. You every time, every time, don’t you drink so much in the street. Don’t fight. Then always you stay out of trouble like this.”

The mother handed the guard bag, which, after going through the contents, he passed on to Barek. She had brought two kilos of sugar, one packet of coffee, one packet of tea, some mint, ten packages of Casa Sport cigarettes and the clothes he had asked for.

“Barek,” she said, dabbling her eyes with a cloth. “How long you have to do here?”

“Another forty days.”

“What day do you get out?”

He told her the date.

“What do you want? You need something more I can bring bring to you?”

“No. Next Friday maybe you must make a good tajim* to bring to me.”

At that his mother began to cry again and the guard came forward to lead Barek away. That afternoon, stoking the fires, Barek told Mohammed about his mother’s visit.

“She’s getting old,” he told the fellow prisoner. “I want to go to Europe to catch a job but sometimes I think it’s better to stay in Casa. But what is my life here? Now I sell souvenirs, sometimes get a job as watchman on the ships for a few days. Okay, with one dirham, I can eat for a day, that’s enough. Maybe sometimes I take souvenirs from the shop and go to the docks and try to sell to Swedish, Norwegian ships, like that.”

“Why don’t you get a better job?”

“Where? Where? I want to work. I want to have a job to make my life. I must have a nice home, some little money to buy a motor scooter, a nice car, enough for a family, some sons, something. But where? Where?”

Gradually, as the weeks passed, Barek began to lose his fear of the prison life. Each cell had a chief among the prisoners and he found that by handing over some of the food and cigarettes his mother brought each week he could stay on the chief’s good side. If the chief and tougher, older prisoners around him favored a man, he might get three or four blankets instead of one. Or perhaps, if someone got money from his family and one of the guards would sell him hashish, the chief might pass a little of his share along. In Cell Three, the chief was a wiry little Senegalese with a face like a worn black walnut, whose shaven head bore a number of ugly gashes from a smashed beer bottle. The Senegalese had drifted up from the Sahara Desert some years before and had been in and out of jail for assault and armed robbery. Somehow he and the gang around him had managed to avoid being sent to the prison farm and within the cell a series of brutal beatings had established their word as law. But as long as a prisoner passed on to them a little of the coffee or sugar or Casa Sport cigarettes his family brought each week, he could stay out of trouble. This made life in the jail easier for those from Casablanca itself. It was different for the prisoners from distant villages, whose families lived too far away to visit and bring food and money.

*beef stew

Late one night, during his second week in the cell, Barek awoke to see five shadowy figures moving down the rows of sleeping men. One of them stopped by the cell door and stood by the barred opening, as if watching for the guards. The other four passed close by and Barek recognized the little Senegalese among them. They stopped and crouched over one of the sleeping men. It was a newly sentenced shepherd boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, who, like the young cowherd in Romanni, had’ been orphaned and ran away from a harsh rural servitude hoping to find free schooling in the city. Watching in horrified fascination, Barek saw two of the men were grinning. He heard one say to the Senegalese, “Let him go. He’s nothing but a boy.” Then he heard the chief reply in a low tone, “He’s the one we want. C’mon, boy. We won’t hurt you. Just take it easy.” The boy began to struggle then and he uttered a sharp cry before something was rammed into his mouth to shut him up. Barek could see his head twisting from side to side and once he thought the boy looked right at him, his eyes wide with terror and pain, much as little Musa’s had been the day Barek dried his tears. The men started to undress the boy and then the Senegalese said, “Not here,” and they carried him to the other end of the cell, two of them carrying his legs and the other two carrying him by the arms. Barek slid deeper under his blanket, pulling it against his ears with clenched fists, trying not to hear, just as he was to do when the same scene occurred over and over again in the weeks to come. “When he spoke to Mohammed about it the next day at work, he was told, “They used ’em like a donkey.”

“I’d kill them if they ever came after me,” Barek vowed.

“Just keep quiet and you won’t get into no trouble. Here if you’re a Casablanca boy and you got a little money, nobody’s going to trouble with you. But I heard a lot of things about the prison farm and I’m afraid to go there. Better you get a good job on the outside, Barek. You don’t want nothing to do with this jail place.”

7.

NE PAS SE PENCHER AU DEHORS
NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN
DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW
E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI

Barek studied the words on the window, understanding only the French. Across the compartment, below two steel-framed black and white photographs of Corsican landscapes, a longhaired, black-bearded American student in blue denims breathed heavily in a deep sleep.

Next to him, a young French woman with artificially yellow hair and a long red nose sat reading Le Monde. Beside her, an adolescent girl with stringy brown hair and a faded blue school smock had her face buried in a comic book. She held a white plastic shopping bag in her lap; a record album was sticking out the top and Barek lips silently framed the words, “Paramount Pictures Presents Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal….” In the corner sat the demure girl who had smiled at Barek when he had entered the compartment; she sat straight back, her eyes closed and Barek admired the golden hair that framed her face like a halo, the delicate features, the fine pink and white complexion. It was she who had helped him find a place to put his suitcases, the new bright yellow imitation yellow one he had bought and the old black leather case his weeping mother had given him two weeks ago before she had returned to the village for the harvest.

In France it was still late spring and as the train sped across the countryside Barek could not get his fill of the lush green landscape: the forests of birch, oak and maple, the wide fields of young green wheat, the silver of the ripening oat fields. How joyful, sweet and gracious this land seemed! The air was clear and transparent, the sun shone brightly, its smiling rays playing in the; rivers and lakes, the pale green foliage, the flowers, the little red-roofed towns, though with mostly empty streets, gave signs of living, breathing. Barek thought how well, how splendidly people most live here. He saw a hunter emerging from a woods, holding his rifle and searching through a long line of shapely trees. A group of schoolgirls passed on bicycles, laughing, their hair flying in the wind. In one village a small boy stood in the midst of a newly plowed field, and waved at the train. Barek waved back; he was certain the, boy saw him and he suddenly felt all was well with him. He was immeasurably, unreasonably happy…. The incredible had happened. He had reached Europe….

For a time, after his release from the city jail, Barek had almost given up hope of ever getting a passport. Almost all his papers were in order, but at the last moment the local Mukkadam would not sign his certificate of residence. Barek’s mother had returned to the village for a month during the wheat harvest and upon his release he had spent most nights with Zora, sleeping in her room at the Hotel Neptune. When he had asked for a certificate of residence, the Mukkadam had sent two gendarmes to Barek’s house. The neighbors told them Barek’s mother had returned to El Jadida and that he himself almost never slept in their old rooms. The Mukkadam had reported this to the Khalifa of the waterfront district and when Barek was finally ushered into his office, after some days waiting in a queue, he was told, “C’est pas address fixe.” Barek had to return to his mother’s rooms and get the, neighbors to testify they were indeed his residence and had been for, some fifteen years. Finally, the Khalifa passed on his papers to the Prefecture once more and the afternoon came when he was called into a clerk’s office and asked to affix his signature to a new passport. Then, for what seemed an eternity, the clerk held the passport in his hand, stopping to joke with some office workers about his telephone being out of order, then, with pen in hand, making the last necessary notations. Barek snatched the passport and said with deep gratitude, “Shukram.” He was on his way.

On the day of his departure he possessed an air ticket to Madrid, which had cost 435 dirhams or $87, another 130 dirhams for a rail ticket to Paris ($26) and 945 dirhams or $185 more, 70 of which he tucked away as his train fare to Marseille, should he not find work in Paris. He also pat in a separate hiding place in the lining of his yellow suitcase 250 dirhams more, or the $50 he would need as boat passage to return to Casablanca should he find no work in France at all. This left him with 605 dirhams or $121 on which to travel and live on in his search for employment. In Casablanca it represented a considerable sum; but he feared in Europe it would not go far.

The evening before he left Barek went to Mama’s for his clothes. With him he carried an old tweed suit jacket, a blue button-down shirt given him once by an American sailor, a tan corduroy Dutch sailor’s jacket, a black corduroy visored sailor’s cap, a pair of blue denims, a -pair of black and white checked -pants and a pair of khaki pants, both with bell bottoms, a yellow and a chartreuse terry-cloth pullover, several yellow and red shirts, a new multi-colored psychedelic tie, one undershirt, two underpants, a blue sweat suit in case he played soccer, two pairs of black leather boots, a bright blue wool pullover, a worn tweed winter overcoat, a pair of yellow Arab slippers, a dark blue sailor’s shirt and two new pink sport shirts given him by Mama as a going away present. A single white dress shirt he had packed still damp and rolled into a towel; Zora had had to wash the blood out of it from an episode the night before.

Barek had vowed to himself that his last night in Casablanca would be a quiet one; that he and Zora would return to her room by eleven. He began the evening drinking only coffee at the Maghreb and then at the Cannabiere Bar waiting for Zora to get off work. But when they reached the Neptune by taxi, they found a young bearded Englishman, his face streaming with blood, pounding and kicking on the hotel door. At first the Englishman, who was drunk and had a badly skinned nose and a black eye, told Barek he had been hit by a car. Then he explained that he had been in a bar and had met a black-skinned Arab woman who was deaf and dumb, she had not been able to speak. Together they had drunk several beers; he had spent about ten dollars. Then she had brought him by taxi to the Neptune. At the desk, the Arab boy who acted as a clerk told him the charge to stay would be fifteen dirhams or three dollars. The Englishman only had ten dirhams left. “Shove off,” the clerk told him. “You have no money.” The girl disappeared upstairs and when the Englishman attempted to go up and try to find her he began scuffling with the clerk. When he pushed the clerk down the boy grabbed a stick and called for help. Two more Arabs appeared and they knocked the Englishman to the floor, kicked him in the ribs a couple of times and threw him into the street. When Barek arrived he was trying to break open the front door and get back inside.

Barek called the clerk and asked him what was wrong. When he heard his story he told the boy, “It’s finished now. Forget it.” With Barek negotiating, the Englishman paid his last ten dirhams and got a room. Zora had a girl friend who wanted to sleep with him for free. Barek ordered six beers and they joined the Englishman and the new Arab girl in his room. The Englishman had a pipe and some hashish and they sat around smoking drinking and talking for about two hours.

When they returned to her room, both Barek and Zora were high. Barek had blood on his shirt from washing and bandaging the Englishman’s face and Zora washed it. Then she began to cry, asking, Barek again and again, “How long you’re going to stay?”

Barek, feeling the beer and hashish, lay back on the bed, wrapped in a wonderful haze of contentment. Zora’s voice came to him as though from a faraway distance.

“I’m rotten, Zora. I’m no good for you. Why don’t you stop that? Maybe I go two, three months. Maybe for all my life.”

Zora was sitting on the bed now and she drew Barek’s head to her bosom, still crying, “Barek, I love you! Why are you going to leave me now?”

“I’m no good,” he said. “Why don’t you just leave me go? Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Sitting up, he propped his back against the wall. He couldn’t go on, because she was looking at him with such love shining in her eyes he had to look away. “Zora…you understand why I’m going? I gotta take this chance? What else am I gonna do? Stay here and end up peddling kif?”

“I do understand, Barek. But none of that matters, what you’re saying. I love you, Barek. And now you’re going to leave me. That’s all that matters.”

“Tegranke maia ana safi, maque,” he snorted, in his most guttural Arabic. “Why don’t you leave me alone? We finish tonight.” He felt like slapping her. Mesghote elevvoiledine. How could anybody be so blind? He didn’t want her to love him; he wanted to be free to go to Europe in the morning but the more he tried to tell her that the more she talked about love. He was filled with anger and resentment.

“Let’s go to sleep, Barek. I know you love me. You’ve been telling me so for five years.”

She twined her fingers in his but he pulled his hand away, shaking his head. “I was lying, that’s all. I’m no good for you, Zora. Better I go.”

Tears were streaming down her face now; her hair was all disheveled. She kept running her hand threw it. Her lips were drawn back in a tight grin, her eyes burned like somebody with a sick fever. Then she sat back and looked serene, although her eyes were still watering. “I know what I want. I know all I’ve ever wanted, and that’s you Barek.”

Barek spat and swore in a filthy flood of Arabic abuse. He leapt up from the bed like he was going to hit Zora. Weeping she slipped to the floor, clinging to his ankles and trying to kiss his feet. Furious, Barek shoved her to one side. Zora fell like a rag doll and cracked her forehead against a chair. For a moment she was dazed and then she turned and looked up at him. “I love you, Barek. I’ll love you all my life.”

It was then Barek saw blood on her forehead, just a trickle but it moved quickly down to her cheek. She must had hit her head. Zora, seeing his face, put her hand up to her forehead and withdrew it, looking at the blood. She was crying hard now, a great flood of tears and Barek gently lifted her up on the bed. He dipped a towel into the washbasin and tenderly wiped the blood from her face and the tears from her eyes. Then he gathered her up in his arms and it was Barek who was crying now.

“Zora, Zora,” he whispered, holding her as tight as he could, “I just go for one month. Then I’ll come back to you. I promise. Just one month and then I’ll come home again.”

They made love all that night and half the next morning so that Barek almost missed the plane to Madrid. At the Maghreb Bar, when he stopped to pick up his bags, everyone wanted to shake his hand. “Look, Barek,” Rodani, the waiter, told him, “How you are going to Europe, you must be straight. Don’t drink. Otherwise you’re a good boy.” “Take care, Barek,” the others called. “Write us. How’s everything in Madrid and Paris!” “Don’t forget us, Barek!”

Fortunately the airport bus was late, and Barek jumped on just as it was pulling out of the downtown station. The airport was a scene of wild confusion but somehow Barek got his ticket checked, his bags checked and with surprisingly little trouble, went through immigration, the officer only glancing at his passport and stamping it. Inside the passenger lounge was a bar and Barek headed straight for it and ordered, a double whiskey. His head was pounding with a hangover and sleeplessness and he was afraid of flying; he had never been in an airplane, much less a jet.

After a second drink he felt better. As he turned to look around an elderly Frenchwoman with frizzy white hair came running toward him. Sputtering with indignation she accused him of taking her boarding card by mistake when he passed through immigration. Confused, Barek pulled his ticket out and sure enough, he had two boarding cards. He gave her one.

Embarrassed, he turned back to the bar when he recognized the Englishman of the night before at the Neptune Hotel. They shook hands and Barek reassured him his black eye and skinned nose hardly showed. The Englishman said he had missed his plane that morning to the south of Spain and now had to go through Madrid to get to the Costa Brava in time for a big party that night. As they were talking the old Frenchwoman passed him again. “Alors!” she said, rather threatening, and then seeing the Englishman she snorted, “Merci, eh.”

When the flight was called, Barek and the Englishman joined the other passengers at the gate. But as Barek moved to pass through, handing an airlines official his boarding pass, he was stopped. “I’m sorry, you, must clear immigration before boarding,” the official said. “Your boarding pass is not stamped.”

“But I went through immigration,” Barek stuttered, watching with growing panic as the other passengers moved out across the tarmac to a waiting jet.

“Your card is not marked. You must go through immigration.”

“You must excuse me….” Barek tried to explain. “Because one French woman…we have two paper…one belong to me and one belong to her. She tell me I have hers…she thinks I take her paper….” He was almost babbling incoherently now.

Someone, a youth in a blue uniform, took him by the arm. “Don’t worry. The plane’s going to wait for you. Till everyone gets in. Just go back through immigration.” Frantically, Barek ran back to the immigration booth and was given a new form to fill out. He was unable to read all of the French and none of the Arabic so he had to find the officer again to help him. Together they scribbled in the, answers. Barek’s eyes were watering in bewilderment and anger. It seemed to take an eternity. As the immigration officer took Barek’s card and passport, another airlines official came running up, “Where’s your boarding card? You should have cleared immigration before. Not wait until now! If it’s not ready the plane will have to leave you. It won’t wait.”

Just then the officer handed back Barek’s passport and the stamped boarding pass. He ran for the door and across the empty tarmac. “Where is the flight to Madrid?” he asked frantically. “The flight to Madrid.” Two stewards were waiting at the gangway. The plane had waited. Barek scrambled up the aluminum steps. Inside the stewardess was telling the passengers to keep their cigarettes extinguished and the seat belts on until the warning lights were turned out. Barek spied the Englishman and flopped down beside him. “I didn’t think I’d make it,” he said. “I saw what happened. It’s some kind of racket. That woman probably doesn’t have her papers in order. But don’t worry. You’re all right now.” Barek breathed more easily. “It’s my first time to fly,” he grinned.

Barek enjoyed the flight; even when the sky clouded over and the plane began to buffet a little as they neared Madrid. As they touched down, it was raining and the Englishman helped Barek through customs and told him which railway station to go for the Paris train before going off to his own flight.

Barek managed to catch a taxi without difficulty at the exit. “Estanon de Chamartin,” he told the driver. “How much?” He had learned a little Spanish from the fishermen in Casablanca. The taxi moved into traffic on a freeway and the driver kept talking but Barek could understand little. Something about a “fiesta manana,” that there was no train for Paris until morning and no hotel rooms available in Madrid.

“How much to Estanon de Chamartin?” Barek repeated.

“One hundred fifty pesetas.”

“You don’t know cheap hotel?”

Again came the flood of Spanish and again all Barek could catch was “manana fiesto toro.” The driver made some gestures of bull fighting and Barek caught on. “No hotel now, only some rooms in a private house,” the driver said, abruptly switching to English. “You must drive around an hour or two with me, maybe you find.”

At that Barek grew impatient. “I am a poor man. I am not rich people. C’mon. Take me to the station.”

The taxi cost Barek twelve-and-a-half dirhams or $2.50. Luckily, he was able to purchase a ticket for the Paris train the next morning, although charges had risen and it was, $32 instead of $26. At a tourist bureau in the station, a pretty red-haired Spanish girl heard Barek’s tale of little money and booked him a room by telephone in a nearby private apartment. It was only $2 for the night. With relief, Barek caught another taxi for a fee of $1 to the apartment house. He was a little frightened entering the house, taking the elevator and then ringing the bell at 7B, but a plump, smiling Spanish woman answered and welcomed him inside. It was a nice room, full of green flowering plants and old cinema magazines. Barek paid the woman in advance and arranged for her to wake him in the morning.

Exhausted, he wandered out in the street in search of a cheap restaurant. The drive from the airport had depressed him. Madrid was nothing like Casablanca. As the taxi had moved through the rain swept suburb, the traffic had grown heavy all along the sides of the freeway were green, uniform lawns and hedges and drab, big, red brick apartment houses. There seemed to be no people walking on the streets, only the endless cars, honking impatiently and spewing grey fumes into the yellowish pall that seemed to hang over the city. Even the restaurant he found that night seemed lonely and empty of people. It was long and narrow, lined with tables on each side with a single occupant at each, facing a television set at one end. All the customers seemed to have come alone and all were watching the news on television. Barek counted the tables and the number of occupants. There were twenty of each. The food was good and cheap though. Spaghetti, salad, soup, wine and coffee for 42 cents. Afterwards even the streets seemed lonely, with single figures walking alone, rarely in two’s or three’s. Luckily, Barek found a little stand-up bar on a side street, where rose wine was served from pitchers and live monkeys scampered about the rafters. Several pairs of women were in the bar; rather drab, down-at-the-heel-looking women of thirty and forty. Barek speculated whether they were prostitutes and decided not. “Well, they seem happy anyway,” he told himself. After two more glasses of wine he began to enjoy listening to the excited Spanish conversation, although he could understand almost nothing. His good mood lasted all the way until he reached the apartment house where he was staying and then he found the outdoor entrance locked. Barek stood at the glass, trying to peer in, when someone caught him roughly by the arm. It was a Spanish policeman. “Where do you think you’re going?” the policeman asked in a harsh voice. Barek was stunned for a moment then he remembered the woman had given him a card, which he fumbled for in his pockets. Mollified, the policeman showed him the night bell and a concierge came to let him in.

In this way Spain passed in blurred confusion and the, next morning on the train Barek slept most of the time-as the bleak Spanish countryside passed by. “I don’t see no camels, no donkey, no horse.” Barek told himself. “I see only cow and sheep. The land is no good. It’s all stone and rocks. It don’t give no good wheat. Not like the Maghreb. How these people are living?” Then he thought of Madrid. “The streets looked dirty, too many cars, too much traffic, the air no good, no people on the streets, no place to go. I didn’t see even one movie house in Madrid. It looked strange. Still, that wine place was nice. Monkeys. Thirty-two pecetas for six glasses of wine. Well, the people seemed happy anyway.”

When the train passed through Bourges, Barek thought, “This is big city. Maybe as big as Madrid.” Then came San Sebastian, which seemed even bigger. In Barek’s coach, a load speaker played recorded music the entire journey, mostly Spanish bullfight music, but also some nocturnes of Chopin and the score of “Porgy and Bess.” They kept playing the same records over and over; perhaps there was only a narrow selection. Toward evening the train pulled into the French border and a voice on the loudspeaker announced that passengers mast detrain with all their luggage to pass through immigration formalities and board the French train, which would carry them on to Paris. The voice reassured passengers that the French train would not depart until “each passenger is on board.” The announcement was repeated in English, French and German translations. Barek, carrying a suitcase in each hand followed the long line of passengers into the border station. Most of them passed a group of French frontier guards by merely flashing their passports but when Barek moved to pass, a hand shot out and grabbed him by the arm. “Where do you think you’re going?” one of them said in Arabic. “You have carte sejour?” Barek didn’t know what that was and he was ordered to stand to the side until the rest of the passengers went by. Two other Arabs tall swarthy youths from the Riff, were also held back until they produced contracts to prove they were on their way to industrial jobs in Germany. There was also a tall redhead in a for coat who appeared to be French. “What’s this?” Barek asked her. “Nothing,” she said angrily. “He is just a son of a bitch.” Almost at once she and the two Riffis were let through but Barek had to wait until he was told a carte sejour meant his Casablancan identity card. Where was it, he thought in panic and began rummaging through his suitcase pulling clothes onto the station floor. Then he remembered he had stuffed it into his yellow slippers and produced it. The officials took it and his passport into another room. Now all the passengers had disappeared from the station and a conductor arrived, looking red and impatient, and gesturing with the red flag in his hand.

“The train can no longer wait,” he called to the immigration officers.

“Please. Three minutes.”

The conductor cursed, looked at Barek with controlled hostility and stamped his foot.

The officials came back and waived Barek through but forgot to give him his passport and he had to ran back for it.

“Vite! Vite!” the conductor called and now both he and Barek were beginning to run. The train was already moving and several other railway men were shouting at Barek to run. He leapt toward the moving train, flung his two begs aboard and dove in himself, landing aboard, sprawling on his knees. His face was beaded with sweat now, his shirt soaked underneath his tweed jacket and he picked up the bags and started moving down the corridor. Although most of the compartments were half empty their occupants glared at him stonily as Barek searched inside for a place and he was about to give up when a blonde French girl smiled and told him there was plenty of space in hers. After this gracious gesture, however, although she smiled politely in his direction from time to time, the girl seemed to take no further interest in conversation and there was little opportunity since she got off at the next stop. “She’s lovely,” Barek thought and afterwards he remembered her little act of kindness a long time. Amidst so much indifference, impatience and barely concealed hostility, any show of kindness from the French at all seemed to assume an exaggerated importance in his mind, transforming the barest civility into what seemed like a gracious act of charity.

The American opposite him was different and almost at once he engaged Barek in conversation. He had just taken part in the Mayday demonstrations against the government in Washington, he said proudly, and was now going to spend the summer with his family in Germany. His father, it turned out, was an army colonel stationed in, Heidelberg.

Once Barek asked him, “Why are you against the war like that?” He was curious, thinking about Mohammed Ali.

“Because the Vietnamese people want the Viet Cong to win,” the student said sharply, almost defensively as if anticipating an argument. “Ho Chi Minh’s a great hero to them. Why the vice president, I forget his name, why he was a bomber pilot for the French.”

It pleased Barek to be addressed like this, but since he knew nothing about the Viet Cong and had never heard of Ho Chi Minh the conversation soon dwindled into silence. Hoping to revive it Barek said, “France is better than Spain. The French are good farmers. That’s why they came to my country.” But the student showed no interest and soon shut his eyes and dozed off. After a time Barek slept too and when he awoke it was already dark; he looked at his watch and saw Paris was less than an hour away. So he went to wash his face with cold water and stopped in the corridor to smoke a cigarette and watch the night rushing past.

Trains, always, when they near their destination after a long trip, especially in the evening or at night, take on a sense of unreality. One senses one is rushing into the uncertain future, an almost tangible sensation not realized on boats or planes. It only happens at night and on a train – especially if the train is to be in Paris within the hour. Barek peered out of the window and it was as if he saw his whole life before him. He would find a job. Or if he found no job in Paris, he would try Marseille. And if that too failed, he would wait until a Greek or Panamanian ship came along and then held ship out, now that he had a passport. He felt he would never return to the Rue du Marche aux Grains. Or even to Zora And then he remembered Zora, not as when they made love that last night, but on the warm summer Casablancan days, when they would rent a tent on the beach and Zora would cook chicken and made a salad and they would buy a bottle of cheap wine and he would play soccer with the boys on the beach returning in the late afternoon and together they would watch the sunset and the foaming breakers along the sea and hear the mournful, beautiful cries of the seagulls. And then lights began flashing by and he knew the train must be entering the suburbs of Paris.

The last time I saw Paris
Her heart was young and gay
I saw the laughter in her eyes
In every street café….

ASSEZ DE CRIMES! HALTE AUX AGGRESSEURS! ASSEZ DE CRIMES! HALTE AUX AGGRESSEURS! ASSEZ DE CRIMES! HALTE AUX AGGRESSEURS! ASSEZ DE CRIMES! Tropicana Orange Juice Tropicana Orange Juice Tropicana Orange Juice PRENEZ VOS VACANCES EN ITALIE OU L’ADRIATIQUE PREND SA SOURCE…Paris Foire de Paris Foire de Paris Foire de Paris Foire de Paris, L’IMPERIALISME AMERICAIN ETEND SA GUERRE CRIMINELLE MEDTACE LA PAIX! Tropicana Orange Juice Tropicana Orange Juice Tropicana Orange Juice

Barek gazed in perplexity at the brilliant, flashing lights, the scrawled red slogans on the Metro station walls, the crowds of people moving past the cafe, back and forth like a large herd of cattle, accompanied by the traffic in the street with its dreadful clouds of exhaust fames and the blowing of horns. It was past midnight but the crowds showed no sign of thinning out; Barek felt dazed and very tired from the journey but he felt too restless to sleep his first night in Paris and he sat at a sidewalk table sipping beer at a cafe on the corner of Barbes and Boulevard de Rochechuart, the heart of the Arab quarter in Paris. Lost and bewildered, he was counting on someone from the Maghreb, perhaps even Casablanca, passing by and he would speak to them, perhaps even get them to help him. And while there were many more black, brown and tan faces passing than white, they all seemed to be Algerians, Riffis or black Africans; he could make out no one from Morocco.

Across the boulevard the marque of a cheap cinema house, advertised a James Bond film. It advertised “unique” prices – only three francs and Barek had felt tempted to go. Down the sidewalk a small Salvation Army band blared its trumpets and clarinets; a crowd was gathering around them. Elsewhere up and down the boulevard, neon bar signs flashed on and off and a cacophony of jukeboxes playing different jazz tones added to the general din.

He had been sitting there an hour and a half, and all that time he was picturing how he could flee Paris and reach Marseille. It seemed strange to him that he should even be here, not moving down the Boulevard du Mohammed El Hansali and crossing under the date palms to his nightly drink at the Maghreb, but in this feverish place of noise and confusion and complete indifference. As in Casablanca, the crowds began to change as the night wore on and Barek scrutinized the strolling figures. Most of them appeared to be Algerians; in his exhausted state, almost all of them looked mean, like the kind of Arab who uses a knife or razor on a man for no reason.

He had caught a taxi from Gare Austerlitz, almost begging the Parisian driver to take him to a cheap place where he could find some fellow Moroccans. “Diare te peu nous trevi un netile que nai pas chire,” he had asked, in his Maghrebian French. “Can you find some hotel for me cheap? Take me to the place where the Moroccan people live.”

The driver shrugged. He drove a sleek Peuguot and obviously thought he had made a very bad choice of fares at the station. “You most have money in Paris,” he told Barek. “Because each hotel is a different price and tonight is Saturday night and you can’t find no hotel.” He had dropped off Barek at a hotel on the Rue du Rivoli and overcharged him. It looked cheap enough but at the desk the clerk, a fat man with a chalky, white pallor and spit curls framing a wide forehead, at first took no notice of him, seemingly buried in a ledger. After some minutes he turned to Barek. “A single’s $10 for the night. Pay in advance. Where you from?”

“Madrid.”

“Ah-h-h-h….” The man lifted his fat, flabby arms and began snapping his fingers like castanets. “But where’s your home? Where are you really coming from?”

“Oh. Casablanca.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h!” The man gave Barek a lewd wink. Barek picked up his bags again and fled toward the door. “Hey, where are you going?”

“I don’t have the money.”

“Come back. Maybe we could work something out.”

Outside the air felt clean and fresh and this time Barek succeeded in finding a taxi whose driver knew the Arab section. He drove him to a hotel in Barbes, where thousands of Algerians, Riffis and Africans lived. It was with relief that Barek saw the taxi was stopping in a street which closely resembled the Rue du Marche aux Grains. Many of the signs were in Arabic; he heard Arab music coming from the bars and from the appearance of the people and the buildings he might have been back in the Medina in Casablanca. He checked into a small but clean Arab hotel, 10 dirhams or 32 for the night, pay in advance. Together the two taxis had cost twenty-four francs, or 20 dirhams or four dollars. He was now down to 510 dirhams or $102 dollars besides the 320 dirhams or $64 he had stashed away as train fare to Marseilles and boat fare to Casablanca.

As he sat in the cafe making these calculations, a voice startled him out of his thoughts. Turning, Barek saw the man at the next table was grinning at him; he was a tall, bony-looking black youth with some gold teeth in front and long brilliantly shining hair. He was wearing extremely tight-fitting white bell-bottoms and an electric pink shirt flecked with some shiny gold material. Barek guessed he must be about thirty. He offered Barek an expensive American cigarette. “My name’s Ezekiel, Zeke,” he said, putting out his hand. “I been watching you. You new in Paris, eh? I know how it feels.”

“Yeah, tonight from Madrid.”

“Just arrived?” Zeke held out a flashy gold lighter. “Paris is a good city for the rich people. Not for the poor man.” He told Barek he was from the Ivory Coast. “I been here for thirteen years.” He turned for a moment to greet two passing Africans in a language Barek couldn’t understand. Then he grinned back at Barek.

“Thirteen years. So I know about Paris and everything. You looking for a job?”

“Maybe.”

“I been at work before. Simca. Now I’m out, they paid me off. I been working there for six years. But it was very hard work at Simca.”

Barek noticed the African wore expensive clothes; his trousers were pressed with a sharp crease that looked like a knife blade. He speculated whether the man had saved money from his old job or was in some new business.

“How can I find a cheap restaurant around here where Moroccan people go?” he asked him.

“Want me to show you?”

“Not for tonight,” Barek said hastily, not wanting to get too familiar with this stranger.

“I already ate in another place,” he lied. “I just want to know.”

“If you have time, later on, I can show you. I can show you, places like you never seen before.”

Barek felt a little uneasy. “What I want to know is, how can one man from Morocco, when he want to work, can he find a job in Paris?”

Zeke frowned, looking serious. “It’s difficult. Maybe it’s dangerous to look for a job in Paris right now.”

“Why dangerous?”

“I can’t tell exactly. But many French boys, they don’t work. Maybe seven hundred thousand French people, they don’t get jobs. Then there’s trouble between France and Algeria, about the oil. If they think you’re Algerian, nobody will give you a job now.”

“But I’m Moroccan.” The words sounded strange to Barek. He had always thought of himself as from the Maghreb before; he had almost no sense of nationalism.

“To them it’s all the same. You’re an Arab. That’s why they don’t give Moroccans work either. Before it was free. Everybody could get jobs. Not now. What do you know? What’s your job?”

“Well….eh….I can do a little electricity.”

Zeke looked at him skeptically.

“Well, anyway, I can do any job if I find and they tell me how.”

“Maybe you ought to try to find something in Marseille. Many Moroccans there. Paris is only for the tourist people. If you really know something about electricity you must go to the Simca place. Maybe they take you. Maybe not. If you, have somebody there who is a friend he might help you.”

“No. I got one friend in Paris but he works private. I got many friends in Marseille. If I don’t have no money and can’t find a job, Paris is not for me.”

Zeke’s eyes narrowed. “You speak some English?”

“Yeah, I used to sell souvenirs on the dock in Casa.”

Zeke grinned. “You can make traffic with the tourist people. Many tourists come to Place Pigalle. It’s about a ten minute walk down Boulevard de Rochechuart.

“What kind of traffic?”

Zeke shrugged. “You see all these boys walking down the street here?”

“Yeah. They got good clothes, they must have money. They sit in cafes. What’s their job?”

“They don’t have no job. Maybe they don’t have work, no room. So they go into some kind of traffic. It’s very difficult for a stranger here in Paris. Beaucoup racism. Sometimes you have to have French nationality to get a job. Many of these boys turn to stealing, voleur.”

“What do you mean?”

“C’mon, I’ll show you. What’s your name?”

“Barek.”

“Well, c’mon, Barek. Lemme show you the life in Paris. You speak some English. Maybe I can find you something.”

Zeke paid the check. “C’mon. I’ll show you the street.”

Together they began to stroll slowly down the Boulevard de Rochechuart in the direction of Pigalle. Barek felt warm and pleasant after the beer, which affected him more since he was so tired. There, were bars and restaurants all along the boulevard, most of the crowded with people who sat around little red metal tables on the sidewalks.

Despite the late hoar, great crowds of people were still moving about, sauntering, talking and laughing together or loitering under the green leafy plane trees on the central boulevard. Across the street Barek observed a circular pissoir, where a dozen or so black figures stood in the shadows. One would dart inside and a moment or two come out again. Something was going on there.

On the sidewalk, in the bright lights from the bars, there were tourists of all nationalities; Barek heard the familiar accents of Scandinavians, Germans, Americans, English. Some were in large groups, others in couples, a few of them, moving more hurriedly than the rest, alone. Mixed among them the North Africans moved mostly Algerians and Negroes but here and there Barek spotted a Riffi and even what he thought might be a Moroccan from the coast. The tourists seemed carefree, out to enjoy their holiday in the most beautiful city in the world. Their days were spent touring the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Saint-Chapelle, the Arc de Triomphe, all the matchless monuments that made the city a beacon to civilized man. Now Barek saw a steady flow of them moving up and down a steep tree-lined lane toward a floodlit Christian church, whose white spires-rose high above them on what mast have been the crest of a hill.

“Sacre-Coeur,” Zeke told him. “Thousands come here every night to see it; It’s the center of Montmarte.” Barek wanted to follow them and see something too, but Zeke told him the street below would interest him more. At Place Pigalle, they stopped at another sidewalk cafe and Zeke ordered them another round of beers. Now on both sides of the street were strip shows and little shops, with neon signs advertising “Sex Books,” in English. Barek wanted to go inside a striptease performance. The signs outside said the admission was only two-and-a-half-francs. “That’s outside,” Zeke told him. “Inside there’s a minimum drink of twenty-two francs. And, you gotta buy at least one drink. You gotta have a lot of money to go in there.” Still, Barek was intensely curious. Outside there had been many life-size photographs of nearly naked girls; he had never seen anything like it before. Down the street, a red light flashed on and off, “Moulin Rouge.” A theater marquie advertised “Oh, Calcutta!”

“This is Place Pigalle,” Zeke said, almost with the pride of ownership. “There’s a lot of whorehouses down the side streets, all along here. You also got plenty at La Bastille, La Chapelle and Stalingrad. When we go back to Barbes, I’ll show you the ones Of the Rue de la Charbonniere.”

“That’s where I’m staying.”

“Yeah. Well, you got them all around you. Oh, they’ve got plenty also on the Champs Elysees and Madeleine, beautiful white girls for maybe four hundred francs for the night.”

“How about over there?” Barek asked, pointing to a nightclub down the sidewalk with an enormous billboard with dancing girls over the entrance; the lights flashed “Madame Mathurs”

“That’s all queers. Men dressed like women. You got lot of cabarets like that in Paris. If you want to play like that you must go to a sauna on the Ru Poucelet just off Avenue Wagram by the Eiffel Tower. It costs twenty francs but there are a lot of rich queers there. You got many such places like that too.”

Barek’s attention was on the street. “Why, that’s a woman! A woman taxi driver. Never in my life do I see a woman driving a taxi.” He seemed more excited about this spectacle than anything he had seen in Paris so far. Barek laughed. “I’ve got to write the boys back in Casa about that.”

As they walked back toward Barbes, Zeke told him, “Well, this is the life in Paris, Barek.”

There were fewer tourists on the boulevard now, and some of the cafes and restaurants were closed and dark. But it seemed to Barek just as many Algerians and Africans were moving about as ever, sitting in the cafes, strolling along the sidewalk or standing in the shadows of the entryways of closed shops and restaurants. Some of these had a predatory air about them and one, a tall Negro in a felt hat, lunged toward Barek as they passed.

The tall Negro grabbed Barek by the arm and spoke with a slurred, thick tongue. “What you doing here, black man? You doing, business here or just fucking around?” Before Zeke could intervene, Barek shoved the stranger with a straight arm, sending him sprawling back on the pavement. “This your business?” he snarled, “Fuck off.” The man, startled by Barek’s violent reaction, crawled to his feet and hurried off in the other direction without looking back.

“I see you don’t take no shit,” Zeke said, with respect.

Barek grinned and showed Zeke his knuckles. “Those are teeth marks. Don’t nobody ever make trouble with me twice.”

Near the corner, just as they reached Barbes, they stopped. From a dark alleyway, a white man, his face streaming with blood as if he had been struck with a bottle, came running out, crying and sobbing. He ignored the pedestrians on the sidewalk and went into the street, his arms flailing the air as he tried to hail a taxi. Within seconds one pulled up, he climbed inside and it sped away. Barek noticed he was still wearing a wristwatch.

“Damn!” Barek said. “What happened?”

Zeke shrugged. “You’ll understand about the life here, Barek. These boys, they come to France, maybe nobody will give them a job. So maybe they go out and steal. Get money, clothes, jewels, watches. Then they come back here to Barbes and try and sell whatever they got. Many of these boys, they go out every night and look for an opportunity.”

“What do you mean ‘opportunity.”‘

“Traffic with the tourist people. Maybe somebody wants a girl, kif. Maybe a boy can pick up one of these tourist girls, get her high, fuck her silly so she’ll give him all the money he asks for. Maybe he’ll go to one of the movie theaters, the Luxuor, the Trianon, La Citale. It only costs three francs and down in the basement it’s a place to go. Many of these North African boys, they don’t work. They come to the movies for some money. Go with old man. Or with a man who has some money. They try to rob them if they can. C’mon, I’ll show you something.”

They crossed Barbes; traffic was still heavy and a gendarme stood in the street directing it. Barek asked, “That man we saw with the blood on his face, why didn’t he ask somebody to help him or run to the police?”

“What is anybody gonna do to help him? What the police going to do? This is the life in Paris.”

They walked past several bars, entering the Arab quarter now. At the corner, the street widened and Barek saw several hundred men, seemingly just milling around.

“This is the thieves’ market,” Zeke told him. “These boys have been all over Paris. Pickpockets, grabbing watches in the Metro, maybe stealing somebody’s clothes. Now they’re selling it. You can get good stuff here cheap.”

They turned into the Rue de la Charbonniere, a narrow, twisting lane that might have been in Casablanca, so completely had all the outward signs of Paris vanished. Then Barek looked up the street at the glittering, floodlit spires and domes of Sacre Couer. Barek told Zeke he wanted to get a postcard of it to send his friends at the Maghreb Bar in Casablanca. He said held write something like, “Here I am in Paris two days and I’m a khafar already.” [unbeliever]

The Rue de la Charbonniere was only dimly lit and the row of shattered hotels cast broad shadows in the moonlight, engulfing some of the groups of men gathered at each door in complete darkness, out of which rose a whisper of women’s voices, smothered laughter and the sound of someone softly playing a guitar. Barek felt a sudden, passionate desire to join the waiting men, to find a girl like Zora inside and to cover her face, her hands, her shoulders, with kisses, to sob, to fall at her feet, to tell her how sorry he was he had left Casablanca and how he would return as soon as possible. And it seemed to him, in his drunken, exhausted but exhilarated state that because he had left her, Zora would find somebody else to love and all possibility of the happiness he had dreamt of was now lost to him forever.

Inside one doorway, past the barred opening and the heads of the waiting men, Barek caught a glimpse of blonde hair, white powdered breasts and heavy-lashed half-closed eyes. In the gloom of a stairway recess he could see an enormous Negress, her arms crossed. From the whispers he guessed there must be several women just inside the door.

Then he heard a man’s voice, low and breathless: “You know what I’m fixing to do? I’m fixing to fuck you all night, you white bitch!” A woman’s voice answered in a snarl, “Shove off. I don’t like black men.” With surprise, Barek heard the man chuckle and move down the street to another door.

“I got to get some money tonight,” Zeke said at his elbow, his voice husky with lust. “I’ll get me some money and come back here. C’mon.”

“There most not be any women in Paris,” Barek said, following after him. They turned into a brightly lit bar at the corner. “Is there no women in Paris or what? All those men lined up like that. Black men and white men. This is no good like this. People get sick. I never do like this in my life.”

Zeke only grinned enigmatically. They stood at the bar and Zeke ordered two beers. Barek pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and something dropped to the floor. He stooped down seeing a silver franc piece but an Algerian standing next to him reached it first. “Hey, that’s mine,” Barek said. For a minute the Algerian stared him in the eyes, then reluctantly handed the franc back to him. Zeke had turned to talk to two young Greeks with long brown curly hair; Barek saw their shirts were unbuttoned and their bare chests exposed.

The bar was fall of people, both North Africans and Europeans. Several older men, dressed in the same tight-fitting clothes as the Greek youths, were speaking Spanish, moving their hands in excited, mincing, feminine gestures. Barek moved to a jukebox and read the names of the records. “Good Arab music,” he told a passing waiter.

He found the coin slot but when he dropped the franc in, it fell through and clanked into the metal coin return box. Ht tried again but with no success.

“You have to put it in here,” a voice behind him spoke in French. Barek turned. It was a young Frenchman, very pale but handsome with finely chiseled features and long straight blond hair, which fell to his shoulders. He wore large steel-rimmed glasses, a red turtleneck sweater and had draped a brown leather jacket around his shoulders. A copy of Le Monde was tucked under one arm.

“Excuse me,” Barek said. “I’m not from here. I’m a Casablanca man. We have another kind.”

The young Frenchman smiled; it seemed the warmest and most friendly smile Barek had seen in Paris. He said his name was Claude and that he wanted Barek to meet his friend, an Algerian who had been in Casablanca.

They returned to the bar. The Algerian was handsome, and dressed in an expensive suit. He shook hands with Barek and said he had a sister in Casablanca and had visited her several times.

“I work in a barber shop around the corner. One of the men there is also from Casablanca. Maybe you know him.” Barek didn’t recognize the name but promised to drop by the shop in the daytime.

“I see you’re reading a newspaper,” Barek told Claude.

“Le Monde. I never read anything but Le Monde.”

Claude ordered a round of drinks. Zeke had now moved away and was talking and laughing with the two Greeks at the other end of the bar. Claude smiled again, warm and friendly. “One must always welcome strangers,” he told Barek.

His Algerian friend agreed. “One German boy, he was in Paris one night,” he told Barek. “Two girls took him to their room. They took his watch, his clothes, his money. I found him in the street. He asked me for a cigarette. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked. The German told how held been robbed. I knew these two girls so I went to their room and said, ‘Please give this man back his watch, clothes and the seventeen thousand francs you took. If you want to give it back, okay. If not, he’ll go to the police. He knows where your room is. So they gave the things back. I took this German boy in my car and we went for a few drinks. The German asked, “Take me to my hotel.’ Also he asked my address. I said, ‘Why you want my address?’ He said, ‘I just want to know about it.’ After three months this German boy came back to my barbershop with one Arab he met in Hamburg. He brought me five shirts, two pairs of pants and some other presents. His Arab friend told me, ‘Always this German boy he talk about you.’ So we went somewhere for drinks and went out for a week, to bars, dancing. Then when he got ready to go, he gave me a work contract for a factory in Germany. But I didn’t’ want to go. In Paris I got a good job. But ever since we’re friends. Sometimes the German comes to visit. Some strangers, if you’re nice to them, they must become good friends.”

Barek ordered another round of beers. He was beginning to think Paris was not so bad after all.

“What about these hotels in Barbes?” he asked.

“The girls charge twenty or thirty francs and you have to pay for the room extra. But you can only stay about thirty minutes. All those men stand outside because there’s no more place inside. You have to wait in turn.” The Algerian said he never went; there were a lot better girls in Paris than in Barbes.

Near them the Spaniards roared with laughter drawing Barek’s attention. He noticed that close up, despite their bright clothes, sideburns and youthful air, they were really old men, perhaps in their fifties.

“What do you think of these Spanish people?” Claude asked him.

“These old Spaniards have to find some Algerian boy who doesn’t have a job to go with them,” the barber said.

Seeing Barek staring in their direction, one of them broke away from the others and came over to Barek. He was much younger than the others but with the same long early hair, tight pants and a shirt open at the neck. He must have been handsome once but Barek, even in the haze of beer and smoke, could see how his face had been ravaged with deep lines turning down the corners of his mouth and wrinkling into crows feet around his eyes when he laughed. To Barek’s surprise, the newcomer spoke to him in Arabic.

“Excuse me,” he said, throwing one arm around Barek’s shoulders. “I heard you saw you were from Casablanca. Excuse me. You’re a Moroccan and I’m Moroccan. I’m from El Jadida. Don’t you think I like these Spaniards? I just go with them. For profit. Fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred francs. I don’t sleep with them. Only joke, drink. You understand?”

The bartender also spoke in a Moroccan coastal dialect now. “This is no good, the things you do. You must drink but you are supposed to be gentle to the people. I hear how you rob and beat them.”

The Moroccan turned savagely on the bartender. “You shut your fucking mouth. This is not your business. You just sell your wine.” He turned to go, looking back at Barek with almost an expression of appeal. “Excuse me, my friend. One man, he’s important in the government in Casablanca, he is in my family.” He named a prominent aid of the governor; Barek recognized it.

The bartender, a short muscular man, served some customers then came back to Barek. “Excuse me, so you are Moroccan people?” he grinned, extending his hand. “So am I and the boss here. Khasutek.”

He turned to an older, bald, man who was also behind the bar. “Hey, boss, this is Moroccan boy!”

The owner of the bar came and shook hands with Barek. “How are you? How’s everything? So you’re from Morocco. Where you from?”

“Casablanca.”

“Hey,” the bartender laughed. “I used to live in Casa. You know the street Sidi Fateh? Gateriam Zoowife? Bou Smara Port de Casa?”

“Sure I know. I am thirty-one years in Casa. Why I not know these places?” He and the bartender laughed and shook hands again.

“Well, have one drink with me,” the bartender said. He brought Barek a beer but didn’t open it at once; instead he kept naming different streets and bars in Casablanca and was delighted that Barek knew most of them.

“What’s your job here in Paris?” Barek asked. “Working here?”

“No. I work in a company. Renault. It’s on strike right now and I just come to help the boss here tonight. He’s from Agadir. My company’s not working now, out on strike. I been eight years in Paris. Well, what are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a job. I got enough money to stay in Paris a week or two. Then I have to go to Marseilles if I don’t find anything. I got friends there.”

“Come with me at two. I’ll show you around the city.”

“No, I gotta go sleep. I don’t have no money. I spent too much on the plane and train from Casa. First night I got a bad taxi driver. Wait, that’s tonight! Seems like I been here a week already. This taxi man, I asked him to take me to cheap hotel, a place where Moroccan people live. Instead he took me to a no good hotel and wanted fifteen francs. I had to get another taxi to bring me here for ten francs.

“So I’m out twenty-five francs just getting here.”

“Twenty-five!” the bartender groaned.

“Paris is very expensive for me.”

“Well, if you want to eat, come here. Cost you cheap and good food. You come here every time to see me.”

Barek came up with a thought. “Can you change Moroccan money?” He still had twenty dirhams he forgot to change at the airport. The boss came down to see the money and said he was delighted to get it. With twenty-five francs he hadn’t counted on, Barek bought a turkey sandwich and drinks for the Algerian, Claude, Zeke and the two Greeks and himself. He felt like a big shot. As the bartender brought him his beer he leaned forward and whispered, “Watch out for these guys that you’re with. A couple of them are gangsters.”

When he straightened up, Barek asked him, “I see many men from the Maghreb in the streets here. They got pretty good clothes, they sit in the bars and drink. What do they do?”

“Most of the Moroccans work. Out at Simca. You won’t see many around here. They got more sense than the Algerians. Some of them though, they just fuck around in the street. Steal from people. You know why? If you’re an Arab or a black man, a lot of these French people, they won’t have nothing to do with you.”

The bartender drifted down the bar, taking orders. Barek looked around for Zeke. He was still talking to the Greeks and Barek passed him on the way to the washroom. When he came out, Zeke pressed his mouth to Barek’s ear and whispered, “Stick around. I’m going to get some money off these Greeks so we can go back to that hotel around the corner. There’s one Arab girl there who is only fifteen.”

Barek returned to his place at the bar. The bartender returned and told Barek the French workers and Arabs at the Renault plant sometimes got in fights. “Some Frenchmen he don’t know about the job but they make him the boss anyway. He just puts his hands in his pockets and tells people, ‘Work.’ The Algerians don’t like it. They come easy to France. They don’t need passports like we do.”

Barek ordered another drink for himself and Claude. The tall Algerian barber had wandered away somewhere. Then Barek saw he had joined Zeke and the two Greeks.

Barek started to say something to Claude, but the Frenchman was watching something at the other end of the bar. “Look, Barek,” he said.

Barek turned and saw Zeke and one of the Greek youths. Zeke’s arms were wrapped around the Greek; they were kissing.

“Look, Barek,” he heard Claude’s voice behind him. The Frenchman sounded nonchalant and indifferent. “This is the life of Paris. You must do like this.”

“No, this is not the custom of my country. Excuse me, to do something like this in front of the people. It’s no good. If there is something, it is between you and him. Not in front of the people.”

The other Greek youth came up to Barek, putting an arm around his shoulder. “You are nice,” he said.

“La!” Barek threw the arm off with disgust. “Bad, I’m no good. Shove off!”

Rebuffed, the Greek turned away, once turning back to Barek and giving him an angry stare. Just then, angry shouts arose in the street. Everyone left the bar and stumbling and pushing, poured out into the street. On the curb Zeke and Claude’s Algerian friend were squared off. “Dieu moc boue! Fuck your mother!” Zeke hissed. “Your father is a pig!” the Algerian shouted back. “Azumle a karasa! You old queer!”

Zeke got in the first blow, jabbing the Algerian in the face with a hard left hook. The barber went down, dragging Zeke with him and they rolled over in the gutter, arms flailing one another. The, crowd from the bar tried to separate them, shouting, “Why you gotta fight for?” “You fight only for a queer!” “Stop it! The boss don’t like this in his cafe!”

Zeke landed another left hook on the Algerian’s jaw and the Algerian rolled to the side, clutching his face. Before he could rise again, Zeke scrambled to his feet, grabbed the two Greeks by the arms and the three of them disappeared down the street. The barber, blood streaming down his face and onto his suit and tie, staggered to his feet and tried to follow the others back into the bar but the bar owner stopped him at the door, pushing him back into the street by jabbing him in the side with a knee. The boss was angry and shouted, “Finish! You no more come to my place!”

Barek was surprised to find Claude, seemingly unconcerned, about his friend, sipping an absinthe at the bar and staring vacantly into space. When Barek spoke to him the Frenchman didn’t seem to hear. Instead, he ordered another absinthe.

“Well, I got to go home anyway,” Barek said, suddenly feeling very tired. He felt he had had enough of Paris. “Why he kiss the man in front of the people like that?” he asked Claude. “There’s no police here or nothing?”

Claude’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “This is Paris,” he said. “It is like this.” He turned to Barek and looked at him with dull eyes, not seeming to recognize him.

“I live far away from here and it’s very late now.” Claude began to speak, forming each word slowly as if it were something he had carefully memorized. “I’ll have to find a hotel for the night. Where do you, go from here? Perhaps we could go together. I have been in Casablanca three times. Will you give me your address?”

“Look, maybe I’ll see you here tomorrow or the next day. I gotta go home now.”

The Frenchman nodded and moved toward the door like a sleepwalker.

“Hey,” Barek called after him. “You forgot your newspaper.”

“Oh, yes.” Claude took the newspaper from him and moved toward the door. “Le Monde.” Barek could hear him saying, “I read nothing but Le Monde.”

9.

“Oh, ma petite, je connait l’habitude de Embassade. I know all the numbers of the Embassy. I was employed by TWA; It is so difficult to operate the telephone. You must know how to make a call. It is so difficult to know. Yes, I used to work for TWA. I spent many years with the American people.” It took Barek some minutes to realize his rescuer had mistaken him for an American. She was an old French lady with a great blaze of orange hair, bright little black eyes peering out from under heavy blue makeup and a dithery, scatterbrained manner. As Barek watched she kept putting tokens into the telephone, getting them back, muttering something under her breath and trying again.

He had come to the post office to try and call Pierrot, a friend who had immigrated to Europe a year before. When he had asked an attendant to help him, she had said impatiently, “Vous pas savez?” and told him to wait. After some time she made one attempt to get his number failed, and appeared to have lost interest in giving him further assistance. Barek had waited fifteen minutes and was about to give up when the old red-haired lady had spoken to him in English and he had replied in the same language. She, thinking him to be an American, had swept him over to one of the “automatique” booths and now, for some minutes, had been feeding slogs into the machine with no success. At first Barek had thought the woman was crazy and then he realized she was only being kind. “You’re no good,” he told himself, “this is nice lady; she’s trying to help you.”

“Ah! Voila!” exclaimed the old woman with satisfaction as she got a dial tone. She snatched the number from Barek, dialed it, listened for an answer and then in triumph handed the telephone to him.

It was Pierrot’s voice.

“Pierrot! It’s Barek!”

“Barek! What are you doing in Paris? Where are you?”

“Yes. Here! In Paris!”

“My God, so you are. Labass?”

“Labass. Praise be to Allah.”

“Labass Aleik. Good for you.”

“What are you doing now? When can I see you?”

There was a pause. Then Pierrot replied, “I’m just waiting for the boss to go get the car. I’m going with him. I’m working this morning.”

“What can I see you?”

“How long you gonna stay here?”

“About a week…. Maybe.”

“Well, let me think. Look, I can see you this afternoon. At three o’clock. I’m off. But I have to be back at seven to let the workers go home. I can lock them in.”

“Can I see you at three then? Your address is still the same?”

“Yeah. Same as I gave you. You still have it?”

“Yes. Okay I see you at three.”

Barek went back to the Arab quarter for lunch filled with expectation. Pierrot would help him. Everything would be all right now. As youths they had played together on the same soccer team in Casablanca. Barek was one of the best players in the city but Pierrot was even better. Sometimes they drank or went to movies together after the matches. Barek recalled one time at the Cannabiere when they had wanted to take a shoeshine boy in for a lemonade and the doorman wouldn’t let them. The boy had said, “I’m going,” and tried to squeeze past the doorman who slapped him. Pierrot had lifted the watchman right off the ground, gripping his collar. Pierrot had worked for a rich Jew who owned a furniture store near the harbor. He remembered the party they had held to celebrate Pierrot’s departure for Paris a year ago. He, Pierrot, Farid and Hamid, who had been the four top players on the team. They had stayed at the Cannabiere and Bolero until late, taken four bottles of wine back to Pierrot’s shop and talked until dawn about how they were all going to meet in Europe. Farid and Hamid had got passports long before Barek but neither had the money yet for their passage. Barek laughed to himself remembering the goodbye party. Pierrot had kept saying he wanted a woman but he had been too drunk.

In his excitement, Barek had forgotten to ask Pierrot how to reach his house by Metro and he no longer had enough money for taxis. He was afraid to take the Metro but he steeled himself and, descended the steps at the Barbes-Rochechuart station, stopping by the window to ask an attendant directions. The attendant, an old woman who had surrounded herself with potted plants and embroidered curtains to make the underground cell look less like a prison, squinted at the address in the dim light. “This name is wrong.” she told Barek. “Is that ‘B’ or ‘H?’ As she searched through the book, Barek’s heart sank. Suppose the address was wrong? How would he ever telephone Pierrot, again without the old French lady to help him?

“Voila! It is Beugeaud, not Peageaud.” She glared at Barek as if he had been trying to trick her. “Go to Dauphine.” Barek started through the gate then saw Dauphine was both a direction and a stop, the end of the line. “Excuse me, madam, please,” he said returning. “Is it the direction or the stop?” “Both,” she snapped impatiently, returning to her reading.

It was a twenty-minute ride. Dauphine was the twenty-second stop. Barek was afraid to take a seat for fear he might miss it and he stood all the way although it turned out to be the end of the line. As the metro sped through the tunnels the stations and passengers seemed to get poorer and poorer and he expected to arrive in a poor tenement section of the city. Instead, as he climbed the stairs to the surface he was surprised to find himself in an elegant street, lined with leafy green chestnut trees with row after row of imposing greystone town houses.

Pierrot’s house turned out to be several minutes walk down the street and the most imposing of all, a four-story stone mansion with heavy white damask curtains on the main floor. Otherwise the windows were all shattered. Barek knew the house belonged to the same Jew who had owned Pierrot’s shop in Casablanca. Pierrot had written he now had some businesses in New York as well. Barek wondered what the businesses were. Whatever they were, Pierrot’s employer seemed immensely rich.

He was about to ring the bell when a voice called to him. Barek turned around and saw a small cafe there. Then Pierrot emerged from the doorway. Barek’s first thought was, “He has become a Frenchman.”

Pierrot was tall and fair with light brown hair. Although he had been born and raised in Casablanca and in his jalaba had seemed an Arab there, his father had been Italian and his mother Jewish, enabling him to qualify for an Italian passport. Now in his well-cut Parisian clothes he looked like any other Frenchman; there was no doubt about it. Pierrot could pass for French any day.

Surprised by his discovery, Barek paused self-consciously for a moment, feeling very much a black Arab emigrant from North Africa, when Pierrot embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks.

Pierrot was laughing. “Salaam Aleik!”

“Salaam.” Pierrot was speaking Arabic. It was just as if they were back in Casablanca. Everything would be all right and Pierrot would look after him.

“How’s everything?” Again Pierrot laughed. “How’s Hamid? How’s Farid? Why don’t they come? They have their passports. I’m just waiting for Hamid for six months now. He said he’s go to Germany and catch work there. How did you come to Paris, Barek? I think I never will see you in Europe.”

Barek told him how much trouble it had been. About the long delay in getting a passport, the forty-five days in jail for hitting the policeman who tried to take Zora, about the flight to Madrid and the train trip to Paris. He did not tell Pierrot about Barbes and the night before. Somehow his friend seemed out of that world now.

After hearing him, Pierrot agreed, “It’s difficult to get a passport there in the Maghreb.”

He himself, he had, had taken out papers for French citizenship. He was doing well, earning more than three hundred dollars a month. Now he owned a motor scooter and was saving up money for a car. After that held think about a home and marriage.

As Pierrot talked they walked up the boulevard. He told Barek he wanted to show him some of the sights of Paris.

“How long are you going to stay?” Pierrot asked casually.

Barek knew then he would not ask Pierrot to help him, either with a place to stay or getting a job. Better he go to Marseille than ask for help. It was just that way, he felt.

“I’m going to stay a week or two. See Paris. Maybe if I find a job I might stay longer. But I think I’ll go on to Marseille.”

“Marseilles? Hm-m-m-m. There’s a strike there in Marseille on the docks. Maybe if you go there you’ll find something.”

“Should we stop for a drink?” Barek felt suddenly he needed one.

“No. I just take coffee. Unless you want something.”

“No. No. Let’s take a round and see something of Paris.”

Barek was embarrassed and decided not to discuss his own situation again. Today he would just be a tourist.

As they walked they talked about Casablanca. Pierrot asked about a Portuguese friend of his known on the waterfront as “Moastache.” Twenty years before he had been a bum, owning nothing but a bicycle and going to the fish market to earn a few dirhams so he could stay drunk on cheap wine the rest of the day. And then an old French woman who ran the Dauphin restaurant on Mohammed El Hansali boulevard lost her husband he was thought to have been killed in Indochina. Some months later Moustache suddenly appeared at the restaurant, sober, wearing a white apron and very much the owner. Every morning he would arrive to eat two fish and drink a bottle of wine followed by a chaser, of Black and White. That was all he had. Gradually everyone learned he was living with the restaurant lady in her house on the beach twelve kilometers away. Barek had been invited to the house once; it was a large villa with an orchard, garden and an open beach. The French woman and “Moastache” shared the villa with about ten dogs and twenty cats. Now the Frenchwoman was getting old, her dyed-red hair failed to conceal she was balding and Moustache had taken over the management of the Dauphin. He had been a friend of Pierrot playing cards, joking, sometimes drinking together. “Now if some men got drunk in the restaurant, Moustache gives ’em hell in Arabic,” Barek told Pierrot.

Pierrot also wanted to know more about Hamid and Farid. Barek said they were fine. He didn’t tell Pierrot that Hamid was drinking a lot and had been in several fights. Or that Farid, who was only twenty-two, had had to sleep with a German man for three months in order to get him to send a work contract and an air ticket, for emigration to Germany. Barek himself had guessed it and joked with Farid about it. Farid had laughed but been ashamed and Barek reassured him, “Better go with this man if he can help you go to Germany. Better than stay here and end peddling kif on the docks.” But was it better? Remembering now Claude’s face in the bar the night before, Barek was not so confident he had given Farid the right advice. In Casablanca, emigration to France or Germany had seemed like the answer, the solution to all problems. Now Barek wasn’t so positive it was not just a circuitous route back once more to the Rue du Marche aux Grains. What was the difference, except that the one was in Casablanca and streets like the Rue de la Charbonniere were in Paris? Then they rounded a corner and Barek looked up, stunned

Above them, directly ahead across the Trocadero, arose the Eiffel Tower, the late afternoon sun sending great shafts of rosy light through its giant steel girders. The air seemed so clear and transparent that it seemed that if they climbed to the first etage or the second, they could see the entire universe, from one end to the other. Climb it they did. The elevator was too expensive and there was a long queue of tourists so they joined the young Danes, Americans, Italians, Lebanese, Syrians, Indians and every country Barek could imagine who were mounting the endless steel steps. On the way they saw two European girls who left their knapsacks in a corner of one, platform to peer over the side. Pierrot laughed. “In the Maghreb somebody would take. But here in Paris you can go and come back and find your luggage.”

Barek was shocked by two giant nude male statues in front of the immense Palais de Chaillot. “Those men have no clothes,” he told, Pierrot. “Look at their dicks. In front of people like this.”

Pierrot laughed.

“It’s not bad like this?” Barek asked. “What if somebody cames with his family and his children see this?”

“No,” laughed Pierrot. “In Paris no families. Go to the Place Pigalle and see what the families of Paris look like.” He told Barek about the theaters which showed only pornographic films and the striptease houses along Boulevard de Rochchuart. Barek didn’t mention he had been there.

On the second etage, Barek spotted a men’s room and excused himself. He entered but almost at once came streaking out. “There’s a woman in there.” he told Pierrot, who laughed and said that was also Paris, that sometimes such places had woman attendants. “Not for me,” Barek said, shocked, and he did not return.

“Well, you can look all Paris,” Barek sighed as they leaned on the rails.

“It’s cloudy today. Too much mist. Too many cars in Paris. The air is no good. Sometimes you can see all Paris and beyond. Look at those girls; they’re lovely.” For some minutes they stood and admired the young European tourists climbing and descending the stairs. Then Barek spotted a soccer match below, not far from the base of the tower. It was a private club, Pierrot said, the only one in Paris, but his employer had gotten him a membership so they could go down and watch a match. “It Is a long way to go,” Barek sighed on the way down. “I been tired already.” He looked straight down the shaft. “Look, look, it’s a long way down. Somebody go, he’s dead.”

They watched the football match for about an hour, both Barek and Pierrot commenting unfavorably on the French players’ skill. “These Frenchmen don’t know how to play,” Pierrot said. “Nobody here, none of these people really know how to play football.” Barek agreed. “Not like as Moroccans,” he said.

After lunch they wandered through the Louvre, which was free on Sunday. Barek was enthralled and silent most of the time and Pierrot had to hasten him on from hall to hall. After gazing for an hour at the huge canvases of David, the satyrs of Rubens and the Venus de Milo, Barek asked Pierrot, “Don’t the people here in Paris wear clothes before?” But somehow Barek felt deeply impressed, “I don’t know,” he explained to Pierrot. “It’s like…my father’s dead and all, but some I kept thinking of him in here, the Louvre. Like this was all that came before as and that’s finished now. Like my father.”

It was twilight when they emerged and strolled through the Tuillerie Gardens, stopping to watch little boys sailing boats on the pond. It was still twilight when they reached the Champs Elysees, but here and there lights were already blinking on under the red and white awnings of the cafes.

“Paris is lovely,” Barek said. “I think before maybe it is like Casablanca, only bigger. I never think it will be like this.”

They stopped in one of the big cafes, sitting at a white table under a red umbrella, but when no waiter stopped at their table for ten minutes, Barek became restless and suggested they walk on. He stared and stared at the people on the boulevard; he had never seen so many elegant people….happy….rich. He felt uncomfortable with his beard, his black boots, his shabby tweed jacket, his brown skin. Did he just imagine it or did the eyes of the passersby seem to look through him, around him, as if he were not there, as if he were invisible or as if he were an imperfection that did not belong in an otherwise harmonious scene. Barek, later he thought deliberately, bumped against an elderly French gentleman with brushed white hair and a green tweed coat who was walking a white poodle. “Pardon.” the gentleman murmured, moving past and not looking, perhaps not even having seen, Barek. Suddenly Barek was filled with panic.

“That’s enough,” he said. “I’m going back.”

“What?”

“I must go home, Pierrot. To Barbes, where I’m staying.”

“Barbes? I heard some of the people from the Maghreb live in that place only by selling hashish, robbing tourists, gambling on the races; people who try to run with the tourists, you know, steal from them.”

“So? When can I see you again, Pierrot?”

“Well…I’m going to be busy the next few days. How about next Saturday?”

Barek had a sinking feeling. That was five days away. By then, even if he were lucky, he would have just enough money left to get to Marseilles. Maybe enough to have a few drinks with Pierrot, to say goodbye. It would be too late then for Pierrot to help him even if he offered to. Barek gazed around, as if the red awnings, the chestnut trees, the great signs advertising Pan American, the National City Bank of New York, Dior and Citroen, the faces of the strollers or even the Arc de Triomphe hazy in the grey distance, could tell him what to do, what to say.

He gave Pierrot his hand. “Saturday then. The same place? Five o’clock?”

“Can you make it back to Barbes by yourself? There’s a Metro station. I left some people working in the shop. I locked them in and have to unlock the door at seven so they can go home. Anyway, I’ll see you Saturday.”

Barek watched as Pierrot, blond and fair in his French clothes, disappeared in the crowd. Left alone on the Champs Elysees he hurried toward the Metro station, almost running down the steps. He felt furtive, hunted, almost as if at any moment he expected a voice to call, “Where do you think you’re going, black boy?”

****pages 71 – 72 missing****

how he had got drunk with M’Hamed and the two of them had spent more than a hundred francs that night. “Paris is no good for me,” he told Claude. “I hate Paris. Better I move on to Marseille.”

Claude seemed to listen attentively but he appeared too drunk to understand much of Barek’s story. Barek saw his newspaper on the bar. “I see you’ve got your Le Monde tonight.”‘

“I read nothing but Le Monde,” Claude repeated.

The Tunisian spoke for the first time. “Look, Claude, I don’t bring money with me tonight. Can you pay for all these drinks? The manager might make trouble for us.”

The Frenchman paid no attention to him. He turned to Barek and spoke quickly and urgently, “Barek, you don’t have to go to Marseille. Just stay over here with me. I’ll look after you. If you can do some job, I’ll keep you until you find something. I’ll find you a job.”

“Well, I’ll see. I’m gonna think what I’m going to do. Whether I stay in Paris or not. But I don’t like to go with a man.”

“Many do not like to go with a man.” Claude said in a low voice, leaning closer. “But sometimes you know….”

From the other end of the bar a roar of laughter arose from a group of Algerians. “What do they all do, these Algerian boys here?” Barek asked.

“Nothing.” Claude spat out contemptuously. “They don’t like to work. Some are bookies. They take bets on the races. Others are pimps, going with tourists, robbing.” He was bored with the subject. He turned and faced Barek squarely, as if he had an important declaration to make.

“Barek,” the Frenchman said. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

“No,” Barek answered simply. “I don’t do like that. I’m not going to sleep now.” He stumbled out of the bar and into the dark street. It must have been very late for he walked through several black streets only to find the bars were closed and shuttered. Suddenly, having drank so much beer, he had to urinate and he crossed, over to a pissoir near the Metro station. Inside he hurried to finish as he saw a man in the next compartment moving his feet; something told Barek he was waiting for someone. As he turned to go, the man leaned forward, his head peering around the partition. Barek fled into the street, but not before catching a glimpse of Claude’s haunted lost face.

After that Barek did not spend any more nights in the bars of Barbes. Instead, he spent his remaining days in Paris taking the Metro to the big industrial plants and applying at personnel offices for jobs. Always, it was the same. He waited in queues with a few Arabs and many more hostile looking French youths and older men and then filled in an application and was told to check back in a week or a month. Barek was down to 200 dirhams or $40 besides the money he needed to get to Marseille and Casablanca and he knew he would never return to any of the offices. But still he kept applying. That was why he had come to Paris. To seek a job.

The huge Renault automobile plant was still on strike but one day Barek took the subway to Billancourt, where it was located, in hopes there might be some openings later on. He had been told the industry employed 93,000 persons and was the world’s eighth largest auto producer.

Barek was on his own now; M’Hamed failed to show up and Pierrot didn’t call.

It was a grey, dismal day and Barek wandered through street after street of grey warehouses and factories unable to find the personnel office. Nowhere did he see any Moroccans or Algerian’s, only elderly guards sitting at the entrance gates or small groups of Frenchmen sitting on park benches or huddling in the street. All the bars and restaurants in the area seemed to be boarded up although it was a weekday. After an hour or so Barek lost his way. He was moving down a long narrow street with high grey warehouses on either side when he met five French boys. They stood right on the sidewalk in his way, glancing his direction from time to time and talking in undertones. All of them seemed very fair, even almost sickly with dead white faces, and sullen, mean expressions. As Barek approached them, wondering whether he should cross the street or hope they would part to make way for him, they seemed like quiet horses, shuffling and snorting impatiently, waiting to trample something. All five of them wore the same blue shirts open to the waist and hobnailed boots and tight-fitting dungarees riding low on their hips. All had stringy brown hair that fell to their necks.

When Barek was only a few feet away he cleared his throat twice quickly and said “Excuse me. I just want to pass.” Instead of making way they slowly circled around him, snickering and flexing their muscles. Barek had never seen such cruel faces. He felt as cold as ice. “What you want here, “n…..”?” the words were close to his ear. Barek stood perfectly still. He could hear the sound of traffic coming from a street some distance away. Then he felt the first hand on him and he went berserk. His arms shot out and one of the French boys went back on the pavement, his body sprawling as the air was knocked out of him. The others tried to jump Barek then but he was running, he never ran so fast in his life, straight down the long street between the warehouses. He could hear laughter behind him, and shouts of filthy abuse but he didn’t turn around. He just kept running until he reached Billancourt and the subway station. Once he passed through the turnstile and got down the steps to the waiting platform he seemed safe and he lit a cigarette.

Dazed, Barek thought of nothing as he boarded the metro. He sat down next to a chic woman with golden hair who carried a small white poodle and a bouquet of red roses in her lap. She was talking with a woman in the opposite seat. Something about being tired. Barek stared dully at the metro map and then read the names of the brightly lit stations they passed through. He was traveling in the direction of Mairie de Montreuil. He had to change at Strasbourg St. Denis. Place Republique. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Voltaire-Leon Blum. Robespierre. Nation. Trocadero. Jasmin. Saint Augustin. Richelieu-Drouot, Bonne Nouvelle, Oberkampf, none of the names meant anything to him…..

Still he didn’t give up. He went to Gare St. Lazare and took the train to the giant Simca factory in the countryside. Six thousand Moroccans were at work there but they didn’t need any more. He went to Ponte de Clichy, Gennevilliers, all the places he heard Moroccans might be, where there might be industrial jobs.

It was evening. Barek rode the bus through Gennevilliers to the Metro station in Clichy. It had been a dismal day. He had walked for hours through the Foyers du Batiment et des Metaux, a bidonville for Algerians, Spaniards and Portuguese. There had been row after row of wooden barracks, four or five men in a room. There was a canteen where men waited in line to buy cheap bottles of wine. The washrooms were filthy, the streets a desolate wasteland. Barek stopped to read the notices outside the manager’s office. Portuguese workers were warned that anyone crossing the frontier illegally to smuggle a father or a brother or a son into the work camp would be evicted immediately. To Barek, the camp seemed just like the jail in Casablanca. Beyond it rose tall glass and red brick apartments; French children played on the green lawns beneath protected from the bidonville by high wire fences. For a long time Barek wandered through an endless junkyard by the banks of the Seine, idly kicking his foot at the bricks and refuse of the great city, somehow feeling this was where he belonged. At a glance around him, the soaring apartments, the grim shantytown of barrack after barrack, the piles of ashes, tires ruined, rusted cars and garbage, he realized what his life in Paris would be like, even if he succeeded in getting a job. In the distance, beyond the river, the city ended and the open countryside began. The green hills, the wheat and oat fields, the little cottages all in rows had a pleasant look, quiet and dreamy, with chestnut trees and willows peeping over stone walls and little black figures moving back and forth, cycling and walking, digging and hoeing or sailing down the river in small open barges. It reminded Barek of the green valley in Romanni and he quickly returned to the center of Gennevilliers to purchase some postcards and stamps to write his friends at home. To Hadj, he merely sent greetings to the family, his wife, Mohamed, Hassan, Abdullah, Ali and, of course, little Musa. “Hello, Baba,” he could almost hear Musa’s voice. “Hello, Baba, hello, Baba.”

To his friends at the Maghreb Bar he wrote:

“Mon Cher Ami

Haj Amar jou vous pas un grande bonjour a toi est a tis ami Haj Aidi et Filali efa Mouloud est toute les ami chagaum sonot et a moulai et a redaree et a couscouse et a comouna et a rais et a toute les grande et petite

La repance

T ede siut

M’Barek Ben Abdesalem” [A copy of the letter; the spelling is Barek’s.]

After mailing the letters, Barek felt his spirits rise and he walked toward the bus stop for more than half an hour thinking about home. It was when he felt hungry and looked about for a restaurant that Barek realized he had again lost his way. Somehow he had wandered out of Gennevilliers, a suburb of immigrants and industrial workers, into Colombes, a community of large villas, parks and leafy, quiet boulevards. There seemed to be few shops and restaurants and Barek walked almost another mile before reaching a corner with two of them. Outside the first he studied the menu. It was expensive but he could order only soup and bread and coffee. As he started to open the door, however, a fat Frenchman in an apron barred his way. “Ferme!” the man said, declaring the restaurant was closing and shutting the door firmly in Barek’s face, but not before he saw it was filled with people. Across the street, the second restaurant advertised a “Plat de Jour” for only ten francs. While this seemed also expensive Barek was so hungry now he decided to pay it. Here too people were sitting around the tables eating but an old woman behind a counter waved him outside. “Ferme! Ferme!” He explained he had lost his way returning to Gennevilliers and was very hungry. The woman shrugged indifferently.

In desperation Barek caught a taxi. The driver was a very old man who seemed unable to control the car. Several times he missed the right turning and when they finally reached a street in Gennevilliers that Barek recognized the fare had risen to ten francs.

For some reason Barek had lost his appetite; he was no longer hungry nor had any desire to eat.

He caught a bus for Clichy, where he could take the metro back to Barbes. On the bus the same emptiness that had seized him earlier took hold once more and he hardly saw the streets they passed and he got off the bus and drifted into the metro station like a sleepwalker.

He was waiting in line to pass through the turnstile when he realized there was trouble just ahead. He moved forward to see what it was.

The ticket puncher, a small, wizened up old man in a blue uniform, was shouting, “Le ticket! Le ticket!” Two men were arguing with him. Barek first saw they were drunk and then when he heard their voices that they were Moroccans.

“Je te donnez le ticket.” one of them claimed, weaving back and forth as he spoke.

“Votre ticket?”

“Je te donnez. Vous avez le ticket.”

“Attentione. Je vous apele le chef.” The ticker puncher was angry. All three began shouting now and Barek could not hear what the old man said for the Moroccans drowned him out in a torrent of Arabic abuse.

People were beginning to crowd up at the gate, some of them voicing anger at the delay. Inside the ticket puncher began pounding on the tin wall of his booth, apparently to signal a supervisor. “Laissez moi tranquil,” Barek heard the old man shout. “Il y a du monde que attendre! The people are waiting. Move aside!”

“You are not French!” one of the drunken Moroccans shouted. “Not true French. You are Jewish. Call your chief and we’ll see what he’s gonna do to me. What’s he gonna do to me? He gonna kill me? Sale Rasse. What your chief gonna do to me?”

The crowd pressed to be let through the turnstile. Several other Arabs were in line and Barek heard them call to the Moroccans in Arabic, “You are drunk, you know.” “Keep quiet!” “Don’t do these things!”

“Just move on! Let me alone.” the ticket vendor was practically shrieking now and pounding on the wall of his booth.

A Frenchman near Barek was telling someone, “The Moroccans are always like this. Always they fight and make trouble.” Other French in the crowd took up the theme. Barek caught only the word, over and over again, “Marocains….marocains….” pronounced with such naked hostility it might have been “murderer” or “rapist.” Somehow the crowd of pushing, complaining people burst through the turnstile. Barek looked to see where the two drunken Moroccans had gone but the train came in and he was swept aboard.

At Place de Clichy he had to change for the line to Barbes. As he moved through a long tiled tunnel for the Barbes-Rochechuart train, he saw the two Moroccans stumbling forward just ahead of him, both blindly drunk and holding onto one another from support. Near the opening to the subway platform, they both stopped and gazed around them, at the French who hurried past, trying not to take notice of the spectacled. One of them wanted to move on and he tugged at the other’s arm. But the second man, barely able to stand kept peering into the faces of the passersby, almost as if he were trying to recognize someone. Barek was still some distance behind; it looked like the man might fall to the ground in a drunken slump any moment. Instead the Moroccan pulled himself up very straight, shook off his friend’s arm, unbuttoned his pants, pulled out his penis, and, moving to the center of the white-tiled corridor and looking to left and right with defiance, he proceeded to urinate on the floor.

Just ahead of Barek was a tall Frenchman with a rolled umbrella in one arm and his wife’s arm around the other. She in turn held the hand of a small boy. Barek could not see the man’s face but he heard him say to the Moroccan, “Vous n’avez pas entre de pissi devant les famille vous connez pas que oui sa femme!” Furiously, the man whacked the Moroccan over the head with the umbrella and then shoved him backwards against the corridor wall, where he slid sprawling to the floor. The Frenchman’s wife screamed, “Non! Non! Laissez tranquille! Let him alone, he’s drunk!” She pulled her husband toward the platform, but he kept turning back, staring at the two Moroccans with a face white with rage and hostility. The Moroccan’s friend helped him to his feet and they too moved out on the platform. One broke away from the other and lunged at the Frenchman, shrieking hysterically, “Is it your business if I piss in the street? Is it your business?” The woman was crying again. “No, no! Let him alone. He’s drunk!” but her husband again shoved one of the Moroccans to the pavement, this time almost knocking the man off the platform and onto the tracks below. The second Moroccan attacked the Frenchman and the two of them went down together, wrestling on the ground. Barek saw many men in the waiting crowd, French and Arab alike, begin to move in on the fighters.

“What happened next Barek was to remember only vaguely afterward. Somehow both Moroccans were on their feat, beating the Frenchman with their fists, then one was down and a second Frenchman was kicking him in the ribs. Everyone was shouting and screaming; women and men were tumbling over each other trying to get away as more men joined in the fight. The heat of the pushing, shoving, fighting bodies was suffocating and then Barek saw three French boys come running onto the platform, their long hair flying like the tails of galloping stallions, their cruel pasty white faces lasting to hurt and destroy and he saw they were punching the Arabs, any Arab now, and a French boy jumped one of the drunken Moroccans from behind, yanking his head back as if to strangle him and Barek himself moved in, a fist smashing into his face spattering blood in all directions as his mind exploded….

“Guerre au racisme! Francais, immigres tous unis!”

“Racistes, Fascistes, guerre a la justice populaire!”

“Guerre au racisme! Vive les pauvres et les noires!”

The students wove through the stalled cars, shouting at the top of their longs, pounding on hoods and hastily rolled up windows, their young faces wet and maniacal in the flickering red light of their torches. “Justice pour les pauvres, les immigres, les noires, les Arabes, les Africains! The villages of the world shall conquer the cities! Long live the victory of people’s war!”

“What is it?” Barek asked the taxi driver.

“A manifestation. St. Germain. Saturday night. It has been going on a long time now.”

Barek was desperate. He was fleeing now. After the metro riot he had stayed drunk all night. Now, with his hotel paid, he had less than twenty francs besides his fare to Marseille and Casablanca. He had taken the metro to save money, missed the transfer point at St. Chapelle and had gotten off with his suitcases at Odeon, hoping to find a taxi. The students swirled all around them, laughing girls and long haired, bearded young men in dirty clothing. “Solidaritie!” a girl shrieked, pounding on the window next to Barek. “Le racisme ne passera pas!”

“But I most get to Gare Lyon.” Barek cried to the driver. “We can’t delay! I’ll miss my train and I have only enough money to reach Marseille. I don’t have the money for another ticket if I miss the train. ‘It

The driver raised his hands in a hopeless gesture. “C’est la revolution.” Ahead there was shouting and the sound of small explosions. “Keep your window rolled up,” the driver warned Barek. “It’s tear gas. It can knock you, out. Trouble ahead with the police.” They could see black silhouettes darting in and out of the cars framed against the red glare of the torches. Sparks flew. A torrent of filthy abuse and taunts of the police rose behind them. Barek twisted around. He was astonished to see people sitting in cafes or strolling along the boulevard with seeming unconcern just a hundred yards behind. From the open windows of an apartment above them came the blare of rock music; Barek craned his neck upward. The gyrating figures of couples were making shadows on the windows in kind of a jerky frenzy. He searched the tense white faces of students passing near the taxi. The torchlight and their screams transformed their faces into grotesque, horrible, masks. “Le racism arme des patrons pour diviner les travailleurs!”

“Are they for the poor?” Barek asked the driver. “Will they help me?”‘

The driver laughed derisively. “Them? They say they are. I think they want to tear the whole thing down, destroy everything and everybody. They’re Maoists.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why? Why?” he asked, his voice thick with scorn for both the rioters and Barek.

Barek was frightened. “How much is the price? How much I owe you now?” He hadn’t liked the tone of the driver’s laughter.

“Twenty francs.”

“Twenty?” Barek was amazed. “We’ve only come a little way.”

“Twenty and my tip. That’s twenty-five. Because you brought me to this goddam manifestation. I might get stuck here for hours. All the traffic’s stalled. How can I leave? And it’s Saturday, my best night. You’ll have to pay me anyway. Twenty-five.”

“No, no,” Barek opened the door in panic and climbed out. “I’m a poor man. I only got enough money to reach Marseille. Twenty-five! I’ll call a gendarme.”

“Call one. You’ll never get one now. If you want your suitcases back it’s twenty-five. I’ve got them locked in the trunk.”

Barek looked around. The driver was clearly taking him and he searched for someone to help him. Now all the cars on the boulevard began blowing their horns in a high, piercing cacophony. The students, still swirling through the cars, took this as a challenge and, began screaming their slogans at the top of their lungs! The car horns got louder, it was like a contest of lunatics. “Le racisme ne passera pas! Le racisme ne passera, pas!” The people strolling on the boulevard and cafes were all watching now, but placidly as if it were all some kind of performance for their benefit. It was like a world gone mad. The driver jumped out of the taxi and stood guard by the trunk, as if he expected Barek to try and tear it open. “Pay me and I’ll give you your bags.” The crescendo of screaming students and car horns seemed to get louder and louder, blotting out sight and thought. Barek thrust three ten franc notes in the driver’s hand. “Give me five francs back,” he said. He no longer had enough money to reach Casablanca. It seemed like the final, inevitable collapse of everything.

If anyone noticed the dark bearded little Arab with a heavy suitcase in each hand, headed back down the boulevard, away from the manifestation, sweat pouring from his forehead, his eyes watering, half-running and half-tumbling down the sidewalk, they gave no sign.

All faces were turned toward the manifestation, a more diverting, exciting spectacle for a Saturday night in St. Germain, the Maoist gladiators versus the flics.

Half-crazed with frustration and rage, Barek just wanted to get away. He thought of nothing, the screams and shouts and car horns blotting out everything from his mind. In the hours to come, in the lifetime to come there would be time to think about where to go next. Appeal to Pierrot? Return to Barbes, to steal and rape and rob and sell himself to stay alive? Move on to Marseille and try to earn his passage home? Ship out on a freighter somewhere? Go back to Casablanca to struggle for pennies on the docks and live off Zora and rot over a hashish pipe? Or find, oh God, perhaps to find, a green valley somewhere where they could make a life?

Barek paused, his arms numb from the heavy suitcases. He put them down on the pavement for a moment until the shouting sounded closer again. “Justice a les arme et les noires! JUSTICE A LES ARME BT LES NOIRES! JUSTICE FOR THE POOR AND THE BLACK!” He picked up the bags and hurried on. Just to get away….

Late that night, oh very late that night in Paris, in a hamam or Arab bathhouse near the largest mosque in France, an Oriental refuge, from all the Western culture that has made Paris the beacon of the entire civilized world, a lone naked figure slept. In the misty green gloom of the dim, domed chambers, as vapors of steam rose from black recesses and beads of water dripped from the ceilings, as rivulets of foamy suds washed down worn marble staircases and blacks with shiny shoulders massaged the ravaged muscles of Maghreb laborers, as drowsy figures moved through the broad shadows between the archways and the scent of hashish wafted from the complete darkness of the alcoves, as more than a hundred men breathed heavily in deep narcotic slumber, flung about the heated tiles around the steaming shadowy pool like dead white fish washed up on the shore by some catastrophe…side by side with his Arab brothers, Barek slept. His sleep was troubled and sometimes his lips trembled and almost formed words as if to speak. Perhaps he was dreaming. Dreaming of a better life in this world. Or the next.

THE END

©1971 Richard Critchfield

Mr. Richard Critchfield is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Washington Evening Star, Washington, D.C. This article may be published with credit to Mrs. Critchfield, the Washington Star and the Alicia Patterson Fund.