“Tell me, are they kind to you?”
Rezk raised his head and saw with astonishment that Hillali’s gaze had disappeared behind the dark glasses. Those two black spots, large and glinting, resembled the visual organs of some fantastic creature and seemed to emit a powerful and insidious cruelty; they hypnotized him momentarily. Then he sniffled, relaxed his arms and legs and grinned wanly at the somber carapace that housed the old man’s eyes.
“Who, Excellency?”
“All those people you are watching. I don’t want to see you fall into some kind of trap. Don’t trust them; they can be very nasty.”
“It’s not like that. On the contrary, they are very good to me. Still, they seem to believe that I don’t love them.”
“But, in truth, you do love them, don’t you?” asked Hillali in the tone of someone seeking to wrest the last words from a dying man.
Rezk nodded imperceptibly in a sign of agreement; then he closed his eyes in shame, as if confessing his sympathy for the city’s seditious youth concealed some defect, some abject meaning difficult to explain. He expected a reprimand, but none came. The silence grew, and he had the impression that the chief of police had left the room, carrying his secret with him. He reopened his eyes, saw that his benevolent torturer had not moved, and in a pathetic voice he asked:
“Is there something wrong with that, Excellency?”
Hillali hesitated for a few seconds before answering.
“You may love them, my son! It will allow you to observe them more closely. We don’t have anything personally against these people.”
On reflection, the young man’s love for the sworn enemies of the powers that Hillali was responsible for defending, far from thwarting his plans, filled him with an odd sense of relief. What a wonderful easing of his remorse! So, this is how Rezk had managed to overcome his horror of his mission — by dispensing his kindness to those very people whom his disloyalty would lead to the gallows or the dungeon. Such a precious gift was more than Hillali could have asked of fate; and even though he felt tragically excluded from this love, his heart basked in the warmth of its radiance.
“Well, you may go now. Is there anything you need?”
Rezk stood.
“No, thank you, Excellency!”
Hillali rose, came around his desk, and approached the young man; for a moment they remained silent, one next to the other, as if united by a precious and unbreakable bond.
“See you tomorrow. And may God keep you, my son!”
Rezk leaned forward to kiss Hillali’s hand, and Hillali had the distinct impression that he carried out this ritual gesture with particular fervor, as if he had sensed Hillali’s pain and wanted to give him yet another pledge of his affection. He thought that all was not lost, and his heart trembled with unexpected joy.
When Rezk went out onto the street, a winter sun, warm and gentle, was pouring down on the city, plating the façades of the houses with wide patches of yellow light. This magnificent luminosity had a calming effect on the young man; he felt himself come alive again. Now that his report to Hillali was finished, he had nothing to fear from the day’s adventure; he could go wherever he wanted and even forget the role of informant he had taken on almost as a dilettante, without believing in it wholeheartedly. In his own eyes, his perfidy only truly began when, alone with the police chief, he was forced to inform him of everything he had seen and heard during his outings the previous day. The rest of the time, until the following day, he was capable of regaining his honor and taking the law into his own hands. Brooding over his hatred of Chawki, he began combing the city for him. He needed to fan this hatred by laying his eyes on his worst enemy: he felt goodness and love overwhelming him and he did not want to allow himself to fall under their spell, which would make him weak. He rejected peace and refused to pay its price, which was forgiving the insult. He would never forgive — he had to hate Chawki and, through him, the thousands like him who defiled the earth as cruelly as a plague; it gave his life meaning and bolstered his pride. After a time he realized his efforts were ridiculous: it was too early for Chawki to be out and about. This realization darkened his mood. Nonetheless, he continued to walk aimlessly, head bent, pained and distraught, like a drug addict suffering from withdrawal, urged on solely by the strength of his hatred.
Suddenly his face lit up and he smiled as though he had seen a long-awaited and much desired apparition. He had just recognized Teymour in the person walking about twenty yards in front of him wearing a turtleneck sweater beneath a sports jacket and beige gabardine trousers, very narrow and extremely modern in cut. Rezk only saw him from behind, but he identified him immediately because of his stylish attire, which was second to none. Teymour was ambling lazily in the sun, stopping from time to time to examine, with an ecstatic gaze, the slightest oddity on his path, like a traveler for whom all the attractions of a city are as yet unknown but who wants to grasp its hidden beauties. Rezk’s first impulse was to go up to him and speak to him, but his natural shyness stopped him; he slowed his pace and began to follow him at a distance, in such a way that Teymour would not notice him. In doing so, he was in no way thinking of spying on him. It was something else that pulled him along in the young man’s wake: the simple pleasure of seeing him move about in these alleyways broken up by sheets of sunlight, like an ethereal creature from a wonderfully pleasant dream.
Unaware of the police chief’s speculations about him, Teymour was strolling with a clear conscience and a soul
freed from the terrors that had assaulted him on his return to his native country. Incontestably, he was far from imagining that he was suspected of building bombs. Since his meeting with Imtaz, his thinking had undergone a marked change; he was now making fun of his own behavior during those first few days, and he retained of this short period the shame of a man recalling a humiliating incident of his teenage years. He couldn’t get over the fact that he had been foolish enough to let himself be influenced by the city’s hideous outward appearance, that he could have lacked imagination to such an extent. At the moment he was eager to forget his prestigious time abroad with its long trail of easy pleasures in order to devote himself as quickly as possible to the new mysteries lying in ambush for him in the shadow of these dilapidated walls. The sleepy alleys, the shops where no one rushed to enter, the houses with their closed shutters seemed to contain all the pleasures that would soon be his through daring and guile. He was delighted to imagine that young beautiful women, frustrated in their sexuality, were on the lookout behind these ever-closed shutters, dreaming of secret and divinely romantic embraces. He felt himself transform into a love burglar — breaking and entering intimacies reputed to be unassailable in order to extract their fiery riches. He was already attempting to locate the houses where he could carry out his burglaries when he perceived the whispering of female voices above him; he raised his head, hoping to catch a glimpse of the features of a face or the stealthy complicity of a glance, but just then a bicycle sped past and skimmed him, spun around and stopped suddenly, blocking his path.