The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  ‘It’s the same with objects we’ve lost, homelands we’ve left, and people who’ve been taken away from us. Their absence doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared. They move in the nerves at the tips of our amputated limbs. They live in us: like a homeland, like a woman, like a departed friend. Only we see them, and as we go about our lives in a foreign land they inhabit us, though without actually sharing our lives. So the chill in our limbs goes deeper, and because of their presence inside us we’re compromised by the cold!’

  His words sent a chill through my body. Yet he’d uttered them calmly, like someone who casually shoots himself, only to wound the person across from him!

  He’d been summing up his life for me through the autobiography of an arm that, in its orphanhood, had become a ‘memory in the flesh’. Yes, even a person’s limbs can be orphaned. But how could he have thought that I wouldn’t understand?

  I felt like crying, or like kissing the stub of his missing arm, where our shared losses had begun.

  Oh, my God. It really was Khaled!

  I fell in love with that man. I fell in love with his language, with the proud way he had of rising above his pain, with the music he chose to express that pain, and with the gracefulness that effortlessly created its own beauty with every passing moment until it radiated from within him. Now I knew why Hayat had loved him so much. He was made to be a character in a novel.

  He was always attuned to the ring of his own words, and to the value of the silences that interspersed them. When you asked him a question, he would take it from you and rephrase it as another question that usually started with, ‘Do you mean…?’

  In those Socratic reformulations lay his answers to your questions. He would correct you, but always in pencil, and in a softer tone than your own. He had no red pen. After all, he wasn’t a teacher. He was just a man, like Borges, who was making fun, who possessed a droll sense of humour that made spending time with him a pleasure I’d never experienced before.

  ‘You know?’ he said, as he leafed through my articles, ‘I envy people who write. Writing is like rowing with one hand. Yet even though I’m missing a hand, I can’t seem to do it. I’ve lost the urge to sail. Maybe it’s because, in order to sail, you have to have a port to sail to. But I’ve got no direction. I haven’t even painted for the past couple of years.’

  This confession gave me a sense of his emotional state. I remembered Picasso saying something to the effect that to go back to painting is to go back to loving. Every phase of his career as a painter was associated with the entrance of a new woman into his life. But maybe writing is just the opposite. Over the course of the two years I spent with Hayat, whenever I asked her why she wasn’t writing she would say, ‘Writing comes with an estrangement from love. It’s a kind of remedy that helps you heal from it. I’ll start writing again when we separate.’

  ‘It’s really unfortunate that you haven’t painted for all this time,’ I said.

  ‘Like writing, painting is weak people’s way of warding off impending harm. I don’t need it any more, since my losses have made me stronger. The strongest people are those who don’t have anything to lose. So don’t be fooled by my appearance. I’m a happy man. Never in my life have I been so lighthearted, so able to thumb my nose at things I used to think were important.

  ‘In the evening of your life, you have to take off life’s burdens the way you take off the suit you’ve been wearing all day long, or the prosthesis you’ve been carrying around. You’ve got to hang your fear on a peg and stop dreaming. All the people I’ve ever loved died as punishment for their dreams!’

  Suddenly I realised that the secret behind his special allure lay in the fact that he’d become free. He no longer had anything to lose or worry about.

  Unlike the way he’d lived before, he realised his beauty by acting on his own inclinations rather than on what other people might say. He was bankrupt and travelling light, and you couldn’t help but envy him. His lightness was something he’d acquired when he finally saw through the hypocrisy people had burdened themselves with, and he could now say things he hadn’t dared say before.

  He could say what he really thought of the ungifted artist whose work he’d always praised so disingenuously, the neighbour he used to humour by wearing a beard for fear of his disapproval, the friend whose embezzlements he’d been too timid to expose, and the hypocritical enemy in whose presence he’d played dumb.

  I asked him, ‘Aren’t you afraid of ending up without any friends?’

  He chuckled. ‘I didn’t have any friends to lose. My friends all fell off the train some time ago. Leaving your homeland is like turning your back on a tree that had been a friend, and on a friend that had been an enemy. Success, like failure, serves as a good test of those around you: of the person who tries to get close to you in order to steal the limelight, of the one who turns against you because your light has exposed his faults, and of the one who, when he fails, devotes his life to proving the illegitimacy of your success.

  ‘People always envy you for something that isn’t worth being envied for, since they get their kicks out of seeing you lose what you have. They even envy you for being a stranger in a strange land, as though homelessness were a benefit that you should have to pay for, if not in cash, then by enduring other people’s hatred and resentment. I’m a man who likes to pay in order to lose a friend. I’m keen to test people and find out how much I’m worth on their emotional slave trade market. One person’s friendship might seem to be valuable until you find out that he’d be willing to ditch you in return for 500 francs – the fee he’ll earn for writing an insulting article about you. Somebody else might borrow money from you not because he needs it, but because he gets a kick out of depriving you of it. And somebody else might even become your enemy because of all the good you’ve done for him. To some people’s way of thinking, there are services so great that the only way to respond to them is by being an ingrate! So you’ve got to excuse people who shut you out for no good reason. After all, what are you going to do to change human nature?’

  ‘And how do you live without friends?’

  ‘I have no need of them. What I’m looking for now are powerful enemies so that I can get that much stronger. The frogs that croak under your window, challenging you to a duel in a bog, are too small to be proper enemies. They just cause static, roil the waters, and keep you from working. It’s a despicable time we’re living in. Enemies have even shrunk in stature, which is a tragedy in itself for a man like me, who spent three years in the mountains, fighting against the armies of France. How do you expect me to duel enemies who are such runts? My sword wouldn’t lower itself to fight them!’

  ‘So you’re living alone?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m always there for anybody who needs me. I may have no friends, but I’m a friend to all. The last friend I lost was a Palestinian poet who died some years back in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Once he was gone, I never found anybody who could occupy the lovely space he used to fill inside me. Some part of me died with him. I’ve never found anybody else who matched my temperament and who could identify with my pain.’

  He fell silent for a bit before adding, ‘You know? This is the first time I’ve talked to anybody this way. But you remind me of him. He was around your age, and handsome, like you. He wasn’t a well-known poet, but he had an amazing ability to choose just the right words. I still have some of his poems, and when I get out of the hospital, I’ll show them to you.’

  Then suddenly, as if in apology, he said, ‘Maybe I’ve talked too much. Most of the time I’m pretty tight-lipped! Somebody once described artists as “the children of silence.”’

  ‘Not to worry,’ I said teasingly. ‘Photographers are the children of patience!’

  ‘I like that!’ he said, his face lighting up with a smile. ‘My God, you even talk like him!’

  I nearly replied, ‘Of course I do. After all, all that woman’s men are alike.�
� But I held my tongue.

  I stood up to bid him farewell. He locked me in a warm embrace and asked me, ‘When will you be publishing this interview?’

  ‘It isn’t ready to be published yet, since it isn’t finished,’ I replied fondly. ‘If you’re open to it, we’ll have a number of meetings. I want to do a thorough job, and write something that touches on all aspects of your personality.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to write a book about me!’ he said jokingly. ‘I’ve never met a writer but that I’ve tried to persuade him to gather up the pieces of my memory into a book!’

  ‘No,’ I replied, sensing that he was serious. ‘I’m not a writer, actually. When you write, you’re just enshrouding Time in white paper. I’m a photographer. My profession is to preserve Time’s corpse, to fix a moment in place the way you mount a butterfly onto a Styrofoam slab.’

  As he escorted me to the door, he commented, ‘In either case, the only thing you’re enshrouding is yourself.’

  Then, as if as an afterthought, he said, ‘Next time you come, don’t forget to bring that prize-winning photograph of yours. Françoise tells me you’re a renowned photographer!’

  As though I’d begun to resemble him, my only response to his description of me as ‘renowned’ was to give him a half-sardonic smile.

  Leaving him to blank space, I departed the hospital bursting with colour.

  When Françoise got home, she found me listening to the recording of our conversation. She asked me if I was transcribing the tape in preparation to write the article. I told her I was filling myself with its contents. In reality, I had no intention of writing an article. Nor had I ever imagined that, like those who had known this man before me, I would aspire to gather up the tattered remains of his memory into a book.

  All at once, life had decided to shower me with such an overwhelming abundance of coincidences that I felt terrified – terrified of a happiness so completely unexpected. No sooner had I taken in the reality of my encounter with Zayyan than I found myself, the very next day, getting to know Nasser.

  Were these chance encounters, along with the events that followed them, really nothing but happenstance? Someone once defined happenstance as ‘the signature God affixes to His will’. And God’s will is what we refer to as ‘fate’.

  The intersection of our respective fates at this particular point in time and space was mind-boggling in its synchrony. However, I’ll never know whether it was a gift from Life, or just one of its pranks. All I know is that after I left Algeria I ceased to be the journalist or photographer I’d once been. Instead I’d become a character in a novel, or a movie, who lives in constant expectation of the unexpected, and now I was prepared for something: for some fortuitous joy, or some impending tragedy.

  Here we were, those whom Constantine had scattered, coming together in capitals of sorrow, in the suburbs of a fear-ridden Paris.

  Even before we met, I’d felt sad for Nasser. I felt sad for someone with a name too illustrious to reside as a mere guest in the suburbs of history. I felt sad for him because his name was all his father had bequeathed to him. I felt sad because some people had turned the homeland into a piece of real estate they could pass down to their children, managing it as though it were a family farm that raises murderers instead of cattle while the country’s heroes languished homeless in exile.

  Nasser was lovely, just as I’d imagined him to be, and so was my encounter with him. As he embraced me, I embraced both history and love together. He was half Si Taher, and half Hayat.

  Murad seemed to be the happiest of us all. He loved bringing old friends together, and he was constantly in search of an occasion to celebrate life.

  Simple though it was, his apartment exuded the warmth of someone who had compensated for some loss through beautiful furniture, and who used Constantinian music to drown out an incessant inner lament.

  ‘When did you manage to do all this?’ I asked, amazed.

  ‘While you were busy doing art exhibits!’

  I got his drift.

  ‘And the Constantinian songs – where did you get them?’

  ‘I bought them here. They’ve got all the songs you could want on the market, from Cheikh Raymond and Simone Tamar, to Fergani. Jews from Constantine produce most of these tapes in France.’

  I asked Nasser how he was, and whether his trip from Germany to Paris had been stressful in any way.

  ‘The questions were longer than the distance from there to here!’ he quipped. Then he added, ‘I mean, the polite insults you receive at airports in the form of questions.’

  ‘Come on, brother, what are you going to do about it? If a guy’s innocent, it’ll be obvious. You can tell a sheep by its face.’

  ‘So what could they tell by my face?’ Nasser demanded. ‘That I was a wolf?’

  ‘Well, even if you aren’t a wolf, there are still plenty of wolves around these days, and I don’t see why you should be angry. Here, at least, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of as long as you’re innocent and you pose no danger to others. In our country, on the other hand, you can’t guarantee your well-being even if you’re innocent!’

  ‘All we’re doing is comparing one death with another, one humiliation with another,’ Nasser grumbled. ‘In Algeria they come looking for you to take you out, so your torment only lasts as long as it takes for a bullet to go through you. But in Europe, on the pretext of rescuing you from murderers, they “murder” you with constant exposure and vulnerability. Your agony is prolonged by the fact that exposure and vulnerability don’t kill you. You feel as though you’ll never be one of the people you live among. You’re naked, exposed and suspect because of your name, your religion, the way you look. Even though you’re in a free country, you lack all privacy. You love, you work, you travel, and you spend your money under the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras, within earshot of bugging devices, and with your life story stored in intelligence files.’

  ‘The same thing happens to you in your own country,’ Murad shot back.

  Then, as if to put a stop to the debate, he got up and asked us, ‘What would you all like to eat?’

  I was happy to hear the question, not because I was hungry, but simply because I was anxious to see an end to a discussion that didn’t serve as an auspicious beginning to a social gathering. I laughed to myself at the thought of all the daily debates and squabbles that awaited poor Nasser, knowing that the biggest sacrifice Murad was likely to make in honour of his guest would be to abstain from alcohol when he was around.

  Before we’d had a chance to answer his question, he headed for the kitchen, and before long he’d returned with a plate of bread, and another plate of cheese and pickles.

  As he set them on the table, he said, ‘Get your appetites going before supper!’

  I suggested that we order pizza so that we wouldn’t turn into guinea pigs in Murad’s kitchen-lab.

  Indulging himself in the hope of a feast, Nasser said, ‘When Ma comes, she’ll make us some Constantinian dishes that will get the taste of German hamburger out of my mouth. God, I miss Algerian food!’

  ‘Get off the subject of Algerian cooking, man, or you really will turn into a terrorist!’ joked Murad. Then he added, ‘Did you know that a book that came out recently in the United States shows a connection between criminal tendencies and certain types of food? If government officials in our country read it, they’ll conclude that it’s their duty to intervene from now on in what Algerians eat, since terrorism has its roots in Algerian cuisine.’

  Given the seriousness of his tone, I asked, ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Of course. Have you ever seen a people as obsessed as Algerians are with eating roast sheep’s heads? Even here in France, if you ask an Algerian what food he likes, he’ll ask you to get him some bouzellouf. You see Algerians lined up outside halal butcher shops for a couple of roast sheep’s heads to take home. And if this delicacy isn’t available, they’ll settle for green beans with sheep’s trotters. I s
wear to God, if Gandhi himself had followed a modern Algerian diet for a month or so, with bouzellouf for lunch and sheep’s trotters for dinner, he would have sold his staff and his goats and bought himself a Kalashnikov!’

  Murad gave us a lot of good laughs that evening. He’s the perfect representative of a people who’ve been delivered from death by their sense of irony.

  Carrying on with his playful argument, I said, ‘Maybe it’s because we eat so many sheep’s trotters that all we think about is running away from Algeria!’

  He interrupted me with an Algerian proverb: ‘And since we eat so much bouzellouf, we’ve become like a roast sheep’s head: There’s nothing left of us but the tongue!’

  When our order arrived, Nasser said lightheartedly to Murad, ‘I hope I don’t spend my entire stay with you devouring pizza on the pretext that there’s a causal connection between Algerian food and criminal tendencies! After all, pizza was born in the land of the mafia. So, considering its Italian line of descent, it isn’t all that innocent, either!’

  Even the rare merriment of our gathering couldn’t make me forget the topic that was my sole concern. Hoping to get Nasser to share more of his news, I said, ‘Your mother should be arriving any day now. It must be hard for somebody who’s been raised on home-cooked feasts to settle for a slice of pizza. At the same time, I hate to think of how hard the trip will be on the poor woman at her age.’

  Then I continued, ‘Will she be staying here with you?’

  ‘No, she’ll stay at the hotel with my sister. But she’s sure to visit me here. I don’t know yet exactly how things will go.’

  He’d given me the one piece of information I’d been looking for. The rest was mere detail.

  So, she would be coming! After all, how could these earthshakingly lavish coincidences have been complete without her coming, and without this sort of a thunderbolt?

  I sank into a reverie. My thoughts wandered far afield as I thought about some coincidence that might bring us together or, at least, let her know I was here. How could I find out which hotel she’d be staying at, and whether her husband was coming with her?