Suddenly I remembered Mou. He lived in the town in that hot country with me and Ali and the moulay. I had thought there were three of us, but actually there were four, I recalled, looking up at the hotel ceiling, feeling like I might be sick.  He was a bit different because he was from there. That made him different.   I didn’t know Mou until Mou and Mr. Tagine took me to Mou’s village to meet his mother and look at the children. The skinny moulay wouldn’t come along. He was a moulay and from a big city—from a big city going way, way back. Those people are like animals, he thought. Mr. Tagine was a whole nother kettle of fish, as they say.  He didn’t really count.  His name meant “stew.” That was a real riot for him. Mr. Stew.  Mou thought Mr. Tagine was an idiot. Mr. Tagine thought Mou was an out and out communist and would have drunk the blood of the ruling classes if he could have, and he was absolutely right. Mou would have lined them all up against a wall if he could have. But he knew he couldn’t. Mou knew it just wasn’t in the cards, but he thought it just wasn’t in the cards for now.  He thought just maybe it would be in the cards in the future, and when that happened, he would be ready. Meanwhile, to bide his time, he practiced ethnology on his own people. He wrote down everything they did because he knew they would soon disappear. His village was vestigal, he thought. It couldn’t last much longer. In fact, it was dead. He walked around the village like he was walking around a museum. He wanted it to be gone as much as anyone else, but he didn’t want it to disappear without a trace. He wanted a record because his village was also an indictment. The way his people lived was an indictment against the comfortable world.  He hated the whole situation, but he wrote it down so people would know. He wanted the people in the comfortable world to know that his people had lived like this. They would never believe it. But he wanted them to know anyway, and he wanted them to know it was their fault. He had translated some songs for me. They were the songs his people sang when they were doing backbreaking labor. Subsistence agriculture is no picnic. It’s really hard, and it doesn’t always work. That is to say, you can break your back all year long and still not subsist. Most of the songs were about how hard the villagers were working and the villagers' landlords—damning them to Hell. Mou also played the Oud.  He was folklore all over. So we took a truck over to his village to look at the children and meet his mother. His father was dead, but a bunch of other male relatives were still around. His mother ate with her hands. She called forks and spoons the devil’s fingers. But everyone in that village ate with their hands. There wasn’t a single fork or spoon in the whole place. The children scared the shit out of me. There were a lot of them, and they had a tendency to swarm. But it might have been the flies.  There were flies everywhere. The people lived with the animals and everything was covered with flies.  The flies were maddening. They put me in a state. I hate flies. I couldn’t think about anything else. All I could think about was the flies. The children might not have been so scary if it hadn’t been for the flies. The children looked like they could eat you alive. They had a tendency to swarm and touch. Who doesn’t like the touch of a child? But if there are a lot of children, swarms of children, it’s different.  They were hungry, and they were active. Hunger hadn’t dulled these children. Hunger had sharpened these children. They were sharp and active and you could see a sharp, active hunger in their eyes. These children, I thought, would eat me alive if they could. The flies were making me nuts. Mou said Germans came through in buses and threw candy out the window. It had ruined them, Mou said.  It turned them into beggars, so now every time they saw a white face they swarmed. Mr. Tagine thought the whole situation was hilarious. Without Mou here, I thought, these children would eat me alive. A sharp word from Mou scattered them instantly. But as soon as he stepped away—to talk to someone, to talk about something secret, or maybe just to say goodbye to his mother—the children came back. They thought I had candy. I didn’t bring any but even if I had there would never have been enough. If I had brought candy, I wouldn’t have let on. I wouldn’t have wanted them to know about it. I wouldn’t have wanted them even to smell it. You could tell just looking into their sharp, hungry faces that the whiff of candy would throw them right over the brink. They were sticking their hands in my pockets when the truck came.