The Disoriented

by Amin Maalouf

  They had been driving in silence for several long minutes, each consumed by memories of Bilal, and by regrets, when Sémiramis suddenly asked:

  “Had you seen him recently?”

  Adam started. He stared at her intently, as though she had gone completely insane. She quickly clarified, without a smile but with a sigh of impatience:

  “I was talking about the brother.”

  “Nidal? No, I haven’t seen him. Not for years. What about you?”

  “I saw him once or twice afterwards. He’s changed a lot. You wouldn’t recognize him. These days he wears the beard.”

  “If that’s the only diff—”

  “I didn’t say a beard, I said the beard.”

  “I know, Sémi. These days tens of millions of men wear the beard, as you call it. It can hardly be considered a novelty. Unfortunately, the spirit of the times is with Nidal, we’re the ones who have become anachronisms.”

  “The beard,” she repeated, as though she had not heard him, “and all the speechifying that goes with it … If you invite him to the reunion, some of our friends might feel uncomfortable.”

  “That doesn’t frighten me. Can he hold a conversation without pulling a gun?”

  “Yes, as far as that goes. He’s pretty polite. But the content …”

  “Reactionary?”

  “More reactionary than a Taliban, and more radical than the Khmer Rouge. All in one package.”

  “That bad?”

  “No, I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much. He is pathologically conservative—he refuses to shake hands with a woman, for example. And when he talks about America, he sounds like a Maoist from the sixties …”

  “I get the picture. But even that is the spirit of the times. I still think it wouldn’t do us any harm to hear him out.”

  “Even if it means some of our friends might feel threatened?”

  Adam thought for only a split second.

  “Yes. Even if some of us feel threatened. We’re all adults, we’ve lost our youthful illusions, why would we need to hold the reunion in an antiseptic safe space? If Bilal’s brother has something coherent to say, and if he’s prepared to listen to others, I’m happy to listen to him, and to answer him.”

  “You do what you like, you’re the master of ceremonies. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. If the reunion is ruined, you’ll only have yourself to blame …”

  “Agreed. I’ll take responsibility.”

  They had just turned into the private road that led to the hotel. Adam assumed that Sémiramis was going to park in front of her little house, but instead she pulled up outside the main door.

  Was she going to put him to the test again, to force him to clearly articulate his desire to spend a third night with her?

  No. She was elsewhere, still immersed in the memories that her passenger had rashly stirred up. Adam was tempted to apologize, but decided against it, judging that it would be more tactful not to make it too explicit.

  He opened the car door; then, having checked that there was no one around, he leaned over and planted a furtive kiss on her cheek. She did not react, neither rebuffing him nor leaning towards him. He did not insist. He got out of the car and let her drive off.

  -

  The Seventh Day

  -

  1

  Last night, I had a dream that was both predictable and unsettling, Adam would write in his notebook under the entry dated Thursday, April 26.

  I found myself in Mourad’s house, it was seething with people, as it must have been yesterday. But I simply pushed through the crowd to seek refuge in a room where my friends were waiting for me. In fact, Mourad was there, and Tania, and Sémi, as well as Bilal, who was swathed in a gilded robe, enthroned like Jupiter on Mount Olympus, his face framed by a luxuriant red beard. A woman’s voice whispers into my ear, “He’s changed so much.” I say smugly, “He told me beforehand.” Then I laughingly say to my friends, “All the people out there think we’re dead!”

  It goes without saying that the dream was rather more chaotic. In setting it down, I have made sense of it, rationalized it. In a certain sense, I’ve reconstructed it from the fragments that I recognized—the location, the faces, the words, the colours. They all come from scenes I experienced and that are imprinted on my memory: my belated visit to the dead man’s house; my conversation with Sémi on the drive back; and then that other conversation, a quarter of a century ago, with Bilal, back when we were close, shortly before he took up arms and died.

  I’ve already talked about the long, loquacious walks we used to take, and notably the last, which, if memory serves, ended in the lashing rain, when Bilal, on the subject of God, howled, “Now there’s a fine occupation!”

  A little earlier in our conversation, the name of a girl had cropped up. When I mentioned it a few days ago, I simply wrote “a mutual friend.” I didn’t name Sémi. If I had done, I would have had to explain who she was and why we were talking about her, tell the story of our nighttime walk and my pathetic inhibitions—which at the time seemed to me like unnecessary digressions. When writing those lines about our circle of friends, I wasn’t thinking about Sémi any more than the others, and I didn’t expect to see her again soon. I believed I’d be catching a flight back to Paris on Monday, Wednesday at the latest, since the dying man whose last words I had come to hear had not waited for me.

  Now, it seems to me that in the moment when I was setting down those episodes from my youth, something inside me changed. Two hours later, I had postponed my flight and left the capital to come and stay here, at the Auberge Sémiramis.

  When writing a text, sentences follow on from each other, and those reading them don’t realize that at certain moments the hand setting them down raced across the page, and at others it froze. On a printed page, or even a manuscript page, silences are erased, spaces are planed away.

  I point this out precisely because, last Saturday, after having briefly alluded to our “mutual friend,” I paused for a long moment. I was tempted to say more about her, to mention her by name, to explain why this conversation about her had so lasting an effect on me. Then I gave up so as not to be sidetracked from my story.

  Now, I am coming back to it. The “young girl” is no longer anonymous, my recent encounter with her casts a different light on what Bilal and I discussed back then, and the context in which we came to be talking about God.

  Our memory of words fades, not that of emotions. What I remember of the conversation with my dead friend is bound to be approximate, but I have no doubts about its emotional content, or its significance.

  Bilal had surprised me by saying, on the subject of Sémi:

  “You used to have a thing for her too … She told me.”

  “It’s true that I found her attractive, but nothing ever happened between us.”

  “So, when I met her, the two of you weren’t together …”

  “We were never together. Did she say otherwise?”

  “No, but I’m glad to hear you confirm it. I want to be sure that I didn’t steal my friend’s girlfriend.”

  “Don’t worry, there was nothing between us, she wasn’t my girlfriend and you didn’t ‘steal’ her. But why ask me about this now?”

  The incident had been almost four years earlier.

  “Before, you were just an acquaintance, now you’re a close friend, and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t hurt you unintentionally.”

  “No, put your mind at rest, you didn’t hurt me.”

  “You never resented me? Never cursed me? Even when you saw us together for the first time?”

  I felt uncomfortable, and he noticed this. Which simply made him more insistent.

  “You don’t want to talk about it … You’re wrong. It’s important to talk about love. You have to dare to talk about it freely with close friends. Women talk about i
t among themselves; men never talk about it, or only to brag, as though their feelings of tenderness were unworthy. I’d like to live in a time where I could talk to my friends about my most recent night of passion without it seeming conceited or indecent.”

  With Bilal, I often found myself playing a thankless role, the purveyor of conventional wisdom, of received ideas. Though I did my best to shake it off, I invariably slipped back into the role.

  That night, I had said:

  “And you don’t think that the emotion might lose something if people could talk about such intimate subjects with no feeling of shame?”

  My friend had shrugged.

  “That’s the perpetual pretext that keeps us silent. In a society like ours, shame is an instrument of tyranny. Guilt and shame were devised by religions to keep us on a leash. To stop us from living. If men and women could talk openly about their relationships, their feelings, their bodies, humanity as a whole would be more fulfilled, more creative. I’m sure that it will happen someday.”

  This was the mid-1960s, and what Bilal was saying was in the spirit of the times. But there was an intensity, an urgency in his words. I said nothing. The extreme prudishness my friend was denouncing was so deeply rooted in me that no argument, however passionate, could dislodge it. A carapace is as protective as it is oppressive; it is impossible to shrug it off without exposing one’s naked body. In fact, he was talking like someone who had been flayed alive. And when he started telling me about his first meeting with Sémi, their first words, their first kiss, the first undone button, the first embrace—it was simultaneously tender, tumultuous, and mortifying.

  Strangely, I never for a moment thought that Bilal was trying to wind me up. I might have done. After all, this young man had done something I had dreamed of but had not dared to do. There was no mockery, no pride, no boastfulness in his attitude towards me. Just a longing for a deep friendship that flouted good manners and propriety.

  At some point in our conversation, he said:

  “I’m glad we both courted the same girl.”

  “Yes,” I said, more to agree with him than because it was what I really thought. “It’s a nice coincidence …”

  “No,” he corrected me, his tone suddenly serious, “not a coincidence, a communion. As though we came from the same village and had drunk from the same spring.”

  We were sitting on a stone parapet at the entrance to a building, in a vaulted passageway. The rain was lashing harder, but I had ears only for my friend’s words.

  “Adam, don’t you think we were born into the wrong time, you and me?”

  “When would you like to have been born?”

  “A hundred years, two hundred years from now. Humanity is metamorphosing, and I’d like to see what it will become.”

  I replied, “Because you think there’s a finish line where you can go and wait for the rest of us? Think again! It’s impossible to see everything in an instant. Unless you’re God …”

  It was at this point that, standing with his arms stretched up towards the rain, he howled:

  “God! God! Now there’s a fine occupation!”

  -

  2

  At this point in his reminiscences, Adam felt the need to phone Sémiramis. When they had parted the night before, he had felt she was angry.

  “No, I was just pensive,” she reassured him.

  “I’m sorry. It was tactless of me.”

  “To talk about Bilal, you mean? Don’t worry about it, it’s ancient history.”

  This was clearly not entirely the case, since her words were followed by an awkward silence. In fact, she quickly admitted:

  “No, actually, that’s not true. It’s a lie, Bilal will never be ancient history. I’ll never feel unmoved, indifferent when someone mentions his name. But that’s no reason not to talk about him. I don’t want you treating me with kid gloves, I don’t want you labelling me ‘fragile.’ The thing that would hurt me would be for a friend like you to feel he had to avoid subjects that might upset me. Even if you think I might suffer, I’m asking you not to treat me like a permanent convalescent. Promise?”

  As if to demonstrate that it was duly noted, Adam said:

  “There’s one thing that’s always nagged at me. Did you ever understand why Bilal took up arms? He was hardly passionate about politics, he loathed the war, and he had little respect for the various factions.”

  From the other end of the line, there came a long sigh followed by another silence, and Adam could not help but wonder whether he had been wrong to take his friend’s assurances literally. However, after a moment she said:

  “You’re right to ask me that question. But the answer isn’t a simple one …”

  “Do you want to talk about it some other time?”

  “No. Are you in your room? Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right up.”

  When she knocked at his door a few minutes later, her eyes were red and Adam felt guilty and ashamed.

  “I’m sorry, Sémi! I didn’t mean to …”

  With a wave, she silenced him then went and sat on a wicker chair. Without looking at him, she began:

  “We loved each other very much, you know that.”

  “Yes, of course I know.”

  “Of all those who fell during the war, not one died for the same reasons as Bilal. It was literature that killed him. His heroes were Orwell, Hemingway, Malraux, the writers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Those were his exemplars, his role models. They had taken up arms for a time so that their hearts could beat in sync with that of the century. Then, their duty done, they had gone home to write. Homage to Catalonia, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Man’s Hope—we had read them together. I’m sure that, on the barricades, shouldering his machinegun, Bilal was not thinking about the battles to come, but about the book he was going to write.

  “I was terrified. From the very beginning. But that’s just one more part of the hero’s image. The wife, or the mother, or the girlfriend pleading with him not to go, while he listens only to his duty … I was a modern lover, I thought I was more sophisticated than other girls. I read the same books he did, I shared his dreams, and this meant I was entitled to say, ‘This isn’t nineteen-thirties Spain, where men were fighting for ideals. In our country, those taking up arms are just neighbourhood thugs. They strut around the place, they kidnap, they pillage, they traffic …’ Sometimes, he agreed with me, but sometimes he would say, ‘People are always contemptuous of their own era, just as they always idealize the past. It’s easy to imagine I would have been a Republican in Barcelona in 1937, or a member of the French Resistance in 1942, or a comrade of Che Guevara. But my life is happening here and now, and it is here and now that I have to choose: either I commit myself, or I stand on the sidelines.’

  “He was afraid of missing out on his own era, and thereby losing the right to be a writer. He was afraid of not living intensely enough, passionately enough, and our love wasn’t enough for him.”

  Sémiramis fell silent, and with her crumpled handkerchief, she dabbed her eyes and wiped the corners of her mouth. Adam allowed a few seconds to pass before saying:

  “You’ve just answered another question that I always wondered about: he didn’t take up arms because the two of you had quarrelled.”

  To his great surprise, this remark elicited a broad smile from Sémiramis.

  “Our relationship was stormy, that’s certainly true. We broke up, we got back together, but neither of us would ever have given up on the other …

  “It was never my fault … Yes, I know, it’s easy for me to say that when he’s not here to defend himself. But I think it’s something he would have readily admitted. He was always the one who started the fights, and he was the one who always made up again. Here, too, the problem stemmed from literature. From that inane myth that authors should have tempestuous relationships so they can wri
te about their lovers. Quiet contentment blunts the edge of passion and dulls the imagination. Bullshit! A happy populace produces no history, a happy couple produces no literature. Complete rubbish. In the end, for us, there was no happy couple and no literature.”

  She caught her breath, then added:

  “Our relationship was like that frenzied dance where the dancers violently pivot away from each other, spin back, and just as violently collide before pivoting away again. But at no point do they let go of each other’s hands.”

  Another pause, a smile from a bygone age. Then she continued her story:

  “He showed me the gun he had just bought, he was as proud as a little kid, he held it out so that I could take it, maybe thinking I’d be overwhelmed. I was instantly disgusted by the cold metal and the smell of gun grease and threw it onto the sofa where it bounced and almost fell on the floor; he caught it just in time and gave me an angry, contemptuous look. ‘I thought you were going to start writing,’ I said defiantly. He said, ‘First I have to fight, then I can write.’ I never saw him again. We never spoke to each other. He died four days later. Without having written anything, and without having really fought. The first mortar shell from the other district landed a few feet from him. He was sitting with his back to a wall, daydreaming, apparently. I’m pretty sure that he never even fired his gun.”

  “At least his hands were clean. He didn’t kill anyone.”

  “No, no one. Apart from himself and me, he didn’t kill anyone.”

  Sémi was visibly distressed by her memories, Adam wrote as soon as his friend had left the room. But, thinking about it, I don’t regret bringing up this chapter of her past—of our mutual past, I should say, even if, for me and for the rest of our friends, the trauma was much less devastating. It was important that I gave her the opportunity to tell me, straightforwardly, that she had done everything she could to stop Bilal from courting death.

  Of course, I realize that that will not take away her grief, or the inevitable feeling of guilt we all feel at the death of a loved one. But I think that making him a sort of martyr to literature, rather than the victim of a grubby skirmish, she ennobled his death, made it a little less absurd.