Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard Page B

with talk, I shouldn’t have acted as if we had an intimate, close relationship which didn’t exist—I went too fast; I had formed my plans alone and quickly, à la Bassam, without caring about what she might have experienced in Marrakesh, a story that didn’t exist. Judit saw me as I was, a youngstranger who was holding her too tight. Maybe she was scared. She told me it was horrible, the way it felt, after the attack, the square that had been so bustling where everyone acted as if nothing had happened without believing it, where all of a sudden the huge machinery for enchanting tourists had ground to a stop.
    She said actually, you know, in Marrakesh I saw your friend, Bassam, the one who was with us the other night.
    As she said that she looked me in the eyes. I wasn’t sure if she really had an intuition about what that meant. It was unimaginable, in any case. Unimaginable to think that she could have come across, a few hours later, one of the people who had made the bomb explode in that café. Despite all the clues I had had, I couldn’t bring myself to realize it. That this attack actually existed, beyond the images on TV, was unthinkable. That Bassam could have participated in it without talking about it to me was, essentially, almost impossible.
    Judit didn’t say it’s strange he was in Marrakesh, when we had seen him the day before without him mentioning his trip.
    I walked her back to her hotel. Judit was distant, she barely opened her mouth the whole way, I tried to fill in the silence by speaking the whole time, which was probably not a good idea. My chatter seemed to force her even further into a disturbed silence.
    Sometimes we sense the situation is escaping us, that things are getting out of hand; we become afraid and instead of calmly looking, trying to understand, we react like a dog caught in barbed wire, thrashing about madly until it slices open its throat.
    My anger was a panic, it had no other object than to conquer Judit’s coldness. I used her gift as a target, the book by Choukri of which I’d read five pages.
    â€œIt’s a disgrace,” I said, “how a Moroccan Muslim could write such things, it’s an insult.”
    Judit said nothing, we were arriving at the Grand Zoco just before the gate to the old city. She just looked at me civilly; to me it felt like a slap.
    I sank into an idiotic diatribe on this novel that I hadn’t read and its author, a poor specimen, an illiterate beggar, a degenerate, I said, and the more absurdities I emitted, the more I felt as if I were drowning, floundering in a sea of stupidity while Judit, still so beautiful, was walking on water. I was sweating as I dragged the wheeled suitcase, in the end she didn’t have a backpack but a bitch of a wheeled suitcase and as a good escort I had insisted on pulling it myself. I was out of breath, I couldn’t continue my speech, which was becoming sporadic, there were too many thoughts in my head: the agitated swirling of my confused movements was pushing away my life raft. I sensed she had just one desire, to reach her hotel and get rid of me, to forget the long train trip, to forget Marrakesh, to forget me and catch her flight, and deep inside, in my innermost depths, I knew she was right. I wanted to seem literary and interesting, I continued my speech, holding forth as only a good male chauvinist can, I said, you should read Mutanabbi or Jahiz instead, that’s real Arabic literature, Choukri isn’t for girls. I had just shot a bullet—not in my foot, but smack in my head. This time Judit’s look contained complete scorn. She said, yes yes, perfunctorily, and if I’d been the least bit courageous I’d have chucked the suitcase, stopped, let out a long string of curses and said sorry, let’s stop everything, let’s rewind, let’s act as if I hadn’t said anything since the start, as if I weren’t obsessed with you, as