Street of Thieves (15 page)

My very dear brother, how are things with you? I'm far away here and it's hard but
Inshallah
we'll find each other again on this earth or in Paradise. Take care of yourself
khouya,
think of me and all will be well.

It wasn't signed, and I wondered for an instant if it was spam, but I don't know, I felt as if I could hear Bassam in these lines, I was sure it was him. Why such a message? To reassure me? He was far away, it was hard, where the hell could he be hiding? In Afghanistan? Mali? No, there couldn't be any Internet over there. Who knows,
maybe the fighters of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had Wi-Fi in their tents. Or else he was writing to me from a secret prison. Or maybe these few words were not from him, but just automatically generated by a machine, and I was completely wrong.

I confess I hesitated to reply to this Cheryl; I ended up not doing so. I was afraid; after all, if he had written to me from that strange address without signing off, there was definitely a reason. I pictured him in his Land of Shadows, with the Khidr who carried his messages to me, that Land of Shadows where he wielded the sword, gun, or bomb, emboldened by prayer, with other fighters, strips of cloth tied around their heads, as they appear in videos online. But no doubt it was far different, the deserted mountains of Afghanistan or the most distant corners of the Sahara.

Take care of yourself,
khouya,
think about me and all will be well,
it's with that phrase in my head that I left for Tunis.

I
didn't mention it to Judit.

I told her about everything, though, at night, during those first nights—Meryem, Bassam, Sheikh Nureddin, my months of wandering, the beating of booksellers, and she was sorry for me, she had caressed me in the darkness the way you apply the magic balm of a kiss to the hurts of a crying child; I had confided to her my fears about the Marrakesh attack, she had confessed that she had thought about it, too, when she had found herself face to face with Bassam as she was leaving her hotel. At first, she said, I thought he was with you, that you had prepared that as a surprise for me, coming to Marrakesh with him. And then I was a little afraid, he made me afraid, he seemed extraordinarily nervous, she said, feverish, as if he were ill. He kept looking around him. For a long time, she added, I wondered if we had mentioned the name of that hotel during our conversations in Tangier. It's possible, but I don't remember. It's all pretty scary.

I agreed, it was all frightening; I had told her by email about the attack on the Café Hafa, and had shown her the artist's rendering when she returned to Tangier. She simply said, It's him, it's horrible, we have to do something.

It's him, it's terrible, it's Bassam, he's gone mad, you have to go to the police and tell them.

I tried to convince her it wasn't him, if he was in Tangier I'd know it, he'd have gotten back in touch with me one way or another, so she had calmed down a little.

We're playing at scaring ourselves, I said.

I didn't want to worry her more by telling her that I had received that enigmatic email. I wanted Tunis to be perfect, magical, as Tangier had been six weeks before; I wanted to be there for her, help her with her classes, talk to her for hours about Arabic grammar and literature, fuck a lot, fuck as often as possible and see what had become of the Revolution.

Nothing less.

Judit came to pick me up at the airport; the Tunisian customs officers looked like the Moroccan ones, gray and hefty; they yelled at me because I hadn't filled out the immigration papers, the existence of which I was entirely ignorant, but they took pity on me and let me through without having to go to the end of the line.

Judit was waiting for me at the exit, I hesitated just for a second about embracing her—but after all we were in the airport of a revolutionary country. I set down my little suitcase, caught Judit by the waist, she threw her hands around my neck and we kissed—finally she was the one, a little embarrassed, who put an end to our show of affection.

I had just taken a plane for the first time, and for the first time, I was in a foreign country. Judit spoke a lot, very fast, about Tunis, her classes, the city, her apartment, her friends; I looked at her, her long hair lightened by the summer, her fine, precise features, a certain roundness to her cheekbones; her lips, with all those sounds continuously coming out of them.

Night was falling.

Judit had decided to treat me to a taxi to ride into town; on our left we could see the lagoon, the lake of Tunis; the sky was still reddening a little in the west.

She lived in a tiny, rather charming apartment ten minutes by foot from the institute where she had her classes; on the ground floor, next door to an office building, two white rooms looked out onto a little patio, also white, its floor made of blue tile: one bedroom with a large mattress on the floor and a little desk, and a kitchen-living-dining room; all of it couldn't have measured more than thirty square meters, but the proportions were perfect; I confess I took a lot of pleasure in typing out my dead poilus every morning, watching the shadows grow shorter in the courtyard, then the summer sun exploding on the bluish tiles; in the evening, when Judit returned, we would spray water on the tiles and lie down on them, naked in the false cool of the humidity, until night fell.

On Saturday, Judit showed me around the center of Tunis and the old city; the heat was less stifling than you'd have thought: a little bit like Tangier, a light breeze blew in from the sea. But the glare was so great that the lagoon looked like an immense expanse of salt, dazzling white. The Tunisian dialect was amusing, more singsong than Moroccan or Algerian, with something oriental about it, I thought. The Medina was a vast labyrinth for devouring tourists and you had to lose yourself in its winding streets to escape from them calling out to you every two minutes,
my friend, my friend, a tea my friend? A rug, a souvenir?
I was quite proud that they usually talked to me in French because I was with Judit.

The day before, the day of my arrival, there had been violent clashes between demonstrators and police in front of the government palace, on the Kasbah square; the whole neighborhood had been blocked off, and the sit-in of young people demanding among, other things, the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, had been dispersed with batons and teargas. The Internet was calling on people to revive the Revolution, which one sensed was in the process of dying, or coming to an end, depending, and the elections, in October, had returned power to the hands of Ennahda's Islamists,
as everyone must have expected. The young people sensed that the fruits of their revolt were being stolen from them, and that the rioting would give birth to an extremely conservative, if not reactionary, government—democratic indeed, but they weren't going to laugh as much as under Ben Ali. As we arrived at the still-barricaded Kasbah square, full of vans of cops and helmeted men, I thought I could smell the sharp stench of teargas—the acid tears of the revolutionaries. The fighting the day before had spread to a large part of the country and to Sidi Bouzid, bastion of the opposition; the police had even used real bullets—to frighten the crowd, they said, but a fourteen-year-old kid had still been killed by a ricochet. According to what I read online, a lot of activists thought the Friday gathering had been organized by Islamists.

In the summer heat, the Tunisians were complaining more about the (relative) absence of tourists than about the provisional government. They all clung to the date of October 23, which would put a democratic end, they thought, to the gas and the police brutality.

For me, maybe because I was foreign, there was a certain sadness in this transition, this post-Revolution, and Tunis seemed paralyzed, petrified in the grenade smoke and the whiteness of the summer.

I
was not Ibn Battuta: I was not about to meet important ulemas, or listen to sermons in mosques, even if that wouldn't have displeased me, but I would have had to be alone there: In Tunisia, as in Morocco, mosques are forbidden to non-Muslims. Since Judit found this measure rather discriminatory—she assured me that was not at all the case in Cairo or Damascus—I searched for the cause, and it was the French, more precisely the first Resident-General in Morocco, Lyautey, who established this law, which then extended to all Maghreb under French rule, to ensure respect among the different religious communities. I don't know if it's good or bad; it seemed strange to me that groups of tourists could freely enter the mosque of the Umayyad or of Al-Azhar and not the ones in Kairouan or Zitouna, not to mention Judit who, while not a Muslim, knew many passages from the Koran by heart and was entirely respectful of the religion. Out of solidarity, then, I didn't go into the famous courtyard with ancient columns or the prayer hall of the most famous mosque in the Maghreb, but no matter. I was only there to be with her, and the week passed quickly; I found that our connection grew stronger every day, closer, so much so that soon it would be very hard to part ways. We spoke a language that belonged only to us, a mixture of literary Arabic, Moroccan dialect, and French; Judit was making huge progress in Arabic daily. And in fact, when I had to leave Tunis, after seven days of dead
soldiers, of Casanova—Judit watched me work, over my shoulder, laughing at my poilus and finding the Venetian's language rather hard to understand—of poor-man's pool sessions on the patio, of strolls to the Goulette, to Carthage and to La Marsa, the closer the time for departure came, the more depressed I felt about going back to Tangier, all the more so since this time we had no prospect, no plan of getting back together again anytime soon. Judit promised me she would return in the fall, but she didn't know when or how, no doubt she wouldn't have the money.

And then we had to bring ourselves to say good-bye.

“It's my turn to visit,” I said, taking her in my arms in the Tunis airport.

“That would be good . . .”

“I'll find a way to get to Barcelona.
Allah karim
.”

“
Sahih.
I'll wait for you, then.”

“
Inshallah
.”

“
Inshallah
.”

And I left, my heart in my shoes.

COMING
back was very hard, I had to work twice as hard because I hadn't managed to keep up my crazy pace from before; I had run out of money; I was fed up with my co-renters, their stupidity was exhausting; I was counting on Ramadan to boost my morale, but fasting, in the heat and the long summer days, was tough and, beyond everything else, I found it hard, in solitude, to rediscover the festive and spiritual side that should have made the hunger and thirst bearable; I kept thinking about the previous Ramadan, with Bassam, Sheikh Nureddin, and the companions of the Koranic Thought, our
iftar
in the little neighborhood restaurant, the readings from the Koran till late at night, and the taste of childhood, the familiar and familial taste that the month of fasting had and that did come back to me now, but only to plunge me into sudden melancholy. Alone, the
iftar
was just a moment of sadness, and even if we made an effort, my terrible companions and I, to be together, the freeze-dried soups, the cans of sardines, or the noodles (not to mention their remarks) added to the sadness. Then I delved alone into my Koran and my Ibn Kathir, but without managing to concentrate, the names of the poilus and Casanova's memoirs kept dancing in front of my eyes—even when I tried to break the fast in a restaurant and go to the mosque to listen to the readings, it was in vain, I took nothing from it.

After two weeks, I stopped fasting, angry with myself, but what the hell, it was better not to pretend. I spent more time at the office, because the air-conditioning made working more pleasant: at my place, even with no shirt on, I was sweating onto my keyboard. I pictured my combatants suffering from thirst in the summer, in the trenches, the mud must have dried and crusted, the number of men killed was alarming, each one had a name, a place, sometimes I would consult the database to find all the ones who'd died in the same place, as I typed I could glimpse the extent of the catastrophe, Verdun, the Somme and the Chemin des Dames led the list of massacres, and after work I would look at documentaries about World War I on the Internet: the hell of the bombs, the life of the trenches, the terrifyingly cynical military decisions. I reconstructed, with the documents we were digitalizing, the campaign of Belkacem ben Moulloub and many others:
Journal of marching and operations of the 3
^rd
Regiment of Algerian Infantry Corps, November 1914. November 5, '14: At 1 o'clock German attack on the front at the most advanced sections. This attack was stopped by our fire. At 6 o'clock violent German attack on the entire front of the 2
^nd
battalion. The undersigned used almost all his ammunition, he withdrew but stuck to the old trenches along the route occupied by him on the 3
^rd
. The 3
^rd
Battalion set up in its connecting trenches facing north. The 12
^th
Company is sent as reinforcement but cannot completely verify the momentum of retreat. Heated battle all day. The reinforcements arrive too late: the enemy saw the weak point and attacked with very superior forces. But the Germans couldn't cross the Yser Canal. 6 November '14: At 5 o'clock violent gunfire on the entire line accompanied by violent cannon fire. No troop movements. The 9
^th
Company has three killed by raking fire,
among them Belkacem, he won't see the end of the war, he won't return to Constantine.