Hacine's Forced Stay in Morocco and Return Home

Hacine Bouali’s forced stay in Morocco begins as an attempt by his father to make him take responsibility and become a man, but it does not produce the settled return his family might have hoped for. Left in Tétouan to care for his mother and oversee construction, Hacine turns instead toward a pursuit of money; the business he enters brings him back to Heillange two years later with fear, shame, and the last of his savings. His return closes one period of absence without resolving the estrangement and insecurity that shaped it.

Departure and the Burden of Responsibility

The immediate background is the police visit to the family apartment after the affair involving the motorcycle. The officers find no substantial basis to take Hacine away: they keep him at the station for five hours, and he leaves without speaking. His father, meanwhile, presents himself to the authorities with the composed dignity he has shown in other dealings with officials. His large red folder, fastened with rubber bands, contains residency permits, naturalization papers, a work contract, and documents accumulated over three decades. The scene sets Hacine’s predicament beside his father’s long record of establishing the family’s place in France: the father can answer scrutiny with a carefully preserved paper history, while his son’s immediate trouble has left him exposed to suspicion.

The next day, his father announces that they are leaving for Tétouan. When the father later returns to France, he entrusts Hacine with looking after his mother and supervising the construction. He is counting on his son, and Hacine promises to do what has been asked. Yet the promise is reluctant: Hacine would rather have his father remain and take responsibility himself. The assignment therefore carries two meanings. It gives Hacine a role in the family’s affairs, but it also leaves him with obligations he did not choose and without the presence of the person whose authority had organized the family’s response to the police.

Hacine does not welcome the prospect of remaining in Tétouan. He says that there is nothing for him there, and his mother’s repeated accusations deepen his sense of being trapped. She calls him lazy, shifty, cunning, and a liar, while worrying about how the neighborhood will judge him and what his conduct will do to her reputation. She wants to hit him, but he is too large for her to do so; several times, he slips into the stairwell to cry in private. These details show the cost of the stay at home as well as its outward purpose. The arrangement is meant to discipline Hacine, but in the household he is treated less as a young man being entrusted with responsibility than as a source of anxiety and disgrace.

The Pursuit of Money

After another disappointment, Hacine redirects himself toward a new ambition. He reasons that everything in life dissipates, escapes, and ends in dust; in response, he decides to become rich. Profit seems to him the one means of keeping death at a distance, and his desire to acquire wealth becomes a concentrated answer to his sense of loss and impermanence. Rather than finding a durable place in the family’s construction plans or in the life his father has assigned him, he commits himself to the one profitable route he sees in Tétouan.

That choice makes his father’s hope of sending him away to learn how to live and become a man deeply ironic. Hacine does return from Morocco with something substantial, but it is not a reformed character or a settled future: he brings forty-five kilos of cannabis resin. His journey also adds another episode to the family’s already complicated history with Morocco. His father had made the trip between Heillange and Gibraltar thirty times over his life; now Hacine follows a route shaped by a different purpose and a different result. The quantity he carries makes the distance between the father’s intention and the son’s outcome concrete: Hacine has pursued money, but the means have set up a precarious life rather than secure belonging.

The Business Unravels

By the time Hacine decides to return, the business has become dangerous. At first, he and Driss ignore the letters sent to them. More arrive, handwritten and abusive, and threats follow. A fire breaks out in the stairwell of the building where Hacine and his family live; the men begin to feel watched and grow mistrustful. Then Driss is seized near the Beaux-Arts and suffers a severe assault. The partners pay after this escalation, and Hacine decides the enterprise is over. The sequence shifts the meaning of his pursuit: what had seemed to him an answer to life’s instability has produced threats against the people around him and fear within the family home.

His father’s heart problems provide a further reason to leave. Hacine goes back to Heillange with fear and shame, carrying only the last of his savings. The return is not presented as a triumphant homecoming or as evidence that the earlier purpose of his father’s intervention has been fulfilled. It is a retreat from a failed enterprise, prompted by danger, the decision to stop paying, and concern about his father’s health. The small remainder of his money underlines how little the attempt to become rich has secured for him.

Return to Heillange

Hacine climbs the stairs to his father’s apartment in silence, still brooding over the disaster and holding an ax handle. A neighborhood boy passes him going down the stairs; only after taking four more steps does the boy recognize the thin figure as Hacine Bouali. Hacine has not been seen in the neighborhood for two years. The recognition arrives with delay, turning the return into a brief public discovery: the person who had seemed to have vanished is suddenly present again.

During his absence, local talk has made Hacine appear more successful than he is. People say he has been making money; his friends have received postcards from the Balearic Islands and the Costa del Sol, and their envy is mixed with jealousy. They had assumed he was gone for good. The gap between those rumors and Hacine’s actual condition is central to the return: the neighborhood imagines prosperity and permanent departure, while he arrives burdened by the collapse of the business, afraid, ashamed, and nearly out of savings. The boy hurries to spread news of his return, so Hacine’s reappearance immediately becomes part of the neighborhood’s shared knowledge. His stay in Morocco has ended, but the contrast between what others believe about his fortunes and what he brings home leaves his place in Heillange unsettled.