Chaos, A Fable

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  “Sorry, but we had to be very careful.” Now Abdelkrim was smiling. He turned off the TV. “Now we know we can trust you.”

  “It’s no problem,” he said, relieved. “Go ahead.”

  “We need someone to write our story, even if we fail. Especially if we fail. Would you like to be part of our network?”

  “Me?” he said, but it was less a question than an exclamation, almost a protest.

  “We work for the Americans, it’s true. At times we’ve had to work against them. And also for the European Space Agency. Today we may seem complicit with ISIS, or with AQMI. For us, everyone is right, and everyone is wrong. The kings, the presidents, those who believe in the vote, those who do not . . .”

  “What do you call yourselves, your organization?”

  “We don’t have a name. We don’t want to have one.”

  “Who backs you?”

  Abdelkrim smiled. That he could not reveal. They received donations, but they were anonymous, he said. “And voluntary.”

  “Are you anarchists?”

  “Anti-arms more than anything else. The state, the states, are our common enemy. Of course, so is ignorance. But these days all of us, or almost all of us, are deeply ignorant.”

  The Mexican was confused. He moved his head doubtfully.

  “Do you know the story of the Yazidi people?” Abdelkrim continued. “Their Muslim neighbors call them devil worshippers. Right. They deny it. The word devil or Satan in fact doesn’t exist, has never existed, in their language. They don’t use symbols, they don’t have a holy book or prophets. That’s all. That wouldn’t seem to justify the Muslims’ wish to exterminate them, would it? We don’t think so. They believe that even Iblis, the Muslim devil, whose name should never be uttered, has already been (or will be, since, for Allah, time does not exist) forgiven. Your God is omnipotent too, no? Why can’t he pardon the devil, then? We can see and understand the perspectives of hatred and of love, of sin and virtue, which are man’s creations. They are ours. We can see, so to speak, good and evil from the inside and from the outside. If we try.”

  “I’m stupefied,” the Mexican confessed.

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! My friend, that means you have understood something.”

  “I think so,” said the Mexican. “But I’m not . . . I can’t be sure.”

  “Without knowing it, you have already helped us—by listening to those tapes, by trying to decipher those memory cards. We have infected our enemies, who surround us. Your plane leaves at five? Let’s go. There’s not much time. I’ll explain,” Abdelkrim told him.

  They went down to the dining room together.

  VII

  During lunch, Abdelkrim explained how he and his network had rescued virgins in Syria and how, in order to do so, some of his group had worked with—had had to work with—ISIS. On the other hand, members of his organization had acted as intermediaries in the multimillion-dollar sale of a series of eighth-century Manichaean manuscripts, but again, to do so, they had had to help enrich and empower an Israeli extremist group. There are many such examples, Abdelkrim assured him. Exploited orphans here, rape victims there, victims of diseases not yet known, even endangered species, and “a very long et cetera,” he said as they ate their lunch.

  “And why not have a name?” he wanted to know.

  “We’re not politicians” was the Moroccan’s answer.

  Rahma’s voice came from the kitchen, incomprehensible to him.

  Abdelkrim asked for tea.

  “Just a moment,” the Mexican said. “What will become of Boujeloud? Do you know?”

  “Your musician friend? Don’t worry.”

  “But I do worry.”

  Abdelkrim closed and opened his eyes. “You have my word,” he said. “He’ll be fine. When the time comes, I will give you proof.”

  “Who was it that took him?”

  “AQMI.”

  “The Maghrebi Al-Qaeda?”

  “Yes, we have friends there as well, khay.”

  VIII

  They went back up to the living room.

  Abdelkrim clapped his hands twice loudly and called, “Slimane!”

  Slimane came out of Mohammed’s study, looking pale. Caught jerking off, the Mexican thought.

  The boy said, “Khay, we’re surrounded.”

  Abdelkrim told the Mexican, “Don’t worry. It’s not yet time.” He looked at his watch. It was after two.

  He thought, I’m going to miss my plane.

  As if he’d read the Mexican’s thoughts, Abdelkrim said, “Don’t worry. If we can count on strength enough to change the world, we should be able to delay a plane.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Without saying more, Abdelkrim walked down the stairs. He didn’t stop in the dining room, however, but continued to the main floor. Slimane went back into the studio, and the Mexican sat down on a m’tarba. Habit was stronger than reason, and he prepared another pipe of kif.

  Abdelkrim came back a few minutes later and said, quietly, enigmatically, “The death of someone in this house will save you.”

  Then he cried, “Slimane!” and in Darija, “Go downstairs and talk with my father.”

  Slimane came out of the studio and went downstairs to join Mohammed.

  Some of Rahma’s relatives lived on the ground floor of the Zhrouni house; they were of djebala origin, Abdelkrim began to explain.

  “Just a few minutes ago,” he said in a very low voice, “the oldest daughter—she was fifteen—took her own life. They dishonored her yesterday. Today she hanged herself, the poor girl. She will be hanging in hellfire.” He stopped. “But her death has saved you.”

  According to Moroccan custom, when someone dies, the burial has to take place the same day, and before sunset. The news of the girl’s death had spread rapidly, and the little streets around Number Eleven were filling up with people.

  The body would be taken to the Souani mosque, where men would pray for the girl, while family members, female friends, and other women of the neighborhood would wait. Then the procession would go on foot to the Al Moujahidine cemetery, a little more than a kilometer from Souani. Abdelkrim went downstairs again, where the Mexican could hear him talking with Rahma and Mohammed. It seemed to him they were saying they should wait.

  At about three (I’ve missed my flight, the Mexican was saying to himself), a din rose up from the street. The Mexican went into the studio and looked out the window.

  A large crowd, almost entirely women, had gathered—dangerously, he thought—in the little descending street, which seemed as if it couldn’t hold any more people. Dizziness, an irrepressible fear was overtaking him. This wasn’t the kif—it couldn’t be the kif—he said to himself, aware now that he was passing out. His head hit the thickly carpeted floor of Mohammed’s studio. Hamdul-lah!—he heard a voice say deep inside.

  A few minutes later, the men walked out of Mohammed’s house carrying two bodies, indistinguishable from each other, wrapped in a single shroud. They made their way down to the street among waves of wailing. And the procession started off, at a quickening pace, to the sound of cries and clapping.

  Joyride

  I

  When he came to, he was standing in the middle of a crowded street that curved gradually between five- and six-story buildings, descending almost unnoticeably. The shop signs, competing for the visible space, were written in both Arabic and Latin letters. They were all incomprehensible.

  He walked along slowly, bewildered, like someone who has had too much to drink, but he didn’t remember having drunk anything at all. He stopped at a corner, looking for a street name. “Istiklal,” read some golden letters on a ceramic plaque. Istiqlal meant independence, he remembered. Why a k instead of a q? Wasn’t this Avenida Al Istiqlal, then, in Tangier?

  Without thinking, present and past confusing themselves in his mind, he put his right hand into his pants pocket. The pants, made of thick linen, were baggy, and the pocket was deep, widening t
oward the bottom. With two fingers, he took out a piece of paper, which was folded twice and covered with small, tight handwriting, a handwriting resistant to cursive—a woman’s hand? “Take funicular to Karaköy. Ferry to Üsküdar. Enter Şemsi Ahmet Pasha mosque. Approach camera. Sirkeci train station at three.” From the other pocket, he took out a weathered fifty-lira bill. It was Turkish. He was in Istanbul!

  He felt a shudder run through his body, then a powerful dizziness. Down the street, the darkness of a passageway that led farther to the right caught his eye, and he set off in a straight line toward the shade. He walked down marble stairs whose center had been warped by generations of human steps. He sat down in a Turkish coffee shop with a very narrow terrace; a waiter soon came to take his order. The waiter smiled from under a thick mustache; his good humor seemed irrepressible.

  “Coffee,” the Mexican asked.

  “Turkish?”

  “Yes, Turkish, please.”

  With the fine powder of the coffee on his palate, a memory suddenly crystallized in some bypath of his brain—or was it not a memory?

  He saw himself wrapped from head to toe in large, damp towels—or was the membrane enveloping him made of something else entirely?—and stretched out on his back on a slab of hot marble. His eyes were open. He looked up at an enormous cupola with holes in the shape of stars and circles and, beyond the cupola, the evening sky. Was it a hexagonal mausoleum? Firm, expert hands washed his body. He felt voluptuously transported back in time. The hands working on him reduced him to a fetal position—he was a baby being bathed for the first time. Tepid water trickled over his head, his shoulders, his back. The hands stretched him out face up on the marble. And now he felt that he was an old man, that this was the future, that he was already dead. This was his final ablution. Yet, without a doubt, this was a memory! Even now, he felt as if those respectful, reverent hands were washing him for the last time.

  He lowered his eyes to the palm of his hand. A Turkish coin. Symbols, strange words. The cipher: 3.50. Now hands and bodies were pushing him forward. He saw himself compelled to pass through a revolving steel door (a valve, he thought) that would not let him move backward again.

  He stood on the prow of a modern ferry, hemispheric like an outdated version of a flying saucer. It swayed softly over the liquid sapphire of the Bosphoros—or were they on the Golden Horn? A woman in a black caftan, her hair held by a salmon-colored scarf, her eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, walked hurriedly to his right, giving him a small push, and uttered something harsh that he couldn’t understand. A Turkish insult? It was three forty-five, as he could see on the huge wristwatch of a tall, obese man to his left who was talking on his phone. Out of the flesh of this man’s hand—its wrist sporting a black Weekender—two or three of his own could have been fashioned.

  A fresh breeze came up from the south, and the crests on the small waves began to multiply.

  “Üsküdar, Üsküdar,” he kept hearing around him. A group of giddy tourists was boarding the ferry then and gathered a few steps away from him at the guardrail, laughing. Amid the landscape of minarets, pointed sharply like pencils, and bulky cupolas, the golden spire of a Romanesque tower shone in the yellow afternoon sun. Several bloodred flags flew over the houses and the hills, over the trees in the park, and over the water. Seagulls came and went, crying out desperately at the blue wind.

  “Where are you going?”

  A young Turk, smiling excessively, was resting on the rail between him and the tourists.

  “To the mosque.”

  “The Sinan mosque?”

  He nodded.

  “Argentinian?”

  He didn’t feel like replying.

  “Don’t you want some company?”

  “No, thanks.”

  The young man, irritated, pushed away from the guardrail and went into the ferry cafeteria, where the darkness swallowed him up. The ferry moved quickly over the water. The huge European cruise ships, anchored at the edges of the channel—Queen Victoria, Norwegian Spirit—soon fell behind them. The houses of the Pera district, beyond the boats, yawned in the afternoon glare.

  It was a chaotic world, and he stood at the center of the chaos. Here, now, he thought, the wind whipping around his head and the water splitting beneath the double keel of the Turkish ferry. Red flags waved everywhere.

  The ferry veered and slowed down. The smallest of the mosques of Sinan faced him from the other side of the street, beyond the docks—a majestic, pale-gray cupola. When the ferry touched the shore, four or five seagulls hovered in the air over the heads of the passengers. A crow flew among the seagulls, scattering them, and traced a straight line toward the mosque. Behind the ferry, and very near, an empty cargo ship—the waterline was much too high, he thought—blasted its powerful horn. He could read on the hull, far above his head, the name Asir, underneath an Egyptian eye. He felt a faint vertigo. Everything seemed insane. Arabic characters, written in gold in a long turquoise panel outside the mosque shone like jewels from across the street. He was standing now on the Asian shore.

  He knelt, barefoot, under the mosque’s splendid cupola, in imitation of the prostrate Muslims in front of a mihrab. Four or five times, his forehead touched the red carpet of the faithful. A waft of cool air from an air conditioner surprised him. Near the entrance was a panel with numerous surveillance monitors. He raised his face to one of the cameras, which seemed to cover every corner of the mosque. No one came up to him. No one even glanced at him.

  On the return trip, in Sirkeci, he went into the waiting room of the old train station, where several men with thick beards and shaved heads were rehearsing a performance of whirling dervishes. Near a newspaper kiosk, a small man gave him a brochure with information on the next semas. On the back of the brochure, he read, written in crude letters with a yellow Magic Marker, in English, “Back to Pera by tunnel. Drink at Pera Palace.”

  This part of the city, with its steep, narrow streets, reminded him of San Francisco. He was now on the street called Istiklal. It didn’t take him long to find the Pera Palace Hotel.

  On the terrace, which seemed deserted, he sat down at one of the central tables, looking eastward, where the massive Marmara hotel blocked the view of the sky. In one of the French windows of the ninth or tenth floor, a man—tall, slender, in a gray suit—consulted his watch while he talked on the phone. He looked down at the terrace, then abruptly stepped back out of view. That seemed perfectly natural. On the back of his bar receipt, the Mexican read. “Özkaya museum at 7.”

  II

  At the end of the road that led to the stately museum on top of the hill, a woman stood, dressed in white, her shoulders and arms bare. She did not seem to be—she could not have been—the hostess. But was she waiting for him? Tall, svelte, her chestnut hair falling over her shoulders, she brought to mind one of the caryatids of the Erechtheion. And she was waiting for him, because when he came within two or three steps of her, she held out her hand. Her eyes, gray and luminous, overcame him.

  “You’re right on time. Very good. There are some people you must meet.”

  Her voice seemed familiar. Did he know her? The woman walked as if she were in a hurry. He followed her along a white gravel path, over a spongy lawn, and to a very wide terrace, where people were celebrating. A band was playing Italian music. The female singer went very well with the scenery: a set for a spy movie.

  Everything, he thought (or remembered?) had been arranged.

  He felt he was complicit in it all, and yet he was also irrationally happy. For the first time, as she stopped beside a small group of people and whispered into his ear, “Let me introduce you,” he inhaled the woman’s scent.

  His mouth closed, and he couldn’t find anything to say. He nodded.

  His last name was not Rubirosa; it was a misunderstanding. He was about to clarify this, but the woman shot him a glance, and he kept quiet.

  An older man, a head taller than he, said, “A writer?” He gripped his hand an
d added, “We’ve been needing one!” His voice, smooth and silky, seemed nevertheless frank. “Thank you, Nada, for bringing him!”

  Nada. Was it a nom de guerre, like Rubirosa?

  “Xeno recommended him, and I was lucky enough to find him,” she said. He swelled a little with happiness to hear the note of pride in her voice and to know he was the cause of it. He laughed, belatedly. He gave his hand to a Greek princess and a French collector, and then Nada took him by the arm and drew him out of the little circle to resume what seemed to be her mission.

  “Some of them have read about you,” she whispered again, and again her perfume distanced him from what he was hearing and seeing. Her low voice (“I put you up online; I wrote a Wikipedia article and everything. I’m sure some of these people have googled you.”), the music (an Italian song about the world turning and turning in infinite space), the procession of elegant citizens with their luxury and their jewels—this was all scenery. The essence of the drama was this woman. Other rounds of introductions continued on the terrace: a scientist and a collector of Byzantine art; an Indian astronomer; the heir to a famous Austrian fortune; an English duke; an Egyptian magnate turned philanthropist during the Syrian refugee crisis; a US billionaire; another Mexican—they were all there.

  Now the musicians were playing an old French tango.

  The woman’s thick, well-defined eyebrows arched on her luminous forehead, and her nose, which was too large, elevated her to a point beyond beauty. She stopped, facing an arch set upon Doric columns: the entrance to another gallery of the vast museum. He read, “SEA: Swords into Ploughshares; Missiles into Satellites.”

  “SEA?” he asked.

  “Space-era art,” she explained. “Let’s go in.”

  What did it matter who she really was or what her name was or where she came from? He walked two or three paces behind her, in the wake of her delicate odor, which was either intoxicating him or doing something very much like it. He had heard of scents that contained some drug or pheromone. Hers had to be one of those. What did it matter? He marched on, happily, from one place to the next, beside this perfect woman, who showed him off proudly to the world. What more could he want? He wanted her. Perhaps it wouldn’t last, he reflected. Did it matter? No! But he would make it last as long as it could. To the extent of his modest possibilities, he would make it everlasting. He took a glass of red wine from a young waitress with the bearing of a film actress, resolving to drink it very slowly.