The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  It was as though I’d told him everything at once. Or at least, I’d said more than I should have in a single session. For a moment he seemed grief-stricken, like a warrior who’s just learned that his wife has abandoned him while he was on the front.

  Nevertheless, he handled the situation with aplomb: with the required astuteness, and with the appropriate degree of feigned stupidity. At the same time, he was such a cynic that he seemed able to fend off grief with sarcasm.

  In a voice as dim as a lighthouse on a rainy night, he said, ‘Beware of loving a woman who loves bridges. You don’t want to build a house next to a bridge, and it won’t put a roof over your head. To build a house at one end of a bridge is to let down your defences against the abyss!’

  He was so steeped in cynical wisdom that it was aggravating his suffering. He had the perspicacity of someone who, afflicted with his final infirmity, has been given the chance to think, and who’s begun noticing things he never saw before. Was it because illness turns a person back into a child, restoring to him the ability of the innocent to intuit who loves them and who doesn’t, who tells them the truth, and who feeds them lies?

  I was sure he had loved me from the first time we met. But what did this man know about me – this man who had welcomed me as a relative or friend as though he’d been awaiting my arrival, and who, as far as I could tell, wasn’t receiving any other visitors? He was certain not to have believed the excuses I’d made about wanting to meet with him for journalistic purposes. Even so, there were times when he spoke to me as if he were addressing a journalist. At other times he would speak to me as a friend, yet never failing to discern in me the rival he feared.

  Almost apologetically I said, ‘If it bothers you to think of my giving the painting to someone else, then I’ll keep it for myself.’

  He gave a sardonic laugh. Then he made a statement the truth of which I would discern only later. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Even if you keep the painting for yourself, you aren’t the one that determines its fate. In the course of an object’s lifetime it changes hands repeatedly, and you’re nothing but one of those hands. Everything changes hands at some point, and some things exchange their owner’s hand for that of his enemy. Like it or not, your wife, your job, your house, your possessions, and everything you have will pass on to someone else. The important thing is for you not to know about it. Even so, you have to train yourself from early on to accept treason.’

  He paused briefly. Then, pointing to his stub with his left shoulder, he said, ‘When you’ve been abandoned by the members of your body, your own flesh and blood, you won’t be surprised to find yourself being abandoned by a sweetheart, a relative, or a homeland. How much less surprising would it be, then, to be abandoned by a painting?’

  I felt as though, as he spoke, grief had made me as old as he was. I’d aged within moments, and gone bankrupt as I watched him display his losses.

  ‘I envy you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never met such a wise man before.’

  Coming back with his usual searing cynicism, he said, ‘There’s a Bible verse I like that says, “Even the wise die; the fool and the stupid alike must perish and leave their wealth to others.”’

  I was about to take my leave of him when, calling me by name for the first time, he said, ‘Khaled…’

  Then, like someone who cares less about how you’ll reply than he does about whether you’ll belittle his intelligence, he continued, ‘Is your name still Khaled?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And other times?’

  Evading his question, I admitted, ‘Most of the time my name is Khaled Ben Toubal, since it’s the most like me. I got it from a novel, actually.’

  As if to spare me the effort of looking for an excuse, he broke in, ‘Do you know why Khaled Ben Toubal commits suicide in Malek Haddad’s novel, Le Quai aux Fleurs ne répond plus?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said apologetically, ‘I read the novel a long time ago, but I’ve forgotten what happens in it.’

  ‘It’s a short novel, just a hundred pages long. Practically nothing happens in it apart from the fact that its main character commits suicide at the end. During a stay in Paris, he reads in the newspaper that his wife Warida has run away with a French paratrooper, and that their affair was exposed when they died together in an accident. He’d loved her passionately and, anxious to get back to Constantine to see her, he’d resisted the advances of a certain Monique. When he learns of the matter, Khaled jumps off a moving train. Somebody else might have thought of some other way to die. But Constantinians, whose mother is a rock and whose father is a bridge, are born with a spiritual deformity. They carry the seed of suicide in their genes. They’re haunted by the urge to leap into nothingness, and with an overwhelming sort of melancholy that tempts them to succumb to the call of the abyss.

  ‘However, it wasn’t betrayal that killed Khaled Ben Toubal but, rather, his knowledge of it. He shouldn’t have learned of it. Even so, he does learn of it – in both novels – since Warida, in the words of Marguerite Duras, had married the wind, and betrayed him with one paratrooper after another. And in each novel Khaled dies twice: once because of his Constantinian genes, and once because of his intelligence!’

  What was I supposed to understand from the discourse of a man who, between words, would lay mines of silence and, between one silence and another, would give me a screwdriver to defuse them with?

  Suddenly he asked me, ‘Are you from Constantine?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, as though I were confessing to a sin.

  ‘Since you can’t change your genes, then I’d advise you not to love a woman who loves bridges. Every Constantinian love stands at the edge of an emotional slope.’

  What a man he was. He’d lost the heedlessness of good health, and acquired the sagacity of illness. As for me, in vain I’d marshalled my senses to pick up on what I’d come in search of. Like other men of his generation, he had an emotional reserve about him. So he wasn’t going to reveal anything to me, and I wasn’t going to ask him about her.

  He may have recognised me through the intuition of the heart. But from the beginning, we’d been playing dumb in a mutual pact of shrewdness, or of pride. I was as content not to know more about him as I was for him not to know more about me.

  We were there because both of us were Khaled Ben Toubal, and this was the only thing both of us knew.

  As soon as I got home, I called Murad on the pretext that I wanted to make sure Nasser’s mother had arrived safely.

  He said, ‘She got here at noon with his sister, and Nasser will be spending the evening with them.’

  I heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘when will we be seeing you?’

  Suddenly finding myself in a hurry, I replied somewhat apologetically, ‘I’ll be busy over the next few days.’

  Then I added, ‘Things are a little mixed up.’

  As he said goodbye, Murad advised me lightheartedly, ‘Mix them up and they’ll clear up!’

  He didn’t know, of course, how mixed up things really were, and how helpless I was to straighten them out again!

  The first question was: How, without causing more than the least possible damage and suspicion, could I manage the intertwined, overlapping relationships that had been created by our having happened, by chance, all to be in Paris at the same time – relationships on such a collision course that they needed Fate’s traffic policeman to keep them from crashing head-on?

  As determined as I was to see Hayat, I didn’t want to lose Nasser’s respect. Neither did I want to arouse Zayyan’s suspicions or cause him pain, or lose my relationship with Françoise.

  There was also the catastrophe of having entered the orbit of a love fraught with perils and risks, with a woman who was followed constantly by a swirl of rumours, and who, wherever she went, was preceded by bugging devices and informers’ watchful eyes. I was constantly afraid of the harm they might do to both of us.

  How could you have go
ne and fallen for a woman whose husband rules an entire country with his money and his informers? You and your exquisite, costly transgressions! What a madman you are!

  I couldn’t have relations with Françoise that night. My body had gone on ahead of me, looking for Hayat in one hotel after another. And how could I sleep when I was consumed with anticipation? It was as though I’d never once given up waiting for her. After being tormented by my temporary possession of her, had I missed her in order to punish myself with longing?

  I knew she hadn’t come to stay, and that this time, too, all I’d have of her was the dust of promises. So why was I in such a hurry?

  I woke up in a good mood the next morning, and decided to melt my exhilaration in a cup of coffee. I wanted to start the day by establishing a pleasant, indolent relationship with life. I’d loosen Time’s necktie, unbutton my shirt and bare my chest to the winds of chance.

  I headed for the exhibition at around noon, certain that, in view of her usual lazy morning routine, Hayat wouldn’t leave the hotel early.

  In fact, I doubted whether she’d show up at all that day. It was her first day in Paris, and it wouldn’t have made sense for her to come to the gallery to see Khaled’s exhibition on her first jaunt through the city. At the same time, I didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing her in the event that she did pass by.

  I was prepared to sit on Time’s chair for a good long while – prepared to dupe the hours as they passed lest patience’s rosary break, scattering its beads every which way. And I held out no hopes of any reward but the eagerness of a first kiss.

  I adore Love’s lovely extravagance. I have a passion for all sorts of mad prodigality when it comes to matters of the heart. Besides which, I’m a man of boundless patience by virtue of my profession.

  But was I the only one waiting for her as I went wandering lost among those paintings? It had occurred to me that we were waiting for her together, his paintings and I, he and I. And this was another remarkable coincidence.

  It was as though life had unravelled the fabric of his story and rewoven it by replacing him with me in every situation. This was the way things had happened in the novel I knew by heart, and by dint of Fate’s practical jokes.

  This was the way he himself had been waiting for her in the beginning of The Bridges of Constantine, hoping she would visit his exhibition again, this time by herself.

  With the same determination, despair and hope he’d paced around the hall where he’d put on his first exhibition, and which was now witnessing his last. He’d described himself as a man who is ‘loyal to places in times of treachery’.

  Since then, how many paintings had been displayed in this same hall before ‘Hanin’ – the first painting he’d done after losing his arm, and a painting the same age as Hayat – came back and took her place on a wall? It was as though, as far as this work of his was concerned, time had been suspended, just like the bridge it depicted.

  Another reason for my happiness on this particular morning was that I had bought the painting after making that crazy deal with Zayyan. He knew, without my explaining anything further to him, that he had no one but me to bequeath it to.

  She was mine, then. In this exhibition hall I was a king, and she was my crown. I felt the exhilaration of going bankrupt in return for a piece of fabric crucified on a wall, and I had named it ‘Constantine’.

  The time crept by.

  After three hours in the exhibition hall, I decided to go to the café across the street and have a cup of coffee. I chose a table near a front window so that I’d be able to see her if she came. To my surprise, however, some time later I saw Murad going into the gallery.

  I thanked God I wasn’t still in there. If I had been, he might have stayed with me the entire time and, if she’d happened to come, ruined my encounter with her.

  I was surprised to see him, since he wasn’t in the habit of visiting exhibitions more than once, and he had no interest in either Zayyan or his paintings. If he had stayed for a long time, I would simply have thought he’d changed his habits. However, he seemed to have come for some other purpose, or to meet a certain someone who, I suspected, might be none other than Françoise.

  My suspicion was confirmed when I saw her bidding him a warm farewell at the door. As she did so, he planted a kiss on her cheek and wrapped his arm around her waist with a more-than-innocent friendliness.

  She must have thought I’d left the gallery and gone home, and he surely hadn’t expected me to be right there to witness his treachery.

  A cloud of melancholy passed over me, and I realised why he was always asking me when I planned to go back to Algeria. After finding out that I only had a tourist visa and that I’d been staying in Françoise’s apartment, he’d begun asking about my travel plans on the pretext that he wanted to send something back with me. He personally didn’t want to live with Françoise so much as he hoped that, between her thighs, he might find residency papers in France and, just possibly, a way of getting himself a red passport!

  I gulped down the free glass of water the waiter had brought me with my coffee, as if to help me swallow the lump in my throat.

  Then I left the café without going back to the gallery as I’d intended to. As I headed for the Metro station, having decided to go straight home, the sky suddenly let forth torrents of rain as though it were weeping on my behalf. With no umbrella, I went wading through the mud of human emotion.

  When Françoise got home that evening, she said irritably as she took off her coat, ‘I hope I don’t find this kind of weather waiting for me in Nice. God, how I hate rain!’

  ‘When are you planning to leave on your trip?’ I asked her.

  ‘Friday morning. I’ll spent the weekend there and come back on Monday morning.’

  I didn’t say anything. I just handed her the photo of her mother with the frameless glass cover I’d made for it.

  She gave me a flustered kiss on the cheek. ‘Oh, thank you! It’s better this way!’

  Stroking her auburn hair, I said, ‘You know, it used to make me sad that I couldn’t make smells visible in a photograph. But I don’t feel sad any more now that I’ve developed my camera in another way.’

  ‘Really?’ she exclaimed credulously. ‘How?’

  ‘Now, for example,’ I explained, my sarcasm undetected, ‘you don’t need to talk. What your closed lips conceal, I can pick up with a lens inside me.’

  I didn’t expect her to understand, so I wasn’t surprised when she replied, ‘So have you invented an X-ray photo?’

  ‘No! I’ve invented a tragedy photo.’

  Suddenly I missed Zayyan. Only he would have been able to understand a statement this painfully sardonic. After all, he’d already invented ‘the tragedy painting’. He’d also shared the same house with a woman who couldn’t feel distressed over anything but the weather forecast!

  I asked her if she’d prefer that I stay somewhere else while she was away. ‘Of course not!’ she protested. ‘How could you think such a thing!’

  ‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I’ll be going back to Algeria in two or three weeks, and I’ll definitely be leaving the apartment before Zayyan gets out of the hospital. I don’t want him to know I’ve been staying here.’

  ‘By the way,’ I added, ‘I’m planning to buy myself a mobile phone that you can call me on since, as you know, I don’t answer the landline for fear that it might be Zayyan calling. He’d recognise my voice.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. Anybody who calls me while I’m away can leave me a voice message.’

  When we shared the same bed after that, I found myself unable to take her into my arms without tremendous effort, or to kiss her thin lips without having to turn for help to the dullness of the senses.

  I took comfort in the fact that night fell on millions of households with the same degree of sexual hypocrisy as it did on ours, and that like me, millions of people wondered how to escape from the night’s scandalous betrayal of their physical alienation
from the person closest to them.

  I thought about my wife, who had managed to extort a child from me on the pretext of our sharing a conjugal bed.

  You may happen to collide with someone who sleeps next to you, or touch a part of him that happens to be within your body’s reach. But when you loiter in the side streets of fate, you might collide with a woman’s love in a ‘traffic accident’ of the emotions, whereas it’s another woman who conceives by you in a ‘car crash’ of the bed!

  I’ve always taken a dim view of gaiety, and I’m suspicious of the deceptive merriment that accompanies holidays. After all, a holiday is nothing but the preparations we make for it, and the same would be true of the encounter I was so anxiously awaiting.

  When I set off for the gallery at noon, the city was decked out as if a holiday were on the way. I felt it was mocking me somehow. Had the end of the year come that quickly? Or was it just that entrepreneurs are always in a hurry to sell you a holiday that isn’t really yours? We create our own holidays, our real holidays, when the official ones aren’t looking.

  Hadn’t she always said that we needed a third city that was neither Constantine nor Algiers, neither my city nor hers, a city that lay off the Arab map of terror where we could meet without fear?

  So here was Paris, and a love that belonged to winter: to roast chestnut vendors, to hurried nightfalls, to rain unceasing, to storefront windows dusted with a sprinkling of cottony snow with happy new year’s wishes traced in it.

  This white joyousness that promised a bitter cold winter intensified my longing for her.

  If only it would snow while she’s here, O God of winter! If only snowdrifts would pile up outside the door of a house, locking us in, so that snow could wreak its lovely savagery outside while we snuggle by the fireplace of yearnings!

  But she didn’t come, and the snow went on falling inside me as I waited for her at the gallery. My thoughts scattered every which way as I contemplated cynically one possible scenario after another. Even so, I kept guarding a certain fragile possibility by continuing to wait.