by Ryad Girod
2.
SEATED ON ONE OF THE BENCHES in the long corridor that served as a waiting room for the neurology department of Kingdom Hospital, I was waiting for Mansour, looking distractedly at the comings and goings of the Filipino nurses who enlivened their every passing with a Good morning Sir! in English that was intended for me, or intended for one of the three other patients dispersed along the long corridor, or intended for the walls or for the tiling, seeing as they were never looking at anyone in particular before they dashed into one of the six examination rooms to drop off folders or pick them up. Over the past few days, the pain had intensified to the point that it prevented Mansour from sleeping or working, and also from having another encounter with his donkey, I thought with a smile, catching the eye of another nurse. Good morning Sir! For what had now been nearly an hour, behind the door across from me, Mansour had been explaining his situation, his sharp pains, his slowed speech, maybe even his donkey … to the doctor I had caught a glimpse of and who hadn’t seemed all that sharp, all that responsive, when he had seen Mansour holding his head in his hands and had asked him if he was ill … But perhaps I was mistaken, who is to say?
Gassouh! Gassouh! continue the cries coming from among the many eyes that watch Mansour al-Jazaïri pass by, the opposite of what the crowd must have been like when it gathered along the edges of the principal artery of Damascus, in 1965, during the passage of that coffin covered by the Syrian flag and containing the remains, or rather what remained of the remains, which is to say ashes or even less, the totality wrapped in a shroud and spread across the bottom of that coffin taken from the Muhyi al-Din Mosque in Salihiyya to be set on a sort of chariot and paraded before the reddened eyes of the military, the high dignitaries and common citizens, all of them sincerely moved by what remained of the remains of Abdelkader al-Jazaïri as they passed by, draped in the nation’s colors. Eyes reddened because, for each one of them, these were not remains or ashes, but Abdelkader himself, resting intact within that coffin the Syrian nation was to send to the Algerian nation. To send as if to send back, to repay a debt, a full century later, to return to the Algerian state the founder of the State itself. And a few hours later, which is to say a few thousand miles away, to the west, the welcome on the tarmac of Algiers Airport, to the sound of canons firing, of this same coffin, removed from the belly of the plane and covered, this time, with the Algerian flag. And the president, in person, approaching the casket alongside the members of his government so as to lift it up on their shoulders and advance toward the platform decorated with flowers and flags the color of the recently and at-long-last independent State … to set the Emir Abdelkader down upon it and stand at attention, to pass in review the different corps of that young army as it marched to the rhythm of the new national anthem, halting, swift, curt, firm, hands just as firmly held to foreheads, and heads turned toward the emir for a first and final military salute. Soldiers marching, their bodies rigid, their movements self-assured, chins held aloft and eyes not reddened this time, but instead vague, or, to put it another way, their gazes were nothing less than undecided and circumspect … And the president himself, his eyes like this as well, pondering perhaps the complexity of the task, wondering where to begin, as if already exhausted by the very scale of the mission to be carried out, namely that of constructing, crafting, carving from all these distinct pieces a myth, a hero, a symbol, a martyr for a grateful homeland … or perhaps not, having those same eyes only because the matter was already underway and would take care of itself. Eyes of boredom, then, idleness and laziness, because soon there would be nothing left to do, no headstones to be put in place, nor even epitaphs to be engraved, no heavy bronze statues to be erected that would fix in time, and in space, for that matter, a horse rearing up on its hind legs, mounted by what had ceased to be a pile of ashes only to be remade into a fiery horseman brandishing a menacing saber … and whether or not he considered this magnificent bearded man he saw lying peacefully before him, through the flag, through the oak, to be a traitor or a renegade, and even if he might have preferred to spit on him instead of honor him … even if this were the case, he impassibly maintained this vague gaze that seemed to be waiting for things to happen as they do … who is to say?
Good morning Sir! Then the nurse disappeared behind the door across from me, allowing me only a fraction of a second in which to see Mansour, listless, his arms hanging limply down the side of the chair he sat in as he listened to the voice, a voice that reached me for a fraction of a second as well, or rather I struggled to hear and understand that voice expressing itself half in Arabic, half in English, trying its best to explain where things stood. And then, a few minutes later, the door opened with the nurse once again holding the knob and this time the doctor holding Mansour’s arm as if to gently push him out of the examination room … and then, imperceptibly, suddenly, all four of us there in front of the already-closed door, the nurse still holding its knob and the doctor addressing me, asking me if I was a relative of Mansour’s, to which I responded that sort of, yes, seeing as we had known each other ever since French high school in Damascus and we had come from Syria together and we had worked for the same company for a decade … So, how else to put it … he explained to me that Mansour would need to be taken care of, that it was a rare disease, an orphan disease, degenerative … that in a manner of speaking, the impulses of the nervous system, or electrical, he had said, had reversed themselves … and in some way, the cells, or the gray matter, he had called it, instead of developing, was retracting, becoming condensed, and would end up dying off … it was this reversal in the direction of cerebral activity that was producing the pain, because the system wasn’t used to it, and these pains would fade and then disappear … However, Mansour was going to progressively become an idiot, he was going to lose all intelligence, the doctor had told me … that at first it wouldn’t be visible but that it was necessary to be vigilant, he had insisted … Hold his hand when you cross the street, Dr. Maarafi had concluded, shooting us both a large smile to confirm that, in some way, this was intended to be funny … but not that funny. All of this despite the fact that two hours earlier we had been in a completely different reality, one that had become forever inaccessible after what the doctor had just said … two hours earlier, Mansour had woken up, he had showered and shaved, had drunk his coffee and swallowed two painkillers, looking out the bay window as the sun rose over Riyadh … then, just like every morning of every week, he had opened his armoire and pulled on a shirt, a suit and a tie … then he had made his way to the bathroom to spritz his neck and hands with a scent that he paid a fortune for when he managed to get over to Muscat. A subtle mélange of oud and sandalwood that an artisan perfumer knew just how to dose out in order to magnify their essences, because, for Mansour, a person’s scent was what distinguished them, what defined them, and it was important to him that his own be appropriately subtle. And yet right then, facing the doctor who maintained his smile, despite the scent of oud and sandalwood, despite the suit and tie, the dangling arms and the impassivity of his face … there was no longer anything subtle about Mansour. Just the opposite. A clown, I had secretly thought, a grotesque clown. And I really thought I had let out a cry, although I may have only done it mentally, in any case I had cried out in my head: No! No! Don’t say that! when the doctor had specified that it was irreversible.
Gassouh! Gassouh! shouts the crowd at the sight of what is perhaps no longer anything more than a vegetable, advancing as might a beast of burden, a cow, an ass … a body depleted of its spirit … just a collection of organic matter, of living matter, which the stroke of a saber will divide in two, transforming it into two masses of dead matter much like the wave of a magic wand … perhaps Mansour is no longer any more than that, any more than meat … who is to say what remains of Mansour within Mansour’s head?
The way I remember it, the corridors of the neurology department had abruptly grown dark, like it was the middle of the night when we took our leave f
irst of the doctor and then of his nurse, who had insisted on accompanying us all the way to the elevator door only to disappear again just as quickly, back into that corridor still plunged into darkness, the echo of a warm and hospitable Goodbye Sir! trailing behind her … Mansour remained mute during the time it took us to leave the hospital and make our way back to the Camaro. I didn’t dare say a thing, didn’t even dare look at him, picturing his blank and immobile gaze … and turning over and over in my mind everything the doctor had said. I started the engine and drove through a city that I no longer even saw … without a goal, without a specific destination, I drove down anything that presented itself before me … avenues, roads, lanes, highways and byways, we just kept going. And I rummaged around in Mansour’s head, I tried to imagine the disorder of the cells in that enormous web, spun throughout a lifetime and abruptly jumbled by the reversal of electrical or nervous impulses … and for what reason? There’s what the doctor hadn’t specified, the reason. A virus? A congenital defect? A genetic predisposition? Or was it simply chance? Just like that, without any reason whatsoever, the nervous impulses had begun to slow down on their way through the tissues, the canals, had then frozen for an instant, a second or a fraction of a second during which Mansour would have felt a violent shock and then they would have set off in the opposite direction, just like that, completely by chance … a current moving against the tide, traveling through panicked membranes, just like that, without any reason, because of some inescapable and merciless whim of providence … It had come over Mansour just like that, perhaps while he meandered peacefully through the mall’s galleries, balmy with the fragrance of oud … Was it an indirect and adverse effect of the oud? Was it due to an excess of oud? And yet, a surplus of oud leads to harmony, the saying goes … but still … While he meandered peacefully past the glittering shop windows of the Royal Mall, lusting after the many items on their display stands, the short-circuit, in a manner of speaking, had beset him, forcing him to stop, to stand frozen in place, perhaps to the laughter of children or even the laughter of women. And he had held his head for fear it would explode, had looked straight ahead, his eyes fixed on something, little matter what it was, something tangible and fixed and concrete and real like a sign on the wall an extinguisher a bench, little matter, something from that reality to which he could cling so as not to be carried away by the violence of the pain … Or perhaps it had been elsewhere, before the yellow of the desert or the red of the dunes, while he contemplated in solitude the billions upon billions of grains of sand, that fate had struck its blow … as he faced that nature, which to him seemed fixed, relaxing in communion with that nature, calm and gentle, the thunderbolt of providence had flashed down to strike him. Unjustly, as only providence knows how … Before those billions upon billions of grains of sand, a bolt of lightning had passed through him, yanking a cry from his throat, throwing back his head, inside of which thousands of electrocuted, fried neurons had been transformed into common grains of sand … and, as he came back to his senses, in the shrill echo of his cry, he raised his eyes skyward as if to make out where the bolt had come from.
And so, still inside the muffled silence of the Camaro’s leather interior, I didn’t have it in me to turn toward Mansour. I only imagined him, from what little passed within my field of vision, sitting there like a statue, a mannequin of hardened plastic, and then guessed what he was holding in his hands once he had fumbled through the inner pocket of his suit and unfolded his wallet … I knew that in his hands, he held a photo that had been passed down to him by his father or his grandfather, a photo he carried around religiously, a photo worn scratched and streaked by time and by fingers but that bore witness, like an ID card, to his filiation. Abdelkader’s face, in black and white, the black having turned to gray and the white more yellowish, the size of a passport photo, which had eluded the emir’s iconography archives to make its way into the pockets of his great-great-grandchild who held it, during that moment, in the palm of his hand. At the edge of my field of vision, I saw his lips move and I eventually heard him muttering under his breath, something that I could still make out seeing as I already knew what it was he said, this recitation, for having heard it a thousand times, as he listed off names like the beads of a rosary so as not to forget them and to transmit them from generation to generation … ascending, Mansour bin Soltane bin Hassan bin Mohamed bin Abdelkader bin Muhyi al-Din bin Mustafa … bin Hasan bin Fatimah bint Muhammad, may peace and salvation be upon him … and descending, from the Prophet Muhammad abu Fatimah umm Hasan bin ʿAli, then Hasan abu Hasan al-Muthana abu ʿAbd Allah al-Kamil abu Idris al-Awwal … abu Muhyi al-Din abu Abdelkader abu Mohamed abu Hassan abu Soltane abu Mansour al-Jazaïri … in a loop, as we drove around Riyadh not knowing where we should stop. In a loop, a tête-à-tête, face to face and eye to eye with his ancestor and maybe with that same gaze … shared between the two of them. Empty at first glance and, even when looking at it head on, always giving the impression that it’s aimed slightly off to the side … as if it were seeing something else. Eventually, by weaving our way through the teeming city, we just happened to arrive at his place, without really knowing how. I accompanied him, silently, withdrawn, into his apartment. Without saying anything to me, Mansour made his way to the bathroom. There he took refuge, locked himself away. I could smell the scent of oud incense, persistent, it seemed to float in the air, and on the orange light that the blinds let into the living room. Stifled sobs reached me and chilled me to the bone. Pain. Embarrassment. Helplessness. I set the keys to the Camaro down on the table by the entrance and closed the door behind me.
Gassouh! Gassouh! they cry, whereas only three months earlier, Mansour and I had instead heard Good morning Sir! Goodbye Sir! in the corridors of the neurology department of Kingdom Hospital. And then the diagnosis, the illness, like a cancer that was to carry him off in three months’ time. Does he even hear? Does he even understand? I don’t know. I watch and I listen to it all as if it lacks in consistency, like a feeling of lightness … I weigh the insignificance of things, the insignificance of everything, as simple as a Good morning Sir! Goodbye Sir! Mansour advances, his body in chains, and perhaps he’s feeling this way as well … he continues forward, following a trajectory straight toward what must be the very center of the square, where a rag and a pail await him … next to which he will kneel and stick out his neck to welcome the blade that will calm the clamor of the crowd. All these people who cannot accept that a Muslim, like them, that an Arab, like them, could utter … the unutterable, they think, as giant, as thundering, and as simple as I am Him. As if no person, no I, could purify himself, simplify himself, reduce himself, lighten himself, and raise himself up as far as Him. Let alone an Arab. As if nothing so great could ever, nor should ever, come from an Arab. Apart from the Prophet, the rest of them should remain nothing more than depraved Bedouins, boors, without culture and without grandeur. Too dirty and too impious to approach Him and love Him … they should endure the contempt and the severity of an intransigent and distant creator … should reconcile themselves, until the end of their days, to a resounding no. Any prayers, any reverence, would have to go unheeded among the sterile and dry sands of Arabia, of the Orient …
Just like how a century and a half earlier, the French dignitaries had met the emir’s complaints with the same contempt and, perhaps worse than contempt, indifference … reading those letters in Emir Abdelkader’s own hand, perhaps amazed by their style or maybe not even noticing it, Lamoricière, or some other representative of the French Republic, put the letters back exactly where he had found them and asked his secretary to reply to them, to reply in the customary way, then he returned to those close to him, which is to say to his family, or maybe his friends, or maybe other generals, to concern himself with the expansion of France, with working to cultivate the grandeur of France, leaving it to his aide-de-camp to grant a minute or two to this Bedouin who, strangely, he may have thought, preferred the emptiness of the desert to castle
life … And so, with those eyes of his, standing on that beam of sorts to frame the locale they had washed up in, he and his people, in the depths of that eternally damp Indre-et-Loire, with that gaze fixed by the click of the photographer, a look that one might read as making plain as day the utter renunciation, the absolute apathy, the irreversible dehumanization … even a congenital idiocy … that gaze having ended, perhaps a few hours after the departure of the photographer and the officials from the newly established French Republic, he set to inscribing words of a prophetic subtlety to express his indignation: My aged mother and the women of my household cry night and day, and no longer give any credibility to the hope that I have been obliged to offer them right up until the end. What am I saying? Not only the women, but the men, too, have succumbed to lamentations. Their state is such that I am persuaded, should our captivity be prolonged much longer, that many shall die of it. And it is I who was the cause of all of this misery! It was I alone who had intended to give myself over to them! Is there not in France a tribunal charged with hearing the grievances and complaints of the victims of injustice? With this Republic, you have achieved a great work which promises to spread good fortune upon all. Make certain that I am not an exception.