Hacine’s forced journey from France to Morocco is an attempted act of paternal discipline that instead deepens his estrangement from his father and becomes the prelude to a criminal return. After police question Hacine in connection with the motorcycle affair, his father removes him from Heillange and takes him to Tétouan, expecting distance, family authority, and work on a building project to correct his son. The journey reverses the direction of an older migration, but it does not deliver the moral renewal his father intends: Hacine eventually comes back to France with forty-five kilos of cannabis resin.

Police Scrutiny and the Decision to Leave

The departure follows a visit from the police after the motorcycle affair. The officers treat Hacine’s father with formal courtesy, while he presents a large red folder, bound with rubber bands, containing the papers he has accumulated over three decades: residency permits, naturalization papers, and a work contract. The folder makes his established place in France legible to the authorities. When officers ask to search the basement, they have little to use against Hacine beyond a few bars of hashish and a knife concealed in his bed springs.

The police take Hacine to the station and keep him there for five hours. He says nothing, and, with no substantial case against him, walks out free. The next day his father announces that they are leaving for Tétouan. The sequence makes the trip an act of family punishment rather than a consequence imposed by the police: Hacine is legally free, but his father decides that he will not remain at home. His father’s repeated threat to kill him if he gets into trouble again has, in Hacine’s view, become heavy with sincerity but empty through overuse. The journey gives that familiar threat a practical consequence: his father can remove him from the life in which the trouble occurred.

A Reversed Migration

The father frames the departure as correction and responsibility. Before leaving France again, he tells Hacine to look after his mother and supervise construction, saying that he is counting on him. Hacine promises, although he would rather his father stay and manage the work himself. The assignment mixes trust with compulsion: Hacine is treated as someone on whom the family can rely, but he has not chosen either the duty or the place where he must carry it out.

The narrator’s reflection on migration sharpens that contradiction. Men of his father’s generation had left Morocco because they could not find work there and their problems could not be solved there; now Morocco is treated as a promised land where the corruption and bad luck of France might be washed away. The reversal is knowingly bitter. The father sends his son back toward the country from which his own generation had departed, investing the return with hopes of purification that the circumstances do not support.

The drive lasts two days. Hacine and his father load the car with large tricolor bags and travel toward Gibraltar, stopping near Perpignan to sleep for three or four hours at a roadside rest stop. They rest in their underwear, with the car doors open and bath towels spread across the seats. Around them, semis continue between France and Spain, their headlights sweeping through the night; exhausted tourists arrive for coffee, while children struggle to stay awake and teenagers read basketball magazines. The pause places their private, uncomfortable passage amid ordinary cross-border traffic, but the father and son are not traveling as tourists: they are carrying a decision that has already been made for Hacine.

Defiance at the Roadside and Arrival

At dawn, Hacine sees his father standing on a small rise in shorts and sandals, watching the traffic. His father looks physically diminished, with a drawn face, a swollen stomach beneath a sunken chest, and white hair on his shoulders and back. Hacine considers this weakness and refuses to continue. His refusal briefly suggests that the command might be contested, but his father answers that he is not asking for an opinion. Hacine says there is nothing for him in Morocco; the look his father gives him ends the debate. His father insists that the shame he has suffered will be the last and orders Hacine to obey.

The confrontation establishes the journey’s central imbalance. Hacine can state his opposition plainly, but he cannot make that opposition count. The two barely exchange words over the remaining nine hundred miles to Gibraltar. After the ferry crossing, they reach Ceuta and face lengthy negotiations with Moroccan customs. Hacine stays in the car, brooding over his resentment as the heat approaches 120 degrees and thousands of cars and people crowd together, shouting and holding out passports. The crossing feels less like a chosen homecoming than an exodus marked by congestion, misery, and delay.

In Morocco, the coercion continues through the conditions of daily life. Hacine has to get used to the constant presence of uncles and cousins, including at night, and to the heat. For weeks he sleeps on the tile floor in his underwear in a tiny apartment where everyone must share every square foot and even the air. The crowding gives concrete form to what he had objected to on the road: there is, for him, no room to make the move his own. His father’s plan has brought him within an extended family, but the account stresses the confinement and discomfort of that arrangement rather than any reconciliation.

The Intended Correction and Its Reversal

The Moroccan stay is presented as a lesson intended to expunge a sin, teach Hacine how to live, and make him a man. Yet a later disappointment sends him toward another pursuit: getting rich. He comes to see profit as a means of holding death at a distance, and throws himself into the available way of making money in Tétouan. The episode therefore connects the father’s disciplinary project to an outcome opposite its apparent purpose. Hacine does not return as the reformed son his father intended to produce.

Instead, he retraces the route through which his father had traveled repeatedly during his lifetime. The trip from Heillange to Gibraltar had been made by his father thirty times; now Hacine adds his own chapter to the family’s complicated history with Morocco. He returns to France carrying forty-five kilos of cannabis resin. That cargo transforms the journey’s meaning: the son sent away to be corrected comes back with a contraband business rather than proof of moral reform. The episode’s force lies in this reversal, as paternal authority successfully compels a departure but cannot dictate what Hacine will make of the return.