The Disoriented

by Amin Maalouf

  For a long time, I sat in silence as though I had run out of arguments. I suddenly realized that this meeting with my friend’s brother was not going to be a simple resumption of contact, but a settling of scores.

  -

  3

  I had not seen Nidal in more than twenty-five years, while he, for his part, had never taken his eyes off me. Unbeknownst to me, he had been observing me, watching me, sizing me up.

  I was still wondering whether to say this, when he preempted me.

  “When I went to see you speak the first time, I intended to talk to you after the lecture. I knew how close you were to my brother, and I thought you’d welcome me with open arms.”

  “And I probably would have done that day,” I said coldly, unwilling to respond to his digs with a gesture of friendship.

  He went on:

  “But as I listened to you, I thought: here is an Arab who doesn’t want anyone to think he’s an Arab. Why embarrass him?”

  This was too much! My host had gone too far. I had to answer immediately or get up and walk out. What stopped me from making a scene was that Nidal looked deeply distressed. He seemed close to tears. Suddenly, what he was saying no longer sounded like cold sarcasm, but genuine reproach. Awkward, insulting, unjustified—but genuine.

  I decided to treat my deceased friend’s younger brother as though he were my younger brother. Strictly, but with an almost paternal strictness.

  “If we believe in the hereafter, it’s possible that Bilal is here at this table with us now, watching and listening to us. Some of the things you’ve said would have made him happy, others not. And when I reply, sometimes he might nod, and sometimes he might frown. I don’t know what his views would be if he were still alive, this benign, invisible witness without whom we would not be together right now. But I do know one thing: he would not have wanted me to doubt your sincerity, or for you to doubt mine.”

  I pause for a moment to separate the emotional prologue from the argument itself. And to glance at Nidal to see whether he has softened, and is now prepared to listen. Then I go on:

  “When I say there are faults on both sides, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re shared out fifty-fifty. More than anything, it means: try to understand why others won, and why we lost. You say: they invaded our countries, occupied them, humiliated us. The first question that comes to my mind is: why could we not stop them? Are we, perhaps, staunch advocates of non-violence? No, we are not. So why were they able to invade us, subjugate us, humiliate us? Because we’re weak, you might say, because we’re divided, poorly organized, and badly equipped. And why are we weak? Why have we been unable to produce weapons as powerful as those of the West? Why are our industries so inadequate? Why did the industrial revolution occur in Europe and not here? Why did we remain underdeveloped, vulnerable, dependent? You can go on saying: it’s someone else’s fault, it’s someone else’s fault. But sooner or later we have to face up to our own shortcomings, our own mistakes, our own weaknesses. Sooner or later we have to face up to our own defeat, to the vast, resounding historic collapse of the civilization that is ours.”

  Without realizing, I had raised my voice. Two young men immediately come into the room and lean against the wall behind Nidal, who does not notice their presence until he sees me looking at them; my host turns to them and nods to say: “It’s alright, we’re just talking, you can go.” They leave.

  I lower my voice and continue in French:

  “Losers are always tempted to present themselves as innocent victims. But that doesn’t square with reality. They’re not entirely innocent. They’re guilty of being defeated. In the eyes of their people, their civilization, they are culpable. And I don’t just mean the leaders, I mean you, me, all of us. If we are on the losing side of history now, if we are humiliated in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes, it is not simply the fault of others, it is primarily our own fault.”

  “In a minute, you’ll be telling me that Islam is to blame.”

  “No, Nidal, that’s not what I was going to say. Religion is just one element. To me, it’s not the problem, but it’s not the solution either. But don’t expect me to give you facile reassurances. I’m not comfortable with what’s going on around us. You think it’s a wonderful sight, these women covered from head to toe, these huge portraits of turbaned men, this forest of beards.”

  “What have our beards got to do with you?”

  “What’s in your heart is none of my business. How you present yourself is a public statement for the benefit of third parties, and therefore it is my business. I’ve got the right to approve or disapprove. I have the right to feel reassured, and the right to feel uncomfortable. But I don’t plan to go on and on about your beard. I was just trying to say that I’ve got the right to talk about anything, without exception, encouraging you to do the same.”

  As he listens, Nidal instinctively brings his hand up to his beard, stroking it as though to renew his allegiance. It’s not really much of a beard, it just looks as though he hasn’t shaved for a couple of weeks.

  “When I first met you, when you were sixteen, you already had a beard—well, more bum fluff …”

  He smiles at this image. I carry on:

  “But you also wore a Che Guevara beret emblazoned with a red star.”

  “I wasn’t the only one!”

  “And now you’re not the only one to have a bushy beard.”

  “You’re saying I’ve been blindly following every passing fad.”

  “I don’t blame you, we all do. It’s what the Germans call Zeitgeist, ‘the spirit of the times,’ we all follow it in one way or another. It’s nothing to be either ashamed or proud of, it’s how human societies function.”

  “So says the professor …” Nidal says with a trace of sarcasm.

  “You’re right, I am speaking as a professor of history. In every era, people have expressed opinions and taken up positions they think are the result of individual thought when in fact they’re the spirit of the time. It’s not inevitable, but it is a like a strong wind—it’s difficult not to bend.”

  “So, I’m spinning in the wind like a weathervane, is that it?”

  I smile.

  “You really want to make me sound like I’m insulting you, when actually I’m just trying to explain a common phenomenon. It was as normal for you to identify with Che Guevara in the early ’70s as it is for you to be an Islamist today. There’s a certainty continuity between the two positions.”

  “Which is?”

  “You still think of yourself as a revolutionary.”

  “While you think I’m not …”

  “Let’s just say that the revolution has taken a different path. For a long time, the concept of revolution was the prerogative of progressives, then one day it was taken over by reactionaries. I’ve got a colleague who’s working on the subject. We have lunch sometimes and talk about it. He calls it the ‘inversion.’ He’s writing a book on the subject he plans to call The Year of Inversion …”

  “Because it is linked to one particular year?”

  “That’s his thesis. He argues that things changed dramatically in the world between the summer of 1978 and the spring of ’79. Iran underwent the socially conservative Islamic revolution. In the West, 1979 marked the start of a different ‘conservative revolution,’ spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Deng Xiaoping instigated a new Chinese revolution that year, moving away from socialism and eventually leading to spectacular economic growth. In Rome, John Paul II became Pope, and he, too, would prove to be as revolutionary as he was reactionary … My colleague has a long list of events from the same period, all tending to be indicative of a social upheaval that has permanently affected attitudes. The right has become all-conquering, while the left simply tried to preserve its achievements. This is what I was thinking when I said …
”

  “… that I’d just swapped beards and carried on thinking of myself as a revolutionary. Is that it?”

  “Yes. Kind of.”

  “While, as you see it, I’ve become a reactionary, right?”

  “I wouldn’t put it precisely that way, but it’s more or less what I think, yes.”

  “At least you’re honest,” he said with a very slight smile of impatience; before adding, “This conversation could go on for a hundred years.”

  “It doesn’t matter, we can carry on when we get to paradise.”

  “If we end up in the same one.”

  “You think there’s more than one? Or that paradise is divided up between nations and religions?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea. That’s a problem you’ll have to pose to the Sophists. That’s what people used to call you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was. The ‘Circle of Sophists.’ But why do you say ‘you’? You used to come to our meetings.”

  “Not very often. Once or twice, with my brother.”

  “With your brother, yes. I often think about him.”

  Hardly had I said the words than I felt I had usurped a role that was not mine, having been a close friend of Bilal only at the end of his life. By way of apology, I added:

  “You must have thought about him a thousand times more often.”

  As he did every time I mentioned his brother, Nidal was silent and thoughtful. He sipped the last of his lemonade, then let his eyes stray to the window, and beyond.

  “He promised to take me with him when he went out on the barricades. Our mother started crying. She said I was too young, that I had to do my homework. Bilal tried to reason with her, told her he’d stay right beside me, that he’d never put me in danger, and that, when we got home, he’d help me with my homework. But she wouldn’t listen. She said, ‘Not both of you! Not both at once!’ As though she sensed what was coming. Bilal whispered that he’d take me next time. He left. An hour later, there was a knock on our door to tell us that he was injured.

  “I’ve thought about that scene a thousand times, imagining the other ways it might have played out. My brother deciding not to go after all, or he and I going together, and me forcing him to shelter in a doorway. Or both of us being blown limb from limb by the same bomb. I’ve often dreamed that I was the martyr, wrapped in a shroud, my mother and my sisters standing over me, crying, and Bilal next to me, holding my hand to the very last moment, sobbing the way I sobbed at his funeral.

  “And every time I wake up, I’m disappointed that it’s just a dream, a fiction, that my brother is still in his grave, and I am on the outside, wretched, among the living …”

  As he was speaking, the two young men who had briefly stepped into the room earlier reappeared and posted themselves on either side of the curtain separating us from the main restaurant. But this time it was Nidal who was speaking, and in a low voice—nothing that was likely to upset militants.

  I look up at them and once again my host follows my gaze. I see him get to his feet and, just then, a man in a black turban appears. Nidal greets him deferentially, introduces us to each other, and invites the man to sit. They clearly had something to discuss, so I quickly took my leave, making it seem, for form’s sake, as though I had been about to leave anyway.

  Which was obviously not true. I would happily have stayed for another hour; we still had things to say, Nidal and I.

  As I left Bilal’s brother, his restaurant, his neighbourhood, his friends, I felt a certain malaise; but I was not unhappy to have seen him again. So many things divide us, and the only thing that binds us is the memory of his deceased brother. A slender thread? Undeniably. It will never be enough to resolve our differences, but I will not be the one to break it.

  Sémiramis was right, of course, Nidal has changed. And even if the change is not what I might have wished, as a human being and particularly as a historian, I understand him. I was careful not to remind him, for example, that when he was alive his brother did not believe in God or the Devil, and hence was a very singular “martyr.” I sensed that the memory of Bilal was a sanctum where I should venture only with infinite verbal precautions. Anything that might be interpreted as sarcastic or mocking would be rude, insulting, and almost sacrilegious. So I thought it best to hold my tongue.

  Since coming back to the country, I have been trying to pick up the thread, not settle scores. Besides, what scores do I have to settle? Can I really blame Nidal for not having the same convictions at forty as he did when he was sixteen? He has changed, I’ve changed, the country has changed, our world is not the same. Yesterday’s avant-garde has been relegated to the scrap heap, discarded, and the rear guard is not on the front lines. It is something I can continue to deplore, but I can hardly pretend to be surprised. Nor can I criticize Bilal’s brother. He is the one who is in step with his time, and I am the one from another era, one that has prematurely ended. But—however much people may mock my stubbornness—I am still convinced that I am right and it is humanity that has lost its way.

  -

  4

  “But you still invited him to come?” Sémiramis said suspiciously after Adam had given her a detailed account of their lunch, and their animated discussions.

  “I haven’t sent him a formal invitation, but it went without saying. I didn’t meet up with him to subject him to a final exam whose results would determine where or not he was included. The invitation was implicit when I phoned him this morning. I was hardly going to leave, shake his hand, and say, ‘Thanks for lunch, but I’m sorry, you’re not invited, you don’t meet the criteria …’”

  “And you’re planning to put him in a room with Albert, who works for the Pentagon? And with Naïm, who’s Jewish and has been to Israel a dozen times?”

  Adam shrugged.

  “They’re both grown up, they spend their time traveling the world, if they haven’t met anyone who thinks like Nidal before now, this will be an opportunity. He’s intelligent, he’s rational, he seems sincere, and he knows how to express what he thinks.”

  “And we won’t be drinking champagne?”

  “Of course, we’ll drink champagne. The bottles will be in the ice buckets, those who want can help themselves, those who don’t, can abstain.”

  “What if he insisted we remove the bottles?”

  “I’ll tell him it’s not for him to decide, I said as much over lunch, and I won’t hesitate to say it again. If he stays, that’s great. If he leaves, too bad. Any other questions, my beautiful chatelaine?”

  “No, Professor, not one!” Sémiramis reassured him in a mock-fearful tone. “You seem to have all the answers, but I’m still sceptical. You’ve got this impression that you can reunite old friends after a quarter of a century as though nothing had happened. I hope you’re right.”

  “Better to be wrong and hope than to be right and despair.”

  “Is that your motto?”

  “That’s not a rule to live by, just a basic requirement for honesty. It’s too easy to say there’ll never be peace, that people will never be able to live together, to wait for the cataclysm with arms folded and a mocking smile, so that when it comes, you can say, ‘I told you so.’ In this part of the world, a prophet of doom is almost certain to be proved right by the future. Predict that there’ll be a war within a decade, and you won’t be disappointed. Predict that two factions will kill each other and it’s more than likely to happen. If you really want to take a risk, you have to predict the opposite. Today, my own minor ambition is to bring a group of old friends together again, so that we can have a polite and informative conversation. Is that too much to ask?”

  His friend gazed at him with amused tenderness, stroked his forehead as though he were a boy of six and said, in a motherly tone:

  “Yes, darling, it’s too much to ask. But don’t give up hope, I like you when you’re i
ndignant.”

  This completely unsettled Adam. He didn’t know whether he should rage against this “motherly instinct” or attempt to restart a serious discussion.

  He grabbed the hand caressing him, wanting to pull it away from his face. But rather than letting it go, he clasped it to his own. They both sat, motionless, and said nothing more.

  From their twined hands rose the desire to make love. But still they avoided each other’s eyes, each waiting for the other to utter the sensible words that would put an end to this temptation.

  The knowledge that they would soon have to move apart made it possible for them to experience this moment of tenderness with a sense of innocence. Did they not know, he as well as she, that there was an invisible line they would not cross? What mattered was not to reach it too quickly; what mattered was to move with infinite slowness.

  Sémiramis had come up to Adam’s room in the late afternoon so he could tell her about his encounter with Bilal’s brother. She had found him at his desk, feverishly jotting down notes. He had stopped writing, and gestured for her to sit, but she had decided to remain standing, leaning against the closed door.

  Later, in the heat of the exchange, he had got to his feet, taken a few steps, and found himself close to her. This was how it had begun.

  How long did they stand, pressed against each other in silence, eyes closed, hands twined? At some point their lips brushed, then parted. Which of them would take the initiative, tell the other they had to stop, that they had to keep their promise?

  A second furtive kiss, then a third, not so fleeting, and a fourth that lingered. Their bodies clung together. Sémiramis stretched out her free hand to switch off the light.

  Only when they had collapsed on the bed did the visitor whisper to her friend:

  “You promised you’d help me.”

  And he, in his distraction, could find no answer.