The Disoriented

by Amin Maalouf

  A few seconds later, my friend came to greet me. He insisted on taking my bag and, telling me to follow him, led me directly to the cell in which I am writing these lines. It goes without saying that it is small and spartan—a narrow bed, a table, a chair, a lamp, a shower, a closet. The floor is bare stone, and the only window is too high to be able to gaze out at the landscape.

  “It’s not exactly luxurious,” Ramzi said by way of apology.

  “Maybe not, but you can feel the tranquility, I’m sure I’ll be perfectly comfortable.”

  I did not say this to please him. Asceticism appeals to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I could spend the rest of my life here; eventually, I’d feel other needs, other desires, frustrations. But for a night, or even a week or two, I have no fear of hardship or solitude.

  Truth be told, I could have been a monk. The fact that I never seriously considered the possibility is not so much because the lifestyle is different to mine—I could have adapted—the problem was religion itself. For as long as I can remember, I have always had an uncertain, ambivalent relationship with religion.

  I feel no instinctive antipathy to signs of faith. In front of me, on the wall of my cell, hangs a small polished wooden cross of sober black. It is a gentle presence, not troubling, almost comforting. But it will not stop me from writing in this notebook, in large, round letters: I am not a follower of any religion, and feel no need to become one.

  My position on this issue is all the more complicated by the fact that I don’t consider myself an atheist either. I can’t believe that Heaven is empty, that after death there is only nothingness. What lies beyond? I don’t know. Is there something? I don’t know. I hope so, but I don’t know; I’m suspicious of people—whether religious or atheist—who claim they do.

  I hover somewhere between belief and non-belief just as I hover somewhere between my two homelands, first toying with one, then the other, but belonging truly to neither. I never feel more like a non-believer than when listening to a man of God preach a sermon; with every exhortation, every quotation from the holy scripture, my mind rebels, my attention wanders, my lips mumble imprecations. But whenever I attend a secular funeral, I feel a chill in my soul, and I feel like humming Syriac or Byzantine hymns, or even the “Tantum ergo” people say was composed by Thomas Aquinas.

  This is the winding path I walk when it comes to religion. Naturally, I walk it alone; I follow no one, and invite no one to follow me.

  Brother Basil just came by and warily opened my cell door, which has neither latch nor lock.

  “I’m sorry for not knocking, I didn’t want to wake you if you were asleep.”

  I had not been sleeping. I was lying on my narrow bed, jotting down notes.

  “We’re going to the chapel for a service. If you like, I’ll come and fetch you when we’re done.”

  “No, I didn’t come to the monastery to write or sleep, I came to spend time with you. I’ll come with you, I’d genuinely like to.”

  As I walked behind my friend, I glanced around at the architecture of the place. My cell opens onto a corridor with eight identical doors. It is a recently built wing, presumably designed by Ramzi. I imagine that in earlier times, the monks had smaller, less comfortable cells. With no showers, obviously. And no electricity.

  At the end of this corridor, is another, darker corridor that leads to a door of unusual dimensions; it is low but broad, and the top and sides are rounded like a squat barrel. Only when we reach this second corridor do I realize that we are now deep in the cliff face. The walls have been carved into the rock, very crudely, as though it were created simply as a cavity with no thought to smoothing the walls. Only the floor is level, there are even flagstones, though these are obviously more recent.

  The monks are seated on pews with no backs. I count eight, including my friend. I slip into the last pew. Brother Basil walks to a lectern at the front, takes a missal from his pocket, opens it and begins to read. Immediately, the other monks get to their feet and recite the prayers with him.

  They are of all ages and sizes. All, apart from my friend, have beards, and all, without exception, are balding—some just at the crown of the head, others completely. Their voices are barely audible. I remain silent. I don’t know the prayers; and when they sing, I don’t recognize the hymns. But I get to my feet every time they do.

  Though indifferent to religion, I’ve always had a weakness for places of worship. And in this old cave chapel, I feel a fraternal affection for these strangers at prayer. I cannot believe that a man would go to live in a monastery these days unless spurred by noble feelings.

  This is certainly the case with Brother Basil. I watch affectionately as he leafs through the missal for his page. He moves with tremulous gestures, my friend the engineer who became a monk. So many men, as they grow up, move from innocence to cynicism; the reverse is rare. I have nothing but respect for the path he has taken, the life he has chosen. Even if I could, I would not try to persuade him to return to his former life, to go back to building palaces, towers, prisons, or military bases.

  At the end of the service, I stand motionless as they file out, the monks greet me with a nod and a smile. My friend is the last to leave. He gestures for me to follow.

  “I’m glad you stayed, but you shouldn’t feel obliged to attend every service. I just wanted you to have an idea of how our days are regulated. Prayer is our clock, you might say, it tolls every three hours.”

  “Even in the middle of the night?”

  “In theory, yes, even in the middle of the night. In the past, that was the rule: there were eight divine offices every twenty-four hours. These days, we observe only seven.”

  “You’re getting slack,” I say, heretic that I am.

  My friend smiles.

  “Our view, which is also that of the Church, is that a man should not inflict unnecessary torture on himself. ‘Monasticism, yes; masochism, no,’” he said in French before slipping back into Arabic, our common language, and, laying a hand affectionately on my shoulder, says, “I suppose you’ve never taken much of an interest in the religious life.”

  I have to confess that, on this particular subject, I am ignorant. Well, no, not entirely. Having studied the Roman and Byzantine empires, I know when and in what circumstances the early monastic orders were founded. But it’s true that I’ve never paid much attention to how they developed or to their daily routines.

  “We’ve long since given up torturing ourselves,” my friend explains. “It’s possible to lead an ascetic life without freezing during winter, without depriving yourself of sleep. The canonical offices that punctuate our days, however, are irreplaceable. It’s not about reciting rote prayers, as laymen often imagine. It is a way of reminding ourselves why we are here—here, in the monastery, and here on earth. And it divides the twenty-four hours into different sections, each with its own mood.

  “Time was, I spent my days going from one meeting to another, the weeks flashed past, the months, the years … Today, there are seven time slots in my day. Every three hours, I pause, I meditate, and then I embark on a completely different activity—not only spiritual or intellectual, but agricultural, artistic, social, and even culinary or sporting.”

  I almost retort that it is precisely because he has worked all his life, because he built palaces and earned a lot of money, that he can now devote himself to this other way of life; that such a life is possible only for someone who does not have to support a family, to work for a living. But I have not come all this way to argue, I came to listen, to observe his daily life, to understand his transformation, and to repair the strained ties of our friendship.

  When his partner, Ramez, visited last year, Ramzi had felt it necessary to remind him that he was not a prisoner, that he had come to the monastery of his own free will. It’s true that, when someone withdraws from the world, we can be tempted to assume they are in di
stress, the victim of a jailer, a manipulator, or their own anxieties. Our friend deserves to be treated differently. His path must be respected. He is neither a visionary nor a gullible fool. He’s a thoughtful, educated, honest, and hardworking man. If, at the age of fifty—having travelled the world, negotiated with sharks, generated fortunes, and built an empire—he has decided to leave everything and withdraw to a monastery, the least we can do is to ask, in all humility, why he did so. His motives are certainly not base. He deserves to have us listen to him, without condemnation, without cynicism.

  -

  2

  APRIL 30 (CONTINUED)

  At 7:00 a.m. precisely we go to the refectory. It is a room that could hold forty people, but there are only nine of us, eight monks and me, sitting at the bare wooden table. Two similar tables lie empty, and another, pushed against the wall, is laid with a large oval platter, a soup tureen, a carafe of wine, a sliced loaf of bread, and a jug of water.

  “A woman from the village makes our food,” Ramzi explains. “When we settle in a village, it’s best not to try to seem self-sufficient, as though we need no one. Otherwise, we would quickly make enemies, and a bad reputation.

  “People are naturally curious, and a little suspicious when they find out that strangers have moved in nearby. In a village, the rumour mill is always running. The fact that this good woman, Olga, has keys to the monastery, that she comes here from time to time with her husband or her daughter, her sister or her neighbour, makes all the difference. She also does the shopping for us. It’s important that people who live around here—the farmers, the grocer, the baker, the butcher—see our presence here as a godsend for reasons other than the fact that we pray for them.

  “It’s a principle I adhered to back when I was a civil engineer. Sometimes, when we were working in a small town, project managers would argue that it was more practical and less expensive to bring everything we needed with us. I always said, ‘No! You go to the market, you buy what you need, and you don’t haggle over the price. It’s important that people consider you a boon, and that they’re sorry on the day you finally leave.’”

  “Do the villagers attend Mass sometimes?”

  “We don’t celebrate Mass here, we are monks, not priests. We go to the village church on Sundays. But if someone wants to pray with us, they can come along, as you did, our door is always open.”

  In the first minutes of the meal, Brother Basil and I were the only ones speaking. I asked questions, he answered; the other seven people at our table were content to eat, to listen, and to nod from time to time in agreement. The cook had made white rice with stewed okra. All the monks filled their plates. Several had second helpings.

  There was a long silence before I steeled myself to ask, to no one in particular:

  “Did you all come to the monastery at the same time?”

  The question was only an excuse to get them to talk. At first glance, it was obvious that these men weren’t from the same country or the same background, and had not ended up here for the same reasons. I knew one of their stories—and even that one incompletely. Of the others, I knew nothing.

  At a nod from my friend, they began to speak, one after another, according to where they were sitting. Four of their first names were clearly borrowed, like masks used by Greek tragedies—Chrysostom, Hormisdas, Ignatius, Nicephorus. The others had more ordinary names—Emile, Thomas, Habib, Basil; however, since I knew Basil as Ramzi, I assumed that these, too, were adopted names. For these men, making the break with their former lives must have been like a second baptism, so it was hardly surprising that they would want to don a new name.

  But although they wanted to change their names, it is far from certain they wanted to changed their identities. Quite the contrary. In fact, I’d say that by merging their individual identities, they were trying to emphasize their collective identity—that of Oriental Christians. I was struck by that fact that my friend had given up a neutral name in order to take on one with strong religious connotations, of a Doctor of the Church.

  Curiously, during my previous visit, when Brother Basil had explained why he withdrew from civilian life, he was silent—consciously or otherwise—about the specific issues he had had to face as part of a minority community.

  I’m not surprised by his silence; it’s one that I, too, have used. A member of a minority longs to pass over his difference in silence, rather than highlighting it or carrying it like a banner. He reveals his difference only when backed into a corner—something that inevitably happens. Sometimes, it takes only a word, a look, and suddenly he feels like a stranger in a land where his people have been living for centuries, for millennia, long before the majority communities of today. Faced with such circumstances, everyone reacts according to their temperament—meekly, bitterly, deferentially, or with flair. “Our ancestors were Christians when all of Europe was still pagan, and they spoke Arabic long before the advent of Islam,” I remember saying to a coreligionist one day, somewhat smugly. “A beautiful turn of phrase,” he said sadly, “Remember it. It will make a fine epitaph for our gravestones.”

  Needless to say, although they never spoke about it, the monks were constantly aware of their status as a minority. It would gradually become obvious as they spoke.

  At Brother Basil’s invitation, they introduced themselves, one after another, giving their religious names; the places they had been born—from Tyre to Mosul, from Haifa to Aleppo, and even Gondar; their ages—which ranged from twenty-eight to sixty-four years; and their former professions—aside from my friend, there was a second civil engineer, a geometrics engineer, a doctor, an agronomist, a builder, a landscape gardener, even a former soldier. None of them directly explained the path they had taken and how they had come to be there, but each of their stories hinted at the tragedy that led him to withdraw from the world in order to pray.

  Their tragedies were most apparent when they told me where they hailed from. This prompted me to ask, when the introductions were concluded:

  “Do you think the communities you were born into have a future?”

  My question was not directly related to anything any one of them had just said, but none of them seemed surprised by it.

  “I pray it might have, but I have little hope.”

  It was Chrysostom who said this, and there was a rebelliousness in his words. Against men, but also against Heaven. The others turned to him, more sad than outraged. They all harboured the same feelings towards their Creator, first formulated by the man they followed, by He whom they follow, the Son of God, the Christ, who, in his final agony, asked his God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

  For some reason I cannot explain, I felt as though I had backed Ramzi’s fellow monks into a corner, and I heard myself repeat the words of the abandoned Christ:

  “Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani?”

  I had deliberately phrased it in an inquiring tone, as though genuinely asking the question, if not of the Creator, then of his monks. They, too, seemed helpless; hearing these words from the lips of a stranger had once again plunged them into the bleak atmosphere of Good Friday. They all set down their forks and sat, wordless, overwhelmed, mute.

  Looking at them, I felt a little ashamed. It was hardly my role as a secular visitor, a monk for a night, to provoke such a reaction. But this was no game. I had always found these words of Jesus shocking. There are a number of elements in the Gospels that, to a sceptical historian like me, seem too commonplace to be true. In keeping with the spirit of the age, there had to be twelve apostles—just as there are twelve months of the year, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve gods on Olympus; and Jesus had to die at the age of thirty-three—the iconic age at which Alexander died. It was important that he have no siblings, no wife, no child, and that he be born of a virgin. Many episodes in the Gospels are clearly embellished, and perhaps borrowed from earlier folk tales so that the myth corresponds with the expectations
of the faithful … Then suddenly, this howl of pain—“Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani.” The word made flesh suddenly becomes a man again, a weak, frightened, tremulous man. A man with doubts. These words ring true. We do not need to believe, only to listen to know that these words were not made up, or borrowed, or adapted, or even embellished.

  To me, miracles are of no importance and parables are overrated. The greatness of Christianity is that it worships a man who was weak, ridiculed, persecuted, tortured, who refused to stone an adulterous woman, who praised the heretic Samaritan, one who was not entirely sure of God’s mercy.

  In the end, it is Brother Basil who breaks the silence and answers my question.

  “If all men are mortal, then we, as Christians in the Orient, are twice mortal. Once as individuals—this is as Heaven dictates; and once as a community, a civilization, and, in this, Heaven is not to blame, it is the fault of man.”

  I think he intended to say more. But he didn’t. Abruptly, he fell silent. I even felt that he already regretted the few words that had escaped him. He got up to get himself some fruit; the other monks followed suit, and so did I.

  Should I bring up the subject again tonight? No. These men usually eat in silence; my presence in their world is unsettling enough. Tomorrow morning, if the opportunity presents itself, I’ll bring it up with Ramzi, one on one, when we go to wander through his maze.

  I did not say another word. I slowly peeled, sliced, and ate a large, cold apple. When they rose from the table to offer a short prayer of thanks, I rose with them. Then I came back to my cell to write these few lines before going to sleep.