Abdellah’s bereavement

Abdellah’s bereavement shapes the return and burial of his only son, Driss, and turns grief into a test of truth. He does not simply seek an answer to a death: he must decide what David’s account of it means, and whether the man who caused it can be forgiven. The narrative renders this loss less through declaration than through controlled gestures, interrupted feeling, and a memory of father and son prospecting together.

The father waiting for the body

At the gate, Abdellah waits for David, whom he regards as the murderer of his son, to appear with his travel bags. Driss’s body has been carefully wrapped and loaded into the jeep for the journey. Abdellah’s mood is beyond what he can describe to himself; the narration presents his silence not as calm but as an inability, or refusal, to give his grief a name. The urgency around the burial gives that silence a practical setting: the family is preparing to take Driss home and bury him without delay.

His sorrow is visible when the journey resumes. At the Ziz gas station, he emerges holding a half-peeled orange, surveys the sky, and eats it for breakfast, tearing the fruit apart and spitting out the pips. The ordinary action does not soften his grief; it takes place alongside it. His face still bears the expression of loss, and he holds himself stiffly, as though his contained energy has nowhere to go. The passage places this private bereavement amid the town’s morning activity, but Abdellah’s attention remains fixed on the body and the journey ahead.

Grief held in silence

At a stop along the route, Abdellah checks the back of the jeep to make sure the body is all right. His concentration remains there even after he closes it. He stands upright against the gusts, draws his chech over his face, and later walks away alone, folding his arms and bowing his head. His expression unsettles Anouar, who explains that Driss was Abdellah’s only son and only child. David cannot read the older man’s anger clearly: the narration suggests it reaches beyond the immediate death toward unnamed things behind individual people. Grief is present, but it does not offer David a simple, legible signal of what Abdellah will do.

The account also shows how Abdellah keeps distress from becoming public speech. As David watches from nearby, a sound seems to come from the shadow where Abdellah stands; whether he is crying, the narration implies, he keeps it deep and inaudible. This restraint does not make his sorrow lesser. It marks the distance between what others can observe and what he bears inwardly, a distance David fills with his own fears and assumptions about revenge.

Burial and the remembered son

The burial passes quickly in the harsh conditions of the desert. Driss’s mother died years before, and it is his aunts and cousins who weep and curse; the men stand silently as the body is lowered and prayers are said. Abdellah’s grief takes a more inward form. He remembers Driss as a ten-year-old, when he took him prospecting across the mountain by himself. The remembered child has a young, freckled face, and the memory fixes their bond to a particular shared pursuit rather than to an abstract image of fatherhood.

That recollection is anchored by a fossil: the Dicranurus that father and son found by the trenches. Driss still kept it in his room. The object connects the present burial to a time when the two of them searched the mountain together, and it gives Abdellah’s loss a concrete domestic remainder. At the grave, he bites his lip; the narration describes his tears as spent, leaving him with vision but no further tears. The memory does not undo the separation. It makes the absent son sharply particular.

The question that determines what follows

After the burial, Abdellah’s attention turns to David’s account of Driss’s death. He has considered what to do to the Englishman during the journey, but remains undecided; vengeance itself, he concludes, is not the decisive question. What matters is whether David will tell the truth. Abdellah waits until Driss has been buried and he has spoken to Ismael before making up his mind, so that judgment follows both the funeral and an effort to establish what happened.

His distinction between an accident and a lie defines the moral terms of his grief. An accident, in his reasoning, is not the same as an individual’s deliberate act; a lie would be willed, and therefore harder to forgive than the death itself. The difference places David’s responsibility before Abdellah not only in what happened on the road but in what he chooses to say afterward. Bereavement becomes a demand for truthful witnessing: Abdellah cannot recover his son, but he can insist that the circumstances of the loss not be deliberately concealed.

Grief in the ordinary aftermath

Afterward, Abdellah stretches his aching body on an oil-stained carpet and eats communal bread dipped in mint tea. His hand shakes visibly, and he stops trying to hide it. The grave is less than a hundred meters away, while the people around him continue with the shared acts of eating and serving food. The proximity of meal and burial brings grief into ordinary life rather than setting it apart from it. Abdellah experiences himself as alone with the facts, unable to make others hear his inward thoughts simply by having them.

Across these scenes, his bereavement moves between bodily restraint, remembered companionship, and moral attention. The half-peeled orange, the fossil kept in Driss’s room, and the trembling hand at the meal are different measures of the same absence: a son is gone, while the father must continue to act. The narrative does not make grief resolve neatly into either forgiveness or revenge. It shows Abdellah withholding judgment until he can confront David with the question that now governs what comes next: whether he will tell the truth.