by Amin Maalouf
“You were wrong, Mourad! You should never have done that!”
“He deserved it!”
Then I read him the text of the announcement. Three, four times he whispered, “My God! My God!” His voice was not the same. I could tell he had gone pale. I could hear Tania next to him asking what had happened. Mourad handed her the phone. I read the five fateful lines. Like him, she murmured, “My God! My God!” Then, “God forgive us.”
Feeling the need to lessen the impact of the blow I had dealt them in the middle of the night, I said, though I only half believed it:
“All is not lost. When Albert sent me that message, he was still alive, and we can’t be sure that he carried out his threat. It’s not easy to kill yourself, it is a brutal gesture, a man might pull back at the last minute. I was calling to offer my condolences, I assumed you would have heard he was dead and you would both be devastated. The fact that you haven’t heard anything is reassuring; maybe nothing has happened yet, maybe he changed his mind.”
“Yes, maybe,” said Tania, who did not seem to believe it any more than I did.
Mourad called me the following morning to tell me he had kicked in the door of Albert’s apartment, but he wasn’t there. Not alive, not dead. His neighbours had not seen him for days, and no one knew where he might be.
My grandmother had had no news either. Taking infinite precautions, I sounded her out, avoiding any reference to his disappearance, pretending that I had a message for him and that I couldn’t get in touch with him to pass it on. I hoped that she would say, actually, he had just dropped by to see her. I knew that, since my departure, Albert visited her regularly. Of all my friends, he was the one who was kindest to her. Whenever she saw him show up at our door, her face lit up; if two weeks passed without him dropping by, she would ask me why we didn’t see him anymore. “The boy is all alone in this world,” she would sometimes say, as though to justify this maternal tenderness for a stranger.
It was true. Albert had no family. As far back as I can remember—and we knew each other as children—he had always been alone. His father had worked in Africa, his mother had been committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland; then they had died, first one, then the other: she from tuberculosis, people said; while he had been murdered. If I wanted to be meticulous, I should insert “people say” or “people said” at the end of every sentence, given that Albert never talked about his family, except in vague allusions. Even after we became close, it was not a subject I ever felt I could broach with him.
All I knew, or thought I knew, I gleaned from whisperings at school. We went through Jesuit school together. I must have met him for the first time when I was six and he was seven. Which doesn’t mean that we were childhood friends. He was a boarder, I was a day pupil, and these two “tribes” rarely mixed. When class finished, we got onto a bus that took each of us back to our own houses. They, the boarders, stayed behind, together.
In a sense, Albert’s case was not out of the ordinary. When a pupil was a boarder, it was usually because his parents were not around. But, obviously there is not around and “not around,” and the rumours were not all the same. Not all absent mothers were rumoured to be consumptives, and not all absent fathers ended up being murdered. Bootlegger? That was the rumour that went around at school. He might have been an honest salesman, a reckless contractor, a road builder, even a civil servant in the colonial administration, but the word that cropped up in the whispered conversations was a half-Arabic, half-Turkish word—meharrebji, which means smuggler. Personally, I had no desire to embarrass Albert by asking questions. Looking back, I think it was my discretion that first brought us together, and later cemented our friendship. With me, Albert had no need to be on his guard.
What is certain is that Albert never lived with his parents, and that his father died a violent death when we were about ten or eleven and in the fifth grade.
Usually, when a pupil lost a close relative, he went home to his family for a few days. Albert didn’t go anywhere. It seemed he had no family in the country. He stayed at school. He was simply excused from classes for a day or two.
A mass was celebrated in memory of his dead father. “Have a thought for your friend Albert, who has just lost his papa!” the priest said, and then exhorted the student not to allow hatred to take root in his soul, and leave to the justice of God and of men the task of punishing the guilty. This was how we found out it had been murder.
All eyes naturally turned towards the boy concerned, who was not in tears, as I had expected him to be. It’s true that he had not lost his father just now, he had lost him a long time ago, if he had ever had him.
I remember the very first time my attention was drawn to him. A young, inexperienced teacher had just announced that he was organizing an excursion, and rashly told pupils to add their names to a form lying on his desk, making it clear that he could take only the first ten who signed. All our classmates rushed at once, instantly triggering a bedlam of jostling, elbowing, brawling, and shouting. I had stayed in my seat and, from behind me, I distinctly heard someone mutter “Barbarians!” I turned around, our eyes met, and we smiled. This is the moment when our friendship was born.
I suppose Albert must have had the same word on his lip the day he heard that his father had been murdered; and also, much later, as he stared out the window of his sixth-floor apartment, watching the “fireworks” of war.
“Barbarians!”
It was dark, that Sunday, when Sémiramis came back and knocked at Adam’s door, less unobtrusively this time.
“I can bring you up a tray if you like, but I honestly think you should take a break. You’ve been working since dawn. You don’t fancy joining me in the dining room?”
“Like yesterday?”
“Like yesterday. The same mezze, the same champagne, the same temperature. And, of course, the same hostess …”
She accompanied the words with a captivating smile it would have been futile to resist.
Ten minutes later, they were sitting exactly where they had been the night before. The hotel owner could have added “the same waiter, the same candles.”
She allowed her friend a few mouthfuls, a few sips, before saying ingenuously:
“I suppose it would be impertinent for the mistress of the house to ask her guest what work it is he finds so engrossing. You never go out, you barely talk, and if I hadn’t forced you, you wouldn’t even have come up to eat. What’s more, you’re dishevelled and you look exhausted, as though you’d just been in a fight …”
Adam simply gave her a smile and an affectionate pat on the arm. Then he ran his fingers through his hair like a crude comb. She waited. The silence continued. After two interminable minutes, just when the “mistress,” having given up hope of getting a response, was about to change the subject, her “guest” said, in a tone of feigned contrition:
“I have a flaw that is all too common among historians: I am more interested in bygone eras than in my own, and in the lives of my subjects than in my own. Ask me about the Punic Wars, the Gallic Wars, or the Barbarian Invasions and you won’t get me to shut up. Ask me about the wars I’ve lived through, in my country, in my region, about the clashes in which I’ve been an eyewitness, or lost friends, or very nearly been among the victims, and you’ll get no more than two or three sentences at most. Ask me about Cicero, about Attila and I’m voluble. Talk to me about my own life, those of my friends, and I’m dumbstruck.”
“Why?”
“The primary reason is related to my profession, as I said. When a historian says ‘my era,’ what spontaneously comes to mind is not the one into which he was born, the one he did not choose, but the one to which he has decided to devote his life—in my case the Roman Era. That said, I’m not a fool, and I’m not trying to hide from the facts, as they say. There is no Herodotean oath that compels a historian to remain within his period. The truth is, I’ve alwa
ys felt uncomfortable, pathologically uncomfortable, whenever I’ve wanted to talk about myself, my country, my friends, my wars. But over the past two days, since I’ve been here, I’ve been forcing myself to try and overcome this problem, or rather this debility.”
“And are you?”
“Not completely. At times, I manage to marshal my memories and recount an episode. But most of the time I get caught up in daydreams, reminiscences, regrets …”
As though to illustrate what he had just said, he fell silent and gazed into the middle distance. For several long seconds, his friend allowed him to drift before bringing him back to earth with a second question:
“And have you been thinking about it for long?”
“My mental debility? Yes, for years now. But I lived with it, I didn’t try to overcome it. I had specific projects lined up for my sabbatical. Then the ghosts of my childhood burst into my life. Out of the blue! Seventy-two hours ago, I hadn’t even begun to think about making this trip. Even yesterday, when I landed …”
Again, he fell silent, and again he stared into the distance. Clearly he was still making sense of things, but only to himself, and his friend felt as though he had not even realized he was no longer speaking.
When he came back to her, he said, stricken:
“I’m supposed to be working on the major biography of Attila that my editor has been waiting on for the past fifteen years.”
It was now Sémiramis’s turn to lay a protective hand on his arm.
“You look exhausted again. Don’t say any more. We can talk about all of this later, later …”
-
The Fourth Day
-
1
The moment he opened his eyes, Adam began writing again.
The bellboy who brought up his breakfast found him already at his desk, poring over his notebook. His bed was unmade; but to judge from his face, he had slept little.
MONDAY, APRIL 23
All night, names, voices, shadows, faces, have been fluttering inside my head like irritating fireflies.
In my state of semi-wakefulness, genuine memories melted into fantasies and dreams. So much so that, when I got up, my mind was muddled and my sense of judgement precarious.
I shouldn’t start writing straight away, but I can’t stop myself. I’m counting on strong coffee to put things into perspective.
The backdrop to his restless sleep had been the tragedy that occurred twenty years earlier, the one he had begun recounting the night before.
Reconstructing it in a faithful, coherent manner required a mammoth effort of memory and perspective. Because, if the death of his childhood friend was, as it evidently was, one of the incidents of the war in which the country was mired, Albert’s fate was different to that of the unfortunates who had their throats cut by bloodthirsty militias, who were mutilated in random bombings, or were gunned down by the snipers hiding on the rooftops. Since he had clearly expressed his intention to take his own life, his action took on a very different significance—a revolt against the murderous folly.
We, his friends, were mostly concerned to find out what had become of him, whether he had actually committed suicide as his strange announcement suggested. Those of us who were still in the country, particularly Mourad and Tania, played an active role in the search. It should be said that we could no longer count on the authorities, who had lost all authority in the country; nor, obviously, on the family of the “missing person,” since he had none.
Despite our efforts, every day we seemed a little more in the dark. Having failed to find him at his apartment, having questioned his neighbours without gleaning any useful information, we had no idea where he might have gone to commit his desperate act, how he might have planned to go about it, and why there was still no sign of his remains.
It happened during the Christmas holidays, and there were endless discussions between those of us who knew Albert, especially his friends from school and from university. Everyone had their own version of the incident, one that broadly reflected their personal worries and fears rather than the reality of the event. I received numerous telephone calls and many letters that I have carefully kept. Including this letter from one of our old history teachers, Father François-Xavier, who was then running a school in Mulhouse in Alsace.
My very dear Adam,
I trust that these few lines find you and those close to you in good health.
The news from your country continues to be very painful for those, like me, who have known and loved it. And this morning, I have had word of a tragedy of a different nature, the disappearance of my former pupil Albert Kithar, which, I am assured, is not related, or not directly, to political violence […]
Back when I was teaching at the Collège, I found Albert a difficult but endearing boy. I do not think he paid much heed to the things I endeavoured to teach his classmates. I can see him still, at the back of the class, head bowed, engrossed in a book—usually a science-fiction novel, if memory serves. And yet he was not as indifferent, not as absent as he appeared. Whenever I mentioned a subject that interested him, he instantly turned his attention on me.
I remember a class in which I was discussing Benjamin Franklin. I had talked about his ideas, his role in the struggle for American independence, his time in France on the eve of the Revolution. Through all this, Albert was manifestly absent. I was constantly watching him out of the corner of my eye, as a shepherd is supposed to keep an eye on a stray sheep. At some point, I raised the subject of his discovery of electricity. Albert sits up, and his gaze, usually elusive, becomes focused and intent. I had intended to quickly pass over this aspect of Franklin’s work, but, so thrilled was I to have caught Albert’s attention for once, that I ended up spending several minutes giving a detailed explanation of the kite experiment and the invention of the lightning conductor. I think I remember that, in my enthusiasm, I even suggested an impromptu theory about the relationship between Franklin’s experiments with electricity and his adherence to the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
I have, as you can tell, fond memories of that period which now seems so remote. Since that time, I cannot but take a profound interest in the fate of your country, and in the destiny of the promising young men I knew there.
I would be most grateful if you could keep me informed of any developments in this worrying event, which, I still dare to hope, many not end in grief […]
Faithfully yours,
François-Xavier, W., s.j.
A week later, the truth was eventually revealed.
What happened is more or less as follows. On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 11, Albert heads off on foot to visit a former classmate who is travelling to France the following day. He gives him three envelopes, obviously containing the famous “notices”—including the one addressed to me—and asks him to post them the moment he lands at Orly airport. Although he is asked to come inside, he stays on the doorstep and quickly leaves, explaining that he wants to be home before it begins to get dark. The other does not insist. The situation in the capital is very tense. There had been a number of clashes the night before, and there was still the occasional sound of sporadic gunfire. Those few people who ventured out onto the street did not linger long.
Albert had planned to lock himself in his apartment, tidy the place a little, perhaps add a post scriptum to the farewell letter he planned to leave for the friends who would find him, swallow a massive dose of barbiturates, then lie down on his bed in a dark suit, arms by his sides. He was not worried about his safety on the streets, he was simply in a hurry to carry out the plan he had made, mentally running through the various things he intended to do.
Then, at the corner of a deserted street, a car screeches to a halt, and two young men jump out armed with guns, Albert does not even give them a glance, he simply takes a step to his left so he is walking closer to the wall. Engrosse
d in his thoughts, he does not realize that the militiamen want him. Not him, Albert Kithar in person, but the anonymous passerby that he was. The armed men were looking to kidnap someone—anyone—who lived in the district, and there were no other pedestrians on the streets.
His kidnappers grab him by the arms and drag him into the car, which drives off at top speed. Hoping to scare him, they warn him that if he screams, if he struggles or tries to escape, they’ll put a bullet in his head.
When he responds to their threats with a howl of laughter, as though he has just heard a hilarious joke, they assume they have happened either upon a simpleton, or upon the bravest man in the country.
When they reach their hideout, they lock their prey in a garage with his hands lashed behind his back and his eyes blindfolded. Still, Albert is smiling like a fool. A brawny man comes and sits opposite him and, in a tone intended to be venomous but which sounds apologetic, he says:
“They’ve kidnapped my son.”
The captive stops smiling. In a neutral voice he simply says:
“I hope he comes back safe and sound.”
“You’ve got good reason to hope so,” the other man says. ”If my son doesn’t come back, I plan on taking your life.”
Albert replies that he has no interest in his own life. In saying it, he uses a common expression that means “I don’t give a damn.”
“What do you mean you don’t give a damn? About your own life? Don’t try to play the tough guy! And stop smiling like a halfwit. You’d do better to pray that my son is returned to me if you want to save your skin!”