‘As-Salaam-Alaikum, Monsieur Habib.’
‘How are you today?’
‘I’m fine, thank you. How are you?’
‘I am fine also, thanks be to God. And how is your family?’
‘They are well. And your family?’
‘All good, Alhamdulillah.’
‘Alhamdulillah,’ I reply, echoing his thanks to God.
‘Please, take a seat. By fortunate coincidence, I have just made some tea. You will take a cup, please?’
‘I should like that very much. Merci bien.’
‘Je vous en prie, Madame.’
Once the mint tea has been poured into a vintage tea glass decorated with gold filigree, and handed over with the customary toast to good health of ‘Bisaha’， Monsieur Habib shows me his latest finds. He knows I’m fascinated by anything from the first half of the twentieth century and seems to take pleasure in unearthing items he thinks will interest me.
‘Look at this ice bucket,’ he says. ‘See, it’s engraved with the name of the Hotel Transatlantique?’ He pulls out a duster and begins to polish it.
‘When does it date from?’ I ask.
‘Around the 1930s or 40s, I imagine,’ he replies. ‘You can just picture a glamorous couple there for an evening of dancing, being served a bottle of Perrier-Jou?t in this, can’t you? Such elegance.’ I tuck my less-than-elegant trainers beneath my chair and rearrange the folds of my shawl to cover them. He sighs wistfully for those long-gone stylish days, raising an eyebrow at the sight of a couple of tourists dressed in skimpy T-shirts and shorts who pass his shop without a second glance. The Senegalese man who sells leather handbags approaches them, displaying the wares strung over his long arms, but they shake their heads at him and cross the road to browse in the souvenir shop over the way.
The Senegalese trader smiles and lifts a hand in greeting to Monsieur Habib, then continues on his circuit of the street, which he’s carved out as his territory. There’s stiff competition among the street traders for the prime spots in the Habous, although they have to be on the lookout for the police, who’ll move them on if they catch them.
I watch him as he goes. He’s immensely tall – over six and a half feet, I’d guess – and has the proud bearing of a warrior. And yet he’s reduced to flogging cheap handbags to tourists, walking miles every day through the streets. He must get very tired of the refusals. It’s hard, thankless work for a few dirhams a day.
‘Monsieur Habib,’ I say, ‘what do you think happened to all the refugees that passed through Casablanca in the war years?’ While I don’t imagine he’s old enough to remember it himself, that time must have been very fresh in the minds of his parents.
My question catches him by surprise and he slowly puts down his duster and raises his eyes to mine. He seems to be appraising me, and something shifts between us as he gauges my genuine interest in his answer before he replies.
‘Most of them managed to travel on to other destinations – to America mainly. And even though America took in more refugees fleeing the Nazis than any other country in the world, they still had strict quotas on the number of immigrants they would receive and there were hundreds of thousands of people on the waiting lists. Certainly some didn’t make it. There were anti-Semitic round-ups here, just as there were in France once the Germans invaded. A few, I imagine, might have stayed on.’ He takes a meditative sip of tea and wipes his moustache with a paper napkin before continuing. ‘Things changed pretty quickly in Morocco, too, at that time, as the nationalists began to campaign for independence. It was only achieved, finally, in the 1950s, but those were turbulent times, speaking in terms of our internal politics as well as the external forces of the war, so plenty of people would have fallen through the cracks in the system. The numbers of refugees here would have been overwhelming.’
He follows my gaze towards the Senegalese man. ‘Not that things are all that much better today.’
I take a polite sip from my own glass and place it carefully back on the silver tray between us. ‘I’ve read in the newspaper about the refugee problem in Europe,’ I agree. ‘But is it particularly bad here?’
Monsieur Habib looks at me pityingly and I feel horribly ignorant. ‘Where do you think those migrants who cause the problems in Europe come from? They are from Africa, mostly. From the war-torn countries in the north and the south alike. From places where life is very cheap and very hard. Take Ismael, for example.’ He nods towards the Senegalese trader who has reached the end of his trajectory down the street and begun to trudge back towards us. ‘How bad do you think it must have been in his country for him to find this life a better option? He told me he saw members of his family tortured and killed in ways I would never repeat to a lady such as yourself. He is one of the many who are passing through, waiting for an opportunity to move on when he has managed to earn enough money to pay the men who traffic people like him across the Mediterranean. Can we really imagine how it must feel to be so afraid of what lies behind you that you are prepared to throw yourself headlong into an unknown that is going to be filled with danger and loneliness? Leaving behind your family and your culture and seeking something better in a land where you are not welcome and you are not understood? It’s no different for him and the thousands of others like him than it was for those who fled here in the war.’ He sighs again, picking up a painted tin biplane and then replacing it carefully on the shelf. ‘We like to think we learned lessons from those wars and yet history continues to repeat itself, year after year.’