Work Text:
“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
1099.
In the end, when steel pierces him Yusuf does not think of God. What escapes his lips is blood, not a single prayer. Mother, he begs in Tamazight, words he has not used since he was a child. Mother, please. Knees in the dirt, he tastes metal on his tongue.
The man on the other end of the sword in Yusuf’s stomach is also gurgling blood. Grime on his face, hair matted, eyes pale and striking. Sancta Maria, he cries out when Yusuf pushes forward, impales himself further on his blade to shove his saber between two of the Frank’s ribs. Madre de Dîo, a supplication to a mother that will not listen. Yusuf stares at him until he cannot see.
“Yusuf,” he says, presses his palm to his own heart. He knows enough Ligurian for this, at least. “My name.” The man with the waterborne eyes smiles. He smiles despite himself, Yusuf can tell. An automatic human response, the corner of his mouth lifting in recognition. My name, Yusuf thinks. Given by fathers and passed on to sons, names linger after death. Son of Ibrahim, himself son of Muhammad.
“Nicolò,” his murderer introduces himself. Yusuf wonders if he too is thinking of his father.
They have killed each other so many times every instance of it has started to blur together in Yusuf’s mind. But he remembers the first clear as everlasting day, and he remembers the last: Nicolò lying face pressed to the ground with an arrow in his shoulder, moaning in pain as his flesh desperately tried to knit itself back together around sharp metal. Yusuf hadn’t thought of speaking the Genoese tongue then— had not thought to look at the crest on the other man’s shield. Had muttered stop moving in Arabic, kneeled and unsheathed his dagger to dig out the arrow while Nicolò screamed against the leather of his glove.
He does not know what to make of this man that cannot die and cannot understand him. At night they sleep under an old olive tree, shivering under the stars wrapped in the bluest of deep blues, the clear sky of the Land of the North. Nicolò wants to start a fire and Yusuf stops him with a hand on his forearm and a broken sentence, half Ligurian and half Sabir.
“Your people will find us. No smoke.”
“Maybe I want my people to find me,” Nicolò says sharply, but he does not try again.
1102.
Nicolò dies right outside of Cordoba.
Yusuf watches him tumble down as if in a nightmare, glued in place, useless and too far from him. The brigand’s swift knife lodges itself in the soft flesh where Nicolò’s throat meets his shoulder, and blood erupts from the wound like a volcano. Stringless puppet, Nicolò falls, desperately palming at the cut. Yusuf kills the man who stabbed him and goes to his knees, presses his own hands over Nicolò’s, slippery with blood.
“Yusuf,” Nicolò gargles, and then his panicked eyes roll back in his skull, and he is dead.
A wail rises in Yusuf’s throat but it comes out broken, a whimper. His hands hover over his companion’s body, aimless. They’ve never died by a stranger’s hand. He lowers his forehead to Nicolò’s chest and prays. God answers.
“Yusuf,” Nicolò says in a sharp hiss on his first breath, like the name had died on his tongue and resurrected with him. The fear distilled in Yusuf’s veins clears out, bad weather pushed by the wind. He opens his mouth to ask if Nicolò is alright but instead he finds himself laughing, almost maniacal. He cannot stop. Relief is more powerful than wine.
Nicolò gives him the stink eye. “Do you find my demise so funny?” he asks in Ligurian. His grasp on Arabic is abysmal. He can barely form a sentence.
“No,” Yusuf shakes his head, tears stinging at the corner of his eyes. “I thought I— I had readied myself to mourning you.”
Nicolò’s expression softens. “Have you not killed me enough to know? You will not be rid of me that easily.”
You are mine to kill, Yusuf does not say. He does not know how to make his thoughts clear in this language that still tastes foreign against the roof of his mouth after two years of traveling together. Instead he offers Nicolò his hand, pulls him up. They are both covered in his blood. Nicolò touches the side of his neck, looking vaguely annoyed.
They bathe in the still waters of the Guadalquivir. Yusuf observes as Nicolò undresses; he is all practicality, quick and swift and not an ounce of modesty. Yusuf thinks of bathhouses, then. Longs for the comfort of the steam, of shallow pools of cool translucent water and the smell of mint leaves. He imagines Nicolò there.
“Are you coming, dreamer?” Nicolò calls, the river lapping at his hips. Yusuf gets rid of his last article of clothing and follows. They leave their weapons on the pebbled shore.
The water is cold, even in late spring. Yusuf scrubs the grime of the road from his face and his arms, and then he turns to Nicolò, who still has red in his long hair.
“I learned how to swim in the sea,” he tells him, unprompted. “The water there stings in your eyes. Here it is sweet.”
“I was pushed in the canal, once,” Nicolò recalls pensively. He almost looks fond. When he dips his head into the river and comes back up, he makes a low, satisfied sound in his throat. Yusuf’s gut constricts.
“You didn’t drown,” Yusuf says.
“Back home?” Nicolò asks. “No. But I did not know how to stay afloat. I remember the pain, water inside my chest. I must have wanted to stay alive very badly.”
Again Yusuf lacks the words to explain what he feels so profoundly he thinks he must have been born with it, this terrible certainty. He must have come into this world knowing, and then forgot. God made you for me. God brought you at my doorstep. And you can die every death you want, now, but I will always have been the first. Not even the dirty waters of Genoa could claim you, not before me.
1132.
Please, Yusuf pleads. His back is sticky with sweat against the cool sheets. Above him Nicolò stills.
“I don’t know this word,” he frowns.
“Pay me no mind,” Yusuf shakes his head, reaches for Nicolò’s cheek. “Please,” he says again, this time in Arabic. Nicolò turns his face into Yusuf’s palm, places an aerial kiss on his fingertips.
“You promised you would teach me,” he says. Yusuf’s blood is burning. Nicolò’s left hand is splayed over the inside of his thigh, keeping his legs spread while the other is working him open so carefully, so slow.
“It’s not Arabic,” he grunts, eyes closing furtively. “Ah— Nicolò —”
He loses track of his own words then, again. Nicolò plays him like a lyre, and music demands no translation.
1199.
In Arabic it is never enough to simply say I love you. Please die after me, Yusuf whispers when Nicolò cannot hear him, idiomatic. He does not mean it, not literally. He imagines Nicolò alone in this world and finds he cannot bear it. God fashioned them from the same cloth, he knows. Woven together in tight threads, two sides of the same coin. Even in death, his body recognizes Nicolò; from the first stammering breath he reaches for him like a plant to the sun, always. Nicolò has never let him die alone. He has crawled with his guts out to be within reach when Yusuf wakes, because he knows. Leaving is the easy part. It is returning that never seems quite certain.
1257.
He teaches Nicolò how to say please and how much and maybe in Tamazight walking through the souk in Marrakesh. They haggle in Arabic, but in the corner of the market Yusuf finds an old Zenata woman selling fruit and greets her in his mother’s language. Child, she says, come here, and offers him a bush mango. Her hands are wrinkled and brown, layers of bracelets on both wrists. He bows and takes the fruit with two hands. The tattoos on her sun-worn face are fading, black turned green-blue, but the siyala on her chin is somehow still dark, defiant. She won’t let him pay, pushes the copper coins back towards him.
Thank you, he tells her with his eyes low. Her smile reminds him of something bittersweet.
Nicolò understands, shapes the words even if he cannot translate them. Thank you. The woman looks at them both, and Yusuf’s side hurts in the strangest way, right below his heart.
He cuts the mango open bare-handed, juice sliding down his wrist in rivulets. Nicolò eats it from his hand, under the scorching sun at its zenith; sucks the sweetness from Yusuf’s fingers and licks the delicate skin where Yusuf’s pulse beats, irrefutable proof of an impossible life.
Thank you, he repeats in a language he does not speak, and for a second Yusuf thinks he might cry, chest heavy, ribcage vast as the ocean.
1720.
Iosif, Nicolò calls him in Crete. They walk along the harbor in Chania and they walk through the ruins of Knossos, and Nicolò tries his hand at Greek. Μάτια μου, he exhales softly, lips pressed to Yusuf’s shoulder blade in the shade on an abandoned beach. Ψυχή μου, he traces the vein that runs on the inside of Yusuf’s arm, the swell of his bicep. My eyes. My soul.
Achilles, Yusuf recites, in the sea where only the breeze can hear them. Nicolò tastes of sweat and iodine and salt. Never bury my bones apart from yours. Let them lie together as we grew together in your house.
Later at the inn in Kandiye he feeds loukoums to Nicolò from the delicate silver platter to his mouth, doesn’t let him stain his fingers with powdered sugar but licks it off the corner of his smile. Nicolò flips them over in the bed, and the frame creaks under their combined weights and Yusuf laughs, brash and loud and so deliriously in love he thinks he might just die from it.
1983.
They live ten years in Belleville, from 51 to 61. When they come back more than two decades later the buildings still loom the same, Hausmannian architecture grey and tall. Yusuf’s favorite little Tunisian corner store is now a hair salon owned by an old Vietnamese lady and her son. At the supermarket, he asks where he can find ras el hanout and the employee beams at him and points him to aisle number 4. She is very pretty, in her red Monoprix uniform, her headscarf a matching pale pink.
“There’s a halal butcher two streets down,” she tells him in darija. “Did you just move here?”
“Something like that,” Yusuf smiles.
At the door, the security guard calls him brother and then asks to see his bag, lets two giggling white girls walk through unbothered while he rummages through Yusuf’s possession. He gives him the backpack back unzipped.
“You can go now.”
“Allah hafiz,” Yusuf tells him, because au revoir implies meeting again, and he and Nicky will be in Germany with the others this time tomorrow. The man stares at him strangely.
Nicky is waiting for him in a tiny Chinese restaurant, his back to the cool window to combat the suffocating July heat. There is a plate of sliced Peking duck already on the table, and Nicky is sipping green tea from a small porcelain cup. His eyes light up when he sees Yusuf at the door.
“I’m starving,” Yusuf says in French, flopping onto the second chair. He says j’ai la dalle, not j’ai faim, like a mumbling teenager.
“This neighborhood does something to you,” Nicky says, amused. His Arabic is tinted with kabyle words, now. He picked up the accent when they were fighting with the FLN, and then here in Paris. Yusuf thinks of him in the desert, indigo cotton wrapped around his face, only his clear eyes visible. Two images in superposition— he remembers a banged up helmet made out of darkened steel, too.
It is always strange, being in France now. He is never this aware of how other people see him. If he closes his eyes it is October 1961 again, and he can smell blood and fear and anger in the air.
Nicky hooks his foot over Yusuf’s leg under the table.
“Come back to me, my love.”
“I am with you,” Yusuf says. There is always melancholia, in places they have built almost-homes in. They are the last two inhabitants of an island no one else has ever known. “I wanted to make you that lamb you like, with the prunes. I thought I could pick up a tagine in Saint-Ouen, but the market isn’t open every day anymore, can you imagine?”
“You are ridiculous,” Nicky says very fondly. “I’ll make sandwiches, there is burrata left in the fridge from yesterday.”
In the evening, they walk the length of the promenade along the Seine. The water is green, its smell pungent. Nicky bumps their shoulders together at regular intervals, a voiceless greeting in circles.
Later still Yusuf will ply him with warm kisses and he will play the guitar, hum along softly— never sing. Tomorrow at the end of their train journey Berlin awaits, but on the little balcony of their rental apartment the world is quiet, the world is calm. Nicolas, Yusuf murmurs, his brain still wired to speak French. Mon amour, mon seul amour.
2019.
There is a fundamental truth in how he touches Nicky. I want to be there when you die. I want to be there when you wake.
“Yusuf,” Nicky murmurs softly, vowels tender in the wind; and this too is holy. This too tastes like sweet dates after sunset, and it smells like incense in a church.
I want to be there, Yusuf says with his hands. Not a second parted from you. Not a breath. And Nicolò answers, mouth slack against his, fingers curling around the nape of his neck. Wordless, meaning in their kiss amphorae-like, contained. This is a language no one else in the world is fluent in: the glint in Nicky’s eye, the unbearable gentleness with which he pushes Yusuf flat against the bed. He pulls his t-shirt over his head and lets it fall to the floor, and even in the soft sound of fabric hitting hardwood there is poetry. Yusuf slides a palm up his side, feels smooth skin under his hand.
“My life,” he says. “What do you want?”
Nicolò rocks forward, blatant in his desire. Yusuf grins.
Every time we die, we are remade, and our atoms shift together. Me becoming you becoming me. We have expired side by side so many times, you and me, hands clasped tight in refusal to be parted. When the fabric of the universe knits itself back together again, who is to say that particles of me don’t become particles of you? Breathing in unison, rebirthed as mirror images, I do not know life without you. You are my spleen. You are my liver. God made you from me, my love. God made you from me.