Father Joachim was the one who told me about flying for the first time. He predicted I’d become a pilot. As if he’d directed my rudder onto a particular path. He planted the seed of flying in my blood. He’d been a pilot during the Second World War. A young man, twenty-two, not imaging at the time he’d wear the priest’s cassock. He was only dreaming of flying. He said when he flew for the first time, he heard voices coming from far away. He said, at that moment, human eyes widen in an inhuman way. It’s not because of fear or pressure but because you see another side of human history. Then he said he saw waves in the sky like the sea. Roads and forests and rivers where groups of lobsters are raised. He said: “You can move around in them like a shepherd or an aimless traveler. You move around between the strata as if you were moving around among cities. One thing that’s not there is the wind.”
Father Joachim looked up at the sky for a moment and asked me: “Did you know people grow up in the clouds? Look at these swallows standing above our heads.”
I lifted my head up to the sky. I saw how they played as if they were swimming in a water basin. They were rising up now and moving away, getting smaller. Were they the ones getting smaller or were we?
He spent a period of the war in southern Algeria and there he tossed off the military uniform and put on the priest’s. As if he exchanged the priesthood of the sky for the priesthood of the desert.
The night’s thick around the charity building. The night’s always thicker at its start. Nonetheless, the moon is near the ground this time of year. The little light comes either from the restaurant where I left the unionist students talking. Or from the top floor where the three priests overseeing the charity live. The garden is wet but the day’s storm passed safely and didn’t leave much of a mark on the trees and flowers that started blooming some days ago.
Someone knocks on the outer door. Father Jerome gets there before me and opens it. I don’t see who knocked. I don’t hear the news he brought. No one hears it except for Father Jerome, who hurries across the garden as if he’s been expecting a catastrophe all day long. He’s been spending day and night praying. Without turning to me, he says: “Father Joachim’s returned. But he can’t go up there.”
Then Father Raphael joins him. The two fathers stand in the garden, as if they’ve always been expecting news like this and waiting for it, looking up at the sky and getting ready to go out, prepared for rain or a storm on the road. They’ll take the donkey with them since they have to bring him back on it. They ask me to pull the donkey because I know the road better than them. And also since the donkey will be useful no matter what. Dawn’s still far off. It might rain again because we’re high up. I see them coming and going in the garden, talking about Father Joachim as if he’d lost his mind. And then as if he’d been tossed aside outside and was dying. Stained with his own blood after getting stabbed in the forest. I’m worried about Father Joachim too, even without thinking he might have been stabbed or drowned, without the other catastrophes in the eyes of the clergymen wrapped in their black abayas.
We’re in the highlands. I’m at the front, followed by the mule and the two monks. Wrapped in their thick black clothes. We’re not in winter but we haven’t entered the period of heat yet. The two monks wear black in all seasons. And it rains a lot in this region. We pass above an old airport. There aren’t the usual markers of an airport on the ground. Father Joachim’s the one who told me this is the airport. Only the rich French land here in their private airplanes for treatment at the Bansmim sanatorium. When one of Father Joachim’s fits comes on, he heads up to the airport and passes the day there. Sitting, looking at the sky. Once, when I was sitting next to him on the airport grass where the scent of wild thyme and wild mint spread inch by inch. I heard him say: “My faith has been shaken.”
Father Joachim was telling me, alone, far from the charity and the fathers: “I no longer believe in God. No one wants to understand me.”
What do you want men who dedicate their lives to prayer and getting close to God to understand? “What do you want them to understand, Father Joachim?”
He seemed miserable, not like someone who’d lost his faith but like someone who’d lost his trust in humanity. Father Joachim has been like that since the day I met him. Nothing will soothe him. He devotes himself to prayer and reading for long months, night and day. Then, like someone who’s lost his good sense, he raves for days, before disappearing for a number of months. He comes back afterward with a radiant face. Calm. Not even mentioning what happened.
“Where were you, Father?”
“I was looking for where I found faith for the first time, in the desert, in the remote south of the desert. The sky is close there. And God comes out. God only comes out in the desert. There are people who can hear what you say as you hear what they say, without needing to speak.”
“How can this be, Father?”
I remember the day monks detained him in his cell when he announced he wanted to change the monastery into a shrine where everyone can take refuge, Muslims and Christians, people exploring, believers and nonbelievers.
I don’t remember how many times he disappeared during my seven years there. What was Father Joachim looking for? Not for God. He says he’s looking for people. Father Joachim kept telling me, as if to dig his words into my mind, that people, in their nature, seek good and aspire for perfection. Because the important thing is that you believe in some kind of perfection. In a being of infinite perfection, and that you aspire for this perfection, call it what you will. I don’t understand him and I don’t understand his way. I see him sometimes as a Muslim, sometimes as a Christian, and sometimes as a heretic. In his prayers, I hear him mix the Quran with the New Testament. Sometimes in a language I don’t understand. Especially when he’s drunk. When I ask him about the language he prays in, he says all languages can take you close to the Creator.
When he isn’t in the charity, he might cross the mountain and go deep into the desert, looking for the nomads. He might not find them. Sometimes nomads aren’t in the areas where he roams. He spends months living on barley bread, water, and fruit from trees, if he finds them. He comes back like a drunkard. He says what he found on his last trip is invaluable even though I don’t understand what it is he found. He can’t explain it. He only yells: “It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere.”
I try to understand him but I don’t. Sometimes I say the man has lost his mind.
Before his latest disappearance four months ago, I asked him: “Haven’t you found what you’re looking for yet?”
This time, traces of grief didn’t appear on his face. He didn’t tell me he’d lost his faith. Or that his belief had been shaken. He was happy. He said he’d decided to leave for good. He’d head to the south, and there he’d build his shrine. A shrine of clay and figs, he’d build it with his hands near a spring, and next to it he’d plant barley and harvest it with his hands. And he’d welcome transients of all nationalities, colors, and creeds.
We found him stretched out near an olive press, passed out, with wounds on his face and his clothes muddied. There was a lamp at his head and some villagers up late around him. They said a gang of robbers had attacked his tent and took the little money he had. A traveler was passing near his tent and brought him here on his camel.
The rain started falling. We were on our way back at dawn. I was pulling the donkey. We were crossing the same road we came on. The ground was wetting my shoes. I see him rocking back and forth on the donkey, Father Joachim, his face bloodied, clothes ripped, covered in mud, and his head bent forward a little, looking at me with the hint of a simple-minded smile on the sides of his lips. As if he was saying he finally found what he was looking for.
16
Hinda
The Next Morning
1
DARKNESS KEPT ME FROM LEAVING the casbah. I said I was waiting for sunrise and, maybe, I thought a lot about where I’d go. The morning I was waiting for has risen and I don’t know yet which
direction I’ll set my head. I remember the life of the dogs waiting for me and I wonder what’s better, the unconfined life outdoors or the life of the casbah. A few days ago, I saw a bitch wandering around nearby, and the free life she was living overwhelmed me. She could go where she wanted and sleep where she wanted. She told me she’d come here to see the casbah because yesterday she’d heard an incredible story about it. She said: “I heard its architect was well known throughout the south. But I only see ruins in front of me. Who lives in this casbah?”
I told her: “Some government types.”
I didn’t want to disturb her morning with stories of burying people alive. And she wouldn’t trust me if I tell her what I witnessed. She’ll say I hate human beings or something like that. We wandered around for a while among the palm trees and then she asked me to come with her to where she lives with a Sahrawi family. We crossed a piece of desert with golden sands, and during the trip I asked her for her name. She told me it was Rustam. The name seemed strange to me and I told her so. She said she really found it strange at first too, but with time. . . . We stopped above a sand dune and rolled down to its bottom laughing and then kept going. She said a man named Glaoui had built the casbah without spending a single penny from his pocket on it. Rustam stopped, turned to me, and asked me what the shabby covers and rusty tin plates filling the courtyard were for. I didn’t know how to respond. I said: “They’re covers from the days of the pasha and no one wanted to take them because they didn’t want to bring misfortune on their house.”
“And the smell of death?”
“What smell of death, dear Rustam? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She grew quiet and looked at me as if she doubted what I was saying. She then said there was an unmistakable odor. We kept going. We reached an oasis with lots of palms around it, surrounded by black Bedouin tents tied to the ground with ropes and pens for herds of goats. Others for sheep. Smoke from ovens and women sitting at the tent entrances making a thick soup from flour and clarified butter with their children on their backs. Their daughters were playing in front of them and other kids of different ages were running in every direction, yelling. Rustam turned to me and said proudly: “They’re all my family.”
I was thinking about Rustam now and about the happy life she was living among the kids and the Sahrawi clan. What a simple life, simple and complete. Rustam was a nice dog and she entered my heart from the first moment I saw her. I was thinking about all this as I hid in the corridor so the commander didn’t see me after I intentionally broke the bottle of whiskey he and the woman with him were drinking yesterday. The door to Aziz’s room was shut. I looked over it from the lower opening and saw him on his slab, sitting naked as the day he was born. He was swimming in a circle of sunlight coming down strongly on him from the ceiling. There was no trace of the festering wounds I saw on his skin at night. He was sitting like a man sunbathing and after a little while, he’d put on his clothes and leave the slab. Yes, I didn’t have anything else to do here. No one needed me. A few months ago, the commander was going to give me to one of his friends. He told him: “Save me from this bitch, she’s not good for hunting or guarding.” But the friend apologized and told him I was an old dog and it was better for me to die here. He’s right. The exhaustion of the years is weighing on my shoulders. I’m not strong anymore like I was when I was young and lived with the tailor Mahjoub and his evil wife. But I don’t want to die here and be buried with the others in an infested hole and be sprayed with lime like the hundreds of corpses I’ve seen. Despite my old age, I still hope for a happier life.
I moved forward on the edges of my toes and looked over the courtyard. I didn’t hear the sound of the guards. No movement in the courtyard at all and the hole was as I left it yesterday, overturned. The guard’s room was empty. So was the commander’s office. In the whole casbah, there was no one. That was strange, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I’ll think about it after I leave this hell. Wherever I go, it’ll be better than this. I learned while living in these wastelands that I can get by on hunting bugs and vermin. I managed to shrink my stomach so a small mouse would be enough for an entire day. Desert rats are among the most delicious meals I’ve had in my life, in addition to being healthy. I don’t really need anything else. I haven’t relied at all on the guards’ generosity because they’re stingy. The commander eats lunch and dinner with whiskey. Since I came here, I’ve relied on myself.
That’s what I said as I approached the big gate of the casbah. The courtyard before the gate was clean and sprayed with water and the trash strewn in front of the casbah had disappeared. Flags fluttered as if we were welcoming an important guest. Only a few minutes passed before I saw him cross the courtyard wearing white slippers and a light-yellow djellaba. A man wearing white from head to toe was accompanying him, carrying a small metal briefcase and a small chair. They went deep into the corridor and reached Aziz’s door. The man put the chair to the side of the door and withdrew.
2
His Majesty has arrived, greeting you and asking you if you have thought about us.
“Maybe it is the last time I will visit you and ask you to say the single sentence I am waiting for from you: You are the king and I am one of your devoted subjects. Is that too much? I do not understand why you do not love me. I have thought about it for a long time but I have not found a convincing response. There is no one in my kingdom who does not love me. Why are you disturbing my life and making me spend time thinking about you instead of the affairs of the people? Why do you hate me? Everyone loves me. My ministers, my poets, my palace jesters, and my slaves. Why do you not love me like all the people love me? You should love me, just like that, simply and without question.
“What do you want? I ask you only what do you want? That I be like the king of Sweden? No one sees him because he spends his day driving around on his motorcycle. Are you Swedish? Or your father or grandfather? Or do you want me to give power to the leftist parties who will sell us out to the Soviet Union? If they are even able to run the country. They will sit on chairs spreading revolution and watch the country head into the abyss. While the money I take, I spend on the protestors among you and the sick. Do you not remember how many singers, composers, and painters I sent for treatment abroad at my expense? Unfortunately they all died, but that did not stop the doctors in Paris from taking all their fees. Do you think the deaths of singers and painters will make their hearts merciful like mine? Oh, by Almighty God, they have not forgiven me. I paid the bills to the last penny. In addition to the bills, I paid for the airlines that transported their dear bodies and that is without talking about the funerals and mourning ceremonies. All this I paid for from the money I collected and saved for the day you would need it. Do you remember the coffin that held the body of our friend, the film director Reggab? How beautiful it was! Who was dreaming of a coffin like this? With ebony and a glass peephole Mohamed could look through at us, we who were loving him and treating him like our son. Would the socialists or communists think about a coffin like this? Never. Do you know why? Because I think of everything. You are my children and part of my heart, and what I ask from you, friend, is not much for a citizen who loves his king. But you do not love me, you wretch. A soldier who does not love his king. There is not anyone like that from China to Norway. That only happens in this country, which does not remember the blessing God has bestowed on it.
“What do you want? Do you want my reign to end so you can begin yours? I see you from here, imagining the day I will flee. Coming out of a narrow back door. With cheers following me: ‘Grab the dictator. Grab him before he gets away. Stone him and stone his children.’ That is if the riffraff do not grab hold of me and lead me to the gallows, shouting at each other and spraying saliva: ‘Kill him and his family!’ Is that what you want? Why? Am I not the father of you all? Your father who loves you and stays up late for your comfort? Who treats you as a father treats his children? If I hit you or jailed you, it
was for your own good. Do you not hit your children from time to time if they act out? Do you not lock them in a room or the kitchen or the well? Speaking of that, do you know the Americans have started asking about you and the others? Is that reasonable? Are you happy? The Americans intervening in our affairs now? They sent a commission and reports and lots of bad things because of you, you piece of bad luck. Are you not ashamed? Is that what you want?”
He calmed down for a moment and his voice seemed subdued as he told us he hadn’t slept the night before. During the day, he only drank a glass of milk with honey. For long nights, he hasn’t slept. The guest rested his back against the wall. I looked at him from my hiding place. I saw he’d passed out. The man who was with him was leaning over him, giving him an injection in his arm. After about fifteen minutes, he woke up and asked the man to help him change position. The man didn’t know what position he was talking about. The man who might be his personal doctor asked him to take a bit of rest. The guest put black sunglasses over his eyes and I said maybe he’s doing that so the doctor doesn’t see his tears. The guest then turned to the nurse getting ready and asked: “How are things on the streets?”
The man said: The situation on the streets is calm.”
He then said: “The repulsion was completed with a hundred tanks at the entrances of the cities.” The guest smiled.
A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me Page 17