Transit (5 page)

7

BASHIR BINLADEN

THE FIRST HALF
lasted long-long time in that war. Everybody stayed in position; the attacks were rare. The battle was a tie, without real fair referee. Cause referee still France in that business-there. Paul Djidou, the Paris guy, never stop coming an going between Paris an Djibouti, so much the Boeing 747 all tired out. Paul Djidou he mediation: result zero. But goverment accuse: yes you wanna help the rebels, France too much friend of The Eternal Opponent (Eternal Opponent, he new chief of Scud, sworn enemy of the president, former prime minister, former deputy, former nurse—Eternal Opponent always former). On their side the rebels accuse too: yes, France providing support for the maneuvers (that military language, very correct) of the goverment. Paul Djidou yelled: yes me too I'm sick of this former territory of Wadags and Walals, and hey I'm going back to Nice (Nice, it beautiful part of France). Long-long time later we learn on RFI that Monsieur Paul Djidou, he left to do peace mediation between Hutus and Tutsis, over there in Rwanda, I think. Results: first half of the first war, it lasted. Old as a child of three, an that no joke. Both teams, they thought we gonna find new fair referee. Eternal Opponent went to ask
Saleh (no, not the marathonian from Djibouti, that Ahmed Saleh, he so-so good with feet; the other Saleh, he president of Yemen) if he think he can be good fair referee. Saleh said: that political interference. Me too, I got big problems: with Eritrea, with fierce bearded guys (poor Saleh don't know my name been Binladen for six months, that confidential top military secret). Real country of Binladen, it's not Gaudy Arabia, sorry, Saudi Arabia, it's Yemenite mountains. Binladen before he got rich an smart he was living out in the sticks in Yemen. So Saleh of Yemen he end up saying go see
UN, OAU
, Arab League, you'll find good fair referee. So war will stop by itself. Dialogue between goverment and Eternal Opponent is deaf dialogue, always. Us draftees, we were happy. We had the weapons, the right to do whatever we want. An then, there still wasn't fierce battle. It was status quo (that military language too). Tie. And lots of dead too, specially rebels or civilians who sort of help rebels. But wait, let's be serious, there dead on our side too, specially young draftees with no esperience, not like me or Aïdid, Warya, Ayanleh, Haïssama. Lot of young draftees (why'm I saying young draftees, they all young, right?) pig out on bullets in the belly. That's war, but can't cry too much like mamas. Man with real hard thing between his legs never cry like little woman and that's that. Dismessed.

8

ABDO-JULIEN

I THINK THE DEAD
are not dead but go on with their little lives, only on another planet. When the evening wind comes in with its troubling scythe, someone you love leaves you. Death should not be proud; people do not die, they just become invisible. God, it's so cold alone here in the grave, they whisper. Like that grandmother from ancient times with the face of a great sachem, affectionate and despotic, who died in her eighty-fifth year, well, she's walking along over a dried-out wadi on the Moon with her long, majestic stride, hampered by a double pain in the hip. She could read the future in the flight of birds and would raise her head to search the stars and the Moon at every occasion. Ah, she could see herself on that lunar land inhabited by old people, stunted acacias, a natural world in suspension or in miniature, bony camels, cats with stringy coats, cacti with a fragile constitution. Life is not abundant there, it's a break in the clouds, but peace reigns permanently and men have lost their vanity and their destructive energy. Every man bears witness for humanity. Besides, don't they whisper behind my back that I, Abdo-Julien, am the reincarnation of my grandfather, who was assassinated by a thug in the Foreign
Legion? Grandfather often comes to visit me. Over there, in the country where he is, they don't call children “children” but “the ones with small feet”; men are companions of the Sun, the other point of reference, along with the Moon—Earth has been utterly forgotten. Round, white flat stones are found there in great numbers, like on a beach of the alabaster coast between Dieppe and Étretat, where I spent a few days during my last summer vacation in Maman's part of the country. Bristling with volcanic knolls, the earth of the Moon seems plunged in a long eternal sleep just slightly smoothed by the sand winds that surge up out of nowhere. The companions of the Sun have slept peacefully, with a clear conscience, ever since they let the people on Earth be born, die, and be born again wherever they are, do their thing and walk round and round inside the circle of their well-fed sedentariness. They remain at the mercy of a big, violent current that will swallow them up forever. Speaking of the ones on the Moon like Grandpa Awaleh, they fit into their new existence with the ease of an alley cat. They're like flying leaves fluttering in the arms of the wind; their own horizon loses its weight and sways along on its wings without a trace or a final point. They are humble; they are able to love slowness and appreciate the wisdom of former times. They have left our wretched enclosures forever. They're not struggling along any more under the constant threat of earthquake in the country of dead stones.

I learned all that from Grandpa, who would tell it to me during his unexpected visits. Experience is a lantern on your back, he would teach me when I asked him a tough question; it only lights up the path behind you. It's weird, these days his face is round and soft, with no hard cheekbones or tense muscles. A face like the Moon.

9

BASHIR BINLADEN

SO I GOT TOO-TOO MAD
. Let's get real here. You think people walk with their ass on the ground? We hear the rebels almost in Djibouti and us, we stuck here, in mountain. They gonna waste everybody over there. When they gonna give the order to attack Scud positions? They say president he don't give a damn about anything, homeland, fatherland, population. He too-too old. So he left for vacation in Parisian hospital after rest in private villa-chateau cause now it's
haga*
(that Djibouti summer, sun it hot lead melting on your skull, even the asphalt on the road yell mama mama I'm too-too melted).
Haga
, too fierce. All the
leaders
(that use to be English before, now not so sure) they left to rest up in Paris, Switzerland, Washimton (for the big somebodies), Addis, Cairo, Yemen (for the small fry—that cook language, Ayanleh who was student cook for the Whites before mobilization told me that). And us, we famished an languished on bald mountain there. We bite our nails cause of nothing to do. Gotta attack Scud making too many corner kicks, an beat it up a little, I say. Gotta hit Scud in Achilles' heel. But that little chief of us, he don't agree. You need green light from chiefa staff even, he answer. Man! We ain't out of this yet.
Little chief of us with walkie-talkie an old
VHF
radio (cause big chief need Motorola cell, of course) he don't agree at all. You think we having fun here? We maintaining the blockade so the rebels are cut off from urban centers. Bullshit. For long time now, Scud been getting supplies from the sea with fast little patrol boats getting ammunition and 9mm in Yemen, that not even confidential top military secret. Even some wounded rebels, they get treated in Peltier Hospital in Djibouti cause they got cousins in goverment too. Me I say all that business shady-shady. He who has ears, let him hear, cept maybe the phony deaf. The country's future's dot-dot-dot suspension points so you gotta think real hard. When war's over, I look for nice chic job. Yes, I know profession like that, it real job front of American Embassy or Mitterrand Consulate, yes. But hey, that my secret.

10

ABDO-JULIEN

THERE
! We're all together again now, by the grace of the Most Lofty. Let's chat for a few moments. I'll go back to what I was telling you yesterday, my boy. So, where was I? Oh yes, did you know that the nomads are late converts, that Islam is an urban religion, born among merchants from Mecca? It is true that Mohammed, may his soul rest in peace, succeeded in conquering the nomads, regimenting them in his troops and sending them forth to conquer the world. And do you know that our beloved religion never really took to the sea, which is why Muslim societies have lagged behind in the development of capitalism? Islam has always viewed sailors as people on the fringe of society, outcasts, or rebels. Now, you little rascal, you're going to ask me how I can explain the power of Oman, if only in our region, and the advent of Swahili civilization from the Red Sea to the Mozambique Channel. It's due to prehistoric maritime cultures. The Omanese and a few Turkified populations on the banks of the Black Sea were able to preserve this knowledge of the sea, and so those remarkable sailors and fishermen gave birth to a veritable maritime power in the Indian Ocean. You didn't know that either, did you? Beware of appearances: an
imposture may even lie between the pages of a history book made in Paris. Now listen to me. No, it's not hard to reach out to people. On the contrary, people are dying to find an attentive ear willing to listen to them and a mind inclined to stir up the mulch of their understanding. From time immemorial, Grandfather gave every conversation a certain depth, a duly calculated slowness that had absolutely nothing to do with laziness. There was in his gestures, and especially in his voice, an economy that captivated and galvanized me by its gentleness, its rhythm, and by the way he would stretch out a vowel like
o
or
u
, depending on his argumentation. And every one of his actions was marked by the same relaxed intensity. He did not hesitate to ask my grandmother Timiro for his thermos of tea three times in a row without raising or lowering his voice. And in the same courteous, firm tone, he could also insist that Grandmother make the tea over again if he didn't like the way it was brewed. All this not for the pleasure of indisposing others and showing his authority like the old quibblers of his age, nor to bother anyone, just to make sure that his interlocutors fully understood all his rights, even in the state of physical helplessness he was in before he passed from life to death. For him, life was a constant flow of exchanges in words or deeds, and because of this, he took all the time he needed to pose his voice, give his opinions, and move his old bones. Without haste, he tasted the sap of every minute: life is a banquet to be savored together, no need to lap it up in two strokes of a spoon. Not everyone shared his point of view. Timiro, gripped by the feeling of his precariousness, often let a few tears escape: they flowed down the ridge of her nose and flooded the hills of her cheekbones.

 

Real creators are stateless wanderers, like the nomads of the desert, and have only one function—at least in this world be low. They are our guides (Grandfather is convinced of this) who show us the trails to follow as we travel through life. They also tell us, with an abundance of details, the story of their emotional carousel. With their memory zinzoling here and there, their imagination working in geometric shapes—rectangles, triangles, trapezoids—they spare us muddy streams, the foaming slime of remorse, putrid waters like the waters of Lake Abbé, even the raging sea. The sea with its gums of an ogre so frightening to mankind. With these guides, you feel like pouncing on that Reaper, taking a dive into that hell which attracts men so much. Chroniclers of the ephemeral, they shell their sayings like oysters; they have such airborne words that they set off levitation above senses and sentiments. Silence and pandemonium bumping into each other, negating each other. The sudden blooming of new knowledge. They offer us pearls of rain from countries where it never rains, as Jacques Brel says in his song, major chords that connect man to humanity. As long as they can speak to us, their voices are made flesh, connecting us to others. They are herders of cows or dromedaries, crossers of limits, peddlers of mirages dragging behind them the latest news of the evening. They own nothing solid, or so little. Bitter almonds and sounds of bones, for many. For others, just a sheepskin for prayer and gymnastics for the believer. And when night has burned out the oil of its last lamps, one must make haste: it is the autumn of life. Poets approaching death commonly become prophets.