Street of Thieves

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.