Read Online Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami - Free Book Online Page A

him only months later, and how there had been no word from either of them for a year. Then the money had started coming, sporadically at first, and later with addicting regularity, and while her mother managed onthe payments, Halima, who didn’t benefit from their largesse with the same consistency, still lived in the same cement house with the corrugated tin roof and brown water streaming down the middle of the street. She wondered now what would have happened had she, too, gone to Europe like her brothers. Would she have an apartment, a washing machine, maybe even a car? Would she have Maati?
    She sat still, and Hanan looked up, a question in her eyes. Halima folded her hands and looked at her shoes. “I was thinking …” She wet her lips with her tongue. “How difficult would it be to emigrate?”
    Hanan’s shoulders dropped. She grabbed a pencil and began tapping it nervously between her fingers. “I’m not a lawyer. I translate documents.”
    Halima shrugged. “Still,” she said. “You’d know.”
    â€œHave you seen the lines at the embassies?” Hanan asked.
    Halima nodded, even though she hadn’t seen them. Maati had told her about them, though, about people queuing up for an entire night just to get a spot inside the buildings, never mind an actual application. He liked taking customers to the embassies because cab fares were higher in the evening, when the lines formed. “But I have my brothers in France,” she said.
    â€œAh,” Hanan said. She looked away, as though she wastoo embarrassed to say anything, and then drew her breath. “Still, they don’t give visas to …”
    Halima knew what Hanan meant, knew that people like her, with no skills and three children, didn’t get visas.
    â€œTake the bastard to court,” Hanan said with a sigh.
    â€œI already have.”
    Hanan blinked, sat back in her chair, at a loss for what to say. The room was quiet, the only sound that of the pencil, still tapping between Hanan’s fingers.
    â€œBut isn’t there some way to get a visa?” Halima asked.
    Hanan shrugged. “You have to have a full-time job, a bank account, a ticket, a place to stay—it’s complicated,” she said, as though Halima couldn’t understand anything that required more than three easy steps, like wash, lather, and rinse. I know so much more than that, Halima wanted to tell her. She suddenly felt sorry for having said anything at all to Hanan. It was a mistake to have thought that Hanan or that judge or that magic powder could get her out of her situation.
    â€œThere must be some other way,” Halima said.
    â€œYou mean, go illegally?”
    Halima shrugged. She knew what she would say the next time her mother rehashed that old song about being patient: She had to do something for her future—today.

Acceptance
    A ZIZ A MMOR HAD SPENT the week saying goodbye. So far, he’d visited two sets of aunts and uncles, four friends, and several neighbors, but none of them offered him good wishes for his trip. When they’d found out about his plan to try his luck on a patera, they’d tried to disguise their shocked looks, tapped his back to offer encouragement, and shaken their heads in commiseration. He was getting tired of the silence that his announcement provoked, so he was relieved when, upon hearing the news, his friend Lahcen knocked the table over as he stood up.
    â€œHave you lost your mind, Ammor?” he said. Even though Lahcen and Aziz had known each other since elementary school, Lahcen still called Aziz by his last name,the way schoolboys often did. Aziz and Lahcen had been friends for nearly twenty years now. Together they had snuck into movie theaters, shared their first cigarette, split their first bottle of beer—a Heineken left behind on the beach by a group of preppy teenagers celebrating a graduation. They had also picked up girls