Rawi Hage: Cockroach

How much? I asked, as I liberated my pocket from the sinful weight of a few round coins sealed with idolatrous images of ducks, geese, bears, and magisterial heads. They were all I had.

Give me those coins and pray, because then, and only then, you will have the chance to be beamed up by Jesus our saviour, and while you are ascending towards the heavens, you can take a peek down at those neighbours of yours who just slammed their door in our faces. You can watch them fry like dumplings in a wok, and I assure you that our Lord will be indifferent to their plight, their sufferings, their loud cries of agony and regret and pain — yes, pain! And may God save us from such harrowing pain.

I kissed the Jehovah’s Witness ladies’ hands. I asked them to have mercy on me in that sizzling day to come. Dying from fire is a terrible thing. If I had to choose, I would certainly want something less painful, quicker, maybe even more poetic — like hanging from a willow tree or taking a bullet in the head or falling into a senseless eternal slumber accompanied by the aroma of a leaky gas stove.

I left the ladies and ran down to the Artista Café on St-Laurent, still hoping to find Reza in a circle of smoke and welfare recipients and coffee breath. As my feet trudged the wet ground and I felt the shivery cold, I cursed my luck. I cursed the plane that had brought me to this harsh terrain. I peered down the street and hesitantly walked east, avoiding every patch of slush and trying to ignore the sounds of friction as car wheels split the snow, sounds that bounced into my ears, constant reminders of the falling flakes that gather and accumulate quietly, diligently, claiming every car windshield, every hat, every garbage can, every eyelid, every roof and mountain. And how about those menacing armies of heavy boots, my friend, encasing people’s feet, and the silenced ears, plugged with wool and headbands, and the floating coats passing by in ghostly shapes, hiding faces, pursed lips, austere hands? Goddamn it! Not even a nod in this cold place, not even a timid wave, not a smile from below red, sniffing, blowing noses. All these buried heads above necks strangled in synthetic scarves. It made me nervous, and I asked myself, Where am I? And what am I doing here? How did I end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time? And on top of it all, I am hungry, impoverished, and have no one, no one. . Fucking ice, one slip of the mind and you might end up immersing your foot in one of those treacherous cold pools that wait for your steps with the patience of sailors’ wives, with the mockery of swamp monsters. You can curse all you wish, but still you have to endure freezing toes, and the squelch of wet socks, and the slime of midwives’ hands, and fathoms of coats that pass you on the streets and open and close, fluttering and bloated like sails blown towards a promised land.

I am doomed!

When I entered the café, I peeled myself out from under layers of hats, gloves, and scarves, liberated myself from zippers and buttons, and endured the painful tearing Velcro that hissed like a prehistoric reptile, that split and separated like people’s lives, like exiles falling into cracks that give birth and lead to death under digging shovels that sound just like the friction of car wheels wedging snow around my mortal parts.

I spotted Professor Youssef sitting alone at his usual table. That lazy, pretentious, Algerian pseudo-French intellectual always dresses up in gabardine suits with the same thin tie that had its glory in the seventies. He hides behind his sixties-era eyeglasses and emulates French thinkers by smoking his pipe in dimly lit spots. He sits all day in that café and talks about révolution et littérature .

I asked the professor if he had seen Reza, the Iranian musician, but he did not respond. He just gave me his arrogant smile.

I knew it, I knew it! The professor wants to shower me with his existentialist questions. The bastard plays Socrates every chance he gets. He has always treated the rest of us like Athenian pupils lounging on the steps of the agora, and he never answers a question. He imagines he is a pseudo-socialist Berber journalist, but he is nothing but a latent clergyman, always answering a question with another question.

Is it a yes or a no? C’est urgent , I shrilled at him, intending to interrupt his epistemological plot.

Non! J’ai pas vu ton ami . The professor pasted on his sardonic smile again, puffed his pipe, and changed the position of his legs. He leaned his body into the back of the chair and looked at me with an intellectual’s air of dismissal, as if I were a peasant, unworthy of the myopic thickness of his glasses. He does not trust me. He smells me through his pipe’s brume. I know he suspects me of stealing his last tobacco bag, which I did. But he cannot prove it. Now whenever I approach him, he acts as if he is repositioning himself in his chair in order to say something valuable and profound, but I can see him through his pipe’s smog, gathering his belongings closer to his body, hugging his bag like a refugee on a crowded boat.

I turned away from the professor, thinking that I would like to choke Reza, the Middle Eastern hunchback, with the strings of his own musical instrument. He owed me, and I was in need. He always managed to extract money from me, one way or another. He either gave me long monologues about Persia and the greatness of its history, or he re-enacted the tears of his mother, whom he will never see again before she dies because, as he claims, he is an unfortunate exile. But I know that all Reza cares about is numbing his lips and face. He is always sniffing, and if it’s not because of a cold, it is because of an allergy, and if it is not because of allergy, it is because of a natural impulse to powder his nose with “the white Colombian,” as he puts it. But there was nothing I could do now except dress again in my armour against the cold and go back to my room and wait for Reza to call.

At home I lay in bed, reached for my smokes, and then for no reason became alarmed, or maybe melancholic. This feeling was not paranoia, as the therapist wrote in her stupid notes (notes that I had managed to steal); it was just my need again to hide from the sun and not see anyone. It was the necessity I felt to strip the world from everything around me and exist underneath it all, without objects, people, light, or sound. It was my need to unfold an eternal blanket that would cover everything, seal the sky and my window, and turn the world into an insect’s play.

A FEW HOURS LATER, in the early evening, I decided to pay Reza a visit at his home. I walked through the cold to his house, rang the bell, and waited. Matild, a French beauty of a waitress and Reza’s roommate, opened the door. As soon as she saw me, she tried to slam the door in my face.

I put my foot in the corner of the door frame and whispered tenderly: I am worried about Reza.

Alors, appelle la police, quoi, bof. Ah moi, alors, je ne veux pas me mêler de cette affaire. He did not pay his share of the rent last mooonth. J’en ai marre là de vous deux.

Can I come in? I said.

I told you, he eeezzz not herrrreh.

I just want to take a look at his room, I said.

Mais non là, tu exagères.

Please, I begged. And I showed Matild what my droopy, bashful eyes were capable of.

You can only go in hiz rrrroom, she said. No kitchen, and no toilet-paper stealing, d’accord ? When you worked with me at the restaurant zerre, everyone was saying that it was you who was stealing the toilet paperzzzz, and they all look at me bad because I was the one who recommended you forrr zee job.

I watched Matild’s firm ass bounce towards the kitchen. I shrunk into myself and hunched my neck into my shoulders, and my teeth felt as if they were growing points as I stared at her magnificent, majestic, royal French derrière — studied it, surveyed it, assessed it, and savoured it to the last swing. She was still in her nightgown, which ended right above her thighs. And she was barefoot!