by Salar Abdoh
Abu Faranci said, “Cleric J took us out there today to see if I didn’t mind getting killed. It was a test. Yes?”
“Everything is a test here. You could say yes. Yes.”
“So what else would you like to know?”
“I believe you have a few brain cells missing, like the rest of us in this mokeb. But I don’t believe your story that you just showed your journalist’s ID and managed to get as far as Tal Abta. Not on your own, anyway.”
“I paid someone in Baghdad to accompany me. A fixer.”
“All right, that’s something I can believe.”
“But you don’t ask me enough questions, Saleh. Why?”
“Because I already understand why you are here.”
“You mean why I have come all this way?”
“Yes. That.”
“Then please, do tell.”
“You needed to come to an end-of-the-world sort of place. This one just happened to be available. And it was for a good enough cause. Look at all the Yazidis and Christians those sons of Satan have killed. You wanted to do something about it. And you were already tired of your everyday life, wherever it was. I don’t know what you did before besides being a journalist, but you had had enough. Like the rest of us. You came here, where you don’t have to worry about anything except getting shot at and making tea for the fighters and having them call you Abu Faranci. That’s enough to make you happy. I’ve been watching you, Mr. Claude. You are content here. I don’t really know why a Frenchman needed to come all the way out here to find contentment. But you did. And I’ve seen stranger things in this world.”
“Your English is better than mine, Saleh. How come?”
“I worked hard to acquire it. I thought it would be my ticket out of the Middle East. Instead it has been a ticket to stay here, in this prison. Then again, where would I go?”
Haji Yusuf had begun to sing the evening call to prayer. You could hear his crackly old voice with a hint of self-mockery in it radiating from the rooftop of the longhouse.
We sat there listening in the room I shared with Cleric J, and now also with Abu Faranci. Soon there were other calls from other abandoned, semihabitable buildings that the Hashd had taken over. The prayer calls got entangled in one another, like poorly tied knots that could not be undone. The better voices suffered the most for it and were lost. Every evening was the same. And every evening the enemy too sang his own Allahu akbar thousands and thousands of times over. We were really fighting with our own shadows. Some of us deserved dying, but very few of us deserved the flower of martyrdom.
The Frenchman’s ease was compelling. He really did love it here. Every night all the men who had been lost to these plains and hills were recalled in our evening prayers. I prayed for them too. But there was no time to pause for them too long, no time to remember them beyond an idea. And so at the end of the day, all the martyrs you’d known became one bandwidth of death, a rainbow of body parts and browned blood. Sometimes at moments like these you just want to cry for your loss. It’s a plaintive hymn of self-pity that I’d heard some men, but not all, descend into once in a while. And now I was feeling it too, especially since tomorrow morning I had to finally return south to Miss Homa and Proust, both of whom wanted their own share of martyrdom.
“But I wish to tell you about myself,” Abu Faranci said.
“Huh?” My mind had wandered.
“You just described me in a paragraph, sir. But there is more to me than just my laziness.”
“I did not say you were here because of laziness. But even that is a good enough reason for being here. I think this is why I am here, anyway.”
“Ah! Maybe that is why I am here too. Do you know what joie de vivre means?”
“Yes. And I don’t have it.”
“When did you lose it?”
“I may have never had it. But if I did, I’m sure I lost it in Africa.”
“Ah! I lost mine in America. Many Americans have much joie de vivre. It should be illegal.”
“They make the rules. We can’t tell them to stop being so enthusiastic.”
“Well, we French try now and then to tell them. It is a mistake. We should not try.”
I said nothing. I liked this guy. My idea of the French had always been the family my mother had married into after the old man died. The Francophone money of old Tehran, like that pseudo-cousin Avesta. They were of the class that turned their noses up at you for not knowing how to say sympathique with the proper accent. At gatherings they huddled among themselves and babbled in French and talked about the “lovely” party at the French embassy last week and then looked at you with expressions of utter pity when you tried to join in but weren’t fluent enough to understand everything they said. That had been my idea of the French and France, except for a handful of hardened and gritty journalists and photographers I’d run into here and there. But this Claude fellow shattered all my preconceptions. I had expected a different man, full of himself and too suave. I was really waiting with my editor’s eye for him to show me one mistake, just one, so I could throw the manuscript of his life into the dustbin. It would have been that easy. All it would have taken was a simple “I don’t trust this guy” from me to Cleric J, and Abu Faranci would have been done for. It was a scary idea and it was the kind of power that one had in northern Mesopotamia at the time. But Abu Faranci had turned out to be the real thing. Our sympathies were mutual and I found myself wanting to protect him from the evil that lurked around us.
He said, “I had a family. Once.”
“What happened? You lost your joie de vivre with them?”
“Not really. Rather, they found theirs. In America.”
“Well, this should make you happy. No?”
He shrugged. “It did. I found a sort of happiness in that, and then I left to come here.” He stopped and looked at me. “Saleh, maybe you want to do your evening prayer first.”
“Maybe you want to do yours.”
“I haven’t a prayer left in me.”
“And I am running at least ten thousand prayers behind. I’ll never catch up.”
“Do you think the Middle East will ever find peace?”
“No. We should rather learn to live in it without peace but with civility.”
“How is that possible?”
“Just like this, here and now. If a few weeks ago someone had told me an Abu Faranci was coming here to join our humble mokeb, I would have laughed at them. I might have even been insulted. But here you are. And we’re talking. This is called civility, even if half of what we suffer here is because of you guys.”
“Only half?”
“Yes. The other half is our own bad behavior.”
The generators cut out and dark enveloped everything. Men’s voices shouted in Arabic. It would be awhile before they got the electricity going again.
I said, “Claude, you’ve come here to die, haven’t you?”
The dark allowed me to ask the question that was impossible to ask while looking into the man’s eyes.
“Yes.”
“Do you not think this is irresponsible of you? We cannot be the assisted-suicide headquarters of all the men who are tired of life.”
“Why not?”
I’d never considered it like that. So it took a few moments for me to answer. “Because this is a real fight. Not a game. Our holy places mean something to us. What do they mean to you? Nothing!”
“It is all right if you wish to insult me.”
The angry hum of the generators was already starting back up but there was no electricity yet. In that dark, with the sound of distant big guns walloping the ends of our minds, it was as if we were at the end of history too. There were at least three times in the past year I had felt this way: once when I buried that Proust book right here at the Eye of the Horse; another time when our positions were attacked at Tuz Khurma while Zahra the Beheader and I stood there holding her fresh bread, talking of Baghdad; and a last instance at Khaled’s old place a
cross the mokeb, watching the beautiful people of Hollywood on television.
Abu Faranci said, “Have you ever been married, Saleh?” He did not wait for me to answer but went on: “It is a beautiful thing, marriage. It is like an illumination. But, you know, betrayal changes the very atoms in your body. I know, in this darkness you are thinking, This Frenchman has gone crazy and is giving me life lessons. But I’m not here to give anyone any lesson. You wanted to know why I’m here and I am telling you.”
“I am sorry if you felt insulted before,” I offered.
“This is your world, your fight, your geography. I know I am an intruder. But I need an ear.”
“Why?”
“Because I am trying also to make sense of this story of mine for my own sake. You are right, this mokeb and this war are not, as you say, places of assisted suicide. But I must ask you again: why not? At every moment, everywhere, something or someone is serving a purpose. Why should your purpose not also be to help me in my journey? This is my first question.”
“But that isn’t a question. It is a statement.”
He was silent for a while, and I wondered if I’d offended the Frenchman again.
“You are right, Saleh. I did make a statement. But do you accept it?”
“That I—we—should assist you in getting yourself killed?”
“Well, yes!”
“Hang around here long enough and it will happen by itself. You won’t need our help.”
“This is all I ask for. That you let me stay. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Silence again. Was he for real? It dawned on me that in all my encounters with people from his world, I was always the one asking for something—a job, a favor, a recommendation for a job, recognition of some kind. It was a one-way street of asking, even groveling, that men like Saeed and Mafiha had perfected to an art. Yet now, this man, Claude Richard, was asking me for something. A favor. The ultimate favor. And I had the power to give it. Or to at least not stand in his way.
“You have more to say, Claude?”
“Only this: by telling you something of myself, maybe I will be helping you too.”
“Helping me?”
The electricity came back on outside, but the room stayed dark. Maybe the bulb had gone bad with the sudden surge; whatever it was, neither of us seemed to mind the circumstance. It was as if the Frenchman and I were speaking to ourselves, as if we had become one and the same person. I felt that I was in a trance.
He said, “Helping you, yes. To understand yourself as you think you understand me. I needed an honest war and I came looking. But I needed one to die in, not one to live through.”
“Well, I’m not here to die, Abu Faranci. There’s a difference between me and you.”
“True. But you are here with the knowledge, because of the danger around us, that if you do die, it is for something bigger than you. This gives you a warm feeling at night.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. And the rest of it, it has to do with that first thing I spoke of: marriage. I want to tell you about what happened to me after one of my trips when I came back home. We were living in New York City then. My posting as a financial journalist was there. But I had to go away often, leaving my wife and child alone in a land full of, well, enthusiasm.”
Footsteps were coming toward us. I switched on the flashlight and shined it at the wall. The men might have liked Abu Faranci well enough by now, but he was still a foreigner. Sitting in the dark with him while the mokeb was bustling would make simple men skeptical. And they would take that skepticism out on him. Someone would. Maybe Maysam or Cleric J or Haji Yusuf, or any of the lesser guys in this place. The truth was that we were always a trigger away from some kind of destruction. We lived in the moment and it revealed itself in the sheer mountains of garbage we were able to produce. Refuse sat all around us. Plastic and feces. More plastic and more feces. The transience of it all made us madmen. It is easy to misuse the word “mad,” but madness on the scale I speak of can only issue forth in war. Or perhaps in violent revolution. It has no place elsewhere. And madness does not take kindly to the dark.
Maysam stuck his head inside and asked who was here.
“Ana wa Abu Faranci,” I offered.
Just then the light popped on. A momentary blindness and then the three of us regarded each other. In Maysam’s eyes was the look of the doer, the man who worries after others and holds the power of death and life. Without saying it, he still seemed to be saying, It is not too late if you think this man is an impostor. We can stick his head under water, you know! Just give me the word.
I said, “Abu Faranci wants to turn to Islam.”
Maysam did not smile or offer a show of enthusiasm. He looked at Abu Faranci, turned back to me, and then his face seemed to say, This is acceptable, and timely. Then he was gone.
Abu Faranci said, “Maysam is the only one who still has distrust for me.”
“He manages our security. It’s his job to distrust. It’s not personal.”
I waited again. There were voices in my head. The last time I’d tried to get on the metro in Tehran, I imagined the oncoming train to be a tank, an Abrams to be specific—Americans. It had been at the Taleghani station and when I ran out from underground, just about suffocating, I came face-to-face with a guy selling pineapples right in front of the door of the former American embassy where they’d painted a death skull.
I hadn’t tried taking the metro since.
“You look like you are sweating, Saleh.”
I breathed. “Please go on. Your marriage.”
“It was a good one. Nevertheless, the devil of infidelity was with me.”
“You’re a Frenchman.”
“Oh please, Saleh! Let’s throw away the clichés. I’ve come here to die, don’t forget. I was not unfaithful because I’m a Frenchman. That is ridiculous. I was unfaithful because it was there like a fruit, and I was often away, and in a sense it came with the job.”
“So you’ve come here to die because you were unfaithful? This seems like a heavy price to want to pay for something not that uncommon.”
“No. On the contrary. I am here because on one of my trips home I found that my wife had also lied, cheated if you will. But before you imagine that I am here because my wife was not faithful, let me tell you that that was not it either. In fact, when I realized she was being unfaithful, it was as if I had been released from all manner of responsibility. I was suddenly free.”
I thought of Atia telling me she was going to marry Mafiha. It wasn’t the same thing. Not at all. But later on when I’d thought about it, I realized there was some form of twisted freedom in hearing the person you love tell you they will marry someone else. Once the dark cloud passes, you can settle inside your misery and let it rock you to desolate sleep.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“The man she was seeing had twin sons the same age as my own boy. He had been divorced for some time and owned a large home in the countryside where his former wife also lived nearby. The boys all went to the same school in the big city. It would have been a clean arrangement for all, except that the man’s former wife seemed unhappy about a married woman playing mother to her sons. I could understand this, and I suppose so could my wife. Therefore, one day my wife insisted that I come to that big, beautiful American country house for a weekend visit. I was, in other words, a decoy, a distraction. I already knew that I was being part of a deceit and yet I did not mind. Because all these years I had been the one to be deceitful. It was a settling of scores and I was fine with it. You could say that in order to make my own deceit acceptable to myself, I engaged in another deceit, this time in collaboration with my own wife.”
He sighed.
I did not like where this was going. Yet Abu Faranci seemed intent on telling his story and I was not going to get in his way—not so late in the game for us.
“It’s a moment, you know, Saleh? It takes just that
one moment to see all of life’s truths arrange themselves in front of your eyes. And I saw it up there in that big, beautiful American country home. My boy was so happy there. It was as if he had two new brothers. I saw the joy in his heart. He had a family at last. And not just a gloomy Frenchman for a father who had wanted to be a war correspondent and instead ended up reporting about financial markets and trading in stock portfolios. Do you want to know when the moment came for me, the moment when I saw the light and knew I could walk away from everything without guilt, without remorse?”
“I am still sitting here listening, am I not?”
“Yes, you are. And I thank you. That American man who had taken my wife, he had built a dirt track for motorbikes at his country home where he taught his children and my boy how to ride. I had, honestly, not a shred of envy in me watching him. He was so capable, so able to build and fix and be the kind of man I was not. He had, if you will, joie de vivre in abundance. True abundance.”
“I guess that was good for your wife and son. No?”
“Yes. They had come under his protection. They too had developed joie de vivre. It was lovely to watch. But that moment, the moment I speak of, the moment of enlightenment, it came as I was taking a walk toward that dirt motorcycle track and I ran into my wife getting on the back of the American’s bike. My wife said to me, ‘We are going to the house to get dinner ready. Will you watch over the kids?’ Those were her exact words. Here I was in America, a land that I did not particularly like or dislike, in the house of a stranger who was sleeping with my wife, and I didn’t mind it at all. And I thought to myself: My God, Claude, what a waste your life has turned into! And I saw the joy in her face as she got on the back of that bike with him, a lovingness that I had never seen before with me, a joy that I was seeing in my son’s face too every day in that big country home. It was then that I knew the time had come for me to leave.”
I could not bear to sit in silence after a confession like this. So I immediately asked, “And then you hurried here to get yourself killed?”