I HAVE HAD no news of Josué for ten days. Myriam disappeared on a regular basis, then came back to tell me about her meetings with the League of Women for Peace. Karim insisted that we do business together, and he stank as badly as ever. Madeleine, a prostitute, sat with me sometimes and told me she liked me and how she was willing to do it for free with me. The lizard kept an eye on me. The White UN workers avoided me, I didn’t know why. Yes, I did know, and I was not saddened. As if it were in the order of things, the order of my life. Stay in the margins like a note, an observation next to a page that others have written, and that frightens me, because if I begin to write there too, the words running with blood and emotion will paralyse me and I’ll suffocate. Give nothing of yourself, and don’t let go. I prefer to comment on life as I observe it. The lizard doesn’t believe me. The Primus is warm, the noodles are cold, the Vietnamese cheese comes from the last century. I should try and find some satisfaction in those things, but I can’t. I should make Sayed an offer: I’ll take over management of his restaurant and turn it into a French bistro. When I make an effort, I can cook reasonably well.
Sayed stopped by. I asked him to sit down, poured him some Primus, and told him about my idea for the bistro. He smiled. I understood that the cheese was Vietnamese and the cuisine vaguely Asian because his wife was Vietnamese. For a Kurd to be married to a woman from Vietnam, and running a hotel in Bunia, did not particularly surprise me. There are waves of migration, exile, and conflict. If you spend time analysing the world’s uproar, classifying and understanding the succession of waves, everything finds its explanation and becomes normal. But what about the encounter of two individuals, a union born, perhaps, of two sets of tragedies? “It’s the first time you’ve asked me a personal question.” Sayed lowered his eyes, as if to reflect a moment, then his face brightened. The story began on a beach, a chance meeting on the sand. This beach wasn’t at rest, waiting for the spring tides. This one, a Spanish one on the Canary Islands, was punished by a storm that had capsized trawlers, tuna boats, and improvised craft loaded with illegals fleeing the conflicts of Asia and Africa. That night there were more than two hundred human castaways, including Sayed, fleeing Kurdistan. Fifteen years earlier, a seven-year-old Vietnamese girl was taken on by a French ship, dropped in a boat-people camp in Malaysia, and then accepted as a refugee in Spain. To show her gratitude, she became a Red Cross volunteer, then an employee. They offered her the Canaries with their sandy beaches. She loved the sea until it started sending her corpses and refugees with nothing but the clothes on their back. The night of the storm, she discovered a single survivor: Sayed. She decided to care for him. He lowered his eyes, raised them again, and smiled. “You know the rest of the story.” No, I didn’t. Of course I could imagine it and construct it by myself, without hearing it and its experience first-hand. But I wanted to know the rest, the first kiss, the first night, the thrill of it, the look in the eye, the words, the silences, the rustling of the sheets, the colour of the room, the birdsong and the calls in the street outside, one shy, the other bold, each in turn. I wanted to know everything about their life. How many lives did I pass by because I didn’t ask the simple questions, “How, when, where,” instead of just “Why?” “You’re not asking me why we’re in Bunia instead of Barcelona? I’m going to tell you even if you don’t ask.” Maïko started hating the sea. She’d spent ninety days in a skiff, and her mother had been eaten by a shark. In the Canaries, Maïko kept picturing pale corpses riding the waves. Anything but the sea, she decided, and Sayed agreed. They chose Africa because they feared the West that had little respect for their beliefs and customs. They moved to the very centre of Africa, as far from the tides as possible. “We got here in 2002. Two days before the war began. We bought the hotel, no, Maïko bought the hotel through one of her cousins who owned a Vietnamese restaurant in Kinshasa. What Kabanga did to those children is terrible. I could tell you, but it would have to stay between us. Kabanga is still just as dangerous.”
What about the first kiss? Sayed blushed. It was on the beach. A kiss on the forehead. The second was on the cheek, at the hospital. I won’t tell you about the third.
On the deck of the Bellevue, overlooking the bay filling with the sea and with it, peace and silence, I decided to save the world. Isabelle and Emma went by and smiled. A smile speaks. But I didn’t answer.
I walked down the avenue de la Libération, went by the Café de la Paix, then past the United Nations offices to the market, ordinary in its poverty. Nothing was pretty there or worthy of admiration. Dust, car horns, kids selling mobile-phone cards and counterfeit Marlboros. Little slices of life. It’s hard to explain, but those things delighted me, they reassured me, though the country, the city, the world filled me with despair. Yet one lived within the other. A unique, independent molecule didn’t make me smile, though I was touched by a child smiling at me in this city I hate. How could I reconcile my visions of the world, tenderness and pain, lies and fervour, innocence and brutality?
I went back to the hotel and asked Sayed. Not the question—but questions.
“If you haven’t found it by yourself, I’m afraid you never will. The answer is too simple: you have to love someone. Take Maïko and me. I understand why she can’t stand the sea, the boat people, the beaches of the Canaries heaped with corpses. Maïko understands my nostalgia for the snow-covered mountains and she knows I dream of the sea that brought me to her. I know she misses Saigon, and she knows I dream of Mosul. We talk about it, we look at pictures, shows on TV, and we have tears in our eyes. If you only knew how we weep over this terrible world that brought us together and the two countries we had to leave. But in the end, we have to accept this twisted world because it brought us together, it gave us a house, a place to live.”
Sayed got up to serve the customers, his eyes were misty, hardly the usual attitude of a Kurdish warrior. To love someone, what a stroke of luck, like an indulgence or a blessing that protects against sin and evil deeds, damnation and suffering, the way faith makes believers generous. But loving someone involves risk. I need to find my children. And run the risk of loving. I always think of the danger in love and never of the boldness. I’ll start with Josué and the children.