The Fugitivities, стр. 40
They walked slowly up the rue Férou. Laura continued. “I thought God was real when I was little. One summer, my parents took us on a trip to the Sinai. We stayed with Bedouin in a camp by the Red Sea. In the distance on the water there was a city we were forbidden to go to. At night, one of the old Bedouin men took us away from the campfires and up into the dunes. His blue shesh was wrapped under his chin and his hands were very bony and strong. We rested on one of the highest dunes overlooking the camp, with Mehdi on one side of the old man and myself on the other. ‘Look up,’ he said. We looked into the deep and all that was there were the stars. The old man said, ‘Look close,’ and he lifted a hand into the darkness above. ‘Do you see it?’ And Mehdi said yes, he did. And I asked, ‘What are we looking for?’ And the old Bedouin laughed and tousled my hair roughly and then took my hand and made an arc with it through the middle of the sky. And then I did see it. A trail, a phantom plume like fog on a windshield. ‘What is it?’ I asked. The Bedouin said that it was the fingerprint of God. And then he said something that I didn’t understand, but that Mehdi nodded to in agreement. He told us that men’s fates were written in the stars. And then he coughed loudly and spit in the sand. He told us not to live dangerously. That danger was always a sign your life was out of balance. He told us to love life and to love Allah, who gave us the chance to know Him. Then he put his bony hand on my thigh and held it very hard, which scared me. He said it was necessary to live very close to Allah. ‘In the cities, a life in accordance with the will of Allah is impossible,’ he said. ‘Only the desert nomad knows his ways and does not stray from the righteous path.’ It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life,” Laura said. “But I think about it often. And when I do, I think of Mehdi.”
Back in the apartment on the rue des Cinq-Diamants, Laura undressed in the bathroom. When she came out, Nathaniel was lying naked on his stomach. She slipped down next to him and kissed him gently between the shoulder blades. Their bodies wanted as immoderately as ever. But something was there that was also different. The distress of brittle sex that is not as it once was.
9
The central stairwells of the Cité Lamartine formed a vertical chorus. All through the day, the crying of children, the muffled shouts, the scurrying whoops and shrieks of schoolchildren, the racket of scooters coming in through broken windows, the laughter and ritual greetings saturated the life on the landings and even in the spaces between them. Sisters, mothers, neighbors from every corner of the former colonial world raised up a babel from their impromptu salons, chatting, gossiping, arguing as they braided, twisted, brushed, picked, locked, roped, pressed, and prodded.
Behind this polyphonic hubbub, Nathaniel recognized a recorded music that amplified as he rose toward the upper floors. It was coming from the apartment next door, and he knew from his time at Faisal’s that it was the extraordinary voice of Umm Kulthum. She sounded to Nathaniel like a blues singer. When he asked his African friends about her they told him, only half-jokingly, that her voice was the only thing the Arabs agreed upon. An experience of transcendent beauty that some, in moments of weakness (and near blasphemy), said even rivaled the surahs of the Qur’an. If the windows were open, and he knew that on a day like this they probably were, her call to her lover, her habibi, would carry out over the balcony, a faint wail reaching the ears of the kids playing soccer in the concrete lot.
Ghislain was cooking, and throughout the apartment there was a heavy aroma of okra stewing in peanut sauce. Nathaniel dropped two grocery bags in the kitchen and exchanged greetings with the chef. When the food was ready the four men sat down and ate by hand from a large bowl set in the center of the table equidistant from each of them. At first, they all ate in silence. Then they discussed their plans for the evening. Each of the roommates desired to know how Nathaniel’s affairs were progressing with Laura, and if he had yet considered marriage. Ghislain produced cups and boiling mint tea, which he poured from very high without losing a drop. For a time, they drank in silence as they listened to the faint voice of Kulthum through the wall. “Nathaniel,” Claude asked suddenly, changing the subject, “do you think one day there will be a black president of America?” Nathaniel felt as if he should have anticipated the question, even though he had no prepared thought on the matter. He looked around at the other men. They met his gaze gravely in a way that suggested they expected him to take some time to answer.
Nathaniel closed his eyes. For a moment his father’s voice wavered in his mind. The time he had talked about Malcolm. Nathaniel was twenty the year they shot King down in Memphis. And the poet Henry Dumas just a month later, right there in Harlem. He hadn’t taken it as badly as others had, certainly not as badly as his father. But that was before. That was then. Now he had taken more time to learn, to think and reflect. When he