Street of Thieves

On May 2^nd, the day after May Day, Osama bin Laden was killed at night by American commandos and his body thrown out of a plane into the Indian Ocean. The news was in all the papers: the thin man with the long beard and spellbinding stare had been crushed like an insect, in the midst of his wives and medications, trapped in his own strange villa, with fortified walls like a fortress — at least that’s what the journalists told us. The most sought-after terrorist in the world was thirty miles away from Islamabad, and had been for years, the article said. People wondered why they had unearthed him today, and not yesterday or tomorrow; why they hadn’t arrested him, why they had thrown his remains to the fish. It didn’t matter much, you sensed that Bin Laden had lost his body, his physical presence, a long time ago — he had become a voice who spoke from time to time from an imaginary cave, hidden in the depths of the centuries; the very reality of his existence seemed increasingly doubtful and his submersion completed his transformation into a character, a demon or a saint: someone who for me, in the confusion of childhood, inspired both horror and admiration, hope and terror, someone who had victoriously defied the United States of America by spreading destruction now became a slightly disturbing myth, a lame symbol, who limped between greatness and wretchedness. I remembered that at school, he was one of Bassam’s heroes; we used to play in the schoolyard at being Afghan fighters; today Bassam had disappeared and Bin Laden had met his fate in the form of black-hooded Navy Seals, ‘seals,’ who had dragged him down into the depths of the abyss. In itself, it made no sense, aside from one more farewell to the world of yesterday.

When Judit told me she was going to enroll in an Arabic course at the Institut Bourguiba in Tunis for all of July and when she suggested I join her there, I said to myself that would be a first journey, just as Ibn Battuta, leaving Tangier for the East, paused in Tunisia. I very much wanted to see with my own eyes what a revolution in progress was like; I felt as if I were living in the age of Revolt and actually felt much closer to a young twenty-year-old Tunisian than to anyone else — I imagined that Tunis must be a little like Tangier, that I wouldn’t feel out of place there, the Tunisians were Maghrebs, Arabs, and Muslims, and what’s more all those young people, my brothers, or rather my cousins, had managed to get rid of their dictator — the prospect of seeing all that close up delighted me. So I ran to negotiate my vacation with Mr. Bourrelier — I naively imagined that one must have a right to days off, and in fact, that was the case, but it was not possible to take them (except in precise cases linked to the registry office, marriage, births, deaths to which I could not lay claim) except after a year of work. Jean-François was very annoyed. He told me he couldn’t make an exception that would risk creating a precedent, but on the other hand, he said, and just for a week, we can arrange something; you set your mind to doing your files and pages, and we’ll close our eyes to your obligation to be present at the office for five days. If ever any of your colleagues ask, we’ll say you’re sick and working from home, and that’s it. But above all don’t let anything happen to you over there and don’t miss the plane back, okay, we’d have to fire you.