Street of Thieves

Seventeen. That’s a huge little number. You don’t realize, when you listen to the radio or the TV, the number of corpses left by some catastrophe or other, what seventeen bodies represent. You say, oh, seventeen, that’s not so much, tell me about a thousand, two thousand, three thousand stiffs, but seventeen, seventeen isn’t anything extraordinary, and yet, and yet, it’s an enormous quantity of vanished life, dead meat, it’s cumbersome, in memory as well as in the cold-storage room, it’s seventeen faces and over a ton of flesh and bone, tens of thousands of hours of existence, billions of memories gone, hundreds of people touched by mourning, between Tangier and Mombasa.

One by one, I wrapped these guys up in their shrouds, and wept; most of them were young, my age, or even younger; some had broken limbs or bruises on their face. The great majority looked Arab. Among these bodies was a girl’s. She had tattooed a telephone number in henna on her arm, a Moroccan number. She had long hair, very black, a gray face. I was disturbed; I didn’t want to see her breasts, her sex; normally I shouldn’t have placed her in the casket myself, a woman was supposed to do that. I was afraid of my own gaze on this female body; I imagined Meryem dead — it was her I was placing in the coffin, her I was burying finally, alone in the night of my nightmares, I imagined the police calling this tattooed phone number, a mother or brother picking up, an almost mechanical voice informing them, repeating very loudly to be understood, of the end of their sister, their daughter, just as the phone must have rung at my uncle’s house, one day, to announce this terrible news, just as it will ring one day for us, too, one after the other, and shyly, tenderly, fraternally, I placed this unknown girl in her metal sarcophagus.

Perhaps we can’t really picture death unless we see our own corpse in others’ bodies, young as me, Moroccan as me, candidates for exile like me.

At night I would write poems for all these dead people, secret poems that I would then slip into their coffins, a little note that would disappear with them, a homage, a ritha’; I gave them names, tried to imagine them alive, to guess their lives, their hopes, their last moments. Sometimes I saw them in my dreams.

I never forgot their faces.

My hatred for Cruz grew; it was irrational; aside from my semi-captivity, he wasn’t mean; he was crumbling beneath the weight of the corpses; he just had this strange perversion that consisted in looking at, scrutinizing all day, extraordinarily violent videos; beheadings in Afghanistan, hangings from the Second World War, all kinds of car accidents, bodies incinerated by a bomb.

I had to get away as soon as possible.

I missed Casanova and my soldiers every day. I thought of Judit, sometimes I sent her texts and called her; most of the time she didn’t reply to the messages or pick up the phone, and I felt as if I were in limbo, in the barzakh, unreachable between life and the beyond.

For books, all I had was the Koran and two Spanish thrillers bought used in town, not great, but OK, they helped pass the time. Then I had three days of vacation because Cruz left to deliver a load of corpses on the other side of the Strait. He couldn’t leave me locked up the whole time, so he gave me a little pocket money (until then I hadn’t yet seen the color of my wages) to amuse myself in town, as he said. I spent my days at sidewalk cafés, quietly reading and drinking my small beer.

I went to check my email and there, surprise: a message from Sheikh Nureddin. He was writing to me from Arabia, where he was working for a pious foundation; he asked me for news. I replied saying I was in Spain, without telling him about my pitiful activity. I hesitated about telling him about the fire at the Propagation for Koranic Thought, I wondered if he knew about it. His letter was kind, even brotherly; my suspicions about his possible participation in the Marrakesh attack seemed ridiculous to me now, even if the mystery of his sudden disappearance remained intact — I asked him if he knew where Bassam was.

I thought nostalgically about the long reading sessions at the Group, lying on the rugs. Tangier was far away, in another world.

I wrote a long note to Judit explaining in brief my slave’s life in Algeciras; I didn’t mention the corpses, just the gardening, cleaning, and the strange Cruz. I told her I hoped to see her soon.

I called Saadi, inviting him for coffee in downtown Algeciras; he had a visa, he could come and go as he liked, that was the injustice of the administration: the older you were and the less you wanted to, the easier it was to move around.

He was happy to see me again, as was I. I asked him if there was news of the company — he told me the Moroccan government was going to find a solution any day now. I still had time to profit from it, he said.