The Disoriented Read online

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  At the airport, no one was waiting. And this minor inconvenience, which Adam should have been expecting, since he had told no one he was coming, triggered a wave of sadness and a brief moment of confusion. It took a conscious effort for him to remember that this place where he had just landed was the city where he had been born, his own country.

  APRIL 20 (CONT’D)

  I go through customs, I hand over my passport, take it back, and walk outside, scanning the crowd like a lost child. Nobody. Nobody speaks to me, nobody is waiting for me. No one recognizes me. I have come to meet the ghost of a friend, and already I am a ghost myself.

  A driver offers his services. I nod and allow him to carry my luggage to his car, a battered old Dodge parked well away from the taxi rank. It’s obviously an unlicensed cab, there is no red license plate, no meter. I don’t protest. Usually I find these things irritating, but tonight they make me smile. They bring to mind a familiar environment, a reflexive sense of caution. I hear myself ask the driver—in Arabic, in the local accent—how much the fare will be. Simply to avoid the indignity of being mistaken for a tourist.

  As we drove, I felt tempted to phone cousins, friends. By now it was gone midnight, more or less, but I know many who would not have taken offence, who would have insisted on inviting me to come and stay with them. In the end, I didn’t call anyone. I felt a sudden desire to be on my own, anonymous, almost incognito.

  I feel pleased at this new sensation. Incognito in my own country, among my own people, in the city where I grew up.

  My hotel room is spacious, the sheets are clean, but the street is rowdy even at this hour. There is also the heady rumbling of an air conditioner that I did not dare turn off for fear of waking up drenched in sweat. I don’t think the noise will stop me getting to sleep. It’s been a long day, my body will soon grow sluggish, and my mind with it.

  Sitting on the bed, with no light but the glow of the bedside lamp, I cannot stop thinking of Mourad. I force myself to imagine him as he must look now. The last time we were together, he was twenty-four, I was twenty-two. In my memory, he is hale and hearty, carnivorous, booming. Since then, illness will have withered him. I picture him now in his old ancestral home, in the village, in a wheelchair, his face deathly pale, a blanket draped over his knees. But maybe he is in the hospital, lying on a metal bed, surrounded by IV drips, flickering machines, bandages; and, next to him, the chair where he will ask me to sit.

  I will know tomorrow.

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  The Second Day

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  Mourad’s wife called Adam on his cell phone in the early hours. Thinking him still in Paris, she said curtly, without preamble, without so much as a “hello”:

  “He couldn’t wait for you.”

  In his hotel room, it was still dark. Adam let slip a muttered curse. Then he told his interlocutor that he had already arrived, last night, having caught the first flight to see Mourad as soon as he got her call.

  But she simply repeated:

  “He couldn’t wait for you.”

  The same phrase, word for word. But the tone was different. There was no reproach this time. Grief, rages, and perhaps a flicker of gratitude to Adam. He mumbled a hackneyed phrase.

  There followed a few seconds of silence on both ends of the line. After which the widow simply said “Thank you.” as though politely responding to his condolences. Then she asked where he was staying.

  “I’ll send a car for you. You’ll never get here on your own.”

  Adam did not protest. He was aware that he would no longer be able to get his bearings in this city with no street signs, no numbers, no pavements, where districts bore the names of buildings, and buildings the names of their owners …

  SATURDAY, APRIL 21

  Tania is already in black. Mourad is lying neatly beneath sheets without a single crease, his nostrils stuffed with cotton wool. He has a whole wing to himself—two adjoining bedrooms, a living room, a balcony. The clinic is all marble and camphor. A place to die like a pedigree dog.

  I stand at the foot of the bed and I do not cry. I bow my head before the remains, I close my eyes, I stand stock-still, I wait. I am supposed to meditate, but my mind is blank. Later, I will meditate, I will summon the memories of our dead friendship, later I will force myself to remember Mourad as he was. But here, in front of his remains, nothing.

  As soon as I hear footsteps behind me, I give up my place. I walk over to Tania, I clasp her to me briefly. Then I go and sit in the living room. Which is not really a living room—three brown leather armchairs, three folding chairs, a coffee machine, bottles of mineral water, a television with the sound on mute—but in a clinic, it is a luxury. Already, there are four women dressed in black, and an old man who has not shaved. I don’t know them. I nod by way of greeting, let myself slump into the only vacant chair. I am still not meditating; I am not thinking about anything. I simply try to adopt an appropriate air.

  When I see other people arrive, like a delegation, I get to my feet, walk back past the deceased, hug Tania again and whisper: “See you later.” I hurry out of the clinic as though chased by a pack of dogs.

  It is only when I find myself out in the street, alone amid the passersby, calm in the tumult, that my thoughts finally turn to the man I have just abandoned on his deathbed.

  Snatches of conversation come flooding back, laughter, images. Walking straight ahead, I think a thousand different things without pausing over any one of them. The blare of a taxi horn brings me back to reality. I nod, open the door, climb in, and give the name of my hotel. The driver speaks to me in English, which irritates me but makes me smile. I reply in his language, which is my mother tongue, but probably with the hint of an accent. To apologize for wounding my emigrant’s pride, he starts cursing the country and its leaders, and launches into an impassioned homage to those who were intelligent enough to leave.

  Adam merely nods politely. In other circumstances, he would have joined in the conversation; the subject is one close to his heart. But just now, he is eager to be alone, alone in his room, alone with his memories of the man who will not speak again.

  As soon as he gets back, he stretches out on the bed and lies for a long time on his back. Then he sits up, takes his notebook, scribbles a few lines, then flips it over, as though starting a brand-new notebook from the other end.

  At the top of the new blank page, where he usually writes the date, he writes In Memoriam, by way of epigraph, perhaps by way of prayer. Nothing more. He turns to the next page.

  Mourad, my un-adopted friend.

  We have been separated by death before we could be reconciled. It is partly my fault, partly his, and death is also to blame. We had only just begun to reconnect when death brutally silenced him.

  But, in a sense, the reconciliation did take place. He asked to see me again and I caught the first flight, only death arrived before me. On reflection, it is perhaps better this way. Death has its own wisdom, sometimes we must trust it rather than ourselves. What could my former friend have told me? Lies, distorted truths. And I, to avoid seeming heartless to a dying man, would have pretended to believe him, to forgive him.

  What worth would our belated reunion and our mutual forgiveness have had in such conditions? If I am to be honest, none. What has happened seems to me more decent, more dignified. In his final hours, Mourad felt the need to see me; I hastened to his side; he hastened to die. There is a sliver of moral elegance in this that does honour to our bygone friendship. I am satisfied with this epilogue.

  Later, if there exists a life beyond the grave, we will have time to talk, man to man. And if there is only nothingness, the arguments between mere mortals will have scant importance.

  On this day, the day he has died, what can I do for him? Only what decency commands: that I calmly evoke his memory, without
condemning or absolving him.

  He and I were not childhood friends. We grew up in the same country, in the same city, but not in the same environment. We did not meet until university—though then almost immediately, in the first days of our first year.

  Early in our friendship, there was a party. There were about fifteen of us, I think, a few more boys than girls. If I had to make a list from memory, I would probably forget some. There was Mourad and me, and Tania of course, already Tania, who was not yet his wife but would be very soon; there was Albert, Naïm, Bilal, and the beautiful Sémi; Ramzi and Ramez, whom everyone called “the partners,” “the inseparables,” or simply “the two Ramzs” … We had just embarked on student life with a glass in hand and a revolution in our hearts, believing we were embarking on our adult lives. The eldest of us was just about to turn twenty-three; at seventeen and a half, I was the youngest; Mourad was two years my senior.

  It was October 1971, on the terrace of his house, a vast terrace from which, by day, you could see the sea, and by night, the shimmering lights of the city. I still remember how he looked that night: dazzled, overjoyed. This house belonged to him, before that it had belonged to his father, to his grandfather, to his great-grandfather, and to still more distant ancestors, since it had been built in the early eighteenth century.

  My family, too, had once owned a beautiful house in the mountains. But for my family, it was a home, and an architectural statement; for his, it was a homeland. Here, Mourad had always felt a sort of completeness, that completeness of men who know that a country belongs to them.

  Since the age of thirteen, I had felt like a guest everywhere. Often welcomed with open arms, sometimes merely tolerated, but never truly belonging. Different in so many ways, out of place—my name, my face, my bearing, my accent, my ties, both real or imagined. Irredeemably foreign. In my homeland, just as I would later be in exile.

  At some point that evening, Mourad had raised his voice, and, still gazing into the distance, had announced:

  “You are my best friends. From now on, this house is your house. For life!”

  There had been a flurry of jokes and laughs, but only to hide emotion. Then Mourad had raised his glass, the ice cubes tinkling. We echoed him: “For life!” Some at the tops of their lungs, others in a whisper. Then we all drank together.

  My eyes welled with tears. And even thinking about it today, I cannot stop them from welling again. With emotion, with nostalgia, with grief, with rage. That moment of fraternity was to be the most wonderful of my life; since then it has been ravaged by war. Not a house, not a memory has been left unscathed. Everything has been corrupted—friendship, love, devotion, kinship, faith as much as loyalty. And even death. Yes, today, death itself seems tarnished, warped.

  I keep saying “that evening,” but it is just a useful shorthand. Back when we knew each other, there were countless parties that now in my memory have merged into one. Sometimes, it seems to me that we were constantly together, like a long-haired horde of hippies, paying only fleeting visits to our respective families. This was not really the case, but rather how it seems to me now. Probably because together we were experiencing intense moments, living through major events. Some filled us with joy, some with indignation, and most of all we argued about them. God, how we loved to debate! What screaming matches! What fights! But they were noble fights. We sincerely believed that our ideas could sway the course of events.

  At university, our constant quibbling and nitpicking earned us the sobriquet the “Circle of Sophists.” Though intended as an insult we adopted the name out of sheer arrogance. There was even talk of founding a “fraternity” bearing the name. We discussed the possibility so interminably that it never saw light of day, a victim of our endless hairsplitting. Some among us dreamed of transforming our gang into a literary salon; others favoured a political movement that would spread through the student populace and later to the whole of society; still others nurtured the seductive idea that Balzac, after his fashion, had depicted in History of the Thirteen, that a small group of friends devoted to a common cause, imbued with a common ambition, a handful of courageous, talented, and inextricably close-knit friends, could change the face of the world. I personally was not far from believing it. To tell the truth, even now, I still sometimes entertain that childish illusion. But where to find such a group? Search as you might, this planet is empty.

  In the end, our gang of friends did not become a fraternity, a salon, a political party, or a secret society. Our meetings remained informal, open, boozy, smoky, ostentatious. And with absolutely no hierarchy, even if we almost always met at Mourad’s instigation, usually at his place, in the village, on the terrace of his ancestral home.

  It was here, suspended between the mountains and the sea, that we would witness the end of the world. “Of the world”? Of our world, certainly, of our country as we had known it. I would go as far as to say: of our civilization. The Levantine civilization. A phrase that makes the ignorant smile and sets the teeth on edge of supporters of triumphant barbarism, those disciples of arrogant sects who clash in the name of the one true God and know of no greater adversary than our subtle identities.

  My friends belonged to all denominations and each made it a duty, a point of pride, to mock his own—and then, gently, those of the others. We were a sketch of the future, but the future would forever remain a sketch. Each of us allowed himself to be escorted, under guard, back into the fold of his faith. We proclaimed ourselves disciples of Voltaire, Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, we called ourselves surrealists, we went back to being Christians, Muslims, or Jews, according to precise denominations, an extensive martyrology, and the pious hatred that goes with it.

  We were young, at the dawn of our lives, and already it was dusk. War was looming. It was slithering towards us like a radioactive cloud; we could do nothing now to stop it, all we could do was flee. Some of us were reluctant to call it by its name, but it was undeniably a war, “our” war, the one that, in the history books, would carry our name. To the rest of the world, it was one more local conflict; to us, it was the Deluge. Our country with its fragile workings was taking in water, it was beginning to break down; and as the downpours continued, we would discover that it would be difficult to repair.

  Henceforth, in our memories, the years would be linked to tragedies. And within our circle of friends, to successive desertions.

  The first to leave was Naïm, with all his family—his father, his mother, his two sisters, his grandmother. They were not the last Jews in the country, but they were part of the tiny minority who, until then, had chosen to stay. There had been a silent haemorrhage throughout the fifties and sixties. Drop by drop, with no fuss, the community had disappeared. Some had left for Israel, by way of Paris, Istanbul, Athens, or Nicosia; others had chosen to settle in Canada, the United States, in England, or in France. Naïm and his family had opted for Brazil. But relatively late, in 1973.

  His parents had made him promise to say nothing of their plans, even to his closest friends, and he had kept his word. No whispered secrets, not even a faint suggestion.

  On the eve of their departure our gang got together, as we did almost every night, at Mourad’s place or Tania’s, in the village, to drink mulled wine. It was late January or early February. The old house was freezing. We were huddled together around a brazier in the small living room.

  We talked about a thousand things, I suppose, as we did whenever we met; about people we liked or disliked, about political events, about trivial things, about a film director or a novelist who had recently died … Obviously, I don’t remember what fuelled our conversation. The one thing I do remember, because it struck me at the time and I have often thought about it since, is that at no point was there any mention of emigration, exodus, or separation. It was only the following evening, when we found out that Naïm had left, that the evening came to seem, in hindsight, like a farewell party.

 
; And yet, there had been a curious incident. We had been talking about this and that when Tania suddenly started to cry. Nothing in what we had just said seemed to explain these tears; all of us, including her fiancé, Mourad, were bewildered. I asked her what was wrong, but she was sobbing so hard she couldn’t answer. When she had calmed down, she said: “We’ll never all be together again.” Why? She did not know. “The feeling just suddenly occurred to me as a certainty, that’s why I started crying.”

  To reassure her, and to break the spell, Mourad suggested we meet up the very next day, at the same time and the same place. No one raised any objections. I would not swear that everyone, without exception, said “see you tomorrow,” but it was taken for granted.

  We went our separate ways at dawn. I had just bought my first car, a tobacco-brown Volkswagen Beetle, and I was the one who drove Naïm home. He said nothing to me about his plans. Even when we were alone, driving through the dim, deserted streets, he said nothing.

  Later, years later, he would tell me in a letter that his parents had spent that night waiting anxiously for him. They were afraid he might have decided not to leave with them, to stay with his friends, and were wondering whether to leave without him or postpone their departure to another date. When he finally arrived home, no one in the family would speak to him.

  But in the end, he left with his family, forever. The first defection in our ranks.

  After him, it was Bilal. A very different way of leaving: death.

  When I feel the urge to curse all those who took up arms, I am reminded of Bilal, and I am tempted to make one or two exceptions.

  He was a pure soul.

  No one can know for certain what is lodged deep in the heart, but I knew Bilal intimately and don’t think I am wrong. He was a troubled soul, but pure, yes, and without a whit of spite.