The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.
The property itself was as close as a locale could get to being a palace without belonging to a king. Collected around a careful profusion of lemon and orange trees, low-slung rose bushes and encroaching juniper, each side of the riad ascended in a starkly elegant blend of plaster and marble, studded with interior-facing balconies and hand-etched banisters, designed to glitter in the midday sun beneath a sheen of meticulously brushed-on egg white. Inside, crystal chandeliers dripped above the tiled floors of no fewer than a dozen salons. Stained glass, crafted in the same exquisitely intricate floral motif throughout the residence, cast shades of royal violet, palm green, and saffron across the high-pile woolen rugs, handwoven over the course of months, sometimes years, by women from the southern mountain tribes. Beneath the colorful expanse of the rugs, hand-cut tiles spiraled in delicate patterns, the shapes and shades of opals from the Baḥr Fāris and emeralds from the Black Desert of Egypt. On the upper floors, silk drapery—the work of assiduous silkworms imported from China’s Zhejiang Province, locally helmed by a half-blind weaver whose reputation in agave silk was undisputed—shielded the elaborate serving trays, mounted lanterns, and candlesticks, all made from hammered Tinghir silver, from view. The centerpiece of the courtyard was a spectacular fountain in the shape of an octagonal Islamic star, a Rub-el-Hizb, whose corners pointed in both cardinal and intercardinal directions like a built-in compass, as if to say, Whichever way you’re facing, you’re fine.
Some time after Abdellah Bensaïd’s death, his grandson’s third wife (the first two had, respectively, died and been divorced with little drama) took over most of the operations of the property. One of the third wife’s most salient traits was loathing insects, and whenever a festively striated paper wasp, stridulent dragonfly, or contingent of Saharan silver ants crossed her path, she’d shriek with the end-of-world gusto of a woman in unmedicated labor. As a result of this reaction, her husband, who worried that the frequency and alacrity of the performance might be misinterpreted by their neighbors as some sort of recurring abuse, was extremely supportive when she hired a full team of specialists, both ancient and modern, to eradicate garden pests. Botanists and shawafas were brought in, scientists and experts in the occult, and through some combination of the applied efforts—which were far too numerous and diverse for anyone to be properly credited—the riad was, one day, completely free of bugs, rodents, and any other living thing with four to a hundred legs. Even the birds, which had once nested in the long, upturned branches of the cedar trees and pecked at the lemons where they fell, now swooped toward the edge of the roof and then swiftly darted away, as though averted by some unwelcome scent. No one ever solved the mystery of what deterred the creatures, although everyone had their own theories. Rich people, Khalida reminds us, can afford anything.
As is true of most Moroccan riads, the windows of Riad Jennaa faced inward. The building, though traditional in its structure, was of especial size and at a slight remove from the neighboring residences along the otherwise crowded derb. Four impenetrable, windowless walls formed the exterior of the property, giving no hint as to what was inside, although this occlusion only served to foment conjecture. Every once in a while, a nimble-legged neighbor boy would climb one of the unnaturally tall cedars across the alley, peer over the high garden wall, and report back with some fresh piece of intelligence, although this was usually exaggerated, or fabricated altogether.
The riad was alternately coveted, praised, and dismissed by the local populace, but always the subject of gossip. There was a rumor that the original plans for the property were far more modest, but that Abdellah Bensaïd had collaborated with the French when Emir Abdelkader fled to Morocco from Algeria, and that his cooperation with the colonizers had been compensated handsomely. Then, nearly a century later (at least according to rumor), Abdellah Bensaïd’s great-great-grandson made a second fortune brokering exchanges of Moroccan sugar for marble from Mussolini’s Italy. Half the mosques and madrasas in Fès, it was said, had Axis marble in the walls.
But, over the following century, especially after France withdrew and left the country more or less to its own devices, Abdellah Bensaïd’s once-great dynasty suffered. By the onset of the twenty-first century, his heirs had so thoroughly failed to maintain, let alone magnify, their family fortune that the topic of selling Riad Jennaa arose.
Now, Khalida notes, here’s where it gets interesting. She explains that, under Moroccan inheritance law, the vote on what to do with a property must be unanimous among shareholders. In other words, if fifteen brothers wish to sell their father’s property, but the sixteenth brother disagrees, the property cannot be sold.
Such was the exact case of Chakir, the sixteenth brother of his family.
“Come on, brother,” the eldest son, Abdellah (the eldest had always been Abdellah, for as long as anyone could remember; the property documents were a litany of Abdellahs), coaxed him. “Why won’t you agree? All of our brothers are in accord, but we are powerless if you disagree.”
Chakir laughed. “What good is a house split sixteen ways?” he asked. “Together, we have something. But separately, the profit will be eaten within a year. Besides,” he added, “a man is what he owns.”
Abdellah found Chakir’s resolve troubling, and difficult to argue with. But what Chakir had said—that a man is what he owns—lingered after they’d parted. Chakir, as one of the sixteen brothers, presently owned the house, which in some sense defined him. All Abdellah had to do was find something else to define him, something Chakir could own, ideally something not split sixteen ways.
With a sudden, spectacular jolt of clarity, Abdellah had an idea.
In those days, Khalida offers as context, women were thought of in a certain way. When reminded that she’s talking about the present day, what’s only just recently happened with the house, she grimaces and says, Yes, I suppose that’s true.
The fifteen brothers were irate at Chakir’s obstinance. They’d, somewhat counterintuitively, met at Hamid’s house, which was much smaller than the house they all still owned, and had spent the morning fuming, getting hopped up on heavily sugared tea, and forgetting their arguments—impassionedly presented and mostly on top of one another—halfway through. Their attentions were finally reunited by Abdellah’s return. “Brothers,” Abdellah announced, “I have a solution.”
When a man cannot be willed in a particular direction, Abdellah proposed, there is only one answer: a woman.
Chakir had lost his wife two years earlier, to an illness that wasn’t taken seriously enough soon enough. She was mourned elaborately, the outpourings of grief amplified by her youth, beauty, and childlessness, although the last of these was probably for the best, people whispered, considering the circumstances. In the time since, Chakir had grown introspective and moody, loathe to leave his small but neatly kept home—a modest dar just off Talaa Sghira, twelve minutes by foot from the ancestral riad—since the route out of the medina took him directly past the shops where the tombstones were chiseled. From morning until late into the evening (depending on demand), the carvers would stand in their knockoff Nike sandals and faded track shorts, half in the street, just barely within the shade of their shops, clacking the names of the deceased in finely rendered Arabic script into the marble. Hamid had asked Chakir once whether it was the sound of the chisel, its earsplitting CHACK-CHACK-CHACKing, that was so painful, but Chakir had replied that it was the sound of the radio playing upbeat chaabi music, the casual way in which the carvers were dressed, their hollow banter and expressions indistinguishable from those of the men selling candy two doors down. This rare insight into Chakir’s emotional state had eventually made it back to the other brothers, and they were all worried for him. If a man were disturbed by sneakers and smiles, he could not be well. It was time, his fifteen brothers agreed, that something be done.
With the clear goal of a new wife for Chakir, someone who could serve as both an ally to the family on the issue of Riad Jennaa and a salve for his wounded heart (the selflessness of the pitch varied by audience), the family snapped into action. They called friends and relatives. They listened for local announcements of untimely deaths, attentive to whether the deceased left an attractive young widow behind. They asked their wives about their friends’ sisters, daughters, nieces. They gathered intelligence over tea, at their souks and barbers, from the drivers of the petit taxis that circled the city like a flock of swallows. They put photos of the women on the table, like headshots at a casting office.
Certain candidates were ruled out on the basis of age, bad rumors, or, in one case, a twitchy-looking eye. (One brother thought it might be a wink, as they were just looking at a photograph, but a majority of the brothers felt that this was not necessarily better than a twitchy eye.) Of the remaining women, a few had other marital prospects, or fathers who were on bad terms with the family. Those who were not ruled out were organized and contacted, more or less in order of preference. It was, in fact, a great deal like casting. The beauty and availability of the candidates were factors, obviously, but there was also some je ne sais quoi element that made certain women more appealing.
Abdellah met with the women one by one at his home in the Ville Nouvelle, a pert two-story house at a reputable, suburban remove from the medina. Each woman arrived in an embroidered kaftan, mdama, and matching headscarf. Each smiled and guessed at the degree of warmth and vivacity that was preferred by the host. And each stumbled at only one point in the interview: a delicate segment, something unprecedented, which none of these bridal candidates had ever been asked by the families of any potential suitors.
They were asked to betray their future husband.
At this point in the interview, Abdellah would sigh and open his palms in a gesture of what he trusted to be understood as empathy, as though he, too, were subject to the unusual predicament of the candidates. “It’s only a house,” he would say. “Think of the money.”
Most women understood what he meant: that money could be real to them, here and now, in a way that owning something never would be. But they also felt thrown by the question of loyalty. How could they be trusted by the family if their first act was of subterfuge against their spouse? Was it some sort of joke? A test?
Some of the women believed that Abdellah was sincere, neither teasing nor tricking them, but wished to affirm their morality. Others found Abdellah to be a bit shifty, and although they might have been willing to go along with the plot, believed that refusal was most likely the desired response. Others were so confused that they simply floundered and tried their best to steer the conversation in another direction, like cooking skills or childcare or an affinity for visiting El Jadida in June, but this only exasperated Abdellah, who needed a reliable accomplice, or, at the very least, one who understood what was going on.
Each candidate, after this point in the interview, dropped away. All except one.
Naima, from the very beginning, impressed Abdellah in a way that frightened him a little. Unlike the other women, she wore a dark, single-toned kaftan with no superfluous hand-stitching or embroidery. Beyond this, the manner in which she carried herself was unusual, as though her beauty were perfunctory and of no personal interest. She took her tea without sugar, also a bit odd, and met Abdellah’s gaze evenly, without fidgeting. Her composure was disconcerting to him, and he found himself fidgeting in inverse proportion, as though the conversation required a certain amount of jitteriness and it was now up to him to meet the quota.
Naima had been sourced from a cousin in Imlil, a restaurateur, whose produce deliveryman had a sister-in-law from Souss-Massa-Drâa, roughly in the vicinity of Aït Mzil. This sister-in-law had a sister who was unmarried, and who was reportedly strong, beautiful, and resilient, a description typical of women from the region.
Also of interest, although Abdellah didn’t see anything especially significant about it for his purposes, was Naima’s family history. She was one of three sisters, no brothers. After her father died, her mother, her sisters, and she continued to care for the place where they had lived since Naima was born. They tended the plants and trees, the animals, the outbuildings as they’d always done. But, meter by meter, month by month, the borders of her father’s property became narrower and narrower. The neighbors let their animals graze farther and farther. They harvested from soil that wasn’t theirs, constructed fences along property lines drawn from their imaginations. At first, the women tried to preserve their home, but each attempt at recourse—public records of title, local members of the judiciary, the police—only led to more friends of the encroachers. It was said by some that the land was better off in the hands of neighbors than the family, now just a widow and three fatherless girls, who couldn’t possibly hope to keep the place in order, although of course they always had. Within a year, the land had been so thoroughly invaded that only a meter remained on each side of the earthen house, and it was suspected that this, too, would not remain in their possession for long. Naima’s older sisters found husbands, her mother went to live with a not-too-distant aunt, and Naima took a job at a hotel in Taliouine which was never fully occupied and where she was permitted to live in one of the spare rooms.
When she was hired, she lined up her few things on the wide ledge of the bathroom sink, stone and jewel-blue tile arrayed in the style of a public fountain. She hung her clothing on hangers in the cedar wardrobe, nearly the same dimensions as the single bed if it were stood upright. She found no spiders, although their abandoned architecture was everywhere. She gently cleared the corners of fraying tufts of web, twirling them around the neck of a vase like she’d seen once in a French film where a man wound cotton candy around a conical spear of paper. She had no photos of the house where she’d grown up and which she’d kept for so long, and so, with a pen from the hotel’s reception desk, she drew it, nested among the low-slung branches of the gnarled tamarisk trees and scrappy myrtles, the road leading toward it freckled with cairns. She only had the pen, so wasn’t able to capture the color, but remembered the house in a rash of sunlight, the hue of powdered coriander.
When the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd put the word out, broadly but discreetly, about the search for a second wife for Chakir, Naima was curious. She had spent nearly a year at the hotel in Taliouine, scouring moka pots and stocking bottles of Sidi Ali, fielding middle-of-the-night requests for shampoo and ashtrays, ushering spiders from the rooms of the guests when cleaning the showers and changing the sheets. On the rare occasion when a guest asked for a printout of their train ticket or boarding pass, Naima would linger at the computer for a moment or two, looking up the name of the latest spider she’d conveyed to the shrubs on the far side of the pool. She discovered online that many of the spiders were Plexippus paykulli, named for Gustaf von Paykull. The next time a guest asked for a ticket to be printed, she learned that Gustaf von Paykull, whose portrait had the cheerful, swollen sheen of an oily, overpuffed brouiat, was a highly regarded zoologist and member of Swedish society in the early 1900s, mostly on account of his donation of dead animals to the prestigious natural history museum in Stockholm. He’d sold what he felt he owned, or discovered, or defined, living or dead, and now a colony of nimble, strikingly striped arachnids bearing his name populated the poolside shrubbery of Dar Taliouine.
That was the very afternoon when, after enduring a brief and baffled interrogation from her manager regarding the reception desk computer’s internet search history, Naima received a message from her sister about the marriage inquiry from Fès. Two hours later, a sprightly nephew with a gray Peugeot, which he’d affectionately named Balak, the word often shouted at pedestrians when a donkey was coming through, conveyed Naima to the main station in Agadir, where she boarded a bus to Marrakech, and from there a train to Fès.
Very little of this came up in the interview, but Abdellah got the sense that Naima was a person of purpose, which he perceived to be aligned with his own. He was glad that he’d connected with the Imlil cousin’s deliveryman’s sister-in-law’s sister. He felt, as the interview went on, that it was fate. He wouldn’t go so far as to invoke God’s will—although his breakfast, morning walk, cab ride, two personal phone calls, one professional phone call, second cab ride, and brief exchange with the doorman were all casually peppered with insha’Allahs, the caveat that God’s will be done attached to nearly every imaginable incident—but he finally felt things were on his side.
When it came to the part of the conversation where Abdellah revealed the conspiracy at the heart of his recruitment, he leaned forward slightly, fingertips pressed together in an ogival arch. He was buzzing a bit from the tea, which his wife kept bringing to the salon in rounds. “Naima,” he said slowly, “there is a special reason I would like you to marry my brother.” He went on to describe Riad Jennaa as a millstone around the family’s collective neck, an archaic monstrosity where no one had lived for the past generation. He didn’t bother much with the details of why the place should be sold; after all, Naima’s concern wouldn’t be the finer points of real estate but rather seducing her new husband to conform to the family’s point of view. He spared her the minutiae and focused on the moral and economic rectitude of his position on the matter. “Most importantly,” he said, “it’s in Chakir’s best interest as well. All of us brothers agree.” At this point in the pitch, he leaned back from Naima, who had been listening attentively, and opened his palms with what he intended as a credible sigh. “So, what do you think?”
“I think that, sometimes,” Naima said carefully, “deceit is the trapdoor through which we enter paradise.”
“Yes!” Abdellah smacked his open palms together. “You understand me exactly. This, all of this, is for my brother’s own good.”
Things moved quickly in the coming days. There was a notable advantage to the rigor of the screening process, which had yielded only one candidate: Abdellah could present Naima as an outcome of serendipity rather than an exhaustive (and fairly duplicitous) search.
It wasn’t love exactly, but Chakir did take to Naima. She found nothing to object to in his appearance or demeanor, and was in fact somewhat drawn to his air of placid gloom. Her few things were delivered from the hotel in Taliouine, local arrangements were made, and the couple was married.
Here, Khalida describes the festivities of a Moroccan wedding celebration—the endless costume changes, the parading of the bride atop the extravagant roofed platform of the amaria—and notes that none of these interested Naima and Chakir, so very few of the flashier customs were observed. The proceedings were modest and swift. Aside from the elaborate dinner that followed, the only evidence that the event was a wedding at all were the lavish, gold-threaded kaftan into which Naima had been cajoled and the presence of an imam.
Roughly a week after the wedding, three of the brothers came to visit the newlyweds at Chakir’s dar: Latif (a middleish brother who had volunteered to help introduce the topic of Riad Jennaa as slyly as possible), Abdellah (who didn’t trust Latif to be very sly), and Hakim (who was mostly there to offset Abdellah’s presence, which might be taken to be too overtly connected to the agenda of selling Riad Jennaa, especially if he kept interrupting Latif). By the time they arrived, Naima had prepared a platter of cut vegetables and olives, sliced bread, and a cluster of small bowls with oil and spices. They sat in the salon and complimented Naima’s feminine touch, although nothing in the aesthetics of the dar had changed since her arrival.
Partway through the meal, Latif cleared his throat and smiled. Abdellah’s grip tightened stiffly around his glass of tea. Hakim helped himself to another serving of tajine, so as to be the only brother behaving normally. “Tell me, Naima,” Latif said, “what do you think of our ancestral home?” Abdellah rolled his eyes.
Naima met Latif’s gaze with an expression so unflustered that it could hardly even be called a smile. “I must confess, I haven’t had the chance to see it yet,” she replied, giving no indication to Chakir as to whether or not she knew about the place, or to the brothers whether she and Chakir had yet discussed it.
“Well, you must!” Latif exclaimed.
“Do what you like,” Abdellah said. He smiled rigidly and gave Latif’s knee a hard squeeze. Hakim, for his part, continued to eat.
Chakir watched his brothers for a moment, then returned his attention to his bride. “Yes,” he finally said. “You should see it. I’ll take you there on a walk, if you’d like.”
“I’d like that very much,” Naima said.
Abdellah relaxed his grip, feeling this phase of the plot to have been passably executed, and returned to his meal.
At the end of the visit, Abdellah, Latif, and Hakim praised Naima’s cooking and congratulated Chakir profusely, then left. As they walked back along Talaa Sghira, past the tombstone carvers, toward Bab Boujloud, Latif remarked that Chakir and Naima seemed less like spouses and more like magnets in proximity, attached at times, but at others simply on the outskirts of each other’s fields, near but alone, at a distance they each seemed to agree on.
Abdellah told Latif he sounded like an imbecile. Hakim, who’d been gifted by Naima with a batch of maakouda to take home, simply continued to eat.
Lying in bed that night, Chakir thought of the house. Perhaps his brothers were right. It was unoccupied; there was money to be gained. Although none of his brothers had articulated it exactly, he was certain that a few of them (somewhere between three and five) were wily enough to recognize an opportunity in Naima. An opinion on a matter could be so fragile, especially in the shadow of the majority. He must present the house to her before his brothers had a chance to speak with her about it. Feeling himself to have a plan in place, Chakir finally fell asleep. Naima, who knew exactly what must be done and thus had no such fretful strategizing on her mind, had already been asleep for hours.
The following day, Chakir guided his new wife along the cobblestone road south across Talaa Sghira, past the barbershop and the new guesthouses that kept springing up with names like Saharan Nights (although they were not in the Sahara) and Dar Chez Maman (although no one’s mother was involved in the enterprise). The entrance to Riad Jennaa was situated on a quiet, high-walled stretch of road that curved toward a row of produce stands and, beyond that, a five-star hotel that no tourist seemed to be capable of finding without a local guide, which was perhaps by design.
It was early enough in the day that there were still long, tightly strung wires of agave stretched along the narrow alleys, and Naima and Chakir ducked under them as they approached the broad cedar door, studded and inlaid with iron, that guarded Riad Jennaa.
Each of the brothers had a key—Chakir took pride in showing Naima the age-worn notches on his—but there was also a way to open the door by leaning against it at a particular angle while jiggling the upper hinge and jimmying the lower. This is how they entered Riad Jennaa on this occasion, and Chakir laughed with pleasure when Naima tried and succeeded at performing the trick.
Once inside, Chakir reset the door in its frame, then adjusted the iron bolt that cut across the door’s center with the rugged precision of a surgical scar. He was curious about Naima’s reaction to the place, and when he turned to observe her she was already at the edge of the fountain, staring down into the empty tile of the eight-sided star.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. She thought of the home she’d tried again and again to draw, the delicate blush-blue of the saffron petals, the lacing of webs in the corners. She listened for the raucous skirmishes of finches in the caper bushes, the rustle of leaf beetles, the sand-red goats in the argan tree. She looked toward the stained-glass windows, the glittering banisters, and breathed, uneasy, in the silence. “But where are all the animals, the insects?”
Chakir told Naima the story of his great-great-great-great-grandmother, something of a legend both locally and familially, who had purged the property of every living thing aside from the meticulously kept trees, flowers, and vines. He explained that the suite of protocols instituted by his ancestor—helmed by shawafas, botanists, and various practitioners of obscure specializations—had been maintained for centuries, in some cases by the descendants of the original workers, in others by apprentices and referrals, generation by generation. Their efforts were mythic, apparently effective, and of some expense to the family. Chakir spoke impassively, with neither judgment nor awe, and Naima listened intently, likewise revealing neither whether she was repulsed or impressed. “There is an opportunity now,” Chakir concluded carefully, “to sell Riad Jennaa.”
Naima smiled then, upon hearing the name of the place aloud from Chakir’s mouth. “Jennaa,” she repeated. “Paradise.”
“That’s right.”
Naima looked around at the gleaming walls of white marble and plaster, the braided rails of the balconies, the stained-glass windows like tapestries in a private museum. She listened to the uncanny silence—no skittering lizards or squawking birds, no water trickling through the fountain at her feet—amended only by sounds from beyond the walls: the muted thump of a banged-up leather ball and its attendant cohort of laughing, bickering children; the whir and rattle of carts wheeling over the uneven cobblestones; the metal awning of a shop scraping and then clanking into place.
Chakir watched his bride with interest. “It’s a bit unusual,” he said, “and I’ll spare you the dull details of property rights, but the decision, as it happens, has fallen to me whether to sell or not. What do you think?”
This was the moment, Naima knew, of doing what must be done. She looked to the bare tiles, the pristine glass, the withering tendrils of halfah grass slung over the rim of the drained fountain.
“No,” she said, as she had always intended to say. “You should never sell.”
Khalida wishes to point out that the aftermath was madness. Gossip was rampant (owing mostly to brothers two and four), and there was a brief flirtation with Morocco World News. The story was squelched, as such things often are (following an intervention from brothers five and eight). The medina erupted with rumors, and, as one might expect, the family was furious. Abdellah threw up his hands and growled in a way that spooked the younger brothers and reminded the elder brothers of when they’d wrestled as boys and the roughhousing would turn serious. And though Abdellah pled with Chakir, assisted at times by other brothers and their gamut of strategies, the youngest would not change his mind. Abdellah harbored a private fury for Naima, who was, on the rare occasions when their paths intersected, enragingly calm. Abdellah sometimes felt himself maddened to the point of telling Chakir the truth: that Naima had been sourced for the explicit purpose of inducing the sale of Riad Jennaa. But there was, of course, no advantage to this; it would only serve to reinforce Naima’s loyalty to Chakir, and would cast Abdellah in a rather unforgivable light. So Abdellah’s entreaties gradually ebbed, and the riad stood, empty and unsaleable, less and less tended, immune to condemnation of any kind. The eclectic and considerable maintenance costs—which had been kept up without interruption for the past century and a half, and only sustained recently with an aim toward selling the place—were abruptly suspended.
Beyond a predictable array of housework, for which her stint at the hotel in Taliouine had equipped her with an especial efficiency, Naima was free. These days, she often buys a glass of lemonade, opens the broad cedar door, and sits at the edge of the Rub-el-Hizb fountain, now gamely rife with slithering lizards and bellicose beetles; speckled spiders renamed as Plexippus paykulli, blithely ignorant of Gustaf von Paykull, maneuvering through the halfah grass; paper wasps and silver Saharan ants; susurruses of dragonflies.
Naima walks through the place she doesn’t own, where the stones underfoot are still redolent of opals, as they have always been. The fifteen brothers have not yet forgiven Chakir, and likely never will. Naima, on the contrary, has come out relatively unscathed. Blame, she’s found, is a bit like inheritance.
One can only bear what she’s been given.
A. J. Bermudez is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is a recipient of the PAGE Award, the Diverse Voices Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Steinbeck Fellowship.
