TO FIND YOU

A Novel

By Elisabeth Eide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published by GYLDENDAL, Oslo, Norway, 2005

© This English sample translation by Bibbi Lee, 2005

Chapters 1, 5 and 24

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overwhelmed by everything that has held me

and everything I have abandoned

I tell myself that

love is a worry

and that I must love departure –

as both people and things become the most beautiful

when you leave them behind

 

ISABELLE EBERHARDT  (February 17, 1877 – October 21, 1904)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

 

 

 

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.

            Then he remained silent. I waited for a continuation, something more than this one short sentence, after almost three years of separation. The words were hanging between us like a lukewarm, resigned accusation. Accusation against me, who partly with energy, partly with reluctance had moved in his direction through streets of sand and dust, barbed wire barriers, an iron gate with heavy bars; against the miles travelled through the air that hung above the desert landscape with its oasis towns. I’d come here, of all places, without prior notice. Still, I was unprepared for the spontaneous judgement about my presence.

            I was travelling through while it looked as if he had settled down, well hidden in a beautiful garden surrounded by light brown walls. The roses were about to bloom and shards of glass decorated the top of the walls like uneven sword-tips. A home well protected from intruders. His judgement surprised me. I wanted to defend myself but his expression made me silent, numb and submissive.

            I’ve always had a certain fear of travel, but even more so of becoming a non-traveller. That was why I had continuously said good-bye to the rooms, the things and the people around me. The flight here was next to the last leg of my journey to my real goal. I had thought I would ask to stay with him for a week, but I was mostly tempted to turn and storm out of the gate. The man I wanted to visit was standing in front of me with his arms crossed, as if to protect himself. The situation demanded the kind of patience I didn’t have. We were standing face to face in a walled enclave of three buildings. Busy young men hurried past. He gave some quick orders; they nodded to me in passing and disappeared. Then we were alone again; he with his arms still entwined in front of him. His mouth narrower than I remembered. Was I a shock?

            “Benoit.”  

            I pronounced his name with care, breathed it toward him. I imagined that his eyes were struggling to not reveal what he was thinking as he stood there, quite close to me, with his loose, half-long, black, shiny hair. Still full and well groomed, maybe newly washed? I sniffed, but didn’t dare approach. Were his nostrils vibrating a little too? I recognized the scar at the left corner of his mouth, a trace from his childhood, like a pale streak, no more visible than a wrinkle. He’d become narrower, but not bony, dressed in a pale beige shirt that hung loosely over a pair of wide, dark brown linen trousers. He still chose soft colours when thinking about his encounter with his own image in the mirror every morning. It was his attempt at harmony in the chaos, in the disorder that he – well, I too – had often attempted.

            It had been three years since the last time. I’d left him because I had been unable to find an opening large enough to tell him of a loss of mine and also ours.

            We stood there as if rooted in place. I waited for a reason that was not being formulated, an explanation for the reluctant reception, but it didn’t come. Instead he broke the status quo and preserved the formalities of hospitality with restrained surface calm. As a newly arrived visitor from far away I was asked if I was exhausted, if I didn’t need to rest. I let myself be led. He showed me his office, where the piles of paper were nicely arranged on shelves and the desk was practically bare. Then he accompanied me past two pickup trucks and two Landcruisers, all of them with a white and green circular emblem. Assistance Globale. This name was new to me; to him it was probably an opportunity to get away from Europe.

            “Come, Iso. We’ll go to the residence.”

            He used the old, familiar short version of my name in spite of it all. The residence was an angular building at the end of the garden. A branch of a rosebush hooked my shawl. He put down my bag and saved the shawl, or was it the rose? We went up five steps and through a squeaking door to a long corridor with a bathroom at the end. A cracked sink, a rusty shower and two big water buckets with plastic ladles, a scrubbed tile floor, the window darkened by a mosquito net. Everything was clean with a raw, prickly smell of moth repellent. Farthest down the dark corridor I was shown a guest room and prescribed rest.

            Benoit then excused himself with other tasks. “You can ask Leila at the reception if you need anything.”

            At least I’d been given a name to relate to, a woman in the office building reception. Someone who could take care of my simple and prosaic needs.          

            “And you, Benoit. When may I ask you? During office hours?” I whispered when he was out of earshot.

            He turned around. “We’ll see each other tonight.”

            He closed the door to the room that would be mine for a few days. There were white sheets on a thick mattress on the floor, a low, brown chest of drawers, a small writing table and a teetering spindleback chair. Heavy, green curtains covered the single window. I made the bed, laid down to rest in the cool sheets and pretended I was blind. Blind in order to make waiting more total and the situation more open. The aggressively fenced enclave, the dark, Spartan room, the evasive looks of the man I thought I knew, all of it disappeared in a darkness lit by small, internal strips of light. That’s how I lay there, sorting my impressions in small cups of newly blown turquoise glass from the world of the seeing, outside the walls. From Tehra Bagh, the sand-blown town where I had landed early that morning and from which I had wandered for several hours, asking my way, before I knocked on the iron gate and was invited in by polite but questioning men. Yet another new place. A strange point zero, this silence I created for myself, at short intervals between traffic noise, calls to prayer, the dogs’ ill-tempered quarrels and the flies’ last sortie before the evening darkness called them to rest.

            Finally my concentration on point zero closed out the sounds. I dreamt that I was travelling with him, that I cried for attention, while he was half turned away the whole time, his eyes focused elsewhere. In the border zone between sleep and being awake, I tried to manipulate my dream, to turn him toward me, again. Toward us at an earlier stage, inquisitive and devil-may-care. Or confused and shy. When I woke up it was dark.

Leila, the receptionist, had probably gone home. It didn’t matter because I had no immediate needs for anything but him. I waited but he did not show.

 

*  *  *

 

            “You shouldn’t have come.”

            “But I am here. What do you want to do about it?”

            Once again it went unanswered. I’d slept around the clock, dreamless, and woke up surprised at myself. It was nine o’clock and breakfast was over. I sat down on the steps outside the residence to get warm in the sun. Then he came with a plate. Bread and soft cheese, two small, red tomatoes. I chose to interpret it as a symbolic gesture and thanked him heartily.

            “I’m travelling through, you see. And when I realized you were in this region, I wanted to drop by . . . to visit you. Is it difficult?”

            “No, not exactly difficult. Just very surprising. We haven’t seen each other for almost three years. Nobody drops by here. Your plane arrived before the sandstorm set in. All civilian air traffic is cancelled. And today there will be big demonstrations in Tehra Bagh.”

            I nodded, satisfied. He couldn’t just send me away then. Even if my purpose, which was to get to know him again, were thwarted, I’d have to wait for good flying weather and quiet in the streets.

            “Travelling through to where?”

            “I’m going to Aïn Sefra. From here by bus or truck, if I can arrange it.”

            Wrinkles of surprise were visible on his face. Half a smile, at last. A glimmer. As if he already knew the reasons for my going to see that special area. But he made no comment. Instead he invited me for a cup of tea in the residence living room.

            “You’ve landed in an area where war is about to break out. Again. Last week it looked a little brighter, but the battles move all the time. Nobody comes here except on strictly necessary errands. This is a not recommended place, you see.”

            I nodded. We were on his territory, populated by the bold. Someone had to help all those who couldn’t escape the war. All was most. I had seen pictures of border guards chasing fleeing families back with long bamboo sticks.

            “Yes, I understand. But can I stay for about a week anyway?”

            “Can you stand it for that long, then? Your restlessness might be dangerous in this chaos. When we’re not out on a job, we stay in here. It’s almost like living in a fortress. Do you think I like it? Strangely enough I’ve acquired a new and quite necessary patience. But you. You’ll be dissatisfied after two days.”

            “How do you know that? Maybe I’m no longer the way you knew me.”

            I waited for a why. But he turned away, like in my dream, listening toward the window, his black hair caught in a ray of sunlight. Black gold. A heart of stone. I followed his focus of attention. A chorus of voices out in the street, it rose and was silent, rose again and drowned out the gusts of wind.

            “Their cries are honouring the martyrs. All of Tehra Bagh could explode soon. The United Nations has counselled everyone to stay indoors during this procession and has asked us to be sure we have enough food, water and fuel for cars and generators.”

            One of his young colleagues came running. They needed him in the office. I stayed, alone in the living room seating area, four deep chairs and a sofa in dark wood. The voices rose again. It must be a long procession. Then more faint, gradually quieter, finally the cries were on the way elsewhere. I had read about the rebellions before I came, about the conflicts that originated farther south in the country. I wondered if the owners of the voices in this chorus had any sense of the finely honed nuances between khaki-clad musclemen with bullet-proof vests – those who were called peacekeeping forces – and the others, who had settled in Tehra Bagh and similar towns in order to get this squeezed and afflicted country back on its feet. Assistance Globale and their like. War’s indispensable clean-up crew.

            I went out into the garden. A narrow, exterior staircase went up to the residence’s roof terrace. From there I could still see them, the bodies behind the cries, the procession itself. A slow stream of trucks and pedestrians flowed through the street. Young men held big banners with portraits of equally young martyrs, dragged them forward against the wind, raised their fists against the sky while they shouted, rhythmically and repeatedly. A group of women followed calmly, most of them wrapped in black, some with only their eyes showing. Were these the people making Tehra Bagh a not-recommended area, with foreign soldiers and United Nations warnings?

            I climbed back down and approached the gate. When I wanted to draw the bolt, one of the gatekeepers that I’d met the day before came toward me. There was no question of going out, he said, in impeccable English. Certainly not alone.

            “Who is . . .?

            “In this town people grieve over two kinds of martyrs. Partly over the old ones who were killed in the big uprising ten years ago. Today it’s about them. Tomorrow there may be a more spontaneous procession with excited masses of people who are grieving new martyrs. No one knows what their sorrow will develop into. If there are a sufficient number of dead, then . . . out of control.”

            I nodded to indicate that I didn’t want to cross him. He held out his right hand.

            “My name is Khorasan. I’m an English teacher, in fact.”

            “English teacher and gate keeper, that’s an unusual combination, isn’t it?”

            “Not so unusual, not any longer. It’s easier to support a family by protecting an office like this than it is to teach the country’s young people a foreign language.”

            He expressed himself with finely honed irony. His body language also had a touch of something other than the servitude normally associated with a subordinate job. He kept a humorous tone; maybe he was acting a little in order to keep his self-respect. I glanced past him, into the little booth where he could seek shelter against weather and wind. Other than what I took to be a log of who came and went, I saw a small stack of books.

            “Have you come here as a tourist?” he asked calmly, without a trace of accusation.

            “I’m travelling through on my way to Aïn Sefra,” I said. “I may be a tourist, but I also carry some work with me.”

            Someone honked outside the gate. He got up and expressed the wish that in spite of everything I would be comfortable here in Tehra Bagh, this afflicted town with its peacefully flowering past, this centre for caravans that arrived thirsty from the unsafe roads thought the desert. Then he concentrated on opening the gate for one of the white Assistance Globale vehicles.

 

*  *  *

 

Benoit found my restlessness dangerous and unseemly. That was something new. Before he had often enjoyed it and recognized himself in my spontaneous eagerness. In this uneasiness of mine, which during the last few months had found a resonance in the texts of a desperate nomad.

            At least I can enjoy Isabelle Eberhardt’s company, I thought when after another short exchange he disappeared back to his office.

            The situation was absurd. We hadn’t seen each other for three years and we were behaving like tin soldiers. I could hardly do anything other than wait for a thaw and in the meantime plunge into the life of the nomad, make myself useful in my own way. In contemplating her texts I hoped to find a kind of tranquillity. I was on my way; I had come closer to her territories. A day and a half’s journey away was a little grave where she had rested for a hundred years. Soon I would brush the sand off a half forgotten tombstone.

            The desert had lured Isabelle Eberhardt into a joyful revolt against everything that tasted of Europe.

           

            . . . and with this inner joy at the thought that I am on my way tomorrow at daybreak and leaving everything that this evening I am still fond of, that I hold dear. But who, if not the nomad or the vagabond, can understand this double pleasure?

While my heart is still touched by everything that has held me and that I have abandoned, I think that love is a restlessness one must abandon with joy because people and things possess only a fleeting beauty.

 

I read these passages of hers one more time, searching. I thought I understood the delight and enjoyment of departure. People’s fleeting beauty was more difficult. Who or what possessed a non-fleeting beauty, if indeed it existed at all? I did not feel quite ready for such a sacrifice, but if I were forced away by a cool and businesslike Benoit, I would have to convince myself of the necessity of departure. How it would go, I still didn’t know.

            To achieve the right height at the writing table, I folded a pillow. The room had no reading light, only a garish tube in the ceiling. In a corner of the living room I found a rolled-up blanket that I placed next to the mattress. On the blanket I placed the books of and about Isabelle Eberhardt. Then I filled a slightly crooked, hand blown, dark green vase with three roses from the garden. I wanted to make the best of my stay. He would see. If he even dared come inside my door.

 

*  *  *

 

Fifteen years ago we’d met for the first time, on a church floor under the rows of benches. We were surrounded by the impatient inhabitants on the island of Maindoran. They yearned for independence from their much bigger neighbour, interior independence at least. And we had sought refuge in a church, where the ever more isolated priest had implored his maker to persuade the combatants come to some kind of reconciliation. His prayers were not silenced until the soldiers’ bullets and grenades perforated God’s house. His flock had discarded the church and was in a more precarious position demonstrating in the streets without weapons. The driving force behind this daring deed was a strong wish to be seen, filmed and listened to. Their banners with slogans written in English were addressed to an international public.

            Benoit was one of those to whom their expectations were tied because he travelled with a video camera in his luggage. His real mission was to make a movie about an orphanage supported by the French, but at that time a camera was a sign, almost a promise, to see and depict what came the owner’s way. I was there to interview a famous author who had joined the rebels.  

            We must both have been on the fringes of the demonstration when some young people began throwing apples – not rocks, but apples – at the troops that had been called out along the route. Maybe we’d already seen each other then, in the jittery swarm, half hidden behind a banner or a police cordon. When the soldiers began to shoot into the air after one of them had been hit by what he thought was a rock, the demonstrators became afraid. Some fled, others picked up real rocks, and some sought refuge inside the walls of the church.

            There, halfway under the benches, under a kind of cover at the order of the priest, we held our hands out to each other in a sort of polite greeting. It became a long handshake.

            I noticed the little runnels of sweat at the base of his nose and the spasms at the corner of his eyes at every new round of shots. His mouth formed a question but without a sound, as if the use of his voice would have made us more vulnerable even during the overwhelming machinegun salvos. I still remember every detail about his clothing. The grey-green t-shirt and khaki shorts. His leather belt with inlaid embroidery, a little worn, a darker brown than new. His eyes that sought the priest or the door when it splintered and partially gave, and that met mine, confused, full of fear, where I was on my stomach, my head tucked down toward my outstretched arms. But not all the way down, I didn’t dare not look, the events reflected in the light brown eyes with unusually long lashes, his mouth protruding with his inaudible words that made me guess that he was French; his black, shiny hair gathered in a ponytail about to come undone. His hand in mine, damp and squeezing.  I had not the slightest urge to let go; no, the long handshake wasn’t dissolved until the shooting stopped and gave way to the cries of pain from outside.

            Then there were other uses for our hands.

            We desperately tried to bandage a fourteen year old’s bleeding leg wound with strips of Benoit’s t-shirt. He recognized the boy, Mario, who cried for his mother and whom we miraculously got into a taxi and brought to the town’s only hospital. His mother wasn’t there but other relatives showed up at the hospital and looked at us as if we were responsible for the boy’s suffering.

            “What did you expect, gratitude?” He turned toward me and excused his outburst before he ran to find more survivors, as he said. Unless he was looking for Mario’s mother, whoever she was. In the chaos he gave me his bag and asked me to take care of it.

            I did as he told me and had to find him.

            I still did not know why he was there. And it proved to take a long time before we knew what had happened to Mario’s mother. That same evening a quiet procession went to police headquarters and asked them to free the cadavers they had removed. Fifteen families had to plan funerals and the government denied them the right to get together. One at a time, that’s the way it was going to be, preferably not more than three a day.

            The author I had interviewed had been arrested and that almost attracted more attention than the massacre. The airport was closed. What few foreigners were on Maindoran had to check in with the police every day. That’s where I met Benoit again. He was on his way to a funeral, dark grey circles under his eyes. The uncle of the boy Mario, whom we had bandaged a few days earlier, was being buried. Benoit and I barely knew each other but I had something that belonged to him. We agreed to meet that same evening. As we were about to go our separate ways, he stopped me and asked a little anxiously if I would accompany him to the cemetery. I hesitated. I had done nothing the last few days except wander around aimlessly or sit in my hotel room reading to calm down after the shock.

            The reason he gave was a general one. He had a problematic relationship to funerals and other grieving ceremonies, he said. Yes, he tried to avoid them but this time it was impossible. But maybe I could . . . I had met Mario too, whose mother had disappeared and whose uncle was now being buried. There was no father around. He lived with a new wife in a completely different part of the world.

            I became confused about these somewhat helpless words and convinced there was something else behind them, something that disturbed him. We accompanied each other. Mario’s uncle had been a prominent man on Maindoran. The procession filled the entire cemetery. In advance a surviving brother had urged the masses of people to remain quiet; the family did not want another bloodbath. He greeted Benoit with a strange glance at me. Benoit embraced him lightly and gave him an envelope. His hands were shaking and he looked ashamed. The man, who was Mario’s mother’s brother, told us that no one knew where she had gone. But, he said with a forced smile, they counted on her having escaped to a guerrilla base in the mountains along with a few other demonstrators. Benoit shook his hands again, visibly relieved. Mario, who was moving around on crutches, received a pat on the head.

            The ceremony seemed endless, but after two hours Benoit said he couldn’t take any more. He felt very badly and wanted to go home to his hotel, which, it turned out, was only a few blocks from mine. He would fetch the bag with the camera later, he said, I could just keep it for now. He needed to lie down now, be alone. He probably did, but he continued to address me as we walked along the streets, not to the hotel, it turned out, but down toward the sea, out on a little jetty. He asked if I had experienced any grief I couldn’t handle. He wanted to know why I’d landed on this island, why I didn’t have a steady job, when I was going home, and who was waiting for me there. I wasn’t used to being thoroughly interviewed by strange men, but he was a pleasant listener. It took a little time before I realized that the conversation was part of his character but also a turn, a manoeuvre away from himself, from the questions I might ask and to which he had no ready answers. He asked and listened; I talked. About groping around after my academic success with a half-finished piece of work that I had put at the bottom of a drawer when I learned that another research fellow had latched on to the same subject; and about how my assignments were born on impulse and achieved if I could manage to find support for them. I didn’t live a life of plenty, I said, but freedom was my luxury. I stayed away from the subject of my family life, but I did ascertain that we were both childless. Not with a single word did he reveal that he had someone waiting for him back in France. It was easier to share travel stories and plans for new trips. Vagabondage, he said in French. Vagabondage, I retorted in English and then we laughed, almost in spite of ourselves, the way you sometimes do after a funeral, and we understood that we both shared the joy of wordplay.

            We sat together on the jetty until the rocks ate into our flesh, until we could barely see the outlines of the fishing boats in the harbour. It was an hour and a half until the curfew started. Then we wandered off to his hotel without any prior discussion. We sat in the little hotel bar until it was just a little too late for me to get home safely, unless I wanted to defy the curfew. He strongly recommended against it. His room was big enough for the two of us, he said.

            I got my own bed. Between us were a meter of floor space and a table with two glasses of cognac. He invented a game as he sat there on the edge of the bed. One of us was allowed to ask the other three questions but they all had to start with the word why. Why? I asked, already using up one of mine, he triumphantly stated. Yes, because he noticed that we were both concerned with what lay behind, what forces made people behave as they did. Then he asked why I travelled alone, like he did. It invites improvisation, I said. Having travel companions often created its own enclosed atmosphere.

            That I had a husband who didn’t like to travel remained unsaid. But what about him? Well, he liked to roam on his own, but he thought maybe that was because he had not yet found the perfect travel companion. What would he or she be like? Wrong question, he retorted. Why did he look for the perfect one? I corrected. Because he was a dreamer, he laughed, a dreamer who most often wanted to go to places other people were not interested in. Like this unfortunate island. We left the game and put aside the rest of the questions. A few hours later I woke up to the sounds that seemed like repressed little moans. I listened to careful steps across the floor toward the bathroom, a glass of water being filled, maybe something taken with the water. I didn’t move and pretended to be asleep, a pensive witness.

            We were both waiting to leave and our movements were limited to the town, where we spent a lot of time together. He got up earlier than I did, but we met for lunch. After the meal we wandered around by the harbour and toward evening slowly drank ourselves into new conversations. During these late hours I expected him to reveal himself and gave him ample opportunity. But his stories were mainly exterior in nature. He explained how he wanted to participate in life, as something between a reporter and a helper, how he wanted to engage in the struggle to bring out stories that were not being listened to. He asked himself and me if it was possible to satisfy one’s restlessness and simultaneously the proclivity toward depth and understanding. An almost impossible combination, I said, a recipe for frayed souls. We chuckled and found joy in competing for strange verbal digressions. Barbed- wire souls, no, starfish.  Octopus tendencies. Profound thoughts choked in a sea of ink. No limits to the overshadowing. Well, speak then, roll up the window shades! Waiter, a black drink, to this woman’s night aspects. No, sparkling water for leaps of thought so that this man may be justified. We sat there until bedtime. He did not want to get back to the recent events that we had shared. Not that I asked directly either.

            He understood that I was almost broke and invited me to move in since we had problems with the curfew. On the third night we pushed the beds together and held each other with a sigh of relief before we got closer, questioning, carefully and playfully at the same time, in the lamplight with our eyes open – look, look what I’m doing with you now, remember this. His hands, that until now I’d experienced in light, polite touches, were now curious about all of me. I experienced something rare, a man who cried after the passion died down. We cried together, without mixing tears with words.

            On the next to last night I understood why he often talked past himself. The cognac had made me more inquisitive. It probably helped a little that I talked about my dead parents. He had no parents, he said, none that he could remember. But he thought he would try to trace his mother.

            “I don’t know whom I look like, because I don’t know them. Have never known them.”

            His statement was sober and factual as he got up and took a look in the mirror on the wall next to the closet. As if it would contribute to solving the puzzle. We manage to smile a little at this – and then: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is this stranger?” I conjure a mother who must have been beautiful and fiery and a father with a slightly curved nose, tall and slender. These words I saved - about an hour after midnight, on the edge of the bed, at the bottom of the last glass of cognac, at the tail end of a stay in which we’d become each other’s surprise. And I wondered how it would be not to know the origins of those characteristics we discover about ourselves after a while, the origins of facial lines, the shape of the body. I don’t know whom I look like. To be cut off from being able to look for oneself in another person. Was it more important to be able to recognize oneself in the next generation, or did the thought of having one’s own children become more difficult?

            Something happened to us during those days. But this something we, with our disdain for convention, had a hard time holding on to when the date of departure arrived and we each packed our bags. Not right away, at any rate. Coincidences would have to conspire if we were meant to meet again.

            I waited for more than a year before I found out that coincidences needed help.

 

*  *  *

 

I spent a lot of time in my room and waited for Benoit to find time to get to know me again. I tried – from my defensive position – to interpret his rejection as a reaction to my three-year-old betrayal, when last we met. That time I’d left after a confrontation but also driven by the fear of being hurt. I repeated this to myself, a masterful stroke of simplification, while I developed sentence after sentence in careful pencil under a kerosene lamp I’d begged for, helpful during the frequent power outages.

      For many years I had longed to work on translating a particular female vagabond, but it was only three months ago since I got a publisher to understand that Isabelle Eberhardt might have something to tell modern readers one hundred years after her death. Once we agreed, a rather generous advance arrived in my bank account. I got hold of Isabelle’s collected works and a few biographies before I started out on my six weeks journey with this uncontrollable daughter of double exile in my luggage.

      Isabelle Eberhardt belonged to the desert. In the end it took her. For many years I had felt that she wanted something of me, this determined and consolidated lonely Isabelle. I didn’t understand what it was about yet and that had been the reason I was on my way to her last resting place, Aïn Sefra in the South Oran, Algeria. Then there was another reason, that I knew Benoit was on the same continent, in the same region. Tehra Bagh became a stop on a detour through a newly created state in a state of war. Here I had plenty of time to reflect over my own motives and over how Benoit regarded my somewhat sudden visit.

      When I wasn’t reflecting, I wrote about the lonely nomad who left her gender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(1)     Trofimovski’s Daughter

 

Once upon a time in Geneva, in the heart of Europe, a girl was born out of wedlock. The year was 1877. Many rebellious Russians had sought Swiss exile. The mother, Nathalie Charlotte Dorothée de Moerder, born Eberhardt, was originally married to a general, forty years older and one of the Tsar’s right-hand men. Five years earlier she had fled to Switzerland with the anarchist Alexander Trofimovski, who was the tutor to her three children.

      In 1877 Mrs. de Moerder gave birth to a daughter. She was named Isabelle and was given her mother’s maiden name. There is no man’s name given in the birth register, but everything points to Trofimovski, originally an orthodox priest, as the father. Trofimovski never admitted his complicity. He may also have been the father of Isabelle’s favourite brother, the five years older Augustin, who was born nine months after the strange couple left Russia. The three older siblings, Nicolas, Nathalie and Vladimir, who accompanied their mother to Switzerland, were obviously the general’s children.

      General de Moerder died before Augustin was born. Trofimovski, who left a wife and three sons in the homeland, held an anarchist’s view of marriage. He must also have held a futuristic view of women’s opportunities. In the house outside Geneva, Villa Neuve, young Isabelle, along with her siblings, was brought up to do physical labour and to develop her intellect. Her father and tutor taught her Latin, Greek, German, French and Arabic. Trofimovski  also guided her studies in the holy book of the Muslims. Through his Armenian background he had special ties to Islam. In the early eighteen hundreds his family emigrated from Turkey to Russia along with thousands of others. When Isabelle was sixteen years old she could write in Arabic and read the Koran in the original language.

      Augustin and Isabelle received special attention from their tutor. With his extensive knowledge of languages, religion and history, Trofimovski seemed like a Renaissance man. In his stories nomadic Tartars and fleeing Armenians came to life, his forefathers’ wisdom and longing were cultivated and brought forward. Another aspect that would be decisive for the youngest child, Isabelle, was that she from early childhood was generally treated like a boy. She was given heavy garden work, learned to ride a horse at an early age and wore boys’ clothes.

      Dressed as a boy she was given the tutor’s permission to discover and explore the city. There is much to indicate that early on she played with the idea of leaving Villa Neuve. Isabelle loved her mother, but her mother’s ability to love was poorly developed and she let herself be influenced by her dominating lover. Two of Isabelle’s half siblings ran away as soon as they were old enough and the first opportunity arose. First the eldest brother Nicolas left. Then Isabelle’s only sister, Nathalie, escaped by marrying below her standing  a man who had dared to criticize the patriarch of Villa Neuve. He threatened Trofimovski’s life when Nathalie accused her tutor of unseemly behaviour. Left behind with Isabelle and Augustin was the haunted and neglected Vladimir. After a while they disappeared too, Augustin into The Foreign Legion and Vladimir into himself.

      Isabelle was a clever and lonely child who compensated for her loss by establishing new correspondence with older and more learned pen pals. She sought some of them out for their knowledge of Islam and some she came across by chance. Among them was the officer, Eugène Letord, who had put an ad in a newspaper. He enthusiastically grabbed the chance to ameliorate the boredom of military life in Algeria through the exchange of letters with the young woman who carried a serious, albeit romantic longing toward the Orient. Later in life he would become an important supporter.

      When as an adult she introduced herself to Muslim friends, she spoke of a Christian-Russian mother and a Muslim-Russian father, who unfortunately had died soon after she was born. She also stated that she was born a Muslim and never later changed her faith.

      While growing up, the five years older brother Augustin was Isabelle’s great love and the family’s enfant terrible. He surrounded himself with questionable friends and pursued intoxication. Isabelle was distraught when he applied to enter The Foreign Legion. After a few months he was dismissed on disciplinary grounds and thereby obtained a new opportunity to continue his spineless life. Everything that Isabelle had imagined for him, he laid waste. But it was perhaps for the best because she came to understand that she had to execute her plans herself. Her dreams consistently flew south. Literary ambitions were tied to these dreams.

      Her first story, Infernalia, was published before she turned nineteen in the Parisian journal Nouvelle Revue Moderne, under the pseudonym Nicolas Podolinsky. It was about death and seduction: A young male student becomes fascinated by a female body in a morgue, but barely manages to overcome his forbidden emotions. Some biographers have interpreted this as an expression of Isabelle’s death wish and voyeurism.

      Many editors received stories and they praised Isabelle. The editor of  L’Athénée, J. Bonneval, who would develop a lifelong acquaintance with Isabelle, was particularly preoccupied by her gender identification and “unusual virility”. He saw advantages to this ambiguousness, but at the same time he warned her in a letter:

 

                  Do not ever become completely masculine, for an extraordinary

                  woman is superior to her male colleagues. As a woman you have

                  some exceptional qualities, but they become less attractive and

noteworthy if you come too close to the other part of humanity,

the one that represents egotism personified.

 

The advice was well meant but Isabelle looked to areas where both masculinity and femininity found expressions other than those of Parisian literary circles.

      She came to North Africa for the first time with her mother, Madame de Moerder. Through acquaintances they were offered a house in the town of Annaba, with the colonial name of Bône. The house was in the French colony and was provided by acquaintances among the French settlers. This part of the town strongly resembled a French town with its mayor and its bureaucrats. Isabelle despised this environment. After a few weeks they moved, at her initiative, to an apartment in the heart of the Arabic part of the town, near a zawiya, a Muslim cloister.

      There she settled down. She moved very little but studied and wrote. This quiet existence was largely due to her mother’s failing health, which they both hoped would get better in the Algerian climate. Nathalie de Moerder needed care and nursing and Isabelle doted on her like a devoted daughter.

      In Annaba she finally met her pen pal Ali Abdul-Wahab. He knew her from the letters only under the male name of Mahmoud Saadi and was naturally enough overwhelmed to meet a “young girl, very elegantly dressed.” He could not get used to this young and beautiful girl wanting to seek challenges that even many men would seek to avoid. In retrospective he wrote:

 

 I left Bône with unforgettable memories of the charming welcome

 Isabelle Eberhardt’s family gave me. My short stay in the town

 [Annaba] did not provide me with sufficient time to get to the

 bottom of the mystery that seemed to be linked to Isabelle’s life,

 the way I later did, but I sensed that she had many problems and

                   that she suffered.        

 

Whether her suffering was caused by the fact that her radius was limited, or by her mother’s illness, is not easy to say. But she became well known in Annaba where she wandered in the old kasbah and befriended Arab students. Through them and the letters from Augustin, who was in Oran, she gathered material and wrote sketches to Bonneval’s

L’Athénée. To Abdul-Wahab she wrote that she was not so preoccupied by making a name for herself but that she liked the writing process: “I write the way I love, probably because that is my fate.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

Isabelle Eberhardt’s double gender identity went deep. I needed time to understand it and her different incarnations: Nicolas, Mahmoud. As a male writer she was more easily accepted. And as a man Isabelle wrote that she could move about unnoticed everywhere. “Ideal for someone who wants to observe. If women are not great observers it is because their clothing draws looks: Women have always been raised to be seen – and are still suffering from it.”

            Be observed or see for yourself, map things out to write and let yourself be seduced by what is forbidden.

            Or, I thought, as I walked past the hook where Leila’s outer garments hung, women have been brought up to not catch a man’s eye in public places. That too. Leila knew she risked punishment simply by going to work for a foreign employer every day. In Orlando Virginia Wolf wrote that clothes carry us. Well, I wonder. Men’s clothes carried Isabelle through the desert; it is questionable whether or not they sustained a believable identity. Regardless, they dressed a rider.

            Once again I studied the very few pictures of her that exist. Leila was right. She was not particularly beautiful. Toward the end of her life she was practically toothless, writes a British biographer. Flat-chested with a growth of hair on her face, writes another. All the more easily to pass for the young Mahmoud. She probably suffered from anorexia. None of these characteristics were apparent from the pictures. Either some biographers deliberately described her as ugly in order to dramatize, or her hard life made her less than beautiful, as others, more understanding, have indicated. I was close to concluding that Isabelle had been degraded by history because she broke with all expectations of her gender and all convention in the places where she rightfully belonged. Many of the descriptions I had studied, teetered on the edge of the pathetic. But go to the core, to my own texts, I imagined her shouting. The problem was that several times they had been subject to changes and editing, by eager editors, know-it-alls and profit-takers. I needed to talk to someone who could help me better understand her as she was.

            Leila had little to do; most of the people in the office were out on different errands. She looked worried this morning. Was she perhaps concerned about Masoud when he went out on different errands? She waved me into a chair while she continued a telephone conversation.

            Maybe I was eager to turn Isabelle into a hero because she was so unbelievably bold as she joined caravans in the desert, lonely, stubborn and jubilant. I grabbed my own wrist while I was waiting for Leila to finish and felt a faint, careful pulse, and addressed an imaginary mirror: What have you dared?

            Leila put down the receiver and audibly sighed. She said she was worried about a close girlfriend and poured tea into two blue cups. “I don’t know how I can help. Do you have a little time?”

            I nodded a yes. My errand would have to wait.

            “It is a long story. Imagine,” Leila started, “a young girl born to a respectable family. One of six siblings, one of four daughters. Her father was an engineer and had brought his family safely through the war. Don’t ask which war, people in this region are used to big and little wars. The engineer supported them as a chauffeur for a wealthy man. When the wealthy man discovered that he knew more than driving a car, he got a better salary and other work. All his daughters and two sons were allowed to go to a good school. Malika, who was the next oldest and good at numbers, thought she would be able to find work in an office when she was out of school.

            “When Malika was in the eighth grade, she lost her father. In the middle of the afternoon, as he was on his way home, a bomb exploded in the marketplace. He was about to buy tomatoes and onions when carts were torn asunder. Those present said that it rained vegetables of all sorts and that a big crater opened up in the ground. The widows and mothers had no whole corpses to tend.”

            She swallowed and told the story so animatedly, as if she’d been there herself.

            “Malika’s mother received some money from the rich employer. In the midst of her mourning she tried to encourage her children to continue their reading, to get an education so that they would have more opportunities than she had had. The money came to an end, the way money does when it must be shared among many. My friend Malika was not the oldest. But everyone said she was the most beautiful of the daughters. She was slender and elegant, with a barely curved nose that did not detract from the rest of her face, the way her big sister’s did; she had flawless teeth and a mouth that did not show too much when it smiled, the way her two younger sisters’ did.”

            She smiled and pointed at her gums. I couldn’t help myself: “She looks like you, then?”

            “Oh, no.” Leila looked at me in horror; he big eyes opened wide. “I’m just a shadow compared to her. But the best part was her modesty. That made her especially attractive among families looking for a daughter-in-law.

            “A distant relative had heard rumours about Malika and about the family which was now poor. The relative was in his thirties and had become rich on the border trade. He was not ugly but according to what was being said, he was moody. If he could have Malika, he would put her entire family under his protection.”

            “How generous,” I interjected without thinking.

            Leila picked up on my tone of voice and gave me an ambivalent look.

            “What choices do you think women have here? Malika knew better than to protest. She saw more clearly than both her mother and her siblings how few alternatives there were if they were to live the way her father had planned. The oldest sister had begun working in a school but earned barely enough to pay the rent for the one room they rented after their father died. The others complained that they no longer had enough money for clothes and school. Malika tried to see the man, who after a while came regularly to the house, through the eyes of the others. ‘He doesn’t drink,” said her mother, ‘he has taken good care of his own family. He will make you the ruler of a big house.’ ‘You won’t have to work so hard,’ said her sisters. ‘He has promised us jobs,’ said her brothers. ‘When we have finished school.’”

            Leila sighed.

            “Malika was under a lot of pressure. Her teacher was sad when she came to say her final farewell to school, after months of absence. She asked if it wouldn’t be prudent to wait another year. Malika was fifteen and her best student. But Malika just bowed her head and thanked her for the years she had spent there and stubbornly added that she would surely find a use for all that knowledge when she would raise her children.”

            “So young.”

            “Young, yes, but not unusual in these parts. Three hundred guests gathered for the wedding and everyone said Malika was the most beautiful bride they had seen. The bridegroom, Zahid was his name, was dressed in green and white, a cape with wide pleats that hid the fact that he had already developed a gut, a turban that hid his already thinning hair. The women were happy on Malika’s behalf and whispered in her ear how lucky she was to have her family with her. ‘What a nice man,’ they said. The eyes of the married men travelled from their wives to Malika, who outshone them all, while one or two younger and unmarried men thought he ought to have been in the rich man’s shoes.

            “He was not quite so rich as they had thought. Malika an her sisters had to toil in the house, under the mother-in-law’s command, and her family, her mother and five siblings had to content themselves with one room. But no one complained because the war had made them unaccustomed to expecting too much. Malika turned seventeen, eighteen, soon twenty, but her midriff continued to be slender. He mother-in-law met her with increasingly impatient looks, on her own behalf and that of the only son in the house. The other two had fled to the other side of the globe. The house was full of unspoken accusations, but Malika did not become pregnant. She hid her despair well and when she turned twenty, she said yes to an older cousin, who offered his newborn daughter for her to raise. They had enough mouths to feed and Malika fervently wanted a child. She named the little one Gulnoor, bright flower, and sewed beautiful little clothes for her new daughter.”

            I nodded my acknowledgment; I had heard such stories before about girl children who were given to those who were childless or to parents who had only boys.

            “Malika’s husband wanted a son, but no one gives away boy children. One day he came home after having been on a one-week trip and declared that he wanted to take a new wife. He needed sons. As Malika couldn’t give him boy children, well, no child at all, he was within his rights. It was already decided. The new woman’s family had agreed and the date of the wedding had been set.”

            Leila’s eyes were focused on the wall behind me, I imagined that she was fighting tears, but her voice was clear and distinct, without any tremor.

            “That evening Malika went to her mother and siblings’ room and went to sleep there with Gulnoor. He husband allowed her to do this for this one night. The next night he came to get her and demanded that Gulnoor should stay with her grandmother and aunts. Saddened by her husband’s demand and the little one’s cries, she followed him.  She asked to be allowed to go away during the wedding. He denied her this and said it was her duty to greet the new wife, so that she would feel welcome. That evening she did not submit to his will. But he bent her will to his so that she could barely move the next morning.”

            “And no one reacted?”

            “Yes. But what could they do? Women have bodies that are meant to heal. Malika’s mother and sisters did what they could to bring back the stubbornness she had displayed as a child, when she refused to give her gifts away to her brothers, when she disappeared to do her homework. That stubbornness which made her wander through the markets with Gulnoor on her arm: ‘Look here, this is my daughter,’ with an expression that made many people look up to her. Malika was going to be the most beautiful woman at the wedding. To that end daily trips to the best and most expensive markets were in order as was dipping into savings and thrift in the kitchen. That’s how yard upon yard of fabric and gold ribbons were procured. Malika was forced into several visits to the tailor, who thought he needed to take things in every time. He asked if she had stopped eating. No, she ate. Malika had to, because of the child, Gulnoor. Gulnoor would have a dress in her mother’s fabric, in her mother’s colours; together they would shine.”

            The telephone rang. Leila answered in a short, almost angry, voice and threw down the receiver.

            “It was them. Some people know that at certain numbers women answer the phone. And then they call just to annoy us . . . Enough said, then the day of the women’s celebration arrived and the new bride was expected. Zahid’s mother was responsible for the preparations along with a horde of helpers. Malika was allowed not to work. Her sisters and mother spent the whole morning making her beautiful, with a reddish power in her hollow cheeks and gold threads in her hair so thick and lustrous that it would barely let itself be managed.

            “The new bride had cheeks like balloons.” Leila puffed out her narrow cheeks to demonstrate.

            “Her dress was half a size too small. She was older than Malika too. She was sweating and seemed worried. She had a brother along. He was Zahid’s age, with grey streaks in his hair and resembled a famous movie star. Malika’s mother silenced her brood and kept an eye on the queen of the evening, who quickly kissed the newcomer. Just a touch, so that her lipstick wouldn’t lose its gloss.

            The wedding celebrations lasted three days and everyone was in agreement about Malika’s beauty and brave bearing. After this she could continue to walk with her head high in the market place. The new woman, however, had to wait a long time for any kindness.”

            I heard a touch of disdain toward this quite innocent other wife, that cheap triumph over another’s defects.

            “Were you there, among the guests?”

            “Of course, she was one of my best friends. But she couldn’t stand being number two, even though she despised her husband. Two weeks after the wedding, Malika was gone, her daughter Gulnoor also.”

            “And where did she go? Did she disappear with that . . . movie star brother?”

            “Who knows? No one in the family has heard from her. She is just missing. Maybe she’ll be back, maybe not. Maybe they’ll find her, maybe not.”

            “What if she has landed in Europe and has found a nice man,” I tried and immediately realized how facile this remark had to sound to Leila’s ears. “You don ‘t know what’s become of her either?”

            Leila answered with a shake of her head. “Not exactly. She has called a mutual friend a few times without saying where she is keeping herself. I’m worried about her. If her husband finds out where she is hiding, she’ll be in great danger.”

            The two friends must have been close. Leila excused herself, her eyes shiny. The thin varnish of powerlessness. She picked at the end of her shawl, pulled a little loose thread and made a knot in it. Then she straightened her back and drilled her eyes into mine.

            “You are the first person I have told this to here. Do you think Assistance Globale can help her to a safe country if she needs it?”

            “I’ll talk to Benoit. It won’t be easy. And you just said you don’t know where she is.”

            “Yes. But if she should show up. You never know.”

            Leila fastened her eyes on me; telling the story about her friend was a kind of investment. Equipped with a passport that opened the borders everywhere we were able to perform miracles, she was not alone in thinking that way.

            If it hadn’t been for the gatekeeper, Khorasan, who came running into the room addressing Leila with a worried expression, I might have continued my reassurances. Leila straightened her shawl and turned toward the satellite telephone on the desk.

 

*  *  *  

 

Curiosity drove me on toward the gate, at Khorasan’s heels, to see what was going on in the world outside. Leila had to use the satellite phone to communicate with the three cars that were out. The governor had ordered several arrests that morning and had the support of the peacekeeping forces. Many people would see this as pure provocation. The rebellion, which until now had been subdued, risked getting completely out of control. Foreigners ought to be especially vigilant.

            “Is there a danger of . . .”

            “Benoit and the other Frenchmen? I don’t think so. Fortunately they’re not far away. I count on them being back by lunchtime.”

            “But who is it that the governor wants to arrest?”

            “The noisiest critics. One of them is a famous singer and poet from this province. He has allowed himself a little satire about the palace. His last song was printed in one of the local weeklies, along with a quite . . . hmm, accurate drawing. When that was discovered, the police confiscated all the issues they could find and closed the paper’s editorial office.”

            “Forever?”

            “No, that is not certain.”

            He smiled at me, obviously happy to satisfy my desire to know. Before I could turn around he asked if it was true that I came from Henrik Ibsen’s country. He had wondered for a long time that this Bjornson had received the Nobel Prize in literature and not Henrik Ibsen.

            I nodded. “I’ve had the same thought. Bjornson received the prize in 1903 and Ibsen was still alive then. No, I really don’t know.”

            “It probably wasn’t because Nora disappeared,” he clucked. “She had to do that, for the sake of her pride, since her husband didn’t respect her!”

            The former English teacher confided that his life goal was to read as many Nobel prizewinners in literature as possible before he died or became too old and feeble-sighted to read. He had started this project in 1988 when the Egyptian, Naguib Mahfouz, received the prize.

            I noticed a pair of reading glasses on top of the stack of books in his booth. Rudyard Kipling was capturing his attention at the moment. And Rabindranath Tagor. “For the sake of balance,” he hummed, “an imperialist and his counterpart.” But the problem was to get English translations of some of the prizewinners. He had heard about Oundset, wasn’t she Norwegian too? I delivered a solemn promise to send him Kristin Lavransdatter in English when I got home. He placed his right hand on his heart as a thank you.

            “What about writers in this part of the world?” I asked

            “Are you really interested?” He asked as if he were used to meeting deaf ears in his efforts to rise above the everyday. One day, soon, he would bring a collection written by Hafez of Shiraz, a Persian poet of the thirteen hundreds. Once it got quiet enough in the streets for him to go home to his lodgings and not have to spend the night here. I thanked him and retired. Leila’s story about Malika had struck me as self-absorbed.

 

* *  *

 

The L-shaped residence was whitewashed with an entry at each end. I wandered around and studied the building from all sides before I sat down on the steps and said hello to the grey-striped cat that was coiled up in the sunshine, carefully licking its white paws. He had arrived before me and as far as I could tell his experiences with human beings had not been good. No one was allowed to touch him but he measured us with his critical yellow eyes as we moved about in the enclave, a property of about a couple of acres. Like a very big yard.

            The wind and the sand forced me indoors. I sat down at the desk to study Isabelle’s handwriting, a photocopy of notes she had made of a day’s journey between two oases. The trip had gone between mountain cliffs, old hiding places of robbers. Even in reduced size the writing was legible. The letters slanted to the right.

            Isabelle Eberhardt yearned for a kind of poverty of need. She gladly spent the night under the open sky where she counted the stars and found a rare peace. We had also had such nights, we who now lived behind separate closed door, begging for sleep to relieve the emptiness or the loss we didn’t want to admit. At least not he.

            Benoit lived a changeable life. He did not like superiors. Routines and paperwork was not his thing. Earlier on he had tried to make a living as a photographer and writer and had belonged to that small group which usually found itself in the wake of wars or conflicts, when the television reporters and bureau chiefs were long gone.

            But that time on the island, as we lay there that last night waiting for our departure, there was something he didn’t want me to grab hold of. Something that made him never want to return to Maidoran even though the situation was now practically idyllic.

            I lay down on the mattress to rest and to wait while the wind made a distant door slam. I tried to imagine the two of us riding straight across the desert, our faces enveloped in thin, blue shawls against the sand. On the same horse with his one arm around my waist, the other holding the reins. Iso, hopelessly romantic, you would have been better off in the time of Jane Austen.

 

 

* *  *

 

At the end of a long, dark corridor a tribunal dressed in black is waiting. “I can change,” I shout. “Let me travel to Isabelle’s world.”

            “You want it both ways,” objects a mild man’s voice. I drown him out. “Let me at least go of my own accord. A hundred years is nothing.”

            I brush off the objections and rush through the corridor, euphoric because I don’t know the number of my days, the appeasing weight of non allocated old age.

            Then I feel something rising and growing in my body. Something Benoit must get to know. I’m leafing and leafing through a notebook. Finally I find a phone number but my fingers are crooked, they struggle with the little keys. Time after time a strange voice answers in French that the person I seek has change his number. My stomach swells and swells; I struggle with the numbers.

            It was a dream within the dream. To my great relief, because I am now finally on my way to Isabelle, my steps dragging across the desert dunes.

            I’m struggling through the harmattan’s sand-swept ruins, where no little growth exists, past a flock of goats, they’re eating cardboard, while cattle and the tough camels have been brought to their knees and the carrion birds are picking clean the bones. “I am no desert person,” I shout and approach her. Wrapped in a white cloth, like a mummy, she is standing there – Isabelle Eberhardt – with a black snake look in her eyes. I grab hold of the cloth and pull; she spins like a top. After a while I wrap myself in her bandages; soon we become a cocoon. A laughing man is bending over us. He has beautiful narrow facial features, but becomes steadily more indistinct. Does he own that mild voice?

 

*  *  *

Idle, drunk on my sleep’s twisted experience, interspersed by half-hours awake with paralysis and regret. He ought to be here soon, wasn’t that a door opening? No, it was probably just the wind.

            Someone knocked on the door.

            “Benoit,” I cried. “Just come in.”

            But the door remained closed; it was just one of his young colleagues who explained that lunch was ready.

            I wasn’t hungry, but got up, if for nothing else but to see if I would find Benoit there, at the table. Normally I ate with Leila, but I thought I would make an exception.

            Two places were not taken, but as the cook carried in the first platters, Benoit and his colleague François arrived. A little short of breath, but glowing with satisfaction. In spite of the unrest in and around town they had delivered the coolers of vaccines to the refugee camp. No, they had not met great obstacles; their chauffeur, Ibrahim, was a great help with his diplomatic demeanour. Ibrahim came in right behind them, smiled shyly and sat down next to Masood, who patted him on the shoulder.

            Three hundred children had been vaccinated during the morning by men and women in the camp who had been trained by the Assistance team. In addition the team had taken the time to give instructions to a big group of mothers on how to treat diarrhoea.

            I got a better idea of his quest for meaning then. Not the meaning inherent in the acceptance of gratitude or increased personal prestige, but the triumph of seeing teams of refugees stepping out of the camp’s grey monotony for a few hours a week.

            “The next challenge will be the new delivery,” said Benoit. “The rebels have many supporters. They might stop that transport.”

            “What if we tried at night?” Masood asked.

            “And break the curfew? Hmmm, a certain risk, but at the same time . . .”

            Benoit didn’t want to discourage Masood but I could see that he would not follow up on the suggestion.

            We continued eating in silence. There was fruit for dessert and I brought my plate in to Leila to tell her what Benoit and the others had managed to do in the camp. I wanted to give her something to think about other than the disappeared Malika. She peeled an orange but ate only a few segments.

            “That’s good. Assistance is one of the better ones.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “At least they give women an opportunity to work. Many of the others have a tendency to forget the women. The problem is that only certain women are allowed to . . . That is, those who are approved of by the camp’s leaders - wives, daughters, daughter-in-law . . . But the widows, those who need that kind of training the most, have problems.”

            “What kind of problems?”

            “The kinds of problems no one dares talk about.”

            Not Leila either. She excused herself with pressing tasks, as though she already regretted having spoken critically to a close acquaintance of her boss.

            Evening finally arrived and after dinner we stayed in the corridor between our two rooms. The three young colleagues were in the living room playing cards and I asked if he had time for a conversation. About something Leila had said. My invention, dressed in a bit of professionalism.

            “In my place this time,” he said and opened the door.

            I had not been in his room since the night when I committed an unbelievably risky thing and lay down next to him. Now the bed was covered by a brown, black and white blanket. Three pillows with black and white embroidery, a night lamp with a green shade and a little desk framed by a bigger book-case. One of the walls was covered from floor to ceiling by a cupboard and a carved chest in dark wood. Along the wall by the window there was a dark red carpet and some floor cushions. We chose the floor cushions.

            “Isabelle and I need a break. We’re together all day, you see.”

            He was sipping from a cup of tea he had brought from the dinner table. “And I could use a break from the job. How about you share a little of what you are writing about with me?”

            “I’ll have to translate then, but I will, with pleasure. My part of the piece is about thirty pages long, the rest will be her texts. I feel it is too tight. Her childhood is relatively quickly taken care of because we don’t know very much about it. But from the time she starts to travel and write herself . . .”

            “I understand what you are struggling with. A life, thirty pages . . . What kinds of secrets has Leila been telling you today?”

            I recounted her words, quietly and carefully.

            He supported his head in his hands. When he lifted it, his eyes were more watchful. “I had a feeling. You know, we are working for employers who are satisfied to just see women in their statistics, with some picture or other of a woman giving a shot to a two year-old. Or a woman, properly veiled, instructing a group of women. We give them that. It doesn’t matter to them if these women have been mobilized as a result of a structure of nepotism . . . We barely know it ourselves and the donors get their female quota supplied.”

            “But the others . . .”

            “We are also aware that interferences take place in the camp, especially against defenceless women. We established a special section for widows, where trusted men were placed as guards. The first group was not sufficiently well selected. Now they are mostly greybeards. But widows are surrounded by rumours here. So Leila may have gotten an embroidered version.”

            “I can believe it,” I exclaimed. “She told me quite a dramatic story about one of her girlfriends today.”

            I gave him the short version about Malika and conveyed Leila’s question about Assistance being able to give some form of protection to a woman who was threatened and pursued by a husband and his relatives.

            “I have to say you’ve received quite a lot of confidences in such a short time?”

            “I have a natural talent. It must be my aura. I promised Leila to convey the question.”

            “There’s probably little we can do,” he sighed. “A brave woman, this Malika. Like Leila. It has become dangerous for women here to have ties to western offices. But she says she took the job in order to learn, to get her qualifications. She would like to learn French. Her English is excellent.”

            “Have you seen her and Masood?”

            “What do you mean? I see both of them every day!”

            “Don’t you see how he looks her up, makes all kinds of errands for himself through the reception area? What if . . .”

            He laughed a little and raised his eyebrows. “Is this Iso, the matchmaker, at work?”

            He thought I was wrong in this case. A relationship between the two of them had no future.

            “Stop dreaming, Iso. They would make a handsome pair but Masood doesn’t own anything. That young man barely has a place to live. He often spends the night here. And Leila’s parents . . .”

            “Aren’t you underestimating Leila’s strength now?”

            “Far from it. She’s an outstanding woman. My worry is that she won’t be able to use her abilities, won’t learn enough. You cannot overestimate the power of convention. You have to tell her that her friend . . . that we might be able to find a hiding place for her through our staff. Not here at any rate. That would ruin her reputation.”

            He started to leaf through the stack of papers on the desk. The audience was coming to an end. He made it possible for me to break it up before becoming more explicit. What if I refused? At that moment the lights went out. I didn’t move. I heard him fumble around for matches and saw the little burst of flame, saw his face for a few seconds before he lit a stub of a candle. It wobbled on a tea tray and fell over. It must have rolled under the bed. He groaned and hit his head on something, lit a match and fumbled, coughed and sneezed in the dust. I laughed then and my laughter infected him as he got up with a few inches of wax between his thumb and forefinger, his hair standing on end. His way of laughing was strangely unexercised, as if it had been a long time since the last time. The gasps died down quickly.

            “I’ll accompany you,” he whispered and opened the door, mildly inviting. In my room he lit the kerosene lamp before slowly retiring. There was a touch of a hand there, in the dark, near the top of my back, could be my neck. Could maybe.

            “May you have pleasant dreams,” he said in a low tone of voice as he remained in the doorway for a moment.

            I touched his cheek fleetingly with two fingers.

            “You too, my friend.”

            So controlled, so reliable.

            I really wanted a dream influenced by the close breathing of another, if necessary in an uncomfortably narrow bed. I grabbed the door handle, as if making sure the door was securely closed, a shield against my fumbling in the semi-darkness.

            I stayed away. A part of me wanted the door to open again. He had left a box of matches, he probably needed it.

            To get to sleep I counted the cities where we had been together. Days and kilometres travelled, days in transit between home and the meeting-places, days of expectation or in the throes of separation. Then I started to count heaving camels, swaying, proud heads, skinny legs with sand-coloured hairy coats and a few open wounds, camels in transport. Driven forward by men in blue with covered faces, their eyes looking out from little slits under their turbans. We had been with them once too, almost ten years ago. All these threads of memory exhausted me but I missed the physical exhaustion Isabelle had been able to enjoy after a long day on horseback. She often went to sleep without having any idea what the next day would bring. A new oasis? Enough money for food and drugs? A roof over her head and a body - close.

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(3)  Mahmoud Saadi

 

Isabelle Eberhardt had hoped that her favourite brother, Augustin, would join her in Tunisia, but he went to Marseille instead, where he married Hélène who had loyally waited for him for four years. Isabelle had nothing but disdain for this woman. To her Hélène was the reincarnation of everything narrow-mindedly petit bourgeois. Her disdain also contained a liberal dose of jealousy. But for a long time she had practiced the art of rationalizing the loss of friendship and love. Therefore she turned in another direction.

      She left Tunisia and travelled via El Khroub in Algeria and onward, south to the oasis Ouargla, on the northern border of the Tuareg realm. She made her way by  mule or donkey and found her way with the help of local guides. She now always dressed as a man. The time had come to test her identity as Mahmoud Saadi. It became a form of rebirth that also allowed for pleasure. In bars she drank alcohol and through her travelling companions she became deeply acquainted with kif. She visited the back rooms of dancers and prostitutes. She slept without any need for comfort, spent the night under an open sky with her burnoose wrapped around her, on the floor mats of simple cafes or as the guest of local sheiks.

                 

Time passes in a night without coolness. Si Ahmed retires and

forgets, as if distracted, his revolver in the green velvet case

next to me. Ben Cheikh bundles himself up in his old burnoose

and I lie down by the open door. [. . .] Nomads are awake for

a long time in the heat of arrival.

 

Some of the men became her lovers, fascinated by young Mahmoud’s lack of facial hair, some of them maybe also by the faint suggestion of breasts under the voluminous clothes. Many of Isabelle’s chroniclers have asked if the men around her really believed she was one of them.

            Women menstruate; that fact would have become known within the intimate circumstances in which she lived with her nomadic friends. But if she suffered from anorexia, as some have suggested, she may have lost this sign of femininity. Or she may have stopped menstruating as a result of enormous physical exertion, long day’s rides, short nights, heavy work with horses and gathering of wood. The biographer and friend, Robert Randau, thinks that those who had known her for a while knew very well that she was a woman. A contemporary traveller, Gertrude Bell, praises the broad tolerance some Arabs had toward differences and suggests that an explanation might be found there.

            Isabelle chose Mahmoud Saadi out of necessity. No woman could conquer the desert the way he could. But she also shed her European clothes in an attempt to become another person – a Muslim and an Arab. She had not come to Algeria to have fun but rather out of a desire to blend with the people and the customs wherever she went. Acquire their souls, as she wrote. To her, the French colonialists appeared unbelievably privileged and boring in their uniformity.

            But her relationship with the colonial power remained ambiguous. In the autumn of 1899, she allied herself with a young Tunisian, Larbi Chabel. His lot in life was to work as a travelling tax collector. Isabelle accompanied him on his travels out of sheer curiosity but exposed herself, as a representative of the ruling power, to the wrath of the Tunisian farmers. She, who had already participated in a rebellion, must have asked herself if this wasn’t a betrayal of the holy Muslim struggle against the colonial power. She wrote that she was ashamed about the task in those cases where they had to put poor farmers in prison because they couldn’t pay. Nevertheless she wrote that those two months provided enchanted moments, nomadic carefreeness.

            The same carefreeness consumed her time and made her unproductive. Trofimovski’s humble inheritance was soon gone. Neither she nor Augustin had bothered to follow up on the plans to sell Villa Neuve, which remained standing in an overgrown garden, open to burglars and vandalism. Hundreds of kilometres away from Geneva Isabelle spent her time in cafes and guesthouses, drank hard and made herself a reputation. ”Do people see me as a degenerate drunkard and plate-smasher?” she asked herself in a rare moment of introspection. She quickly answered that her inner being contained a pure soul that rose above the kind of degenerate behaviour in which she participates because she coveted suffering and harboured such a deep disdain for convention.  

         After her excesses had made her broke she left Tunisia to meet publishers and editors in France. She landed in Marseille, but did not stay with her brother and his Hélène. In a little room in a cheap boarding house she wrote the critical essay on civilization entitled The Age of Emptiness, which was published in “L’Athénée in March 1900, signed Mahmoud Saadi.

            At that time, certainly also under the influence of fin-de-siècle melancholia, she saw civilization as a big betrayal, an accumulation of always new needs that leave people always dissatisfied. Surplus has become a necessity, she writes, and luxury indispensable. She went on to Paris where she quarrelled with her old mentor Ali Abdul-Wahab before she put herself on the express train back to Marseille in December 1899. But she could not stay there. She spent the turn of the century on a boat between Livorno and Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia.

            Her travelling companion was an exiled Tunisian, Abdul-Aziz Osman. They lived together for four months, travelling from Sardinia to Paris with a quick trip to Geneva. Isabelle described the relationship more as a friendship than a romantic affair. Although he was her lover, as she confesses in a diary entry, he misunderstood her feelings.

            These months were only a preparation. She looked for advice from the Russian travel writer Lydia Pashkoff, who had travel extensively in the Middle East and who had good contacts in Parisian literary circles. Her first advice was discouraging: “A woman cannot make a living from journalism in France, unless she is French, has a lover who works for a journal or a husband who can support her.” She recommended that Isabelle seek support among rich benefactors.

            The Marquise de Morès was such a benefactor, whose husband had been murdered in 1886 – probably by a Tuareg – in the border area between Tunisia and Algeria. The Marquise gave Isabella a considerable sum of money to research the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death. Isabelle made plans but soon learned that the area where she would be looking was too unsafe. She accepted the money nonetheless and travelled to the oasis El Oued. Her plan was to write, meditate and find a form of peace.

             On the road between the end of the railroad,Tourggort, and the oasis town she met a young Algerian sergeant. Rather than ending up as one of a number of short affairs, he became the love of her life.

         Slimène Ehnni was young and handsome with a look in his eye that made her vibrate. He was from an officer family, which was well integrated into the ruling colonial system. No one succeeded as he did  in winning her trust after her relationship with her brother Augustin gradually disintegrated. He was somewhat playful and was more of a dreamer than a dutiful colonial collaborator. He was also willing to learn. He did not in any way want to rot away in the army.

            Isabelle managed to borrow a horse from the local French captain Cauvet, who ironically was responsible for surveying her movements. In this way the young lovers could meet outside the town, I small oases with fresh water and fruit trees full of fruit. After a few intense meetings they began to speak of the future. She felt older and less demanding then: “I no longer have a single illusion, nor any desire for illusions, no need to make that last which is sweet and nice because it is fleeting,” she wrote after one of these meetings; melancholic but also with a smattering of self-defence.

            During the periods of time when Slimène was free they lived together in her quarters. After a while they began to drink heavily and one night they were thrown out of the local bar. These excesses culminated in her smashing the door to the little house she had rented. The couple took a break then and optimism replaced melancholia. Isabelle must have hidden away some illusions about love, for in a letter to Augustin she confessed to having found – like him – a kind of harbour. He is my family, she wrote, making plans for a vegetable garden on which the two of them could make money.

            During the quiet months in El Oued, Isabelle for the first time obtained entry into the Qaderiya order, the oldest Sufi brotherhood in the Islamic world. This membership would give her both practical and spiritual help wherever she travelled in Algeria. The Sufis emphasized the individual’s direct contact with God and fundamental Islamic values and opposed everything that might come between the human being and the divine. The road to this unity was through meditative states, love, silence, moderation, patience, trust in God and lastly - a holy conviction. The goal of a Sufi was to destroy the illusions of the self, in order to die in the conviction of surviving through God. Asceticism was an important element, but not celibacy, on the contrary; the experience of earthly love was perceived as an omen of divinity. To a searching soul this brotherhood must have seemed like a kind of extended family and an opportunity to enter more deeply into Islam. The fact that Slimène Ehnni was already a member of the Qaderiya brotherhood made it easier for Isabelle to be accepted.

            But Isabelle could not hope for permanent happiness. Poverty knocked on the door and the colonial powers disliked the relationship that had developed. Isabelle’s contacts with the Qaderiyas, known for their resistance to the French, did not make them less concerned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24

 

Benoit and I were more than ready to pile into a truck but Basir was still out negotiating with the driver. I pulled out my writing pad and translated for Benoit what I had written about Isabelle’s last days.

            “If we get out of here, we’ll go there. To her grave,” he said.

            A solid handshake. A pact. “What do you think of this sentence: “Life was a party to which she was not invited.”

            “A little pathetic. Life is created by all those who live.”

            “Also by those who feel they stand completely apart? Those who are sure to be frozen out by the wielders of taste? Some are too far ahead. They make people feel ashamed a hundred years later.”

            “Are you one of those, Iso?” He lowered his voice toward my ear, tender and warm.

            “From time to time. That sense of belonging she sought with people in Europe’s back yard – and that she experienced in part – have you and I ever been close to it? In one of her short stories she describes a young officer who dreams about settling in Algeria, build a house, convert to Islam. Could you . . .?”

            “No, but do you necessarily have to convert in order to get closer to people? You remind me of an old acquaintance of mine. He did that, in his own way. Seventeen years ago he converted and became part of a movement not so different from the one Wahid belongs to, but in Afghanistan. Haven’t I told you about him?”

            My memories were vague. “A Frenchman?”

            “Yes, but like Miss Eberhardt he took a Muslim Name: Abd-el Qadit. And before you ask – even I know what this name means. Abd-el Qadir means servant to the cleverest. But when he took the name he was probably thinking of the rebel chief of Algeria in the eighteen hundreds. The one who was forced into exile in 1847 and died in Damascus forty years later.”

            “Where is this acquaintance today?”

            Benoit didn’t know. They hadn’t been very close. Abd-el Qadir was considerably older, an inconsiderate reporter, who according to what people said, suffered from advanced disillusionment. His family in Paris had declared him missing. It was said that he was killed in Pakistan but no one had received a final acknowledgement. Some thought he was in Kashmir.

            Truly extreme. I indicated that I could imagine meeting this man. Seventeen years. A cynical reporter would have come back after six months with a sensational bestseller about the inside story of the closed brotherhoods.

            “He would have stuck in your throat,” said Benoit, short and deprecating. “He despised most women.”

            “He would certainly have liked Isabelle. Do you think there is a connection between settling your accounts with cynicism and extreme conversion? Trofimovski was cynical enough to not acknowledge one, no two, paternities. Isabelle may have missed sincerity in her anarchist and nihilist friends in Geneva but she found it among the true believers in Algeria.”

            Sincerity. Parents. I was presenting this message to a man who had lived his entire life without a family. I could see that he felt bothered, but he didn’t reject me.

            “In the end,” he finally said, “it is probably better to live with just an illusion of a father-figure, an image that comes from moving the characteristics you yourself have and wonder about, back in time, than to grow up with a father like Trofimovski.”

 

* *  *

 

We were sitting under heavy tarpaulins, closed in by boxes and bags of oranges, nuts and dried apricots. It was dark outside and even darker on the floor of the truck. Sweet odours were mixing with the sharp smell of sweat.

            Talking was difficult over the howling of the motor. If we hollered someone outside might hear us. Leila was sitting with us while Masood had Gulnoor in the front seat. Like the driver, Masood had his papers in order and no one asked a small child

for papers. She would not give us away unless she started crying for her mother. It was a risk we were running because Leila couldn’t stand the thought of having her with us under the tarpaulin. Gulnoor, the bright little flower, was afraid of the dark.

            We were prevented from any communication with Masood and Wahid, who had taken the driver’s seat. If we had to, the agreement was that we would beat hard on the wall of the cab.

We had to wait a day before the owner was willing to rent us the truck. He helped Wahid and Masood to find a new load to transport. The extra time helped Masood convince Leila and win Gulnoor’s trust. Benoit negotiated a price that meant we still had dollars left in case of emergency.

The space was too small to lie down in, but we had some old cotton blankets to sit on. It was hard nevertheless and relatively cold. The cold seeped in through small invisible rips in the tarpaulin. It meant we had enough air. Even so there was this stale smell of sweat that had nothing to do with heat but with fear. None of us ate because we didn’t want to have to go to the toilet in there, but we did enjoy a few sips of water from a bottle. That was all.

According to the plan, the trip to the border would take eight hours. We would arrive early in the morning when traffic was most intense and the possibility of being summarily waved through by the overworked customs and border patrols was greatest. When we were getting close, Masood and Gulnoor would come and sit with us. Benoit had a watch that glowed in the dark. It showed that we had been under way for four and a half hours. We had already been stopped once and had listened to short-tempered men’s voices, certain that the tarpaulin would be torn aside. We had no idea how much was paid to get us past this fermenting fury. Wahid was equipped with his own papers from his leader, a man few had met, but who ruled his rebel brothers via satellite telephone. The papers might help us through some barriers, but far from all of them, and only if those who were manning the self-appointed checkpoints accepted them and were convinced by Wahid. Wahid might change his mind and turn us over. Masood did not think that would happen. Benoit and I had agreed not to talk about our doubt.

Leila had fallen asleep leaning against a bag of apricots. I was sitting in the middle, close to Benoit, my body completely stiff. At the moment I was having a hard time forgiving us for not using these last few days in another way, to talk about our lives, together and apart, fascinated and with longing. It was so much simpler to talk about others, except for that night when we had been waiting for a hail of bombs that didn’t come.

“Are you sleeping?” he asked close to my ear.

My acknowledgement made him free an arm. It snaked around my neck and his hand remained resting on one of my breasts. Restless fingers. After the absence of the last few days my breast was more than receptive. My right hand landed carefully in his lap, where small changes were taking place. Then we were completely entwined, in a complete folly of playful fingers and mouths and surrounded by sweet scents and salty sweat and the monster’s diesel fumes and a swaying, close darkness that didn’t frighten but shielded us. Rocking us closer together, out of balance. Our lips met softly, heavy engine growls drowned out whatever sounds our throats might have made. He was touching me deeply, with a side of himself rarely seen, completely out of control. So much so that when the gasps had quieted down, I promised myself that if we survived this, I would tell him about the child we did not get to share – and that, according to what I had figured out, was conceived in a teahouse when we sought shelter for the night after a very special bus trip. Maybe I had not wanted it enough to make it grow inside me since I didn’t know where he was and had tried and tried but couldn’t reach him when I discovered my condition. I wanted it and didn’t want it and weighed the inconveniences and the advantages while I tried to guess what he would think. I didn’t want it enough. You should know this, I whispered, fully aware that he could hear nothing with his head resting on my chest.

That day when I had knocked on the gate in Tehra Bagh and he said I shouldn’t have come, my bitterness had still been a part of my motivation, a joker carried and hidden, ready to surface in case his rejection became unbearable. In case he had repeated that sentence one more time. But he didn’t; he was intuitively wise.

            The six year old story.

I don’t know if it will stand us in good stead, but I need to share it with him.

But first we have to save each other.

The last few weeks have made me empty. Empty of anger and also of regret.

 

*  *  *

 

The truck rolled on through the night. I felt his breath against my ear, calm, as if he was falling asleep. It would soon be the day’s first hour of prayer and I would pray for us in my own way, a prayer that encompassed golden images, where I saw us on horseback riding across the sand dunes, each with our own little bag, everything we owned in this world tied to the pommel. We were riding slowly and were enjoying all the yellow-brown and reddish nuances in the sand, which was dull and quiet after the wind had died.

            In the oasis twenty miles farther south Leila and Masood would celebrate their wedding. They would be waiting there in the shade of and old sand-swept wall, along with Isabelle, wrapped in her burnoose.

 

* *  *

 

Someone was banging on the cabin wall. Loud cries, but the words were indistinct. The truck was not swaying so much; it was slowing down. We knew what we had to do. We fumbled quietly, retrieved the cotton blanket we had been sitting on, pulled the surrounding bags toward us and folded the blanket over us. Our breathing was shallow as the engine turned silent.