Free The Last Friend by Tahar Ben Jelloun Page B

enduring, this woman took on legendary proportions. Ali compared her to his idol, Ava Gardner. Sometimes he hallucinated. I did nothing to bring him back to reality. Like all of us, he needed to dream, to escape from reality when he could.
    I was not in love, and I had not left a girlfriend behind. As time passed, I imagined a magnificent creature named Nina. Ali suspected she did not really exist. He listened to me, and suggested we arrange for the two women to meet, so they could talk about us. He said we would have to wait for a full moon, and that we would conjure them by thinking about them with all our might. Unfortunately, on that night we were being punished collectively; one of the detainees had tried to scale the wall to see a prostitute. Tadla ordered us into the courtyard, and we had to stand at attention until sunrise. Half the detainees fell over from the strain. Ali and I managed to stay the course, precisely because we were able to escape mentally. Despite our best efforts, we did not succeed in staging a meeting between the two women. We needed an isolated place, where we could summon tremendous concentration. As the night was ending, I thought I saw the two women walking hand in hand through the ranks of detainees. They gave water to some men, brought others back to their feet. They were perfumed and scantily dressed. They vanished as soon as Tadla showed up.

6
    Six months after our arrival, General Oufkir decided to send us to the officers' school in Ahermemou, a mountain village north of Taza on the way to Oujda, near the Algerian frontier. Tadla said nothing about our destination in his good-bye speech. "You guys are no longer a bunch of weak women; you're men-strong and patriotic. Now you understand we will not tolerate Communism in our country. You're going somewhere else, I don't know where, in the secret army. You'll be with men who will continue to work on you the way I have, so no messing around-don't screw up. We bury troublemakers in holes with only their heads left above ground. They can breathe, but they fry in the sun, and they're only good for the hospital. The Chinese taught us this method. Very clever, the Chinese."
    We had seen soldiers buried with only their heads above the sand, left in the heat of the day. Tadla had made a point of showing them to us. We already knew how cruel he was. We didn't need further proof.
    The officers' school of Ahermemou was quite different from El Hajeb, the camp we had left. We sensed that the worst of the torture was over, and that our reeducation would now take place under more humane conditions. We slept six to a room. I asked the officer in charge if I could be in the same room as Ali. No problem, he said. We arrived on New Year's Day. It was snowing. The commander gathered us together and spoke to us in good French. He had been educated at the military academy in St. Cyr, in France. He was refined and hard, without being vulgar. This officer knew why we were there, and what he was supposed to do.
    "I know who you are. I've studied each of your dossiers. I know that your political activity is incompatible with the monarchy and the prerogatives of the king. Here, there are no politics. I was chosen to complete your reeducation, and I'll tolerate no discussion or rebellion. I'm in charge here. I don't know any of you, and I'll follow orders without compunction. The slightest infraction by a single individual will lead to collective punishment. Here, you wash every day, you're on time, and you obey orders. A word to the wise should suffice. Fall out!"
    The commander was a more sophisticated version of Tadla. Young officers took charge of our instruction. We were given pens and notebooks. We underwent military training, deprived of any civil liberties. We could write to our families, but our letters went through a censorship office. Ali wrote to his "fiancee," who did not respond. The day he suggested I write to Nina, I realized he was beginning to lose his