Free Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) by Mois Benarroch

important, and tweedledee tweedledum. But he left, oh my mother’s intuition... He left in less than ten minutes, which seems perfectly fine to me, considering he came without calling or anything. I didn’t see him again and a couple of months ago he left. He lives in each city for two months. He called my wife from Vienna but only left a message. He has four children, each from a different mother, and he is German. He and my wife were planning on getting married and she got pregnant by him. She miscarried a year before we got married. Are you getting an idea of the issue? Do you think I’m too jealous for reacting the way I did?
    We’re walking down Jaffa Road and it looks as if there had been an earthquake yesterday. They’re constructing the paths for a future tram and I’m telling you, it would be perfect for walking around all day with a camera taking photos non-stop. It’s apocalyptic, half streets, bus stops in the middle of the street, thousands of people looking for each other and closed stores or stores that look like shuks. The noise is horrible and you can’t hear anything. There are all kinds of tractors and strange machines making holes and filling them up.  And this is your book, so you ask me for more descriptions. The Jerusalem winter sun, the entrance to the social security building next to the old city and hundreds of Arabs waiting for their turn. The one that was in the old city was closed a year ago, after a Palestinian killed the guard, and all those Moors remind me of the crowds in Tetouan, the streets full of people with nothing to do. And this is your book, but as soon as you entered this book you were no longer you. Things change, you’re a character, and characters have their own life. They end up far away from those who inspired them, they go so far that all they have left is a glance at reality.
    But this is your book and you dream about it, and this one, like all books, is not mine, it is not my book. You inspired it through your words, through your book. For years I’ve wanted to write a novel in Spanish, but only poems piled up, more and more poems. My Spanish language only allowed for poems, but you opened that door for me and this is your book. But not a novel, or maybe so, Tabucchi calls everything a novel, although that’s for marketing purposes. Any book called a novel sells better than those called something else. “Ansina es”, “that’s how it is”, we would say in Tetouan. We’ll call it a novel but to me it’s a book, words, thoughts, but not a story. It’s about characters who cross paths once in a while and create a world that never convinces me. They don’t convince me that it’s truth, or even imaginary. Novels disappoint me so much that I almost never finish them and I open a book of poetry to the middle to breathe in some sincere air. That’s what’s missing for me in novels, sincerity. It seems as though the writer makes a lot of decisions with book sales in mind, either consciously or unconsciously, something that is almost ridiculous to do in poetry.
    That’s what I’m searching for in this prose, sincerity, a road not taken, a path full of trees whose fruit no one has eaten.
    And this is your book, but I don’t know you, while at the same time I have always known you.
    You ask me if I remember the Arabic teacher. Vaguely, but who I do remember is the Arabic teacher who I think came after you left, Monsieur Sitbon, who really liked to caress the girls. I would always argue with him. He was very tall and handsome, but like the Hebrew teacher, he was always an outsider, coming from the French part of Morocco. The other Arabic teacher, whose husband was in jail; yes, I remember her, she was an Arab. I think she gave me private Arabic classes for a few months because I didn’t have very good grades. At school we studied Arabic, Hebrew and English, and the classes were given in French. But they didn’t teach us Spanish even though all of us spoke it,