Street of Thieves (13 page)

We divided up the work, my colleagues (French literature students or young typists, mostly) and I: one hundred fifty or two hundred files in the morning, and sixty pages of books, minimum, in the afternoon. The problem was that you couldn't give up one project for another; everything had to be done at the same time: copying out the memoirs of Casanova for a Quebec publishing
house was at least as urgent as the “Killed by the Enemy.” The volumes of
History of My Life
were immense, endless. I confess having taken great pleasure, despite the sleepless nights, in typing them out by the kilometer. This Casanova was funny and likeable, courtly, crafty; he spent his time running around with his sex on fire, hence on running around taking care of his venereal diseases, which didn't seem to cause him any shame; for him, the body, women, youth had nothing shameful about them. There was an ironic intelligence in him that reminded me of Isa ibn Hisham and Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari, the heroes of Hamadani — but in a longer version, of course. The Casanova was one of the rare books I actually
read
as I was copying it out: over three months' work, without any slacking.

I always wondered how much Jean-François Bourrelier billed for our services, and what his cut was; I never dared ask him. One thing was for certain, the Killed by the Enemy and Mr. Casanova didn't touch a penny of it, and as for myself, after the accounts were audited (money withheld for corrections, etc.), I rarely managed to get more than five hundred euros a month, for a minimum of sixty hours' work a week, which was an extraordinary salary for a young yokel like me, but far from the tens of thousands of dirhams promised. When payday arrived, Mr. Frédéric always looked slightly apologetic, he'd say Ah, there were a lot of corrections, or else Good, this month isn't too bad, but you'll do better next month, you have to get used to these dead-soldier files and accelerate your pace.

I told all my stories to Judit in interminable letters, that was my recreation, every night, when I should have hated the computer and above all its keyboard I would write at great length to Judit to explain what we had done that day, Casanova, the poilus and I; I told her about Achille Brun the typhoid-stricken and about Belkacem ben Moulloub dead in Soupir, about Casanova and Tireta watching an execution on the Place de Grève from a window, in the company of two ladies, without going so far as to dare tell her the obscene but hilarious details of Tireta's mistaken shot.

I began writing her poems as well, mostly in French and stolen from Nizar Qabbani; French or Spanish poetry seemed dry to me, not flowery enough. I always ended my missives with a verse,
Love, my love, is a beautiful poem embellished on the moon,
and so on. Judit was more discreet about her feelings, but I sensed, in her emails which were sometimes in French, sometimes in Arabic, that she appreciated our correspondence; she told me about her life in Barcelona, her everyday routine, her annoyance with the stupidity of her classes, her boredom at the university, where the professors themselves seemed to scorn the texts they taught as if they were a dead language like Latin. Through her, I began to hate these puny Arabic scholars in colonial shorts who every day regretted the fact that Spain had for a few centuries been Arabic, sighing over Andalusian texts in which they saw nothing but lexical difficulty. She told me look, we're studying such-or-such a poem by Ibn Zaydún, such-or-such a fragment by Ibn Hazm whom they called Abenhazam, and I would rush to a bookstore to find the book in question; most of the time it was a wonder to me, a jewel from another time whose Arabic filled my mouth and eardrums with unprecedented pleasure. Despite the dead poilus and Casanova, I felt very Arabic thanks to Judit; I followed her studies from day to day: she would ask me grammar questions, I would open the grammar books and classical commentators to find an answer for her; she heard of an author and the next day I would send her an annotated file with extracts and summaries.

Of course, these activities were incompatible with my co-renters' way of life, who had been unearthed by a kind of syndicate of French companies, which tried as much as possible to facilitate lodging for their personnel; Adel, Yacine, and Walid all came from Casablanca, they were “skilled technicians” and worked in an automobile parts factory, on the assembly line. Every night they saw me immersed in my files of dead soldiers or in my books, and took me for a madman. Sometimes they'd shout Lakhdar
khouya,
you're
going to make yourself deaf and blind, it's worse than masturbation, all that, come out for a spin in the open air, you'll see some girls! No no, he'll just see the sea, but that can't hurt him!
Moulay
Lakhdar, you're pale as prepubescent underwear, come inhale the exhaust from our car! And they'd end up leaving, earpiece in place, for Tangier and its delights, cruising with the music at full blast for hours till they ended up stuffing their faces with hamburgers around midnight, coming home brimming with excitement, and sprawling in front of the TV smoking joint after joint before returning to the factory the next day.

I hadn't heard anything about Sheikh Nureddin or Bassam since the attack, they hadn't reappeared; little by little my fears of seeing the police turn up had lessened and the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought seemed far away, over there, in those endless suburbs peopled by hundreds of hicks like me, but yet very close; of course I had followed the news on TV; they ended up arresting three suspects, I didn't know any of them: they had odd-looking faces that didn't exude intelligence, but photos of criminals are rarely flattering. Every day I expected news of Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam being arrested, but it never came.

Just a few days after Judit left, there was another horrible attack, which profoundly affected me, as if I myself had been present, maybe because we had been at the place not long before. The Café Hafa is situated on the cliff top, suspended above the Mediterranean, lost among the bougainvillea and jasmine of the neighborhood's luxury villas; it may well be the most famous place in Tangier and one of the most pleasant on nice days (a table set a little apart, where Judit had taken my hand before kissing me, I remember, I've thought about it often since, I was ashamed, very ashamed, I was afraid we'd be seen, kissing in public is a misdemeanor) especially when there aren't many people, late morning for instance, and you feel as if you have the sea and all the Strait to yourself. I learned from the paper that a man had entered the café, taken out a long dagger or
sword and attacked a group of young people sitting at a table, no doubt because there were foreigners among them; a young Moroccan my age died, and another was wounded in the thigh, a French boy; there were two Spanish girls with them: they were all students of translation at the university in Tangier. The suspect fled down the cliff, pursued by the café's customers and waiters, and managed to escape. An artist's rendering of his face was attached to the article; he had the same round head and childlike face as Bassam, it could have been him. Maybe he had suddenly gone mad. First Judit sees him in Marrakesh just after the explosion and then a face that resembles his appears in
Le Journal de Tanger.
I couldn't picture him stabbing young students calmly sitting in the sun; it wasn't possible that he'd changed so quickly, and yet I couldn't help but remember how readily he had beaten up the bookseller. It seemed to me that the question
Why?
would remain forever without an answer, even if it was indeed Bassam who had helped place the bomb in the Café Argan and stabbed a Moroccan our age, even if I had him in front of me, if I had asked him why? why do it? he would have shrugged his shoulders; he would have answered For God, out of hatred of Christians, for Islam, for Sheikh Nureddin, what do I know, but he would lie, I knew he would lie and that he certainly didn't know the reason for his actions which, in fact, had none, no more than there was a reason for beating up the bookseller, it was like that, it was in the air, violence was in the air, the wind was blowing that way; it was blowing pretty much everywhere and had swept Bassam up in idiocy. I thought about what I'd brought about despite myself, unhappiness and death; Bassam held the club and maybe the sword, but the ideological causes I could see from the height of my twenty years didn't convince me: I knew Bassam, I knew that his hatred of the West or his passion for Islam were all relative, that a few months before meeting Sheikh Nureddin going to the mosque with his father annoyed him more than anything, he never bothered getting up one single time at dawn for the
fajr
prayer, he dreamed
of going to live in Spain or France. But when I thought about it carefully I was also aware that,
a contrario,
just because he liked girls or dreamed of Germany and America didn't prevent anything whatsoever. I knew that Sheikh Nureddin had grown up in France, and when I had spoken with him about it he appreciated some aspects of the country and he acknowledged that, if not for living in the midst of
kuffar,
infidels, it was better to live in France than in Spain or Italy, where, he said, Islam was scorned, crushed, reduced to poverty.

All those months spent with the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought had brought me closer to Nureddin; he was good to me and I knew (or liked to believe) that he had taken me in without any ulterior motives; he gave me lessons on morality, true, but no more than a father or a big brother. He would often repeat, laughing, that my detective novels were rotting my mind, that they were diabolical books that were driving me to perdition, but he never did anything to stop me from reading them, for example, and if I hadn't seen him with my own eyes leading the group of fighters at night I would have been incapable of imagining for a single second that he could be connected, closely or remotely, with a violent action.

Apparently, the three brutes of the Marrakesh attack had acted alone, at least that's what the police said; they had learned on the Internet how to create a bomb and make it explode. But Bassam's presence there, then, affirmed by Judit, led me to envision networks, connections, paranoid conspiracies; I even thought for an instant that Sheikh Nureddin was actually in the service of the Palace, an agitator, a double agent, whose mission was to make all reforms and progress toward democracy fail, which would explain the fire at the Group's headquarters, to wipe out all traces, and also the fact that I had never been bothered.

The attack at the Café Hafa seemed to me particularly cowardly and worrisome, maybe because the victim could have been me, Judit
and me, maybe because it was on my territory, here and now, and no longer a rumor—a tremendous one, true, but far away. I have to confess, for a long time I was afraid, when I'd sit down at a café in Tangier, of seeing Bassam appear, sword in hand.

I had to stop thinking about these things too much if I didn't want to become completely paranoid.

Fortunately the dead soldiers, Casanova and my poems for Judit left me little free time.
Your eyes are the last boat leaving, can you make room for me?
For I am tired of wandering through the harbors of madness. Stay with me! So that the sea will keep its color,
and so on, always Nizar Qabbani. My idea was, of course, to end up composing my own verses without the help of my prestigious elders, but that was a lot of work. My Poem Number One, the first that was really mine, was the following: