by Salim Bachi
SINBAD CAME TO, his head cradled in the Sleeper’s hands which were as hard as stone. All around, the small square was in chaos, men and women lying among scattered branches. Rivulets of blood trickled among the leaves, staining the stone and pooling in small crimson lakes. Ambulances were parked in front of the theatre and stretcher-bearers, assisted by a few passers-by, were lifting up the wounded, strapping them onto gurneys and pushing them hastily into their vehicles. These then drove away again, their axles, crumpled metal and sirens making a din, while a line of taxis formed to pick up more of the dead or dying. Screams, tears and laments rose up in the warm air which still caressed the trees, ruffled the leaves and caused the branches to sway, while Sinbad explained the reason for this commotion, his ragged breathing a little affected. The Sleeper gazed, as cool as his hands, at the sight of this violence which was so familiar to him and which had remained unchanged since the dawn of time. Naturally, techniques had been perfected, and now, instead of smoking out innocent victims after herding them into caves, they blew them up—which saved a good deal of time.
“Does this happen often?”
“Every day,” said Sinbad. “Every day some lunatic detonates a device in the middle of a crowd. It’s a national sport. A local custom. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. You can get used to anything.”
The Sleeper moved his head although, as usual, it was impossible to tell whether he was agreeing or disagreeing. His dog, whose mouth was watering at the smell, could not stand still: it was growling, whining, pricking up its ears and drooling, as if about to rush for its bowl.
“Anyway, no one gives a damn. It doesn’t even make the papers these days. And the dead aren’t likely to make a fuss, are they?”
“What about the wounded? The orphans?”
“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Sinbad wasn’t a cynic. He had barely woken from that hideous dream in which he’d almost lost his life. He felt as though he were facing the darkness alone. He felt weak and fragile. This was the very reason why he’d run away from the disaster that descended on Carthago with monotonous regularity. The city burned daily, and every day it was something different. He also understood why the kids of the town, tired of living in this hell, had begun to build the rafts that became such terrible shipwrecks. By night, they left the lights of Carthago behind and, at the water’s edge, constructed their small craft, like opium dreams. They built their shipwrecks because no one let them pick up the threads of their lives.
“Doesn’t anybody stop them?” asked the Sleeper.
“They leave at dawn. Like I did, a long time ago.”
THE GAWPING ONLOOKERS, alarmed by this strange group, parted to let them through. Dog had regained his strength, as if reinvigorated by the events of the day, his encounter with the taxi driver and the attack on Square Port-Said: he was energized by the smell of carnage flowing through him like an electric current. The dead bodies, the screams, the men lying face down on the pavement, the uprooted trees, the wailing of sirens, the coming and going of ambulances, had changed his psyche, arousing terrible instincts, connecting new nerve endings, producing new organs and forming new muscles. Despite appearances, Dog was far more formidable than the animal domesticated by man fifteen thousand years earlier. The Sleeper’s companion was a creature fashioned in the bowels of the earth, a diabolical creation, assuming that the Demiurge did indeed exist and that the universe represented form without purpose. Our world, illuminated by Nothing, was a Cave whose walls showed terrible images that had men mimicking actions they didn’t understand, while governed by urges they concealed under the guise of reason. God had no place in this macabre performance. Wherever the world was, God wasn’t there. He was somewhere beyond the spheres and galaxies that had been launched into space after the first spark like missiles. God had died at that moment and had been replaced by Fate.
Sinbad had been drifting off course ever since he’d met the stranger and his dog, ever since that night when he’d gone over to them on the boat as it was nearing Carthago. He should never have met them. He was the complete opposite of the Sleeper and his dog. One side represented life, youth and love, and the other was the complete negation of these qualities. Sinbad was being contaminated by the gloomy presence of the Sleeper, as if darkness were threatening to claim him too. His story was no longer of any interest, although he would still insist on telling it. His life’s adventures, his voyages and his women signified nothing; he would describe them to the Sleeper, whose ear was like a bottomless well in which words and emotions dissolved and disappeared. He’d tell him about his voyage to Italy, Syria and, finally, his return in the midst of war, but he didn’t care about any of that now—his life had been slowly ebbing away since he’d been in the company of the Sleeper and Dog, whose dark mission frightened him.
Apart from him, who would give a damn about the stories?
Who these days took the time to read a book or listen to a man inventing his life? Realism had become the boring byword in this fiendishly modern world. Even the great massacres were scientific achievements, programmes and statistics. Homer and Scheherazade belonged to a lost race. No one would ever bewitch the world again. Someone had to acknowledge this, thought Sinbad, on the verge of tears. Dog’s coat was gleaming in the sun and his mouth opened to breathe in the warm air blowing between the buildings. Sinbad felt that the oven-like heat around him was being sustained by the animal’s fetid breath. The creature was part of the natural order, like the ground and the sun, or the primordial ocean that had witnessed the birth of life. Sinbad and the Sleeper stopped in front of the Grande Poste for a breather. The sun, now at its zenith, was baking the asphalt. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The sky was white as molten metal.
II
BUILT in the eighteenth century, at the end of the rule of the Sublime Porte, the house Sinbad shared with his grandmother, Lalla Fatima, boasted the magnificence of a bey’s palace combined with the old-fashioned charm of a family home. It was three storeys high and arranged around a patio with a murmuring fountain. The villa’s rooms had balconies overlooking the fountain’s shivering pool. In summer, the women used to stretch out on its broad ledge, legs splayed, and slowly fan themselves while their energetic children played war games.
This palace, now occupied solely by Sinbad and his grandmother, was the only one left in the Kasbah that had not fallen into ruin.
The two men and the dog had walked through the ancient Citadel at night. The Sleeper had been able to observe the true extent of the destruction. This wayward and idiosyncratic town, which had survived the invincible armada, the madness of Charles V, the capture of Oran, the influx of the French armies, the encirclement by colonial troops, partition, the Anglo-American invasion, as well as twenty or thirty earthquakes which would have made the Lisbon Earthquake look like trampoline practice—in other words, five centuries of bitter conflict, bloody wars and all kinds of upheaval—would not survive the following decade, even though it looked set to be one of the most peaceful periods ever experienced by this damned country. The Citadel which, in its immaculate whiteness, had once been the pride of Carthago, was now an image of its shame, its hidden face an exact likeness of its decline. All that remained of those ancient lanes where Barbarossa’s corsairs had once lived were isolated sections of wall, ruined interiors and roofless villas opening onto nothing: Pompeii was beautiful in comparison.
Time caught hold of the Sleeper again and memories washed over him. He again saw the images from his nightmare. He was walking around Hiroshima, through the rubble of the Twin Towers, and in Dresden after the bombing, where women and children had been caught in shelters like rats in a trap. He became one with spectres from all the holocausts, the concentration camp prisoners, the mountains of bones and skulls piled high by the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Killing Fields, the lines of prisoners led to torture in all the cellars and basements of this vast world, whose fearsome beauty, he realized in a final epiphany
, was nothing but a Guantanamo with mod cons.
“Welcome to our home,” said Sinbad. “Please come in… don’t stand on ceremony.”
THE WOMAN looked older than the Sleeper’s dog. She was crouching on a rug, her back supported by a multitude of velvet cushions embroidered with gold thread which glittered in the dim light. Her face was deeply lined and it was impossible for him to make out behind the wrinkles the young woman she had once been.
Lalla Fatima was sitting there like an ancient deity, a vestal virgin from some sacred, yet forgotten, cult.
“You’re the man foretold in the prophecy,” she said in a voice which sounded far too young for her mummified appearance.
“I’m No One.”
She recoiled, which did not escape his notice, despite the poor light in the tapestried room. Generations of women weavers had stretched and cut these threads every day, as if in reality stretching and cutting the ties that bound men to life. The Sleeper was well aware that, one day, when death claimed this woman, she would be buried in one of these hangings.
“Why do you have that dog with you?” she asked in the same soft voice.
“It’s the Guardian.”
Sinbad shifted restlessly, vaguely anxious.
“The Guardian?”
“Of the two worlds,” replied the Sleeper. “It was he who guarded our sleep and prepared for our awakening.”
“You’re leaving something out,” continued the old woman. “The prophecy is clearer than that.”
“What does it say, Lalla Fatima?” asked Sinbad.
The old woman ignored the question and fixed her blue eyes on the Sleeper’s face.
“You’ve come to see what the men of this country have done, haven’t you? You’re here for Judgement Day. My father often spoke to me about it. He said: ‘On the day that every soul shall find gathered together what it has done of good and what it has done of evil, it shall wish that between it and that evil there were a long passage of time.’ Has that Day come when we should fear you?”
The Sleeper could not reply. He would have liked to understand what had brought him here. Not to this room, but to Carthago, which he had once loved so dearly and which now looked like nothing on earth. He wondered if he might not be the plaything of the Demiurge, who had brought him back to life to torment him. Or maybe he was just an amnesiac who had been forced to board a boat so that he could be sent back to his people, like one of those illegal immigrants picked up on the streets of Paris, Rome or London? He had probably set sail from here at the end of the war to work in a factory, on a building site or in a barren field. He had lived alone, without a wife or children, an unarmed soldier in an economic war, a modern-day serf. That was probably the root of the problem: he was a former slave sent home in the evening of his life. But no one, in that situation, would have saddled himself with a fearsome dog.
SINBAD HAD PREPARED a room for the Sleeper on the first floor, under the arches and the slender columns of this former cloister, often infiltrated by the protective rays of the sun. That evening, the full moon cast a spell over the Turkish house that was home to two lonely people, separated by age and history.
Sinbad had met him on the boat coming back from Marseilles. He’d seen him leaning against the ship’s rail, gazing at the city’s skyline with a distracted, yet determined, expression. After that, he’d noticed the pitiful dog, all skin and bones and receding gums. Since then, the animal had perked up. Its ears were cocked and its eyes had brightened during the day. Its muscles were now bulging beneath its coat.
Sinbad had no reason to question his first impression of the Sleeper on the boat as it drew nearer to Carthago which, in a stroke of genius or folly, had been excavated from the past by one man, the way you might unearth a treasure or an ancient mummy and show it to the world, or exhibit the tattered rags of a defeated people or the soiled garments of a rape victim.
Sinbad sat down before his guest and began telling him the true story of his life:
“I, Sinbad, was a happy man. The son of one of the most successful merchants in Carthago, I inherited a substantial fortune on my father’s death. I spent all my time living it up with my friends. I thought this way of life would never end. I lived like this for a long time until I finally came to my senses and saw the error of my ways. Then I realized that I’d squandered my fortune and that my position had deteriorated. One day, I had nothing left and the prospect of being poor made me tremble with fear. As the great King Solomon once said, ‘These three things are better than the other three: the day of death is better than the day of birth; a live dog is better than a dead lion; and the grave is better than want.’
“So, with some twenty other people, I boarded a fishing vessel and set out to conquer Europe, where I thought I’d make my fortune, then come back to live with my kin as I had before.
“We were packed together in the boat, like animals, with hardly any food. Each passenger had paid a fare equivalent to a year’s wages. Sometimes their family clubbed together to pay for the crossing. The patriarch sold his sheep, the stepmother her tapestries, and the children the little trinkets they’d made for fun.
“As a result, some strange odysseys were being undertaken over the Mediterranean, our white sea, which would become tinged with the blood of future shipwrecks off the coast of Malta or Sicily.
“Carthago was full of desperate sailors and a great many small craft set sail from its shores. The numbers increased as the young people of this once magnificent city despaired of ever finding happiness.
“Most of the crew were recruited from the Libyan coast, on the Gulf of Sirte or in Tripoli, and there were many black Africans among them. The crossing was pleasant. It lasted three weeks. By the end, we were literally dying of hunger and thirst. I would have been tempted to eat one of my young companions if I hadn’t retained a little of that sensitivity instilled in me by the education my grandmother, Lalla Fatima, gave me. She spent her nights telling me exciting stories of ogres who devoured reckless children. The idea had revolted me and I couldn’t bring myself to draw lots, as suggested by Robinson, a fellow who still had some physical strength, but who was clearly losing his mind.
“‘The person who draws the short straw can eat that child over there.’ Robinson was serious. He looked first at me, then the child, and then came back to me, holding out his hand so that I could pick a piece of straw.
“‘I’m not hungry, but thanks all the same,’ I said, staring at the poor kid who was drying out under the sun, like a flower between the pages of a book.
“Often when the sea was flat, it shimmered with silvery glints that blinded me. When it grew choppier, it cast up bright gems that hypnotized the children into falling asleep, lulled by the regular sound of the bow slicing through the waves.
“In the evenings, the boat’s occupants watched the white foam left behind by the boat and the phosphorescence within it, little lights that winked on and off, then flickered out.”
III
WE WEATHERED STORMS for several nights. The sea swelled, striking fear into our hearts, and we had to cling on for fear of falling overboard. Having a poetic soul, I watched the celestial fire silently spilling onto the black water at regular intervals. When I eventually fell asleep, my eyes were filled with those flashes of frozen electricity that made my eyelids flutter open like an epileptic’s and left me with a numb tongue and a head full of cotton wool. Then we ran out of fuel and the engine died, so we drifted.
For a long time, we made no headway on the oily surface, barely borne along by the currents. This lasted an eternity while the terrible heat hammered out its judgement on the weakest among us, the children and women who were barely conscious. We covered our heads with shirts, blankets and a fishing jacket found in the bottom of the small boat. We rationed the water and there wasn’t enough food to go round. Sometimes, a flying fish fell into the boat and we devoured it raw, without the slightest sense of revulsion.
Finally, in the scorching heat of t
he sun, we ran aground on the island of Gozo, where we were helped by the UNHCR’s dedicated teams. They nursed us back to health and gave us shelter in a camp. They questioned us for days, trying to establish who came from where, so that they would know where to send everyone back to. Naturally, no one told them anything, because we’d already all burnt our passports. In Carthago, we were called the Harragas—“those who burn”—refugees who set fire to their identity papers. This colourful language appealed to me, Sinbad, a man who’d got himself into this unholy mess through his own stupid fault.
The refugee camp looked promising. It had every modern convenience you could wish for. Barbed wire protected the survivors from the locals, who wanted to string them up, and watchtowers guarded them as they slept peacefully. Soldiers armed by the UN, as in Rwanda, kept a close eye on this starving multitude which was in danger of overrunning Europe. My companions and I were lodged comfortably in metal shacks which could hold around thirty beds, with space to spare.
We were allowed to wander where we liked among those huge shelters, and even fearlessly go up to the barbed-wire fences, while waiting for our bowl of food.
We sometimes ran short of water and had to ration it, but that just meant that we didn’t take showers. It was no worse than being at sea.
