ATHANASIA

CHAPTER 1

In a traditional café inside one of the alleys of the Medina in the Tunisian capital, he found himself a seat among dozens of tables and chairs, tons of people, a cloud of smoke, and interfering voices that almost prevent one from hearing his own thoughts. A lone table in the middle of the café seems to have been emptied only a moment ago, with four empty glasses and playing cards left scattered. Of the four chairs that were supposed to surround the table, only two remain. The old man sat on one of them with his crutch resting on the edge of the table, and then turned with great difficulty towards the waiter, who immediately understood that the customer was after his usual order; A cup of green tea with a piece of lemon floating on top of it.

The café was no different from any traditional café the old man had visited throughout his life. Rectangular in shape, at the end of it is a counter with a coffee machine on it, an empty plate, an open water bottle, a cup full of spoons, and a bowl of sugar. On one side there is a fridge for water and soft drinks, and on the other side is the toilet door.

The old man crouched in his chair, silently watching the customers, as he always did, enjoying their noise, and narrowing his black eyes sharply so that he could follow what was going on at each table; at least the closest to him. He was surrounded by four tables, to each one seated four people. On his right, four old men, at least two decades younger than him, were playing ‘Scopa’. They all seemed to be in their sixties, but they showed the energy of young men in their twenties, especially when someone hits the table with frightening force and shouts, “Scopa.”

At the table in front of him, four elderly people were sitting playing ‘Rummy’, the most prevalent card game there, and everyone was nervous, which means that the game was getting closer to an end, and that they were betting on something; That is, the loser has to pay for the drinks or give an agreed amount of money. But the tension didn’t stop them from making a fuss whenever one suspected the other had stolen a card or cheated in any other way.

The old man with the white beard and hair did not see who was sitting behind him when he turned to the waiter, but he understood from their voices that they were a group of young men each holding some kind of rectangular hard pieces, most likely playing a game of ‘Scrabble’ or ‘Domino’. He was very amused by everything that was happening around him, without any change in his features that had been frozen for years. Adding to his pleasure, he felt for a moment that he was some sort of a mirror between the two tables on either side of him; the number of people is the same, with similar ages, in addition to the same enthusiasm for the same game on both sides.

He didn’t quite understand why he was enjoying these moments. He doesn’t sit with any of them, he doesn’t do what they do, he can’t even shout the same way they do, and no doubt if he catches a bunch of playing cards he’d tremble drop them all. But now he feels like he’s with each group of them, he sits at their table and plays their game and wins every time. As if he belonged with them, as if he was the cards they were playing with and the chairs they were sitting on and the smoke they were blowing... He always imagined that they looked at him in the same way, and saw him win and lose, quarrel and reconcile, drink their coffee and tea, and teach them new tricks in their games, even Dominoes game, although it does not appeal to him.

At five o’clock in the evening, that was his daily rendezvous with the daydreams that he could only achieve when he was in that coffee shop. His daily appointment with a cup of tea when the summer heat cools down a bit and the ceiling fans spare what’s left of it. The cup of tea arrived with the waiter’s smile, which also became a part of his daily routine. He took a sip quietly and then thought back to the way all the café-goers and staff really saw him; An eighty-four-year-old man, whom everyone loves and respects, and no one can see him without shouting his nickname ‘Hajj’ and greeting him with a smile.

He thinks back to the age of twenty, when he first moved to the capital from his small town in the northwest of the country. At that time, he was full of energy and full of life, his dream was bigger than that city and bigger than the world; a dream about a new life, a life worthy of him.

There, on that forgotten patch of land, dreams were not great. Therefore, there was no way to fulfill any expectations that would come out of one’s unhappy way of life. The ultimate ambition of his peers was to find a job, any job. At the age of twenty, the poor man tried to be one of them; to find a job in a coffeeshop, or to become a construction worker, but the stipends were not enough for him to get out of the employers’ command and become his own boss.

He told his mother everything, he spoke about his dreams, which seemed too big for the people of that city, but she expressed her satisfaction with what her son intended to do. Before leaving on his journey towards the capital, which is only a hundred miles away, she prepared his provisions and bid him farewell with her prayers that accompanied him for the coming years and never left his heart.

In the capital, Tunis, the strange young man found another world he had never known. As if the earth was spinning there faster than the rest of the country, everyone was in a hurry. The cars there were incredibly many. That strange machine that travels on four wheels, he had only seen it in his city a few times; he can almost count them it on his fingers.

There, he decided to start his career the simple way any of his townspeople would, and started working in a café. He did not have a place to sleep, but the owner allowed him to sleep in his workplace, as long as he was satisfied with his wages and worked the whole day. The young man was grateful, and satisfied with anything in order to try a new life.

Over time, he became friends with several clients, including intellectuals and activists against the French occupation of the country at the time. He sits with them when he does not have a job, and learns a lot from them; history, art and philosophy… only by listening and memorizing. Then he found a way to enter into their conversations. He told them about the last thing he had read in the newspapers about the Second World War and the radical changes it might lead to in the entire world.

At the age of thirty, the young man became one of the active members of a resistance movement against the French occupation, and he did not miss any meeting or session. He was known for his courageous stances and his cleverness in decision-making, to the extent that no decision was taken without his approval. He was fully devoted to the cause, and no matter how many times he was arrested and tortured by the soldiers, his liberating ideas and his anti-fascism stances did not change one bit.

Throughout his struggle, he did not think about marriage or having children, or any of the things that could distract him from devoting his entire time to his cause. That was until he reached the age of forty, and the country gained its independence. As if his life was turned upside down. He knew that the real work of nation-building begins after its independence, but not for him. He had just reached that moment during his lifetime, and was ready to avoid any political life and immerse more in social and cultural life.

After he became an editor in a weekly newspaper, and his star rose among the educated circles, he devoted himself a little to his private life. He found a wife who is the daughter of a fighter with whom he shared his journey. She was thirty-five years old, and she was the widow of one of the martyrs of the ninth of April 1938. She fell deeply in love with her second husband, who was ten years older than her. It was as if the old man at that time had become more grateful that his journey had brought him to that wife than he was grateful for the independence.

The happy marriage led to a beautiful daughter who added fragrance to the flower of his life. It had become perfect, and he could not ask for anything greater. He was so grateful when the country evacuated the last French soldier in 1963. He just wanted to retire from everything and spend the rest of his life enjoying the passage of time with his wife and daughter.

The old man sank further into the sea of ​​his memories, and was overwhelmed with happiness by the thought that no one on this earth could wish him ill or harm him. As soon as he took the second sip of the tea, he felt a heavy weight on his right shoulder. He shook in horror, and then slowly raised his head to see who was standing to his right. It was a young man, apparently in his thirties, dressed in a beautiful black suit with a white shirt that’s top button was open. He was rather handsome in the old man’s eyes, with a very black beard and neatly styled hair. But the most attractive was his incredibly friendly smile.

The young man lowered his head a little, and whispered:

“Would you allow me, sir, to sit at your table? You see, all the chairs are being used except the one to your right.”

The elder stared for two seconds into his green eyes, and then did what he never thought he would be able to do one day. His lips cracked like a sandy rock, and a smile sprang from it, which no one he meets daily has ever seen. He did not understand why, but quickly answered:

“Of course! please, go ahead.”

The young man opened the buttons of his suit before sitting in order to keep it flat. Then, after sitting quietly, as if he had not moved the chair, but rather teleported on it, he asked:

“Can I ask you a question?”

The old man noticed him after he lost his focus for a moment, thinking about the reason for his smile, which visited him at that time after years of estrangement: “Yes, of course.”

“I couldn’t help but notice that everyone in the café was sitting in groups except for you,” said the young man, in a neutral voice. “Are you waiting for someone or do you just prefer sitting alone?”

The elder answered with a slight shiver, as if his throat had dried up suddenly: “Actually, son, neither. But - as you can see - I have no choice. I do not have a friend to sit with. I am eighty-four years old; all those I knew have died. I haven’t known many people in this long life.”

The young man hesitated and then asked, in a voice bearing a little pity: “What about your wife and children?”

The old man was silent for a moment without thinking about the torrent of questions he found directed towards him, neither about their cause nor about the person sitting before him. But he answered anyway: “I was fortunate to find a wife when I was forty-five years old, and we had a daughter who is the most beautiful creature in the world. But we only spent ten short years together...”

The young man understood what he meant, but asked coldly, “How did you part?”

The old man took a sip of his tea with his head back, as if recalling a memory not far from his mind: “My daughter’s skirt got stuck in the railway tracks, while my wife and I accompanied her on our way to the zoo.” He took a deep breath as if trying to climb out from under the metal rail, then continued: “I came out of that place with two coffins, a crutch, and a memory that has not left my mind for a second.”

The young man did not show much interest in the story. Rather, he was astonished by the ability of humans so far to pay much attention to death and to think strangely about the dead, even though it is something that all the living have in common.

He watched the old man take another sip of his cup of tea, as if holding back a tear from descending by tilting his head back, and then said: “Eighty-four years of which I spent seventy-four alone... I would say live for yourself, perhaps it is better than a life full of strangers that come and go, turning happy moments into sad memories.”

The elder raised his eyebrows, and asked with face filled with numerous question marks: “Do you think so? As for me, going back to the years I spent with myself, nothing speaks to me other than my thoughts, nothing heals me other than my patience, nothing dances with me except for my disappointments, nothing feeds me but my hands ... I do not see that I have lived or experienced anything of living.”

The young man wiped his finger on the table, then looked at it as if to check how clean it was, and said, “I apologize for my questions, it seems I opened a wound that was pretending to be healed...”

The old man’s facial muscles relaxed, and he answered gently, “No, son, your questions didn’t bother me. On the contrary, I didn’t mind having a little conversation with a stranger after all this silence... Now, may I ask you a question?” ”

The young man nodded his head lightly.

The old man nodded his head in return and asked, as if trying to stick his nose in the face of the young man: “What brought you to this café? You don’t seem to be from this city, nor do you seem strange to me... This is the first time I see you, but I feel like I know you very well...”

The young man put his hands on the table and brought his face close to the elder’s eyes as if gazing into his soul through his slender body: “I don’t think you know me, but I think you have been waiting for me.”

Astonishment appeared on the man’s features, and then he asked: “Waiting for you? I never waited for anyone, nor did I expect a visit from anyone.”

The young man looked at the elder’s eyes for a long time, as if he was extracting a lie from them, and then said as if he was trying to change the subject without changing it: “What do you think we play a game?”

“Game?” His response was quick and calm at the same time: “What kind of game? I don’t see that I have the ability to play cards now.”

The young man answered without changing his gaze: “We will not play cards... How about I ask you simple questions and you answer them honestly and without interpretation?”

The response came with the same speed, as if he had prepared a list of answers in advance: “Questions? Interpretations? What do you want me to answer?”

The young man lowered his head, showing some shame in his eyes: “It’s not an interrogation; it’s greed from me for some of your wisdom and life experience.”

The elder raised his hand with difficulty until he wiped his white beard with a jerk, then smiled again and said in a confident voice: “Let’s do it…”

- Good... You told me in advance that despite the years you have lived, you have not lived anything from them. What did you mean by that?

- I mean, I “lived for myself” as you described it, and a person’s living for himself is nothing but death in it. If I do not live for others, if I do not experience love and death over and over again, I would not see ‘life’ in living.

- Wasn’t it your choice to live alone after your wife’s death?

- Yeah... it was a wrong choice.

- What if you had a chance to be reborn?

- I will repeat the same mistakes, and find me after eighty-four years sitting in a cafe surrounded by smoke and the noise of the living, anxiously awaiting death.

- Are you waiting for your death? Are you ready to die?

- Ready? What is the value of death if it did not surprise us?

The young man quickly looked at his watch and said:

- What if death comes to you after five minutes?

- I will be waiting for it, unprepared for it, feeling its presence, unconscious of it.

- Who said that death kills with a touch of it? I touched you a while ago and you didn’t die.

- I don’t seem to know anything about how death works.

The elder widened his smile until there was no room for it on his face, and then continued his speech:

- How do you work?

- Ten minutes... I didn’t want to just do it with a touch. The moment I put my hand on your shoulder, the countdown has begun. I sit and talk to you for ten minutes, and then...

- How much do I have left?

- Three minutes. What do you want to do during it? I think it is enough time for prayer.

The man laughed with a sarcastic look, and said: “Prayer? I spent my life not missing one prayer; do you think that this is the one that will really count?”

“What do you want then?” asked the young man, really interested in every new way a dying person chooses to go.

The elder returned to his list of already-made answers, and quickly said, “I want to finish my cup of tea.”

The young man leaned gently on the back of the chair and watched the new friend in silence. The latter, in turn, sipped the cup of tea, without the smile leaving his lips. The shiver left his hands, as if sixty years had been deducted from his life, as if he understood through his silence that he was right, that he had never lived. Only now did he have the chance of a life, even if it ended before it even began. The tea did not reach the middle of the cup, but his thoughts were interrupted. It was as if he had shut his mind for once and decided to feel the moment as it was, still, deep, and white.

The young man looked at his watch, and then raised his head toward the elder. They both felt that time had stopped for a moment. They exchanged a silent smile. In an instant, the young man put himself behind the old man carrying an arrow and a bow, pulled it as hard as possible and aimed at the old man’s heart. Without any hesitation, he shot the arrow that crossed the thin body. The cup of tea then fell, announcing to the public that a story that began generations ago had just come to an end.

The young man put the crossbow on his back and it immediately disappeared, he stood watching the after-last moments in the life of his new friend, whom he had only known for ten minutes. He felt somewhat happy as a result of the dialogue he had with him, especially since the poor one understood the matter directly, and did not panic as soon as he looked death in the eyes. He slowly started walking outside the café, chanting out audibly:

“He wasn’t ready... He was waiting for me, he greeted me, but he forgot the passage of time with his still warm cup of tea... He wasn’t ready...”g here…