The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Given her dreadful, searing absence, her tantalizing, frosty absence, she was a woman about whom you could say that she was doing you a favour even when she stood you up.

  When I’d given up hope of her coming, I felt a renewed need to see Zayyan. I could hear his news and, just maybe, some of hers. I begged God not to bring the three of us together in the same room for fear of a coincidence from which none of us would emerge unscathed.

  It was four in the afternoon when I went to see him.

  I was surprised to see a bouquet of flowers, chosen with the finest of taste, next to his bedside table. The room was filled with joyous vibrations created by the coupling of the yellow and violet roses.

  I found him cheerful, though it may have been the cheerfulness of someone leaning, with a forlorn smile, against the ramshackle remains of his life. He seemed bankrupt and light, although it was impossible to know exactly what thievery it was that had left him so full of disdain.

  He started to get up to receive me, but I told him not to get out of bed. He laid a book he’d been reading on the table next to him. As I leaned down to kiss him, he said, ‘Welcome. I’ve missed you, man. I thought you’d drowned in a lake!’

  Lest I be suspected of enjoying a happiness that a sick person might perceive as an assault on his grief, I replied, ‘I’ve just been drowning in problems, but I’m sure you can relate!’

  It was a typically Algerian reply, the kind that conveys a barrel-load of discontent the reasons for which one isn’t obliged to explain as long as the one listening ‘can relate’ since, being an Algerian himself, he’s sure to be drowning in the very same problems!

  As if to find out more about the source of my problems, he surprised me by asking, ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘And at other times?’

  ‘Other times, I’m a homeless romantic.’

  Then, as if to reassure him, I added lightheartedly, ‘But I’m a cautious man. I stick to my own territory!’

  He laughed. ‘You remind me of a friend of mine who made it his profession to take calculated risks. In other words, he wasn’t a philanderer, but he wasn’t faithful, either. He was afraid of the diseases going around, and whenever he made claims to virtue, I’d say to him, “Fidelity based on a fear of illness is like peace based on a fear of nuclear war – it won’t last. So choose which side you’re on, man, and stay there. Either be a traitor worth your salt, or a loyalist from the heart!”’

  This was the first time he’d asked me about my personal life. In so doing, he’d granted me the right to ask him about his.

  ‘And are you married?’

  He laughed again. ‘Since I hate infidelity, I’ve refused to get married. A successful marriage needs a bit of infidelity to keep it afloat. Marriage owes its survival to infidelity, just as infidelity owes its existence to marriage. There’s nothing more depressing than feeling you own somebody forever, or that somebody owns you forever.

  ‘I refuse to own anything. So how could I agree to own a person and demand that she pledge me her neverending fidelity based on some official piece of paper? I don’t think I’m capable of promoting marital tedium between the sheets of hypocrisy.’

  After a pause, he added, ‘You know, the most wonderful thing in life is fidelity enveloped in desire, and the most miserable is desire wrapped in the shroud of fidelity!’

  Where had he gotten the clarity of mind to arrive at such wisdom when he sat surrounded by medicine bottles and platitudes? When had he experienced these things, and with whom?

  His eyes shone with a beauty borne of chronic fatigue. Yet he didn’t appear despondent.

  ‘You seem happy today.’

  ‘Really?’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Well, what’s the use of being in torment? Don’t believe people who tell you that suffering makes you stronger and more beautiful. Only forgetting can do that. You have to greet memory from a safe distance, since all your sufferings come from paying too much attention to yourself.’

  As he poured himself a glass of water, I took a closer look at the book that lay on his bedside table. A small book with an ordinary-looking cover, its title was Les jumeaux de Nedjma, ‘Nedjma’s Twins’. Curious to know more about the reading habits of a man on whose table I’d never seen a book before, I instinctively picked it up and started leafing through it, utterly unprepared for the surprise that awaited me. Although he seemed surprised by my behaviour, he said nothing as I took the book off his bedside table.

  I contemplated the title. Then I opened the book unthinkingly to the first page, only to find myself faced with a dedication in her handwriting! Feeling his wordless gaze following me, I didn’t read what it said, contenting myself with a glance at the date written at the end. His proud silence made me uncomfortable. Maybe he was testing me to see how tasteless I could be, or whether I had the audacity to spy on his big secret.

  Concluding that she’d visited him that morning, I realised where the beautiful bouquet of roses next to his bed had come from, as well as the box of fancy chocolates. I also picked up the message that underpinned this exquisite gift when, arguing for the virtues of chocolate as he insisted on giving me a piece, he said, ‘Chocolate doesn’t just give you a “high” and a rush of creative energy. The pleasure of eating it helps you to swallow any bitterness that might come with it. It makes it easier to die the moment the bullet hits you. When Hemingway wrote to his stepmother asking her to send him his father’s shotgun – the one he’d used to commit suicide – she sent it to him with a box of chocolates, knowing that the reason he wanted the gun was that he intended to . . . commit suicide!’

  He watched me put the book back on the table. As if to take our conversation away from the topic of the woman we’d both loved, he remarked, ‘It’s a nice book. It contains amazing details about Kateb Yacine’s death that I’d never known before. I was jailed with him on 8 May 1945 in Kidya Prison, and I lived with him through the birth of his novel Nedjma, from start to finish. We were of a generation with similar lives, with devastating disappointments, with patriotic dreams we had yet to grow into, with fathers we’d never gotten to know, and with mothers crazy with worry over us. Nearly all of us were alike in every way. The only thing that distinguished us from each other in the end was our deaths.’

  He reached into the drawer of the small table to his right and took out a cigarette that he didn’t light. Holding it as though he’d lit it, he said, ‘I belong to the generation of bizarre, unexpected endings. When I read in this book about the details of Kateb Yacine’s death in France, which coincided with the death of his cousin, Mustapha Kateb, and then about how his funeral was held in Algeria, I thought about a saying of Malraux to the effect that the things that happen to a person aren’t what he deserves, but what fits him the best. And Yacine’s death fit his life. Like his life, his death was painful, disturbing, theatrical, full of protest, provocative, ironic.

  ‘Imagine . . . when Yacine died in Grenoble, France on 29 October 1989, there was an earthquake in Algeria. However, the national radio’s news broadcast that evening included a religious edict issued by Mufti Mohamed Ghazali, Head of Constantine University’s Islamic Council and President Bendjedid’s advisor at the time, saying that such a man wasn’t worthy to be received by Algerian soil and forbidding his burial in an Islamic cemetery. But even after he died, Yacine went on thumbing his nose at religious edicts, and at authorities of all sorts. His bier was the first to be carried by women as well as men. In fact, his pall bearers consisted of an entire theatrical troupe!

  ‘His final joke was that the Peugeot 504 that was taking his body to the cemetery broke down under the weight of all the actors it was carrying. So they got out of the car and took him the rest of the way on foot to the sound of cars honking, ululations, and people singing the left-wing anthem “L’Internationale” in the Berber language.

  ‘Neither the country’s religious leader nor its government officials could do anything
to silence Kateb Yacine, whether in life or in death. Nor did they manage to prevent Fate from having him buried on the first of November, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Algerian revolution. He was the first person ever to bring anarchy, democracy and ululations into a cemetery, just the way he’d brought them before that into prisons!’

  ‘What a remarkable death!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’d never heard these details before.’

  ‘That in itself isn’t so remarkable,’ he corrected acerbically. ‘The really remarkable thing is the strange coincidences of fate that have marked the deaths of people in our generation. I have two friends, both of whom were men of history and leading freedom fighters in the revolution. One of them died grieving, and the other died laughing. Can you believe it? You must have heard of Abdelhafid Boussouf?’

  ‘Of course. He was Head of Military Intelligence during the revolution.’

  ‘That intractable man, who was infamous for his inscrutability and his merciless liquidation of friends as well as enemies – do you know how he died? He keeled over from a heart attack in 1980 when he was laughing at a joke a friend had told him over the phone! He’d withdrawn permanently from political life after Algeria’s independence, refusing any leadership positions, which was what made it possible for him to die laughing!

  ‘Wouldn’t you say that the end he met was preferable to that of Suleiman Umeirat, his comrade-in-arms who died of a heart attack while he was reciting the Fatiha over the body of Mohamed Boudiaf, another comrade-in-arms who’d been assassinated? Even those who’ve died as martyrs and heroes haven’t escaped this curse. The bad fortune that had afflicted his generation, he passed down to his successors, including, for example, the hero and martyr Mustapha Benboulaïd, whose son Abdelwahhab was killed at the age of fifty on 22 March 1995, exactly thirty-nine years after his father was assassinated at the hands of the French. Some thugs stopped him at a sham checkpoint when he was on his way to his hometown of Batna to take part in the annual commemoration of his father’s martyrdom.

  ‘This death in particular may embody the tragedy of our whole generation – the tragedy that Algeria would present a man like Mustapha Benboulaïd, a symbol of our resistance, with his son’s corpse on the very day when he himself had been martyred. What kind of a homeland is this??’

  Just then the tape ran out. He noticed that I’d opened the recorder, and as I turned the tape over, he said, ‘Leave the tape recorder alone, man! Bloody history does its own recording!’

  In an attempt to assuage his bitterness, I said jokingly, ‘History records, but I publish! I want to publish this interview as a testimony to that period.’

  ‘What “period”?’ he scoffed. ‘“That period” hasn’t ended, man. Algerians are caught in a dialectic of self-destruction. When they don’t find an enemy to do it for them, they’re programmed to self-destruct and make an example of themselves. Do you think criminals should be given the credit for innovating the practice of murdering writers, judges, doctors, cinematographers, poets, lawyers and dramatists? Algeria already has a tradition of killing its intellectuals. I was a freedom fighter when, in a kind of psychological warfare, France insinuated to Colonel Amirouche that some of his men were working as informers for the French army. So, in July 1956, after a hasty trial, he had 1,800 of his men liquidated in what’s now known as “La bleuite”. In no time, fingers of accusation had been pointed at intellectuals, that is, at students who had left to join the front, and whose loyalty was suspect in the view of the National Liberation Front because of their knowledge and their French educations. They were murdered by their fellow freedom fighters, most of whom were illiterate villagers who, from the start, had held these men’s superior knowledge and learning against them. And nothing has changed since: Every ignoramus avenges his ignorance by trying to prove he’s more pious than his educated compatriots by casting doubts on their patriotism, and finally by killing them. So here we are now, still taking up collections to help victims’ families.’

  Suddenly he stopped and asked me, ‘Have you bought that painting?’

  Before I could reply, he opened the drawer in search of something. Then he brought out a lighter and lit the cigarette he’d been holding in his hand the entire time.

  Even though I hadn’t said a word, he could tell I was shocked to see him smoking in the hospital. ‘Don’t worry,’ he joked. ‘I belong to a generation that was born to disobey!’

  Then he rephrased his earlier question: ‘What are you going to do with that painting?’

  ‘I’ll take it with me to Constantine when I go back in two or three weeks.’ Then, afraid he might have changed his mind, I added, ‘It will be at your disposal, of course. You can see it when you come to visit.’

  ‘I’ve stopped visiting Constantine. I’ve got nothing and nobody left there. The last time I went there was a year and a half ago to attend the funeral of my brother Hassan’s son, and as far as I could tell, the only place for it any more was on picture postcards and in paintings. Her bridges looked decrepit and worn out, as though they’d aged and lost their stones the way people lose their teeth when they get old. And people crossed them with no expressions on their faces. Sometimes they were in a hurry, other times they dragged their feet. But they were all lost and confused, like someone who’s waiting for a disaster to happen.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because you visited it at a sad time.’

  ‘I’ve never made a visit there that was happy. I’ve always left it feeling bereft. I refuse to make a pact with the mud that covers everything now, and I don’t want to be there when Constantine sheds her last stones and slips into the abyss.

  ‘Believe me. Since Boudiaf was assassinated I’ve hated even to travel to Algeria. When he died, something in us died, too. When they begged him to come back to be president and save the country, they didn’t think that this man, who had been enervated by prisons, exile and the treachery of former comrades, was really fit to strike a deal over others’ dead bodies, so they turned him into a dead body too so that we’d take a lesson from it.

  ‘Don’t you see all the stones that have fallen on us since he died? Now we can go on pelting each other with questions. However, the question is no longer: Who killed Boudiaf? but, rather, Where is this mudslide taking us? And what kind of a quagmire is history sucking us into?’

  A pained silence ensued.

  Then – I don’t know how it happened – I went over to the bed and, like someone grabbing onto a rock for fear of being washed downstream, I put my arms around him and, to my amazement, started crying.

  They must have been pent-up tears that had collected inside me, like a cloud heavy with rain looking for the right time and place to drop its burden.

  As if to justify my blunder, I said, ‘Khaled, I love you.’

  He didn’t object to my calling him Khaled, nor did he seem surprised that my love for him would give me a reason to cry.

  In fact, he acted as if it were a normal thing for a man to cry, and held me without trying to understand what was wrong with me. He might have understood more than what I’d told him. However, he didn’t cry. I suppose he was the type who only tears up.

  ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. ‘Dreams were made not to come true!’

  As he held me, a shiver went through my body as I came up against the empty space that had been left by his missing arm. I was experiencing what it must have been like for him to hold her, and how it was possible for a man with only one arm to press another human being to his bosom. I didn’t know any more: Was I crying over her, in him? Was I crying over him, in her? Or was I crying over myself between the two of them?

  She who had been where we were, and sat in the chair where I’d been sitting – it was as if she were still among us, and I could smell the perfume of her absence.

  When, after that, he wanted to get out of bed to see me off, he inadvertently knocked the vase of flowers to the floor as he was trying to lean against the table. Sorry to see what had happened, I bent down to g
ather everything up.

  ‘I’ve gotten clumsy of late,’ he muttered apologetically. ‘Everything I pass, I bump into! Don’t worry about gathering them up. The nurse will come and do that. They’re only roses, and they were wilting anyway!’

  Then, with an irony of which he alone was master, he added, ‘Even if my arm falls off, beware of picking it up.’

  ‘You’re reversing that poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “If my arm falls off, pick it up, and if I fall next to you, pick me up.”’

  ‘And,’ he broke in, ‘“strike your enemy with me…”’

  ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Do I know it?’ he repeated with a grin. ‘I know it, and then some! It was my friend Ziyad’s favourite poem. He used to always say, “If only I’d been the one to write it.” To which I would reply, “Don’t worry. If you fall, I’ll pick you up with my one arm.” With Ziyad, I knew which enemy I’d throw his body at, but if you picked up my arm, who would you throw it at?

  ‘By the way,’ he went on genially, ‘when I get out of the hospital, I’ll show you some of Ziyad’s poems.’

  ‘Do you still have them?’

  ‘Of course. I’d sooner give up my paintings than give up those poems of his. I’ve always had a problem with martyrs’ bequests.’

  We parted that day without my knowing whether he’d been happier than usual, or sadder than usual.

  He behaved with the disregard of someone who’s got nothing to lose. He smoked, knowing full well that cigarettes were bad for him. He would ask me to bring him miniature bottles of whiskey, the type they serve on aeroplanes that fill one glass, ignoring the fact that he was forbidden to drink it with his medicine. He would even forget to take his medicine, since he knew it wasn’t doing him any good. And he would eat things that were bad for his health to lift his spirits, which thrived on things forbidden.

  I think he was happy, although his happiness had nothing to do with the bouquet of flowers, or with the fancy chocolates she’d brought him (some of which he stuffed into my pocket as he bade me farewell), or with the book he’d received from her the way Hemingway had received the shotgun from his stepmother.