Badawi

by Mohed Altrad

  A hard day was beginning to dawn. The direction in which the sealed windows faced meant he couldn’t watch the sun come up over the horizon, but it was getting light. The sleepless night, the coffees, the waiting, and the irritation all contributed to a growing sense of unease. He felt dirty, on the outside and inside; his skin felt taut, as after a long flight. He wished he could take a shower. And this new day dawning worried him. He set off in search of a telephone, going from one floor to the next, until the investigators arrived.

  They appeared in the bright, neon-lit foyer with the puffy faces of people who’ve just been woken. Hardly so much as a hello, only a wave of the hand for him to follow them, and they dived into the elevator. Once they reached their floor, they asked him to wait. To wait! He was surrounded by bland, unimaginative comforts. Gray carpeting, glass doors, air-conditioning. He waited.

  When he was called into the room to answer some questions, he went in with total, exhausted detachment. What followed was an inept inquiry to which he responded without really concentrating. He was thinking about Fadia. From time to time he noticed, but didn’t comment on, the investigators’ incompetence on various technical points. He was also surprised to be asked a number of more personal, more insidious questions, but he dealt with these without paying much attention either. He was thinking about Fadia again. This performance went on until midday, when they were provided with meal trays. He asked several times to be allowed to make a telephone call, but was stopped on a variety of grounds.

  The afternoon was given over to more questioning.

  It was now seven o’clock and the interrogation had come to an end. He had to wait for a decision to be reached about him. Qaher thought the whole thing was laughable. The last few days he’d sometimes felt he’d turned into the person he used to be—mostly in spite of himself. But at the same time, the child he’d once been, with his thwarted hopes, constantly running into stupid, self-serving attitudes, had become a triumphant adult. He found the thought comforting.

  He promised himself that, once this charade was over, he’d call Fadia and they could laugh about all this, as in the old days. As soon as it was over he’d find Fadia, and they’d go into the desert together. The desert in all its sobering freedom washes away absurdity far more efficiently than the sea ever can. Yes, they’d go into the desert. Tomorrow. This evening. He would talk to her. He suddenly knew what to say to her.

  The door was flung open and Qaher woke from his daydream with a start. The two investigators were standing facing him but not actually looking at him. One of them handed him a letter. Qaher stood up and took the letter but didn’t open it.

  “Is it over?” he asked.

  They nodded.

  “Can I make a phone call now?”

  They said he could.

  Qaher slipped the letter into his pocket and ran into the corridor, into the elevator, into the entrance hall, all the way to reception, where he demanded a telephone. The secretary handed him a cordless phone and he grabbed it eagerly. He feverishly dialed the number he’d been repeating to himself for hours, and asked to speak to Fadia.

  “Your friend’s no longer here, sir,” a woman told him. “She’s left.”

  “What do you mean? Has she moved to different halls?”

  “No. She’s gone back to Syria.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know, sir, she didn’t give me a reason.”

  44

  The air-conditioning was always on too high at the Columbia Café. Today more than usual. It was cold. The last straw in this sun-drenched place. Qaher repressed a shiver. At the far end of the room a pianist—or rather a weary-looking shadow bent over a keyboard—unconvincingly plinked a few tired notes. The bar was deserted. In its nakedness, it was just a big gloomy room made somehow sinister by the absence of customers. The souks and beaches must be teeming with people at this time of day; in the oil and gas fields the massive machinery of metal and men must be droning as it toiled. Life was going on elsewhere.

  Qaher heaved a sigh of resignation and shifted in his chair but failed to get comfortable. He hadn’t succeeded since this morning, and had exhausted every possible position. His body was now aching. His four friends sat facing him, in shirtsleeves, sipping drinks. Sector 8 hadn’t started operating again yet, and they were passing the time. Nestled deep in the black leather chairs, they looked as if they’d been up all night drinking, exhausted, disheveled.

  Qaher looked at them and thought about the desert. He thought about the letter the investigators had given him. He thought about Fadia, who’d left because he didn’t turn up.

  After all those months of faultless work, after being a scrupulous and attentive engineer, driving across the Habshan region in every direction, day and night … after all that, he’d been suspended. The Company had almost fired him, although it didn’t actually accuse him of causing a fire for which he couldn’t possibly be held responsible.

  And yet the clinical way he was informed of his temporary suspension was nothing compared with the appalling news the switchboard operator had delivered when she said Fadia had left. Qaher had called the airport. In vain. And the office of Oman’s minister for education. With no better result. Fadia had gone back to Syria, thinking God only knew what about him. He hadn’t managed to talk to her or to stop her from leaving.

  Laid off and with nothing to do, he’d ended up going to the scene of the disaster a few days later. To see, to touch with his own hands the incident that had so wronged him. The fire still wasn’t completely under control, but the crisis was over. The sector’s wells had been shut down, and all employees had left the site, leaving the firefighters in charge.

  He’d stayed there a long time, gazing at the now inert derricks blackened by smoke. He’d tried to reconnect with the sense of power he’d felt when it was all working. But he failed. Something that had once seemed tangible, huge, and intense now felt dead in the forced inactivity before him. A massive lifeless skeleton disfiguring the landscape. All those thousands of men and machines he’d pictured working to the same rhythm, with the same purpose, delving into the ground—they’d all gone, disappeared, as if they’d never existed. That power was proving as pointless and false as the power he had butted up against as a child when he had to confront his grandmother’s incomprehension and his father’s contempt; it was as deceitful as the noise of the construction site had seemed once he’d witnessed his young uncle’s sentencing. He left, feeling completely indifferent to this dead thing, indifferent to its fate.

  “What are you thinking about, Qaher?” Durieux asked.

  “Stop drinking. She’ll come back, believe me,” Alvaro muttered, pasty-mouthed.

  “Leave him alone,” Bensoussan intervened, even though it seemed to cost him a superhuman effort. Then, more or less mumbling to himself, he added, “We’ve drunk just as much as him.”

  “Come on, get a grip,” Alvaro continued, ignoring the comment.

  But Bensoussan kept going, his voice softening as he added thoughtfully, “Especially as nothing’s changed, you know, it’s only temporary.”

  Qaher looked up slowly. Apart from the time of day and recent events, this could have been one of those countless, tediously repetitive evenings he’d spent with them. Only yesterday he would have smiled at this; now he felt peculiarly moved.

  “I was thinking about my childhood,” he said. “The desert.”

  “The desert?”

  “Yes … it’s hard to tell my childhood and the desert apart.”

  “Do you mean it was empty?” Bensoussan asked. He was trying desperately to bring Qaher back to reality, back to his group of friends here and now. Despite his gloomy mood, Qaher couldn’t help smiling.

  “No, I mean I grew up in the desert.”

  Then he had an idea and suddenly sat up to have a good look at his four friends. Just then a low hum filled the room, a rhythmic, beating sound. The ceiling fans had been put on. The place would soon be filling up. Qaher
looked at his friends, who’d now fallen silent one after the other, having tried to ease his pain in their own individual ways.

  In light of the injustice visited on Qaher and of his own weakness, these people he’d always thought of as strangers were showing their more human side. Their drunken superficiality and their easy carefree life were giving way to a new compassion, to eye contact and gestures and words Qaher would never have expected from them. He was angry with himself for being so blind.

  Cunning, he’d always tried to convince himself, helped overcome differences. But how wrong he’d been! He would never be anything but a Badawi, a child of the desert, and cunning would never eradicate that. Qaher had wanted to break away from his origins. He’d sat here with the others drinking stiff bourbons, he’d laughed and joked with them, he’d also silently despised them and sometimes envied them, but at the same time he’d become deaf to the beating of his own heart, he’d wanted to believe that he’d freed himself of the desert, and that it would never try to get him back again. The penalty inflicted on him by the Company was having an effect: it was opening his eyes. Just as Fadia had done.

  David Bensoussan had forsaken his usual pessimism. It was only a temporary decision, he said again; they’d soon realize Qaher had nothing to do with the accident. They’d end up apologizing and taking him back. Maybe David was right. Probably, even. But that didn’t matter.

  Alvaro, who’d had more to drink than usual, had gone into ecstasy over the old photo of Fadia that Qaher had been keen to show them. He thought she was lovely, so much so that Qaher was almost jealous. But his friend’s slightly drink-fueled words and his own mental picture of Fadia waiting for him in vain had persuaded him not to comment. He had only himself to blame.

  Brint hadn’t said anything specific. He’d come. That was enough. The way he drank spoke for him. Strange as it may seem, he was drinking because he shared Qaher’s pain, and the only way he knew to alleviate pain was to drink. What did it matter then whether Brint understood what was really hurting him? Just having him there, even if he didn’t speak, touched Qaher.

  Durieux, on the other hand, had been angry and disgusted. Qaher would never have suspected that of him. Unlike the others, Durieux hadn’t tried to console him, hadn’t told him to be patient, hadn’t pandered to his vanity, and hadn’t shouldered his pain. No. He’d told him to dump everything, abandon all this, leave, start a new life. Qaher had listened—he wasn’t far from sharing this view—and in the end he realized that Durieux’s vehemence was nudging him toward doing what he himself had never had the courage to do: to leave.

  Qaher put down his half-empty glass. To think he’d always said he didn’t want to fail at anything! He got to his feet and gestured to the others to stay sitting.

  “I’m going out for a bit of a walk,” he said.

  But he’d taken only a couple of steps before he changed his mind; turned back toward his friends, who were still looking at him in surprised silence; and—not sure whether they’d actually understand—said:

  “My name’s Maïouf.”

  Then he headed for the doors and walked out of the Columbia Café.

  45

  There was no clear boundary at the top of the hills, as on that fateful day, that fateful night. Qaher listened intently. He could hear them, hear animals calling. Horses whinnying, goats bleating, foxes yelping. He couldn’t see them, though. They felt so near and yet so far away, living beyond the miseries of mankind. It was all there, just as before: the desert, the sky, and the moon. A red moon, red as the oil fire that had lit up the sky. The expanse of sand stretched before him, curve after curve. No woman would lift the blanket and slip out of the tent. No dark shape would hurry through the darkness with a donkey. He was alone for all eternity. Alone in the middle of the desert.

  Why had he come here? He’d answered a call. He’d driven from expressway to expressway, his mind a blank, until he reached this one which came to a sudden stop deep in the desert, an abrupt end as if the planners had run out of money to finish building it. A road suspended, in the middle of the desert. Was this one last joke? Or a sign? The stars overhead glimmered. He tried to see their reflection on the land. Pointless. There was no river here, and no woman would come to it. He took a step. Then another. He felt so clumsy, so unsure of himself! One more step.

  His self-assurance grew as he walked into the darkness, as the last traces of humanity disappeared, as he left behind that absurdly truncated strip of asphalt, as he moved away from his car whose smell of fuel he could still make out, the same smell that used to hang over his father’s truck which he so longed to ride in as a child. He headed deeper into the night, drawn by those dark shapes blocking the horizon, blacker than the night itself. He immediately recognized the slump and bulk of these dunes, and, in a perverse interplay of shadows, they reminded him of the churlish judge who sentenced his uncle, and they seemed to have been waiting all this time for him here, right here. Just a few ordinary dunes, accumulations of sand around his village.

  He hurried on. He wanted to get away from this flat, stony ground. He wanted to press on into the dust, to hear the fine sand crunch beneath his feet. To trample that judge underfoot along with all those who judged his life. He was irresistibly drawn by the supple, shifting curves, the swelling waves which rose up into the sky, abolishing a sense of space, stretching into infinity. As in the old days. He wanted to get to that mysterious place where the land came to an end.

  Before him was nothingness, empty space, darkness and shadow swallowing up life. Not a soul to chase away or to follow, but a fear to appease, as on that first day long ago. A hillside appeared. He climbed it. The plain spread out beneath Ishtar’s twinkling gaze. Here and there a motionless glitter of light lent an eeriness to this forsaken place covered in unpromising mounds, this vast emptiness which had never been welcoming.

  He sat down at the top of the rise to gather his thoughts. He stayed there a while, letting his eyes drink their fill of the darkness and the moon’s soft light catching on stones. Then he had a sudden urge to see the river, an imperious need, for no apparent reason and with no sense of hope. But he didn’t move. Not straightaway. He leaned forward, carefully untied his laces, took off his shoes and socks, and put them in a neat pile beside him.

  Only then did he stand up. Barefoot, he set off down toward the plain which reminded him of days gone by, when he was a child, days full of promise for a better life, full of dreams and secret joys. With the first few steps he felt a sharp pain. It was such a long time since he’d trodden arid ground like this. His feet and legs and every part of him had lost the habit of the desert. As a child he’d walked barefoot so often. Fire and frost, the sharp stones, he’d known all that, experienced it, overcome it. He was rediscovering it now.

  He was wearing European clothes. He hadn’t planned or prepared anything; he’d simply answered a call. And even now he didn’t know what he was aiming for or where he was heading. But he kept going, his feet bleeding, stifling his pain, hypnotized by the expansive sea of scorched earth swallowing the horizon. He knew perfectly well there wasn’t a river. But still he went. He wanted to find the river as he remembered it, to see its banks, its shimmering salt flats.

  Once, not all that long ago, he’d wanted to feel at one with the land, to blend into the darkness in order to forget his sorrows and fear and remorse. He hadn’t succeeded. He was just a child at the time. Would he be man enough now? Suddenly, out of nowhere, he heard a lament, a sad funereal song sung by a thousand voices, from across the ages, for him and him alone, alone in the middle of the desert, a murmured keening, chanting, weeping full of heartbreak, all around him.

  He doubled up as if he’d been struck, turned around, looked up at the sky, and peered into the shadows. The lament swirled around him, enveloping him. So he started to run, but it followed him. His feet were being ripped by the jagged stones, and the lament followed him. He blocked his ears, and the lament shut in around him, imprisoning him, more r
eal to him than the sky and the earth. He wished he could cry, but found he couldn’t, just as he hadn’t been able to on that other night. He screamed to smother the chanting but it cut through his cries.

  She went out like a fire

  With no embers left to burn

  The river, the tumultuous waters of the river would deliver him from it. The river over there, behind that dune, or that one, beyond the horizon, over there. His salvation. Maïouf launched himself into the darkness.

  46

  “Hello. Is that you? So, do you know where he is?”

  “No idea. No one knows where he is.”

  “But I’ve had the letter! They know what caused the fire. It’s nothing to do with him. His suspension’s over.”

  “I know, David, I know! I’ve read the letter too.”

  “But where the hell’s he gone and hidden himself?”

  “If only I knew … He’s just vanished.”

  47

  Dear Fadia,

  There was a story they told in my village about a woman who caught the eye of a prominent man. She didn’t find him attractive but he was important, and she couldn’t refuse his advances. In order to escape she offered him a deal. He would go to a hill and leave a bag containing two stones: one black and one white. She would then go to the hill, alone, and take one of the stones without looking in the bag. If she came back with the white stone she would be free. If she came back with the black one, she would be his. The man agreed to this.

  But he put two black stones in the bag.