Mathias Énard - Street of Thieves

I no longer had much of a chance to pursue my career as a poet: I came home too beat to write, and even reading became an activity for Sunday, when I didn’t work. But my apartment was very far from the port of Mediterranean Tangier and it took me a good forty-five minutes by bus to get to work or come home. In short, I wondered if I hadn’t made a huge mistake in leaving Mr. Bourrelier and the dead soldiers. Even my correspondence with Judit wasn’t kept up much. I thought of her, a lot even; in the beginning, I would take advantage of the Algeciras stop to send a handwritten letter to Barcelona— I’m writing to you from Andalusia —but very soon, we realized these missives and postcards took at least as long to reach her as if I had sent them from Tangier. Judit was getting more and more involved in anti-system opposition, as she called it; she had joined a discussion group connected to the Movement of Indignants, they were getting ready for some major actions post-elections. What she described of the situation in Catalonia was rather frightening; the nationalist right in power was systematically destroying, she said, all public services, with the University in the lead: they were reducing supplies, the teachers saw their salaries waning from one semester to the next. She was worried: the quality isn’t great as it is, we’re wondering what’s going to become of it all, she said. She was at a crossroads, in the last year before her diploma, and she had to choose her path, a master’s probably, or a long stay in the Arabic world; she wasn’t sure about trying to become an interpreter — in short, she felt a little lost, and so grew more and more indignant.

I had received one or two emails from Bassam, still just as enigmatic, each time sent from different addresses. He didn’t ask me for news; he didn’t give me any of his own; he just complained about the difficulty of existence and quoted Koranic verses. One day, the Sura of Victory: When the victory of God and the Conquest will arrive, etc.; another, the Sura of Butin: And your Lord revealed to the Angels: “I am with you: strengthen the believers. I will strew terror in the hearts of the impious. Strike above the neck.”

No one had claimed responsibility for the attack on the Café Hafa, and the papers no longer mentioned it. Only the elections held the media’s attention, the elections in Tunisia, Morocco, Spain — you felt as if a wave of democracy were unfurling onto our corner of the world.

I was suspended, I was living in the Strait; I was no longer here and not yet there, eternally leaving, in the barzakh, between life and death.

My nightmares were recurrent and were spoiling my life; either I dreamt of Meryem and rivers of blood, or of Bassam and Sheikh Nureddin; I kept seeing attacks, explosions, fights, massacres with knives. I remember one particularly horrible night I dreamed that Bassam, his eyes empty, a band of cloth around his forehead, was slitting Judit’s throat like a sheep’s, holding her by the hair. This atrocious scene haunted me for many days.

When I had the time, I tried to pray at regular hours, to rest my mind; I regained a little calm in the ritual prostrations and the recitation. God was merciful, he consoled me a little.

I had to find a way to rebuild my stock of thrillers, the only one that was left was Jean-François’s going-away present: a copy of Manchette’s Full Morgue, which he had given me because he had two. It was a good book, very good even, written in the first person, the story of an ex-cop named Eugène Tarpon who had become a private detective without any work, a drinker of Ricard whose sole prospect was to go back to live with his mother in the French sticks. Kind of despairingly funny, it took my mind off things.

Judit didn’t have enough money to come visit me; I didn’t have a visa to take the bus in Algeciras and go see her. I could only look at Spain from behind the Customs fences, just as hundreds of guys in my situation were looking at the barbed wire around Ceuta or Melilla; the sole difference being that I was on the continent. For a long time I thought about stashing myself in a truck or trying to sneak through in the line of cars, and I could’ve probably managed it, but to what purpose. Energy was starting to fail me. The strength that Judit’s presence, Judit’s body, had given me in Tunis was getting sapped away little by little. I was content to let the days go by, to sail, without much hope, ready to spend eternity between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

IThappened in January. A blow of Fate, once more; at a point when we hadn’t seen a penny of our wages since September, when I had ended up in despair, very seriously contemplating signing up again for the dead poilus, when Judit had almost completely stopped sending me news, replying very laconically to my messages, and when I was beginning to suspect she had met someone else, one night, when we had arrived at Algeciras early that morning as usual and had waited all day for the order to cast off without understanding why we weren’t leaving, the captain called us all together. There were thirty-two of us in the cafeteria. He wore a funny expression, surprised, maybe, or defeated, or both at once. He didn’t beat about the bush. He said, well boys, the boats have been seized by the Spanish court. We can’t move from here until we receive word. The company owes millions of euros in gas and harbor rights. There you are. He raised his eyes to the room. Everyone began talking at the same time. He answered the nearest questioners. Yes, you can return to Tangier on a ferry belonging to one of our competitors, they’ll take you, of course. But that will be regarded as abandoning your post, a breech of your contract, and you’ll lose all your rights over your unpaid wages in case the ships are sold. At least that’s what I thought I understood.

It seemed completely absurd. We were stuck in the port of Algeciras. Fine, me, I’m going back, I thought. Back to Mr. Bourrelier and the War of ’14, which I never should’ve left.

The captain kept answering questions.

“Luckily the tanks are full, we have enough oil for electricity and heat for a good while. And we should be able to get by and not die of hunger. Worst case we could get our colleagues to send in supplies from Tangier.”

“I have to stay here, yes. But you. . It’s your choice.”

“Two weeks, possibly. Perhaps less. The company has to pay part of the bill for the seizure to be lifted.”

“At least we have enough room — we have all the cabins. . There should even be some spare sheets and blankets.”

“I don’t know, we could play charades. If we were in the navy, we’d take the opportunity to repaint the hull.”

He began cracking up. A lot of guys were laughing. But there were others who found it much less amusing. The ones who had wives and children in Tangier, for example. It was a strange feeling to be stuck here, ten miles from home: less than an hour by bike on solid ground.

The next day, we were news in the local paper, which the Spanish dockworkers brought us:

Un nuevo drama laboral en el sector maritime recala en el Puerto de Algeciras. Un total de 104 marineros, los que componen la tripulacíon de los buques Ibn Battuta, Banasa, Al-Mansour y Bouhaz, afrontan una situación muy precaria, abandonados a su suerte por la naviera marroquí Comarit, que se encuentra en graves problemas económicos que están motivando un drama social que salpica también a otros purtos del Mediterráneo.

There was a photo of the Ibn Battuta ; you could see some of the crew on board, including me. It was the first time I had been in the paper, I’d have liked to email the link to Judit, but obviously we had no Internet. I sent her a text to tell her, she replied almost immediately Wow! Incredible! Keep me posted!