The Sailor from Casablanca

by Charline Malaval

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Family Life; Friendship; Historical Fiction; World War II; Holiday books; Media Tie-In; Southern; Women's Fiction; Historical Mysteries; Romance; Action & Adventure Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Eighteen-year-old sailor Guillaume has the world at his feet when he steps onto the shores of Casablanca in April 1940. But his dreams of travelling the world are cut short when he dies in a warship explosion in the harbour of Casablanca. Sixty-five years later in 2005, as Loubna fights to open a cinema in the bustling harbourside city, the young woman discovers a suitcase full of her grandfather Guillaume's love letters. But could it be that the boy everyone has supposed dead for over half a century is still alive? As Loubna searches for answers, she finds herself swept up in an epic story of love, passion, intrigue and betrayal, set in the enchantingly glamorous heart of Golden Age Casablanca.

Release date: June 25, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 240

Sample

I’m not saying I was going to do a runner or anything, but my heart was in my boots and I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff … Announcing someone’s death was no one’s idea of fun. But dying like that, so young, in such circumstances … that was just rotten luck.

I reckoned Guillaume would’ve known what to say. He’d have managed to adopt just the right expression, anyway, and he’d have come out with some line from a film that hit just the right note, like he always did, always so sure of himself. He’d have had them eating out of his hand, and made them cry at just the right amount.

Still, we couldn’t exactly ask the poor bastard to organize his own farewell party, and then write his own eulogy to boot!

It was the hardest bloody thing I’d ever had to do in my life. Joining the navy, saying goodbye to my old dad and his cows, kissing my weeping mother in the early morning and heading off out of Meaux … that was nothing compared to this.

I’d had the whole journey back from Morocco to prepare myself, waiting around in the railway station, getting from Toulon to Paris and then the bus to Amiens, but my thoughts were still all over the place, wondering what was going to happen when the words blundered out of my mouth.

I had no idea how to tell them, Guillaume’s parents. I knew it was best to keep it simple, that He’s dead. I’m sorry, was all I really needed to say, because that was the brutal truth, there was nothing more to add. But damn it, I couldn’t do it.

Pulling myself together, I told myself, “Felix, you’re going to go to their house, and you’re going to tell them. If they offer you a coffee, you’re going to sip it ever so politely. If they ask you questions, don’t say anything … Just fudge it, as the saying goes – end of story. Then you can get back to enjoying your leave and sinking a few in honour of your old mate.”

I walked through the garden gate and spotted his mother, Hélène, out of the corner of my eye. She saw me from where she was standing on the front steps, with my uniform and my cap with its red pompom under my arm, because I knew I should uncover my head out of respect. It was my mate Eugène who told me I should go in this way. “If you turn up in your uniform you won’t even have to say it, ‘Your son is dead.’ A sentence like that can fell you for days, going round and round your head.” He wasn’t wrong. For parents, the death of a son is quite sad enough; there’s no need to make it worse by adding words that will just linger long after they’ve been spoken. And oh God, of course he was right, there was no need to say anything in the end. She wasn’t expecting me, so when I turned up it was pretty obvious I wasn’t bringing good news; she understood immediately.

Before I’d even got close to the front steps, her knees buckled and she collapsed. Luckily at the last minute she grabbed at the front door, or she’d have smashed her head on the stone. She stared at me, eyes and mouth wide open, then she uttered an awful cry. I can’t imagine the horrors that were going through her head, but they must have been at least as bad as my worst nightmares.

Lying there on the ground, Hélène began to howl like a wounded animal. In the whole of my short life I’d never imagined I’d be responsible for causing so much pain.

I wasn’t exactly feeling wonderful myself, and now the one thing I wanted was to run away as fast as I could … but I forced myself to have the courage to stand there and face the effect that I would have on the whole family.

His father Lucien must have heard the screaming as he suddenly appeared and tried to help her up. She pulled her arm away and threw him a furious look. She didn’t want him to touch her; bad luck is contagious. It looked like she wanted to be alone on the front steps with her grief.

The poor bastard just stood there, holding out his hand, no idea what to do … It was probably easier for him to stare at her than to accept it was all over. After a moment, long enough to get over the initial bombshell, Hélène seemed to pull herself together, and shock and pain gave way to complete calm. The best way I can find to describe it is that it was like she had found relief from some terrible torment. As if this had put an end to all their questions and doubts. Even when it comes to the worst possible thing, it’s always better to know than not to know.

I decided that if I was going to go up and introduce myself, it was now or never. But I wanted to hold off for a minute rather than say something straight off, so I held out the letter I’d been given to hand over to them, typed by Captain Hourcade himself.

Obviously I hadn’t read it, but I think it said everything that needed to be said. In other words, not quite the whole truth. Broadly speaking, yes; but there are things that civilians aren’t supposed to know, and I’d been well briefed in that regard. “Felix, you must give them the official version. And the official version is that we don’t know anything. The only thing we know is, it’s wartime and their boy gave his life for France. And that’s all they need to know, too.” As he read the letter, Lucien stood there, tall and dignified. It’s quite something to find yourself in front of an impressive man like that, a man who’d endured the Nivelle Offensive in 1917 and hadn’t been sent home feet first. It would’ve been incredible in any circumstances. Guillaume had told me all about his father’s feats in the Great War: he’d skewered some Germans, when it was a question of him or them. But apparently he never talked about the massacre. He just used to say that you had to draw on all the strength you had if you wanted to come back in one piece – there was nothing to do but to focus on that one thing. Guillaume always told us his father was born under a lucky star. He came back from the trenches without a scratch, and that must mean it was in Guillaume’s blood as well. “I’ll be the last man standing, you’ll see. I’m like my dad – they call me the Comeback Kid.” He should’ve kept his trap shut, poor bastard.

But even though he’d thought he was hard as nails, and bound to survive, that doesn’t mean it should have happened the way it did. The whole thing made you want to smash your head against a wall, it was so bloody pointless.

I stood watching them, and in spite of everything, it was quite something how his parents maintained their dignity. It suddenly hit me what a big deal it was to have been Guillaume’s friend, how much I’d taken him for granted … I might have been able to make a difference if I’d met them earlier.

It made me so sad to think of the void Guillaume had left behind him. With some people it wouldn’t really have been a big deal. Me, for example. You might’ve felt some affection for me, I’m not saying you wouldn’t, but with him it was so much more. It really felt like he was going places … he wasn’t just hanging around patiently till it was his turn to peg it. He was on his way somewhere, somewhere better, somewhere great! You just knew it. But all the same, you never felt like he was looking down on you.

But damn it … that day it was either him or me. And things weren’t great for me now. It was all about to kick off again. My leave would be over in three weeks and I was going to have to go back, without my friend Guillaume … Because that’s how it was; we were up to our necks in it now. We could no longer fool ourselves into thinking that we were going to escape war, that we were going to “stick it to the Krauts”.

I met Guillaume back in 1936, on basic training in Toulon. We were both from the north and we hit it off right away. He was awfully young. Much younger than the rest of us, but he’d got some kind of dispensation … Which made him sound so serious, what with the rest of us wishing we could’ve got a dispensation to get out of the navy. But we didn’t tease him for long. There was nothing accidental about him being there. He was a really determined lad.

He talked about going off to see the world. He was bored as hell in Toulon, the whole way through basic training. He said he knew enough for them to let him jump in the big blue – that’s what we called the Mediterranean.

At first all he would talk about was the size of the world, and he’d read so many books that he talked like one. But he was a real character too, and he manned the guns like nobody else. And even when the ship pitched and rolled, he wasn’t the kind of bloke to throw up over the side.

I can still picture him, surrounded by all his books, lying on his bunk, one arm folded behind his head. That was when we used to really talk. He was so self-possessed. He knew all these adventure stories and travel tales: “The world is so vast, Felix, too vast to be content with just gawping at the horizon. You have to embrace it, drink it all up, to the very last drop.” That was the way he always talked.

He was handsome, well brought up, good-natured. Sometimes I used to think I didn’t belong in the same cabin. He loved reading, but what he loved more than anything was the flicks.

If you didn’t understand Guillaume’s passion for the cinema, you didn’t really understand who he was. It was all he ever thought about. It was very simple – as soon as we got to shore, in Toulon, Casablanca, Bizerte, Algiers, the first thing he’d do was find his way to the nearest cinema. He’d watch anything. French films, American, Italian … he’d go and see them all. But his favourite was anything that starred Jean Gabin.

Ah, my old friend! He wouldn’t have missed the latest Gabin for anything. He could recite whole scenes from his films by heart; it was amazing to watch.

With his accent from the north, it sounded even better. Almost as good as the straight-talking Parisian whippersnapper scrambling over the rooftops. He had a mouth on him, that’s for sure. I think he really identified with Gabin, especially when he read that Gabin had been drafted by the navy in Cherbourg. Guillaume saw this as a sign. He used to say he was going to follow Gabin’s lead – he was going to get out of the navy and try his luck in the pictures.

That’s what he wanted to do when he got out of prison – that’s what he’d begun calling the navy. “I’m going to give it a go.” Anytime some newsperson showed up, he’d make sure he was caught on film, so there might be a glimpse of him in the newsreel before the feature. “They’re going to see me in a hundred cinemas, Felix. That’s how it’s done. How else do you think people get spotted?”

When he thought he looked good in a photograph, he’d send it to the newspapers. One time, Le Frou-Frou printed one. He was pretty chuffed. He was bound to end up doing something big. He had it all: the looks, the confidence, the charisma … He was going to blow them away, that young lad from the Somme region. And he was nobody’s fool, either.

I wasn’t like that. I didn’t have big dreams – I didn’t have time for them. In Meaux, when I was young, I had to look after the animals for my parents and grandparents. I enlisted so I could send a bit of money home and get some experience of the world, but I can’t say I’m any happier to be in the navy than slogging my guts out for some employer in town. At least there I learned a trade, electrician. Now it was the sea that was giving me a thrashing. There’s always something to keep you from getting too big for your boots.

When I finally make it home – if I make it home – I’ll go back to it. And Christ, that suits me just fine.

Me and the other lads had a lot of respect for Guillaume, for the way he believed in himself so stubbornly. The confidence he had. Because when you want something that much, it doesn’t half put some grand ideas into your head.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the horizon, though you can’t help feeling melancholy after you’ve stared at it for a while. It gets rid of all those grand ideas, for a start. And then, without you even noticing it creeping up, you’re hit by such a wave of melancholy that you have no choice but to bawl your eyes out.

Whenever I said that to him, it made him smile. He’d tell me he liked feeling a bit melancholy, and that it was fate that made him melancholy more than staring at the horizon ever would … In any case it suited him, because in the films he loved most there was always some unlucky bastard whose life was a bit of a mess. Apart from that, I didn’t really get the appeal.

The first time we docked in Casablanca after we were done with our basic training, he was obsessed by one thing: going to the Vox to see a film. He wasn’t the only lad to be obsessed by one thing, but the rest of us had something a bit different in mind. We wanted to go to Bousbir, the red-light district. We all wanted to have a go with the famous “snake charmers”.

It was a long time since any of us had so much as touched a woman, and we’d heard there was a plentiful supply of them there. People talked about them as far away as Marseille. There’s a similar neighbourhood there as well, but to say it’s not exactly chic would be an understatement. Marseille is dark, dangerous, sleazy … women yelling and brawling like fishwives, the sound of drunks and cheap music … It’s squalid, full of whores and dirty money. Admittedly I’m no looker, but even I know you have to get away quick from these places, or you’re bound to catch something.

That particular evening I was planning on heading out to Bousbir, but Guillaume had been bending my ear so much, going on about this cinema, that I began to think that if I didn’t go it would be like not having seen the Titanic before it sank, and kicking yourself afterwards. So I ended up going with him.

It was 1938 and they were showing a Gabin film. Even though we’d already seen it because it’d come out in France the year before, we were happy to see it again. It was Pépé le Moko, the story of a lowlife smuggler, who underneath it all is really a good guy. He’s a “Moko” like us, a lad from Toulon; ex-navy; who found himself on the wrong side of the tracks … Now he’s got the police on his tail, and he’s gone to ground in a casbah in Algiers. He can’t come out or he might get nicked. So, obviously, he falls in love with a sophisticated lady and now he can only dream of one thing: getting out … And it’s his dreams of escape that do for him in the end, even more than if he’d got a bullet in the head.

I remember that night like it was yesterday. Guillaume was getting dressed up in his civvies and he said to me: “You can’t go out in uniform, Felix! We’re having a night on the town. And where we’re going, they don’t want to see that we’re not quite as peace-loving as everyone likes to pretend we are.”

So we left the port in our Sunday best, and ambled up the Boulevard de la Gare. By the time we got there I’d already attracted my fair share of glances, and I felt pretty good. It was all so fancy. Guillaume had been right to tell me not to go out dressed like a cabin boy; there were so many beautiful people on this gorgeous avenue, it brought tears to my eyes. There was no need to feel homesick any more because we could have been in Paris, what with all the little cafés and tall white buildings. Only the palm trees down the middle reminded us that such a mild March was the preserve of warmer climes. I walked as confidently as I could, because alongside Guillaume I felt like a bit of a peasant. I was used to that, but even so I wanted to try and rise to his level. “Will you look at that!” I said. “Over there – now that cinema is a beauty. The Empire. Oh my goodness, there’s another one! See the one on the left, the Rialto? That’s a real stunner!” Guillaume was in heaven. But he was still focused on one thing: seeing the biggest cinema in Africa. The Vox. He’d read about it in a newspaper in Toulon, that it seated two thousand people and had three balconies.

We looked up, to the right, the left … there was music, dancing, laughter, champagne flowing like water, and we kept on walking towards the Place de France. There it was, the Vox, and it really was an amazing sight. It was absolutely huge. Even in France, I’d never seen a cinema so big. Not that I’d been to that many, but still. It was mammoth, that building.

I have to say, I didn’t regret not going to Bousbir, especially once I was comfortably settled into my seat with a freshly lit cigarette, enjoying the cool evening breeze. The place was half open to the sky, with a roof that opened up to make you feel as if you were outside. I’d never seen anything like it before. It’s moments like that which remind me what a lucky bastard I am, really, to have experienced such things. I was thinking how we’d be able to tell our mates back in France how we’d gone to the flicks, sat in big, plush seats, comfortable as kings. I could already see myself bragging about it. Guillaume was lost in the film, imagining he was in Pépé’s shoes, repeating Gabin’s lines under his breath.

He didn’t say anything when we went for a drink afterwards at the Café de l’Empire on the Boulevard de la Gare. I knew Guillaume; he was replaying the film over and over in his head. It was about that time that he first became preoccupied by the idea of being trapped in a dead-end situation.

Out of the blue I saw this look of despair in his eyes; he was muttering one of Pépé’s lines from the film, like he’d figured something out, some great revelation:

“‘You’re afraid for your life?’ ‘What d’you think? It’s the only one I have.’”

I grew up without a father, on Alger Street in Casablanca, not far from the United Nations Square and the central market on Hassan II Boulevard. It was a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city, where the streets were lined with buildings that had been a dazzling white once upon a time.

As kids in the eighties and nineties, we’d spent our childhood hanging out at the port, or playing hide-and-seek among the mountains of spices and fruit piled up on stalls in the market. When we got older we’d walk up Almohades Boulevard to the Hassan II mosque to watch the rabble-rousing kids hanging out together on the ramparts below. Poised above the Atlantic Ocean, they’d dare each othe. . .