Badawi

by Mohed Altrad

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon,” he said.

  Qaher glanced at him surreptitiously. The little man seemed not very concerned, more uninvolved. Nestled nice and safe, deep in the back of the car, he looked at the outside world as if it were a film being projected onto a wide screen. From the look of him, with his impeccable tie and his blandness that touched on nonexistence, Qaher knew in a flash that this man had never dared set foot in the desert he was purporting to tell him about. He even wondered whether he might have had the car windows sealed to stop desert smells from getting in. He was careful not to comment, though.

  Qaher ignored the jumbled images of the past that kept coming back to him, memories from a childhood he’d decided to forget: all those sensations and faces and smells. He leaned back against the leather seat and, taking his lead from the little man, affected detachment.

  The car raced onward, gobbling potholes and stones on the road, swallowing clouds of sand, even outstripping the thoughts barging into Qaher’s head. The metal monster didn’t even slow down when it passed animals wandering along the verge, only miraculously missing them every time. The first couple of times Qaher was quite anxious, but he’d stopped worrying about it. Not interested in his traveling companion’s occasional pronouncements and no longer fretting about how dark the sky was, he was now lost in contemplation of “something” that had appeared to his right. For some time now he’d been aware of a pipe running parallel to the road, about a hundred meters away. So that’s all it took! thought Qaher. A pipe, a simple pipe could do away with the desert and simultaneously relegate his childhood to the realm of a lost era. A pipe, a simple pipe would propel him into the future that he’d chosen, a future made of tubes, pumps, and noise.

  It was at this point that the car came out of a blind bend and only just missed a cluster of Bedouin children trying to cross the road. The driver grumbled but made no attempt to slow down. Qaher gasped and spun around to see whether anyone had been hurt. All he could see were the sheep that the children had been leading back to camp; they were skittering over the rocks to get away, terrified by the noise and drag of the passing car.

  “Tell the driver to be careful!” Qaher chided, turning to face the front again.

  Nestled in his seat, the little man in the dark suit gave no reply. It wasn’t until a while later that he deigned to mutter, “Don’t worry. It’s always the same with you new boys … you get in such a state. You’ll get over it. A dead Bedouin doesn’t matter here. At best, it’s one less mouth to feed.”

  The man took out a handkerchief and wiped the back of his neck. Realizing he needed to justify his cynicism, he added, “The whole country depends on oil production, do you see? So we’re not going to trouble ourselves for a handful of nostalgic nomads surviving off a handful of ewes. Personally I don’t have anything against them, you know, so long as they don’t get in the way of our work …”

  It grew even darker; it was now almost like nighttime. The bushes they passed grew increasingly gnarled. A tightly packed flight of swallows skimmed past close to the ground. But all this disappeared when the car forked off onto a route that led deep into the desert. Qaher looked up, eager to see the installations, and forgot to reply to the little man in the dark suit.

  When Qaher had arrived at the almost insolently clean and modern Abu Dhabi airport the previous day, he’d taken a deep breath, filling his lungs with the hot outside air. It wasn’t because he was happy to be back on the soil of his past—in fact the countryside here looked more like a salt lake than the desert as he knew it—but his stomach knotted with a combination of pride and apprehension. A car was waiting for him. A black limousine, not something he’d seen often, even in France. The driver put his bags in the huge trunk, and then set off along the wide, fast-flowing expressway.

  When the city appeared on the horizon he was almost dazzled, perhaps because of the sunlight flashing off the sea and the great glass tower blocks. In any event, this light was his first true impression of the United Arab Emirates. The sky here was pure, like the skies Qaher remembered nostalgically.

  As they drove into the big modern city, his nostalgia vanished and was replaced by dismay mingled with surprise. The farther the driver took them along those avenues, the more the city shed its Arab identity—at least the Arab identity which Qaher imagined it had but which was due more to the sizzling light in the sky overhead. In the center, the city felt almost Oriental to him. Qaher was unpleasantly struck by how artificial his surroundings were. Of course the oases he’d known as a child had been luxuriant, but they’d never allowed anyone traveling through them to forget they were in the desert. Here in Abu Dhabi, though, the avenues and crossroads were embellished with exuberant vegetation, a carefully maintained, unnatural flora of low shrubs and lilacs and, at intervals, more palm trees than he’d ever seen, to the extent that it was hard to believe he was in the Arabian Peninsula.

  The driver took the coast road so Qaher could see the mangrove tract with its intensely blue depths. But instead of enjoying the view, all Qaher could think of were the tankers plying up and down the Persian Gulf behind the spit of land blocking his view.

  They left his bags at the hotel and then went to one of the oil company’s offices. A little man in a dark suit, a man who managed to look both self-effacing and oddly arrogant, was waiting for him behind a desk. When Qaher shook his hand—which he found unpleasantly limp—he suddenly stopped being a passenger: he was here to work. Petrochemistry, the choice that had been made for him in Damascus.

  31

  It was a Friday, the beginning of the weekend for Western engineers and a day of prayer for Muslims; he was both. Standing out in the street, he heard the muezzin, and his heart constricted involuntarily, in the viselike grip of memory. His heart beat a little faster and his recollections came to life with new energy. The desert was reclaiming him … unless it was something else. He went into the building.

  The air-conditioning was on too high, and Qaher shivered as he stepped into the dark blues of the Columbia Café. In a corner of the room a pianist was playing quietly and with earnest intensity. His face was lit by a soft half-light in contrast to the harsh neon glare in the rest of the room. Gaggles of guests from the Beach Hotel were starting to come in. They weren’t hard to distinguish from the regulars: they looked more alert and more awkward, and kept in tight groups like tourists in the souk before they surrendered to the pleasure of buying.

  Qaher was immediately put off by the artificial chill and superficial atmosphere, and was tempted to go back into the burning heat outside. He had a sudden urge to be in the heavy salty air on the avenue with the light flashing off the sea and the feeling of the sun on his skin, but most of all the blaze of late evening light which reminded him of how as a child he used to run home from school across the desert.

  He was about to leave when he saw someone in the middle of the room waving at him wildly. He’d been spotted by David Bensoussan, a young computer analyst of Jewish descent whom Qaher had always found very kind and forthcoming, and reassuringly disillusioned. Bensoussan invited him to join the group sitting at a table drinking, and wouldn’t sit down again until Qaher waved back at him with a sigh of resignation.

  Qaher immediately regretted what he saw as weakness. Letting the door close behind him, he gestured toward the bar, meaning he had something to sort out before he joined them. A bit longer, just a bit longer …

  For eight months now he’d been working as an engineer at a network of very rich oil wells in the Habshan region, nearly two hundred kilometers inland from the Persian Gulf. He’d acclimatized faster than most newcomers—everything was already familiar to him—and had established his place on the team, even fitting in with its little ways. But deep down, he felt he was constantly out of step with the others.

  When he’d accepted this job, Qaher had decided to devote himself entirely to his work. And he’d stuck to this decision. He didn’t see many people, didn’t go out much, arrived
at work early, and left late. He’d become so isolated that when he did take some leisure time, like this evening, he felt somehow pointless. Without the power and thrum of the machines at work, all that was left was the company of other men, like those he was with now in hopes they might help him relax.

  Of course he got on well with “them,” the members of his team, whom he currently called his friends. Still, it had taken only a few weeks for him to realize that things would be the same with “them” here as in France. Perhaps he no longer needed to prove his abilities, but he still had to play his part, know his place. That was the weakness of men: they judged on appearances, unlike machines. In times of doubt, Qaher wondered whether he’d ever find that elusive sense of belonging: a Badawi in Raqqa, a Syrian in France, a foreign worker in the Emirates, he was always a stranger to the people around him. But when optimism wrapped him in its embrace he smiled. After all, what could appearances do compared with cunning? Cunning, the strength he’d inherited from his ancestors, was a distortion of power that fascinated him; it was a sort of technique and one that could be learned. Cunning operated on a deep level; it was an art that he was born to, and it allowed him to get around those who thought him weak. He did this without hypocrisy, though; it was more that it had become a habit, driven by necessity from his earliest childhood until those first years in France. He had a way of never asserting his own importance but always making himself indispensable so that people who wanted nothing to do with him in the beginning would end up recognizing his strengths and asserting his importance for him.

  And then, although he didn’t notice it happening, the course of his life had been altered by those years in Montpellier spent shrugging off his past and studying. Until he lived in France he had fought to throw off the trappings and prejudices of his people—things that others might call traditions—but all that had been turned on its head. What had looked like rebellion during his childhood had had to be transformed into discipline and conformity, a young Badawi’s attempt to fashion himself on the accepted image of a westerner. And he’d won that particular battle. But he was no longer too naive to realize that this victory was only temporary; everything would be temporary for him until he asserted himself in a world that wasn’t his own, until he became the master of his own image.

  He wasn’t there yet. For now he had to carry on playing the game, meeting up with his “friends” for a drink as he did at the end of every week, a ritual that always seemed to go on forever and which did little for him: it involved not coming to life until you’d had three neat bourbons. But Qaher didn’t really want to avoid it. So he turned up at these weekly get-togethers in his impeccably pressed suit—he’d learned to perfect his appearance, appearance being a part of cunning.

  Knowing he couldn’t dawdle at the bar any longer without looking rude, Qaher made up his mind to join his friends. He walked unenthusiastically toward a low table in the middle of the room where four men in shirtsleeves were already lounging in big black leather armchairs, while a diverse clientele bustled and chatted all around them.

  32

  Qaher drew closer to the low table of lacquered wood embedded with shards of colored glass—halfway between Islamic art and the latest interior design—and saw a lot of drinks on it. The glasses were half-filled with an amber liquid that matched the tones of the table, and they sparkled under the lights. Yet again: bourbon and small olives. This routine was handed down from one generation of engineers to the next and served as a smokescreen for his colleagues’ slow descent into alcoholism. He gave a small smile. As if this was a signal, everyone started talking at once: “Late again!” “We couldn’t wait, look!” “How are you? Hey, pull up a chair and come and sit with us!” “So, Qaher, everything under control?” “No work chat, we’ve all agreed!”

  Qaher parried this verbal assault with a modest, “Yes, everything’s under control.”

  He moved a chair and parked himself in the space between Bensoussan and Durieux.

  “What’s happened to you? You look miserable!”

  Oxley Brint was British and, from the day he arrived in Abu Dhabi, he’d deemed it his duty to defend the Anglo-Saxon reputation for heavy drinking. Ever since, he had been successfully enlisting his friends in this crusade. This meant that other people’s good or bad moods didn’t matter much to him, and he was quick to add, “Come on, Qaher, have a bourbon like everyone else!”

  Qaher took off his jacket, put it carefully on the back of his chair, sat down, and looked slowly at the others. When he finally grasped that they were waiting for his reply, he muttered self-consciously, “Yes, yes, I’ll have a bourbon. As for how I look …”

  David Bensoussan interrupted him by waving to the diminutive Filipino waiter who was clearing the next table, then turned to him and encouraged him to go on: “So, you were saying, how you look …”

  “Nothing, it’s personal,” Qaher said, hoping the others could be satisfied by this evasive reply.

  All of a sudden the room was full of noise and people. A group of about twenty had just arrived and were making absolutely sure they were noticed. Men and women who in their humdrum everyday lives were mostly discreet, self-effacing, crippled by scruples and frustrations, went wild here, far from home and disguised as part of a crowd. They were loud and brash, quick to pick arguments, and—worse still—given to unpleasant hysterical laughter. Qaher closed his eyes. Usually these performances irritated him, but not today. He hoped it would distract his so-called friends at least long enough for them to forget the beginning of the conversation they’d just had. With a bit of luck, he thought, he could slip away earlier than usual and lose himself in the thoughts preoccupying him this evening.

  Unfortunately, Durieux looked up nonchalantly and raised his voice to be heard above the din.

  “What is it? Is it family? Bad news?”

  Durieux was also an engineer, but he could just as easily have been a café waiter or a poet: nothing about him revealed why he’d opted for his chosen career. He was one of those who preferred the film evenings at the French Institute to betting at the racetrack and took pride in being different although with a good dollop of affectation. He actually demonstrated a level of intelligence that Qaher respected, but this was coupled with a curiosity that sometimes bordered on indiscretion. That explained why he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to find out a bit more about Qaher’s private life, particularly as Qaher himself was normally unusually discreet on the subject.

  “In a way,” Qaher conceded with controlled composure.

  “I can’t really hear with this noise,” Durieux pursued shamelessly. “What? What bad news?”

  “No secrets here!” David Bensoussan threw into the mix, laughing, almost drunk.

  “I’m not keeping secrets.”

  The waiter in his white uniform had just put the glass of bourbon on the table along with a plate of olives. Qaher bought some time by taking a gulp of his drink and nibbling on an olive.

  “It’s to do with a girl.”

  “A girl!” Alvaro perked up.

  To use his own vernacular, Alvaro was a “whole different lemonade” from Durieux. The product of fiercely republican French and Spanish parents, he’d made a point of being indifferent to all political issues, and had turned his energies to the fairer sex instead. Poor Alvaro! Here he was languishing in a country that offered few satisfactions for his desires, a country where women didn’t actually wear the veil—because the Emirates were liberal—but still had to cover their bodies in heavy fabrics that gave nothing away. Alvaro tried his luck with female tourists, with varying degrees of success, and that was partly why he’d chosen this bar. The thought of additional prey delighted him.

  Qaher was about to reply when Brint, who was probably exasperated by his dithering and was anyway far too busy drinking, raised his glass and yelled, “Here’s to you.” Then, as he brought the glass to his lips, he added, “And here’s to this girl of yours, too!”

  “You will introduc
e her to us, won’t you?” Alvaro asked anxiously.

  And they all raised their glasses.

  The conversation drifted from one thing to another, and eventually ran dry while the big ceiling fan carried on whisking the air as vigorously as ever. All of them gradually succumbed to a sort of torpor as one drink led to the next. Foreigners stationed in the Emirates enjoyed a number of privileges that they eventually took for granted. They were better paid here than in other places, benefited from unwarranted comforts and the illusory safety of a rarefied community, and were therefore often reduced to indolence and laziness. Qaher knew this, but made the most of the general restorative lethargy and, forgetting his companions, sat back comfortably in his chair, picked up his umpteenth drink, and lost himself in thought.

  Fadia had written to him, telling him she would be there soon. How had she tracked him down? In his last letter—which was such a long time ago!—he didn’t remember mentioning the Emirates; he wasn’t even sure he’d been offered this job at the time.

  He’d continued his correspondence with her as if carrying out a duty, so he didn’t remember it very clearly. It was completely possible that he’d referred to this work in some way, or said how badly he wanted to secure a job like this one, or he could easily have mentioned the name of the Company. Fadia would only have had to do a bit of research … She was perfectly capable of that. That’s what had attracted him to her: her liveliness, the intelligence brimming in her eyes, always eager to know more, whatever the obstacles. Fadia had written to him, and was coming to see him … That was no one’s business but his.