by Mohed Altrad
“And do you remember talking about a child in those letters?” she asked.
This caught Qaher unawares.
“Yes. Of course. I …”
“About our child?” She insisted, turning toward him and staring at him intently, making him feel uncomfortable. He almost stopped the car so that, once and for all, he could give her his endlessly deferred explanations, but Fadia had more to say.
He could have been irritated by these constant reminders of the past, by her unwillingness to listen to what he had to say. But, as he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, it felt strange having her there, in that car lit up by those multicolored lights, easing along that modern avenue which occasionally afforded glimpses of the desert close by. She wasn’t wearing a shawl and her luxuriant hair framed her face, giving her a whole new dimension.
“I was scared, you know,” she said. “Scared to come here. Scared I’d find a foreigner, a stranger. Last time I saw you”—he opened his mouth to speak but she put a hand up to stop him—”Yes, I know, you wrote to explain why you didn’t go back to Aleppo. But what difference did that make? Since you left, I mean since you left the first time, not one day, not one hour has gone by when I haven’t thought of you. Every morning I’d go to see the mail. Every morning, despite your silence, I hoped I’d get a letter. Every morning!”
Qaher had accelerated without realizing it. He had no answers to these recriminations. He was well aware that he’d wronged her, and it was a wrong he’d tried to avoid by talking about power and work. He knew he’d always made a point of not thinking about it. As he often did, he’d convinced himself things would sort themselves out on their own, and Fadia’s love would fade and die. But that’s not what had happened, and there wasn’t much point saying he regretted that. It wouldn’t help, so he didn’t say anything.
40
“Stop playing with me, Maïouf!” she cried suddenly.
All the arguments he’d prepared about the past—about time, his childhood, himself, and her—they all collapsed in a flash. All that reasoning was valid for the young girl he remembered. But when he’d turned to look at her in the car just now he’d seen a woman living and breathing beside him, a woman in whom he barely recognized the Fadia he’d loved, a woman made all the more mysterious by the half-light. He screwed up his eyes involuntarily. For a moment the world around him disappeared. He’d opened his mouth to speak but just stood there, his words still unspoken. After what felt like an eternity he eventually mumbled a few words, dredging them up from somewhere.
“Give me some time.”
“Time to do what, Maïouf?”
A shadow appeared in the entrance hall, attracting his attention. The woman on duty had come out of her booth and busied herself around a table. She was clearly preparing to close up for the night, and probably had to tidy the mess left by students.
“She’s going to lock up, I can’t stay out,” said Fadia. “Let’s meet tomorrow.”
“Yes,” Qaher said, feeling the situation was beyond him.
“Tomorrow,” Fadia said again, and she disappeared into the dim light.
41
Qaher had taken a room for the night in one of the thankless hotels along the city’s seafront, a low-slung, almost anonymous building which nevertheless had a reasonably presentable interior. This traditional-looking city still showed signs of its seafaring past, of the trade and commercial fishing that had kept it alive until the ground surrendered up its wealth, and when Qaher arrived he’d gone, without thinking, to the first hotel he found. Over time he had grown used to a degree of comfort, but Fadia and her retinue of memories had reminded him of the life he’d known in his grandmother’s cob house, and the evenings he’d spent in tents on feast days; and he had decided this hotel’s services would be perfectly adequate. Another detail here reminded him of Syria: portraits of the sultan in pride of place in the reception area, like images of the president on the walls of every little shop in Raqqa.
The streets were empty and he’d driven quickly till he reached the network of little roads leading down to the port. He could now see the square white building at the end of the avenue. On the way here, thousands of thoughts had sprung to life in his mind. After Fadia had left he’d been furious with himself, furious because he hadn’t explained himself, but mostly because he was now so confused. But it wasn’t long before he thought about the last thing he’d said, and Fadia’s conspiratorial smile.
Time. What did he mean by that? Time to come back to her? Did that mean he wanted to get back together with her? True, he hadn’t really looked at her since she stepped off the plane. Also true that he’d been prepared to notice only how she’d changed on the outside—until this evening, when her face had appeared to him in that shifting light inside the car, and in her face he’d seen how much of a woman she’d become. Was he falling in love with Fadia all over again? Could this old relationship be rekindled after everything he’d seen, and everything he’d left behind?
Then he remembered the early days when they first met. Fadia was the only person who accepted him for who he was, a Badawi with no family. And he’d been hurting her, for all these years.
He should have written to her more often. Yes, probably. He’d thought he would be able to drive her out of his mind, park their little relationship in some recess of his memory. But he wasn’t so sure now.
He remembered the smile she had given him as she stepped out of his car. A glorious smile. He’d never told her she had an adorable smile. The smile of a woman shaped by the gods to be happy, which is just what he’d thought the first time he’d seen her. She had once asked him whether he thought she was pretty, and he couldn’t remember how he’d answered. But as he drove along the road toward his hotel, he knew how he would answer now. She was more than that. She was the sort of person you’d want to … no, no, you wouldn’t want to save her, but you’d want to see her happy, that was all.
She’d said in her letters that he loved her but didn’t dare admit it. Did thinking about her as a woman who deserved to be happy constitute loving her?
He’d driven all the way to the hotel while he mulled over all these ideas, and more, plenty more.
Qaher parked his car on the seafront and took a deep breath. He gathered all these disparate thoughts, and put them into some sort of order until he reached a conclusion: if loving a woman meant feeling the distress he was experiencing, if loving a woman meant knowing—as he now knew for sure—that she occupied the deepest recesses of his being, well then, yes, he had to admit he loved Fadia.
Strangely, Qaher acknowledged this “revelation” calmly. He felt as if a knot had been unraveled. He sat in his car for a moment with a half smile hovering on his lips, before eventually making up his mind to get out. The air outside was warm. Qaher walked slowly over to the hotel, contemplating his newfound conviction.
Leaving behind the night with its neon streetlights, he went through the big glass door, which parted silently, as if bowing to him; then he crossed the hall with its soft carpet and opted for the stairs instead of the elevator. A new energy pervaded him, an energy which dispelled the power he’d confronted until so recently. Tomorrow he would see Fadia again. Tomorrow he would talk to her. He would tell her what was on his mind, and in his heart.
42
It was a stupid situation. It was nearly seven in the evening and, after the most ridiculous day of his life, Qaher still had to wait for his fate to be decided. It had all started the night before when he stepped into his hotel room, just as hope had brought some warmth back into his heart. He’d seen a tightly folded note on his bedside table, an official missive from the Company—which had searched every hotel in the city—to tell him there’d been an incident in Sector 8, his sector, and to summon him back to work as soon as possible, even that very night. Still feeling euphoric, he hadn’t thought this instruction strange: an inconvenience, a lot of traveling, no more than that. So he’d packed up his things, trying vaguely to ima
gine what could have gone wrong, and hoping he could settle the problem swiftly. Then he’d raced off, not even taking the time to contact Fadia. How could he have done so, anyway? The switchboard at her halls was not manned twenty-four hours a day.
That night as he drove along the coast and then inland, he’d been obsessed with one thought: getting back in time to meet her where they’d agreed to meet. And now that he had plenty of time to himself—an eternity—he tried to picture Fadia in his mind’s eye. Not that he didn’t know what she looked like; he just wanted to go on and on exploring, contemplating in minute detail the face of the secret, enigmatic Fadia he’d discovered earlier that evening. Perhaps it would only prolong the state he was in … but then again he had no desire to end it. He should have been worrying about why the Company had summoned him in the middle of the night; but he didn’t think about that. He couldn’t tear himself away from the excitement of love. He wanted to think of Fadia and nothing else. In order to conjure a mental picture of her, he combined the very clear memory he had of her face as a teenager along with her face as the woman she’d become. But despite all his efforts, Fadia’s features started dancing before his eyes, scattering over the surrounding countryside lit by his headlights, jumbling themselves up; it was as if this longed-for face was toying with him. Only the halo of hair remained constant, and he remembered Omar Khayyam’s words:
You, whose face was used to fashion lilies, oh my lovely!
You, whose beauty is ever a faithful image, oh my lovely!
The King of Babylon invented the game of chess
Based on your knowing ways, oh my lovely!
It was like a revelation. He was calling on the poets—having neglected them terribly in the last few years—to crystallize her dancing features. Now, standing in a corridor, he couldn’t remember all the verses that had come back to him as he drove along but, thanks to the poets, he’d managed to recall all the elements of Fadia’s face, one by one: her thick hair, her dark eyes, her clearly defined cheekbones, her fine nose, which had curved slightly as she’d matured, her pure lips always ready to smile, her tidy little chin, her whole face, in fact. And, as they like to say in Arabia, it was as beautiful as the moon. He’d forgotten the verses that had helped him reconstitute her face, all except the last, because he’d sung and shouted, whispered and chanted that particular one until the end of his journey. It was a couplet from one of the tales in the Thousand and One Nights, tales he’d learned as a child, between the desert and Raqqa, and now knew almost by heart.
Whether near or far, your face
And your name are always on my lips.
These two lines had stayed with him and were still resonating inside his head, only much more softly because while he’d been driving, the idea of her being far away had been just a poetic turn of phrase, but as he stood waiting in that corridor lit day and night by harsh electric bulbs, it was starting to become a bitter reality.
And yet he was still thinking of Fadia, not the men discussing his fate on the other side of the door. Fadia who must be waiting for him in vain, Fadia who he needed to talk to, whose tousled hair had so burned his heart, as the Persian poet put it.
As he’d drawn near to the scene of the fire, his arms and legs stiff from so much driving, the night still glowed red from the blazing flames. He was stopped by orderlies manning a safety perimeter. At the point where they’d stopped him he couldn’t see much of the devastation being wrought, but he could tell it was bad from the stress on their faces, the frequent walkie-talkie conversations they had, and the snatches of information they gave him. After a lot of discussion, one of them sent him to an area that was out of danger, toward the south of the complex, back the way he’d come behind the hills. They were expecting him there.
Thoroughly exhausted and with his head still full of thoughts, Qaher was fairly ill-tempered as he retraced his steps. He had to drive another good fifteen minutes through the desert over an almost impassable, rutted track before reaching the assembly point. It was an oil field like Sector 8 but on a smaller scale and, more important, it was isolated. Everything seemed calm, ordinary, routine. A far cry from the tension he’d just witnessed. After he cut the engine, Qaher sat for a moment listening to the strange whistling sound of the desert; then he went into the building. But he didn’t find any of the people he thought would be waiting to see him.
The door opened to reveal the usual team of guards. They were waiting for him. An engineer in white overalls came to greet him, briefly abandoning his control panel. He showed Qaher into a staff break room and asked him to wait while he got in touch with the managers. What else could Qaher do? He waited.
The room was in a prefabricated building, an exact replica of the one in which he’d spent the last few months. Qaher noticed that familiar smell, a combination of oil and plastic, and he had a cup of the same thin, scalding coffee in his hand; for a moment it felt as if the time he’d spent with Fadia was aeons ago, as if it had been propelled back into a misty, dreamlike past. But the illusion didn’t last. Tiredness and anxiety took over. To kill time and because this was his first proper opportunity, he started thinking seriously about what had brought him here. For starters, he couldn’t really see why this needed sorting out in the middle of the night. What needed sorting out, anyway? Qaher couldn’t understand why they needed him there so urgently, and certainly couldn’t see why they’d now kept him waiting for nearly an hour. The fire had started while he was away; he was in no way responsible for the disaster. As for the firemen and their battle to overcome it, there was nothing in his skill set to help them. Unless he was simply the chosen victim. The duality he felt inside himself, the notion—or perhaps he should say the fact—of being an Arab among Europeans and a European among Arabs could very easily turn against him. Of the engineers who worked at Sector 8, he was the only one of his kind. Could that be why he’d been summoned?
When he heard footsteps outside, Qaher got to his feet. The engineer appeared in the doorway, looking embarrassed: he hadn’t managed to get hold of the investigators. It was probably only a matter of time, but Qaher would have to keep waiting. He didn’t know any more than that. Qaher wanted to call Durieux and Bensoussan in the hope that they could shed some light on things. The engineer refused to let him. Well, of course, he didn’t explicitly forbid him, but he made such a fuss that Qaher grasped it would be better if he didn’t contact his colleagues before talking to the investigators. That was when Qaher realized he might not be able to get away quickly. He let the engineer go back to work, and sat down on a folding chair, pulling his jacket tightly around his neck.
Stranded in that anonymous room in a prefabricated building, sitting on an uncomfortable chair with a now cold cup of coffee in his hand, he tried to think of Fadia, but the enthusiasm that had surged through him in Muscat had faded. And nothing about his present surroundings was likely to revive it. Fear had insinuated itself into his mind. Wasn’t there something in the air and, more particularly, in the imperious tone of that note, wasn’t there a whiff, a vibe, a nervous tension which reminded him unpleasantly of that court case in Raqqa? Right now, the waiting, the contempt with which he was being treated, the ridiculous way he’d made himself available, not to mention the fact that it was night and he hadn’t been allowed to make any phone calls, made him feel it was his trial going on. And wedged into that chair, dazed by the neon lights, he couldn’t help thinking his sentence had already begun.
Qaher shook off his lethargy and walked out of the building, hoping he’d be able to gather his thoughts. He climbed up a hillock to look out over the installations with their derricks and hundreds of lights dotted across the desert. The anticipated thrill had been lost along the way. The scene didn’t light up before his eyes. When he scuffed the ground with his foot, he just loosened the earth, the desert sand. He sat down. The desert, the darkness, the hillock … it all reminded him of something he couldn’t pinpoint. Instead of Fadia’s face, which he so wanted to see, different i
mages came back to him: his uncle’s face as he was sentenced, snatches of the prosecution’s closing speech, noises and colors, remarks overheard. It all came to him in no apparent order, connected only by fear and anger. Still, Qaher realized it was unreasonable to worry about any sort of trial. Come on! He worked for a private company which had no legal powers. What could it do to him? At worst, fire him. And even that made no sense. But he couldn’t help it; the desert was scoffing at him. There it was, defying him, tormenting him, reminding him that power could draw on many more hidden resources than you would think. The words he’d heard when he first arrived here came back to him: a dead Bedouin doesn’t matter.
Qaher was tempted to run. He was alone, sitting on the sand, under cover of darkness, with no one watching him; he hadn’t committed any crime; the fire had nothing to do with him. He was free. Fadia was waiting for him. Fadia meant more to him than anything else. He didn’t do it. Leaving in such unfavorable circumstances could have been interpreted as a confession of guilt. And he also realized that people here were at breaking point, ready to snap at anything or anyone without provocation.
When Qaher went back into the building, the engineer had managed to get hold of the investigators. They’d already been waiting a long time for him in the Company’s administrative offices. He had to get back on the road. Qaher started up his car. It was nearly dawn.
43
The Kafkaesque situation started all over again in the Company’s administrative offices. The investigators weren’t there. They were about to arrive, the night watchmen told him, he’d just have to wait. Wait again. And yet he’d been told they’d be here. He must have misunderstood. The investigators had gone to Abu Dhabi in the middle of the night. He should wait. He should go up to the second floor. The investigators were on their way, they’d be here any minute.