As Rich as the King

Description

“Don’t let its French prize-winning status fool you: this is a pleasurable, even filthy summer romance . . . about motorbikes, moody teens and misplaced desire on the Moroccan coast.”  – The Times (UK)

A coming-of-age tale and twisted love story, set amid the beaches, streets, and mansions of 1990s Casablanca

This deliciously sensual, poetic, and provocative love letter to Casablanca hums with the city’s sounds, sights, tastes, and smells on every immersive page. A critically acclaimed debut novel, As Rich as the King is appearing in English for the first time.

Sarah is poor, but at least she’s French, which allows her to attend the city’s elite high school for expats and wealthy locals. It’s there that she first lays eyes on Driss. He’s older, quiet and not particularly good looking – apart from his eyes, which are the green of thyme simmering in a tagine. Most importantly he’s rumoured to be the richest guy in the city. She decides she wants those eyes. And she wants a life like his.

But to get to Driss she will have to cross the gaping divide that separates them and climb to the top of the city’s society, from street corner merguez and frites to mansions overlooking the ocean. Provocative, immersive, sensual, As Rich as the King is an unforgettably twisted love story amidst the streets of Casablanca.“Don’t let its French prize-winning status fool you: this is a pleasurable, even filthy summer romance… This confident debut suggests that Assor may prove a worthy successor to Sagan. She has certainly earned her prize money with this dirty beach read about motorbikes, moody teens and misplaced desire on the Moroccan coast.”
—The Times (UK)

“In this richly evoked story set in a city of two very distinct halves, Assor draws a rich and rather damning portrait of life between haves and have-nots in contemporary Morocco, striking a balance between desire and delusion.”

Abigail Assor was born in Casablanca in 1990. As Rich as the King is her debut novel. It won the Françoise Sagan Prize, the Bookstagram Prize and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize for Debut Novel in France, and is now being translated into 6 languages.

Natasha Lehrer is a writer, translator and editor, whose work has been shortlisted for several international awards. Her translation of Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger won the 2016 Scott Moncrieff Prize.1
Once a boy told her that in other places, far away, the sand was velvety soft, white as clouds. He talked about seashells and the smell of salt, the music of the waves. She didn’t believe him. Those kids from the Carrières Centrales, they’re always telling stories to bewitch you, the jerks. Here, beneath her, the sand was yellow and grey; it smelt of stubbed-out cigarettes, and if she rubbed against it, it nicked her skin. It was gross, but that’s what it was like, Casablanca sand. At least it was real.
They must have been asleep in the sun for three hours by then. At least the Casablanca sun never disappoints – every time, it’s like drowning in light, it cloaks you, envelops you, melts you up entirely. Maybe, lying there together, they’d die, melt away, vanish, one by one they’d turn into slimy globules of fat, and when their parents came looking for them, when they got to Beach 56 they’d just find a big, murky, greenish puddle, they wouldn’t even know the puddle was their children’s melted bodies. Well, the others’ parents probably wouldn’t even bother to come looking for them, they were twenty-three. But her mother would come to find her, definitely.
She couldn’t tell anymore where their bodies began and ended, where the limits of her skin were; there were legs, hot and weltering, all the grains of sand, the corner of a rough towel, her nose in someone’s arm. Everyone dozing, and the footballs bouncing in the water and splashing everyone, the sound of kids yelling in the streets, the shriek of car horns on the avenue behind us, none of it mattered – the sounds of life, as Yaya liked to say. Reminding us we’re not dead.
 
Eventually, slowly, everyone began to uncouple. From the shapeless mass, one after another, bodies unravelled; it was like a dance – not a dance from here, a modern dance from France. The boys clasped their legs between their arms and the girls lay on their stomachs, bending their legs like little Lolitas. Sarah didn’t pose like that. She sat with the boys. They chatted a bit, drank some expensive Sidi Ali water, agreed that actually it had a bit of a sour tang. Yaya threw stones into the Atlantic, he said one day he’d end up killing a seagull, not on purpose, it would be the seagull’s fault, because it should have known Yaya threw stones into the Atlantic at that exact spot every day. He was right, Sarah thought. The thing that got on her nerves was the way Driss didn’t look at her at all. He was acting like he used to six months ago, the bastard, like he used to before all the whole thing started. All the boys looked at her, even the really angry ones, even after she’d told them the most terrible lies, they all carried on looking at her. That guy from La Notte, when he found out she was only sixteen, he kept on looking at her – he looked at her even more. But Driss sat there with his notebook writing down bullshit and getting sand everywhere like he didn’t give a damn about her. He wasn’t even good looking. He was pretty ugly, actually.
“Fuck’s sake, is he ever going to give up?” It was Chirine who spoke, still lying on her front like an American starlet. A street kid was trying to sell her a black-market cigarette or a piece of Flash Wondermint chewing gum. They could be really insistent, those little urchins. They’d be like, “Flash Wondermint, please, madame, Flash Wondermint, please.” They always spoke in French because it made them look polite.
“What’s the problem, Chirine?” said Alain.
“That brat’s asked me ten times.”
“He’s annoying you?”
“Yeah. Ten times.”
Alain got up and went towards the kid. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, skinny, with blemishes on his dark skin.
“Hey kid, what’s your name?” asked Alain in Arabic.
“Abdellah.”
“Abdellah. Abdellah, my girlfriend has told you ten times to get lost. You leave her alone, alright?”
“But monsieur, just one cigarette, monsieur, just one, please.”
“You see? He’s a nightmare,” Chirine said in French.
“What about a chewing-gum, monsieur, please.”
Alain patted the kid gently on the back and told him to get going, coaxing him in the direction of the road. But the kid was going nowhere. His threadbare trainers planted in the sand, he was wired, a warrior, ready to fight. He kept saying, “One cigarette, please monsieur, one cigarette,” his voice beseeching, but there was nothing beseeching in his eyes. His eyes were full of fight.
“Just ignore him,” said Chirine, but before she finished speaking something came flying through the air, swift and violent, and hit the kid on the arm; scared, he ran off.
It was Badr. He’d thrown his shoe.
“Good riddance,” he said.
 
They went back to their lazing, skin sweaty and sticky, dozing on and off, laughing. A few hours later the sun began to go down, it was time to go. Sarah pulled on her dress and flip flops, and they all walked towards the main avenue filled with the roar of traffic and hawkers selling corn on the cob. They kissed each other goodbye, and when she embraced Driss she tried to give him a lingering kiss on the cheek that would mean something, make him understand. It didn’t work. The second she’d finished pressing her lips to his skin he turned to the road without a word, eyes fixed to the ground, and walked towards the carpark behind McDonald’s, where he’d left his motorbike.
The others were leaving too, everyone heading in different directions. Sarah made as if she was going north, towards Anfa Supérieur, where the beautiful villas basked, but she soon turned east towards Hay Mohammadi. She walked for nearly an hour. It was dark by the time she reached home.
It was a falling-down brick building. There was never any hot water. Since there were no curtains or shutters on the windows, she could see from the street that the lights were out, that her mother wasn’t back. Further along on the right, behind some rusty fencing, loomed the bidonville. There the shacks were built of old flattened petrol cans, and all around you could see the names and colours of service stations, Afriquia, Mobil, Total. At least her house was made of brick, thought Sarah, and even if they weren’t amazing bricks, and it was damp, it wasn’t so bad; her mother always said that so long as you’re on the right side of the tracks, you’re not on the wrong side of the tracks.
She was about to open the front door when she heard a voice – she knew he’d be here, the little shit.
“Sarah! Sarah!” Without turning round, she said in Arabic, “Sorry, but honestly you deserved it.” He chuckled. On the other side of the fencing, Abdellah balanced like a monkey on some railings. “You think you’re better than we are, Lalla Sarah, because you hang out with the rich kids?”
He was always coming out with this thing about the rich kids. It made him laugh to call her Lalla, giving her a swanky title because he thought she fancied herself a queen. But she knew one day she really would be addressed as Lalla, and the little Arab brat would still be stuck in this slum.
“Of course I’m better than you. I’m French. We’re not the same, idiot.”
As she went inside, she distinctly heard Abdellah hiss, “We’re exactly the same.”

 
 
 
2

Six months earlier
 
Driss had this way of not looking at girls. The very first time she ever saw him, at the beginning of 1994, his eyes had slid right over her. As if she’d been a current of air – there was nothing about her that caught his eye. Suddenly she was a little girl again, sneaking snake-like into the Lynx cinema on Mers Sultan Avenue. She’d plunge her entire being into the dark pupils of the Egyptian stars; and those beautiful Cairene eyes, staring straight out of the screen, gave her nothing back. They too slid right over her.
That day, six months before Beach 56, before it all kicked off, she was with Kamil at the Campus, the café opposite the lycée’s Building K, the one where the rich kids, pretty girls and boys in leather jackets, hung out. A bit further down there was a pool café she sometimes went to. As well as shooting pool, you could smoke whatever you wanted there and eat the tuna and tomato sauce sandwich that you’d got on credit from Moustache, the old guy at the shop on the next street. But she’d never have admitted to Kamil that she went to the pool café. He’d held the door open a little for her as they went into Café Campus, and she listened to him tell her he worked in telecoms with his father. Which meant whatever it meant.
He wasn’t bad looking, Kamil, not exactly good looking either, and she liked that. She sometimes thought he went on a bit about his car and his fancy pad in a swanky neighbourhood where everyone went to play cards in the evening; but for that kind of a guy, he could have been a lot worse. He watched her from behind his black coffee and banana split. He seemed astonished, she could feel every feature of her face fluttering towards him. Her long, straight nose, he saw it, loved it, the same for her dark skin and princess eyes that stretched towards her temples. All of it, he loved it all, wanted to possess it all. This was the third time he’d brought her to the café. Sarah had figured out the technique the year before. To wait before she took off her clothes. It worked. Boys were such fools, they’d buy you endless coffees to get a result. And sometimes they kept it up afterwards, when they thought they were in love. Kamil was the worst, they hadn’t even kissed yet. She thought it was sweet.
He talked non-stop. “My villa in Dar Bouazza, five bedrooms, six bathrooms, I’ll take you there sometime if you like,” he said. “It’s not bad in Casa, it’s true, but what I want to see is America, the other side of the Atlantic. You realise, right,” he said, “when we’re on Beach 56, on the other side of the ocean it’s America? I’ll take you there – hey, why are you laughing, I’m serious, I’m telling you.”
Sarah laughed anyway. She didn’t doubt it for a moment. She laughed because suddenly he was very handsome, and she was even prettier, with him there on the other side of the water. She was wearing a broad-brimmed green hat, he had a moustache, they were strolling like aristocrats along a quayside, among a crowd of people hurrying towards the boats. Lightheaded and nervous, she laughed at these American beauties, because they were so beautiful it should be illegal. Kamil faltered, discouraged by her laughter, but Sarah said, “No, tell me more.”
He started telling her about some hot and sticky New York nightclub, then he broke off suddenly.
“Hey man!”
He’d caught sight of someone behind Sarah; she turned to see a young man taking off his motorcycle helmet, framed in the doorway. He had stocky, short legs and a little paunch. At Kamil’s words he smiled, and little canine teeth appeared, smashed against thick gums, which folded under the shadow of a crooked nose, pointing to the ground. Yeah, pretty ugly.
Driss made his way over to them.
“Been a while, Driss! Your old man working you like a dog?
“Not too bad, not too bad. How’re you doing?”
Kamil prattled away about telecoms and America. And then Sarah saw the eyes. They were tiny but they were green, a complicated green, the green of the outdoors, nature, thyme leaves from the High Atlas, nothing like any eyes she’d ever seen – and this green slid right over her. Driss did not look at her once.
He turned to go, with a duck-footed gait that made his little belly wobble, and Kamil whispered, “That guy is the richest of the rich. Richer than both of us. Maybe as rich as the king. But still, he’s a good guy, you know.”
That was how it had begun: because Driss was rich. Richer than the lot of them, as rich as the king, richer than Kamil with his villa in Dar Bouazza. But maybe it was also because in his tiny green eyes there was thyme and bay, whose leaves she had seen melting into the beef tagines Loubna used to cook when she was a child. Loubna was her friend Severine’s au pair. She went there for lunch every Wednesday in the last year of primary school. Séverine used to call her the au pair rather than the maid, because she was polite, and she was French. And Sarah, with her mouth full and her teeth all greasy, would say, “Me too, we have a Loubna too, at my house, with thyme leaves and beef and olives and cooking pots made of terracotta, like you. And we have gold, and diamonds on the floor, and we trip over them, in my big house, like you do here.” It didn’t matter if Séverine didn’t believe her.
Yes, thyme certainly has its share of responsibility in this story. Later she wondered if it hadn’t been for his eyes, and the way they brought back the tajine, Séverine, the last year of primary school, she might not have gone so far; she’d have picked another guy, also rich, maybe not as rich, but quite rich all the same. But the thing was, after that first encounter, she saw those eyes of thyme everywhere. In the café Kamil’s face turned pale, grew wider, folded in on itself, until it morphed into Driss’s face, with its crooked nose, its gums, its little canines, those eyes. It was as if it was Driss she’d been speaking to all along over the banana split at the Café Campus. When Kamil paid for her cinema ticket a few days later, it was Driss’s hand she saw pulling apart the Velcro on his wallet, Driss’s hand she felt gripping hers as they watched Amina Rachid being lectured on the big screen for having opened the door to the sheep delivery man with the sleeves of her djellaba rolled up. Kamil was licking an ice lolly and laughing at the husband’s cries – “You show up naked like that even for the delivery man, and what am I, the fourth sheep?” – but it was Driss’s laugh Sarah heard in the dark. The week after it was as if she were playing cards with Driss in the villa in Dar Bouazza, and as if it was with Driss that she finally made love, praying it didn’t sound the death knell of the Campus coffees, the cinema, the villa in Dar Bouazza. By the time she was fourteen, Sarah was going to bed with boys mainly for the paninis at lunch, but they always ended up spitting in her face a few days later with their friends in the school corridor, calling her a slut, and never paying for anything again. The girls talked about her too, with an air of disgust, “She’s not a virgin, the French girl. C’est la hchouma. Shameful.” Sarah didn’t care, there were plenty of other rich guys in Casa, and plenty more paninis to be had. But every so often she didn’t even get a panini out of it, and that was horrible. She learnt her lesson. By the time she was fifteen she’d changed her target: only older guys, at least nineteen, who’d left school already and had a fancy car. She’d pretend to be a shy little thing, madly in love, like the other girls; when they went to bed together, she’d say it was her first time. That worked better – even after she’d spent the night at Kamil’s he didn’t stop coming to pick her up from school and buying her lunch. In his open-top Porsche he told her he loved her, she held his hand. It smelt faintly of thyme.GB

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