This time the actors weren’t on stage; they were in coffins. And the one directing this final scene of the play was outside the theatre. After all, the theatrical space was too huge for any mere human to have been able to manage it. This time, too, there was no competition among the actors, since the only actor in Death’s drama is Death itself. And since there was no place for applause, the actors wouldn’t come out to greet the audience before their final withdrawal.
Isn’t it fate that caused Kateb Yacine to die in Grenoble on 28 October 1989, and his cousin Mustapha Kateb to die just one day later in Marseilles? One newspaper even ran a headline that read, ‘Kateb + Kateb = Maktub [decreed by fate].’ Thus it was that Kateb Yacine’s body was brought to Marseilles Airport to be placed on the same aeroplane with the body of Mustapha Kateb.
Benamar Médiène talks in his book about how, being Kateb Yacine’s best friend and the person responsible for escorting his body home, he found himself witness to a bizarre series of events in the course of which the transit lounge for luggage and dead bodies in coffins at Marseilles Airport was transformed into a stage with no boundaries or curtains, a stage on which everything was real, and where everything evoked a Greek theatre.
Suddenly he saw a woman approaching with unhurried steps. Clad in a long dark coat, she held a long-stemmed rose in her black-gloved hand. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, while her upturned coat collar concealed most of her features.
The woman came up to the two coffins and read the name written on each one. Stopping next to the one in which Mustapha lay, she bent down and kissed its edge. Without removing her gloves, she passed her hand quickly over Yacine’s coffin as well. Then, after holding onto the rose for some time, she placed it on her brother’s coffin and retreated.
She was ‘Nedjma’!
Like the protagonists of novels and plays who step out of their texts and come to bid a writer farewell, ‘Nedjma’ had come. However, she hadn’t come to bid farewell to the writer who had made her a legend and a symbol of the nation, the poet who had made her face into a thousand faces, her name into the name of every woman, and her story into a classic of world literature.
Rather, she’d come to say goodbye to her brother. She was Zuleikha Kateb who, now in her seventieth year, might well have forgotten after all those years that she was ‘Nedjma’. After all, she too had gone by two names, one in real life, and the other in legend. Consequently, she hadn’t expected life itself to remind her before Yacine’s dead body that, despite her old age, she was still ‘Nedjma’. But legends never grow old!
When life starts alternately imitating theatre and literature, it can become so outlandish that it makes you look like a liar. After all, who would believe you if you told them about a woman like a black tulip, sometimes referred to as Hayat, and other times as Nedjma? She’s a woman who always shows up at the last moment, in the last scene, to stand in front of the coffin of a man who’d waited for her so long, his time had run out.
She’s a woman who, like your homeland, doesn’t bother to do anything but pass her gloved hand over your coffin or, at best, grace it with a rose. How many times do you have to die to be worthy of her warm embrace!
It made me think of Somali writer Nuruddin Farah who, justifying his reverse emigration from Europe to Africa, said, ‘I’m in desperate need of warmth. That’s what dead bodies need.’ I nearly took that woman’s coat off her so that I could use it to cover Khaled’s coffin for its long journey back to the homeland’s frosty chill. I nearly shouted at her, ‘Don’t be Nedjma! Keep him here with a kiss! Keep him here with more tears! Say you loved him! Scandalise yourself with him a bit. Is there anything more wonderful for a lover than the scandal of death?’
Place your hand on him: the hand that kills, the hand that writes. Pass it over the top of the coffin as though you were massaging his shoulder, the site of his orphanhood.
Don’t worry that he might be scandalised somehow. He isn’t afraid of anyone any more, nor is he in danger of anything. He’s simply on display to satisfy the curiosity of others. His closed eyes keep the secret, and his rib cage, where he held you as his little bird, is forlorn and cold since you left it. So cover him up.
O woman filled with dread and hesitation, fling yourself onto the wooden box that holds him the way you used to fling yourself into his lap as a little girl, back in the days when he would play with you, draw you to him with a single arm and hold you close.
Here he is, prostrate before you. Who has been yours since him? Who, besides him, has ever been yours? Kiss his coffin. Kiss it. He’s bound to know it. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that wood isn’t a good conductor of heat, since death doesn’t recognise the laws of physics.
While the living aren’t looking, fulfil those final wishes that we snatch off Death’s corpse, and give him a kiss of the sort that brings the dead back to life.
I, who’d learned her geography like the back of my own hand, knew her volcanic regions, her mercurial regions, her igneous regions. I’d discovered her glacial region as well, and the topography of her studied sadness, a sadness calculated not to exceed its proper bounds.
As I saw her in that staid sorrow of hers, I knew for a certainty that things had reached their conclusion. And, having witnessed her icy composure, I realised that if I were to die, this was the way she would relate to my corpse as well!
After we’d finished reciting the Fatiha, the three of us moved to a far corner of the lounge. I took the opportunity to hand Hayat a bag containing some small notebooks in which Zayyan had recorded scattered thoughts over the years, as well as some other papers he’d kept in an envelope and which I assumed were his in view of their masterful poetic form of expression and the difference between her handwriting and his.
The bag also contained her two books, without dedications, which he’d kept the way they were down the years apart from a few sentences he’d underlined. Nor had I forgotten, of course, Nedjma’s Twins, which she’d given him a few days earlier during her last visit to him.
In this way I’d divided Khaled’s bequest between two women, confident that one of the two would be quick to throw most of her share in the bin and keep nothing but his paintings for their monetary value, and that the other, having lost his paintings, would turn her loss into a book.
All I kept for myself was his watch, not realising that I would fall into its snare later on. How can you approach life from the point of death, as though the hands of time were turning against you, with every rotation hastening your annihilation? To justify to Nasser my having given that bag to his sister, I said, ‘These are some papers and writings Zayyan left behind, and I thought they might be of some use to Madame Hayat if she decided to write something about him.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Nasser replied wryly. ‘The press will be sure to shroud him in newsprint!’
She didn’t open the bag. She didn’t even take a peek at its contents. She must not have expected to find herself in such a peculiar situation. However, she turned to me for the first time and asked me, ‘With regard to the paintings, what have you all done with them?’
‘I think most of them have been sold,’ I said.
To which Nasser added, ‘When Hayat called to tell me he’d died, the first thing I thought of was the painting you told Murad and me you’d persuaded him to sell to you. At first I’d thought you were crazy for spending everything you owned on a painting. But later I thought about how there are certain things that are irreplaceable, and that a person shouldn’t think about how much they cost if he has the chance to acquire them.’
‘What painting are you talking about?’ she asked curiously.
Before I could say anything, Nasser replied, ‘It’s a painting Mr Zayyan made in his early days as an artist and that was really precious to him. It depicts the Sidi M’Cid Bridge.’
With an innocent-sounding politeness that placed a sham distance between us, she said to me, ‘I wish I could see it. Might you leave me a phone num
ber or an address I could write you at in case I need anything related to Zayyan’s works?’
She knew my habit of disappearing suddenly from her life, and this was apparently the only way she could think of to ask for my address in her brother’s presence.
Replying in a way that would give her to understand that I hadn’t changed, I said, ‘Sorry, I don’t have a permanent address yet.’
Then, after a brief silence, I added, ‘Besides, I sold the painting!’
‘You sold it?!’ the two of them cried in unison. ‘Why??’
‘Why?’ It wasn’t the right place to explain to them ‘why’ I’d sold it. Zayyan might have been listening in on us, and he already had one tragedy to deal with. Besides, one question was bound to lead to another. ‘Why?’ would become ‘how?’, ‘for how much?’ and ‘to whom?’.
‘For how much?’ was nothing by comparison with ‘to whom?’. Once they knew that, it would look as though I was a traitor who’d sold Algeria and the entire Arab nation to the West. It would be because of me that Granada had fallen and Jerusalem had been lost. After all, some grand plot must have been woven against the Arab nation and carried out by the gallery in cahoots with the hospital, especially in view of the fact that most of the doctors there were Jews. Indeed, was anything that had happened to us for centuries attributable to anything but a conspiracy?
They went on standing there in shock, waiting for an answer from me, but I didn’t know what to say. Sometimes you have to write a book the size of this one to answer the single-word question: ‘Why?’
And I couldn’t help but wonder: Was she really in such shock over the loss of that painting that she’d lost her voice?
I think she was about to say something when a voice came over the loudspeaker inviting all passengers travelling to Constantine on Air Algérie Flight 701 to go to Gate 43. She seemed to take this summons as an excuse to prepare to leave, so there was nothing left to say.
I thought of something Malek Haddad once said to the effect that the voices that come over the loudspeakers in train stations, bus stations and airports address ‘the gentlemen travelling’ to such and such a location, since ‘the ladies’ never go anywhere. In his day, women were forbidden to travel, so they stayed cooped up at home. Today, by contrast, they don’t accompany a loved one who’s travelling in a coffin simply because they don’t have the time.
Nasser pressed me to his breast, saying, ‘May the Lord comfort you in your loss, and protect you. Believe me: If I were allowed into Algeria, I’d go with you. But you know how it is.’
Then he stopped in front of the body for a few moments and murmured what appeared to be a prayer. I saw him wiping tears away as he rested his right hand on the coffin.
Had Nasser’s prayer awakened something inside her? Had the voice over the loudspeaker reminded her that I and the person shrouded for burial would be going away together, and that she had lost us both?
She extended her hand to me in farewell. Then, for the first time, I saw her burst into sobs in front of his lifeless body.
I feel contempt for people who, despite their misery, haven’t got the guts to risk a breathtaking happiness, a happiness that carries a steep price. It’s the kind of happiness that you have to seize when you can, since a great love is something you experience at that moment of extremity when you’re about to lose it.
It’s the moment of glory for the brilliant lovers who show up just when we’ve given up on them, who hijack a taxi to get to the airport in time to buy the last ticket on a certain flight and reserve a seat for coincidence next to someone they love.
I wanted a love that would arrive just minutes before takeoff and change my travel plans, or reserve itself a seat next to me on the plane. But, instead, she just left me with him and went on her way.
She didn’t say a word. She just cried. Meanwhile, Khaled remained shrouded in the chill between us. I’d managed to get him the price of a ticket, but I hadn’t managed to get him a coat.
As the voice over the loudspeaker repeated its call, it cemented the awareness that a farewell was in the offing, but no handkerchiefs are big enough for the big goodbyes.
I was the only one with him when they came to take him away. They picked him up and carried him to a place where he’d be a human being surrounded by luggage, while I boarded the aircraft where I’d be a piece of luggage surrounded by human beings. So, though we were both taking the same aeroplane, we parted ways there.
My last travelling companion was gone, and I trembled, not knowing how to close the door behind a man who had lived, as he had died, on a history-swept bridge.
Like salmon, those who’ve lived their lives in a foreign land look for a waterway that will take them back to where they came from, and they cross a bridge to get there. However, the bridge doesn’t exist on account of the river, if there is one. Like citizenship, it was only created because of a hoax known as ‘the homeland’.
So, friend, sleep like a painting. Your bridge isn’t a bridge any more.
In every airport, leave-taking wins the day, and lovers’ rosaries break and are scattered on the floor.
Airports call you with feverish persistence, repeatedly announcing the number of the flight that Fate itself has reserved for you at a travel agency that specialises in final journeys.
So, lonely traveller in the tightly sealed box – with no ticket in your pocket, and with all paths leading to where you’re going – why do you need all these importunate calls to remind you of your destination, and all these lit-up signs to direct you towards your gate? O man of two shores, cross a bridge and you’re there. In just two and a half hours you’ll be settled in your hole, a fate’s throw away, and you’ll have a grave as cramped as a homeland.
I sat in my seat knowing that beneath me lay the man who had been my twin, seeking refuge in his silence from the insults of the suitcases and trunks among which he’d been cast.
He wasn’t the man he used to be, nor the painter he used to be. He was nothing but a box in the cargo hold of an aircraft. But it wasn’t the box that set him apart from me. Rather, it was the fact that he’d be staying from now on in the underworld, whereas I was still alternately sitting down and pacing back and forth somewhere above him. I still enjoyed that self-important presence that comes with being alive.
I’d never been in such a strange situation. Here I was escorting a dead body I’d reserved a ticket for so that it could travel with me, or, rather, that I’d reserved myself a ticket for so that I could travel with it.
I recalled the book Nedjma’s Twins, whose author relates how, by a strange coincidence, he found himself accompanying the bodies of Kateb Yacine and Mustapha Kateb from Marseilles to Algeria, and I found some solace in the thought that he might have suffered double my pain, having had to travel not with one dead body but two.
Then my thoughts led me to newspaper reports from the 1980s of cargo aeroplanes in a certain Arab country that had been converted by necessity into air hearses. For weeks on end the planes had shuttled back and forth, bringing home the remains of thousands of Egyptians who had gone to work in said country for individual reasons, and had come home maimed in wooden boxes that had been closed tight on their modest, and now mutilated, dreams. One dark night, amid celebrations of the return of hero soldiers from their war against their neighbours, it had been officially announced that it was now open season on foreigners, who had been accused of violating women’s honour while the country’s menfolk were busy defending the honour of the Arab nation.
So this was Arab death, wholesale and retail: death in the singular, the dual and the plural, the death in the face of which you don’t know whether it’s more painful to travel aboard an aeroplane whose passengers don’t know, as they pester the stewardesses with trivial requests, that beneath them lies a dead man, or to be the pilot of an Arab aircraft that has no stewardesses and offers no services, since all its passengers are deceased!
The situation reminds me of a friend of mine wh
o hails from a certain Arab mamlakah, or kingdom. One day somebody asked him where he was from, to which he replied wryly, ‘From the mahlakah’ (“the place of peril”).’ Playing along with the pun, the other said, ‘And I’m from Umm al-Mahalik’ (“the mother of places of peril”)!’ And the two of them laughed at the joke. Each of them recognised which country the other was from, though they might not have agreed on which of them was the more imperilled!
You’re in peril, son. Doomed. And in this airport you’ll experience firsthand the extent of the damage the hit-men have done to your green passport.
Your youth is gone, and you’re under suspicion wherever you go. Your features and your dark skin give you away as you stand in a line of pushing, jostling humanity surrounded by dogs trained to sniff out people like you.
Ever since some criminals hijacked a French aircraft and murdered some of the people on board, Algerians have been under security quarantine at airports as though they were afflicted with some sort of terrible disease, and you’re forced to stand there defenceless before the mighty power of X-ray machines that reveal all, cameras that expose your secret motives, glances that pierce through to your feelings, and tactful insults worded in the form of questions.
So, do you deserve what’s happened to you?!
From lobby to corridor to airway gang-plank, you’re nothing but a number in queues of humiliation. So, now that you’ve gotten used to being abased, how are you going to demand more respect on board ‘your aeroplane’?
You haven’t been assigned a seat, so you have to race to get one. You have to push and jostle with the audacity of a VIP. A seat, any seat, is something to be fought for. People have been sent by the thousands to their graves for the sake of winning a seat in Parliament, and you want to get a seat on an aeroplane without having to suffer for it?!
The Dust of Promises Page 25