Mathias Énard - Street of Thieves

We hadn’t left the hotel much during those three days, aside from a few excursions, Cape Spartel, the caves of Hercules, the Kasbah Museum and the Marshan Cemetery to see Choukri’s grave; the remarks of the café waiters, the museum employees or even the passersby, when they saw me alone with Judit, didn’t encourage me to go out: it was as pleasant as a kick in the ass, that mixture of scorn, jealousy, and crass vulgarity that made me want to give them the finger with a heartfelt phrase about the sisters or mothers of the parties concerned. Walking with Judit was to receive, at every street corner, a serious quantity of symbolic gobs of spit, because I was a young Moroccan, and strolling in the company of a European girl without, seemingly, belonging to the social class that visited the private beaches or bars of luxury hotels, a class that could allow itself anything. Judit herself realized it, and I felt she was sorry for me, which made me even sadder. Even at Choukri’s grave, a moron my age came over to bother us; he asked me in Arabic what we were doing there, which is a funny question to ask in a cemetery — I replied, we’re coming to get ourselves buried, of course, when I wanted to say “We’re coming to your funeral, ass,” but I didn’t dare. After all, he might have been sincere, maybe he wanted to help us.

I’d become a little savage, in fact, I think. Locked up with my books, in my solitude, alone with Judit, I no longer had any contact with the outside world, aside from my three co-renters, who couldn’t really be called the “outside world.”

In the meantime, I had read For Bread Alone, and even the next one, The Time of Errors ; I had to apologize to Judit: this Choukri was something else. His Arabic was dry as the sticks his father beat him with, hard as famine. A new language, a way of writing that seemed revolutionary to me. He wasn’t afraid, he told his story without hiding anything — sex, violence, or poverty. His wanderings reminded me of my months of vagabondage, at times; the feeling was so strong that I had to close the book, the way you walk away from a mirror when its reflection doesn’t suit you. Judit was happy I had seen the light; she told me about the unique history of the text of For Bread Alone : published first in translation, banned in Morocco in Arabic for almost twenty years. It wasn’t hard to see why: poverty, sex, and drugs must not have been the taste of the censors of the time. The advantage is that today the books have so little weight, are so little sold, so little read that it’s not even worth banning them anymore. And Choukri was buried in great ceremony, with ministers and representatives from the Palace, in Tangier about twenty years ago — as if all those higher-ups were celebrating the fact of his death by accompanying him to the grave.

Judit’s departure, after our three days and three nights, had plunged me into sadness and solitude; I fought them as usual, by work, reading until my eyes were burning with fever, and love poetry. I thought about the forty-five days that separated me from my trip. I looked at pages and pages of information about Tunisia, about the Revolution. Ibn Battuta just devoted a few lines to Tunis, where there were, he said, many important ulemas; he was there at the end of Ramadan, and took part in the celebration. I myself would be there just before the start of the fast, which meant I was barely a month behind my illustrious predecessor.

ASif on purpose, a new blow of fate, I received the first email from Bassam two days before my flight. I confess I was thinking a little less often about him and Sheikh Nureddin, that I hadn’t returned to the neighborhood since the fire at the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, that I was living a little like an exile, and one morning, glancing over my inbox as always just after getting up, to see if I’d already gotten a reply from Judit to my missive from the day before, I noticed a bizarre message, which I took at first for one of those emails offering to effortlessly lengthen your virility by five centimeters, or to buy Viagra at a discount price to strengthen it, with the sender’s name as “Cheryl Bang” or something like that. What intrigued me was the subject line: News, and I opened it — the note had just three lines:

My very dear brother, how are things with you? I’m far away here and it’s hard but Inshallah we’ll find each other again on this earth or in Paradise. Take care of yourself khouya, think of me and all will be well.

It wasn’t signed, and I wondered for an instant if it was spam, but I don’t know, I felt as if I could hear Bassam in these lines, I was sure it was him. Why such a message? To reassure me? He was far away, it was hard, where the hell could he be hiding? In Afghanistan? Mali? No, there couldn’t be any Internet over there. Who knows, maybe the fighters of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had Wi-Fi in their tents. Or else he was writing to me from a secret prison. Or maybe these few words were not from him, but just automatically generated by a machine, and I was completely wrong.

I confess I hesitated to reply to this Cheryl; I ended up not doing so. I was afraid; after all, if he had written to me from that strange address without signing off, there was definitely a reason. I pictured him in his Land of Shadows, with the Khidr who carried his messages to me, that Land of Shadows where he wielded the sword, gun, or bomb, emboldened by prayer, with other fighters, strips of cloth tied around their heads, as they appear in videos online. But no doubt it was far different, the deserted mountains of Afghanistan or the most distant corners of the Sahara.

Take care of yourself, khouya, think about me and all will be well, it’s with that phrase in my head that I left for Tunis.

Ididn’t mention it to Judit.

I told her about everything, though, at night, during those first nights — Meryem, Bassam, Sheikh Nureddin, my months of wandering, the beating of booksellers, and she was sorry for me, she had caressed me in the darkness the way you apply the magic balm of a kiss to the hurts of a crying child; I had confided to her my fears about the Marrakesh attack, she had confessed that she had thought about it, too, when she had found herself face to face with Bassam as she was leaving her hotel. At first, she said, I thought he was with you, that you had prepared that as a surprise for me, coming to Marrakesh with him. And then I was a little afraid, he made me afraid, he seemed extraordinarily nervous, she said, feverish, as if he were ill. He kept looking around him. For a long time, she added, I wondered if we had mentioned the name of that hotel during our conversations in Tangier. It’s possible, but I don’t remember. It’s all pretty scary.

I agreed, it was all frightening; I had told her by email about the attack on the Café Hafa, and had shown her the artist’s rendering when she returned to Tangier. She simply said, It’s him, it’s horrible, we have to do something.

It’s him, it’s terrible, it’s Bassam, he’s gone mad, you have to go to the police and tell them.

I tried to convince her it wasn’t him, if he was in Tangier I’d know it, he’d have gotten back in touch with me one way or another, so she had calmed down a little.

We’re playing at scaring ourselves, I said.

I didn’t want to worry her more by telling her that I had received that enigmatic email. I wanted Tunis to be perfect, magical, as Tangier had been six weeks before; I wanted to be there for her, help her with her classes, talk to her for hours about Arabic grammar and literature, fuck a lot, fuck as often as possible and see what had become of the Revolution.