Read Edward Hamlin’s awardwinning short story on
The Chicago Tribune recognizes outstanding works of short fiction with its annual Nelson Algren Award. The 2020 winner, “Haddad: A Requiem” by Edward Hamlin, is presented here in full.
‘Have you ever noticed,” Tony Haddad asked me as we strolled near his flat, “how walking behind a man with a missing leg focuses the mind?”
It was just the sort of thing he’d say back then, in the weeks before he died: wry and ironic and utterly true, economical as a scalpel cut. The disease had honed him. There was never a miscue, never a wasted word. He spoke canonically, because he knew. The nearness of death made Tony Haddad dangerously honest.
On another occasion he said: “I became truly a man, Sam, only when I admitted to myself that sex was for other people. Thank God I was given a daughter before I realized it.”
I envied my colleague and dear friend — not for the ALS that was consuming him, of course, but for how it freed him to speak so directly. It had always been hard for me to get that kind of honesty right. I’d touched it perhaps a dozen times in my fifty-two years, with women I’d loved, with old friends, now and then with strangers on airplanes or trains. For Tony, as he neared the end, it became second nature. In his books he’d always expressed himself with precision, but his conversation was loose and free, generous, ripe with sly humor and innuendo and digression, never stinting; his best jokes, and he had many excellent jokes, were those made at his own expense. A vast, untrammeled soul resided within that compact body, belied by the tidy sweater vest and dated grey suit, the impeccable nails and pencil moustache, the readers on a chain around his neck. So to hear him as he was in those final days — strict and concise as a village imam — was galvanizing. If I took the Eurostar up from Paris to Leiden every Saturday to see him, it wasn’t only because I knew he’d soon be gone. His immense clarity held me captive.
In the matter of one-legged men, for example, Tony was exactly right. We’d been out walking along the canal for an hour, through the damp dusk and into the chilly night, and for ten minutes or so we’d followed behind a man whose heaving gait could only mean a false leg. I was pushing Tony’s chair along a path that meandered from footbridge to footbridge beside the drab sluggish water, my friend swaddled in a blanket against the October chill; the man had appeared from nowhere, falling in ahead of us and laboring toward a nearby bandshell, every step a travail.
Tony and I stopped talking at the sight of him, leaving a friendly disagreement about his daughter Elise hanging in the air. It was almost as if the one-legged man had turned and called out to us. At the bandshell he stopped to catch his breath, then fumbled in his overcoat for a cigarette and leaned back against a balustrade to smoke it.
I stopped pushing Tony’s chair. My friend took a pull of oxygen and said something I couldn’t make out. The disease slurred his speech miserably; lately it had been much worse. Speaking exhausted him, but he wouldn’t be silenced. He slowed down; enunciated; labored through it. Apologized, as if he were at fault.
When I leaned down, he said: “Recognize the coat? Look how he holds his cigarette. You know him.”
It took a moment for it to register, but then I saw it plainly. Not ten yards ahead was Milan Visser, the notorious thug who’d once tried to destroy my friend—a cocky jackbooter from the violent fringe of the anti-Islamic movement, the sort who staved in the heads of Arab immigrants, even if, like Anthony Haddad, they’d been raised Catholic. Now he was here before us, shambling along the canal, stopping for a solitary cigarette. He cut a lonely figure in the dusk.
I was surprised to see him. I assumed he still lived in Amsterdam, where he’d made his name terrorizing Turkish boys and Moroccan grocers and Lebanese businessmen. What was he doing here? Leiden was a university town, hardly fertile ground for his sort of paranoia.
“Visser,” I said, feeling the sudden need for a cigarette I didn’t possess.
“He’s living in the Joulestraat with a boy. We’re nearly neighbors. He enjoys this walk too.”
“But you keep your distance,” I said warily.
“Why should I? Life has thrust us together.”
“Tony! The man’s a killer.” “Which interests me. I’ve never known a killer, have you?” He took another pull of oxygen; the machine clacked. Phlegm mustered in his throat. “Let’s go.”
I began pivoting the chair in the direction of his flat, but he nodded toward Visser. “No. There. Go.” When I hesitated, he scolded me: “Sam, there are things you don’t understand.”
I controlled the chair; I could have turned us around and left Visser behind. But my respect for Tony Haddad didn’t permit it. And so we crept forward, stealing up on the man who’d done his level best, not long before, to terrorize my friend.
Visser had come to public notice when he was arrested for slitting the throat of a Turkish teenager in an Amsterdam alley. He contended that the boy had tried to rob him at knife point: he was merely defending himself from a “virus.” But the boy was half his size and autistic, likely incapable of such an organized assault; the hunting knife was Visser’s, moreover, and had been used from behind. Outrageously, the court acquitted him — a travesty in which many saw the long arm of the anti-immigrant bloc. A message had been sent.
Soon Visser was all over television, his vitriol making him an irresistible guest. He didn’t apologize for despising Islam; the Arab invasion would be the death of Christian society. He fit the role almost comically: the shaved head, the virulent grey eyes, the crude race-baiting. And of course his signature accessory, the authentic SS trench coat — the same one we’d see before us as we strolled the canal on that Leiden evening.
When the media began to lose interest in Visser, he turned his scorn upon Professor Anthony Haddad. Visser needed to gin up a new scandal to keep himself in the news, and in Tony — this cultured, endlessly congenial academic and committed Catholic — he found his improbable target.
My friend’s particular offense had been to write a guest column in De Volkskrant mourning the destruction of antiquities in the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra. This tragedy touched Tony on many levels: like me he was a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology, but he was also a native son, damned to watch from afar as his country set itself afire. In the summer of 2015 he’d somehow managed to go back, to slip into Palmyra at immense personal risk and see for himself the heart-rending state of things. This was only days before ISIS would blow up the Temple of Baal and execute his old professor, Khaled al-Asaad, for refusing to reveal where he’d hidden certain artifacts he couldn’t bear to see destroyed. Tony had stayed at al-Asaad’s home during his visit, had eaten at his sparse table and reminisced with him for hours, never guessing how brutally his elderly teacher’s life would soon end.
They were terrible days, so frightening that Tony’s daughter sought me out, after three years in which not a word had passed between us. “Samuel!” Elise’s panicked phone message said. “Don’t you dare refuse to call me back. This isn’t about us.” Beneath the sharp tone I detected a vein of radioactive anxiety. Her self-assurance, always so reliable, was decaying fast, throwing off a dangerous energy. I called her back and she sobbed helplessly, profoundly afraid for her poppa.
Tony had concealed his plans from both of us, as it happened. He’d said he was holing up at a place he kept on Crete, going to ground so he could start a new book. This was his ritual and we believed him, until Elise got a call from the Istanbul airport. Ashamed at having lied to her, he could no longer keep up the charade. In the few minutes they had, she’d been unable to talk him out of continuing on to Damascus; neither words nor tears could sway him. What he proposed to do was unthinkable. To slip into Syria while ISIS was on a rampage … utterly crazy. We were furious with him.
Elise and I had been a failure as lovers, but with her father in the war zone we needed each other. She’d been house-sitting in Amsterdam, to be close to him; I went up and we talked for hours in a restaurant along the Bloemgracht. “He’s not equipped for life in the real world,” she said. “Don’t let him fool you.” She was right. For all his cosmopolitan air, Tony lacked common sense; he was a sentimentalist. He’d gone to visit his homeland the way he’d have visited an old friend on his deathbed — I believe that’s just how he saw it. We doubted he understood the raw danger he was about to face.
By the grace of God he made it home. Upon his return we fed him dinner at Elise’s, lamb and Ciney, and he spoke barely a word the entire evening. Tony was in profound shock — who wouldn’t be? Words couldn’t describe what he’d seen. And all this was before the murder of his friend Khaled. That blow was yet to come.
We gave Tony space that evening. We didn’t press him. For some time we talked of Elise’s latest triumph, a life-sized bronze Proust she’d shipped to Paris for installation at the Ritz. I told a long story from my student days, I don’t recall which. The meal labored on. It was hard to tell whether Tony even heard us; when Elise went to make coffee he abruptly rose to go, as if a taxi had honked outside. After putting him on the Leiden train I went back to Elise’s and we tried to make love, craving that release, but the ghost of Tony’s pain lingered in the flat, defeating us.
“This is exactly how he was after the accident,” she said, nestled in the crook of my arm. “Inconsolable.”
I knew only the barest outline of that event. Long before we met, Tony Haddad had rounded a corner in his car on a narrow Amsterdam street and run down a man and his son on their bicycles, killing the boy and gravely wounding the father, who was pinned under a tire. The riders had plunged right into the driver’s path; had it not been Tony, it would have been someone else. Poisoned by remorse, Tony went into deep seclusion, refusing all attempts at comfort and eventually withdrawing to Crete where he dropped ten pounds, weight he couldn’t afford to lose. His collapse terrified Elise, who’d already lost her mother to leukemia and was just striking out on her own in the world. She became fiercely protective of her father.
Now Tony Haddad was consumed in mourning again — but this time for an entire civilization.
A month after his return from Syria, Tony would read in the newspaper of his old professor’s barbaric death — beheaded at age eighty-three and hung from a Roman column, a martyr for love. Khaled’s beloved, like Tony’s, was Syria, whose beautiful body had been defiled before his eyes.
Upon hearing the horrifying news, my friend abandoned his teaching duties and refused to see anyone; neither Elise nor I could reach him. When she went to his flat, the neighbor said he’d been gone for a week. Perhaps he was at his place on Crete, but there was no telephone service there. I imagined him lost in the sort of depression that ends in a reckoning of the worst kind. Elise and I were plotting a trip down when he suddenly resurfaced, calling her to ask if she knew how to get an article into the newspaper. Didn’t she have a journalist friend?
While in seclusion he’d drafted two essays, cries of the heart for his beloved Syria. The first — a bitter elegy for five priceless Syrian antiquities destroyed by ISIS — was taken immediately by De Volkskrant. The writing was so passionate, the topic so consummately of the moment, that other newspapers quickly reprinted it. In France, Libération; in Munich, the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Time ran it in their international edition.
The second article was his loving testament to Khaled al-Asaad, cast as a colloquy between teacher and student. Think Plato, immediately after the death of Socrates — the grievous anguish, the veneration. The article was white hot. Tony poured his soul into it, and when it hit the papers his phone rang with interview requests, which he ignored. What was the point? Anything he’d say on television could only diminish what he’d written. His writing was a wail of pain.
It would be barely a week before Milan Visser appeared on a right-wing radio show to denounce Anthony Haddad as the leader of a terrorist cell. Bits of the ugly interview were replayed on the Dutch news, and Elise called me in a fury. According to Visser, the articles were only a smokescreen to divert attention from the author’s true mission, which was to recruit jihadis from the universities. By attacking ISIS, Haddad positioned himself to do its bidding. Who’d ever suspect an archaeology professor of betraying his adopted country? A perfect cover! Haddad should be jailed immediately, for the safety of the homeland.
Visser’s diatribe was covered even in France, where the anti-immigrant wave was constantly in the news. I switched on television and there was his brutal face, a translation of the Dutch radio interview playing as voiceover; it was unspeakable. I called Elise and convinced her that Visser’s taunts shouldn’t go unanswered. In a rage I drafted a short statement in defense of Tony and sent it straight to De Volkskrant, which printed it the very next morning.
Perhaps my words had some small impact, or perhaps the coming elections simply knocked Visser out of the news. Whatever the case, the coverage stopped, only to give way to more intimate threats. First came an anonymous email threatening to behead Tony; attached was a grisly photo of al-Asaad’s headless corpse. Then an emailed photo of viscera turned out onto pavement, and a string of others. Panicked, he’d forwarded the first to Elise, but only the first. I discovered all of them after his death, printed and tidily filed under Correspondence, my heart breaking at how he’d tried to make sense of their cruelty.
Soon came a parcel with a bloodsmeared Koran, then late-night phone calls threatening to rape Elise. It may have been Visser on the telephone, or not; it hardly mattered. Rather than call the police, Tony shifted an armoire so it blocked the balcony doors and covered the windows with newspaper. He no longer answered the phone, no longer answered email. When Elise and I pleaded with him to open the door, he begged to be left alone. He seemed to be in the midst of a full-on breakdown. We were beside ourselves with worry, but didn’t know what to do.
Only when someone sent a clumsily doctored photo of Professor Haddad to the University president — one that purported to show Tony in flagrante delicto with a girl of nine or ten — did the police take notice. Not because they thought the botched photo genuine, but because they hoped it might lead them to Tony’s tormentors. Though they made no arrests, the harassment abruptly stopped, and gradually my friend began to emerge from hiding, gently coaxed by his daughter and me. The trip to Syria, the loss of al-Asaad, and now this slander — Elise and I wondered if he’d ever recover.
Not long afterward, on an ordinary Thursday, he called Elise to say that he was under evaluation at the University’s neurology department.
While in Syria, the muscles of his forearms and calves had begun to quiver oddly; he’d attributed it to anxiety. After the murder of al-Asaad, a weakness began to steal up his limbs; he called it grief. But when he found himself nearly incapable of climbing the stairs to his flat, he realized there was something medically wrong. Within weeks he could no longer pull pants over his legs. He couldn’t begin to manage zippers or buttons. It must have been even more frightening than Visser’s attacks.
A year later — on the very evening when he and I encountered his old adversary by the bandshell — he’d tell me that ALS was like being pinned in sunken wreckage, the water rising up around you, the outcome inevitable. “Sam,” he said, “in Syria we say: Birth is the messenger of death. The message has come, and it’s addressed to me.”
In person, Milan Visser had the look many celebrities do when off the air: vaguely disappointed and therefore disappointing, depleted somehow, wan as children stuck inside on a rainy day.
He was shorter than he’d seemed on television. As we rolled toward him he turned abruptly — no easy thing for a onelegged man — and I noticed that his signature trench coat was six inches too long. My eyes were level with the top of the famously shaved head, which without benefit of television makeup was scabbed and dull. As we came to a halt before him he tossed his cigarette away and slumped forward, all his bravado gone. He was no more than half the man I’d imagined. For a moment I felt sorry for him, despite all he’d done.
When Visser registered Tony’s presence he nodded soberly and said something in Dutch, a language I barely understand. Tony replied in his hoarse voice, articulating the words painfully, struggling with the gutturals. I heard no anger in his reply, whatever it was he said. The two adversaries faced off rather formally, like gentlemen arriving for a duel. From Visser’s manner you’d never have guessed what a goon he was.
Now they were talking in earnest, Visser leaning in precariously on his good leg, hands clasping his knee. Still I understood nothing of the conversation. But I was watching more than listening, anyway, for it had occurred to me that Visser might try to harm Tony. The stubby hands looked powerful. But they stayed where they belonged, Visser cocking his head thoughtfully at something Tony said. I wondered, fleetingly, if the whole storm trooper thing was a ruse, whether the man was actually intelligent, even educated, but just as quickly dismissed the thought. He’d murdered an autistic boy. What more proof did I need?
And then, suddenly, the encounter was over. Visser stood up, nodded at Tony and turned onto a path that led away from the canal, slumped shoulders reeling with every difficult step.
“What was that all about?” I asked my friend as I wheeled him home. “Nothing important.” “Everything between you two is important.”
“Visser and I have reached an understanding, Sam.” In an offhand way he added: “We see each other now and then.” “What are you saying?”
He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “Sam, can you speed it up? I’ve filled my diaper, damn it.” An eruption of phlegm set him coughing. “The dying body speaks in metaphor,” he managed, smiling crookedly.
I sped him home and handed him off to his homecare aide, a Palestinian student named Ali. With exceeding care Ali pushed the chair into the bathroom and dealt with the mess while I waited in the ill-lit front room. If I were dying, I thought, I’d want nothing but bright light around me … why did Haddad choose to live in perpetual twilight?
The flat had been adapted to his new reality. The swing-out desk for his wheelchair; the oversized computer keyboard designed for use with a mouth stick; the bookshelves stocked with diapers and wipes. An oxygen tank in the corner. A portable commode. In the kitchen I glimpsed a blender, essential equipment now that he could no longer manage solid food. Apparently Ali was a wizard with it, his latest creation being a revolting purée of Tony’s beloved nasi goreng. I felt my throat thicken with anguish … what had Tony Haddad done to deserve this?
But there were still signs of his old life. On the wall were etchings of Palmyra and the Temple of Baal. A photo of Elise as a girl, sitting on the steps of Carnegie Hall during Tony’s year at Columbia. And beside the French doors, lugged inside for winter, Tony’s beloved fig tree, whose marvelous fruit Elise had once plucked and fed to me. She’d worn a crimson streak in her hair then, defiant and precise. With her amber skin and keen mind she’d been irresistible to me — she still was, in many ways. There was a reason we’d tried again and again to make it work.
My friend wheeled himself back into the room in striped pajamas, looking greatly relieved, while Ali ran a bath. There was something in his gaze that hadn’t been there before, a sort of resolve. I couldn’t quite read him.
“Sam, listen,” he said, “will you stay the night in town? Come back for breakfast? As a favor to me?”
He’d never made such a request. “Of course. Why?”
He looked away, tracking Ali through the bathroom door. “It will be important for you to be here, I think.”
I thought of Visser: was Tony staging some kind of meeting? But I sensed this wasn’t it. “You’re being obscure,” I chided him.
A labored smile crossed his lips. “Comme il faut.”
I recall being struck by how placid he seemed, once I’d agreed to come. It was the same way he’d been with Visser, an hour before; Visser too had seemed to calm him. I couldn’t account for it — until, that is, I thought I could.
“Tony,” I said, “you’ve forgiven Visser, haven’t you?”
“Forgiveness is one of the few pleasures I have left, Sam.”
“What he did to you was unforgiveable. Particularly the photo of the child.”
“Nothing is unforgiveable. Nothing. Besides, it wasn’t as unfair as you think.”
“You’re not making sense.”
Tony studied my chair leg, abstracted. “Look,” he said with a rasp, “I don’t have time to worry about others being fair to me. What matters is being fair to others.”
I saw Ali slip into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, sending an appraising look Tony’s way. A moment later he reappeared with some runny gelatine and a bib. “Fluids, Professor,” he said gently, and helped Tony take a few sips. It seemed to go down smoothly at first, but then Tony started coughing severely, frighteningly. Unfazed, Ali moved behind him and lifted his flaccid arms high until it stopped. Tony had spat up on his clean bib, which seemed to disgust him. Those few seconds brought home to me how little time my friend had left. His mind was as sharp as ever, but there was no denying his frailty; death was bearing down. I felt tears welling in my eyes and turned to daub them away, not wanting to upset him further.
Tony was exhausted. “I need to let you get to bed,” I said, standing. “What time do you want me here in the morning?” “Not a minute later than seven.”
I had the urge to kiss him on the lips, as Arab men do, though it wasn’t something we’d ever done.
“Sam, don’t go just yet,” Tony said, surprising me. “Sit.”
I pulled a chair up next to him and took his birdlike hand in mine.
“You know how this ends, don’t you?” he said.
“I’m afraid I do.”
I’d read up on ALS, of course. I did know how it ended: with paralysis of the diaphragm. What began as a quiver of the muscles would end in excruciating suffocation. It generally took a year or two; it had been fourteen months since Tony’s first symptoms.
I squeezed his hand carefully. “I’m so sorry, Tony.”
He nodded — the smallest of gestures, one he’d soon be unable to manage.
I went on, fumbling for words, hating myself for not finding the right ones. “Do you ever have … you know … thoughts of getting out ahead of it?”
He knew exactly what I meant, despite my clumsy way of putting it.
“Out of the question for a believing Catholic, unfortunately.”
“But if it’s done medically? It wouldn’t be —”
“Suicide? Close enough. The patient needs to take affirmative steps. Multiple steps, over time. So much Dutch bureaucracy. The Church has a position, of course.”
“I thought the Church believed in mercy.”
“A merciful God, yes. Which isn’t the same thing at all.” Tony met my eyes calmly. “Sam, know that I’m at peace with what’s going to happen. Do you believe me?”
I couldn’t answer him. Instead I rose, kissed my old friend and went outside, where I was finally, gratefully, able to cry. I realized that I loved Tony Haddad as I’d never loved anyone before — not even Elise, whose father’s decline, I realized, had brought closer to my heart than ever.
I spent a sleepless night at a hotel near the station. To get the blood flowing I jogged back to Tony’s in the sun, hating the loveliness of the water below. There were sirens about, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was determined to be there for my friend, to be present in every way, no matter how exhausted I felt.
It was farther than I thought, and I arrived a few minutes late. As I rounded the final corner, the reason for the sirens became clear: several police cars and an ambulance had jammed into Tony’s narrow street. Policemen warned gawkers away, radios chattering, the press arriving. Ali sat on a stoop sobbing, a policewoman bent over him. I felt my chest go hollow, because I knew exactly what the commotion meant. I could only watch, unable to take another step forward, the morning shattered.
I wondered about the show of force. Why so many police?
“Visser,” Elise would explain a few hours later. She’d taken a taxi down from Amsterdam immediately after getting the call. The police had let her through immediately. She was the daughter; I was no one.
Once they’d taken Tony away, we walked through town under a blinding sun and climbed the steps to the ancient, ruined keep at the confluence of the old and new Rhines. Elise had details to attend to, but none was more important, she said, than being with me. She smiled; we kissed, and leaned over the parapet overlooking the city.
She seemed at peace, but I wasn’t. There might be solace in knowing that Tony’s suffering was over, but it mattered profoundly how the end had come. I needed to know that he hadn’t suffocated to death. But how could I ask his daughter such a question?
She had another topic in mind, fortunately. “Visser’s why there were so many police.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“Ali found my poppa in his bed, in his favorite pajamas, with his Coptic Bible beside him … Sam, he was serene. He didn’t suffer. The autopsy will say what the specific drug was, but he’d been put to sleep, I’m sure of it. By Milan Visser.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you know how Visser lost his leg?” “No idea.”
“Remember my father’s accident? With the bicyclists, the father and son? The son killed, the father pinned under the car?”
Of course I remembered — the rough sketch of it, anyway. Then it struck me: “That was Visser’s son … and Visser’s leg. Why didn’t you tell me, when all the trouble broke out?”
“Poppa made me promise not to. He didn’t want you to know, Sam. That accident was his greatest shame. And …” She paused. “I think my poppa and Visser may have made a pact. Especially given how they found Visser.”
“Meaning?”
“Ali arrived early for work and found the door unlocked, then found my father. Imagine, Sam … he loved my poppa, who treated him like a son. Poor boy.”
“But Visser?”
“At some point Ali opened the linen closet and there he was, hanging from a wire. I saw it myself. He’d killed himself in the most brutal way possible — slowly suffocated, almost decapitated. Killed himself punitively. Visser sent my father off with such delicacy and kindness, then did that to himself.” She shook her head in disbelief. “What self-hatred.”
I was even more confused. “If you’re Tony Haddad, why have Visser do this? Of all people?”
“My father never forgave himself for killing Visser’s son. It was the central struggle of his life, Sam. In letting Visser kill him he must have felt a kind of moral symmetry. And sidestepped suicide, or convinced himself he had. All he did was leave the door unlocked.”
Fragments were coming back, things Tony had said: Visser and I have reached an understanding. And: I’m at peace with what’s going to happen. Now I understood. He and Visser must have agreed in the park, the evening before, that it was time. When Tony asked me to come back at seven the next morning, he perhaps hoped I’d intercept Ali. Instead Ali arrived before me — his misfortune — and stumbled onto the scene.
“I’ve got to go,” I told Elise. I needed to be alone. Something in me was slipping, something collapsing. I turned away, the Rhine catching the sun beneath our ancient tower, the day marching on relentlessly.
“Stay, Sam,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me from behind. “You know what he wanted for us, don’t you?”
“Elise …,” I said, but could say no more. When I tried to pull away she only held me closer. We stood there in silence for an eternity, my old lover and I, her breath warm against my neck, the smell of old stone rising from the battlements as it must have risen, in better days, from Haddad’s beloved ruins. Edward Hamlin is the author of “Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories,” winner of the 2015 Iowa Short Fiction Award and the Colorado Book Award. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Printers Row Journal and elsewhere, and has won numerous other awards. He was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Short Story Award in 2013 before winning it in 2020 for “Haddad: A Requiem.” Raised in Chicago, Hamlin now lives in Colorado.