The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  I nearly shouted, ‘So you’re Katherine, aren’t you? I read about you in that novel!’

  I was bowled over by the succession of little discoveries I’d been making. I was waiting to see how far life would go in its attempts to play tricks on me, in a crazy situation where a novel’s protagonists bear the names of people in real life while real-life people like me take on the names of their favourite characters in novels.

  I was still chuckling at this idea when she said, ‘Pardon me, but you haven’t introduced yourself.’

  Wanting to take the absurdity of the situation to its logical conclusion, I decided to test out a certain name on her to see if it might turn out to be this artist’s real name.

  ‘My name is Khaled Ben Toubal,’ I told her. ‘I work as a photojournalist.’

  The name didn’t appear to mean anything to her. What I failed to realise at the time was that, from then on, I’d have to go on using this name as if it were my own, even when the Fates placed me, at a later time, in the presence of Zayyan himself, since nothing mattered more to me now than to unravel this man’s mystery.

  When I voiced my desire to meet him, Françoise told me he was currently undergoing treatment in a hospital in Paris. However, she added, he was expected to be leaving the hospital in time to attend his solo exhibition, which was scheduled to be held in ten days’ time. Then she continued, ‘The exhibition calendar is set a year in advance, and sometimes two years. So when Zayyan agreed to this date for his art showing, he hadn’t been expecting to get sick. He also didn’t realise it would be so soon after this joint exhibition, which was put together at the last minute to bring in funds to help the families of artists who’d been the victims of terrorism.’

  ‘What does he suffer from?’ I asked, finding myself concerned about his health.

  ‘Cancer,’ she said. ‘Only he doesn’t know. The doctor thought it best to keep it from him for fear of bringing his morale down. There’s no point in him knowing.’

  What Françoise had just told me ruined the excitement I’d felt about the possibility of meeting him. From now on, I’d anticipate the encounter with him as a joy to be followed by tragedy, as if I’d come into his life at the wrong time.

  Thus it was that, in the space of a mere twenty-four hours, I found myself enmeshed in this man’s life – from his wretched beginnings to the infirmities of old age, from his obsession with bridges and his ability to get shoes to talk, to Françoise, the bridge that had linked him to me.

  The next day I invited Françoise to dinner. It made me happy to think of finally having dinner with somebody after having eaten by myself for so long. Having dinner alone is even more difficult for me than going to bed alone. After all, while you’re asleep you forget you’re by yourself, whereas when you have dinner by yourself, you’re constantly aware of the bleakness of the bed that awaits you.

  Françoise was kindhearted, helpful, and cultured within the bounds of her world, which revolved entirely around painting. There was something sensual about her that began gradually announcing itself. My appetite for her also developed gradually, since I was wary of the ennui that follows passions that are quickly ignited, and pleasures that end quickly in regret.

  At the same time, I needed her, not to take me in and support me as women were wont to do for drifters but, rather, to distract me from other things, the things that become more serious depending on what phase of life you’re going through and the vicissitudes of Fate. But most of all, I needed her to bring me together with this man.

  It was a rainy evening. However, I did my best during dinner to resist the mood generated by the time of day, which could easily have kindled our desires.

  In my buccaneer days I’d loved the women I’d met at port calls, the kind of women in whose arms sailors cry before going back out to sea. However, this sailor had stopped crying from the time when, taking it as a new adventure, he’d boarded the ship of fidelity. And I was pleased with my accomplishment. I’d held out in the face of temptations, though not so much out of fidelity to someone as out of the satisfaction of resisting the sirens’ call.

  After dinner, Françoise drove me back to the hotel and bade me farewell at the entrance on the understanding that we would meet the following day.

  When I got back to my room, I found a voice message from my friend Murad telling me he was back in Paris and would be expecting a call from me.

  Little did I know that Fate would use his coincidental arrival to give me the strangest experience of my life. Murad had decided that, beginning the following day, he would relocate his raging pandemonium, his grumbling and complaining, and his countless projects, into my life. When he proposed that I move into the apartment he’d just rented, the only thing that spared me having to accept his offer was that I’d paid for my hotel room in advance.

  Actually, I loved Murad. But, given our radically divergent inclinations, I found it difficult to share a house with him. It was hard for me to live with his edginess and the sudden mood swings I’d seen in him when we were together in Mazafran.

  Even so, I was happy to have him in Paris after his two months in Germany, where he’d been hosted by an organisation that supports freedoms across the world.

  As for what had brought him back to France, that’s another story, the stuff of a good novel or movie. A lot of Western newspapers had even carried his story, since he’d become a symbol of the absurdity of what was happening in Algeria, and an example of the fate that awaits the Algerian intellectual. Certain people in mosques had issued fatwas declaring him fair game to whoever wanted to kill him for being a leftist, while government authorities had sentenced him to prison in absentia on charges of belonging to Islamist organisations!

  Murad was a prominent intellectual in Constantine who was known for his leftist sympathies and his fiery pronouncements against crooks in high places. In addition to running a publishing house, he took part in most of the city’s cultural activities and sometimes wrote for the local press.

  Then one time he redirected his weapon, and began firing the bullets of his wrath at a certain general who was steadily swallowing up everything in his path. Murad couldn’t bear to see people being turned into human shields to protect those who cut off both people’s livelihoods and their heads, and who spend their time pelting each other with the lives of the innocent.

  What Murad hadn’t realised was that his pen might spell his doom, because a mafia of fearsome spiders decorated with medals and stars had wrapped him tight in a web of enough accusations to have him condemned to death.

  And in fact, Murad nearly lost his head in a prearranged death. If he had lost it, it would have served as booty for the winning side of the battle, and as a lesson for other intellectuals. However, not long after surviving the assassination attempt, he fled to Europe.

  Within a week of the first time he was interviewed by a well-known French magazine, his sister was assassinated. Despite the fact that she’d been a teacher and that many teachers had been assassinated, Murad discerned a clear message in her death.

  But rather than being silenced by fear, the lava of his rage went spewing forth onto the pages of newspapers, exposing the practices of ‘Mr…’, the general who, with the multiple stars on his shoulders and sleeves, decided whether Constantine’s sky would be clear or overcast, its weather calm or stormy. ‘Mr . . .’, in fact, was none other than the husband of that writer who, just as her spouse made it his profession to mastermind assassinations, amused herself by killing off the characters in her novels.

  Herein lay the secret behind my affection for Murad and my patience with his shortcomings: the two of us shared a love for the same city, and a hatred for the same man. Unlike me, however, Murad was unaware of the missing link between the city and the man. He knew nothing of the existence of the woman with whom I’d fallen so devastatingly in love, and my passion for whom I guarded through silence and deft concealment.

  Like a photograph that’s taken in the light but is only
born in the darkness, my love for her needed to be concealed. From those tiny dark rooms where film is developed, I’d realised the need for darkness in everything.

  Murad and I had lots of shared memories. However, I hadn’t expected the coincidences of life abroad in Paris to reunite us so that we could practise in concert for the experience of freedom after having lived together through the days of terror in the ‘safe house’ in Mazafran. Following a wave of assassinations that had plucked the lives of seventy journalists, the government had reserved a hotel on the shore of Sidi Faraj to serve as a refuge for the surviving members of our now endangered species.

  There were some who lived there as vagabonds for as long as four years, and some who never left it to go anywhere but the hospital following a twelve-day hunger strike in protest against being asked to vacate the premises. As for me, I spent a year and a half there.

  I didn’t go there so much out of a fear of dying as out of an urge to experience a kind of death-like separation from things after what I had gone through with that woman after Abdelhaq’s assassination. Going there would also give me a justification for another separation from my wife, who I was sure would prefer to stay with my family in the capital.

  I spent a year and a half cut off from the world, sleeping ‘securely’ in a vagrant’s bed. I was taken by private bus to a barracks that had been turned for security reasons into a press headquarters that housed all Algerian publications in both Arabic and French, and I never left it except to go to my new residence.

  It was hard to know what to call the place where I lived. It wasn’t a home. It wasn’t a hostel. It wasn’t a prison cell. It was a newly invented type of lodging called a ‘safe house’ located on a beach that had once been a tourist resort, and which was now shared by the government’s charges and security guards. It was a place where you sought protection from fear by submitting to humiliation. After all, what we wanted wasn’t just a bed to sleep in and a door to protect us from hired gunmen, but our dignity.

  During the summer of Mazafran – the days of fear, injustice and daily terror – I knew she was staying nearby in her summer house on the beach adjacent to where I lived. She was in the other half of the world – the half that was the polar opposite of my misery – on the Nadi al Snobar Beach where there was an exclusive, four-star and five-star ‘preserve’ whose villas were reserved for the country’s leaders.

  This awareness caused me a torment for which I hadn’t been prepared. I’d chosen this place of exile not so much to protect myself from hired hit men as to protect myself from her love, and what should I find but that the first thing I lost was my emotional security!

  So is this what had led me to hate her and rebel against her? To have her so close to me, yet always on the other side of the world, the side diametrically opposed to mine, with nothing to connect me to her, was the ultimate torment. In reality, however, nothing separated her from me – neither rain, nor sun, nor sand, nor sea, nor terror.

  Sometimes I would go out to the balcony and wait for her with the cheerlessness of a lighthouse on a rainy night, hoping the boats of winter longing might bring her my way. I would dream of the lovely gasp of surprise, her tremulous, agonised longing when we would meet, her look of surprise, our first embrace. In the words of ‘Umar Ibn Abi Rabi‘a, I would think, ‘I scan the heavens with my gaze in hopes that, when she looks up, my gaze might meet hers.’ Then I’d go to sleep hoping for a rain that would baptise the two of us into the religion of love while death and its servants slept.

  Murad, who shared a room with me at the safe house before he went from being protected by the government to being its intended prey, found it strange that I would stand for so long on the balcony and would call me inside to have a drink with him and indulge in some merriment.

  I was neither addicted to drink nor given to hilarity, and Murad often became irritated when I declined his invitations. He also tended to misunderstand my excuses. He’d come out to the balcony and pull me inside, saying grumpily, though not without a touch of his customary charm, ‘What’s wrong with you, man? Damn it all. What are you thinking about? Look, I don’t even care what people think of me. They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned!’

  Murad represented the Algerian’s disastrous relationship with the sea. He saw a sea with which he didn’t know how to establish a healthy bond. Between him and the sea there was an apprehension, a suspicion, a historic misunderstanding. So we were living in a beautiful coastal city that had its back turned to the sea, while the sea reciprocated the indifference.

  It was there that I realised why Borges had likened the loneliness of the sea to that of a blind man. Or maybe it was there that I realised that I was the sea!

  When I called Murad the next morning, he scolded me, since he’d had such a hard time locating my phone number in Paris. Then he started teasing me with that endearing Algerian sarcasm of his. He said I’d forgotten him after winning a prize for a picture of a dog’s cadaver instead of photographing his handsome face, which had dizzied so many European women that an ambulance had started following him around to pick up the damsels who’d swooned at the sight of him.

  ‘The ambulance was behind me, brother. I was walking along, and it was so loaded down with girls, it started weaving back and forth across the street. Now tell me, please, what was I supposed to do!’

  Murad robbed death of the chance to claim him by making light of it. He may have owed his survival to his unfailing joviality, while he owed the beauty that radiated from him to the way he made light of beauty. This was how he coped with his complex. Speaking of which, he used to remind me that even my reasonably good looks would never outshine his homeliness. He liked to quote a saying by French singer Serge Gainsbourg to the effect that ugliness is more powerful than beauty, since it lasts longer! And in fact, despite his unattractiveness, Gainsbourg won the affection of dazzling beauties that were out of others’ reach. It’s as though, when ugliness overflows its banks, it becomes – in its extraordinary superfluity – a form of enticing beauty.

  There was a logic to it that defied my understanding. However, it might be explained by Proust’s comment to the effect that beautiful women should be left to men that lack imagination. In keeping with Proust’s counsel, Murad always banked on women’s imagination, overcoming the timidity of breathless bachelorettes and sober-minded women alike with his unexpected, scandalous quips.

  Some weeks later, I arranged for him to come to the gallery with me. As we were making the rounds of the paintings, most of which depicted bridges and old, partly open doors, we were joined by Françoise, to whom I’d already introduced him. She asked him cordially what he thought of the exhibition. After a serious exchange in which he displayed the breadth of his artistic knowledge, he added suddenly, ‘As an Algerian I can relate to Zayyan’s pain, and I know the tragedy his paintings convey. But as an ordinary recipient, I see these bridges and half-open doors as a feminine symbol. So if I could choose a title for this exhibition, it would be “Women”.’

  Then, to our wonderment, he proceeded to expound his idea. He said, ‘The door ajar is the membrane behind which femininity crouches, bound by the chains of expectation. The door’s open aspect is the eternal invitation to enter. As for its closed aspect, it represents seduction’s blatant game of “hard to get”. This is why I’ve never known a woman whose door was impossible to open. It’s just a matter of time, so you’ve got to be patient.’

  A sudden silence descended on Françoise and me, and I sensed an awkwardness on her part as a woman, whose doors seemed to have begun opening for this man in whom she’d showed no interest at first.

  I didn’t know where Murad had gotten this Freudian analysis, although he had a tendency to bring sex into everything. One time, during an impassioned defence of democracy, he’d tried to convince us that, like other Arabs, Algerians had failed to achieve any victories. All they’d done, he claimed, was come up with some grammatically masculine catch words. They’d lost
millions of lives trying to prove the virility of ‘independence’ whilst belittling grammatically feminine terms the way they belittled their women. Consequently, Murad had developed an obsession with the idea that the Arabic words for ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and the like should be made grammatically masculine, since if they were, male chauvinist Arabs might actually translate them into reality!

  When I objected to his idea, arguing that Zayyan belonged to a generation that didn’t see things this way, he said, ‘Creativity is born of feelings and unconscious motives. So no matter how hard you try, you’ll never know what an artist or writer meant by a particular painting, poem or whatever else.’

  I countered, ‘If you know something about an artist’s life, you’ll realise what he wanted to communicate to you. His life is the key to his works.’

  As the debate heated up, he said mockingly, ‘For God’s sake, how do you expect to be able to wage war on the people who deprive you of freedom of speech when you refuse to let me disagree with you over how to interpret a painting? After all, whatever is “true” in the world of art, its opposite is also “true”.’

  More important than whether I was convinced of Murad’s opinion was my conviction of the need to get him away from Françoise, since I was afraid he might ruin the plan I’d been laying over the course of the previous month. This need became all the more urgent when, as we sat together in a café one day, he launched into a semi-jocular, semi-serious discourse on what he considered to be points of similarity between types of doors and types of women. He saw European women, for example, as being similar to the glass doors in modern-day shops that open the moment you approach them, whereas Arab women, by contrast, brandish their staid propriety in your face like thick wooden doors to give you the illusion that they’re impregnable fortresses. There are women who, lest you think them ‘easy’, take things slowly, like the rotating glass doors in hotels that take you around in a circle in order for you to cross a threshold that you could have crossed in a single step. Others hide behind a modern armoured door with all sorts of locks and latches, but they leave you the key under the doormat, hoping you’ll think it was unintentional.