Abdellah’s father-son bond with Driss

Abdellah’s father-son bond with Driss combines deep familiarity with a hard-won sympathy for his son’s desire to escape. Driss is Abdellah’s only son and only child; after Driss’s death, memories of their time together and Abdellah’s acceptance of his son’s frustrated ambitions make the loss both intimate and painfully specific.

An only child and a remembered boy

Driss’s death leaves Abdellah bereaved of his only child. At the burial, while Driss’s aunts and cousins weep and the men stand silent in the wind, Abdellah remembers his son not as an adult but as a ten-year-old boy. He had taken Driss prospecting across the mountain by himself, a shared excursion that remains vivid to him years later.

The remembered child has a face like an apple, marked by the burnished freckles of youth. On that trip, father and son found a Dicranurus near the trenches. Driss kept it in his room. The fossil thus holds an ordinary, tangible trace of their closeness: it belongs both to the work and landscape they shared and to the private store of objects Driss carried from childhood into adulthood. At the burial, Abdellah’s tears are spent; what remains is the force of the memory itself.

A father’s understanding of escape

The Elvis fossil reveals a less sentimental but equally significant part of their relationship. Abdellah explains that Driss had stolen the specimen from him and gone off hoping to sell it. He does not present the theft as a simple betrayal. Young men in the village feel trapped by a miserable life of digging, he says, and do not want to live as their fathers have. He understood Driss’s frustration and, in a way, wished him luck.

That understanding extends to the practical appeal of the fossil. Dealers had given it the name Elvis; only three specimens had reportedly been found in the Sahara, and Abdellah says it might bring ten thousand dollars in the United States or a thousand euros in Midelt. Even a sale for a few hundred would have made him happy for Driss. The money represented a possible route away from digging, not simply a prize to be kept within the family.

The loss inside the counterfactual

After Driss’s death, Abdellah imagines a different outcome: if David had stopped and bought the Elvis fossil, David would have been back in Azna with his wife, while Driss might have reached Casablanca. In this imagined version, the stolen fossil leads to escape and a chance at another life; in reality, it is the object that set Driss on the open road where events turned fatal. Abdellah insists that the impulse was not greed but bedazzlement, a young man’s susceptibility to the possibility of getting out.

The counterfactual gives Abdellah’s grief its particular shape. He does not excuse the theft, but neither does he reduce Driss to it. His willingness to imagine the sale as a tolerable, even welcome, outcome shows that he had recognized his son’s wish for a life beyond the one he inherited. What he mourns is not only the child he once took prospecting, but the adult future Driss might have pursued.