Street of Thieves

They might have killed strangers; they’d almost even killed Judit, who knows. They’d beaten up my favorite bookseller; they had offered me shelter, food, and an education. My room was too little; the commentaries on the Koran, the grammar books, the treatises on rhetoric, the Sayings of the Prophet, his Lives, my shelf of thrillers: these magnificent books were obstructing my view. Where were they, all the members of the Group? At noon, I called Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam on their cellphones from our telephone: no answer. I had the feeling that no one would come back, that this office had served its purpose, that they had left me, the naive one, to get the beatings and deal with the police. That’s why the Sheikh had so easily given me five hundred dirhams. I wasn’t going to see anyone ever again. Not a single one of them. Stay with my books until the cops arrived. No, I was paranoid; impossible. I had read so many thrillers where the narrator realizes he had been used, manipulated by the crooks or the forces of law and order that I saw myself, sole representative of the abandoned Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, waiting calmly for the cops and ending up being tortured in place of the beards.

Sheikh Nureddin’s office wasn’t locked. I told myself I was imagining things on my own, that they would come back momentarily, expose me, and make fun of me till the end of my days.

The bookstore’s cash box was there, on the table, no one had emptied it for weeks, there were about two thousand dirhams in it.

I found other bills in a leather bag, euros and dollars, ten or fifteen thousand dirhams in all, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Otherwise everything was empty, the desk diaries had disappeared, the contacts, the notebooks full of orders, the account books, the activities, the business affairs of Sheikh Nureddin, all gone. Even his personal computer wasn’t there. Just the monitor.

I was all alone in the midst of dozens, hundreds of shrink-wrapped books.

I took a walk around the neighborhood, to see if I might come across a familiar face that belonged to the Group; no one. I went to Bassam’s house, a few feet away from my parents’, I met his mother and asked if she knew where he was; she gave me the kind of look you reserve for contagious beggars, muttered a curse and slammed the door, then reopened it to hand me a dirty old envelope with my name on it — Bassam’s handwriting. I glanced at it, it wasn’t dated today; apparently some old thing he had never mailed, since he hadn’t known where to send it. His mother closed the door again abruptly, with no explanation.

At four o’clock I had a meeting in the Free Zone with Jean-François for the new job; I wanted to change, to make myself as handsome as possible, I felt as if the world were crumbling into pieces. Going back to the Group, I thought I saw two shady looking characters hanging around our premises; cops in civilian clothes, who knows. I checked my email, there was a message from Judit, she wrote that she was finally coming back to Tangier as planned, but alone; she didn’t have enough money to get a new ticket for Barcelona; she’d be there a little before the set date, the day after tomorrow, she said, after having seen Elena off at the airport.

This news warmed my heart, even if I was a little wounded that she wasn’t doing it to see me again sooner and for longer, but for unfortunate financial reasons.

I made my decision, without waiting for the outcome of the afternoon interview. I gathered together all the cash that there could be in Sheikh Nureddin’s office, even the ten-cent pieces. I had almost fifteen or twenty thousand dirhams in bills and coins. More cash than anyone had ever seen, I could have taken a taxi to the suburb of Nador to find Meryem, say I’m taking this young woman away, here’s ten thousand dirhams for your trouble, no one would have objected.

It was April, the month of dust and lies.

I gathered my things together, the hundred or so thrillers took up so much space you wouldn’t believe, I emptied the boxes we had just gotten from Saudi Arabia to put them in: in all, with the Kashshaaf, The Stories of the Prophets, the dictionary, the books I liked, there were three big boxes; even some clothes had gone into each of the boxes; plus I took the Group’s laptop, the screen, the keyboard and two or three things I had to keep.

A real house moving, and nowhere to go.