Rezk had remained breathless and trembling before the awful gratuitousness of that spit. For an instant he was seized with the desire to run after Chawki and beat him to death, but he was still too young, too weak to tackle such infamy. He swallowed his anger to rush to the aid of his hapless father whose face, dripping with saliva, expressed an anguished surprise without the slightest trace of rage or fury. Over the next few days he kept this surprised expression, shaking his head often, like a man undergoing a cruel interrogation. It was as if he were attempting to grasp the mysterious reasons that had led a stranger to inflict such an insult. This effort seemed to take up all his time and energy; he refused to eat, would look at his wife and children in silence, and then start to rub his face energetically with a bit of rag as if a few drops of the fateful spittle were still stuck to it. He died a few weeks later, without having said a word, simply shaking his head one last time in a sign of total incomprehension.
Rezh closed his book and tucked it away in his jacket pocket, like someone indulging in a criminal act. He did not know why, but he felt some embarrassment at the idea of being caught educating himself in a foreign language. Looking around, he noticed that the garden was now completely deserted. The vagabonds, disturbed by the light of day, had abandoned it to go rest in more suitable places; as for the little cigarette-butt scavengers, once finished combing the paths, they went off about their business. Rezk shuddered; he suddenly felt very alone sitting in the damp wind coming off the river. With a feverish gesture, he wound his woolen scarf tightly around his neck and stood up. It was time for him to make his daily report to Hillali, the police chief. This degrading occupation was a constant reminder of his hatred for Chawki because it was to his father’s premature death that Rezk owed this abasement and servitude. The poverty into which they had been driven then was nothing like what they had known in his father’s lifetime, when good spirits and a carefree attitude had reigned supreme. Rezk had to leave school to take a job as a laborer in the factory, but his fragile health made him a very poor workman and after a short while he was laid off in a dangerously weakened state. It was his mother who had saved them from starvation by doing poorly-paid housework for some of the city’s middle-class families. The ups and downs of employment led her one day to the home of Hillali, the chief of police. Hillali was touched by her devotion to keeping his house, and he offered her his protection and advice. An upright man with an extremely generous heart, he had done more than just show an interest in the widow; he had also taken care of her children, especially Rezk, first by urging him to continue his studies, and then, a few years later, by providing him with the job of informant, an occupation that required no physical effort, but simply some contact with the city’s intellectual rabble suspected of hatching conspiracies against the government. His gratitude to Hillali had forced the young man
to play the stool pigeon, a role whose usefulness he seriously doubted; it seemed more and more like something his benefactor had invented to help him out. Indeed to this day he had not been able to uncover the slightest hint of a conspiracy. It even seemed as if the shady-looking young men whom he was assigned to keep an eye on, eavesdropping on them in public places, were completely unaware of the tyrannical powers that obsessed the police chief and against which they were supposedly rebelling. Rezk was now almost certain that all those young men were conspiring with just one goal in mind: to find a girl to make love to. But he did not dare say as much to Hillali, afraid of sullying the seriousness of his mission with such a frivolous piece of information.
Rezk walked along the boulevard planted with scrawny dwarf palms that stretched for about a hundred yards along the river. This boulevard, a decorative set piece, had cost the municipality a fortune. On one side it was lined with brightly colored detached houses that belonged to the city’s elite. During the day one met hardly a souclass="underline" most of these mausoleums’ residents led an idle and sedentary life. Every now and then a servant shaking out a sheet or a rug could be seen through an open window, but that was all. As every morning, Rezk dreaded his interview with Hillali because he had no serious information in his possession, and so there was no haste in his step. He was thinking about what he had just read in the book by the foreign author, dead for two centuries, some of whose ideas stirred secret feelings in him. After having walked along half of the boulevard as slowly as a Sunday stroller, he turned into a dirt path on his right and strode with more determined steps toward the police chief’s house. The official lived in a recently-constructed apartment building that had pretensions to modernism; rather than balconies in the old style, each of the apartments had a glass-enclosed veranda. Rezk started up the clean and well-maintained marble staircase and climbed to the third floor, then rang the bell and waited, catching his breath.
The man who came to open the door was thin and flinty, about sixty years old, tall, clean-shaven, with closely cropped grey hair. He was wearing a severe navy blue wool suit, an embroidered vest with mother-of-pearl buttons, and black patent leather lace-up ankle boots. These clothes, with their outmoded appearance, gave his figure a quality of ascetic nobility that commanded respect. His gaze, tinged with a kind of haughty solemnity, contained a glimmer of benevolence when he recognized the young man.
“Greetings, Excellency!” said Rezk. He bowed, took Hillali’s hand, and brought it to his lips in a gesture of filial devotion.
“Greetings, my son!”
Hillali closed the door and led the young man into his study, an unpretentious room with an almost administrative austerity. Even though he was tormented by the absence of any significant news to offer up for his employer’s shrewd analysis, Rezk nonetheless had an agreeable sensation on entering this room; as every morning, his gaze was immediately drawn to the huge mahogany bookshelf with its rows of fat bound volumes; he was fascinated by their titles’ clever brevity. The contents of this bookcase, which he never tired of contemplating, cast a magic spell on his mind and made these secret meetings, which his absurd occupation as stool pigeon imposed on him, somewhat less oppressive. The proximity of these books on law and sociology, subjects about which he hoped to learn more in the near future, increased his esteem for the police chief. For, despite what the mocking, slandering mob thought, Hillali was no fool. His learning, the scope of his knowledge, would have surprised all those of the city’s residents who imagined, wrongly, that no provincial police chief could be of much value to his profession. They did not know that it was precisely such awareness of his own worth — along with his disdain for the baseness of the regime and those who sang its praises — that had gotten him relegated to this backwater. In truth, his arrogant attitude had made him not only lose favor in the government’s upper echelons; he was also suspected of lending a willing ear to the unsavory opinions of the opposition. For this reason, he found himself obliged to be extremely vigilant in tracking down the subversive activities that had, over the last few months, taken a particularly fearsome turn in his own district. The recent rash of abductions of local notables placed him in an extremely dangerous position; the slightest lack of determination on his part could be interpreted as tacit complicity with the government’s adversaries. Unfortunately he lacked any real proof of a conspiracy, or even anything that would allow him to identify its instigators, and so could not crack down on them. Having studied revolutionary terrorism in every shape and form, in every era, he was convinced these disappearances were linked to a political conspiracy; to attribute them to some common criminal was out of the question: criminals of that sort rarely run the risk of transporting and hiding a victim’s corpse. In his opinion, only an organization obsessed with an ideal and dedicated to disorder was in a position to carry out such crimes. It was therefore only natural that his surveillance be directed toward certain citizens whose social behavior and anarchical opinions had long attracted the inquisitive attention of his detectives. The result of this strict surveillance was hardly encouraging; the people being watched used their excessive spare time to hide out and plot, far from the prying eyes of the police. Hillali knew they frequently got together at night, and that they often changed their meeting places, but he was still hesitant to intervene by arresting the most seditious among them. He was not at all sure that he had the situation under control.