by Ali Bader
90
She was elated, and when she reached the roof she lay down on the bed. Ismail did the same. They resumed their lovemaking to the sound of music under the clear summer sky. They felt they were on another planet far from the struggles of daily life.
The minaret of the Siraj al-Din Mosque was close to the house and quite high. Germaine said to Ismail, “Look at the minaret. It’s as if someone is watching us.” He laughed, looked at the minaret and then the empty street, where only a barking dog and the whistle of the guard could be heard, and reassured her, “No, the imam won’t watch us.” Germaine got up, covered herself with a sheet, and looked at the courtyard of the mosque. She saw a tree bearing small fruit hidden from passersby by the high wall. She turned to Ismail, ran her fingers across his body and said, “I want one of these apples.” Ismail was surprised but he complied. He put on his black trousers and went down to the courtyard. As soon as the guard moved away, he climbed the tree and picked as many green apples as he could. When he heard someone coming down the minaret’s steps, he quickly hid the apples in his pants, and clambered down. Two hands grabbed him immediately, one by the neck and the other by his pants. It was the imam, who exulted, “I’ve caught you, sinner.” The guard came over, and by the light of the moon he saw Ismail’s pants filled with the mosque’s apples. Ismail’s pleas for mercy went unheeded. The guard, proud and happy to have finally caught a scofflaw, shouted at him, “You are a thief, and you steal from a mosque!”
The imam added, “He is also an adulterer.”
When Ismail sought to correct him, “Only a thief,” the imam pronounced, “I was watching you from the minaret. You delayed my call to prayer, you sinners.”
Hoping to confound him, Ismail suggested, “Maybe you were watching a porn flick, imam?”
The guard didn’t like Ismail’s rudeness. He told him to take off his pants, leaving him totally naked, and tied him to a tree. Meanwhile the imam had climbed the minaret and invited the inhabitants of al-Sadriya to come and see the adulterer.
All this took place as Germaine, covered only with a sheet, watched, helpless and mortified, from her roof.
91
The scandal must have been more than Abd al-Rahman could handle. The documents confirm that he died one week after the news broke of his wife’s liaison with his colleague. His life turned upside down; Germaine returned to Paris; Ismail disappeared; Edmond immigrated to Australia; and no one knew what happened to Nadia. Was this the Trotskyite plot hatched by Edmond and Ismail? Did Ismail betray Abd al-Rahman on his own? Was he, a betrayer by nature, pushed to do so? Was it the wife who wanted to cheat on a husband busy with his nausea, his dissolute life, and the prostitutes in the nightclubs?
It was up to me to answer all these questions and finish up the philosopher’s biography I had started writing three months earlier. I had been working on it nonstop, totally involved in it, in order to receive the money promised to me by Hanna Yusif and Nunu Behar.
The Philosopher’s Journey
One quiet morning, having almost finished the philosopher’s biography, I woke up early and pulled open the curtains of the casement overlooking the street. I opened the window and felt the cold air hit my face. The sun was pale, and its rays spread over the upper stories of the buildings, hotels, and luxurious houses. The smell of ink reminded me of the drama of lost-love stories I had lived with ever since I had dived into the maze of documents in search of the words that gradually formed themselves into the stories of real people.
Those words shaped the philosopher’s distorted hands, his large, handsome chest, and sleepy look. They put some order into the flurry of documents that encumbered my desk and my room, and inspired the writing of the biography: there were documents, old newspapers, magazines thrown everywhere, piles of rough copies, and photographs. The furniture in the apartment was covered with dust. My dog barked nonstop after I tied him to the bedpost with my belt to prevent him from disturbing the papers or breaking the pens. There were leftover bits of food: dark bread crusts that looked like a stain on the table, an open bag, and the remains of a hard-boiled egg.
Writing freed me of all that because I could give free rein to the emotions the philosopher was unable to express. I revived him, breathed life into him, brought him to the brink of an explosion. By this I don’t mean I wrote a book of history; I always insisted on the danger and futility of an interpretation based on history. No, I made room for imagination and a place for his personality in the biography, filling the gap between the imagined personality and the real subject. What the flesh-and-blood philosopher and the philosopher on paper have in common is the way of life, the environment, and the persons that surround them. I became aware that people live only through their imagined selves, which led me to establish a relationship between words and objects through the imagination of the characters and their delusions. I created a supplementary image in the mind, one that was more anguished in the abstract than it was in reality. It is an image that a work written without sincere concern for the main character cannot include between its covers.
As I said earlier, I was looking at the street from the window, and I saw a woman carrying a bag, a nightingale taking in the cold of the gardens. Then I heard the thin sound of a violin wafting on the fresh air, entering my room through the window, and spreading like a long, well-combed beard.
I drew a bath and jumped into the tub to relax after a strenuous period of work. I closed my eyes and let myself go, enjoying the scent of the salts I had put in the water. Suddenly I heard a noise that sounded as if someone were trying to break into my apartment. The dog was barking, and I was petrified, as if my body had turned into a log floating in the bathwater. I slid out of the tub, put on my bathrobe, and half-opened the door. Hanna Yusif was moving surreptitiously toward my desk. I went out and asked him what he was doing in my apartment. It was a silly question because I knew very well that he was after the philosopher’s biography. He was startled and tried to hide his embarrassment. He laughed loudly, “Oh! You’re here! I didn’t know, forgive me.” When I asked him how he managed to open the door, he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and said, “I opened it with the key, believe me. I found those keys in my pocket and said to myself, let me try one of them.”
“You should have knocked,” I shouted.
“By Christ, I did knock, but you didn’t hear me. I thought you weren’t at home, and I decided to come in and wait for you,” he explained.
I rejected his excuse, “Hanna, when I am not at home you do not have permission to come in. You know this. It’s simple good manners!”
He continued to defend himself. “I know, but we’re friends— or I thought we were.”
The dog was stretched out near the bed, sweating, his eyes yellowish. His mouth was opening and closing, his teeth were not showing. I was alarmed and went to check his pulse. Hanna said, “Don’t worry. He won’t die. It’s a temporary anesthetic. He’ll come back to his senses in a few minutes.” The dog was moaning and twitching slowly on the floor. I went to my room to get dressed, and when I returned I saw Hanna going through my papers on the table.
I went to the kitchen to make coffee, and I heard Hanna laugh as he was reading the papers. He was more elegant this day than when I first saw him. He carried a silver cane and used it for appearances only. He wore a shiny blazer and a vest with a silver watch in one of the pockets. His hair was well combed, and his cologne filled the space of the room. All this elegance, however, could not hide his depravity and hypocrisy.
I put his coffee on the table, and when I turned to look at him, his hand was shaking. He said to me, “I’ll take these papers home to read.” I objected, “No, Hanna. I have not completed my work yet.”
The truth is that I had made two copies of my biography. One I hid in my clothes closet, and the other was on the desk. I was worried about the future and didn’t trust Hanna Yusif or Sadeq Zadeh. I was able to persuade Hanna to read the papers in my apartment.
I went out to eat breakfast and buy cigarettes and left Hanna in the apartment to read. I hurried back and found him tearing up some of the pages and dumping them in the wastebasket. I shouted at him, “What are you doing!” He explained, “Nothing, some of the information is incorrect, believe me.” He had destroyed all the pages on which I wrote of the suicide of the philosopher but showed a great interest in the activities of Ismail Hadoub. He was more interested in this character than in the others. Laughing indecently, he said he wanted me to provide more dirt about Ismail. His malicious eyes moved from page to page. Finally he agreed, “What you’ve written is enough. Can I take the biography home with me?”
“Yes, you may, once you pay me the agreed upon wage.” But he wasn’t prepared for that.
“I’ll give you your money tomorrow. I didn’t expect you to finish it so soon. Believe me, I’ll pay you tomorrow.” But I insisted and told him that he wouldn’t get the biography before he gave me the money he owed me.
I took great pleasure in tormenting him. He would first beg me to accede to his request, and whenever he failed he’d act as if it didn’t matter to him. He’d seem to give up, “OK, I’ll leave it here then, even though we’ve agreed that I’ll pay you. Don’t worry. I’ll give your money. I can’t deny you your rights. You’ve worked very hard the whole time.”
Then he’d flip the pages and come up with another reason to take the manuscript home, “If you give it to me today I’ll correct some of the historical mistakes and give it back to you for a rewrite, then I could pay you. Once you’re done with the corrections, I’ll come back with Nunu Behar and take the final version.”
I thought to myself, “what’s wrong with giving him this copy? I have another one. I can discover his intentions from the historical corrections he wants to make.” I told him, “All right Hanna, take these papers with you on condition that you return them to me tomorrow with the money.” He could hardly contain himself. He snatched up the manuscript and fairly flew out of the apartment.
I began straightening up my apartment and placing the documents in their place in the cupboard. I discovered that some documents related to Ismail Hadoub’s life had disappeared. Frantic, I looked for them everywhere—under my papers, between the magazines and newspapers, under the bed. I was looking among my clothes when I heard a knock. Sadeq Zadeh and Nunu Behar were at the door. Sadeq pushed me inside and asked, “What did you give Hanna?”
“Nothing,” I said, fully aware of my lie. Sadeq was furious and his eyes were spewing flame.
“Where is the biography?” asked Nunu. I opened my cupboard and gave them the second copy. They leafed through it while I watched, seated beside my dog.
Nunu Behar sat on a chair holding her purse while Sadeq Zadeh read through the philosopher’s biography, commenting volubly. “Not true. I never said that! Liar, liar.” He was swearing and whistling his fury, then turned to me, “Where did you get these documents?”
“Which documents,” I asked, frightened by the tone of his voice.
“The documents related to Ismail Hadoub.” I was silent and nervous. I had never expected Ismail Hadoub’s story to be more important than the philosopher’s. I was commissioned to write a biography of the philosopher not of Ismail Hadoub, and if I included information about him it was because he augmented the image of the philosopher. I said to Sadeq, “But you told me that the most important thing was to write about the philosopher’s life. I don’t understand this sudden interest in Ismail Hadoub.”
Sadeq couldn’t restrain himself. He jumped nervously from his seat, grabbed me by the neck with one hand, and held a gun to my head with the other. Fuming, he growled, “You wrote the biography of the philosopher because we paid you to do so, but who asked you to write about Ismail Hadoub? What obscene person induced you to do it? Tell me!”
I defended myself, “No one told me to do it, but I found that Ismail was important for understanding the personality of the philosopher, believe me.”
Nunu Behar tried to calm him down. “Leave him, Ismail. Let him be.” Until this second I had not realized that Sadeq was Ismail Hadoub. I hadn’t written about him to expose him, and if he had told me the truth I would have embellished his image. If only to spare myself his wrath and to get my money I would have avoided reporting the information in the documents literally. I freed myself from his grip and ran headlong without looking back. Two bullets whistled through the air.
I didn’t go back to my apartment, but I inquired about Hanna Yusif’s new address—the coward had changed lodging. Someone I knew told me that he was living in a small place called Hotel Hamameh at the end of al-Rashid Street. When I arrived there I found it to be a miserable one-star hotel with a small reception hall and an aged Egyptian receptionist guarding a bunch of keys. Hanna was in room thirteen, on the second floor. I climbed the stairs, two steps at a time, ignoring the receptionist’s protests, “Sir! If you please. Sir!”
I arrived in front of Hanna’s room determined to enter without knocking, to force my way in if need be. The door was broken however, and I had no trouble opening it, and pulled off the door handle in the process. Hanna was just coming out of the restroom and buttoning his trousers, a cigarette between his lips. He could see in my eyes how upset and angry I was. He squeezed the cigarette between his teeth and said in a low voice, “How wonderful it is to be able to answer the call of nature, it is such a relief!” I jumped at him, grabbed him by his necktie, pushed him to the floor with my left hand, and fell onto him. He managed to wriggle out of my grasp like a louse, but I held him down by putting my knee on his belly and throttling him by the neck with my hand. I held my shoe in my other hand and whacked him on the head and face, “Son of a bitch, where’s the money? I’ll smash your head with this shoe”
He was pleading with me, his mouth foaming, lips turning blue, neck stiffening, eyes white. I hit him and threatened him further, “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” He smiled when he heard those words, then began laughing loudly and tried to free his neck. I couldn’t understand why he was laughing as I was still threatening to pound him with my shoe. Unable to control himself, he said “I’m laughing at your curses. I have never heard those words before, ibn al-‘arida.”
I started laughing too and gradually released my grip. We sat on the floor and laughed. He jockeyed to gain the advantage, but I threatened again to kill him and said, “You won’t walk through this door without paying me.” He kept repeating, “I will, I will, just calm down.” I repeated, “I won’t calm down. You conned me, you didn’t tell me that Ismail Hadoub was Sadeq Zadeh.”
“I thought you knew,” he said.
“How could I?” I said.
He found more excuses, “You’re an intelligent man. You could have found out. You uncovered many secrets.”
But I insisted, “What about the money? Are you trying to get out of paying me?” Finally, he told the truth, “I don’t have the money.” The blood rushed to my head.
I stood up and advised him, “I am going to cut off your nose and hand it over to you, do you understand? If you don’t pay me right now, I’ll stick each piece of furniture in this room up you know where.” He chortled loudly. The arms holding his torso relaxed suddenly, and he jerked backward and hit his head on the floor. Hanna was pleading, “Oh, God, don’t make me laugh. You’re so funny. Just looking at you amuses me. When I hear those swear words I can’t control myself.”
I replied angrily, “My curses are not meant for your amusement, you rotten shoe. Do you understand?”
I searched his pockets for money. He helped me go through his clothes, showing me the secret pockets in his suit. There was nothing in them but a few Iraqi banknotes, two sexually explicit pictures, a small notebook, and a lighter. I noticed a small briefcase on the bed. I opened it and dumped out its contents: an old worn-out book, a fake Yves Saint Laurent perfume box, and a counterfeit identity card issued by Yaacub Saleh Yaacub’s travel agency.
“Take this book as
security until I bring you the money tomorrow at ten o’clock. Wait for me here at this hotel,” said Hanna.
“Which book?” I asked.
“This book. It is an original manuscript that dates back to the tenth century.” I examined the book and could see that its well-worn cover and its paper resembled old manuscripts, but I was still suspicious.
“You’re lying, this is not an authentic ancient manuscript, it’s a counterfeit.”
He was adamant, “By Christ, it’s not a counterfeit! Look, there’s even the stamp of Hajji Khalifeh. I went to Father Anastas al-Karmali, and he helped me buy it from a priest who works in the convent. I paid a very high price for it.” I was not convinced and told him so but he swore again by Christ.
I finally said, “I’ll break your neck if it’s not authentic.” He reconfirmed the time and the place to deliver my money, “I’ll wait for you here tomorrow. You should know that no amount of money can compensate me for the value of this book, in case you decide to take it and ran away with it.”
I defended myself. “I’m not a thief like you.” His face expressed his disapproval.
I took the manuscript as Hanna was repacking his case. I left still wondering whether the manuscript was really worth the amount he had agreed to give me for writing the al-Sadriya philosopher’s biography. I decided to confirm its authenticity before Hanna ran off completely. I went directly to the Iraqi Manuscript Center across the Tigris, an old house built in the thirties. It was a cold and windy day despite the shining sun. I knocked nervously at the door and waited for a few minutes, but no one came. I started banging very hard and shook the door, shouting loudly, “Open the door! Open the door.”
Now I realized my mistake. In my haste to verify the authenticity of the manuscript, I had behaved in a way that made the people of the house suspicious. They looked at me distrustfully from an upper-floor window. I begged them to check the manuscript right away. Two guards took hold of me and led me inside. They snatched away the manuscript and passed it to a thin, graying man who looked like Pasteur. He examined it with the help of a magnifying glass and said, smiling, “It’s a counterfeit.”
