Read Online A Palace in the Old Village by Tahar Ben Jelloun - Free Book Online Page A

the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, a sacred night, worth more than a thousand months, so for death, I’ll arrange to escape the box, because even if I’m dying I’ll take the plane—and I hateplanes—to die at home, not with strangers, foreigners who know nothing of my religion, my traditions.
    Aha! you’ll tell me. And your children? Well, that’s a sore point, very sore. No, my children will be saddened, but would they escort me back home? Would they wash my body in the Muslim way? If I’m buried in the village, will they come pay their respects at my tomb? Perhaps at first, but later they won’t bother to come all that way to visit a grave overgrown with weeds, strewn with plastic bags, empty bottles, old newspapers thrown there by visitors without any sense of propriety. Lots of Moroccans leave their litter in cemeteries as if the dead had no right to clean graves. I can’t see my children gathering to remember their father on some Friday just before the noonday prayer, raising their hands, palms pressed together, and reciting a few verses from the sura “ Al-Baqara ” to ask God to have mercy on my soul.* I don’t see them spending any vacation time to perform such seemingly useless actions. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t ever think of me; they’ll remember me in their own way, any way they like, but they’ll remember me. When I visit my parents’ graves, I get the shivers; I sit on a large stone and talk to them the way I used to, telling them about my life and the people they loved, going into detail, especially for my mother, who was always eager for news—I can still hear her demanding to know the name of the grocer’s fiancée and how many children he had with his first wife, and asking if my aunt is still so stingy and bad tempered and her children still dirty and greedy. I imagine all that and I smile. I love that ritual. Then I go pray at the little mosque and give alms.
    Oh, enough of these black ideas—my children will never leave me! I’d rather not think that they might ever forget me. Last year a poor Algerian fellow was buried in Bobigny, where they had a hard time finding him a tiny spot in the Muslim cemetery. His children didn’t want to send his body back to his village: they said that Algeria wasn’t their country anymore and France wasn’t either, so what did it matter in which hole they buried the body? What counts is the soul, in any case, and once it leaves the body it goes off to God. But I wouldn’t like to leave my body in a French hole. It’s foolish, what I’m saying, but if I could be certain that my children would often visit my grave if I were buried in France, no problem, I’d give my body to Lalla LaFrance; I’d make things simpler for them.
    I’ll be frank: black or grey thoughts aside, deep down I’d like my kids to come back home to gather a few Koranic readers at my tomb in my village, on a Friday, preferably, and they should give a little money to the many beggars. For some time now, it’s been Africans who beg around cemeteries. Poor things, they left their homelands to come work in Europe. They walked day and night, and then were abandoned. They beg to survive . They aren’t pushy; some of them are embarrassed to have sunk to this. Ever since I stopped working I’ve been obsessed by such ideas. Death, Hallab told me—he’s the one who claims to be an imam—death is nothing , you don’t feel anything anymore, and it’s as if you were sound asleep. If it’s nothing, I asked him, how come everyone is so afraid? If you’re at peace with yourself, he replied, and have nothing to reproach yourself for, you will be happy to go to God, whose infinite heavens arefull of goodness and mercy. Hallab’s a fine fellow, but what does he know? He repeats what’s in the Koran. I will never contradict the Koran, but I confess that sometimes , at night, I sit up with a start, drenched in sweat, and I see death. It isn’t a skeleton with a scythe, or an