2
Abdellah watched eagerly as Ms. Gallagher continued her lesson. A few weeks ago, he had spoken not a
word of English. Now, though his sentences were limited, he was able to express simple, basic ideas, and he
realized with satisfaction that these ideas would become more and more complex as the year went on.
“Where is the mouse?” asked Janna Gallagher, and pulled a Mickey Mouse toy out of her pocket. The class
laughed as she put the toy on the floor next to a chair. “Driss?” said Janna, and an eager but somewhat slow-
witted fat boy in the front row stammered out “The...the moose...”
The class laughed louder, and Driss chuckled with them at his mistake. “Mouse,” corrected Janna, smiling
warmly, and had the class as a whole repeat the word so that Driss would not feel that he was alone in his error.
“Mouse,” repeated Driss. “The mouse is on the floor,” he said self-assuredly, with none of his usual hesitation.
“That’s good!” exclaimed Janna, who gave a shriek as she glanced at the toy mouse, and jumped onto the
chair beside it. The class roared with laughter at her pretended fright, but once again quieted as Janna asked in
almost a whisper, “Whe...where is your teacher?”
Shit!, thought Janna Gallagher. Is the fucking bell ever going to ring! Then, realizing that the hour was not yet
half over, she smiled at her irritation, a smile which her students saw and misinterpreted as part of the lesson.
Ordinarily her heart was in what she was doing, but today she wished only that the noon bell would ring, that this
interminable hour would end, and that she could rush to the “salle des profs,” or teachers’ room, to see if a letter
had arrived from Cleveland, Ohio. Lord, I never thought I’d be waiting for mail from Cleveland, Ohio, of all
places, she said to herself. But Cleveland was where Lahcen had been sent just two months ago. And it was with
Lahcen that her thoughts were now on this morning in late October, not on the lesson she was teaching.
Lahcen. Lahcen. She could hear the name echo again and again in her mind. Why had it been so easy to leave
her friends in Washington D.C. when she came to Morocco last year, but so difficult to say farewell to this one
human being? Departures were common to Janna. First from her Irish-American family at seventeen, away from
the stifling atmosphere of Boston, of a family where one brother had become a priest and a sister a nun. Thank
God she chose that vocation before it was my turn, Janna had often exclaimed. She had spent two years at the
University of California at Berkeley during a period of student uprising--two years spent protesting the Viet Nam
war, drinking beer and smoking grass, and making uninhibited love. But she had left Berkley without regrets for a
year of back-packing across Europe. Oh, the fascinating people she had met there, and yet she had gone on with
her life and never looked back. After finishing her university studies in Washington D.C., she had worked in the
office of a U.S. Senator, but three years of being a virtual secretary was all she could take. Eighteen months ago,
she had eagerly packed her bags and left the States in order to teach English in Morocco. She was sick and tired
of being thought a sex object. She liked sex, but damn it, she was a person and in Washington no one ever
seemed to think of her as anything but a body with a pair of legs and a pair of tits attached to it in the proper
places. So she had said good-bye to Washington, not only without regrets, but with pleasure.
Janna wished now that she had taken more seriously the warnings she received before leaving for Morocco.
One friend had told her that the women’s lib movement in America would seem centuries ahead of its time once
she had lived for a while in North Africa. American women have it made, her friend had claimed. But Janna would
have none of this. It can’t possibly be that bad, she thought naively.
God, had she been innocent! Now she knew that it was true. In Aïn El Qamar, women were either saints or
whores. Your mother and your sisters belonged to the first category, other women to the second. Foreign teachers
were especially suspect. The married ones dared to go unveiled, wore
PREVIOUS PAGE NEXT PAGE