The Storyteller of Casablanca (17)

Well, I thought, she could probably have guessed a lot of that from looking at me. I’m clearly a refugee from France and on my way to America like so many other people in Casablanca. But I was pleased to hear the bit about courage and freedom. And I liked the bit about the moon in the bowls of water – I’ll definitely bear that in mind when I wake up in the middle of the night and maybe it will help a bit. It’s quite reassuring to think of the moonlight shining on our old house in France as well as our new house here in Morocco.

Then she turned to Nina and said some things in Arabic that I couldn’t understand but Nina nodded and thanked her. I tried to give the dreamseller my last few sous but she shook her head and smiled broadly at me. It was then that I saw her front teeth were missing. Her face was very wrinkled and as brown as the leather cover of this notebook, but it was one of the kindest and wisest faces I’ve ever seen. She absolutely refused to take my money and then she said something rather strange. She told me that she couldn’t take money from a member of her own family. I suppose she was being extra kind because Kenza is her niece and I’m a friend of Nina’s.

When we left the dreamseller’s room, Nina told me the rest of what she’d said. ‘She sees that your heart is filled with grief. You need to go to the ocean. Write the names of the things you’ve lost on stones you will find there and then cast them away into the waters. The ocean is big enough to take your grief and keep it safe for you, freeing up space in your heart for other things. The dreamseller says this is an important lesson for you to learn now and you must remember it. It will help you later in life.’

While we were having a cup of mint tea and some cookies back downstairs in the courtyard, Nina casually asked Kenza if she would take us to the ocean one day soon. She says she will, as long as Maman says it’s okay.

Now it’s time for me to go to sleep. I suppose writing things in my journal is a bit like writing things on stones and throwing them into the ocean, so Kenza didn’t need to worry because in a way Papa and the dreamseller have given me the same advice.

I think I’ll sleep a bit better tonight. Goodnight.





Zoe – 2010

The darkness feels as stifling as the bedcovers that I’ve shoved aside, creating a crumpled range of hills against the solid wall of Tom’s back. He’s lost, deep in sleep, each steady in-breath catching on a faint snore, each out-breath a quiet sigh. His exhalations are strangely expressionless, containing neither satisfaction nor sadness. Somehow, their neutrality – which makes him seem even more distant and unreachable – infuriates me. What a relief it is to be able to admit that in the silent darkness. Our day-to-day careful courtesy towards one another feels so very brittle and forced. I wonder what Tom really thinks about me, how much he, too, is leaving unsaid.

How is it possible to lie so close to someone and still to feel so alone? My wakefulness and his oblivion only serve to further emphasise how far apart we are these days. I know the statistics are not encouraging: few marriages survive what we’ve gone through.

The move to Morocco was supposed to have given us a fresh start, but somehow everything we’d tried to leave behind seems to have found its way here along with the few belongings we packed in our suitcases.

Sometimes we still can’t bear to look at each other.

Every morning, he showers off the sweat and the dust from his early run through the city and emerges, transformed, ready to step out of the wreck of his marriage and into the calm, ordered world of his work, a place where he can be something other than a half of us. Dressed in his suit, he drives in his air-conditioned car to his air-conditioned office, where I imagine there are polite, smiling colleagues and coffee from a machine and an orderly pile of work to get through so he doesn’t have to think about anything else. It’s not surprising he’s not exactly keen to come home in the evenings. I wonder what he sees when he stands in front of the mirror in the hall, tying his tie in a neat knot just before he leaves the house. Is that image real for him? The calm, tidy, controlled career man. Or, like me, does he see what lies beneath the surface – the wreckage, the pain, the tangled mess of emotions? When I catch sight of my own image in the mirror, I see what a bad job I do of trying to wear my own disguise. My hair is stringy, pulled back in an elastic band, the dark roots only emphasising the matching dark circles beneath my eyes, and I’m usually wearing an old T-shirt and sweat pants, the appropriately saggy uniform – given the sagging post-baby flesh it conceals – of the stay-at-home mum.

Yesterday evening he suggested we might go away for a weekend. The thought of packing bags and driving for hours to stay in a hotel filled me with panic. We can scarcely bear to be in this house together, where there’s space for us each to escape into our own rooms so that we don’t have to sit and bear witness to each other’s guilt and hurt. I couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped in a hotel room with him. And besides, as any young mum knows, going away for a weekend is more trouble than it’s worth. By the time you’ve packed everything a baby needs so that you can haul them to an unfamiliar place where the routine you’ve tried so carefully to construct collapses, unsettling them so they can’t sleep, the whole thing seems totally pointless. Tom was annoyed by my reaction and I could see he was hurt at my rejection of his idea. But he dropped the suggestion so quickly that I suspect he, too, was a little relieved: he’d done the right thing by making the offer and, as usual, I was the killjoy who’d refused it.