My office was relocated to a different building even closer to the Moroccan cafe where I was getting my morning and afternoon coffee, so now I’m visiting up to three times a day. Ramadhan started recently, and I feel terrible coming in and ordering food and drink when all the staff are starving. Yesterday afternoon when I got my coffee I struck up a conversation with two of the workers, asking if they were fasting. I mentioned that when I lived in Tunisia, restaurant workers weren’t put in the position of serving non-fasting patrons, because most of the cafes were closd during the day.

One of the guys asked how long I had lived in Tunisia, and I told him. The other guy said, “I’m from the country right next door to Tunisia.”

“Are you Algerian or Libyan?” I asked.

“Moroccan,” he answered.

“I don’t think Morocco and Tunisia share a border,” I said.

He insisted, and even drew me a map. I contradicted him, but then one of the other patrons (not a North African) said to me, “You know, he’s right. Morocco is next to Tunisia.”

“I don’t THINK so,” I said, but I was starting to doubt myself. On one hand, I was sure that Morocco wasn’t next to Tunisia, because if it had been, I would have gone there. It was the fact that Tunisia was landlocked between of war-torn Algeria on one side and death-to-America Libya on the other that prevented me from taking any train journeys out of the country for three years. On the other hand, I’d persisted in idées fixes in the past only to have my worldview crumble when proven wrong. There was the time my mother-in-law told me that the word “restaurateur” was properly spelled without an N, and the time that my friend P. proved that Neil Young had never been in the group America. Could I have been laboring under a geographical delusion all these years?

No.

I can’t believe I backed down.