Abdellah and Driss’s father-son relationship

Abdellah and Driss’s father-son relationship is presented after Driss’s death as both intimate and fundamentally unresolved. Abdellah can recall the physical details of his only son and the stages of his life, yet those memories do not give him the knowledge he wanted while Driss was alive. His grief therefore has two objects: the son he has lost and the son whose private history remained inaccessible to him.

Childhood and a Father's Memories

The sound of children working the cliffs brings Abdellah back to Driss as a boy, dangling from a ledge on a long rope while the family feared for his safety. The memory joins the present-day tapping of hammers to a specific image of his son’s childhood: Driss among the people who worked the stone, exposed to the heights and dangers of the cliffs. After the death, such recollections become more than scenes from the past. Abdellah clings to them as fragments of the life he can no longer ask Driss to explain.

He later enters Driss’s room and lingers among his belongings, sensing that the room still carries a trace of the person who lived there. The details draw him toward a period he had not understood as it unfolded. After returning from France, Driss shut himself away with secrets Abdellah regarded as immoral, smoked kif, and went out only at night. He had gone back to Hmor Lagdad to seek work at the quarries, perhaps trying to regain his former job, but Abdellah does not know whether he succeeded. Even in recollection, the practical facts of his son’s life are accompanied by uncertainty.

Return and Estrangement

Abdellah remembers Driss’s return from Europe as a change in their relationship. He seemed more aloof and difficult than before, with a new arrogance and an unwillingness to answer questions about his earnings. He kept what little money he had to himself and did not explain what he had done in Europe. Abdellah recalls having let him leave without a word; Driss returned equally closed to conversation. The silence between them thus spans both departure and return, rather than being confined to a single quarrel.

The father’s recollection also preserves the hopes that seemed to accompany Driss’s departure: he appeared to expect to come back richer, more knowledgeable, and more capable than his family. That anticipated transformation contrasts with the son Abdellah actually encountered, a bitter recluse whom he felt no father should have to see. Yet Abdellah’s account does not establish what Driss intended or experienced abroad. The gap between the returning son and the son’s unspoken story remains part of the relationship itself.

In the room and in memory, Abdellah assembles particulars without arriving at a complete explanation. He recalls Driss’s long hands, a small scar on the left hand, wandering eyes, and the habit of hiding banknotes in his socks. He remembers that the green in Driss’s eyes seemed to disappear as he grew older, and that Driss spent hours alone listening to raï through earplugs. These intimate observations sit beside reports of the dishonor Driss had brought upon the family in Erfoud or Rissani. Abdellah believes Driss apparently sold drugs and illegal trilobites, while also judging that he was no worse than other young men involved in the same trade, only less discreet. Knowledge of visible habits and reported conduct accumulates, but it does not resolve who Driss was to himself.

Grief, Restraint, and Unanswered Questions

After sparing David, Abdellah returns to the house and remembers Driss through the sounds of children striking stone. The work on the cliffs recalls not only his son’s childhood but the life that continued around the family after his death. Abdellah smokes and lets memories of his only son pass through him, now depending on those remnants with a determination sharpened by loss. The relation is therefore shown in its altered form: the father can no longer speak with his son, and remembrance becomes the remaining means of holding him close.

That closeness does not bring peace. During the following night, Abdellah regrets not having killed David, not because he has established David’s guilt, but because he cannot forgive him for Driss’s death. He thinks that he possessed the power to punish David and failed to use it; to him, the absence of punishment makes Driss’s life and death seem wasted. At the grave after midnight, however, Abdellah recognizes a deeper source of his desire for vengeance: he wanted to avenge the fact that he had never known his son. The thought reframes the conflict. Punishing David could not recover the knowledge Abdellah lacked, and sparing him cannot restore the possibility of learning it.

Abdellah’s final reflections make that ignorance permanent. He imagines Driss retaining his own past in the grave, inaccessible to everyone else, while the riddles surrounding his life grow more complicated. The father’s memories preserve gestures, habits, work, secrecy, and family reputation, but none can stand in for Driss’s own account. Their relationship consequently ends not in reconciliation or certainty but in the recognition of an irretrievable distance: Abdellah remains bound to his son through grief, while the son’s inner life can no longer be entered.