E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
Assor As Rich as the King
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78227-891-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A Tale of Casablanca
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-891-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Abigail Assor was born in Casablanca in 1990. As Rich as the King is her debut novel. It won the Françoise Sagan Prize, the Bookstagram Prize and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize for Debut Novel in France, and is now being translated into six languages
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They stood waiting outside the large, Moorish, cedarwood front door that was no longer really in vogue. You didn’t see riad-style doors or zellige-tiled fountains much anymore in Anfa Supérieur. Now it was all wrought iron gates, plate glass windows, white villas like in Los Angeles and dogs. A minute earlier, as they’d turned into Rue Ibnou Jabir, the labrador belonging to the villa on the corner had barked as they went by. Yaya leapt in fright, then muttered, ‘Dirty beast. Who keeps a fucking street dog in their house? They really fancy they’re French.’ The heavy double doors drew slowly open and a maid appeared, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Welcome, Lalla, welcome, Sidi.’ She bobbed her head, smiling. She led them along a little stone path set into the grass. As they made their way among the palm trees and red hibiscus, Sarah counted her footsteps—one, two, three, ten steps, fifteen steps, as many as her street in Hay Mohammadi, and they hadn’t even reached the garden yet.
At the end of the path was the pool. It was dark now, and the lit-up pool glowed blue like the spring sky at eight o’clock in the evening in the month of Ramadan, when the sun’s just gone down, the stars aren’t out yet and everyone’s at home breaking the fast around a table laid for iftar. Every evening during Ramadan, every year, she ran from the bidonville to the Corniche, then walked along the Corniche to the Sun. The Sun was a beach club you had to pay to enter, and every time she tried to get in during the day the bouncer threw a shoe in her face. But during iftar, when there was no one else around, she’d jump the barrier and hurry past the restaurant down some dirt steps to the deckchairs on the sand. They were stacked one on top of another. She took off her sandals and clambered up. When she got to the top, she sat down cross-legged and looked out to sea. Then she stretched out, a queen, looking up at the royal blue sky that existed only for her. When it got dark, she sat back up. She jumped back down onto the sand, grazing her knee, spraining her ankle, and went home to Hay Mohammadi.
‘Ahlan, friends!’
While Yaya was greeting everyone, all Sarah wanted to do was dive into the sky-blue pool—except that there, sitting on a lounger next to Badr playing the guitar, was Driss. Then she remembered that one day she too would have her blue sky all year round, with no barrier to climb over, a pool in her very own kingdom. She sat down on a deckchair next to Yaya.
‘Hey, man,’ said Badr, his fingers sliding over the guitar strings, ‘you’re bringing us girls now, are you?’ Alain, beside him, laughed. He was drinking whisky and Coke in great gulps, and stroking Chirine’s smooth, glossy hair with his free hand. Chirine, her head in his lap, was yawning. Driss had his back to the others—he was playing patience.
‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ said Yaya, taking off his cap. He took out a little plastic-wrapped bundle and put it on the table. ‘I’ve not forgotten you.’
‘Serve yourself a drink,’ said Badr, getting to his feet.
Alain was already sniffing the weed, practically crushing Chirine’s face. ‘Stop it,’ she said, sitting up, her cry as shrill as the gulls that swoop over the port of Essaouira. As she brushed her hair out of her face, she caught Sarah’s eye and smiled. But Sarah didn’t care about her. She was only interested in Driss’s bent back that was almost vibrating as he obsessively shuffled the cards, as if Badr’s guitar, Chirine’s squeals, Yaya’s weed and she were at the very edge of his world, far away, towards the south, muffled by the dunes of Dakhla. And then Badr came back with the money. Yaya put his arm round Sarah’s shoulder:
‘I’m off. Can I leave this little princess with you?’
Badr froze. Chirine, open-mouthed, glanced over at Alain who, joint between his fingers, looked taken aback. Driss, noticing the sudden silence, turned his head towards them. His eyes met Sarah’s, perhaps he recognized them—instantly, he lowered his gaze.
‘Come on, brothers,’ said Yaya, ‘she’s just a little Frenchie, sweet sixteen with no plans for this evening.’
‘Sixteen!’ said Chirine sharply. ‘Your parents let you out like that?’
Sarah shrugged her shoulders and let out a little laugh. ‘Yup,’ she said. Badr, fixing his huge, dark pupils on her, asked her what her name was, if she was at the French lycée—the same school he’d gone to a few years earlier, like all the rich Moroccans of Casa. ‘Yup,’ she said again. She used her eyes to convey all the charm she was capable of, all the sincerity and mystery and beauty, everything that her whole life had enabled her to procure what the world gave freely to others: paninis, milkshakes, cinema tickets, bottles of perfume. It worked, as it always did.
All night long they smoked, danced on the lawn, pushed each other into the pool; Sarah had a great time. Driss was still playing cards, but Badr couldn’t keep his eyes off her. It was like they were sewn on to her smooth, plump cheeks, and after Yaya had left she said it, like that, insolently:
‘Badr, your eyes, it’s like they’re sewn on to me!’ The words came to her just like that. She’d spent the earlier part of the evening altering a dress that her mother had picked up at the Institut Français—a long blue beach robe that might have belonged, at best, to an actress who’d performed at their theatre, or a singer, or the wife of the president of the Cercle Amical des Français, or of the tennis coach from Mohammédia, maybe even a student who’d got rid of a bunch of old clothes before leaving Casa; anyone, basically—Sarah prayed as she sewed—as long as none of these women had ever been seen wearing it by anyone from the lycée. Everything she picked up second-hand she took apart and refashioned until all the curves of the previous owner, all the wrinkles in the fabric made by her movements, the smell, dissolved and died, slain by her scissors.
Badr smiled. ‘Well, well. She’s not shy, Yaya’s little princess.’
He sat down next to her, posing with his guitar, his wet hair smelling of chlorine; he began singing in English, and sometimes instead of a chorus he chanted obscenities in Arabic to the same melody. Everyone laughed. He kept his eyes on Sarah, like two squashed cockroaches attached to her cheeks with big stitches, oozing fat and sweat, repeating the same obscenities even louder, answered by more laughter, though not as hearty as before. He was already a little bit in love with her.
Later, lounging by the sky-blue pool beneath a tall palm tree, Badr and she were blowing smoke rings with Yaya’s weed, when he asked the question: ‘So who are you?’
Up until then he’d held her hand, spun her round on the grass, splashed her, asked her, ‘What does she want to drink, Yaya’s little princess?’ But he hadn’t asked her that. Sarah knew that a boy who’s in love doesn’t want to know that sort of thing; he wants to love wholeheartedly like you’d love a flower, love like that can last for months, as long as you can’t see the roots, the underside of the skin, the dust. But lying there by the pool, neither she nor Badr had been able to think of anything to say to each other for at least ten minutes as they smoked their joint, and a few feet away Alain was bleating like a goat, mimicking the peddler who sold eggs and bleach in the streets of Casa, and Chirine was howling with laughter. Sarah even heard Driss chuckle. So poor Badr had to say something. He couldn’t leave them both alone in their silence like that.
‘What do you mean, who am I?’ said Sarah, as she gazed up at the sheltering palm fronds.
‘A beautiful girl like you, sixteen years old, hanging around with dealers and old folk like us, I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Before she answered, Sarah turned her head to look at him. She still had to unleash all the enchantment of her beauty to distract Badr from the little rundown house in Hay Mohammadi.
‘You know who I am.’
‘I do?’
He’d also turned his head and was staring at her apprehensively, like a child.
‘I’m Yaya’s little princess.’
At these words, Badr burst out laughing and Sarah understood it was a laugh of relief.
They stood up and went back to join the others on the sunloungers. Badr was whispering bits of gossip to Sarah, and whenever he got too close she drew back, knowing that this slight recoiling would give birth to all his hopes of seeing her again mingled with doubts and fears, and that these hopes and these doubts and fears would hallow her status as a guest at all Badr’s future pool parties until the end of time, or at least until her beauty faded. Even the pool parties that would happen after she married Driss—she’d wear a new blue dress made by someone other than...
