Chapter 802: The Case
[Hotel Rabat, room 412. Thursday 19 July 2018. 17:40.]
The case would not shut.
That is how I want to start this, because that is where I was 2 days later. On my knees on a hotel carpet in Rabat with one hand flat on a suitcase lid, in a room I was leaving in 20 minutes, and the thing would not shut.
I had come into that country on the 5th of June with a holdall and 2 suits.
I was going out of it with a case that would not close over a wooden box, a leather document wallet, a medal in a case, a folded flag, 3 shirts I had been given by men who had nothing to give, and a framed photograph somebody had put outside my door on Wednesday night without a note on it.
I took the flag out. Put it back in. Took the box out and could not do it, and put it back in, and sat on the floor with my back against the bed.
Knock knock.
"It is open."
My mother came in with her coat already on 20 minutes early, the way she has been early to everything since 1981, and looked at me on the floor.
"You have been up here 40 minutes."
"The case will not shut."
"Daniel." She stood there. "Is it the case."
"It is the case."
She did not come and sit on the floor with me, because she is 61 and she does not do that, and she did not say anything soft either.
She went and stood at the window with her back to me and looked out at Rabat for a bit, and let me get on with it.
Somebody asked me last year what I remembered about the Wednesday. That was the day between. The palace was Thursday morning and the parade was Tuesday, and in the middle of them there is a whole day and I have almost nothing of it.
I know I slept until 11, which I have not done since I was 22.
I know Bray sat by a hotel pool in his socks for 4 hours reading a newspaper he could not read.
I know I was taken up the coast to look at a building site and came back different, and I will get to that.
And I know I stood in the Throne Room of the Royal Palace of Rabat on Thursday morning at 10 o’clock and a country did something to me that I have never properly been able to describe, and 6 hours later I was on a carpet with a suitcase, crying about a zip.
So. The Throne Room.
It is not a room. It is a distance.
Cedar 40 feet up, worked in a pattern that goes on and does not repeat. A floor you could land an aircraft on. Light coming in from one side in bars.
Tp. Tp. Tp.
38 pairs of shoes. You hear every one of them.
They stood us in 2 lines, and I have watched that squad walk out for a World Cup final and I have never seen them frightened like that.
The King came in first. The Prince from Moscow 2 steps back on his left, who found me in that line inside 4 seconds and did the smallest thing with his eyebrows that I have ever seen a man do.
And on the right, in a dark suit, stood straight as a post, the Crown Prince.
He is 15.
Nobody told me. I had built a room full of adults in my head and there is a boy in it, 15 years old, doing his job in front of 400 years of carpet, looking at Achraf Hakimi exactly the way a 15-year-old looks at Achraf Hakimi and not letting one bit of it onto his face.
He shook 38 hands and got every name right. When he got to Bounou he held on about a second longer than he was supposed to, and I watched a boy decide to do that and then do it.
The Prince took my hand in both of his.
"The famous Switzerland."
"Sir."
"I have told 4 people that story this week." He did not let go. "One of them was my brother."
Then the side door at the far end opened again, and I did not know about this part either.
They brought the mothers in.
All of them. Every mother of every player in that squad, flown in from Holland and Belgium and Spain and France and Casablanca and Oujda, walked the length of that floor in their best clothes and were stood beside their sons.
Sofyan’s mother, who cleans 3 houses a day in Huizen, in a grey scarf, holding her handbag in front of her with both hands like a woman waiting at a bus stop in a cathedral.
Hakimi’s mother, who sold things off a stall in Madrid so the boy could keep playing, got to him and took his face and turned it left and right in the light, checking him over, in front of a king.
Bounou’s mother put one hand flat between her son’s shoulder blades and left it there for the whole ceremony.
Banoun’s mother has never left that country either. She came up that floor looking straight ahead, and when she got to Badr she said one word to him and he had to put his chin up and look at the ceiling.
And 4 places down from Boussoufa, in a blue coat, was mine.
They had flown her out on the Monday. From Moscow, to Casablanca, in a bed on a plane, with a man from a federation carrying her bag, and they had told her not to tell me and she had not told me.
She had been in Rabat 3 days by then. She had been to a hairdresser, and my mother has cut her own fringe since 1994.
I had found her in a side room on the Tuesday night in a ruined suit with my ears still ringing, and she got hold of the front of my jacket with both hands and did not let go for about 20 seconds, and the first thing she said to me was:
"Before you start. I did not ask for any of this."
Then, on the Thursday, they put her in the line with the mothers.
I did not know where to look. She did. She looked straight back at me across that floor with her handbag held exactly like Sofyan’s mother’s, and raised one eyebrow about a millimetre, which is my mother for do not you dare.
She had made friends. That is the thing I still cannot get over.
3 days, 9 other women, and about 11 words of shared language between the lot of them, and somebody had taught her something in Arabic.
She used it on Sofyan’s mother while we were stood waiting. I do not know what she said. Sofyan’s mother put a hand on her arm and laughed with no sound at all, in a throne room, and I get to keep that.
Then a man read a citation for about 3 minutes and then they did the honours.
The Wissam Al Arch. The Order of the Throne. It comes on a ribbon in a case and there is a man whose job is to carry the case.
Players first. 3rd class. Officer. One at a time, with their mothers stood at their shoulders, and after the 4th one I could not look straight at it any more.
Benatia, 31, retired 4 days.
Bounou. Hakimi, who did not go anywhere near his phone. Ziyech, who kept his face still for exactly as long as it took and then did not.
Sofyan Amrabat, out of a front room in Huizen, decorated by a king with his mother at his shoulder.
Banoun, who never left.
Then they called the coach of the national team, and I walked out onto that floor, and they gave me the Order of the Throne, 2nd class.
Commander.
Which is a grade above 3rd class.
They had just given 23 men who bled for 6 weeks a lower thing than the one they hung on me, with their mothers stood there watching it happen, and I got back into that line and could not lift my head.
Benatia leaned over.
"Coach."
"Mehdi."
"Take it."
"They have given you a 3rd."
"I have got 73 caps and a knee that is finished," he said. "You have got a country. Take it and shut up."
I thought that was us finished.
A man came out with a second folder and the room went quiet in a different way, and Nadia, 4 feet to my left, made a noise I have never heard out of her.
It was read in Arabic and then in French and I got about half the French, and the half I got had my name in it and the word citizen.
Tp.
"Coach," Nadia said, without moving her lips. "Stand up straighter."
***
Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.