Dreams of Maryam Tair Read online

  “Ustad. I am Mohamed Bouzid. I was your student two years ago.”

  “Yes, yes. I’m sorry, Mohamed. How are you?”

  “I am well.”

  “Is this your cart?”

  “Yes. My life is different now, as you can see.”

  “You left university?”

  “My family needed the money, and so here I am.”

  “But you would have become an engineer! You could have helped them then.”

  “How many years would they have had to wait? I wasn’t a bright student.”

  “We could have found a solution for you.”

  “Do you know how many of me there are out here, dragging carts or working assembly lines? At first, I believed that you would call me to your office and offer to write that letter for me. But after three years, I knew it would never be sent.”

  “The letter was for the very best, the exceptions. That doesn’t mean all the rest should drop out. You would have become an engineer.”

  “Yes, but that’s not how things work.”

  “Not everyone drops out.”

  “No, people stay as long as they can. Some have their families to help them. Some find work. Others find politics, or religion. Some stay because they have nowhere else to go. But I’ve found nothing except mouths to feed.”

  Adam was quiet. He hid his hands in his pockets and lowered his pounding head. He wanted to hold his breath for all of eternity.

  “It’s not your fault, Ustad. What can you do against God’s will.”

  ~

  Adam put his hand to his forehead to ease the terrible headache that was submerging him. Sneering voices and wailing furies vied for control of him. He thought he saw the peddler pushing his cart uphill. When the cart reached the top, it rolled back down. Then the peddler pushed it back, over and over again. Adam saw other peddlers relentlessly pushing carts uphill. At first, the peddlers were young and gentle, their skins smooth and brown. Their patience knew no bounds. But as time passed, they became mightier, and their anger grew. If they were ever to burn, would the city burn with them? The space in front of Adam filled with pieces of papers—letters he never wrote, diplomas he never awarded, contracts he never honored. The piles swirled and rose in the air until he found himself in the eye of the storm, while the silence raged all around, and a mint-tea vendor who used to be a university student showed him the world to come.

  Adam began to lose himself, slipping into an abyss of pain. Then the cold-eyed demons swooped down toward Adam and Mohamed the peddler. Under Adam’s trembling eyes, they grabbed the peddler and swept him off into the air. But then they turned and stared back down at Adam, delivering a brutal promise before disappearing.

  Leila and Adam

  Leila and Adam were never meant to be. Leila was urban, wealthy, and upper-class. Adam was poor and orphaned. They were from different castes, and had they remained in Morocco, their paths would never have crossed. But they met in Paris where differences could be temporarily abolished by a shared drink, a kiss, and a walk along the Seine.

  There they were far from the shame of the love affair in their home country. Leila and Adam found themselves irresistibly drawn to each other and ignored all advice to end their story before they ruined their lives. They were their own impossible beginning. When they returned to Casablanca, they braced for resistance and active opposition. Instead, they were met with silence, desperation, and then pragmatic acceptance of their union. Gradually, they were pushed into banality.

  Leila heard a key turn in the lock and saw Adam come in. He was shaking and shivering. He carefully placed his keys and papers on the table by the door and paused, hesitant, in the middle of the room. The living room was in penumbra, and he could not see Leila. She rose from her seat by the window and took him in her arms. She could sense his weakness. She covered him with a blanket and rubbed his hands with jasmine oil.

  “It’s done,” he said. “We lost.”

  “Yes. How could we win?”

  “They were there. They spared no one. The chill that comes.”

  “I saw them too. I saw everything. They are real. The sky turned grey, and they closed in on the rioters. They spared no one?”

  “I saw them. They made me a promise.”

  Leila saw the emptiness in his eyes. What he had just witnessed had erased a lifelong attempt to defeat his childhood terrors. Today, the demons of a loveless childhood had escaped from the dark, solitary corners of his mind and irrevocably proved that his repressed agony was real. They would keep their promise, that he knew.

  “Did they see you?” Adam asked.

  Leila thought for a minute.

  “Yes, one of them saw me. He looked up and smiled. Will they come for us?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  They fell quiet. Their silence echoed the silence outside. Sirens, metallic wings, and tires crushing gravel, all sound had ceased. The end may come soon but not tonight, not right away. As they stood silently together, they noticed a piece of paper on the tiled floor at their feet and bent down to look at it. It was a note written in small, tight, black letters and addressed to them. Adam picked it up and read.

  Dear Mr. and Ms. Tair,

  Please join me tonight after curfew. You will find me beyond the dead end inside the Portuguese Medina if you take the entrance facing the sea. Follow your footsteps, you cannot miss me.

  Most Gracious Regards, S.

  Adam and Leila paused to think, but they could not find a reason to ignore the summons. Besides, tonight, they still had some time left. Tonight, they could still heed the city’s pull and walk its streets. Tonight, for one last time, they could let its inner song, part-blues and part-Fairuz, fill their minds. They left their apartment and closed the door behind them.

  ~

  Adam and Leila went down into the street. Curfew had been imposed on Casablanca, but they didn’t care. The streets were almost silent but for the distant swoosh of a wing and the crackle of the wind. They left their apartment and walked into the blue-grey June dawn. Despite the disappointments and heartaches it had caused them, the fissured, half-abandoned city still held sway on Adam and Leila. Divided against itself, sprawling, crumbling with rare gardens and destructive nights, it was beautiful and harsh all at once.

  Its roads were jammed, and the waves breaking on its shores clean and high. It was violent and cruel, rarely kind and compassionate. It was a city forged in second-hand steel, barely able to resist decay. Trees and green spaces were few and interspersed. The moist, full earth had been chased by the architects of a utopian city of industrial workers and colonial administrators. The very rich rubbed shoulders with the very poor, while the middle classes were a glitch in the imagination of a mad economist. Casablanca was dark, humid, and closed in upon itself despite its buzzing harbor and eclectic population. But its pull on its inhabitants, both visible and invisible, was undeniable. Adam and Leila walked in silence.

  The cracks in the walls ran deep and wide. Howls broke the distance. They shuddered but knew that the howls were not for them, yet. They crossed the central plaza with its fountain, garden, Grand Tribunal, and Wilaya. They left the plaza to their right and walked toward the Medina. Leila briefly yearned to turn the other way toward the Place of Dying Palaces, where her family’s house stood. She felt the need to press against her mother’s chest and close her eyes for a while. But the note had said into the Medina, the Arab and Portuguese Old City. She lifted her head and continued walking. All they could hear were her heels on the pavement.

  Adam and Leila walked into the sodden, humid air of the Old City. They smelled corrosion, saltwater, and rust. Here, too, the windows were shut and the streets deserted. They walked in silence with their arms wrapped tightly around each other, closer to each other than they had been in a long time. With silence all around and within, new sounds emerged. They heard a dull pulse that became more and more distinct the farther they walked into the Medin
a. They went deeper and deeper into its twisted streets and dark alleyways. Their shadows stretched wisplike on the broken walls before being lost to the night. The beat of the pulse was now so overwhelming that their bodies shook under its vibrations. Suddenly, deep into the heart of the Old City, they stopped.

  They had reached the dead end. They stopped and waited, but nothing happened. Then Leila bent toward the dead end and saw, carved in the very walls of the Portuguese fortress, a small brown door with a bronze hand of Fatima, the prophet’s daughter, her palm facing upward. She placed her hand on the sculpted hand of Fatima and pushed.

  ~

  They soon found themselves in an oval-shaped room that looked like a cave. But the cave did not smell dank and peaty. It smelled crisp and earthy, as though the cave were located in the loveliest and greenest of forests instead of the dead end of a crumbling Medina.

  There were tables by a fire and low couches embroidered in crimson and gold. A man was standing by the fire, his face hidden behind a veil as blue as night. He was a giant, with one hand green and one grey. At his side was a mighty sword with the name Zulkitab inscribed across its length. He held a small carving tool in his grey hand and what looked like a writhing serpent in his green hand. He was scraping delicately at the serpent-like thing to make an object that, upon closer look, happened to be a smoking pipe.

  Then they saw two figures sitting with their legs folded on one of the crimson and gold couches: an old woman and a little girl. The Old Woman was telling a story to the child who was listening intently, her head lowered. When the Old Woman saw Adam and Leila, she stopped and smiled.

  “Greetings, my children.”

  “Greetings, Old Mother.”

  “You have received my note. I was expecting you.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “Because it is the end.”

  “The end?”

  “Yes, but it is not written that it is over.”

  “Will we be lost?”

  “You will be lost for a while in the wordlessness of the abyss, but perhaps you will return.”

  “It would be a miracle.”

  “Yes.”

  Leila turned to the little girl who was looking at her with curiosity in her large almond-shaped eyes. They smiled at each other, and Leila’s senses were overwhelmed by the most wonderful of scents: the scent of windy steppes, cedars, orange blossoms and rose water, of half-moons, white stars, and emerald planets, of warm skin, beginnings, and pure joy. Leila touched the little girl’s hair.

  “What a beautiful child,” she said softly.

  Adam felt the taste of saltwater, lemon, and honey in his mouth. He felt a sense of shame and bitterness. The little girl got up and gave Adam and Leila the two brass bracelets she wore around her slender wrists.

  “These will protect you from the darkness and will bring you back. Look, there’s writing inside. It’s magical and will engrave itself in your skin, and no one will be able to pry the bracelet away from you, unless that is your wish.”

  Sheherazade looked closely at Leila, Adam, and the child, her eyes sparkling.

  “Oh yes, you will meet again,” she said. “You will be everything to each other. Yours will be the tie that binds. That is my decision. Well, I decided, but you chose. Ha! And it is a good choice.”

  The man with the blue veil put down a bottle of clear, bubbling liquid. The Old Woman filled three small glasses.

  “Drink of lamahia,” she said, “the elixir of life. It is the drink of poets, condemned men, and humble peasants. The fig tree from which it came was itself drunk. Its roots, sap, bark, and branches were drunk before the fig was plucked. It was gorged in alcohol and forgetfulness. Drink to the bottom, that it may grant you peace. It’s the end, my children. You will walk through other doors leading to other stories, but you will remember the door that you opened tonight and the hand of Fatima that warmed yours. And know also that the more violent they are, the more fragile they become. Their violence and cruelty will be your new beginning. Thus will you plant the seed of a new world.”

  Adam and Leila drank to the dregs. They felt the sweetness and bitterness of life course through their veins and shoot through their hearts. The bracelets attached themselves firmly to their wrists, and the inscriptions hooked themselves to their skin—hot-white tattoos of talismanic protection. When they looked up, the veiled man had disappeared, while the little girl was once again intently listening to Sheherazade’s words. Their silhouettes faded like pale apparitions in the moonlight.

  “Wait, Old Mother,” Adam cried. “Why are they coming for us? Under what pretense, and with what proof? What will be the accusation and what could be the defense?”

  “This is not a system of proof and defense,” she answered. “This is the realm of fear and accusations. It is not a logic of laws and crimes—well not the laws you know and not the crimes you can fathom. It is about hearsay and instincts. About an unacceptable story that must be quelled. You were seen tonight. Don’t be mistaken—you were seen as you are, as you dream yourself to be. The love of Adam and Leila should never have been. Their story should never have been told. From their love, their words, arises the possibility of a child, one whose birth must be avoided, for her powers could overwhelm the world. But if this child is ever born, and how could that ever be, she will smell of orange blossoms and walk the earth with soft boots of blue. Go. It is time.”

  ~

  A ringing sound echoed through the air, and the storyteller and her disciple were gone. Adam and Leila were back in front of the dead end in the Medina. The small door and the bronze hand of Fatima were gone. All that remained were the bracelets around their wrists and the embers in their veins.

  Later that night, back in their home, Adam turned to Leila.

  “A child? he said softly. “There was never a child for us. If only that mad old woman knew.”

  “She knows. She has her certainties. And she has left us with our doubts and our fears.”

  “And now to say goodbye to you, to our life that barely started, which I see now for what it could have been.”

  “They are coming. They are here.”

  ~

  The demons took Leila and Adam Tair. They burst into their home and destroyed everything: books, music, pictures, memories, and hope. Their world was violated and obscured. Leila and Adam disappeared, and everyone thought they would never return. But the demons’ ways were mysterious, and death was not always the worst fate that they could imagine for their prey.

  The Myth of Adam, Lilith, and Maryam

  An ageless woman sits on a high rock in a burning desert. Her hair is long, and an owl’s wings are wrapped around her body. She has a face as wrinkled as time. A smoking pipe is draped lazily around her forearm. Next to her sits a little girl with blue boots and a blue dress. The older woman’s voice rings clear and golden.

  “Listen to the forgotten tale that is your heritage. Listen to the story of Adam, Lilith, and Maryam.”

  Kan ya makan, when the universe was young and the stars were spinning the night sky, God created a man and a woman from clay and water. He made them alike, each other’s equals, and infused in them the same paradoxes and divisions. For a time, God was content with his creation. Adam and Lilith were His mirror to the world, and their existence was a proof of His greatness. He attached a golden bell to the mirror so that each time Adam and Lilith sang His praises, or looked within it up at the heavens, the bell chimed its golden song. But soon God became restless. The golden bell sang less frequently, and the mirror itself lost its pure transparency. The angels told him that the couple’s love for each other was so great that they were forgetting His existence. God’s ire was deep and his jealousy even deeper.

  As the seasons passed, Lilith and Adam decided to have a child. They each bore her essence in their souls and breathed that essence on molded clay and fresh water they gathered from the spring. They were about to utter her name when God came down from His throne, His chariot wheels
on fire and thunder in His stead. His wrath was terrible. “You have usurped my power. You have given life and name to your creation and done so without my permission.” To punish Adam and Lilith for their terrible sin, God turned them against one another. He said, “Choose between eternity together as Adam and Lilith in the wastelands of hell, or knowledge and ease in the Garden of Paradise with a creature I will make even more perfect and more seductive than either of you.”

  The stars, moons, and planets suspended their work across the universe, as Adam and Lilith paused to consider God’s offer. Lilith was still hesitating when Adam bowed his head in submission to his Lord. At that very moment, the love of Adam and Lilith broke. And ever since, lovers must break and conflict must arise.

  God then said, “This child who should never have been born, the first child born of man and woman before they were man and woman, I will call her Maryam, the Disobedient One. She is your rebellion and your disobedience. She is your doubt, your resistance, and the chaos you have brought upon us all. I will exile her to the farthest corners of the universe, inside the emptiness. She forever will be forgotten, will be oblivion, namelessness, the world before the word. She will be the amphora that must never be opened and the black line drawn under the eyes of the bride forced to marry against her will. Her defiant heart will be quelled by millions of years of stardust in the cemetery of the universe.

  “You, Lilith, will be punished for resisting your God. You will never have another child. Maryam will be your punishment, the poisoned fruit you loved and lost. You will be remembered through the ages as the succubus who fought with her lover and disobeyed her Lord. Dark wings will grow on your back, and you will never know rest. You will be feared by wives, mothers, and infants. You will be the lack that is the power of night, the one without a man. The jackal, the owl, and the raven will be your only companions as you wail through the tapestry of the world.