Mathias Énard: Street of Thieves

That night, at the station, I learned from her mother that Judit’s surgery had taken place, that she’d come through. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

Two or three days later Núria came to see me in custody.

She assured me that Judit would visit me as soon as she got out of the hospital.

They questioned me; one by one, they wove all the threads of my existence together on endless pieces of paper.

The psychiatrist declared me of sound mind.

And a few months later, once the prosecutor had uttered his long and lugubrious summation in which the darkness of premeditation glared, after my lawyer had pleaded, arguing that I was a lost child, young, too young to spend twenty years in prison, that I had sought to defend society, that I had, she said, struggled poorly for the good, which deserved the leniency of the jury, when the presiding magistrate asked me if I wanted to add anything, contrary to the advice of my lawyer who rolled angry eyes behind her glasses, I rose; I looked at Judit in the audience, Judit, more beautiful than ever despite her pallor, a worried but encouraging smile on her lips; I turned to the judges and said calmly, hoping my voice wouldn’t tremble too much:

“I am not a murderer, I am more than that.

“I am not a Moroccan, I am not a Frenchman, I’m not a Spaniard, I’m more than that.

“I am not a Muslim, I am more than that.

“Do what you will with me.”

ONhis way home, Ibn Battuta goes back through Syria; he wants to meet his son there, born soon after he left Damascus, twenty years before — the country is at the time decimated by the Black Death, two thousand four hundred people are dying there every day and, from Gaza to Aleppo, the region is devastated by the epidemic; Ibn Battuta’s son died too. The traveler asks an old man from Tangier for news of the country and learns that his father left this world fifteen years ago and that his mother has just died, over there in the West. Then he goes to Alexandria, where the plague causes one thousand one hundred deaths in a single day, then Cairo, where twenty thousand people, he says, have perished; none of the Sheikhs he had met on his way out are still alive. He goes to Morocco and passes through Tangier to pray at his mother’s grave, before settling once and for all in Fez.

Today when the plague is here again, when its breath roars over much of the world, when I watch the successors of Hassan the Mad circling in the yard, all those who want to see their mothers again before they pass, their city, their world before it’s erased, in the sweet company of books, of the monastically regulated life of prison, I look at myself in the mirror; I examine the white hair at my temples, my black eyes, my hands with their chewed nails; I question myself about my guilt, sometimes, after a nightmare that’s more powerful than usual, a bloody dream, a vision of a hanged man, a woman being prodded by surgical instruments, corpses of drowned teenagers, I scrutinize myself in silence and have no certainty, none; I think of Cruz; I think of Bassam, of Bassam’s final expression; I think of Meryem, of Judit, of Saadi the sailor; my regrets fade away on their own, dissipate; I have made use of the world. Life consumes everything — books accompany us, like my two penny thrillers, those proletarians of literature, travel companions, in revolt or resignation, in faith or abandonment.

Men are dogs with empty gazes, they circle in the twilight, chase a ball, fight over a female, over a corner of the kennel, stay stretched out for hours, tongues lolling, waiting to be done in, in a final caress — why, in one instant, does one make a decision, why today, why now, maybe he’s the one who decided and not me, Bassam seemed to be looking at me, seated, back straight, in the living room; light from the street projected his shadow on Mounir’s closed door, he said nothing, he had seen me come out of my room; the streetlight was reflected on his shaved skull, his face against the light was a shard of sapphire: silent shapes instead of cheekbones, dark shadows around his eyes, motionless; he was waiting, in silence; he waited for God, for the Hour, for me — he stared at me in the night, hands on his knees, a motionless prayer.

I thought I understood what he was asking me; only I could get up, stand firm, in the midst of invisible flames. Maybe our lives are valid for a single instant, a single lucid moment, a single second of courage. I didn’t reflect, I didn’t think ahead, I knew; Bassam jumped when he heard the click of the knife that I’d picked up from the table: he moved a little, his profile went into shadow, he didn’t struggle, didn’t cry out, he pressed his hand against my back, to help me maybe, he contracted when the blade sank into his chest, bent over in pain, raised his head to look at me, to send out one final enigma, gratitude, sadness, or surprise, he fell on his side when I withdrew the metal from his heart — I collapsed as well; and dawn was beginning to wheel around us.

Mathias Énard studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. A professor of Arabic at the University of Barcelona, he won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucault for his first novel, La perfection du tir. He won several awards for Zone (also available in English translation from Open Letter Books), including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Décembre, and won the Prix Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Theives.

Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant, Blanchot, and many other distinguished authors. She has received many accolades and awards for her translations, including a Literature Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for Zone, also by Mathias Énard.