Fiction: One Of Them Was Mine To Name

By Itto & Mekiya Outini

 

I saw them as I was passing the mouth of the alley, on my way to the rental lot where I leave my taxi overnight, safe from Hamza and the other miscreants who roam the neighborhood. Three years I’ve been driving, and I know the streets of Meknes better than I’ve known any woman, but I’m no closer to owning the license or the cab. That morning, though, I didn’t even know the alley ten paces from my door. What was happening made it strange. 

One of the shadows was Hasana. I recognized her by her swollen belly. She lived a floor below me, ran the bakery across the street, was always up at 4:00 a.m. like me. My first day in Meknes, she’d refused my money, just given me coffee and a plate of pancakes and told me to rest a while. Three days, I’d been on the bus from Rif—two buses, actually: the first had broken down—and I’d spent everything I’d had on hot eggs, cookies, canned sardines. All I’d been able to offer in exchange for her kindness was my undivided attention. Which I would’ve given to her anyway. She had laugh lines and a sturdy jaw, and her face was haloed by glossy black with hints of silver, like a gutter a-glitter with coins. I hung on her every word: how she worked from dawn till dusk to pay the bills and feed her husband, a good-for-nothing from the north who drank and burned through cash like rolling papers and wasn’t even strong enough to beat her, and how she still nursed hopes of raising a child of her own someday, even though she was pushing thirty, and that was the least he could do for her, the least he could do. 

“How about you?” she’d asked then. “Are you looking for work? Or for a woman to support you?” 

“Work,” I’d said. Nothing about becoming a detective. Already I’d known how to hold my cards close to my chest. 

“And how about lodging?” 

“That, too.” 

“You’re in luck,” she’d said. “My neighbor just ran away with a foreigner. The landlord is looking for someone to fill her room.”

Besides the building, I’d soon learned, the landlord, a rich man who lived in a city called Germany, very far away, and trusted Hasana to look after his affairs, was the owner of a fleet of taxis. 

The second shadow in the alley was Hamza. His back was to me, but I knew him by his voice, the Night Voice, gravelly and rasping: “Thirty dirhams.” 

Not everyone knows it, but there are two Hamzas: the Day, and the Night. Day Hamza is a happy-go-lucky fellow, a fruit and vegetable vendor, good-humored, soft-spoken, kind to beggars and children, always giving mandarins away for free, beloved by his neighbors. Night Hamza is everything Day Hamza is not. He runs on moonshine and hashish, breaks into cars and homes and sells whatever he can find in hopes of staving off the next round of cravings. No more than a couple of hours of sleep separate the two Hamzas, but always, come morning, he’s his sober, courteous self once again. 

“Stop it, Hamza,” Hasana was saying. Her voice was stern, but not surprised, meaning this wasn’t her first encounter with Night Hamza. Some of our neighbors would be shocked, would refuse to believe it. Others knew about the two Hamzas, but believed they were two different men. Only a few knew the truth. 

“Thirty dirhams,” he repeated. “Come on, Hasana. Help out your old friend Hamza, would you?” 

“That’s yesterday’s wages. Everything I made.” 

“How come you’re being like this…so stingy?” 

“I’ve already got one man depending on me,” said Hasana. “I don’t need another.” She tried to push past him. He seized her wrists, wrestled with her for a few seconds, then got the upper hand and slammed her against the wall. Only now did I catch a glimpse of her face, pale with fear—if not for herself, then for the child in her belly. “Get away from me!” she screamed. “Let go!” 

“Where is it?” Hamza pawed madly at the neck of her djellaba. She wasn’t carrying a purse, but she would need cash to make change for her customers. It was probably in her bra.  

“Stop it,” she said again, her voice firming up once more. “Stop it, or I’ll tell the whole world about you.” She’d spotted me over his shoulder. She was looking straight at me. The sight of me was giving her courage. “You think I won’t do it?” Chin raised, she looked him in the eye. “Get your hands off me, or—”

“Oh, no you won’t,” he grumbled. “Bitch.” Quick as a flash, he crouched low, snatched up something from the ground, and drove it into her side.

Her eyes bulged. 

Winded as if by a blow, I staggered backward, lost my footing, and collapsed in the road. If a car had been coming, I would’ve been gone. 

Hasana’s knees buckled. Her eyes guttered low, the broken-off neck of the bottle tearing out of her as she sank sideways, in slow motion, down the wall. Her blood frothed on contact with the pavement, the same way the blood from the goats and sheep and chickens in Rif would froth whenever they were slaughtered, when my father stood over them, showing me how. 

I blacked out. 

When I came to, no more than a couple of seconds had passed. Hasana now seemed to be floating on her back in the alley, on a pool of blood and strewn hair, her belly and djellaba open, her head thrown back and to the side so that her lifeless gaze fell past mine, like an expired ray of sunshine, out into the road. Hamza was kneeling beside her. In each hand, he held an object, dark and slippery and strange. At first, I thought he’d found the other half of the bottle and was studying the two broken pieces, as if by fitting them back together, he might somehow restore the life he’d taken. 

Then I made out the umbilical cords. 

Hamza’s shoulders were still. He wasn’t shaking with laughter, at least. But neither was he weeping. He was gazing down in fascination at the babies, the twins, fresh from Hasana’s womb, their bodies black with blood. 

Something jolted me, an echo, a memory, a muted sort of déjà vu, but the lid over it was too heavy. 

Only gradually did Hamza become aware that I was there. For a few unbearable seconds, he peered at me out of the shadows, unsure who I was. Then comprehension rattled across his face, and he pronounced my name: “Mustafa.”  

I scrambled to get my feet under me. 

“You tell anyone,” he slurred, “and you know what’ll happen.”

“Of course.” The words sprang to my lips without premeditation, survival instincts kicking in. “Of course, Brother. Why would I tell? She was just a woman. And you and I—” a nervous little laugh escaped me, false and awful, “—we’re men!” 

Hamza’s interest was already waning, his attention withdrawing from me, his gaze returning to the two small corpses in his hands. 

In a moment, I was on my feet, fleeing the scene. 

My legs got me all the way to the lot, but as soon as I reached the cab, they gave out. I collapsed against the door, too weak to pull it open. Two other drivers stared at me across the parked cabs’ roofs. I sank to the ground and half-sat, half-lay with my back to the fender. For a long time, I couldn’t stop shaking. Pretty soon, the sun was glimmering back at me from the windows of the office buildings and glowing behind the laundry drying on the rooftop lines. 

In my mind’s eye, each of those fluttering dresses and sheets and bits of underwear was a djellaba, torn. 

For the first time since coming to Meknes, I found myself wishing I’d never left Rif. It had been my parents’ hope that I should stay and spend my whole life planting wheat and fava beans. Maybe their wisdom had exceeded mine, but I’d been too hardheaded. Everything had changed the year my father bought the tractor. Seduced by the realization that I would not be needed early in the fields, I’d started staying up late, a radio propped on the pillow beside me, listening to true crime and police procedurals. At first, it had been an escape, a way to lose myself in those exotic, urban tales. But as time had gone on, my interest in the subject had grown. 

Detectives are law enforcement, my parents had reminded me. And law enforcement is the state. And the state is for the Arabs. Not for us. But I didn’t care about any of that. If I could just get to the city, to a police station, I was confident that they would teach me everything they knew. By the time I realized that to be admitted to the police academy, I would have to graduate from high school, which I hadn’t even started, it was much too late. 

At least I’d made it to the city. 

Maybe God had had a hand in keeping me away from the police academy. I’d thought I’d managed to harden myself against such horrors, but here I was, unable even to stand—but maybe it’s different when it’s inside the radio versus in the alley by your building. When it’s a stranger versus someone whose life is mixed up with your own. 

If I were half the man I’d thought I was, I would’ve gone straight to the police station and told them what I knew. But fear had its hooks in me, its hands like frosty gloves encasing mine, guiding me as I backed the taxi out lot and swung onto the road. 

For some time, I drove aimlessly, oblivious to the streets and alleys I was passing, unable to unscramble the mixed-up letters on the signs. My mind floated far from my body. All I could see were the slick, black shapes in Hamza’s hands, the curve of a not-yet-torn belly, the way the blood had bubbled on the concrete…how her eyes had bulged. 

One hand up. One finger raised. Snagged by the familiar signal, my eyes caught on the young woman walking briskly along the road, wearing a headscarf and a long, black, modest dress. A stranger. But there was something familiar about…a familiar curvature. 

I almost veered away, into oncoming traffic, but somehow found the strength to pump the brakes and ease over to the curb to let her in. She looked to be in her eighth month, as Hasana had been. 

To my horror, instead of the backseat, she got in beside me. She didn’t look or smell like Hasana, at least. Her face was much too pinched, her perfume much too saccharine. Her voice, for all its delicacy, was clearly accustomed to getting its way. Without looking at me, she said, “Mohamed V.” 

The hospital. 

Eyes fixed on the windshield, I merged back into the stream of morning traffic. I couldn’t wait to get this over with, for this apparition to leave me, for all the flashing afterimages to fade. 

“Well?” She cocked her head at me. “Aren’t you going to tell me how much?” 

Normally, I’d have pointed to the meter, explained that it would tell us once we got there. This time, I just shook my head. 

“What?”

“No charge.”

“No,” she said, a little indignant. “I can pay.” 

“No charge,” I repeated, fighting the thickening traffic, nearly clipping a passing flatbed. “I don’t want your money. Keep it.”  

She narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of my panicked reaction. Failing. After a few seconds, she sat in her seat with a huff, produced a pair of headphones, and spent several seconds untangling them before stuffing them into her ears. 

The objects passing through my field of vision came in and out of focus, losing definition and regaining it—but no, not losing definition, exactly; more as if the meaning itself were burning off, the familiar objects disassembling themselves into lines and curves and muted colors and sinister, anarchic geometries. The whole world was narrowing, zeroing down to a black dot, an impossibility. If I looked anywhere but at the road, I feared I would find her red with blood, either torn open, or else spurting from beneath her dress, a miscarriage. Only if I kept my eyes off her would she go on serenely ignoring me, lost in her own world. 

Somehow, we made it to Mohamed V. If you’d asked me then, I’m sure I couldn’t have coughed up the name of a single street in Meknes, but something in me knew the route. I didn’t wait to see the girl safely through the doors. I gunned the engine, sped away.  

The time to go to the police had come, was now, was slipping by, already fluttering in my mirrors—but I couldn’t go to the police. I couldn’t face that jagged bottle…the shame of what I was and wasn’t…Hamza’s burning eyes. 

A few blocks from the hospital, I spotted another hand rising up out of a gaggle in front of a coffee shop. I cut across two lanes, edged up to the curb, anxious for the nightmare to end, for my life to fall back into the familiar groove, the mundane string of disappointments it was meant to be. Then the crowd parted, and my blood ran cold. God, I prayed silently, what is this? What are you doing to me? 

This time, the woman slid into the backseat, but this gave me no relief. She was closer to Hasana in age, maybe even a little older, with a matronly air—again, pregnant. Maybe eight months pregnant. Definitely not with her first child. Maybe with her last. 

“Mohamed V,” she said, already turning her attention to her phone. 

And that wasn’t the end of it, either. Next was a couple, he middle-aged, stocky, a little bow-legged, with a salt-and-pepper mustache, she much younger, pretty in fair-weather sort of way, bedecked with lots of jewelry, eight months pregnant. Then a barefoot waif of a girl, ended up eight months pregnant from what she did to feed her family, by the looks of it. Then a pair of sisters, the elder unfertilized, the younger almost due. All of them going to Mohamed V.

No matter what its object, fear cannot expand. If it needs to make itself bigger in relation to you, it contracts, squeezing and squeezing until nothing of you but a black speck remains. The proof of this is that the longer that day went on, the pettier my fears became. The more pregnant women got into the cab, the more my mind affixed itself to a single and not at all extraordinary fact: I wasn’t getting paid. This was even within my control, so it’s possible that I was simply distracting myself. Except that in deeper sense, it was not within my control at all. I could almost remember signing a contract with the universe, taking an oath to endure whatever punishment was assigned, etching my name in blood right next to God’s. Three years in the city, and I was barely breaking even, subsisting on the cheapest bread that I could get my hands on, always sending money back to Rif—and now this. A license, a taxi, a house of my own, a wedding—all were years out of reach, if not decades. Today’s sentence was turning those decades to centuries. 

By noon, I was making pleading eyes at every male pedestrian I passed, even slowing as I drew level with them. None of them showed any interest. As if I were visible only to pregnant women, a magnet drawing them from every corner of Meknes. 

The last fare was a trio, all pregnant. They were waiting at the corner of an intersection. I knew before I even saw the hand go up, three fingers raised, that they would soon be in my cab; but I was startled when the man behind them pushed suddenly forward, jostling his way to the fore, shouting, “Zeitoun! Zeitoun!” 

The opposite direction from Mohamed V. 

I’ve never wanted anything as badly as I wanted to take him instead of those women, to charge him, to salvage what was left of that day. But I knew better. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “We’re going to Mohamed V.”

Too late, I realized that the women had yet to name their destination. They peered at me in the mirror, uneasily tracking my eyes. 

The man muttered something, spat on the sidewalk, then ambled away. 

“Yes,” said one of the women, as if this would make it as if she had already said it, my knowing explained away. “Mohamed V.” 

While we were on the way, the call to prayer began. Involuntarily, I closed my eyes, bent my head so that my forehead brushed the wheel; but then they were all shouting at me, “Hey! Hey!” and snapping their fingers by my ear. I jerked my head up just in time to pump the brakes and keep from ramming the bumper in front of me. They murmured to one another, their discontent barely audible beneath the mueddin’s voice, the grumble of the engines. At the hospital, they wasted no time getting out of my cab. 

It was half past noon. The sun was spreading its ferocity across my windshield, a huge, accusing eye. All over the city, foot traffic was thinning, pedestrians retreating into mosques, drivers pulling over, taking their siestas in their cars. All of Meknes’s pregnant women had been swallowed by Mohamed V. I was hungry, but I couldn’t stop at a café, not after burning gas all morning, earning not even a single rial. I’d rested well the night before, had even dreamed, but now I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days. The thought of slinking back to my apartment, drawing the curtains, putting an early end to this accursed day seduced me. 

Where was Hamza? Probably in his room already, the one across from mine, sleeping it off. Would he be up in an hour, going about as if nothing had happened? Loading his cart with wares, flashing his usual smile at passersby? Or would he wake up already remembering? Had he left the babies in the alley? Or would he find the bodies in the bed with him, staining his pillow? What about the broken bottle? What if he was lying in wait for me, ready to snuff out any possibility of my alerting the police? 

And what about Hasana’s body? Surely, she’d been found. Was she lying somewhere under yet another blade? This one wielded by a medical examiner? But would anything of interest come from the autopsy? Would anyone think to run the babies’ DNA, compare it to Hasana’s good-for-nothing husband’s? 

Now the dream was coming back, the one I’d had the night before, forgotten by the time I’d passed the alley. The way those insubstantial threads of memory solidified, the opposite of smoke dispersing, I could almost imagine them wafting up from around the edges of a heavy lid. Hasana, on a balcony across from mine—even though she hadn’t really had a balcony, hadn’t really had a room on the second floor across the street from mine—calling out in a buoyant voice, breaking the news that she was having twins. 

With a pounding heart, I’d rushed back inside. My drawers and cabinets had been stuffed with sweets and pastries, luxuries I’ve never even tasted with my waking tongue. I swept them greedily onto trays. 

The next thing I knew, she was there, in the apartment with me, as if she’d blown across the street and through the window, her swollen frame a-flutter in a light blue dress. 

We sat at my small, wooden table, facing each other over pastries and tea. 

“Please, Mustafa,” she said apologetically, nibbling on a madeleine. “Don’t be disappointed. It’s just, you can only name one.” 

“Only one?” I repeated. The air was suddenly colder, the mint tea greasier on my tongue.

“Is that all right?” 

“Which one?” I asked. “The firstborn?” 

By way of an answer, she smiled coyly at me from behind her tilted mug. 

Too late, I threw all my weight on the brakes, but I’d been coming around the corner fast. Too fast. The fender of the parked police car folded around the cab’s front bumper, its chassis rocking, its taillights dripping glass. I pitched forward into my steering wheel, sat back hard, shook my head to clear away the trailing nightmares, then gazed wild-eyed through the windshield. 

Four policemen stood in front of the building. They’d been gazing down at something on the sidewalk, out of my line of sight behind the patrol car. Now they raised their eyes as one, watching in astonishment as I leapt from the cab, rushed around it—and came up short at the sight of what they’d all been staring down at. 

Hamza.

He knelt in front of the steps of our building, his eyes red, his face twisted, his cheeks streaked with tears. His hands were cuffed behind his back—not that he was a danger to anyone anymore. 

“Stay back!” barked one of the policemen, raising a hand, palm out, and striding toward me. 

But Hamza’s cry interrupted him, tearing from his throat and bouncing off the faces of the building. 

“That’s him! The one who was with me!” 

The policeman froze. Gasps fell from the mouths of the neighbors who were hanging out their windows, hit the pavement, shattered, delicate as glass. 

“This man,” said one of the officers, gesturing at me, his other hand floating down to his holster. “This man was with you? When—”

“Yes.” Nodding frantically, Hamza addressed the policemen. “Yes. Yes. When I did it. When I slaughtered the woman.” Then he turned, addressing me. “What kind of man are you, Mustafa? Where the hell have you been?”

My knees shook beneath me. I clutched the side of the police car so I wouldn’t fall. 

“Hey!” cried the officer. “Get away from there!” 

“Who is he?” the second one wondered aloud. 

“That’s Mustafa,” someone shouted helpfully down from a high window. “From Rif!” 

The third officer said, “An accomplice.” 

The fourth, already halfway to me, didn’t wait for denial or affirmation, just closed the rest of the distance in two strides, spun me around, and pressed my face against the patrol car’s tinted window. 

From behind me, Hamza went on in a hoarse, broken voice: “You were there, Mustafa. You knew everything. You could’ve reported me straightaway. What was stopping you? Didn’t you care for her? Didn’t you want justice?” 

“Did you name yours?” I asked his reflection in the tinted glass, centimeters from my nose. “Is that what you were doing? Naming yours?”

“What’s wrong with you?” he cried, straining against his handcuffs, no doubt yearning to beat his chest, to pull his hair, to claw his eyes—and maybe to get his hands around my throat. “What’s wrong with you people, letting me run wild at night the way I do? Haven’t you got a conscience? Any of you?” 

“Tell me you didn’t name both of them, Hamza,” I snarled, the handcuffs clicking around my wrists. “You’d better tell me you didn’t name both of them!” 

From the way his voice was shaking, I could tell that he was rocking, that soon he would be slamming his head against the pavement, destroying himself if they didn’t restrain him. “Why didn’t you do it, Mustafa? Why didn’t you do it? Why did you leave me to turn myself in?” 

“Promise!” I shouted as the officer wrenched the car door open, shoved me in. “Promise me, Hamza! Tell me you left one. One of them was mine to name.”

 

 

 

 

 

Itto & Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in magazines around the world, and their work has been supported by MacDowell, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and others. They’re collaborating on several books, running an author support platform, and co-hosting a podcast about literature and the arts, Let’s Have a Renaissance.