meaningless definitions of our trade bestowed on me by Abdel-Qawi.
With childish malevolence, al-Adl was trying to embroil me in an enmity with Mustafa, but I ignored it. I didn’t enter into the conversation, hoping that Mustafa would be aware just what I was offering him. But he did not take the bait. Instead, he set about destroying my pet theory, giving al-Adl what he was after:
“I’m no reformer or political leader. I just rob rich people because they own what’s worth stealing, and maybe because they don’t miss what’s gone missing. I don’t mean whether or not they’re psychologically affected, of course. That’s not my point. It’s just that with a little pressure they manage to turn a blind eye to what’s been stolen—and they don’t report it, which is how I manage to avoid situations like the one I’m in right now.”
“But our investigations show you gave some of the money you stole to the poor. That proves you were attempting to turn yourself into a legend, to be whispered about by the people. . . .”
“Contrary to what you believe, I’ve no sympathy for the poor. In my view, they are largely responsible for their condition. There is something called the human will. If those who possess it don’t use it to escape their predicament, then they’ve no one else to blame. I worked harder than you would believe to plan and carry out each theft. Do you think I’d do all that for the sake of some pauper who just sits there whining day and night? Plus, I don’t consider what I’ve done as something wrong that I must atone for, nor am I so dead to the wellsprings of satisfaction that I have to get it from making others happy.”
The interview would come to an end, and his words would echo in my mind, so that it was no hardship to rewrite them when I returned home, adding to them my own interpretation of how the interrogation was proceeding, the questions that Nabil al-Adl should have asked or that he’d asked at the wrong time.
How did you come to take up thievery?
How did you come to justify it?
The truth is that it becomes easier when you define your options quickly. Abandon whatever resists you and take what comes to you. To turn failure into success—to transform from one thing to its polar opposite if need be—is a power you gain by looking hard at your disappointments. Where does it come from, this power of transformation? From university professor to thief. From lawful to illicit. This is our nature; if you are not aware of it, you will be lost—an astonishing mix of earth, and water, and fire. I am testing myself, nothing more. Later, perhaps, I shall become something quite different.
Can this be mine? Can I transform? I appreciated how difficult it would be, the transformation that Mustafa—who, for all his symbolic violence, was a traditionalist—had made from good to evil. A human story repeated a million times over, his own personal contribution a reversal of mankind’s general law: the evildoer who gropes his way toward good. He had his own private concepts, and there were no ethical concerns to hamper his transition from one code of conduct to the next.
I proceeded in a daze: no signpost to teach me good from evil. Over and over, I reread the thoughts of the philosophers and thinkers, yet the distinction remained elusive. And I came to believe that they, like me, had not been able to separate the two principles. Then I understood that to rise above this system one must first pass through it, one must experience good and evil for oneself, and that I’d been nothing but a fool to believe that observation and reading could be fit substitutes for getting involved. Such lies. Writers are liars. Fools like me. They stick to the shore and write down their fantasies—and those fantasies took me in. I thought them the product of experience, when they were just the product of impotence and fear.
In your victim’s home, do not act like a blundering thief driven by resentment to wreck and destroy.
Treat the site of your burglary as though it were your own home. Do not hurt the feelings of others by violating their privacies unless you must prevent them reporting what has happened.
Maintaining a respectful distance between yourself and those whose homes you invade ensures that you retain control over feelings that should not be allowed to guide you in those moments and thus spoil your work.
Mustafa Ismail
The Book of Safety
3
I am the chance at deliverance that Sawsan al-Kashef hoped for. I did not hang the photograph of her with her lover right beside her wedding portrait on the wall of her home simply in order to prevent her husband reporting the burglary. If that had been all I was after, I would have threatened him with other, more important documents. Was it a coincidence, his total absence from her secret album, from the pictures she’d stockpiled from different events: at school, on the beach, trips to Europe, alone in a bar with only a glass of beer for company, dancing with a friend at a wedding while the newlyweds’ relatives looked on grimly?
It was my decision to restore her to how she had looked at no more than seventeen, two fingers placed in her mouth (most likely an attempt to whistle); and up above, on one of the balconies, a figure pointing down to her; and on the balcony opposite, a man and woman sitting close together, his arm around her neck, and in front of them two cups of tea on a small table. The Seventies—I reckoned it from the clothes and a freedom whose fragrant breeze I almost scented as I studied the details. Sawsan al-Kashef’s secret album, and its incongruity beside the scowling portraits on the walls, ushered me into her story. How was it that life had changed for her to such a degree?
To protect the reputation of the al-Adl family, what Mustafa testified to that day was not to be made public, a secret preserved by three who kept their pledge: the thief, the interrogator, and the transcriber. But I’m an author now. What do they expect? It means nothing to the writer that you make him swear by honor, integrity, or ethics. Writing, for those initiated into its secrets, means nothing if not the betrayal of what is stable and immutable. And why should Nabil al-Adl believe that his family is so exalted that any mention of it should be scrubbed from the transcript of the interviews? More importantly, Sawsan al-Kashef’s story and what happened to her are vital in clarifying the reasons that led Mustafa Ismail to embark on his project as a whole. And so: I spill.
Mustafa knew nothing of the link that bound my boss to that home. His Book of Safety didn’t cover coincidences like that. And so he didn’t understand why the interrogator was so vexed that he’d exposed that woman’s secrets to her husband in such a ruthless fashion. But as I saw it, he wouldn’t have cared even had he known. He had his convictions, and these made him a believer in what he embodied.
Every home I entered brought me one step closer to what I did not know.
The only sentence concerning that incident that I entered into the transcript of his confessions. Al-Adl made his wishes quite clear as he left his desk for the sofa in the room’s far corner. He plucked the pen from my hand, capped it, and laid it on the paper before me. To the page that would remain blank, I apologized. That evening I was to enjoy being an audience and nothing else—a child whose father reads him a story before bed. But what about my fingers? I laid them against my thigh, tapped out a tune that was buzzing around my head, whose title and composer I’d forgotten.
Nabil’s voice, apologizing to Mustafa for the interruption:
“Please go on. Sorry.”
Several jobs in, my comrades had their instructions off by heart—what we wanted and what we couldn’t use; what we mustn’t touch; what, if we took it, would implicate us in a situation we couldn’t deal with. There are some things whose loss people are unable to forgive, usually when under some form of compulsion: important documents, guns. We steal what can, with a little menacing, be forgotten. My colleagues carry out their tasks as befits a contemptible band of thieves, while I wander monk-like through the home, feeling out its detail. At first, this involved no more than the search for documents—blackmail material—but it soon became an end in itself. I came to love these close inspections of how our victims lived, and the experience taught me to make quick and accurate judgments of their homes. Here, with its predominantly feminine touch, the woman is in charge.