Street of Thieves

by Mathias Enard

  Nothing less.

  Judit came to pick me up at the airport; the Tunisian customs officers looked like the Moroccan ones, gray and hefty; they yelled at me because I hadn’t filled out the immigration papers, the existence of which I was entirely ignorant, but they took pity on me and let me through without having to go to the end of the line.

  Judit was waiting for me at the exit, I hesitated just for a second about embracing her—but after all we were in the airport of a revolutionary country. I set down my little suitcase, caught Judit by the waist, she threw her hands around my neck and we kissed—finally she was the one, a little embarrassed, who put an end to our show of affection.

  I had just taken a plane for the first time, and for the first time, I was in a foreign country. Judit spoke a lot, very fast, about Tunis, her classes, the city, her apartment, her friends; I looked at her, her long hair lightened by the summer, her fine, precise features, a certain roundness to her cheekbones; her lips, with all those sounds continuously coming out of them.

  Night was falling.

  Judit had decided to treat me to a taxi to ride into town; on our left we could see the lagoon, the lake of Tunis; the sky was still reddening a little in the west.

  She lived in a tiny, rather charming apartment ten minutes by foot from the institute where she had her classes; on the ground floor, next door to an office building, two white rooms looked out onto a little patio, also white, its floor made of blue tile: one bedroom with a large mattress on the floor and a little desk, and a kitchen-living-dining room; all of it couldn’t have measured more than thirty square meters, but the proportions were perfect; I confess I took a lot of pleasure in typing out my dead poilus every morning, watching the shadows grow shorter in the courtyard, then the summer sun exploding on the bluish tiles; in the evening, when Judit returned, we would spray water on the tiles and lie down on them, naked in the false cool of the humidity, until night fell.

  On Saturday, Judit showed me around the center of Tunis and the old city; the heat was less stifling than you’d have thought: a little bit like Tangier, a light breeze blew in from the sea. But the glare was so great that the lagoon looked like an immense expanse of salt, dazzling white. The Tunisian dialect was amusing, more singsong than Moroccan or Algerian, with something oriental about it, I thought. The Medina was a vast labyrinth for devouring tourists and you had to lose yourself in its winding streets to escape from them calling out to you every two minutes, my friend, my friend, a tea my friend? A rug, a souvenir? I was quite proud that they usually talked to me in French because I was with Judit.

  The day before, the day of my arrival, there had been violent clashes between demonstrators and police in front of the government palace, on the Kasbah square; the whole neighborhood had been blocked off, and the sit-in of young people demanding among, other things, the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, had been dispersed with batons and teargas. The Internet was calling on people to revive the Revolution, which one sensed was in the process of dying, or coming to an end, depending, and the elections, in October, had returned power to the hands of Ennahda’s Islamists, as everyone must have expected. The young people sensed that the fruits of their revolt were being stolen from them, and that the rioting would give birth to an extremely conservative, if not reactionary, government—democratic indeed, but they weren’t going to laugh as much as under Ben Ali. As we arrived at the still-barricaded Kasbah square, full of vans of cops and helmeted men, I thought I could smell the sharp stench of teargas—the acid tears of the revolutionaries. The fighting the day before had spread to a large part of the country and to Sidi Bouzid, bastion of the opposition; the police had even used real bullets—to frighten the crowd, they said, but a fourteen-year-old kid had still been killed by a ricochet. According to what I read online, a lot of activists thought the Friday gathering had been organized by Islamists.

  In the summer heat, the Tunisians were complaining more about the (relative) absence of tourists than about the provisional government. They all clung to the date of October 23, which would put a democratic end, they thought, to the gas and the police brutality.

  For me, maybe because I was foreign, there was a certain sadness in this transition, this post-Revolution, and Tunis seemed paralyzed, petrified in the grenade smoke and the whiteness of the summer.

  I was not Ibn Battuta: I was not about to meet important ulemas, or listen to sermons in mosques, even if that wouldn’t have displeased me, but I would have had to be alone there: In Tunisia, as in Morocco, mosques are forbidden to non-Muslims. Since Judit found this measure rather discriminatory—she assured me that was not at all the case in Cairo or Damascus—I searched for the cause, and it was the French, more precisely the first Resident-General in Morocco, Lyautey, who established this law, which then extended to all Maghreb under French rule, to ensure respect among the different religious communities. I don’t know if it’s good or bad; it seemed strange to me that groups of tourists could freely enter the mosque of the Umayyad or of Al-Azhar and not the ones in Kairouan or Zitouna, not to mention Judit who, while not a Muslim, knew many passages from the Koran by heart and was entirely respectful of the religion. Out of solidarity, then, I didn’t go into the famous courtyard with ancient columns or the prayer hall of the most famous mosque in the Maghreb, but no matter. I was only there to be with her, and the week passed quickly; I found that our connection grew stronger every day, closer, so much so that soon it would be very hard to part ways. We spoke a language that belonged only to us, a mixture of literary Arabic, Moroccan dialect, and French; Judit was making huge progress in Arabic daily. And in fact, when I had to leave Tunis, after seven days of dead soldiers, of Casanova—Judit watched me work, over my shoulder, laughing at my poilus and finding the Venetian’s language rather hard to understand—of poor-man’s pool sessions on the patio, of strolls to the Goulette, to Carthage and to La Marsa, the closer the time for departure came, the more depressed I felt about going back to Tangier, all the more so since this time we had no prospect, no plan of getting back together again anytime soon. Judit promised me she would return in the fall, but she didn’t know when or how, no doubt she wouldn’t have the money.

  And then we had to bring ourselves to say good-bye.

  “It’s my turn to visit,” I said, taking her in my arms in the Tunis airport.

  “That would be good . . .”

  “I’ll find a way to get to Barcelona. Allah karim.”

  “Sahih. I’ll wait for you, then.”

  “Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah.”

  And I left, my heart in my shoes.

  COMING back was very hard, I had to work twice as hard because I hadn’t managed to keep up my crazy pace from before; I had run out of money; I was fed up with my co-renters, their stupidity was exhausting; I was counting on Ramadan to boost my morale, but fasting, in the heat and the long summer days, was tough and, beyond everything else, I found it hard, in solitude, to rediscover the festive and spiritual side that should have made the hunger and thirst bearable; I kept thinking about the previous Ramadan, with Bassam, Sheikh Nureddin, and the companions of the Koranic Thought, our iftar in the little neighborhood restaurant, the readings from the Koran till late at night, and the taste of childhood, the familiar and familial taste that the month of fasting had and that did come back to me now, but only to plunge me into sudden melancholy. Alone, the iftar was just a moment of sadness, and even if we made an effort, my terrible companions and I, to be together, the freeze-dried soups, the cans of sardines, or the noodles (not to mention their remarks) added to the sadness. Then I delved alone into my Koran and my Ibn Kathir, but without managing to concentrate, the names of the poilus and Casanova’s memoirs kept dancing in front of my eyes—even when I tried to break the fast in a restaurant and go to the mosque to listen to the readings, it was in vain, I took nothing from it.

  After two weeks, I stopped fasting, angry with myself, but what the hell, it was better no
t to pretend. I spent more time at the office, because the air-conditioning made working more pleasant: at my place, even with no shirt on, I was sweating onto my keyboard. I pictured my combatants suffering from thirst in the summer, in the trenches, the mud must have dried and crusted, the number of men killed was alarming, each one had a name, a place, sometimes I would consult the database to find all the ones who’d died in the same place, as I typed I could glimpse the extent of the catastrophe, Verdun, the Somme and the Chemin des Dames led the list of massacres, and after work I would look at documentaries about World War I on the Internet: the hell of the bombs, the life of the trenches, the terrifyingly cynical military decisions. I reconstructed, with the documents we were digitalizing, the campaign of Belkacem ben Moulloub and many others: Journal of marching and operations of the 3rd Regiment of Algerian Infantry Corps, November 1914. November 5, ’14: At 1 o’clock German attack on the front at the most advanced sections. This attack was stopped by our fire. At 6 o’clock violent German attack on the entire front of the 2nd battalion. The undersigned used almost all his ammunition, he withdrew but stuck to the old trenches along the route occupied by him on the 3rd. The 3rd Battalion set up in its connecting trenches facing north. The 12th Company is sent as reinforcement but cannot completely verify the momentum of retreat. Heated battle all day. The reinforcements arrive too late: the enemy saw the weak point and attacked with very superior forces. But the Germans couldn’t cross the Yser Canal. 6 November ’14: At 5 o’clock violent gunfire on the entire line accompanied by violent cannon fire. No troop movements. The 9th Company has three killed by raking fire, among them Belkacem, he won’t see the end of the war, he won’t return to Constantine.

  I received a second message from Bassam, this time I was absolutely sure it was him:

  Ramadan karim, Lakhdar khouya! Here we’re suffering, but we’re holding strong.

  The email was sent from an equally strange, but different, address, a Robert Smith or something like that.

  Still mysterious.

  Sometimes, to clear my head, late at night, I’d go swimming at one of the beaches on the other side of the airport; the Atlantic was cold and turbulent, it was pleasant, I thought hard about Judit and dreamed she was coming to join me on the spur of the moment, or that I was leaving to visit her. She was on vacation somewhere in Spain with her parents, and didn’t write much, just a text from time to time, from her cellphone. I was afraid she’d dump me, that she’d get tired of me or meet someone else.

  I had to leave. I was fed up with Tangier.

  I had decided to talk to Mr. Bourrelier about it, he might have an idea—after all, thriller-seekers have to help each other out. I asked him if by any chance he might be able to get me a job in his business in France. He opened his eyes wide: in France! Really, if we’re set up here it’s because it costs less, it’s not to send our workers to France! Anyway, isn’t she in Spain, your girlfriend? (He had gone back to tutoyer-ing me when we were alone.) I agreed, saying I didn’t speak Spanish very well, and in any case, with a Schengen visa, you could go anywhere.

  “No luck,” he said, “if you had done the Revolution in Morocco, you could have landed by the thousands in Ceuta or Tarifa like the Tunisians in Lampedusa. Then Zapatero would have slipped you papers to send you north, as a gift to Sarkozy, like Berlusconi . . . It’s too bad . . .”

  That made him crack up, the bastard.

  “Actually, that would have been a good solution. But the Revolution is over here. The Constitutional reform has been adopted, and the elections are about to take place to elect a new government.”

  “And you’re happy?”

  “I don’t know. All I want is to be free to travel, to earn money, to walk around quietly with my girlfriend, to fuck if I want to, to pray if I want to, to sin if I want to, and to read detective novels if I feel like it without anyone finding anything to object to aside from God Himself. And that’s not going to change right away,” I said.

  He looked at me gravely; I suddenly felt as if he were taking me seriously.

  “Yes, that fight isn’t won yet.”

  “All young people are like me,” I added. I suddenly felt emboldened. “The Islamists are old conservatives who steal our religion from us when it should belong to everyone. All they offer are prohibitions and repression. The Arab Left are old union members who are always too late for a strike. Who’s going to represent me?”

  Jean-François suddenly seemed to be concentrating on something.

  “You know, in France, I’m not sure they’re any better off on the political front. Plus, with the crisis . . .”

  He seemed to be thinking.

  “Listen, for your travel plans, I might have an idea. I’m not promising anything, but I’m good friends with one of the directors at Comarit. They have lines for Spain, but also for France. At least you could see the country. I’d hate to lose you, but if you have your heart set on seeing the sights, here, outside of books, you’re not going to travel much.”

  All Tangier natives knew about Comarit, a shipping company, because its name was written in big letters on the ferries entering the port from Tarifa or Algeciras. I didn’t quite see what I could do on a ferry, I had no knowledge of the sea, but this conversation gave me hope. Speaking frankly with Mr. Bourrelier had made me realize who I was: a young Moroccan of twenty from Tangier who wanted nothing but freedom. I wrote a long letter to Judit telling her this story and the possibilities that went with it, she replied almost immediately with Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! I felt my heart glowing.

  THAT night I was again captive to my nightmares. I dreamed I was slapping Judit, very hard, I was beating her because she was jealous of Meryem; I was hitting her with all my strength, and she was shouting, she was screaming and struggling between blows, but she wasn’t running away—after a while I rejoined Meryem in her bedroom, began to caress her, undress her, I put my hand between her legs, it was warm, then I turned toward an old Sheikh who was there, next to the bed. That’s normal Lakhdar, he said, death warms corpses up after a certain amount of time, it’s like that, and I said it’s annoying, all this blood coming out from there, and he replied but it’s from you, this blood, and I looked at my penis, a red liquid was streaming from the urethra, continuously: the more excited I got from Meryem’s burning body, at the contact of her remains, made incandescent by being long dead, the more blood spurted out; I penetrated Meryem, my sex was consumed by hers; her eyes were still closed. Judit had replaced the Sheikh by the side of the bed: she said yes, yes, like that, that’s good, you see, you’re filling her, that’s good, look, and in fact the blood was coming out of Meryem’s motionless lips, overflowing from her nostrils onto her white teeth, I was terrified but I couldn’t stop, I moved in and out of her in a clinging warmth.

  I woke up with my belly sticky from semen, my heart pounding.

  I told myself I was crazy, that I had come down with some terrible mental illness; I curled up in the night like a dog, moaning with anguish.

  II

  BARZAKH

  THE sole material trace of my childhood still left is two photos I’ve always kept in my wallet: one of Meryem when she was little, on vacation in a village, sitting against a tree, and another of my mother with my little sister Nour in her arms. Nothing else. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if, instead of always running farther away, instead of trying to escape the consequences of my actions, I had returned home, if I had insisted, if I had tried to impose myself on them at all costs, to repent, accept all the punishments, all the humiliations; I’ve often wondered if they would have ended up taking me back, if I could have found a place with them. Of course the question shouldn’t be asked, I have to accept my travels, which are another name for Fate.

  Like those soldiers in 1914, who left their villages or douars without knowing what was awaiting them, on September 21, 2011, I boarded the Ibn Battuta, a ferry belonging to the Comanav-Comarit Company, at the port of Mediter
ranean Tangier for my first crossing of the Strait, headed for Algeciras as a bar waiter and general dogsbody, or rather, mostly as a dogsbody. A cabin boy. The ship’s name, Ibn Battuta, seemed to me a sign, a good omen. The crew looked askance at this teacher’s pet who’d never set foot on ship, but fine, I thought, the main thing would be to make myself accepted little by little. I tried to be obliging and to answer the scornful looks with kindness, which might have made me seem weak or an idiot but no matter, I was on the sea, en route to Spain. Obviously, I had no visa to leave the Algeciras port; for the time being I’d do round trips, circles in the Strait, but someday they’d end up letting me disembark.

  I had no plan.

  Jean-François’s friend had agreed to hire me for a pitiful salary, which just barely paid for my rent in Tangier. But don’t worry, he said, there are tips, bonuses, extras. Mr. Bourrelier had been sorry to let me go, there were still miles of dead men to whom a digital existence had to be given and books that awaited a new electronic life, but deep down he was happy for me, I think. So, bon voyage, he said to me as he held out his hand, and above all don’t forget, if you want to come back you’ll always be welcome.

  The Ibn Battuta was not the Pequod, not a single mast, no whale oil: it was an old British vessel 130 meters long, built in 1981, and could transport a thousand passengers and two-hundred-fifty cars at nineteen knots, despite at least a meter’s thickness of several layers of paint that had to have weighed it down a little. It took between an hour and a half and two hours to reach Andalusia, and we did two trips a day; I was beginning to help unload the trucks and cars either at six in the morning and getting home at six at night, or at eleven in the morning, in which case I was back by eleven at night.