by Amin Maalouf
As soon as Sémiramis tracked down Ramez’s phone number, Adam called him. A woman’s voice answered: no, he had not dialled a wrong number, this was Ramez’s “cell phone,” and she was his assistant. Her boss had given it to her because he was at the hospital, visiting a cousin who had just had an operation. Adam introduced himself, and the assistant, Lina, said she was delighted to speak to him; her boss had often talked about him.
At first, she assumed that he was phoning from Paris. When she realized where he actually was, she almost yelped. By happy coincidence, Ramez was there today, too.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t want to leave without seeing you. He had planned to fly back to Amman at about 3:00 p.m., but I’m sure he’ll postpone. I hope you haven’t had lunch yet.”
“No, not yet.”
“If you’re free, I’ll send a car right now, that way you’ll be able to spend some time together.”
Adam was taken aback.
“Are you sure? Don’t you want to check with him first?”
“There’s no need. I’m sure he’ll be delighted; he’ll be grateful to me for organizing a surprise lunch. Just give me the address where you’re staying and I’ll take care of the rest.”
-
5
A metallic silver Mercedes arrived to transport Adam to the coast, to a historic Ottoman house that had been converted into an Italian restaurant and christened Nessun Dorma. The car door was opened by a courteous footman who guided him to the second floor without troubling to ask with whom he was dining.
When he saw his friend appear, Ramez got to his feet and gave him a fond hug before saying, in English:
“Let’s skip the part where we’re supposed to say ‘You haven’t changed at all!’”
Adam answered in the same language:
“You’ve got a point, no point lying to each other straightaway.”
Laughing, they sat down at a circular table on which was set a large platter of crudités, and began by observing a short silence. Although both of them had changed, it was in very different ways. Adam was beginning to go grey but he had stayed slim; someone would easily pick out his younger self in a group photograph. Ramez had put on weight, and had grown the sort of thick, broad, elegantly bushy moustache once favoured by British colonels. Curiously, this was still black, while his hair was a pale grey. If his friend had met him in the street, he would have been hard-pressed to recognize him.
“Your assistant is very charming, and amazingly efficient.”
“Lina is brilliant, I’m lucky to have her.”
“An hour ago, I was wondering how I could track you down so we could have a brief chat, and now here we are having lunch together. It’s almost a miracle.”
“You can’t imagine how happy I am to see you again. Though I suppose it’s really poor Mourad who has brought us together again. I flew in this morning to offer my condolences. I had a meeting in Athens yesterday, so I couldn’t attend the funeral. I’m told there were thousands of people there.”
“I didn’t attend the funeral either, despite the fact that that was sort of why I came …”
He briefly explained his falling-out with Mourad, the phone call he had received from the dying man’s wife at dawn on Friday, his decision to make the trip so as not to upset his former friend. Lastly, his reluctance to attend the funeral … Ramez reassured him:
“You did the most important thing. When he phoned you, you put aside your differences to come and be with him. And you went to visit Tania after the funeral. You have no reason to feel guilty.”
He said nothing for a moment, then went on, this time in Arabic:
“I’ve followed Mourad’s career a little, and I can understand why you cut ties with him. I responded somewhat differently, given that, in my profession, I’m constantly forced to deal with people whose wealth is the result of ill-gotten gains; but I felt the same about him as you did. Even though the position he adopted during the war was one he shared with many, many people, it was hard to accept from one of us. Every time I heard Mourad described as a corrupt politician, or the right-hand man to a thug, I felt ashamed, I felt personally humiliated.
“That said, I still believe that, deep down, our friend was an honest man, and that’s the tragedy. Scumbags who behave like scumbags are completely at peace with themselves; honest people who, by dint of circumstances, act like scumbags are eaten up by guilt. I’m convinced that the cancer that killed Mourad was the result of his guilt, his shame, and his remorse.
“But I shouldn’t be talking like this, when the man has only just been buried … God have mercy on him, Allah yerhamo! Let’s change the subject.”
The table was ringed by a screen of tall, leafy plants, mostly bamboo, creating a sense of intimacy that favoured confidences. Here and there in the vast room were towering palm trees. The maître d’hôtel was standing next to one. Ramez beckoned him over.
“To start, can we have two larges plates of antipasti, no ham on mine. As for a main course—have you decided, Adam?”
“I’m tempted by the red mullet on a bed of risotto.”
“An excellent choice. I’ll have the same. White wine to wash it down?”
“Not for me, thanks, I don’t drink at lunchtime.”
“In theory, I agree with you, it’s best not to drink at lunch. But this is a special occasion, so the least we can do is have a house prosecco to celebrate our reunion.”
The maître d’hôtel nodded and went off to put in the order. The two friends immediately returned to their conversation, their reminiscences, punctuated by the occasional laugh—Ramez had a particularly booming laugh. Until at some point, in the course of conversation, Adam mentioned Ramzi.
The effect was instantaneous. Ramez’s face clouded over, his voice faltered. The man who a moment earlier had been so loquacious was suddenly groping for words.
Adam watched him for a moment, then set down his fork and asked:
“Do you know why he went away?”
Several seconds ticked away.
“Do I know why he went away?”
His eyes closed, Ramez repeated the question as though to himself.
“When a man decides to retreat from the world, it’s like committing suicide without the physical violence. There are obvious reasons, and others that are obscure, even to those closest to him, and of which even he may not be entirely conscious.”
He fell silent, perhaps hoping that Adam would make do with this tortuous response. But his friend continued to stare at him. So he went on:
“If I had to sum it up in a sentence, I would say that, deep down, he had a feeling that everything he did, everything he had dedicated his life to, was useless, futile.
“Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, he would suddenly pause and say to me, ‘Why are we doing all this?’ The first time, we had just been awarded a major contract to build a palace. There we were, poring over the blueprints, and he asked, ‘Why does this man need another two-thousand-square-metre palace? He already has three, to my knowledge.’ He was smiling, and I smiled too and said, ‘I agree with you, but he’s a client, he has more money than he knows what to do with. He’s going to squander it one way or another, and I’d prefer he spent it on us.’ He said, ‘Maybe you’re right,’ and that was the end of that. But over time, he made remarks like this more and more often.”
Ramez paused, as though collecting his thoughts, then went on:
“Our friend couldn’t stop wondering about the purpose of the projects we were commissioned to build. A company like ours, with branches in more than twenty countries, is contracted to build a thousand different things: a seaport, an airport terminal, a shopping mall, a tourist centre, a museum, a prison, a military base, a palace, a university, and so on. Not all the projects have the same value or the same ethical implications, but it’s not our place to judge, is i
t? I’m no cynic, and I share the same values as Ramzi, but I feel it’s not our role. The prison you built for a tyrant might be used to incarcerate his opponents today, but tomorrow it might be the tyrant and his cronies who are locked up there. You can’t simply refuse on principle to ever build a prison. There are prisons in every country in the world, everything depends on how they are used. Our role, as a construction company, is to try to make prisons a little more humane—that’s all we can do. When you have 1,837 employees, each of them with families, and you have to find the means to pay them every month, you can’t afford to play at being a righter of wrongs. Don’t you agree?”
Little remained of the good humour with which Ramez had greeted Adam’s arrival. He now seemed beleaguered by the thousand thoughts clashing inside his head. He took several sips of prosecco, too quickly. Then he continued:
“What I’ve just said is only one aspect of it. Then there were the wives, our wives.
“It starts like a fairy tale. One day, I meet a girl, Dunia, and fall head over heels in love. I immediately introduce her to Ramzi. She finds him intelligent, funny, sophisticated; for his part, after their first meeting, he took me aside and whispered, ‘Take her by the hand and never let her go.’
“Four months later, Ramzi comes and tells me that he, too, has met his soulmate. By troubling coincidence, her name is also Dunia. As though fate were giving us an emphatic nudge. Can you imagine? Ramzi and I have almost the same name, we’ve been inseparable since our first day at university, we spend our days together and our nights together, and now here we are, falling for two girls with the same name.
“So, he introduces her to Dunia and me. She is quite pretty, she seems friendly, he is visibly in love with her, and we decide to get married on the same day. It couldn’t be a single ceremony, because my Dunia and I were being married by the cheikh, whereas he and his Dunia were to be married in church—by the bishop of the mountain—who was his uncle on his mother’s side. But we decided to have a single reception. You were already in France by then, but a number of our friends came, including Tania and Mourad, Albert, and Sémiramis.
“Unfortunately, the only thing our wives had in common was their name. Mine immediately understood how important Ramzi was to me; from the day of the wedding, his wife was jealous of our friendship. When I was worried about something, the first thing my Dunia would say was ‘What does Ramzi think?’ and she encouraged me to take his advice. She constantly reminded me that he was a true friend and that I was lucky to have a partner who was so honest, intelligent, and devoted. To listen to her, he didn’t have a single fault. I was the one who should have been jealous, hearing my wife talking about another man like that, don’t you think?
“But it was the other way round, Ramzi’s wife was constantly telling him not to trust me, to distance himself from me. If I so much as called him and we spent a couple of minutes on the phone and she heard him laughing at something I had said, either she would make a scene, or she would find some other excuse. It was ridiculous, and it was pathological. She wanted him to take a closer look at the accounts. She was convinced that I wasn’t giving him his full share of the profits.”
“And Ramzi ended up believing her?”
“Not for a second! In the beginning, he didn’t even mention it to me, he felt sad about it, and ashamed. Then, one day, there was a trivial incident—I don’t need to go into detail—but one that made my wife and I realize how much this woman despised us. The following day, Ramzi came into my office, he apologized, and he talked to me about her outbursts. To justify his wife’s behaviour, he talked about her family history, a father who had been swindled by his own brothers, an uncle who had robbed his own nieces of their inheritance; in short, a series of betrayals that had made his wife pathologically suspicious. Ramzi said he was certain that, in time, she would grow more trusting and her attitude would change. I said, ‘Of course she will.’ But I didn’t believe it, and neither did he, I suspect.”
“He must have found it very painful.”
“Excruciating. For me, it was simply a minor inconvenience; for him it was a constant torment. One day, with tears in his eyes, he told me that getting married was the worst decision he had ever made. He was angry with himself for not realizing her faults in time. The similarity of our wives’ first names had seemed to him to be a sign from Heaven, but it was a trap set by Hell.
“I tried to console him, I told him that, when it came to marriage, there was no such thing as foresight, that it was a lottery, you don’t know whether you’ve got the right ticket until afterwards. And I wasn’t just saying that to console him, I genuinely believe it. In traditional cultures, where men and women spend little time together before the wedding, when they can’t even talk in private before being pledged to each other for life, marriage is like one of those fortune cookies you get in Chinese restaurants. You pick one at random, break it open, smooth out the strip of paper, and only then does it tell you your fortune.
“In more developed cultures, men and women spend time together. In theory, they have the opportunity to size each other up. But in practice, they’re just as likely to make mistakes. Because marriage is a disastrous institution.
“I’m hardly in a position to say so, since I’ve spent the past quarter century with a woman I love and who loves me. But I still believe marriage is a disastrous institution. Before the wedding, all men are attentive, considerate, they treat the object of their affections like a princess, until the day she becomes ‘their’ wife; after that, they quickly become tyrants, they treat their wives like servants, they change completely and society encourages them. Before the wedding is all fun and games; afterwards, things are serious, and sordid, and sad.
“Women are little better. When they want to get married, they’re all sweetness and light. Gentle, obliging, easy-going—everything to reassure their suitor. Until he marries them. Only then do they reveal their true nature that they’ve been doing everything to suppress.
“To their credit, I’d say that with women the transformation is not as brutal or as systematic as it is with men. The lover and the husband are two different species, like a dog and a wolf. Before marriage, we’re all dogs to some extent, and afterwards, we’re all wolves; to different degrees, granted, but it is a transformation that is difficult to avoid. In certain cultures, it is as inevitable as the progression from adolescence to adulthood.
“With women, it’s less clear-cut. Many of them don’t change very much, either because they are genuinely loving, or because they’re not very good actresses and end up revealing their true nature before the man proposes. Ramzi’s wife didn’t fall into that category. She managed to hide her true character until after the wedding; she came across as gentle and attentive, she treated me like a brother and my Dunia like a sister. Then, overnight, she couldn’t hold it in anymore, she started spitting her poison. By the time Ramzi realized, it was too late.”
“He could have divorced her.”
“He should have done, it’s certainly what I would have done if I’d made the same mistake. But, aside from the fact that divorce, for Christians like you, is much more complicated than it is for us, Ramzi is opposed to it in principle. We discussed the possibility of it more than once … He preferred to cling to the notion that his wife would change. He kept telling me that she needed to feel safe, to feel secure, and that it was his duty to create an environment that would help her get better.
“Then the children were born, two boys and a girl. The birth of a child is supposed to be joyful, and Ramzi tried to convince himself that he was happy. And he clung to the idea that motherhood would bring out all the love and tenderness he had seen in his wife when they first met. I didn’t contradict him—what would have been the point? But by then, all I expected from her was slap in the face or a stab in the back.
“And I wasn’t wrong. She went on undermining him. She fed the children the same lies that h
er husband refused to listen to. ‘Your father is a gullible fool who lets himself be manipulated by his partner.’ The slow drip of poison, day after day, year after year, gradually had its effect, I noticed it every time our two families met up. Ramzi was as affectionate as ever, his wife put on an act, but the children didn’t know how to pretend. I could tell from the way they behaved what she had been telling them about me. When I tried to hug them, they flinched. Not just when they were ten, when they were four. It was sad and it was absurd.
“But the most serious issue was the lies this woman managed to plant in their minds about the business their father and I had founded. We had built up an empire, one that our children would inherit. But she spent so much time telling them that their father was being manipulated, exploited, robbed, that they grew up with a burning hatred for everything we did. As a result, not one of them wanted to study engineering or architecture, not one of them wanted to work with us.
“None of this was helped by the fact that their mother fell seriously ill. A particularly aggressive cancer that, within a year and a half, would be the death of her. The pain made her more venomous, more spiteful. Though Ramzi cared for her selflessly, she never stopped railing against him, claiming that he had always favoured the business and his partnership with me at the expense of his wife and his children.
“Since she was gravely ill, and in agonizing pain, her husband didn’t contradict her. To appease her, he promised to focus less on the business and devote more time to his family. The children—who, by then, were thirteen, sixteen, and seventeen—heard all this; they saw their mother as a martyr and their father as a cold-hearted monster.
“Then the poor thing died. She was only forty or forty-one. The children channelled all their grief into a bitter hatred of their father, as though this was a natural expression of their loyalty to their mother’s memory. All three of them left home. They’re in America now: the girl in New Jersey, one of the boys is in North Carolina, I don’t know where the other is. They haven’t had any contact with their father for years. I don’t think they even gave him their contact details.