Si Mimouni was kind
and friendly and open and good-looking.
He was also reputed to be really smart.
One of my friends knew him from home
so he often stopped to talk to us.
He was a new breed of teacher;
he had studied in Paris.
Many teachers from my Lycée spent their summers in France
so they were full of new ideas.
Everything was open for discussion, or almost everything.
I took a course with Si Mimouni on ideas of paradox within Islamic doctrine.
It was whispered
that he would one day be a great prince of the Mosque!
One other teacher hovered darkly in the corridors.
Everybody was afraid of him.
All the boys were known to wet themselves
because he had a way of glaring at them
when they conversed.
He didn’t, it seems, like kids speaking.
At Le Lycée Mixte du Kef,
the boarding-school where I went in 1968,
Si Tayeb Lazhar was dean of discipline,
and had a fearsome reputation as a merciless wielder of the strap.
I studied him carefully when I first saw him;
he was gaunt and unsmiling.
One evening in May,
Four of us were hanging around the basketball court after lights out.
When he saw us,
he stood quietly at first
and watched;
then he picked on the most innocent and vulnerable boy.
He called Arrouj over
and began to interrogate him,
pinching one cheek hard
and then the other,
pulling his ears with enormous, slow ferocity
then moving to his slow-growing sideburns
until he had almost lifted him off the ground.
Si Tayeb Lazhar was evil.
I made up a song about him with a vile chorus.