The Last Friend (8 page)

During our political meetings, Ali was meticulous and precise. His one flaw was impatience. He could not tolerate people who came late, or people who could not think on their feet. I was proud to be his friend, though his image of me as the well-bred son from a good family got on my nerves. The fact that he came from Fez accentuated his feeling of being different, a sort of disguised arrogance. I did not know Fez, and I had no interest in going there. The people of Fez considered themselves the sole heirs of the Andalucian Golden Age of Muslim civilization.

We knew a cop had infiltrated our group. He was a student, someone we knew, who ate with us in the university cafeteria, who joined our political debates. He was both intelligent and mean. We were wary of him, but he played the game better than we did. He was short, very thin, ugly, and wore bifocals. He had no luck with girls, but he drove expensive cars and often invited girls to private soirees. Claiming to be the son of a wealthy industrialist, he said he detested his father, who exploited his workers, underpaid them, and did not allow them to unionize. He was the one who reported on our activities to King Hassan's political police. This was 1966, one year after the student riots of 1965, when thousands of high school and university students demonstrated against bad education legislation. They were joined by the unemployed and other dissatisfied citizens. General Oufkir, the interior minister, suppressed the rebellion with machine-gun fire from a helicopter. Hundreds were killed. Afterward, there were thousands of arrests.

One morning in July 1966, the day after my return from France, two men in civilian clothes arrested me at my parents' house. My mother cried. My father controlled himself, trying to negotiate with the police. There was nothing they could do, they said. Orders were orders, and these came from high up. "We have to arrest him to interrogate him, and then he will be sent off to do his military service." My father choked. "What military service? This is Morocco." The reply was instantaneous. "Well, your son will be starting a new tradition. Think of it as an honor for the family."

We all knew the names and faces of people who had been arrested and were never heard from again. My mother threw a roll out the window into my hands.

I spent fifteen days at the mercy of the police. They beat me. I thought about my parents, about Ali and Hamza. I knew the authorities had opted for total repression. General Oufkir was in charge. We had committed no crime. We just had some ideas for helping our country emerge from poverty and paralysis.

There was nothing to indicate that the military base where the jeep let me off was a disciplinary boot camp. I got there at the end of the day and waited in an empty room. Around two o'clock in the morning, an enormous man appeared. His head was shaved. "I'm Commander Tadla, and I'm in charge here. I report to no one, not even the camp commander."

He left me with a corporal who told me to take off all of my civilian clothes and put them in the sack he threw at me. "You'll find everything you need here to become a soldier," he said to me. Another soldier arrived with a little case. He was the camp barber. He proceeded to shear me like a sheep, then shaved my head, without saying a word. By three o'clock in the morning, I had become someone else.

Early the next morning, Commander Tadla called all of us together and gave us an unforgettable lecture. "You are just ninety-four spoiled kids. You're being punished. You wanted to be smart-asses, and I'm going to teach you a thing or two. There's no daddy and mommy here. You can yell all you like; nobody will hear you. In this place, I will dress you and change you. You'll no longer be spoiled kids, queers, children of the rich. Here Commander Tadla rules. Forget all that liberty-democracy crap. Here the slogan is: 'We belong to Allah, our king, and our country.' Repeat after me…"

I looked around for Ali, but I couldn't find him. I was sure he'd be in the group punished by General Oufkir. Afterward I found out he had been in the infirmary, where they were changing his bandages. The barber who shaved him had used a rusty blade, and Ali had several deep gashes on his head.

When I saw him, I scarcely recognized him. He had lost weight and his head was bandaged. He embraced me. We were in the same barrack-room, but not in the same section.

In our group there were students, teachers, a lawyer beginning his career, an engineer who had refused to kiss King Hassan's hand at the end-of-the-year university reception. "Punishment" was the euphemism for what they were doing to us. We were quarantined, and at the mercy of lower-rank officers, some of whom had served with the French army in Indochina. Most of them could neither read nor write, and they spoke a mix of French and Arabic. The ones who had been in Indochina were nicknamed "the Chinese." They never spoke to us, but they beat us occasionally.

Once I was clubbed on the head for trying to protect Ali.

I was worried about his health. A young doctor, sent by the French government, forced Commander Tadla to send Ali to the military hospital in Rabat. Tadla had some respect for the French officers who were employed by the Moroccan army for their technical skills.

Ali left the camp with a military escort, as if he were some kind of dangerous criminal. Tadla warned him: "Not a word about the camp. Otherwise…" He didn't need to finish his sentence. We knew what he was capable of. He had spies everywhere, and he was often called to Rabat to report to his commander. We presumed he was in direct communication with General Oufkir. They had known each other in Indochina. It was rumored that Oufkir admired Tadla's force in repressing the Rif Mountain riots in 1958. Tadla was said to have killed people with a saber. In the camp, his stature was maintained by his acolytes. Even the camp commander was afraid of him. He didn't show it, but the day Tadla left the camp, the commander called us together and told us we should never defy Tadla.

I felt very alone during Ali's absence. He was lucky to be in the hospital. The rest of us led a Sisyphean existence. Our job was to transport rocks from one end of the camp to the other, to build a wall that other detainees would immediately demolish. As soon as wed finish, wed start all over again. The corporal who filled our sacks with rocks was sadistic. He chose the heaviest rocks, and if we paused for a second, he kicked us in the ass. Camp rules forbade us from helping anyone who collapsed under the weight of the load. It was hot. We were thirsty. We were not allowed to speak to one another. The distance from one end of the camp to the other was two kilometers.

Ali came back in relatively good shape, looking almost normal, ready to rejoin the ranks of the "punished." He told me about his stay in the Rabat hospital, where he had met the son of a colonel. As soon as he had learned that Ali came from El Hajeb, he asked to switch rooms. Ali had returned with a book that a doctor had given him,
Les Liaisons dan-gcrmses,
by Choderlos de Laclos. The doctor said that if he needed a mental escape from the camp, there was nothing better than this twisted love story. It would let Ali travel through time and space.

Once a month, we were given a pack of cheap Troupe cigarettes and a good meal. Since Ali hated tobacco, he reluctantly gave me his pack. Smoking was the only pleasure the camp allowed at certain times. Ali preferred to think of a woman he said he was in love with. He confided in me. Not knowing when we would be released from the camp, we made no plans for the future. Ali liked talking about this woman whom I didn't know. What with her absence and the sufferings we were enduring, this woman took on legendary proportions. Ali compared her to his idol, Ava Gardner. Sometimes he hallucinated. I did nothing to bring him back to reality. Like all of us, he needed to dream, to escape from reality when he could.

I was not in love, and I had not left a girlfriend behind. As time passed, I imagined a magnificent creature named Nina. Ali suspected she did not really exist. He listened to me, and suggested we arrange for the two women to meet, so they could talk about us. He said we would have to wait for a full moon, and that we would conjure them by thinking about them with all our might. Unfortunately, on that night we were being punished collectively; one of the detainees had tried to scale the wall to see a prostitute. Tadla ordered us into the courtyard, and we had to stand at attention until sunrise. Half the detainees fell over from the strain. Ali and I managed to stay the course, precisely because we were able to escape mentally. Despite our best efforts, we did not succeed in staging a meeting between the two women. We needed an isolated place, where we could summon tremendous concentration. As the night was ending, I thought I saw the two women walking hand in hand through the ranks of detainees. They gave water to some men, brought others back to their feet. They were perfumed and scantily dressed. They vanished as soon as Tadla showed up.

Six months after our arrival, General Oufkir decided to send us to the officers' school in Ahermemou, a mountain village north of Taza on the way to Oujda, near the Algerian frontier. Tadla said nothing about our destination in his good-bye speech. "You guys are no longer a bunch of weak women; you're men-strong and patriotic. Now you understand we will not tolerate Communism in our country. You're going somewhere else, I don't know where, in the secret army. You'll be with men who will continue to work on you the way I have, so no messing around-don't screw up. We bury troublemakers in holes with only their heads left above ground. They can breathe, but they fry in the sun, and they're only good for the hospital. The Chinese taught us this method. Very clever, the Chinese."

We had seen soldiers buried with only their heads above the sand, left in the heat of the day. Tadla had made a point of showing them to us. We already knew how cruel he was. We didn't need further proof.

The officers' school of Ahermemou was quite different from El Hajeb, the camp we had left. We sensed that the worst of the torture was over, and that our reeducation would now take place under more humane conditions. We slept six to a room. I asked the officer in charge if I could be in the same room as Ali. No problem, he said. We arrived on New Year's Day. It was snowing. The commander gathered us together and spoke to us in good French. He had been educated at the military academy in St. Cyr, in France. He was refined and hard, without being vulgar. This officer knew why we were there, and what he was supposed to do.

"I know who you are. I've studied each of your dossiers. I know that your political activity is incompatible with the monarchy and the prerogatives of the king. Here, there are no politics. I was chosen to complete your reeducation, and I'll tolerate no discussion or rebellion. I'm in charge here. I don't know any of you, and I'll follow orders without compunction. The slightest infraction by a single individual will lead to collective punishment. Here, you wash every day, you're on time, and you obey orders. A word to the wise should suffice. Fall out!"

The commander was a more sophisticated version of Tadla. Young officers took charge of our instruction. We were given pens and notebooks. We underwent military training, deprived of any civil liberties. We could write to our families, but our letters went through a censorship office. Ali wrote to his "fiancee," who did not respond. The day he suggested I write to Nina, I realized he was beginning to lose his mind. I wasted no time bringing him back to reality. He knew that he sometimes became delirious, and admitted that he had no more sensation in his penis. Same for me. We tried to calm ourselves by putting bromide into our disgusting morning "coffee," made partly from chickpea paste. I told him that this kind of punishment regimen was designed to make us regret, for the rest of our lives, whatever we had been arrested for. It had been refined by penal experts, so that we would end up eating sand, losing all confidence in ourselves. The idea was to brainwash us by the time we left, so that we'd be ready to obey, without ever doubting or contesting anything again. This was the method used by Mao and Stalin. We were perfect victims. So what difference did it make whether we had erections or not? Where could we go with our excited cocks? I'd forgotten what a woman's body looked like, I'd forgotten what sexual desire and pleasure felt like. We didn't know when-or if-we would get out of there. It was torture, psychological torture. But Ali had to hang on, just as I did. Otherwise, we would be giving them the satisfaction of seeing us beaten down, defeated.

There was one Jew among us. He had probably been arrested in error. The police and the army did not like to admit their mistakes. He was there, said nothing, spoke good Arabic, but found himself alone. His name was Marcel. Ali and I tried to talk to him, but he preferred to remain apart from the group. On the first day of Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting, he finally spoke up, asking to talk to the officer in charge. He had no reason to fast during the day, like the Muslims. His case was heard in Rabat, where it was decided that hed be allowed to eat during the day. When the officer in charge told him he had won this privilege, Marcel thanked him, but said he had decided not to exercise it. "I'm like the others," he said. "Even if I'm not Muslim, I will observe Ramadan." For him, it was a matter of principle. After this, he felt more at ease, better integrated into the group. But the commander did not appreciate this show of solidarity. He ordered Marcel to eat a piece of stale bread in front of the rest of us. Sure, Marcel was a Moroccan, the commander barked out, but not a Muslim. "You're a Jew, so act like one!" Marcel lowered his eyes, and bit into the hard, stale bread. After the second mouthful, he vomited. The commander put him in solitary confinement for three days.

Our sense of smell got used to the nauseating odor of camel fat, but I couldn't stomach food cooked in it. Ali ate only bread and noodles. We were all fragile, but Ali took it to the extreme. Of course, there was no question of protesting or expressing ourselves. We fantasized about simple meals on a terrace in the summer, with beautiful girls, eager bodies, and light hearts.