Mathias Énard - Street of Thieves

Saadi was a little like a big brother or a father, he was worried about me, would ask me questions; I told him about my life, and he would exclaim oh la la, listen, Lakhdar my son, you’ve had some hard knocks; he blamed my father, he said, for having so hard a heart; he shared my doubts about Bassam and Sheikh Nureddin. He said in a low voice if you want my opinion, all that’s the fault of religion, may God forgive me. If there weren’t any religion, people would be much happier.

He understood I wanted to emigrate, to leave Tangier — he just said that, with this old tub, you didn’t really choose the best way.

The more days went by, the more I said to myself, all right, I’ll leave for Barcelona, I’ll find a way to leave the port, come what may. And a few hours later I’d think, all right, I’ll go back to Tangier and find Mr. Bourrelier again.

The worst thing was having nothing to read, aside from the paper in the port cafeteria; I couldn’t keep rereading Full Morgue over and over again. I had recovered a tiny Koran that a kind soul have given me, I squinted my eyes over it to learn a few suras by heart, the one of Joseph, and of the People of the Cave, it was a good exercise.

A prison exercise.

We hadn’t committed any crime, the ship owner had committed it for us, but we were inside. Soon it would be two months since I’d last paid my rent, I wondered if I’d find my suitcases in front of the door or in the trash when I got back. If I got back.

Judit’s silence ended up making me crazy. February was freezing; an icy wind swooped through the Strait, the sea was invariably gray-green and covered with whitecaps. All my comrades were depressed. Even Saadi looked glum, his beard was turning grey, he had stopped shaving. He spent most of his time sleeping.

“We can’t stay like this till Judgment Day,” I said.

He jumped from his cot, straightened up.

“No, that’s true, little one, we can’t. At least you can’t. Me, you know, I could stay like this until I retire. They’ll end up finding a solution eventually. We’re in the way, a hundred sailors and four ferries stuck in the port.”

“Don’t you miss your wife? Don’t you want to go home?”

“You know I’ve spent nine-tenths of my life far from home. This isn’t much of a change. I’m used to it.”

“I feel like I’m in prison. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to go crazy here, pacing back and forth between the boats and cleaning.”

He looked at me a little more softly.

“I can see you’re going crazy, yes. That’s a possibility that shouldn’t be ignored. I remember the time I was sailing on the Kairouan, one of the sailors went mad. He couldn’t leave the gangway or the bridge. It was impossible to make him go down to the lower decks or the engine rooms, impossible. He was suddenly horribly claustrophobic. We decided to ignore it, we didn’t worry about him, we did his job for him. Waiting for him to get better, you know? And then it got worse: he curled up into a ball in a corner of the bridge. He was outside, sitting down, soaked the whole time by the sea spray, the rain. We forced a raincoat onto his shoulders. The captain began to get worried, saying, but he’s completely crazy, that one, he’ll catch pneumonia, we have to do something, take him down to the infirmary. We replied that might not be a good idea to shut him up, because of the sudden claustrophobia, but the officers didn’t want to hear it. It took five hefty guys to carry him, he didn’t give in, he braced himself against the pipes, clung desperately to the doors. Finally they managed to get him inside, he shouted with terror when they locked the door, he pounded with his fists for hours, begging them to open it, it made you sick to your stomach; I saw quite a few guys with tears in their eyes when they heard him and finally the captain ordered him to be freed immediately. When we went in he was just a moaning bundle of nerves, had pissed himself, was shaking like an epileptic. We took him gently to bring him back outside, but it was too late, he was totally broken: as soon as we let go of him he leaped over the railing and threw himself into the sea — we couldn’t save him.”

“That’s awful. I hope I won’t go mad like that. At the same time, if I throw myself into the harbor, I won’t have to smell fuel oil till the end of my days, but I won’t be missing much else.”

He looked at me, laughing from his cot.

“Son, I actually think it’s time you made yourself scarce.”

ITtook more time than expected to organize “my escape,” as Saadi called it, but once again, chance, Fate, or the Devil smiled on me and, two weeks later, in mid-February, I was walking for the first time on European soil, and not just between containers; I remember going by foot, without any luggage, to the center of Algeciras, and I spent my first euros there, in a bar, on a beer and a tuna sandwich. No one paid any attention to me, no one looked at me, I was a poor Moor like any other; I tried to read the paper, but I was too feverish to concentrate. The beer tasted like happiness, may God forgive me. On my passport I had a one-month visa granted “for humanitarian reasons,” that is, to go make my life miserable somewhere else — I neither had the right to work nor to go to another European country; I could only crawl to Tarifa to board a ferry for Tangier. But before that I wanted to go to Barcelona to see Judit.

As I left the bar I asked the owner where there was an Internet café, he pointed me toward a kind of telecommunications office with free computers. The place was managed by Moroccans — I don’t know why, I was a little ashamed, I’d have preferred the owners to be Spanish. I sent an email to Judit: Ya habibati, I’m on my way, if you want me. I have a visa, I’ve left the port. I can take a bus from Algeciras and be in Barcelona tomorrow. If you want. I didn’t ask her all the questions that had been eating away at me about her silence, but the slightly despairing phrasing of the message, I thought, did it for me. Then I made the rounds of Algeciras; I looked at the shops, people-watched. I bought myself another beer in a bar I found rather chic. There were women in the café; all kinds of women. Young women, talking in groups with their friends; older ones looked like they were having a drink on their way back from work. And even a waitress, who must have been my age; she’s the one who brought me my draft beer. I was trying to pass unseen, to pretend as if all this weren’t new — the language, the faces. I felt as if I had passed into a television and all of a sudden, with my khaki parka slightly blackened at the elbows, I imagined that everyone was staring at me, guessing it came from the Salvation Army.

Two hours later I went back to see if Judit had given a sign of life, but no reply. I decided to give her a little more time, I crossed the city looking for the least expensive hotel. I found it — it was pathetic, not to say disgusting; there were hairs on the pillow, pubic hairs in the shower, it stank of frying oil from the restaurant downstairs, and you had to pay in advance, but the rates were almost Moroccan.

Freedom had a taste of sadness. I thought about Saadi and my friends on the boat, about Jean-François Bourrelier, about Sheikh Nureddin, Bassam, all the people who had helped me before disappearing. About Judit too, of course.

I had made one more huge mistake, I was alone, with two hundred euros loaned by Saadi, I had nothing on me except a Koran, a thriller, and a rotten parka, I had to reconstruct everything, with a charity visa, gotten as a special favor from the port authorities. My life seemed extraordinarily fragile to me; I saw myself begging in the markets as I’d done two years earlier, back to square one.