by Raja Alem
“I have brought you a special request from Captain Davos.”
At once, the steely conviction melted from the imam’s face. He reined in his irritation and asked, “Tell me, what exactly does he ask of me?”
“This girl lost all her relatives in the war, and she doesn’t have anyone to act on her behalf. So, according to the law, you are now her guardian and it is your duty to see she is married. Please, be gracious to us and recite the Fatiha, and marry us before God and according to the Prophet’s example.”
Without further comment, the imam invited his two friends into the room as witnesses, and under their suspicious gaze, the imam humbly held Raphael and Sarab’s hands within his own and recited the Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran, so they all could hear.
An hour later, Raphael and Sarab were wandering through the Bois de Vincennes. Nothing in their appearance suggested they had just gotten married.
They walked peacefully, side by side, avoiding brushing each other’s hands, and allowed the spaces of infinite green to seize them and lead them toward the beauties of its hidden lakes. They approached a sort of walkway, a great passage between two rows of towering trees, its ground covered with golden autumn leaves. It reached all the way to the horizon and had been split down the middle by a pale line from all the feet that had walked along it. Sarab was rooted to the spot, captivated by this dazzling passage of light. Suddenly, a red bicycle appeared on the horizon and raced toward them. At first the rider alarmed Sarab as he bowled toward them like a black lump, but as he got nearer she became aware of the details of his flowing black woolen robe and wide sleeves, his black hood, and the ragged scarf flung over his shoulders. He ignored them as they stood watching the magnificent scene he presented: the vivid red bike rushing over the regal gold of the earth, and the pale face of the young priest brimming with vitality, framed by the ragged black clothes, flying through the air as he shot past them and shifted into a higher speed.
“That priest was from the Minim order. They live in this forest and dedicate themselves to a life of isolation, vowing to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience,” Raphael said.
Sarab whirled around, her gaze following the flying monk until he disappeared in the dense wood. “I’m trying to comprehend that I just saw a priest flying along on a red bike!” She could never have imagined one of the sheikhs on such a bicycle, and felt as cheerful as if she herself had been flying along on it. They left the golden passageway and plunged into the vast lawn that suddenly rolled away before them.
Raphael took advantage of that moment of levity to reassure her: “Sarab, I want you to know that what we’ve done today—I mean the contract—doesn’t mean I’m going to impose any physical demands on you. It’s just a measure we’ve taken so you feel it’s lawful for you to live with me.”
The cheeks of both flushed, and he avoided looking at her. They were as embarrassed as if they were naked, and an electric charge crackled between them.
“I pray that God accepts this. He knows how fear blinded me there. And here, I have no way of making a living. I can’t even work as a maid or go back to my country, seeing as I have a man’s identity card.”
“You can’t leave your country as a woman with no male relatives; as Sayf, you’re an independent person.” He needed to justify having pushed her to keep using her brother’s identity card.
“Sometimes at night, I leap awake in terror. For a girl like me, from a desert tribe, the sense of being alone in the world is horrifying. Sometimes I wake up screaming. I’ve never felt anything like this terror. It’s worse than anything I felt in the Grand Mosque. It’s not of this earth. I’m certain it’s the sound of terror after death, and I can’t stop shaking and wondering whether I was mad to stay alive and leave my country and put myself in a situation where there’s no going back.”
He watched her silently, and she went on: “I know you’re trying to help me.”
He was perplexed by this loneliness of hers he couldn’t keep at bay, and they sat in silence.
After a few moments, he said abruptly, “I’ve resigned.”
That moment, when the barriers fell, Sarab realized what had drawn her to this stranger. There was no doubt he had been a professional killer, but he’d had the will to stop and question himself, and here he was now, striving to change. He reminded her of tilled ground, ready to sprout seedlings at the least hint of rain.
He was confused by her glance, in which pleasure, longing, pity, and fear fought one another. He went on: “Not because you need me, but because I’m the one who needs you.”
Sarab felt she was resisting an invasion of her innermost thoughts; for the first time in her life, all the obstacles with which she had stopped up the channels in her brain had been swept away, releasing a deluge of her own reflections and ideas. She was alarmed at the sudden, instinctive craving that exploded within her.
“You shouldn’t depend on me. In the desert, when the snake sheds its skin, the Bedouin call it the moving wound, and they avoid it in case it lashes out at them. I am that moving wound, and I don’t know what I will do, or why I did what I did, or where I am going. I am afraid and naked, and I don’t know what I will do to you. I might be dangerous to you; I will be in constant danger if your country finds out I’m hiding here under a man’s stolen identity.”
“Don’t deceive yourself. You are strong.”
She ducked her head bashfully under his admiring gaze.
“And please, don’t worry about your legal status in France. Let’s pray the storm around the siege will quiet down. Later we can find a way of getting you a real refuge . . .” He put his arm around her shoulders.
“Don’t do that!” she gasped, moving away.
In a revolt against the serious discussion, her body took over. She removed her shoes and sank her bare feet into the grass; her face shone with pleasure at the unexpected sensation. They sat on the grass, looking at the Temple of Love gleaming across Lac Daumesnil. The overwhelming pleasure of the grass brushing against her legs and through her clothes whetted her senses; she had a vision of her body lying naked on the grass, and the flush on her cheeks deepened. She felt herself sucked in by the beeches and oaks, by the Temple of Love perched on its humpbacked rock sunk into the lake, forming a grotto that invited her to disappear inside.
“For twenty-one years in the desert, I never saw houses made from anything but mud and sand and palms.”
He stayed silent.
“I could never have imagined that I would be sitting here, in this paradise on earth.” She was astonished to see him turn away from her and wipe away a tear.
“Are you crying?”
He stopped trying to hide his tears.
“But a man should never cry,” she said. “If my mother had seen you crying, she would doubt your virility.”
“Not you. I suppose you don’t have any doubts on that score?” He teased her to lighten the tension, and they sat in silence. From his bag Raphael took out some bread and cheese he had bought on their way to the forest, and divided them up.
“The lunch of ascetics. It used to be a ritual of mine to have Comté cheese with seeded bread. Bread and cheese are an art form in France.”
Sarab compared the taste of the bread with the treasure that was oven-baked bread in Wajir. She had no words to describe the difference; there, the bread tasted of earth and salt and fire, more ascetic, perhaps like the bread of the prophets. Here, bread was a work of art with a glorious taste, like the bread of kings. She scoffed at her own naive comparisons.
“You could say that we French are haunted by the idea of art.”
“Just as we’re haunted by the idea of Paradise after death, where something is waiting for us that no eye has seen and no ear has heard.”
He almost asked her: “Was that why you were so keen for martyrdom?” But he held himself back.
Finally Raphael took out a grapefruit. It had sparked her interest in the market, and when he saw she had noticed it,
he put in their shopping bag immediately. He brought it out, huge and rosy and glowing in the sunlight. Peeling it, he offered a slice to Sarab, unaware that it was the first time she had seen one.
Raphael watched the tip of her red tongue pass doubtfully over the segments of grapefruit; she wrinkled her nose, and he burst out laughing. His laughter had a stimulating solidity; she had never heard a man laugh with such abandon before. She felt years of apathy flaking off her tongue from that bitter taste and her thwarted senses were sharpened into life, demanding more.
The taste of the sun and the morning with its hint of bitterness loaded her with something reckless. His gaze followed her tongue as it chased the drops of grapefruit juice that had slid along her fingers to her wrist. His soul had been stolen by this girl from the desert who was tearing each segment of grapefruit apart, looking inside them as if she were seeing a miracle.
“After my father died, this was my secret refuge.” This slice of his past surprised him; accompanying Sarab had opened up more memories about his father, which had been buried in oblivion for years. He went on: “I was fascinated by Mata Hari, who was imprisoned in the fortress here during the First World War.”
He didn’t know what had driven him to bring up this funereal topic, but he kept going. “I used to come at dawn and stand next to the moat, imagining the soldiers leading Mata Hari in front of her executioners. She refused to be blindfolded or to have her hands bound. She blew a kiss to the firing squad and said, ‘Strange habits you French have, to shoot people at dawn.’”
Ending Number Two
Sarab went out for one of her walks along Saint Germain. She was dawdling, glancing furtively at the art galleries on either side without daring to go in. They showed a completely different world from the one she knew, one where serious men opened their doors to display colorful canvases to invisible people. In their house in Wajir, the only wall decorations were her father’s rifles and a small tapestry woven with the Throne Verse. She saw the city around her like some huge, decorated doll, the River Seine running through it like a magical illumination, its banks brimming with life and lovers who adored each other openly in front of every passerby. There was a lot to discover in an open city like this.
She was engrossed in watching two lovers kissing in Café La Palette when she heard a car screech behind her. She retreated to the pavement to let it pass. Suddenly the white Renault Alpine speeded up and hurtled onto the pavement alongside her. She hurled herself backward into the doorway of a gallery that fortuitously appeared next to her.
She stood in the middle of the exhibition. The abstract paintings tracing endless whirlpools on the walls reflected the roiling flood inside her. She reeled, dizzy, as the gallery owner rushed over to her.
“That crazy man almost hit you . . . are you all right, Mademoiselle?” Sarab was overcome with a fit of shaking. She recognized the gallery owner as Arab from the black circles around his eyes and the luxuriant black beard; a strange color, as if it had been dyed with shoe polish. It was the third time such an occurrence had happened; always the same driver, but in different cars.
At first Raphael was inclined to believe that they were harmless coincidences. “Calm down, there’s no need for all this panic. The siege is in the past now.”
He treated the accident lightly, like an ironic joke, but his levity failed to wipe the pallor of fear from her face.
“You must have been distracted by the city. You’re always walking around with your eyes glued to the buildings and the changing light in the sky and the florists’ displays and the bakers in the boulangeries and the shop windows. You never pay any attention to where you’re going, or even to the road. So what do you expect? Paris has a lot of traffic and you have to keep your eyes open if you want to avoid getting run over.”
But now she was half-confident that it was in fact a pursuit, and the driver really did want to kill her.
“But why?” Raphael wasn’t convinced. His eyes ran nervously over his medals, which were lined up on the living room wall over his small desk.
“What if I’ve been discovered?”
“Who would care about you? They might think you deserve to be punished for escaping, but it defies all imagination that you would be run over like this in broad daylight.” However, he was instantly assailed by doubt about this logic.
“I’m a fugitive, don’t you understand?”
“Are you saying that Mujan’s followers are after you?”
She trembled.
“But why?” Raphael realized they were still standing at the entrance to his small apartment. The door was still open; when he had opened it for her, she had immediately blurted out her fears. Calmly, he led her to the comfortable sofa and sat next to her. From the broad, open windows the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens looked down on them, spying on their bewilderment and filling the room with a refreshing smell of verdure.
“You’re not the only one who escaped the siege. There are reports confirming that a number of your comrades managed to escape, and they were never found.”
Fear still pierced Sarab’s eyes, and he asked again, “Why you? Why look for a simple girl like you? Excuse me for saying so, but you’re nothing and no one to them.”
His question sparked a memory Sarab had ignored till now. She closed her eyes, hiding her sudden realization. She got up and fled to her bedroom; Raphael now slept on the sofa in the living room, as he had done for the two months they had been in Paris. She sat on the wine-colored bed and he followed her, standing in front of her, waiting for an explanation.
“What is it?” he persisted. “Do you know something that might make them follow you?”
Her hesitation confirmed that she was hiding something, and he kneeled down in front of her.
“Sarab, if you are in danger, you have to let me help you. Our lives are united; you are a part of me. Next time maybe you won’t be quick enough or lucky enough, and you could be killed. Are you hiding something that might put you in danger?”
She looked at him with a mixture of fear and utter confusion, unable to speak. She couldn’t find the words to begin.
“If there is something, it might be what happened in the well of the mosque, when the Mahdi was shot,” she faltered at last.
He waited patiently, determined to hear every detail.
Her face turned gray as she looked back into the terror she had striven to bury. She had to exhume that fear and display it to the light, so it could be examined.
Her voice was as faint as an echo from the distant mosque: “I was standing at the top of the steps leading to the well when he was hit in the head by a bullet and fell to the ground. I was sure he was dead.”
Raphael seized on every word she said, listening intently. She was silent, aware she had said more than she should, sure that she would never be free from whatever she revealed now of her past.
She was still staring into Raphael’s eyes, overcome by the hell she had lived through, the last hours of the siege, and the moment in the well when the Mahdi was shot.
*
Sarab coughed violently as she came back to life, her eyes burning and her heart exploding from the smoke and the teargas. She flew down the steps of the well to where Muhammad’s body lay. She knelt next to him, but couldn’t look. His face was covered with blood, which oozed over her feverish hands. She brought her face close to his chest and realized he was still breathing, and she was flooded with a joy that gave her extraordinary powers. She tore off his turban, revealing the wound. The bullet had pierced the turban and made an incision so deep she could touch his skull.
She closed her eyes with a mixture of joy and revulsion. Suddenly two hands of steel clamped her from behind like a vice and lifted her bodily from the ground, crushing her ribcage and lungs. She gasped for air, and the grip on her body slackened when the attacker recognized her voice despite the National Guard uniform she wore. She recognized Muhammad’s personal guard, a tall Yemeni. He was like a man returned from the dea
d; blood drenched his left shoulder. Quickly, without speaking, they dressed Muhammad’s wound. They knew they had to get him out of there.
The Yemeni took his master onto his right shoulder and carried him as though he were a weightless puppet. Automatically, Sarab led the way; the maps she had studied for months glowed in her head, indicating every secret passage. Her body took over and she easily led the Yemeni to the mouth of the well. It was difficult for them to find the entrance to the tunnel Sarab was looking for, located close to the well source. The door was probably identical to the stones of the wall. But at last they distinguished its outline low to the ground, marked with larger stones. In the smoke and darkness, they groped blindly for a handle or some way to open it. Beating the door in desperation, they knocked a round stone, which fell to the ground, uncovering the handle hidden behind it. The Yemeni pulled at the heavy door; his strength was supernatural. Carrying his master effortlessly with one arm, he used his injured arm to pull open the door, which was half-welded shut. It was so low they had to crawl through it.
Sarab went forward into the pitch black, and the Yemeni followed, dragging his master with him. Sarab’s body was on full alert, somewhere between total collapse and ecstasy, in a state of disembodiment. It seemed as if they were crawling through the very essence of darkness, driven by some inhuman will to reach the end of that endless tunnel. They were forced into narrow passageways, where the Yemeni had to cram his master in front him like he was threading a needle, until they reached an open space where they could stand and stretch out the tension in their backs. But after a few steps, the earth opened under their feet and they slid deep into the mossy bowels of the earth, falling all the way to the bottom. The Yemeni slammed into the ground, cushioning his master’s body. It was a miracle that Sarab didn’t break a rib from the force of the fall. As soon as she reached the bottom she trembled, feeling something slippery crawling over her body. Paralyzed, she stopped moving. The crawling sensation had reached her head when, with a crack, blood exploded over her face and neck. Her gasp was lost as she stared into the cold eyes of a serpent; between them, the Yemeni’s knife was sunk deeply into its skull. She couldn’t see anything but those eyes, which seemed wider than the tunnel, and Sarab started to imagine that the snake was infinite, the size of the tunnel itself. Both fugitives were exhausted, but they moved forward relentlessly. They were racing against time to carry their Mahdi to safety.