A boy shepherd was idling and had allowed all the sheep and goats to stray into a field of young beans. Only the donkey was content outside the area, eating a thistle. The boy’s father came on the scene and, wanting to chastise the boy, threw a stone at him. He meant to miss the boy, meant it as a warning to him. But the stone killed his son.

A girl was pregnant. She shouldn’t have been. “Semen left over from the men’s day at the hammam,” her family said.

“In the early ’70s at Taourirt in the Eastern Rif, we met a young man we knew. We had seen him already in his village somewhere on the mountains about 10 kilometres away. He had left home with twenty dirhams, he said, to look for work. Now he had only ten dirhams left, and would have to beg in the souq for the money to reach home. Or maybe he ended up in the coal mine at Jerrada…”

An emigrant to France sent money regularly to his brother at home, telling him to buy this and that, a cow, a sheep, a field, three olive trees, or to fix the roof of the house.

The money order came to the post office, near the souq. On each souq day, the mqaddem would drop into the post office and collect any letters for the people of his douar. Then he would go to the Qa’id’s house for his weekly meeting. When the mqaddem arrived back in the douar, he passed the money order on to the brother. The brother would then go to the post office himself to cash the money order. Upon receiving the money, he would give a tip to the man at the post office. Sometimes in winter, with the rivers in flood, this trip would take several days. And each time he got the money in his hands, the brother would celebrate, always finishing up at Moulay Yacoub, a hot water spring and baths about twenty kilometres from Fez. This was where the prostitutes of Fez were to be found.

Some years later, the emigrant finally came home on holidays from France. Instead of the prosperous farm he imagined, he found the same little place; the roof had not been mended for ten years, which hadn’t mattered during the years of drought, but that year there had been rain, and the roof had leaked badly. There were no olive trees, just a few skinny sheep and a few stalks of maize. Only the aloes and the prickly pear surrounding the compound flourished. The emigrant stayed the allotted time, and said nothing. Then he went away and never came back or sent money, ever again.

A widow woman became pregnant, three years after her husband had died. “The baby was asleep in the womb for three years,” she explained.