The Death of Murat Idrissi Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  So It Begins

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  THE DEATH OF MURAT IDRISSI

  Tommy Wieringa was born in 1967 and grew up partly in the Netherlands, and partly in the tropics. He began his writing career with travel stories and journalism, and is the author of four other novels. His fiction has been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Oxford/Weidenfeld Prize, and has won Holland’s Libris Literature Prize.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Originally published as De dood van Murat Idrissi in Dutch by Hollands Diep in 2017

  First published in English by Scribe in 2019

  Text copyright © Tommy Wieringa 2017

  Translation copyright © Sam Garrett 2019

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

  Extract from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land reprinted here with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

  Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from the acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher so that omissions may be rectified in subsequent editions.

  9781925713305 (Australian edition)

  9781911344889 (UK edition)

  9781925693331 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For Channa

  Song of Solomon 1: 15–17

  So It Begins

  In the deepness of time. The calm breathing of millions of years. An inland sea falls dry, evaporates beneath the blazing sun; the basin becomes a wasteland of salt. Sol Invictus. The searing heat of the deep desert — rain evaporates before it hits the ground, a fine mineral spray settles on the earth’s surface.

  And then, at the end of that silent, motionless epoch — there is no one to witness the wonder of the continent’s tectonic fracture — a breach opens between the Atlantic Ocean and what will become the Mediterranean Sea. Foaming and churning, the water breaks through the rift and descends on the saline desert; the waters rise a few metres each day.

  First, the basin fills from Gibraltar to Sicily; then comes the eastern part, to the coasts of Turkey and the Levant. Mare Nostrum. Yam Gadol. Akdeniz. Cragged mountaintops stick out like islands.

  The crack between the Eurasian and African plates is but a scratch in the earth’s crust; still it divides the continents resolutely. Here is here and there is there.

  From the flank of her mountain, the Neanderthal woman whose bones will be found one day in a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar can see the mountain on the far side of the strait, Jebel Musa, shimmering in the light. Does she see signs of human life there? Pillars of smoke on the horizon? Does she have thoughts about the other?

  The life there does not impinge on hers. Too far away.

  Sixty kilometres long is the Strait of Gibraltar, at its narrowest only fourteen wide; there is a powerful current. Dreaded by sailors. Sandbanks, headlands, reefs, the treacherous Boreas. The fog that drops in suddenly, obscuring the far shore.

  Rising up on both sides, the Pillars of Hercules: the Rock of Gibraltar in Europe and Jebel Musa in Africa. Marking the end of the world. So far, and no further. He who ventures past this point becomes lost in the mist beyond.

  More water dissipates from the Mediterranean than the Nile, the Rhone, and other rivers can replenish; there is a huge influx from the Atlantic. At the same time, through the Strait an undercurrent of heavy, saline water slips back into the ocean.

  Current, counter-current, wind, contrary wind; it rages between the mountains on both sides of the Strait. All you can do is brace yourself and pray to be saved.

  Six thousand years ago, not far from Gibraltar, on a rock close to Jimena de la Frontera, someone drew an ochre-coloured ship; it has a sail, oars are sticking out from the gunwale. It is the world’s oldest depiction of a sailing ship. Perhaps it is a ship used for fishing along the coast, perhaps for commerce between Europe and Africa — though no evidence exists for such early traffic between the continents.

  For a Bronze Age vessel, the route from Spain to Morocco would have been a risky enough enterprise; a venture from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic would have meant its certain demise. The end of the world is the death by drowning that awaits you there.

  Still, someone was the first to get past the Strait of Gibraltar. Steely waves below him, their cold gleam. The sea of monsters and sunken empires. The ocean without an other side.

  The captain’s name has been lost to time. A Cretan, blown by the storm? Or else a Phoenician, shipwrecked in the mist? A current under sea picked his bones in whispers …

  Galley men at their oars, the Phoenicians row past the Pillars, against the Atlantic current. They establish the trading post of Mogador on the African coast and the colony of Gadir at the mouth of the Spanish Guadalquivir. The Carthaginian explorer Hanno makes it to the Gulf of Guinea, and returns home with stories of burning mountains and women covered in fur.

  Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians have rounded Africa, with, as footnote, ‘something I cannot believe, but perhaps another may’.

  In the year 711 after Christ, General Tariq ibn Ziyad crosses to Europe at the head of seven thousand Berber soldiers, to conquer the land of the Visigoths. The current drags at his ships. Rough swells, waves roll solidly, barely fluid, beneath the fleet of feluccas; row after row are smashed upon the arid coastline. He lands at the beaches by Gibraltar, the rock that will bear his name: Jabal Tariq.

  The wind beats at your ears and silences your thoughts. You want to hide from it, from the chill Levanter blowing through the funnel of the Strait.

  Navigational instruments improve, and in the Middle Ages there appear portolan charts, showing every shallow and every headland around the Mediterranean; the Strait of Gibraltar, however, is still shunned like the plague. Captains’ charts and nautical almanacs may be reliable, but current, wind, and sudden mist are not.

  After the Moors are driven out of Europe, British and Dutch merchants begin appearing in the Strait from the sixteenth century — flapping above the harbourfronts of the Mediterranean one sees not only the Venetian lion, the Genoan cross, and the Ottoman crescent, but also the Union Jack and the tricolour of the Republic.

  The inland sea becomes a European sea. Shipyards everywhere; countless vessels raise anchor, triumph, are sunk or destroyed by storms. Just as one cannot apprehend all those beautiful horses devoured by the ogre of war, neither can one fathom the ships that go down, the shattered galleys, caravels, galleons, and windjammers — the seabed waits for them patiently.

  With the help of the Dutch, the British conquer the Rock of Gibraltar in 1704 and n
ever relinquish it again. Napoleon, Mussolini, and Generalissimo Franco stare at it till their eyes water; stoically, the British hunker down further into their rock.

  After the Second World War — twenty-seven submarines alone are sent to the bottom of the Strait — the merchant ships return. Cruise ships follow. A tinkling glass of gin and tonic in hand — ‘Easy on the T, please …’ — the passengers roll through the Pillars of Hercules and then on past the ruins of Carthage, Troy, and Knossos.

  Gibraltar is unsuited for mass tourism, although the Rock itself is an attraction and the conditions at Tarifa a drawcard for windsurfers. In spring and autumn, the Strait is a corridor for migratory birds — tourists from around the world stand oohing and ahing from behind their binoculars and tele-lenses.

  On the far side, along the African coast, migrants from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa await their chance to cross. Europe lies in plain sight: on a clear day, white buildings stand out against the rocky coast. So close, just one little leap …

  They come in clapped-out fishing boats and even in truck tyre inner tubes; since the turn of the century, a few thousand of them have drowned in the Strait. In Ksar es-Seghir, a fisherman looks out over the high waves and sighs: ‘Around here, you’re more likely to find a corpse in your net than a fish.’

  On the far shore, in the cemetery of Santo Cristo de las Ánimas in Tarifa, a corner behind white pickets has been reserved for the nameless dead who wash ashore. Tufts of hardy grass bend beneath the wind. A column of vultures and storks rides the thermal, round and round, in endless orbit. Far below, the flash of a ship — the ferry from Tangier to Algeciras.

  1

  The girls on the top deck brush the hair from their faces. The hazy blue mountain ranges, rising on both sides of the Strait. The places you will never go, the life there. Ilham’s eyes wander over the mountains of the Rif, the country they are leaving behind. Why did they stay so long in Rabat? They had the car — they could have gone south, to the desert, but instead they spent the whole time hanging around the city. The terrace at Café Maure; the view of the Bou Regreg estuary and the Atlantic Ocean behind. The boys. The contraband at the boats.

  It feels like a loss, that they didn’t go to the desert, like a missed opportunity. They could have asked Saleh to go along; women in Morocco rarely travel alone. The looks, the comments — if it remains at that.

  They’ve been on the road for six weeks now, two weeks longer than planned. There had been problems. Situations. Those are behind them now; most of them have been solved.

  Saleh comes towards them, holding onto the benches to keep from being knocked over by the pounding of the ship and the hard wind.

  The other passengers are downstairs in the salons. Men are sleeping with their legs up on the worn benches; children are fussing, watched over by the women, their fatigue bottomless. The vague smell of piss everywhere.

  The freedom on the top deck is better, in the lee of the pilothouse as much as possible.

  ‘Hola, chicas,’ Saleh says.

  ‘Have you taken a look at him?’ Ilham asks.

  He nods. ‘No worries.’

  She is on unfamiliar ground; she has to trust him. His almond eyes, the domineering curl of his lips; you want to believe him.

  Fahd shows up too. He stumbles towards them across the deck, in his wake a boy they’ve never seen before. Fahd slides up beside Saleh, and the new boy sits down beside Thouraya. A long, nasty face, yellow teeth his lips can’t quite cover. He produces a hipflask, pours whiskey into the opening of a cola can.

  ‘Who are you?’ Ilham asks. She leans over. The wind tugs at the words in her mouth.

  ‘Mo,’ Saleh says. ‘He’s a gas.’

  ‘Can’t he talk for himself?’ She sees Mo’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he drinks.

  The cola can goes round; the girls pass.

  ‘He’s riding with me,’ Fahd says.

  ‘Oh really?’ Ilham says.

  ‘Cheaper than going alone.’

  Fahd can’t get his cigarette lit, not in the hollow of his hand, not in the shelter of his coat either.

  Ilham turns her head and looks at the crests, the sandy-coloured Spanish land beyond. Her mood has swung. Something has been disturbed. The order of things. They started off the day with the three of them, Thouraya, Saleh, and her, united in a conspiracy to get Murat to the far side. First they picked him up in Témara, in Tangier harbour number five; Fahd showed up — he was going to take the spare tyre back to Holland. Murat had nestled down into the deep hollow made for it, where he would spend the crossing, in the dark, covered with baggage. And now, suddenly, there are six of them. That’s not good. She was born on the fifth of January. There are five people in her family. The star on the Moroccan flag has five points. Five is better than six. The Israeli flag has six points, and her father hates the Jews.

  They light cigarettes from the one Fahd finally got lit. Thouraya snaps her fingers.

  ‘Woof,’ Fahd says, and hands her a cigarette. Ilham asks him for one too.

  She sucks smoke into her lungs. She thinks about cancer. Her uncle died of cancer. From the steel mills, her father says, but as a matter of fact there isn’t a single photo in which he’s not smoking a cigarette.

  It’s her uncle’s fault that she was born in Holland. In 1975, her father arrived in France from Targuist — that was all fairly easy back then; his brother convinced him to travel on to Holland. They worked in shifts at the Hoogoven mills, and shared a room in Beverwijk. They married and were laid off during the steel crisis in the early eighties. Life beat them down. Her uncle rose to his feet again, her father remained lying; he was the weaker of the two. But her uncle is dead and her father is still alive.

  Sometimes she thinks about life as a française. What it would have been like. A big country, more air. The way she’s sitting on deck now, the sky high and spacious above her.

  She hears her friend say: ‘Hey, give me a little room, would you?’

  Mo grins and puts his arm around Thouraya. A mouth made for saying dirty little things.

  ‘You they’d like to marry,’ Thouraya had said to her sometime in the last weeks. ‘With me they only want to do dirty shit.’

  Ilham had looked at her when she said it. Thouraya probably meant well, she figured, and she said: ‘They’d marry a dog, if it had a Dutch passport.’

  Thouraya pushes the boy’s arm away. ‘Buzz off, man!’

  Ilham looks at Saleh. No counting on him. She slides up a few feet, Thouraya slides along with her.

  The boys laugh about it. That’s the way it works, Ilham thinks, their earnest little game; they can’t not do it. Their desire, their eagerness — it has to be on display all the time, it determines their position in the group. They want it, the girls do, they just don’t know it yet. They have to be told that they want it.

  When he slides up to her again, Thouraya stands up resolutely and says to Ilham: ‘Yallah.’

  The other boys talk her into sitting back down; he’ll cool it now, really.

  A bit of ash blows into Ilham’s eye. She dabs at it with the tip of her sleeve.

  Saleh is sitting sideways on the bench, looking back at the land they’re leaving. She knows he has plans to go back, to set up something there — a boy like him probably has more of a chance in Morocco. The words ‘detention centre’ and ‘repeat offender’ wouldn’t be hanging in orbit around his life there. Going back — that had been their parents’ dream. Everything they did and did not do was a part of going back on that day. That day that never came.

  Saleh fishes a joint from the seam of his Gucci cap. The smoke stays inside him for a long time, finally leaving his nostrils in thin, blue streams.

  He has said that there’s nothing for them to worry about. They don’t check passenger cars. They could never do them all. Vans, campers, okay, but not passenger cars.


  He has done this before, he says. He’ll check on him during the crossing. Bring him a bottle of water, that kind of thing.

  The first time she met him was at a wedding party in Rijswijk. She started hearing things right away. Seven months for putting a retarded girl to work for him; he would wait for her at the gate to the shelter and bring her back in plenty of time. It took a long time for them to find out about it.

  It could be true, or not, but for a rumour there were an awful lot of details. You couldn’t forget about it, but you could look past it; it always remained somewhere at the edge of your vision.

  In Rabat, not long after they got there, he had taken her and Thouraya under his wing. He knew his way around. The Andalusian gardens in the Casbah, the cafe perched high on the city wall above the estuary, and the old pirates’ nest of Salé, further along, across the river. He kept the boys at bay. At bakers’ stands in the Casbah they had seen hornets teeming over the sugar-coated croissants; that’s how it was with the boys, too.

  The ones from Holland were the only ones Saleh let through. Daoud from Venlo, Brahim who drove a BMW. Even though they were in their parents’ homeland and staying with relatives, even though they identified with the people there, they were not Moroccans. That is what they had in common. That they were seen as tourists. That they paid tourist prices. They were the children of two kingdoms, they carried the green passport of the Royaume du Maroc and the red-lead one of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but in both countries they were, above all, foreigners.

  The discussions in the playground back then, or in the auditorium — how she had demanded her rightful place. Ilham Assouline, as Dutch as they came. How she had fired personal particulars at them: I, Ilham Assouline, born in the Red Cross Hospital in Beverwijk, a student at Kennemer College high school, who swims in the same dull sea you do in the summer. So if that hasn’t made me Dutch already, when will it?

  She had been angry and expectant; antagonism only egged her on.