David’s fatal collision with Driss and removal of his ID

David’s fatal collision with Driss and the removal of Driss’s identification are disclosed through a witness’s account rather than shown as an uninterrupted scene. Ismael describes the roadside encounter to Abdellah: two young fossil sellers ran toward a slowing car, but it did not stop, and Driss was struck. Ismael says David later searched Driss’s pockets and took his ID. That act gives the death a second consequence: Abdellah must reckon not only with the loss of his son, but with the possibility that the stranger who killed him tried to obscure who he was.

The Roadside Encounter

Abdellah questions Ismael under the oil lamp, studying a boy he considers evasive and untrustworthy. He nevertheless listens because Ismael is the only witness besides David. The testimony begins with the approach of the foreign couple’s car. Driss and Ismael ran toward it carrying boxes of fossils for sale; when the driver slowed, they took that as a sign of interest. They had hoped a foreign buyer in a car might pay far more than the fossils’ ordinary worth.

The boys held up Psychopyge trilobites, but their hopeful misreading of the driver’s movement proved consequential: the car did not stop. Ismael insists that they had made a mistake, and says that whatever the driver understood about the fossils, he continued on. The account does not establish the exact mechanics of the impact. It does establish the fatal sequence as Ismael remembers it: the sellers ran toward the vehicle, it slowed, it did not stop, and Driss was left lying on the road.

The Death and the Removed Identification

Abdellah asks whether Ismael ran while Driss lay there. Ismael answers that Driss was already dead and says he watched the man turn the body over. He then reports the detail that changes the meaning of the encounter: David went through Driss’s pockets and took his identification. The account supplies no explanation for David’s action, so Abdellah interprets it as an attempt to evade discovery. He sees the removal as evidence that David believed he could act without being found out.

Ismael also recalls the couple arguing after the collision. The woman screamed at the man, while the man wanted to find Ismael. This glimpse complicates the image of a single, seamless escape: the pair were in conflict, and David’s apparent wish to find the surviving witness sits beside his removal of the dead boy’s ID. Ismael, however, had already run. The collision is thus reconstructed through the gaps between what he saw, what he fled, and what he later told Abdellah.

The Fossil Carried by Driss

The collision is connected to a particular object when Abdellah shows David the fossil Driss had been carrying. Police recovered it after the crash. Wrapped in newspaper, it is described as an armored creature with widely spaced eyes, a row of spines, and three humps. Its label gives its geological period as Devonian; dealers call it the Elvis fossil, a name attached to one of only three such specimens found in the Sahara.

Abdellah tells David that Driss had stolen the fossil from his own father in the hope of selling it. He explains the pressure behind that choice: young men do not want to spend their lives digging, and a valuable specimen seems to offer an escape from a future they see as narrow. Driss hoped even a lower sale price in Midelt could provide a way onward to Casablanca. Abdellah says he understood his son’s desire to try his luck and would have been glad if he had sold the fossil.

Aftermath and Counterfactual

For Abdellah, the Elvis fossil becomes the tangible remainder of the failed encounter. He imagines a different outcome: if David had stopped and bought it, David might have returned to Azna with his wife, while Driss could have gone to Casablanca. Instead, the car’s failure to stop and the collision ended that imagined escape. Abdellah frames the difference not simply as greed or calculation, but as Driss’s dazzlement by the possibility of another life.

The exchange also exposes a divide in how the fossil is understood. To Driss, it could be a means of leaving a life of digging; to David, its value is difficult to explain; to Abdellah, it is both a lump of rock and something some people regard as the form of a dead demon. The object’s uncertain meaning sharpens the tragedy: a specimen that seemed to promise movement becomes evidence of the road encounter that killed Driss. By joining the recovered fossil to the removed ID, the narrative makes the collision more than an accident in retrospect. It becomes a death surrounded by competing interpretations, and a burden of responsibility that Abdellah directs back toward David.