Where To?
by Jessica Knauss
part 1
Chefchaouen, Morocco
Even here in the Rif Mountains, away from the coast or any border, the young men who’ve been too hungry, held too little power, try to stow away in the wheel wells of the tour buses they think are headed back to Spain. As if they could fold themselves up for a while, mail themselves like a letter, and end up with a better life. I can’t blame them for trying. Humans, especially young men, can’t live on a beautiful backdrop alone. Young men’s career options are limited to serving tea or shilling multicolored lamps or blankets, and that’s only if they have connections.
Regardless, I feel an urge to let them know that nowhere better exists. Even when I complete the Moroccan Arabic course I’m taking in Tangier, I doubt I’ll be able to find the words to convince them. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed such wild desperation to leave a place, and here I am thinking that Chefchaouen might be where I finally settle down after five years of solo wandering.
I started wandering years before that, with my beloved husband. We met on a rainy day in Boston when I ducked under the awning of the Radisson in order to work on opening a stubborn umbrella and found him there, holding a city map upside down. I showed him where his business associates awaited him, and he bought me a better umbrella. He had no ability to attach to a particular place, but it never mattered. He was home.
Until he denied his symptoms and tolerated unimaginable pain so we could keep traveling, and cancer took him. Without him, I have no place where I feel comfortable, where I have people to talk to, where I can let down my guard and rest even for a little while. So perhaps rather than solo wandering, these years have been the search for a place to settle. Somewhere my feet don’t automatically want to walk away from.
I checked out South America and coastal Asia. After Vietnam, a couple of stints in France and Switzerland made me comfortable getting what I needed in French. And then the dreams of mosaic tiles started. The dreams repeated as much as the tesserae in a Moroccan wall, so when I kept seeing ads for the Moroccan course — in magazines at the Swiss dentist’s, on the screen in Lausanne railway station half a kilometer underground, and even on an old-school billboard on the highway between Bern and Basel — something stirred in my heart. It was as if my husband were telling me it was time to head to Morocco. After five years, I still feel him in the pull of travel.
Tangier is so cosmopolitan, you could probably live a fulfilling life just speaking English, but I’ve applied myself to the study of subtle vowel sounds that barely get represented between swoops and whorls going right to left across the page. I felt the need to strike out into Real Morocco to test what I’d learned.
Chaouen, as the locals seem to call it, was a strange choice for my weekend if I wanted to speak Moroccan Arabic. I got off the bus and stepped into the walking tour with the zany Yoda lookalike, filling my head with his bizarrely youthful English. Even so, setting foot in the narrow blue streets is like being cradled in a sunny sky. I feel my soul expanding here to match the infinity. It’s as if I can see past the touristy boutiques with multicolored lanterns, apothecaries, leather, and blankets to where my house would be, where I would walk every day, the people I would wave or say hi to. This pretty little city they say was established by Jews and Muslims fleeing medieval Spain will welcome me, too, if only I decide to walk into its embrace.
The tour ends conspicuously in the plaza with any number of tea houses to visit before getting back on the bus. Although I could do with some of that magnificently sugared mint, I let the crowd of English holiday-goers take every last alfresco seat in the plaza because in the corner, tucked where no one but me seems to see it, there’s a bookstore. The wooden sign on the blue-washed stucco is only in Arabic, but that much I can decipher.
I approach the door, which is flanked by racks of photo-glutted tourist books: MAROC, MARRUECOS, MAROKKO, MOROCCO. I get a sinking sensation that this store is like the shops on the tour, its sole raison d’être to offer exactly the same wares as every other store and siphon whatever it can from the purses of indiscriminate travelers. Like me.
Or not like me at all. As I catch a glimpse beyond the doorframe, I correct my impression. Bookshelves such as you find in a poorly organized city archive, with books filed, stacked, and crammed into unlikely postures, confront the visitor, a clear challenge to me to continue. A desk with a plain lamp — not like those colorful glass ones for sale meters away — casts sickly yellow light on a desk, which apparently serves as the checkout. I observe that the bookshelves twist and double back into the depths of the building, and turn to the man at the desk.
I don’t carry a camera. If I need to remember some detail about where I’ve been, I look it up on the internet and stumble upon the déjà vu images of places I’ve visited and promptly forgotten. I prefer to carry with me only the emotional memory of the places I investigate, storing each one in a separate box in my mind. One day, without consciously thinking about it, I will open up one of the boxes, and it will contain the place I want to live for the rest of my life.
But when I say, “As-salaam Alaykum,” I suddenly wish for nothing more than a good camera so I can capture this man’s expression. As he lifts his head to respond, he has no discernible expectations of me, of this bookshop, of anyone, anywhere, at any time. I want to study his features in detail to see if I can solve the riddle of what this man wants. And when I figure it out, I will give it to him. Because this man’s face is a slighter, Moroccan version of my husband’s. That aquiline nose has been handed down to him by his mother, and I used to wake up every day to those brown eyes.
I don’t hear his reply, and my skimpy Moroccan Arabic knowledge is suddenly nonexistent. In French, I ask him if in his shop he has something I can’t get anywhere else.
“Do I have something you can’t get anywhere else?” he replies, also in French. He laughs, a schoolgirl’s titter. “Do I?”
I’m so entranced, watching my husband’s face on this man’s body, that I’m not sure how much time passes before a crash startles me. I jump and end up a little closer to the desk.
“Don’t mind her. It’s just my wife trying to help.”
His wife? But I’m his wife...
Misinterpreting my confusion, he rises from the chair behind the desk and beckons me into the maze of bookshelves.
I look at my watch. I bought it in Mexico with my real husband when he was alive. I’ve replaced the batteries more times than I can count, and I would pay any amount to keep it running. It tells me I have five minutes to get back to the tour bus.
The man with my husband’s face has already disappeared into the literary warren. I hear another crash. “Now, now, you can be more helpful than this,” he chides someone I haven’t seen yet.
The idea of returning to Tangier now holds no fascination for me. Maybe I’m meant to live in Chefchaouen for the rest of my life. Maybe starting right now. Or maybe I can find a hotel or another bus back later. It’s immaterial. I’m compelled to enter the stacks.
I weave around the ancient, groaning shelves, the air thick with the musk of dried glue, ink, and dust. When I find the shopkeeper, he’s crouched, trying to bring order to a pile of books in wildly varying sizes and colors on the floor. They must be what crashed before, but turning in every direction, I don’t see anyone who could’ve knocked them off the shelves. I don’t see anyone else at all.
“Where’s your wife?” I ask.
He stands with some of the books and gives me an unexpectedly lost look through my husband’s eyes. “I don’t know where these go.”
I briefly wonder why I’m asking him about his wife when clearly, I’m his wife; then I collect myself. “Who were you talking to before?”
Five or six hardcover books on the shelves at eye level zip in front of me, crash into the books on the opposite shelf, and head straight to the floor. I’m keenly aware they could’ve broken my nose or my jaw, and, far too late, I duck. As I straighten, fear crackles in my ears.
“What’s going on here?” I demand. My voice squeaks.
“I’m so sorry. Usually, she’s helpful. I think she’s jealous because of the way you look at me.”
Embarrassment takes over the fear. Am I so obvious?
“You must leave here,” he tells me.
“No, you must explain to me what’s going on.”
He looks to his right, the direction the books have been flying from. He leans in close to me, shielding our faces with one of the books, and I have every expectation that he’ll come in for a sweet, gentle kiss. Instead, he whispers in the same rumbling tones as my husband, “I can’t explain here. But I can’t leave until closing time, either. Wait for me in the plaza.” He steps away.
“What time do you close?”
He puts the book next to his face again, and whispers so quietly, it’s as if I’m reading his lips. “When she lets me. I’m going to make a scene now.”
He comes at me, making shooing motions with his arms. “Get out! Leave me alone!” he shouts. The words aren’t French or Arabic, but a strange Spanish.
It breaks my heart to see my husband’s face shouting at me, and as I stumble through the stacks, I sob helplessly. I haven’t felt this kind of despair in about half a decade. I’m not sure how I find my way out of the labyrinth, but when I get to the desk, the door is open. It slams shut behind me.
I gaze into the soft night, the blue buildings illuminated weirdly with colored glass. None of the other tourists from my group are in the plaza. A single couple sits at a table in the hotel terrace. I realize that this hasn’t been goodbye, that I’m meant to wait here for the man with my husband’s face.
I sit at a wooden picnic table, and a waiter wordlessly but politely leaves a menu with photos of the offerings on my placemat. I look up, past the gaudy street lamps, into the sky. No stars are visible, but the firmament isn’t black. It’s a deep blue.
When the waiter comes back, I tell him in English and French that I’m waiting for a friend. All the tour buses must’ve left for the day, and I watch a few groups of young men who were probably looking for their ticket out, heading home for another night. At the moment, I’m no better off than they are, facing a distinct possibility of spending the night without a roof. But at least I finally lack that treacherous urge to keep searching, keep moving.
Here, time doesn’t seem to pass, and I think it’s a good sign. I don’t even have time to think that the bookseller seems to be in the thrall of a poltergeist, and that the situation should be making me more nervous. The dread I felt when the books would’ve clipped my whiskers if I had any is so far away, as if it never happened.
In the plaza, the street lamps give my husband’s Doppelgänger a sallow look with dark shadows that remind me too much of his final days. He looks around at the different tables, then waves at me, motioning for me to go to where he is, which is not far from the bookstore. I get up from the table, feeling both guilty and thirsty, because I never ordered anything.
When I’m close enough, he murmurs, “I’m sorry, I can’t join you over there. It has to be here.” He points to the single wooden table at the tiny teahouse that shields his bookstore from view from the plaza. A waiter stands in the doorway. He looks as if he’d rather close and go home. But the bookseller makes a gesture, and the waiter nods and goes inside as if to prepare the usual. We sit across from each other at the table.
The place has a distinct odor, as if hashish has been smoked here every night for the last fifty years, and the street lamps turn the mysterious stains on the walls and tabletop into writhing dragons.
“Why here, exactly?” I ask.
“She doesn’t let me go farther.”
My concern for this bizarrely familiar man grows. “You can’t even cross the plaza? You live at the bookstore?”
He nods.
“Why does she have so much power over you?”
He points. “Look behind you.” Across the plaza, I see the blue city, nestled into its hillside for the night. “Chaouen was founded by Jews fleeing Spain. Later, it welcomed Muslims, also. It’s a fortress for people who don’t fit in anywhere else.”
Now the city seems to clamber up the mountainside, fleeing anything below that could do harm.
“People who may have had everything at one time,” I say, “but now have no place to call home.” Small wonder I felt called here.
I turn back to him. He continues: “I’m a tourist, too.”
It’s polite of him to forgive my interruption, but I don’t like being called a tourist when what I’m on is the ultimate quest: for home. And he’s a Moroccan if I ever saw one. How is he a tourist?
“From Casablanca,” he says, as if answering my thought. “I took the long way home from the hajj. I wanted to see these places I’d always heard about in my own country. I toured the north coast and decided to cross back to Casablanca through the mountains.
“I love books, so I entered the bookshop. A man with a long white beard was at the desk. He hardly looked up from his book. I explored the rows and rows of books for some time, picking up items to buy. Then suddenly I was face to face with a woman I hadn’t heard walking toward me.”
I know who he means. “She was startling in life, too?”
“I never knew her when she was alive,” he says.
Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Knauss
