She opens the letter:
3rd March, 1984
Zitoune, Morocco
My darling Addy,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. You know how crazy things can be when I’m over in Nigeria. I loved your letter about your initiation week at Concordia, but please tell me that was a purple wig and that you didn’t dye your lovely titian hair. Just like your mother’s.
Well, I’m not in Nigeria any more. Things are still unsettled here with the politics and all that, and with the glut of oil on the market right now, they terminated my contract early. No need to have a petroleum geologist searching for oil when they have more of it than they can sell!
The job down in Peru doesn’t start till May, so I’ve headed up to North Africa for a bit before going there. It’s dinosaur land up here, so I thought I’d do a little independent oil prospecting. Remember what I used to tell you when you were little? Where there were dinosaurs, there’s probably oil. I might try to stop by Montréal to see you when I get back before flying back to Nanaimo. Is The Old Dublin still there? They do a cracking pint of Guinness.
Addy, my darling, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking up here in the mountains. It’s a beautiful place – you must come here one day. I know how much you love the Rockies. There’s something about mountains, isn’t there? Solid and reassuring. A good place to come when life wears you down.
I know it hasn’t been easy for you since your mother died. You know there was no option but the boarding school, what with me having to travel so much for work. You made a good fist of it, though. Honour student. I never told you how proud you made me. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for a lot of things … I hope you know how much I love you and your sister.
There’s something I need to tell you. I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it. I’ve met someone here. Up here in a tiny village in the Moroccan mountains. You know they talk of thunderbolts? It was like that. I can’t explain it. Maybe you’ll feel it yourself one day. I hope you do.
She’s a lovely young woman from the village. She writes poetry. She has such spirit. She’s only twenty-three, Addy – nineteen years younger. I only hope
Addy peers into the envelope. Nothing. Where was the rest of the letter? What did her father hope? Who was this woman?
She looks at the Polaroids fanned out across her lap. The colours faded – the red turning into orange, the purple into pale blue, the green into yellow. The images slowly disappearing into memory. The splayed imprint of the footprint of a large bird in red clay. Something that looks like prehistoric cave carvings. An old man on a bicycle in an ancient clay-walled alleyway. A circular stone opening in a seaside wall. The shadows of a couple silhouetted on a sandy boardwalk – their loose clothing billowing about them, caught by a gust of wind. A woman’s slender brown hands holding an intricately carved wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl veneers.
Addy holds the photo up and squints at the fading image. The ring on the woman’s left ring finger. Golden hands clasping a crowned sapphire heart. A Claddagh ring. Her mother’s wedding ring. Hazel’s ring.
One by one, she turns the photographs over. Her father’s handwriting. The blue ink from his fountain pen. Dinosaur footprints, Zitoune, December 1983 – with H and … Addy squints. She can’t make out the other initial. Cave art, near Zitoune, February 1984 – with H; Alley in the Marrakech medina, March 1984 – with H; On the fortifications, Essaouira, April 1984 – with H; Le Corniche boardwalk, Casablanca, May 1984 – with H.
With H? Who’s H? Is she the woman in the letter?
Addy shifts in the chair and a final Polaroid slides out of the envelope into her lap. Its corners crushed and bent, the gloss cracking. Her father. In his forties, still fit and handsome, standing in front of a fairy-tale waterfalls. He has an arm around a woman. She’s young, with long black hair falling onto her shoulders. Her skin is a warm brown, her eyes the colour of dark chocolate.
They’re both smiling. Her father has never looked so happy. But it isn’t his smile that draws her gaze. It’s the round bump straining the fabric of the purple kaftan. Addy turns the photo over. The blue ink. The familiar impatient t’s and g’s. Zitoune waterfalls, Morocco, August 1984 – with Hanane.
Zitoune, Morocco – November 1983
‘Higher, Hanane. You can do it.’
Hanane glances down at the laughing boys, her fine black eyebrows raised in doubt. ‘You think so? It looks a lot higher when you’re up here.’
‘Look, I’ll show you.’ Omar grabs a low branch of the olive tree, swinging his lithe body up onto the bough. He jiggles a branch, raining fat black olives over his older brother, Momo, and their friends, Driss and Yassine Lahcen.
‘Stop! Stop, Omar!’ Momo yells. ‘They hurt!’
‘Don’t whine, Momo,’ Hanane says. ‘Get the basket and fill it up. We don’t want them to go to waste. They’ll make good oil this year.’
Omar reaches down through the branches. ‘Take my hand, Hanane. I’ll help you.’
Hanane peers up through the grey-green canopy of the olive leaves. ‘How did you get up there so quickly, Omar? You’re like one of the monkeys by the waterfalls.’
‘I’m the best climber in Zitoune, you have to know it.’
‘I’m not as small as you. It’s harder for me to squeeze through the branches.’
‘Is it true you will be married soon?’ Momo’s best friend, ten-year-old Driss Lahcen, shouts up to her.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I heard your brother talking in the café. He said your father made a deal with your uncle in Ait Bougmez for you to marry your cousin, Mehdi, after Ramadan, and Ramadan finished already.’
Hanane grimaces and shakes her head, her long black braid swinging across the back of her blue djellaba. She’d never marry fat, ugly Mehdi, no matter what her father and Mohammed said.
She had a plan. She needed to convince her father to send her to university in Beni Mellal to study as a teacher. The new school rising up on the hill would need teachers. She was lucky that her poor mother had demanded that she learn to read and write at the village school, even though it had meant sitting behind a curtain so as not to distract the boys.
It had been wonderful, learning the magic of transcribing her thoughts into words that she’d scribble with her mother’s kohl stick onto the scraps of paper she’d collect from the alleyways and hoard in her cupboard, rolled up in the folds of a hijab. Behind the dirty flowered curtain in the schoolroom, she’d discovered a talent that was hers and hers alone. Poetry. Short, sweet aches of life. The poems sprung from her like water flowing from the fountain of the garden of Paradise.
Then her mother had died. The baby hadn’t managed more than two days of breath before he’d joined her. Her father had pulled Hanane out of school. A home needed a woman to cook the tagine and wash the clothes, he’d said. Someone needed to feed and care for him and her older brother, Mohammed. Even though she was only twelve. When her father had married the dull girl Hind the following year, nothing changed. Her education was over. But Hanane would escape her duties in the house whenever she could to range around the valleys and fields, helping the shawafa find the plants for her medicines and potions. In the mountains, she was free.
She was twenty-three now and the world was changing. Even here in the mountains. She’d often