DEVIN’S JOURNEY ~ PART 5

Story by Linda S Barth     Artwork by Carole W

~ Casablanca, Morocco ~

Malachite

When Devin looked back on myriad memories of his journey, there was one he preferred to ignore, still wishing after many years that his six months in Morocco had never happened. And yet, while he had to admit it had been another…learning experience…he knew he was very fortunate it had not been his last.

After leaving Jelenia Gora, he’d spent just over a year exploring his way through southern Europe – Vienna, the Italian Alps, Marseille and the villages of Provence, the Algarve. He would never stop being amazed at how expansive the world actually was, far more than even he had imagined. He’d absorbed everything he could from each place, each person, each possibility; yet with every phase of his adventure, he craved another and another.

There was just one thing that prickled at him, even as he tried to ignore it. Everything – even challenging moments, dark days and nights, difficult problems – had all worked out amazingly well in the end. He couldn’t help wondering if his luck would someday run out, despite the promises of protection and guidance whispered by the stones he carried with him.

Early in October, six months past his twenty-sixth birthday, he arrived in Andalucia, and, inspired by remarks from another passenger on a train, headed for Sevilla. He’d been  ready to settle in one place for a while, but soon found this was not the right fit for him. While the crafts markets, tapis bars, and artisan shops of this Spanish city reminded him with a warm glow of his months in San Miguel de Allende, it was not similarities he sought. He craved the differences still to be discovered in another dawn in another destination.

While deciding where he should go next, he took a job in Sevilla’s growing tourism industry. Partnered with a Spanish-speaking tour guide, he delighted in meeting people from all over Europe. He stored bits of information they shared of their travels and homes as possibilities for the next and the next and the next stop in his travels.

A lively tale of Casablanca, told to him by an elderly couple from Edinburgh, intrigued him, and he decided on the spot it would be his next destination, even though he had no way of sharing  – let alone appreciating – the storytellers’ fondness for some old movie of the same name. A few days later, he disembarked the ferry from Gibraltar to begin his first days in Africa. A few additional hours of travel in yet another series of buses and trains took him from the port of Tanger Med to the city of Casablanca. And it was there his path took a deeply dark direction that derailed his years of good fortune.

He would come to realize this interlude in Morocco was an object lesson, one he’d easily ignored in the past, only to see it become an unforgettable truth. He could still hear Pascal’s father reading to the children just before bedtime from a book of Aesop’s fables. He could still see the illustration from The Fox and the Goat, and the look of hopeless entrapment on the face of the gullible goat when he realized his fate.

Look before you leap. If only he’d remembered that moral of the story on a deceptively bright, anything’s possible day in Casablanca. Instead, he’d impetuously agreed to make a deal with a fox, which condemned him to accept the fable’s contrasting role. In the end, he’d managed to escape the fate of Aesop’s naive goat, but it was due to nothing more than luck…and just maybe the power of the stones in his collection.

When his life in Morocco fell horribly apart, he’d fled along an intricate, twisted route few could hope to trace. Fortunate to have saved enough money for a series of connecting flights from Casablanca, he journeyed toward Mozambique. During one of many layovers in yet another airport lounge, he forced himself to face what he’d done and what he’d almost become. Perhaps, like lapis lazuli and amethyst promised, he’d find in himself the emotional strength to purge darkness and destruction, to heal and move on.

Remembrance of his months in Casablanca spiralled past him, cohesive and comfortable at first, frantic and fragmented all too soon. He’d spent his first few days wandering the Medina, thinking perhaps in the colorful, thriving market quarter he might put to use his skills as a Mexican glassmaker, perhaps draw on his experience as a tailor in Marseille, or become a baker as he had in Vienna. He drifted in and out of shops and stalls, looking and listening for opportunities, but none appeared until he paused to take a break, one he’d live to regret.

While sipping a cup of mint tea at a crowded cafe, an older man asked if he might share his table, one of very few with an unoccupied chair. As they chatted, Devin unknowingly let down his guard, and after only a half-hour found himself accepting the well-spoken, fashionably dressed man’s offer of a job as a clerk in his import/export business. Evidently one of his long-time assistants had suddenly quit, leaving an opening for someone with ingenuity and intelligence, which, he assured Devin, it was obvious the young American possessed. He would actually be doing the business owner a great favor if he would accept the position, one he hinted broadly was quite appealing in many ways.

Thus it was that ‘Ed Mason’ walked blindly but willingly into a web of darkness where those awaiting him were nothing like they seemed. Their methods for overcoming anything they perceived as obstacles ranged from issuing intimidating threats to inflicting physical pain, and, if nothing else worked to their satisfaction, fulfilling far more than a promise of death.

The morning following the encounter in the cafe, Devin had begun his new job and quickly learned the procedures, while becoming comfortable enough, if not actual friends, with his co-workers. As time passed, there had been hints that all was not as it seemed, but he’d chosen to ignore them. Sorting and packing various items for export – small statues, decorative boxes, packages of silk scarves – paid well and it was easy work. If perhaps some invoices seemed to contain slight errors or if unusually large amounts of shipments went to a relatively small number of recipients, was that really any of his concern?

It wasn’t as if his employers were doing anything seriously illegal. They were probably nothing more than businessmen doing what they needed to do to survive, and while breaking a few laws was something he didn’t entirely condone, he could certainly understand the rationale. He continued to pretend all was well, and by the time he could no longer ignore what was obvious, he was in far too deep.

An airport announcement pulled him from his reverie, telling him his next and final flight would begin boarding in twenty minutes. But there was no distraction that could let him turn away for long. He had to face the truth of his recent past if he had any chance of making it a learning experience – and perhaps a penance – for his future.

Sensations clawed at him as if they were happening now. Dismay when he discovered many of the intricately carved cedar wood boxes were not filled with a potpourri of orange blossom, jasmine, and mint but instead quantities of high grade hashish. Shock when Malek, one of his co-workers whom he’d come to regard as a friend, revealed he’d long been stealing small quantities of hash and selling it on the side. Confusion when Malek encouraged ‘Ed’ to do the same – easy profits for them and no one would ever suspect, let alone find out.

For just a moment he’d been tempted. It would mean more money than he’d ever had before, a chance to see certain places and do other things he’d been unable to afford. And, he had to admit, there had been something undeniably alluring in the idea of dancing on the edge of a knife, accepting and outwitting the devious and potentially destructive version of a childhood dare. But the impulse had not lasted long; his ingrained moral sense of right and wrong would not allow it.

And when he accidentally overheard ‘the fox’ tell a supervisor of his plans for trapping the workroom thief and what would happen to make him pay for what he’d done, he was beyond grateful he’d refused his friend’s offer.

He’d immediately shared the discovered info with Malek, only to see it shrugged off, no matter how hard Devin tried to convince him it could be a fatal mistake. They were too stupid to suspect him, his friend insisted, then with a sneer added a suggestion that maybe they thought someone else was the thief. He could easily get away with it if he just backed off for a while; then when things cooled down, he’d resume his own clandestine business, one that was becoming increasingly lucrative. Maybe, he added, ‘Ed’ would change his mind by then and want in.

Even now Devin trembled and felt as if he might be sick, wishing he could purge from his mind the sights and sounds that had followed when his friend, another unwitting goat, had been proven wrong. This fox, like the one in the fable, had no mercy for his perceived target. Somehow ‘Ed’ had survived through little more than sheer luck. Malik had not been as fortunate.

Multiple layers of escape and concealment had convinced everyone that the shattered remnants of a burned corpse in an alley in Casablanca were the remains of Ed Mason, the clerk who had stolen from his employers, who had attempted to blackmail and betray them and who had somehow – no one seemed to be certain just how – come to pay for his mistakes. Ed would forever become an example, a sinister role model of sorts, his fate instilling fear – or at least caution – in other workers who might have considered a similar line of sub rosa work.

For a while, there had been lingering questions about Malik, a highly dependable clerk who had oddly stopped coming to work and then seemed to have vanished from Casablanca. But no one really cared deeply about him, and they easily let his memory fade as instead they focused on an object lesson that anyone with sense would take to heart.

He’d come so close to death, but now with no sign anyone suspected he’d survived, he could finally let himself begin to relax. The serendipitous deception that had cost his guilty co-worker his life had saved his. Now he was free to leave that sordid part of his past behind forever, but the shades of memories and lessons learned would haunt him.

The darker side of Casablanca had offered a frisson of danger, a lure of the illicit that sparked a fascination with things he’d never thought to experience. It had appeared to his unseeing eyes just another adventure…until he was forced to admit he’d let himself be lured into a trap he should have recognized. But now it was over. He had made it out and had taken with him a lesson he’d never forget. Nothing like this would ever happen again; he’d make sure of that.

He glanced at a clock on the airport wall. It was time to go. He picked up his bags and wove through the crowd on the way to his departure gate. When someone touched his arm, he turned on them as if they were the pursuer he’d finally stopped expecting to see.

The young woman recoiled, then relaxed at his stuttered apology. She held out a small cloth bag. “I think you dropped this.”

He looked at an object he’d never seen before and shook his head. “No, it’s not mine.”

“Are you certain?” She tilted her head at him. “I really think it’s yours.”

Knowing a scam when he saw one, having worked more than a few himself, he turned and walked away, but paused when she caught up with him. “Look, I know what you’re doing. I take whatever is in this bag, and then you ask for money because you’ll claim I agreed to buy it. Then, when I object, you’ll call security and say I tried to steal it from you. And who are they going to believe?” He smirked and shook his head. “We both know the answer to that.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, okay, you got me.” Then she grinned at him. “You know, I usually get away with it.”

He couldn’t help smiling back. “A pretty girl with a smile like yours – I’m not surprised.”

The loudspeaker blared an updated boarding announcement. “Look, I’ve got to go. But let me give you a piece of advice. Stop doing this. Something tells me you could do better for yourself than perfecting your skills as a scam artist.”

To his surprise, tears trickled down her face. “I want to change, but…”

“Then change. Stop making excuses and telling yourself you believe them. Just –” He sighed heavily. “Just do it.” He unzipped the pouch on his belt pack and removed a small stone, then handed it to her. “Here, take this. Maybe it sounds crazy, but it could help you. It helped me.”

Her eyes widened at the purple stone she held in her hand. “It’s amethyst, right? The stone that’s supposed to heal you from what happened in the past and help you find courage to move on. The one that’s supposed to protect you from the negative parts of yourself.”

“You know about this?” He stared at her, then huffed a laugh. “Well, evidently you do, and it sounds like you could benefit from what the stone can offer you.”

She tightened her grip on it, then shook head. “I can’t take it. It’s yours. You must have needed it.” She held it out to him. “You keep it.”

He folded his hand over hers, clasping the amethyst in her grasp. “I have other pieces of amethyst, given to me by someone who was wise enough to know what  they would mean to me. I want to do the same for you.”

“Even though you don’t know me? Even after what I tried to do?”

He nodded. “Even so. And now I really have to leave.”

“Wait!” She unknotted the tie on the bag she’d tried to foist on him. “Then you take this as a gift from me. It’s a stone native to Morocco – that’s where I’m from – it’s malachite.”

The smooth green stone felt cool and comforting in his hand. “And what are malachite’s secret powers?”

“It’s a protection stone, too, kind of like amethyst. Except it’s supposed to be like a sponge, absorbing negative energy, and also creating a shield against evil influences. It helps you get rid of traumas from past mistakes, and it encourages you to take risks for the better.”

“For the better, huh? I could have used this about six months ago.”

The impudent smile returned to her face. “Better late than never. So, what do you say – is it a deal? Can we make a trade?”

He hesitated for a moment. “Sure, but on one condition. We both agree to listen to what the stones are telling us and we don’t ignore these things. We act on them.”

“You got it!”

Devin walked away, then looked back to see her smile as she pocketed the amethyst. He wondered how long she’d uphold their bargain. He hoped it would be forever.