David’s Journey to Tafal’aalt for Atonement

David Henniger’s journey from Azna to Tafal’aalt is both an act of atonement and a loss of control. He agrees to accompany Abdellah and the men returning with Driss’s body because he wants a chance at forgiveness from the dead man’s father; once on the road, however, David finds that the journey is not simply a voluntary visit. He cannot contact his wife or friends, and at its destination he is placed inside Driss’s home and made to confront the absence his journey was meant to address.

The Decision to Go

Hamid tells David that the visitors are being polite but may insist that he go with them. David initially regards their plan as absurd and interprets it through a hostile stereotype, imagining that they intend to keep him in a village until he pays. Yet his resistance gives way to exhaustion and a recognition that he had expected some demand to follow Driss’s death. He also sees that paying money, however affordable it might be for him, would not be equivalent to being forgiven by the bereaved family.

The distinction between legal or official exoneration and personal forgiveness becomes the decisive reason for his consent. David believes that only Abdellah can forgive him, and that a handout cannot accomplish what facing the dead man’s father might. When Hamid presses him for an answer, David agrees to go. Asked how much money to take, Hamid advises him to take everything he has and present it as the whole amount, explaining that the family is extremely poor. The advice establishes an unequal exchange: David has money to offer, but the meaning he seeks from Abdellah cannot be bought or guaranteed.

Richard Galloway responds with relief and treats the prospect as an interesting excursion, even while acknowledging that it is not ideal. David, by contrast, is already aware that agreeing has committed him to something he cannot easily reverse. His decision is neither a confident embrace of a rite nor simply an act of generosity. Guilt makes the journey feel like a possible way out, while his expectation of pressure makes it feel like a trap.

The Road to Tafal’aalt

As the Toyota Camry leaves, Anouar offers David a cigarette for the road. David reluctantly accepts, and Anouar lights it for him. Their exchange is courteous: Anouar speaks near-perfect French and compliments David’s wife, Jo Henniger, while David takes his measure without an open confrontation. The small gesture of hospitality sits beside David’s uncertainty about the men and the purpose of the trip. By the time the car is on the road, all six men are smoking, and the group travels at close to eighty miles an hour.

The route makes the destination progressively more concrete. About an hour later, the party reaches the ruined ornamental gate of Alnif, where villagers and fossil dealers are already gathered in the morning. The Aït Kebbash go to a café, while David tries his cell phone again and gets no connection. Unable to contact anyone, he recognizes that he is trapped in a practical as well as an emotional sense. He thinks of Jo asleep in Azna and resolves not to tell her what happens on the journey, intending to keep the experience to himself.

Beyond Alnif, the party passes La’gaaft and continues through villages whose cement domes and metal doors bear painted trilobites. David sees caves, ladders and ropes on the face of Jbel Issomour massif, and notices a boy waving a white cloth from a ledge. People come out to greet the travelers along the way. These encounters mark a route through inhabited settlements, not an abstract passage across empty wilderness; nevertheless, David interprets the unfamiliar surroundings through his own alienation and apprehension.

Arrival at Driss’s Home

Tafal’aalt is the last village before the open desert and the home David associates with Driss. Its roughly two dozen domed dwellings stand beside vegetable plots, low stone walls and date palms. Abdellah takes David to a metal door marked with blue trilobites and calls for the household. David is hustled out of the car with the neatly packed traveling bags Jo prepared. The arrival brings the journey’s private purpose into contact with the family’s public mourning: three women emerge from the house and run toward the car lamenting, while the men had plainly anticipated their grief.

The women’s mourning and David’s presence together make clear that he has not arrived as an ordinary visitor. But the passage does not present the family’s response as a simple exchange of money for absolution. David has come seeking a judgment that only Abdellah can give, and the household’s grief confronts him with what that judgment concerns: Driss is not an abstraction or a debt, but the absent member of a family.

Driss’s Room and the Meaning of the Journey

After the initial reception, Anouar leads David and his bags down a corridor and into another room, away from the women. The room contains a mattress, plastic bottles of water, a transistor radio, newspapers on the floor, and numbered trilobite specimens labeled in Roman letters as if prepared for a Western buyer. David recognizes the objects as Driss’s belongings. The fossils connect the room to the trade that had occupied Driss’s life, while the mattress and radio make his absence immediate in the domestic space where David is to stay.

Anouar confirms that it is Driss’s room and explains that Abdellah wanted David to feel the dead man’s spirit there. David trembles and visibly weakens at the explanation. The room therefore becomes the most concentrated expression of the journey’s purpose: David has been brought not just to a village or a burial, but into a space made to confront him with the person whose death caused his guilt. The journey begins with David’s hope that Abdellah may forgive him; its arrival instead places that hope beside mourning, dependence and the material traces of Driss’s life. The available account ends with David in the room, before establishing what forgiveness or the burial will ultimately bring.