Street of Thieves (3 page)

IT
was just that I lacked the habit. Over the course of the two years that followed, I had all the time in the world to get used to it. My work at the Thought was the quietest sort, which left a lot of spare time for study and prayer. Being a bookseller comprised receiving boxes of books, opening them up, removing the plastic wrap, putting them in stacks on the shelves and, once a week, on Fridays, setting up a table at the mosque's exit to sell them. At least, “selling” them is a big word. Most of them (small paperback booklets, a little like cheap textbooks) cost 4.90 dirhams. The hellish thing was you had to have cashboxes of coins to make change, almost as many cashboxes as booklets. At that price we could give them away, I said to the Sheikh. No no, impossible, people have to be aware that this paper has value, otherwise they'll throw them out or use them to light barbecues. So then maybe we could sell them at five dirhams, that would help with the change. Too expensive, the Sheikh replied. It has to be accessible to everyone.

These manuals were enormously successful. Our bestseller:
Sexuality in Islam,
I sold hundreds, no doubt because everyone thought there'd be sex in it, advice on positions, or weighty religious arguments so that women would allow certain practices, but not at all, the act was called “coitus,” “lovemaking,” or “the encounter” and the whole thing was an annotated compilation of phrases of great medieval lawyers that wasn't the least exciting—a rip-off, in my
opinion, even at five dirhams. The people who bought the manual were 99% male. Our bestselling book for women was
Heroines of Islam,
a rather simple and effective pamphlet on the contemporary world, the injustice of the times, and how the only thing that could save the world was if women returned to religion; the pamphlet drew from the examples of the great women of Islam, especially Khadija, Fatima, and Zaynab.

The other part of our catalogue was more expensive, 9.90 per book. These were bound books, usually in several volumes, heavy as a dead donkey. The collection was entitled
The Heritage of Islam
and was comprised of re-editions of works by classical authors: lives of the Prophet, commentaries on the Koran, works of rhetoric, theology, grammar. Since these mammoths had beautiful imitation-leather bindings in colored calligraphy, they were used mostly to decorate the neighborhood's living and dining rooms. It should be said that the Arabic of a thousand years ago is not the easiest thing in the world to read. We also sold CDs of recordings of the Koran, and even a DVD of a Koranic encyclopedia that was pretty interesting—if only because you didn't have to lug around the fifty volumes of various commentaries that it contained. The bookseller's dream, in fact.

The Thought was open all day, and my bookstore as well, but there weren't many customers. Some came by sometimes to buy one of the books that I wasn't authorized to put out on the tables. I asked Sheikh Nureddin if they were forbidden by censorship, and he told me of course not, they're just texts that require a greater knowledge, which could be interpreted the wrong way. Among them were
Islam Against the Zionist Plot
and pamphlets by Sayyid Qutb.

One of my tasks (the most pleasant one, in fact) consisted of looking after the association's website and Facebook page, and of announcing activities (not many), which allowed me to have access to the Internet all day long. I took my work seriously. Sheikh Nureddin was pleasant, cultivated, sympathetic. He told me that he had
studied theory in Saudi Arabia and practice in Pakistan. He recommended readings to me. When I got tired of the porn on the web (a little sin never did anyone any harm) I would spend hours reading, comfortably stretched out on the rug; little by little I got used to Classical Arabic, which is a sublime, powerful, captivating language of extraordinary richness. I would spend hours discovering the beauties of the Koran through the great commentators; the simple complexity of the text astounded me. It was an ocean. An ocean of lights. I liked to picture the Prophet in his cave, wrapped in his coat, or surrounded by his companions, on his way to battle. Thinking that I was reproducing their gestures, repeating the phrases they themselves had chanted helped me put up with the prayers, which were still an interminable chore.

I felt as if I were making amends, as if I were undoing the stains of months of vagabonding. I could even imagine meeting my father or mother without shame. That thought revolved often in my head, Fridays as I stood behind my table; I said to myself that a day would come when I would meet them, it was inevitable. I knew that they refused to even mention my name in public; I had this disconcerted feeling that Bassam was hiding something from me, he avoided talking to me about my family. When I questioned him he'd reply: don't worry don't worry, they'll get over it, and would change the subject. I missed my mother.

Evenings, I'd go out for a walk with Bassam. We spent much less time than before contemplating the Spanish coast and much more time staring at girls' asses in the street. Tangier had the advantage of being big enough so that we could feel free outside our suburb; sometimes we'd treat ourselves to a couple beers in a discreet bar; I had to negotiate for hours until Bassam agreed, he'd hesitate till the last second, but the prospect of mingling with foreign girls ended up deciding it. Once in the joint, he would vacillate for another five minutes between a Coke or a beer, but he always ended up taking the alcohol, before getting angry with himself for hours afterward
and swallowing a kilo of mints to mask the smell. Not far from the bar there was a beautiful, completely renovated French bookstore where I liked to hang out, without ever buying anything since the books were much too expensive for me. But at least I could eye the female bookseller a little, after all we were colleagues. I never dared say a word to her. In any case, she wore a wedding ring and was much older than me.

Afterwards, invariably, I'd walk Bassam back to his place, then go back to my tiny room at the Propagation of Thought, pick up a thriller and read for an hour or two before falling asleep. The neighborhood bookseller had an inexhaustible stock in the back of his shop, I don't know where he got them from: Fleuve Noir editions (the cheapest), Masque editions, Série Noire editions (my favorite), and other obscure collections from the 1960s and '70s. All these titles on the metal shelves composed an immense, incomprehensible, mad poem:
The Dining Room of the Ready-to-Bleed / The Carnival of the Lost / Pearls to Swine / Mardi gris / Sleep of Hot Lead,
I never knew which to choose, even though I had a preference for the ones that took place in the United States rather than in France—their bourbon seemed more real, their cars bigger and their cities wilder. The bookseller must not have been raking it in; in fact, aside from his stock of thrillers that I must have been the only fan of, he sold old textbooks, outdated newspapers, decrepit Spanish journals, and a few soft-porn Egyptian novels. He was a pretty funny guy who spent his time tippling in secret in the back of his shop, a freethinker with Nasserian leanings, a fixture in the neighborhood. He often told me that barely twenty years ago the surrounding hills were empty, just two or three houses here and there, and that from where we were to the airport it was all countryside. Me, I'm a real Tangierian, he'd say.

After reading, four or five hours of sleep until dawn prayers: Sheikh Nureddin came, and with him a large part of the Group (except Bassam, who said he prayed at home, which I had a hard
time believing). When they left I would go back to sleep until eight or nine, then breakfast, and at 9:30 sharp I'd open the bookstore. Often the Sheikh would return around noon, we'd talk for a little, he'd ask me to add this or that to the webpage, would check the state of the stock, usually ordering the books that were running out himself (one box of
Sexuality,
one of
Heroines,
the complete works of Ibn Taymiyyah in twenty volumes), and would leave again on his own business. The books usually took a month to reach us from Saudi Arabia, so you had to plan ahead. Then I had peace all afternoon. I stayed there quietly studying, as Sheikh Nureddin said. Paradise. Room, board, and education. After evening prayers Bassam would come by for me, and we'd go out on the town, and so on. A healthy routine.

I had only one fear, or one desire—meeting my family; they knew where I was, I knew where they were; I saw my mother, once, on the sidewalk across the street—I took cover, my back turned, my heart pounding. I was ashamed. So were they, even if I still didn't know to what extent, or why. I'd have liked to see my little sister, she must have changed a lot, grown a lot. I tried not to think about it. I'm still trying. I wonder what they know about me, today. There are always rumors, gossip that reaches home; they must surely cover their ears.

Often, I thought of Meryem—I told myself I could have found the courage to take a bus to the village to go see her secretly. I wrote to her, and these letters always ended up in the trash, out of cowardliness mostly. Meryem already belonged to the realm of dreams, to the rustling body of memory.

The year passed quickly, and when the demonstrations began in Tunisia I'd already been at the Thought over a year. My tranquility was a little upset by these events, I have to say. Sheikh Nureddin and the whole Group were like madmen. They spent all their time in front of the TV. They prayed all day for their Tunisian brothers. Afterward they started up collections for the Egyptian brothers.
Then when the list extended to the Libyan and Yemeni brothers, they began organizing actions “for our oppressed Arab brothers.”

When the uprising started in Morocco on February 20
^th
, they couldn't stand still anymore. They took turns in sit-ins, demonstrations. My bookstore had become campaign headquarters: the group saw the Arab revolts as the long-awaited green tide. Finally, genuine Muslim countries would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, they dreamed about them at night. According to what Sheikh Nureddin told me, the idea was to win as many free, democratic elections as possible in order to take power and then, from within, by the conjoined forces of legislature and the street, to Islamize the constitutions and the laws. Their political projects didn't matter much to me, but the incessant and noisy activism turned my life completely upside-down. They stopped letting me have constant access to the Internet (they needed it all the time), and I could no longer read quietly. There was always some activity, some demonstration to take part in, some broadcast to watch on TV. So I would spend more and more time downtown. I'd go read a detective novel over a cup of tea on the Place de France all afternoon. Sheikh Nureddin blamed me a little for my absences; he'd look at me reprovingly and say, you could take a more active part in our struggle.

They took some blows. The cops had received orders to disperse the tail end of demonstrations not with tear gas or rubber bullets, but in the old style, by hand and with clubs, and they did pretty well for themselves: you'd see blue uniforms swarming over the bearded men. Since young people had to be in the forefront of the Movement, Bassam had been the first to sustain some injuries near the Place des Nations, late one night, and to return a hero, his chest streaked with bruises, a bandage on his nose, his eyes purple, still chanting “For God, Nation, and Liberation.” The model for all this was Egypt. That was the only thing on their lips, Cairo, Liberation Square. Egypt is an advanced society, said Sheikh Nureddin, the Brothers
will carry the day. He almost cried with emotion. I remember, when we heard a French specialist on Arabic society on the TV saying there are no Muslim Brothers on Tahrir Square, Sheikh Nureddin was incredibly upset at first. Lies, he said. May God destroy these miscreants. What bastards these Frenchmen are, they respect nothing, not even the truth. Ready to do anything to keep their power, those assholes. And then he got hold of himself, saying after all it's not bad to stay in the shadows, it gave an even more legitimate feeling to the uprising. What's more, the news from Egypt was excellent: the Brothers were confident of emerging the great victors in the free elections when they took place, and of forming a government. The first one since the Algerian swindle twenty years before.

It was chaos in Tangier for at least a week, but Sheikh Nureddin could clearly see that it wasn't taking the Tunisian or Egyptian path, that the Palace was more clever or more legitimate (after all, isn't the King the Commander of the Faithful?) and that they'd have to form an alliance with a party already in place if the reform of the Constitution were to take place.

A few weeks later, the King granted amnesty to an entire contingent of political prisoners, among them members of the Group who had been languishing in government jails since the massive roundups after the attacks on Casablanca years before. The Sheikh was euphoric. He welcomed these companions as if he were Joseph himself returning from Egypt and finding his brothers again. The Propagation of Koranic Thought became a hive of bearded men.

I was impatient for all this agitation to be over so I could resume my reading and regain my tranquility. The Group was like a pack of caged animals—they kept pacing in circles, waiting for night and the time for action. They had decided to take advantage of the disorder, the demonstrations and the cops to undertake a “neighborhood cleanup” as they called it. Bassam, anxious to avenge his broken nose on the first person to come along, was on the prowl for fights. They went out in bands of a dozen each, armed with cudgels
and pickax handles after a belligerent, eloquent sermon by Sheikh Nureddin, which talked of the campaigns of the Prophet, the Battle of Badr, the Battle of the Trench, the fight against the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qaynuqa; about Hamza the hero, the glory of the martyrs in Paradise, and about the beauty, the great beauty of dying in battle. Then, very heated after this theoretical warm-up, they would move out into the night almost at a run, with Bassam's nerves and cudgel in the lead. I heard nothing about the result of their first engagements, except that they would come back happy, out of breath, with no wounded or martyrs. Sheikh Nureddin thought that for safety reasons it was important he not take part in this holy war himself, but would look at me in surprise when I said I preferred to keep him company at the Center. After two nights of fights without any losses, he wanted to lead his troops to victory himself; I was finally prepared to stay alone and peaceful in front of the computer, but one glance from Sheikh Nureddin was enough to convince me that I'd better join them; I was given a club which I hid, like everyone else, under my caftan.