Stephanie Halldorson

There was no getting out of Morocco. Algeria, Mauritania, and the disputed territories of the Western Sahara were all closed. People were being murdered all around but the tourists arrived nonetheless. The hostel was still doing a bustling business and a young American couple were complaining about having to return to Spain in order to fly into the real Africa. They were an easygoing couple with two skin colours between them: a pasty New Jersey white and forgotten New England red. High school sweethearts. They had two languages between them: English and an elaborate series of body gestures and hand signs indicating thirst, need for a toilet, and inquiries as to whether the meat had been sufficiently cooked. They were nineteen: they had never had coffee with warm milk, they had never had tea with leaves, they had never had passports. And they couldn’t understand why people stared at them, him and her, they couldn’t understand why people were so rude. They had come to look, not be looked at.

There was also the Swiss gardener—lily-white and near-sighted—who had a fondness for the thick caramel skin of the Arab African. She came from a small town in the Alps and fell in love with the nice Arab boy who was her host. But she couldn’t be sure. They spoke English together, her third language and his second. So she alternated between cooing in dark corners and questioning arriving Westerners whether they thought it was a good match. When the nun from Argentina arrived, the two of them spent a long time sitting on a bunk bed with a dictionary seriously considering the meaning of love.

This was the Rabat youth hostel, the last bastion of civilization, the modern day foreigner’s cafe. The young American couple, the Swiss woman, the nun, and two overgrown university boys from Alberta sitting in their bright red hair and freckles, drinking Coke and charging their electronics. As the night came on, an Australian girl with a flowing skirt and an attitude of cigarettes and obliviousness arrived, as well as an Irish fellow, newly graduated from medical school who had only three weeks to be this person—a person in a hostel—before he became a permanent member of a different class.

In the evening, in the twilight, people gathered in the courtyard. They come to exchange stories, laugh, smoke, and delight in stories, travel stories. As the night wore on, the stories became grander, more eloquent, more creative. There was the snake attack, the military men who almost found a not-so-hidden stash of hash, and the thieves who took everything. But there was never a tone of regret at the pain or the suffering because a good story was what everyone came for. To have them. To hear them. To hold them as your own.

The talk always begins with stories of being a tourist because that is how every traveller starts out. But in the telling of a story, you are asking others to acknowledge that you are no longer merely a tourist. Sure, everyone gets ripped off in Morocco, but the stories are punctuated with modestly detailed heroism and significant self-deprecation. The Swiss woman told of meeting a friendly young man on a bus from Tangiers who took her to a shop to buy a djellaba and slippers, having assured her that it was what she was expected to wear. The Irish fellow had met the same man who had tried the same sales tactics. He only bought the slippers. The American couple explained how they had been forced to buy a rug to get out of the Fez souk after dark. The Australian woman had overpaid for some Berber jewellery. The Iranian dentist from San Francisco had been followed through the market, and the Canadians had been overcharged by a tour guide. In the frenzy of it all, some of the stories are told twice with slight modifications.

The sun of Rabat finally escapes the sky, and although you can still see, everything is coming into darkness. Some of the tellers are high, others are simply exhausted, and others need to say the story out loud, to make it real and then leave it here, in the darkness, among the indistinct faces. A woman arrives. She is white, from Canada, alone. She sits down among them.

When I met him, I remember watching him from a ways away. We talked for about an hour, and I guess he had convinced himself that he had convinced me to go with him—businessman—to Marrakesh. He was a skinny man with a small car and I needed the ride. I was neither impressed nor intimidated, which was my first mistake.

It was bright white sunlight. The terrain was bushweeds and cacti. The sky was blue. But there are the details that you never dream about that will become all that you remember: stopping to buy a single litre of gas, a single cigarette, a single stick of gum because that is the way these things are sold. Thinking back, I should have left then. He had a single cassette tape full of Bollywood pop, and everywhere we went there were people who had papers and pictures to prove whatever needed to be proven: I know this person, I have been here. I am this person. I am that person.

We turned off the main road. We pulled into the sad crumblings of a hamlet. He only said “Must see. Must see.” chanting my own fatal curiosity back to me. Inside the walls of his home were several small adobe rooms. Each separate and white. I met his sister and his sister-in-law with their two young children, a girl and a boy. He insisted I stay for dinner and then he pulled the battery out of his car. He said he needed it to run the television set for the women. Then he said I would stay the night.

He said I should drink the water and try the hash and enjoy myself. He insisted and insisted saying all his Western friends drank the water, tried the hash, and then he showed me a picture of a white woman, a passport-sized photo—his Western friend. He told me his family was poor but proud, knowing I wanted to hear that. The other men were away working in Casablanca. He was alone, he said. I fell asleep while we all sat in a huddle around the black and white television. When I woke up in the middle of the night, the TV was off, and his family had gone to sleep in other white rooms. He had also fallen asleep in front of the TV and was breathing a heavy asthmatic heaving under a thin blanket.

The following day, the ride was no longer available. He no longer had business and was no longer going to Marrakesh. Stay here, he mildly suggested as he waved out at the vast grey countryside of a Moroccan winter. He only wanted a little, only wanted. But I politely refused. I told him that I had nothing to give, and perhaps I believed it. After all, I had used up my savings for the trip, leaving a low-paying job and a cheating boyfriend behind. I felt like I had nothing, but nothing is a horizon line that can never really be reached. Of course I had something, and it was plain for everyone to see. He could see my life, and he wanted that. He wanted to be me.

I didn’t understand. I said again that I had nothing to give him, thinking that if I had to I could get him some more money, perhaps off my Visa card. He smiled. Of course, I would give him money, he seemed to say. But that was not what he meant. He gave me a hint: I love you. He said it with tears in his eyes, with anger in his fists, straining like an East Indian movie star to look sincere. I had left Canada to that look, and I found it repulsive. My boyfriend had let me save for a trip he had no intention of ever going on with me, and he, too, had strained to show some emotion, vowing to never let me go.

My angel, my flower, my white child, my love.

So the game began. The game was not about what you have, because there’s no hiding what I had. The game was about what I’d give. Nothing, I said again and again.

His first tactic was guilt. A strong first advance. He had been in the army, he said, and had been prepared to kill capitalist pigs. The Western pigs who take and take everything. He showed me with a nicotine-stained finger how he would drag the knife across a sunburned throat—fast but not too fast. He explained to me how women are raped for revenge or when they think they are too much like white women—when they think they are anything but breasts like apples and backs like mules.

We played the game for two days. He told me he would become a terrorist, figuring that it would be easy for me to believe this possible. He detailed how he would hunt me down and how he would kill me. Then he told me if I left him he would randomly kill white women as they stepped off the trains in Casablanca. Like a terrorist, he said. I will be a terrorist, he said, you will make me a killer.

Day after day he blustered, until one morning he angrily placed the car battery back in the engine and drove me out to an empty field. He slapped the sunglasses from my face, he held me by the back of my neck. Even as his grip tightened, we both knew that it was over. We looked at one another and realized we had pulled our charades out to the line. He was being terrifying and I was countering it with tears and refusals. Neither of us had given up. He would have to kill me or I would have to give him a wife.

He let me go. I gave him some more money. I told him it was all I had, but I kept some in my shoe. I don’t know why. He bought me a bus ticket back to Rabat, the place where he had found me. Before the bus left he scrambled back on. He said I was stronger than Margaret Thatcher and then spit in my face.

Night had fallen in the Rabat hostel, fallen behind the open-roofed atrium where they sat, enclosed. The Australian woman lit up another cigarette and someone asked if anyone has been to Essaouira. Another story began as two boys from Alabama arrived. They were rich and loudly announced that they were on their university graduation tour, although everyone there had heard that proclamation every day for the entire week they’d been in town. Chairs scraped and people went off in search of toothbrushes and travel books.

The boys were just returning from the Islamic city, specifically from the bar where it was legal to sell alcohol to foreigners. They were waiting for the next instalment of their parents’ money and complained about the “Moroccan street monkeys” who shined their shoes. They, too, wanted to have a story to share, but they always arrived drunk, in the darkness, bumping into the plastic patio chairs, sending them sliding on their backs over the concrete floor. They said “hey, hey, hey, hey” meaning nothing at all and leaned over one another’s backs. They had nothing to tell. They pulled dirhams and dollars out of their pockets, looking for something by the light of the moon, their thick bodies invisible, their mouths like fists.