Karim pushes past Driss and frowns. “Who was that?”
Driss tosses his empty can in the trash and shoves his hands in his pockets. He shrugs. Someone cackles behind them, and Driss wonders what her laughter sounds like.
She missed me.
He can’t hide the small smile that snakes across his mouth.
“Sly boy,” Karim drawls, jostling him. “Finally found a girl and you’re keeping her to yourself? Proud of you, man. What’s her name?”
Her name.
It’s all Driss can think of when Karim drops him off, when Aziza tells him a joke she found in the paper, and when he gives her the last turn in his Rubik’s Cube. He’s still thinking about it when he falls into bed and stares at the wall, the dry branches outside his window carving shadows that undulate like the Qandisa’s hair in the breeze.
He did a search online and found nothing. The tale of the Qandisa isn’t unsung—everyone knows it. So why doesn’t anyone know her name?
Driss slips out of bed and into the hall. Aziza’s door is ajar, soft light pulsing through from the little TV he got her a few years back. He sneaks past to the back room where they keep rubbish they should have thrown out months ago. The last thing he needs is to explain himself, so he moves as quietly as he can, staving off one too many sneezes as he stirs up the dust of old things. It doesn’t take long to find his grandfather’s old books. There’s sand in the tape used to hold the spines together, holes where the bugs got through.
The books aren’t many. Some on business practices. A couple on the numerous languages of Morocco. Another about puzzles, the love of which he passed on to Driss. And then there’s the last one, the thickest and most derelict, Aziza’s favorite: fables.
Driss opens it with care, flipping page after page before he finds what he’s looking for: a black-and-white sketch ofthe riverbank, where a dark, demonic figure looms.The Qandisa, the title reads.Should have brought a flashlight, he thinks to himself, squinting to make out the old text.
He laughs at himself. He’s not scouring the news, or a biography. He’s looking through a book of fables to learn about the girl by the river drowning men.
She was wronged.
Driss stops and reads the passage again. The Qandisa was the most beautiful girl Morocco had seen. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, she was betrothed to a man who was kind, considerate.
Too kind and considerate, sogoodthat he didn’t see his own brother for the monster that he was until it was too late.
And there, in the last line of her story, is her name. Driss shifts the book into the dim light, his heart sinking. It’s a smudge, only half of an??left behind. The act looks deliberate, as if her name is something to hide, to destroy.
A bind of pages slips loose, and Driss lunges to grab them, slamming the book shut in the process. He freezes, sneaking a glance at Aziza’s room as dust showers around him. He holds his breath.
The TV murmurs on in the tight silence. He exhales in relief and mistakenly inhales a lungful of dust and sneezes.
Aziza’s door creaks open, always noisier than his. She peers out with her big-rimmed glasses and calls out his name.
Driss holds his breath until she disappears back inside, and then he hurries, carefully opening up the book again totuck away the fallen pages, neat and orderly.
A sudden beam of light drenches the pages, illuminating the Qandisa.
Aziza stands in the hall, flashlight in hand. Driss can’t see much of her with the light in his eyes, but he can sense her fear, concern, worry.
“There is power in a name,” she says quietly, and closes her door, but not before giving him what he sought.
Driss works the morning shift on Tuesdays, and he can’t get through quickly enough. Somehow, his seeing her at Ayub’s barbecue, seeing how Karim’s eyes followed her hungrily, made her killings less monstrous, madeherless monstrous.
Karim’s mom snaps at Driss thrice, enough that even Karim gives him a look of concern. Driss deserves it. He gives a couple from Canada the incorrect amount of change. He gives a pair of backpackers from Fès the wrong hand-painted bowl, and then drops the right one.
“Sorry,” Driss says every time, but he can hardly bring himself to focus.
He takes the bus, getting off at the stop before the Qandisa’s copse. The trees sway in the distance, and he thinks he spies a flash of red before a car whizzes past and he crosses the street, Rubik’s Cube twisting just as the traffic light turns. He sprints the rest of the way.
He doesn’t know why he’s coming to see her.Maybe you have a death wish, he tells himself. Maybe thenot-so-rational part of his brain is also romantic and wishful and dense. What, exactly, should he say?I understand.But he doesn’t. He still doesn’t know why she tried to killhimwhen he’d never done ill.
When he nears the place where he almost drowned in the Qandisa’s lap, his thoughts vanish. The sun dims a little, that enigmatic glow of just-before-sunset weaves around him even as the time on his watch ticks just after noon.
There is power in a name. That’s why he’s come. Is there power enough to free her from her curse? To stop her from killing, to snip the tether tying her to the river?