Street of Thieves

by Mathias Enard

  Sheikh Nureddin’s office wasn’t locked. I told myself I was imagining things on my own, that they would come back momentarily, expose me, and make fun of me till the end of my days.

  The bookstore’s cash box was there, on the table, no one had emptied it for weeks, there were about two thousand dirhams in it.

  I found other bills in a leather bag, euros and dollars, ten or fifteen thousand dirhams in all, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  Otherwise everything was empty, the desk diaries had disappeared, the contacts, the notebooks full of orders, the account books, the activities, the business affairs of Sheikh Nureddin, all gone. Even his personal computer wasn’t there. Just the monitor.

  I was all alone in the midst of dozens, hundreds of shrink-wrapped books.

  I took a walk around the neighborhood, to see if I might come across a familiar face that belonged to the Group; no one. I went to Bassam’s house, a few feet away from my parents’, I met his mother and asked if she knew where he was; she gave me the kind of look you reserve for contagious beggars, muttered a curse and slammed the door, then reopened it to hand me a dirty old envelope with my name on it—Bassam’s handwriting. I glanced at it, it wasn’t dated today; apparently some old thing he had never mailed, since he hadn’t known where to send it. His mother closed the door again abruptly, with no explanation.

  At four o’clock I had a meeting in the Free Zone with Jean-François for the new job; I wanted to change, to make myself as handsome as possible, I felt as if the world were crumbling into pieces. Going back to the Group, I thought I saw two shady looking characters hanging around our premises; cops in civilian clothes, who knows. I checked my email, there was a message from Judit, she wrote that she was finally coming back to Tangier as planned, but alone; she didn’t have enough money to get a new ticket for Barcelona; she’d be there a little before the set date, the day after tomorrow, she said, after having seen Elena off at the airport.

  This news warmed my heart, even if I was a little wounded that she wasn’t doing it to see me again sooner and for longer, but for unfortunate financial reasons.

  I made my decision, without waiting for the outcome of the afternoon interview. I gathered together all the cash that there could be in Sheikh Nureddin’s office, even the ten-cent pieces. I had almost fifteen or twenty thousand dirhams in bills and coins. More cash than anyone had ever seen, I could have taken a taxi to the suburb of Nador to find Meryem, say I’m taking this young woman away, here’s ten thousand dirhams for your trouble, no one would have objected.

  It was April, the month of dust and lies.

  I gathered my things together, the hundred or so thrillers took up so much space you wouldn’t believe, I emptied the boxes we had just gotten from Saudi Arabia to put them in: in all, with the Kashshaaf, The Stories of the Prophets, the dictionary, the books I liked, there were three big boxes; even some clothes had gone into each of the boxes; plus I took the Group’s laptop, the screen, the keyboard and two or three things I had to keep.

  A real house moving, and nowhere to go.

  When everything was ready, I left for the Free Zone in a bus; I left all my things at the Group, took only the cash and the laptop, that made me look important, a laptop. I thought Jean-François wouldn’t remember me, or else that the secretaries (very dark Moroccans, short skirts, black pantyhose, nice legs, disdain in their looks and voices) wouldn’t let me get to their boss, but no, ten minutes after I reached the office I was shaking hands with Jean-François; he addressed me formally with vous now, saying, aha, here’s Mr. Friend of the Série Noire, and all of a sudden the women in black stockings and miniskirts began regarding the young yokel who had just arrived as a human being; the boss disappeared very quickly, I was placed in a tiny room that adjoined the director’s office, a Frenchman appeared, handed me a book; there you are, he said, our business is to make these things into digital files, copy two pages of this on this computer for me. I took the book, put it on a stand, and copied it while the Frenchman looked at his watch, a big shiny timepiece, after two pages I said, okay that’s it, he replied, hey not bad, you’ve got something, let me look it over, my word it’s pretty good, wait a second. Jean-François reappeared, the other man called him Mr. Bourrelier, it looks good to me Mr. Bourrelier, he said, no problem, Jean-François looked at me smiling, and said I know a good thing when I see it, you go over the details together, Frédéric.

  Frédéric called in the secretary, she took my papers, which she photocopied; Frédéric asked me when I could begin, and I thought a second: if Judit was arriving in Tangier tomorrow I’d want to spend some time with her. Next Monday? That’s fine with me, Frédéric replied. You’re paid by the page, 2,000 characters, 50 cents. That means about 100 euros for an average book. Then we deduct corrections, at 2 cents each. If you copy out 20 books a month, you get 2,000 euros, more or less, if the work is done well.

  I made a quick calculation: to reach 20 books per month, let’s say 200 pages per day, you had to copy out 25 pages in 60 minutes. One page every two minutes, more or less. This Frédéric was an optimist. Or a slave driver, depending.

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to scan the books?”

  “For some of them, no. For the ones with slightly transparent paper, it’s almost impossible, the results are erratic. The OCR doesn’t understand anything, and then you have to take the book apart, lay out the page, correct things, it ends up costing more.”

  To me he sounded like he was speaking Chinese, but fine, he must have known what he was doing.

  “Can I take the work home?”

  “Yes, of course. But you have to work here at least five hours a day, for tax reasons.”

  “Okay.”

  The secretary had me sign a contract, the first one in my life.

  “Good, see you Monday. And welcome.”

  “Till Monday, yes. And thanks.”

  “Thank you.”

  I went to say good-bye to Jean-François, he shook my hand, saying, see you next week, then.

  And I went back to Tangier. On the way, the sea shone.

  Judit was arriving tomorrow. In fifteen days I’d be twenty. The world was a strange mixture of uncertainty and hope.

  In the paper, still no news of who was responsible for the attack in Marrakesh.

  So it was almost seven o’clock when I got back to the neighborhood; night was falling. I had had time to make a plan. First I wanted to clarify a few things; I felt full of energy. I went back to see the bookseller.

  My heart dropped when I reached his shop; the display wasn’t out, but the metal shutters were raised. I had a lump in my throat, I gathered all my courage and pushed open the door; after all I had been coming to this place since I was fifteen or sixteen, I wasn’t going to let Sheikh Nureddin take it away from me.

  The bookseller was sitting behind his desk, he lifted his head; on his face I saw surprise, then hatred, scorn, or pity. I had expected insults; I had imagined myself asking his forgiveness, he would have forgiven me, and we’d have resumed our conversations like before. He remained silent, staring at me, his brow knit; he said nothing; he was contemplating my stupidity, was drowning me in my own cowardliness; I was shrinking, crushed with shame; I couldn’t manage to speak, or to take out the envelope with the dirhams that I had naively prepared for him, I muttered a few words, hello, sorry, I choked and turned tail, fled once again, fled faced with myself; I left at a run; there are things that can’t be fixed. Actually, nothing can be fixed. As I left the store I imagined he’d run after me saying “Come back, boy, come back,” but of course not, and when I think about it today it’s entirely logical that he had only scorn and no pity for a lost kid who had chosen the cudgel and Sheikh Nureddin. I walked quickly to the Group’s premises, my guilt was changing into aggression, I was mentally insulting the poor guy, what came over me, good Lord, to go back there, and two small tears of rage emerged from the corner of my eyes, there was smoke in the night, a thick, whitish smoke mixed with a
shes scattered by the wind; a vapor of anger was weighing down the springtime, a burnt smell was invading my throat and it was only when I reached the corner of the street, seeing the crowd and the fire trucks, that I realized that the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought was burning; tall flames leapt from the windows and licked the upper floor of the building; from outside, with their hoses, firemen sprayed water on the openings, mouths with tongues of fire that spat tons of half-consumed paper debris, while a squad of policemen were trying their best to keep the crowd away from the catastrophe. Hundreds of books were going up in the breeze, invading the air as far as Larache or Tarifa; I pictured the blister packs melting, the heat attacking the compact pages of stacked books that ended up catching and transmitting the destruction to their neighbors, I knew my stock well, near that window was the supply of Heroines, Sexuality, and all the little manuals, over there were the cubic yards of commentaries on the Koran, and right in the middle, on the synthetic rugs that must have been liquefied, my boxes, the Série Noire were flying away too, the Manchettes, the Pronzinis, the McBains, the Izzos and all my nice shirts, my fabulous shoes, my patent leather; the polish must have been burning, the hair gel would fuel all of it and soon, if the firemen didn’t manage to get the fire under control, it would be the gas canister in the kitchen and the one in the bathroom that would explode, sending into the air once and for all what remained of Sheikh Nureddin’s institution.

  The neighbors were there, I recognized them; one was in his bathrobe, he had thrown a bright silver survival blanket over his wife’s shoulders, who must have been in a nightgown; some were silent and downcast, others on the contrary were bellowing and gesticulating like mad. The firemen seemed to be having trouble gaining control of the literature-fed flames.

  After three minutes of morbid, dumbfounded contemplation, I was suddenly overcome with fear; I rushed down the hill toward the center of Tangier. The whole neighborhood knew that I was the bookseller at the Group for Propagation of Koranic Thought. The police were no doubt going to look for me, especially if, as I imagined, the Group was linked closely or remotely to the Marrakesh attack. I didn’t have anywhere to go. Sole possessions: a bag containing a laptop, some cash, and the copy of Choukri’s For Bread Alone that Judit had given me and that I had taken with me to read on the bus.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about the boxes, every cloud has its silver lining. When you leave on a journey, said the Prophet, you have to settle your affairs as if you were going to die. I had seen the bookseller again; the Group was burning, and all my possessions with it; all I had left were my parents. For a few days, and despite the argument with my brother, I had very much wanted to see my mother again. Not today. Not enough strength. Little by little my adrenaline was ebbing, I fell asleep in the bus that took me downtown. Suddenly I was exhausted. I couldn’t manage to think. Finding out what or who had provoked the fire was all the same to me. I got out by the Grand Zoco, a little haggard. Strange day. Now I had to find a place to sleep; I almost took a room in the same hotel as Judit, but that might be a little too much, if she found me set up in the room next door when she arrived in Tangier. Plus I wasn’t sure if she was staying in the same place, it was likely but not certain. I chose another inn, not far, a little lower down near the harbor; the owner looked at me as if I were a leper, young, Moroccan, and without a suitcase; he demanded I pay three nights in advance and repeated ten times that his hovel was a respectable place.

  The digs weren’t bad, with a little wrought-iron balcony, a pretty view of the harbor, the roofs of the old city and above all, Wi-Fi. I searched for news of the fire online, it must not have been a major event, no one was talking about it yet.

  I sent a message to Judit, then I went out to buy some clothes and have a bite to eat.

  I was ready to leave. I’d had no family for two years, no friends for two days, no luggage for two hours. The unconscious doesn’t exist; there are just crumbs of information, scraps of memory not important enough to be dealt with, tatters like those old keypunch strips you used to feed computers; my memories are those scraps of paper, cut up and thrown into the air, mixed together, patched up—I had no idea if they would soon settle down in order to make new sense. Life is a machine to tear out your being; it strips us, from childhood on, in order to repopulate us by plunging us into a bath of contacts, voices, messages that change us endlessly, we are always in motion; a Polaroid just gives an empty portrait, names, a single yet complex name they project onto us and that’s what makes us, so you can call me Moroccan, Moor, Arabic, immigrant or by my first name, call me Ishmael, for example, or whatever you like—I was about to be smashed by part of the truth, and look at me running around Tangier, ignorant, not knowing what had just burned down along with the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, clinging to the hope of Judit and my new job as if they were my life raft. At times I think I can relive the schemings and thoughts of the person I was at that time, but of course this is an illusion; that young man who bought himself two black shirts, two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, and a suitcase is an imitation, just like the clothes he gets; I thought that the violence that surrounded me had no hold over me, no more than the violence in Tripoli, Cairo, or Damascus. Blinded, all I thought about was Judit’s arrival, about those super-sentimental verses by Nizar Qabbani that we used to copy out, in high school, in secret messages for girls who were moved by them, the lines I had already recited to Meryem, when we were gazing at the Strait, not daring to hold hands, and especially the next line, wandering among the stations of madness—Judit’s eyes were then, as this poet-for-the-ladies said, the last boats setting out. I remember, Meryem was worried; she was afraid of our relationship, afraid of the consequences, afraid, afraid of what I could make her do; she didn’t know what solution to find for this adolescent love, she was hesitant to confide in her mother, after all hadn’t she herself married her first cousin, and I remember that one day, when I had sent Bassam to find her, far from the neighborhood, she told me she was afraid I would abandon her to emigrate, so then I tried to reassure her with Qabbani’s verses, when the truth, if it exists, is that I couldn’t have cared less about her, about her, I mean I cared less about her than about satisfying my desire, my pleasure, managing to undress her, to caress her, and when I finally understood, after reading her last letter, in that old envelope picked up at Bassam’s house, when I finally understood that I was responsible for her death, out there in that lost village, for her hemorrhaging during a furtive, amateur abortion, because I hadn’t responded to her despair, any more than I had to the despair of her mother, who died of sorrow a few weeks later, in this paradise of modern Morocco where in theory no woman bleeds to death or ever kills herself or even ever suffers under the blows of any male, for God and family and tradition watch over them and nothing can hurt them, if they are decent, if they are merely decent, as Sheikh Nureddin said so well, Sheikh Nureddin who knew the truth, just as the whole neighborhood had learned it, Bassam in the lead; when I knew I could no longer escape that reality since it was as sordid and tangible as the number on a banknote, as precise and real as the bee gleaning nectar from the saffron flower on the new ten-cent coin I returned with each of the books I sold; when death, fixed and immutable as those coins, caught me by the ear to tell me O my boy, you skipped a step, for eighteen months now you’ve been living in ignorance of me, the world, my world, had to be well and truly destroyed so I didn’t destroy myself further, after this deflagration; Judit had to be by my side so that I didn’t give in to tears, once the shock was over: all of it confirmed an intuition; of course I knew too, my body knew, my dreams knew even if at that moment, at the moment of Meryem’s death at the far end of the Rif, I was in the process of getting myself beaten up in a police station in Casa or begging for an apple at a market—my nightmares, clearer, became only more painful, more vivid, even more unbearable; my conscience, more confused and even less sure of itself, riddled with regrets and with that terrible sensat
ion, which could draw tears of shameful sorrow from me, because, in my dreams, for months, I had been sleeping with a dead girl: with Meryem who was disappearing in the flesh-eating coffin while I was seeing her alive and well, as the seasons passed; she was accompanying me when she was no more and that was so mysterious, so incomprehensible in my still-young heart that I saw a disgusting betrayal in it, a piece of filth even greater than my responsibility for her death, a hatred that turned against Bassam, against my family, against everyone who had prevented me from mourning for Meryem and had forced me to lust for her dead body—just as you slowly withdraw the shroud from a corpse to observe its breasts. On the marble table, I had dreamed of her cold belly and pubis. It was there, the shame, there, in this slippage of time; time is a woman from the graveyard, a woman in white, who washes the bodies of children.

  I bought some shirts with my back tensed, sensing a catastrophe, without knowing it had already taken place. I attributed my feverishness to the fire, to Judit’s arrival, to the attack and to Bassam’s disappearance, without sensing that the worst was already there; I hesitated for a long time in front of a pair of pajamas, hoping Judit would see me in them; I had a fleeting thought, a little sad all the same, about the only woman who had ever seen me naked, not knowing that she no longer existed.

  That evening was one of the longest ever.

  Solitude and waiting.

  I lingered online to find news, news of anything, of Bassam, of Sheikh Nureddin, of Judit, of the world, of Libya, of Syria. The flames were taller than ever. I went out for a walk; the night was warm, the town was crowded, Tangier could, in the spring, be thrilling and dangerous. Everything had turned against me; the burnt smell lingered in my nostrils and blocked the smell of the sea. Young people were walking in threes, in fours, restlessly, swaying their shoulders; at a bend in the street, I saw a guy my age, half-mad, violently attacking a potted tree, flinging it on the ground and shouting insults, for no reason, before being pummeled in turn by the shop owner, who had burst out of his store—blood splattered onto his white T-shirt, he lifted his hand to his face, seeming stunned, before running away, screaming. I remember, the tree was an orange or lemon tree, it had little white flowers, the owner of the store set it back upright in its pot, stroking it if as it were a woman or a child, I think he even spoke to it.