Street of Thieves

I was ready to leave. I’d had no family for two years, no friends for two days, no luggage for two hours. The unconscious doesn’t exist; there are just crumbs of information, scraps of memory not important enough to be dealt with, tatters like those old keypunch strips you used to feed computers; my memories are those scraps of paper, cut up and thrown into the air, mixed together, patched up — I had no idea if they would soon settle down in order to make new sense. Life is a machine to tear out your being; it strips us, from childhood on, in order to repopulate us by plunging us into a bath of contacts, voices, messages that change us endlessly, we are always in motion; a Polaroid just gives an empty portrait, names, a single yet complex name they project onto us and that’s what makes us, so you can call me Moroccan, Moor, Arabic, immigrant or by my first name, call me Ishmael, for example, or whatever you like — I was about to be smashed by part of the truth, and look at me running around Tangier, ignorant, not knowing what had just burned down along with the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, clinging to the hope of Judit and my new job as if they were my life raft. At times I think I can relive the schemings and thoughts of the person I was at that time, but of course this is an illusion; that young man who bought himself two black shirts, two pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, and a suitcase is an imitation, just like the clothes he gets; I thought that the violence that surrounded me had no hold over me, no more than the violence in Tripoli, Cairo, or Damascus. Blinded, all I thought about was Judit’s arrival, about those super-sentimental verses by Nizar Qabbani that we used to copy out, in high school, in secret messages for girls who were moved by them, the lines I had already recited to Meryem, when we were gazing at the Strait, not daring to hold hands, and especially the next line, wandering among the stations of madness — Judit’s eyes were then, as this poet-for-the-ladies said, the last boats setting out. I remember, Meryem was worried; she was afraid of our relationship, afraid of the consequences, afraid, afraid of what I could make her do; she didn’t know what solution to find for this adolescent love, she was hesitant to confide in her mother, after all hadn’t she herself married her first cousin, and I remember that one day, when I had sent Bassam to find her, far from the neighborhood, she told me she was afraid I would abandon her to emigrate, so then I tried to reassure her with Qabbani’s verses, when the truth, if it exists, is that I couldn’t have cared less about her, about her, I mean I cared less about her than about satisfying my desire, my pleasure, managing to undress her, to caress her, and when I finally understood, after reading her last letter, in that old envelope picked up at Bassam’s house, when I finally understood that I was responsible for her death, out there in that lost village, for her hemorrhaging during a furtive, amateur abortion, because I hadn’t responded to her despair, any more than I had to the despair of her mother, who died of sorrow a few weeks later, in this paradise of modern Morocco where in theory no woman bleeds to death or ever kills herself or even ever suffers under the blows of any male, for God and family and tradition watch over them and nothing can hurt them, if they are decent, if they are merely decent, as Sheikh Nureddin said so well, Sheikh Nureddin who knew the truth, just as the whole neighborhood had learned it, Bassam in the lead; when I knew I could no longer escape that reality since it was as sordid and tangible as the number on a banknote, as precise and real as the bee gleaning nectar from the saffron flower on the new ten-cent coin I returned with each of the books I sold; when death, fixed and immutable as those coins, caught me by the ear to tell me O my boy, you skipped a step, for eighteen months now you’ve been living in ignorance of me, the world, my world, had to be well and truly destroyed so I didn’t destroy myself further, after this deflagration; Judit had to be by my side so that I didn’t give in to tears, once the shock was over: all of it confirmed an intuition; of course I knew too, my body knew, my dreams knew even if at that moment, at the moment of Meryem’s death at the far end of the Rif, I was in the process of getting myself beaten up in a police station in Casa or begging for an apple at a market — my nightmares, clearer, became only more painful, more vivid, even more unbearable; my conscience, more confused and even less sure of itself, riddled with regrets and with that terrible sensation, which could draw tears of shameful sorrow from me, because, in my dreams, for months, I had been sleeping with a dead girl: with Meryem who was disappearing in the flesh-eating coffin while I was seeing her alive and well, as the seasons passed; she was accompanying me when she was no more and that was so mysterious, so incomprehensible in my still-young heart that I saw a disgusting betrayal in it, a piece of filth even greater than my responsibility for her death, a hatred that turned against Bassam, against my family, against everyone who had prevented me from mourning for Meryem and had forced me to lust for her dead body — just as you slowly withdraw the shroud from a corpse to observe its breasts. On the marble table, I had dreamed of her cold belly and pubis. It was there, the shame, there, in this slippage of time; time is a woman from the graveyard, a woman in white, who washes the bodies of children.