The Corniche is gently undulating and frighteningly empty compared to the roads of the United States. Other vehicles rushed towards them with vigour, as fast as bullets, and straddled the middle of the road. On the side of the road, as far as the sun can see, little girls in colorful Berber costumes hold out bouquets of flowers - violets? Poppy? - We are afraid, we dare not stop and we dare not accept. What are we afraid of? Pitfall. Robbery. Fear of giving too little or too much. I don't know much French, Arabic or Berber. "Don't stop, Dad, don't!" The children shouted. Really, when we stopped at the bazaar, curious people popped up from all over the place, gathered around our rented Renault car, stared into the car, and made some inexplicable invitation.
In 1969, we were Americans living in England, and when we came to Morocco in April, we naively thought that coming here would be the same as the eastern Americans rushing to the Caribbean coast at this time of year.
Restinga was desolate and windy, and a British travel agent who knew nothing about its seasonal climate as much as we did was dropped us off. The semi-circular shape of the inn was just ordered by the enterprising and tourism-minded king. At night, the winding hallway doors slam shut, and a lone security guard in a hooded cape guards the empty room and the strange American who had arrived before the tourist season. During the day, the waves are too big for swimming, and the Mediterranean Sea is not the deep red of wine, but as black as oil. Walking along the beach, our feet will be stained with tar blocks. Lying on the beach, the wind blows the sand into your ears. In the distance, pink concrete apartment buildings slowly build, and within a month, these empty squares and wood-fenced arcades will be crowded with tourists. But now, there are only strong winds, weak suns, and lonely, lazy, silent Arabs not far away. Perhaps, they are Berbers? Anyway, it was the dark skin in the robes that scared our little darling Genevieve. Now she wears a disco dress studded with sequins, so tall and cute, but at that time she was only eight years old, chubby, and it was incredible to think about it. Caleb was ten years old, Mark was twelve, and Judith was fourteen.
"It's a pity," I told the manager of the Restinga inn, a young man in a blue sweater who walked around closing the wind-blown door, "too windy to go to the sea." ”
"It's too windy." He smiled and agreed, as if to reassure us that we weren't as stupid as we seemed.
"The children are really unlucky, and so is my wife. The wind was too strong to go out. This hostel is so beautiful in the summer. "I should have used the subjunctive mood and the future tense, and I shouldn't have tried to explain.
The manager gave us a faint blessing for leaving, but explained in a series of financial French why he couldn't return the money we had advanced in London. All I had left was a small amount of cash, a Hertz credit card, four children, a wife, and a plane ticket that would have stranded us in Morocco for about ten days.
We took a bus to Tangier. Standing on the side of an empty highway at noon, six wandering Americans, short, stocky and fragile, dressed in British wool clothing, with suitcases stuffed with Continental European outfits bought at White Lily and travel books from Penguin Publishing. The sun was scorching us, and the wind was blowing. The road stretched out at either end, melting into the pink clouds in the distance. "I couldn't believe it," said the wife, "and I wanted to cry." ”
"Don't scare the kids." I say. "What can we do?" I asked, "No taxis, no money." ”
"There must be another way." She said. Somehow, in my memory, she was wearing a navy blue beret at that time, and she really didn't dare to compliment.
"I'm scared." Genevieve announced, clutching her backpack. She was wearing a thick gray coat and looked uncomfortably hot and her face was flushed.
"Little baby." Her sister said disdainfully. Wherever she goes, she attracts the attention of local men, so she feels quite powerful.
"The car will come." When Daddy reassured, his eyes looked over their heads and towards the end of the road. The road disappeared into a cluster of pink buildings that had been slowly built at the behest of the king.
A thin black man in a dirty Turkish robe suddenly appeared and spoke to us in a long nasal voice. He spread out his palms, as if to make people look at palmistry.
"Dad, this person is talking to you." Mark said embarrassedly. At that time, he was still so young, and now he is a computer science graduate.
"I know he's talking to me." I told him helplessly.
"What did he say, Dad?" Genevieve asked.
He was asking if it was a bus station. I lied.
The man, still talking, came closer, and there was a strong Muslim smell in his breath—the smell of local chili peppers, the smell of rotting teeth, and the smell of burnt dryness in his mouth after a devotional fast. He spoke faster and more urgently, but the sparkle in his bloodshot eyes slowly faded.
"Let him go away." This advice came from Caleb, our silent, calm, sane child, who is now a third-year student in zoology at the university.
"I think he will." Actually, I wasn't sure, but he shook his scrawny head at us unresponsive idiots and really left. Our little family came together and breathed a sigh of relief. The sand blew into our shoes, the inn we had just left, our only home in this strange land, its semicircular hall roaring behind us, like some low, clumsy musical instrument.
Bus! Bus to Tangier! We waved our hands — we waved our hands desperately — and the bus stopped in disbelief. Withered green grass was tied to the roof, a chicken coop with chickens, and rolls of carpet. The cars were full of Moroccans: dusty, hunched, patient strangers, wearing knitted trinkets on their heads and feet, wrapped in robes. The women were all black, and some of them covered their faces. Seeing such a group of red-faced and childish Americans rushing up, everyone's eyes became flickering, and they all rolled upward, both vigilant and surprised.
The driver hesitated to collect the fare, a few dirhams. He has a Nasser-esque mustache and a chin that resembles Nasser. There is still a bit of a spot at the back of the bus. As we struggled to carry our bulky suitcases down the aisle, the car swayed and started. I'm so scared that our innocent sheer size will fall apart this fragile car and its cargo that is just the delicate balance. In the depths of the carriage, the smell of the local area, like the burning of ropes, intensified.
In Tangier, the rickety bus was replaced by an overloaded taxi, and the taxi driver took us to Hertz on his own initiative and tried to get in and negotiate for us. Thanks to Allah, His help was unnecessary: the yellow plastic Herzka I showed did it all. If only I had shown the gray-green American Express card, our long unresolved journey, from Tangier to Rabat to Casablanca, and then through the narrow streets of Jedida, Essaouira and Teflaut, would have been much easier, for at every hotel we had to beg them to accept personal traveller's cheques from the banks of London, which no hotel but the most expensive hotels were willing to take. As a result, we were able to indulge from time to time on a trip to escape the Mediterranean winds.
As we drove into Rabat, the streets were covered in red. When we saw a poster with a hammer and sickle, Lenin, we abandoned any idea that was popular. The multi-faceted king, who received high-level Soviet delegations, including Kosygin and Podgorny, found that the Hilton Rabat was fully booked and could not accommodate the most needy children.
However, we were admitted to a hotel that the Soviets did not want to stay. During lunch, we sat down in a small carpeted circular hall, surrounded by huge copper plates, and a smiling barefoot girl walked on tiptoe behind us, sprinkling rose water on our heads. Mark tickled and grimaced.
On the lawn above sea level, the feeling of being greeted and at the same time playful is revived. After miles of empty fields, we were hungry and guided by a wooden arrow to a tiny restaurant, almost a sloping shack. We pulled up our rented Renault and marched through the grass in a column, feeling our enormity again as we walked to the back of a smelly bus. A man came out of a humble hut carrying a table, we stopped, and another boy came out carrying a chair. In a pleasant atmosphere, the furniture was placed in the place we indicated – on the green grass. Wine, rice, kebabs and colas were brought out of the hut just in time, and we enjoyed them facing the Atlantic Ocean, the hazel cliffs and the pastures where only one donkey was grazing. We were told that we were the only group of guests that this seaside restaurant had ever received.
On the way back to Tevlaut, when we entered the rocky mountains of the Lower Atlas Mountains, the gasoline meter showed zero, and there were no houses, not a single sheep or goat, just a little girl standing in a low-lying part of the unpaved asphalt road, holding out a handful of flowers to us. The road was a dry riverbed and full of stones, so our Renault was moving so slowly, so slow that when she saw that we really didn't plan to stop, she had time to whip the fenders of our cars with that bouquet of flowers and throw them in through the open windows. One or two flowers fell on our thighs, and the rest fell on the asphalt at her feet. From the rearview mirror, I saw the little girl stomping her feet angrily, maybe she was crying. She was about the same age as Genevieve, and when she grew smaller behind us until she couldn't see it, Genevieve felt the same and looked sad.
At Teflaut, Caleb stared intently at a man who was very lame: the man was a bit like a spider, moving quickly across the crowded ground with his hands, his small body dragging between them. In fact, he didn't beg, he moved around, like a local dignitary, rushing to do something important.
In the northern part of Agadir, we waited in our hotel room for lunch, and as time passed by, we noticed that all the vehicles and pedestrians on the road outside had stopped. The police arrived quickly and began questioning the driver of a dirty truck. The young man, dressed in a light-colored overalls, leaned lazily against the cab with his head drooping, nodding and nodding his head as the police questioned him. Traffic on the road was interrupted in both directions, and we stayed on our side, purely tourists, interested. It was hard to see what was happening, there were bundles of something blocked by the wheels and couldn't be seen. Amid the commotion, the police brought a mother over, and Mark crossed the road to look.
Mark returned to the side of the road where we were standing, his face was pale and he didn't make a funny grimace. We asked him what he saw. "You won't want to see it." Here is his answer.
"It's a little girl." He later told us.
The mother was short, dressed in black and without a veil. She ran back and forth on the slope across the road, her strange mourning and wailing through the sky. The men chased after her, trying to push her to the ground. They missed, and the crowd of excited chasers grew larger, a team of clumsy men chasing her behind her, and there was superhuman strength in her sorrow. No American can make her voice that way. All the breath in her chest shot into the sky, so sudden, so powerful, that her body trembled. Ancient mourning rituals sustain her. Her performance was so naked, so pure, that we turned our heads and didn't want to see it again, we didn't come to Morocco to witness this kind of scene. When the two men finally caught her and pressed her by hand, she fainted and fell to the ground.
In Agadir, we found the weather we wanted. The beach there is wide, the sun and the sea are warm, and the beach is almost empty. We looked for other vacationers and tried to sit next to them, but we didn't see any. We spread out towels not far from the breakwater. Judith left us and walked away, shy in a bikini, her skin as white and delicate as pearls. She picks pebbles and gazes at the sea, far away from her parents and siblings. Genevieve and Caleb began to build sandcastles. Mark lay on his back, his skin tanned with one mind.
We slowly realized that thirty yards away lay an Arab in a robe, facing us. His face—dark, pentagonal—was always on our side, staring at us from his shrunken, crumpled robes, eyes that seemed bloodshot with stinging, silently burning with lust. Genevieve and Caleb silently built sandcastles, Judith returned to us, and none of us dared venture through the trash on the beach, through the silent swaying eyes of the Arabs to the seductive seashore. My mother whispered to me, "Don't look, that man is masturbating." "The sound is so small that it is impossible for children to hear it.
He was really masturbating. From his robes, towards Judith and us.
I stood up, my legs trembling, and led everyone back from the beach as fast as I could. That afternoon we found a private pool for one dirham, all Europeans swimming, sunbathing, and safely avoiding the surrounding culture. We went there every day for five days in Agadir. The sun is shining and the breeze is blowing. We found a small inn run by an old French couple, surrounded by bougainvillea flowers, with a parrot in the courtyard and a European menu for dinner.
Less than a decade ago, on February 29, 196, a massive earthquake struck Adigar that killed an estimated 12,000 people and devastated the city. We don't see a trace of this catastrophe. In Agadir we are back in the middle class, we have money again. I telegraphed the Bank of London, and they had a lovely British "deal" with a bank in Agadir. The bank was built in 196, and the marble entrance is quite neat and decent, but there is a strong smell of livestock inside. Merchants in shepherd's robes muttered and waited in front of the long, noisy counters, and the names of the parties were called out aloud in Arabic for every transaction. When my name was called, the amount of money that had apparently been remitted from London was also called. The muttering stopped, and the astonished brown eyes at the counter all flew towards me. I swelled up like a giant all at once—a rich stranger, a monster. When I stuffed the pastel-colored bills into my wallet, my face flushed and I wanted to explain: "I have children to feed. ”
Genevieve loved feeding the dog that was wandering around our hostel. Foreign pets are also strange: think about it, they know French or Arabic better than you. They don't quite like American animals: they squint and walk a little differently. Later, we found out that our camera was full of pictures of these animals, and they were not in focus, and the children took pictures with Nikon cameras.
It was with great difficulty that we escaped from Adigar and Morocco. On a globe the size of a basketball, the distance we drove yesterday was only a fraction of the size of a thumb fingernail. At Air Maroc, they told us that there were no six seats available on the flight from Agadir to Tangier, and that we had booked a hotel in Tangier for the night and a flight to Paris early the next morning. There is no other way but to get there by car. It took us several days to traverse, 500 miles, 800 kilometers, along the northwest side of Africa.
We set off at dawn and to be on the safe side, we brought a large box of oranges and Parisian mineral water. Dad drove, hour after hour. Mom refused to drive in Morocco, perhaps because the rental car terms didn't list her as a driver. You kids, four of you huddled in the back of a tiny Renault, quiet. It is in the nature of a child, and you seem to feel real danger, real difficulty.
In some small gray city, maybe Safi, I didn't see a red light and ran through. A shrill whistle sounded, and in the rearview mirror, I saw a man in a white helmet calmly copying my license plate number, as clear as I could see the little flower girl stamping her feet. The White Helmets are getting farther and farther away from us, but his eyes are always following us. My heart sank. But the street stretched straight ahead, and pedestrians in dirty local clothes continued to go about their business as if nothing had happened. One more day we will be safely in Paris. The traffic lights were placed in the wrong place, too close to the side of the road, and blocked by billboards. I kept driving like a criminal. The boys cheered, and the girls were a little uneasy.
"Maybe he just wants to give you a loud shout." Genevieve said.
"Unlikely," argued Mark, "he might put Dad in a prison full of rats and lice, which is a horrible place." ”
"I saw the red light," said the mother gently, "and I thought you saw it too, dear." ”
"Thank you very much." I'm not so gentle.
"I didn't see it," said Caleb, who was our family's natural comforter and peacemaker, "maybe a yellow light, and then a red light." ”
"Who sees a traffic light and thinks it's yellow?" I asked hopefully.
The answer is silence.
"Who saw the traffic lights and saw what color they were?"
"Red light." Three voices rang out in unison.
"And what do you want me to do? Turn around and go back and explain to the policeman? I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not—"
"No!" Shouted in unison again, but Mom didn't make a sound.
"You've made your own decision." Judith told me, almost in the tone of a mature woman.
"Hurry up, Dad." Mark said.
We were already on the outskirts of the town, and there were no police cars catching up. Empty green pastures and smooth and empty roads have led us to change our ways. We drove hard along the coastline, going back to the old days. It's a small restaurant on the grass by the cliff. This is the charcoal grill on the side of the road, where everyone refuses to eat the foie gras sandwich that the One-Eyed Man made for us. This is Casablanca, and it's not at all what it looks like in the movies. This is Rabat, the red slogan has been taken down, and the Soviets have gone elsewhere. It was evening, and with sore shoulder blades and sand in his eyes, Dad was becoming more and more sure that his license plate number had spread throughout the coastline through a network of secret police in the monarchy's kingdom. The siren will sound at any moment, and he will be arrested, arrested, and thrown into the painful and real Morocco; He didn't want to pay attention to the real Morocco, he just wanted to enjoy the sunshine and exoticism.
Maybe the police will be waiting for him at the hotel front desk in Tangier. From Restinga to the hotels where he had only stayed for one night, to the signature on the check from the Bank of Agadir, they traced his name all the way. Or maybe you have a scene at the airport: handcuffs at passport control. Oh, why don't I stop when the whistle blows?
If my French wasn't so rudimentary, I might stop.
If we hadn't recently read an article in the hotel's Newsweek about innocent Americans slowly dying in African, Asian prisons, I might have stopped.
If it weren't for the fact that the United States was overwhelmed and unable to get out of Vietnam, I might have stopped.
If it weren't for the red flags in Rabat, the men masturbating on the beach, the dead girls under the wheels of trucks...... Anyway, I didn't park, I refused to park, I was timid, I was afraid to park, and it became a stain on my memory about Morocco.
By the time we drove into Tangier, it was already dark. We had to go through a maze of one-way streets to get to the hotel, but the front desk had kindly registered our reservation and didn't hand us a warrant. The king himself would not be kinder to tourists than this hotel. The gray-haired hotel waiter (who looked a bit like Omar Sharif) smiled as he took the handful of messy dirham bills I handed him. The waiters bowed deeply, as if we were the only guests there. When we got there, we were pretty much the only guests in that season. The trip took a total of fifteen hours. We ate up the whole bag of oranges and drank all the Parisian mineral water. The next morning, we sadly parted with our loyal Renault, which had never broken down, but when we returned it it was in disgrace. The people at the Hertz car rental were so busy settling accounts that they barely looked up and didn't know they had such a serious criminal record on their license plates. A month later, the bills were sent to London, about the thickness of the ozone layer that covers the planet. We escaped.
Children, remember Paris? In the Tuileries Gardens, we huddled together in the cold of spring. There wasn't enough space in the back seat of the Renault for the four of you, so one of you, usually Genevieve, had to sit in the front and breathe into my ears. Mom, sitting next to me with a seatbelt on, handing out oranges and water. Caleb and Mark tirelessly argued about who was "squeezing" whom. Judith leaned against the window, wandering in her dreams. In Morocco, we used to be so close together as a family, but we've been separated ever since. Growing up, getting out of the house, and witnessing my parents divorce – all in the decade since. But on the glittering top platform of the Eiffel Tower, I felt like we were forever together.
Translated by Chen Xinyu
# Writer Bio
John Updike (1932-2009), a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and critic, is a master of contemporary American literature who has won two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and more than a dozen other awards, including the O. Henry Prize. "Sex, religion and art" are the subjects of Updike's lifelong pursuit, and "Americans, Christians, small towns and middle class" are the themes of Updike's unique creation, and he has become a well-deserved soul painter of the contemporary American middle class, known as "Balzac of America"