With her feet on the railing of the balcony, she recalls Marwan’s story. That final meeting at the Café Riche. He eventually fell silent. And his hand nudged the package there in front of him. “I’ve kept it my entire life. Not as a thief . . . Because it was my duty. I always knew that I would give it to you.” And those were the last words she heard from his lips. After that he was silent, letting her take her time to put her hand on the object and slowly remove the tissue paper. She opened her mouth wide when the statue of the god Bes appeared before her. In black stone, as big as her palm. The dwarf god with long arms and short stocky legs. The face of a lion and a thick beard. The god who performs his grotesque, grimacing dance to chase away the forces of evil, to protect men from nightmares and sexual malfunction. The god Bes who is placed under the head of the dying at the moment of their death in order to look after them in the hereafter. The ugly, belching hairy dwarf with his thick eyebrows. She takes him in her hand, oblivious as to whether anyone in the café is looking at her or not, whether anyone around them is wondering what on earth that thing is . . . She accepts, and Marwan smiles. She remembers that moment: when Marwan smiled. He got up, said nothing more. Nothing. Not even “goodbye”—because the right word would have been “farewell”—let alone “see you soon,” because that would have been a lie. He paid and left, and she let him go off with that cane she had never seen him with before, walking like a mountain that is crumbling, she let him go to his submersion and she clutched the dwarf god tightly. She remembers this. And tonight, on the terrace in Alexandria, she thinks again of Marwan with the feeling that for the first time she is no longer a mistress who has lost her lover. She has learned to be without him. She thinks again of the god Bes, the feel of stone in her hand. A statue that was buried in the earth thousands of years ago, until Mariette Pasha held it, then Maspero, then others, a long chain of archeologists who agreed, on taking it, to acknowledge the shadow side of their profession. And Botta should have taken it. If he had known that two hundred and nine crates filled with the ancient artifacts exhumed from the site he had discovered were about to sink to the bottom of the Tigris, he would have taken it. She thinks of this long chain of men and women leading down to her and to the man she gave the statue to—possibly the first not to be an archeologist. And so? What does she know? The Bes statue has been restored to life, shunted from one country to the next, one convulsion to the next. Some people died, others wanted to get rid of it, but until it came to her the artifact was always passed on. She wonders how much of her gesture Assem will understand, what he will make of the object, what he will do with it. She thinks about him. And it’s strange, but she thinks about him the way she would think about a lover. Will they ever meet again? Their time together seems to have expanded inside her since they met. He has begun to take up room. She thinks about him, during this night that has brought them together on this same shore of the Mediterranean, wrapped in the same thick, humid heat that is causing the palm leaves to wilt from Alexandra to Tripoli, and she hopes that the dwarf god is watching over him wherever he might be, banishing with his grimacing face the nightmares that hover over human beings.
XIV
TRIPOLI
He is sitting across from Job. The American lets him get settled, looking at him calmly, then with a strange smile he asks, “Why did you come?”
He is not sure he knows but he answers anyway.
“So we can finish our conversation.”
Job smiles.
“You’re better than they are, lieutenant . . . ” And he pours a drink. Then he says, playfully, “You’re right. You’re here so that there can be an ending. And that’s good. That’s what I hoped.”
And before Assem can speak again, he continues: “It is defeat that unites us, lieutenant . . . ”
And now Assem feels what he had felt in Beirut: that all at once, through the power of words, time has expanded.
Job’s eyes are shining in the gloom of the salon. There is the sporadic sound of automatic weapon fire in the distance. He isn’t startled, but for a split second a shadow of anxiety passes over his face. Defeat . . . Assem knows that Job is telling the truth. He know that this is what they have shared all along: the deep conviction that they have been defeated. And it’s no longer a matter of success versus failure. True, deep defeat, the defeat that one fine day humans feel inside like a force weighing upon them, will make them less quick, less innocent; there is the defeat of the body, thickening, swelling, becoming short-winded, and of eyes that wish they had not seen so much. The deep, private defeat, in the face of this thing that is drawing closer, from which no one can escape, and which is called submersion.
“What are the causes we have fought for, lieutenant?” Job asks again, seeming more and more agitated. Assem doesn’t know how to answer his question. So he asks one himself.
“What,” he says bluntly to the American, “are you going to do now?”
The other man doesn’t flinch, looks at him forcefully and says:
“The battles we were asked to win—we’ve won them, but you and I both know that we have been defeated, we can feel it inside, something has gone too far, or has lost its meaning . . . Don’t you think so, lieutenant?”
Assem remembers that day, always the same one, on the road to Sirte, when he was among the crowd of Libyan opponents, that baking day with Gaddafi’s disarticulated body and the sound of gunfire in the damp sky. Part of him was left behind there, and Job may well be right . . .
“Now I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do,” says Job, with greater assurance and a strange smile. “I’m going to tell you what I am. Really. Unmasked. And when I’m done, it’ll be up to you to judge. All right? When I say judge, I mean it will be up to you to tell me whether I should live or die.”
There is not a sound in the hotel lobby, only his voice, thick, stubborn, which seems to have taken possession of the space and reigns over the sofas and armchairs like a sovereign in his realm, as he continues.
“That is why they sent you, isn’t it? To find out whether I should live or die? I’m not asking you anything more than what they asked you. Except that they want to know whether I represent a risk for the United States, or something like that . . . Forget them. Between you and me it’s different.”
Assem answers rather quickly, as if he wants to avoid venturing into territory where he senses he might get lost.
“You know they’re going to do all they can to neutralize you?”
Job takes his time, looks at him with a sort of kindliness in his eyes and says, “We’re beyond that.”
Assem doesn’t know what to say. The conversation is taking an unpredictable turn. He would like to get up and leave.
“I don’t understand,” he stammers.
“Yes you do, you understand perfectly,” answers Job, with a hard gaze. “And you know that this is how it will end. If you think I have to live, I will go away and they will never find me. But I want to hear it coming from your mouth. We’re done with obeying, you and me. What exists between us now is loyalty.”
Assem would like to say no, to find the words to make him see reason, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, seems to consent, and so Job continues: “I’m going to tell you what happened in Kalafgan.”
There is no one left around them. The businessmen already got up and left a long while ago. The glasses are still on the table and everything seems so still, so frozen, that it is hard to guess how long they will stay there. They are alone in the building. The humid night comes through the half-open windows only when a puff of wind has enough strength to lift one of the heavy taffeta curtains—vestiges of a time when the place was awash with money.
“Did you know that in Antiquity there were priests who believed you could know the will of the gods by studying the way children moved around the playground? When they play, their shouts and moves, the gestures they make, the fights they get
into, their games, it all makes sense.”
“Why are you telling me this?” asks Assem.
“Because that is what I did,” continues Job, his voice hard. “In Afghanistan, in Kalafgan, I did that. I watched a schoolyard full of children. How they came and went. And shouted. Their footprints in the dusty ground. And the gods spoke to me. It was beautiful. The light of the sky. Their chiming voices. I swear. It was beautiful. But do you know what I heard? ‘Destruction.’ That was the word the gods murmured in my ear. Right there, with the kids coming and going: ‘Destruction.’ I felt it as if the word were written on the air, as if the children themselves had asked for it. I had to kill something, absolutely, as quickly as possible. So I did. The gods don’t lie, do they. I obeyed them. I sent the coordinates of the madrasa to Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and a missile took off from far away and came to land there before me, and the will of the gods was done. Destruction. The children were no more. I did that and I stayed to the end so I could walk through the schoolyard once the fire had died down and I could listen to the silence, but there wasn’t any silence, just the villagers screaming, hands grabbing me, hatred everywhere, mine, theirs, I could understand their insults, and I shared them, and I could have hit them the way they hit me, it hardly matters, it was hitting that was needed just then, one way or the other, so that it would all be over, that’s what the gods had asked for, for stones to be thrown, blows to be delivered, I thought it would end there but they rescued me. That was the expression they used. I should have jumped out of the helicopter. I thought about it: jump, and die torn to pieces in the dry stones of Kalafgan, but there were no gods to tell me to do that. They had fallen silent.”
Assem says nothing. He is stunned by what he has just heard. Job takes his time. Maybe he’s thinking about Jasper Kopp. He has just let out the secret Kopp had taken to his grave, and Kopp, back there, should be able at last to cry out from beyond death, in his relief that someone knows what he did. Then suddenly Job starts speaking again.
“So, lieutenant. Should I die?”
Assem feels hot, unwell. He doesn’t want to hear this question and all that it implies.
“Let me go,” he murmurs. And so that Job won’t start talking again, he repeats it, louder, “Let me go.” He is about to get up but Job is quicker. Brusquely, he pulls his hand out from under the table and shouts, “You’re not going anywhere, lieutenant. You promised. Loyalty. Remember? Now you have to answer me.”
And in his hand he is holding a grenade.
“What are you doing?” says Assem.
“Have you decided?”
Before Assem has any time to react, he hears a noise: Job has just removed the pin from the grenade. He is holding it close to him now. At any moment he can let go of the lever and everything will blow: the armchair, the table, Assem . . . They can die together. It depends on Job. If he releases the pressure of his finger, it will all end here. But he doesn’t, he goes on sitting there, his hand tight around the grenade, staring at Assem.
“Should I live?” he asks.
Assem says nothing. He has no more words.
“Look at me!” screams Job. His eyes are feverish. Assem looks up and stares him right in the eyes. “Say something! Or can’t you? Answer, lieutenant!”
And Assem, barely audible as he exhales, lets out one word, “Die . . . ,” and just as he hears it, strangely, Job’s face lights up, not despondent like that of a prisoner who has just been given his sentence, but relieved, as if he had been waiting so long for that word, as if it was the finest gift anyone could give him, and then he says, with a grateful smile, an almost handsome smile despite the feverishness in his eyes:
“Death rather than my carcass . . . That’s good. Thank you. All is well.”
Assem slowly gets to his feet. He senses that Job will let him go, that he is no longer with him, doesn’t even seem to see Assem anymore. His hand is still clutching the grenade, his face turned slightly upward, he’s communing with invisible forces, light-years away from the city around him, he’s staring down the centuries. Maybe he is summoning the ghosts of the children and of Jasper Kopp, unless he is remembering the night at Abbottabad, the sound of the helicopter during the flight back, with that body at his feet, or the schoolyard in Kalafgan beneath the Afghan sky, and the oracles that said nothing but “destruction” . . . Assem moves backward one step at a time, slowly, then goes out, leaving Job behind him without another word, without another look. They are too far apart now. He does not turn around. The air in the street feels good. A few cars in the distance drive quickly along the seafront. He crosses the street, knows that everything is coming to an end there in that room he has just left. Job must have stayed in exactly the same position he’d been in, perhaps speaking to his ghosts, or cursing his enemies . . . Until the explosion rips through the silence, muffled by the thick walls of the Radisson. He knows that throughout the neighborhood men and women will have woken with a start, wondering what has just happened. He knows that someone will eventually go to see but no one will find a thing, because all there is up there are bits of charred body parts and a smile floating through eternity.
XV
CANNE DELLA BATTAGLIA
Everything in the main hall of the museum is quiet, and yet the world is on fire. Palmyra has fallen. They have murdered Khaled al-Asaad. She just found out. She is walking through this room in the Bardo where she has been attending a conference on heritage conservation. A few months ago there were people here who were running, screaming, bleeding . . . They have come here, symbolically, to lend their support, reassert their values. They spoke, the audience applauded, and then one of her colleagues leaned over to her and murmured: “They’ve beheaded Khaled al-Asaad,” showing her his telephone with the news brief from one of the news channels. She stood up, unsteadily. She left the gallery. She wanted to be alone with the artifacts. She wandered slowly through the huge museum, its name now marked with blood, and stopped only when she had the red terra-cotta mask in front of her, with its twisted nose, grimacing mouth, and those two dark holes for eyes. Who is he laughing at? Is it her? Their impotence in the face of barbarity? Her illness? Kind Dr. Hallouche’s comforting words as he looked at the results of the test, the way a father would look at his offspring’s report cards? No. The mask is looking further: at the men rushing past his eyes, at the men and women going back and forth in front of this display case. The day of the attack the mask saw people panicking in this museum that had become a trap. He heard the shots, the screams. Maybe he saw the traces of blood along the walls . . . And he grimaces at the sight of humanity’s self-slaughter. Does he grimace from disgust or simply to ape the madness of men? The entrances to these buildings will soon be better guarded than embassies or barracks. The murderers are the same men who attacked the colossuses at the museum in Mosul with their angle grinders, the same men who occupied the Zenobia Hotel in Palmyra, looking at the ancient relics with a vulture’s appetite, the same men who want to make women forget how to read, who burn the past and topple columns at timeless sites. She stays in the room looking at the red mask for a long time, until she concludes that he hasn’t been looking at anything. No. The holes in the place of eyes are there so that you can enter into him, so that you can be snatched away by the centuries. And the open mouth, too. So for the space of a few minutes she immerses herself in the mask, into a space where there is no one around her, she is far away from everything, from Dr. Hallouche telling her that the results are encouraging, from the other participants at the conference who are scattering in little groups through the huge rooms of this museum that was built as a palace for mosaics but has ended up a tomb, far from her colleagues walking through the rooms trying to be as quiet as possible, intimidated by the pervasive sensation of death. She leaves all that and, paradoxically, she feels strong. Here, facing the mask, for the first time in weeks, she feels determined. The struggle will continue. In spite of the fatigue her
treatment will cause her, she will go on working, coming and going between Paris and Baghdad, from rich, potbellied Europe—Geneva, Zurich, London—to these ever-turbulent lands, but she still has the strength, so she will do it. She will hunt down the plundered artifacts, will defend the museums they want to burn. She places her hand on the glass opposite the mask and it is like a promise. The words she said during the conference that has just ended, about the battle against obscurantism and how they cannot afford to lose it, must never lose it: that is something she believes in. And the death of Khaled al-Asaad does not cancel out her words. Blood will flow again. Marvels from ancient times will be sold on the black market or destroyed, men and women will be murdered, but there can be no defeat. Because that would mean accepting a loss of our identity, that would mean making us forget how to live. We have been reading poetry for too long, we have been admiring mosaics for too long to give all that up. From Alexandria to Baghdad. From Tunis to Palmyra, she will carry on until exhaustion, but that does not matter, because there can be no defeat.
Hear Our Defeats Page 19
