was asked of him.
The next day, I received a plastic card, blank but for my name. No logo, no phone number, no job description, just, in its center, engraved in black: Khaled Mamoun. The first of the avatars of a mystery which I must accept without question. No one ever brought it up. They acted as though everything were completely normal. I couldn’t tell: was this deliberate disregard or was it stupidity? Was it, indeed, the long habituation that leaves the strange familiar? Would a time come when I would cease to be brought up short by the thought of my existence within an institution unlisted as part of the state establishment, headquartered on a patch of wasteland, and ringed by a wall shielding the mounds of sand we were forbidden to approach?
But perhaps I was overdoing the astonishment. What did I know of the world, anyway? Other eras have played host to dinosaurs the size of buildings, and seas that part to swallow kings. What’s one more wonder? Why did I obsess over peripheral details and miss what my coworker Abdel-Qawi called ‘the crucial point’:
“Why can’t you just accept that we’re as high as it gets—the agency that only takes on the most critical and sensitive cases?”
Logically speaking, I agreed with him, but one thing stood between me and acceptance:
“But whose agency?”
An exasperated sigh, then he would pull himself together, invoking the patience of a father confronted with an offspring’s mulishness, a father who believes such patience is the way to ensure that his son learns all there is to know:
“Just so you’ll stop pestering me, then. We are an agency tasked with looking into and keeping tabs on everything—on whose behalf I couldn’t say for sure, but what’s certain is that we are on the side of good against evil. Not that I’m bothered myself, but I’m telling you to help you get past this silly muddle you’re in. Why do you ask questions that can’t help you? This place has been around forever, as far as I know. It’s a miracle we were chosen. And quite honestly I reckon you’re asking the wrong thing. Instead of ‘What’s our job?,’ ask yourself ‘How am I doing?’”
A pointed observation, and one I had heard on numerous occasions. He would repeat it robotically.
It was either that, in the instant he was made, air had outweighed the other elements in his body, or that he was able to manipulate this balance for his own purposes. He moved just like it, light and quick. His presence took me unawares: I would hear neither door opening nor the sound of footsteps. He had a physical slightness at odds with his morbid craving for food. After he had departed my life, a caricature of the man lived on in my mind: using a chicken bone to write or comb his hair, outfits accessorized with vegetables—a collection of contradictions called Abdel-Qawi. For all the settled calm with which he was endowed and which imbued his features, he was the most trying person I have ever met, flitting without warning from mood to mood. He would decide to speak and it would be impossible to interrupt him: loud tones to make his point, frequently lapsing into silence midway through his inexhaustible stock of stories for the air to fall still once more. Before we bonded, this behavior had incapacitated me. This reaction of mine astonished him, and he regarded it as evidence of an unhealthy absentmindedness—or worse, a disregard for others. And, as always with him, what he believed was not up for discussion.
I couldn’t make up my mind which position best suited him. Uncategorizable in a place whose function was to categorize and judge. Which is why I left and he stayed on. His experience enabled him to sidestep the difficult question. Commenting on his behavior, I once told him, “We are obliged to be serious.”
And he replied, with a simplicity that defeated my assertion, “Says who?”
Is this why everybody loved him?
We got caught up in a friendship, ignoring, like teenagers, our lack of anything in common. With the self-centeredness of someone on a voyage of discovery, I didn’t care; I needed a guide through the initial stages, and for the duration of that period there was nothing I hid from him, with the exception of the fact that I was writing down everything that happened.
I was, as they say, swept away: bewitched by his regional dialect and the childlike laughter that vied with his constant chatter, and obsessed with the riddles he left dangling over my head.
“They called me today from Alexandria. Try and guess what’s happened.”
I had no way of knowing who ‘they’ might be, but I had learned not to ask, because he would manage to sidestep my inquiries by deploying one or other of his extraordinary stratagems. Family, I guessed, his relationship to them reduced to financial assistance. But as I grew closer to my other colleagues, the mystery surrounding Abdel-Qawi—his roots and family—only deepened. The way he spoke about Alexandria gave the impression he’d lived there as baby and boy, but the occasional southern phrase left the connection he sought to imply open to question. Everyone had a different story for him, which they’d swear to as if they’d know him since childhood—one of the entertainments of our Palace, built as it was on secrets and paradox. Stories from the world of hackneyed melodrama: on the run from a blood debt unavenged; no, his family had been killed in mysterious circumstances; no, they hadn’t been killed and there was no blood debt, either. It was simpler than that: he dumped them in order to live as he pleased. A family of exaggerated indigence, vast in number. A father whose favored pursuit was screwing his wife, siring seven more besides our man. Should Abdel-Qawi shoulder another man’s burden? Even nobility has its limits—and to describe him as cowardly just because he took a pragmatic view would hardly be fair. The long and short of it: he saves himself or they take him with them. And what good would that do?
People loved him, and they cared about him, and whenever he disappeared—on a mission or for personal reasons—our institution lost its soul. Even so, I found someone leaning in with a word of warning:
“Watch out for that one.”
One sentence sufficient for fear of him to meld with my friendship; for everything he did to take on an aura of awe and respect. Yet I was not wary. I represented no threat to anyone, him least of all. I played the part of someone passing through, and placed myself outside the fight. What I genuinely feared was the terrifying emptiness that surrounded him and into which he dragged anyone who associated with him: no history, no present, and no future—just the moment in which he was. And when he withdrew, it was like he’d never been.
After the curtain had come down, and while the players were bowing to the audience, it seemed to me suddenly as though the five years in which I’d known him had been a mirage. I would walk for hours and suddenly come to, almost out of my mind, without a single fixed memory—each frame erased before it could be linked up to the next. And not just memories of him, but of everything he touched, everyone who’d shaken hands with him, everyone to whom I’d told his story. Had it happened, or was it just a flight of fancy drawn out longer than was proper?
Does prison guarantee that your sins will be paid off? When we step outside the law, does this mean we have a debt toward society that we must pay? And why does the regime, too, not pay its debt toward society? Why is it not held to account as we are?
These are questions it is imperative to answer before undertaking any act of rebellion. Your conviction that you are in the right will grant you an incredible freedom of thought, such as you never dreamed you possessed, and will assist you in planning every detail—starting with selecting your victim, and by no means ending with how to emerge intact from various desperate situations and dead ends.
Mustafa Ismail
The Book of Safety
2
Do what you have to.
An almost meaningless line, one that belongs on paper, in the pages of some novel or movie: a thriller’s hero addressing his sidekick in Delphic terms, an indirect order to kill, to burn all the files.
Nothing to be proud of that this fantastic sentence is my father’s legacy to me. No money, no memories, nothing but five words bequeathed to my mother, a woman no less peculiar than him. She considered them a message