The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  What had turned this woman into a novelist who, in a book, went on dancing with the characters she’d killed off? Was it a fire that, one loss after another, ignited her pen with flames that refused to be extinguished? Or was it her desire to provoke the wind by setting fire to the gangster-plundered warehouses of history?

  As a matter of fact, I loved the courage she displayed when she battled history’s tyrants and highway robbers. I loved her willingness to risk smuggling such a huge quantity of gunpowder disguised as a book. But by the same token, I couldn’t understand her cowardice in real life when it came to confronting her husband.

  I didn’t know how to reconcile the brilliance she exhibited in novels with the stupidity she revealed in the world beyond literature. She was so stupid, in fact, that despite her apparent expertise in psychology, she couldn’t tell the difference between someone who was willing to die for her and someone who was willing to give his life in order to kill her. It’s the blindness of the creative genius who lives in a state of endless childhood.

  Perhaps the explanation lay in the fact that she was nothing but a little girl amusing herself with a book, who neither saw herself as a literary figure nor took writing seriously. The only thing that mattered to her was fire.

  So one day I said to her, ‘I’m not going to take the matches away from you. Go on playing with fire for the sake of the infernos to come.’

  This was because, for her, a novel was simply a way to communicate dangerous ideas under innocent-sounding appellations.

  She enjoyed outsmarting Arab customs officials and finding ways around checkpoints. But what was she hiding in those heavy bags and thick books of hers?

  Her luggage was stylish-looking, always black, with lots of secret compartments. As such, it was reminiscent of a novel, which, like the handbag of a woman who wants to convince you she isn’t hiding anything, is arranged with the intent to mislead. Even so, like the luggage of miserable exiles, it was easy to open.

  Is every writer away from home bound to be betrayed by a faulty lock on her travel-weary suitcase, never knowing when, or at which station of life, its contents will come spilling out in front of strangers, who will rush to help her gather up her things just so that they can spy on her more easily? Of course, when they do, they’ll often find their own things hidden among hers.

  The novelist is a thief par excellence, albeit a respectable thief, as no one could ever prove that she’d stolen the details of their lives or their secret dreams. This is why people are so curious about her writings, just as we are about strangers’ luggage as it passes by us on the airport conveyor belt.

  I remember the first time this woman’s suitcase fell open in my presence. I was sick in the hospital when it occurred to Abdelhaq, my coworker at the newspaper, to give me a book she’d written.

  I was healing from a couple of bullet wounds I’d received in my left arm while trying to photograph demonstrators during the disturbances of October 1988. They were the first popular demonstrations the country had witnessed since Algeria’s independence in 1962. It was the first time people’s anger had come spilling onto the streets, and when it did it brought with it gunfire, destruction and chaos.

  At the time I didn’t know whether the two shots, which had been fired at me from the top of a government building, had been intentional or not. Did the army think I was holding a weapon and aiming at them? Or did they know that all I had in my hands was my camera? If the latter, then did they shoot me with the intent of assassinating a potential witness for the prosecution?

  I’ll never know the answer to these questions. Nor will I ever know whether it was by coincidence or by design that Abdelhaq brought me that book. Was the book Fate’s gift, or its other bullet? Was it another event, or another accident, in my life? Maybe it was both.

  When I first read the book, I didn’t like it. I wasn’t impressed by it. Rather, I was terrified by it. It’s been said that, ‘Beauty is nothing but the beginning of an almost unbearable terror.’ I was terrified by staggering, unexpected visions, by a deafening collision with the Other.

  Anything of beauty is, ultimately, a catastrophe. So how could I not have feared a state of beauty that I would have needed a lifetime of ugliness to achieve?

  As I opened the book, I was simultaneously entering the orbits of love and fear. From the very first page, this woman’s things came spilling out onto my sickbed.

  She was the type of woman who would arrange her closets in your presence, empty her suitcase and hang up her clothes in front of you, garment by garment, while listening to the music of Mikis Theodorakis, or humming songs by Demis Roussos.

  How can you resist the temptation to spy on a woman who, so busy is she putting her memory in order, seems not to be aware that you’re in the same room with her?

  When you cough to alert her to your presence, she invites you to sit down on the corner of her bed. Then she starts telling you secrets that are, in reality, your own secrets, and before you know it, you discover that the things she’s been taking out of her bag are your clothes, your pyjamas, your shaving equipment, your cologne, your socks, and even the two bullets that went through your arm.

  At that point, you close the book for fear of meeting the fate of a certain protagonist whom you’ve come to resemble even in his physical handicap, and your first concern becomes: how to get to know a woman with whom you’ve experienced the greatest inward adventure of your life. Like a submarine volcano, everything has happened below the surface, and all you want is to see her so that you can ask her how she managed to fill her suitcase with you.

  There are books you should read with caution. Once inside them, you might find her revolver hidden among her intimate apparel and her short, oblique statements.

  It’s as though she’d been writing in order to shoot someone dead, that ‘someone’ being known to her alone. However, when she fired, she missed her intended victim and hit you instead. She had the rare ability to plan a crime of ink between one sentence and the next, and to bury a reader who, thanks to his curiosity, had ended up at someone else’s funeral.

  I saw her shrouding a loved one’s corpse in a novel with the care and attention of a mother swaddling an infant after its first bath.

  When a barren woman says, ‘In a writer’s life, books reproduce,’ she must mean to say that ‘corpses reproduce’. I wanted her to conceive by me. I wanted to take up residence deep inside her. I feared that, otherwise, I might end up a dead body in a book.

  With every experience of ecstasy, I would be drenched with language the way one might be drenched with sweat, shouting, ‘Conceive! It’s time to create new life!’

  My lips would lick away the tears of barrenness that were streaming down her cheeks as if in apology.

  These were feelings I’d never experienced with my wife, whom I’d forced to take birth control pills for years. I was obsessed with the fear that I might be murdered and that my child would have to endure the same tragedy I had. So, following Abdelhaq’s assassination, I would wake up in terror, thinking I had heard a baby crying.

  With Hayat, though, I discovered that fatherhood is an act of love, and I’d never dreamed of becoming a father with anyone else. I’d always had a kind of ‘false pregnancy’ with her.

  But to fail to reproduce through a ‘false pregnancy’ is to miscarry. In fact, a miscarriage is simply the outcome of a conception that occurred outside the womb of logic, and novels only come into existence because we need a cemetery in which to lay our dreams that have been buried alive.

  If I sit down to write today, it’s because she’s died.

  After killing her, I’ll go back and record the details of the crime in a book.

  Like a photographer who hesitates over which angle to take a picture from, I don’t know where to start writing this story, whose pictures I’ve taken at such close range.

  By the logic of the image itself, which the camera captures upside down, and which only ‘rights itself’ after the film h
as been developed, I have to accept the idea that everything is born upside down, and that the people we see upside down really are upside down, because we’ve met them before life has had a chance to turn them right side up in its ‘dark room’.

  They’re nothing but rolls of film that have been ruined by exposure to the tragedy of light, and there’s no point in trying to keep them, since they were born dead.

  On the other hand, the only truly dead people are those we bury in the cemetery of memory. By forgetting, we can put to death whichever of the living we choose, then wake up some morning and decide they no longer exist. We can contrive a death for them in a book. We can concoct some sudden departure from life with the stroke of a pen as unexpected as a car accident, as tragic as a drowning. After this it doesn’t matter to us whether they go on living. It isn’t that we want them to die. Rather, what we want is the corpse of their memory, so that we can weep over it the way we weep over the dead. We need to get rid of their things, their gifts to us, their letters, and our memory’s whole entanglement with them. We need to mourn for a while, and then forget.

  In order to recover from being in love, what you need are love’s remains, not a statue of the beloved that you go on polishing after you’ve parted, insisting on achieving the same lustre that stole your heart away once upon a time. In order to bury the person that was closest to you, you need a grave, some marble, and a lot of courage.

  You’re looking at a dead love’s rotting corpse. Don’t keep it in memory’s cold storage. Instead, write. That’s what novels are for.

  A number of authors were asked once why they write. One of them quipped, ‘To make conversation with the living dead.’ Another said, ‘To make fun of cemeteries.’ And a third said, ‘To make a date.’

  Where else but in a book could you schedule a date for a woman whose death you had previously staged, intent on inserting her corpse into the procession of the living even though you know they’ll make a miserable match?

  Doesn’t this irony make mockery of graves which, beneath their marble headstones, hold the living, leaving the dead free to roam the streets of our lives?

  I’d read somewhere that when the Gauls, France’s original inhabitants, wanted to commemorate their dead, they would throw letters to them into a fire. The funeral ceremony would continue for several days, during which time mourners would cast the deceased’s belongings, along with messages conveying their greetings, longings and grief, into the flames.

  Fire alone serves as a trustworthy postman. Fire alone can rescue the conflagration. Do we really need all these ashes, ashes that were once fire, to make a good book? As you write, your conflagrations die out. So gather up their ashes, one page at a time, and send them to your dead by registered mail, since there’s no surer way than a book to communicate with those you’ve lost.

  Learn to spend years producing a handful of word-ashes for the pleasure of throwing a book into the sea, the way you strew roses over the corpses of those who have drowned. Take the ashes of those you loved and scatter them over the sea, and do it in celebration. Don’t worry about the fact that the sea can’t be trusted with a letter any more than a reader can be trusted with a book.

  Graham Greene once likened the act of writing a novel to putting a letter in a bottle and casting it into the sea, after which it might fall into the hands of friends or unsuspecting enemies. In so saying, Greene forgot to add that, in all likelihood, our bottle will bump up against the dead bodies of ex-lovers lying at the bottom of the ocean of oblivion, bound to the rock of their cruelty and selfishness, and that we have to busy our hands writing a novel to keep ourselves from reaching out to save them, since if we did save them they might brag about having the remains of a love of theirs embalmed in a book.

  A love that we write about is a love that doesn’t exist any more, while a book that we publish thousands of copies of is nothing but the ashes of a deceased passion that we scatter among bookshops.

  To the people we love, we give a manuscript, not a book. We give them a fire, not ashes. We give them what will reserve them a place in our hearts that no one else could even approach.

  After corresponding for eighteen years with an aristocratic woman by the name of Lady Eveline Hanska, Balzac married her, only to die six months later. When, after their wedding, they were travelling from Russia back to Paris over snow-covered terrain in a horse-drawn wagon, Balzac said to her, ‘In every city we stop in, I’ll buy you jewellery or a dress. And when I can’t do that any more, I’ll tell you a story that I don’t intend to publish.’

  Because he’d spent all his money simply to reach her, and because it was a long way home, Balzac is sure to have told Lady Eveline many a tale! So his best stories are most likely the ones no one has ever read and only one has heard.

  Maybe this is why I’m writing this book for the one person who’s no longer able to read it, a person of whom the only part left is a watch for which I am the wrist, and a story for which I am the pen.

  It’s a watch I never noticed when it belonged to him and which, now that it’s mine, seems to be the only thing I do notice. It was from him that I learned that the scattered remains of things cause more pain than the lifeless bodies of the people they belonged to.

  He was someone who had mastered the art of loving, although he should have mastered the art of dying. He once said, ‘I don’t want to make peace with death on a bed. I’ve always gone to bed to do battle with love, as a way of glorifying life.’ Nevertheless, it was on a bed that he died, leaving to me, as to others, a love incomplete, and objects I don’t know what to do with.

  His watch lies before me on the table where I write. For days now I’ve been busy bartering my life for it. I’m giving him a hypothetical life, enough additional time to write a book. Lost in the space where our destinies intersect, I have nothing but the compass of his voice to guide me, to help me understand by what sort of coincidence love led us both to the same woman.

  I listen tirelessly to our conversations, now preserved for prosperity on tape. I listen to the silent derision between statements, to the ‘blank space’ that existed between us even when we resorted to talking. O God of the cosmos, how could You have taken him and left his voice? It’s as though some part of him hasn’t died. That laugh of his!

  How do you ward off the harm Fate might do you when two tragedies coincide? Can you say you’ve fully recovered from a love lost without either laughing or crying?

  Speaking of which, crying isn’t just a woman’s thing. Men need to reclaim their own right to cry. Either that, or sorrow needs to reclaim its right to make fun.

  You’ve got to make your choice: Either you weep the bitter tears of manhood, or, in your capacity as writer, you compose a text that’s irreverent and sarcastic. Like love, death is too absurd to be taken seriously. It’s repeated itself so often that there are times when you lose track of your tragedies, not knowing which came before the other. So you start relying on death’s calendar as a guide to the twists and turns in your life, with the meaning of a given event depending on the order of your friends’ deaths. What you have to do now is rein in your tendency to be gloomy, just as you’ve managed, as you’ve grown older, to rein in your tendency to lose your temper. You’ve got to develop the habit of laughing and scoffing rather than, as you have in the past, crying over a woman, a cause, or a friend’s betrayal.

  Once again death hovers about you, more determined than ever to do you in. It’s mean-spirited, like a mine that doesn’t explode under you but rather right next to you. It misses you, only to strike you in a place you can’t see, and at a time you aren’t expecting it. It’s playing the Nero game with you – Nero used to charge at one of his friends with a dagger and, after just missing him, snicker and say he’d just been teasing.

  Laugh, man! As long as death misses you every time only to strike someone else, it’s just joking around with you!

  Chapter Two

  In March 1942, Jean Genet, at the time a penniless v
agabond and not yet the famed man of letters he would later become, was imprisoned for stealing a rare copy of one of Paul Verlaine’s poetry collections. When, during his interrogation, he was asked, ‘Do you know the price of the book you stole?’ he replied, ‘No, but I do know its worth.’

  When I was informed that I’d won the prize for ‘Best Press Photograph of the Year’ in France’s Visa Pour l’Image competition, I remembered this incident from Genet’s life, perhaps because I’d stolen the picture out of death’s arms. I didn’t know at the time what a price it would fetch on the illustrated tragedies market, but I did know how much it was worth. I know how costly a photograph can be, since, ten years ago, a photo cost me the use of my left arm.

  In ‘war photographs’-turned-‘photograph wars’, there are some who get rich off a picture, and others who pay with their lives for one.

  Only the photograph of a ruler, who never tires of seeing his own picture, will give you peace of mind, that is, if you have the honour of chasing him around every day to catch shots of him in his comings and goings. Nevertheless, you’re implicated in a tragedy, and in a history known for calling upon photographers, as happened in Yemen in the 1950s, to capture insurgents’ executions on film, and to immortalise the sight of swords sending heads flying in public squares. In those days, cutting off someone’s head was the most important accomplishment one could achieve, and the theme with which the country’s chief and sole photographer was expected to commence his career.

  Then one day, the picture descends on you like a bolt of lightning, and you become a photographer in a time of meaningless death.

  There’s a risk involved in taking photos of ugly death. It’s as though you risk your own inner destruction, and once that occurs, nothing can rebuild your personal ruins, not even the thrill of winning a prize.

  Renowned war photographers who have preceded you to this blood-spattered glory assure you that you won’t emerge unscathed from this profession. That much you know already. However, you make still another discovery, namely, that when dealing with severed heads, or focusing your lens whilst standing in a pool of blood, you can’t remain neutral.