Rawi Hage - De Niro's Game

MOUSTAFA SOUGHT ME out, sat next to me, and offered me a cigarette.

I have seen passengers vomiting for days; you do not get seasick. You are leaving. He smiled.

Yes, there is nothing for me there.

Yes, there is nothing in these places, he agreed.

We smoked, and Moustafa walked down to the stern of the ship, above the ceaseless waves that passed under our fleeing feet.

The little lamps went off, and only the captain’s room shone in the middle of the sea. The wind got cooler, so I went downstairs, through the narrow alleys, and sat in the kitchen. The captain came down slowly and sat, pensive and calm. Then he stood up, filled a kettle with water, and offered me tea.

I have a cabin for you, he said. You can have it after eleven. Mamadou, the African sailor, has a shift at eleven, and you can lie down in his bed.

We drank tea in silence. At eleven, I followed the captain. He banged on a cabin door, and an African man slowly opened up. The captain explained the situation to him. Mamadou nodded and waved his hand to invite me in. I lay on the bed and tried to sleep through the sound of the omnipresent engine, a sound that was loud but muffled like underwater signals from a clanking factory buried under seven layers of seas. I imagined a factory with armies of slave monkeys packing tuna in metal cans, and sticking on labels with esoteric languages, and arranging the cans in waterproof musical boxes screeching diabolic symphonies, and shipping them on the backs of seahorses to underwater villages filled with drowned soldiers, kidnapped maids, invading barbarians, treasure hunters, and a princess who had been enslaved in a sealed bottle by a jinni with a single earring, and who was now waiting for a fisher to solve the riddle and take her back to her lost palace, where she would rejoin the caliphate in a garden of jasmine and amber, and stroll through the arches of Baghdad before the invading armies burned her favourite books and destroyed thousands of tales.

IN THE MORNING, Mamadou knocked at the cabin door, and we exchanged places. As I was stepping out, he smiled and said that the last passenger had refused to share his bed with a black man. He shook his head and smiled again.

I went up to the deck. The ship was surrounded by blue water and blue sky, and nothing else. Sailors rushed along the deck, and up and down the metal stairs. The boat cut its way through water that merged with the sky.

MOUSTAFA FOUND ME on the deck and asked if I had eaten. No, I said.

We went down to the kitchen, and the cook offered us food in plastic bowls. The boat rocked, and the dishes swung in our hands, and the food shifted side to side in our mouths. Everyone was silent. The engine’s hum cut through the sailors’ bashful eyes, their quiet manners and balanced feet. After a time, a blue-eyed sailor spoke to Moustafa in broken English, saying something about the boiler in the back. Moustafa stood up and slowly shuffled his feet. The man sat in Moustafa’s place and started to eat, ignoring my presence. I finished my food and walked up to the deck. The wind had risen. The smell of water surrounded the boat. I sat and thought of my home. I tried to locate its direction but found I was lost in the roam of the drifting-away earth, as if my neighbourhood drifted on the tide, and my chunk of land, with its war and my dead parents, floated on the seas. I stretched my neck, and stood on my toes, but could not see it; it floated away all around me, it was swept away in the flux of things. I leaned over the rail and watched white foam passing the bottom of the ship, caressing its edges and changing shape. And a partridge appeared and said to me, No condition is permanent. I shall bring you a branch when the floating mountains are closer to your feet .

I PACED THE DECK, the splashing waves staining my face in ocean blue, and when the boat rose above a high wave I stretched out my hand, and touched the sky, and pulled it down, and took a peek over it, and released it. It bounced back, fluttered, and settled again.

When night returned, Moustafa sat next to me and asked, Do you like a little kayf (hash)?

I nodded and smiled.

He pulled out a small bag, and we rolled oily hash into a thin sheet that we cut, with giant scissors, from the drape of the stretched-out sky. Moustafa passed his tongue along the edge of the sheet, and the liquid, like carpenter’s glue, sealed it. I extended my arm and picked a light from a burning star, and Moustafa grabbed the wind and squeezed it in his chest. Then he passed the wind, the sky, and the fire to me, and I pulled all these toward my lips, and like a black hole I sucked them in, held them, released them. They floated and landed on the water’s surface, bounced on the waves, and attracted a school of flying fish that circled inside the fumes and sang ultraviolet, watery melodies to the enslaved underwater monkeys who repeated the tunes over the pounding noises of the tuna machines, sweet tunes reminiscent of the jungle sounds in their long-destroyed habitats, their abodes in swaying branches.

You will never go back. You seem like the wandering type to me, my brother, Moustafa said to me.

What is there to go back for? I whispered.

I have been on the seas for many years, Moustafa told me. I left Egypt when I was young. I have travelled places, my friend. I went to Japan and saw glittering lights, I had massages with tiny women walking on my back, I went to Africa and got drunk in bordellos, I slept with whores of all colours in all continents. I wasted my money on restaurants and bars, I smoked opium and snorted the best cocaine. I worked on many ships. I have seen prostitutes with black eyes like deep wells who asked me to save them from the fists of their gold-toothed pimps. I have walked in cities where men’s arms were stamped with anchor tattoos, and women perched on windowsills, calling out to you to make haste before their husbands returned.

Moustafa and I smoked and told stories, and for days the ship slid over the waves, and waves passed by and never came back, and the sailors pulled their sails, and the wind puffed and huffed and pushed us north and stole the smoke from our breath, and when the winds were high up, the sea slowed down and the water slowed, and the sail slowed, and the fish slowed, and the partridge glided above our heads under the sheet of the Hellenic skies, and one-eyed nymphs saw us and gathered to listen to our fantastic tales, charmed by the smell of our burning plants, mistaking it for the incense of their flying gods.

Two days before our arrival in Marseilles, the partridge took flight and disappeared.

WHEN THE BOAT ARRIVED IN PORT, A GROUP OF THE SAILors led me down to the engine room. I stayed behind the boiler, sweating, and hid from the inspector who checked the cabins. When the inspector left, Moustafa and Mamadou ran to me and brought me water, laughing at my wet hair and clothes.

That night, Moustafa and I sailed to shore in a small boat. We crossed a fence and some train tracks. Then Moustafa smiled and said, You are in Marseilles. You are on your own now.

I WALKED.

I walked through vacant streets, past doors that opened directly onto the curb of the street. A few dogs barked at my passage. My shadow was pasted to the ground; it moved and shifted shape depending on the position of the street lamps that hung high on curved poles. A car passed me by; loud music blasted my ear and then faded behind the buildings when the vehicle made a sharp turn. I walked on, looking for the centre of the city, for a place where I could rest. I looked at the sky: the purple light of dawn was starting to break, rising from underneath the sea. Then I heard that same bombastic music approaching again. I recognized the sound of the car without looking behind me. I grabbed my bag, switched it from my back to my belly, opened its useless lock, dug both of my hands into it, and cranked the gun inside the bag.