The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

Deliberately prolonging the obnoxious game of playing dumb, I pressed the surprise button, saying casually, ‘Love always has a lofty presence, you know. It lives on the seventh floor.’

  She didn’t say a word, nor did I search her eyes for the effects of the shock produced by her collision with reality.

  As I opened the door and turned on the lights, I felt her looking around the place to reassure herself that things were all right.

  The game made me think of a situation where an artist refuses to acknowledge the person who inspired him to do a certain painting, and just when you end up believing that the idea behind the painting was his alone, the steps of fate lead you to where his secret lies hidden, and you can’t resist the urge to confront him with his deception. This apartment, which had emerged from her book and matched her description of it down to the last detail, was perfectly suited to just such a confrontation.

  I love that moment when I manage to silence a woman with an argument she would never have expected, then observe her naked before the truth.

  I’d decided that as long as she wasn’t evincing any obvious reaction, I’d take the game of playing dumb to its limit.

  ‘Do you like the apartment?’ I asked.

  Choosing her words carefully, she replied, ‘It has a nice cozy feel to it.’

  Noticing her wet clothes, I added, ‘On a day like this you should have brought an umbrella, or worn your fur coat.’

  ‘I wore this jacket for fear that a fancy coat might cause me problems on the Metro. I hear that muggings and pickpocketing have been on the rise lately.’

  ‘And who says you’ll be safe here?’ I asked as I placed a first kiss on her lips. ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than a lover who’s been waiting for two years!’

  With a kiss I swallowed her lipstick, leaving it to her to swallow her lies.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited so long for this day!’

  As a matter of fact, she was still under the unsettling influence of the location, and didn’t ask me how I had ended up in this house or what I was doing there.

  I began studying her features following the surprise of the first kiss, which always leaves a person’s face different than it was before.

  Seeking relief from the embarrassment of the situation, I said, ‘You get younger with every kiss. A few more, and you’ll almost be back to twenty years old again!’

  ‘And who told you I liked that age?’ she countered as she headed towards the living room. ‘Today I’m as old as your lips.’

  ‘And tomorrow?’ I asked with a touch of bitter sarcasm.

  Surprised by the question, she replied, ‘Tomorrow? I don’t know. The afterlife isn’t one of my preoccupations.’

  ‘In that case,’ I joked, ‘I’ll give you enough kisses to get you to hell in no time!’

  I teased her as a way of alleviating the awkwardness of the first moments, though, if the truth be told, all I wanted to do was look at her.

  I sat down on the sofa across from the fireplace and watched her as she made the rounds of the living room. She looked without comment at the statue of Venus and the paintings that hung on the walls.

  I didn’t want to interrupt her first private moment with memory. I was content just to gaze at her.

  She was soaking wet. Something about her reminded me of Olga, my Polish neighbour, as she dried her hair in her white bathrobe.

  Worried that she might get sick, I said, ‘You could dry your hair in the bathroom.’

  She smiled absently.

  Before she headed for the bathroom, I remembered something and added, ‘If you’d like to change your clothes, I have a dress you could put on.’

  ‘Does it belong to the lady of the house?’ she asked cattily.

  She might have seen pictures of Françoise and her mother on the corner table in the living room.

  Ignoring her provocation, I replied, ‘No. I bought it for you.’

  I left her standing in the middle of the living room and returned shortly with the black dress in its fancy bag.

  As I handed it to her, I said, ‘I hope you’ll like it, and that it will fit.’

  ‘When did you buy it?’ she asked as she took it in astonishment.

  ‘Believe it or not, I bought it more than two months ago, even before I expected to see you!’

  She spread it out, obviously impressed.

  ‘It’s beautiful, really beautiful. How could you have thought of buying it for me? You must have ruined your budget!’

  ‘Don’t worry. It was a good emotional investment.’

  ‘If I hadn’t come to Paris and we hadn’t seen each other, what would you have done with it, silly? Would you have given it to your wife?’

  ‘Of course not. I bought it to bribe Fate. It’s a love dress, and I’m happy to have you wear it, not somebody else.’

  ‘And is there a somebody else?’ she shot back with obvious womanly jealousy.

  ‘No. However, it was you who taught me that we tailor every love from the fabric of a love that went before it.’

  Without commenting, she went over to the mirror and held it up to herself.

  ‘Black suits you,’ I said.

  Starting to put it back in its bag, she said, ‘It’s too pretty to wear in the house. It’s a party dress.’

  ‘And we’re at a party. In Paris. Where will I see you in it if not here?’

  She appeared convinced.

  I suggested that she go into the next room and put it on.

  She took a moment to study my face reflected before her in the mirror. Then, without a word, she took the dress and headed for the other room, to which she obviously knew the way!

  Had I wanted to test her knowledge of the house? Or was I testing my patience with her, and punishing myself by having to wait for her as she bared herself to her memory in that other room?

  I could have joined her out of impatience, or I could have suggested that she put it on in the living room. But, wanting to preserve the beauty of the moment, I did neither. Despite my body’s hunger and haste, I took pleasure in postponing my pleasure, like when you have a piece of fruit you know is yours, but you put off taking the first bite.

  I tried to make the wait easier by looking for a cassette tape suited to the occasion. The one I wanted was already in the recorder, so all I had to do was rewind it and press the button:

  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.

  I sat down with Constantine to wait for her, or so I thought, until she appeared around the corner like a black swan. It was as though whatever she put on, she wore nothing but her malaya, and what should I find but that she herself was . . . Constantine.

  As she stood before me, I contemplated her peculiar, inexplicable appeal. She wasn’t the most beautiful. She definitely wasn’t the most beautiful. But she was the most alluring. She was the most splendorous. And this was something I couldn’t explain any more than I could explain the uniqueness of her voice, which could cause a cosmic disturbance with a single word.

  As she made a half turn in the dress to the rhythm of the music, she asked in our Constantinian dialect, ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Do I like it? What a question!’ I said, a tremendous longing welling up inside me. ‘I like you!’

  I’d always loved the way she moved, the way she turned, the way she stopped, the way she bent down, the way her shawl cascaded over her hair, the way she lifted the hem of her dress with one hand as though she were holding onto a secret, the way she went, the way she came…

  During the days when she would visit me disguised in her mother’s cloak for fear of curious stares and criminals who lay in wait for unsuspecting women, I remember telling her that I loved her in that black cloak. Her response was, ‘You have to love what you’re wearing in order for it to love you. Otherwise, it will reciprocate your apathy and dislike, and you�
��ll look ugly in it. Some people aren’t on friendly terms with what they wear, so they look unattractive even in their elegance, while others positively glow because they’re wearing an outfit they like, even if it is simple and the only one they have.’

  So, did she look so appealing in that dress because she loved it?

  Or did she love the appeal of the situation itself, and the oddness of the fact that we were meeting in a house that took her back ten years to her first emotional labyrinth?

  Mingled with sighs of longing for Constantine, the words of the song were an expression of our losses. With the rhythm of its tambourines, the music charged the atmosphere with fear – the fear of desires that generate emotions so violent that the urge to dance feels like a passage into another sorrow.

  Being in an ‘emotional preserve’ off the map of Arab fear gives you permission to test out your madness. So I said to her, ‘Hayat, dance for me.’

  My request surprised her, and her reticence surprised me. With the bashfulness of Constantine’s women in a time past, she said, ‘I can’t. I’ve never danced in front of a man before.’

  Responding with a manly gallantry to match her womanly timidity, I said, ‘I’m not just a man. I’m your man. And if this beauty isn’t for me, then who is it for?’

  It was as though I’d uttered the password her body had long awaited, since I don’t think anyone before me had asked her such a question.

  With the modesty of a Constantinian woman when she dances for the first time in the presence of a man, her body began to sway gently to and fro. She wasn’t writhing. She wasn’t twisting. There was nothing provocative about her movements. Her power to excite lay in her oblique allure, in a womanliness that danced beneath a din of muslin as though it were weeping, and to a song laden with a burden of sorrow.

  The atmosphere was filled with the buds of wild, deferred passions that had blossomed at last outside the gardens of fear, but in a house so entangled with our sorrow that we found ourselves unable to rejoice there.

  It seemed to me that, given the impossibility of our being joyful, we were making love through dance with the ecstasy of a transcendent sadness.

  It was the first time I’d witnessed a dance that stokes the flames of grief. I sat across from her in silence: so sad, I was rapturous, so rapturous, I was sad, so hungry for her that I was intoxicated with her. My blood frothed within me, like grapes off the vine being pressed beneath her feet.

  I loved the eloquence of her feet, dyed with men’s blood, in every desire a bit of masked violence. Was this why I’d been afraid of her heels? Or was it because dancing in high heels didn’t befit Constantine? I said, ‘Take off your shoes, Madame. In dancing, as in worship, we don’t need shoes.’

  I’d noticed Venus standing erect, wearing her eternal smile. The fact that she was a goddess didn’t exempt her from the requirement to appear barefoot in the presence of Louis XVIII. The day she was brought to him so that he could receive her in a manner that befits a goddess of beauty, one of his minions felt it his place to demand that she humble herself and perform the rites of obedience by coming to him barefoot as in the ancient myths.

  Since her left foot was covered by a piece of fabric that hung from her waist, it’s said that restoration experts at the Louvre replaced her right foot with one that had no shoe on it.

  But Venus has been getting cheekier ever since. Never once have they been able to get her statue to bow, or her amputated hands to clap in applause for a ruler or monarch.

  She wished she could come down off her pedestal and dance to the music herself. However, a Constantinian dance isn’t done by a half-naked woman with a shawl tied around her hips. In fact, the women of Constantine have such a solemn presence, their dance is almost a rite of worship.

  O goddess of beauty, it’s far more beautiful than a striptease, too marvellous for words!

  So grieve a little, my lady of stone. (We can’t dance with somebody who’s happy.) Wear a dress of velvet embroidered with threads of gold, a dress too heavy for you to put on alone, and too beautiful for no one to see you in it. Around your waist wrap a belt whose gold links your mother has spent a lifetime collecting so that you can don it on your wedding night. Around your hennaed feet draw a pair of ankle bracelets whose jangling can be heard when you walk, and only one of which can be seen when you’re seated. Then come and ride in the gently swaying howdah of desire and learn to dance like a Constantinian.

  Hayat bent down to take off her shoes. Then she continued dancing with her feet, and her desires, bared to the rhythm of the ankle bracelets in my head.

  I was so enthralled with her that I’d forgotten about the possibility that we might be disturbing the neighbours. So when the telephone began ringing insistently in the bedroom, I expected it to be somebody calling to complain about the music.

  In keeping with Françoise’s instructions, I made no move to answer it, but just looked at my watch instead. It was a quarter after nine, past the hour when civilised folk put up with loud parties.

  The tape was about to end, and I went over to the recorder to lower the volume.

  As she sat down across from me on the sofa, she asked, ‘Aren’t you going to answer the telephone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe there’s somebody who insists on talking to you,’ she suggested cattily. ‘Letting the phone ring off the hook is something women tend to do more than men.’

  Ignoring her insinuation, I said, ‘Lovers, like worshippers, don’t interrupt their prayers to answer the telephone.’

  ‘They don’t interrupt their prayers to look at their watches, either – unless, of course, they’re expecting a telephone call!’

  I laughed at her jealousy-driven logic. Taking my watch off and setting it on a nearby table, I said, ‘On the contrary, time is a worshipper’s sole preoccupation since, like the lover, he’s afraid his hour will suddenly come upon him. Every love confronts us with the fear of death. Time is lovers’ obsession even though, like the dead, they don’t need a watch. After all, by entering into love, they’ve exited time as we know it!

  ‘So,’ I continued. ‘I’ve taken off my watch, and I challenge you not to look at yours again, either!’

  ‘Damn you,’ she retorted, laughing. ‘You always beat me without the slightest effort!’

  Drawing her towards me, I corrected, ‘But it does take an effort to counter your emotional inanity!’

  I gave her a protracted kiss, a kiss so late in coming it would have to make up for a two-year wait. Nothing but a kiss can restore a lifetime that’s slipped out of your grasp even though you’ve been wearing a watch on your wrist the entire time!

  I felt the urge to ask her whether anybody had ever kissed her on this same sofa before. However, I already knew the answer, so I replaced this question with another, more urgent one.

  ‘Hayat, has another man kissed you since me?’

  Surprised by the question, she replied with a cunning laugh, a rainy laugh whose storminess I ignored.

  In clarification, I said, ‘I don’t want a novel. It doesn’t matter to me who he was, or how, or when. All I want to know is whether it happened or not.’

  She usually didn’t tell the truth until there was something in the truth that would cause me pain, and for once I hoped she would lie.

  I was expecting an answer from her, but all she had for me was some quick-fix words, like bandages you apply in a hurry to staunch a wound.

  Thinking that another question would exonerate her, she said, ‘You once said that intelligence was a kind of “question-sharing”. So let me be intelligent and ask you: What relationship do you have with the woman whose pictures are all over this house?’

  I laughed at her question. Intelligence to her wasn’t ‘question-sharing’ but, rather, ‘question-reversal’. I’d brought her to this place to force her to confess that Khaled actually existed, and here she was reversing our roles and interrogating me about Françoise!

  I decided to thro
w the hot embers of jealousy back her way as fast as she had thrown them my way. Interestingly, she still didn’t expect me to have met Khaled, or even to know anything about him, since she thought he had left this house years before. She had, however, become acquainted with Françoise through the paintings of her that covered the walls, and she didn’t understand how this woman could have stolen the two most important men in her life.

  ‘She’s a friend I’ve been staying with for the past month.’

  Then I continued spitefully, ‘After you and I parted, I fell into more “womanholes”. But in every one of them, I stumbled upon you!’

  ‘So, then, there’s no need to ask you what you’ve done in my absence,’ she said with a laugh that concealed a seething jealousy. ‘And since you’ve stumbled upon me in every hole, I imagine you’ve spent a lot of time on the ground. Have you enjoyed yourself?’

  She was a one-woman intelligence bureau that required you to file a report on every encounter with every woman you’d made love to before her. And like all intelligence agencies, she found satisfaction in scrutinizing every last detail.

  Wanting to go on causing her pain, I ignored her curiosity. After all, she knew that any story that doesn’t divulge its details is a romance, and that passing flings whisper their secrets into the ears of beds that have no memory.

  Maybe this was why she’d never spoken of her love for either Khaled or Ziyad. Maybe it had been a love too big and beautiful to be described anywhere but in a book.

  The more certain she became of my infidelities, the more passionate she became towards me. As I reflected on the matter, I stumbled upon a remarkable irony: that a man’s loyalty to a single woman makes him all the more desirable to others, who make it their aim to bring him down and that, if he does fall, his unfaithfulness to her makes her want him all the more! I remembered Khaled who, like me, might have lost Hayat in the past precisely because he’d been too loyal to her. He’d become worthy of her jealousy only after being snatched up by Françoise, just as he’d become an artist worthy of note in Algeria only after leaving it and being snatched up by Parisian art galleries.

  So, those who say we need little lies in order to preserve the truth ought perhaps to add that we need a bit of betrayal to preserve fidelity, whether to a homeland or to a woman.