Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 17 Marrakech 1975 [Then]

The house at the end of Moz's alley remained empty. No one had lived in it since the dog woman died and her companion went home to England. So now it was to be sold, but before this could happen the place needed repairing, otherwise it couldn't be sold to a nasrani and no one but a foreigner would be willing to pay the price the dog woman's family in England had decided it was worth.

"Ask Hassan," Malika insisted. Caid Hammou decided who got building work in the Mellah, and Moz needed money because his mother needed medicine. He knew this because Malika had told him so.

"Hassan won't--"

"Ask him," she insisted, and then she smiled as the jellaba-clad boy shuffled his feet in front of her. "If you don't," she said, "I'll ask him for you."

Smashing down an internal wall and carrying away the rubble was Moz's first real job. He was thirteen, ould Kasim had agreed his hand could be untied and he got the work because Hassan found it funny that Moz was asking for his help.

"You want what?"

In the background Idries smirked.

"Dar el Beida," said Moz. "I heard they need someone to help rebuild the dog woman's house."

"And you understand building?"

"I can learn."

It wasn't until later that he discovered that Hassan was taking not just ten percent in commission from what little Moz earned. The older boy had also been given a handful of dirham by his uncle, who hired the foreman who actually employed Moz. He had to give another ten per cent to the foreman for the hire of a sledgehammer.

Moz laboured for the whole of that autumn, far harder than he'd ever worked in his life. And at the end of each day his body ached and clear liquid bled from the blisters on his hands and fingers, but Moz kept working and did as he was told, pissing into a bucket to help temper concrete for the maallan and always remembering to let the urine run over his fingers first, so that their blisters would heal and he could move the rubble faster...

It made no difference in the end.

The ring was gold and had an inscription around the inside, "all my love always." It took Moz most of that winter to find someone who read Turkish and in the end it was only bloody-mindedness that made him try the cigar seller in Gueliz.

There was a second ring; this was fatter but had the same words around the inside and Moz found it inside an envelope sealed and hidden at the back of a drawer stuffed with bras his mother had long since become too thin to wear and knickers washed to a faded and ghostly greyness.

He put those back where he found them.

In the same drawer was a make-up bag stuffed with names Moz had seen on advertisements in shop windows in the New Town. The bag was plastic and had a broken zip. A line of words pressed into the clear plastic read "Made in Hong Kong." Moz had no idea where Hong Kong was but then he hadn't known Dido owned any make-up.

Dido was what his mother insisted he call her.

For a while, when he was younger, he'd decided this was because Dido wasn't his real mother. He'd mentioned this theory to ould Kasim, Malika's father, trying to catch the man out. All ould Kasim had done was grin sourly, take another gulp from his cracked tea glass and grin again.

"You'd be so lucky."

A rabbi and his son buried Moz's mother in the Jewish cemetery. Moz would have preferred to have her interred in the New Town in the cemetery off Boulevard De Safi but the priest to whom he spoke wanted money. So Malika went to her rabbi and told him that Moz's mother was Jewish and so the man agreed to bury her in the cemetery next to Bab Rhemat and pay for it himself.

Malika and Moz had agreed she should tell the rabbi that Dido had married a gentile and been cut off from her family. Moz knew the meaning of gentile, and that Jews only liked to marry each other, from when he'd run errands for the maallan who owned a bread oven on the edge of the Mellah.

In the event, the rabbi just asked if she was certain about his mother's faith and then took over the rest of the arrangements. Twenty-four hours later it was done. Malika's father drove the rabbi away with drunken curses and threats of violence when he came calling a week later to see how Moz was coping with his grief. The rabbi came a handful of times after that but Moz was never there, and when the Jew left the boy a letter ould Kasim tore it into pieces and threw them in a gutter.

"You found her?"

Moz nodded. He was sitting on the roof with his face to a cold sun and his body throwing an impossibly etiolated shadow across the dirty red tiles behind him. Malika stood backlit in front, a black space where the winter sky should be. All he could see was a man's shirt washed so thin that even if the light had not been behind her Moz would probably have been able to see her legs silhouetted through the cloth.

The shirt came from a suitcase that once belonged to her mother, like everything else Malika ever owned. Malika was twelve that year. Moz was one year older.

"It's hard," Malika said. "You know, things like that. I remember."

What Moz wanted was for Malika to go away and leave him in peace but she'd never been very good at that. So while he was still doing his best to ignore her, Malika dropped to her heels in front of Moz and reached out to tap his knee. The briefest touch.

"That your bed?" Her nod took in a single blanket and an old pillow stuffed with feathers up against the wall that ran along the back of their flat roof. His other jellaba lay in a discarded heap next to the pillow. It was the one he'd worn for his mother's funeral. Malika had washed it for him. She'd done it without being asked.

"Obviously."

If Malika heard the sharpness in his voice she pretended not to mind. "It'll rain soon," she said. "You'd be better coming back inside."

Moz looked at her. "It hasn't rained in two years."

"Soon," she said, "it will. You can't sleep up here forever."

Moz wanted to say that he could, he would sleep where he wanted and nothing she could say would change that. She wasn't his...

"It hurts," she said. "I know that."

Holding his head against her bony shoulder, Malika let the boy cry himself out and then pretended not to notice when he pulled away and shuffled sideways so she could no longer see the tears on his face.

"Do you want me to do it?" There was, it seemed, no limit to the number of questions she could ask him. And as she always pointed out, Moz was not in a position to complain given the number of questions he asked himself.

"What?"

"The room."

Moz shook his head. "I'll do it."

"When?"

When I'm ready, that was what he wanted to say. Only he would never be ready. Her illness had been getting worse for a long time and Malika had been the one to realize the end was approaching. Not saying anything, but offering to fetch shopping for Dido or carry her bread to the local oven until even Moz understood what was happening and went cap in hand to Hassan for a job.

They had the autumn, three months in which Moz learnt more about Dido than he'd ever known before. She still refused to tell him where his father had gone or why, but Moz learnt that his mother's father was English and had married a German woman after the war. He wasn't sure which war and Dido was too tired to explain properly, but he asked and kept asking until he found a man in the Mellah who'd fled Germany and he told Moz what the boy needed to know.

"Come on," Malika said, climbing to her feet. "We'd better do it together."

It made Moz feel sick to go through his mother's few possessions. And only the fact Malika was there stopped Moz from giving up. He offered Malika the green dress and Dido's red skirt and the shoes, both pairs.

"You could sell them at the clothes souk," she told him.

"Keep them."

"It might upset you." Malika's face was serious, her mouth screwed into a smile that made her look sadder still. She was holding the shoes in one hand and looking between these and the boy who was on his knees emptying a cardboard box.

"If you want them, keep them," Moz said crossly.

Things like that didn't upset him, or so he told himself. There were letters in the box and an old passport which showed his mother looking young and pretty, her hair curled and cut close to her head. She wore a dress open at the neck and smiled at the camera. There were other photographs in a fat paper folder, some of them showing the same dress. She was pretty in all of these too.

Maybe she'd stopped having her photograph taken when her prettiness faded or maybe she stopped being pretty when whoever took those photographs went away. Moz found it hard to recognize his mother in the girl who smiled at him from almost every shot.

"Keep them," Malika said, when Moz began to tear the pictures in half. "And keep that." She nodded at the passport.

"You like them so much," said Moz, "you keep them." Carrying the box to the door, he threw it onto the landing and went back to his roof.

When he came down again, the room he shared with his mother had been cleared of everything that might remind him of Dido and Malika had stripped the bed and taken Dido's sheets for washing. And the next morning, when Moz met Malika in Djemaa el Fna with Hassan and Idries, she behaved as if clearing out his room had never happened.