by Ryad Girod
Leila has robbed me of my reason
O Leila, I said, have pity on the fallen
Her love is hidden away … buried deep in entrails
O you alienated one, lift away the humiliation
I am lost and for her, a servant I have become
… while little Aziadeh, surprised, had begun to laugh and then to sing, behind my voice:
… while her father continued to look at me without responding, full of sadness and despair, listening attentively as I let it all out and really anything at all so long as he took in, or at least so I was hoping, everything that was chewing away at my insides without finding an exit or a release or exploding and so that at last my entire head emptied itself of these shitty stories, that of Stan and his Westerns, the tears of King Faisal, the end of Arab civilization, maybe even Nadine’s cries at the same exact moment I was letting all of this out, the acceleration of the beautiful red Camaro and the neglected thought of Ibn Sina, the misinterpreted thought of Ibn Rushd and the trampled-on thought of Ibn ʿArabi, the profaned statues of Abdelkader and François Hollande’s smile … Outside, a wind picked up and pushed drifts of sand in through the glass-lined porticos of the Royal Mall. Grains rolled in unexpected ways across the shopping center’s impeccable tiles. As if the earth was attempting something, a last stand. A losing battle, because as we all know, the earth included, not one drop of sand will be left in Riyadh in twenty or thirty more years. An army of cleaning operatives was deployed before our very eyes to erase, with blows of the scrub brush, the only thing that could remind us that we were in the middle of a desert … Aziadeh’s father took advantage of this interruption to get to his feet and take over the dialog, telling me: You ought to put some order in your thoughts … order is always important when it comes to understanding … and that’s precisely what you’re hoping for … No? Take three thoughts, and by permutating them, that gives you six possible understandings … take five thoughts, one hundred and twenty-five possibilities! etc. He gathered up Aziadeh’s hand and off they went, leaving me alone in front of the Starbucks table that the server had just cleaned with antibacterial spray, alone to calculate the possibilities of understanding for a thought that was based on even just ten concepts … Three million six hundred and twenty-eight thousand eight hundred! And I ended up telling myself that if it was understanding that we wanted, the slightest little bit, anything about anything at all, we would have to acquire the speed and the power of a computer … or maybe not, order having no importance at all, as if some sort of synthetic perception, a priori or a posteriori, was responsible for putting order into all thought … but who is to say? How are we to escape from the paradox of the eye that sees itself or the thought that thinks itself, or here, in this case, of the understanding that tries to understand itself … Lost in the jumble of knots making up these reflections and regretting that I hadn’t brought up, during the entire time that I was confiding in the stranger of the Royal Mall, the critical view that the Muʿtazilites held about reason and knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori, in the houses of wisdom of al-Maʾmun’s flamboyant Baghdad … Lost in all those knots, I imagined Abdelkader lost in the interlacing of the friezes in the majestic Umayyad Mosque and perhaps he too, seeking to tally all of the possible permutations of the group of geometric transformations that were behind the implausible beauty of the ornamentation that hands, expert and skillful, had instinctively known how to deploy … trying to come up with a tally even as, perhaps at the same moment, in Algiers, Poincaré was knocking an audience flat on their asses by summarizing mathematics as a whole … I had forgotten to talk about that as well … thinking that I had told everything to that man, all jumbled and in no semblance of order … that I had revealed everything to that man, as if he would have been able to relieve my mind and been willing to make it his life’s work. As she left, little Aziadeh turned back and shot me a look full of curiosity while I continued to perform my calculations in order to determine all of the possible variations surrounding the thinking of someone like Ibn ʿArabi or even Abdelkader and realizing that they would surpass, in number, a sky full of stars.
You can’t see it, Mansour, but the crowd that demands you be put to death is black with hate. Blacker than a sky without stars. Without stars, without moon, and without God. What trajectory is it that has brought you all the way to the center of this esplanade? Was there only one and one alone? Or would any other path have unerringly brought you right here? Among all the possible combinations of fates, each one would have unerringly brought you right here. Here and now. Among all the possible trajectories, whether that of Nadine or Stan or the stranger of the Royal Mall, that of Ikram or my own … one alone brought you here. Yours. But I am convinced, Mansour, that all the others would have inevitably steered you to the center of this esplanade.
The stranger and his little girl had left me to my tallying the possible combinations of this thought or of that one. As I watched them leave, I asked myself if it was possible for even one single person to have existed who fully understood Ibn ʿArabi or Abdelkader or anybody at all … All things considered, perhaps the stranger had spoken correctly and had sent me off to founder in complete ignorance. I remembered Poincaré’s texts on the foundations of knowledge. I remembered them with a touch of embarrassment, even shame … the embarrassment of having summoned all of those great men to my meager table at the Starbucks and the shame of having mixed them all up in this story … For fifteen days, wrote Poincaré, every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning, I only had to write out the results. A stable combination … and I conceded, disheartened, that all that remained was to once again give in to chance. Let all those ideas jostle around in my head, let them turn over, so to speak, until they result, or never do result, in a stable combination that would allow me to understand any part of this story …
An unexpected humidity had settled upon the city. The winds had turned. I arrived in Stan and Nadine’s neighborhood, and as I got out of the Camaro, I was struck by a thick blanket of air that immediately glued itself to my face. The atmosphere, usually dry and stale, was laden with scents … it seemed as if I could smell the wood of the row of tortuous acacias lining the street and it even seemed that the sounds of the city had found, via that air, a serendipitous conductor … the sounds of the cars, the hammer blows of the workers, the whistling of the blackbirds … I had almost believed myself to be in a city on the Mediterranean, Beirut or Algiers, and expected to catch a glimpse of the sea at any moment. Even the sound of the car door slamming resonated differently. I pushed open the gate and made my way into the grounds of the villa. Ikram’s 4x4 wasn’t there and I thought that maybe they had all gone out, forgetting to shut the gate behind them. I noticed that the garden had miraculously healed from its burns, had been tidied, cleared of the scrub that had choked it. They had even planted graceful blue hydrangeas to conceal the aridity of the place. I also noted that the window to Nadine’s bedroom was open. Moving closer, snippets of conversation reached me intermittently, obscured in part by the whistling the heat produced in the foliage. I shot up the exterior stairs that led to the main floor. Opening the door, I entered the cool hallway and heard the purr of the air conditioner and that of Nadine’s voice … the door to her bedroom was open and a heady odor of burnt oud drifted out. I hesitated to go any further … the fear of seeing them, the two of them, literally stopped me in my tracks … I listened carefully, trying to hear what was being said in the bedroom. I remained motionless on the threshold of their world, looking at that half-yawning door that I would only have to shove to catch them in the act … all I needed to do was stretch out my arm, by three feet, or even less … but my God those three feet seemed far!
Abdelkade
r, too, found the distance to be infinitely long when he stretched out his arm to push open the door of the French Consulate in Damascus so he could propose raising an army of a thousand men and saving what remained to be saved of the Christians during that month of July in 1860. Infinitely long and infinitely short, as all the trajectories of his life seemed to converge toward that midafternoon when he went out onto his balcony and saw the Christian quarter burning, put to the torch and the sword, becoming a true charnel house under a cloud of brown smoke … infinitely short when his men informed him that the Russian Consulate was in flames, that the Dutch consul had been assassinated and that the rioters, the “rabble,” as they said at the time, were scouring the city in search of the French consul to slit his throat. Infinitely short because he had to make the decision to go to the aid of the Christians in their need and despite the many vile abuses perpetrated on him by other Christians in other times, and which other Christians still continued to perpetrate, in Algeria … and on that balcony, on that scorching July day, over the whistling the heat produced in the trees of his garden, Abdelkader immediately knew that there were no parts within the whole that was unfolding by way of his existence and that a transcendental will gathered within it all of the contrary wills that gave the impression of clashing with it … his own, that of the pasha, that of Louis-Napoléon, that of Bugeaud and of Lamoricière, those of the tribes of the east and those to the west … When he saw, from his balcony, his nephew’s horrified face gasping for breath and come to let him know that the Christians were being murdered and their wives raped, he immediately understood which will it was that drove him to again take up his sword and go stand before the door of the French Consulate and stretch his arms wide so that in a few short hours his men stood tall before the dark rabble and his great dwelling was transformed into a replica of the Château d’Amboise, within which thousands of Christians found refuge prior to being transferred to and protected behind the tall ramparts of Ahmed Pasha’s citadel … and in a few days, after the Legion of Honor and the thanks of more or less every Christian in the world, the name Abdelkader was circulated around the luxurious cabinets of London and Paris in search of a consensus if not unanimity as to it being proclaimed that of the future governor of Syria concurrent with the establishment of Lebanon … When, in a few words, he revealed his disinterest and his withdrawal from political affairs: That everyday life does not deceive you, that its vanities do not deceive you on the subject of God … My kingdom is not of this earth.
Once I, in turn, pushed open the door, a violent shock passed through my chest as I saw them there, the two of them … Nadine, sitting cross-legged, passing her fingers through Mansour’s hair … and the devastating effects of that shock spread to my stomach, like a heavy and nauseating echo, as I looked at Mansour’s head resting on Nadine’s thigh. When he saw me, Mansour didn’t get up and Nadine didn’t even bother to pull her hand away … as if they had foreseen my arrival and they had prepared themselves for it … she continued, without faltering, her monologue or her recitation or her prayer, while he peered up at me with a look that was both frightened and engrossed … like an animal fearing that his feed would be taken away or that his head would be cut off. Frozen there in the doorframe, I wordlessly watched the scene, which continued to unfold as if I wasn’t even there. Nadine was caressing Mansour and reciting the poetry of Hafiz, Khayyám, Ibn ʿArabi, or the verses of a prayer to which only they understood the meaning and the words … in that position that left no doubt whatsoever as to their relationship … right in front of the friend that I quite suddenly no longer was.
Mansour, I can no longer exactly remember what forces were able to help me get back down the stairs after I fled your presence … what forces were there to support my legs, turned to ash by the shock, what forces were able to hold me up and carry me down to the bottom of the stairs where Ikram was waiting for me … and what forces urged me to speak to him. All the trajectories in this sky, Mansour, would have brought you to the center of this esplanade … Even if we had never left Damascus and even if you had never climbed atop that dune and if Ikram had never left his Pakistan, even if Nadine had written a thesis as dry as “The Logical Undecidability of Kantian Propositions,” which would have inevitably led her to work in communications or advertising and would have allowed her to blossom in a hectic and exciting Paris where she would have made a life with someone exactly Stan’s opposite … even if, Mansour, you and me, we would have both still ended up on this esplanade.
I was catching my breath at the bottom of the stairway when Ikram approached me and asked me if everything was all right, if I needed help. I looked at him for a long moment without being able to answer, I was still getting over my childish emotional outburst and saw something in his eyes that went beyond concern. Ikram was staring at me, scrutinizing my gestures and my attitude in search of the slightest discernable clue, the proof that would have allowed him to claim the five-hundred-riyal reward for denouncing something that was contrary to public morality … that is what I gathered from the look on his face and what frightened me. Our confrontation went on too long for it to end without consequences. Then I asked him if the two of them were often alone in that bedroom. Who’s that? demanded Ikram, calmly and without really waiting for a response. The branches of the trees rustled in the heat and humidity of that accursed day and, before closing the gate of the villa, before returning to Mansour’s Camaro, as I turned to see Ikram climbing the stairs, I wished with all of my heart that something might occur on those accursed stairs … that, even if it was the only time in the history of this accursed humanity, the path would lose itself in the infinite from which it was formed. But, just as the rustling of the trees didn’t stop, Ikram continued to climb the stairs without losing himself in my imaginary world. Tears of childish rage ran down my cheeks as I closed the car door.
In tears, I asked myself why Providence had dropped us in this arid land when our destinies would have worked out much better in Dubai or Doha … like fish in the waters of that new Arab world, all aglitter and prosperous, filled with prostitutes and electronic music, where we would have found paradise in the bathroom of a nightclub or on the golden divans of a five star hotel as we enjoyed the sunset that cast its rays upon the sludgy and oily sea of the Persian Gulf which was little by little becoming the center of humanity … why did our luck run out two hundred and fifty miles from the heart of the galaxy, leaving us to toil away like slaves and paste whorish smiles onto our faces so that someone would offer us a glass or two of lousy whisky or lousy wine … and have us end up in this implausible story … In tears, I could once again see those that Mansour had let fall as he returned from atop his dune, toward which I was heading as fast as I could, for one more night … where I could cry at my leisure over this new world that was springing up as fast as it could over a sea made of sludge and petroleum and which, I had the feeling, the certitude, I would never see again … A terror-filled night awaited me atop the dune toward which I flew at full speed through the abrasive and absolute brilliance of the day that crashed down upon Mekkah Road … and in spite of all the sun that pasted itself across the windshield, which prevented me from seeing much of anything on that long road, I let loose all the horses of the Camaro … persuaded that nothing could happen to me because I had to be both source and witness to the passion of Mansour.