Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (21 page)

Edmond pushed Nadia to the floor; he wanted to crush her fingers with his foot and beat her. She defended herself as best she could, crying. Edmond kept accusing Abd al-Rahman of deflowering her. She denied it, swearing in the name of Christ that Abd al-Rahman was not responsible, but to no avail. Finally she said, “It was not him, but someone else. It was Mayer ben Nassim, when I was a girl.” He didn’t believe her, but she went on explaining and trying to exonerate Abd al-Rahman. “I swear it was Mayer. I wrote a letter to Abd al-Rahman and explained that I was not a virgin, but he ran away to Paris. This is the whole truth.” Edmond was still not convinced.

“I don’t believe you. It is this cowardly existentialist, this base fellow who did it. Just be patient, and I, Edmond son of Adileh, will wash away this dishonor and take my revenge.”

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That evening Faraj, Elias Khaddouri, and Edmond held serious discussions to decide what action must be taken. The servants saw them, and two of them swore to me that they heard the three men talk about killing Abd al-Rahman in an act of vengeance. I
met those two servants, Boulos and his sister Malakin, in their house in Camp Sarah near the Zahleh markets. They passed this information on to me, but I couldn’t confirm that this incident was behind the death of one of Iraq’s greatest philosophers of the sixties. Nor did any of the documents I had confirmed this as a possibility. A document provided by Sadek Zadeh maintains that the philosopher committed suicide. A possible scenario can be based on the following reasoning: Abd al-Rahman’s physical and mental condition was deteriorating, which might have led him to have a nervous breakdown, and end his life with a self-inflicted gunshot. I could imagine him thinking about the millions of people who went about their business with vulgar enthusiasm but without seizing the essence of life, and wanting to set an example for them. Before killing himself he would have felt everything around him was nauseating, and that the objects in his room were closing in on him. He took a gun from a drawer and pointed it calmly at his chest. Germaine had just come out of the bathroom when she heard the shot. She ran to his room and shouted from behind the locked door, “What have you done, what have you done?” The servants broke the door down and found him lying on the floor with one red spot on the left side of his chest.

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Naturally, this scenario needed to be verified. It was meant to convince us that nausea and nihilism as an aspect of life—and not its nonexistence (the Iraqi intellectuals of the time did not differentiate between the two)—were the reasons for the philosopher’s suicide. But I had my doubts, because for the al-Sadriya philosopher nausea motivated him to embrace life, not to reject it. It was a way to shout out against the stillness of life, and an incentive for an enthusiastic approach to it, rather than a reason
for asceticism and the torture of the body. I had to go beyond this document that Sadeq Zadeh described as the most important.

I had to verify a second theory: the Trotskyite conspiracy. It was suggested as the Khaddouri family sat in their garden, near the fountain one afternoon, together with Edmond and Elain, drinking tea and eating cookies. “Let’s kill him,” said Edmond, biting into his cookie.

“No,” said Elain in her Jewish accent, “we need to do something that won’t leave evidence.” Nadia’s mother wondered how this could be accomplished, and Elain explained, “We need to create a scandal.”

Faraj approved wholeheartedly: “Excellent idea!”

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Ismail went to meet Edmond at his house on Anastas al-Karmali Street. Edmond met him at the door and took him to a table filled with a variety of foods worthy of a banquet: fish, chicken, many kinds of sweets, fruits, flatbread, and plenty of whiskey. The conversation turned around the life of the poor and the revolution that had brought down the bourgeoisie, feudalism, and the Sirkaliya system.

When Ismail left Edmond’s house he was totally drunk and staggering. His eyes twinkled as he examined the boxes of sweets his host had given him.

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Soon after his meeting with Edmond, Ismail started visiting the philosopher’s wife while her husband was absent. A week before his death Abd al-Rahman told his wife that he would not be spending the night at home, but she didn’t seem to care and went on washing her young daughter’s face.

Ismail arrived after midnight, and when he learned that her husband was absent he decided to stay with Germaine until dawn. They ate and drank, and as he was about to leave she asked him to go with her, naked, up to the roof.

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She was elated, and when she reached the roof she lay down on the bed. Ismail did the same. They resumed their lovemaking to the sound of music under the clear summer sky. They felt they were on another planet far from the struggles of daily life.

The minaret of the Siraj al-Din Mosque was close to the house and quite high. Germaine said to Ismail, “Look at the minaret. It’s as if someone is watching us.” He laughed, looked at the minaret and then the empty street, where only a barking dog and the whistle of the guard could be heard, and reassured her, “No, the imam won’t watch us.” Germaine got up, covered herself with a sheet, and looked at the courtyard of the mosque. She saw a tree bearing small fruit hidden from passersby by the high wall. She turned to Ismail, ran her fingers across his body and said, “I want one of these apples.” Ismail was surprised but he complied. He put on his black trousers and went down to the courtyard. As soon as the guard moved away, he climbed the tree and picked as many green apples as he could. When he heard someone coming down the minaret’s steps, he quickly hid the apples in his pants, and clambered down. Two hands grabbed him immediately, one by the neck and the other by his pants. It was the imam, who exulted, “I’ve caught you, sinner.” The guard came over, and by the light of the moon he saw Ismail’s pants filled with the mosque’s apples. Ismail’s pleas for mercy went unheeded. The guard, proud and happy to have finally caught a scofflaw, shouted at him, “You are a thief, and you steal from a mosque!”

The imam added, “He is also an adulterer.”

When Ismail sought to correct him, “Only a thief,” the imam pronounced, “I was watching you from the minaret. You delayed my call to prayer, you sinners.”

Hoping to confound him, Ismail suggested, “Maybe you were watching a porn flick, imam?”

The guard didn’t like Ismail’s rudeness. He told him to take off his pants, leaving him totally naked, and tied him to a tree. Meanwhile the imam had climbed the minaret and invited the inhabitants of al-Sadriya to come and see the adulterer.

All this took place as Germaine, covered only with a sheet, watched, helpless and mortified, from her roof.

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The scandal must have been more than Abd al-Rahman could handle. The documents confirm that he died one week after the news broke of his wife’s liaison with his colleague. His life turned upside down; Germaine returned to Paris; Ismail disappeared; Edmond immigrated to Australia; and no one knew what happened to Nadia. Was this the Trotskyite plot hatched by Edmond and Ismail? Did Ismail betray Abd al-Rahman on his own? Was he, a betrayer by nature, pushed to do so? Was it the wife who wanted to cheat on a husband busy with his nausea, his dissolute life, and the prostitutes in the nightclubs?

It was up to me to answer all these questions and finish up the philosopher’s biography I had started writing three months earlier. I had been working on it nonstop, totally involved in it, in order to receive the money promised to me by Hanna Yusif and Nunu Behar.

The Philosopher’s Journey

O
ne quiet morning, having almost finished the philosopher’s biography, I woke up early and pulled open the curtains of the casement overlooking the street. I opened the window and felt the cold air hit my face. The sun was pale, and its rays spread over the upper stories of the buildings, hotels, and luxurious houses. The smell of ink reminded me of the drama of lost-love stories I had lived with ever since I had dived into the maze of documents in search of the words that gradually formed themselves into the stories of real people.

Those words shaped the philosopher’s distorted hands, his large, handsome chest, and sleepy look. They put some order into the flurry of documents that encumbered my desk and my room, and inspired the writing of the biography: there were documents, old newspapers, magazines thrown everywhere, piles of rough copies, and photographs. The furniture in the apartment was covered with dust. My dog barked nonstop after I tied him to the bedpost with my belt to prevent him from disturbing the papers or breaking the pens. There were leftover bits of food: dark bread crusts that looked like a stain on the table, an open bag, and the remains of a hard-boiled egg.

Writing freed me of all that because I could give free rein to the emotions the philosopher was unable to express. I revived him, breathed life into him, brought him to the brink of an explosion. By this I don’t mean I wrote a book of history; I always insisted on the danger and futility of an interpretation based on history. No, I made room for imagination and a place for his personality in the biography, filling the gap between the imagined personality and the real subject. What the flesh-and-blood philosopher and the philosopher on paper have in common is the way of life, the environment, and the persons that surround them. I became aware that people live only through their imagined selves, which led me to establish a relationship between words and objects through the imagination of the characters and their delusions. I created a supplementary image in the mind, one that was more anguished in the abstract than it was in reality. It is an image that a work written without sincere concern for the main character cannot include between its covers.

As I said earlier, I was looking at the street from the window, and I saw a woman carrying a bag, a nightingale taking in the cold of the gardens. Then I heard the thin sound of a violin wafting on the fresh air, entering my room through the window, and spreading like a long, well-combed beard.

I drew a bath and jumped into the tub to relax after a strenuous period of work. I closed my eyes and let myself go, enjoying the scent of the salts I had put in the water. Suddenly I heard a noise that sounded as if someone were trying to break into my apartment. The dog was barking, and I was petrified, as if my body had turned into a log floating in the bathwater. I slid out of the tub, put on my bathrobe, and half-opened the door. Hanna Yusif was moving surreptitiously toward my desk. I went out and asked him what he was doing in my apartment. It was a silly question because I knew very well that he was after the philosopher’s biography. He was startled and tried to hide his
embarrassment. He laughed loudly, “Oh! You’re here! I didn’t know, forgive me.” When I asked him how he managed to open the door, he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket and said, “I opened it with the key, believe me. I found those keys in my pocket and said to myself, let me try one of them.”

“You should have knocked,” I shouted.

“By Christ, I did knock, but you didn’t hear me. I thought you weren’t at home, and I decided to come in and wait for you,” he explained.

I rejected his excuse, “Hanna, when I am not at home you do not have permission to come in. You know this. It’s simple good manners!”

He continued to defend himself. “I know, but we’re friends— or I thought we were.”

The dog was stretched out near the bed, sweating, his eyes yellowish. His mouth was opening and closing, his teeth were not showing. I was alarmed and went to check his pulse. Hanna said, “Don’t worry. He won’t die. It’s a temporary anesthetic. He’ll come back to his senses in a few minutes.” The dog was moaning and twitching slowly on the floor. I went to my room to get dressed, and when I returned I saw Hanna going through my papers on the table.

I went to the kitchen to make coffee, and I heard Hanna laugh as he was reading the papers. He was more elegant this day than when I first saw him. He carried a silver cane and used it for appearances only. He wore a shiny blazer and a vest with a silver watch in one of the pockets. His hair was well combed, and his cologne filled the space of the room. All this elegance, however, could not hide his depravity and hypocrisy.

I put his coffee on the table, and when I turned to look at him, his hand was shaking. He said to me, “I’ll take these papers home to read.” I objected, “No, Hanna. I have not completed my work yet.”

The truth is that I had made two copies of my biography. One I hid in my clothes closet, and the other was on the desk. I was worried about the future and didn’t trust Hanna Yusif or Sadeq Zadeh. I was able to persuade Hanna to read the papers in my apartment.

I went out to eat breakfast and buy cigarettes and left Hanna in the apartment to read. I hurried back and found him tearing up some of the pages and dumping them in the wastebasket. I shouted at him, “What are you doing!” He explained, “Nothing, some of the information is incorrect, believe me.” He had destroyed all the pages on which I wrote of the suicide of the philosopher but showed a great interest in the activities of Ismail Hadoub. He was more interested in this character than in the others. Laughing indecently, he said he wanted me to provide more dirt about Ismail. His malicious eyes moved from page to page. Finally he agreed, “What you’ve written is enough. Can I take the biography home with me?”

“Yes, you may, once you pay me the agreed upon wage.” But he wasn’t prepared for that.

“I’ll give you your money tomorrow. I didn’t expect you to finish it so soon. Believe me, I’ll pay you tomorrow.” But I insisted and told him that he wouldn’t get the biography before he gave me the money he owed me.

I took great pleasure in tormenting him. He would first beg me to accede to his request, and whenever he failed he’d act as if it didn’t matter to him. He’d seem to give up, “OK, I’ll leave it here then, even though we’ve agreed that I’ll pay you. Don’t worry. I’ll give your money. I can’t deny you your rights. You’ve worked very hard the whole time.”

Then he’d flip the pages and come up with another reason to take the manuscript home, “If you give it to me today I’ll correct some of the historical mistakes and give it back to you for a rewrite, then I could pay you. Once you’re done with the corrections, I’ll come back with Nunu Behar and take the final version.”