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wife or colleagues was a priority, and he found disputes over material things particularly pointless. He minded his business, quietly, inoffensively. When there was a strike, he went along with everyone else, never took the lead, followed Marcel’s orders, waited for the whole thing to blow over. It’s not my problem, he said. The French are used to going on strike, so I do as they do, and sometimes I don’t even know why we’ve stopped work, so Marcel explains it to me, and while I’m listening I think about somethingelse, like my childhood back home, and I smile, because if I’d stayed home no French fellow would ever have taken the trouble to tell me the reasons for a strike, political or whatever, and no European would have asked for my opinion! It’s really your decision, Marcel tells me. You can vote against the strike, that’s your right; we’ve got a democracy here.
    The first time Mohammed had heard that word was in a café in Marrakech, one day while he was waiting for the bus to Tangier. Someone on the radio was shouting, “Demokratia al hakikya!” Democracy and truth. Later, on the bus, a man sat down next to him and began explaining what it was all about: You see, we who live out in the country, when we go to the city we feel like we don’t belong, but with demokratia we’ll get better treatment —that’s what a guy said on the radio the other day, that we’ll all be equal and our children will go to public school for free, like hospitals and medicines will be too, but to get that you have to go vote, even if you can’t read, so you just put your fingerprints in a notebook, then you vote, that’s demokratia , and then we’ll get water, electricity in the village, plus we’ll have roads and even streetlights because you see, we want to be like Europeans and that’ll take time and lots of effort, but we’ll get there, so anyway, right now I need to smoke this cigarette. Got a light?

4
    MOHAMMED HANDED all bureaucratic paperwork to his youngest daughter, who spent hours filling out forms for the welfare and health insurance agencies, the bank, and the tax authorities. Although Mohammed had learned the alphabet back in Koranic school and could write his name in Arabic, his signature was a drawing of a tree—an olive tree, he said, the very one (and the only one) that grew in his village. He drew two vertical lines topped with a circle full of crosshatching: an original signature, unlike the traditional X used by his friends.
    I can’t write, but I like to draw. The children don’t know this; they’d make fun of me, so I draw in secret. Don’t need school for that. In fact, I have a notebook full of drawings, which I’ll leave to my children or, rather, to my grandchildren. I draw trees and houses. That’s all. Trees with fruits of every colour, big trees, middle-size ones, squat ones, trees thin as sticks, others that are bushy; I draw groves of them and even a forest, and I can walk in the forest, lose my way, stop and sit down with my back against an immense tree trunk, and though I don’t know the name of this tree, it offers cool shade to rest in, gives me fresh air, and it does me good, this tree that exists only in the forest I draw, for I knowit doesn’t exist anywhere else. I draw trees and forests because we don’t have any back home, up country where it’s all dust and stones, dryness everywhere, and among the large or small stones there are scorpions that sting children while they sleep so that they die asphyxiated, sometimes, when people forget to raise the beds high enough, as with my four-year-old niece who was killed by a scorpion one night: in the morning she was swollen , her eyes shut, she had stopped breathing. If only we’d had water, some small streams, the scorpion wouldn’t have stung my little niece.
    I draw playgrounds, slides, mazes in an English garden like the one I saw one day on the TV: the whole movie took place among these crisply trimmed rows of