Open City (14 page)

I
N THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS IN
B
RUSSELS
, I
MADE SOME DESULTORY
efforts to find her. I had little idea of where to begin. The listings gave no help: there was no Magdalena Müller in the phone book in the apartment, or in another one I consulted in a phone booth. I briefly considered visiting nursing homes; and I felt, suddenly, an irrational shame at speaking French badly and Flemish not at all. A five-minute walk from my Brussels apartment was an Internet and telephone shop, located on the ground floor of a narrow building. I visited it in the hope of doing some online searches.

The shop contained a row of glass-fronted wooden booths for phone calls and a half dozen computers. The man behind the counter must have been in his early thirties. He was clean-shaven, with a lean, pleasant face and lank black hair. He pointed me to a computer terminal near the back. I found the Belgian white pages quickly. The site came up, to my surprise, in English, and I quickly entered the search terms: Magdalena Müller. The results listed many people named Magdalena M., many others listed as M. Müller, and two hits with Magdalena Müller, but both with hyphenated last names.

I shut the site down and went back up to the counter. I communicated with the man in broken French, paying for the service, which had come to fifty centimes for the twenty-five minutes of Internet use.

I
WENT INTO THE SHOP THE FOLLOWING DAY, TO CHECK EMAIL
, and paid when I was done. But this time, as I left, I surprised him by asking for his name, in English. Farouq, he said. I introduced myself, shaking his hand, and added: How are you doing, my brother? Good, he said, with a quick, puzzled smile. As I stepped out onto the
street, I wondered how this aggressive familiarity had struck him. I wondered, also, why I had said it. A false note, I decided. But soon after I changed my mind. I would be going into the shop for a few weeks, and it was best to make friends; and that interaction, as it turned out, set the tone the following day.

The shop was busy. Farouq, reading a book at the counter, paused to attend to the people coming in or leaving. Customers sat at all the computer terminals, and I could hear the conversations taking place in the wooden booths. I called my father’s sister, my aunt Tinu, in Lagos, and friends in Ohio. I also called the hospital in New York to approve and renew some prescriptions. V.’s was among them: she’d been on Paxil and Wellbutrin, but neither was working, and I had recently started her on tricyclics. I gave the necessary permissions to the head nurse, who told me that V. had wanted to know how I could be reached. I can’t be reached, I said, have her call Dr. Kim, the resident covering for me. Then, feeling the vigor of ticking things off my list, I also called Human Resources to check up on some paperwork having to do with my vacation time; I was told the department had closed early and wouldn’t be open again until the third of January. I came out of the booth annoyed at this and waited until Farouq was done attending to another customer. He looked at his computer log and then at me and said, United States? Yes, that’s right, I said, and you, where are you from? Morocco, he said. Rabat? Casablanca? No, Tétouan. It’s a town in the north. That’s it in the picture behind me.

He pointed at an old color photograph in a metal frame of a broad cluster of white buildings and, behind them, massive green mountains. I said, I just finished a novel by a Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun. Yes, I know him, Farouq said, he has a big reputation. He was about to say more, but just then, another customer came up to pay for his computer use and, as he did the reckoning, collecting payment and giving out change, I caught, belatedly, the note of disapproval in his “big reputation.” I noticed that the book Farouq had been reading was in English. He noticed my curiosity and turned it
around. It was a secondary text on Walter Benjamin’s
On the Concept of History
. It’s difficult reading, he said, requires a lot of concentration. Not much of that here, I said. Another customer came up, and again Farouq flipped seamlessly into French, and back again into English. He said: It’s about how this man, Walter Benjamin, conceives of history in a way that is opposed to Marx though, for many people, he is a Marxist philosopher. But Tahar Ben Jelloun, as I was saying, he writes out of a certain idea of Morocco. It isn’t the life of people that Ben Jelloun writes about but stories that have an oriental element in them. His writing is mythmaking. It isn’t connected to people’s real lives.

I nodded as he spoke, and I tried to align the drab Brussels neighborhood, the hum of petty business, the boxes of gaudily wrapped sweets and chewing gum on the wall shelf with the smiling, serious-faced thinker sitting in front of me. What had I expected? Not this. A man who works in a shop, yes, a man who works in a shop that’s open on Christmas Day, sure. But not this: the crisp, self-certain intellectual language. I greatly admired Tahar Ben Jelloun for his flexible and tough-minded storytelling, but I did not contradict Farouq’s statement. I was too surprised for that and only offered, weakly, the idea that perhaps Ben Jelloun did capture the rhythm of everyday life in his novel
Corruption
. The book was about a government functionary and his inner struggle with bribe taking: What could be closer to everyday life than that? Farouq’s English came out in a succession of lucid sentences as he put my protest down. I couldn’t follow his argument. He wasn’t saying that Ben Jelloun pandered to Western publishers, exactly, but he was suggesting that the social function of his fiction was suspect. But when I seized on that idea, he shook it off, too, and only said: There are other writers whose work is connected with everyday life and with the history of the people. And this doesn’t mean they have any connection to nationalist ideals. Sometimes, they even suffer more at the hands of nationalists.

So I asked him to recommend something different to me, something more in keeping with his idea of authentic fiction. Farouq solemnly took a scrap of paper from the desk and wrote out, in a slow and jagged cursive: “Mohamed Choukri—
For Bread Alone
—translated by Paul Bowles.” He studied the scrap for a moment, then said: Choukri is a rival to Tahar Ben Jelloun. They have had disagreements. You see, people like Ben Jelloun have the life of a writer in exile, and this gives them a certain—here Farouq paused, struggling to find the right word—it gives them a certain
poeticity
, can I say this, in the eyes of the West. To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely? Choukri stayed in Morocco, he lived with his people. What I like best about him is that he was an autodidact, if it is correct to use this word. He was raised on the street and he taught himself to write classical Arabic, but he never left the street.

Farouq spoke without the faintest air of agitation. I didn’t quite grasp all the distinctions he was making, but I was impressed with the subtlety in them. He had the passion of youth, but his clarity was unfussy and seemed to belong (this was the image that came to me) to someone who had undertaken long journeys. This calmness of his put me off balance. Finally, I said: It is always a difficult thing, isn’t it? I mean resisting the orientalizing impulse. For those who don’t, who will publish them? Which Western publisher wants a Moroccan or Indian writer who isn’t into oriental fantasy, or who doesn’t satisfy the longing for fantasy? That’s what Morocco and India are there for, after all, to be oriental.

This is why Said means so much to me, he said. You see, Said was young when he heard that statement made by Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinian people, and when he heard this, he became involved in the Palestinian question. He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You
can wait forever, and no one will give you that value. Let me tell you something that happened to me in class.

Farouq opened the register. I wished the customers would stop interrupting us. For a moment, too, I thought I should correct his slightly inaccurate quotation of Meir. But I was unsure of my ground, and he continued as though there had been no interruption at all. A question was asked, he said, during a discussion of political philosophy. We were supposed to choose between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and I was the only person who chose Malcolm X. Everyone in class was in disagreement with me, and they said, Oh, you chose him because he is a Muslim and you are a Muslim. Yes, fine, I am a Muslim, but that is not why. I chose him because I agree with him, philosophically, and I disagree with Martin Luther King. Malcolm X recognized that difference contains its own value, and that the struggle must be to advance that value. Martin Luther King is admired by everyone, he wants everyone to join together, but this idea that you should let them hit you on the other side of your face, this makes no sense to me.

It’s a Christian idea, I said. He was a churchman, you see, his principles came from the Christian concept. That is it exactly, Farouq said. This is not an idea I can accept. There’s always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation. It’s an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.

Farouq laughed. I looked at my watch, though I really had nowhere to go. The victimized Other: how strange, I thought, that he used an expression like that in a casual conversation. And yet, when he said it, it had a far deeper resonance than it would have in any academic situation. It occurred to me, at the same time, that our
conversation had happened without the usual small talk. He was still just a man in a shop. He was a student, too, or had been one, but of what? Here he was, as anonymous as Marx in London. To Mayken and to countless others like her in this city, he would be just another Arab, subject to a quick suspicious glance on the tram. And of me, he knew nothing either, only that I had made phone calls to the United States and to Nigeria, and that I had been into his shop three times in five days. The biographical details had been irrelevant to our encounter. I extended my hand and said, I hope we can continue this conversation soon, peace. I hope so too, he said, peace.

Thinking back to Mayken’s assertions, I had been wrong, I decided. What Farouq got on the trams wasn’t a quick suspicious glance. It was a simmering, barely contained fear. The classic anti-immigrant view, which saw them as enemies competing for scarce resources, was converging with a renewed fear of Islam. When Jan van Eyck depicted himself in a large red turban in the 1430s, he had testified to the multiculturalism of fifteenth-century Ghent, that the stranger was nothing unusual. Turks, Arabs, Russians: all had been part of the visual vocabulary of the time. But the stranger had remained strange, and had become a foil for new discontents. It occurred to me, too, that I was in a situation not so radically different from Farouq’s. My presentation—the dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger—made me a target for the inchoate rage of the defenders of Vlaanderen. I could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist or “Viking.” But the bearers of the rage could never know how cheap it was. They were insensitive to how common, and how futile, was their violence in the name of a monolithic identity. This ignorance was a trait angry young men, as well as their old, politically powerful rhetorical champions, shared the world over. And so, after that conversation, as a precaution, I cut down on the length of my late-night walks in Etterbeek. I resolved, also, to no longer visit all-white bars or family restaurants in the quieter neighborhoods.

I hoped, on my next visit to the shop, to talk to Farouq about the
Vlaams Belang, and what life had been like in the wake of all the acts of violence. But on the day I next went there, he was in conversation with someone else, an older Moroccan man, who seemed to be in his mid-forties. I nodded to both of them in greeting, and went into one of the phone booths, and placed a call to New York. When I came out they were still talking. The older man rang up my charges, and Farouq said, My friend, my friend, how are you doing? But it suddenly occurred to me that, even if he had been alone, I wouldn’t have wanted to talk. He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one’s cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?

One euro exactly, the older man said, in English. I paid, and left the shop.

T
he days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified. Most days I stayed indoors, reading, but I read without pleasure. On the occasions when I went out, I wandered aimlessly in the parks and in the museum district. The stones paving the streets were sodden, liquid underfoot, and the sky, dirty for days, was redolent with moisture.

I went to a café in Grand Sablon one afternoon, sometime after the lunch hour. I was one of only two customers, the city being rather quiet in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The other person in the café was a middle-aged tourist who, I noticed when I came in, was scrutinizing a map. In the small interior, which was lit by the diffuse light from outside, she looked pallid, and her gray hair caught the light with a dull shine. The café was old, or had been done up to look old, with darkly polished wood lining its walls and several oil paintings in tarnished gold-leaf frames. The paintings were marine scenes, choppy seas on which quartermasters
and merchant ships listed perilously. The seas and skies were without a doubt much darker than they were when they had been painted, and the once-white sails had yellowed with age.