by Amin Maalouf
-
The Twelfth Day
-
1
TUESDAY, MAY 1
In the morning, when Brother Basil came by to fetch me and we walked up the steep path to the labyrinth, the sun was still hidden behind the mountains, but its light was everywhere.
“This is the time of day when it’s easiest to tell the black flagstones from the white,” my friend explained as we approached, speaking in a soft whisper as though we were in church.
He took up a position on the edge of the maze, then stepped forward as though crossing a threshold, as if there were a tangible doorway.
I watched him. He walked with slow tread. His head, bowed at first, gradually straightened so that he could gaze into the distance.
He had said nothing about what I should do, had given me no sign. Eventually I realized that I should follow his route, through the invisible “door” rather than stepping over the invisible “walls.”
The maze sketched out on the ground was not too tortuous, the path formed by the white flagstones was not narrow, but nonetheless I had to focus some of my attention on my feet in order to stay “within the lines,” which I managed to do, without much effort. The human mind—or mine, at least—seems to adapt to this ritual as easily as it does in the theatre, when it is asked to believe that a young actor sitting on a wicker chair is an ageing king upon his throne.
Soon, I no longer thought about the labyrinth through which I was walking, no longer looked at Brother Basil, no longer felt the chill air. I took wing from the landscape, as though under the effects of a potion prepared by St. Marie-Jeanne. My thoughts became dissociated from place and time, and focused entirely on a question that suddenly seemed of vital importance, “What is my real reason for returning to this beloved country whose name I fear writing down just as Tania fears saying aloud the name of the man whose widow she now is?”
And a strange answer came to me, one whose formulation is as limpid as its meaning is opaque: I have only come back to gather flowers. And it occurred to me that this action of picking a flower and adding it to the spray already in one’s hand, perhaps even pressed against one’s heart, is at once beautiful and cruel, because it pays homage to the flower only in killing it.
Why this image? In that moment I couldn’t say, and even now as I write this, seven or eight hours later, I’m still not sure. Does it relate to some anxiety, some feeling of guilt connected to the discovery of so many intimate things about my friends, my country, and myself? The man who writes a memoir is a traitor to his own people, or at the very least a gravedigger. All the fond words that flow from my pen are kisses of death.
But as I wandered through the labyrinth, I also experienced a serenity; a feeling of invincibility that was, curiously, accompanied by humility rather than arrogance; and above all a longing for silence.
I had come up to this place intending to continue my conversation with Brother Basil about the Christians of the Orient, about his beliefs, his vision of the world, his former life, his “sea change,” about Ramez; but when I emerged from the labyrinth I was in a different frame of mind. If the maze facilitates contemplation, it is to the detriment of any conversation. I did not want to speak, let alone to listen. My friend knew this, of course, and was careful not to interfere with my contemplation.
It was only much later, when I realized the time that I had arranged for the hotel chauffeur to drive me back was fast approaching, that I felt the need to talk to Ramzi about the reunion I am planning, to ask whether he would be willing to join us. I was careful to explain that it would be a moment of reflection on what our lives have been, what the world has become, and I invited him to open the reunion with a brief ecumenical prayer for the repose of Mourad’s soul. He nodded enigmatically, and did not ask any questions. I went on speaking, listing the names of those who were coming, and explaining that the reunion would probably take place next Saturday, at about noon. Until that moment, I had not thought in such precise terms, but as I was talking to the Brother Basil it seemed clear to me that I couldn’t leave without giving him a date and a time. In answer, he said that it was a wonderful initiative on my part, and that he was not ruling out the possibility that he might join us. Vague though it was, I was happy with his reaction, and I felt it best to stop there, without pressing him for a commitment.
On the drive back, I sat in silence, with only a minimal conversation with Kiwan, dictated by politeness. And when I arrived back at the hotel, I did not call Sémi. I holed up in my room to set down these notes.
Sémiramis had hoped that Adam would tell her the details of his visit to the monastery, as he had last time. Obviously, he did not feel the need. And she did not want to press him. To avoid disrupting him, she did not phone, as she usually did, to ask whether he wanted to join her for lunch, for fear it might seem like an oblique attempt at seduction.
As a result, he did not have lunch that day. After writing a few paragraphs and snacking on the fruit in his room, he dozed off. He did not wake up until Sémiramis knocked on his door at about four o’clock to tell him it was time to leave for the airport.
-
2
To his shame, Adam did not recognize Naïm.
Though he stared at the stream of travellers as they came through customs, scanning the men one by one, both those travelling alone and those who were accompanied, he was unable to recognize his friend.
Naïm had to come and stand in front of him, and say “Adam!” before he threw his arms around him.
The voice was the same. But the long curly hair was more white than grey, and the features of his face thirty years ago were now hidden beneath plump cheeks, a bronzed complexion, and a South American moustache.
“You haven’t changed a bit!” the newcomer said.
“Oh, I have. I’m myopic,” Adam said.
This was his way of apologizing.
“It has to be said that the man who’s just arrived doesn’t look much like the one you used to know,” said Naïm.
This was his way of returning his apologies.
The traveller was carrying a green canvas bag, striped with yellow and blue. Adam took it, leaving his friend behind to wheel the large suitcase emblazoned with the same Brazilian colours.
“Sémi drove me in her car, but she couldn’t find a parking space. She’ll probably be just outside.”
And there she was. Cheery and garrulous. Trying to justify herself to a uniformed officer who clearly wanted to be stern but had just as clearly fallen under her spell. She’d only be a minute, she said, only a minute, not a second more.
“Actually, here they are right now!” her friends heard her shout.
As soon as they were in the car, Naïm opened fire:
“Adam was so convinced that I was going to be arrested he didn’t even see me come out.”
Sémiramis added, in the same tone:
“You, you’ve piled on the weight; he’s piled on the neuroses.”
Sitting in the back seat, Adam laughed. These quips reminded him of the conversations in the Circle of Sophists back at University. That same tender hostility that kept their minds alert, and avoided lapsing into conformity.
In keeping with this habitual mockery, Adam had to respond in the same vein.
“You show up forty kilos heavier and expect to be recognized from five hundred metres!”
At the hotel, Naïm was checked into room seven, next to that of his friend. He was scarcely given time to unpack. By now it was ten o’clock, and Sémiramis had planned to celebrate his arrival with a candlelight dinner.
“You’re not going to be much help losing my extra kilos,” the newcomer said to his hostess, gesturing to the groaning table.
“Here, every night is mezze and champagne,” Adam said, nodding to the open bottle cradled by the irreplaceable Francis.
“Cha
mpagne? Mezze with champagne? That’s madness! With your permission, I’ll have mine with arak.”
Naïm seemed genuinely outraged. And when the waiter returned with a dimpled bottle of the local liquor in a bucket of ice, Naïm called on Francis for support.
“Mezze with champagne! It’s heresy, tell them, monsieur! Tell them!”
Francis clearly agreed, but he wouldn’t have dared criticize his employer, even in jest, for the world. Leaving the purist to pour his own arak, he ceremoniously poured the heretical bubbles.
Having duly clinked glasses with his friends to toast their reunion, Naïm said:
“So what have you been up to, the two of you, since I left?”
He said it in the casual tone of someone asking what they had done that afternoon before coming to the airport. But the protocol of the Circle of Sophists dictated that one should never be caught off guard; or, at least, never let it be seen. Adam’s first response, therefore, hewed to that rule:
“Two years after you left, I left, Sémi stayed behind to keep our seats warm …”
“And because she was too lazy to emigrate …” chimed in Sémi.
But this was merely a prelude. Naïm’s question deserved a genuine answer. The three friends had not seen each other for a quarter of a century; beyond a few scant episodes, none of them knew what paths the others’ lives had taken. If they wanted this reunion to be meaningful, they had to recount their past.
It was Sémiramis who began, in a tone simultaneously cheerful and jaded, where it was impossible to tell which emotion was feigned.
“There’s not much to tell where I’m concerned. I can sum up my last twenty years in less than twenty seconds. My friends left, war broke out, I holed up waiting for it to end. After my parents died, I opened this hotel. In winter, it’s empty, in summer it’s full, and this April two old friends came to pay me a visit, rooms seven and eight.
“Right, that’s that done. Over to you two!”
She fell silent. And, to emphasize that she had finished, she folded her arms.
“It is a little brisk, this story of yours,” said Adam. “Too brief to be honest.”
“I could embellish it, obviously, but I’ve told you the essentials.”
She raised her glass, her friends did likewise. Everyone took a long, thoughtful sip. Then Naïm, in a slightly suspicious tone, said:
“So, you never married.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Your reasons, you mean Bilal?”
“I’d rather not talk about that.”
“Naïm, don’t wind her up!” Adam said softly.
“I’m not trying to wind her up, but I’m not going to give up, either. If she’d said, ‘Every morning, I wake up to the birds singing, I breathe fresh air, this hotel is my kingdom, an oasis of tranquillity that makes me forget the tumult of the world!’ I’d have said, ‘Sémi, I envy you, you can’t imagine what life is like in our monstrous cities, carve out a little space for me in your paradise, and if I can’t come and seek refuge here, at least I can dream.’ But that’s not what she said. She said, ‘My friends left, my parents died, and I’ve buried myself alive while waiting to grow old.’”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Well, that’s what I heard. ‘I couldn’t even find twenty seconds’ worth to say about my past twenty years.’ Tell me if I’m wrong, Sémi.”
“Maybe I didn’t express myself very well. I wasn’t complaining. I just meant to say I have done nothing remarkable, nothing memorable, in my opinion. But I live as I please, there is nobody to give me orders, every morning my breakfast appears on my veranda, I can hear the birds singing; and every night I drink champagne. I haven’t taken a vow of poverty, or—just to reassure you—of chastity.”
“That does reassure me.”
“But I didn’t want a husband always on my back.”
“There are other positions, you know.”
“Very funny!”
“Sorry, that wasn’t very subtle. I just meant to say that a man doesn’t have to be a burden or a nuisance. He can be an ally, a support, a partner …”
“That’s where you’re wrong. At least as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t need a man in my life.”
“Let’s be clear: I wasn’t offering my services.”
“Shut up, you idiot!”
She took Naïm’s hand in hers; then, for the sake of fairness, she took Adam’s too.
“I’m so happy to have both of you here. Even if you tease me a little, I know you do it in the right spirit, and it reminds me of the most wonderful period of my life.”
For as long as the three friends stood this way, Francis, a tactful sommelier, kept his distance. He possessed the skill and wisdom to see all while looking at nothing. Only when Adam and Sémiramis unclasped their hands did he refill their champagne flutes and offer Naïm another arak in a clean glass.
“And what did you do during the war?” asked the Brazilian.
“I spent my winters in Rio, and summers in the Alps,” his hostess said as though she had already prepared her response.
Before her friends had time to recover from this two-pronged attack, she once again laid her hands on theirs, soothing and affectionate, and said, as though talking to two schoolboys:
“Those who lived here through those years never use the word ‘war.’ They say ‘the events.’ And this is not a matter of trying to avoid using the dreadful word. Try asking anyone here about the war. They’ll bluntly ask: which war? Because, when it comes to war, we’ve had several. The forces were not always the same, nor were the alliances, the leaders, or the battlefields. Sometimes foreign armies were involved, sometimes it was only local forces; sometimes the conflicts were between two different communities, sometimes within a single community; sometimes war followed war, and sometimes they were waged simultaneously.
“As for me, there were times when I had to lie low; when shells were falling all around me, and I didn’t know whether I would be alive by morning; meanwhile barely ten kilometres away, everything was quiet, my friends were tanning themselves on the beach. Two months later, the situation would be reversed; my friends would be in hiding while I was on the beach. People only worried about what was happening nearby, in their village, in their neighbourhood, on their street. The only people who conflate all of these separate events, the only ones to group them together, the only ones to talk about ‘war’ are those who were living far away.”
“Winter in Rio, and summer in the Alps,” Adam mumbled. “Message received. That said, I’m not convinced that one sees things better from up close than from a distance. Obviously, those who are there suffer more, for sure, but they do not necessarily see things calmly and clearly. On the phone one day, Mourad said, ‘You’re not here, you haven’t been through what we’ve been through, you can’t understand!’ And I said, ‘You’re right, I’m far away, I can’t. So explain it. I’m listening.’ And of course, he couldn’t explain anything. He just wanted me to admit he was the victim, and, as the victim, he had the right to behave however he saw fit. Even kill, if he thought it necessary. I had no right to lecture him, since I was elsewhere and I was not suffering.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Sémiramis said, as though anyone might think to accuse her.
Adam brought her hand to his lips.
“Of course you didn’t kill anybody. I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to him, to our absent friend. Sometimes I talk to him in my head.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Sémiramis repeated slowly, pulling her hand away. “But it’s not as though I didn’t want to. If I could, I’d have killed all the leaders, and disarmed all the kids. A widow’s fantasies.”
A silence ensured that her friends dared not break it. Then, looking down at her plate, she added:
<
br /> “I was probably the first war widow. Not that there’s any glory in that. Have you ever seen a monument to war widows?”
Another silence. The maître d’hôtel took this opportunity to refresh their drinks. Sémiramis looked up again.
“If you really want to know what I did during the ‘war,’ then I’ll tell you, it won’t take long.
“In the early stages, I was still in the depths of depression. Bilal’s death had already been buried beneath thousands more, but I still hadn’t got over it. I was pumped full of drugs; I was wretched. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t leave the house, I barely left my bedroom. Sometimes, I’d sit with a book on my lap, but I could go for half a day without turning a page.
“When the bombings began in our neighbourhood, I had to be physically carried to the shelter. My parents treated me like I was a four-year-old. They were wonderful, they never uttered a word of reproach, they were nothing but kindness. They seemed almost happy that their daughter had regressed to childhood and was constantly by their side. I was treated by an old psychiatrist of eighty-five, also a family friend, who had also emigrated from Egypt. He visited me every other day, and reassured my parents. ‘She’ll get through this, you just need to give her some time and lots of affection. I’ll deal with the rest.’
“The therapy he gave helped me, I suppose, and the affection. But the true therapy was the bombing of our neighbourhood. In fact, it was one specific shell that changed me. Up until that day, I still had to be dragged to the shelter; after that explosion, I was the one leading my parents to the shelter. It was as if, until that moment, my mind, my senses were seeing through a glass darkly, and in a split second the glass had been shattered by that shell. Suddenly, I was engaged with what was going on around me. I rediscovered my voice, my appetite; and in my eyes, it seems, there was a distant glow. I began to listen to the radio every day to find out where the battles were raging. I started reading again. I started living again.