“So they’re all wrong?”
“Maybe they don’t have the same god. Maybe there’ll be a war of gods at the end of time. Ever think of that, Rachid?”
“You’re blaspheming. There’s only one God. The imam says so.”
“The Jews and Christians say so too. So tell me why you’re not a Jew or a Christian, Rachid? And why Christians and Jews aren’t Muslims?”
“You’re driving me crazy, for God’s sake!”
“And what about the others?”
“What others?”
“Buddhists, animists, atheists, agnostics.”
“They’ll go to hell along with the Jews and Christians,” Rachid decided.
“That’s a lot of people. We’ll be in good company in hell.”
“Impossible.”
“If the god of the Jews is right, we’ll burn in flames, because neither of us are Jewish. If it’s the god of the Christians, then we’ll go to hell with the Jews.”
“Allah is the one true God.”
“One chance out of three, Rachid, once chance in three. It’s mathematical.”
“God doesn’t play with dice!”
“Einstein thought the same thing, Rachid. May He hear you both! Besides, maybe it isn’t the same one.”
Big Brother began to laugh as he looked at Notre-Dame over there, so near, and so far away. Sometimes seagulls would fly up the Seine and get lost. They were having fun too, in a way, they were playing as they flew over the work of Maurice de Sully and Louis VII. An endless project; its construction was still going on. It seemed to him that generations were disappearing into the limbo of history, into the nocturne of memories.
“What about people before us, Rachid? What do you do with the Arabs from before Islam? Will they go to hell? Mohammed hadn’t taught them Allah existed yet. Mohammed himself didn’t exist yet. What do you do with those men, Rachid?”
“They’re dead, that’s all.”
“That’s a lot of dead people, don’t you think?”
They crossed the quay and entered rue du Fouarre.
“Fouarre means straw.”
Big Brother had already gone on to something else. Rachid was still on their discussion about God and his worshippers. It was bothering him some. If Big Brother was right, then nothing made sense. But Big Brother must be wrong, no doubt about it.
“Straw Street. Funny, isn’t it, how the streets of Paris always have a hidden meaning, a new story. Here they used to cover the street with straw so the students could sit down on dry spots to take their classes. The whole street was covered by those studious people. It was closed to traffic. And if a cart happened to go through during the classes the monks were teaching, the students would beat up the driver and they’d dump his load on the ground. To avoid fights, the city authorities would close the street off with chains. Classes began in the morning, after mass. Since bums would come and sleep on the straw at night, they had to kick them awake before they changed the straw for the students in the Middle Ages. Hence the expression the last straw.”
“How d’you know all that?”
“Books. Man’s best companions.”
Now they were walking along rue Dante.
“Dante is supposed to have lived here after he fled Florence.”
“Florence?”
“Shit, man, you really should get out of La Courneuve from time to time!”
Big Brother traveled a lot, crazy as it may seem. He had disability papers that allowed him to take the train free and gave him discounts on most airlines. He had been wounded in Sarajevo while defusing an antipersonnel mine. At eighteen, he had joined UNPROFOR and was sent to Bosnia. After he was discharged, he lit out for Italy, as he told Rachid, who’d never been out of the projects of La Courneuve: The only Italian he knew was pizza and spaghetti. What’s more, he got bawled out by Big Brother whenever he cut his pasta before he gulped it down.
He had traveled, he said, to set his mind aright after the horrors of the war. A kind of convalescence. Rachid couldn’t really remember all the places on his journey. But he did know Big Brother had a disability card. And he was very discreet about his war injury. He never talked about it. When Rachid insisted, Big Brother would tell him to read The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. But Rachid never opened a book, everybody knew that. Actually, that was the problem. If Rachid had the slightest bit of interest in anything written, he would have understood his older friend a lot better. But since hanging out with Big Brother had always paid off, Rachid just said forget it, even if his ignorance could fill the Seine.
“In 1309, Dante leaves Italy. He comes here, to Paris, to attend the lectures of Sigier de Brabant. Right here, on the straw of rue du Fouarre, he absorbs those odious truths, demonstrated with syllogisms.”
Rachid was feeling the pangs of hunger. A sweet, heady aroma of kebab was tickling his nostrils: The only truth he managed to put into a syllogism was not at all odious to his belly.
“I’m starving.”
“One should have an empty belly and a light mind.” Big Brother began to recite, in a loud voice, right there in the street: “Is this the glorious way that Dante Alighieri is called back to his country after the affliction of an exile that has lasted almost fifteen years? Are these the wages of his innocence, obvious to one and all? Is this, then, the fruit of the sweat and fatigue of his studies? Never will the man who is an intimate friend of philosophy suffer the disgrace of being chained like a criminal to be rehabilitated!Never will the man who was the herald of justice, and was offended, accept the idea of going to his offenders as if they were his benefactors, to pay tribute! This is not the way to return to one’s homeland, father. If you or someone else can find a way that does not blacken the reputation and honor of Dante, I will take it, without hesitation. If there is no honorable way to see Florence again, I will never return. What then? Can I not see the sun and stars from any corner of the world? Can I not, under every part of the heavens, meditate on the truth, the most precious thing in the world, without becoming a man who has no glory, dishonored in the eyes of the people and city of Florence? Even bread, I am sure,will not be lacking.”
Big Brother fell silent.
Big Brother was born and grew up in Algeria, in Cirta.
When he was ten years old, his father, an immigrant he had never known, sent for them, his mother and him, to come live on the outskirts of Paris thanks to the new policy of family entry. Ever since then, he’d always felt exiled: Hence his excessive love for Dante and Joyce, his pantheon of the banished.
Above all, he was drawn to lives that had been ripped away from their childhood, broken by political events, wars, famine. Or simply alienated through an absence of attachment to the environment where they were born and grew up, a bit like Joyce fleeing Dublin, which had become too narrow for his genius. He himself felt that France had become a suit that restricted his movements; this explained his enlistment in the army at eighteen and then his flight to Italy, a copy of The Divine Comedy in the pocket of his khakis.
“To return to our conversation, you should know, Rachid, that Dante put men with no religion in Purgatory, that antechamber of Paradise. And do you know where Mohammed is, in The Divine Comedy?”
“No.”
“In hell! Even Averroës — Ibn Rushd to us — the second Master after Aristotle, is in Purgatory, ahead of our Prophet. You see, Rachid, you have to relativize things. Always relativize.”
Big Brother liked to talk. He would hold forth whether or not Rachid was following what he was saying. In fact, he kept himself somewhat aloof in the projects. He didn’t hang out with anybody and was utterly discreet about his little trips back and forth to Paris. Naturally he needed Rachid as a foot soldier, but the boy was kind of simpleminded: Only the neighborhood imam had any concern for him. The other kids his age made fun of him and kept him away from their business — making little deals, stealing motor scooters, taking night joyrides that let them extract a little pleasure from their sordid lives between the huge buildings of the project where the only flowers that sprouted from the asphalt were the ones they smoked at night when they hung out and bullshitted for hours.