Derb Sultan had always been more than a neighborhood. It was a rhythm, a scent, a voice behind every shutter. Now, it stood battered but unbroken—like a lion with a singed mane.
Yassin walked its narrow alleys slowly, each step stirring memories like dust. Children played football with a charred can. Vendors opened stalls with trembling hands. Old women, dressed in black, whispered verses while sweeping the soot off their thresholds.
But something had changed.
Derb Sultan had seen fire—and survived.
Echoes Beneath the Stone
He found the old tea house again, half-collapsed from a bombing raid. Its tiled walls cracked, but still holding. He stepped inside and stood at the very corner where Khalid once spoke of revolution with trembling fury and hope.
In a hidden recess, behind a loose tile, Yassin discovered a bundle of papers: Khalid's original plans, some scrawled in French, others in Arabic, all written in the margins of cigarette cartons and torn prayer books.
There was also a photograph—faded, singed at the edges—of a young Khalid, Samira, and Abbas, seated with cups of mint tea, smiling like children.
Yassin took it and placed it in his coat.
"We remember," he whispered.
The Festival of Smoke
In honor of the uprising, Derb Sultan's people organized a festival—not of music, but of memory. They called it Eid al-Ramad (The Feast of Ash).
Instead of parades, they planted olive trees. Instead of fireworks, they lit candles in doorways. And at night, storytellers gathered in cafés to recite the names of the fallen, as musicians played lutes and drums with mourning hands.
Samira stood before the crowd, her voice clear:
"This is not a funeral. This is a birth. A nation coming into breath."
The crowd erupted in chants, their voices echoing off stone and sky.
Letters Returned
Yassin began hand-delivering copies of the resistance letters to families across the city.
He walked miles.
To a widow in Hay Hassani. To a mother in the Mellah. To a child in the Ain Diab orphanage who would never meet the brother who died for his future.
Each delivery was met with silence. And then, slowly, with tears. And finally—with pride.
The people didn't just mourn. They remembered.
They rose.
The Pulse of the Past
One evening, Yassin visited the local school. Children were painting a mural on the courtyard wall. At its center: the face of Samira, radiant. Above it, a single phrase in Arabic:
"الذاكرة حياة ثانية" — "Memory is a second life."
He sat with the teacher, a man who had once taught French colonial history from state-issued books. Now, he taught rebellion and poetry.
"They know the truth now," the teacher said. "We were never silent. Only silenced."
Return of the Watch
That night, Yassin opened his pocket watch. The glow had faded weeks ago.
But now—it pulsed again.
Not to pull him back. Not to flee.
But to say: you've come full circle.
Derb Sultan wasn't a beginning or an end.
It was a home.
To be continued in Chapter 13: The Road to Rabat