ordinary—the war in the Sahara was dragging into its sixth year, the price of flour and oil had increased catastrophically, and labor unions had called for a general strike. Hardly a week went by that spring when someone didn’t organize a protest against the government. But I do remember we weren’t talking about politics, because we were preoccupied with our exams, hoping we’d pass all our subjects in the first session so we could have the rest of the summer to ourselves. We sipped our coffees, both of us taking it black and chasing it with water. We said goodbye to one another outside the café, and went our separate ways. It was already half past one, I realized suddenly, and I was late for lunch. My wife wouldn’t like it. I was walking down the Rue Gouraud when an old woman called out to me from an apartment window three floors above. “What are you doing out, my son?” she asked as she pulled her shutters closed. “Go home, there’s trouble.”
“Where, Auntie?” I asked.
She pointed toward the Boulevard Hassan I. Only half-believing the old woman, I ducked into the next building and went up to the roof to check for myself. Standing in the middle of television antennas, I saw army tanks driving down the boulevard in a column, headed toward a mass of protesters at the intersection. In the distance, plumes of black smoke rose in the sky. A terrible, familiar fear settled over me. How was I going to get home? Perhaps, I thought, I could walk back toward the Arab League Park and try to catch a bus or find a taxi. I crossed the length of the roof to see if the Rue d’Alger was still safe, but found instead that a Jeep with red and green stripes was idling on the pavement. Abruptly it sped up and struck two teenage boys who were running away from the boulevard, then swerved off and chased after another teen. A girl. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. From the other end of the street, a police van drew up to her, cornering her next to a pharmacy with a crescent neon sign. Then a policeman jumped out of the Jeep and started beating her with a truncheon. Blood pooled around her head like a halo.
This is it, I remember thinking. This is the end of the regime. How could it survive when it was killing its own children in broad daylight? But just as the thought crystallized in my mind, one of the policemen spotted me on the roof, raised his gun, and aimed. Even from a height of four floors, I could see the black barrel pointed at me. I sank to my knees, realizing only by its sibilant sound that the bullet had missed me. With my back against the wall, I waited for the thump of police boots on the stairway. All afternoon I waited. Even as night fell, I waited. I could still hear the sirens of police cars. Tires screeching. Glass breaking. People screaming. The wind in the palm trees.
Dawn brought with it a strange silence. I went down the stairway, walked across the empty lobby, down the street with its smashed storefronts, past the bloodied corpse that still lay under the flickering neon sign, and went home, where I found Maryam beside herself with worry. All night she had stayed up listening, too, hoping to hear footsteps, yet fearing they were the wrong ones. She hadn’t known if I was alive or dead and she’d been too afraid to go to the police. If I’d been arrested, asking the police about me would do no good; they would not acknowledge it. And if I hadn’t been, asking them about me might be used as evidence that I’d taken part in the protest. “I wasn’t arrested,” I said, taking her hand, trying my best to comfort her. “I’m fine.”
But when I told her about the policeman who’d pointed a gun at me, she panicked.
“Are you sure you weren’t followed?” Her gaze shifted to the door.
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”
Still, our fear didn’t dissipate, and by the afternoon we heard from Brahim’s sister that he had been arrested. No one knew where he was being