Aziz took a bit of sand and watched it run slowly down through his raised fist. The grains glimmered when struck by a ray of light.
“I told my Uncle Mani that I would die if I didn’t become an actor.”
“You really told him that?”
“Yes.”
“That was perhaps a bit much. How old were you?”
“I’d just turned fourteen.”
“And you already knew you wanted to become an actor?”
“Yes.”
“And the voices? You talked to your uncle about the voices you heard, those of Halim and your grandfather, didn’t you?”
“No, they disappeared when I arrived here. But others took their place. Many others. It’s those I mentioned to my uncle. I said to him, ‘Uncle Mani, don’t tell Aunt Dalimah, but I hear voices. As if they were sleeping in the sky and my gaze brought them out of their slumber. They whisper, murmur, fill my head with their suffering. They’re as numberless as the stars that make holes in the night. When I close my eyes, the voices light up in my head.’ My uncle said I had too much imagination. All that would disappear when I had a good job, when I found the woman of my life, and when I had children in my turn.”
“And?”
“I insisted. I told him that I felt as if dozens of people were living inside my head. ‘Uncle Mani, maybe you’re right and I have too much imagination. But how can I have less? It’s as if I were always carrying around a little town inside me. I hear children playing, laughing, sometimes singing, and then there you are, I don’t know why, they start to cry. After that I hear other voices, women and men the age of my parents, and others with the tired voices of older people, and all those voices panicking, lamenting, moaning, and crying with rage in a single howl. And you know what I think, Uncle Mani? All those voices, they want to be heard, and not just as ghosts in my head. If I become an actor, I’ll be able to bring them into the world, give voice to them. Give voice, Uncle Mani, do you understand? A voice that everyone will be able to hear, with real words and real sentences. Otherwise they’ll dwindle away inside me and I will become a ghost.’”
“Aziz, you really do have a lot of imagination. You told your uncle that?”
“Of course, sir. I had no choice.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the truth.”
“And how did your uncle react?”
“With another truth. Uncle Mani said to me: ‘My dear Aziz, I see what you’re trying to say. Yes, now I see it. Those voices you’ve just been describing to me, I can guess where they come from. Not just your head, I’m afraid. I think it’s time I told you the truth about your brother. I never knew him. All I know about him, I’ve learned from your aunt Dalimah and from you. But I want you to know that for me, you are Amed and you are Aziz. You are both. Don’t seek your brother any longer, because he is in your heart.’ Then my uncle took my hand and held it in his own. ‘Listen to me, Aziz, I have verified everything you’ve told me about Soulayed. I’ve talked to important people I trust. I’ve written to others. I’ve also searched through the newspapers from those days. I still have a lot of contacts back home, especially journalists. I can assure you of one thing: there never were mines on the mountain. Everything Soulayed told you was false. Your brother never went to the other side of the mountain. That was not his mission. There was no military camp to blow up. On the other side of the mountain there was just a poor refugee camp. The day they took away your brother, they went south, in the same direction they’d taken Halim. No one will ever know what they really told your brother before abandoning him to his fate. He must have crossed the frontier through a secret tunnel. I can’t confirm it to you. But what is certain, and nothing can erase the history of our countries, is how your brother died. He blew himself up, surrounded by a hundred children. Children, Aziz, children your age. There were dozens dead and as many wounded, seriously maimed. Those children were participating in a kite-flying competition. They’d been brought together beforehand in a school where they were attending a puppet show. I had no intention of revealing that to you today. I’ve talked about it often with your aunt Dalimah. We knew that one day or another, you’d learn about it. I was amazed at first that you’d not been told about what happened when you were still back there. I imagine they did everything they could to hide this information from you. A little while ago, when you spoke to me about the voices you were hearing, I couldn’t help thinking about those sacrificed children and their parents’ wrenching anguish. I think you are bearing within yourself their grief for all those dead children. I think that’s what you’re hearing and that’s what is making you suffer. It’s perhaps your brother’s last message, sent when he activated the detonator. Not everything can be explained. Not even war, you can’t explain it when it kills children.’ That’s what my uncle revealed to me that day.”
Aziz got up and kicked at the sand. A cloud of dust and light rose from the floor, filling the stage.
“My brother was a murderer. I can’t tell his story the way you want. It wouldn’t help anything. It would save no one, certainly not a child. Find something else for the scene.”
Mikaël didn’t know how to answer. Words caught in his throat.
“My brother is a murderer of children, sir!”
Aziz stood in front of Mikaël as if waiting for something. Mikaël observed him for a moment. With the scattered dust, the space around his body had taken on a porous, evanescent cast. Mikaël stood as well, wanting to take Aziz in his arms, to embrace him. He should have done so. Aziz just needed to be comforted.
Instead, Mikaël insisted that Aziz reverse his decision. He had to tell his story. It was the best solution. His brother’s suicide attack, whether it took place in a school full of children or in a military camp, changed nothing where war’s logic was concerned. In both cases, it was a matter of destroying the enemy and its means to attack and to defend itself. Mikaël heard himself uttering these words, and he found himself hateful. He couldn’t think clearly, his reasoning tied him up in knots, and his arguments rang false. There was a difference between killing innocent children and blowing up military warehouses. Anyone could see it. But without being aware, Mikaël was placing himself in the position of the mercenary character he’d created. What was there in Aziz’s story that would touch him? What would persuade him to spare the child? Why would a man conditioned to kill listen to this story about a switch between twin brothers?
One question followed another and Mikaël feared that every possible answer would turn out to be another illusion. His play now struck him as pretentious and vain. He fought against the fear that his entire theatrical project would collapse like a house of cards before Aziz’s story and this undeniable fact: his brother, a nine-year-old child, blew himself up surrounded by children his own age.
Mikaël went to turn off the console and turned on the house lights. He could no longer bear this lighting, shot through with shadows. He asked Aziz to come and sit in a seat next to him. For a long time they stared into the void in front of them, the great gaping stage mouth with its potential for lies and truth.
“Why did he agree to carry out such an unthinkable act? That’s the question you must have asked yourself hundreds of times. Am I right?”
Aziz stared straight ahead. Mikaël waited a moment for him to reply. Aziz seemed absent.
“You’re not fair when you accuse your brother of being a murderer. How can you know what was going on in his heart when he saw what was lying in wait for him? He was deceived until the very last moment. I don’t know, perhaps he was drugged . . .”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.”
“You’re right, I know nothing. I dared to write a play about war in complete ignorance of what it involves, of what it provokes. What business did I have doing that?”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“But you did.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s good that something can h
appen in life to shake us up and show us our own triviality.”
“I like your text.”
“Thank you, but it’s still unfinished. And that’s not what interests me, anyway, to know whether you like my text or not. That’s not the question.”
“You’re angry, sir.”
“Yes, I am!”
Aziz rose and made his way slowly to the exit. Mikaël did nothing to stop him.
SONY
Aziz didn’t attend any more rehearsals, nor did he return phone calls from Mikaël and his friends. It was a serious offense. He was putting his training in danger and risking expulsion from the school. Two days before the opening, Mikaël had no choice but to give Aziz’s lines to three different students so they wouldn’t have too much to memorize in such a short time. In the final scene, the mercenary would no longer address Sony, now absent from the stage, but rather would speak directly to the public. In that way, every member of the audience would become the child. Mikaël was not happy with this solution. It didn’t allow him to present a clear idea of the mercenary’s decision: kill the child or let him live? The answer would hover in the minds of the spectators in abstract fashion. But Mikaël could do no better in his present state of agitation.
Aziz’s absence had affected the morale of the group. The changes to the staging had unsettled the performances of some. Mikaël tried as best he could to remain calm, to not show his apprehension, to be encouraging. But he was shaken. He’d behaved badly with Aziz. In the end, he had no concrete idea of what Aziz had lived through in his country, of the torment that ate away at him when he imagined his brother’s last moments. Had the boy understood what was being asked of him? Had he taken the measure of his act’s barbarity? Had he been manipulated to the very last moment? Forced to perform the unthinkable? These unanswered questions robbed his text of all its pertinence, highlighting his own helplessness. His apprehension was enormous. His sadness, even more so.
One hour before the start of the play, to his astonishment, his nervousness suddenly disappeared. Perhaps he’d anesthetized himself without knowing it, to protect himself from his growing fears? And so he sat in the audience instead of in the control room as he had intended.
The show began a few minutes late, but everything went rather well for a first night. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to concentrate on what he was seeing and hearing. It was as if his own text made him uneasy and ashamed. He tried to take mental notes of the performances for the actors, to give to them after the curtain call. He hadn’t forgotten that this was also a pedagogical exercise. But as the evening moved on, he lost the thread of the show, his concentration came and went, and he found himself thinking of Aziz’s brother. He imagined a little nine-year-old boy with a belt of explosives around his waist, hidden under his shirt. He saw him in the midst of other children who were also watching a show—not a war story like this one, but a story that was simply making them happy. He heard their laughter. Aziz’s uncle had spoken of a puppet show. He’d like to know whether the little boy weighed down by explosives had, for an instant, forgotten his hand on the detonator, captivated by the puppets’ behavior. To know, finally, whether the tragic destinies of Aziz and his brother might have been avoided.
As the play neared its end, Mikaël stopped paying attention to what was happening onstage, as if he were trying to escape his own text. But then the stunned silence of the actors pulled him out of his inner world. As if by magic, Aziz had appeared. He was standing stage right, wearing his winter coat, his red scarf around his neck. He had just come in from outside, you could still see a bit of snow melting on his shoulders. Mikaël sensed that the audience around him was confused. Clearly, the spectators were wondering whether or not the young man’s entrance was part of the show. He stood out, dressed as he was, in that desert decor. The sand, in the course of the action, had been completely swept away. Now the entire floor was just a sheet of light, making the actors seem poetic or spectral, depending on their position. After a moment of hesitation, the play resumed, but nothing was the same. A sense of solemnity had descended on the hall, casting its ill-defined spell over both actors and spectators.
Aziz took a step.
“Listen to me, soldier. My name is Sony. I’m seven years old.”
That was how he spoke to the actor who played his parents’ assassin. He took another step.
“Listen to me, soldier. My name is Aziz. I’m nine years old.”
He took another step.
“Listen to me, soldier. My name is Amed, I’m twenty years old. In my head there are other names and other ages, many others. He who is talking to you is never alone. He carries a little country around in his head. You’ve just killed my parents. You sliced my father’s hands off with your big jagged knife. Then you slashed his throat. And shot him down. Your action was very precise. Wonderful. You must have had many occasions to practice this action to lend it such elegance. And you lost none of your deftness and concentration when you shot down my mother with your brand-new, beautiful machine gun. Who gave it to you? Was it a present? How you seem to love it and care for it! But your clothes are dirty and torn. Your hair is grey with dust and your hands red with blood. Your shoulders slump and your gaze is cracked like a pebble. I’m amazed that you can ask me to tell you a story. I’m young, and in your eyes, I’m only a child. Do you need to hear a story told by a child? Maybe you don’t see a child when you look at me? Or perhaps you only see your own? Because you, too, have a son. A son who looks like me. Who looks like us. Who looks like my brother.”
Aziz advanced to the center of the stage. The light from the floor elongated his silhouette. He resembled a flame, ramrod straight, drawn up toward the sky. He spoke to the audience.
“How old are you? What is your name? You have the name of a father and the age of a father. But you have many other names and many other ages. I could talk to you as if you were my brother. Instead of the machine gun your hands are gripping so fiercely, you could be wearing around your waist a heavy belt of explosives. Your hand would be on the detonator and your heart would be on mine. And you would ask me to tell you a story so as not to fall asleep and let your hand, by accident, press the detonator. And I would talk to you until the end of time, that end which is sometimes so near.”
Aziz took off his long scarf, then his coat. Mikaël felt as if he alone was watching Aziz, but he knew that every member of the audience was feeling the same way.
“Listen to me, soldier, even in the painful situation in which I find myself, I can still think. You tell me that you’ll let me live if I give you a valid reason to spare me. If I capture your attention with a story that will free you from your hatred. I don’t believe you. You don’t need me to tell you a story. And you certainly don’t need a reason to not shoot me down like a dog. You want to know what I’m doing now, by talking to you as if I were talking to a friend? I am mourning my father, I am mourning my mother and also all my brothers. There are thousands of them.”
Amed took one more step toward the public.
“No, you don’t need to have a reason or even to have right on your side to do what you think you must do. Don’t look elsewhere for what is already within you. Who am I to think in your place? My clothes are dirty and torn, and my heart is shattered like a pebble. I cry tears that tear at my face. But as you can hear, my voice is calm. Better still, I have a peaceful voice. I am speaking to you with peace in my words. I am speaking to you in a voice that is seven years old, nine years old, twenty years old, a thousand years old. Do you hear me?”
Larry Tremblay is a writer, director, actor, and Kathakali specialist. He is the author of thirty books, including two previous novels, The Bicycle Eater and The Obese Christ; one short story collection, Piercing; and numerous volumes of poetry. A three-time finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and a finalist for numerous other international prizes, he is also the author of more than twenty plays, including The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, The Ventriloquist, and War Cantata, which
have been translated and produced in more than a dozen languages. Tremblay lives in Montreal. Credit: BERNARD PRÉFONTAINE
Sheila Fischman has translated more than 150 Quebecois novels from French to English, including works by Anne Hébert, Gaétan Soucy, Jacques Poulin, André Major, Élise Turcotte, and Michel Tremblay. She has received awards for her translations and for her life’s work, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, the Columbia University Translation Center Award (twice), and, most recently, the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. She lives in Montreal.
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