Street of Thieves. Mathias Enard

good mood. Sheikh Nureddin invited us to lunch at a little neighborhood restaurant, like every Friday, with the rest of the “active members” of the Group; I listened to them talk politics, Arab Revolutions, etc. It was amusing to see these bearded conspirators licking their fingers; the Sheikh had spread his napkin over his chest, one corner tucked into his shirt collar, so as not to get stains on himself—saffron sauce doesn’t come out easily. Another man held his spoon with his fist like a cudgel and shoveled food in a few inches away from his plate, to have the least distance possible to travel: he stuffed semolina into his wide-open mouth like gravel into a cement mixer. Bassam had already finished, his cheeks streaked with yellow, and was now passionately sucking a last chicken bone. The beards of these prophets glistened with semolina grains, were spotted with a shower of golden snow, and they needed to be brushed off like rugs.

      I vaguely followed the conversation from afar, without taking part in it: I knew that, like every Friday, they were going to go over the sermon of the detested Imam, whom they would end up calling a mystique, in French. For Sheikh Nureddin, mystic was an insult even worse than miscreant; I don’t know why, but he always said mystique like that, in the language of Voltaire, perhaps because of its resemblance to moustique, mosquito, or mastic, gum; Sufis or those who were suspected of being so were his bête noire, almost as bad as Marxists. Right now, the conversation was centered on the Cave, and on its commentary; one was asking why the Imam hadn’t insisted on the first verses, that attack against the Christians, and the fact that God had no son; the other was worried about the emphasis placed on the dog, the guardian of the Seven Sleepers, who watched over them during their sleep; a third found that there really were more pressing matters to concern oneself with than the land of Gog and Magog and Two-Horned Alexander. Sheikh Nureddin brought the discussion to an end, spitting out Mistik! Mistik! Kullo dhalik mistik! which delighted everyone.

      I couldn’t manage to take an interest in anything except Judit. She hadn’t come. How could I see her again? If the two girls were following their itinerary as planned, at least the one I thought I had understood last night, then a priori they were leaving Tangier tomorrow for Marrakesh. An idea: I could still go by their hotel. Leave a note, who knows, with my email and phone number; I had cellphone credit that was eternally exhausted, but I could still receive calls. Even better: bring her the book (or even several books, too bad for the weight in her backpack—I pictured her with a backpack, the symbol of European youth, instead of with a rolling suitcase) with the above-mentioned note inside it. Until now I had never taken anything from the stock, I read the books that interested me, but that’s it. I didn’t think Sheikh Nureddin would get upset over a few missing copies, after all the goal of the association was to propagate Koranic thought, so I was working in the right direction.

      I didn’t want to lower myself to the point of waiting all night in front of their hotel for them to appear. I had to be firm on that point, even if the temptation was great. Lunch seemed endless to me.

      And then finally the Sheikh got up, and everyone took his lead; I thanked him, he smiled at me warmly, I took advantage of the moment to ask him if he could advance me two hundred dirhams against my next month’s salary, he answered even five hundred if you need it, what’s it for? I didn’t want to lie to him, I told him it’s to buy a gift for a friend, and invite her out for ice cream, I felt as if I were a child, a teenager asking his parents for the cost of a movie ticket to buy some cigarettes, he looked very happy with my frankness, he said no problem, if it’s for a noble cause, and handed me five 100-dirham notes, I hadn’t asked for so much, it was a fortune, half my salary. You’re doing your work well, you’re one of us, you study a lot, you have a right to have fun too. I liked this almost brotherly friendship, all of a sudden I was ashamed of deceiving him, in one way or another. Bassam was watching me with envy, Sheikh Nureddin had taken out the bills without hiding anything, Bassam had the right to another kind of pay: violence and danger.

      From Friday night till Sunday, I had the weekend off; I didn’t have to answer for my use of time to anyone. My gratitude to Sheikh Nureddin said a lot about my naivety, not to mention my stupidity. My thinking had become bogged down in rose jam. As the Spanish proverb says: An idiot’s skin is thicker than cast iron. I went back to the Group at the same time as everyone else, they were getting ready for a meeting from which I was excused, so much the better; just the once won’t hurt, instead of settling down quietly on the rugs, they locked themselves up in the Sheikh’s little office, with a conspiratorial air. I supposed it had to do with the attack that Bassam mentioned to me yesterday, but I was incapable of imagining that it concerned a real action, even less one of the most cynical and paranoid violence. The fact that the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought was a respectable institution guaranteed, I thought, that it would keep its activities within the (cowardly, it’s true) limits of the law.

      I took three books that I wrapped rather pathetically in newspaper (still, the paper was in Arabic, so it went with the theme) and headed out. I had taken care to put a thriller in my pocket; if the girls didn’t appear, I’d drown my disappointment by blowing the Sheikh’s dough reading and knocking back some beers.

      And I set off, my mind finally made up to cool my heels in front of their hotel until they appeared. Which just goes to show I had no moral strength whatsoever.

      THAT night, after having spent the afternoon and evening with Judit, when I was indeed sad to have left her again but above all happy to have seen her again, I had my first nightmare, at least my first real nightmare as an adult. Not an erotic dream that would have allowed me to rediscover the woman I had just left but a horrible dream, where my little brother appeared, the one I’d seen just that morning, infernal visions that were going to go on repeating themselves pretty much identically until today. The subject matter of the dream varies little, its form is more shifting—the violence, the color, the images of fear persist, you never get used to them, despite how often it comes: there’s hanging, either I myself am hanged or I come across a hanged body still in convulsions; or the sea is suddenly streaked with an increasingly dense red current that ends up drowning me as I’m swimming; or rape, skeletal old men rape me, laughing, while I can’t move or cry out—all these scenes are interrupted at their climax by a breathless awakening or, on the contrary, they go on endlessly, the long agony of watching a familiar corpse floating in the air, frantic, swimming in waves of blood. The women who have witnessed me sleep tell me I can groan for a long time, huddled with my arms over my head, or I’ll keep tossing this way and that, letting out stifled cries. The sequence of scenes can vary, some can go away for a while and then come back, without warning, without my ever managing to understand the reason for their reappearance.

      I woke up in the middle of the night with these images and for an instant, in the darkness, I mentally prayed, my first reflex against fear was prayer, to implore God, and I would have given anything for there to be someone by my side, until I chased away the mental representations by turning on the light, replacing them with the familiar objects of my tiny room. I spent a long time calming myself down. I clung to the vision of Judit’s face. She had promised that she’d return to Tangier on her way back, in five days, that she’d email me about her trip. The terrifying dream slowly disappeared as I remembered her. I would have happily gone with them to Marrakesh, I’d never been there. It was strange to think they would know my country better than me. But was it really my country? My country was Tangier, at least that’s what I thought; but in truth, I had realized that afternoon, Judit’s Tangier did not coincide with mine. She saw the international city, Spanish, French, American; she knew Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and William Burroughs, so many authors whose remote names vaguely reminded me of something, but about whom I knew nothing. Even Mohamed Choukri, icon of Tangier, I knew who he was, but of course I had never read a word by him. I was very surprised to learn that they studied his novels in modern Arabic literature at the University of Barcelona. Speaking with Judit about Tangier, I had the feeling we were discussing a different city, two images, two foreign territories linked by the same name, a homophonic mistake. No doubt Tangier was neither one nor the other, not the memories of the old days of the international city, not my suburb, not Tanger-Med or the Free Zone. But the fact remains that with Judit and Elena, strolling about with them all afternoon and a good part of the evening, after having practically run into them by chance two hundred meters away from their hotel, my package