The Colour That Comes Before Leaving

Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.

Ghita hooked the skein out of the indigo with her stick and it came up wrong. Indigo always surfaces green and turns blue in the air, she had watched it happen ten thousand times, but this skein hung dripping onto her sandals and would not decide what it was.

She lifted it into the slot of light that fell between the rooftops of Souk Sabbaghine. Across the alley, Moulay Brahim stopped stirring his pot of pomegranate rind and came over, drying his yellow hands on his apron.

"What did you put in that?"

"Indigo. Lime. Dates. The same as yesterday."

He looked for a long time. "It's like the inside of" he began, and stopped, and tried again. "It's the colour of when you" and stopped again.

Nobody ever finished. Her grandfather had told her that, forty years ago, when she sat on the lip of this same vat with her legs blue to the knee. People will try to name it. Let them try. And then the other thing he told her, the thing she had half decided was a story for children: it comes before someone leaves. Not dies, Ghita. Leaves. Leaves Fez and does not come back.

She hung the skein inside the doorway, out of the light. Too late: the Alaoui boy from the next alley already had his phone up.

Fez, 1956. The first time, the city was still hoarse from cheering. Flags hung from every window in the medina, red with the green star, some of them dyed in this very alley in a single week of furious work, and Driss, nineteen and his father's apprentice, had red under his fingernails until April.

That was when the vat gave up the colour. His father stared at it and said it was a fault in the lime. Monsieur Gaillard, the French clerk who had bought their wool for twenty years and paid late every time, came down the alley that afternoon, saw it hanging, and stood very still. In May he sold his furniture to a carpenter in the Talaa and took the train to Casablanca and the boat beyond.

It came up again in June. The following week the Toledano family closed the cloth shop at the mouth of the alley and left for the station with their mattresses roped to the roof of a taxi. Old Toledano shook Driss's hand and said, "Your father's red was the best in the city," which was the closest he came to saying goodbye.

Driss's father wanted to pour the vat into the river. Driss kept back a single hank and hid it under his bed, and at night he took it out and tried to name it and could not.

The buyer came on Thursday in a linen jacket that would not survive the alley. His name was Rachid Tazi, he was from Casablanca, he represented a design house in Paris, and he stepped around the mule carts the way people step around something that might bite.

He showed Ghita the Alaoui boy's photograph on his phone. Under it, four thousand strangers had argued about what colour it was.

"Two hundred thousand dirhams," he said. "For exclusive rights. Everything that comes out of that vat, and the method."

"There is no method."

"Then everything that comes out of the vat."

"It doesn't come when you call it."

He smiled as if she were bargaining, and perhaps she was. He left a card on the edge of the pomegranate pot, where it soaked up a yellow corner.

Up on the roof, among the wet skeins steaming in the sun, her son Yassine had heard everything. He was twenty-four and had trained as an electrician, and still he came every morning to haul water and lift wool, and every morning Ghita counted it as a kind of promise.

"Two hundred thousand, Mama," he called down. "You could fix the roof. You could pay Hicham to work the vats full time. You wouldn't have to lift anything."

"I have you to lift things."

He bent to straighten a skein that did not need straightening.

Next morning the colour rose again in her vat, thicker this time, climbing the wool as she watched. Moulay Brahim came across and looked at it, then at her.

"Not for me," he said gently. "My daughters are already in Bordeaux. I'm too old to go anywhere but the cemetery."

She had already counted the alley. The Benjelloun girl had gone to Rabat in the spring. The cobbler's nephew had come back from Italy and swore he'd never leave again. There was nobody else left to count.

That night she ladled harira into Yassine's bowl and sat across from him without eating.

"Where is it?" she said.

"Where is what?"

"The place."

He put the spoon down. "Montreal. An installation company. Solar panels, mostly." He turned the bowl a quarter turn. "They wrote back on Tuesday."

"Tuesday."

"I was going to tell you after Eid."

"After Eid," she repeated, as if he had named another country.

The colour came up a third time on the morning Abdelhak walked into the courtyard with a stamped contract from a labour agent in Marseille: the docks, two years, passage paid. He was seventeen. Their father shouted until the neighbours closed their shutters. Driss went up to the roof, and after a while his brother followed him and stood among the dripping blue.

"You'll have the vats," Abdelhak said. "What will I have? Half a vat? Your leftovers?"

Driss could have told him it wasn't true. He could have offered him the whole vat. He looked at the hank of nameless wool drying on the line, the one he had stopped hiding, and said nothing at all.

That night, after their father slept, he went down to the vat by lamplight with a length of woven sabra silk he had been saving for his own wedding.

Rachid Tazi came back on Monday with a contract in a plastic sleeve and raised his offer by fifty thousand before she had said a word.

"No," Ghita said.

"Name a number."

"It isn't mine to sell." She pushed a skein down into the vat with her stick and watched the colour climb it. "It belongs to whoever is going."

He looked at her as people look at the medina when they decide it is beyond saving, and he went back up the alley, stepping around the mules.

She went to Si Abdellah the weaver on the Derb Lamtiyine and bought the finest length of sabra silk he had, and paid him what he asked without arguing, which made him check the notes twice. In the afternoon, alone, she lowered it into the vat. She did not hurry. She let it go under three times, the way her grandfather did with anything that mattered, and each time it came up more itself.

She hung it on the roof among the blue and the yellow and the red, and it moved in the hot wind like something already halfway through a door.

On the night before the flight she folded it into Yassine's hands.

"They say the winters are cold there," she said.

He held it up to the bulb. "What colour is this?"

"You tell me. Write and tell me when you find the word."

He wound it twice around his neck, standing in her kitchen in August, and did not take it off.

At the bus station by Bab Boujloud, Abdelhak wore the scarf even though it was July and sweat ran down into it. When the bus pulled away he put his arm out of the window, and the scarf lifted from his neck and streamed back along the side of the bus, and Driss watched it until the road bent.

Abdelhak never came back. He married a woman from Oran in Marseille, worked the docks for thirty-one years, and sent a letter every Eid, each one promising next summer. When the letters stopped, his daughter's began. One of them held a photograph of a grandniece Driss would never meet, a laughing girl with the scarf around her shoulders, faded now to an ordinary blue that anyone could have named.

Driss was eighty-one when the photograph arrived, and Ghita, home from school, found him at the vat holding it. She asked him whether he wished he had kept his brother instead of dyeing him a scarf.

He set the photograph on the ledge, well back from the indigo, and took up the stick.

"I kept the vat," he said. "He kept the colour. Come. Hand me the lime."