Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

Just yesterday, it was draped in an immense shroud that muffled its lights and its echoes and reduced its former excesses to a cold anxiety, rooted in uncertainty and failure. Has Beirut so completely forgotten its torment that it has no compassion for its cousins in their distress? What a hopeless place! In spite of the specter of civil war that hovers over its banquets, it pretends there’s nothing amiss. And those people on the sidewalk, charging around like the cockroaches in the gutters, where are they running to? What dream could reconcile them to their sleep? What dawn to their tomorrows? No, I’m not going to end up like them. I don’t want to resemble them in any way….

Two o’clock in the morning. There’s no one left in the street. The shops have lowered their shutters, and the last ghosts have vanished. Jalal won’t come back tonight. Do I really need him?

I return to my room, chilled but reinvigorated. The fresh air has done me good. The toxin that was prowling around in my mind gave up in the end. I slip under the covers and turn off the light. I’m at ease in the darkness. My dead and my living are near me. Virus or bomb, what’s the difference, when you’re grasping an offense in one hand and, in the other, the Cause? I don’t need a sleeping pill. I’ve returned to my element. Everything’s fine. Life’s nothing but an insane gamble; it’s the way you die that determines whether or not you win the bet . That’s how legends are born.

A middle-aged man presents himself at the reception desk. He’s tall and bony, with the waxy complexion of an aesthete. His outfit includes an old gray overcoat, a dark suit, and leather shoes worn at the heel. With his large horn-rimmed glasses and his tie, which has seen happier days, he exhibits the dignified and pathetic bearing of a schoolteacher nearing retirement. A newspaper protrudes from under one of his arms. He presses the button on the counter and waits calmly for someone to come and attend to him.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Good evening. Please tell Dr. Jalal that Mohammed Seen is here.”

The desk clerk turns toward the pigeonholes. Although there’s no key in number 36, he says, “Dr. Jalal’s not in his room, sir.”

“I saw him come in not two minutes ago,” the man insists. “He may be resting, or perhaps he’s very busy, but I’m an old friend of his, and I know he’d be unhappy to learn that I came by to see him and he wasn’t informed.”

From my seat in the lobby, where I’m drinking a cup of tea, I catch the clerk’s eye as he looks past the visitor. Then the clerk scratches his head and finally picks up the telephone. “I’ll see if he’s in the bar,” he says. “And you are?”

“Mohammed Seen, novelist.”

The desk clerk dials a number, loosens his bow tie, and bites his lip when someone answers on the other end. “Good evening, this is the front desk. Is Dr. Jalal in the bar? A gentleman named Mohammed Seen is waiting for him in the lobby…. Of course.” He hangs up and asks the novelist to be so kind as to wait.

Dr. Jalal erupts from the elevator, his arms open wide and a smile splitting his face from ear to ear. “ Allah, ya baba! What good wind blows you here, habibi ? I’m overcome — the great Seen remembers me!” The two men embrace warmly and kiss each other’s cheeks, delighted at this reunion; they spend a long moment in mutual contemplation and reciprocal backslapping. “What an excellent surprise!” the doctor exclaims. “How long have you been in Beirut?”

“A week. The Institut français invited me.”

“Excellent. I hope you’re staying awhile longer. I’d love to spend some time in your company.”

“I have to go back to Paris on Sunday.”

“That gives us two days. God, you look great. Come, let’s go up to the terrace. The view from there is splendid. We can watch the sunset and admire the city lights.”

They disappear into the elevator.

The two men sit in the glassed-in alcove on the hotel terrace. I hear them laughing and exchanging claps on the shoulder before I slip surreptitiously behind a wooden panel where they can’t see me.

Mohammed Seen extricates himself from his overcoat and lays it across the arm of his chair.

“Will you have a drink?” Jalal suggests.

“No, thanks.”

“Damn, it’s been a long time. Where do you live these days?”

“I’m a nomad.”

“I read your last book. I thought it was simply marvelous.”

“Thank you.”

The doctor sinks back into his chair and crosses his legs. He smiles as he looks the novelist up and down, clearly overjoyed to see him again.

The novelist leans forward with his elbows on his knees, joins his hands like a Buddhist monk, and delicately rests his chin on his fingertips. His enthusiasm has vanished.

“Don’t make such a face, Mohammed. Is there some problem?”

“Just one: you.”

The doctor throws his head back in a short, sharp laugh. He recovers immediately, as if he’s suddenly absorbed what the other has said. “You have a problem with me?”

The novelist straightens his back; his hands clasp his knees. “I won’t beat around the bush, Jalal. I attended your lecture the day before yesterday. I still can’t get over it.”

“Why didn’t you come and see me right afterward?”

“With all those people orbiting around you? To tell you the truth, I hardly recognized you. I was so baffled, I think I was the last person to leave the auditorium. I was stupefied, I really was. I felt as though a roofing tile had fallen on my head.”

Jalal’s smile disappears. His face takes on a pained, solemn expression, and furrows crease his brow. For a long time, he scratches his lower lip, hoping to eke out a word capable of breaking through the invisible wall that has just sprung up between him and the novelist. He frowns again and then says at last, “As bad as that, Mohammed?”

“I’m still stunned, if you want to know the truth.”

“Well, I assume you’ve come to teach me a lesson, master. Have at it. Don’t hold back.”

The novelist lifts his overcoat, pats it nervously, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. When he holds it out to the doctor, Jalal refuses with a brusque movement of his hand. The violence of the gesture doesn’t escape the novelist’s notice.

The doctor barricades himself behind his disappointment. His face is drawn, and his eyes are filled with cold animosity.

The writer looks for his lighter but can’t put his hands on it; as Jalal doesn’t offer his own, Seen gives up the idea of smoking.

“I’m waiting,” the doctor reminds him in a guttural voice.

The writer nods. He puts the cigarette back in the pack and the pack back in the overcoat, which he returns to the arm of his chair. He looks as though he’s trying to gain time so he can get his thoughts in order. He takes a deep breath and blurts out, “How can a man turn his coat so quickly, from one day to the next?”

The doctor trembles. His face muscles twitch. He doesn’t seem to have expected such a frontal attack. After a long silence, during the course of which his eyes remain fixed, he replies, “I didn’t turn my coat, Mohammed. I simply realized that I was wearing it inside out.”

“You were wearing it right, Jalal.”

“That’s what I thought. I was wrong.”

“Is it because they didn’t give you the Three Academies Medal?”

“You think I didn’t deserve it?”

“You deserved it, hands down. But not getting it isn’t the end of the world.”

“It was the end of my dream. The proof is that everything changed afterward.”