Mathias Énard - Street of Thieves

The neighbors were there, I recognized them; one was in his bathrobe, he had thrown a bright silver survival blanket over his wife’s shoulders, who must have been in a nightgown; some were silent and downcast, others on the contrary were bellowing and gesticulating like mad. The firemen seemed to be having trouble gaining control of the literature-fed flames.

After three minutes of morbid, dumbfounded contemplation, I was suddenly overcome with fear; I rushed down the hill toward the center of Tangier. The whole neighborhood knew that I was the bookseller at the Group for Propagation of Koranic Thought. The police were no doubt going to look for me, especially if, as I imagined, the Group was linked closely or remotely to the Marrakesh attack. I didn’t have anywhere to go. Sole possessions: a bag containing a laptop, some cash, and the copy of Choukri’s For Bread Alone that Judit had given me and that I had taken with me to read on the bus.

At least I didn’t have to worry about the boxes, every cloud has its silver lining. When you leave on a journey, said the Prophet, you have to settle your affairs as if you were going to die. I had seen the bookseller again; the Group was burning, and all my possessions with it; all I had left were my parents. For a few days, and despite the argument with my brother, I had very much wanted to see my mother again. Not today. Not enough strength. Little by little my adrenaline was ebbing, I fell asleep in the bus that took me downtown. Suddenly I was exhausted. I couldn’t manage to think. Finding out what or who had provoked the fire was all the same to me. I got out by the Grand Zoco, a little haggard. Strange day. Now I had to find a place to sleep; I almost took a room in the same hotel as Judit, but that might be a little too much, if she found me set up in the room next door when she arrived in Tangier. Plus I wasn’t sure if she was staying in the same place, it was likely but not certain. I chose another inn, not far, a little lower down near the harbor; the owner looked at me as if I were a leper, young, Moroccan, and without a suitcase; he demanded I pay three nights in advance and repeated ten times that his hovel was a respectable place.

The digs weren’t bad, with a little wrought-iron balcony, a pretty view of the harbor, the roofs of the old city and above all, Wi-Fi. I searched for news of the fire online, it must not have been a major event, no one was talking about it yet.

I sent a message to Judit, then I went out to buy some clothes and have a bite to eat.

I was ready to leave. I’d had no family for two years, no friends for two days, no luggage for two hours. The unconscious doesn’t exist; there are just crumbs of information, scraps of memory not important enough to be dealt with, tatters like those old keypunch strips you used to feed computers; my memories are those scraps of paper, cut up and thrown into the air, mixed together, patched up — I had no idea if they would soon settle down in order to make new sense. Life is a machine to tear out your being; it strips us, from childhood on, in order to repopulate us by plunging us into a bath of contacts, voices, messages that change us endlessly, we are always in motion; a Polaroid just gives an empty portrait, names, a single yet complex name they project onto us and that’s what makes us, so you can call me Moroccan, Moor, Arabic, immigrant or by my first name, call me Ishmael, for example, or whatever you like — I was about to be smashed by part of the truth, and look at me running around Tangier, ignorant, not knowing what had just burned down along with the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, clinging to the hope of Judit and my new job as if they were my life raft. At times I think I can relive the schemings and thoughts of the person I was at that time, but of course this is an illusion; that young man who bought himself two black shirts, two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, and a suitcase is an imitation, just like the clothes he gets; I thought that the violence that surrounded me had no hold over me, no more than the violence in Tripoli, Cairo, or Damascus. Blinded, all I thought about was Judit’s arrival, about those super-sentimental verses by Nizar Qabbani that we used to copy out, in high school, in secret messages for girls who were moved by them, the lines I had already recited to Meryem, when we were gazing at the Strait, not daring to hold hands, and especially the next line, wandering among the stations of madness — Judit’s eyes were then, as this poet-for-the-ladies said, the last boats setting out. I remember, Meryem was worried; she was afraid of our relationship, afraid of the consequences, afraid, afraid of what I could make her do; she didn’t know what solution to find for this adolescent love, she was hesitant to confide in her mother, after all hadn’t she herself married her first cousin, and I remember that one day, when I had sent Bassam to find her, far from the neighborhood, she told me she was afraid I would abandon her to emigrate, so then I tried to reassure her with Qabbani’s verses, when the truth, if it exists, is that I couldn’t have cared less about her, about her, I mean I cared less about her than about satisfying my desire, my pleasure, managing to undress her, to caress her, and when I finally understood, after reading her last letter, in that old envelope picked up at Bassam’s house, when I finally understood that I was responsible for her death, out there in that lost village, for her hemorrhaging during a furtive, amateur abortion, because I hadn’t responded to her despair, any more than I had to the despair of her mother, who died of sorrow a few weeks later, in this paradise of modern Morocco where in theory no woman bleeds to death or ever kills herself or even ever suffers under the blows of any male, for God and family and tradition watch over them and nothing can hurt them, if they are decent, if they are merely decent, as Sheikh Nureddin said so well, Sheikh Nureddin who knew the truth, just as the whole neighborhood had learned it, Bassam in the lead; when I knew I could no longer escape that reality since it was as sordid and tangible as the number on a banknote, as precise and real as the bee gleaning nectar from the saffron flower on the new ten-cent coin I returned with each of the books I sold; when death, fixed and immutable as those coins, caught me by the ear to tell me O my boy, you skipped a step, for eighteen months now you’ve been living in ignorance of me, the world, my world, had to be well and truly destroyed so I didn’t destroy myself further, after this deflagration; Judit had to be by my side so that I didn’t give in to tears, once the shock was over: all of it confirmed an intuition; of course I knew too, my body knew, my dreams knew even if at that moment, at the moment of Meryem’s death at the far end of the Rif, I was in the process of getting myself beaten up in a police station in Casa or begging for an apple at a market — my nightmares, clearer, became only more painful, more vivid, even more unbearable; my conscience, more confused and even less sure of itself, riddled with regrets and with that terrible sensation, which could draw tears of shameful sorrow from me, because, in my dreams, for months, I had been sleeping with a dead girl: with Meryem who was disappearing in the flesh-eating coffin while I was seeing her alive and well, as the seasons passed; she was accompanying me when she was no more and that was so mysterious, so incomprehensible in my still-young heart that I saw a disgusting betrayal in it, a piece of filth even greater than my responsibility for her death, a hatred that turned against Bassam, against my family, against everyone who had prevented me from mourning for Meryem and had forced me to lust for her dead body — just as you slowly withdraw the shroud from a corpse to observe its breasts. On the marble table, I had dreamed of her cold belly and pubis. It was there, the shame, there, in this slippage of time; time is a woman from the graveyard, a woman in white, who washes the bodies of children.