‘Why wage these fake wars then?’ I asked.
He replied angrily, ‘Give me an honest war to end my life with. Do you want me to die in peace like any other dog?’
I talked with Al-Firsiwi for more than an hour, as if I were meeting him in a dream. Every now and then he pointed out events that linked me to him, as if everything had ended a long time ago, as if he had really disappeared for good. I was listening to a voice talking to me about the Firsiwi who did not kill Diotima, the Firsiwi who had mysterious love affairs and wrote poems about the death of love, the Firsiwi who buried Bacchus in the courtyard of an obscure mosque in the blueness of the mountain. He talked about the Firsiwi who did not like his life at all.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the name or the family it connects me to or the village where you’re looking for me. I don’t like the Rif, which is supposed to be a lost Eden but is nothing more than a passage for wind. I don’t love Diotima who stole her means of death from me, or Hans Roeder who swallowed my poems. I only like this blindness that protects me, this darkness that resembles a huge gate that the Creator closed on me to make it possible for me to do as I please, far from spies and the curious.’
At some point I ended the conversation, but the voice stayed close by, as if Al-Firsiwi were standing behind the disintegrating wall of his old family home.
‘Are you here?’ I asked him.
After a moment’s silence he replied, ‘Yes, I am here in the heart of darkness.’
I jumped into the house through the collapsing window and ran in all directions, entering rooms without doors and ceilings and making formless birds fly away in fright. I asked him again, ‘Where are you, are you here?’
His voice reached me from afar, through the phone held tight to my ear. It said, ‘I’m in the courtyard of the mosque where Bacchus is hiding, lying down after having spent a long time standing on hard stone. One day my remains will be mixed with his: me, a representative of the human race in its eloquent rags, and him a representative of forgotten imagination, of the relationship between dreams and granite. Don’t forget to visit me from time to time. Not for my sake but yours, for the sake of the frail thread that mocks us.’
When the call cut off, I was in the middle of the ruined house. I was overcome by a feeling of fear and desolation that compelled me to quickly head out to the nearby field, to collect my strength and get away from the place as fast as possible. I wanted to get rid of the phone, but I felt as if it were stuck to my ear and had become part of my facial features.
I walked in the road that ran through the village all the way to the cemetery. As I got in my car, I felt I was looking at this place for the last time.
When the storm surrounding the manhunt for Al-Firsiwi abated, I was able to see things somewhat realistically. He had put an end to a period of struggle and violence, both overt and covert, replacing it with a period of calm that was suitable for a time when so many people were scheming and profiting silently, with a kind of belittling indifference.
The Zaytoun Hotel reopened during the tourist revival when it did not matter who benefited behind the scenes. What counted were the newly opened roads around, outside and within the city. Guesthouses multiplied, as did business in traditional crafts. Buying power grew and property revived. Troupes to perform religious songs and chants were formed in this forgotten city. There might have also been some hidden scandals that made people pronounce the hawqala, appealing for God’s help, without the sparks of anger in their eyes disappearing. Eventually, Al-Firsiwi’s disappearance marked the withdrawal of the tragic from public life. There was also a large-scale movement in the city to please those who whimpered and whined. Yet I was not tempted to return to the hotel, despite my half-sister and her husband’s insistence. I could not forget the sight of my mother sitting in the hotel lobby nor get rid of the sense of Al-Firsiwi’s spirit controlling the place. It seemed to me that a return to the hotel under its new direction would put me in direct confrontation with two gigantic beings I would be unable to face.
Reality, however, is not always as simple as expected. In this flood of changes that brooked no challenge or opposition, the state saw fit to submit Al-Firsiwi’s mosaics to forensic examination in Italy. A delegation of well-known archaeologists travelled to Rome, taking Al-Firsiwi’s bag with them. There the pieces were individually examined, and the final report categorically concluded that each of the 13,624 pieces was from a genuine Roman mosaic that had originally represented Hylas, the companion of Hercules. It was different from the mosaic currently located in Walili, which showed Hylas in a struggle with two nymphs, one holding his chin and the other his wrist. In this mosaic, one nymph gave him a drink from a decorated cup while he embraced the other and looked angrily at a tiger about to pounce on the two nymphs. The design also showed a scene similar to the mosaic visible to this day: the creeping hunter, the dead bird, the trial, and the hungry tigers savaging the guilty hunter. About 2,000 pieces were missing to complete the design and assemble it again.
I called my father many times on his mobile phone in a desperate effort to talk to him. My purpose was not to inform him about the report, nor to express my tremendous happiness at this miraculous achievement, but to beg him to reveal to me the unique personality that extracted from Hylas’s mosaic, the mosaic of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi and Al-Firsiwi struggling against the serpent of the Valley of Death, as well as all the other designs he used to decorate the Zaytoun Hotel. If he was that unique person, why did he not tell me? Why did he spend years changing the course of this archaeological imagination to direct it into his own personal legends, without ever saying anything about it?
I sent Fatima an e-mail and attached that story with the relevant questions. She replied that Al-Firsiwi had done nothing but repeat what humanity had been doing since time immemorial — reproduce a single creation in different scenarios and personalities. I considered her answer a philosophical ploy to be done with a topic that did not interest her. I began having nightmares in which I was standing in the middle of the crumbling house, surrounded by dust, smashed ceilings and frightened birds, while Al-Firsiwi’s face kept appearing and disappearing in the midst of the ruins, his voice getting louder and then weaker. In the distance I could hear the sound of collapsing buildings or explosions, I could not say exactly which. Every time I woke from this repeated nightmare, I felt immense regret for having failed to get close to Al-Firsiwi and understand him. I was sorry for merely considering him a colourful persona, a callous acrobat who knew how to step on words and emotions while maintaining his own balance and calculated chaos. Then I saw the paradox in a journey like Al-Firsiwi’s. I had considered it confused and disconnected, while in reality it was extremely coherent and methodical, its links connected by flawless logic. I came to the conclusion that the true meaning of any life was this mysterious logic and nothing else.
In an effort to put an end to the confusion that overwhelmed me, I went to Al-Firsiwi’s house and tried with my sister’s help to find something there: papers, poems, a will. We found nothing but an open box with a single piece of mosaic inside it and a copy of the poetry book published in Frankfurt. In another room we found one of the letters I had sent to him from Germany, in which I accused him again of having killed my mother. In the wardrobe we found nothing but a rustic djellaba he had kept from his teenage years. As I pushed the djellaba aside, I felt a solid object behind it. When I took the djellaba out of the empty cupboard, the statue of Bacchus, as I had known it, was clearly visible, with his dull gaze and the bunch of grapes hanging over his shoulder.