In Arabian Nights Read Online Free Page B

tightened
her headscarf. She was an intimidating woman, the kind who
filled ordinary henpecked Moroccan men with terrible fear. We
would have let her go long before, but neither Rachana nor I had
the courage to ask her to leave.
    'He's lying,' said Zohra coldly. 'He's lying because he's a
coward.'
    'He's frightened,' said Hamza. 'We are all frightened.'
    'Frightened of what?'
    The Bear moved slowly to one side, revealing a curious series
of geometric shapes and numbers etched on the door in chalk.
    'The children have been playing again,' I said. 'The bad boys
out there do that stuff all the time.'
    Hamza wiped the sweat from his scalp with his hand.
    'This isn't the work of mischievous boys,' he said.
    'This is the work of . . .'
    'Of who?'
    The guardians and the maid shut their mouths and
swallowed hard.
    'Who has scrawled all this?'
    'A sehura ,' said Osman, 'a sorceress.'
     
    Each week I would visit the grave of Hicham Harass, which lay
on a south-facing hillside at the edge of Casablanca. I would
sit on the grass beside his tombstone and listen to the sound of
the gulls swooping in the distance, and I would tell Hicham
everything that had happened in the seven days before.
    I have had many friends in Morocco, but none have matched
Hicham Harass in their outright wisdom. He lived in a shack
behind the small, whitewashed mosque in the shantytown, and
collected postage stamps for a hobby. Every few days I would
take a handful of used stamps to his shack and we would talk.
We had the kind of conversations that only great friends can ever
share.
    They were touched with magic.
    Hicham had a heart attack and was suddenly gone. His wife
and their three-legged dog moved away from Casablanca and I
was left feeling empty inside. I would think about the stories
Hicham must have heard in his youth and I pictured him on his
grandmother's knee, listening. Nothing was quite so important
to him as the telling of a tale. He was a natural raconteur, a man
who delighted in polished delivery. Once he told me that he felt
like a puppeteer, that the power to manipulate an audience
was in subtle movements, the pulling of the strings. His life was
rooted in firm values, all transferred, he said, through the tales
his grandmother told. Hicham Harass was the kind of man who
liked to be one-on-one, the kind of man who scoffed at Egyptian
TV.
    One Sunday afternoon in the summer, I took Timur with me
to sit by the grave. It was so hot that we were both sticky with
sweat as we climbed the steep cemetery slope. Timur was moaning
about the heat, begging to be carried. I glanced up to see how
much further we had to go. A man was kneeling at Hicham's
grave. He was dressed in a fine black jelaba , the hood pulled
down over his head, his hands cupped upwards in prayer. I was
surprised because I had never seen anyone there before. Hicham
used to tell me that he had no friends, and he didn't know his
real family, for they had given him away to a travelling scrap
dealer as a child.
    When the man had finished praying, he washed his hands
over his face, turned and greeted us. 'As-salam wa alaikum,' he
said in a careful voice. 'Peace be upon you.'
    We sat down together at the foot of the grave and listened to
the gulls. Timur pleaded for me to take him swimming, but I
ignored him. After a few minutes, the other visitor asked how
I had come to know Hicham. I told him that we would meet
each week and have conversations paid for in postage stamps.
    'He was a very wise man,' he said.
    I agreed, and I asked him how he had known Hicham
Harass, as I did not recognize him from the shantytown.
    The man wove his fingers together and pressed them to his
lips in thought. 'I owe everything I am to him,' he said. He fell
silent, and I was just about to coax an explanation from him,
when he said: 'Twenty years ago I used to be a drug addict. My
life was all about kif . I would smoke all day, and every night I
used to roam the streets searching for an open window. When
I found