A night to describe and to remember ~ September 18, 1986

by David Heiller

The moon shone bright that summer night in 1978. It lit the land with a white glow. Rocks stood out on the hill to the south like a black and white negative, their shadows deep black. The rolling hillside below the rocks had a stubble of grain, already a stubble and it was only May. The Moroccan sun will do that to land. In the moonlight, the stubble lay as smooth as the coat of a Siamese cat.

A Moroccan full moon in the coastal city, Ceuta.

I stood on the balcony of my apartment, on the third floor of a brick building, marveling as I always marveled, at the full Moroccan moon, so bright you could easily read a book by the light. Across the street, the neighbors had their television on. The screen flickered from scene to scene, though I could not see the picture. The windows were tinted a milky color, so that nosy neighbors or lonely Americans couldn’t peer in on moonlit nights. The sound came through the windows, the only sound in the night at the edge of town, a French dialogue, probably dubbed to an American TV show like “Kojak.” Somehow Moroccans watching Americans speaking French made perfect sense. Tourist brochures call the country a land of contrasts, don’t they? Just like the rocks on the hill in the moonlight, black and white, contrast.

A car motor interrupted the TV sounds. I looked to the right, to the west, down the street. Headlights bounded over the rutted road, the diesel engine puffing and roaring all at the same time. The car swerved to the right to miss a crater, then crashed over the curb on the other side to miss a pile of rocks from a construction site.

“Slow down, you’ll kill someone, or yourself,” I said out loud, smiling.

The car jerked up below my house, rocked to a stop. A young man jumped out. He craned his neck, waved to me. I waved back. “I’ll be right down,” I shouted.

“Good,” he said. The word rhymed with “rude”—a good French pronunciation.

I grabbed two plastic jugs from my kitchen counter, and strode down the two long flights of cement steps to meet my friend. We shook hands. I had seen Pierre that day at school where we both taught, but we shook hands anyway. That is the custom in Morocco. It is a custom among friends.

We climbed in the car. I fastened my seat belt. I had ridden with Pierre enough to know the importance of a seat belt. He slammed the Renault into gear and sped over the dark street, toward the highway.

“You know, thees is some night,” he said, pointing to the sky. “It’s so bright.”

We hit the main highway, a good paved road that connected Fes and Meknes, two large cities in Morocco, large and modern compared to the oil refinery town we lived in. Those towns had good water. Our tap water turned your teeth brown.

“How would you describe this night?” Pierre asked, glancing at me. The moon reflected off the gleam in his eye. He smiled a slight smile, a winning smile, the smile of someone playing cribbage holding a 24 hand.

I could tell Pierre knew how he would describe this night. He may have thought of it when writing one of his science fiction books, one of the nine he had written, though none had made it to the publishing house just yet. Or maybe he came across the perfect word in his science teaching studies. It was probably some scientific word I had never heard of.

“Geez, I don’t know,” I answered in protest. We drove down the highway a little further, then Pierre swerved to the left, making a complete U-turn, in the middle of the road, right by a curve in the road. If a truck or car had been coming, we would have been described as mush. But Pierre kept his winning smile, a kind of pursed look, like he was about to spit a watermelon seed.

I grabbed my two plastic jugs, while Pierre opened the back of the little station wagon and pulled out four of his own. We walked over to the hillside, across the smooth ground. Countless feet, shod and human, barefoot and American-soled, had stood on this ground. It was as smooth as the ground by a Moslem shrine. But this was a shrine of nature. Out of the hill stuck an iron pipe, and out the pipe gushed water, spring water, good water. The Moroccans called it “L-ma h-loo,” which means, “sweet water.”

A Moroccan street.

“Come on, how would you describe this night?” Pierre asked again, as he filled up his jugs from the iron pipe. He had four large jugs, enough for two days of water for his wife, and their two small children. My two gallon jugs would last me for two days too. Then we would come back again, me risking life and limb for a ride with a crazed Frenchman.

I looked up at the hill above us. Up close, it was not so stark. Browns and tans replaced the grey. On the other side of the road, a river cut through a pasture of grass. The grass had been clipped bald by sheep and goats. That too was brown, dusty.

“I don’t know,” I said, stalling, searching for that 24-hand. Milky? Are you kidding? How about ghastly? Lunar? Luminescent? That’s not bad, but it will never top this Frenchman with that smile. Then I found a good one, not physical enough perhaps, but one that Pierre could relate to.

“Surrealistic,” I said, standing up with a full jug.

He craned his neck back, looked at the land as I had looked. My eyes followed his. How do you describe land like this, a land of contrasts, friends and strangers, a land where you have lived for a year, that you love, yet that you don’t feel a part of?

“Phantasmagoric,” Pierre said, his smile finally breaking into a broad grin.

“Phantasmagoric,” I repeated. “Where the heck did a Frenchman ever learn the word ‘phantasmagoric’?”

“Never mind that. That’s what tonight is,” he said. And I knew he had me.

We got back in the car, two friends from two countries in a third country, a third world. Pierre had topped me that night, that phantasmagoric night. But I sat content in the front seat of his car, and smiled. Because I knew I would have the chance to top him again. That’s what friends are for.