Free The Expelled by Mois Benarroch

secret.”
    “Secrets, we all have secrets, but do you want to know my secrets or what happened on the bus, you have to decide. If it’s a secret you want, well here's one, at twelve I stole my mother's gold ring and they accused the maid and fired her. I sold the ring to a gypsy, a street vendor, and kept this money that bailed me out of difficult situations for many years.”
    “Well, you better keep telling us about the bus and leave your childhood where it belongs.”
    “Can you send me some more sandwiches...?”
    “No.”
    “Then we turned back, which was not simple. The trees reached up to the road and the forest was so thick that it was hard to find a space the size of the bus, so we drove in reverse for one or two miles until we found a gap, or more or less a gap. The men got out and we cut some olive branches with our bare hands so the bus could turn around. The bus was still full, but I think one or two passengers stayed back in the mount of olives. I don't know who, I can't remember everything. I watched the landscape that had changed into an infinite Scottish green field after we turned back. Then a guy came and sat next to me and told me that what he wanted was to forget, to forget his brother’s death...”
    “Here we go again, let's try something new, can you tell us who you are? Your story.”
    “My story?”
    “Yes, your life. What you do, where you were born, where you come from.”
    “Me?”
    “Yes, I believe you're the only one in this room. You.”
    “Alright, I was on the bus and I was going to my city. Or what is probably my city. I don't know where my city or my town is, somewhere. I was born in France, in Blois, my parents were Moroccan immigrants, in the Loire. I was born there but I was never French, I wasn't legal there, my father wasn't a legal migrant, and at school they called me the Moroccan, ‘le marrocain’, and they told me to go back to Morocco. My parents came from the Riff and sometimes they spoke to each other in Tamazight, but I don't understand a word of Tamazight. Don't tell me you don't know what Tamazight is, it's the language of the Berbers, but don't say that word to my parents, they would kill me, they are Imazighen, not Berber. Anyway, what happened is that when I was twelve the French government decided to clean up a little bit its streets from Moroccans and they offered a few thousand francs to those who wanted to return to their village. My parents were fed up with being Moroccan and having bad jobs so we went back to Morocco. Actually, they went back, because for me it was my first trip to Morocco. We went to Tangiers, where he had a brother who had a photography business that he built thanks to six years of work in Germany. Then I returned or I traveled or I moved to Morocco, and there everyone at school began calling me the French guy, ‘El Fransaui’, and it was true, I was el fransaui, I only spoke French. When I was twenty I went back to France and since then I travel around Europe in search of the boy I was when I was twelve years old, before history parted my life in two, the one before and the one after, I go from sea to sea, here and in Morocco, I go from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and I am the one who splits in two, I am the land that prevents the seas from becoming the world.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “I don't know, it's just what I say.”
    “But we believe that you are a terrorist from Al-Qaeda.”
    “The only attacks that I commit are attacks against myself.”
    “And that seems small to you?”
    “Well, it's cosa mía [5] .”
    “Cosa Nostra [6] .
    “It was a figure of speech, a metaphor.”
    “Me too.”
    “What?”
    “I am from Morocco too.”
    “Not me. I was born in France, in Blois. I already told you that.”
    “Well I was, I was born in Morocco.”
    “Good for you.”
    “Not really.”
    “Then, no.”
    “Well yeah, but I don't know, last night I dreamed that all my life had been a spirit, a nothing,