From his office, Émile held the reins tightly in his hands. His bookkeeping remained accurate and he routinely updated it. One could gaze at the business landscape through the ledger’s pages as though from a privileged vantage point. Émile found the order in which reality was laid out, having been meticulously transformed into numbers, was soothing. He was the one who handled Semereth Effendi’s money now. It had conferred him a place of pride amongst the city’s merchants. But Émile’s silent partners always received conscientious accounts. Hajji Semereth was barely able to understand the figures Émile quoted him. When those sheets of paper found their way to the depths of the deserted wildernesses where the Hajji now lived, the urban language of commerce was painfully impenetrable. The Hajji admired the papers as though they were paintings: mysterious scribbling where a knowledgeable man had imprisoned reality.
The Maronite handed Abdelkarim an envelope and a map, directing him to a small town in the interior where he would meet Abubaker: it would be the old man’s duty to accompany him to Hajji Semereth. This was the first time he had employed Abdelkarim in this manner. Up until then, Abubaker had been the one to negotiate those web-like roads: travel bans didn’t apply to that old man, who was as secretive as a stone, and could crumble or hold steady as the occasion demanded.
Abdelkarim had always been afraid of Abubaker. But the fear that Hajji Semereth inspired was different, deeper, and instead of rebelling against that, his willpower fastened itself firmly to him, like a shadowy accomplice. If Abdelkarim had escaped the shipwreck of the Hajji’s household, it was because the Hajji had entrusted him to the young Maronite, the same person he’d handed over his wealth to. Abdelkarim had never forgotten the moment when, having been torn from a world in which he’d thought the story of his life would be written, he found himself locked in the bright orbit of a new man: the Maronite had come from the sea and his nature had retained some of that fluidity.
The thought of appearing in front of that giant again was making Abdelkarim highly anxious. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t chase away the shadow that lingered between them like a ghost. Ferdinando was the one casting the shadow, and everything perished once swallowed by the Hajji’s silence. Abdelkarim wanted to throw himself at the giant’s feet and hug his beloved Ferdinando’s shadow: but it always flitted away, and the giant’s feet were made of stone.
In the silence of the desert plains, Abdelkarim felt nostalgic for his master’s presence, a man who was afflicted by an unruly brother, but was still very disciplined himself, and who adopted a conciliatory attitude towards life. Abdelkarim already wanted to start on his return journey, and once past the difficult night that trip necessitated, and steering his daydreaming in the opposite direction, he tried to picture himself entering the shop and seeing the satisfaction on his master’s face, and the kindness he would show him.
In the meantime he continued walking through the boundless plain, Semereth’s form growing frighteningly before his eyes. The long road to the uplands belonged to him. The further he walked, the more detached Abdelkarim felt from everything else. The giant had become synonymous with that vast country: King, kingdom and road had fused into one.
In order to guarantee his safe passage, he had been given the Maronite’s papers; he would have to rely on his shrewdness to outsmart the Italian army, but the Maronite’s papers would help him overcome those invisible gates and their ferocious guardians. Although he was familiar with that country and he knew its master, something had changed inside him: he no longer belonged to the giant, to that tragic, powerful lord of darkness – instead he was now owned by a merchant, a young man who confidently steered his ship through the boundless sea.
To reassure himself, Abdelkarim patted the Maronite’s papers hidden inside his wide white belt.
Until he’d accomplished his mission and delivered his message, Abdelkarim would only encounter obstacles he knew how to avoid: the nets that the occupying army had laid out all over the country, through which the natives of the feudal countryside walked as though they were an open door. And once Semereth Effendi had handed him a reply, Abdelkarim would start on the same journey, just in the opposite direction, once more armed with a talisman. He was the hand that relayed notes back and forth between the two friends, and so long as he was in their service, he would be as safe as a jinn.
Abdulkarim found Abubaker in the town he’d been directed to, deep in the verdant uplands of Barca. The old man immediately took possession of the papers and Abdelkarim feared he would be left there awaiting a reply, or even sent back empty-handed. But it was an unfounded worry. Sure enough, he followed Abubaker to the location where they would find Semereth Effendi. The journey took two days, during which time Abubaker didn’t ask him a single question.
They camped in the middle of a wood. Abdelkarim only noticed Semereth Effendi’s arrival a moment before he appeared in front of him. He stood up abruptly, but having drawn near to kiss his hand, he froze, intimidated. Semereth Effendi approached until he stood in front of him, and then stopped. He wasn’t looking at him, but something was clearly bothering him, and stopped him from proceeding further.
Semereth Effendi saw a wall before him, and for a moment that giant felt as though he had once more taken a wrong turn. Even so, he was only faced with Abdelkarim’s shadow, which was as thin as a sheet. Semereth Effendi remained motionless. It was only when the frightened Abdelkarim took a step back, and his shadow flitted away and cleared the path, that the Hajji continued on his way, without even turning to greet him or acknowledge that he’d registered his presence. He had no intention of stepping over that shadow, whose shape recalled Ferdinando.
Abubaker later came to tell him he’d been summoned by the Hajji.
Abdelkarim entered the dimly lamp-lit tent. Semereth Effendi gave him a friendly smile. The young man grasped his enormous hand and kissed it. He then kept his eyes on the floor while standing in front of the Hajji, who was seated on a straw mat.
Semereth Effendi asked him about Émile Chébas, whether he was in good health, if he’d had any difficulties with the Italian authorities, if he still felt at ease in Benghazi, and then invoked the heavens to bless him and praised him highly. He told Abdelkarim that he was very pleased to have found him such a good master. Having said that, he motioned him to come closer. Smiling, he asked him if he was happy with his new master, but Abdelkarim didn’t dare answer.
Hajji Semereth spoke for a moment longer, then stopped. The tent swelled with shadows and the Hajji waved his hand, as though shooing them away. Order only returned to the tent after a long silence, at which point the Hajji held out a sheet of paper to Abdelkarim, who likewise held out his hand and made the paper disappear in the blink of an eye. He then took hold of the Hajji’s hand again and kissed it. Observing the boy’s head, Semereth Effendi was astonished by how small it was.
He plunged a hand into his pocket, produced a coin, and held it out to Abdelkarim. The boy took it and shamefully put it away.
Abdelkarim saw Hajji Semereth was no longer concerned with him. He had seen Semereth Effendi engrossed in his own thoughts many times before. He turned and scampered off.
It wasn’t until he reached Benghazi three days later that Abdelkarim stopped living in fear that the Hajji – who, having regretted his generosity, had come to lead him, as he’d done with Zulfa and Ferdinando, through the labyrinthine streets towards death – was right behind him.
Chapter 4
I
Abdelkarim was very surprised to find the shop closed at that time of day, when the whole market was still lively, but didn’t want to ask around and draw attention to the fact he’d been absent from the city. What had happened to the master?
He reached the house, where he hoped to find the master, but nobody answered the door. He knocked at the neighbours’ house; he would jump off their balcony and into the master’s.
But as he was climbing down a rope into the courtyard, passing in front of Olghina’s windows,
he stumbled upon a scene, and was most certainly – although he nearly let go of the rope to drop down – seen himself. The master was lying in bed with the beautiful Olghina.
As soon as he’d reached the ground, he scurried off into the corridor, but was already trapped. Not long afterwards he heard someone knocking at the door, but he didn’t dare answer. He went to hide in the courtyard.
Having come downstairs, it was the Maronite who opened the door, and he left with the newcomer: a merchant whose voice Abdelkarim had immediately recognised. But the master shut the door again, and took care to lock it.
Abdelkarim had warily dodged many dangers up in the mountains: now he was sorry he hadn’t fallen victim to one of them. It would be better to die purposelessly than for an actual reason. The fact he’d been an involuntary spectator was irrelevant: he wouldn’t be punished because he had tried to spy on them, but purely because he’d seen. His secretiveness wouldn’t mitigate the offence he had caused his master. Promises and oaths would be useless. Like Semereth Effendi, the master would be both victim and judge. But there was no hope that the aggrieved party would pretend to be guilty out of pity.
Why had the Venetian woman encouraged the affair between Zulfa and Ferdinando? The other wives had never aroused her jealousy. When the child bride had been enthroned as the favourite of the house, the Venetian woman had bided her time and created the opportunity to lure her down the path to Semereth Effendi’s dark wrath, or better yet, into the doomed prison of justice. She was a cunning woman and knew she’d have to pay the price. The child bride would drag an extensive retinue of victims with her into death, which Semereth would sacrifice to placate his wounded naïvety. The Venetian woman hadn’t fled the house on the day of reckoning, but had instead sought refuge in the room where Semereth Effendi dwelled alone, and that was where she had met her end.
In turn, Abdelkarim could flee into the limitless country before the master returned. The rope was still dangling from the terrace in the courtyard, meaning he could extricate himself from Émile’s wrath. But he wanted to stay. He’d vaguely suspected a liaison between the master and the beautiful neighbour, but would never have dared spy on them. However, seeing them lying entwined hadn’t been a coincidence. That vision had appeared before his eyes, as though magically conjured to exclude that option. His gaze had torn them apart.
When he had been told of Armand’s arrival, Abdelkarim had feared the presence of a third person would separate him from his master. Instead, it was Olghina who turned out to be that third person, and not the vain, blameworthy boy. The scene Abdelkarim had stumbled on while sliding down that rope couldn’t mean anything else. His gaze, like an evil spell being cast, had the same impact on that affair as the intrigue which coloured Semereth Effendi’s parable. So long as Abdelkarim was alive, the master would be imprisoned by the sight of Abdelkarim holding on to the memory of him intertwined with the beautiful Olghina. Thus, if the master’s pity removed the threat of death, it would be on the condition that he remain a prisoner of his servant’s memory: as unacceptable to him as it was for the Hajji to relinquish his wife to Ferdinando. The order of things always prevailed on compassion, and the kind master would have to sacrifice the witness. The beautiful Olghina would inevitably make that request, since Abdelkarim’s gaze had desecrated her white nakedness.
The Maronite returned home an hour later. The wrath caused by the sudden apparition in the window had vanished, as when the sky seems to presage a storm, but then calms down and becomes sunny again. Émile had thought about beating Abdelkarim and chasing him out of the house: the image of the master’s life which he’d stolen couldn’t be considered a debt, but instead had to be transmuted into a crime, and punished accordingly.
But being forced to leave with the merchant – whom he had not wanted to receive in the house where he felt so ill at ease – had allowed enough time to pass for leniency to gain the upper hand, and once he’d opened the door on his return, he realised he’d come back from a different direction. It was a tangle of thoughts, images and desires, which had now split into two opposing armies under the flags of wrath on one side, and leniency on the other.
Abdelkarim had sought refuge at the far end of the courtyard. The Maronite seemed to be guided by desires that had been kept concealed during his usual daily walk. The boy’s sudden appearance in the window had derailed the natural order of things, and the old rules now seemed obsolete. The boy was helpless. Having gone into his room, the merchant called him in and asked him to hand over the document the Hajji had given him. It had been folded twice. The Maronite read it. He then asked Abdelkarim a few questions about his trip, which the boy was barely able to answer. These were only delays.
At that moment, there was nobody who could spy on that scene, no window which someone might carelessly pass by. The isolation bound them tightly together, like two threads in a piece of string.
BOOK III
CHAPTER 1
I
Mikhail Chébas woke up early. He was a man who always showed off his industriousness. Few could claim to be less inclined to hypocrisy and deceit, but he always exaggerated everything, and was incapable of looking on a situation with indifference and detachment. His eye was always an inch away from reality, blowing everything monstrously out of proportion. His ideas were simple, so his efforts remained stifled. There was a constant imbalance between his modest goals and the exertions he employed to achieve them. His goodwill, scrupulousness and devotion – to family and business, which were one and the same as far as he was concerned and also used up all the time one had ‘down there’ – were so extreme that they even made his nephew Émile Chébas, the demanding head of the company, feel ill at ease. As for strangers, they found Mikhail’s tendency to exaggerate everything highly annoying.
Why should Émile look elsewhere – in other words outside the family circle and the interests of the business – to find friendship and patronage? Mikhail wondered whether Émile wanted to run away as much as he wanted to grow, as though legacies and traditions were an impediment, and as if man could possibly break through the limited confines of his destiny.
Mikhail was baffled by his nephew’s indifference to the religion of the people he dealt with: not only with regards to his customers – protecting, in turn, his business – but also with others, the people he met at cafés, or entertained in his house, or paid visits to. He was also baffled by how effortlessly Émile could strike up a rapport with the Italian officers. He didn’t simply treat them with respect because they represented the local authorities, he welcomed them cordially, even sought them out. Were these relationships as important to him as his family ties? Did they serve a purpose, or was he simply mistaking them for customers? How could anyone manage affairs that weren’t strictly useful or dictated by necessity, and what rules were these affairs subject to?
Mikhail had opened a branch of the business in El-Hania, the little port city in the east that seemed to be growing in importance. The tribes from the interior of the country would favour that market over Benghazi. Mikhail had helped build the spacious warehouse in the clearing where the authorities had decided the new market would be erected, making the doors and windows with his own hands. The warehouse, which had two entrances, faced true north, towards the sea.
Mikhail was always the first to show up for work and he inevitably welcomed his helpers with reproaches for being late, dismissing them with more reproaches for the little they’d done or because they’d left work early, whereas he would have gone on longer. These anti-ceremonies were the bookends to the working day, gloomy prayers that extended a veil of melancholy over the branch of the business he’d been entrusted with. He was never satisfied with anything they did, because all that was good could only concern either his family or the business. He always took part in whatever job needed to be done, even the humblest, but never addressed his subordinates with a kind word, and he could never abide hearing them gossip. It was as though he were the watchman of a tiny
penal colony. He ate frugal meals, was highly reserved and stingy even with himself, exhibiting a certain hatred towards commodities, even though his business relied on them.
The letters he wrote to his nephew always began with interminable declarations of fondness, cosseting him like a child: My dearest, beloved nephew, I kiss your eyes … He always asked Émile if he’d received news from distant relatives, and begged him not to withhold any information. He would appear to lose his patience when Émile told him that no mishaps had happened, and was plagued by doubts that tragedies had in fact occurred, but that nobody wanted to tell him. He would complain about feeling lonely because he was so far removed from his beloved nephew, and then give brief, incomplete accounts of how the business was going, complaining about customers and employees: one lot were parasites, while the others were freeloaders, all of them damned swindlers. He never specified the current quotes for goods, or market trends, or the safety of shipping routes, or expressed an opinion on the political climate and its fatal consequences for trade. The only injections of feeling into his droning soliloquy came at its opening and then at its conclusion; once he reached that end point he would once again affirm his affection for his nephew and beg him to write longer letters, since his was the only voice that broke though that gloomy silence, the only ray of light that pierced the darkness, the only warmth that put his lonely heart at ease.
Losing his patience, Émile would reply, hurrying through the typical pleasantries employed at the time, and would ask his uncle to send him more detailed reports. When said reply finally arrived, Mikhail’s words were always imbued with drama, as though something sacred were on the verge of breaking. He would say that he’d dedicated his entire day to work, invoking God to testify to his scrupulousness; he would swear oaths on the lives of his three distant daughters, saying destiny might prevent him from ever seeing them again, that what he was saying was true, and that he – meaning Émile – was more dear to him than those daughters, and that he was more like a beloved brother. Did these requests for financial details mean Émile didn’t trust him? Everything was in danger: the family, the business. Then, suddenly growing sparing with words, he would conclude on a note of bitter resentment, saying that if Émile wanted to replace him, he should do so immediately, since Mikhail had the business’s best interests at heart – but that if so, he wanted to be told clearly.
The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I Page 11