I never translated their private calls, always marking them not relevant to current investigation — which didn’t stop me following their movements just for the hell of it, as if they were daily updates from a distant branch of my own family.

Sometimes I would even go onto Google View. I would push my little arrow along the long pink road which hugged the blue sea, with one of Tinariwen’s songs playing as the soundtrack. And I would imagine myself walking behind Afid to Oued Laou, sea breeze in my hair.

3

Where there’s a will, the intrepid Jewish woman will find a way

When I wasn’t busy following the twists and turns in the saga of my new Moroccan family’s life for relaxation purposes, I would visit my mother in her end-of-the-road nursing home.

Passing through the automatic doors of that institution, poetically called Les Eoliades, was like crossing a border between life and an alternate universe. My nostrils were assaulted with a stench that seemed to come from the yellow walls — of vegetable soup, industrial-strength detergent and dirty mattress protectors. Parked in the hall to greet me as they waited to be nudged into the dining room, were a hundred dazed and confused old folk, waggling their heads as if saying no to death.

The manager called them “the residents” as though they were living in some luxury apartment building; just ordinary old people who happened to be living there, and who could leave whenever they felt like it.

Amidst this defeated humanity, I would find my mother strapped into some sort of a capsule, her blind, staring eyes like saucers, fixed on the ceiling, waiting for the heavens to open like the doors of a store on the first day of the sales.

Once inside, I would take her up to her room. There, with palpable impatience, I would administer her special easy-to-swallow gruel for dysphagia sufferers. Then I would pull on her adult-sized onesie — we don’t say onesie, Madame, it’s infantilizing, we prefer nightwear — purchased in ten packs on the internet. It’s to stop the bedridden from rummaging in their nappies — we don’t say nappies either, Madame, we prefer protectors; nappies are for babies. Then I would wait for the aides to move her from the capsule to her bed, as I listened to her rant.

When she had been scooped out of that white plastic thing with a winch and deposited on her sheets, she looked so vulnerable, all curled up in her flanelette outfit, it was frankly distressing.

The woman who had once been so elegant in her lilac, chiffon dresses now had dirty teeth, a pasty mouth from her medications, a completely grey head of hair and a face sprouting with unsightly whiskers.