Parler Tricks

“If I offered you a bet” William said, proffering the die in his hand, “put a dirham on odds and if you win you get nothing, or put a dirham on evens and if you win, you get twenty dirhams. Which one would you bet on?”

It was a rhetorical question. Hicham just shrugged his shoulder, no more interested in this American Christian’s persuasive gymnastics than those of the Muslims he’d avoided all his life. He wet his lips at the glass of ebony liquid in front of him and watched the bustle on the street: greener than Casablanca, fewer dusty cats. The skinnier women weren’t as nice to look at even though more of them showed, but essentially it was the same fascinating business of meetings arranged, secret, and chance; of little accidents with heels and shopping bags and windblown scarves; the same need to make the glass stretch out over the hours. 

It was a little bit patronizing, that die in his pocket, carried just for the sake of making this argument, for William would no more place money on a game of chance than he would agree to the shot of whiskey the three Frenchmen with red veined noses--still or already drunk at eight in the morning--had offered them as a veiled insult to Hicham’s obviously Magreb complexion. The die for the sake of argument, and the argument for the sake of the seven-year-old son, an impossibly adorable boy almost brown enough, curls almost tight enough, to be Hicham’s rather than William’s. The boy balanced his tailbone on the edge of a wicker chair before his half-drunk chocolat chaud, an intense adult’s drink nothing like the powder stirred into hot water he had in the States, something more like pure melted dark chocolate bars. Hicham was just the excuse to present the analogy in front of the boy. 

The mention of dirhams also annoyed him, a disingenuous nod to Hicham’s homeland when the obvious gamble was francs. Still, Hicham let him talk, scanning for a way to turn William’s gambit for a convert into either currency. He imagined a church back in the US giving the middle-aged missionary some kind of larger bonus for hooking a Muslim, a harder fish to land than an atheist and one he had to cast further ashore for than a Catholic. 

“It’s an easy calculation” William concluded leaning forward on his elbows for effect. “Now imagine betting eternity on it.”

It was an easy calculation for little Matthew, who already believed whole-heartedly in the kingdom of heaven. Hicham did not, but looking into the boy’s giant eyes, the match for the color and richness of his chocolat, shining with sincerity at the analogy, he calculated instead how many hours left before Celine would be home and he could comfortably return there without that oppressive homebody feeling of filling a woman’s role, and badly. “Tell me more. Show me your church.” The boy’s eyebrow lifted in muted triumph as his head snapped to catch his father’s reaction.

On the way out, Hicham deposited his copy of Le Figaro on the table of a man nearby, jutting his chin to indicate the slim ankle-crossed brunette reading the same at the next table over. The stranger had cast about for something to say to her for the last few minutes since she leaned over to ask him for a light of her cigarette, and time, ticked down by the length of the cigarette and the contents of her cup, was running out. Hicham had seen the man here before, perhaps a good turn would not be lost on him.

It was not a parlor trick, the charm William cast to lure in his mark, but Matthew had heard the term “parlor trick” and, being American newly able to read and newly arrived in France, had understood it to be a “parler trick.” A speaking trick, which seemed to fit. He even wanted to mention to people that it should be pronounced “par-lay trick,” but he could only manage to turn up to them those velvety eyes that made men put their palms flat on his head and women fish around in their purses for sweets. 

The first of the parler tricks was bringing Hicham home to lunch. No midwest American wife could get to a Moroccan man’s heart by the usual gastric route. When they ate at Celine’s friends’ homes, Hicham ate half a baguette with eggs and olive oil before they left: to avoid both hunger and inadvertent commentary on the friends’ hospitality when the food predictably ran out. But French hosts didn’t even hear that unuttered admonishment; it never occurred to them to be ashamed of their empty serving dishes. It was a running joke among the Maghrebis with White wives, or had been before he had begun avoiding his countrymen. 

The missionary’s wife would be pressed to put in front of Hicham the parade of food that would be enough to satisfy his enormous appetite; to include enough to honor him as a guest would offend her frugality and distaste for waste; to add enough seasoning (Hicham guessed) would elicit a comment about her house smelling for a week. It wouldn’t, of course, but for those who gave their lives over to convincing others that we are all brothers in God’s house, making themselves the bullying big brothers seemed only fair. 

No, there was a Senegalese maid, whose cooking was both more delicious than William’s wife’s and more pungent than Hicham’s mother’s, to blaze the trail from stomach to heart, while Ellen took the longer route through his mind and omitted to censure the cooking odors. 

Ellen told the stories. She sat on the floor up close to the coffee table with a steaming glass of mint tea at hand. It made her look casual and homey, provided a crooked knee for Matthew to climb on as he listen to the tales of his father’s adventures, but it was also calculated to put her on a level below William, so that when she broke Hicham’s gaze and looked toward the arm-chair-throned hero, Hicham had the full benefit of her sharp jawline angled up in adoration toward her husband, shining waves of light brown hair flowing behind. 

There was a rushing river and a neck-deep horse in some Atlas-mountain flash flood; a trapped teenager on the other side rescued from a cave in the slope so naked of vegetation, so loosely strewn with scree that the rain had turned it into a vast waterfall in mere minutes.

There was a country hospital overwhelmed with the victims of a bus crash at an hour when the government doctor had not bothered to appear. The confused overwhelmed nurses, in need of a man to come tell them what was what, were able to settle into triage after William wandered in from the coffee-shop outside and barked a few orders. Afterwards, William had spent the rest of the day transporting car loads of those who could survive the trip nearly two hours away to the next hospital.

There was the rifle-shot sound of rocks hurled through the window of their home and against the stucco walls by a crowd enraged by William’s influence on the mayor, whom he had convinced to crack down on corruption. A crowd of people with unjust suits in the courts, facing unfavorable rulings now that the obvious path of bribery was closed, had decided to run the do-gooder out of town. William, in a desperate bid to divert their attention away from his wife and infant son, had fled out the back garden, strategically rattling the iron gate to draw them and their stones away. They referred to it as the time when William had been “stoned,” alternating between comically suggesting he must have been high to try something so risky, and comparing him to a biblical martyr. 

In any case William had slipped the crowd, sheltered by the faction with just causes in the courts. But the family had to move. They took a furlough in the US, but were denied re-entry. All suspected missionaries had been ejected from the country in the interim.

“There was a big blow up about groups that had been operating for decades in Morocco. Suddenly everyone wanted them kicked out for proselytizing. The State Department gave them all our names as a gesture of goodwill, trying to sway them away from the Soviets,” Ellen explained.

“I remember it,” Hicham said. “A drunk pissed on the side of a mosque and his defense was that he had been converted.” 

The three exchanged looks, William anxious. About the word used in front of Matthew, about how the reminder of a desecrated mosque would derail his purpose. But Ellen read her guest better, the tiny jumps of her chest restraining a laugh as if a flock of disoriented birds careened around inside until the guffaw burst from her mouth. She waved her hand, still holding the half-empty tea glass and protested “It’s not funny. It’s not funny. That he…disrespected a mosque. But,” she had to pause, tears leaking from her eyes as Hicham’s gentle rolls of laughter joined hers followed by William’s sniffing chuckle. Ellen breathed deeply and finished “... to blame it on the Christians…Like I stole all the flowers from the graveyard, but it was because the Jews I’ve been hanging out with prefer stones…”

“I cracked my car into the liquor store when I was high,” Hicham responded, “because of the Muslims.”

“Better expel them,” Ellen concluded.

Matthew stood silently at the arm of his father’s chair, wide eyes taking in the comfortable scene. In fact, in the decades after, it has never left him, this moment of basking in the warmth-- as sensate as the wood fire that crackled at his back--this last cosy moment of feeling that his father was a hero, his mother charming and fun, both able to find the ridiculous in the rigidity of other people’s rules. After the next parler trick it was this fireplace he would envision Hicham’s other wife sitting before in her grief, for he had never seen the type of steel shipping-barrel stove that really warmed the home of Atlas women of her class.

Celine did not really care one way or the other about Hicham’s nominal conversion. It was something appealing about her. She neither wanted to change him nor to show him as a curiosity. Many a French woman showed off her North African husband at parties where she appeared in her skimpiest gown: proof of her hold on him. He wouldn’t dare suggest that she cover herself up. If Celine had been one of those, she would have objected to his new denomination. If her own faith had been more than a hoop she jumped through to keep her parents’ approval, she would have been pleased. 

As it happened, she just wanted him to get a job, and he’d be good at this gig with William. Hicham’s role was to go into neighborhoods and make friends, find out what people needed, find a way to make them work to get it--by building, serving, volunteering--work alongside them, and talk. He was ideal: he paid attention to details and had a silver tongue in all three languages, courtesy of his apprenticeship in Morocco’s communist party.

Besides, beyond the blood sense, he was no more Muslim than Celine was Catholic: too many people had waved that flag around him all his life, and wielded the pole as a cudgel. William aimed to be a fisher of men; Hicham, as it turned out, was not the fish he was angling for but the cormorant kept on a chain and sent out to bring in a more formidable catch. He could convince the Muslims. Not, of course, to abandon their faith--for here was Mohammed’s proverbial mountain--but to soften, to see the American Christians doing good work and, embarrassed by the contrast, step up their own efforts in their communities. Any good done was to the good, but it was the means, not the end.

If the fish caught at Hicham’s neck ring wouldn’t be the main course, perhaps they could still be the bait, served up to the next round who could be brought in. William and his backers played a long game; he could weather a few lost rolls, a few slipped fish.

The one surprise convert was Hicham himself, who saw William’s church actually doing in poor neighborhoods what the Communist party for which he’d been exiled had only talked about.

When the time was right, when conviction replaced expedience, William invited him again. Ellen was absent this time, spared the crass details of paying Hicham for his labor of love. Matthew was there. The lesson was, after all, partly for his benefit, an exercise in what a man may be asked to give up for his faith, in a man’s capacity for sacrifice when his faith is strong.

Perhaps the puff of his hair added an inch that day or the tan jacket had squarer shoulder pads than typical. In any case, William’s status as an upright man seemed more than figurative for the follow-up parler trick. 

All things, Hicham was assured, could be forgiven in Christ. But to persist in the sin, that was another matter, and God had given to mankind to be married to one alone. He must renounce one of the wives.

It was clear now why Ellen was not present. She might not forgive him, as William would. Her womanly loyalties might one day prompt her to disclose the situation to Celine. How William had learned about Fatma and their child, he did not say. Matthew stared, all his concentration poured into understanding. How could it be that a man with a wife could have another. Could his mother have another child at another home? What would that child be to him?

Hicham was not an upright man, but he had aspirations to goodness. He was not cruel; he was cheered by relief and triumph over adversity. He was shamed by his transgressions. Even as he married Celine, his thoughts went to Fatma, to Hayat, only an infant when last he’d seen her. He did not feel entitled to a second wife; it had been wrong from the start. But weighed against the humiliation of divorce for Fatma, the loneliness for himself, the long years he might wait before his political exile was lifted at home or his citizenship achieved here so he could send for them, he had simply salvaged what could be salvaged of a life.

Now William demanded what must be demanded. And Hicham, it turned out, was not a chained bird. Faced with the truth, he departed, like the rich man asking Jesus what must be done to get into the kingdom of heaven: not disputing the justice of the verdict, but carefully backing away from it as from a snarling animal. 

Matthew, looking right up to his upright father, saw through his gleaming white veneer, a film play out in shades of gray. A film of Hicham going home to Celine, kissing her and explaining that he’d lost his job; treading up carpeted stairs to the privacy of a room where he could write hopefully, tenderly, to the other, enclosing a cheque, neither of them harmed by his father’s judgment. In his failure, Matthew could comfort his father, who saw only black and white in contrast as sharp as dots on a die.

Hicham turned up again several days later, not a caged creature at all but a pet, back for a next meal, assuring William that he would henceforth honor only the legal marriage, only the one solemnized in a church. Atlas mountain marriages were merely de facto, solemnized by dancing guests and milk smeared across a lintel post, nothing that could honor so sober a personage as the Heavenly Father.

When the picture of the other woman, hair wrapped in white knotted kerchief, child clutched to her body for warmth, seated too close to the misimagined fireplace with Hicham’s final letter trailing from her work-calloused hand settled into Matthew’s mind, the boy looked to his father’s triumph in dismay. 

His face breaking into a joyful grin, William pulled his hands from his pockets to reach out to Hicham in welcome. Something flew from the pocket and clattered on the floor where Matthew raced his diecast trucks, and the jacket slipped on William’s shoulders in Matthew’s line of sight. The uprightness was just empty padding in the suit. Diecast trucks; dies cast. Matthew located the object that had fallen from his father’s padded suit, a die showing three--odds--and hurled it into the fire.