Read The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe Online
Authors: Romain Puertolas
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (12 page)
CHAPTER THREE
The concept of hygiene in the prison was almost nonexistent. Even the water that came out of the showerhead was rather dark and muddy. There were cockroaches in the cells, and the prisoners coughed all day and all night. A pestilential stench pervaded the corridors and common areas. The toilets were constantly blocked, and on the rare occasions they became unblocked, gallons of yellowish water overflowed the bowls and flooded onto the broken tiles. When that happened, the prisoners had to paddle in their own excrement, either barefoot or in sandals, like caged animals.
One day, when the two men came back from the patio, where they were allowed to stretch their legs for a few hours each day, Devanampiya—who had been coughing constantly for several weeks—collapsed into the arms of the shocked Walid.
The doctor was called immediately. When he arrived, he examined the young Sri Lankan’s body where it lay on the floor. Then he lifted up his stethoscope,
shook his head sadly, and two big men dragged the corpse away through the yellowish water in the corridor.
Walid was worried. He asked a passing prisoner what was happening, and learned that his friend was dead.
(I wonder if blind people weep. I’ll have to check. If they do, then Walid will cry. He will cry a lot. The dog barked three times as I was thinking this, impatient for me to resume my story.)
So Walid wept. (To be checked.)
He cried his eyes out that night. He was heartbroken. His sobs could be heard as far away as his home, in Afghanistan. He had lost a friend, his only friend, and with Devanampiya, he had also lost his ability to see. Under these circumstances, prison would soon become a hell again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Walid Nadjib did not have time to get used to being alone in his cell. A few days
later, there was a knock, and the thick wooden door creaked on its hinges.
“We would have left you alone,” said the guard, “but there’s no more space. I hope this will be all right.”
He had spoken the last sentence as if he knew something about the new arrival that the blind man didn’t; something that did not bode well.
The door banged shut again, and a deathly silence rose to fill the room. The Afghan spoke first, as if to exorcise an evil spell. He introduced himself, not forgetting to tell his new cell mate that he was blind and that he would appreciate it if the new arrival would speak to him.
But the new arrival did not say a thing.
The straw in one of the beds crunched like salad leaves being slowly chewed. The new arrival must have lain down. Soon he was asleep and breathing so loudly, like a snoring bear, that Walid’s ears hurt. The blind man thought his new companion must be very tired, so he didn’t disturb him.
A few hours later, at mealtime, the man woke up and ate his gruel. Walid could
hear him chewing and belching; it was as if he were inside the man’s stomach. As the man was awake, Walid spoke to him.
“I apologize if I said something to offend you earlier. I am blind and I cannot see the expression on your face. If you don’t speak to me, I am afraid I will never know with whom I am sharing these sad walls. The time will pass much more quickly if we trust each other. Well, that’s what I think, anyway …”
The other man did not reply.
Walid continued to hear the man munching his gruel. It sounded like boots stomping through mud. Intrigued, he stood up and groped his way forward until his hands touched his cell mate’s clammy skin. The man stopped chewing.
“Stop feeling me up, you old perv!” shouted the man in a version of Sinhala seriously mangled by elocution problems. “I’ve killed men for less than that!”
Walid removed his hand instantly, as if he’d touched fire.
“No, no, don’t get me wrong! I’m blind. I just wanted to get your attention because you hadn’t spoken a word to me since your arri—”
“There’s no point wasting your breath,” the Sri Lankan interrupted in a stammer. “I’m deaf as a post.”
The news fell like the blade of a guillotine.
The new arrival was an imposing man, six-foot-six-inches tall with big muscles and a fat belly. A thin black mustache covered his top lip, as if to say “not one word will escape this mouth.” But Targuyn, thanks to laborious articulation exercises, had managed to learn speech, in spite of the pessimistic predictions of all the doctors who had examined him. So Targuyn was no longer mute, only deaf, a handicap he could do nothing to alter.
As soon as he had entered the cell, he had been struck by the strangeness of this man in sunglasses. What was the point of wearing something like that in a place where the sunlight barely penetrated?
With his dark glasses and his wandering hands, the prisoner definitely seemed like a pervert. He had probably been locked in this miserable place, deprived of any sexual outlet, for several years—long enough, anyway, to warp his judgment, so that when he looked at a mustachioed
giant weighing 400 pounds, he saw a desirable twenty-year-old virgin.
And then suddenly it all became clear. The dark glasses, the way the man moved through the cell groping with his hands, the white cane leaning against the wall. All these clues finally indicated to Targuyn, who was a bit slow on the uptake, that his cell mate was blind.
One of us deaf and the other blind, he thought. What a joke!
As night was falling, Targuyn got up from his bed and approached the blind man, who was sitting with his face to the ceiling, his lips quivering. He looked like he was either going crazy or praying.
“My name is Targuyn,” he said simply.
So Walid discovered that the giant was not a bad man, after all.
(What can happen next? Quick, I need an idea! The dog is barking.)
The two men soon became friends, because each of them had something that differentiated him from everyone else. The first could not see, and the second could not hear. In some ways, they
completed each other. What one could not see, the other could describe for him. What one could not hear, the other could write for him.
Targuyn had never seen a blind man write before. With one hand, Walid touched the edge of the paper, so he wouldn’t go beyond it, and with the other he wrote in letters that were as tiny as possible. The lines he wrote went off in every direction, forming pretty pileups of words.
Walid, who missed Devanampiya a little more every day and thought of him nostalgically, one day repeated to Targuyn the strange request he had once made to his former cell mate.
He wrote: “Deskryb for me wot you sea threw that windoe.”
So many questions had been buzzing around Walid’s head since his friend’s death. What Targuyn had taken for prayers, quivering on Walid’s lips as he sat in a delirium, had actually been a recital of Devanampiya’s descriptions, remembered by the blind man and repeated to himself as a way of restoring the blessed
illusion of sight that had marked the first months of his incarceration.
And so, on the first day of spring, the giant read the words Walid had scratched with a pen on a scrap of paper. While it was true that he spoke Sinhala fluently, the Afghan struggled badly with his spelling.
“You write better than some native speakers, Walid. There are a few mistakes, but I can still get the gist. On the other hand, I don’t really understand what you want. Tell me, and I will grant your wish.”
Targuyn sometimes spoke like the genies who come out of lamps in fairy tales. But the blind man’s only response was to tap the piece of paper with his finger, insisting upon what he had written.
“The window looks out on a wall,” said the giant. “A brick wall. There’s nothing to see.”
For a moment, the blind man did not react.
“What?”
Walid looked as though he had been turned into a stone statue.
Then, slowly, he bowed his head.
His world had collapsed.
He understood that his former cell mate had invented all those descriptions just to make him happy. A generous, selfless gesture. A gesture of love, fraternity, friendship.
(All right, so I’ve covered the front of the shirt with writing, and both sleeves, and now I have just finished the back. Unless I’m mistaken, there is no space left. And anyway, I don’t know what to write next. I need to revise it, but I think it’s pretty good for a first novel …)
The pride he felt at having put his ideas into words was the third electric shock that the fakir received to his heart during this adventure. He knew this was a good story, and that all he had to do was write it on paper and it would become a book. He promised himself he would do that as soon as he arrived at his destination, wherever that might be. After first telephoning Marie, of course. That couldn’t wait.
“And that is how I ended up inside your trunk, madame,” Ajatashatru concluded with a half-smile.
Disappearing inside a piece of luggage in Barcelona and reappearing in Rome was, by far, the best magic trick he had ever performed. Houdini could not have done better.
The beautiful young woman with green eyes and brown hair looked at him, her expression wavering between surprise, skepticism and the desire to scream. But this was better than the hysterics that had gripped her when she had first opened the trunk and discovered him. She lowered the bedside lamp she had picked up as a weapon. The story was far-fetched, admittedly, but there was something sincere and genuine in the man’s tone. And how could anyone come up with such a ridiculous lie?
“I will now leave this room. I will not bother you anymore, madame. I will vanish completely
from your life. But before I do, I would like to ask you a question.”
“All right, I’m listening,” she managed to stammer in excellent English.
“Where are we? This must be the fourth time I’ve wondered that in the last two days. You can’t imagine how annoying that is …”
“In Rome,” replied Sophie Morceaux. “At the Hotel Parco dei Principi.”
“Ah. You mean Rome in Italy?”
“Yes, yes. Rome in Italy,” confirmed the Bond girl from
Tomorrow Is Not Enough
. “Do you know another one?”
“No.”
The man seemed so harmless and the situation so comical that the actress could not help smiling. Having thought at first that he was some kind of maniacal fan, she now felt relieved.
She looked at this Indian, tall, thin and gnarled like a tree, with a large mustache. His white, crumpled shirt was covered with tiny writing. It looked like a shroud printed with penciled hieroglyphics.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to his shirt.
“That? Pencil. An Ikea pencil, in fact. But,
to be more precise, my latest novel … or rather, my first novel, written in the dark.”
“Do you usually write your books on your shirts?”
“Would you rather I’d written it on yours?” joked Ajatashatru.
Sophie Morceaux giggled. Then she turned toward her open and hopelessly empty trunk.
“Speaking of my clothes, I presume they must have stayed in Barcelona. In fact, if I understand you correctly, I have nothing else to wear.”
Ajatashatru bowed his head like a guilty child. He did not have the courage to tell her that he had kept a pair of her underwear in his trouser pocket.
“Me neither,” he said.
Little remained of the beautiful suit, shirt and tie that he had rented from old Dilawar. The jacket and the tie were moldering in France, and the shirt was covered with the opening pages of a novel.
“Well, I didn’t like those dresses anyway,” Sophie Morceaux lied. “This is Gucci and Versace country, after all,” she added, happy at the idea of going on a shopping spree. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to find something, should it?”
“I think …” said Ajatashatru, who never knew how to reply to negative questions.
“So, do you have any plans for the evening? What time does your next wardrobe leave?”
For the first time in his life, someone was trusting him, just like that, without him having to come up with a cheap trick or clever ploy, but simply by him telling the truth. The “good countries” really were a box of chocolates full of surprises. And the welcoming committee was not always composed of policemen. His homesickness lifted for a few seconds.
This was the fourth electric shock that the fakir received to his heart during this adventure. He had been helped again. But when would he be able to help someone else?
Moved by the Indian’s story, Sophie Morceaux had asked him to spend the evening with her. He was a mysterious, original and sincere character, and his presence allowed her to forget, for the time it took them to eat dinner, the watered-down, superficial personalities with whom she had been rubbing shoulders ever since she began starring in American blockbusters. Moreover, she did not entirely believe his story and preferred to imagine that Ajatashatru was a political writer, in hiding from the authorities in his country, who had been forced to travel illegally in order to reach Europe and seek asylum. Yes, that was much more exciting.
The hotel where the actress was staying for the next few days, in order to attend the Festival of Latin Cinema, was situated on a hillside in the Italian capital, just behind the beautiful Villa Borghese gardens, a breathing space in this frantic city.
As the Parco dei Principi Grand Hotel & Spa
was much too expensive for
A-jar-of-rat-stew
, the correct pronunciation of his name, which she managed to say perfectly, she had invited him to sleep in the room next to hers, room 605, which her manager had reserved, along with a dozen other rooms on the same floor, so that the star would not be disturbed by her fans.
It really was worth traveling in a trunk if you were then given a night in a room in one of the most luxurious hotels in Rome, separated only by a dividing wall from the most beautiful woman in the world. The Indian did feel a little guilty, however. Assefa and his friends were probably not so well off at this very moment. He imagined them sitting in the back of a cargo truck crossing the Franco-Spanish border, eating canned food and chocolate biscuits while they waited for the police to arrest them again.