‘Should we catch them?’ He doesn’t wait for me to respond and starts running after the startled pigeons, while I linger on the doorstep of the apartment.
It’s dark inside, the shutters are closed, but in some places the slats don’t perfectly fit together anymore, allowing daylight to pour into the room in narrow strips. The floor is covered in dried-up pigeon shit. Redouan spreads his arms wide, as if saying he’s coming in peace and wants to embrace the pigeons. He manages to herd one pigeon into the corner of the room, but he’s not quick enough to catch it.
Dust and pigeons flutter up and into every corner of the room.
‘Leave them be, they’re filthy,’ I say.
‘Then you must’ve never had a pigeon pastilla,’ he chuckles.
My stomach is rumbling; I went to class without having breakfast this morning, and after our last morning lecture I’d wanted to go straight to our usual eatery. But as we walked past this unfinished house on the corner, Redouan had suddenly come to a halt. We always passed this house on the way to campus, and Redouan fantasised about it being ours. He was dying to look inside.
Personally, I was more fascinated by the words that had been painted in black on the house’s façade. First it had said ‘For Sale,’ but after a while, right below, the words ‘Death to the MRE’ had appeared.
Someone despises the Marocains resident à l’étranger. The Moroccans residing abroad.
They are the ones who’ve built their vainglorious houses in this neighbourhood, in every possible style: from smooth and soulless to dizzyingly Oriental, not shying away from combining Moorish arches with red pagoda-like roofs. These gigantic houses were often finished within a year, blossoming front yard included. Others started quickly and confidently on the foundations, only to hit a snag that caused the house’s growth to be stunted – a marriage crisis, a layoff or a conflict with the city about permits. Because of this, the neighbourhood presents you with not only a sample card of different architectural styles but also the state of affairs of every owner’s personal trajectory as well.
In any other part of the city this ugly graffiti wouldn’t even have lasted a day, but here, in this neighbourhood, nobody goes through the trouble of painting over the words. Which is very unusual for Rabat – a city kept tidy, and near manically so, by the urban maintenance departments. The streets are vacuumed twice a week, and the many unnaturally green plots of grass are mowed, trimmed and irrigated to perfection. But not here.
Redouan abandons his pigeon hunt, grabs my hand and guides me through the apartment. ‘This is the kitchen, and this small space will be the bathroom, there will be warm water everywhere, we’ll have solar panels on the roof, and this room right here’ – there is a heap of fine sand in the middle of the room – ‘this will be our master bedroom.’
He pulls me down onto the sand next to him, puts his right arm around me and kisses my dry lips.
‘Hadn’t you promised me you would scatter rose petals all over our marital bed?’ I ask him.
‘Oh, but they’re right here, close your eyes; can’t you smell them?’
I smile. Redouan’s slogan is: ‘Everything starts with the imagination.’ Though I’m more of a down-to-earth kind of person, I often let myself be swept away by his fantasies; to my surprise, it often makes our tough student lives feel a little lighter.
I pull him towards me. In the next room, I can hear the pigeons flapping their wings nervously again; they don’t like us being here.
‘I want sheets made of soft Egyptian cotton,’ I whisper in his ear. ‘And a rough woollen blanket for those cold nights, woven in the village where my mother was born.’
‘Even if I have to walk all the way there, I’ll get you one and wander on to Taznakht to buy you a rug woven by women’s hands.’ All the while, Redouan fruitlessly fiddles with the clasp of my bra.
‘But when?’ I ask.
‘Be patient, my love.’
I help him unhook my bra and I pull my T-shirt over my head in one go. He does the same with his own shirt and then rests his head in between my breasts. We lie there like that for a while.
‘Your heart beats so beautifully,’ he says.
I lift his head, kiss his temple, his mouth, his neck, which tastes like the sea. ‘What if this apartment is an omen for our life, Redouan? What if, despite the promise, it will remain unfinished, like these ugly brick walls – what if it will never become what we’ve dreamt of?’
He kisses my breasts, his lips enclose my nipple, and as always when he does this I can feel my soul transcending my body and filling the room, as if I were dissolving, as if I consisted of nothing and everything all at once.
I pull his head softly towards me; it’s too much.
‘I’ve dreamt of this long before I could kiss your breasts. I wrote poems about it. Sometimes I felt like I was crossing a line with my imagination. Like I was committing sacrilege by undressing you, who I worshipped, in my mind. For a long time I thought they were insane dreams, the delusions of a madman.
But look at us now. I’m kissing your breasts.’
My stomach growls again. ‘Hungry?’ he asks. I nod. ‘Then we have to leave at once, or else we’ll miss our next lecture,’ he says, and he hands me my bra and T-shirt. We close the front door behind us, and as we walk away I decide we should paint our façade a light yellow.