Mohammed Achaari - The Arch and the Butterfly

People listened and exchanged complicit smiles, and they proceeded scared and surprised. All the while Al-Firsiwi was immersed in his hallucination, holding the tightly closed bag with care. He headed in the direction of the blue mountain until he reached the governorate building, where the informal handing over of the bag took place, as if it were a passing joke. The joke did not stop the governor handing Al-Firsiwi the receipt he requested, one that included the number of pieces after they had been counted. The governor asked Al-Firsiwi to specify the number of pieces, and he said 13,624. The governor wrote the number down on the receipt and loudly stamped it, and Al-Firsiwi left totally satisfied with the procedure.

After Al-Firsiwi surrendered and placed his treasure of Roman mosaics in the hands of the governor, things began to happen quickly. Authorities ordered Al-Firsiwi’s arrest. But Al-Firsiwi had left the city — people saw him though he did not see them — after eating breakfast at the marketplace café. The man seemed to melt into the blue mountain, as he used to call it. He left unconcerned by anything, while the police were quick to announce their failure to find him, as if the inability to find a blind man were a remarkable success. All the TV news bulletins showed the face of an officer announcing with a smile that his forces had looked for the fugitive from justice in every fold of the mountain without finding a trace of him.

When matters had gone that far, I decided to get involved in the search for my father, fearful that his disappearance was due to a fatal accident rather than exceptional cunning. The day I arrived in Bu Mandara, expecting to hear news about his disappearance, Al-Firsiwi contacted me from a mobile phone number I did not recognise. He told me that he did not want me to look for him or rescue him from oblivion. He said that the warrant for his arrest had no foundation because the pieces of mosaic were nothing but soil, and he was the only one who had declared that they were Roman. Think about this great country, he said. A blind man sitting in the lobby of a ruined hotel, passing the pieces of mosaic between his fingers and then declaring that this one was a pre-Christian Roman piece, and that one was the work of potters from the dawn of the third millennium, while those were from the ovens of Tajmouati in Fes and dated back to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those imbeciles believed that and issued arrest warrants, he said. Confession was the best evidence, and as long as Al-Firsiwi himself believed that, he had no fear that the most modern labs would prove he was making fun of all of them.

‘Why wage these fake wars then?’ I asked.

He replied angrily, ‘Give me an honest war to end my life with. Do you want me to die in peace like any other dog?’

I talked with Al-Firsiwi for more than an hour, as if I were meeting him in a dream. Every now and then he pointed out events that linked me to him, as if everything had ended a long time ago, as if he had really disappeared for good. I was listening to a voice talking to me about the Firsiwi who did not kill Diotima, the Firsiwi who had mysterious love affairs and wrote poems about the death of love, the Firsiwi who buried Bacchus in the courtyard of an obscure mosque in the blueness of the mountain. He talked about the Firsiwi who did not like his life at all.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the name or the family it connects me to or the village where you’re looking for me. I don’t like the Rif, which is supposed to be a lost Eden but is nothing more than a passage for wind. I don’t love Diotima who stole her means of death from me, or Hans Roeder who swallowed my poems. I only like this blindness that protects me, this darkness that resembles a huge gate that the Creator closed on me to make it possible for me to do as I please, far from spies and the curious.’

At some point I ended the conversation, but the voice stayed close by, as if Al-Firsiwi were standing behind the disintegrating wall of his old family home.

‘Are you here?’ I asked him.

After a moment’s silence he replied, ‘Yes, I am here in the heart of darkness.’

I jumped into the house through the collapsing window and ran in all directions, entering rooms without doors and ceilings and making formless birds fly away in fright. I asked him again, ‘Where are you, are you here?’

His voice reached me from afar, through the phone held tight to my ear. It said, ‘I’m in the courtyard of the mosque where Bacchus is hiding, lying down after having spent a long time standing on hard stone. One day my remains will be mixed with his: me, a representative of the human race in its eloquent rags, and him a representative of forgotten imagination, of the relationship between dreams and granite. Don’t forget to visit me from time to time. Not for my sake but yours, for the sake of the frail thread that mocks us.’

When the call cut off, I was in the middle of the ruined house. I was overcome by a feeling of fear and desolation that compelled me to quickly head out to the nearby field, to collect my strength and get away from the place as fast as possible. I wanted to get rid of the phone, but I felt as if it were stuck to my ear and had become part of my facial features.

I walked in the road that ran through the village all the way to the cemetery. As I got in my car, I felt I was looking at this place for the last time.

When the storm surrounding the manhunt for Al-Firsiwi abated, I was able to see things somewhat realistically. He had put an end to a period of struggle and violence, both overt and covert, replacing it with a period of calm that was suitable for a time when so many people were scheming and profiting silently, with a kind of belittling indifference.

The Zaytoun Hotel reopened during the tourist revival when it did not matter who benefited behind the scenes. What counted were the newly opened roads around, outside and within the city. Guesthouses multiplied, as did business in traditional crafts. Buying power grew and property revived. Troupes to perform religious songs and chants were formed in this forgotten city. There might have also been some hidden scandals that made people pronounce the hawqala , appealing for God’s help, without the sparks of anger in their eyes disappearing. Eventually, Al-Firsiwi’s disappearance marked the withdrawal of the tragic from public life. There was also a large-scale movement in the city to please those who whimpered and whined. Yet I was not tempted to return to the hotel, despite my half-sister and her husband’s insistence. I could not forget the sight of my mother sitting in the hotel lobby nor get rid of the sense of Al-Firsiwi’s spirit controlling the place. It seemed to me that a return to the hotel under its new direction would put me in direct confrontation with two gigantic beings I would be unable to face.

Reality, however, is not always as simple as expected. In this flood of changes that brooked no challenge or opposition, the state saw fit to submit Al-Firsiwi’s mosaics to forensic examination in Italy. A delegation of well-known archaeologists travelled to Rome, taking Al-Firsiwi’s bag with them. There the pieces were individually examined, and the final report categorically concluded that each of the 13,624 pieces was from a genuine Roman mosaic that had originally represented Hylas, the companion of Hercules. It was different from the mosaic currently located in Walili, which showed Hylas in a struggle with two nymphs, one holding his chin and the other his wrist. In this mosaic, one nymph gave him a drink from a decorated cup while he embraced the other and looked angrily at a tiger about to pounce on the two nymphs. The design also showed a scene similar to the mosaic visible to this day: the creeping hunter, the dead bird, the trial, and the hungry tigers savaging the guilty hunter. About 2,000 pieces were missing to complete the design and assemble it again.