Infidels

by Abdellah Taïa

  “To repent. To return to the true, the pure, the First.”

  “We’ll both repent at the same time, won’t we, Jallal? By the same near and far door that slowly opens before us.”

  His hand had not left mine.

  Yes, we’ll do things together, Mahmoud, I promise you. I swear.

  I confirmed this pact without uttering a word. He hadn’t said anything either. Everything happened in silence. Our eyes spoke for us.

  I didn’t force myself to do anything with him. It was as if everything that happened between us was a matter of course.

  Mahmoud was ill. I met him that way. And without a second thought, I caught his illness. I needed it. That illness and that love. Since I’d left Cairo with my mother’s last husband, Mouad the Belgian, I’d searched Brussels for a savior. A soul to comfort me, understand me, guide me, make me lighter. A special being, a chosen being, a brother and a stranger. Mahmoud, ill, was this exceptional person. The visionary who forced me to drop everything and follow him in his view of the world, his way of loving, and his plan to leave his mark on earth.

  I understood this from the start. As soon as I gazed into his eyes.

  I didn’t know Mahmoud. And nothing had prepared me to meet him.

  For a year I’d been living alone in Mouad’s apartment in Brussels. He had more or less abandoned me. He’d gone back to his job in Saudi Arabia. He felt that at my age, twenty-two, I was able to fend for myself in Brussels. In the West. He left me the apartment, too big for me, and sent me five hundred euros each month. On leaving, he told me: “It’s time you became a man. Without me. You can’t become a man sticking to me like glue. Do you understand?”

  I understood nothing.

  Meeting Mahmoud at Brugmann Hospital in Brussels helped me to understand. Not loneliness or abandonment, but the deep meaning of my life, my existence. With Mahmoud, sick and beautiful, frail and powerful, I’d found a mission. Love and a mission. To love and be angry. To finally get even with the world, which had never given me a thing and, what’s more, had taken my mother, my Slima away from me. To give others a taste of the cruelty they’d instilled in me. The self-contempt they’d forced on me. To get my revenge. To avenge Slima.

  Mahmoud was a stranger. I met him when I went to the hospital with Steve, Mouad the Belgian’s nephew, who was an old friend of Mahmoud’s.

  Steve came to visit me at Mouad’s apartment. He said: “Mouad called. He says hello. And he says you have to call him from time to time. He wants to know how you are. Are you doing alright?” I had nothing to say, either to Mouad or Steve, whom I barely knew.

  Steve spoke again. “Mouad asked me to stop by once in a while. To get you out of the house. Do you want to do something? Catch a movie?”

  We left the apartment together. Before the movie, we went to the Brugmann Hospital. Mahmoud was waiting for us. Waiting for me.

  Steve had insisted, “It won’t be long, Jallal. I have to visit him. He’s not really a friend. We went to college together and apparently he’s very ill. You don’t mind coming?”

  Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, my mother Slima taken from me, I lived in Cairo in the care of Lalla Fatma.

  She was abducted, tortured, imprisoned, damaged. She told me once, only once, about that disappearance, the unspeakable violence they’d inflicted upon her. She told me on the eve of her departure to Mecca with her husband Mouad.

  Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, years after Slima had left Morocco for Cairo, I was reunited with a mother who was no longer my mother, no longer capable of it. She didn’t see me. She expected something else from life.

  Slima had become a torn and shattered woman. Completely destroyed. Another person. But she was forced to keep working at her first profession, that of her mother and hundreds of thousands of other Moroccan women. Prostitution.

  Quite in spite of myself, I became her friend. Her confidant. I pretended to be.

  Before she joined me in Cairo, I had grown used to living without her. The endless din of the Egyptian capital was enough to fill me, to keep me away from my mother, away from the woman I still loved, but without understanding. In Cairo, by my side and at the same time absent, she talked politics quite often, too often. She was becoming part of another story, which didn’t include me. She needed an ear. I played that role. She needed to retrieve her dignity in another way.

  Her men, wealthy clients she met in posh Cairo hotels, paid for everything, including my schooling at the French Lycée.

  I never really understood how, from her prison in southern Morocco, near Ouarzazate, she’d managed to have me sent to Cairo and into the care of Lalla Fatma, a Moroccan woman, a bit of a witch. How had she kept watching over me from that terrible, nameless prison far away?

  I’ll never know.

  Even living under the same roof as my mother Slima again, I couldn’t reconnect with her and our past in Morocco, in Salé. The hammam. The house in Hay Salam. The soldiers. The soldier. The movie, River of No Return.

  Cairo possessed me. The crowds, twenty million, kept me company. Protected me. Separated me a little more each day from my mother Slima.

  I learned solitude in Cairo.

  Solitude in the midst of an angry but remote, unfeeling humanity.

  I grew away from my mother.

  I waited a year for her. For the first year, in Lalla Fatma’s apartment, I still had hope and fervor, belief in her return. The second year, sad, heavy-hearted, I deliberately cut all ties between us. Every connection. Every last thread. I’d decided she was dead. She wouldn’t be back. One day, someone would announce her death.

  Just as well to kill my mother right away, let her go that very moment.

  Adolescence is a time of power. Every day is a tragedy. Every day is war. We become ruthless. We forget quickly. Zap things quickly. Kill in cold blood. And keep on living. Without any guilt.

  I became a monster.

  Without my mother.

  Even when she came back, her absence continued to haunt me. She really was another woman. In an opaque world.

  We lived side by side. We drank the same water from the Nile. I saw nothing. I played the stupid boy. The blasé, vacant teen.

  Desperate and fearful till the end, until death, living without her. Needy.

  I’ve been without a mother for ten years now.

  I’m a little over twenty-three now.

  I want to spit. Like when I was little, in Salé.

  I walk the streets of Brussels. And I spit.

  I look up at the black sky. And I spit.

  I go to the door of Mouad’s apartment. And I spit. I spit.

  I remember what I told him, the man who accompanied my mother to her death in Medina, Saudi Arabia. “You’re my father, Mouad, yes, yes,” I told him several times to reassure him. He was falling asleep. “Yes, you can leave for Saudi Arabia with your mind at ease.”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine. I swear. You’re right, I’m old enough to become a man. Twenty-two is the age of manhood. I’m a man, Mouad. I’m strong. I know my way very well around Brussels. I can manage alone. I’ll go back to university. Yes, yes. This time you can believe me. You did what you could for me. You saved me. Thanks to you, I have a roof over my head. I won’t starve to death. You’re right, I’m grown up now. You can go.”

  Just before entering the apartment in Brussels, I hawk and spit.

  I lied to Mouad. All I did was lie, wear a new mask every day.

  Brussels is killing me. Smothers me. Never talks to me.

  Where am I? What am I doing here? How do you read the codes of this city? How do you approach people, read the signs? How do you live without color?

  I spit. Again and again.

  Spit renewed I renew my ties with childhood. With the ill-mannered boy I was in the city of Salé.

  Brussels
makes me want to close all the windows and all the doors. To become ill. End it once and for all. Escape, cross the river. Join my mother.

  And that’s what happened when Steve, who wanted to take me to the movies, took me first to Brugmann Hospital to visit a school friend of his. A Belgian, four or five years older than me, who was a patient there.

  His name was Mathis. But like Mouad, he’d changed his name and religion.

  A coincidence?

  Later I understood that it was anything but a coincidence. Without having decided to do so, I’d followed my mother’s road. Like her, I met a Belgian convert to Islam who would play the role in my life that Mouad had played in hers. With him, I entered the Revolution. With him, Mahmoud, I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change, for my heart to open and let in the light.

  Mahmoud was in his hospital bed. In another bed, next to his, was an old man.

  Mouad’s nephew had brought flowers.

  I’d brought a single candle, small and white. Bought long ago in Cairo. I had told myself that if this unknown sick person was nice, I’d give it to him. If not, too bad for him.

  He was not only nice. He was radiant. Sick and radiant. Sick and so peaceful.

  So gentle. So gentle.

  He was the brother I was desperately searching for in Brussels. I knew it right away. So did he.

  I kept the candle for another day. I didn’t dare give it to him in front of Steve, the gift that was so important to me and came from a town where my life was so different.

  I said nothing in front of him that day.

  As we were leaving, Steve and I shook hands with him.

  He said:

  “You’ll come back to see me, won’t you?”

  It was not an order or a prayer. It was understood. A voice from On High. Neither of us had any choice.

  I had to go back. To continue what had begun. Become close very quickly, he and I. And in some way reproduce, replay the story my mother lived with Mouad the Belgian at the end of her life.

  Yes, I had to go back. Every day. Without Steve, of course. Without revealing anything to him. Without revealing that I’d made my decision long before Mahmoud shook my hand.

  It was written in stone. The Cairo candle was for him.

  Later, for the two of us.

  At first, I didn’t dare reply to his invitation. But after a few seconds, trembling, I uttered a little “yes.”

  “I’d be very happy to come back and see you!”

  He had the power to say things, decide things. Enter deep inside me. Read my heart. My soul. Give me food and water.

  I returned two days later. The old man was asleep.

  Mahmoud said:

  “Do you see the sky? Are you looking at it the right way? And the Moon?”

  I answered:

  “Here in Brussels, everything seems black to me. I don’t have anything. I wander aimlessly. I don’t see anything. There is no sky.”

  “That’s not true, Jallal. The Moon is there. Always. You have to go beyond the blackness. Beyond the veils. You’re wrong, Brussels isn’t black.”

  I didn’t dare contradict him.

  And he made the following proposal:

  “Do you want to climb up on the Moon? Do you want to? We’ll cut it in half. Half for you and half for me.”

  I realized this was an initiation into Mahmoud’s inner language, his way of using words, connecting them to each other, reinventing, breathing new life into them.

  I made an effort. I answered him in kind, trying to be inspired like him:

  “One day, Mahmoud, we’ll find a tree together and carve the first letters of our names in the bark.”

  “In what language, Jallal?”

  “Do you know Arabic?”

  He’d converted to Islam a few years ago but he didn’t know Arabic.

  “Will you teach me, Jallal?”

  “Here, in the hospital?”

  “Yes, here in this room. I have to stay almost two more months.”

  I immediately accepted.

  I had not spoken Arabic since my arrival in Brussels with Mouad the Belgian, but the language was still alive and strong in me. I was going to know it more and more deeply in the two months I had left on this earth.

  Mahmoud continued speaking like a poet.

  “And so we’ll go the Moon. We’ll ride the mythical winged horse, Buraq, like the prophet Mohammed. He’ll take us there. We’ll look for a tree and carve the first letters of our names in Arabic. What do you say?”

  How could anyone resist?

  I didn’t resist. He was ill. It was important to make him happy.

  After a moment of silence, he said my name. Jallal.

  Following a silence of exactly the same length as his, I said his name. Mahmoud.

  The next day, I started to teach him Arabic. To write and speak it.

  The old man watched us. Sometimes he participated in these very special courses. And in that way, he joined us on the journey to the Moon. To the light.

  It was Mahmoud who told me one day about the ninety-nine names of Allah in Islam.

  I was not really a good Muslim but I still knew them by heart. Quietly reciting, chanting every single one of them each day, brought you closer to God, of course, and kept death away.

  I told Mahmoud all that.

  “Are you afraid of death, Jallal?”

  Yes, I was still afraid of death.

  Not he.

  “So each time you come here to see me, we’ll say the ninety-nine names of Allah. I don’t want you to die, Jallal. Not right away. You’ll start. You’ll chant a name. Then another. In Arabic. I’ll follow you. And one day, we’ll say them at the same time, from the same heart. Without opening our mouths. Just by looking into each other’s eyes. Does that suit you?”

  It suited me perfectly.

  He knew how to sweep me away. Guide me. Carry me along with him into a new cycle of life.

  When I was with him I forgot all the rest, the better to find myself.

  Finally I loved God. Allah.

  Mahmoud said:

  “Where is God in you?”

  I didn’t know.

  He said:

  “Do you know of the poet Jalal al-Din Rumi?”

  I didn’t.

  Three days later, I knew everything about him.

  Jalal al-Din Rumi was a Muslim poet, Sufi, who lived in the thirteenth century. He celebrated God and love for God in his poems, which Mahmoud considered sublime and others considered too free, blasphemous.

  “Read the poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. You will know God. You will know love. And you will come to me with greater understanding. Jalal al-Din Rumi will be our witness. The witness of our meeting. Our reunion with God, His Hidden Mystery, His Eternal Word.”

  Miracles exist.

  Faith can return.

  As it was for my mother at the end of her life, Islam could be something besides prohibitions on thinking, existing, freeing yourself.

  Mahmoud and I gradually reinvented Islam. We found love there. Love. In our own small way, we made it progress.

  I never dared to ask, “How did you come to Islam?”

  One morning, after taking his many medications, he began to speak.

  “I went to Afghanistan. I learned everything. Learned it again. I was a rookie journalist. It was an excuse to go there. I lived there for two years. I returned transformed. A different person. On my Belgian identity card I’m still Mathis. But since my Afghan emir chose Mahmoud as my name, I’ve given up my past life. I’m someone else now. Do you understand? Do you understand?”

  Did I understand? What had he really been doing in Afghanistan? And who was this emir who’d revealed him to himself? A Taliban? An Islamist from another gro
up? A terrorist? Was Mahmoud like that emir?

  I kept my doubts to myself. It wasn’t the time to share them, to talk about them.

  It was my turn to speak.

  “My mother died in Medina. Her last husband, Mouad, brought me back to Brussels. And he left. I can’t do anything here. I’m horribly lonely here. None of it was my choice. Here everything looks black. This land is blackness. I want to go to the Moon with you. Ride the winged horse Buraq with you. Pass through the seventy thousand veils with you, the veils of light and darkness that separate us from the Creator. And take along the white candle I bought in Cairo.”

  He took the candle.

  And he smiled. He looked like an angel. He was an angel.

  “We’ll go to the Moon. We won’t be afraid of the dark . . . Tonight you’ll stay here, you’ll sleep in my bed. I’ll hide you. We’ll light the candle in a secret corner. We’ll wait. Finally the sky will open.”

  I hid in his arms. I slept, traveled, supported by his arms.

  We never spoke of the past again. All that interested us were God, His Love, and the Moon.

  I ended up buying an orderly’s apron. That way I could enter the hospital whenever I wanted.

  The old man slept almost all the time. Dying a little more each day. He seemed to be at peace. He’d accepted the idea of the end. Of leaving. Across the sky. Mahmoud and I liked to watch him sleep; he was in some other place right beside us. Sometimes we witnessed the reawakening of his childhood fears. He was seized by panic though he was sound asleep.

  He woke with a start. He quickly got out of bed. His arms flailed every which way, seeking a direction and finding it; a dark corner behind an empty little white cabinet, where he curled up in a ball. Clutched his head in his hands. And began to talk, whisper. Maybe pray.

  The old man never wept. At that moment he was in a state of terror. Horror. Paralysis.

  “Peace does not exist. Will never exist in us. We were wrong. We’ll always, always be afraid.”

  The old man told us this as if pronouncing an oracle.

  If his attacks came on when I was in the room, Mahmoud and I went to him without conferring. We each took one of his hands and talked to him. Every time, when he was back in bed, he asked for a lullaby. Mahmoud didn’t know any. I still had the song in me somewhere faraway. River of No Return.