My Friends, page 26
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Why not tell him? He’s our friend.”
I filled our glasses, sat opposite him, and asked him to tell me everything he had discovered.
“Well,” he said, “in January 1980—”
“That’s what?” I said interrupting. “Three months before Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan—”
“Exactly,” he said.
“And two months,” I went on, “before I heard him read your story on radio.”
“Yes,” he said. “In that month, a twenty-three-year-old Lebanese student named Hassan Elias Badir checked into the Mount Royal Hotel on Marble Arch, and, while assembling a homemade bomb, blew himself up. No one knows why he checked into that hotel or who the bomb was intended for. But I found a photo. An uneasy and shy face with a little warmth in the eyes. I keep seeing him going down for a little walk, grabbing something to eat on the Edgware Road. I then see him sitting cross-legged on the freshly made hotel bed, with the pillows piled up behind him, working quietly. Sometimes I can even hear his thoughts. Then everything goes white.”
He looked both moved and enthusiastic, how I imagine an artist might feel when his work is finished. I remembered then what Mustafa had said, that there is nothing more dangerous than a writer who does not write. He took out his notebook, I suspected as much to hide his face as to read out his findings.
“On the 28th of July 1978, a couple of years before Hassan Elias Badir killed himself, a bomb was placed under the Iraqi Ambassador’s car in London. He wasn’t in it, but the two other diplomats who were sustained serious injuries.
“In 1972, three young men entered the London home of General Abdul Razzak al Naif, an Iraqi former Prime Minister, spraying bullets as they moved from room to room. Amazingly, the General survived. Six years later, in July 1978, he was getting into a taxi in front of the Intercontinental Hotel by Hyde Park Corner when a man approached him from behind and fired several shots. The General was rushed to Westminster Hospital, the same place where you were taken, but died the next day.”
He leafed through his notebook, which was covered in curling and continuous handwriting that went from edge to edge.
“Before that,” he said, reading from his notes, “in January 1978, Said Hammami, the London representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was murdered in his Mayfair office. A few days before, on New Year’s Eve, a car carrying two employees of the Syrian Embassy exploded in Mayfair.”
He looked up and his faced was pleased.
“So you see what I mean about London? And it has been the case for a very long time. For example, on the 1st of July 1909, Madan Lal Dhingra, a young Indian student, the sixth of seven children of Dr. Sahib Ditta Mal Dhingra, a wealthy and pro-British Hindu civil surgeon, left his flat on Ledbury Road in Bayswater and went to a National Indian Association meeting at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, where he managed to assassinate Lieutenant Colonel Sir Curzon Wyllie, an official of the British Indian government. Dhingra was hanged the following month. On sentence of death, he thanked the judge, saying: ‘I am proud to have the honor of laying down my life for the cause of my motherland.’ His last wish was for a bath and a shave. He was executed at Pentonville Prison on the 17th of August 1909. On the following day his statement was printed in the Daily News. In it Dhingra described himself as a patriot working to emancipate his motherland. He ended: ‘The only lesson required in India today is to learn how to die and the only way to teach it is by dying ourselves, and so I die and glory in my Martyrdom. Bande Mataram,’ which apparently means ‘Hail the motherland.’ ”
He went on and relayed several such stories of political assassinations that had taken place here, and that involved individuals of all types. I felt my kitchen grow smaller. When he left, I washed the dishes and tried to convince myself that all this might lead to him writing again. I could not rid myself of the image of his filled notebook, with its manic and relentless activity, like a man scratching a wound. I went to bed that night with a deep sense of disquiet, convinced that I had overlooked an important detail.
80
That night I had a dream that I have not been able to forget. In it, the world, everything and everyone I knew, nature and my sentimental life—the entirety of my emotions and ideas and opinions and hopes and dreams and my grief—all of that which is in me and outside of me appeared as a single piece of fabric, large enough to cover a child’s bed. The sheet was suspended in midair, worn thin and billowing weakly, its edges fraying.
The following month, Claire telephoned. She and Hosam had got back from Devon several weeks before.
“I need to speak to you,” she said, and suggested we meet a couple of days later at the National Gallery.
I found her waiting on the steps. I remember thinking she looked shy, that waiting was an awkward activity for her. We wandered through the galleries. She seemed nervous, kept speaking about a picture she had been looking at and could not make head nor tail of.
“Would you like to see it?” she said, and stopped to ask a museum guard for directions to the “Hans Memling paintings.” The man did not seem to understand. “Never mind,” she told him and kept on walking. “Hans Memling,” she said, “was born in the mid-1400s. He died in his late twenties. This particular picture was painted when he was in his midteens. A child, really,” she said. “It depicts a young man lost in a daydream. Or so I thought before I read the title.”
Suddenly we were right in front of it. It was called A Young Man at Prayer.
“I can’t work it out,” she said.
I looked at the deep green background, made lush and more verdant by the boy’s pale face, his open and blatant expression, as if no one, truly no one, could see him. We took a bench in the middle of the room and looked at him from there. I thought of telling Claire about my dream. I wanted to share with her my bewilderment about why I no longer pray. I had stopped years ago and still did not know why. And, as I thought this, I saw the unattended room inside of me where prayer used to happen gathering dust. Did she pray?
“Just imagine,” she then said, “regardless of how strong one’s faith might be, that you would actually know what to ask for.”
I wondered what happened in Devon?
“But isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “The whole picture is so available that you’re at a loss as to what to do with it. And isn’t his face sweet?”
“A little confused,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “Not sure whether God exists but thought, what the hell, might as well, just in case.”
I enjoyed the easy and warm sound of her laughter. How could anything be the matter, I thought?
I went to stand in front of the painting again. The boy’s hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes were all made of delicate and determined lines cast this way and that, like wind-combed fields.
“I’ll tell you how I see it,” Claire then said softly. She was now standing right behind me. “It’s a performance. Both the painting and what it depicts.”
I nodded without understanding what she meant. I began to see something else in the picture. I felt certain, too certain to have to say it, that what the boy was involved in was a reckoning with the possibility of prayer, that at that moment he was not praying so much as coming to terms with how he might, and to what end, which surely must be a sort of prayer in itself.
Then, long after we moved on, and after standing in front of a handful of other paintings, I thought, no, that was not it either. The boy was not coming to terms with how to pray, but rather making space, and in so doing he had inadvertently arrived at the furthest reaches of himself. This would explain, I thought, why his face appears to be that of one standing on a summit, looking out on to a vast landscape, and, also, the opposite, that of one who has arrived at the limit of himself and, with cautious hope, decided to look inward.
We went to the café next door, in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery. We sat beside the curving wall, with people’s feet walking above us on the glass ceiling. Here it comes, I thought, what she has come to tell me.
“How was Devon?” I said.
She looked at me wondering if I knew more than I was letting on.
“Well, that’s it,” she said. “I mean, we had a good time. Everything was as always. Hosam is a dear heart,” she said, and her voice cracked. “Never complains. Have you noticed?”
“Yes,” I said. “What happened?”
“He was fine. A little somber, but that happens sometimes,” she said, nodding to herself. “We had a good day walking. He was quiet, hardly said a word, but that too happens. Except,” she said, and stopped, looking at me with open, doubting eyes. “There are times, it has always been the case, when I sense an abyss opening within him. I don’t know. I’ve always felt it and it frightens me. But this too passes. That day it remained, and at night, leaving the hotel for supper, he suddenly unhooked the fire extinguisher in the corridor and aimed it…well, at nothing, absolutely nothing, there was nothing there. He emptied the entire cylinder, yelling out something I couldn’t understand, something in Arabic. Everything was covered in white powder. It went up his arms, and on our shoes and trousers. I laughed, or attempted to anyway, but he wasn’t fooling around, he was dead serious, had a face, his face…I’d never seen it like that. As though something broke in him, and it broke my heart to see it.”
“What do you mean ‘something broke’?” I said.
“He said the same thing he had yelled but in a quiet voice, hardly audible. Repeating it over and over. I cried out for him to stop. The manager of the hotel came running through the doors.”
“And what did Hosam do?”
“Nothing. He turned to the man and slowly told him, ‘The fire, the fire.’ ”
The worst of it, the detail that accompanied me all the way home after Claire and I said goodbye, with me trying to comfort her with generic words about how everything will be fine, and so on, and her nodding into the distance, was what she said happened after Hosam spoke those words. She led him slowly back to their room. He sat on the edge of the bed, unable to speak or move or look into her eyes. She lifted his chin but his gaze remained downturned. There was only a moment when, whether meant to comfort or as a plea for help, he placed a hand on her thigh. Eventually, Claire told me, he managed to change out of his clothes and lay curled in bed all night with a face, as she described it, “stripped of all effort.”
81
The next time we met at Café Cyrano, Hosam was nearly his usual self. His eyes seemed a bit slow, so that when he held me in them time seemed to stop for a fraction of a second. He sat next to Mustafa, facing me. His shoulders were a little hunched. At one point, when he went to the toilet, I watched him, overwhelmed by the urge to embrace him. His face, which was expressionless, stirred with emotion when Claire walked into the café.
“I love how predictable you three are,” she said.
She smiled knowingly at me as she took the seat beside me, facing Hosam. Hosam registered this. Perhaps he suspected that Claire had confided in me or perhaps he was suspecting something else altogether. I became nervous, told some humorous story concerning the school where I worked, and then, because outrage is a great camouflage, I hotly complained about budget cuts and expressed with passion my love and concern for my students. Mustafa said something about how bad David Cameron’s government promised to be. We ordered drinks and, without waiting for a silence, Hosam interrupted to recount a dream he had had the night before. He looked at Claire when he spoke, and only when Mustafa or I said something did he turn to us, which gave the impression that we were eavesdropping on a private conversation between him and Claire, who listened attentively and with a hint of anguish, devoted but not unquestioning, an independent woman in love. All I cared about was that Hosam was telling us a story again, even if it was a dream.
“I was here, in this café,” Hosam said. “But Cyrano had become a secondhand furniture shop. Mostly Chinese, some Arabic pieces, Islamic carvings. An old man sits outside by the entrance. I wander in and find the waiter, but he doesn’t recognize me. In fact, everybody working here is suddenly Arab, definitely North African, perhaps even Libyan. They hardly notice me. They are busy discussing the arrangement of the furniture. I feel myself in the way. I leave, walk aimlessly around, and when I return, they have laid out the place but are still debating. I am looking for a coffee table for the house. The old man sitting outside on the pavement begins to sing softly to himself. I recognize the tune, but can’t place it. Then I realize the old man is me, years from now, and, just as I do, I spot a desk. I think, finally, I found it. I search for the price tag, but there isn’t one. The old man is now being teased by the others. ‘What a voice, old man,’ one says. But he, toward whom I dare not look, continues singing to himself. Now I know the tune. A lullaby my grandmother used to sing to me.” Hosam hums it, and both Mustafa and I recognize it immediately. “He sings it with feeling,” Hosam said, speaking more to us now, his fellow Libyans, who have had that same lullaby sung to them as young children. “But singing requires a dire effort from him. The young men notice this too and stop teasing him. They too seem moved. I continue to examine the writing table. I am no longer sure about it. It has a thick wooden frame. The top is padded in green velvet. I place a hand on a patch of the worn velvet. Too heavy to carry home, I decide.”
“What happened next?” Mustafa asked.
“Nothing,” Hosam said.
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I woke up.”
“Don’t worry,” Claire said, “episode two will follow.”
This made Hosam laugh. But then he continued laughing more than seemed necessary, until his eyes teared up.
We then tried to interpret the dream. The familiar café that had become a furniture shop was an allusion to the fear of the world changing, Mustafa suggested. I proposed that the dream had to do with writing because of the desk. Mustafa insisted that the old man was an expression of Hosam’s anxiety about growing old away from home. This, to my surprise, solicited a sympathetic response from Hosam.
“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps.”
“After all,” Mustafa went on, “you’re this peculiar creature: an Arab writer living in England.”
“Just as peculiar as an Irishwoman living in England,” Claire said, and I was the only one who agreed with her.
Hosam looked at Mustafa not harshly but with a sort of reflective bleakness, like a still sea under an overcast sky. Mostly, however, Hosam and Claire listened to our interpretations with an expression that was at once amused and consolatory, as though they already knew the meaning of the dream but had decided, silently, in the way couples do, to keep it to themselves.
As the evening went on, color entered Hosam’s face, and there were moments when he was almost his old self again. I could tell that Claire was delighted, with a quiet but profound sense of gratitude directed at Mustafa and me. When she laughed, the vein on the side of her neck bulged. The couple stayed beyond the usual time. Every extra minute felt like a conquest. When they stood up to leave, Mustafa insisted we all have another round of drinks. He went as far as swearing on the lives of his own parents. Hosam said nothing. He simply smiled and walked away; Claire was behind him, looking back at me in such a way that made me believe that for that instant I perceived her hopes and fears as she did mine.
82
Mustafa saw all this differently. It always took him a few minutes to settle down once Hosam had left the café. He was always ruffled by him, but much more so on that occasion.
“Well, this confirms it,” he said. “He must’ve seen the video.”
“What video?” I asked.
“First, did he tell you anything? He seemed strange, like a zombie. Came to life only a little at the end. And she, obviously preoccupied. Did they tell you anything?”
“What’s the video?” I said.
He came and sat beside me. “Do you remember,” he said, taking out his phone, “the rumor we heard around the time of the shooting, that Hosam’s father, Sidi Rajab Zowa, went on television and praised Qaddafi?”
“Yes, but there was never any proof of that.”
“Now there is,” he said. “And it’s worse than anything we could have imagined. Hold your horses.” He was busy with his phone. “Someone,” he said and stopped. “Someone recently…posted it on YouTube. In a matter of days…three exactly, it had over five thousand views. Quicker than a pop single,” he said, and laughed a horrible laugh. “Here it is.”
I felt captured by his terrible certainty. He was busy digging in his pockets, bringing out the earphones, unknotting the cable.
“He had a nervous breakdown. In Devon. That’s what it was,” I heard myself say, and, to myself, I thought, if he had, I could too—we all could. “We must keep an eye on him.”
“Here,” Mustafa said, handing me one of the earphones.
How could he have not heard what I had just told him, I thought, and, at the same time, I was relieved he did not hear. There was hot enthusiasm in his progress. He took the earphone from my fingers and plugged it into my ear.
“Life is a traitor,” he said, “always waiting to stab you in the back. Watch, watch.” He pressed “play,” then paused the video immediately. “Note the date,” he said, pointing to the tiny print on the bottom of the screen.
“This broadcast,” it read, “was originally aired live on the 24th of April 1984.”
“Isn’t that amazing?” Mustafa said, excitement and outrage having found a perfect union in his voice. “Seven days exactly after we were shot. Seven days. Isn’t that amazing?” he asked again.
Whenever Mustafa spoke like this, a will inside me, wanting to resist, accused him of exaggeration. “Play it,” I said, and we came closer together in the booth, instinctively pulling into the corner, so that no one could see what we were watching.
I filled our glasses, sat opposite him, and asked him to tell me everything he had discovered.
“Well,” he said, “in January 1980—”
“That’s what?” I said interrupting. “Three months before Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan—”
“Exactly,” he said.
“And two months,” I went on, “before I heard him read your story on radio.”
“Yes,” he said. “In that month, a twenty-three-year-old Lebanese student named Hassan Elias Badir checked into the Mount Royal Hotel on Marble Arch, and, while assembling a homemade bomb, blew himself up. No one knows why he checked into that hotel or who the bomb was intended for. But I found a photo. An uneasy and shy face with a little warmth in the eyes. I keep seeing him going down for a little walk, grabbing something to eat on the Edgware Road. I then see him sitting cross-legged on the freshly made hotel bed, with the pillows piled up behind him, working quietly. Sometimes I can even hear his thoughts. Then everything goes white.”
He looked both moved and enthusiastic, how I imagine an artist might feel when his work is finished. I remembered then what Mustafa had said, that there is nothing more dangerous than a writer who does not write. He took out his notebook, I suspected as much to hide his face as to read out his findings.
“On the 28th of July 1978, a couple of years before Hassan Elias Badir killed himself, a bomb was placed under the Iraqi Ambassador’s car in London. He wasn’t in it, but the two other diplomats who were sustained serious injuries.
“In 1972, three young men entered the London home of General Abdul Razzak al Naif, an Iraqi former Prime Minister, spraying bullets as they moved from room to room. Amazingly, the General survived. Six years later, in July 1978, he was getting into a taxi in front of the Intercontinental Hotel by Hyde Park Corner when a man approached him from behind and fired several shots. The General was rushed to Westminster Hospital, the same place where you were taken, but died the next day.”
He leafed through his notebook, which was covered in curling and continuous handwriting that went from edge to edge.
“Before that,” he said, reading from his notes, “in January 1978, Said Hammami, the London representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was murdered in his Mayfair office. A few days before, on New Year’s Eve, a car carrying two employees of the Syrian Embassy exploded in Mayfair.”
He looked up and his faced was pleased.
“So you see what I mean about London? And it has been the case for a very long time. For example, on the 1st of July 1909, Madan Lal Dhingra, a young Indian student, the sixth of seven children of Dr. Sahib Ditta Mal Dhingra, a wealthy and pro-British Hindu civil surgeon, left his flat on Ledbury Road in Bayswater and went to a National Indian Association meeting at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, where he managed to assassinate Lieutenant Colonel Sir Curzon Wyllie, an official of the British Indian government. Dhingra was hanged the following month. On sentence of death, he thanked the judge, saying: ‘I am proud to have the honor of laying down my life for the cause of my motherland.’ His last wish was for a bath and a shave. He was executed at Pentonville Prison on the 17th of August 1909. On the following day his statement was printed in the Daily News. In it Dhingra described himself as a patriot working to emancipate his motherland. He ended: ‘The only lesson required in India today is to learn how to die and the only way to teach it is by dying ourselves, and so I die and glory in my Martyrdom. Bande Mataram,’ which apparently means ‘Hail the motherland.’ ”
He went on and relayed several such stories of political assassinations that had taken place here, and that involved individuals of all types. I felt my kitchen grow smaller. When he left, I washed the dishes and tried to convince myself that all this might lead to him writing again. I could not rid myself of the image of his filled notebook, with its manic and relentless activity, like a man scratching a wound. I went to bed that night with a deep sense of disquiet, convinced that I had overlooked an important detail.
80
That night I had a dream that I have not been able to forget. In it, the world, everything and everyone I knew, nature and my sentimental life—the entirety of my emotions and ideas and opinions and hopes and dreams and my grief—all of that which is in me and outside of me appeared as a single piece of fabric, large enough to cover a child’s bed. The sheet was suspended in midair, worn thin and billowing weakly, its edges fraying.
The following month, Claire telephoned. She and Hosam had got back from Devon several weeks before.
“I need to speak to you,” she said, and suggested we meet a couple of days later at the National Gallery.
I found her waiting on the steps. I remember thinking she looked shy, that waiting was an awkward activity for her. We wandered through the galleries. She seemed nervous, kept speaking about a picture she had been looking at and could not make head nor tail of.
“Would you like to see it?” she said, and stopped to ask a museum guard for directions to the “Hans Memling paintings.” The man did not seem to understand. “Never mind,” she told him and kept on walking. “Hans Memling,” she said, “was born in the mid-1400s. He died in his late twenties. This particular picture was painted when he was in his midteens. A child, really,” she said. “It depicts a young man lost in a daydream. Or so I thought before I read the title.”
Suddenly we were right in front of it. It was called A Young Man at Prayer.
“I can’t work it out,” she said.
I looked at the deep green background, made lush and more verdant by the boy’s pale face, his open and blatant expression, as if no one, truly no one, could see him. We took a bench in the middle of the room and looked at him from there. I thought of telling Claire about my dream. I wanted to share with her my bewilderment about why I no longer pray. I had stopped years ago and still did not know why. And, as I thought this, I saw the unattended room inside of me where prayer used to happen gathering dust. Did she pray?
“Just imagine,” she then said, “regardless of how strong one’s faith might be, that you would actually know what to ask for.”
I wondered what happened in Devon?
“But isn’t it wonderful?” she said. “The whole picture is so available that you’re at a loss as to what to do with it. And isn’t his face sweet?”
“A little confused,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “Not sure whether God exists but thought, what the hell, might as well, just in case.”
I enjoyed the easy and warm sound of her laughter. How could anything be the matter, I thought?
I went to stand in front of the painting again. The boy’s hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes were all made of delicate and determined lines cast this way and that, like wind-combed fields.
“I’ll tell you how I see it,” Claire then said softly. She was now standing right behind me. “It’s a performance. Both the painting and what it depicts.”
I nodded without understanding what she meant. I began to see something else in the picture. I felt certain, too certain to have to say it, that what the boy was involved in was a reckoning with the possibility of prayer, that at that moment he was not praying so much as coming to terms with how he might, and to what end, which surely must be a sort of prayer in itself.
Then, long after we moved on, and after standing in front of a handful of other paintings, I thought, no, that was not it either. The boy was not coming to terms with how to pray, but rather making space, and in so doing he had inadvertently arrived at the furthest reaches of himself. This would explain, I thought, why his face appears to be that of one standing on a summit, looking out on to a vast landscape, and, also, the opposite, that of one who has arrived at the limit of himself and, with cautious hope, decided to look inward.
We went to the café next door, in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery. We sat beside the curving wall, with people’s feet walking above us on the glass ceiling. Here it comes, I thought, what she has come to tell me.
“How was Devon?” I said.
She looked at me wondering if I knew more than I was letting on.
“Well, that’s it,” she said. “I mean, we had a good time. Everything was as always. Hosam is a dear heart,” she said, and her voice cracked. “Never complains. Have you noticed?”
“Yes,” I said. “What happened?”
“He was fine. A little somber, but that happens sometimes,” she said, nodding to herself. “We had a good day walking. He was quiet, hardly said a word, but that too happens. Except,” she said, and stopped, looking at me with open, doubting eyes. “There are times, it has always been the case, when I sense an abyss opening within him. I don’t know. I’ve always felt it and it frightens me. But this too passes. That day it remained, and at night, leaving the hotel for supper, he suddenly unhooked the fire extinguisher in the corridor and aimed it…well, at nothing, absolutely nothing, there was nothing there. He emptied the entire cylinder, yelling out something I couldn’t understand, something in Arabic. Everything was covered in white powder. It went up his arms, and on our shoes and trousers. I laughed, or attempted to anyway, but he wasn’t fooling around, he was dead serious, had a face, his face…I’d never seen it like that. As though something broke in him, and it broke my heart to see it.”
“What do you mean ‘something broke’?” I said.
“He said the same thing he had yelled but in a quiet voice, hardly audible. Repeating it over and over. I cried out for him to stop. The manager of the hotel came running through the doors.”
“And what did Hosam do?”
“Nothing. He turned to the man and slowly told him, ‘The fire, the fire.’ ”
The worst of it, the detail that accompanied me all the way home after Claire and I said goodbye, with me trying to comfort her with generic words about how everything will be fine, and so on, and her nodding into the distance, was what she said happened after Hosam spoke those words. She led him slowly back to their room. He sat on the edge of the bed, unable to speak or move or look into her eyes. She lifted his chin but his gaze remained downturned. There was only a moment when, whether meant to comfort or as a plea for help, he placed a hand on her thigh. Eventually, Claire told me, he managed to change out of his clothes and lay curled in bed all night with a face, as she described it, “stripped of all effort.”
81
The next time we met at Café Cyrano, Hosam was nearly his usual self. His eyes seemed a bit slow, so that when he held me in them time seemed to stop for a fraction of a second. He sat next to Mustafa, facing me. His shoulders were a little hunched. At one point, when he went to the toilet, I watched him, overwhelmed by the urge to embrace him. His face, which was expressionless, stirred with emotion when Claire walked into the café.
“I love how predictable you three are,” she said.
She smiled knowingly at me as she took the seat beside me, facing Hosam. Hosam registered this. Perhaps he suspected that Claire had confided in me or perhaps he was suspecting something else altogether. I became nervous, told some humorous story concerning the school where I worked, and then, because outrage is a great camouflage, I hotly complained about budget cuts and expressed with passion my love and concern for my students. Mustafa said something about how bad David Cameron’s government promised to be. We ordered drinks and, without waiting for a silence, Hosam interrupted to recount a dream he had had the night before. He looked at Claire when he spoke, and only when Mustafa or I said something did he turn to us, which gave the impression that we were eavesdropping on a private conversation between him and Claire, who listened attentively and with a hint of anguish, devoted but not unquestioning, an independent woman in love. All I cared about was that Hosam was telling us a story again, even if it was a dream.
“I was here, in this café,” Hosam said. “But Cyrano had become a secondhand furniture shop. Mostly Chinese, some Arabic pieces, Islamic carvings. An old man sits outside by the entrance. I wander in and find the waiter, but he doesn’t recognize me. In fact, everybody working here is suddenly Arab, definitely North African, perhaps even Libyan. They hardly notice me. They are busy discussing the arrangement of the furniture. I feel myself in the way. I leave, walk aimlessly around, and when I return, they have laid out the place but are still debating. I am looking for a coffee table for the house. The old man sitting outside on the pavement begins to sing softly to himself. I recognize the tune, but can’t place it. Then I realize the old man is me, years from now, and, just as I do, I spot a desk. I think, finally, I found it. I search for the price tag, but there isn’t one. The old man is now being teased by the others. ‘What a voice, old man,’ one says. But he, toward whom I dare not look, continues singing to himself. Now I know the tune. A lullaby my grandmother used to sing to me.” Hosam hums it, and both Mustafa and I recognize it immediately. “He sings it with feeling,” Hosam said, speaking more to us now, his fellow Libyans, who have had that same lullaby sung to them as young children. “But singing requires a dire effort from him. The young men notice this too and stop teasing him. They too seem moved. I continue to examine the writing table. I am no longer sure about it. It has a thick wooden frame. The top is padded in green velvet. I place a hand on a patch of the worn velvet. Too heavy to carry home, I decide.”
“What happened next?” Mustafa asked.
“Nothing,” Hosam said.
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I woke up.”
“Don’t worry,” Claire said, “episode two will follow.”
This made Hosam laugh. But then he continued laughing more than seemed necessary, until his eyes teared up.
We then tried to interpret the dream. The familiar café that had become a furniture shop was an allusion to the fear of the world changing, Mustafa suggested. I proposed that the dream had to do with writing because of the desk. Mustafa insisted that the old man was an expression of Hosam’s anxiety about growing old away from home. This, to my surprise, solicited a sympathetic response from Hosam.
“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps.”
“After all,” Mustafa went on, “you’re this peculiar creature: an Arab writer living in England.”
“Just as peculiar as an Irishwoman living in England,” Claire said, and I was the only one who agreed with her.
Hosam looked at Mustafa not harshly but with a sort of reflective bleakness, like a still sea under an overcast sky. Mostly, however, Hosam and Claire listened to our interpretations with an expression that was at once amused and consolatory, as though they already knew the meaning of the dream but had decided, silently, in the way couples do, to keep it to themselves.
As the evening went on, color entered Hosam’s face, and there were moments when he was almost his old self again. I could tell that Claire was delighted, with a quiet but profound sense of gratitude directed at Mustafa and me. When she laughed, the vein on the side of her neck bulged. The couple stayed beyond the usual time. Every extra minute felt like a conquest. When they stood up to leave, Mustafa insisted we all have another round of drinks. He went as far as swearing on the lives of his own parents. Hosam said nothing. He simply smiled and walked away; Claire was behind him, looking back at me in such a way that made me believe that for that instant I perceived her hopes and fears as she did mine.
82
Mustafa saw all this differently. It always took him a few minutes to settle down once Hosam had left the café. He was always ruffled by him, but much more so on that occasion.
“Well, this confirms it,” he said. “He must’ve seen the video.”
“What video?” I asked.
“First, did he tell you anything? He seemed strange, like a zombie. Came to life only a little at the end. And she, obviously preoccupied. Did they tell you anything?”
“What’s the video?” I said.
He came and sat beside me. “Do you remember,” he said, taking out his phone, “the rumor we heard around the time of the shooting, that Hosam’s father, Sidi Rajab Zowa, went on television and praised Qaddafi?”
“Yes, but there was never any proof of that.”
“Now there is,” he said. “And it’s worse than anything we could have imagined. Hold your horses.” He was busy with his phone. “Someone,” he said and stopped. “Someone recently…posted it on YouTube. In a matter of days…three exactly, it had over five thousand views. Quicker than a pop single,” he said, and laughed a horrible laugh. “Here it is.”
I felt captured by his terrible certainty. He was busy digging in his pockets, bringing out the earphones, unknotting the cable.
“He had a nervous breakdown. In Devon. That’s what it was,” I heard myself say, and, to myself, I thought, if he had, I could too—we all could. “We must keep an eye on him.”
“Here,” Mustafa said, handing me one of the earphones.
How could he have not heard what I had just told him, I thought, and, at the same time, I was relieved he did not hear. There was hot enthusiasm in his progress. He took the earphone from my fingers and plugged it into my ear.
“Life is a traitor,” he said, “always waiting to stab you in the back. Watch, watch.” He pressed “play,” then paused the video immediately. “Note the date,” he said, pointing to the tiny print on the bottom of the screen.
“This broadcast,” it read, “was originally aired live on the 24th of April 1984.”
“Isn’t that amazing?” Mustafa said, excitement and outrage having found a perfect union in his voice. “Seven days exactly after we were shot. Seven days. Isn’t that amazing?” he asked again.
Whenever Mustafa spoke like this, a will inside me, wanting to resist, accused him of exaggeration. “Play it,” I said, and we came closer together in the booth, instinctively pulling into the corner, so that no one could see what we were watching.
