Part 2 (1/2)

I usually have great difficulty sleeping in noisy environments, I said, so it's fair to say I envy such people, too. She brightened and said, Well, sometimes it's an absolute necessity. By the way, do you prefer English or French? I recalled that the announcements on the intercom were already in three languages, as we flew over Long Island; I told her my French was poor. She asked where I was from. Oh, Nigeria, she said, Nigeria, Nigeria. Well, I know a great many Nigerians, and I really should tell you this, many of them are arrogant. I was struck by her manner of talking, the unapologetic directness of it, the risk of alienating the person she was talking to. She was at an age, I supposed, at which she had long ceased to care what other people thought. This directness could certainly be taken in the wrong way if it came from a younger person, but there was no such risk in this case.

Ghanaians, on the other hand, Dr. Maillotte went on, are much calmer, easier to work with. They don't have such a big concept of their place in the world. Well, I suppose it's true, I said, we are a bit aggressive, but I think the reason is that we like to get ahead, make our presence felt. We think of ourselves as the j.a.panese of Africa, without the technological brilliance. She laughed. She put her book away, and when the dinner cart came by, we both selected the fish option on the menu-microwaved salmon, potatoes, dry bread-and ate in silence. Then I asked what she did. I'm a surgeon, she said, retired now, but I did gastrointestinal surgery in Philadelphia for the last forty-five years. I told her about my residency, and she mentioned the name of a psychiatrist. Well, he used to be there, maybe he's gone now. This is all so long ago, anyway. Did you have any rotations at Harlem Hospital? I shook my head and told her I'd gone to medical school outside the state. I only mention it because I consulted there a few times recently, she said, I'm retired, but I wanted to partic.i.p.ate in a voluntary thing, so I've been in Harlem. I was a little unfair earlier, she added, I should say the Nigerian residents are excellent. Oh, don't worry about it, I said, I've heard much worse. But tell me, there aren't many American residents at Harlem Hospital, are there? Oh, they have a few, but yes, a lot of Africans, Indians, Filipinos, and really, it's a good environment. Some of these foreign graduates are a lot better trained than people who went through the American system; for one thing, they tend to have outstanding diagnostic skills.

Her diction was precise, and the accent only vaguely European. She told me that she had done her training in Louvain. But you must be a Catholic to be a professor there, she said with a chuckle. Not so easy for an atheist like me: I've always been one, I'll always be one. Anyway, it's better than Universite Libre de Bruxelles, where no one can achieve anything professionally without being a Mason. I'm serious: it was founded by Masons, and it's still a kind of Masonic mafia. But I like Brussels, it is still home, after all these years. It has its advantages. For one thing, it's color-blind in a way the U.S. is not. I have been spending three months each year there since I retired. I have an apartment, yes, but I prefer to stay with my friends. They have a big house, it's in the southern part of the city, in Uccle. Where will you be staying? Ah, right, well it's not far from there, you just go south from Parc Leopold, and that's the neighborhood. If you had a map, I would show you.

Then, as if the talk of Brussels had gently pushed a door in her memory ajar, she said: Belgium was stupid during the war. The Second World War, I mean, not the First, I was born much too late for the First. That was my father's war. But I was just about to enter my teens during the Second World War, and these d.a.m.ned Germans, I remember them coming into the city. The blame really is on Leopold III; he made the wrong alliances or, I should say, he refused to make alliances, he thought it would be easy to defend the country. He was an old fool. There was a ca.n.a.l from Antwerp to Maastricht, you see, and a line of concrete fortifications, and this was supposed to be the perfect defense, this line. The idea was that the water would be too difficult to bring a large army across. Of course, the Germans had planes and paratroopers! All it took was eighteen days, and the n.a.z.is marched in, and stayed, like parasites. The day they finally left, the day the war ended for Belgium, was the happiest day of my life. I was fifteen, and I remember that day perfectly, I will never forget that day as long as I live, and I'll never be happier than I was that day. And here she paused, extended her hand, and said, I suppose I should introduce myself. Annette Maillotte.

Then she went on, falling deeper, it seemed, into her memory, telling me about her days as a young girl, how difficult things had been during the war, how Leopold III had bargained with Hitler for better rations, the devastation of the countryside afterward, when straggling figures covered the landscape and went from house to house begging for food and shelter, her decision to go into medicine, then her subsequent training in surgery, which was unusual for women at the time. Somehow, as she spoke, I could still see in her that resolute girl.

You must have been determined, I said. Well, no, no, you don't think of it like that, she said, you just find what you must do, and you do it. There's really no opportunity to stop and praise yourself, so I won't say determined. I nodded. Listening to her, I felt as if the objective fact of her age-if she was fifteen when the war ended, it meant she had been born in 1929-stood in an indirect relations.h.i.+p with the fact of her mental and physical vitality. At that moment, the flight attendants came to take our trays away, and Dr. Maillotte took up her book again. I lowered the light above my seat and, closing my eyes, imagined the frigid nighttime Atlantic racing by below us.

Although I was tired, I managed to sleep only fitfully, and woke again after a few hours, with a sore neck. Dr. Maillotte must have slept as well, but by the time I woke, she was again reading. I asked her how the book was. Yes, it's good, she said, nodding, and went back to reading. I signaled that I had to go to the bathroom and apologized for disturbing her. She stood up in the aisle, and was still standing when I came back. I have to keep the circulation moving, she said, especially important when you're as old as I am. When we sat down again, she said: Do you know Heliopolis? It's in Egypt, just outside Cairo. Helio-Polis, it means city of the sun, sun city. Well, I told you I was going to stay with a friend of mine in Brussels. His name is Gregoire Empain, and we've been friends since we were young, maybe when we were both twenty, and it was his grandfather who built Heliopolis.

If you ever get a chance to go there, you should. It's a fantastical place, and edouard Empain, or Baron Empain as they call him, was the engineer who designed and built it. That was in 1907. It was a real luxury capital, broad avenues, big gardens. There's a building there called Qasr Al-Baron, the Baron's Palace, that was modeled on Angkor Wat in Cambodia and also on a Hindu temple, a specific one, but I don't recall the name. And you know, this is now the most important suburb of Cairo; in fact it's within the city boundaries now. The president of Egypt lives there today. But the Empains are in a tussle with the Egyptian government, because part of Heliopolis belongs to them, and they are trying to claim it, or at least get compensated for it. The family is still wealthy, anyway, one of the wealthiest in Belgium. Baron Empain was a great industrialist-not just Heliopolis, he built the Paris Metro as well, when the Belgians wouldn't let him build one in Brussels-and his son was an industrialist also. The grandson Gregoire is modest, he doesn't like to be in the limelight. But Gregoire has a brother, Jean, and he's a different story.

I used to be crazy about skiing, and my husband, too, all my children-and we went to Mont Blanc with Gregoire, Jean, their sisters, and we skiied at Chamonix, at Megeve. Not Negev, like in Israel, but Megeve, close to Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps. And the Empains had this large chalet there, and all sorts of people showed up, you know, Jean-Claude Aaron, Edmond de Rothschild of the French Rothschilds. And this always amuses me to think of it, but once the queen of Sweden came, and the poor thing, she came with her husband and, you know, I don't think she had any idea the man was a complete f.a.ggot. It was obvious to everyone, but she was oblivious, and they just carried on. Anyway, we went, but it wasn't because these people were there, it was just good skiing. And I needed to get away from America from time to time, this terrible, hypocritical country, this sanctimonious country. I really can't stand it sometimes. Do you know what I mean?

But let me tell you about Gregoire's brother, Jean. He is not as quiet as Gregoire, quite the opposite: he likes to do deals, to jet-set. He's the one who inherited the t.i.tle. He's Baron Empain now, and sports cars, royal families, billionaire friends, that's his kind of thing. But poor fellow, you know, he was in all the papers in the late seventies. I think it was in 1978 that he was kidnapped, you see, and held for two months. Gregoire, the whole family, they were of course frantic. The kidnappers were French, and demanded something like eight or nine million dollars, a ridiculous amount of money, but not impossible for the Empains. The family was willing to pay. But there had been a lot of kidnappings at the time, all through the seventies, and the French government had a strict policy of no negotiations, no payments. So these kidnappers, I think one of them was called Duchateau-it is funny that I remember that, but you have to understand, we were following this story so intensely day after day in the newspapers-what Duchateau and his mates said was: Money brings liberty. I mean, it's ridiculous, they sound like philosophers, but they really meant it, and when the money was not forthcoming, they sliced off Jean's little finger and put it in an envelope and mailed it to his wife. They cut it off with a kitchen knife, without anesthetic, and threatened to amputate additional fingers for each day of delay with the payment. But the negotiators refused, and somehow, the kidnappers didn't follow through on their threat. Eventually, the police were able to ambush them, and they killed one of them, and captured the other two, and Jean was released.

I tell you, that was two months of h.e.l.l for the family. And Duchateau, the kidnapper, had written somewhere: These are tiny little slips of paper, but they mean everything, money brings liberty. If you see Jean now, there's a little k.n.o.b where that finger used to be. But the worst, if you ask him, was not that amputation, it was the cold. I think he was terribly cold for the two months; they made him sleep in a tent in an unheated room. And light deprivation, so he wouldn't recognize his captors. Cold and dark. For these tiny little slips of paper, right?

It was morning. We were flying with a bank of clouds above us and a bank of clouds below, and Europe was close. I asked Dr. Maillotte to tell me more about her children. They are all doctors, she said, all three of them, like my husband and me. I think it's what they wanted, but who knows? My eldest, well, he was thirty-six last year when he died. He had just finished his residency in radiology. Cancer of the liver, and a quick decline. It's an impossible thing to go through, watching a son die. He was married, and had a three-year-old daughter. It was impossible; it still is. The other two: one is in California, one is in New York. They are the younger ones. And my husband is with me in Philadelphia, well, we're just outside Philadelphia, and he's a cardiologist, and he just retired, too.

A silence fell on us. And you, she said, tell me, why Brussels? It's a strange place for a vacation in winter! I smiled. Cozumel was the other possibility, I said, but I don't know how to dive. Well, she said, here's the number at Gregoire's. Friendly people, you know, they don't put on airs. I'll be there for six, maybe eight, weeks. You should come around and have dinner with us. I thanked her for the invitation and told her I would consider it. And, as I looked at the number she had written down for me, I thought about the Paris Metro, that expression of optimism and progress, and about the ancient city in Egypt that had also been known as Heliopolis, before Baron Empain built his version, and of underground travel, we millions moving around underneath cities, inhabitants of an age in which, for the first time, traveling great distances beneath the earth had become normal for humans. I thought, too, about the numberless dead, in forgotten cities, necropoli, catacombs. The pilot announced the final approach for landing, in English, French, and Flemish, and as we broke through the lower bank of clouds, I saw the city spread across the low landscape.

EIGHT.

Mayken, the woman who owned the Brussels apartment, had offered to pick me up from the airport for an additional fee of fifteen euros. The other options, she had told me on the phone, were to take a taxi for thirty-five euros, or to take public transportation and risk being robbed. And so, when I arrived on the overnight flight, she was waiting in the arrivals lounge with a sign that had my name on it. Her bleached hair sat on her head like yellow cotton candy, and looked likely to lift and sail away if caught in the wind. I bid goodbye to Dr. Maillotte, and walked over, waving until Mayken spotted me. She was in her fifties, friendly, but with a sharp business manner that, as we later went over the short-term lease papers-pages and pages of picayune legal detail-became, with her bouffant hair, the only visible part of her personality.

The original idea of Brussels, she said, as we drove out of the airport, was that it should be equally Flemish and Walloon. Of course, it's not that way anymore, she went on, now it is ninety-five percent Walloon and other French speakers, one percent Flemish, and four percent Arab and African. She laughed, but quickly added: These are real numbers. And the French are lazy, she said, they hate working and are envious of the Flemish. I'll tell you this in case you don't hear it from anyone else.

I looked outside the window, and in my mind's eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders' retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: the Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half century ahead and, better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment.

Mayken's English was slightly inflected with wavering Dutch vowels. I looked out on both sides of the speeding car, and the Brussels of my experience came back to me. It was my third visit to the city, but the previous ones had been brief, the first having been more than twenty years before, during a two-day layover on the way to the United States from Nigeria when I was seven. At the time, my mother had said nothing about her mother, though my oma had moved there by then. The details of that journey were buried in my memory until I saw the Novotel Hotel near the airport, where the airline had put us up. How ideal it had all seemed back then: the black Mercedes-Benzes that were used as taxicabs at the airport, the strange food at the hotel buffet. It was a glimpse of impressive sophistication and wealth, that first experience of Europe. Outside the hotel, I had noticed the order and grayness, the modesty and regularity of the houses, and the cool formality of the people, against which American life, my first real contact with which came a few weeks later, had seemed lurid.

It is easy to have the wrong idea about Brussels. One thinks of it as a technocrats' city, and because it was so central to the formation of the European Union, the a.s.sumption is that it is a new city, built, or at least expanded, expressly for that purpose. Brussels is old-a peculiar European oldness, which is manifested in stone-and that antiquity is present in most of its streets and neighborhoods. The houses, bridges, and cathedrals of Brussels had been spared the horrors visited on the low farmland and forests of Belgium, which had borne the brunt of the countless wars fought on the territory. Slaughter and destruction, ferocious to a degree rarely experienced in history, had taken place on the Somme, in Ypres, and before that, out at Waterloo.

Those were the theaters, so conveniently set at the intersection of Holland, Germany, England, and France, in which Europe's fatal tussles had played out. But there had been no firebombing of Bruges, or Ghent, or Brussels. Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.

During my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. It was, in some ways, like a city in waiting, or one under gla.s.s, with somber trams and buses. There were many people, many more than I had seen in other European cities, who gave the impression of having just arrived from a sun-suffused elsewhere. I saw old women with dotted black patterns around their eyes, their heads swaddled in black cloth, and young women, too, likewise veiled. Islam, in its conservative form, was on constant view, though it was not clear to me why this should be so: Belgium had not had a strong colonial relations.h.i.+p with any country in North Africa. But this was the European reality now, in which borders were flexible. There was a palpable psychological pressure in the city.

I'm sure Mayken's ”four percent Arab and African” was intended to be snide, but from what I saw, it might have been a modest estimate. Even in the city center, or especially there, large numbers of people seemed to be from some part of Africa, either from the Congo or from the Maghreb. On some trams, as I was to quickly discover, whites were a tiny minority. But that was not the case with the morose crowd I met on the metro some days after my arrival. They had been to a rally at the Atomium to protest racism and violence in general, but in particular a murder that had happened much earlier, in April of that year. A seventeen-year-old, after refusing to give up his mp3 player, had been stabbed by two other youths at the Gare Centrale; this had happened on a crowded platform, during rush hour, with dozens of people around; the fact that no one had done anything to help the boy had become a point of discussion in the days following the murder. The murdered boy was Flemish; the murderers, reports said, were Arab. Fearful of racial backlash, the prime minister had appealed for calm, and in his homily that Sunday, the bishop of the city had bemoaned a society so indifferent that everyone around had refused to help a dying boy. Where were you at 4:30 P.M P.M. that day? he had said to the crowded congregation at the Cathedrale des Saints Michel et Gudule.

The bishop's hand-wringing had gotten a swift and impa.s.sioned response from the Vlaams Belang (the Flemish right-wing party) and its sympathizers. Well-known columnists took a wounded tone and complained of reverse racism. The victims were being blamed, they said; the problem was not with uncaring pa.s.sersby but with the foreigners who committed crimes. It was easier to get flagged for violating biking rules than for actually stealing a bike, because the police were afraid of being seen as racist. One journalist wrote on his blog that Belgian society was fed up with ”murdering, thieving, raping Vikings from North Africa.” This was quoted approvingly in certain mainstream sources. Efforts by the Muslim community in Brussels to heal the wound, such as their distribution of home-baked bread at the public memorial service for the murdered boy, drew a furious response from right-wingers. Later, during the elections, the politicians of the Vlaams Belang recorded gains once again, consolidating their position as possibly the biggest party in the country. Only the coalitions of the other groups kept them out of power. But the murderers in the Gare Centrale case, it turned out, weren't Arab or African at all: they were Polish citizens. There was some debate about whether they were Roma, gypsies. One of them, a sixteen-year-old, was arrested in Poland; his seventeen-year-old partner was arrested in Belgium and extradited to Poland, and with his departure, some of the tensions around the case dissipated.

But there were other ugly incidents. I was there at the very end of 2006, a year in which several hate crimes had ratcheted up the tension experienced by nonwhites living in the country. In Bruges, five skinheads put a black Frenchman into a coma. In Antwerp, in May, an eighteen-year-old shaved his head and, after fulminating about makakken makakken, headed for the city center with a Winchester rifle, and started shooting. He seriously injured a Turkish girl and killed a nanny from Mali, as well as the Flemish infant in her care. Later on, he expressed a specific regret: for having accidentally shot the white child. In Brussels, a black man was left paralyzed and blind after an attack at a petrol station. The paradoxical result of these crimes was that even politically centrist parties like the Christian Democrats began to lean rightward, adopting the language of the Vlaams Belang in order to cater to voter discontent about immigration. The country was in the grip of uncertainties-the sense of anomie was apparent even to a visitor.

I went to the Parc du Cinquantenaire. It was covered in fog, but this made the scale of the monuments seem even bigger. The already gigantic arcades shot up vertiginously and lost their heads in faint white veils, and the rows of trees before and beyond them, rigid as sentries, stretched into eternity. The park, built by a heartless king, was also of inhuman scale. A handful of tourists, so dwarfed by the monuments that, from a distance, they looked like toys, roamed around silently, taking photographs. When they came closer, I heard them speaking Chinese.

It was half past four, night fast falling, and the air was misty and cold; the area just southeast of the park looked out into Etterbeek and the Merode metro station, a complex a.s.sortment of roads, tram tracks, and signs, but few people were about on Christmas Eve. In the park, right in front of the Musees Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, which I had int.i.tially taken for the better known Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, a broad-headed horse stood by a carriage marked POLITIE POLITIE, but there were no police officers in sight, and the museum was closed. Under the arcade was a bronze plaque displaying in relief the portraits of the first five Belgian kings: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, and Baudouin, and beneath it an inscription that read: HOMMAGE A LA DYNASTIE LA BELGIQUE ET LE CONGO, RECONNAISSANTS, MDCCCx.x.xI HOMMAGE A LA DYNASTIE LA BELGIQUE ET LE CONGO, RECONNAISSANTS, MDCCCx.x.xI. Not triumph, then, but grat.i.tude; or grat.i.tude for triumphs achieved. I stood under the arcade and watched the Chinese family enter their car. They drove away, leaving just me and the patient horse. We were the two living animals in that place, and with every breath cold fog entered our lungs. I was there, it seemed to me, to no purpose, unless being together in the same country, as I and my oma now were (if, that is, she were still alive), was, by itself, a comfort.

IN THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS IN B BRUSSELS, I MADE SOME DESULTORY MADE SOME DESULTORY efforts to find her. I had little idea of where to begin. The listings gave no help: there was no Magdalena Muller in the phone book in the apartment, or in another one I consulted in a phone booth. I briefly considered visiting nursing homes; and I felt, suddenly, an irrational shame at speaking French badly and Flemish not at all. A five-minute walk from my Brussels apartment was an Internet and telephone shop, located on the ground floor of a narrow building. I visited it in the hope of doing some online searches. efforts to find her. I had little idea of where to begin. The listings gave no help: there was no Magdalena Muller in the phone book in the apartment, or in another one I consulted in a phone booth. I briefly considered visiting nursing homes; and I felt, suddenly, an irrational shame at speaking French badly and Flemish not at all. A five-minute walk from my Brussels apartment was an Internet and telephone shop, located on the ground floor of a narrow building. I visited it in the hope of doing some online searches.

The shop contained a row of gla.s.s-fronted wooden booths for phone calls and a half dozen computers. The man behind the counter must have been in his early thirties. He was clean-shaven, with a lean, pleasant face and lank black hair. He pointed me to a computer terminal near the back. I found the Belgian white pages quickly. The site came up, to my surprise, in English, and I quickly entered the search terms: Magdalena Muller. The results listed many people named Magdalena M., many others listed as M. Muller, and two hits with Magdalena Muller, but both with hyphenated last names.

I shut the site down and went back up to the counter. I communicated with the man in broken French, paying for the service, which had come to fifty centimes for the twenty-five minutes of Internet use.

I WENT INTO THE SHOP THE FOLLOWING DAY, TO CHECK EMAIL WENT INTO THE SHOP THE FOLLOWING DAY, TO CHECK EMAIL, and paid when I was done. But this time, as I left, I surprised him by asking for his name, in English. Farouq, he said. I introduced myself, shaking his hand, and added: How are you doing, my brother? Good, he said, with a quick, puzzled smile. As I stepped out onto the street, I wondered how this aggressive familiarity had struck him. I wondered, also, why I had said it. A false note, I decided. But soon after I changed my mind. I would be going into the shop for a few weeks, and it was best to make friends; and that interaction, as it turned out, set the tone the following day.

The shop was busy. Farouq, reading a book at the counter, paused to attend to the people coming in or leaving. Customers sat at all the computer terminals, and I could hear the conversations taking place in the wooden booths. I called my father's sister, my aunt Tinu, in Lagos, and friends in Ohio. I also called the hospital in New York to approve and renew some prescriptions. V.'s was among them: she'd been on Paxil and Wellbutrin, but neither was working, and I had recently started her on tricyclics. I gave the necessary permissions to the head nurse, who told me that V. had wanted to know how I could be reached. I can't be reached, I said, have her call Dr. Kim, the resident covering for me. Then, feeling the vigor of ticking things off my list, I also called Human Resources to check up on some paperwork having to do with my vacation time; I was told the department had closed early and wouldn't be open again until the third of January. I came out of the booth annoyed at this and waited until Farouq was done attending to another customer. He looked at his computer log and then at me and said, United States? Yes, that's right, I said, and you, where are you from? Morocco, he said. Rabat? Casablanca? No, Tetouan. It's a town in the north. That's it in the picture behind me.

He pointed at an old color photograph in a metal frame of a broad cl.u.s.ter of white buildings and, behind them, ma.s.sive green mountains. I said, I just finished a novel by a Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun. Yes, I know him, Farouq said, he has a big reputation. He was about to say more, but just then, another customer came up to pay for his computer use and, as he did the reckoning, collecting payment and giving out change, I caught, belatedly, the note of disapproval in his ”big reputation.” I noticed that the book Farouq had been reading was in English. He noticed my curiosity and turned it around. It was a secondary text on Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History On the Concept of History. It's difficult reading, he said, requires a lot of concentration. Not much of that here, I said. Another customer came up, and again Farouq flipped seamlessly into French, and back again into English. He said: It's about how this man, Walter Benjamin, conceives of history in a way that is opposed to Marx though, for many people, he is a Marxist philosopher. But Tahar Ben Jelloun, as I was saying, he writes out of a certain idea of Morocco. It isn't the life of people that Ben Jelloun writes about but stories that have an oriental element in them. His writing is mythmaking. It isn't connected to people's real lives.

I nodded as he spoke, and I tried to align the drab Brussels neighborhood, the hum of petty business, the boxes of gaudily wrapped sweets and chewing gum on the wall shelf with the smiling, serious-faced thinker sitting in front of me. What had I expected? Not this. A man who works in a shop, yes, a man who works in a shop that's open on Christmas Day, sure. But not this: the crisp, self-certain intellectual language. I greatly admired Tahar Ben Jelloun for his flexible and tough-minded storytelling, but I did not contradict Farouq's statement. I was too surprised for that and only offered, weakly, the idea that perhaps Ben Jelloun did capture the rhythm of everyday life in his novel Corruption Corruption. The book was about a government functionary and his inner struggle with bribe taking: What could be closer to everyday life than that? Farouq's English came out in a succession of lucid sentences as he put my protest down. I couldn't follow his argument. He wasn't saying that Ben Jelloun pandered to Western publishers, exactly, but he was suggesting that the social function of his fiction was suspect. But when I seized on that idea, he shook it off, too, and only said: There are other writers whose work is connected with everyday life and with the history of the people. And this doesn't mean they have any connection to nationalist ideals. Sometimes, they even suffer more at the hands of nationalists.

So I asked him to recommend something different to me, something more in keeping with his idea of authentic fiction. Farouq solemnly took a sc.r.a.p of paper from the desk and wrote out, in a slow and jagged cursive: ”Mohamed Choukri-For Bread Alone-translated by Paul Bowles.” He studied the sc.r.a.p for a moment, then said: Choukri is a rival to Tahar Ben Jelloun. They have had disagreements. You see, people like Ben Jelloun have the life of a writer in exile, and this gives them a certain-here Farouq paused, struggling to find the right word-it gives them a certain poeticity poeticity, can I say this, in the eyes of the West. To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely? Choukri stayed in Morocco, he lived with his people. What I like best about him is that he was an autodidact, if it is correct to use this word. He was raised on the street and he taught himself to write cla.s.sical Arabic, but he never left the street.

Farouq spoke without the faintest air of agitation. I didn't quite grasp all the distinctions he was making, but I was impressed with the subtlety in them. He had the pa.s.sion of youth, but his clarity was unfussy and seemed to belong (this was the image that came to me) to someone who had undertaken long journeys. This calmness of his put me off balance. Finally, I said: It is always a difficult thing, isn't it? I mean resisting the orientalizing impulse. For those who don't, who will publish them? Which Western publisher wants a Moroccan or Indian writer who isn't into oriental fantasy, or who doesn't satisfy the longing for fantasy? That's what Morocco and India are there for, after all, to be oriental.