Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

       Why I ever got mixed up with Farid and his ‘cell’ I don’t know. Boredom, perhaps.  Or that Weltschmertz which used to settle on me during those interminable, hot afternoons at the cafe table in Fez, as coffees followed beers, and cigarette butt joined cigarette butt, and nothing ever happened. It began innocently enough. Tall, high-cheekboned, with a brown complexion and a shock of black hair, Farid took my courses at the university, and when he used to see me at the Cafe Marrakech would join me.  Then, we’d spend hours talking of books and politics, of Marxism and change, the feudal privilege and poverty, the tourist trap and police state that make up Morocco. ‘They live, while we watch’, he used to say of the Fassi bourgeoisie, a hard light in his eyes.
 
      When he asked me to obtain copies of Bakunin and Guevara in London, it had seemed only teacherly, comradely, to go to Collet’s and get them. And when in a campus riot a fundamentalist student thrust a broken bottle in his face, so that he was kept in hospital under arrest like dozens of others, it seemed only humanitarian to visit him and make sure he had money for bandages and painkillers.  Of course, I had to show my green Carte de Sejour  to the soldier on the door each time.  Then, later, when he led me through backstreets to a bare room close to the railway depot, I was not to know three members of his ‘cell’ would be there, and that the conversation, between the puffs of kif, would turn to ‘the struggle’ and ‘the revolutionary situation’ and how to bring it to crisis point by various ‘actions directes’.

       One action they decided on at a subsequent meeting was the assassination of the Chief of Police.  The idea repulsed me at first.  I did not find it easy to be an accomplice to the murder of a neighbour, someone I had exchanged civilities with and heard laughing in his garden with his two little girls.  For, yes, I did live next door to him. When I first rented the half-villa I did not know who was in the other half, but the uniform, the official car, and shopkeepers’ comments soon told me.  He owned his half and lived there with a blonde French wife and two fay-like daughters.  Whenever we coincided at our respective front gates we would swop the usual pleasantries, and on Sunday mornings I would see him sitting in his garden in his jellaba, sipping a beer and watching his daughters play.

      Yet, as Farid argued, there was no denying that le Commissaire de Police, the functionary with the peaked cap and blue-grey uniform and the Smith and Wesson in the black holster was a key figure in the ‘repressive state apparatus’, the man responsible for the beating and jailing of many socialist friends and students.  So, as the price for my involvement, I took through a gap in the hedge a telephoto close-up of his moustached and heavy-jowled face.  This photograph would enable the ‘people’s executioner’ to recognise him and the information I gave them would put him in the right place at the opportune time.

       A comrade from Meknes, and thus unknown to the local police, volunteered. His brother had been tortured in the political  prison in Kenitra and he had a revolver from his soldier cousin who was sick of the war in the Sahara.  He was given the close-up and instructed to study the locale chosen for the attempt.  For every Friday at one o’ clock, I was able to inform them, the police chief walked the short distance from his home to collect his bread on the corner of the Place d'Atlas.  The square was busy then with horses and carts, taxis and buses, hawkers and workmen.   It would be easy to take a shot and be gone in the crowd on a motorbike before anyone could do a thing.

      The appointed Friday arrived.  Myself, Farid, and two others waited, chain-smoking with tension, in the Christian cemetery on the edge of town.  After a short time, the comrade from Meknes rode up the track and skidded to a halt beside us.   As soon as we saw his face we could tell.   Farid hauled him off the bike, snatched the gun from inside his leather blouson, and pushed him to the ground.

     ‘You saw him? You recognised him?’

     ‘Yes, yes’.

     ‘You had a good view? Nothing in the way like a truck or something? You had him in your sights?’

      ‘Yes, yes.  No problem’.

       ‘Then - merde! - why didn’t you?  We had him!’

       Farid squatted down on his haunches, shaking the gun barrel in his face.

       ‘Why?  Why?’

       The comrade from Meknes looked up at our disappointed and angry faces.  He screwed up his eyes and blinked back tears, and his Adam’s apple leapt in his throat as he swallowed hard.

       ‘He - you see, he’d just left the patisserie and was crossing the street.  He didn’t have his cap on and the wind had blown his hair forward revealing a bald spot.  He was carrying his bread. The paper around it was flapping and he was having to flip the loaves from one hand to the other, they were still so hot. I could smell it, feel the warmth in my own hands. Who hasn’t felt that, eh, coming from the baker’s?’   He looked round us wildly, desperate for confirmation, for some fellow-feeling, but we each averted our gaze.  In a high-pitched moan he cried,  ‘I could not kill a man who was carrying bread!  I could see it on the table, broken, divided in pieces for the - family’. Then he rolled on the ground, brought his knees up in a foetal position, and lay there in the graveyard dust, jerking out dry sobs of failure and fear.

       ‘Merde! Batarde!’ Farid swore, stood up and kicked him in the back.  ‘We can never trust him now’.

       His gaze flicked from the comrade on the ground to one or the other of us, his eyes finally resting on me. The determination in them flared into defiance, then dissolved to pained, terrifying query.  I held his gaze to savour it, then inclined my head a little and turned away.

       As I and the two others trudged down the road, a single shot slapped the air behind us.  The sparrows in the bushes rose and beat their wings furiously for a moment before settling again in the dusty heat.