I was still trying to think of a way to draw Nasser into a conversation about his brother-in-law in the hope that he might reveal more of her news when, unable to resist the temptation to badmouth the man, Murad said to Nasser, ‘So, is that good-for-nothing coming with her?’
‘Who are you talking about?’ I asked stupidly.
‘His brother-in-law. No number of stars can lift a swine out of the mud!’
‘I don’t think he’s coming,’ Nasser replied. ‘He’s afraid that if he visits France, some of his victims’ relatives will demand that the French authorities prevent him from going back to Algeria and try him as a war criminal for the torture he’s overseen, and the assassinations that have been carried out on his orders. His affairs abroad are all managed by his sons.’
Nervously lighting a cigarette, Murad grumbled, ‘War’s a good investment. How could they get rich if they didn’t have a steady supply of corpses coming in? This way, they can keep others so busy burying their dead that they’ve got no time to notice what people in high places are doing. Even when the death machine isn’t operating on their orders, it’s still operating to their benefit. So tell me, for God’s sake: who’s the bigger terrorist, and who does more to destroy our country – these guys, or the murderers roaming the streets?’
I was afraid the atmosphere of our get-together might be spoiled by differences of perspective which, I suspected, weren’t new to either of the two men, and for which the time wasn’t right. Be that as it may, it gave me a welcome opportunity to ask Nasser the question that had preoccupied me for so long.
‘Pardon me,’ I broke in, ‘but I can’t understand how your sister’s been able to live with this man, and why she’s never asked for a divorce.’
After a pause, Nasser retorted, ‘Because people like him aren’t divorced – they’re murdered.’
A chill went through me. For a few moments, my mind began reviewing all possible scenarios of premeditated death. My God – could something like that actually happen?
My macabre thoughts reminded me in the end that I needed to get back to Paris. I looked at the clock, and to my surprise it was already a quarter to twelve. I got up, in a hurry to be on my way. I feared the suburb trains and the surprises they might bring by night. Murad advised me to stay overnight, enticing me with a soiree that might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I hesitated to accept his offer. I thought about Françoise. I hadn’t told her I wouldn’t be coming home that night. Then I thought about how I hadn’t brought my toiletries with me, and how there might not be enough room for us all.
However, Murad settled the matter, saying, ‘We’ve got everything you’ll need right here, sir!’
I knew the chance to spend the night with Nasser might also be once in a lifetime, and I hadn’t forgotten for a moment that he was the brother of the woman I loved.
I asked Murad if I could use his telephone without telling him I’d be calling Françoise. Later, however, he sprang a crafty question on me: ‘So, did you tell her you wouldn’t be back tonight?’
‘Who do you mean?’ I asked, pretending not to know what he was getting at.
‘That lioness of yours!’
I don’t know what prompted him to refer to Françoise as a lioness. Maybe it was her red hair, or maybe some exhilarating ferocity he saw in her.
Changing the subject with a quip, I said, ‘Listen, brother, I’m running away from the jungles of the homeland. So please, keep the lions away from me!’
‘What are you so afraid of? We’ll show them who’s boss!’
I don’t know who he was intending to show ‘who’s boss’: the terrorists? the army? Françoise?
‘You can show whoever you want “who’s boss”,’ I jibed, wanting to settle the dispute. ‘I, for one, am a scaredy-cat!’
Nasser came in wearing a house dishdasha after praying the final evening prayer. He looked older than his age. He radiated a purity that I loved, and that had nothing to do with his white garment.
He was still untainted. Life abroad had done nothing to corrupt or pollute him, nor had he been marred the way some expatriates are. However, he was guilt-ridden over being somewhere other than Algeria. He seemed scattered by the freedom he now enjoyed. Yet he hadn’t lost his self-composure, and he wasn’t prone to making fiery speeches. He defended his convictions in a low voice, and sometimes without a word.
‘What are you two talking about?’ he asked.
I said, ‘I was just telling Murad that I’m a scaredy-cat. Is there something wrong with a person’s being afraid?’
He made no reply. I felt as though I’d disappointed him. As if to justify my fear, I went on, ‘Believe me – I’ve lived for so long with an invisible enemy, fear never leaves me any more, especially at night. Whenever I go down the dark staircase in my apartment building to take out the rubbish, I expect somebody to be waiting to attack me. And when I go out, I expect somebody to jump out at me from some dark alley. I think about the movie star Ali Tanaki, who was murdered in my neighbourhood when he was taking out the trash one night. Imagine somebody’s memory being associated in your mind with trash, with entire lifetimes that have been stuffed into plastic bags at ten pm to be picked up by Fate’s rubbish collector. He’d just finished shooting a movie called The Butterfly Will Take Wing No More.’
‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Murad broke in, ‘you can spare us those stories. What time do you think it is?’
We all looked at the clock.
‘It’s nearly one am. So, man, enough of this talk about burglars and murderers! As the saying goes, “I got a cat to keep me company, but it scared me when its eyes glowed in the dark!” We tell you to stick around and keep us company, and then you go scaring us to death with your horror stories about people being murdered when they take the rubbish out at night!’
Nasser and I burst out laughing in a way we hadn’t done in a long time.
Murad had been imitating Inspector Taher, a popular comedy figure who died in the 1970s. A Columbo-like, trench coat-clad detective, Inspector Taher specialised in thefts and murders. He was also known for his distinctive accent: he pronounced the Arabic letter qaf as a kaf like the residents of the city of Jijel in northeastern Algeria. He pronounced the word qalb (‘heart’) as kalb (‘dog’), and instead of saying, qala li (‘He told me’), he would say kalli.
Like an elderly person who’s afraid he’ll have a heart attack if he laughs too hard, Nasser went back to being serious. ‘Well,’ he said primly, ‘I really shouldn’t be laughing this way!’
‘Now if that doesn’t take the cake!’ Murad scoffed. ‘One’s afraid to die, and the other’s afraid to laugh! Laugh it up, man – you’re going to die in the end anyway!’
This had been Murad’s motto during our days in Mazafran. He would lecture us on the importance of happiness as an act of resistance. As he saw it, our problem in Algeria was that people had no time to live. For years they’d thought about nothing but martyrdom. In fact, they were so busy looking for a reason to die a beautiful death that they forgot why they were dying, whereas we were so busy trying to stay alive that we forgot to live. So in the end, they found no happiness in their deaths, and we found none in our lives.
He’d been right, that’s for sure. We were so lousy at being happy – since being happy had been a ‘banned activity’ in Algeria for years on end – that, as he put it, we needed to form clandestine cells where we could take ‘joy pills’ behind closed doors. A professor I know has told me how, as he sat one day talking and laughing with a couple of friends at a roadside café near his university, two men dressed in Afghan attire came up to them and asked them in a hostile tone, ‘What’s so funny?’ The only thing that saved them from God knows what sort of a painful fate was the fact that one of the two men recognised someone in the group. Even so, they wouldn’t leave until they’d extracted a promise from them not to laugh any more!
When I related this bizarre incident to Murad, he saw it as confirmati
on of his theory that tyrants always view happiness on the part of their subjects as a violation of the laws of subjugation and a challenge to the institutions of oppression. Consequently, the greatest act of opposition to a dictator is to decide to be happy, since it’s in the nature of a dictator to be pained if people rejoice in anything – unless, of course, it happens to be related to his birthday or his accession to power.
Murad headed over to the tape recorder and inserted a tape of Constantinian songs. Before we knew it, we were listening to the strains of a dance song that I seemed never to have forgotten even though I hadn’t heard it for ages. It was the type of song that almost seems to give off an aroma and to have a body of its own, like the women you saw in your childhood with their tresses flowing, transported through dance to the point where they were on the verge of fainting, their beautiful dresses embroidered with gold thread.
His cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, Murad got up and seemed to begin dancing with himself to a zindali cadence tinged with an erotic, manly solemnity. His shoulders quivered, their every move seeming to accentuate the rhythm of the defiance that inhabited him, while his waist undulated right and left at a leisurely pace that betrayed the mood of his lusts and his body’s secret pulse.
Suddenly he seemed more handsome to me than he really was, more handsome than he ever had been, and I understood why women found him so desirable.
Somehow or other, the sight of Murad’s dancing took me back to Hayat’s husband, whom I’d seen once on television during a live broadcast of a military ceremony.
Decked out in his military regalia, he looked like someone who makes pretensions to dignity. He was seated in a front row with men who were too important to be moved by a piece of music and who, when the hall was set ablaze by the sound of Fergani’s voice as he crooned, ‘Beloved leader, parting sears my soul!’, contented themselves with some sedate applause in the singer’s honour, fearful that if they stood up, the stars affixed to their shoulders with the glue of their sham prestige might go flying!
I pitied him. After all, a man who doesn’t spring to his feet in music-induced rapture couldn’t possibly be able to tremble with bodily ecstasy.
At the time I’d felt grateful for his frigid presence in her bed.
Murad grew more and more handsome with the beating of the tambourines. It was as if the music were celebrating his manliness and, in its rapture, his body seemed to be making supplication to something that he alone could see.
In the name of God I begin to speak:
Constantine is my passion.
In my dreams I remember her
As dearly as my mother and father.
Together with the tambourines, voices responded to the singer at the end of every stanza with an enraptured ‘Allah!’ as the song proceeded to list by name all Constantine’s neighbourhoods and markets:
For Eswika I weep and wail,
O Rahbet Essouf, my heart is wounded!
Where are you, O Bab el-Wad and Elkantara?
O places of beauty, you’ve been lost!
At the same time, this song – which was leading me somewhere I couldn’t yet identify – was weaving a plot against me. Its moving strain was leading me to sorrow, and its rapture to grief. And by reminding me of the weight of my losses, it confronted me with the sudden extinguishment of the pleasures of my youth.
Had Murad really wanted to cheer us up with a song that, despite its upbeat rhythm, was – given our situation at the time – an open invitation to weep? We’d gotten out of the habit of being happy, and weren’t fit any longer for membership in the Felicity Party he was inviting us to join whether we wanted to or not!
In vain he tried to get us to dance with him in celebration of our deferred pleasures. But our evening gathering ended the way it had begun, with conflicting feelings that concealed losses we no longer knew what to do with.
I respected the grief Nasser didn’t feel at liberty to express. So when, after that, I had to share a makeshift bedroom with him, I gave him the sofa that had been transformed into a double bed and sacked out on the floor. It was only fitting, since he was the one with the dignity and authority of history, whereas I was the man of earthly passions and low-lying grief who’d always slept at Constantine’s feet.
Another morning in a cold suburb. I was a bedfarer wherever I slept. My heart, which had awakened as topsy-turvy as the chairs that lay upturned on the tables in Paris’s cafes, was waiting for someone to mop up the footprints of those who had tracked mud on my dreams.
Did my mood have something to do with a night I’d spent tossing and turning on the floor? I, who’d been experiencing the strangest coincidences, had now shared a bedroom with the brother of the woman with whom I’d dreamt of spending a night!
How could I have gotten even a wink of oblivion when I’d spent the night on the floor of deprivation, right at my memory’s feet?
Where could I get away from a woman who haunted me wherever I went? And how could I climb out of this prison when it had no walls?
Before closing my eyes, I chatted a bit with Nasser in the way women in our part of the world do between two balconies of an apartment building.
As I lay in the darkness waiting for drowsiness to overtake me, and after I thought he’d already dozed off, Nasser suddenly turned to me and asked, ‘How was Constantine when you left her?’
I suspected that he’d postponed his most important question for fear that it would expose him, or because he wanted to go to sleep remembering his city the way some people go to sleep remembering a beloved woman.
I wanted to envelop him in something beautiful, but instead I found myself saying, ‘She’s fine. She’s finally taken off the clothes of mourning she wore for so long over the loss of Salah Bey. You hardly ever see malayas in Constantine any more. Whenever an old woman dies, her malaya is her shroud, and with the birth of every girl, a new hijab appears.’
He didn’t reply, and I said nothing more to add to his grief. I think he must have fallen asleep holding his mother’s malaya, perfumed with her scent, close to his heart.
At the time I’d been thinking of a woman who was the sole heiress to that beautiful bereavement, and slipping beneath the sheets of her absence.
My bed had never been empty of her. After every visit her sweet fragrance was renewed, and I would hide her robe the way, when we were children, we used to hide our new clothes under our pillows the night before Eid. Then I would revisit her scent, and be visited by her nightdress in my solitude.
For two years I’d been faithful to a negligée that had stolen the sweet fragrance of womanhood, aged like wine in the bottle of the body.
Every night I’d want her all over again. And every morning I’d wake up to find the telltale signs of Hayat-tinged dreams on my bed.
So, then, would she be coming – she who had been brought my way by one coincidence and taken from me by another? I, who had never looked behind me, never gone back to a rubbish bin in search of something I’d thrown into it, had been gathering up her pieces in others, reassembling the parts of me that had shattered apart when she was broken. And now at last I’d stumbled upon a ruse to draw her into the trap of coincidence. I gave Nasser a card announcing Zayyan’s exhibition, fully confident that he’d tell her about it, especially now that I’d informed him that Zayyan was ill and was looking to sell the last of his paintings.
Moved by the news, Nasser said, ‘I’m so sorry to hear he’s been ill! What does he suffer from?’
‘Cancer. But he doesn’t know it.’
‘Somebody like him, not know it?’ Nasser scoffed. ‘You must not know him very well. He’s always known more than he’s supposed to.’
‘How long have you known him?’
‘For a long time. It’s as if I’ve always known him. I first met him as a little boy, when he used to visit us in Tunisia after my father died. I lost track of him for a while, but then we met up again in Constantine at Hayat’s wedding. To this day I don’t
understand how he could have agreed to attend it. It was the only time we’d ever disagreed about anything. But, like my father, he’s always had a special place in my heart.’
After we’d gotten up, Nasser went to shave and take his morning bath. While we were having our coffee, I asked him jokingly, ‘Did you shave off your beard for fear of harassment?’
‘I’ve never had a beard to shave off,’ he rejoined, unhurriedly stirring his coffee. ‘I like the saying of Imam Ali that “the best asceticism is the kind you hide”. Some beards are nothing but disguises, like the ones we used to grow in the 1970s. Men of that generation all know the story of the guy who, when he was young, was wounded in the face with a razor blade in a brothel in Constantine. After that he grew a beard, which covered up his scandalous scar with an appearance of piety.’
Later Nasser asked me for the address of the hospital where Zayyan was being treated. He told me he wished he could go visit him that same day, but that he’d be busy receiving his mother and sister.
So there. I’d set the traps of coincidence everywhere. All that remained now was for me to await her approach with the patience of a hunter, or of a photographer who hangs on for hours to capture a shot. Just as a woman only yields herself to a lover who’s willing to squander a lifetime waiting for her, a picture only yields itself to someone who’s prepared to wait for as long as it wants him to.
I went back to the house happy. Murad’s the type you’re happy to see, but he’s also the type you’re happy to take leave of so that you can retreat again into your own peace and quiet.
But I hadn’t retreated into my peace and quiet empty-handed. I’d borrowed two cassette tapes from him – the one containing the song he’d danced to, and another I was intending to cry to. In my experience, every joy tends to be accompanied by sorrow, just the way, in France, every cup of coffee you order comes with a glass of water.
Françoise welcomed me back with a bit of fanfare, and I sensed that she’d missed me.
The Dust of Promises Page 11