by Amin Maalouf
“Then my parents died, six months apart. My mother went first, of cancer, then my father, of a broken heart. Both my brothers were living in Canada, in Vancouver, and they asked me to go join them. But I didn’t have the will or the strength to start over, so I decided to take on this property, which was derelict at the time, and I turned it into a hotel.
“Now you know everything. I told you about my war. Now it’s your turn. I’m listening … One of you can start …”
As though he hadn’t heard, Naïm glanced around and said sceptically:
“And you make enough to live from the hotel?”
“Let’s say in the last five or six years I haven’t made a loss. But I don’t live off the profits.”
“What do you live off?”
Sémiramis turned to Adam.
“Has your friend always been so pushy?”
“Yes,” Adam sighed. “I’d almost forgotten, but I think he’s always been this way, even when he was forty kilos lighter. You can always refuse to answer if you’ve got something to hide.”
“You’re as infuriating as each other! I’ve got nothing to hide. I live off the money my father left me. He left Egypt with a small fortune.”
“Really?” Naïm said, incredulous. “He must have been the only one! The Jews who fled Egypt in the ’50s and ’60s had only the clothes on their backs.”
“That was true of everyone, not just the Jews,” Sémiramis nodded. “But my father was lucky. Adam already knows the story so I won’t bore him with it again.”
“You can if you want, I don’t mind.”
She explained the “something foolish” that had forced her father to sell off everything and flee Egypt before the nationalizations and the sequestration. Naïm was spellbound. When she finished, he said:
“Would you allow me to write up this story for my newspaper?”
“As long as you don’t use real names, I don’t have a problem.”
“I don’t have to remind you that this happened half a century ago and Nasser’s been dead for more than thirty years. But, if it makes you more comfortable, I can change the names …”
“The only time my father ever told the story to strangers, he pretended it had happened, not to him, but to one of his brothers. That’s why I assume he wouldn’t have wanted his name associated with it. Maybe if he were still alive, he would have changed his mind, but it’s too late to ask him now.”
“It’s not a problem, I’ll change the names …”
“From what you’ve just said, I take it you’re a journalist,” Sémiramis retorted, glad to be the one posing the questions.
“Didn’t you know?”
“OK, if I’m honest, I did know that much. But that’s about all I know. Start from the beginning. So you and your parents caught a plane to São Paulo. And then …?”
The Brazilian raised his glass, toasted his friends, then moistened his throat with a long draught of his milky liquor.
“After two days travelling and two shots of arak, I don’t really feel capable of telling my whole life story. But I’ll give you the broad outline. When I got there, I went back to university, I studied journalism, and I got a job with a business weekly. That was the same year I got married. I was twenty-three. I’m still a journalist and I’m still married.”
“To the same person?” Sémiramis asked.
“To the same person.”
“Brazilian?”
“Yes, Brazilian.”
“And Jewish?”
“That’s what my mother thought. She asked me straight out, ‘Is she Jewish?’ and I just said, ‘Maman, her name is Rachel.’ And her name really is Rachel, or rather ‘Raquel,’ the Brazilian equivalent, but she’s a devout Catholic. My mother never questioned it. I kept up the ambiguity until the night before the wedding.”
“You should have brought her with you so we could meet her,” Adam said.
“Raquel’s not like me, she can’t take off whenever she likes. She owns a restaurant in São Paulo, Chez Raquel, one of the best in the city. She spends her days and nights there, and she’s convinced that if she went away for a week, all her customers would desert her. She thinks she’s indispensable; personally, I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration …”
“Do you ever help her out?” Sémiramis asked.
“At the restaurant, you mean? Yes, sure, in my own way. Whenever she comes up with a new dish, I’m the first to taste it. If I say ‘It’s delicious!’ she adds it the menu; if I say ‘It’s okay,’ she ditches it.”
“So you’re the one who is actually irreplaceable,” Adam said mockingly.
“I hope you get paid for your efforts,” his hostess added.
“Of course, she pays him,” Adam said. “She pays him in kilos. Just look at him!”
“It’s true I’ve put on weight, but that’s not because of Raquel. When we’re together, I am a model of restraint. It’s when I’m travelling that I eat too much. When I’m on an assignment somewhere, my greatest pleasure is to reserve a table at a fancy restaurant, order a big meal, a huge mug of beer, and write my article while I’m eating. Three sentences, one bite, three more sentences, one sip. The ideas flow freely and I feel as though I’m in a state of rapture.”
“Just listen to how he talks!” Adam whispered.
“I’m an incurable glutton, and I’m not ashamed of it,” Naïm confessed. “Loving to eat is a heaven-sent blessing. Every morning you wake up to the aroma of roasted coffee. It’s the smell of Brazil, the most delicious anywhere on earth. Already you’re in a good mood, then you remind yourself that you’ve got three more feasts before the day is over. Three delicious daily feasts. Eleven hundred a year! Who said gluttony was a vice? It’s a godsend, a blessing, an art! You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I do,” Adam grumbled. “It’s the perfect marriage between sophistication and animality.”
“I’m going to make a confession,” Naïm said, shamelessly. “I know you two will use my honesty against me, but I’ll tell you anyway: I’ve never known when to stop eating. I never feel full. I only stop when all the plates are empty, or when I have to leave the table.”
“Hang on, Naïm, that sounds worrying,” Adam frowned. “What you’re describing is a pathology. If you’ve never experienced the sensation of being full …”
“Don’t worry,” said Naïm. “I know the diagnosis. It’s a relatively benign condition called ‘Jewish mother syndrome.’ When I was a boy, she force-fed me, literally. I didn’t eat when I was hungry, I ate when she told me to open my mouth. And I didn’t stop when I was full, only when she stopped reloading the spoon. As far as my mother was concerned, there were two kinds of children, the scrawny and the healthy. The former were a disgrace to their mothers, the latter were their pride and joy.
“It could have put me off food for life. But it didn’t. I loved every bite, and I never wanted it to end. As I grew up, things carried on like that. My mother was forever telling me I looked sallow, that I didn’t eat enough. I didn’t want to argue, so I helped myself to seconds and thirds until every plate was empty. So I never learned when to stop. I could carry on eating forever. Provided the food is good, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Adam laughed. Then, raising his glass, he added, “What I think you’re saying is that the forty kilos you’ve put on isn’t down to your gluttony, it’s the fault of your mother.”
“Mock all you like, but that’s the truth. I’ve had my fair share of problems because of her. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved my mother, I’ll always love her, but I am clear-sighted. What I just told you about food also applies to other areas of life.”
“Sex …” Sémiramis hissed.
“No, not sex! Something much more serious.” Naïm said.
“What could be more serious than sex?” Adam asked in a booming voice that made d
iners at nearby tables turn to stare.
Sémiramis flashed an apologetic smile.
Our friend did not explain what other problems he suffered by having a Jewish mother, Adam would write in his notebook at the end of the day. We were hanging on his every word, but Naïm closed his eyes and fell asleep at the table, like a dormouse.
When the Brazilian began to slump in his chair, Sémiramis gently patted the back of his hand, twice, three times. He opened his eyes.
“Do you feel alright?”
“I feel fine. I didn’t miss a word of what you were saying.”
“What we were saying? We haven’t said a word,” Adam laughed. “You were the last person to speak.”
“What was I saying?”
“You were saying you wanted to go back to your room,” their hostess suggested kindly.
Naïm nodded.
“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” he apologized.
“Me neither,” Adam said. Then he added casually, “In a monastery, they wake you at dawn.”
At this, Naïm stared at me, complete bewildered. Sémi glowered, believing—quite fairly—that I was taking advantage of our friend’s exhaustion to sow confusion. I didn’t say another word. Naïm closed his eyes. Our chatelaine patted his hand again.
“My bed, my bed, my kingdom for whoever carries me to my bed,” Naïm pleaded with his last Shakespearean breath.
But as soon as he got to his feet he was able to go downstairs to his room without our help.
-
The Thirteenth Day
-
1
When Adam opened his eyes, he discovered a note had been slipped under his door by Sémiramis inviting him to come up to the veranda for breakfast as soon as he woke. She had sent the same invitation to Naïm, who was already there, eating fig bread.
“When I closed my eyes last night, he was eating; I open them this morning, and he’s still eating!” Adam quipped.
Naïm was about to answer, but his hostess preempted him.
“Leave the cockfighting until later. Naïm and I were working out a morning schedule. He wants to visit the house his parents used to rent for the summer. It’s only a half-hour drive. I’ll go with you.”
“I’m not planning to hang around,” Naïm said. “I just want to see whether my memory of the place corresponds to reality or whether I’ve embellished.”
“If that’s what you were hoping, you might as well give up now,” Sémiramis said. “Even if your memory tallied with what it looked like then, it certainly won’t tally with what it looks like today.”
“Don’t worry, Sémi, I know what to expect. Revisiting one’s childhood is a masochistic pastime. We set off expecting to be disappointed and—surprise, surprise—we are.”
The house indeed proved to be disappointing. The external walls and the shutters looked as though they had never been painted. The roof was low and flat. The front door was barely two metres from a busy road with trucks roaring past. The air was pervaded by smell of petrol and burnt oil.
As soon as Naïm recognized the building, Sémiramis pulled in and parked outside. There followed a few minutes of indecision. The “pilgrim” stared out the window, unable to make up his mind whether to get out of the car. His friends waited in compassionate silence, watching him out of the corners of their eyes. It was Naïm who finally broke the silence, doing his best to sound more amused than upset:
“It doesn’t look like anything anymore.”
It was difficult to contradict him.
“The war made its mark here,” Adam sighed, by way of consolation.
“It wasn’t the war that did this, it was this road,” Naïm said. “Back when we used to come, there was only a narrow dirt track. There was a small courtyard in front of the house with railings and a wrought-iron gate, and a driveway leading to this door you see here. But now the road has taken over the driveway, the courtyard, the railings, and the gate.
“Every year when we arrived in early July, the ritual was the same. The owner, Halim, would be waiting to greet us. We politely addressed him as ustaz Halim. He was a customs officer, and always showed up in a suit and tie. We would give him the keys so that he could open the gate; he would formally welcome us and hand back the keys, then my father would give him an envelope that contained the annual rent. The man would say ‘There’s no hurry …,’ then, ‘Time enough another day!’ and only when my father insisted for the third time would he take the money and slip it, uncounted, into the pocket of his jacket.
“After the owner left, my mother would go out into the garden and every year she would say, ‘This place is a jungle!’ and every year my father would say, ‘So much the better! Naïm can tidy it up. It’ll put muscles on him.’ But this was only a joke. I never did much work in that garden.”
“Where is the garden?”
“Round the other side. Come on …”
The garden of the summer house was indistinguishable from the surrounding pine forest. The low concrete wall was more of a seat than a barrier and here the three friends sat, shaded from the sun by a tree with dense foliage. Instantly, they forgot their first impressions. Sitting hip to hip, their feet dangling, intoxicated by the heady scent of the pines, they savoured the tranquil wilderness that had been Naïm’s childhood place.
“Two or three times over the summer, ustaz Halim would come round to see my father. They would have coffee together, leaf through old books. Halim used to say, ‘In this village, no one knows who’s Muslim, who’s Jewish, and who’s Christian. Am I right?’ My father would nod in agreement. Of course, he was wrong, as both of them knew only too well. When you encountered someone in the street you always knew, as if by instinct, which community they belonged to. But it felt good to hear him say the words. Because his intentions were good.”
“It was a civilized white lie,” Sémiramis nodded. “Today, you constantly hear people saying, ‘as a Christian, I believe this,’ or ‘as a Muslim I believe that.’ I keep wanting to shout at them: ‘You should be ashamed! Even if your every thought is dictated by your community, you could at least pretend to think for yourselves!’ They could at least have the decency to lie …”
“The lies of yesterday were much more civilized than today’s ‘straight talking,’” Adam said. ‘People still thought in terms of their religious affiliation, they couldn’t help but do so, but they knew that was wrong, that they should be ashamed. So they lied. And by their transparent lies, they showed that they could tell the difference between how people actually behaved and how people should behave. People these days spew out whatever is in their hearts, and it’s not exactly pretty. Not in this country, not anywhere in the world.”
“The least they could do is apologize, but that doesn’t even occur to them,” Sémiramis said. “People around them do the same thing, so they think it’s normal. They’re proud of it, rather than ashamed.”
“My dear friends,” Naïm interrupted, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but at your age you need you to know: the era of propriety is passed. Or, to put it bluntly: decency is dead.”
Adam greeted his friend’s stentorian words with the requisite smile, then asked:
“When did it die, in your opinion?”
“In 1914,” Naïm said confidently, as though this was an acknowledged fact. “Decency died in 1914. Obviously, in the span of human history, there’s never been an era when people were perfect, and it’s also true that decency is not the defining trait of our species. That said, as far as I’m concerned, everything that happened before 1914 falls into the category of youthful indiscretion.
“Before that date, humanity was powerless. Natural disasters were man’s chief enemy; his medicine killed more than it cured, and his technology was in its infancy. It was in 1914 that we saw the first great man-made disasters: the First World War, mustard gas, the Octob
er Revolution …”
“That’s not how you used to talk about communism!” Sémiramis said.
“No, you’re right; when I was young I said something very different. But looking back I’m convinced it was a catastrophe of the first order. A great dream of equality between men, hijacked by a cynical and totalitarian state. We still haven’t finished paying the price. In just five years, between the slaughter of the trenches and the Treaty of Versailles—the insidious precursor to every war that would follow—the scene was set. It is a scenario from which we have never escaped. All the horrors that have since befallen us have their roots here, whether in the Levant, in Central Europe, in the Far East, or elsewhere. But perhaps our esteemed historian does not share my opinion?”
“Yes and no,” Adam said, causing his two friends to exchange a complicit wink and giggle. But they allowed him to marshal his thoughts. “I think that the previous century was marked by two destructive ideologies: communism and anti-communism. The former unquestionably distorted the idea of equality, the idea of progress, of revolution, and a thousand other ideas that should still be respectable. But the death toll of the latter was still worse. People were so busy chanting ‘Better Mussolini than Lenin,’ ‘Better Hitler than Stalin,’ ‘Better Nazism than the Popular Front,’ that they allowed the world to founder into wickedness and barbarism.”
“I don’t disagree,” Naïm said. “Anti-communism was never my creed, but I did believe in the ideals of communism, we all did. We championed communism for honourable reasons, and we found ourselves betrayed.”
Adam had a similar comparison in mind.
“It’s our destiny to be betrayed,” he observed, “by our beliefs, by our friends, by our bodies, by life, by history …”
His two companions marked a moment of silence, then Naïm jumped down on the ground and, with somewhat forced cheerfulness, said: