Above the towers of the mosque in the Jmn El Fna Square in Marrakech, the twilight sky burned with a fierce redness. The young American, Eric, turned down into the winding streets of the native quarter. He had rented a room and left his luggage at the Hotel de France where many Western travelers often stayed. That left him free to wander for some time in the Medina, nothing on his mind, no expectations or plans. He turned into the alley of woodcarvings and carpets. The hooded figures jostled in the alley moving from stall to stall quarreling over prices, their harsh Berber voices, strident in expression. It was all familiar to Eric; he had been to Marrakech some months before. He had lived with a French girlfriend then on the other side of the Medina and many early night hours had been spent walking these same streets of shops and vendors. And this night of deep red twilight put him in mind of the joyful hours of his time with Josette, when after a nocturnal breeze came down from the Atlas Mountains, the two would close the shutters of their mosaic tiled room and embrace and talk, secure in each other's arms, until dawn.

   Now, he faced solitude. The city seemed different, he felt immediately an unfriendliness. Men walked, their heads bent forward under burnooses wrapped closely about them; Moroccans avoided his eyes. He sat down at an outdoor table at the Cafe Akmed for a mint tea but after some time watching the men play dominoes and not being served, he left and further walked into the turning streets and alleys. Someone brushed against him and it felt deliberate. Glancing down he saw a young boy. Naturally he was begging. In a cloying, unnatural tiny voice that put his nerves on edge, the boy was asking alms, stretching out, instead of the usual tin cup, a tambourine. He walked hastily to escape. The boy hurried along beside him, surprisingly hurling English words at him.

   "I know you. You are not a stranger."

   Eric walked faster, leaving the jangling of the tambourine, feeling the comfort he sought eluding him. "No, get away", Eric shouted explosively, without looking back at the boy pursuing him. The begging child's voice cried out at him:

   "I know your character. You are the one who laughs when passing mosques. You are no stranger here."

   Amazed at these words, puzzled and unsettled, Eric ran down an alley that led to a courtyard of basins used to mix dyes that colored fabrics. Women attending the vats looked at him, startled by his sudden appearance. Some covered their bare heads with their caftans; all of them gestured him to go away, snarling and waving their arms. Eric ran down another alley towards what he hoped was the center of town. He wanted to be where there were some bright lights. As he approached the tumult of the square, it was no longer disturbing there; people walking in the square paid no attention to him. He welcomed the anonymity.

   Arriving at his room in the Hotel de France, he lied down on the bed hoping to relax. It was no use. As the evening edged on, his discomfort increased. "What did that beggar mean?" he asked himself, "What's happening?"On the rooftops of the hotel under the moonlit sky the Westerners were drumming; it was their customary nightly ceremony. Eric had no desire to join them. He closed the door to lessen the noise. The shuttered window on the other side of his room looked out on to the crowded street. From it he could hear the brittle sound of dominoes as they were shuffled on the tables. In his view was a game shop for young men where tables of soccer were played, the harsh slapping sound of the sliding bars knocking the bonelike disc around the tables and the loud Berber talk and cigarette smoke offended Eric. It was hours before the drumming and noise from the game room ceased and it was late at night when he finally sunk into sleep.

   In the morning Eric awoke refreshed, cleared of much of his apprehension and resolute to stay sometime longer in Marrakech. Outside in the street it was raining and a wind from the mountains beat against the awnings of the shops. He held his head down as he walked. A man on his donkey smiled at him as his animal carried him towards the Medina. Again Eric was surprised when he was greeted cordially by the bread stall owner and again by the fruit merchant where he had always in Josette's company bought figs and dates and oranges. In fact everyone, the carpet weavers and the carpenters and metal workers greeted him with a surprising friendliness. It was even more puzzling that such sudden warmth was offered Eric on a windy rainy day. Even the crowds that gathered around the fortune tellers and the snake charmers looked at him amicably from under umbrellas. Eric turned down the street full of cloth merchants hoping to buy a new burnoose from the rainy season. A merchant beckoned him forward to look at his merchandise. Offering him a seat made of camel hide, he followed by bringing a jeweled tray and on it a silver glass of mint tea.

   Eric gratefully responded "Thank you for the kindness."

   The merchant countered, "Don't thank me, instead thank the rain. Men must be generous on rainy days."

   "Enshallah" Eric offered, trying to please the merchant with the sacred word he had learned as a gesturing sound of respect.

   "Enshallah, my friend suggests the will of Allah. Is it his will that you buy something from me? A traveling bag or a fine pair of leather slippers? Eighty percent camel hide and twenty percent tax." The merchant twisted his mustache and giggled, "I have everything you might desire."

   Eric smiled obligingly but politely told the merchant that he was looking for a burnous, but that he might come another time for a traveling bag.

   "Another time?" the merchant said. "Always tomorrow with foreigners. Today is the day, a special day. It's not everyday it's raining."

   Eric felt awkward as though ensnared in a kind of trap of whimsical playfulness, a situation with which he found it difficult, in his shyness, to deal and he fumbled with his desire to disengage."

   "What you are looking for then my friend is not in my hands. It is the foreigners here that do not know what they want. Where are you from my friend?"

   "America."

   "Aha, I see. A burnous today and maybe a traveling bag tomorrow. So it is 'Enshallah'. Being certain of your desire is not in your American character. Bless your heart, my friend."

   As Eric got up nervously to leave, shaking the hand offered by the merchant, he had the feeling that he was helpless to leave with any graciousness and that he might enact some irrevocable insult, that opening his mouth to speak would be a foolish gesture he might regret later. So he nodded cautiously as the merchant smiled and bowed to him.

   "American, you said. Then you must know the expression an American once taught me. He said looking up to sky, This American said 'Look at this weather. It's raining cats and dogs'."

   The merchant relaxed into a soft laughter that Eric enhanced with a louder laugh as he turned again into the street. The merchant called to him, "But we Berbers say it different. We say it is raining camels and donkeys."

   Eric's last gesture of farewell was to appreciate the merchant's joke by continuing a long, sustained laugh. A few feet away from the merchant's store, he heard voices near him. Several hooded men looked towards him. An expression of annoyance was on their faces. He walked on. The voices behind him grew louder and more excited. Once voice said something in Berber and another voice shouted out at Eric. "You are laughing. An insult! Do you know where you are?"

   Eric turned fearfully towards these men and saw that they were angry. They were standing in the tiled archway of a mosque.

   "Do you know where you are? This is the Dar Ghazi Mosque, sacred to us, and you laugh while passing by. That's an insult. You should know better, you are no stranger here."

   Bewildered and frightened, Eric was shaking, reflecting bleakly upon his bad luck, and remembering what the child beggar had said. It had somehow come to pass and Eric was wishing he could leave Marrakech, when a small figure approached him in the street.

   "Sir", it said, "Come with me. You must leave from here. Follow me."

   "Where to?" Eric asked, noticing that this boy who apparently wanted to help him was about the same age as the begging urchin . The boy began to run motioning him to follow. They slowed to a hurried walk and went through alleys and under arches and through tunnels, into a congested street that Eric recognized to be near the Jmn El Fna Square. The boy held Eric's hand, moving forward, not looking back. Finally, the two paused before a green door at the end of a narrow passageway. The boy knocked loudly.

   "Where are we?" asked Eric, still shaking.

   "It is a hammam, see the green door. Always a green door means a bath house."

   An old man swung the door open and stood looking at the two of them.

   "It is very busy. Not the best time."

   "Please let us in. Hamdullah. Make an exception. This foreign man has made a mistake at the Ghazi mosque. He did not intend to perform an insult but he laughed while walking past the mosque. Let him come in to be cleaned and to wash this stain from his character. Please Hamdullah. I'm sure he has money."

   Eric momentarily pulled back reluctant to accept the boy's solution, recoiling against surrendering his will and losing all measure of control.

   "Just wait. I did not agree. I did not ask to come here." Eric angrily stated.

   "Sir, believe me, it is not a thing of choice. Trust me, it is intended you come here and wash and cleanse away this mistake. Come this way to the baths. They will comfort you, the best in Marrakech."

   Eric stepped inside the door. It was dark but he could feel warm air blowing, first upon his face and then engulfing his entire body. The boy guided Eric through the dark corridor opening at its end into a large, domed dimly-lit room, its tiled floor slick with moisture. The boy now let go of Eric's hand and looked up into his worried face and spoke soothingly:

   "You will be fine now. You are in good hands. Take your bath. For the moment perhaps you have little trust, but soon you will see that it was all meant for your protection. That old man over there will help to make this thing right for you. I do not ask money from you, sir. I am not here for that but only to guide you towards your health and good fate."

   The old man, naked to the waist, approached Eric offering him a towel and guiding him down a corridor to the place to undress. The warm current of air enveloped him as he undressed. No one seemed to notice him, but leaving his clothes, wallet in his pants, on a straw mat provided, he wondered if his money was safe and would his clothes be untouched.

   The old man turned around to face Eric and putting his hand out in a gesture of reassurance, said clearly "Safe. Nobody will touch your things. Believe me."

   The air was warm and moist and the steam thickened as Eric entered the domed room where at various angles, figures lay resting or asleep, wrapped in blankets. At the far end of the room a gathering of men, towels wrapped about their waists, sat about a burning cauldron of coals, drinking tea and talking in loud tones.

   Eric slowly approached in their direction, taking care not to step on the sleepers or bump into any lying bodies. He seated himself quietly at the pool's edge some feet from the group of men. He was thinking of the strangeness and misfortune he had encountered since his arrival in this city of mazes, flanked on one side by the vertical reach of mountains and on the other by the stretch of desert vastness beyond the encircling old walls. It was not yet too steamy for him to see that the men sitting around the coals were looking in his direction. He soaked his feet in the pool, breathing rapidly. For some time he sat there, trying to think of nothing, watching the steam rise into the slanting bars of light that sprung from little windows at the top of the dome. The men were speaking Berber so he drifted away from listening to their voices and continued watching the interplay of steam and light.

   First it was a fragment of English, a word or two he overheard and soon an entire sentence floated his way through the steam and echoing chambers. He felt as though he were a child deciphering the morphemic blur of language for his first time. One voice deep and guttural said:

   "Ah..... heem, yes it is that one."

   Another voice emerged, shrill and whiny:

   "How eez it you know heem?"

   "He is the one they are talking about."

   Again things changed abruptly. Eric was in a state of nervousness. His mind was moving again towards the edge of fear. His thoughts followed the fitful movement. They were saying, "Is this really happening? It is absurd. A nightmare." He sat still while the voices continued, waiting for some sense of clarity to come to him.

   The deeper voice continued: "He is that one the imam was talking of. And some of the shop-keepers near the Ghazi. We know him but he does not know himself at all. Not this man. He doesn't know what it is he wants. Does he want to be with men or is it women he wants. I tell you he is a stranger to himself. I think it is men he is desiring to go with."

   Eric sat still melting in a pool of fear. His lips were quivering and his blood was surging inside. He got to his feet and wasted no time in making his way towards the place of undressing. His lips could not stop fluttering. A violent desire to run back to his clothes seized him but he feared the possible quarrel that stumbling against a body might cause. He walked stealthily along the slick tiled floor and when he reached the room where he had left his clothing, he saw that nothing had been disturbed. He could feel his wallet under the pile of garments. Quickly he slipped into his clothes struggling into his burnous and walked rapidly to the door that opened onto the street. The old man sat there on a stool and held out his hand. "Your money. Fifteen durham and five for the use of the towel." Eric took a crumbled twenty five durham note and handing it to the bent old man with sagging flesh, Eric hurriedly walked in the direction of his hotel.

   The whole rain-soaked city seemed to be pouring its grimness down upon him. Terror covered him so that he saw nothing but an abyss of absurdity that every moment appeared to plunge deeper. He saw no details. He knew the gray terraced walls were there in the gloom ahead and he was aware that he had to pass under several arches to reach his hotel. All the external world seemed invisible. 

   What had to be navigated were the sharp edge of his indignation and the corners that turned into a deepening sense of inexorable fear. Eric raced through the dark alleys of his mind, his heart now quivering like his lips and found himself fainting into a sheltering place of respite that was his room. From intense exhaustion of nerves and from tremors, he fell into a deep sleep.

   At dawn when he awoke, he felt that the day was going to be another dark and puzzling one. The rain had stopped. He got up and opened the window. The early morning sky was hung heavily with clouds. His dreams had been chaotic, a continuation of the frenzy of his waking state. An unappeased throbbing went on in his body. He was restless to leave the sad bleakness and cold of his room, but he trembled thinking of what might await him on the streets.

   The bus station was only a half a mile walk from his hotel, but for him every step and every corner to turn and every archway ahead of him seemed an effort to be made against an implicit danger. Outside the door he walked the sequence of streets and shops which soon unrolled into the public market and openness of the Jmn El Fna Square. The buses were loading for their journeys; bags of merchandise and sacks of grain were hoisted to the racks by bands of shouting men in djellabas. Women with tattooed faces under caftans talked noisily, their hectic voices mixing with the grinding sound of motors. Some dusty bearded men were boarding the buses to Fez and Taroudant and Tiznit and towards Goulamine at the frontier of the Sahara desert. Some carried sheep over their shoulders. Goats were being tied and strapped into cages provided at the back of one bus destined for towns in the remote Atlas Mountains. Eric looked nervously for the buses going north to Tetuan and Tangiers. His lips began quivering again when he didn't see any. Eric could turn frantic at any moment and began shouting questioningly into the crowd, "Tangiers? Going Casablanca....Tangiers?" Nobody answered him. Looking around in a state of frenzy, he spotted a man in uniform. A policeman, he thought, an appropriate person to ask. Approaching the man closer he saw that he was not a policeman, but a young man in the brown uniform of a soldier.

   "Tangiers? Bus for Tangiers?" No answer. Eric tried to say it in French.

   "Quest l'autobus pour Tangiers?"

   "No" responded the tall soldier, "No ici, no ici. Terminal de Nord, mon ami."

   Eric followed the soldier past the crowded square and under shop awnings towards the quieter quarter of town. The soldier prodded him to hurry to make the bus schedule and extended his hand to assist Eric move more quickly through the crowd. When they reached the olive groves along the Quitaba Gardens, Eric saw no reason for the soldier's hand, and so unwrinkled his fingers to withdraw. 

   The soldier tightened his grip. Eric uneasily scanned the garden landscape. The soldier led him along the street that flanked the garden and towards the arched gate at the edge of town. It seemed to Eric that they had walked too far, beyond the area he imagined the buses would be.

   "Ou allons nous, terminal du Nord?" Eric asked.

   "Oui, monsieur, oui! Don't worry, hurry" the soldier said walking faster, his boots tapping the paved paths with a metallic sound. His hand tightened again around Eric's. Behind him Eric sensed the presence of others and when he turned around he saw two men walking very close behind them. A hostile spirit overtook him and he felt something ominous entering his consciousness. Eric reacted and pulled away from the soldier but couldn't free his hand from this sudden fierce grip.

   Translating into thought what he had already intuited, he cried out, "What are you doing? Quelle passe? Est ce la bonne direction?"

   Eric turned to look back at the two men following. Their faces glared at him intently silhouetted against the hot hillsides, they moved closer emerging black shadows. His lips quivering he caught his breath in a sob, he tried to pull away but couldn't. Just a moment after passing under the arched gateway, Eric was thrust against the crumbling city wall. The two men encircled him. The soldier reached down and seized Eric's groin. Someone's fingers were pulling at his pants, another hand undressed him below the waist, his bare legs shivering, his buttocks caught horribly in the grip of grasping hands. Eric felt the blood leap upward in him like a fierce flame. "Let go of me!", he shouted.

   "Laisse moi tranquille" he kept screaming, his face growing redder, and his blood on fire. A sharp pressure began piercing between his quivering thighs, further up between the crevice of his rear, up into the opening. The pain was pushed by the fury of man's thrusting pelvis. The moment was reaching grotesque proportions. With one hand Eric seized the soldier's throat, and with the other, he pulled the man out of position behind him. The soldier caught hold of Eric's face and began pressing his tongue into Eric's quivering lips, trying to force the mouth open. Suddenly there was a blow to Eric's legs; they buckled and Eric fell to his knees before the soldier who quickly loosened his belt and reaching under his garment brought out his extended organ that sprung forward near Eric's face. "Monsieur, submission mon ami" the soldier whispered.

   A hand gripped Eric's throat and he thought, "now they are going to have me, to make me into their woman." His throat was caught and choked. He couldn't scream and had to open to his mouth for air at which moment the sour fingers from a rude hand forced his lips open and tongue out. At this moment he could not struggle and like falling away from the fury of a dream, he eased up and the muscles of his mouth stopped working and relaxed into accepting the thick and throbbing penis of the soldier. The hand around his throat also eased and fell away. The salty strange thing in his mouth pushed forward, slowly sliding deeper. Eric looked up at his rapist whose face was grinning and then grimacing as though in pain. His mouth was now forced open fully and his head slowly tilted upward as if he were looking at the ceiling of his submission that touched the swirling tide of a grotesque sky. From somewhere unknown, a remote region of himself came floating the words he had heard from the men in the bath house. "I tell you he is a stranger to himself." And again another fragment went across his memory, "He doesn't know what it is he wants." And then again: "I think it is men he is desiring to go with." A glimpse of the beggar boy and the boy leading him to the hammam slid into his unresisting mind and the mad sequence of days that carried him like a victim into the present moment of savage violation stared nakedly and accusingly at him.

   Deep in the core of his being, something stirred to shake the neglected roots of his will and turn his surrender into anger. An indignant voice reached inside him, informing his senses with the sudden possible choice of action. His blood rose, burning in his head, straightening the nerves in his quivering lips, tightening the muscles in his jaws, and empowering his mouth to resist.

   Eric's teeth tightened against the soldier's penis which slid away enough to allow a better grip. Eric grinded, pressed down fiercely and, slowly and violently, sinking his teeth with all their sharpness into the rigid and gristly instrument that had invaded him. The soldier cried out and then howled in pain. Eric increased the pressure, biting harder and deeper than he had thought possible.

   Some blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. Eric could not relent; the soldier could not bare the pain and began weaving and gyrating. The soldier's eyes were scalding tears. He waved the other men away. The two men obeyed, withdrawing some distance away. Eric did not stop however and the two men watched their soldier friend writhing in agony. When Eric at last released his teeth and pulled away, the soldier fell to the ground and lay still but shaking, his nose in his puddle of spittle, pinkish with blood. Eric feared that he was doomed, but felt a triumphant surge as he shouted out into the world. "I did this! I caused this pain of yours! What will happen to me now?"

   A crowd began to gather. "Did you see what I did? Call the police. Do you hear me, call the police. I want witnesses. I want them to see; everyone should see what happened, what was intended. I am not your casualty, not just the outsider, do you hear me."

   In the court the magistrate consulted with his associates before arriving at a decision. Eric was stunned by the lack of sympathy for his situation. The witnesses had told their version of what had happened at the city wall. The two men, the soldier's accomplices, were allowed to be considered witnesses and testified harshly against him.

   "The witnesses have all spoken about what occurred at the city wall," the magistrate said, "and from what I understand, you proclaim yourself innocent. You are not the honorable kind, you are the other kind."

   And as Eric opened his mouth to speak, the magistrate interrupted him and said impatiently, "Your words are of no value here. You come to this city a stranger, you defile with your laughter our most sacred mosque, you go to our bathhouse with suspicious intentions and you fight violently with the soldier who you may have ruined for life. We don't want your kind walking our streets. Your passport has been sent to Tangiers stamped for you to leave our country in four days. You will be released from our jail tomorrow when you must go to the Tangiers's Police Station and arrange to take the boat to wherever you live and you must not return ever."

   The verdict from the magistrate shocked Eric who found it another twist in a plot of absurdities. But Eric, once he received the sentence, was relieved to be on his way out of danger and far from Morocco. His last night in jail he had dreamed feverishly. In the first part of the dream he saw the figure of Josette beckoning him forward from a distant terraced wall. The second part, which was even less clear, he saw a hand that was a familiar sight in the southern Berber region, the Hand of Fatima, a pointed object with a long extended finger, pointing at him and following him until the dream's end. In the morning he was released and he was content under clear skies to be catching the train to Tangiers. His mind no longer dwelled upon what had happened and what, if anything, the last miasmic days had meant. Looking out the train window and watching the outline of the Atlas Mountains fading away in the distance, he thought about the magistrate, remembering the disconcerting look on his face. He felt for certain that the magistrate understood what had really happened.

   Absolutely, the magistrate, Eric believed, knew the truth, however, it was not intended to affect the conclusion. It was that other kind of truth.