Street of Thieves

Everyone came out of the mosque, Bassam first; I sold a few books, as usual, time passed slowly, I kept looking in all directions to see if she was coming, not too focused on my work. Bassam kept teasing me, he knew very well what I was hoping for.

At two o’clock, the time to put things away, I had to face the obvious: she wasn’t coming. Life’s a bitch, I thought. My sole visitor was my idiot of a little brother.

I started putting things away, death in my soul. Bassam kept gently teasing me. I wasn’t in a 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.