by Amin Maalouf
-
4
Having reaffirmed his decision not to attend his former friend’s funeral the following day, Adam immediately picked up the thread of his story.
The “package” arrived in perfect condition. I vainly scanned his eyes and his words for the stigmata left by the kidnapping and the suicide attempt. Nothing. Albert was completely back to his old self. Or at least that is my memory of the time he spent in Paris in February 1980.
At the beginning, at the very beginning, in the first hours, I was ill at ease. I had moved him into the guest room in my apartment, I watched him constantly out of the corner of my eye and I refrained from mentioning certain things. Then, little by little, I relaxed until I was joking about everything, starting with the irony of his being kidnapped just at the moment when he was about to kill himself. From time to time, Patricia, my partner at the time, would reproach me: “Be careful, he’s fragile, don’t be fooled by his apparent good humour.” I didn’t agree with her; I felt instinctively that the best approach was to go easy on him, not to treat him like a survivor, or even like a convalescent, but like the quick-witted friend he had always been, able to laugh at anything, including his own misfortunes. I was not wrong. Two days after his arrival, I knew that the battle was won.
It was a Saturday. Both of us had woken up very early, at about 5:00 a.m., and so as not to wake my partner, we had holed up in the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. I had started making coffee, but my guest had other things in mind.
“Come on, get dressed, let’s go out,” he said. “For years I’ve been dreaming about having breakfast in a bistro in Paris. Now is my chance, let’s go, my treat. And besides, there’s some stuff I want to tell you.”
Outside, it was cold, rainy, and still almost pitch dark. But we were so happy to be wandering around Paris together.
A brasserie caught our eye, and we took a table among the market traders and ordered a banquet—hot chocolate, pastries, jams, cheese, eggs, juice, fruit, cereal, even pancakes with maple syrup …
“I’ve got a declaration to make,” Albert said, “a declaration in five points …”
His tone was solemn, almost official, though this was tempered by his sardonic smile and the half-eaten croissant in his hand.
“Firstly, what I tried to do a few weeks ago is something I will never do again, a page has been turned. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there’s anything I regret. Let’s just say that I don’t regret the fact that things turned out the way they did. Or coming through it unscathed.”
I nod several times without interrupting him. A shadow flickers across his face.
“Secondly: I am never going back. On reflection—and you might think this is stupid, but you shouldn’t feel obliged to tell me—on reflection, it wasn’t life that was weighing me down, I think I was just looking for a way out, I couldn’t carry on living in that country, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave it. I couldn’t find the strength to get myself out of my apartment. I’d come to the point where I thought the best thing would be to fall asleep one last time surrounded by my furniture, my books and my music boxes and never wake up, or to wake up … elsewhere. Fate decided otherwise, I acknowledge it, I bow before it.”
There was a quiver in his voice, which he quickly hid with a cough before continuing:
“As long as I was back there, I felt incapable of leaving. Now that I’m far away, I feel completely incapable of going back. I’m like a survivor of a shipwreck. I couldn’t jump when the ship started taking in water, but now that I have, it would never occur to me to go back aboard. To me, that is another page that has been definitively turned. And not just for me, either … I don’t have to tell you that the Levant we knew is lost, irredeemably.”
He was right, I was hardly in a position to argue, having left my homeland before he did. But what Albert had said was too brutal, too definitive; I felt obliged to express some vague objection, while taking care not to hijack the conversation so that my friend could carry on.
“Thirdly: I’m not going to stay in France, either. I’m leaving for America. I love Paris, and I feel happy here. Thanks to the years I spent with the Jesuit fathers, nothing in France is entirely alien to me. Or to you, I imagine … But, for what I plan to do, I need to be there, in America. I’m just hesitating between New York and California. I’ll decide when I get there …”
A silence came over him, like an internal deliberation, one that I eventually broke.
“And fourthly?”
“Fourthly, I think that, now, for the first time since I was born, I know what I want to do with my life. It’s taken … all of this.”
I wait. He says nothing more. So I ask, the way we used to when we were teenagers:
“So, what is it? What do you want to do with your life?”
“I’m not going to tell you now. You’ll find out when I’ve done it.”
I thought about pressing him, but I didn’t; I didn’t want Albert to promise me he was going to do extraordinary things only to later feel that he was not equal to the situation. Better to let him get back on his feet calmly, with no pressure, in his own time.
Adam closed his notebook and checked his watch. Seven o’clock already, give or take a minute. He decided to call Sémiramis. She had told him she would be spending the day in the city and would call when she got back, but he wanted to call her first.
When she answered her mobile phone, he asked whether she was home yet.
“Not yet. I’m on my way. But we can talk, I’m not the one driving. Good day’s work?”
“Not as good as the previous days, I was less focused …”
“That’s my fault, I led you astray.”
This was probably true, but it would have been unseemly for him to say so.
“No, not at all,” he protested.
But, as though he had not spoken, she added:
“You were working so well and I had to go and disturb you. You must really resent me …”
“Oh, I do!”
He laughed and gave his lover a moment to laugh before adding:
“We shared a wonderful moment, one that we’ll never forget. That’s all that matters.”
“Despite the regrets.”
“Yes, despite the regrets.”
“So, shall we have dinner together again tonight?”
“Again tonight.”
“And afterwards, we go our separate ways?”
“No. Afterwards, we don’t go our separate ways.”
“We’re having a second meeting?”
She had obviously used the word because she was not alone in the car and could not say “a second night together.” Adam had no need to take similar precautions since he was alone in his room, with no one to overhear, but he decided to use the same coded language.
“No, not a second meeting, we are simply reconvening. The initial meeting was never concluded, as far as I’m aware …”
-
The Sixth Day
-
1
In the morning, the two lovers met, as they had the previous day, on the veranda.
Adam had been the first to get up, but had waited for Sémiramis to join him so that she could press the button that brought the breakfast tray up from the ground floor.
“Today is Mourad’s funeral,” she remarked, preparing to nag him again about shunning the ceremony. But from the look on his face, she realized it would serve no purpose. Instead, she simply asked whether he had already written to their old friends to tell them the sad news.
“That’s what I was planning to do today. While you’re at the funeral, I’ll write an announcement to send to our mutual acquaintances, and individual letters to two or three close friends in which I’ll mention the reunion Tania would like to hold.”
His lover gently laid her hand on
his.
“That’s good. That way you’ll be participating in the funeral, from a distance.”
A silence.
“And do you know who you’re going to start with?”
Adam closed his eyes and nodded slightly, and in doing so, readopted the body language of the Levant, after so many years absence.
“Yes, I know.”
Sémiramis was clearly waiting for him to give her a name, but he gave her only an enigmatic smile. She raised her coffee cup in a toast, as though it was already evening and they were once again drinking champagne.
“To friends in far-flung places!”
“To the survivors.”
It was not a felicitous expression. His friend’s eyes misted over. She quickly recovered her composure, raised her cup again, and, with a mixture of effrontery and tenderness, said:
“To those who left!”
Back in his room, Adam threw open the window overlooking the valley. He took a long moment to breathe in the pine-scented air of the forest before sitting at his table and opening his laptop to begin the first letter.
My dearest Albert,
I am sorry to say that this email brings bad news. It’s about Mourad. He died last Saturday, ‘following a long illness’ as people say. He was only forty-nine. His funeral takes place today.
On the last few occasions we spoke about him, we said little that was good. His death is not likely to change our opinion, I suppose; but it compels us to change our attitude.
Tania would love to hear from you. She would also like his old friends to meet up sometime soon in his memory. I feel that a ceremony with speeches in honour of the deceased would be inappropriate and embarrassing; on the other hand, I like the idea of a reunion of our old gang of friends. Think about it. We’ll discuss it later …
Warm wishes,
Adam
Having sent the email, Adam went through his electronic address book and found a number of people with whom he had been in touch in recent years, the “mutual acquaintances” he had mentioned to Sémiramis. All of them were “in emigration,” to use the laconic phrase used by those who had remained in the country.
It took him some time to compose the death notice he intended to send them. He tried to find the right tone, midway between intimate whisper and official announcement. Eventually, out of sheer exhaustion, and out of laziness, he simply copied and pasted the first paragraph of his email to Albert, and the first sentence of the third paragraph—Tania would love to hear from you—before concluding, I hope our next correspondence will be in less unhappy circumstances.”
He looked at his watch, it was precisely eleven o’clock, the time set for the funeral. He observed a few seconds of meditative silence; then, to avoid allowing his guilty conscience free reign, he returned to his emails to discover, to his great surprise, that Albert had already responded. Despite the fact that, in Indiana, it must be three o’clock in the morning or something of the sort.
My Dearest Adam,
Having got up because I suffer from insomnia, I just stumbled upon your email.
I am saddened by the news, and later today I will write a letter to Tania for whom I have only ever felt affection and friendship; as for Mourad, although I share your opinion on his public actions, I will never forget what he did for me during my ordeal. If he had not been able to show consideration and tact, I would not have come through it alive. If only for this reason, I think it appropriate that I pay my last respects—in thought, naturally—before his coffin. Besides, in my heart, I do not hate him; I simply regret the moral drift which, in the end, cost him much more than it did you or me.
As for the idea of reuniting the old gang, I think it is wonderful. The circumstances and the pretext don’t really matter. In fact, I can’t help but wonder why we never thought of doing it before … Even as I wrote those words, the answer leapt out at me. It was because of Mourad. A reunion with him had become unthinkable, a reunion without him made no sense. Following this line of reasoning, I realize that his death is the perfect pretext for us all to meet up again. Don’t worry, I am not going to say that to Tania. If she needs to believe that it is Mourad’s memory bringing us together, we should leave her with her illusions and her consolation.
So, yes, as far as the reunion goes, I’m in. But it can’t take place in the “old country.” As an American citizen, I am not supposed to travel there, as you know. Furthermore, given that my institute has ties to the Pentagon, a personal visit is not merely inadvisable, it is strictly forbidden. Sorry! If you want me to be there, the reunion will have to take place elsewhere. I think Paris would be the best place, but I’m open to other suggestions.
In terms of dates, on the other hand, I’m pretty flexible. I’m happy to fit in with whatever you decide as long as you give me a couple of weeks’ advance notice.
Do it soon, I’m eager to see our friends of long ago. I’ve had no contact with most of them for donkey’s years …
Yours faithfully,
A
Adam replied immediately, a single succinct paragraph:
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, Albert. I understand your reservations. And since there can be no question of us meeting up without you, let’s make it Paris. It suits me fine, as you can imagine. I’ll talk to the others and suggest a few different dates … Regards, A
He clicked Send, closed his laptop, and opened his notebook at the page where he had left off the night before.
I’ve always known that the institute where Albert works is an important think tank linked for decades to the American military, though, until just now, he never said as much explicitly. From someone as apolitical as he was, it is undeniably paradoxical, not to say peculiar. He ended up there by a roundabout route, but it was a logical one.
When he told me, over that gluttonous breakfast in Paris twenty years ago, that he finally knew what he planned to do with his life, he had just discovered the existence of a new field of study, one he had always dreamed about: futurology. No, not fortune telling or astrology or chiromancy, things that never interested him, nor even science fiction, which he enjoyed as a reader and even considered one day contributing to as a writer; but a recognized discipline, entrusted to “researchers who have their head in the stars and their feet firmly on the ground,” as he himself described it to me.
During the early period of his time in the United States, I rarely heard from him. He sent me a letter when he arrived; I called him once on the New York number he had given; after that, silence. I carried on with my life, while he began to fashion his.
It was not until ’87 that I found out what had become of him. I was reading an article about “the future of oil” in a respected magazine of international politics when I noticed, in a footnote, a complimentary reference to the “innovative work of Albert N. Kithar on the idea of the ‘blind spot.’” Fortunately, the footnotes mentioned the name of the Indiana-based institute that had published his research. I quickly sent a letter to my friend care of the institute, not knowing whether it would reach him. But he must have received it quite quickly, since his reply reached me just two weeks later.
My dearest Adam,
You can’t imagine my impatience as I tore open your letter, and my excitement when I discovered you had heard something about my research.
Don’t get your hopes up. I didn’t invent a new theory and I haven’t become a celebrity. The notion of the “blind spot” is simply a thinking tool, what in our jargon I call a “digging tool.” It is no more than that, and it’s not rocket science, as you’ll see.
The idea first occurred to me back when we were at school. In class, we were discussing the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” published during the French Revolution. Someone asked whether it included women and, if so, how come women didn’t get the right to vote in France until after the Second World Wa
r? The teacher explained that, in practice, they were not included in this declaration of equality before the law, but that did not mean that they had been deliberately excluded. Such a view of reality, he said, was quite simply inconceivable, “invisible,” to men of that era.
I found this idea intriguing, and when I became more interested in the forecasting models used in futurology, I realized it was crucial to constantly remind yourself that, in every era, there are certain things that people are unable to see. Including, of course, our own era. We can see things that our ancestors could not; but there are things they could see that we cannot anymore; and, more importantly, there are countless things that our descendants will be able to see that we cannot yet see, given that we, too, have blind spots.
To take just one example out of hundreds: pollution. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we were completely incapable of seeing that locating factories close to urban conurbations might pose a serious health risk; we had other concerns, other priorities. It is only in the last forty years that the issue has entered our field of vision. Another example, of the same nature, is the notion that marine resources are not infinite, that they could be exhausted, that it is necessary to conserve them. Just a few years ago such an idea was invisible, except, notably, to a tiny minority of “visionaries” whose voices went unheard by their contemporaries.
I hasten to add that I didn’t invent the concept of the blind spot. Historians, psychologists, and sociologists have been talking about it for years. The contribution made by your friend Albert is specific and modest. Four years ago—the institute had not yet moved to Indianapolis—a New York state university asked me to host an introductory seminar on futurology. At the end of term, I set the students a single question, which was to be the subject of their dissertation. I formulated it thus: Every era has it blind spots, ours is no exception. There are aspects of reality that we are incapable of seeing, and it is inevitable that each of us, in a few years, will think: “How can I not have seen that?” So, I am asking that you project yourselves into the future and talk to me about a blind spot that is very difficult for us to see today, but which, in thirty years, will seem self-evident.