Mathias Énard - Street of Thieves

YOUnever remember entirely, never really; you reconstruct, with time, the memories in your mind. I am so far, now, from the person I was at the time that it is impossible for me to once again exactly locate the power of sensations, the violence of emotions; today, it seems to me I would not be able to withstand such blows, that I would shatter into a thousand pieces. No one would survive such powerful shocks.

If I was certain about Meryem’s death, though, she had never been so alive, since I was discovering her voice in her writing; her letter was a call for help that resounded in the midst of the darkness, in the desert. A cry straight out of the caves of Hercules, by which you enter the Underworld; a dirty joke of fate. She said she loved me, called me her love, she said we had to get married, otherwise she would have to abandon the child to an orphanage; her despair was too much for me, I burned the letter in the hotel bathroom, along with Bassam’s letter. I will never know what happened over there between Al-Hoceima and Nador, no one will ever know. Bassam explained the details to me with strange, medical words, in his childlike scrawl. He said nothing of himself, but surely, to write such a letter, he must have made up his mind to disappear as well; otherwise, why tell me now what he could have explained to me the day before face-to-face.

I paced in circles in my room; night fell slowly. I rolled myself a joint, smoked it on the balcony; turned on the computer; looked online for updates about the attack, about the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought; nothing new. Details, clarifications about the bomb, the type of explosives, but no arrest. I found a short, two-line piece, arson in a religious bookstore, hundreds of books destroyed. Arson. The police must be wondering why none of the members of that association had reappeared.

The muezzin had just made the call to evening prayer.

I had a note from Judit apologizing for not having been more talkative earlier, she was exhausted. If I wanted to go out for tea that night, I could come by her hotel.

Strangely, I no longer wanted to. I didn’t want anything.

I went to the bathroom, showered for a long time, washing my feet, my hands, my forearms, my face. I put my blanket on the rug, turned to the east, and prayed. I made four prostrations thinking of nothing but God.

The night was there, it was gazing at the lights of the ferries going to Tarifa.

As I recited the Fatiha, as I breathed out the verses without any thought troubling them, as I repeated the holy words, I became calm again.

There was an intimate strength in silence, a precious song.

It lingered in me.

The Spanish coast shone, to the left of my improvised Kiblah.

I wondered if I had enough cash to pay for an illegal passage to Spain. I was more and more convinced that Sheikh Nureddin had left this money for me. It was inexplicable otherwise; he must have had pity on me. He knew the horrible story of Meryem and my aunt. With me, he had always been fair and kind. Deep down I hoped they had nothing to do with Marrakesh, neither the Sheikh, nor Bassam; unfortunately what I had been able to see for myself, the cudgels and the sermons, left me little hope.

What the hell would I do in Spain? There was my uncle who was working in the Almeria province, but it was no use going to see him. Also they had a crisis there. No work. In any case I didn’t have any papers. Go off in search of adventure?

I thought Paris would be more lenient. Paris or Marseille, the cities of books and detective novels. I pictured them as somewhat alike, populated with sons of grouchy Italians, fighting Algerians, gangsters who spoke slang. I was fifty years behind the times, but still, there must be something left, after all Izzo had written Total Chaos not long ago, I thought. I imagined visiting him, sending him a note saying Dear Sir, I am a young Moroccan fan and I would very much like to meet you. I looked at Wikipedia and found out he was dead. Manchette, too, had died a long time ago. Aside from a few remote and idiotic cousins I didn’t know anyone else in France.

The main thing was to get ready as fast as possible: find lodging that didn’t cost an arm and a leg like this dive, buy some clothes, start working. This business of copying out texts intrigued me. Ask for a passport, just in case. Wait for news from the police, which would certainly end up coming; read everything I could to train myself. Forget Meryem, Bassam, and Sheikh Nureddin.

Put a plan into action.

Have a program.

Work for the future.

After all, twenty is the finest age in life.

I got another email from Judit on Facebook, posted four minutes earlier, it said You’re not coming by, then? I replied — I’ll be right there.

LAKHDAR, Judit said to me in the middle of the night. Lakhdar, and I liked the way she said my name, her slight Spanish accent, her stress on the dad, that letter that exists only in Arabic.

“Lakhdar, that’s not very common, is it?”

My head was on her shoulder.

“No, it’s pretty rare in Morocco. But common in Algeria. My father liked the name, I don’t really know why.”

“What does it mean, other than ‘green’?”

“Actually Lakhdar has two meanings, ‘green,’ but also ‘prosperous.’ Green’s the color of Islam. Maybe that’s why my father chose it. There’s also a prophet who was important to mystics. Khidr the Green. He appears in the Cave Sura.”

“Lakhdar. I’ll call you the Green Hornet.”

“You’re more beautiful than Cameron Diaz.”

She gently caught my hand and guided it downward.

THEweeks and months that followed, before November and my start as a waiter on the Comarit ferries, went by so quickly that my memories are like them, brief and quick. Work for Jean-François was hard, dull, and mind-numbing; my room, halfway between the center of town and the Free Zone, cold and inhospitable; I shared the apartment with three workers slightly older than me but I felt they had never been my age. They seemed to be a bottomless fountain of stupidity. As soon as they got a few dirhams they’d blow them on a new tracksuit, sneakers, hash; they dreamed about a nice life, the high point of which would be the purchase of a double bed from the corner furniture store and a car from the Nissan or Toyota dealer; every day they surfed on voitureaumaroc.com and dreamed of luxury sedans they could never buy, look, here’s a 1992 Jaguar for a hundred thousand dirhams; they wore huge sunglasses that rounded out their faces and their Bluetooth earbuds were always in place. They were smooth, interchangeable, and noisy. But they were company, human activity next to me; they hit on garment factory girls, whose small soft hands ached from the throb of sewing machines, or if they couldn’t get them, then on the fish girls in the frozen-food plant, who smelled of grouper or shrimp from chin to innermost cunt, and all these girls were responsive to the vulgar advances of my fake-Ray-Ban-toting roommates who brought them in great ceremony, like princesses, to eat hamburgers in those big American chains that somehow gave them the impression of living life, real life, not the life of nerds, of hicks who didn’t have the luck to work in the Free Zone, and thus not only earned less, much less, but above all were much less distinguished, having neither sunglasses nor fancy phones; the whole performance made for a huge waste, far, far different from the neighborhoods where I had grown up, true, but also and especially from the ones where I wanted to live.

In any case I didn’t have much time off, not much time to interact with my housemates, work was terribly time-consuming and resembled the work of the sewing-machine slaves or the prawn-shellers, but without the smell: I spent twelve to sixteen hours in front of the screen, back bent like a string bean picker, faithfully copying out, with my four or six fingers, books, culinary encyclopedias, handwritten letters, archives, anything that Mr. Bourrelier handed me. The job was well-named: saisie kilométrique, typing by the kilometer; more precisely “double typing,” since this mind-numbing work was done twice, by two different mind-numbed idiots, and then the results were cross-checked, which gave a reliable file that could be sent to the sponsor. Mr. Bourrelier’s customers were extremely diverse: publishing houses that wanted to make digital use of or reprint an old backlist, government officials who had tons and tons of written stuff to go through, cities, town halls with overflowing archives, universities that sent old tapes of lectures and teachings to transcribe — you felt that all of France, all the verbiage of France, was landing here, in Africa; the whole country was vomiting language onto Mr. Bourrelier and his slaves. You had to type quickly, of course, but not too quickly, since you had to pay for corrections out of your pocket: every time a crosscheck of the two samples revealed a mistake, the word or phrase in question was verified and the misprint deducted from my salary. The first book I copied was a travel book about the African coasts at the end of the eighteenth century; pirates, slaves, that sort of thing. There must have been a goldmine in this genre of literature, because after that I was off to Russia, typing out A Frenchman in Siberia, written in 1872; and you might have thought this work was interesting, but more than anything it was exhausting, you had to pay attention to spelling and to proper nouns; you got lost in the flesh of words, in letters, sentences, as close as possible to the text, and sometimes I’d have been quite incapable of summarizing what such or such a page that I had just copied out was talking about. At least, I said to myself plausibly, after a few months of this treatment my French might be impeccable, but above it was all frustrating — I of course didn’t have the time to look up unknown words in the dictionary; I copied them out as is, without understanding them, and the number of typos stemmed from my incomprehension, from my lack of knowledge of one term or another.