Street of Thieves E-Book

Mathias Enard

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In Tangier, young Lakhdar finds himself homeless after being caught in flagrante with his cousin Meryem. As the political and religious tensions in the Mediterranean flare up with the Arab Spring and the global financial crisis, Lakhdar and his friend Bassam entertain dreams of emigration, fuelled by a desire for freedom and a better life. Part political thriller, part road-movie, part romance, the latest novel by Mathias Enard takes us from the violence of Tangier's streets to Barcelona's louche Raval quarter. Street of Thieves is an intense coming-of-age story that delves deep into the brutal realities of the immigrant experience.

Leseprobe

‘[Street of Thieves] represents the kind of fiction one hopes will emerge, from Enard or others, after the tumult once known as the Arab Spring has receded a little further into the past.’

— Robert F. Worth, New York Times

‘Set against a backdrop of rising Islamic extremism, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement, Enard’s latest novel is a howling elegy for thwarted youth.’

— Publishers Weekly

‘I’ll read everything Enard writes from [Street of Thieves] on: his language jumps across and down the page, he doesn’t fear engaging with complicated ideas, and he manages to animate living, breathing characters who savour the complexities and ambiguities, the beauties and horrors, of life.’

— Lee Klein, 3:AM Magazine

Praise for Zone

‘[An] ambitious study of twentieth century conflict and disaster … Enard’s novel is to be seen within a tradition of French avant-garde writing … The result is a modern masterpiece.’

— David Collard, Times Literary Supplement

‘[I]f you were going to write a story of mankind’s savagery, it would have to look pretty much exactly like this.’

— Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

‘The brilliance of Zone lies in its brutal refusal to stop. Again and again, Mathias Enard’s white-knuckle narrative plunges us back into the battle-scarred past, forcing us to confront its horrors … a relentlessly inventive novel.’

— David Winters, Literary Review

STREET OF THIEVES

MATHIAS ENARD

Translated by

CHARLOTTE MANDELL

‘But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.’ ‘Here!’ I interrupted. ‘You can never tell! Here I met Mr Kurtz.’

— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphI. STRAITSII. BARZAKHIII. THE STREET OF THIEVESAbout the AuthorsCopyright

I. STRAITS

Men are dogs, they rub against each other in misery, they roll around in filth and can’t get out of it, lick their fur and their genitals all day long, lying in the dust, ready to do anything for the scrap of meat or the rotten bone they want someone to throw them, and I’m just like them, I’m a human being, hence a depraved piece of garbage that’s a slave to its instincts, a dog, a dog that bites when it’s afraid and begs for caresses. I can see my childhood clearly, my puppy dog’s life in Tangier; my young mutt’s strayings, my groans of a beaten mongrel; I understand my frenzy around women, which I took for love, and above all I understand the absence of a master, which makes us all roam around looking for him in the dark, sniffing each other, lost, aimless. In Tangier I would walk five kilometres twice a day to go look at the sea, the bay and the Strait, now I still walk a lot, I read too, more every time, a pleasant way to trick boredom, death, to trick thought itself by distracting it, by distancing it from the truth, the only truth, which is: we are all caged animals who live for pleasure, in obscurity. I have never gone back to Tangier, but I’ve met guys who dreamed of going there, as tourists, to rent a pretty villa with a view of the sea, drink tea at the Café Hafa, smoke kif and fuck natives, male natives for the most part but not exclusively, there are some who want to screw princesses from the Arabian Nights, believe me, I’ve been asked so many times to arrange a little stay for them in Tangier, with kif and locals, to relax, and if they had known that the only arse I ogled before I was 18 was my cousin Meryem’s they’d have fallen down laughing or wouldn’t have believed me; they so associate Tangier with sensuality, with desire, with a permissiveness that it never had for us, but which is offered to the tourist in return for hard cash in the purse of misery. In our neighbourhood, nobody ever came, not a single tourist. The building I grew up in was neither rich nor poor, my family likewise, my old man was pious, what they call a good man, a man of honour who mistreated neither his wife nor his children – aside from a few kicks in the backside now and then, which never harmed anyone. He was a man of a single book, but a good one, the Koran: that’s all he needed to know what he had to do in this life and what awaited him in the next, pray five times a day, fast, give alms, his only dream was to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, which they call the Haj, Haj Mohsen, that was his sole ambition, it didn’t matter if he worked hard to transform his grocery shop into a supermarket, it didn’t matter if he earned millions of dirhams, he had the Book-prayer-pilgrimage period; my mother revered him and combined an almost filial obedience with domestic servitude: I grew up like that, with suras, morality, stories about the Prophet and the glorious times of the Arabs, I went to a totally average school where I learned a little French and Spanish and every day I would go down to the harbour with my buddy Bassam, to the lower part of the Medina and to the Grand Zoco to check out the tourists, as soon as we sprouted hair on our balls that became our main activity, eyeballing foreign women, especially in summer when they wear shorts and miniskirts. In the summer there wasn’t much to do, in any case, aside from following girls, going to the beach, and smoking joints when someone handed us a little kif. I would read old French detective novels by the dozen, which I bought used for a few coins at a bookshop, detective novels because there was sex, often, blondes, cars, whisky, and cops, all things that we lacked except in dreams, stuck as we were between prayers, the Koran and God, who was a little like a second father, minus the kicks in the rear. We would take up our places on top of the cliff facing the Strait, surrounded by Phoenician tombs, which were just holes in the rock, full of empty crisp bags and cans of Coke instead of ancient stiffs, each of us listening to a Walkman, and we would watch the to-and-fro of the ferries between Tangier and Tarifa, for hours. We were bored stiff. Bassam dreamed of leaving, of trying his luck on the other side as he said; his father was a waiter in a restaurant for rich people on the seafront. I didn’t think much about it, the other side, Spain, Europe, I liked what I read in my thrillers, but that’s all. With my novels I learned a language, I learned about other countries; I was proud of these novels, proud of having them for me alone, I didn’t want that oaf Bassam to pollute them for me with his ambitions. What tempted me more than anything at the time was my cousin Meryem, my Uncle Ahmed’s daughter; she lived alone with her mother, on the same floor as us, her father and brothers farmed in Almería. She wasn’t very pretty, but she had big tits and a round arse; at home she often wore tight jeans or half-transparent house dresses, my God, my God she aroused me terribly, I wondered if she did it on purpose, and in my erotic dreams before I fell asleep I imagined undressing her, caressing her, placing my face between her enormous breasts, but I would have been incapable of making the first move. She was my cousin, I could have married her, but not felt her up, that wasn’t right. I made do with dreaming, and of talking about her with Bassam, during our afternoons spent contemplating the wake of the boats. Today she smiled at me, today she wore this or that, I think she had on a red bra, etc. Bassam nodded, saying, she wants you, no doubt about it, you turn her on, otherwise she wouldn’t put on that act. What act, I replied, isn’t it normal for her to wear a bra? Yes but it’s red, you idiot, don’t you see? Red is for arousal. And so on, for hours. Bassam had a stolid peasant’s head, round, with little eyes. He went to the mosque every day, with his old man. He spent his time devising incredible plans to emigrate secretly, disguised as a customs officer, or a cop; he dreamt of stealing some tourist’s papers and, well dressed, with a pretty suitcase, of calmly taking the boat as if it was nothing – I asked, but what would you do in Spain without cash? I’d work and save a little, then I’d go to France, he’d reply, to France then to Germany and from there to America. I don’t know why he thought it would be easier to leave for the States from Germany. It’s very cold in Germany, I said. And also they don’t like Arabs over there. That’s wrong, said Bassam, they like Moroccans, my cousin is a mechanic in Dusseldorf, and he’s super happy. You just have to learn German, and they respect you like crazy, apparently. And they issue papers more readily than the French.

We would exchange our castles in the sky, trade Meryem’s breasts for emigration; we would meditate this way for hours, facing the Strait, and then we’d go home, on foot, him to evening prayers, me to try and catch one more glimpse of my cousin. We were seventeen, but more like twelve in our heads. We weren’t very clever.

A few months later I got my first real beating, an avalanche of blows the like of which I had never experienced before, I ended up half unconscious and in tears, from humiliation as much as from pain, my father was crying too, from shame, and he was reciting phrases of conjuration, God protect us from evil, God help us, There is no God but God, and so on, adding hits and belt lashes, while my mother moaned in a corner, she cried, too, and looked at me as if I were the devil incarnate, and when my father was exhausted, when he couldn’t hit me anymore, there was a great silence, an immense silence, they both stared at me. I was a stranger, I felt that these looks propelled me outward, I was humiliated and terrorized, my father’s eyes were full of hatred, I left at a run. I slammed the door behind me, I could hear Meryem crying from the landing and shouting through the door, the sound of slaps, insults, bitch, whore, I ran down the stairs. Once outside I realized I was bleeding from my nose, that I was in my shirtsleeves, that I had only ten dirhams in my pocket and nowhere to go. It was the beginning of summer, fortunately, the evening was warm, the air salty. I sat down on the ground against a eucalyptus tree, I held my head in my hands and I bawled like a baby, until night fell and there was the call to prayer. I got up, I was afraid; I knew I wouldn’t go back home, that I could never go back, it was impossible. What was I going to do? I went to the neighbourhood mosque, to see if I could catch Bassam as he came out. He saw me, opened his eyes wide, I motioned for him to give his father the slip and follow me. Shit, have you looked at your face? What happened? My old man caught me with Meryem, I said, and the mere memory of that instant made me clench my teeth, tears of rage filled my eyes. The shame, the terrible shame of being discovered naked, our bodies exposed, the burning shame that paralyzes me even today – shit, Bassam hissed, what a beating you must’ve got, yep, I said, yep, without going into detail. And what’re you going to do now? I have no idea. But I can’t go back home. Where’ll you sleep, asked Bassam. No idea. You have any money? Twenty dirhams and a book, that’s it. He passed me a few coins that were in his pockets. I have to go. We’ll see each other tomorrow? As usual? I said OK, and he left. I walked around the city, a little lost. I walked up Avenue Pasteur, then down to the edge of the sea by the steep little streets; there were red lights in the hostess bars, seedy-looking guys sitting in front of the windows. On the promenade, couples were strolling calmly, arm in arm, it made me think of Meryem. I went back to the harbour and climb-ed up to the Tombs; I sat down facing the Strait, there were beautiful lights in Spain; I pictured people dancing on the beaches, freedom, women, cars; what the hell was I going to do, without a roof, without any money? Beg? Work? I had to go home. The thought immediately destroyed me. Impossible. I stretched out and looked at the stars for a long time. I slept until the cold of dawn forced me to get up and walk around to warm myself up. I hurt everywhere, from the blows, but also from the ache of sleeping all night on the rock. If I had known what was to come, I would’ve gone meekly back home, I would have begged my father for forgiveness. If I hadn’t been so proud, that’s what I should have done, I would have avoided many more humiliations and wounds, perhaps I’d have become a grocer myself, perhaps I’d have married Meryem, perhaps this very instant I’d be in Tangier, dining in a fancy restaurant by the sea or giving my kids a thrashing, a whole litter of bawling, starving pups.

¶ I was hungry, I wolfed down some rotten fruit the market vendors left out for beggars, I had to fight for gnawed-on apples, then for mouldy oranges, fight off all sorts of nutcases, one-legged men, retards, a horde of half-starved wretches who prowled around the market like me; I was cold, I spent nights soaking wet in the autumn when storms beat down on the city, chasing away tramps under the arcades, in the far corners of the Medina, in buildings under construction where you had to bribe the guard to let you stay dry; in winter I left for the south, finding nothing there but cops who just roughed me up in a crumbling station in Casablanca to encourage me to return home to my parents; I hit upon a truck headed for Tangier, a nice guy who slipped me half his sandwich with me and then gave me a beating because I refused to play the girl for him, and when I went to see Bassam, when I dared set foot again in the neighbourhood, I had lost God knows how much weight, my clothes were in rags, I hadn’t read a book in months and I had just turned eighteen. Not much chance I’d be recognized. I was exhausted, shivering. I was half clean, I washed in mosque courtyards, beneath the disapproving eye of the custodians and Imams, then I was forced to pretend to pray to warm up a little on the comfortable rugs, I took a Koran into a corner and slept sitting up, the volume on my knees, with an inspired air, until a real believer would get annoyed at seeing me snoring over the Holy Text and would throw me out, with a kick up the arse and sometimes ten dirhams so I’d go hang myself somewhere else. I wanted to see Bassam so he would go visit my parents, tell them I was sorry, that I had suffered greatly, and that I wanted to come home. I remember, I thought often of my mother. Of Meryem, too. During the hardest times, the horrible times when I had to humiliate myself in front of a parking lot guard or a policeman, when the atrocious stench of my shame escaped from the folds of their clothes, I would close my eyes and think of the perfume of Meryem’s skin, of those few hours with her. I was stunned by the speed at which the world could change.

You become the human equivalent of a pigeon or a seagull. People see us without seeing us, sometimes they give us a few kicks so we’ll disappear, and few, very few, imagine on what parapet, on what balcony we sleep at night. I wonder what I thought of, at the time. How I held on. Why I didn’t simply go back after two days to my father’s house and collapse on the living room sofa; why I didn’t go to the town hall or God knows where to ask for help, maybe because there is in youth an infinite force, a power that makes everything slip by, that makes nothing really reach us. At least in the beginning. But then, after ten months of being on the run, three hundred days of shame, I couldn’t bear any more. I had paid my dues, maybe. And no poems came to me, no philosophical considerations about existence, no sincere repentance, just a mute hatred and a deeper mistrust of all that was human.

Before I went to see Bassam, I remember, I took a swim. It was a fine spring morning, I had slept in a crevice at the bottom of the cliff, towards Cape Spartel, a few miles away from the centre of Tangier, after downing a can of tuna and a piece of bread, sooty from a fire made from a wooden crate and some newspapers. I had wrapped myself up in the long wool coat stolen from a market that had accompanied me all winter, and I had dozed off, lulled by the surf. In the morning the Mediterranean was calm, calm and dark blue, the rising sun gently caressed the sandy spots between the rocks. I knew I’d freeze my balls off but I didn’t care, I desired this beauty, this liquid rest too much. The water was terribly cold. I warmed up a little by swimming fast to the north, a few hundred feet maybe, the current was strong, I struggled to get back to the coast. I collapsed on a stretch of sand, in the sun; there was no wind, just the warm caress of the silica, I fell asleep again, exhausted and almost happy. When I woke up two or three hours later, the April sun was beating down and I was starving. I ate the rest of the bread from the day before, drank a lot of water; I folded the coat up in my bag, put my clothes into some sort of order – my shirt was torn in the armpit, and it had grease spots on the back; my trousers were completely threadbare at the cuffs; you could no longer make out the stripes on my grey jacket, which I got from an Islamic solidarity centre for the poor. I felt good, despite everything. Bassam would slip me a clean shirt and a pair of pants. I hadn’t seen him since the end of December, since I left for Casa; he had helped me as much as he’d been able, by giving me a little money, some food, and even, once, news of Meryem: her mother had sent her to live at her sister’s house in the remote depths of the Rif. Might as well be in prison. Bassam was still making castles in the sky about going to Spain, and the last time we’d seen each other, still in the same place, facing the Strait, facing the unattainable Tarifa, he had said to me, Don’t worry, go to Casa and when you come back I’ll have found a way to get us to the other side. I still didn’t see what the hell we’d do in Spain without papers and without money, aside from begging, ending up getting arrested and deported, but still, it was a nice dream.

I went to his house around noon; I knew his father would be at work. Rediscovering the neighbourhood streets stung my heart. I walked very quickly, taking care not to pass by the family grocery shop, I reached Bassam’s building, ran up the steps and knocked on his door like a madman, as if I were being followed. He was there. He recognized me right away, which reassured me about my looks. He had me come in. He sniffed me and told me I didn’t stink too badly, for a bum. That made me laugh. That might be true, but I’d still like to take a shower and eat a little, I said. I felt as if I had finally arrived somewhere. He handed me some clean clothes, I stayed maybe an hour in the bathroom. I’d never have thought that having as much water as you wanted could be a heavenly luxury. In the meantime he had prepared breakfast for me, eggs, bread, cheese. He was smiling the whole time, with a conspiratorial air. He barely asked me what I’d been up to these last three months, just: So, how was Casa? – without insisting. He was excited, he kept getting up and sitting down, still with a smile on his lips. Come on, out with it, I ended up saying. He made a face as if he’d been caught stealing a chicken. What do you mean, out with it? Why are you saying that? Fine, OK, I’ll tell you, I think I found something for you, a place where you can lay low, where they’ll take care of you. He resumed his smiling, conspiratorial air. What kind of place is it, an asylum? I thought that behind it all was a plan for a crazy adventure, one of those Bassam affairs. No no, my friend, not an asylum, not even a hospital, even better: a mosque.

What the hell do you want me to do in a mosque, I asked.

It’s not a place like the others, Bassam replied, you’ll see, the people are different.

And yes, it was true, they were different. Bearded, dressed in immaculate dark suits. Aside from that, they really were quite nice and generous, these Islamists. Sheikh Nureddin (he called himself Sheikh, but he couldn’t have been over forty) asked me to tell him my story, after Bassam introduced me: This is the one I spoke to you about, Sheikh, he’s a real believer, but he’s in need. Then God will provide, replied the other. The mosque wasn’t really a mosque, it was the ground floor of an apartment building, with rugs on the floor and a brass plaque on the door that read ‘Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought’. Bassam looked very proud for bringing them a stray lamb. I recounted everything down the smallest detail, almost. Sheikh Nureddin listened to me attentively, looking me straight in the eyes, without looking surprised, as if he already knew the whole story. When I finished he sat silent for a bit, still staring at me, and asked: Are you a believer? I managed to reply yes, without seeming to hesitate. You haven’t sinned, my young friend. You let yourself get caught in that girl’s trap. She is the one responsible, and your father was not fair. You were weak, that’s true, but it’s your youth that spoke. Your father is the guilty one, he should have better supervised the women of his family, should have enjoined decency on them. If your cousin had been decent, none of it would have happened. Bassam interrupted him: Sheikh, his father is proclaiming to the whole neighbourhood that he no longer has a son, that he disinherited him.

Nureddin smiled sadly. These things might come right with time. The important thing is you now. Bassam tells me you are pious, serious, a good worker and that you like books, is that right? Yes sir. Well, I mean for the books, I mumbled.

In five minutes I was hired as a bookseller for the Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought; they offered me a tiny room that looked out onto the back and a salary. Not a huge amount, but still a little pocket money. I couldn’t get over it. I thanked Sheikh Nureddin effusively, all the while expecting some unforeseen thing to make the deal fall through. But it didn’t. A real miracle. They gave me some dirhams in advance, to buy some clothes and shoes; Bassam went with me. He was very proud and smiled the whole time. I told you, he said, I told you I’d found you a solution. You see that going to the mosque pays in the end, he said.

He had met the Group of Thought at Friday prayers, with his father. After seeing them for a while, they had gotten acquainted, and there you have it. They’re the right kind of people, said Bassam. They come from Arabia and they’re loaded.

We crisscrossed the centre of town like nabobs to buy me three shirts, two pairs of pants, some boxer shorts, and some black shoes slightly narrowed at the tips, slightly pointed, very cool. I also bought a comb, some hair gel, some shoe polish, and once again I was penniless, mostly, but happy, and Bassam as well, for me. He was so pleased that I had gotten myself back on my feet, it was pleasing to see. That warmed my heart at least as much as the shiny shoes. I hugged him and ruffled his frizzy hair. Now we’ll go change and afterward we’ll walk around, I said. We’ll chat up some girls, hit on a couple of pretty tourists and show them around Allah’s paradise. And maybe they’ll even buy us a few beers afterwards in thanks. Bassam muttered something, then, yes yes, good idea, why not. He knew very well: barring a second miracle on the same day, we’d never come across two welcoming miniskirts, but he played along. When I went back to the Propagation of Koranic Thought to don my new threads, it was crowded; it was time for afternoon prayers and there was no avoiding it. I made four prostrations behind Sheikh Nureddin, it seemed to go on forever.

¶ It was just that I lacked the habit. Over the course of the two years that followed, I had all the time in the world to get used to it. My work at the Thought was the quietest sort, which left a lot of spare time for study and prayer. Being a bookseller comprised of receiving boxes of books, opening them up, removing the plastic wraps, putting them in stacks on the shelves and, once a week, on Fridays, setting up a table at the mosque’s exit to sell them. Well, ‘selling’ them is a big word. Most of them (small paperback booklets, a little like cheap textbooks) cost 4.90 dirhams. The hellish thing was you had to have cashboxes of coins to make change, almost as many cashboxes as booklets. At that price we could give them away, I said to the Sheikh. No no, impossible, people have to be aware that this paper is worth something, otherwise they’ll throw them out or use them to light barbecues. So then maybe we could sell them at five dirhams, that would help with the change. Too expensive, the Sheikh replied. It has to be accessible to everyone.

These manuals were enormously successful. Our bestseller: Sexuality in Islam, I sold hundreds, no doubt because everyone thought there’d be sex in it, advice on positions, or weighty religious arguments so that women would allow certain practices, but not at all, the act was called ‘coitus’, ‘lovemaking’, or ‘the encounter’, and the whole thing was an annotated compilation of phrases by great medieval jurists that wasn’t the least bit exciting – a rip off, in my opinion, even at five dirhams. The people who bought the manual were 99 per cent male. Our bestselling book for women was Heroines of Islam, a rather simple and effective pamphlet on the contemporary world, the injustice of the times, and how the only thing that could save the world was if women returned to religion; the pamphlet drew from the examples of the great women of Islam, especially Khadija, Fatima, and Zaynab.

The rest of our catalogue was more expensive, 9.90 per book. These were bound books, usually in several volumes, heavy as a dead donkey. The collection was entitled The Heritage of Islam and was made up of reprints of works by classical authors: lives of the Prophet, commentaries on the Koran, works of rhetoric, theology, grammar. Since these mammoth works had beautiful imitation-leather bindings in coloured calligraphy, they were used mostly to decorate the neighbourhood’s living and dining rooms. It should be said that the Arabic of a thousand years ago is not the easiest thing in the world to read. We also sold CDs of recordings of the Koran, and even a DVD of a Koranic encyclopedia that was pretty interesting – if only because you didn’t have to lug around the fifty volumes of various commentaries that it contained. The bookseller’s dream, in fact.

The Thought was open all day, and my bookshop as well, but there weren’t many customers. Some came by sometimes to buy one of the books that I wasn’t authorized to put out on the tables. I asked Sheikh Nureddin if they were forbidden by censorship, and he told me of course not, they’re just texts that require greater knowledge, which could be interpreted the wrong way. Among them were Islam Against the Zionist Plot and pamphlets by Sayyid Qutb.

One of my tasks (the most pleasant one, in fact) consisted of looking after the association’s website and Facebook page, and of announcing activities (not many), which allowed me to have access to the Internet all day long. I took my work seriously. Sheikh Nureddin was pleasant, cultivated, friendly. He told me that he had studied theory in Saudi Arabia and practice in Pakistan. He recommended things to read to me. When I got tired of porn on the web (a little sin never did anyone any harm) I would spend hours reading, comfortably stretched out on the rug; little by little I got used to classical Arabic, which is a sublime, powerful, captivating language of extraordinary richness. I would spend hours discovering the beauties of the Koran through the great commentators; the simple complexity of the text astounded me. It was an ocean. An ocean of lights. I liked to picture the Prophet in his cave, wrapped in his coat, or surrounded by his companions, on his way to battle. Thinking that I was reproducing their gestures, repeating the phrases they themselves had chanted helped me put up with the prayers, which were still an interminable chore.

I felt as if I were making amends, as if I were undoing the stains of months of vagabonding. I could even imagine meeting my father or mother without shame. That thought revolved often in my head, on Fridays as I stood behind my table; I said to myself that a day would come when I would meet them, it was inevitable. I knew that they refused to even mention my name in public; I had this disconcerted feeling that Bassam was hiding something from me, he avoided talking to me about my family. When I questioned him he’d reply: don’t worry don’t worry, they’ll get over it, and would change the subject. I missed my mother.

Evenings, I’d go out for a walk with Bassam. We spent much less time than before contemplating the Spanish coast and much more time staring at girls’ arses in the street. Tangier had the advantage of being big enough so that we could feel free outside our suburb; sometimes we’d treat ourselves to two beers in a discreet bar; I had to negotiate for hours until Bassam agreed, he’d hesitate till the last second, but the prospect of mingling with foreign girls ended up deciding it. Once in the joint, he would vacillate for another five minutes between a Coke or a beer, but he always ended up taking the alcohol, before getting angry with himself for hours afterwards and swallowing a kilo of mints to mask the smell. Not far from the bar there was a beautiful, completely renovated French bookshop where I liked to hang out, without ever buying anything since the books were much too expensive for me. But at least I could eye the female bookseller a little, after all we were colleagues. I never dared say a word to her. In any case, she wore a wedding ring and was much older than me.

Afterwards, invariably, I’d walk Bassam back to his place, then go back to my tiny room at the Propagation of Thought, pick up a crime novel and read for an hour or two before falling asleep. The neighbourhood bookseller had an inexhaustible stock in the back of his shop, I don’t know where he got them from: Fleuve Noir editions (the cheapest), Masque editions, Série Noire editions (my favourite), and other obscure collections from the 1960s and ’70s. All these titles on the metal shelves composed an immense, incomprehensible, mad poem: The Dining Room of the Ready-to-Bleed / The Carnival of the Lost / Pearls to Swine / Mardi-Gris / Sleep of Hot Lead, I never knew which to choose, even though I had a preference for the ones that took place in the United States rather than in France – their bourbon seemed more real, their cars bigger and their cities wilder. The bookseller can’t have been raking it in; in fact, aside from his stock of detective novels that I must have been the only fan of, he sold old textbooks, outdated newspapers, decrepit Spanish journals, and a few soft-porn Egyptian novels. He was a pretty funny guy who spent his time tippling in secret in the back of his shop, a freethinker with Nasserian leanings, a fixture in the neighbourhood. He often told me that barely twenty years ago the surrounding hills were empty, just two or three houses here and there, and that from where we were to the airport it was all countryside. Me, I’m a real Tangerois, he’d say.

After reading, four or five hours of sleep until dawn prayers: Sheikh Nureddin would come, and with him a large part of the Group (except Bassam, who said he prayed at home, which I had a hard time believing). When they left I would go back to sleep until 8 or 9, then breakfast, and at 9.30 sharp I’d open the bookshop. Often the Sheikh would return around noon, we’d talk for a while, he’d ask me to add this or that to the webpage, would check the state of the stock, usually ordering the books that were running out himself (one box of Sexuality, one of Heroines, the complete works of Ibn Taymiyyah in twenty volumes) and would leave again on his own business. The books usually took a month to reach us from Saudi Arabia, so you had to plan ahead. Then I had peace all afternoon. I stayed there quietly studying, as Sheikh Nureddin said. Paradise. Room, board, and education. After evening prayers Bassam would come by for me, and we’d go out on the town, and so on. A healthy routine.

I had only one fear, or one desire – meeting my family; they knew where I was, I knew where they were; I saw my mother, once, on the sidewalk across the street – I took cover, my back turned, my heart pounding. I was ashamed. So were they, even if I still didn’t know to what extent, or why. I’d have liked to see my little sister, she must have changed a lot, grown up. I tried not to think about it. I’m still trying. I wonder what they know about me, today. There are always rumours, gossip that reaches home; they must surely cover their ears.

Often, I thought of Meryem – I told myself I could have found the courage to take a bus to the village to go see her discreetly. I wrote to her, and these letters always ended up in the trash, out of cowardliness mostly. Meryem already belonged to the realm of dreams, to the rustling body of memory.

The year passed quickly, and when the demonstrations began in Tunisia I’d already been at the Thought for over a year. My tranquillity was a little upset by these events, I have to say. Sheikh Nureddin and the whole Group were like madmen. They spent all their time in front of the TV. They prayed all day for their Tunisian brothers. Later they started up collections for the Egyptian brothers. Then when the list extended to the Libyan and Yemeni brothers, they began organizing actions ‘for our oppressed Arab brothers’.

When the protests started in Morocco on 20 February, they couldn’t stand still anymore. They took turns in sit-ins, demonstrations. My bookshop had become a campaign headquarters: the group saw the Arab revolts as the long-awaited green tide. Finally, genuinely Muslim countries would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, they dreamed about it at night. According to what Sheikh Nureddin told me, the idea was to win as many free, democratic elections as possible in order to take power and then, from within, by the conjoined forces of legislature and the street, to Islamize the constitutions and the laws. Their political projects didn’t matter much to me, but the incessant and noisy activism turned my life completely upside-down. They stopped letting me have constant access to the Internet (they needed it all the time), and I could no longer read quietly. There was always some activity, some demonstration to take part in, some broadcast to watch on TV. So I would spend more and more time downtown. I’d go read a detective novel over a cup of tea on the Place de France all afternoon. Sheikh Nureddin reproached me a little for my absences; he’d look at me reprovingly and say, you could take a more active part in our struggle.

They took some beatings. The cops had received orders to disperse the tail end of demonstrations not with teargas or rubber bullets, but in the old style, by hand and with clubs, and they did pretty well for themselves: you’d see bruises flourishing all over the beards. Since young people had to be at the forefront of the Movement, Bassam had been the first to sustain some injuries near the Place des Nations, late one night, and to return a hero, his chest streaked with bruises, a bandage on his nose, his eyes purple, still chanting ‘For God, Nation and Freedom’. The model for all this was Egypt. That was the only thing on their lips, Cairo, Tahrir Square. Egypt is an advanced society, said Sheikh Nureddin, the Brothers will carry the day. He almost cried with emotion. I remember, when we heard a French specialist on Arabic society on TV saying there are no Muslim Brothers on Tahrir Square, Sheikh Nureddin was incredibly upset at first. Lies, he said. May God destroy these miscreants. What bastards these Frenchmen are, they respect nothing, not even the truth. Ready to do anything to keep their power, those cocksuckers. And then he got hold of himself, saying after all it’s not bad to stay in the shadows, it gave an even more legitimate feeling to the uprising. What’s more, the news from Egypt was excellent: the Brotherhood were confident of emerging the great victors in the free elections when they took place, and of forming a government. The first one since the Algerian swindle twenty years before.

It was chaos in Tangier for at least a week, but Sheikh Nureddin could clearly see that things weren’t taking the Tunisian or Egyptian path, that the Palace was more clever or more legitimate (after all, isn’t the King the Commander of the Faithful?) and that they’d have to form an alliance with a party already in place if constitutional reform were to take place.

A few weeks later, the King granted amnesty to an entire contingent of political prisoners, among them members of the Group who had been languishing in government jails since the massive roundups after the attacks on Casablanca years before. The Sheikh was euphoric. He welcomed these companions as if he were Joseph himself returning from Egypt and finding his brothers again. The Propagation of Koranic Thought became a hive of bearded men.