books—criminal motive, the behavior of the masses in the absence of a unifying objective, the resentment of the poor as a driver for human history. He saved me from playing an unsatisfactory role.
“Not useful.”
Thus Nabil al-Adl, my terror of whom—or of what he represented—I had spent the first part of my training battling to master. The softest manifestation of the state’s power, the sort whose thoughts and plans lie beyond your power to guess at.
“Well, maybe useful, but you have to hitch it to reality. We’re not a research center—in part perhaps, but we have other facets you will have to experience for yourself.”
Mustafa helped me discover these facets. He vouchsafed me passage to the other shore, from enemy to ally, and all I had to do was wait to be told the details of my mission.
We knew about him before he arrived, from old files in the archive, but ordinarily we wouldn’t place much faith in them. We knew how they were written. As al-Adl sighed:
“Torture, fabrication, and filth.”
But nor was he much impressed with what I gave him, selecting from my report only the most obvious passages, those whose meaning was plain. I had written:
What Mustafa Ismail and his associates achieved evokes both a legend and a scientific fact. The legend is that of the Merry Men who banded around Robin Hood, and associated with this legend is a scientific fact, to wit: psychologically and physically, men require an activity that might theoretically be beyond their capabilities. This ‘merry’ part of man, this ribaldry, must be sated, which explains why, for instance, the male prefers war over dialogue. Castrated by civilization, this aspect of his nature may find its outlet in addiction—to sex, to sport, to drink—but others can only fill the void by engaging in a rebellion that liberates them from authority.
My superior described what I presented to him as ‘a sentimental report.’
And although in a professional context the phrase was meant harshly, it pleased me. Perfect as a cryptic title for a book. Perhaps I’d use it, would agree to the terms offered by Anwar al-Waraqi, owner of a printing press who was seeking to rise a rung on the ladder of his trade and take on the title of publisher. He thought the stories I told him about what went on in the Palace of Confessions would make a good book, showing how things really got done in this country.
“And anyway, brother,” he’d said, “it’s a chance for us to get out of here! See the world a bit before we die.”
I would make al-Adl a character, would overstep the bounds and write his name. Who would ever believe that Nabil al-Adl was flesh and blood, and genuinely occupied a position of such sensitivity? Who would ever know but members of the club, the cream of the crop? Who would ever credit that these things were real? Regardless of risk, there was no way such an artistically satisfying character could be allowed to slip through my hands. He had all the qualities to ensure the book’s success: his blind devotion to traditional values, his passion for (enslavement to) the ringing lines whose phrases, no sooner uttered, burrowed themselves inside my mind as though I was being mesmerized. Could he ever have allowed himself to sacrifice his fine-sounding ‘torture, fabrication, and filth,’ and cast around for something more in keeping with my sentimental report?
I may say that I knew him; I worked with him for five years. It was he who chose me. An official in his position has the right to choose his assistant.
*
The wording of the advertisement, torn from a newspaper, had forced me to stop and read it through:
In your own hand, write the story of your life as you see it in 300 words. You may use any literary style or approach to convey your message. Send the document in a sealed envelope to the address provided, writing below the address: c/o THE OFFICIAL RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ‘TO WHOEVER WISHES TO KNOW ME’ COMPETITION. We will be in touch.
And with that, I sent off the necessary, without the faintest idea who was behind the advertisement or what they might want with the applicants. Subsequently, I would learn to my astonishment that thirty letters had been chosen from thousands upon thousands of submissions. Let’s think clearly here: do you, as I did, send your life story to an unknown address for an unknown purpose unless you are ready and waiting to entertain a mystery? The days go by, but your enthusiasm remains undimmed. You keep your senses sharp lest the call go unheeded. And when it comes, it’s to reveal this farce: I’d always thought myself different from other people, and had made sure to keep clear of them, but I was now to find that thousands of them had had the same idea, and had been waiting to be summoned as I was!
The thirty were soon whittled down to five. Someone came along to look over the queue standing outside the door. Three years later, this person would be me. I came straight from home and joined a crowd of about forty souls all hoping to get their hands on the prize, pretending to be one of them. For exactly two hours, instinct guiding my judgment, I struck up conversation. I provoked, played on nerves: one of many tests to determine the five who would be chosen.
The final test, briefly stated, was that each of us rewrite his life story from the beginning, not necessarily with the selfsame words and sentiments we’d sent off in our letters, but any way that took our fancy—just for purposes of comparison and to make sure that our first efforts hadn’t been plagiarized or written for us by others. One of us withdrew for a reason we never had explained to us, though it was clear enough: he had no story to call his own.
I wrote:
The first time I mourned anyone was at the death of Fahmi, son of al-Sayyid Ahmed Abdel-Jawwad, and the first time I felt fear was when I read about Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis. Awaking to find that you’re an insect, and must now deal with the world on that basis, and because you know the world has no logic, and that stories are truer than reality. Then all things are possible, even things as nightmarish as this. Then The New York Trilogy showed me that meanings are tangled together and confused to an extraordinary degree, and that most likely nothing has any value. That is how I might describe my life: from one book to another, from one story to the next. I could list dozens—no, hundreds—of works, but this is not what you’re after. You want to know what happened to me in real life. Only, unfortunately, I have done nothing worth mentioning to date. Of course, I engage in the quotidian activities that keep me alive; it’s just that now, approaching thirty, I cannot think of anything worth telling. The dilemma may have its root in my attitude. There are those who can turn the simplest incident into a dramatic happening worthy of the world stage, but it is my belief that certain conditions need to be met before adventure can claim the name, that there are conditions that make a life fit to be written down. The power to breathe, and speak, and mate is not enough to make your tale worth telling.
This, in short, is my story, which you asked for; and, as you can see, it is finished inside your limit of three hundred words. And because I believe this limit has to matter to you—it was the only condition you mentioned, after all—I shall add the following: my way of thinking is liable to lead to nervous collapse, but what spares me is that Florentino Ariza is my favorite protagonist. Like me, he spends his time engaged in trivial things, waiting for his one ambition to be realized: to be reunited with his sweetheart. A lucky man, who gets what he wants.
After we had passed through a battery of tests, they gathered us together in a large room. We’d no idea what to expect and hadn’t dared ask. Not a sound. None of the usual chatter between office workers. No doors opening and closing. The person who’d escorted us to the room hadn’t uttered a single syllable. We had climbed from the ground floor to the third, then down a long corridor, and our guide had pointed to the far end of it and walked off. A room, empty but for five chairs.
I hadn’t been able to get a precise fix on al-Adl’s age; his features were so bland that it was difficult to form impressions. He inspected us, our files between his hands, then spoke two words, no more—“Khaled Mamoun”—before turning to exit the room, leaving the door open. I went out after him and shut the door behind me, making sure it did not slam. I fancied that there