She Waited Three Years for a Jacket and Counted the Cuff Twice
In a workshop off a Marrakech derb, Imane Taoufik collects the jacket she ordered in November 2023 and checks it the only way she trusts: one stitch at a time, standing by the door.
9:40 a.m. Imane Taoufik stands in the doorway with the jacket held up to the light. The workshop is two rooms off a derb near Bab Doukkala. The sun comes in through a gap in the roof matting and lands on her sleeve.
She starts at the left cuff. Her lips move. The first row is 212 stitches, in thread the colour of dry saffron, on indigo wool.
Farida Benali watches from her stool. She does not offer help. She has a pencil behind one ear and a thimble on a string around her neck.
The ledger on the shelf is open to a page dated 14 November 2023. Imane's name is in pencil, number 417. Beside it, in a different pencil, someone has written the word patience and then crossed it out.
Imane drives a tram in Lille. She booked the jacket on a holiday, from a phone with a cracked corner, after seeing a coat on a stranger in a café. She never found the stranger. She paid a deposit of 2,000 dirhams. The balance is 9,800.
She reaches the end of the cuff and starts again from the other side. 212. She nods once and moves to the collar.
An apprentice sweeps thread ends toward the door with a short broom. Some of them stick to Imane's shoe. Nobody tells her.
The pattern climbs the back in a long diagonal, like a road seen from a hill. Farida drew it the week after the order, then put the drawing in a biscuit tin and did not look at it for two years. She says this flatly, the way you would say what you had for lunch.
At the collar Imane stops. She turns it inside out and looks at the seam. There is a small knot of undyed cotton, left in on purpose, the size of a lentil. Farida says every jacket has one. She does not say why.
Imane puts the jacket on. The left sleeve is a few millimetres shorter than the right. She holds both arms out and compares them. Then she lowers them and says it is fine. Farida says it is not fine and picks up the thimble.
They spend forty minutes on the sleeve. Mint tea arrives from the stall at the corner, in glasses with gold rims worn down to nothing.
When Imane leaves, the lamps along the derb are coming on, one by one, and the walls have gone the colour of slate. She walks slowly. The apprentice carries the empty garment bag after her, folded, in case she needs it, and she does not.
