What the hell would I do in Spain? There was my uncle who was working in the Almeria province, but it was no use going to see him. Also they had a crisis there. No work. In any case I didn’t have any papers. Go off in search of adventure?
I thought Paris would be more lenient. Paris or Marseille, the cities of books and detective novels. I pictured them as somewhat alike, populated with sons of grouchy Italians, fighting Algerians, gangsters who spoke slang. I was fifty years behind the times, but still, there must be something left, after all Izzo had written Total Chaos not long ago, I thought. I imagined visiting him, sending him a note saying Dear Sir, I am a young Moroccan fan and I would very much like to meet you. I looked at Wikipedia and found out he was dead. Manchette, too, had died a long time ago. Aside from a few remote and idiotic cousins I didn’t know anyone else in France.
The main thing was to get ready as fast as possible: find lodging that didn’t cost an arm and a leg like this dive, buy some clothes, start working. This business of copying out texts intrigued me. Ask for a passport, just in case. Wait for news from the police, which would certainly end up coming; read everything I could to train myself. Forget Meryem, Bassam, and Sheikh Nureddin.
Put a plan into action.
Have a program.
Work for the future.
After all, twenty is the finest age in life.
I got another email from Judit on Facebook, posted four minutes earlier, it said You’re not coming by, then? I replied—I’ll be right there.
LAKHDAR, Judit said to me in the middle of the night. Lakhdar, and I liked the way she said my name, her slight Spanish accent, her stress on the dad, that letter that exists only in Arabic.
“Lakhdar, that’s not very common, is it?”
My head was on her shoulder.
“No, it’s pretty rare in Morocco. But common in Algeria. My father liked the name, I don’t really know why.”
“What does it mean, other than ‘green’?”
“Actually Lakhdar has two meanings, ‘green,’ but also ‘prosperous.’ Green’s the color of Islam. Maybe that’s why my father chose it. There’s also a prophet who was important to mystics. Khidr the Green. He appears in the Cave Sura.”
“Lakhdar. I’ll call you the Green Hornet.”
“You’re more beautiful than Cameron Diaz.”
She gently caught my hand and guided it downward.
THE weeks and months that followed, before November and my start as a waiter on the Comarit ferries, went by so quickly that my memories are like them, brief and quick. Work for Jean-François was hard, dull, and mind-numbing; my room, halfway between the center of town and the Free Zone, cold and inhospitable; I shared the apartment with three workers slightly older than me but I felt they had never been my age. They seemed to be a bottomless fountain of stupidity. As soon as they got a few dirhams they’d blow them on a new tracksuit, sneakers, hash; they dreamed about a nice life, the high point of which would be the purchase of a double bed from the corner furniture store and a car from the Nissan or Toyota dealer; every day they surfed on voitureaumaroc.com and dreamed of luxury sedans they could never buy, look, here’s a 1992 Jaguar for a hundred thousand dirhams; they wore huge sunglasses that rounded out their faces and their Bluetooth earbuds were always in place. They were smooth, interchangeable, and noisy. But they were company, human activity next to me; they hit on garment factory girls, whose small soft hands ached from the throb of sewing machines, or if they couldn’t get them, then on the fish girls in the frozen-food plant, who smelled of grouper or shrimp from chin to innermost cunt, and all these girls were responsive to the vulgar advances of my fake-Ray-Ban-toting roommates who brought them in great ceremony, like princesses, to eat hamburgers in those big American chains that somehow gave them the impression of living life, real life, not the life of nerds, of hicks who didn’t have the luck to work in the Free Zone, and thus not only earned less, much less, but above all were much less distinguished, having neither sunglasses nor fancy phones; the whole performance made for a huge waste, far, far different from the neighborhoods where I had grown up, true, but also and especially from the ones where I wanted to live.
In any case I didn’t have much time off, not much time to interact with my housemates, work was terribly time-consuming and resembled the work of the sewing-machine slaves or the prawn-shellers, but without the smell: I spent twelve to sixteen hours in front of the screen, back bent like a string bean picker, faithfully copying out, with my four or six fingers, books, culinary encyclopedias, handwritten letters, archives, anything that Mr. Bourrelier handed me. The job was well-named: saisie kilométrique, typing by the kilometer; more precisely “double typing,” since this mind-numbing work was done twice, by two different mind-numbed idiots, and then the results were cross-checked, which gave a reliable file that could be sent to the sponsor. Mr. Bourrelier’s customers were extremely diverse: publishing houses that wanted to make digital use of or reprint an old backlist, government officials who had tons and tons of written stuff to go through, cities, town halls with overflowing archives, universities that sent old tapes of lectures and teachings to transcribe—you felt that all of France, all the verbiage of France, was landing here, in Africa; the whole country was vomiting language onto Mr. Bourrelier and his slaves. You had to type quickly, of course, but not too quickly, since you had to pay for corrections out of your pocket: every time a crosscheck of the two samples revealed a mistake, the word or phrase in question was verified and the misprint deducted from my salary. The first book I copied was a travel book about the African coasts at the end of the eighteenth century; pirates, slaves, that sort of thing. There must have been a goldmine in this genre of literature, because after that I was off to Russia, typing out A Frenchman in Siberia, written in 1872; and you might have thought this work was interesting, but more than anything it was exhausting, you had to pay attention to spelling and to proper nouns; you got lost in the flesh of words, in letters, sentences, as close as possible to the text, and sometimes I’d have been quite incapable of summarizing what such or such a page that I had just copied out was talking about. At least, I said to myself plausibly, after a few months of this treatment my French might be impeccable, but above it was all frustrating—I of course didn’t have the time to look up unknown words in the dictionary; I copied them out as is, without understanding them, and the number of typos stemmed from my incomprehension, from my lack of knowledge of one term or another.
Mr. Bourrelier was nice enough to me; he often said to me Ah, sorry, still no thrillers on the horizon, but if there ever are any, I swear they’ll be yours. I was a good worker, I think, I tried to be serious and didn’t have much else to do.
One day, my zeal got me a poisoned gift: when I arrived at work one morning, Mr. Bourrelier called me into his office. He was cheerful, he was laughing like a child, I’ve just gotten some excellent news, he told me. Magnificent news. A very big order from the Ministry of Former Combatants. It involves digitalizing the individual files of all combatants in the First World War. It’s a very fat contract. We replied to their call for bids, and we were chosen. They’re handwritten files, impossible to deal with them automatically, we’ll have to copy them out by hand. We’re beginning with the dead.
“Aren’t they all dead yet?” I asked naively.
“Yes yes, of course they’re all dead, there aren’t any more French fighters from the First World War alive. I mean we’re going to begin with the ‘Dead for France,’ a separate batch of files.”
“And how many are there?”
“One million three hundred thousand files, total. Then there’re the wounded and the ones who got out alive, that’ll be more cheerful.”
One million three hundred fucking thousand dead, you don’t really realize what that represents, but I can assure you that makes quite a bit of work for typing by the kilometer. Gigabytes and gigabytes of scanned files, a special program to enter the data, last name, first name, date and p
lace of birth, serial number, date, place, and type of death, sic, type of death, they didn’t weigh themselves down with fancy phrases, at the time, do you think, they had hundreds of thousands of files to fill out. All of it handwritten, in a beautiful fountain-pen calligraphy: Achille Brun, soldier, 138th Infantry Division, Died for France on December 3, 1914, in the hospital at Châlons-sur-Marne, Type of death: war wound (crossed out) typhoid fever (added), born January 25, 1891, in Montbron in Charente; Ben Moulloub, Belkacem ben Bohammad ben Oumar, second class, 2nd Regiment of Algerian Infantrymen, Died for France on November 6, 1914, in Soupir, in Aisne, Type of death: killed by the enemy, born in 1884 in (illegible), département of Constantine, and so on a million three hundred thousand times, even with the special program you needed one or two minutes per file, especially to decipher the names of unknown holes in the wall, Algerian douars, Senegalese villages, French hamlets I knew nothing about; some of the soldiers stayed in my memory, like that Achille Brun or that Belkacem ben Moulloub, and it was strange to think that these ghosts of poilus were making a posthumous trip to Morocco, to Tangier, in my computer.
We divided up the work, my colleagues (French literature students or young typists, mostly) and I: one hundred fifty or two hundred files in the morning, and sixty pages of books, minimum, in the afternoon. The problem was that you couldn’t give up one project for another; everything had to be done at the same time: copying out the memoirs of Casanova for a Quebec publishing house was at least as urgent as the “Killed by the Enemy.” The volumes of History of My Life were immense, endless. I confess having taken great pleasure, despite the sleepless nights, in typing them out by the kilometer. This Casanova was funny and likeable, courtly, crafty; he spent his time running around with his sex on fire, hence on running around taking care of his venereal diseases, which didn’t seem to cause him any shame; for him, the body, women, youth had nothing shameful about them. There was an ironic intelligence in him that reminded me of Isa ibn Hisham and Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari, the heroes of Hamadani — but in a longer version, of course. The Casanova was one of the rare books I actually read as I was copying it out: over three months’ work, without any slacking.
I always wondered how much Jean-François Bourrelier billed for our services, and what his cut was; I never dared ask him. One thing was for certain, the Killed by the Enemy and Mr. Casanova didn’t touch a penny of it, and as for myself, after the accounts were audited (money withheld for corrections, etc.), I rarely managed to get more than five hundred euros a month, for a minimum of sixty hours’ work a week, which was an extraordinary salary for a young yokel like me, but far from the tens of thousands of dirhams promised. When payday arrived, Mr. Frédéric always looked slightly apologetic, he’d say Ah, there were a lot of corrections, or else Good, this month isn’t too bad, but you’ll do better next month, you have to get used to these dead-soldier files and accelerate your pace.
I told all my stories to Judit in interminable letters, that was my recreation, every night, when I should have hated the computer and above all its keyboard I would write at great length to Judit to explain what we had done that day, Casanova, the poilus and I; I told her about Achille Brun the typhoid-stricken and about Belkacem ben Moulloub dead in Soupir, about Casanova and Tireta watching an execution on the Place de Grève from a window, in the company of two ladies, without going so far as to dare tell her the obscene but hilarious details of Tireta’s mistaken shot.
I began writing her poems as well, mostly in French and stolen from Nizar Qabbani; French or Spanish poetry seemed dry to me, not flowery enough. I always ended my missives with a verse, Love, my love, is a beautiful poem embellished on the moon, and so on. Judit was more discreet about her feelings, but I sensed, in her emails which were sometimes in French, sometimes in Arabic, that she appreciated our correspondence; she told me about her life in Barcelona, her everyday routine, her annoyance with the stupidity of her classes, her boredom at the university, where the professors themselves seemed to scorn the texts they taught as if they were a dead language like Latin. Through her, I began to hate these puny Arabic scholars in colonial shorts who every day regretted the fact that Spain had for a few centuries been Arabic, sighing over Andalusian texts in which they saw nothing but lexical difficulty. She told me look, we’re studying such-or-such a poem by Ibn Zaydún, such-or-such a fragment by Ibn Hazm whom they called Abenhazam, and I would rush to a bookstore to find the book in question; most of the time it was a wonder to me, a jewel from another time whose Arabic filled my mouth and eardrums with unprecedented pleasure. Despite the dead poilus and Casanova, I felt very Arabic thanks to Judit; I followed her studies from day to day: she would ask me grammar questions, I would open the grammar books and classical commentators to find an answer for her; she heard of an author and the next day I would send her an annotated file with extracts and summaries.
Of course, these activities were incompatible with my co-renters’ way of life, who had been unearthed by a kind of syndicate of French companies, which tried as much as possible to facilitate lodging for their personnel; Adel, Yacine, and Walid all came from Casablanca, they were “skilled technicians” and worked in an automobile parts factory, on the assembly line. Every night they saw me immersed in my files of dead soldiers or in my books, and took me for a madman. Sometimes they’d shout Lakhdar khouya, you’re going to make yourself deaf and blind, it’s worse than masturbation, all that, come out for a spin in the open air, you’ll see some girls! No no, he’ll just see the sea, but that can’t hurt him! Moulay Lakhdar, you’re pale as prepubescent underwear, come inhale the exhaust from our car! And they’d end up leaving, earpiece in place, for Tangier and its delights, cruising with the music at full blast for hours till they ended up stuffing their faces with hamburgers around midnight, coming home brimming with excitement, and sprawling in front of the TV smoking joint after joint before returning to the factory the next day.
I hadn’t heard anything about Sheikh Nureddin or Bassam since the attack, they hadn’t reappeared; little by little my fears of seeing the police turn up had lessened and the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought seemed far away, over there, in those endless suburbs peopled by hundreds of hicks like me, but yet very close; of course I had followed the news on TV; they ended up arresting three suspects, I didn’t know any of them: they had odd-looking faces that didn’t exude intelligence, but photos of criminals are rarely flattering. Every day I expected news of Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam being arrested, but it never came.
Just a few days after Judit left, there was another horrible attack, which profoundly affected me, as if I myself had been present, maybe because we had been at the place not long before. The Café Hafa is situated on the cliff top, suspended above the Mediterranean, lost among the bougainvillea and jasmine of the neighborhood’s luxury villas; it may well be the most famous place in Tangier and one of the most pleasant on nice days (a table set a little apart, where Judit had taken my hand before kissing me, I remember, I’ve thought about it often since, I was ashamed, very ashamed, I was afraid we’d be seen, kissing in public is a misdemeanor) especially when there aren’t many people, late morning for instance, and you feel as if you have the sea and all the Strait to yourself. I learned from the paper that a man had entered the café, taken out a long dagger or sword and attacked a group of young people sitting at a table, no doubt because there were foreigners among them; a young Moroccan my age died, and another was wounded in the thigh, a French boy; there were two Spanish girls with them: they were all students of translation at the university in Tangier. The suspect fled down the cliff, pursued by the café’s customers and waiters, and managed to escape. An artist’s rendering of his face was attached to the article; he had the same round head and childlike face as Bassam, it could have been him. Maybe he had suddenly gone mad. First Judit sees him in Marrakesh just after the explosion and then a face that resembles his appears in Le Journal de Tanger. I couldn’t picture him stabbing young students
calmly sitting in the sun; it wasn’t possible that he’d changed so quickly, and yet I couldn’t help but remember how readily he had beaten up the bookseller. It seemed to me that the question Why? would remain forever without an answer, even if it was indeed Bassam who had helped place the bomb in the Café Argan and stabbed a Moroccan our age, even if I had him in front of me, if I had asked him why? why do it? he would have shrugged his shoulders; he would have answered For God, out of hatred of Christians, for Islam, for Sheikh Nureddin, what do I know, but he would lie, I knew he would lie and that he certainly didn’t know the reason for his actions which, in fact, had none, no more than there was a reason for beating up the bookseller, it was like that, it was in the air, violence was in the air, the wind was blowing that way; it was blowing pretty much everywhere and had swept Bassam up in idiocy. I thought about what I’d brought about despite myself, unhappiness and death; Bassam held the club and maybe the sword, but the ideological causes I could see from the height of my twenty years didn’t convince me: I knew Bassam, I knew that his hatred of the West or his passion for Islam were all relative, that a few months before meeting Sheikh Nureddin going to the mosque with his father annoyed him more than anything, he never bothered getting up one single time at dawn for the fajr prayer, he dreamed of going to live in Spain or France. But when I thought about it carefully I was also aware that, a contrario, just because he liked girls or dreamed of Germany and America didn’t prevent anything whatsoever. I knew that Sheikh Nureddin had grown up in France, and when I had spoken with him about it he appreciated some aspects of the country and he acknowledged that, if not for living in the midst of kuffar, infidels, it was better to live in France than in Spain or Italy, where, he said, Islam was scorned, crushed, reduced to poverty.
Street of Thieves Page 9
