Open City_ A Novel Part 2

I usually have great difficulty sleeping in noisy environments, I said, so it's fair to say I envy such people, too. She brightened and said, Well, sometimes it's an absolute necessity. By the way, do you prefer English or French? I recalled that the announcements on the intercom were already in three languages, as we flew over Long Island; I told her my French was poor. She asked where I was from. Oh, Nigeria, she said, Nigeria, Nigeria. Well, I know a great many Nigerians, and I really should tell you this, many of them are arrogant. I was struck by her manner of talking, the unapologetic directness of it, the risk of alienating the person she was talking to. She was at an age, I supposed, at which she had long ceased to care what other people thought. This directness could certainly be taken in the wrong way if it came from a younger person, but there was no such risk in this case.

Ghanaians, on the other hand, Dr. Maillotte went on, are much calmer, easier to work with. They don't have such a big concept of their place in the world. Well, I suppose it's true, I said, we are a bit aggressive, but I think the reason is that we like to get ahead, make our presence felt. We think of ourselves as the j.a.panese of Africa, without the technological brilliance. She laughed. She put her book away, and when the dinner cart came by, we both selected the fish option on the menu-microwaved salmon, potatoes, dry bread-and ate in silence. Then I asked what she did. I'm a surgeon, she said, retired now, but I did gastrointestinal surgery in Philadelphia for the last forty-five years. I told her about my residency, and she mentioned the name of a psychiatrist. Well, he used to be there, maybe he's gone now. This is all so long ago, anyway. Did you have any rotations at Harlem Hospital? I shook my head and told her I'd gone to medical school outside the state. I only mention it because I consulted there a few times recently, she said, I'm retired, but I wanted to partic.i.p.ate in a voluntary thing, so I've been in Harlem. I was a little unfair earlier, she added, I should say the Nigerian residents are excellent. Oh, don't worry about it, I said, I've heard much worse. But tell me, there aren't many American residents at Harlem Hospital, are there? Oh, they have a few, but yes, a lot of Africans, Indians, Filipinos, and really, it's a good environment. Some of these foreign graduates are a lot better trained than people who went through the American system; for one thing, they tend to have outstanding diagnostic skills.

Her diction was precise, and the accent only vaguely European. She told me that she had done her training in Louvain. But you must be a Catholic to be a professor there, she said with a chuckle. Not so easy for an atheist like me: I've always been one, I'll always be one. Anyway, it's better than Universite Libre de Bruxelles, where no one can achieve anything professionally without being a Mason. I'm serious: it was founded by Masons, and it's still a kind of Masonic mafia. But I like Brussels, it is still home, after all these years. It has its advantages. For one thing, it's color-blind in a way the U.S. is not. I have been spending three months each year there since I retired. I have an apartment, yes, but I prefer to stay with my friends. They have a big house, it's in the southern part of the city, in Uccle. Where will you be staying? Ah, right, well it's not far from there, you just go south from Parc Leopold, and that's the neighborhood. If you had a map, I would show you.

Then, as if the talk of Brussels had gently pushed a door in her memory ajar, she said: Belgium was stupid during the war. The Second World War, I mean, not the First, I was born much too late for the First. That was my father's war. But I was just about to enter my teens during the Second World War, and these d.a.m.ned Germans, I remember them coming into the city. The blame really is on Leopold III; he made the wrong alliances or, I should say, he refused to make alliances, he thought it would be easy to defend the country. He was an old fool. There was a ca.n.a.l from Antwerp to Maastricht, you see, and a line of concrete fortifications, and this was supposed to be the perfect defense, this line. The idea was that the water would be too difficult to bring a large army across. Of course, the Germans had planes and paratroopers! All it took was eighteen days, and the n.a.z.is marched in, and stayed, like parasites. The day they finally left, the day the war ended for Belgium, was the happiest day of my life. I was fifteen, and I remember that day perfectly, I will never forget that day as long as I live, and I'll never be happier than I was that day. And here she paused, extended her hand, and said, I suppose I should introduce myself. Annette Maillotte.

Then she went on, falling deeper, it seemed, into her memory, telling me about her days as a young girl, how difficult things had been during the war, how Leopold III had bargained with Hitler for better rations, the devastation of the countryside afterward, when straggling figures covered the landscape and went from house to house begging for food and shelter, her decision to go into medicine, then her subsequent training in surgery, which was unusual for women at the time. Somehow, as she spoke, I could still see in her that resolute girl.

You must have been determined, I said. Well, no, no, you don't think of it like that, she said, you just find what you must do, and you do it. There's really no opportunity to stop and praise yourself, so I won't say determined. I nodded. Listening to her, I felt as if the objective fact of her age-if she was fifteen when the war ended, it meant she had been born in 1929-stood in an indirect relations.h.i.+p with the fact of her mental and physical vitality. At that moment, the flight attendants came to take our trays away, and Dr. Maillotte took up her book again. I lowered the light above my seat and, closing my eyes, imagined the frigid nighttime Atlantic racing by below us.

Although I was tired, I managed to sleep only fitfully, and woke again after a few hours, with a sore neck. Dr. Maillotte must have slept as well, but by the time I woke, she was again reading. I asked her how the book was. Yes, it's good, she said, nodding, and went back to reading. I signaled that I had to go to the bathroom and apologized for disturbing her. She stood up in the aisle, and was still standing when I came back. I have to keep the circulation moving, she said, especially important when you're as old as I am. When we sat down again, she said: Do you know Heliopolis? It's in Egypt, just outside Cairo. Helio-Polis, it means city of the sun, sun city. Well, I told you I was going to stay with a friend of mine in Brussels. His name is Gregoire Empain, and we've been friends since we were young, maybe when we were both twenty, and it was his grandfather who built Heliopolis.

If you ever get a chance to go there, you should. It's a fantastical place, and edouard Empain, or Baron Empain as they call him, was the engineer who designed and built it. That was in 1907. It was a real luxury capital, broad avenues, big gardens. There's a building there called Qasr Al-Baron, the Baron's Palace, that was modeled on Angkor Wat in Cambodia and also on a Hindu temple, a specific one, but I don't recall the name. And you know, this is now the most important suburb of Cairo; in fact it's within the city boundaries now. The president of Egypt lives there today. But the Empains are in a tussle with the Egyptian government, because part of Heliopolis belongs to them, and they are trying to claim it, or at least get compensated for it. The family is still wealthy, anyway, one of the wealthiest in Belgium. Baron Empain was a great industrialist-not just Heliopolis, he built the Paris Metro as well, when the Belgians wouldn't let him build one in Brussels-and his son was an industrialist also. The grandson Gregoire is modest, he doesn't like to be in the limelight. But Gregoire has a brother, Jean, and he's a different story.

I used to be crazy about skiing, and my husband, too, all my children-and we went to Mont Blanc with Gregoire, Jean, their sisters, and we skiied at Chamonix, at Megeve. Not Negev, like in Israel, but Megeve, close to Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps. And the Empains had this large chalet there, and all sorts of people showed up, you know, Jean-Claude Aaron, Edmond de Rothschild of the French Rothschilds. And this always amuses me to think of it, but once the queen of Sweden came, and the poor thing, she came with her husband and, you know, I don't think she had any idea the man was a complete f.a.ggot. It was obvious to everyone, but she was oblivious, and they just carried on. Anyway, we went, but it wasn't because these people were there, it was just good skiing. And I needed to get away from America from time to time, this terrible, hypocritical country, this sanctimonious country. I really can't stand it sometimes. Do you know what I mean?

But let me tell you about Gregoire's brother, Jean. He is not as quiet as Gregoire, quite the opposite: he likes to do deals, to jet-set. He's the one who inherited the t.i.tle. He's Baron Empain now, and sports cars, royal families, billionaire friends, that's his kind of thing. But poor fellow, you know, he was in all the papers in the late seventies. I think it was in 1978 that he was kidnapped, you see, and held for two months. Gregoire, the whole family, they were of course frantic. The kidnappers were French, and demanded something like eight or nine million dollars, a ridiculous amount of money, but not impossible for the Empains. The family was willing to pay. But there had been a lot of kidnappings at the time, all through the seventies, and the French government had a strict policy of no negotiations, no payments. So these kidnappers, I think one of them was called Duchateau-it is funny that I remember that, but you have to understand, we were following this story so intensely day after day in the newspapers-what Duchateau and his mates said was: Money brings liberty. I mean, it's ridiculous, they sound like philosophers, but they really meant it, and when the money was not forthcoming, they sliced off Jean's little finger and put it in an envelope and mailed it to his wife. They cut it off with a kitchen knife, without anesthetic, and threatened to amputate additional fingers for each day of delay with the payment. But the negotiators refused, and somehow, the kidnappers didn't follow through on their threat. Eventually, the police were able to ambush them, and they killed one of them, and captured the other two, and Jean was released.

I tell you, that was two months of h.e.l.l for the family. And Duchateau, the kidnapper, had written somewhere: These are tiny little slips of paper, but they mean everything, money brings liberty. If you see Jean now, there's a little k.n.o.b where that finger used to be. But the worst, if you ask him, was not that amputation, it was the cold. I think he was terribly cold for the two months; they made him sleep in a tent in an unheated room. And light deprivation, so he wouldn't recognize his captors. Cold and dark. For these tiny little slips of paper, right?

It was morning. We were flying with a bank of clouds above us and a bank of clouds below, and Europe was close. I asked Dr. Maillotte to tell me more about her children. They are all doctors, she said, all three of them, like my husband and me. I think it's what they wanted, but who knows? My eldest, well, he was thirty-six last year when he died. He had just finished his residency in radiology. Cancer of the liver, and a quick decline. It's an impossible thing to go through, watching a son die. He was married, and had a three-year-old daughter. It was impossible; it still is. The other two: one is in California, one is in New York. They are the younger ones. And my husband is with me in Philadelphia, well, we're just outside Philadelphia, and he's a cardiologist, and he just retired, too.

A silence fell on us. And you, she said, tell me, why Brussels? It's a strange place for a vacation in winter! I smiled. Cozumel was the other possibility, I said, but I don't know how to dive. Well, she said, here's the number at Gregoire's. Friendly people, you know, they don't put on airs. I'll be there for six, maybe eight, weeks. You should come around and have dinner with us. I thanked her for the invitation and told her I would consider it. And, as I looked at the number she had written down for me, I thought about the Paris Metro, that expression of optimism and progress, and about the ancient city in Egypt that had also been known as Heliopolis, before Baron Empain built his version, and of underground travel, we millions moving around underneath cities, inhabitants of an age in which, for the first time, traveling great distances beneath the earth had become normal for humans. I thought, too, about the numberless dead, in forgotten cities, necropoli, catacombs. The pilot announced the final approach for landing, in English, French, and Flemish, and as we broke through the lower bank of clouds, I saw the city spread across the low landscape.

EIGHT.

Mayken, the woman who owned the Brussels apartment, had offered to pick me up from the airport for an additional fee of fifteen euros. The other options, she had told me on the phone, were to take a taxi for thirty-five euros, or to take public transportation and risk being robbed. And so, when I arrived on the overnight flight, she was waiting in the arrivals lounge with a sign that had my name on it. Her bleached hair sat on her head like yellow cotton candy, and looked likely to lift and sail away if caught in the wind. I bid goodbye to Dr. Maillotte, and walked over, waving until Mayken spotted me. She was in her fifties, friendly, but with a sharp business manner that, as we later went over the short-term lease papers-pages and pages of picayune legal detail-became, with her bouffant hair, the only visible part of her personality.

The original idea of Brussels, she said, as we drove out of the airport, was that it should be equally Flemish and Walloon. Of course, it's not that way anymore, she went on, now it is ninety-five percent Walloon and other French speakers, one percent Flemish, and four percent Arab and African. She laughed, but quickly added: These are real numbers. And the French are lazy, she said, they hate working and are envious of the Flemish. I'll tell you this in case you don't hear it from anyone else.

I looked outside the window, and in my mind's eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders' retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: the Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half century ahead and, better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment.

Mayken's English was slightly inflected with wavering Dutch vowels. I looked out on both sides of the speeding car, and the Brussels of my experience came back to me. It was my third visit to the city, but the previous ones had been brief, the first having been more than twenty years before, during a two-day layover on the way to the United States from Nigeria when I was seven. At the time, my mother had said nothing about her mother, though my oma had moved there by then. The details of that journey were buried in my memory until I saw the Novotel Hotel near the airport, where the airline had put us up. How ideal it had all seemed back then: the black Mercedes-Benzes that were used as taxicabs at the airport, the strange food at the hotel buffet. It was a glimpse of impressive sophistication and wealth, that first experience of Europe. Outside the hotel, I had noticed the order and grayness, the modesty and regularity of the houses, and the cool formality of the people, against which American life, my first real contact with which came a few weeks later, had seemed lurid.

It is easy to have the wrong idea about Brussels. One thinks of it as a technocrats' city, and because it was so central to the formation of the European Union, the a.s.sumption is that it is a new city, built, or at least expanded, expressly for that purpose. Brussels is old-a peculiar European oldness, which is manifested in stone-and that antiquity is present in most of its streets and neighborhoods. The houses, bridges, and cathedrals of Brussels had been spared the horrors visited on the low farmland and forests of Belgium, which had borne the brunt of the countless wars fought on the territory. Slaughter and destruction, ferocious to a degree rarely experienced in history, had taken place on the Somme, in Ypres, and before that, out at Waterloo.

Those were the theaters, so conveniently set at the intersection of Holland, Germany, England, and France, in which Europe's fatal tussles had played out. But there had been no firebombing of Bruges, or Ghent, or Brussels. Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.

During my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. It was, in some ways, like a city in waiting, or one under gla.s.s, with somber trams and buses. There were many people, many more than I had seen in other European cities, who gave the impression of having just arrived from a sun-suffused elsewhere. I saw old women with dotted black patterns around their eyes, their heads swaddled in black cloth, and young women, too, likewise veiled. Islam, in its conservative form, was on constant view, though it was not clear to me why this should be so: Belgium had not had a strong colonial relations.h.i.+p with any country in North Africa. But this was the European reality now, in which borders were flexible. There was a palpable psychological pressure in the city.

I'm sure Mayken's "four percent Arab and African" was intended to be snide, but from what I saw, it might have been a modest estimate. Even in the city center, or especially there, large numbers of people seemed to be from some part of Africa, either from the Congo or from the Maghreb. On some trams, as I was to quickly discover, whites were a tiny minority. But that was not the case with the morose crowd I met on the metro some days after my arrival. They had been to a rally at the Atomium to protest racism and violence in general, but in particular a murder that had happened much earlier, in April of that year. A seventeen-year-old, after refusing to give up his mp3 player, had been stabbed by two other youths at the Gare Centrale; this had happened on a crowded platform, during rush hour, with dozens of people around; the fact that no one had done anything to help the boy had become a point of discussion in the days following the murder. The murdered boy was Flemish; the murderers, reports said, were Arab. Fearful of racial backlash, the prime minister had appealed for calm, and in his homily that Sunday, the bishop of the city had bemoaned a society so indifferent that everyone around had refused to help a dying boy. Where were you at 4:30 P.M P.M. that day? he had said to the crowded congregation at the Cathedrale des Saints Michel et Gudule.

The bishop's hand-wringing had gotten a swift and impa.s.sioned response from the Vlaams Belang (the Flemish right-wing party) and its sympathizers. Well-known columnists took a wounded tone and complained of reverse racism. The victims were being blamed, they said; the problem was not with uncaring pa.s.sersby but with the foreigners who committed crimes. It was easier to get flagged for violating biking rules than for actually stealing a bike, because the police were afraid of being seen as racist. One journalist wrote on his blog that Belgian society was fed up with "murdering, thieving, raping Vikings from North Africa." This was quoted approvingly in certain mainstream sources. Efforts by the Muslim community in Brussels to heal the wound, such as their distribution of home-baked bread at the public memorial service for the murdered boy, drew a furious response from right-wingers. Later, during the elections, the politicians of the Vlaams Belang recorded gains once again, consolidating their position as possibly the biggest party in the country. Only the coalitions of the other groups kept them out of power. But the murderers in the Gare Centrale case, it turned out, weren't Arab or African at all: they were Polish citizens. There was some debate about whether they were Roma, gypsies. One of them, a sixteen-year-old, was arrested in Poland; his seventeen-year-old partner was arrested in Belgium and extradited to Poland, and with his departure, some of the tensions around the case dissipated.

But there were other ugly incidents. I was there at the very end of 2006, a year in which several hate crimes had ratcheted up the tension experienced by nonwhites living in the country. In Bruges, five skinheads put a black Frenchman into a coma. In Antwerp, in May, an eighteen-year-old shaved his head and, after fulminating about makakken makakken, headed for the city center with a Winchester rifle, and started shooting. He seriously injured a Turkish girl and killed a nanny from Mali, as well as the Flemish infant in her care. Later on, he expressed a specific regret: for having accidentally shot the white child. In Brussels, a black man was left paralyzed and blind after an attack at a petrol station. The paradoxical result of these crimes was that even politically centrist parties like the Christian Democrats began to lean rightward, adopting the language of the Vlaams Belang in order to cater to voter discontent about immigration. The country was in the grip of uncertainties-the sense of anomie was apparent even to a visitor.

I went to the Parc du Cinquantenaire. It was covered in fog, but this made the scale of the monuments seem even bigger. The already gigantic arcades shot up vertiginously and lost their heads in faint white veils, and the rows of trees before and beyond them, rigid as sentries, stretched into eternity. The park, built by a heartless king, was also of inhuman scale. A handful of tourists, so dwarfed by the monuments that, from a distance, they looked like toys, roamed around silently, taking photographs. When they came closer, I heard them speaking Chinese.

It was half past four, night fast falling, and the air was misty and cold; the area just southeast of the park looked out into Etterbeek and the Merode metro station, a complex a.s.sortment of roads, tram tracks, and signs, but few people were about on Christmas Eve. In the park, right in front of the Musees Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire, which I had int.i.tially taken for the better known Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, a broad-headed horse stood by a carriage marked POLITIE POLITIE, but there were no police officers in sight, and the museum was closed. Under the arcade was a bronze plaque displaying in relief the portraits of the first five Belgian kings: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, and Baudouin, and beneath it an inscription that read: HOMMAGE A LA DYNASTIE LA BELGIQUE ET LE CONGO, RECONNAISSANTS, MDCCCx.x.xI HOMMAGE A LA DYNASTIE LA BELGIQUE ET LE CONGO, RECONNAISSANTS, MDCCCx.x.xI. Not triumph, then, but grat.i.tude; or grat.i.tude for triumphs achieved. I stood under the arcade and watched the Chinese family enter their car. They drove away, leaving just me and the patient horse. We were the two living animals in that place, and with every breath cold fog entered our lungs. I was there, it seemed to me, to no purpose, unless being together in the same country, as I and my oma now were (if, that is, she were still alive), was, by itself, a comfort.

IN THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS IN B BRUSSELS, I MADE SOME DESULTORY MADE SOME DESULTORY efforts to find her. I had little idea of where to begin. The listings gave no help: there was no Magdalena Muller in the phone book in the apartment, or in another one I consulted in a phone booth. I briefly considered visiting nursing homes; and I felt, suddenly, an irrational shame at speaking French badly and Flemish not at all. A five-minute walk from my Brussels apartment was an Internet and telephone shop, located on the ground floor of a narrow building. I visited it in the hope of doing some online searches. efforts to find her. I had little idea of where to begin. The listings gave no help: there was no Magdalena Muller in the phone book in the apartment, or in another one I consulted in a phone booth. I briefly considered visiting nursing homes; and I felt, suddenly, an irrational shame at speaking French badly and Flemish not at all. A five-minute walk from my Brussels apartment was an Internet and telephone shop, located on the ground floor of a narrow building. I visited it in the hope of doing some online searches.

The shop contained a row of gla.s.s-fronted wooden booths for phone calls and a half dozen computers. The man behind the counter must have been in his early thirties. He was clean-shaven, with a lean, pleasant face and lank black hair. He pointed me to a computer terminal near the back. I found the Belgian white pages quickly. The site came up, to my surprise, in English, and I quickly entered the search terms: Magdalena Muller. The results listed many people named Magdalena M., many others listed as M. Muller, and two hits with Magdalena Muller, but both with hyphenated last names.

I shut the site down and went back up to the counter. I communicated with the man in broken French, paying for the service, which had come to fifty centimes for the twenty-five minutes of Internet use.

I WENT INTO THE SHOP THE FOLLOWING DAY, TO CHECK EMAIL WENT INTO THE SHOP THE FOLLOWING DAY, TO CHECK EMAIL, and paid when I was done. But this time, as I left, I surprised him by asking for his name, in English. Farouq, he said. I introduced myself, shaking his hand, and added: How are you doing, my brother? Good, he said, with a quick, puzzled smile. As I stepped out onto the street, I wondered how this aggressive familiarity had struck him. I wondered, also, why I had said it. A false note, I decided. But soon after I changed my mind. I would be going into the shop for a few weeks, and it was best to make friends; and that interaction, as it turned out, set the tone the following day.

The shop was busy. Farouq, reading a book at the counter, paused to attend to the people coming in or leaving. Customers sat at all the computer terminals, and I could hear the conversations taking place in the wooden booths. I called my father's sister, my aunt Tinu, in Lagos, and friends in Ohio. I also called the hospital in New York to approve and renew some prescriptions. V.'s was among them: she'd been on Paxil and Wellbutrin, but neither was working, and I had recently started her on tricyclics. I gave the necessary permissions to the head nurse, who told me that V. had wanted to know how I could be reached. I can't be reached, I said, have her call Dr. Kim, the resident covering for me. Then, feeling the vigor of ticking things off my list, I also called Human Resources to check up on some paperwork having to do with my vacation time; I was told the department had closed early and wouldn't be open again until the third of January. I came out of the booth annoyed at this and waited until Farouq was done attending to another customer. He looked at his computer log and then at me and said, United States? Yes, that's right, I said, and you, where are you from? Morocco, he said. Rabat? Casablanca? No, Tetouan. It's a town in the north. That's it in the picture behind me.

He pointed at an old color photograph in a metal frame of a broad cl.u.s.ter of white buildings and, behind them, ma.s.sive green mountains. I said, I just finished a novel by a Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun. Yes, I know him, Farouq said, he has a big reputation. He was about to say more, but just then, another customer came up to pay for his computer use and, as he did the reckoning, collecting payment and giving out change, I caught, belatedly, the note of disapproval in his "big reputation." I noticed that the book Farouq had been reading was in English. He noticed my curiosity and turned it around. It was a secondary text on Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History On the Concept of History. It's difficult reading, he said, requires a lot of concentration. Not much of that here, I said. Another customer came up, and again Farouq flipped seamlessly into French, and back again into English. He said: It's about how this man, Walter Benjamin, conceives of history in a way that is opposed to Marx though, for many people, he is a Marxist philosopher. But Tahar Ben Jelloun, as I was saying, he writes out of a certain idea of Morocco. It isn't the life of people that Ben Jelloun writes about but stories that have an oriental element in them. His writing is mythmaking. It isn't connected to people's real lives.

I nodded as he spoke, and I tried to align the drab Brussels neighborhood, the hum of petty business, the boxes of gaudily wrapped sweets and chewing gum on the wall shelf with the smiling, serious-faced thinker sitting in front of me. What had I expected? Not this. A man who works in a shop, yes, a man who works in a shop that's open on Christmas Day, sure. But not this: the crisp, self-certain intellectual language. I greatly admired Tahar Ben Jelloun for his flexible and tough-minded storytelling, but I did not contradict Farouq's statement. I was too surprised for that and only offered, weakly, the idea that perhaps Ben Jelloun did capture the rhythm of everyday life in his novel Corruption Corruption. The book was about a government functionary and his inner struggle with bribe taking: What could be closer to everyday life than that? Farouq's English came out in a succession of lucid sentences as he put my protest down. I couldn't follow his argument. He wasn't saying that Ben Jelloun pandered to Western publishers, exactly, but he was suggesting that the social function of his fiction was suspect. But when I seized on that idea, he shook it off, too, and only said: There are other writers whose work is connected with everyday life and with the history of the people. And this doesn't mean they have any connection to nationalist ideals. Sometimes, they even suffer more at the hands of nationalists.

So I asked him to recommend something different to me, something more in keeping with his idea of authentic fiction. Farouq solemnly took a sc.r.a.p of paper from the desk and wrote out, in a slow and jagged cursive: "Mohamed Choukri-For Bread Alone-translated by Paul Bowles." He studied the sc.r.a.p for a moment, then said: Choukri is a rival to Tahar Ben Jelloun. They have had disagreements. You see, people like Ben Jelloun have the life of a writer in exile, and this gives them a certain-here Farouq paused, struggling to find the right word-it gives them a certain poeticity poeticity, can I say this, in the eyes of the West. To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely? Choukri stayed in Morocco, he lived with his people. What I like best about him is that he was an autodidact, if it is correct to use this word. He was raised on the street and he taught himself to write cla.s.sical Arabic, but he never left the street.

Farouq spoke without the faintest air of agitation. I didn't quite grasp all the distinctions he was making, but I was impressed with the subtlety in them. He had the pa.s.sion of youth, but his clarity was unfussy and seemed to belong (this was the image that came to me) to someone who had undertaken long journeys. This calmness of his put me off balance. Finally, I said: It is always a difficult thing, isn't it? I mean resisting the orientalizing impulse. For those who don't, who will publish them? Which Western publisher wants a Moroccan or Indian writer who isn't into oriental fantasy, or who doesn't satisfy the longing for fantasy? That's what Morocco and India are there for, after all, to be oriental.

This is why Said means so much to me, he said. You see, Said was young when he heard that statement made by Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinian people, and when he heard this, he became involved in the Palestinian question. He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You can wait forever, and no one will give you that value. Let me tell you something that happened to me in cla.s.s.

Farouq opened the register. I wished the customers would stop interrupting us. For a moment, too, I thought I should correct his slightly inaccurate quotation of Meir. But I was unsure of my ground, and he continued as though there had been no interruption at all. A question was asked, he said, during a discussion of political philosophy. We were supposed to choose between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and I was the only person who chose Malcolm X. Everyone in cla.s.s was in disagreement with me, and they said, Oh, you chose him because he is a Muslim and you are a Muslim. Yes, fine, I am a Muslim, but that is not why. I chose him because I agree with him, philosophically, and I disagree with Martin Luther King. Malcolm X recognized that difference contains its own value, and that the struggle must be to advance that value. Martin Luther King is admired by everyone, he wants everyone to join together, but this idea that you should let them hit you on the other side of your face, this makes no sense to me.

It's a Christian idea, I said. He was a churchman, you see, his principles came from the Christian concept. That is it exactly, Farouq said. This is not an idea I can accept. There's always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the n.o.ble ideas; I disagree with this expectation. It's an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill ma.s.ses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.

Farouq laughed. I looked at my watch, though I really had nowhere to go. The victimized Other: how strange, I thought, that he used an expression like that in a casual conversation. And yet, when he said it, it had a far deeper resonance than it would have in any academic situation. It occurred to me, at the same time, that our conversation had happened without the usual small talk. He was still just a man in a shop. He was a student, too, or had been one, but of what? Here he was, as anonymous as Marx in London. To Mayken and to countless others like her in this city, he would be just another Arab, subject to a quick suspicious glance on the tram. And of me, he knew nothing either, only that I had made phone calls to the United States and to Nigeria, and that I had been into his shop three times in five days. The biographical details had been irrelevant to our encounter. I extended my hand and said, I hope we can continue this conversation soon, peace. I hope so too, he said, peace.

Thinking back to Mayken's a.s.sertions, I had been wrong, I decided. What Farouq got on the trams wasn't a quick suspicious glance. It was a simmering, barely contained fear. The cla.s.sic anti-immigrant view, which saw them as enemies competing for scarce resources, was converging with a renewed fear of Islam. When Jan van Eyck depicted himself in a large red turban in the 1430s, he had testified to the multiculturalism of fifteenth-century Ghent, that the stranger was nothing unusual. Turks, Arabs, Russians: all had been part of the visual vocabulary of the time. But the stranger had remained strange, and had become a foil for new discontents. It occurred to me, too, that I was in a situation not so radically different from Farouq's. My presentation-the dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger-made me a target for the inchoate rage of the defenders of Vlaanderen. I could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist or "Viking." But the bearers of the rage could never know how cheap it was. They were insensitive to how common, and how futile, was their violence in the name of a monolithic ident.i.ty. This ignorance was a trait angry young men, as well as their old, politically powerful rhetorical champions, shared the world over. And so, after that conversation, as a precaution, I cut down on the length of my late-night walks in Etterbeek. I resolved, also, to no longer visit all-white bars or family restaurants in the quieter neighborhoods.

I hoped, on my next visit to the shop, to talk to Farouq about the Vlaams Belang, and what life had been like in the wake of all the acts of violence. But on the day I next went there, he was in conversation with someone else, an older Moroccan man, who seemed to be in his mid-forties. I nodded to both of them in greeting, and went into one of the phone booths, and placed a call to New York. When I came out they were still talking. The older man rang up my charges, and Farouq said, My friend, my friend, how are you doing? But it suddenly occurred to me that, even if he had been alone, I wouldn't have wanted to talk. He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?

One euro exactly, the older man said, in English. I paid, and left the shop.

NINE.

The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified. Most days I stayed indoors, reading, but I read without pleasure. On the occasions when I went out, I wandered aimlessly in the parks and in the museum district. The stones paving the streets were sodden, liquid underfoot, and the sky, dirty for days, was redolent with moisture.

I went to a cafe in Grand Sablon one afternoon, sometime after the lunch hour. I was one of only two customers, the city being rather quiet in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. The other person in the cafe was a middle-aged tourist who, I noticed when I came in, was scrutinizing a map. In the small interior, which was lit by the diffuse light from outside, she looked pallid, and her gray hair caught the light with a dull s.h.i.+ne. The cafe was old, or had been done up to look old, with darkly polished wood lining its walls and several oil paintings in tarnished gold-leaf frames. The paintings were marine scenes, choppy seas on which quartermasters and merchant s.h.i.+ps listed perilously. The seas and skies were without a doubt much darker than they were when they had been painted, and the once-white sails had yellowed with age.

The tall girl who brought my coffee had a Parisian rather than Bruxelloise affect. She set the coffee down and, to my surprise, she herself sat for a moment at my table, and asked where I was from. She was about twenty-two or twenty-five, I guessed, with heavy-lidded eyes and a winning smile. I was flattered by the approach, and by her obvious interest in me; she was undoubtedly used to having a strong and immediate effect on men. But, flattered as I was, I was uninterested, and my responses to her were polite and even a little curt, and when she stood up again, with her tray, it was less with displeasure than with puzzlement.

Some fifteen minutes later, I paid the man at the counter. At the same time, the pallid tourist had come up to settle her bill. She spoke halting English with an Eastern European intonation. When we both stepped outside, into the by now heavy rain, and stood under the cafe's awning, I saw that she was more blond than gray, with heavy circles around her eyes, and a kind smile. I had an umbrella, and she didn't. There was a quiet friendliness in her manner; there was, perhaps, expectation. I turned to her and asked if she was Polish. No, she said. Czech.

By fifty, which is what I estimated her age to be, a woman's appearance often requires effort. For someone the age of the waitress, someone in her twenties, to be even a little good looking was enough. At that age, everything else falls into accord: skin is taut, stature straight, gait sure, hair healthy, voice clear and unwavering. By fifty, there is a struggle. And for these reasons, the afternoon was a surprise-a surprise for the tourist, at the clearly expressed, if largely wordless, interest she began to pick up from me, and surprise for me, too, at her large gray-green eyes, their sad intelligence, their intense and entirely unantic.i.p.ated s.e.xual allure. The afternoon had taken on the character of a dream, a dream that now extended to her hand touching my back lightly, for a moment, as I moved the umbrella so that it covered her fully. We stood there for a moment and watched the rain continue to come down in sheets. Then we walked together a little way along the little cobblestone streets, up the busy rue de la Regence, hardly speaking, using the shared umbrella as a pretext as far as we could take it. But when she suggested a drink at her hotel, the ambiguous touch on the back had given way to clarity, and my resolve became correspondingly strong. I would take the folly, I said to myself, as my heart raced, just as far as she was willing to go with it. And clarity gave us both courage. I followed her up, my eyes set on the hemline of her gray skirt, which was guillotined at the calf.

In the faux Louis XV bedroom, her shyness dissolved. She embraced me, and the embrace became a kiss on the cheek. I kissed her neck-long, a surprise-and her forehead, topped by that mane of hers, which had become mostly gray again in interior light, then, finally, her mouth. Her waist was thick, pliant; she went down on her knees, quickly, and sighed. I pulled her back up, shaking my head. Then we both went down together, by the side of the Baroque bed, both pushed up against its satin shams, and I pulled the linen skirt upward to her waist.

Afterward, she told me her name-Marta? Esther? I forgot it immediately-and explained, with some difficulty, that she handled the travel bookings for the Const.i.tutional Court in Brno. She had a grown daughter who was a ski instructor in Switzerland. She said nothing about a husband, and I didn't ask. I introduced myself as Jeff, an accountant from New York; the unimaginative falsehood felt seedy, but it also had a comedy that I appreciated, and was resigned to appreciating alone. Then we drew back the sheets on the unrumpled bed, and slept. By the time we woke up, two or three hours later, night had fallen. Wordlessly, I got dressed, but this time the silence was wreathed with smiles. I kissed her on the neck again, and left.

The lights in the park had come on, and the rain had stopped. People were out in pairs, in families, heading to performances or to restaurants. I felt light and grateful. Rarely had I seen Brussels looking so generous. A wind rustled the leaves, and I wondered if I would remember her face; it was unlikely that I would. But she had made the whole thing easy for me, my first since Nadege, and something needful that I'd neglected to do. Now it was done, and I couldn't have wished it different. Best of all, I decided, had been her pleasure; we were simply two people far away from home, doing what two people wanted to do. To my lightness and grat.i.tude was added a faint sorrow. It was a few miles back to Etterbeek, and walking there, I returned to my solitude. This cannot happen again, I had wanted to say to her; but I found that it was not quite what I meant to say, and that nothing really needed saying. I returned to the apartment, and the following day I didn't go out. I remained in bed and read Barthes's Camera Lucida Camera Lucida. Later in the afternoon, Mayken came round, and I gave her money.

The following evening, or the one after that, I found the sc.r.a.p of paper on which Dr. Maillotte had written her phone number, and this spurred me to go to the phone shop. Farouq wasn't there. The older fellow, solemn, with sallow skin, was working at the desk. He had a brush mustache and bulbous eyes. I nodded to him, and went into a phone booth. A man answered the phone on the other end, but when I spoke in English, he called Dr. Maillotte.

She came to the phone and said, h.e.l.lo, who is this? Oh, yes, how are you, but I am sorry, tell me how we know each other again. I reminded her. Ah, yes, of course. You are in Belgium for a month, three weeks? When do you leave? Ah, so soon. I see. Well, why don't you call me on Monday, and we can go out for dinner or something, before you leave the country.

When I replaced the handset, and went out to pay, Farouq had arrived and the solemn man was chatting with him. Farouq saw me. My friend, he said, how are you? He insisted that I not pay for the call, which in any case had been brief and local. The colleague went away, and a customer came in. Farouq greeted her, ca va? Alhamdulillah ca va? Alhamdulillah, the woman replied. Farouq turned to me and said, It's very busy, as you can see. Not only for all the people making New Year greetings but also for a lot of people calling home for the Eid. He gestured to the computer monitor behind him, and on it was a log of the calls ongoing in all twelve booths: Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France, Germany. It looked like fiction, that such a small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places. It's been like this for the past two days, Farouq said, and this is one of the things I enjoy about working here. It's a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me.

I used to work as a janitor, he said, at an American school in Brussels. It was the foreign campus of a university in the States, and for them I was just the janitor, you see, the man who cleaned the cla.s.srooms when their cla.s.ses were finished. And I was nice, quiet, like a janitor should be; I pretended not to have any ideas of my own. But one day, I was cleaning one of the offices, and the princ.i.p.al of the school, the head of academics, came around, and somehow we got talking, and I just had this idea to really speak as myself, not as a janitor, but as someone with ideas. So I started talking, and I used a bit of my jargon. I was talking about Gilles Deleuze and, of course, he was surprised. But he was open, and I went on, and we discussed Deleuze's concept of waves and dunes, about how it is the s.p.a.ces between those forms, the necessary s.p.a.ces, that gives them their definitions as waves or dunes. The princ.i.p.al was completely responsive to this conversation, and in this generous American way, he said, Come to my office sometime and we'll talk more.

When Farouq said this, I imagined the man's tone of voice. It was like an arm around the shoulder, a disarming gesture, a promise of complicity: Come to my office sometime, let us engage with each other. But, Farouq said, continuing his story, when I saw him next, he not only refused to speak to me but actually pretended he had never seen me before. I was just the janitor, mopping the floor, nothing more than a part of the furniture. I greeted him, tried for a moment to remind him of our Deleuze conversation, but he said nothing. There was a line, and I was wasting my time in the attempt to cross it. As Farouq spoke, people went in and out of the booths rapidly, and he greeted each person, the level of familiarity determined, I guessed, by how often they'd come into the shop before. He spoke French, Arabic, English, as was appropriate; with the man who had been calling Colombia, he exchanged a few words of Spanish. His judgment of the right language to use with each person was swift, and his manner so friendly that I wondered why I had had the impression, when I first met him, that he was distant.

I have two projects, Farouq said. There is the practical one, and there's a deeper one. I asked if the practical one was his job at the shop. No, he said, not even that; the practical thing, for the long term, is my studies. I'm studying to be a translator between Arabic, English, and French, and I'm also doing some courses in media translation and subt.i.tles for films, this kind of thing. That's how I will find a job. But my deeper project is about what I said last time, the difference thing. I strongly believe this, that people can live together, and I want to understand how that can happen. It happens here, on this small scale, in this shop, and I want to understand how it can happen on a bigger scale. But as I told you, I'm an autodidact, so I don't know what form this other project will take.

I asked him if he thought he could be a writer, and he said that even that was unclear to him. He would study first, he said, and come to an understanding, and only then decide what form his action would take. I was struck by the purity of the goal, its idealism and old-fas.h.i.+oned radicalism, and the certainty in the way he expressed it, as though it was something he had nurtured for many years; and I trusted it, in spite of myself. But I also thought about his reference to our previous conversation, when he said he had referred to himself as an autodidact. It was a minor thing, of course, but (and I was sure I wasn't misremembering) he had only used the word in reference to Mohamed Choukri, not to himself. This was a small instance, not of unreliability, but of a certain imperfection in Farouq's recall which, because of the absolute sureness of his manner, it was easy to miss. It in any case made me revise my previous impression of his sharpness, even if only modestly. These minor lapses-there were others, and they were irrelevant lapses, actually, not even worthy of the label mistake mistake-made me feel less intimidated by him.

My experience at the American school, Farouq said, became combined in my mind with f.u.kuyama's idea of the end of history. It is impossible, and it is arrogant, to think that the present reality of Western countries is the culminating point of human history. The princ.i.p.al had been talking in all these terms-melting pot, salad bowl, multiculturalism-but I reject all these terms. I believe foremost in difference. Remember what I said about Malcolm X: this is what the Americans don't understand, that the Iraqis can never be happy with foreign rule. Even if Egypt invaded Palestine to save them from Israel, the Palestinians cannot accept this, they would not want Egyptian rule. No one likes foreign domination. Do you know how much Algeria and Morocco hate each other? So you can imagine how bad it is when it is a Western power doing the invasion. I believe that Benjamin can help me understand this better, and I believe that his subtle revisions of Marx can help me understand the historical structure that makes difference possible. But I believe, also, in the divine principle. There are those things that Islam can offer our thinking. Do you know Averroes? Not all Western thought comes from the West alone. Islam is not a religion; it is a way of life that has something to offer to our political system. I say all this not to make myself the representative of Islam. Actually, I am a bad Muslim, you see, but one day I will return to my practice. At the moment I don't practice very well.

He paused, and laughed, a.s.sessing my reaction to what he had been saying. I gave no indication of my thoughts. I only nodded, signaling that I was listening. Three or four customers had gathered around the desk and, with a smile, Farouq continued. The thing, though, is that I am a pacifist. I don't believe in violent compulsion. You know, even if someone is right here, with a gun pointed at my family, I cannot kill this person. I mean it, so don't look so surprised. But, my friend, he said, in a tone that indicated he was wrapping things up, let us meet the day after tomorrow. You're a man of philosophy, but you're an American also, and I want to talk to you more about some things. On Sat.u.r.day, I get off work at six. Why don't you meet me across the street? That Portuguese place, Casa Botelho, right at that corner here-he pointed across the street-let us meet there on Sat.u.r.day evening.

ON S SAt.u.r.dAY, I WENT UP THE STEEP HILL OF THE WENT UP THE STEEP HILL OF THE C CHAUSSeE d'Ixelles all the way to Porte de Namur, and from there I cut across the throng of weekend shoppers to Avenue Louise, and then on to the Royal Palace. Every now and again, looking into the faces of the women huddled at the tram stops, I imagined that one of them might be my oma. It was a possibility that had come to me each time I was out in the city, that I might see her, that I might be tracing paths she had followed for years, that she might indeed be one of the old women with their orthopedic shoes and crinkly shopping bags, wondering from time to time how her only daughter's only son was doing. But I could recognize the nostalgic wish-fulfillment fantasy at work. I had almost nothing to go on, and my search, if my poor effort could be called by that term, became insubstantial and expressed itself only as the faint memory of the day she had visited Olumo Rock with us in Nigeria, and had wordlessly ma.s.saged my shoulder. It was in these thoughts that I began to wonder if Brussels hadn't somehow drawn me to itself for reasons more opaque than I suspected, that the paths I mindlessly followed through the city followed a logic irrelevant to my family history. d'Ixelles all the way to Porte de Namur, and from there I cut across the throng of weekend shoppers to Avenue Louise, and then on to the Royal Palace. Every now and again, looking into the faces of the women huddled at the tram stops, I imagined that one of them might be my oma. It was a possibility that had come to me each time I was out in the city, that I might see her, that I might be tracing paths she had followed for years, that she might indeed be one of the old women with their orthopedic shoes and crinkly shopping bags, wondering from time to time how her only daughter's only son was doing. But I could recognize the nostalgic wish-fulfillment fantasy at work. I had almost nothing to go on, and my search, if my poor effort could be called by that term, became insubstantial and expressed itself only as the faint memory of the day she had visited Olumo Rock with us in Nigeria, and had wordlessly ma.s.saged my shoulder. It was in these thoughts that I began to wonder if Brussels hadn't somehow drawn me to itself for reasons more opaque than I suspected, that the paths I mindlessly followed through the city followed a logic irrelevant to my family history.

The weather had become drizzly again, but as a fine mist, not rain. I had not taken an umbrella, so I went to the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, but once I was inside, I found that I was not at all in the mood to look at paintings. I stepped outside again, into the mist. From then on, I simply wandered aimlessly, through the Egmont Park and its morose gallery of bronze statues, then down to Grand Sablon, with its antiques dealers who hovered with suspicious glances over their worthless old coins, past the little cafe I'd visited before, having a quick glance in to see if my tall waitress was there (she wasn't), and from there down to Place de la Chapelle. The cathedral there was like the streaked hull of a sunken s.h.i.+p, and the few people around it were tiny and drab, like midges. The sky, already gloomy, had quickly begun to darken. There was an Indian restaurant I had seen in the area once, and I thought I should find it and eat there. When I had walked by before, I had noticed a menu board that included Goan fish curry, and I started craving that dish; but I simply ended up lost, tramping around in an area of derelict government housing in which not a single wall was free of graffiti. My wool coat was sodden by this time. Because there was no metro in the immediate vicinity, I walked back to Porte de Namur and took a bus from there down to Philippe. I hurried to my apartment and changed out of the soaked coat, then went out immediately again to meet Farouq at Casa Botelho.

Three men sat playing cards in a corner of the cafe. Their dowdy clothes, the slow deliberation of their movements, and the clutter of bottles on the table c.u.mulatively created an exact Cezannesque tableau. It was accurate even down to the detail of one man's thick mustache, which I could swear I had already seen on a canvas at the Museum of Modern Art. The room was busy, but as I came in I saw Farouq at a table farther inside, near the window. He raised a hand, and smiled. There was a man sitting there with him and, as I approached, they both stood up. Julius, Farouq said, I want you to meet Khalil. He's one of my friends, in fact I can say he's my best friend. Khalil, this is Julius: he is more than a customer. I shook hands with them and we sat. They were already drinking-both of them had bottles of Chimay beer-and were also smoking. Behind Khalil, and just visible in the nicotine haze, was a sign warning that smoking was not permitted in the restaurant. It was a new law; it had come into effect just a few days before, with the new year, and no one, neither management nor customers, seemed to have any interest in enforcing it. The waitress, with whom they both appeared to be familiar, came to take my order. She speaks English, Khalil said in English, but I don't. We laughed, but it was true: that was the most fluent English he would speak to me. I ordered a Chimay.

Khalil, round-faced and talkative, interrogated me in French. He asked about where I was from; I responded in English. He wanted to know what I was doing in Brussels; I gave him a version of the truth about that. This man just got married, Farouq said. I congratulated him, and asked Farouq if he was married. They both laughed, and he shook his head and said, Not yet. Khalil said something to me that sounded like: America is a great country that is not a great country. I asked him to speak a bit more slowly, because my French was only a little bit better than his English. Does America really have a left? he said. Khalil is a Marxist, you see, Farouq said, in a gently mocking tone. Yes, I said, America has a left, an active one. Khalil looked genuinely surprised. The left there, he said, must be further to the right than the right here. Farouq had to translate this for me, because Khalil had spoken too quickly for me to catch. Not exactly, I said, the issues are emphasized differently. There are the Democrats, who share the political power, but there is also a genuine left, who would probably agree with you on many things. What are the important issues there? Khalil asked. What do left and right disagree on? As I began to answer him, as I enumerated the divisive issues, I felt faintly embarra.s.sed at how tawdry they were: abortion, h.o.m.os.e.xuality, gun control-Khalil looked confused by that last term, and Farouq said des armes des armes. Immigration's also an issue, I said, though not in the same way as in Europe. Well, Khalil said, what about Palestine? I think your Democrats and Republicans are united on that issue.

The waitress, whose name was Paulina, finally brought my beer, and we raised our gla.s.ses. The beer went down easily, and I felt myself set into a new, pleasant keel by it. I said, it's not so simple. There's a strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories. But in practical terms, in terms of our government, well, the support for Israel is pretty solid in both parties. I think it has to do with religion, because the Christians walk in step with Jewish ideas about Jerusalem to a large extent, but it also has to do with the strong Israel lobby. At least that's what the left-leaning magazines and journals say. And then there's also the perception that we share elements of our culture and government with Israel.

This is the strange thing, Farouq said. They say that Israel is democratic, but it's actually a religious state. It functions on a religious idea. He translated this into French for Khalil, who nodded in agreement. They were both chain-smoking. Pack a day? I said. For me, two packs, Khalil said. But wait, this interests me, he added, this obsession with communitarianism in the United States. I asked Farouq what the word meant, whether it was something like ident.i.ty politics, but he said no, it wasn't that, exactly. Khalil started speaking about communitarianism, about how it gave unfair leverage to minority interests, about how it was logically flawed. White is a race, he said, black is a race, but Spanish is a language. Christianity is a religion, Islam is a religion, but Jewishness is an ethnicity. It makes no sense. Sunni is a religion, s.h.i.+te is a religion, Kurd is a tribe, you see? He continued in this vein for a few minutes, and I lost the thread of his argument, but I didn't ask Farouq to translate. I drank my beer. Khalil was quite exercised by the subject. It was easier to nod once in a while and make a show of following him.

I was getting hungry, and when Paulina came around again I ordered a salad and some grilled ribs. Khalil seemed to have gotten the communitarianism thing off his chest. Let me ask you something, he said, with mischief in his eye. The American blacks-he used the English expression-are they really as they are shown on MTV: the rapping, the hip-hop dance, the women? Because that's all we see here. Is it like this? Well, I said slowly and in English, let me respond this way: Many Americans a.s.sume that European Muslims are covered from head to toe if they are women, or that they wear a full beard if they are men, and that they are only interested in protesting perceived insults to Islam. The man on the street-do you understand this expression?-the ordinary American probably does not imagine that Muslims in Europe sit in cafes drinking beer, smoking Marlboros, and discussing political philosophy. In the same way, American blacks are like any other Americans; they are like any other people. They hold the same kinds of jobs, they live in normal houses, they send their children to school. Many of them are poor, that is true, for reasons of history, and many of them do like hip-hop and devote their lives to it, but it's also true that some of them are engineers, university professors, lawyers, and generals. Even the last two secretaries of state have been black.

They are victims of the same portrayals as we are, Farouq said. Khalil agreed with him. The same portrayal, I said, but that's how power is, the one who has the power controls the portrayal. They nodded. My food arrived, and I invited them to join me. They both picked at the fries without protestation, and they ordered more beer.

If we talk of portrayal, Khalil said, Saddam is the least of the dictators in the Middle East. The least. I turned to Farouq to make sure I understood what he was saying. It's true, Farouq said, I also think Saddam was the most moderate. They kil