Mathias Énard: Street of Thieves

The Thought was open all day, and my bookstore as well, but there weren’t many customers. Some came by sometimes to buy one of the books that I wasn’t authorized to put out on the tables. I asked Sheikh Nureddin if they were forbidden by censorship, and he told me of course not, they’re just texts that require a greater knowledge, which could be interpreted the wrong way. Among them were Islam Against the Zionist Plot and pamphlets by Sayyid Qutb.

One of my tasks (the most pleasant one, in fact) consisted of looking after the association’s website and Facebook page, and of announcing activities (not many), which allowed me to have access to the Internet all day long. I took my work seriously. Sheikh Nureddin was pleasant, cultivated, sympathetic. He told me that he had studied theory in Saudi Arabia and practice in Pakistan. He recommended readings to me. When I got tired of the porn on the web (a little sin never did anyone any harm) I would spend hours reading, comfortably stretched out on the rug; little by little I got used to Classical Arabic, which is a sublime, powerful, captivating language of extraordinary richness. I would spend hours discovering the beauties of the Koran through the great commentators; the simple complexity of the text astounded me. It was an ocean. An ocean of lights. I liked to picture the Prophet in his cave, wrapped in his coat, or surrounded by his companions, on his way to battle. Thinking that I was reproducing their gestures, repeating the phrases they themselves had chanted helped me put up with the prayers, which were still an interminable chore.

I felt as if I were making amends, as if I were undoing the stains of months of vagabonding. I could even imagine meeting my father or mother without shame. That thought revolved often in my head, Fridays as I stood behind my table; I said to myself that a day would come when I would meet them, it was inevitable. I knew that they refused to even mention my name in public; I had this disconcerted feeling that Bassam was hiding something from me, he avoided talking to me about my family. When I questioned him he’d reply: don’t worry don’t worry, they’ll get over it, and would change the subject. I missed my mother.

Evenings, I’d go out for a walk with Bassam. We spent much less time than before contemplating the Spanish coast and much more time staring at girls’ asses in the street. Tangier had the advantage of being big enough so that we could feel free outside our suburb; sometimes we’d treat ourselves to a couple beers in a discreet bar; I had to negotiate for hours until Bassam agreed, he’d hesitate till the last second, but the prospect of mingling with foreign girls ended up deciding it. Once in the joint, he would vacillate for another five minutes between a Coke or a beer, but he always ended up taking the alcohol, before getting angry with himself for hours afterward and swallowing a kilo of mints to mask the smell. Not far from the bar there was a beautiful, completely renovated French bookstore where I liked to hang out, without ever buying anything since the books were much too expensive for me. But at least I could eye the female bookseller a little, after all we were colleagues. I never dared say a word to her. In any case, she wore a wedding ring and was much older than me.

Afterwards, invariably, I’d walk Bassam back to his place, then go back to my tiny room at the Propagation of Thought, pick up a thriller and read for an hour or two before falling asleep. The neighborhood bookseller had an inexhaustible stock in the back of his shop, I don’t know where he got them from: Fleuve Noir editions (the cheapest), Masque editions, Série Noire editions (my favorite), and other obscure collections from the 1960s and ’70s. All these titles on the metal shelves composed an immense, incomprehensible, mad poem: The Dining Room of the Ready-to-Bleed / The Carnival of the Lost / Pearls to Swine / Mardi gris / Sleep of Hot Lead, I never knew which to choose, even though I had a preference for the ones that took place in the United States rather than in France — their bourbon seemed more real, their cars bigger and their cities wilder. The bookseller must not have been raking it in; in fact, aside from his stock of thrillers that I must have been the only fan of, he sold old textbooks, outdated newspapers, decrepit Spanish journals, and a few soft-porn Egyptian novels. He was a pretty funny guy who spent his time tippling in secret in the back of his shop, a freethinker with Nasserian leanings, a fixture in the neighborhood. He often told me that barely twenty years ago the surrounding hills were empty, just two or three houses here and there, and that from where we were to the airport it was all countryside. Me, I’m a real Tangierian, he’d say.

After reading, four or five hours of sleep until dawn prayers: Sheikh Nureddin came, and with him a large part of the Group (except Bassam, who said he prayed at home, which I had a hard time believing). When they left I would go back to sleep until eight or nine, then breakfast, and at 9:30 sharp I’d open the bookstore. Often the Sheikh would return around noon, we’d talk for a little, he’d ask me to add this or that to the webpage, would check the state of the stock, usually ordering the books that were running out himself (one box of Sexuality, one of Heroines, the complete works of Ibn Taymiyyah in twenty volumes), and would leave again on his own business. The books usually took a month to reach us from Saudi Arabia, so you had to plan ahead. Then I had peace all afternoon. I stayed there quietly studying, as Sheikh Nureddin said. Paradise. Room, board, and education. After evening prayers Bassam would come by for me, and we’d go out on the town, and so on. A healthy routine.

I had only one fear, or one desire — meeting my family; they knew where I was, I knew where they were; I saw my mother, once, on the sidewalk across the street — I took cover, my back turned, my heart pounding. I was ashamed. So were they, even if I still didn’t know to what extent, or why. I’d have liked to see my little sister, she must have changed a lot, grown a lot. I tried not to think about it. I’m still trying. I wonder what they know about me, today. There are always rumors, gossip that reaches home; they must surely cover their ears.

Often, I thought of Meryem — I told myself I could have found the courage to take a bus to the village to go see her secretly. I wrote to her, and these letters always ended up in the trash, out of cowardliness mostly. Meryem already belonged to the realm of dreams, to the rustling body of memory.

The year passed quickly, and when the demonstrations began in Tunisia I’d already been at the Thought over a year. My tranquility was a little upset by these events, I have to say. Sheikh Nureddin and the whole Group were like madmen. They spent all their time in front of the TV. They prayed all day for their Tunisian brothers. Afterward they started up collections for the Egyptian brothers. Then when the list extended to the Libyan and Yemeni brothers, they began organizing actions “for our oppressed Arab brothers.”

When the uprising started in Morocco on February 20 th, they couldn’t stand still anymore. They took turns in sit-ins, demonstrations. My bookstore had become campaign headquarters: the group saw the Arab revolts as the long-awaited green tide. Finally, genuine Muslim countries would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, they dreamed about them at night. According to what Sheikh Nureddin told me, the idea was to win as many free, democratic elections as possible in order to take power and then, from within, by the conjoined forces of legislature and the street, to Islamize the constitutions and the laws. Their political projects didn’t matter much to me, but the incessant and noisy activism turned my life completely upside-down. They stopped letting me have constant access to the Internet (they needed it all the time), and I could no longer read quietly. There was always some activity, some demonstration to take part in, some broadcast to watch on TV. So I would spend more and more time downtown. I’d go read a detective novel over a cup of tea on the Place de France all afternoon. Sheikh Nureddin blamed me a little for my absences; he’d look at me reprovingly and say, you could take a more active part in our struggle.