by Salim Bachi
SALIM BACHI
THE NEW
ADVENTURES
OF SINBAD
THE SAILOR
A NOVEL
Translated from the French by
Sue Rose
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
For Amel
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
About the Publisher
Also Available from Pushkin Press
Copyright
I
THE DOG WAS VERY OLD now and its grey coat was covered in dark patches. It was walking in front of its master, feebly wagging its tail. Any memories of being a puppy had faded a long, long time ago. It had kept watch over its master, the Sleeper, who was at present disembarking from the boat; it had kept watch night and day and, Lord knows, those nights were long, and so were the days.
The town stretched out before them, white as the dawn that had broken over the sea. Once, the town had been called Algiers, but now its inhabitants called it Carthago, although this meant nothing to the traveller and his dog. In a different life, towns probably did not change so quickly, but those ancient memories of his were distant echoes that no longer bounced off the walls of the cave.
They walked down the gangway onto the quay, where men were jostling each other. The crowd swelled like a wave about to come crashing down onto a seawall in a storm, and the traveller didn’t recognize a soul. His dog began whining, so he bent down and gently stroked its coat. They could then carry on pushing their way through the throng of men and women who looked nothing like those he’d known in his youth.
“Stop right there!”
A soldier had suddenly appeared before them.
Were they still at war, the man wondered, directing his question at the dog.
“Your papers!”
There was no other explanation: the nightmare, the terrible nightmare was still going on.
“Are you going to arrest me?”
The soldier stared at him as if he were mad. He noticed the dog and took a step back.
“Your passport, sir. Border police.”
It was a strange kind of police force that behaved like an army in time of war, thought the man, rummaging in his jacket. He pulled out an old document creased by long years of use and handed it to the soldier, or policeman—he wasn’t sure which.
“This isn’t a passport!”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Apart from a dog.”
The policeman turned the papers over in his hand, fingering them as if they were an ancient relic. He began leafing through and, as he turned the pages, his eyes grew as wide as two pale moons.
“Is there a problem, um… officer?”
He had hesitated before addressing him in this way. These sorts of scum could be very touchy, when they were not just plain stupid.
The other man removed his kepi and scratched his head.
“But this is a French passport! An old…”
“That’s what it’s supposed to be, officer.”
“But it isn’t Algerian; it isn’t even a valid French passport. It dates from the war!”
“Is the war over?”
“It depends which one you mean. The first war ended in ’62.”
So there had been a second war. What a strange country this was, where one war followed hard on the heels of another, as if people had learnt nothing from history. Had he slept that long? Was his dog that old?
“Follow me!”
He hesitated.
“Both of you!”
THE SLEEPER might still have been young. He certainly looked it. If it weren’t for that ancient, revolting dog which went everywhere with him, he could have passed for a man in his thirties. His clothes, however, could have been made a century ago. They were new but they looked as if they had come from a display cabinet in some museum, or one of those old shops you sometimes see in black and white films.
Although his black shoes still gleamed, they were gradually losing their shine as the boat brought him ever closer to what was Carthago, according to one of the other passengers, a young man whose occupation seemed to involve some kind of trading activity. He bought clothes at the other end of the world, transported them himself in large plastic bags and sold them at a market in Carthago. Why did he do such strange, tedious work?
“I’m a biznessman…”
He gestured to his bundle, which was spilling over with multi-coloured handkerchiefs, Italian shirt collars and an electric hairdryer.
“… a businessman! Sinbad. That’s what they call me in my neck of the woods. Sinbad.”
The dog raised its muzzle in his direction and yawned.
“That old mutt needs some shut-eye. Where on earth did you get it? It’s older than Lalla Fatima, my grandmother!”
“Is she still alive?” asked the Sleeper, suddenly taking an interest in his fellow passenger’s conversation.
“If you can call it living. She sleeps all day and spends her nights saying she’d be better off dead.”
“Why?”
“She claims things were better before.”
“And were they?”
“I’m a new man in a new country. They tell me that the town used to be called Algiers and is now called Carthago. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s Carthago. They tell me things are better than before and I agree with those who shout this from their soapboxes. They’re right, they’ve always been right… the war… all that stuff… it’s all a pack of lies. Don’t you think so, sir?”
The Sleeper wasn’t thinking any more, he was daydreaming.
Carthago. It was a strange, musical name which sounded familiar to him. It was as if he’d woken from a nightmare to find himself trapped in one that was far worse, where even the name and appearance of the bloodstained city had changed; as if the city where they had shot partisans, slit women’s throats and tortured children, the strange city he’d been forced to flee with his dog to take refuge in the mountains from the paratroopers, soldiers sent by Africa’s generals, as if that city had finally acquired a name worthy of its reputation. Carthago.
“What does your grandmother think of the war?”
“Which war?”
Seeing the Sleeper’s bewildered expression, the other man continued: “Oh, I see! You haven’t moved on from the first! The great war… the one with the martyrs, the heroes, the evil paras…”
He began to laugh heartily, revealing a flash of teeth.
“Why are you laughing?”
“No reason, sir, no reason. I’m a new man in a new country. A biznessman. Sinbad the Traveller.”
He had experienced war. He couldn’t have said where or when. But what it was… that he knew only too well. It ran so deep that it felt like it was branded into his flesh. He only had to raise his arm or bend his back to feel it creeping painfully, viciously, through every fibre of his muscles to reach into the dark recesses of his soul. It marched in front of his eyes like the nightmare of a hundred nights, a thousand lives. Processions of prisoners filed past and the gates of the camps opened, spewing out corpses for Judgement Day. There were other monstrosities, other ghouls filling his fogged memory: cities ravaged by barbarian hordes; men, women and children confined in dark caves, crammed together in catacombs, imprisoned like rats, engulfed by flames, burne
d at the stake, huge living torches in the darkest parts of his soul. When he had awoken, he had found the dog watching over him, as dark and grey as the day he’d fallen asleep. Then he remembered the tale he’d been told by his grandmother, before she had been swallowed up by the darkness of death:
Dogs are seen as a blessing by the Faithful; he who treats them with kindness will receive it back hundredfold because they are the guardians of hell, my child, and yours will extinguish the flames threatening to devour your heart by plunging its tail in freezing water.
“WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”
“I don’t remember.”
The uniformed policeman scratched his head. He was somewhat bemused and mystified. Clearly, the Sleeper and his dog weren’t your average travellers. He’d brought them to this prefabricated hut at the end of the quay. His colleagues didn’t look best impressed when they came in, particularly by the dog with its grey coat, gaping mouth and putrid breath. Hell’s teeth, didn’t it stink! It was rotting away on the spot. How old was it, for goodness sake? Even the man, the animal’s master since time began, didn’t know. Only the beast itself could have told them, but it just whined with its mouth open, wagging its tail and gazing at its master.
“Your papers aren’t in order, sir. There’s no date of birth. How old are you?”
The Sleeper stretched out his hands, turned them over and shrugged: he had no idea. Like a man waking from a long sleep who, in the morning, tries to gather his thoughts and piece together his memories.
“What are we going to do with this guy?”
A colleague who’d come over to the desk said, “Haven’t we got enough on our plate as it is! The country is going to the dogs, no one would even recognize his own mother in this mayhem. One more won’t make any difference.”
“But his papers.”
The other man started laughing.
“Leave it out. Everything in this country has gone up in smoke! That’s identity-theft for you. Show me a boss round here who gives a damn about an ID card or passport! What are they good for, anyway?”
“Travelling.”
“Into the arsehole of hell! Death without a destination! Who needs passports? Kids build rafts so they can die at sea… passports… it’s a bloody joke… We get an illegal immigrant for once, and you want to give him a hard time?”
The Sleeper asked, “Children build rafts?”
“Yes, Mister Nowhere Man. Kids… shipbuilders. They build shipwrecks with their bare hands out of a few planks and some tyres! They run aground or earn themselves a fine death at sea under the watchful eyes of the Spanish, Italian or Maltese coastguard.”
“Some of them survive, don’t they?”
“If you can call it that… walking skeletons… they’re herded into camps, fed, nursed back to health, then sent back to us so they can get lost at sea all over again.”
“Why are these children running away?”
The policemen stared at him as if he’d said something stupid. One of them handed back his old passport and the other spat on the ground.
“It’s a long story, sir.”
He was in no hurry.
The dog had actually fallen asleep at his feet. A blessing in itself: with its mouth shut, the air was easier to breathe. The fact that it was no longer wagging its tail also meant that any decaying particles fell straight to the ground instead of being sprayed into the stifling air of the shack.
The authorities had been promising to build them proper offices for the past twenty years. They had been dumped at the end of the quay behind a disused boathouse and promptly forgotten. When an illegal immigrant like this man and his dog passed through their hands, they grilled him with no particular malice, away from prying eyes. If it was someone suspicious, like a terrorist coming back to Carthago to try out his pyrotechnical skills, they handed him over to the real police, the bad police who kept the basements of their police stations so spick and span. At first glance, this man and his dog were just a couple of harmless nutcases.
“Sir, you need a name, it doesn’t matter what it is.” He pointed to his colleague: “He’s Achilles; I’m Patroclus. Or Castor and Pollux, or Thomson and Thompson, who cares… you could be… wait, let me think… No One! Yes, No One.”
The dog shook itself and its fleas.
“Aha, I had you fooled, didn’t I! You thought we were complete halfwits. But I can assure you we’ve come a long way since Independence. We cops are no fools. We even have publishers who produce guidebooks to the town.”
He opened a drawer, rummaged around and took out a book. He smacked it against his hand to remove the dust, then handed it to him.
FLASHES OF MEMORY like lightning in the dark. He had lived several lives; but this was probably just another dream. How long had he slept? How many years? Was he suffering from amnesia? No. The only explanation was that he’d been outside time for part of his life. Unsatisfactory. He still had these blinding memories: heightened emotions, lost loves, lengthy parades, headlong flights. Had the dog always been with him? He wasn’t sure. The animal had turned up later; he’d woken up beside it. But was it his? For the present it was. The ancient creature turned its head towards him and rubbed its muzzle against his leg. In return, he stroked its flank. He had the strange sensation that his hand was touching something else, as if his fingers were sinking into the soft flesh of a decaying carcass.
“So those bastards let you go! Oh, if you only knew… they held me for five hours… they unpacked everything… my bags, my things… all jumbled up… all over the floor. I tried telling them I was Sinbad, but it was no good, they wouldn’t listen! Those bastards. That reminds me, what name did God give you, my humble friend?”
“My name is No One.”
“He had a sense of humour. You don’t come across that every day. What about your dog?”
“Dog.”
“Those customs officers, those policemen! They are legion, you know, as it says in the book of the Christians.”
“You mean the Gospels?”
“We call it the Injil, which is how it translates into Arabic. My friend… No One… do you speak the language of the seventh-century Qurayshites the way our Lord and Master spoke it, may the prayers of God and man be upon Him, our dearly beloved of angels and fools, our prophet Mohammed? Because if you don’t speak that ancient language forgotten by all, you won’t survive here. If you can find the exact equivalent in colonial French, the language of the collective rape of our virgins, then… you might be mistaken for an honest citizen of Carthago.”
Sinbad began laughing so hard that he dropped his bag which spilled its contents over the quay.
The port looked like a prison. Metal bars as far as the eye could see. He had to get out of this cage! Dog began growling; his master tapped him on the back; the growling stopped. Incandescent lava flowed beneath the vast blue sky; the air was liquefying like molten metal. Dog turned his gaping mouth to the sea to drink in cooler air. An occasional breeze brushed over his ears, then disappeared, leaving only that hellish heat beneath a brutal sun. But they had to keep going, they had to escape from that cooking pot and make their way to the heights of Carthago. They followed Sinbad. He knew the way. When they arrived at the gate, he turned to them.
“Willkommen daheim! I’ve had to learn the languages of the world. Every single one. My travels often take me to places you wouldn’t imagine. We even trade with China: ‘the workshop of the world’. I read that once in the paper. That’s what they say now. The workshop of the… they even make Moroccan slippers! I have to buy them there to sell them to our housewives. I’ve seen African merchants buy masks and fetishes to sell at home. Made in China. Masks straight out of hell. I’ll never get used to it. It beggars belief! All those countries, all those customs, all those different ways of eating, dressing, loving… I shall never thank God enough for giving me eyes and legs and for ensuring that I was born in this country where life isn’t easy.”
“Where are we going?”
&
nbsp; “Back to my house! It isn’t far. It’s just a taxi ride away.”
Then he looked at Dog and said, “He’ll never be allowed in the car. People don’t like animals here. Or men… and, as for women and children, you can forget it.”
“Why?”
“There’s no room, Mister No One. Can you believe it, we’ve run out of parking spaces in this life! We’ve had to go running to the Chinese, yet again, to build a few more apartment blocks to provide housing for all the people reproducing furiously under the gaze of God. Worse than cats. Or rabbits. So women and children are cursed by men… they take up too much room. You can understand it, can’t you? Sometimes, on a boat, when we’re far away, I have the strangest thoughts… terrible thoughts… I can’t tell anybody about them, because they make me feel so ashamed.”
“What sort of…”
“…all these wars haven’t even solved our problem of overcrowding. Get my drift?”
“Not really.”
“I’m not expressing myself very clearly, I realize that. Well then, let me be frank and honest. I think honesty is a quality people often lack.”
He set down his bag and looked at the Sleeper and his dog.
“No One, are you old enough to hear a few home truths?”
Dog yelped and stretched out his muzzle; he stared at Sinbad as if he represented some kind of threat. It was as if that dog had sprung from some terrifying hellhole: Dog’s age was even more of a mystery than that of his master. The fact that he was old did nothing to alleviate anyone’s uneasiness. His grey coat, long emaciated legs, protruding tongue and shortness of breath might have misled some into believing that the beast was on his last legs. But first impressions can be deceptive: this dog might be ageless, but he certainly wasn’t defenceless or weak. The animal remained true to his primary calling.
THEY FOUND A TAXI that would take animals, although only in the boot; the dog would never survive being locked in there in the scorching heat. The boot was air-conditioned, just like the car, insisted the driver, who’d had a lot of experience with journeys made under duress.