by Amin Maalouf
Adam looked out the window of the plane. There was nothing to be seen now but darkness. The remains of the day. He checked his watch.
“Nearly eight o’clock.”
“We’ll be landing in Amman in about half an hour. A small whisky?”
“No, thanks. I’d prefer another coffee.”
The steward approached, took the order, and returned with a steaming cup, a glass filled with ice, and a bottle of whisky with a distinctly peaty aroma.
“So there’ll be about ten of us at the reunion,” said Ramez, who was clearly excited by the plan. “So, what’s it to be? A banquet? A ceremony? A seminar?”
“I haven’t given that part much thought. Up to now, I’ve simply suggested meeting up to see whether our friends were really keen, whether it would mean something to them after all these years. So far, the reactions have been positive, but there’s a lot left to decide.”
“You can’t bring people from the four corners of the earth just for a reunion dinner and a coffee with no sugar. There has to be something more.”
“You’re right, but what? To be honest, I’m not much of an organizer.”
“It’s not your job to organize, Adam. You’re a university professor, an intellectual, your job is to think, and to help us to think too. Forget about logistics! Forget about Mourad’s death! Forget about the reunion …”
“But the reunion is the whole purpose of the plan.”
“Forget the whole purpose! When starting a plan, you always need a pretext, but it’s important not to get too attached to it, otherwise you forget the essential.”
“And what is the essential, according to you?”
“The essential, is that we’ve just come to the end of a terrible century, a new century has begun, one that looks like it might be more terrible still, and I can’t help but wonder what fate has in store for us.”
“And you think our old friends will be able to tell you?”
“Maybe, maybe not, but I need to talk about it to someone. Preferably, with people I’m close to, people with empathy and a certain ability to think. That’s what I most loved about our circle of friends at university. Not so much the political ideas. We all claimed to be Marxists back then, because that was the zeitgeist. But, to be honest, I’ve never really understood dialectical materialism, the class struggle, or democratic centralism. I parroted things from books I’d read, or that I’d heard from people who had read them. If I claimed to be left-wing, it was only because I wasn’t indifferent to the plight of the poor and the oppressed. Nothing more. And the reason I liked hanging out with our group is because they were interested in the whole wide world, not just their own little lives. They talked about Vietnam and China, about Greece and Indonesia. They had a passion for literature, for music, for philosophy and ideas. At the time, we might have believed that most people shared our concerns, but that kind of circle of friends was rare when we were young, and it’s even rarer these days. I’ve been going to business meetings and social gatherings for more than twenty years. Most men go through life from cradle to grave without taking the time to wonder where the world is headed, or what the future will be.
“What I’m saying to you now is almost word for word what Ramzi said to me one day. At the time, I agreed with him, having no idea of the decision he was contemplating. Personally, I would never willingly retreat from the world, I am more fascinated than terrified by change. But on one point at least I completely agree with him: it’s sometimes necessary to rise above the mundane and consider fundamental questions. I’m not expecting our friends to communicate some eternal truth, but I want to listen to them talking about their lives, thinking aloud, telling me their hopes and fears. We are on a cusp between two centuries, between two millennia. 2001! I realize that the numbering of years is simply a human construct, but such a symbolic year is a good time to pause and meditate. Don’t you think?”
Adam’s face broke into a broad smile. His friend shot him a suspicious look.
“What’s so funny about what I’ve just said?”
“Since this morning, I’ve been wondering what the hell I could say to Ramzi when I go to visit. And you’ve just given me the answer. I’ll give him precisely the same speech I’ve just heard you give. If I invite him to a reunion dinner for friends, I know he won’t come. But if I invite him to a meditation retreat …”
It was Ramez’s turn to smile.
“You can always try, though I’m still sceptical.”
“Well, it’s the only card I can play …”
“If you manage to convince him, I’ll give you a plane just like this one.”
“No, thanks. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“A car, then …”
“That sounds more reasonable …”
“Any particular make?”
“No, Ramez, I was just joking, I don’t need a jet or a car. In Paris, I go everywhere on foot, or by metro, taxi, or bus. Sometimes even by bike. On the other hand …”
“Go on, tell me.”
“On the other hand, if you were to send me two crates of white apricots every year …”
“I’ve already promised.”
“And if you were to add a crate of Egyptian mangoes, the long, thin ones with rust-coloured flesh they call hindi …”
“Done!”
“… a crate of sugar apples, and one of moghrabi oranges.”
“And dates, I assume.”
“No, these days I can get dates in Paris.”
“Not like the ones I’m going to send.”
There were still two apricots on the plate. Each of the friends took one and savoured it slowly.
-
7
The plane touched down smoothly in Amman. An all-terrain vehicle arrived at the foot of the steps to whisk the businessman and his guest towards one of the twenty hills that ringed the site of ancient Philadelphia.
As Adam must have expected, the Ramez residence was an opulent three-storey building of white stone set among lush gardens that sharply contrasted with the arid terrain all around. The gate swung open as the car approached, there was no need even to slow down.
As the two friends stepped down, a swarm of security men, gardeners, and servants clustered around them, holding open doors and offering deferential greetings.
A moment later, Ramez’s wife, Dunia, came to greet them wearing a long grey housedress embroidered with yellow threads.
As soon as she had greeted her guest and kissed her husband, she asked, a little worriedly:
“Is Lina not with you?”
“No, she stayed behind, she had a dinner. When I fly our friend back, I’ll bring her home with me.”
Dunia turned to Adam.
“In our family, we take a plane the way other people take a car. You’d think we were in Texas!”
But what had struck the guest was something different.
“So you’re saying that the charming young woman on the telephone who introduced herself as your assistant is actually the daughter of Ramez, well of both of you.”
Both parents smiled.
“That’s how she is,” Dunia said. “When she’s working, she never says she’s his daughter.”
“And so as not to give the game away, I simply say Lina.”
“And then you say she’s brilliant and you’re lucky to have her.”
“As her employer, that’s my considered opinion,” Ramez said, visibly happy to have the opportunity to talk about her.
“And an entirely objective opinion it is too,” his friend teased.
“Lina is the love of his life,” Dunia said in a tender voice.
“Whoever marries her had better treat her like a queen. Otherwise …”
The threat hung in the air.
Adam was escorted by his hosts to what they called
“his room,” and which was actually a lavish apartment with a bathroom and Jacuzzi, a living room bigger than the one he had in Paris, a liberally stocked bar, a television, a computer, and a balcony overlooking the glowing city.
Laid out on the bed, still in their packaging, were a pair of pyjamas, three shirts, three pairs of socks, underwear, and an embroidered bathrobe with matching slippers.
“I think I’ll just stay here,” Adam said by way of thanks. “I don’t suppose there’s a job going at the University of Jordan?”
“It could be arranged,” Ramez said with a booming laugh, “the provost is a close friend. We’ll be waiting for you downstairs when you fancy dinner. But take your time, we usually eat late. Call your wife to tell her where you are. Oh, and call the hotel so they’re not expecting you back tonight.”
“Sound advice,” Dunia said, “I wish Ramez would call me from time to time to let me know whether he’s in Singapore, Dubai, or Kuala Lumpur.”
Her husband took her arm, partly by way of apology, partly to interrupt.
“What difference would it make? After a certain number of trips, you don’t know which city you’re in; conference rooms all look the same, as do hotel rooms.”
“Come on, let’s let Adam get some rest.”
-
The Eighth Day
-
1
When Adam opened his eyes, the room was in darkness. He picked up his wristwatch from the nightstand. It read 6:15 a.m. He raised the blinds and the sun hit him full in the face.
He was still wearing the dressing gown. The box containing the new pyjamas was no longer on the bed; someone had moved it to the table, together with the shirts and the other packaged clothes.
It seemed he had not moved all night. Though he had been supposed to join his friends downstairs for dinner. They had probably come to fetch him and, finding him sound asleep, had decided not to wake him.
He took another shower, shaved, and patted his face with eau de cologne, then he dressed and left the suite of rooms. A young woman wearing a white apron was waiting outside the door to lead him to the sun-soaked veranda where his friends were taking breakfast.
“Just as well we didn’t wait for you before having dinner,” Ramez said good-naturedly.
Adam apologized profusely while Dunia defended him against his friend’s teasing.
“That’s no way to greet a guest first thing in the morning. You’d do better to ask if he slept well.”
“I don’t need to ask, I saw it with my own eyes,” her husband said, still chuckling. “He was snoring like a diesel engine.”
“What a terrible oaf I married, don’t you agree?”
She laughed and her husband laughed with her. Adam added his two cents:
“If you’d asked my advice, I could have warned you. He had a dreadful upbringing. It’s much too late now. I’m afraid you were unlucky.”
Ramez seemed delighted to be attacked in this manner.
“That’s how it used to be, in the group. We were forever calling each other illiterate, brainless morons. But it was just a private joke. We genuinely liked each other, we respected each other. Didn’t we?”
Adam nodded. Then the young woman in the apron who had brought him downstairs reappeared with a steaming cafetière and served them each in turn. As soon as she had gone, Ramez said to his wife:
“On the flight over, we talked about Ramzi. Adam is planning to go see him.”
Since Adam had arrived the previous night, he had only ever seen Dunia smile. A gentle, natural, artless smile. But at the mention of their lost friend, the smile instantly faded.
“We still haven’t got over his departure. His ‘desertion,’ I should probably say. There’s something disturbing about a man abruptly deciding to leave his work, his home, his friends, to hole up with a bunch of strangers in a cabin in the mountains.
“He was like a brother to Ramez—and to me, too, for that matter. When he left, we were both stunned. You have a friend, you see him every day, you trust him with your secrets, you feel you know him as well as you do yourself, and one day you discover you didn’t know him at all. You discover that there was someone else within, someone you never expected. Ramez still tries to make excuses for him, but I feel bitter about it. A man has no right to just leave like that, on a whim.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t on a whim,” Ramez said thoughtfully.
“If it wasn’t a whim, it’s worse. It means that he agonized over his decision in secret without ever talking to us. It means there must have been a dozen times when he sat at this table where we’re sitting this morning, and while we opened our hearts to him, he was already contemplating his decision to leave and never see us again.
“I’m supposed to forgive him because he was overcome by faith. What sort of faith tells a man to leave his closest friends, his only true friends, in order to find God? Does that mean that God is up there, in the mountain, but not here, in the city? That God is in the monastery, but not on building sites or in offices? To believe in God is to believe that he is everywhere!
“I’m sorry, Adam. It’s not religion that I’m criticizing. I don’t know what you believe, and I wouldn’t want to offend you.”
“Speak your mind, Dunia,” the guest said. “With me, you’re welcome to criticize every religion in the world. Mine and all the others. Don’t imagine for a moment that I’ll be offended.”
“In any event, I’m not criticizing your coreligionists, mine are much worse. When they take to the mountains, it’s not just to pray and meditate … What I find frustrating is the way that these days people drag religion into everything, and use it to justify everything. I dress the way I do because of my faith. I eat this or that because of my faith. A man can leave his friends and feel no need to explain because his faith is calling to him. They dress it up every which way, they claim to be serving their faith when in fact they’re using religion to serve their ambitions, or their manias.
“Of course, religion is important, but no more so than family, than friendship, certainly no more so than loyalty. More and more people are using religion to replace morality. They talk about what is admissible and inadmissible, what is pure and impure, always citing chapter and verse. I’d rather they worried about what is honest and what is decent. Because they have religion, they think they’re exempt from having morals.
“I come from a devout religious family. My great-grandfather was Shaykh al-Islām to the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. At home, we always fasted during Ramadan. It was normal, it went without saying, we didn’t make a fuss about it. These days, it’s not enough to fast, you have to let the whole world know you’re fasting and keep a wary eye on those who are not fasting.
“One of these days, people will get fed up of the intrusiveness of religion and reject everything, the good with the bad …”
Dunia had become feverishly impassioned. Ramez laid his hand on hers.
“Calm down, darling. Religion didn’t force Ramzi to withdraw from the world. The monks didn’t come and kidnap him. He had a crisis of faith, and perhaps it was our role, as his friends, to notice, and to foresee the consequences.”
“No, Ramez! Stop blaming yourself! Stop feeling guilty! You couldn’t be expected to guess what was going on in Ramzi’s mind. You were his best friend; it was his responsibility to confide in you so that you could discuss it. You and I have no reason to reproach ourselves. And you’re right, it’s not the monks’ fault. If someone behaved badly, it was Ramzi. And that woman … I won’t speak ill of the dead, but if she were still alive, I’d have a few choice things to say about her.”
She paused, as though groping for words, or trying to regain her composure, or perhaps to recall a particular scene. The two men simply waited in silence.
“When people come to our house,” she went on, “I always look at their eyes. I try to read
their thoughts. Most are probably thinking they would love to have a house like ours. But they don’t all think it in the same way. Some look at it with wonder, others with envy. Some of our guests are richer than we are, most are much less wealthy and some are poor. But their wonder or their envy has nothing to do with whether they are rich or poor. It is about their outlook on life. Harun al-Rashid was a caliph, his empire stretched from North Africa to India, but he envied the great wealth of his vizier, Ja’far, and set about ruining him and stripping him of his riches. There are those who rejoice in others’ fortunes, even if they share in them only briefly, partially from without. And there are those who feel threatened by the happiness of others.
“When you got here, Adam, you probably thought, ‘My friend Ramez has made his fortune, he’s built a beautiful house, his wife is friendly, it will be nice to spend some time in their company.’ But whenever Ramzi’s wife came to our house, I could see the envy in her eyes, in her pinched lips. If there was some new piece of furniture, she would spot it immediately. If I bought a new rug, Ramez could walk across it fifty times without seeing it. I’d have to say ‘Look!’ to get him to notice it. Whenever that woman visited, she would spot something new the moment she came in, and I could see her working out how much I’d paid for it.
“When we first moved in here we had pipes burst on three separate occasions, and one day I said to Ramzi’s wife that I was afraid we’d wake up one morning with the whole house flooded, water streaming down the walls, soaking the furniture, the rugs, the drapes … I looked at her, and what I saw on her face was a look of pure, uncontrollable joy, as though I’d just told her about some wonderful event.
“I remember, that day, I felt afraid of her, and I remember thinking, ‘She’ll cast a spell on my husband.’ I’m not usually superstitious, but after seeing her reaction I was afraid, especially when Ramez took the plane somewhere. In fact, I told him never to mention the plane in front of her.”