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  He pointed at an old color photograph in a metal frame of a broad cluster of white buildings and, behind them, massive 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. 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. 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 scrap 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 scrap 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, 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 classical 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 passion 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 class.

  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 class 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 noble 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 masses 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 assertions, 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 classic 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 i
n the name of a monolithic identity. 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 café 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 café 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 shine. The café 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 ships 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 café’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 unanticipated sexual 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 Régence, 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 Constitutional 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 Nadège, 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 gratitude 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. Later in the afternoon, Mayken came round, and I gave her money.

  The following evening, or the one after that, I found the scrap 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, Hello, 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, Ça 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 classrooms when their classes 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 principal 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 spaces between those forms, the necessary spaces, that gives them their definitions as waves or dunes. The principal was completely responsive to this conversation, and in this generous American way, he said, Come to my office sometime and we’ll talk more.