by Kamel Daoud
Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes. In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period. The others were “the strangers,” the roumis God brought here to put us to the test, but whose days were numbered anyway: One day or another, they would leave, there was no doubt about that. And so nobody responded to them, people clammed up in their presence, leaned on the wall, and waited. Your writer-murderer was wrong, my brother and his friend had no intention whatsoever of killing them, him and his pimp friend. They were just waiting for them to leave, all of them, your hero, the pimp, and the thousands and thousands of others. We all knew it, we knew it from early childhood, we didn’t even need to talk about it: We knew one day they’d eventually leave. When we happened to pass through a European neighborhood, we used to amuse ourselves by pointing at the houses and divvying them up like spoils of war. One of us would say, “This one’s mine, I touched it first!” and set off a frenzy of claims and counterclaims. We were five years old when we started doing that, can you imagine? As if our intuition was telling us what would happen when Independence came, but leaving out the weapons.
And so my brother had to be seen through your hero’s eyes in order to become an “Arab” and consequently die. On that miserable morning in the summer of 1942 — as I’ve already mentioned several times — Musa had announced that he’d be home earlier than usual. Which annoyed me a little, because it meant I’d have less time for playing in the street. Musa was wearing his blue overalls and his espadrilles. He drank his café au lait, looked at the walls the way people today browse through their phones, and then suddenly stood up, maybe after coming to a definitive decision about his schedule and the hour of his rendezvous with some friends. Every day, or almost, went the same way: a foray in the morning, followed — if there was no work at the port or in the market — by long hours of idleness. Musa slammed the door behind him, leaving my mother’s question unanswered: “Will you bring home some bread?”
One point in particular keeps nagging at me: How did my brother end up on that beach? We’ll never know. That detail’s an immeasurable mystery. You can get dizzy thinking about it and then wondering how a man could lose his name, plus his life, plus his own corpse, all in a single day. Yes, that’s it, basically. This story — I’m going to allow myself to get a little bombastic here — it’s everybody’s story these days. He was Musa to us, his family, his neighbors, but it was enough for him to venture a few meters into the French part of the city, a single glance from one of them was enough, to make him lose everything, starting with his name, which went floating off into some blind spot in the landscape. In fact, Musa didn’t do anything that day but get too close to the sun, in a way. He was supposed to meet one of his friends, a certain Larbi, who as I recall played the flute. Incidentally, he’s never been found, this Larbi guy. He vanished from the neighborhood to avoid my mother, the police, the whole story, and even the story in your book. All that’s left of him is his first name, which makes an odd echo: Larbi l’Arabe, Larbi the Arab. But he’s a false twin, he couldn’t be more anonymous … Oh, right, there’s still the prostitute! I never talk about her, because her part is truly insulting. It’s a tall tale invented by your hero. Did he have to make up such an improbable story, a working whore whose brother wanted to avenge her? I acknowledge that your hero had the talent to create a tragedy out of a newspaper clipping and bring a mad emperor to life out of a fire, but I confess, he disappointed me there. Why a whore? To insult Musa’s memory, to smear him and thus diminish the gravity of the author’s own misdeed? I’ve come to doubt that. I think rather that his twisted mind conceived some abstract characters. This country, our land, in the form of two imaginary women: the famous Marie, brought up in a greenhouse of impossible innocence, and the alleged sister of Musa alias Zujj, a distant symbol of our land, plowed by customers and passersby, reduced to dependence on an immoral, violent pimp. A whore whose honor her Arab brother feels himself duty-bound to avenge. If you had met me a few decades ago, I would have served you up the version with the prostitute slash Algerian land and the settler who abuses her with repeated rapes and violence. But I’ve gained some distance now. We never had a sister, my brother Zujj and I, period.
I can’t help wondering, over and over, what was Musa doing on that beach that day? I don’t know. Idleness is an easy explanation, and blaming it on destiny is too pompous. Maybe the proper question, after all, is the following: What was your hero doing on that beach? And not only that day but every day, going a long way back! A century, to be frank. No, believe me, I’m not one of those. It doesn’t matter that he was French and I’m Algerian, except that Musa was on the beach first, and it was your hero who came looking for him. Reread the paragraph in the book. He himself admits he was slightly lost when they came upon the two Arabs, almost by chance. What I mean to say is, your hero had a life that shouldn’t have led him to such murderous idleness. He was starting to get famous, he was young and free, he had a paying job, and he was capable of seeing things as they are. He should have moved to Paris by then, or married Marie. Why did he go to that very beach on that very day? What’s inexplicable is not only the murder but also the fellow’s life. He’s a corpse that magnificently describes the quality of the light in this country while stuck in some hereafter with no gods and no hells. Nothing but blinding routine. His life? If he hadn’t killed and written, nobody would have remembered him.
I want some more to drink. Call him.
Hey, Musa!
It was already the case some years ago, and it’s still the case today: When I add things up and go over my lists, I’m always a little surprised. In the first place, the beach doesn’t really exist, and also there’s Musa’s alleged sister, who’s either an allegory or just a pathetic last-minute excuse. And then there are the witnesses: One by one, they turn out to be pseudonyms, or not really neighbors, or memories, or people who fled after the crime. My list is down to two couples and an orphan. On one side, your Meursault and his mother; on the other, Mama and Musa; and right in the middle, unable to be the son of either, me, sitting in this bar and trying to hold your attention.
Judging from your enthusiasm, the book’s success is still undiminished, but I repeat, I think it’s an awful swindle. After Independence, the more I read of your hero’s work, the more I had the feeling I was pressing my face against the window of a big room where a party was going on that neither my mother nor I had been invited to. Everything happened without us. There’s not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward. Not a single trace, my friend! The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance. No one! There’s good reason to get a little angry, don’t you think? If only your hero had been content with bragging, without going so far as to write a book! There were thousands like him back then, but it was his talent that made his crime perfect.
Say, the ghost is absent again this evening. Two nights in a row. He must be conducting the dead, or reading books nobody understands.
VII
No, thanks, no café au lait for me! I despise that concoction.
Actually, it’s Fridays I don’t like. I often spend them on the balcony of my apartment, looking at the people, the streets, and the mosque. It’s so imposing, it’s as though it prevents you from seeing God. I’ve lived there — I’m on the fourth floor — for twenty years now, I think. The whole place is falling into ruin. When I lean over my balcony and observe young children playing, it seems like I’m watching a live broadcast of the new generations, in ever-increasing numbers, as they push the old ones toward the edge of the cliff. It’s shameful, but I feel hatred when I see them. They’re stealing something from me. I slept very badly last night.
My neighbor’s an invisible man who takes it upon himself, every weekend, to read the Koran at the top of his voice all night long. Nobody dares tell
him to stop, because it’s God who’s making him shout. I myself don’t dare, I’m marginal enough in this city as it is. His voice is nasal, plaintive, and obsequious. It sounds as if he’s alternating roles, from torturer to victim and back. I always react that way when I hear someone recite the Koran. I get the feeling it’s not a book, it’s a dispute between a heaven and a creature! As far as I’m concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God — I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don’t want to take an organized trip. I’ve loathed Fridays ever since Independence, I think. Am I a believer? I’ve dealt with the heaven question by recognizing the obvious: I realized very young that among all those who nattered on about my condition, whether angels, gods, devils, or books, I was the only one who knew the sorrow and obligation of death, work, and sickness. I alone pay the electric bill, I alone will be eaten by worms in the end. So get lost! And therefore I detest religions and submission. Who wants to run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth, has never had to know hunger or work for a living?
My father? Oh, I’ve told you everything I know about him. I learned to write his name in my school notebooks, the way you write an address. A family name and nothing else. There’s no other trace of him; I don’t even have an old jacket or a photograph. Mama always refused to describe his looks or his character, to give him a body or share the smallest memory with me. And I had no paternal uncles and no tribe to help reestablish his outline. Nothing. And so, when I was a little boy, I imagined him as rather like Musa, but bigger. Immense, gigantic, capable of fits of cosmic anger, sitting at the world’s border, doing his night watchman’s job. My theory is, it was either weariness or cowardice that caused him to leave. You know, maybe I’ve taken after him. I left my own family before I had one, for I’ve never been married. Sure, I’ve known the love of lots of women, but it never untied the heavy, suffocating knot of secrets that bound me to my mother. After all these years of bachelorhood, here’s my conclusion: I have always nurtured a mighty distrust of women. Basically, I’ve never believed them.
Mother, death, love — everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination. The truth is that women have never been able to free me from my own mother, from the smoldering anger I felt toward her, or to protect me from her eyes, which followed me everywhere for a long time. In silence. As if they were asking me why I hadn’t found Musa’s body or why I’d survived instead of him or why I’d come into the world. And then you have to consider the modesty that was obligatory in those days. Accessible women were rare, and in a village like Hadjout, you couldn’t come across a woman with her face uncovered, much less talk to one. I didn’t have any female cousin anywhere around. The only part of my life that was anything like a love story was what I had with Meriem. She’s the only woman who found the patience to love me and lead me back to life. It wasn’t quite summer yet when I met her, in 1963. Everyone was riding the wave of post-Independence enthusiasm, and I can still remember her wild hair and her passionate eyes, which come and visit me sometimes in insistent dreams. After my relationship with Meriem, I became aware that women would get themselves out of my way, they’d make, so to speak, a detour, as if they could instinctively tell I was another woman’s son and not a potential companion. My appearance didn’t help much either. I’m not talking about my body, I’m talking about what a woman divines or desires in a man. Women have an intuition about what’s unfinished and avoid men who cling to their youthful doubts too long. Meriem was the only one willing to defy my mother, even though she almost never met her and didn’t really know her except from running up against my silences and my hesitations. She and I saw each other about ten times that summer. Then we had a correspondence that lasted several months, and then she stopped writing to me and everything dissolved. Maybe because of a death or a marriage or a change of address. Who knows? There’s an old mailman in my neighborhood who wound up in prison because he’d fallen into the habit of throwing away his undelivered letters at the end of each day.
Today’s Friday. It’s the day closest to death in my calendar. People dress ridiculously, they stroll through the streets at noon still wearing pajamas, practically, shuffling around in slippers as though Friday exempts them from the demands of civility. In our country, religious faith encourages laziness in private matters and authorizes spectacular negligence every Friday. You’d think men observed God’s day by being completely scruffy and slovenly. Have you noticed that people are dressing worse and worse? Without care, without elegance, without concern for the harmony of colors or nuances. Nothing. Old men like me, fond of red turbans, vests, bow ties, or beautiful, shiny shoes, are becoming rarer and rarer. We seem to be disappearing at the same rate as the public parks. It’s the Friday prayer hour I detest the most — and always have, ever since childhood, but even more for the past several years. The imam’s voice, shouting through the loudspeakers, the rolled-up prayer rugs tucked under people’s arms, the thundering minarets, the garish architecture of the mosque, and the hypocritical haste of the devout on their way to water and bad faith, ablutions and recitations. You’ll see this spectacle everywhere on Friday, my friend — you’re not in Paris anymore. It’s almost always the same scene and has been for years. The neighbors start to stir, dragging their feet and moving slow, a long time after their pack of kids, who wake up early and swarm around, like maggots on my body. The new car gets washed and rewashed. Then there’s the sun, which runs its course uselessly on that eternal day, and the almost physical sensation of the idleness of the whole cosmos, reduced to balls that must be washed and verses that must be recited. Sometimes I get to thinking: Now that these people don’t have to go underground and the land is theirs, they don’t know where to go. Friday? It’s not a day when God rested, it’s a day when he decided to run away and never come back. I know this from the hollow sound that persists after the men’s prayer, and from their faces pressed against the window of supplication. And from their coloring, the complexion of people who respond to fear of the absurd with zeal. As for me, I don’t like anything that rises to heaven, I only like things affected by gravity. I’ll go so far as to say I abhor religions. All of them! Because they falsify the weight of the world. Sometimes I feel like busting through the wall that separates me from my neighbor, grabbing him by the throat, and yelling at him to quit reciting his sniveling prayers, accept the world, open his eyes to his own strength, his own dignity, and stop running after a father who has absconded to heaven and is never coming back. Have a look at that group passing by, over there. Notice the little girl with the veil on her head, even though she’s not old enough to know what a body is, or what desire is. What can you do with such people? Eh?
On Friday all the bars are closed and I have nothing to do. People look at me strangely, because despite my age I entreat no one and reach out to no one. It doesn’t seem right to be so close to death without feeling close to God. “Forgive them [my God], for they know not what they do.” With my whole body and all my hands, I’m clinging to this life, which I alone shall lose and which I’m the sole witness to. As for death, I got close to it years ago, and it never brought me closer to God. It only made me long to have more powerful, more voracious senses and increased the depth of my own mystery. The others are marching to death in single file, and me, I’ve come back from it, and I can report there’s nothing on the other side but an empty beach in the sun. What would I do if I had an appointment with God and on the way I met a man who needed help fixing his car? I don’t know. I’m the fellow whose vehicle broke down, not the driver looking for the way to sainthood. Of course, I keep quiet here in the city, and my neighbors don’t like my independence, though they envy it and would be happy to make me pay for it. Children fall silent when I approach them, except for some who mutter insults as I go by, but they’re always ready to run away if I turn around, the little cowards. Centuries ago, I might have been burned alive for my convictions, and for the empty red wine bottles found in
the neighborhood Dumpsters. Nowadays, people just avoid me. I feel something close to divine pity for this teeming anthill and its disorganized hopes. How can you believe God has spoken to only one man, and that one man has stopped talking forever? Sometimes I page through their book, the Book, and what I find there are strange redundancies, repetitions, lamentations, threats, and daydreams. I get the impression that I’m listening to a soliloquy spoken by some old night watchman, some assas.
Ah, Fridays!
Remember the bar ghost, the guy who has a way of circling around us, as though he’s trying to hear me better or steal my story? Well, I often wonder what he does with his Fridays. Does he go to the beach? To the movies? Does he too have a mother, or a wife he likes to kiss? Intriguing mystery, eh? Have you noticed that generally, on Fridays, the sky looks like sagging sails, the shops close, and the whole universe is deserted by noon? That’s when a kind of feeling grips my heart, the sense that I must have committed some secret fault. I went through so many awful days like that in Hadjout, and always with the sensation of being stuck forever in a deserted railroad station.
For decades I’ve stood on my balcony and observed these people: killing one another, rising again, waiting forever, hesitating over their departure schedules, shaking their heads, talking to themselves, digging in their pockets like panicked travelers, looking at the sky instead of a watch, surrendering to strange venerations, digging holes to lie in so they can meet their God sooner. I’ve observed these people so often that today I see them as a single person, a man I avoid talking to for any length of time and keep at a respectful distance. My balcony overlooks the city’s public space: broken playground slides, a few scrawny, tormented trees, some dirty staircases, some windblown plastic bags clinging to people’s legs, other balconies decorated with unidentified laundry, water cisterns, and satellite dishes. My neighbors bustle about before my eyes like familiar miniatures: a mustachioed retired military man who washes his car with infinitely drawn-out, almost masturbatory pleasure; another man, sad-eyed and very dark, who’s discreetly charged with handling the rental of chairs, tables, dishes, lightbulbs, and so forth for funerals as well as for marriages. There’s a fireman with a bad limp who regularly beats his wife and who stands on the landing of their apartment at dawn — because she always ends up throwing him out — and begs her forgiveness, all the while shouting his own mother’s name. And nothing else but that, for God’s sake! Well, I suppose you’re familiar with that sort of thing, even though you’ve lived in exile for years, or so you claim.