Ibrahim spent five weeks in hospital. All of us — his mother, Haniya and the twins, Ahmad Majd, Fatima, and myself — visited him every day, monitoring his condition that was critical until he had been through six operations. While he was in a coma, a leading newspaper published his photo under the headline: Lawyer Ibrahim al-Khayati Target of Assassination Attempt by Anti-Homosexual Group. When Ibrahim recovered, the police questioned him at length about his sexual orientation. He strenuously confirmed that he was straight, as he had done when interviewed after Abdelhadi’s suicide.
Ibrahim’s mother, who constantly repeated that she knew him best because she had given birth to him, had a stroke of genius. She sat on his hospital bed one evening and spent a long time staring into her wounded son’s eyes. She began laying out her plan for Ibrahim in veiled words and tear-filled sentences. Ibrahim responded with an appeasing gesture and a few words. ‘OK, I agree. Don’t torture yourself. I completely understand. I agree.’
‘What are you agreeing to, my son? I haven’t said everything yet.’ Finally she spat it out. ‘I want you to marry Haniya, so that Essam and Mahdi can be looked after by you. That’ll put a stop to all the gossip and give me peace of mind before I die.’
Ibrahim knew full well what awaited him. He signalled his acceptance with a wave of the hand and gave his mother permission to act as she saw fit. He felt that the arrangement fitted in totally with everything else. There was no better way to avenge Abdelhadi’s suicide, and there was nothing in his life that did not reveal to him, on a daily basis, that step by step he was drawing nearer to this destiny, submitting to the inevitable.
When, months later, the door closed behind Ibrahim and Haniya for the first time, he was nervous and embarrassed. He almost choked on his feelings, until he turned towards her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face angled slightly towards the wall. His heartbeat quickened because in her isolation, she looked like Abdelhadi in the melancholy of his song.
Casablanca was still joking about their marriage when Ibrahim received another terrible shock, the death of his mother, which hurt him like a painful amputation. The morning she died, he was awakened by the cries of Haniya, Essam and Mahdi shouting, ‘May God have mercy on the Hajja!’
‘What are you doing in the garden? Why don’t you keep still so I can understand?’ he asked.
Haniya then stood before him and told him his mother had been playing with Essam and Mahdi in the garden and collapsed. She now lay dead, her head in the water of the swimming pool and her body stretched on the lawn. ‘Listen, invoke God’s name. Your mother has passed away.’
Ibrahim said impatiently, ‘No one dies like that. Mother’s playing, she’s just playing!’
When he raised her head from the blue of the swimming pool, she seemed to smile. He got ready for her to jump to her feet cackling with laughter, as she would do to amuse the twins, unconcerned that she was stiff and cold. At that point, Haniya and the maids, wailing loudly, came and picked her up. They carried her to her room and laid her carefully out on the bed, as though they had long been trained for this.
Ibrahim buried his face in his hands and relived, as if standing under a gentle shower of rain, the details of the life they had been through together: her milk, her fears for him, her tears, her devastation at the loss of his father, her silence, her games, her happiness, her misery, her presence on the edge of his bed until he went to sleep, her stories, her dreams, and her skills at fighting poverty and time. He remained in that position until Haniya reminded him angrily that death was a believer’s duty and if life were meant to last, it would have lasted for Prophet Mohammed. Ibrahim replied, distressed, ‘But Prophet Mohammed is not my mother!’
After the funeral rites were over, Ibrahim entered a black box where he lost his ability to reconcile with life. He turned inward and dwelled on his conviction of the futility of a life of delusions. This was before he submitted to the resignation that dominated the scene and impacted our whole generation, a mixture of dervish tendencies, secular Sufism and new-age spirituality. I was at his side during that difficult period and took advantage of his spiritual predisposition to reveal that I was meeting Yacine as a child who talked to me about everything, as if he had not crossed to the other side. Ibrahim accepted and approved my experience, confirming that souls meet in total freedom independent of our ephemeral bodies. Whenever the police called us to resume the investigation with new information related to terrorist organisations, Ibrahim, in all seriousness, begged me not to tell Yacine, as there was no need to bother souls with what we did or did not do.
4
I met Layla for the first time one quiet morning in the lobby of the Hilton. She was absorbed in a book as people came in and out of the hotel with their luggage and I approached to make sure it was her. Sensing my presence, she lifted her head but did not give me a chance to talk or introduce myself and burst out saying, ‘You must be the journalist who’s covering Saramago. It’s great, really great, that you’ve come early. It’s a good omen to meet a journalist who arrives early. An interview? A newspaper interview with Saramago? Forget it! He’s the type who believes that what he writes is all he needs to say. There’s no point insisting. Hold on, use a hunting technique. Track the prey then pounce. Or maybe he’ll decide on his own to grant you an interview. Try and talk to him; cajole him or trick him. You must have read his books — or at least I hope you’ve read them. I don’t think it’s possible to talk to a person like him about anything else. He doesn’t talk much about the weather! I’m reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ for the thousandth time. Believe me, out of all the books I’ve read, there isn’t one I enjoyed more. You know what? The subject of the book doesn’t matter at all. How Jesus was born, how he grew up and faced life’s questions, how he met God and how he met death. The story isn’t like in the Gospels, but as Jesus might have lived it. What are the Gospels anyway? Are they the book, or Jesus as he lived or might have lived? None of this matters at all. What matters is the prose, the way words and sentences become more important than the narrative, a purity that gives you the sense of beauty in the abstract, without subject matter, or it’s its own subject matter. Do you understand that?’
I had been straining to interrupt her dense stream of words and finally managed to get a word in. ‘Yes, yes, I understand completely. I’ve also read Blindness for personal reasons to do with my father, but it depressed me so much that I stopped reading for a few months.’