My Friends, page 20
When I walked into the hotel, the man sitting behind the reception seemed familiar. But how could he be? How could I have recognized this man based only on a book of short stories read more than a decade before, and hearing his voice utter no more than a single word, “Yes,” on that BBC radio interview? I remember Henry once telling me that in a writer’s prose, in the sounds and rhythms of his sentences, “there lies the inner logic of the person.” Whatever it was, what I sensed on entering the hotel lobby, and it hit me with profound certainty, was that this stranger sitting behind the reception desk was somehow known to me.
“Welcome, Mr….” he said in English, leafing through my British passport, “Mr. Khaled Abd al Hady.”
He pronounced the name perfectly. His accent had, ever so slightly, the refined edges of an educated North African. And, given that this was Paris, I assumed that he was from one of the former French colonies: Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco. I knew this game: he would not ask where I was from and I would keep to the same policy. Whoever blinks first loses. An immigrant’s test of discipline, most probably ancient, for this instinct to pass unnoticed, to veil oneself, must surely be as old as time, as old as exile, as old as when Adam and Eve, cast out of Eden and sent down to earth, were made to live on opposite sides of the empty planet. I judged myself good at this—very good, in fact—but he was older and not only appeared to have more experience, but looked like a man who had, in the time allotted to him so far, lived more than most. I was twenty-nine and guessed he was about ten or fifteen years older, when, in actual fact, he was only six years my senior. His lips ran in a straight line, hinting neither at a smile nor a frown. The skin on either side was slightly discolored. Perhaps long ago he survived a fire. It stretched like a drum across each cheek. It conveyed power and control and something else just beyond reach: the determination of a person in hiding. His entire face was fastened in place by his eyes, which held you with force. Two deep wells. It was as if a trace of everything they had ever witnessed was retained within them.
“I hope you enjoy your stay,” he said, handing me my room key.
His English had a hint of an Irish accent.
“Thank you,” I said. “And what is your name?”
“Sam,” he said, and tried to smile.
I know this too, I thought: the shame felt in concealing one’s identity and the shamelessness that comes to our defense. I thanked him and felt tempted to say more, to reveal something of my plans. And so, even though I had already checked the route on my map, I asked him for directions to the hospital.
“Oh, no,” I said, “I have no intention of taking the Métro.”
“In that case, c’est une belle promenade,” he said.
The French here seemed deliberate, a placeholder for the phantom language we both knew we shared.
“I don’t speak French,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Walking, sir, is an excellent idea. Forty minutes at most. A couple of good cafés on the way, if you fancy.”
Yes, the accent was definitely Irish. I thanked him and climbed the stairs to my room. I felt a thrill at the prospect of sleeping in an unknown bed, a bed that, no matter how many nights I would stay, would never be mine. Sam, I thought, what a name to hide behind. But then the shallow judgment faded and, in its wake, arose that magical quietude that only occasionally opens up within us when the absent-minded wanderings of our thoughts play on as though we had become, accidentally and by the most unexpected of turns, free from our mind’s habit. I found myself enjoying the impenetrable surface of the man. Why this suspicion of what is concealed, I thought, when there is pleasure in opacity? Is it not more revealing to observe a person clothed than naked?
The room was small and plain, with a large window that looked out on to the opposite building. Some of the windows across the way were curtained, some were bare, and others were, like mine, open. Through them I could see a kitchen, a bedroom, a table with one empty plate. Perhaps if I’m lucky, I thought, I might spot someone unawares, sleeping or reading a book, or a couple embracing or sitting quietly, possibly with music playing just out of earshot. I showered, shaved, and put on fresh clothes. “Wishing you a very pleasant walk, Mr. Khaled,” Sam said, as I handed him the key.
57
At the hospital I was informed that Rana was expected to arrive any minute and that I could wait in her assigned room. I was led there by a nurse who had a slight sideways gait, which made her progress both courteous and hesitant. A little while later the famous surgeon walked in and introduced himself. With his eyes on the empty bed, he asked what my relationship was to the patient.
“She’s my friend,” I said.
He smiled weakly. “Madam Lamesse has arrived,” he said. “She’s just finishing registration.”
He left the room. I stood by the window. A view of the side street. You could pretend you were in a hotel. A few minutes later I heard the nurse’s voice coming from the corridor. The door opened and Rana appeared. She smiled as soon as she saw me. We embraced.
“Thank you,” she said right beside my ear.
The nurse instructed Rana to change and then quietly closed the door behind her.
“It’s better than I thought,” Rana said, looking around the room.
“And you’ve got a view of a beautiful quiet street,” I said.
“Who needs the Ritz?” she said.
I left so that she could change and settle in. I walked slowly down the stairs. What if she doesn’t make it, I thought, or emerges impaired, unable to walk or talk or see? Such fears remained with me throughout all the days that she was in hospital. I found a corner shop and bought crisps, biscuits, bottled water. When I returned, she was dressed in a baby-blue hospital gown and tucked beneath the sheets. She looked smaller. She asked how I was.
“Very glad to be with you,” I said.
We talked about Paris, the weather, some new restaurant she had read about in the inflight magazine.
“Let’s go when all this is over,” she said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
After a moment’s silence, I asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to tell your family?”
“Hundred percent,” she said. “It’ll all be over soon. Couple of weeks at most.”
“Won’t they suspect?”
“I’ll say work is taking longer. Anyway, it’s not a bad idea for Hyder and me to be apart for a bit. He knows I’m hiding something. It’s hard work hiding things. Have to watch yourself, the way you walk even, how you eat and sleep. And I’m terrible—you know this—a terrible liar. Back then I was bad at lying because I didn’t know how to do it; now I’m bad at it because I know how to do it. I married out of love, but even that has its limits. All marriages do. The secret is to know where those limits are. It’s not so much that I don’t want to worry him, worry my parents and everyone else; it’s just that I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
She stopped and waited until her face was calm again.
“On the plane, as we were over the sea, I remembered when I was a child and they used to tell us those slogans at school that you are part of a body, the body of your family, your society, the Arab World, the human race. Remember?”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
“If you are healthy, they told us, the rest of the body is healthy. Back then I thought how silly, but that’s exactly how it feels.”
Tears gathered in her eyes. I said nothing. You must help her, I told myself. This is why she chose you. Don’t let her down.
“Whatever you do,” she said, her face looking very earnest now, “don’t bring flowers.”
I laughed and she did too.
“Of course I’ll bring flowers. You love flowers.”
“Not in hospital I don’t.”
“I’ll bring flowers.”
58
There were a number of tests that needed to be done before the operation could take place. These took several days. I visited Rana every day in the early afternoon and stayed till evening. I saw Sam whenever I left or returned to the hotel. He was always there. We continued to greet one another briefly and in English. “Back to hospital,” I sometimes said, hoping to provoke an inquiry or a platitude. He never budged. But with every passing day the air around him seemed to grow more fraught. Instead of looking across the small lobby, which, initially, when I first arrived, seemed to be his private domain, now I often found him facing downward, forehead cradled on his hands, engrossed, I assumed, in a book. But when I approached, I would find him staring into absolutely nothing, facing the wood grain of the desk, taken aback by my sudden appearance.
Whether it was the adventure of being in a new city, or the good purpose of caring for Rana, or the ambiguous sense of victory, of gaining the upper hand in the immigrant’s game I was playing with the stranger behind the reception desk, my mood brightened. One afternoon, on arriving at the hospital, I began to exchange the usual greetings with the nurses and then took to teasing them.
“I mean, the decor here is truly dreary. And look, ladies, at your clothes. You really need to widen the color palette. My suggestion is to revolt.”
They laughed.
“And the rooms!” I went on. “Any chance of a minibar? For goodness’ sake, roll in a grand piano. Failing that, a television and video player at least.”
A couple of hours later a knock came at the door, and a table was wheeled in by a couple of rosy-cheeked nurses. It had a television and a video player. Rana teared up with joy, which surprised me. The nurses rushed over and wrapped their arms around her.
I went to Fnac, a shop recommended by one of the nurses, and spent the afternoon buying films. Initially, I thought to get new releases, but then remembered our days in Edinburgh and got some of the old classics we had watched there together. Cairo Station, L’éclisse, Pickpocket, and, miraculously, Rana’s favorite, Journey to Italy, which back then she believed was the most perfect film ever made.
“If it were a building,” I remembered her saying, “it would be a modest but glorious thing, hardly noticeable by those who never truly look.”
I remembered the scene when the married couple, played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, who on arriving in Naples realize that their life together has turned into a loveless one, are taken to a dig in Pompeii and witness the unearthing of the ghostly shape of another couple buried in ash nearly two thousand years before when Mount Vesuvius erupted, embracing one another for eternity. Nothing is the same after that.
Waiting in line to pay, I wondered if Rana still felt the same way about Journey to Italy, whether she had seen it in the eleven years since. I then tried to imagine where these videotapes in the basket would end up, in whose house? They were too cumbersome to carry back to Beirut or London. Most likely, I thought, they would end up in a Paris secondhand shop, to be bought by individuals who will never know the circumstances under which they were originally purchased. I paid and, as soon as I was out on the street, clutching the bagful of videotapes, I felt a childlike rush of excitement. I could not stop smiling at everyone I passed. I felt such love for her, and such desire that she and Hyder should be happy. She was wrong, I thought, about the limits of a marriage. And, even if she is right and there are limits, they ought never to be accepted. I stopped at a bakery and got a large box of gateaux for the nurses.
59
We spent the next few afternoons stretched side by side on the hospital bed, watching films. She would often fall asleep and wake up asking me to fill her in on what she had missed. It became our joke. “What happened, what happened?” she would say, and I would tell her, only for the whole thing to reoccur a few moments later. Sometimes I turned down the volume and listened to her long breathing. She was growing weak. We were alone and away, as if in hiding, in a hospital in a foreign country where we knew no one and had only a partial command of the language.
“This is what it must be like,” she told the doctor later that evening, “to be awaiting the day of your duel.”
“But, madame,” he said, “we won’t be fighting.”
“You won’t be, Doctor,” she told him.
The day came. Rana, without providing any instructions concerning what to say, handed me Hyder’s telephone number. The doctor then took me to one side and warned me that the surgery would take hours. “Five minimum,” he said, sounding both anxious and excited. I tried to leave, but could not. In fact, I hardly moved from the seat in the empty waiting room. My own days in hospital returned to me. One detail in particular. I had all but forgotten it till then. It concerned a dream I kept having immediately after the operation. I am about to cross a road and nearly get run over. I am violently startled awake and tell myself I must look both ways next time. But each time the same thing happens. It got so bad I could hardly sleep. I told Nurse Clement that I kept having the same nightmare.
“Are you about to cross a road?” she said. “You step off the pavement and nearly get run over, right?”
“Exactly,” I said. “How do you know?”
She enjoyed my astonishment. “It’s the painkillers, love. A common side effect. We’ll change them and you’ll be right as rain.”
Seven hours later, Rana’s doctor emerged.
“It went very well. As well as we could have hoped,” he said. “Now the critical stage begins. She’ll be in intensive care for a few days. You won’t be able to see her, but don’t worry, I’m pleased with how it has gone.”
I thanked him and could not help but embrace the man.
60
Only when I was out on the street did I notice that I was trembling all over. The city was shrouded in night. The soft amber lights emerging from inside cafés and restaurants looked warm and inviting. A sensuous hunger swirled in my veins. I wanted to drink and eat and lie naked with someone, to burn or break something inside me.
Several hours later I was walking back to the hotel with the world swimming a little, the pavement as soft as a trampoline. I was tired and ashamed and could not imagine going to sleep. I kept breathing in deeply, wanting to clean out my nostrils. The prostitute I had been with was Moroccan. She pronounced my name perfectly and then said, “I know that isn’t your real name.” She did not think it was strange, she said, that I wanted to lie beside her and do nothing else. “You’re sweet,” she said, and it made me sad being next to her, breathing in her sweat and the sweat of others. I guessed that she too was in her late twenties. I held her from behind, her head and agitated hair resting on my arm. I watched the back of her neck, the dim pulse tapping there.
“Think what you will,” I said, “but Khaled is my real name.”
A few minutes later—it could have been an hour—she nudged me awake, her eyes on my scar. Had she not noticed it till now? I put on my clothes, paid her, and left. Now I was thinking, I should have fucked her. That would have been less horrible.
When I entered the lobby and saw Sam lost as usual in his downward gaze, I burst out laughing.
“So,” I said, speaking much louder than I had intended, “you say…No, you, in fact, don’t say; you don’t say at all; you insist that your name is Sam.”
There was fear but also vague relief in his eyes, as though he were thinking, finally, here it comes.
“Well,” I yelled out even louder now, “if you are Sam, then I’m Kafka.”
The night porter appeared, looking ready to act. Sam waved him aside and rushed toward me with his hand outstretched. I was certain he was about to strike, to slap or punch me. I tightened my fists, panic already in the knees. Instead, he took hold of my arm and did so with a peculiar confidence. He calmly told the porter to keep an eye on things. The man acknowledged the instruction gratefully, which made me think Sam was known among his colleagues for being good in emergencies. He led me out, pulling me beside him all the way to the corner of the street.
“You know what I feel like?” he suddenly said, speaking softly but with a tremor in his voice. “Un bon chocolat chaud.” He looked at me, and when I did not reply he said, “Fancy a hot chocolate, Monsieur Kafka?” And before I could answer he looked left, right, and pulled me across the street. “There’s an excellent place nearby. It might even still be open.”
I moved helplessly beside him. The ground now was as hard as a solid fact. The air was crisp. I had not noticed that it had rained. The tarmac was glazed. Shards of light bounced off it like broken glass. I touched the top of my head with my one free hand and found my hair damp.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but he was already talking, saying, “When all is said and done—”
“I mean, if I caused any trouble,” I interrupted.
He paused and, without acknowledging what I said, continued, “French cuisine, despite what people say, is somewhat average.” Then, lowering his voice as if we were in danger of being overheard, he added, “Mind you, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can say here that would be more offensive. Sheer blasphemy. I mean, the food is good, but it would be even better if they weren’t so adamant about it. To my taste at least, give me Derna any time.”
Hearing the name of that dear and familiar city where my mother was born, the place where my parents took us in summer, and hearing it pronounced so perfectly, brought me to a standstill.
“Come,” he said, looking at me directly.
Like a child, I obeyed and continued moving beside him.
He switched to Arabic, speaking it in a perfect Benghazi accent, which, out of all the dialects of the world, is the closest to my heart. Things said in it are not mere ephemeral utterances, but structures that are as known and reliable as the house I was born in. I cannot be objective about it. I cannot judge if it is beautiful or ugly. His superiors, those who selected him for this task, must have known this about me. How stupid to have thought that my British passport would conceal my origins when it clearly states that “Benghazi” is my birthplace, the head’s landing place, as the expression goes in Arabic. I longed with such violent force for that city now, the warm shelter of my family, and saw, in my mind’s eye, as vividly as though it were right in front of me, my mother’s neck, the strong and gentle and hospitable curve of it. I remembered, as though I were a boy again, the curious urge to forever lay myself entirely there. Panic ran through me. Is this the moment I am going to be forcibly returned, I wondered, to be paraded on television, where, like so many before me, I will be asked to admit guilt for my actions and then praise the regime or else be made an example of? Run. This is the moment to run. But I felt the weariness of one who had been running for so long.
