The Last Friend (12 page)

Six months AFTER my first chemotherapy session, Dr. Lov-gren became more optimistic, saying I could travel. He said I could go to Morocco on vacation, but I had to be careful, I could never touch anodier cigarette, and I should not even sit next to a smoker, or in a smoky room. That was going to be difficult in a country where everybody smoked.

Whether it was an opinion I had formed before seeing it, a self-fulfilling prophecy, or bad faith, I did not like the way Ali had furnished the apartment. That was a good enough pretext for a dispute. I waited for the right moment. As always, Ali was generous and helpful. He told me I had lost weight, that I looked different. I told him it was my work, the constant travel, and disappointment in married life. We had coffee together, and he confided in me, just like in the old days. He talked about his Spanish mistress, a nymphomaniac. "It's sex, it's all about sex, no feelings or emotions," he said. "She's obsessed with sex." He added: "I don't feel guilty, since she's not a threat to my marriage, or to my emotional life."

I was suddenly jealous. I wanted something like this to tell him. In marrying Ghita, I had opted for marital fidelity, never looking at other women. It was a rational and comfortable decision. It tested my willpower. I loved Ghita. I could have had an affair with Dr. Lovgren's assistant. Briggit was available, and she made it clear to me in various ways, but I resisted. I had an impulse to tell Ali that he stereotyped women as either sexually obsessed or hysterical, but that wasn't really true of him. I did not want to pursue this discussion. I needed to set the stage for our forthcoming conflict. I asked him what he thought of
Mortal Sin.
He was astounded. It was overdone, he said. The screenplay was good, and so was the acting, but it was extreme. This wasn't jealousy; this was pathological. I asked what he thought about substituting a friendship between two men for the relationship between husband and wife. He had no idea what I was getting at. "There's no room for jealousy in a friendship," he said. "Friendship is pure; it's not based on sexual or material interest." He added: "You know, since you moved to Sweden, your attitude has changed. Has there ever been jealousy between us? I don't think so. We're friends because we share certain values and interests. We help each other, we have faced ordeals together, we know we can count on each other, there are no issues with women or money between us. What are you getting at, Mamed?"

I could have launched into the argument right then and there, but I was a coward. I looked at him with tears in my eyes. I wanted to cry for myself, my plight, the things I was setting in motion. I bowed my head to avoid showing my feelings. I backed out of the dinner he had prepared for us that night. I said it was fatigue and malaise. Ali offered to come and keep me company. I discouraged him, and promised we would see each other the next day.

Ghita told me again that Ali's wife was jealous. "I don't like the way she looks at our children. She can't stand the idea of not having any of her own, even if Nabil is so cute," she said. "You don't think so? You think I'm wrong? You should trust my intuition. This friend of yours, the one you're always putting on a pedestal…" I told her to stop. I would not allow her to judge thirty years of friendship. It was not her problem. She needed to show some respect.

Ghita's comments upset me and I couldn't sleep. I put off the confrontation with Ali. I don't know why, but I wanted to let Ramon know what was going on. I called him, and we talked for a long time. He listened without saying anything.

When we got back to Stockholm, I slept for two days straight. The fatigue, the grief, the sorrow, the feeling of having made an irreparable mistake, all that in the midst of my illness. I was completely confused. Everything was mixed up-good and evil, goodwill and guilt, the stench of jealousy, and the genuine desire to spare my friend my anguish. The certainty of approaching "the dark void," as my grandfather called it, preoccupied me night and day. I became obsessed with the damp ground in which my body would lie forever. Everything brought me back to this devastating thought.

I received several letters from Ali. I forced myself to answer them brusquely, without emotion. I turned this page of my life painfully, and at the same time wondered whether it had been a good idea. To calm my nerves, I drafted my posthumous letter to Ali.

A long-standing witness to this friendship, I found myself involved in its dissolution. I refused to pass judgment on this sad affair. Mamed told me his version of the story. Ali did the same. I understood that it was not simply a question of differing points of view.

Ravaged by illness, told by the doctors that his condition was terminal, Mamed decided to return to his country to die. He called me the day before he arrived, and asked me not to tell anyone. I met him and his wife and children at the airport. His withered face was stark testimony to the advanced disease. They moved into Mamed's parents' old house. He slept in his mothers bed, and stopped taking the medicine Dr. Lovgren had said was useless at this point. He closed his eyes and waited for death to take him. In Morocco, we say that you can see death in a person's eyes forty days before it comes. Ghita was distraught, but she managed to appear strong. She told her children Swedish fairy tales to prepare them for the loss and void ahead. I went to see Mamed twice a day. I told Ghita I would do the shopping and take care of the children.

As soon as Mamed learned that his case was hopeless, he had a passionate desire to leave Sweden in order to die in the family home. He believed Moroccan soil was better suited to the dead than the glacial soil of Scandinavia. He no longer had the energy to compare the two countries, to criticize everything that didn't work in Morocco. He wanted to stand once more on the soil of the country he carried in his heart.

His parents' house was in a state of terrible disrepair. His father lived there alone, surrounded by his history books and an address book in which many of the names had been crossed out. An old peasant woman came to clean once in a while. The old man said nothing, waiting for the end of his days with the faith of a good Muslim who had already put his life in Allah's hands. He forgot to take his medicine, convinced that everything was already determined in heaven, and that after a lifetime of reading, now it was time for prayer.

Seeing his son was a shock. He was confronted with a man who looked as old as he was. He wept silently, citing a verse of the Koran that says everything happens according to Allah's will. Despite their suffering, different in intensity, father and son felt a need to communicate. I knew Mamed did not have a religious bone in his body. When he was fifteen, he would sneak out of the house to eat during Ramadan, either at Ali's house or mine. He did believe in some kind of higher spirituality, and he liked Islamic mystic poetry, especially by Sufi Ibn Arabi. I stayed there, trying to make myself scarce, witnessing this final coming together of father and son. When I got up to leave, Mamed signaled me to stay.

Mamed's father believed that the mystics made the divine spirit into an idol, which some even dared confuse with Allah. Mamed did not contradict him, and enjoyed their conversations. They realized that they had rarely had the opportunity to talk to each other. "How are you, my son?" his father asked. "I don't mean your health, which is in Allah's hands, but in general. How was life in Sweden? You know, I wanted to visit you there. I used to dream about Scandinavia. For me, it represented honesty, social justice, democracy. But maybe I'm wrong. Some people hold up Britain as an example, but a country that colonized other countries can never be an example for others. You know, my son, I was tempted to get involved in politics when Morocco became independent, but I quickly realized we weren't ready for democracy. Not that we didn't deserve it, but we needed to be taught what democracy is. We had to learn to live together. Democracy is not simply a question of putting your ballot in a ballot box. It takes time. It's a culture that needs to be learned.

"How are things with your wife?" he went on. "No problems, I hope? Well, everybody has them, of course. I can tell you want to rest now. If you don't mind, I'll read some verses from the Koran so you'll sleep peacefully. Afterward, we can listen to some music. I know you like Mozart, don't you? Mozart couldn't have been Moroccan. The proof is that we have no one of his caliber."

He sat on the edge of his son's bed, watching him and reading the Koran. Then he prayed silently. Mamed fell asleep, forgetting the music. I prayed, too.

Mamed slept badly, thrashing around as if fighting demons in a nightmare. He was struggling against death, which was fast approaching him with open arms.

Ghita divided her time between her husband and her children. Most of the time, she had to leave the children with a cousin who ran a private school. She answered the telephone, and politely refused most visitors. "Mamed is tired. As soon as he feels better, he'll come to visit you." When Ali called, Ghita paused, hesitated, looked at me, then went and whispered in her husband's ear. Then she spoke into the phone: "I'm sorry, Ali," she said. "He doesn't want to see anyone. It's best to respect his wishes. If he saw you, it might make him worse. Good-bye." She looked at me again, as if to make me an accomplice. I lowered my eyes, as if I hadn't understood what she had said.

I imagined Ali, tears in his eyes, a look of defeat on his face, despair in his heart. He must have been thinking: "But this is when he needs me. This is the most important moment in our friendship, whatever differences and misunderstandings we've had. I have to see him. I must tell him that my love is sincere, pure, even if he was mistaken about me, even if his wife did everything in her power to separate us. At the same time, I know him. When he's sick, he doesn't want anyone to see him. I remember when he got sick in the disciplinary camp, he asked me to turn out the light, so people couldn't see his tired face, wracked with fever. Today, it's much more serious. If he came home to Morocco, it's because there is no more hope. I absolutely must see him, unless… maybe it's better this way. Perhaps he wants me to preserve the image of a lively, happy Mamed, at peace with himself. Or maybe he's angry with me. But why? Because I will outlive him? Could it be that simple? No, Mamed isn't like that. I can't believe it."

I did not find it hard to put myself in Ali's place, to imagine what he must have felt. I saw him struggling with the suspicions running through his mind, questioning himself. Something had happened, but what? He admitted that he searched constantly for the root of the misunderstanding: a careless word, an inappropriate gesture, a joke in poor taste, a lack of attention, some failure on his part. He continually replayed the last few years of their relationship. There had been no obvious drama, mishap, or misunderstanding. Their friendship had been open and transparent. They told each other everything, confided their secrets in each other. So why this harsh about-face? I think they did not have the same perception of things, that clear divergences existed, but they never brought them up. The story about the apartment was just a pretext. Mamed's wife could never have influenced him to that extent.

Ali had spent three years pondering the cause of this inexplicable breakup. The way he explained it to himself was that Mamed had changed. Time and distance might have played their role in the wear and tear on their relationship. He clung to the image of his friend as a man of his word, a faithful friend, but decided that Mamed had taken another path in life, discovered new horizons, and didn't want to be bound by a relationship that reminded him of his youth and adolescence. Maybe he thought of their friendship as a book he had read too many times. Now it was time to start a new one.

Each time, Ali found the beginning of an explanation but was unable to follow it to the end of the argument. He had heard a story about two Egyptian friends, writers who had chosen to use the same pseudonym. They were so inseparable that people called them twins. They were different but melded together by a bond that had been severely tested in Nasser 's political prisons. When they married, they managed to persuade their spouses that their friendship was sacred, even more important than their conjugal lives. But the Egyptians' story was an exception. The reason they were used as examples was that complete harmony reigned between their families.

Whenever Mamed felt well enough, he worked on his posthumous letter to Ali. As soon as his wife was away and his father was asleep, he wrote. This letter was immensely important to him. Even his illness was eclipsed while he wrote to his friend. When he was writing, he felt better. His ideas were clear. Two doctor friends came to see him from time to time, and told funny stories to cheer him up. They left as soon as they saw that he was tired. They were the jokers among his old gang at medical school. They loved risque stories, and they never ran out of steamy gossip. I no longer felt like telling jokes. I was at Mamed's disposal. I spent hours with him. I didn't ask him anything; I read crime fiction. I kept thinking about this friendship that was ending in drama, and I realized that I had never had a close friend.

One morning, Mamed asked Ghita to bring the children to see him. Ghita called me. It was a Monday in winter, and the sun was shining.

Mamed wanted to speak to the children. Yanis and Adil were conscious of the gravity of the occasion. They held each other's hands, not allowing themselves to cry. "Come here, so I can kiss you both. Stick together no matter what. Take care of each other. Life is beautiful, life awaits you. Be confident, and generous. Do not humiliate or bring shame on anyone. Stick up for yourselves. Go now. Be happy!"

Ghita cried. Mamed put his hands on her eyes. Night entered his room, never to leave it.

Mamed was buried in the cemetery of the Mujahideen, the freedom fighters. It was a simple grave, under a tree. Ali was among the crowd of mourners, one man among many others. His sorrow was immense. He felt alone. I decided not to disturb him.