The Punishment Read online

  The

  Punishment

  BOOKS BY TAHAR BEN JELLOUN IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  The Punishment

  About My Mother

  The Happy Marriage

  By Fire

  A Palace in the Old Village

  The Rising of the Ashes

  Leaving Tangier

  The Last Friend

  The Magic of Morocco

  Islam Explained

  Medinas

  This Blinding Absence of Light

  Racism Explained to My Daughter

  French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants

  Corruption

  With Downcast Eyes

  Silent Day in Tangier

  The Sacred Night

  The Sand Child

  The

  punishment

  TAHAR BEN JELLOUN

  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LINDA COVERDALE

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2020 by Linda Coverdale.

  Originally published as La Punition, copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2018.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in Electra and Nobel types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948754

  ISBN 978-0-300-24302-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Preface

  Off to El Hajeb

  Last Moments of Freedom

  Akka

  Medical Exam

  Punished by His Majesty

  Heavy Stones out in the Sun

  Maneuvers in the Rain

  Mohammed V Hospital

  An Evening chez Ababou

  The Convoy

  Ahermoumou

  On Sophisticated Brutality

  Daily Life

  Liberation Yes, Liberation No

  On the Outside

  June 5, 1971

  The Surprise

  Translator’s Notes

  Translator’s Afterword

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  “You go into great detail, is this book autobiographical?”

  “Completely, I invented nothing. It is an account, not a novel. My memory was extraordinarily faithful and brought back to me everything that happened.”

  Tahar Ben Jelloun

  Interview, February 13, 2018

  www.yabiladi.com

  The

  Punishment

  OFF TO EL HAJEB

  July 16, 1966, is one of those mornings that my mother has tucked away in a corner of her memory, she says, so she can remember to tell her gravedigger all about it. A gloomy morning with a white and pitiless sky.

  Many words have gone missing from that day. What remains are vacant, downcast eyes. Dirty hands snatch a son not yet twenty years old from his mother. Commands and insults fly: “We’ll teach him what’s what, this sonofabitch!” The army jeep spits nauseating fumes. My mother fears the worst, tries desperately not to collapse. It’s a time when young men are disappearing, when frightened people keep their voices low, suspecting the walls of recording thoughts voiced against the regime, the king, and his henchmen, those ruthless soldiers and undercover policemen whose cruelty hides behind hollow phrases. Before leaving, one of the two men tells my father, “Tomorrow your kid must report to the camp at El Hajeb, general’s orders. Here’s the train ticket, third class. He’d better not run away.”

  The jeep belches one last blast of exhaust and takes off, tires screeching. I knew that I was on the list. They’d gone to Moncef’s house the day before, and he’d warned me that we were in for it. Someone had told him beforehand, apparently, perhaps his father, who has a cousin at army headquarters. On an old map of Morocco, I look for El Hajeb. “It’s next to Meknès,” my father says. “It’s a village where there are only soldiers.”

  The next morning, I’m on the train with my older brother. He has insisted on going all the way there with me. We have no specific information. Just that curt summons.

  My crime? To have participated on March 23, 1965, in a peaceful student demonstration that was bloodily repressed. I was with a friend when suddenly, right in front of us, members of the Chabakoni brigade, as they’re called—ça va cogner, “gonna get rough”—began savagely beating the demonstrators for no reason at all. Frantic with fear, we ran and ran until we finally found shelter in a mosque. Along the way, I saw bodies lying on the ground in their own blood. Later I saw mothers rushing to hospitals in search of their children. I saw panic, and hatred. Above all, I saw the face of a monarchy that had given soldiers free rein to restore order by any means whatever. On that day, the division between the people and their army was sealed. There were rumors in town that General Oufkir in person had fired on crowds in Rabat and Casablanca from a helicopter.

  That same evening, the Union Nationale des Étudiants Marocains (UNEM) held a secret meeting in the kitchen of the university cafeteria, a gathering I was naive enough to attend. Even before it was over we heard the jeeps arrive: we had clearly been betrayed. The union leaders had long thought that someone was tipping off the police and suspected one guy in particular, a thin, ugly, and very smart little fellow, but they could never prove anything against him. The police came in, rounded up the older students, and took down the names of all the others. I thought I’d simply had a close call . . .

  The seats are wooden, the train cars date from before World War II, and we creep along like a snail. The landscapes drift by with a strange indolence. From time to time, the train stops. We look out the windows and breathe in air polluted by the locomotive’s smokestack. People clamber aboard laden with baskets, sacks, even live roosters. They smoke foul tobacco. I cough and turn away. I think about the meetings we held over the past few months: useless, unproductive. At our age, it’s normal for us to want to change things, and we aren’t doing anything wrong. We talk for hours, discussing the hard facts of the situation. We want to fight against injustice, repression, the lack of freedom. What could be more noble? Most of us don’t belong to any political party. One of us is a Communist, it’s true, or at least he’s always championing communism, but we don’t try to find out what that really means for him. He hates America. Me, I adore jazz and American movies, so I don’t understand his stubborn attitude. He thinks everything that comes from the United States is bad, harmful, untouchable. He doesn’t drink Coca-Cola, for example. That’s his way of expressing his anti-Americanism. Well, a little glass of Coke, I like it, especially in the summer. That’s hardly enough to make me feel complicit in the atrocities committed by GIs in Vietnam.

  The train gently gets going again. My brother has dozed off. The peasant with the roosters stinks. I ev
en think I see a louse or a flea on the dingy collar of his old shirt. He takes out a long pipe, packs it with what looks like tobacco, and lights up. It’s kif.1 He smokes quietly without even wondering if it might bother us. I feel a migraine coming on. I’m prepared for this: when I get an aspirin from my bag, the peasant holds out a bottle of water, and I wish I’d brought a glass along too. I thank him and swallow the tablet. I stand up and walk a little way along the aisle. In the distance I can see a shepherd taking a nap under a tree. I envy him. I tell myself he has no idea how lucky he is. There’s no one to punish him, and I know he hasn’t done anything, but personally I’m innocent as well and here I am on this miserable train headed for a barracks where I have no idea what’s going to happen to me! I see a peasant woman go by and think of my fiancée. That hurts. Zayna didn’t come to say good-bye to me before I left. And I’d even called her. Her mother had answered the phone coldly. When I told Zayna what was happening to me, she didn’t say anything, or rather she sighed, as if I were annoying her. “Good-bye,” she told me, and hung up. I’m in love with her, I think constantly about when we met, in the French Library. Our hands had reached for the same book, The Stranger by Camus. “I have to write a report about it,” she told me, and I’d quickly replied, “I could help you, I’ve already studied it.” That’s how we came to meet several afternoons at the Café Pino, rue de Fez. We talked a long time about this story of an Arab murdered because of the sun, or sorrow. “His mother dies,” she’d say to me, “and he doesn’t know exactly when? He’s an unworthy son . . .” I too didn’t understand how a son could not be sure about which day his mother died. After all this astonishment, we looked at each other like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. I often accompanied her all the way home. One evening, taking advantage of a power outage, I stole a kiss. She clung to me, and it was the beginning of a love story in which everything seemed momentous. We had to hide to love each other. She preserved her virginity and I made do with caressing her. Darkness was our accomplice. There was an excitement about these furtive embraces that left us trembling. Rich in feverish uncertainties, our love intoxicated us. Impossible to forget, those moments that played out later in our dreams. The next day, we’d tell each other about our night. We were giddy and happy. To all that, His Majesty’s police were about to put a brutal and definitive end.

  The train enters the station in Meknès at around seven that evening. Torrid heat. The last bus between Meknès and El Hajeb left a half hour earlier. Spending the night in this unfamiliar city is a discouraging prospect. My brother finds an inexpensive little hotel. The guy at the reception desk is blind in one eye, hasn’t shaved for a few days, and spits on the floor with a sharp little sound, it’s a tic. He makes us pay in advance and hands over a large key, saying, “No whores allowed.” I look down, embarrassed in front of my big brother. A room with two beds. Dirty sheets. Randomly stained with blood. We look at each other without a word. No choice. If you’re poor, you can’t be fastidious about soiled sheets. My brother produces a roast chicken from his bag: our mother has thought of everything. A big loaf of bread, some Laughing Cow cheese, and two oranges. Sitting right on the floor, we eat without comment. Looking to wash our hands, we realize that there is neither sink nor toilet in the room. Everything is out in the hall and repulsively foul. We stare at one another, wild-eyed, then look down, mortified. We go to bed completely clothed. The mattresses sag in the middle. They’re almost hammocks. All we need are trees, springtime, the cocktails, and the green olives. I don’t sleep. The migraine has settled in. I sit on the edge of my bed. Something is pinching the back of my neck. I scratch and find a bedbug. I squish it with my fingers. It stinks. Will I be able to forget that odor of blood and rotten hay? My brother is awakened by the noise and bothered by the smell. I go down the hall to wash my hands. The water is just a dribble. The washbasin, broken; the cracks are filled with crud. I return to the room and sit back down on the edge of my bed. Although feeble, the light is enough for me to spot two more bedbugs on the pillow. I shake it. They fall; I squash them with my shoe. My brother joins the hunt for the smelly little bugs. For the first time all day, we laugh, even though we feel like crying over our fate—because after those wretched policemen delivered the summons to our house, my parents fell ill.

  One day, just like that, men come knock at your door in the name of the government, you don’t dare verify their identity, they’ve come for a simple routine verification of documents. “We just have a few things to clear up with your husband,” they explain; “he’ll be back in an hour or two, don’t worry.” And then days go by and the husband does not come home. Despotism and injustice are so pervasive that everyone lives in fear. My father dreams of a system like the one in the Scandinavian countries and often talks to us about Sweden, Denmark, and democracy. He also likes America, where even if someone assassinates the presidents, revenge is not taken on the entire population. “John Kennedy died; his murderer was shot. That’s all!” he said to me one day.

  In the middle of the night, I begin to feel tired. My head feels hot, I’m sweating. I open the window; mosquitoes fly in by the dozens. I close it. I try to think about a lush green meadow with me sitting on a bench chatting with friends; in the distance I see a girl in a summery dress coming toward me . . . it’s a dream. A fresh bedbug bite startles me. I decide to get up. I rummage through my bag and take out the cookies my mother made. I eat two of them. Crumbs fall to the floor. Ants, on the alert, come running. It’s amusing to watch them. They entertain me. My brother has managed to get back to sleep; he’s snoring. I whistle but that doesn’t help: he changes position and keeps snoring. I study him carefully and notice the beginning of a bald spot. He’s twelve years older than I am. He is a generous and cheerful man. He got married when very young to a cousin. He finds politics interesting, but like my father, he’s careful when he tackles sensitive subjects. He speaks in metaphors, mentions no names, but everything he thinks is written on his face. He is the one who explained to my parents that this summons for military duty was a punishment. My mother began to cry. “What has my son done to be punished? Why shut him up in a barracks? Why ruin his youth and destroy his health, and mine as well?” My father told her, “You know perfectly well why, he meddled in politics!” My mother, indignant: “What’s this ‘politics’? Is it a crime?” Before my astonished eyes, my father then launched into a lecture: “In Arabic, politics is Siassa, which comes from the verb sassa meaning to direct, to lead an animal, a mare or a donkey, for you must know how to guide the animal so that it gets where you want it to go. To engage in politics is to learn how to control people. Our son tried to learn this profession, he failed, is being punished for it, would have been congratulated in another country, but in ours he is permanently discouraged by being made to regret having wandered into a domain reserved for those who have the means to exercise power and who do not put up with those who contest this. There, it’s quite simple. Our son made a mistake: he strayed into an area that does not belong to us.”

  Actually, he was trying to convince himself of what he was saying. My father abhors injustice. All his life he has denounced it, has fought against it as best he could. He knows that in this country, battling injustice can end quite badly. He’d been traumatized by the arrest and imprisonment of his nephew, who had dared to say in public that “corruption in this country begins at the top and goes all the way down to the doorman.” Three days after going to see his nephew in prison, he was visited by two men who bombarded him with questions. At some point, one of them said, “You have children, boys, don’t you?” My father understood instantly: he had to keep his head down. It made him sick. That evening, he had a fever and went to bed without a word. The next day, he called my older brother and me together to tell us, “Be very careful: no politics—this isn’t Denmark, also a monarchy, but here it’s the police who rule, so think of my health and especially of your mother’s, her diabetes might get worse, so no meetings, no politics . . .”

&n
bsp; We replied that in any case the powers-that-be could hurt us even if we avoided politics. We live in a system where everything is under control. Fear and suspicion are pre-installed. A cousin of my father’s who frequented the Information Bureau warned him that I’d been seen having coffee with a leader of the student movement in Rabat. Having a coffee! A crime already noticed and archived. As for me, at the time I had absolutely no idea of the extensive security network in Morocco. I busied myself with the Ciné-Club in Tangier with a complete feeling of impunity. I saw nothing political about the club at all. The very day after we showed Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, however, I am summoned by the police. I’m fifteen years old and quaking, because it’s the first time I’ve set foot in a police station.

  The guy, maybe an officer, says to me, “Do you know this film is an incitement to rebellion?”

  I’m speechless. Then I get a grip.

  “But, not at all, monsieur. This film portrays a historic event that has nothing to do with our situation, it’s a work of art. Eisenstein is a great cinematographer, you know.”

  “Don’t feed me guff, I know about Eisenstein. I once wanted to work in film production—I’d even registered at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, but my father died in an accident, so I had to interrupt my studies, and since the police were recruiting, I signed on. Right, listen up: you’re lucky I love movies. By the way, what’s the next show at the Ciné-Club?”

  “Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.”

  “Very good choice. That one, at least, isn’t political!”

  By five in the morning, I’m nodding off. I no longer feel the bedbugs, mosquitoes, and so forth. The ants have disappeared. I fall asleep. No dream, no nightmare. At eight, my brother awakens me. We have to go. We eat breakfast in the café next door. Terrible coffee, but excellent mint tea, some fritters. “Careful,” my brother tells me; “this cooking oil must be a year old!” It’s not as noxious as the bedbugs. The fritters remind me of my childhood in the Medina, the “old city” part of Fez. Once a week, on the day we went to the hammam,2 on our way home my father would buy us fritters for our breakfast. We’d dip them into a bowl of honey. It was unforgettably delicious. There were crumbs and dead bees in the honey pot. My brother and I would have fun cleaning out the pot, laughing and licking our fingers.