The Ardent Swarm

by Manai, Yamen

  “How do you know he didn’t believe in God, huh? You could read his mind, is that it?” rebelliously interjected a younger passenger in the back seat, who had left her hair exposed.

  The teacher flew to his disciple’s rescue:

  “No need to read his mind! His mouth was plenty big and he said what he thought loud and clear. He claimed that the law of God couldn’t govern our society, that the two were incompatible. How could he voice such heresy? What does it mean, then, to believe in God? Is it just a hobby? He was a drinker and a blasphemer!”

  In the back of the van, next to Sidi, was seated a giant of a man in a baseball cap, his face scarred. Hearing them, he opened the bag at his feet and took out a beer that he uncapped with one flick of his nail. He addressed the two believers: “You two! A pair of rats who’ve been hiding out a long time. Come and kill me if you have the balls!”

  Then he tossed out a “God is great” and in one swig, downed his beer, concluding with an impressive belch.

  “Calm down, please,” demanded the driver. “You can have at one another, but not right now. Not in my van.”

  The capital was only a two-and-a-half-hour drive away, and yet it seemed like a different world, its urban frenzy a strong contrast to the stripped-down countryside. It had been a long time since Sidi had set foot here.

  The driver dropped off the passengers at the train station, and everyone went their own way. Sidi dove into the streets in search of a bookstore.

  In his distant memories, the city had been a magical place. The hill of the saint whose mausoleum overlooked a peaceful cemetery where white tombs were scattered in the grass like sugar cubes; the souks of the old medina that pulsated like a heart oxygenated by master artisans; the cafés in the Frankish quarter on the outskirts of town, which, early in the morning, exuded the smell of strong espresso, with the warm voice of Oum Kulthoum lending its rhythm to the hand brooms sweeping the sidewalk; the bus station, its blooming gardens, its bus and tramway lines bordered by newspaper stands and shoe polishers. These were the images Sidi had kept of the time when, as a younger man, he would come to the capital to sell a few jars of his honey.

  But he didn’t recognize this sad and filthy city. People were walking around with long faces, as if hungover. The public squares were surrounded with barbed wire, and the army tanks parked here and there made the whole thing even more troubling. Graffiti and various slogans decorated the walls and facades:

  LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!

  FREEDOM TO THE PEOPLE!

  MAY GOD’S KINGDOM COME!

  MAY GOD DAMN HE WHO PISSES AGAINST THIS WALL AS WELL AS ALL HIS DESCENDANTS!

  Trash cans were overflowing, fighting with people for space on the sidewalks. But his gaze, increasingly distressed, wasn’t just focused on the litter. The strange trend that had struck his village was present here, as well. There were many women covered up in black and as many men in tunics. Had they also been given the crates? Had they also voted for the Party of God? Did they know to what danger they were exposing themselves? worried Sidi. Did they know about the hornets?

  He went to the Rue des Libraires, in the south of the city, but since his last visit, the street had changed. There were no more bookstores. At best, he came upon a few stationery shops that only sold blank paper and textbooks.

  He had no bearings left. He felt lost and almost got himself mowed down. Running stop signs and red lights were among the freedoms the revolution had given the people.

  He took refuge in the pedestrian alleyways of the medina and headed toward its main pathway. Even if artisan crafts were quietly dying out, the old quarter was always crowded, always vibrant, mysterious. You could still discover works of art and craftsmen with golden hands. He navigated through the spices and flower essences, weaving between mosaics and margoum rugs. The stroll perked him up.

  Sidi explored the wide avenue and its adjacent paths for two hours, and not a bookstore in sight. Just packed cafés and snack bars that never emptied, stands and stalls of various goods, from underwear to smartphones. He took a break with Ibn Khaldun, in the square named after him. This local figure was celebrated by a majestic statue depicting him reading a book, a symbol of his prolific works and his knowledge, which nobody knew anymore, or hardly. His name had become a meeting place. Before the indifference of the people skirting by him, taking him for a bum, Sidi stared at the statue in admiration and without breaking his gaze, sat on a nearby bench, as if hypnotized.

  This statue of a world-weary Ibn Khaldun was the only creature around with a book in its hands. In his time, the renowned sociologist, father of the discipline, had said: “Man is social by nature.”

  Sidi sighed. “Face facts. You still need other people.”

  Other people. Again. Often hell, sometimes salvation.

  He made up his mind to go see her. Not that he thought she owed him a debt, though she said she owed him everything, but because her hand was always extended, ready to help, and she had a sharp mind, and lots of books.

  Her house was less than ten miles away.

  He stood up and resumed his quest.

  21

  Despite the steam on her glasses, it took her just one try to fish her granddaughter’s bottle out of the pot in which she was sterilizing it. She was simultaneously listening to the radio and thinking about a thousand different things. Both a devoted mother and an enthusiastic young grandmother, she had plenty to think about. But her usual thoughts were crowded by new preoccupations, a citizen’s preoccupations. What future was in store for the country? What future was in store for her children and grandchildren in this new order?

  The prime minister was speaking on the radio, trying to reassure listeners about the state of the country despite the recent urban clashes targeting the American embassy and the assassination of the lawyer Nazih. She didn’t believe a word of his supposed sincerity and held the government responsible not for the country’s inherited poverty but for its divisions and uncustomary violence.

  Of course, she had faith, to the extent that she made sure to do her daily prayers and was planning a pilgrimage to Mecca, but she didn’t look favorably on the Party of God’s ascent to power. On the contrary, its legions and speeches made her hair stand on end. She felt like they were worshipping a God of hate and punishment, while hers was one of love and mercy.

  The minister’s spiel didn’t calm her anxiety, and she eventually turned it off. Before, in the time of the Handsome One, there hadn’t been news on the radio. Every song in the repertoire was already known. Then came the day when good news rang out, followed by bad news that kept coming, picking away at morale and shoving aside budding hope. Hope for a better life.

  Like most of her fellow citizens, she had been euphoric when the revolution erupted, happy to see, in her lifetime, an end to the farce led by the Handsome One, who had insulted his people on a daily basis. Despite the difficult weeks that followed his flight, punctuated by demonstrations, discord, and curfews, enthusiasm didn’t wane. The first free elections in the country’s history were in sight. How proud they had been!

  But the mountain gave birth to a mouse—a bearded mouse!—and the Party of God rose to power.

  The religious competencies of its ministers didn’t solve a single economic or social problem, and in many respects, the situation worsened. The country remained mired in poverty and its young people in unemployment, while the violence of a fringe of radicals and their hate-filled discourse proliferated with the leaders’ complacency. Within the dream of prosperity and tolerance, nothing remained of fragile democracy but the illusory right to talk shit.

  She didn’t swear but she was waiting for the next elections impatiently. She was anxious, like many, to return to the ballot box and chase this ideological intrusion and its representatives out of the country. Until then, Lord help her!

  The ringing at the front door interrupted her thoughts, and before it could interrupt her napping granddaughter, she ran to open the gate at the end
of her small garden. Instead of the neighbor she had expected, she found Sidi.

  “What a lovely surprise!” she cried, taking him in her arms.

  As soon as he saw her, Sidi felt relieved. She was still the same, face beaming with light.

  “Jannet! I need you.”

  In a country of taboos and traditions, Jannet was the only product of a marriage between villagers that ended very early in divorce. In other words, she was orphaned when she was just a baby in her crib. Her parents abandoned her to her fate, and the little girl survived by hiding in the shadows, living with relatives, at the mercy of anyone interested in bothering about her.

  Tossed from one family to another throughout her childhood, she miraculously avoided the illnesses and fevers of infancy but grew up in sadness. Treated as a bastard, she was constantly subjected to drudgery and reprimands. At night, when she prayed in secret, fists clenched, she often ended up crying. All she wanted was to be loved, but all she found was the cruelty of grown-ups and of the children who followed their example. And yet the ugly duckling transformed into a marvelous human being under the noses of those who had wanted to bury her.

  This emancipation never would have occurred without the aid of a distant uncle, a beekeeper who lived alone with his bees and who had taken pity on her. He couldn’t do much for her, but the little he could, he did. With the firmness of solitary men, he demanded that her guardians send her to school as the law dictated. For although the Old One who had taken the reins of the country at independence had ended up mad, he hadn’t been for his entire life. Every now and then, he had even been capable of flashes of brilliance.

  When he was still of sound mind, he made school obligatory for all the children in the country. Instead of a saint to worship, he offered them the chance to take their fate into their own hands.

  Jannet’s guardians begrudgingly enrolled her in school, where the child’s daily woes evaporated. School was her oxygen, the place where she was free, where she blossomed. At the first glimmers of dawn, she would walk ten miles across the steppe to sit on her school bench. She loved to learn and gave her teachers the utmost attention, finally tasting the joys of praise and honors.

  But more than anything, she loved to write, because when she wrote, she felt like she existed.

  The merit-based system rewarded this brilliant student, and she was granted a boarder’s spot at the Montfleury High School for Young Girls, on the hill near the capital’s Frankish quarter. She pursued her secondary education there, and the little girl in rags became a sublime young woman who could perfectly wield both the Arabic of Al-Mutanabbi and the French of Baudelaire.

  She dreamed of becoming a teacher so she could save children on the path to perdition. This came easily to her.

  She dreamed of love, and love came to her in the form of a young penniless academic.

  Emerging victorious from this difficult stage of life, she didn’t harbor any rancor toward her family and the past. If she had made it here, it was thanks to these people as well, including her parents.

  She married and had children. She gave all the love and attention that she had been sorely deprived to her family and her students. Everywhere she went, she was sympathetic to anyone in pain, trying her best to offer support and comfort.

  Years passed between two temples, home and school, worker bee and queen, bags of groceries in one hand, and in the other stacks of notebooks belonging to young minds who had written the day’s date and were waiting for corrections.

  Sidi looked into the crib where the baby girl was sleeping peacefully and didn’t move for several minutes. He placed his finger in the palm of her hand. She squeezed it. He smiled.

  “The new generation is here.”

  Jannet nodded in agreement.

  “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen months.”

  “Mashallah! What’s her name?”

  “Farah.”

  He leaned over and whispered a few words, their secrets known to him alone, then said, “May she be blessed.”

  In the living room, Jannet served him tea and he served up his story.

  He explained the reason for his trek. Described his discovery of the initial massacre, the epic battle he had waged against the hornets, how questioning the villagers led to the original nest, his hopeless attempts to find an encyclopedia in the capital, his decision to call on her for help.

  She was completely absorbed in his account, her face reacting to every detail, and when Sidi revealed the massive creature, now lying dead in the jar, she jumped back. His worry infected her immediately.

  “I’ve never seen this kind of bug either, not in nature, or in a book. Let’s talk to Tahar at the university. He has access to a well-stocked library. We’re sure to find an encyclopedia that lists it.”

  Jannet asked her neighbor to watch her granddaughter until she returned, and then called her husband to let him know they were coming. She and Sidi climbed into a taxi together, heading for the College of Arts and Sciences.

  22

  Tahar was waiting for them in the dean’s office, his office, engrossed in his newspaper. The first in a stack representing the various movements and leanings popping up right and left.

  He had stopped reading the newspaper years ago, but the revolution had disrupted everything in the country, from individual to insect. In its wake, the newly won freedom of speech had given back to the press its long eclipsed credibility. Ever since, Tahar stopped at the newsstand every morning.

  For nearly thirty years, journalists had updated only the slim sports and culture sections. When it came to politics, the Handsome One, as soon as he took power, would prepare them the pot of daily soup to be served to the people.

  And so the front pages were entirely dedicated to him. You could read that he had presided over this or that council of ministers, or that he had been honored by some university in France or Canada, or that with his blessing, Ramadan would start on such and such date. And between the lines, nothing.

  Deeper in, sports journalists would enthuse over some sad little soccer championship, the new opiate of the masses, and their colleagues on the culture pages, confronted with mediocre productions, would rack their brains to fill their columns, taking a few risks even. “Hollywood to make an epic about Hannibal, our Carthaginian hero,” one proudly wrote. Whereas in reality, the biopic in question was about Hannibal Lecter, the psychopathic cannibal.

  When there was a scientific article, you had to buckle up. Readers learned, for example, about the successful outcome of the unexpected cross-breeding of a cowboy and his mare in California, leading to the birth of the first horse with a man’s head in modern history, and about paleontologists’ discovery of a one-hundred-foot skeleton in West Africa, undoubtedly belonging to Adam. Curiously, Eve’s skeleton was missing. The final pages were a dumping ground. Next to a coquettish photo of an Egyptian actress or Lebanese singer would be a hadith saying not to look. Psychics and amateur psychiatrists competed for headlines with reader mail, letter upon letter confessing “I have nothing . . .” or “I’ve loved in silence . . .”

  For a long time the country had nothing, and loved in silence.

  Then, as if by magic, the Handsome One disappeared. The regime of silence had ended.

  What did the people have today?

  Who would they declare their love to now?

  The recently launched newspapers tried to provide the answer.

  “We have debts,” wrote one journalist.

  “Saïda Manoubia mausoleum set ablaze,” wrote another. “On Tuesday night, two individuals threw Molotov cocktails at the mausoleum before fleeing,” he reported, noting that this wasn’t the first act of vandalism of this nature. “Several mausoleums have been burned down since the bearded ones took power. Should we interpret this as cause and effect?” dared the journalist. “Can we talk about night beards, who vandalize, and day beards, who govern? Is there a link between the two?” he asked.

  “A link betwee
n the two? The five o’clock shadow preaching at dusk!” laughed Tahar bitterly.

  How had those bastards dared profane the tomb of the saint who’d been sleeping in peace for eight centuries on Montfleury Hill? A remarkable, transgressive woman who had carved a place for herself in a society of men. Of unfailing virtue, she excelled in the field of theology and spiritual paths, supplanting the scholars of her time, writing her own incantations and teaching her own disciples, for whom she led collective prayers at the mosque.

  Tahar thought of his wife. Saïda Manoubia had been an enormous source of comfort and inspiration for Jannet while a boarding student at the Montfleury High School for Young Girls. When her classmates went home during school breaks, she would visit the mausoleum, inhale the incense beneath its modest dome, and listen to old women recount episodes from the saint’s exceptional life. She volunteered to welcome visitors and serve free meals, maintaining in this way the saint’s memory, now up in smoke.

  How would she react when she found out?

  He sighed, then looked at his watch. He felt like journaling and he had a little bit of time before Jannet and Sidi arrived.

  He started to write.

  Today, as I was talking to the vice-dean about the disastrous state of the college, two female students entered my office without knocking. They were wearing burkas and black gloves. I could barely make out their eyes beneath the fabric. They demanded that we end mixed-gender classes, set up a prayer room, and suspend classes during prayers.

  The vice-dean and I exchanged alarmed looks. We had already noticed the emergence of this fundamentalist movement within the university. In fact, that was the subject of our discussion. The previous evening, several students had removed the national flag and replaced it with the black flag of a small terrorist group. This escalation was to be expected, but it’s one thing to expect it, and another to confront it.

  We told the students that we would take their demands into consideration. The vice-dean even pretended to write them down on the corner of a piece of paper. But the two young women insisted that he immediately post an announcement. So we got firmer, and the vice-dean stood up and asked them to go. They left the office in hysterics only to suddenly throw themselves down the stairs in a big clatter. As we watched in shock, they stood up somehow, though their covered bodies had no doubt been seriously bruised by the fall. Then they threatened to file a complaint for assault and battery if we refused to concede to their demands on the spot. We locked the door.