by Amin Maalouf
“Right, let’s go! I’ve had my fifteen minutes of melancholy. I came, I saw, I was disappointed. Now let’s hit the road. All things considered, I prefer my cabin in Brazil.”
“Wait, not so fast!” Adam said, “I seem to remember that this house once served as a hub of lascivious activities, that’s what I wanted you to tell us about. That’s the only reason I came with you. Are you with me, Sémi?”
Naïm’s face lit up with a childlike smile, as though images of the past were flooding back to him, and his friends assumed that given his proverbial loquaciousness he would launch into a long story. But this was not his intention.
“I’m more than happy to reveal my secrets, Adam. But there’s something that’s been bothering me since last night.”
He turned to Sémiramis:
“Don’t you think it’s strange that our friend here is happy to make you and me tell him our life stories, our most personal, most intimate secrets, while he hasn’t told us anything?”
“We’ve only just met up again,” Adam said defensively, “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Sémi and I have already had our time, but not you. I’ve told you about my intemperance, about my problems with my wife and my mother. Sémi has talked about her depression and how she came through it. And you haven’t told us anything. Not a single secret. All I know about you is that you teach history and that you’re supposed to be writing a biography of Attila. But I know nothing about your personal life, not a thing! I’m not about to make a big deal of it, but this is a flaw of yours I noticed a long time ago. You might want to think about dealing with it before the three of us are old and senile.”
As though they had planned this together, Sémiramis added:
“He’s right, Adam. Confidences have to be reciprocal. Naïm has showed us his old country house, now you should show us yours. We know it exists, we’re bound to see it one day. It’s now or never, don’t you think?”
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2
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2
I don’t know whether my friends had planned this in advance, or whether it simply occurred to them at the time, but their demand would brook no argument, and I sensed that I couldn’t get out of it.
Their criticisms were not entirely unfounded. It’s true that, since childhood, I’ve been in the habit of getting others to tell their stories without confiding much in return. It’s a flaw I’m all the more ready to acknowledge since it stems from a virtue. I enjoy listening to others, drifting away on the sea of their stories, navigating their dilemmas. But listening, while it is a generous trait, can become predatory if you feed on the experiences of others yet share nothing with them.
Faced with my old friends’ mutiny, what could I do but give in? Besides, the only feelings underlying my behaviour were shyness and modesty. I still can’t imagine that my stories would be of interest to anyone. When someone tells me otherwise and insists that I relate them, I’m happy to comply. I have nothing to hide. Well, obviously, I have things to hide, but more from myself than from others.
In this particular case, I had always avoided talking about my childhood home simply because I did my best never to think about it.
But today, I had to force myself. I told Sémi how to get to the village, and after a little trial and error, I finally spotted the outline of “my” house.
When my friends saw it, their eyes grew wide. As though to mock me, it looked magnificent. Sémi kept saying, “This place is a palace!” Naïm said, “This is what you’ve been ashamed of? This is the house you’ve been hiding for thirty years?” And they were right; it does look like a palace, I should feel proud, yet instead I feel ashamed, because I lost it.
Everything changed when I was twelve and a half. Until then, this house had been the centre of my world. All my childhood friends knew it, I loved inviting them to come. In doing so, I felt I was showing them the best of myself. It was a kind of vanity, an arrogance, and can only be called class pride. But until adolescence such sins are venial; we need to feel we have a place in this world, that we’re not interlopers.
It’s so comforting to grow up feeling you have a country of your own, one you can proudly stake a claim to. When I was in this house, I had that feeling, and afterwards, I never had it again. If this house had still belonged to me at the outbreak of the war, I don’t know what I would have done in order to keep it. But the question didn’t arise; I was spared that dilemma. Given everything that happened, I should be happy about this, but it has always been like a curse. I envied Mourad, who managed to hold on to his ancestors’ house; now I feel I should pity him. In the end, I was the one cosseted by fate. But it has taken me a long time to realize.
My parents adored this house. You could say they had two children: me, and this house.
My father did not simply inherit it from his father. For a long time it was jointly owned by twenty cousins, all of whom were prepared to give it up but none of whom were prepared to take care of it. So my father bought them out, just as long-pious souls used to buy back the freedom of their fellows enslaved by infidels. My father got himself into debt to buy out his cousins’ shares, then got into more debt in order to pay for the repairs. Which were never-ending. He was an architect, and wanted to make his home not only the magnum opus of his career but also, somehow, his calling card. He felt that anyone who saw it would want the same.
His conceived it as two almost identical buildings, some fifteen metres apart: the old, restored house, and another based on the same design, both swathed in vines. The two wings were connected in three ways: on the first floor by a suspended living room with a picture window overlooking the mountain slopes on one side and the valley on the other; on the ground floor by a path lined with flowers; and in the basement via a tunnel. To my parents and to me, it was more than a house, it was a kingdom, and certainly a source of pride.
Earlier, I mentioned class pride. That was unwarranted self-flagellation, and almost an insult to the memory of my parents. What distinguished the house was not the size or the gilded mouldings; it was the style. It was not a vulgar display of wealth; it was an artistic manifesto. Both my mother and father had a confident, understated taste. Their house was the product of their love of beauty, and of their love for each other.
Their life together was a joy, to which I was not only a witness, but chief admirer and sole beneficiary. This made the fall, when it came, all the harder.
Everything was played out in a few short minutes over the Gulf of Oman. The plane on which my parents were travelling plunged into the sea, and my life was destroyed in the wake.
This was in August ’66. An airline company had decided to commence direct flights to Karachi and, to promote the event, had invited a number of prominent personalities on the maiden flight. My parents were hugely proud to have been selected, it was recognition of their status in the country. I can still see them packing their bags, happy, excited, wonderstruck in advance by all the things they would see, without the slightest feeling of nervousness or foreboding.
It was a night flight, scheduled to take off in early evening and land as dawn was breaking. My maternal grandfather drove my parents to the airport, and I went with him. The two of us stayed there until the plane had taken off and disappeared over the horizon. I felt not the slightest foreboding either. I was simply disappointed that I had not been invited to go with them.
Back at home, I read late into the night, as I always did in the summer months, perhaps a little later than usual, since my parents were not there to babysit.
When I woke, sometime in the late morning, I heard unfamiliar sounds. It seemed as though the house had been invaded by a murmuring crowd. I emerged from my bedroom to see who was there, and from the way the men looked at me and, especially, the way the village women took me in their arms, I immediately realized there had been a tragedy.
As if this catastrophe we
re not enough, it was quickly followed by another: I was penniless. This I discovered a month later. As my parents’ sole beneficiary, I had inherited a house that was worth “a fortune,” but also a bank debt estimated at twice that fortune. My father had never been prudent. Why should he have been? His order book was full, he earned a lot of money, he was in the prime of life. At his usual rate of work, he would have repaid his debts in two or three years. But the moment he died, everything collapsed. There was almost no money coming into the accounts, no life insurance …
In my youth I railed against the bankers; at that time I was driven by a furious rage. In fact, this is undoubtedly the reason why, at fourteen, I started calling myself a Marxist. Later, I would come up with intellectual justifications for my position, but at the time, it was blind fury. The family lawyer explained that my only option was to cede ownership of the house to the bank in settlement of the debt. At the time, I harboured a black hatred for him and every other lawyer on earth. Now I realize that he brokered the best deal I could possibly have got. Apart from the house, I owned absolutely nothing. With my father dead, “our” architectural practice wasn’t worth a penny; he had not owned the office premises, and before long I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent. My lawyer persuaded the bank to write off a debt of 1.2 million in exchange for a house worth half of that. And even to leave me a small sum so that I was not completely destitute.
But at the time, I didn’t see things that way. I railed against the lawyers and the banks, against architects, airlines, against Heaven itself … Out of spite, when I moved out of the house, I decided not to take anything with me, not even my books. I went to live with my maternal grandparents. I don’t know how long I wept for my parents, my home, my dreams of the future. I must have been unbearable, and it required all the patience, the forbearance, and the love of my grandparents to bring me through.
I never wanted to talk about any of this. And I never once tried to visit “our” house, or even to drive past. Many times, I would drive miles out of my way in order to avoid catching a glimpse of it. It took the coercion of Sémi and Naïm for me to agree to visit the place again, it took war and exile, it took the passing of a third of a century, and with it the taming of the furious adolescent that raged inside.
And so I returned to the lost domain on an enforced pilgrimage. As soon as I saw the facade, I felt a lump in my throat. I said nothing, but simply pointed to it. “That one?” I nodded. “This is what you’ve been ashamed of? This is the house you’ve been hiding …?” I started to sob like a child. Now it was my friends who felt ashamed. They apologized for having pressured me. So I told them the whole story, or almost: my former life, the plane crash, the bank, the day I moved out of this house, which had been my first exile …
“We didn’t know,” Sémi said.
She ran her fingers through my hair, then leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. We had not even got out of the car. I was in the passenger seat. Naïm was sitting in the back. He said:
“How could you have managed to keep this all inside for all these years?”
I said laconically:
“I managed.”
Then, for no reason, I started laughing. My friends laughed too. It was something we all needed. We were at the edge of a quagmire of sentimentality and had no desire to fall in. Laughing had the advantage of making our eyes well up without us having to distinguish between the tears of sadness, joy, nostalgia, empathy, or simple friendship.
There followed several tumultuous minutes before I said, by way of conclusion:
“Until now, the only people who knew my story were my grandparents, my old governess, the lawyer, and the banker, and they’re all dead. I have never told anyone before today. This was the first time, and it will be the last.”
“I’m not so sure about ‘the last,’” Sémi said with implacable gentleness. “Now that the dam has burst, you won’t be able to stop the water flowing.”
At these words, this image, I foolishly started to sob once more. Sémiramis didn’t know what to do, how to comfort me. She pressed my head against her chest, stroking my hair and my neck.
“If I’d know that was the reward, I’d have found some excuse to cry, too,” Naïm mumbled, as though to himself.
And, once again, we went from tears to laughter. Then I continued:
“I’m not going to tell you stories of some lost paradise, though that’s exactly how I remember it. An Eden from which I was banished, like our common ancestor, my namesake. But not because of a sin, because of an accident.
“My parents were a joy to behold. They were happy to be alive, and they loved me intelligently, for want of a better word. My father talked about painting and architecture, my mother about fabrics, about flowers, about music; she often bought LP records, and would call me down to listen to them with her.”
“And you were their only child,” said Sémi, who had doubtless suffered from growing up as the middle child between two beloved brothers.
“I never felt having no brothers or sisters was a privilege. I didn’t have anyone to play with, and I missed it. I played by myself. At twelve, I was still lining up toy soldiers. I only abandoned them when I left this house.”
“If I were you, Adam, I wouldn’t say that out loud,” Naïm commented.
“Why?” Sémi said. “Some men spend their whole lives playing with toy soldiers.”
I’m not quite sure that she said this in my defence. I would probably have been wiser to say nothing.
“So, when you hit puberty, you bought yourself a regiment wearing kilts …?”
This brutal attack from Naïm earned me another hug from Sémi.
Throughout the whole conversation, we sat in the car outside the gates of my old house. It looked uninhabited, perhaps even abandoned and derelict. Of what we could see from the road, a few shutters on the first floor of the new wing were nailed shut and the paint was peeling.
“Should we try to sneak in?”
This was Sémi’s suggestion.
“No!”
I screamed the word so loudly she felt she had to apologize. Then I apologized to her for having shouted. I pressed her hand to my lips. She smiled, and said softly:
“I don’t suppose you know who owns it?”
“No. No idea. I never wanted to know.”
I had answered instinctively. A rather different idea had just occurred to me.
“Can you move the car about twenty metres? That’s it, just past the house. Park under this tree. If memory serves, there used to be a path there.”
It was still there, exactly as I remembered it. A path paved with irregular flagstones, like a homemade version of the ancient Roman roads.
The moment I saw it I climbed out of the car, gesturing for my friends to follow.
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3
The path dipped steeply. In rainy weather, it would have been slippery, but on this day it was hot and dry.
The three friends found themselves between two hills, as though in the hollow of a small valley. The undergrowth was thick. From here, no road was visible, no houses, no tilled fields. Nothing but leafy trees and brushwood; on both sides brambles had overgrown the paved path, without completely blocking it.
They walked in single file. Adam went first, now and then pushing aside a branch or stepping over a thorny spur. From time to time, he turned to check for his friends. They were still following, Sémiramis hard on his heels and Naïm just behind her; even so, he called back, “Follow me!”
At some point he paused and glanced around before confidently declaring:
“Nearly there!”
“Thank goodness!” Naïm panted, mopping his face and neck.
They had only been walking for five minutes, but what had at first been a gentle downhill slope was now a steep climb. A few minutes later, Adam, now also breathless, stopped and
turned to his companions.
“There it is. Look!”
His voice was muted, almost a whisper, as much out of respect for the tranquility of the place as for his own memories.
Sémiramis and Naïm looked around. There was not much to see. Just a wall with an old wooden door.
But Adam wouldn’t have led them this far had he not had a story to tell them in this very place.
He began with a prologue.
“What struck me the first time I came here is the fact that the path suddenly stops. You assume it leads all the way down to the valley, then suddenly you’re walking back uphill, until you come to a high wall built from the same stones as the path, arranged in the same manner, except that, obviously, one is horizontal, the other vertical.”
“So, what’s on the other side?” Sémiramis asked.
“That’s exactly what I used to wonder when I was a boy. But the wall was so high and I was so short that I couldn’t see over it.
“I used to imagine all sorts of things, from Sleeping Beauty to Bluebeard, by way of Doctor Moreau. Then one day I decided to take a look.
“I needed a ladder, ideally a folding stepladder. We had a number of them at home. I snuck one out. Just getting it this far was quite a trek.”
“Why don’t we all sit down?” Naïm suggested, leaning against a tree. “I feel like this is going to take some time.” He mopped his forehead again.
A few steps away there was a fallen trunk, and there the three of them sat, their faces in shadow. Adam picked up the thread of his story, pointing to a spot on the wall.
“I placed the ladder right there, made sure it was stable, and climbed up. It wasn’t quite high enough. Even on the top rung, the wall still came up to my chin. I had to stand on tiptoe to see over.
“The first thing I saw was a head wrapped in a pink towel. Then I saw the silhouette of a woman in a pink bathrobe. She was sitting on her windowsill, half turned towards the outside, and therefore to me. She was holding a piece of paper, seemingly a letter, and studying it in the sunlight. Time passed. She sat, motionless, and I stood, motionless, holding my breath. Then she put down her letter, took off her towel, and shook her head, her hair whipped by the breeze. She was movie-star blonde.