Street of Thieves

Praise for Mathias Énard

“Homeric in its scope and grandeur, remarkable in its detail, Énard's American debut,
Zone,
is a screaming take on history, war, and violence. . . . Mandell's translation of the extravagant text is stunning.”

—
Publishers Weekly
[starred review]

“A tremendous accomplishment. . . . Énard's
Zone
is, in short, one of the best books of the year.”

—
Daily Beast

“With its historical sweep and grand moral import,
Zone
is an epic of modern literature.”

—
Bomb

“Like Flaubert and James Joyce, Énard seems to have found a model for his omnivorous novel in the Homeric epic, while Ezra Pound's ghost also haunts
Zone
.”

—
New York Times

“Énard's brilliant fourth novel seeks to escape ‘the memory of emotions and crimes.' . . . Form and theme fuse powerfully in
Zone
.”

—
World Literature Today

“The novel of the decade, if not of the century.”

—Christophe Claro

Also by Mathias Énard in English Translation

ZONE

Copyright © Actes Sud, 2012

Translation copyright © Charlotte Mandell, 2014

Originally published in France as
Rue des voleurs
by Actes Sud, 2012

First edition, 2014

All rights reserved

The newspaper articles quoted in the novel come from the
Diario de Cádiz,
dated February 17, 2012 (p. 137 in the book) and from the news site
www.yabiladi.com
(p. 144-145).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.

ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-05-2

With Support of the Centre national du livre.

www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Design by N. J. Furl

Open Letter is the University of Rochester's nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

www.openletterbooks.org

CONTENTS

I. Straits

II. Barzakh

III. The Street of Thieves

“But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.” “Here!” I interrupted. “You can never tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz.”

—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

I

STRAITS

MEN
are dogs, they rub against each other in misery, they roll around in filth and can't get out of it, lick their fur and their genitals all day long, lying in the dust, ready to do anything for the scrap of meat or the rotten bone they want someone to throw them, and I'm just like them, I'm a human being, hence a depraved piece of garbage that's a slave to its instincts, a dog, a dog that bites when it's afraid and begs for caresses. I can see my childhood clearly, my puppy dog's life in Tangier; my young mutt's strayings, my groans of a beaten mongrel; I understand my frenzy around women, which I took for love, and above all I understand the absence of a master, which makes us all roam around looking for him in the dark, sniffing each other, lost, aimless. In Tangier I would walk five kilometers twice a day to go look at the sea, the bay and the Strait, now I still walk a lot, I read too, more every time, a pleasant way to trick boredom, death, to trick thought itself by distracting it, by distancing it from the truth, the only truth, which is: we are all caged animals who live for pleasure, in obscurity. I have never gone back to Tangier, but I've met guys who dreamed of going there, as tourists, to rent a pretty villa with a view of the sea, drink tea at the Café Hafa, smoke kif, and fuck natives, male natives for the most part but not exclusively, there are some who want to bang princesses from the
Arabian Nights,
believe me, I've been asked so many times to arrange a little stay for them in Tangier, with kif and locals, to
relax, and if they had known that the only ass I ogled before I was 18 was my cousin Meryem's they'd have fallen down laughing or wouldn't have believed me; they so associate Tangier with sensuality, with desire, with a permissiveness that it never had for us, but which is offered to the tourist in return for hard cash in the purse of misery. In our neighborhood, nobody ever came, not a single tourist. The building I grew up in was neither rich nor poor, my family likewise, my old man was pious, what they call a good man, a man of honor who mistreated neither his wife nor his children—aside from a few kicks in the backside now and then, which never harmed anyone. He was a man of a single book, but a good one, the Koran: that's all he needed to know what he had to do in this life and what awaited him in the next, pray five times a day, fast, give alms, his only dream was to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, which they call the Haj, Haj Mohsen, that was his sole ambition, it didn't matter if he worked hard to transform his grocery store into a supermarket, it didn't matter if he earned millions of dirhams, he had the Book prayer pilgrimage period; my mother revered him and combined an almost filial obedience with domestic servitude: I grew up like that, with suras, morality, stories about the Prophet and the glorious times of the Arabs; I went to a totally average school where I learned a little French and Spanish and every day I would go down to the harbor with my buddy Bassam, to the lower part of the Medina and to the Grand Zoco to check out the tourists, as soon as we sprouted hair on our balls that became our main activity, eyeballing foreign women, especially in summer when they wear shorts and miniskirts. In the summer there wasn't much to do, in any case, aside from following girls, going to the beach, and smoking joints when someone handed us a little kif. I would read old French detective novels by the dozen, which I bought used for a few coins at a bookshop, detective novels because there was sex, often, blondes, cars, whiskey, and cops, all things that we lacked except in dreams, stuck as we were between prayers, the Koran and God, who was a little like a second
father, minus the kicks in the rear. We would take up our places on top of the cliff facing the Strait, surrounded by Phoenician tombs, which were just holes in the rock, full of empty potato chip bags and cans of Coke instead of ancient stiffs, each of us listening to a Walkman, and we would watch the to-and-fro of the ferries between Tangier and Tarifa, for hours. We were bored stiff. Bassam dreamed of leaving, of trying his luck on the other side as he said; his father was a waiter in a restaurant for rich people on the seafront. I didn't think much about it, the other side, Spain, Europe, I liked what I read in my thrillers, but that's all. With my novels I learned a language, I learned about other countries; I was proud of these novels, proud of having them for me alone, I didn't want that oaf Bassam to pollute them for me with his ambitions. What tempted me more than anything at the time was my cousin Meryem, my Uncle Ahmed's daughter; she lived alone with her mother, on the same floor as us, her father and brothers farmed in Almería. She wasn't very pretty, but she had big tits and a round ass; at home she often wore tight jeans or half-transparent house dresses, my God, my God she aroused me terribly, I wondered if she did it on purpose, and in my erotic dreams before I fell asleep I imagined undressing her, caressing her, placing my face between her enormous breasts, but I would have been incapable of making the first move. She was my cousin, I could have married her, but not felt her up, that wasn't right. I made do with dreaming, and of talking about her with Bassam, during our afternoons spent contemplating the wake of the boats. Today she smiled at me, today she wore this or that, I think she had on a red bra, etc. Bassam nodded, saying, she wants you, no doubt about it, you turn her on, otherwise she wouldn't put on that act. What act, I replied, isn't it normal for her to wear a bra? Yes but it's red, you idiot, don't you see? Red is for arousal. And so on, for hours. Bassam had a stolid peasant's head, round, with little eyes. He went to the mosque every day, with his old man. He spent his time devising incredible plans to emigrate secretly, disguised as a
customs officer, or a cop; he dreamt of stealing some tourist's papers and, well dressed, with a pretty suitcase, of calmly taking the boat as if nothing was amiss—I asked, but what would you do in Spain without cash? I'd work and save a little, then I'd go to France, he'd reply, to France then to Germany and from there to America. I don't know why he thought it would be easier to leave for the States from Germany. It's very cold in Germany, I said. And also they don't like Arabs over there. That's wrong, said Bassam, they like Moroccans, my cousin is a mechanic in Dusseldorf, and he's super happy. You just have to learn German, and they respect you like crazy, apparently. And they issue papers more readily than the French.