Street of Thieves

I began writing her poems as well, mostly in French and stolen from Nizar Qabbani; French or Spanish poetry seemed dry to me, not flowery enough. I always ended my missives with a verse, Love, my love, is a beautiful poem embellished on the moon, and so on. Judit was more discreet about her feelings, but I sensed, in her emails which were sometimes in French, sometimes in Arabic, that she appreciated our correspondence; she told me about her life in Barcelona, her everyday routine, her annoyance with the stupidity of her classes, her boredom at the university, where the professors themselves seemed to scorn the texts they taught as if they were a dead language like Latin. Through her, I began to hate these puny Arabic scholars in colonial shorts who every day regretted the fact that Spain had for a few centuries been Arabic, sighing over Andalusian texts in which they saw nothing but lexical difficulty. She told me look, we’re studying such-or-such a poem by Ibn Zaydún, such-or-such a fragment by Ibn Hazm whom they called Abenhazam, and I would rush to a bookstore to find the book in question; most of the time it was a wonder to me, a jewel from another time whose Arabic filled my mouth and eardrums with unprecedented pleasure. Despite the dead poilus and Casanova, I felt very Arabic thanks to Judit; I followed her studies from day to day: she would ask me grammar questions, I would open the grammar books and classical commentators to find an answer for her; she heard of an author and the next day I would send her an annotated file with extracts and summaries.

Of course, these activities were incompatible with my co-renters’ way of life, who had been unearthed by a kind of syndicate of French companies, which tried as much as possible to facilitate lodging for their personnel; Adel, Yacine, and Walid all came from Casablanca, they were “skilled technicians” and worked in an automobile parts factory, on the assembly line. Every night they saw me immersed in my files of dead soldiers or in my books, and took me for a madman. Sometimes they’d shout Lakhdar khouya, you’re going to make yourself deaf and blind, it’s worse than masturbation, all that, come out for a spin in the open air, you’ll see some girls! No no, he’ll just see the sea, but that can’t hurt him! Moulay Lakhdar, you’re pale as prepubescent underwear, come inhale the exhaust from our car! And they’d end up leaving, earpiece in place, for Tangier and its delights, cruising with the music at full blast for hours till they ended up stuffing their faces with hamburgers around midnight, coming home brimming with excitement, and sprawling in front of the TV smoking joint after joint before returning to the factory the next day.

I hadn’t heard anything about Sheikh Nureddin or Bassam since the attack, they hadn’t reappeared; little by little my fears of seeing the police turn up had lessened and the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought seemed far away, over there, in those endless suburbs peopled by hundreds of hicks like me, but yet very close; of course I had followed the news on TV; they ended up arresting three suspects, I didn’t know any of them: they had odd-looking faces that didn’t exude intelligence, but photos of criminals are rarely flattering. Every day I expected news of Sheikh Nureddin and Bassam being arrested, but it never came.