by Kamel Daoud
The next day they released me, without a word, at dawn, the moment soldiers often choose for making a decision. Some suspicious djounoud were muttering behind my back, as if they were still in the underground even though the whole country belonged to them. They were young peasants from the mountains, and their eyes were hard. I think the colonel had decided that I was to live in the shame of my alleged cowardice. He believed I was going to suffer for it. He was, of course, wrong. Ha, ha! I’m still laughing about it today. He deluded himself totally, totally …
By the way, do you know why Mama chose Joseph Larquais as the sacrificial victim — because you can say she chose him, yes you can, even though he came to us that night? It’s hardly plausible, I promise you. She explained it to me the day after the crime, while I was half asleep between two oblivious naps. Ah well, that roumi had to be punished, according to Mama, because he loved to go for a swim at two in the afternoon! He’d come back tanned, lighthearted, happy, and free. Once he came back to Hadjout, paid a visit to the Larquais family, and displayed that same happiness, which Mama, though busying herself with her housekeeping tasks, did not fail to find outrageous … “I’m uneducated, but I understand everything,” she declared. “I knew it!” I knew it. Knew what, exactly? God alone knows, my friend. But incredible all the same, right? He died because he loved the sea and was always too lively when he came back from it, according to Mama. A genuine madwoman! And I swear to you, this story has not been invented by the wine we’re sharing. Unless I dreamed that confession of hers sometime during the long hours of stupefied sleep that followed my crime. Maybe I did, after all. But nevertheless, I can’t believe she made up everything. She knew almost all there was to know about him. His age, his appetite for young girls’ breasts, his work in Hadjout, and his connection with the Larquais family, which didn’t seem to appreciate him very much. “The Larquaises used to say he was a selfish, rootless man who didn’t care about anybody. One day their car broke down and they were on the side of the road, waiting for help, when he came driving by, and do you know what he did? He pretended not to see them and continued on his way. As if he had an appointment with God himself. That’s what Madame Larquais told me!” I don’t remember everything, but I assure you, I could write an entire book on the subject of that roumi. “I never served him anything whatsoever. He hated me.” Poor Joseph. The poor guy fell into a well and landed in our courtyard that night. What lunacy. Such gratuitous deaths. Who could take life seriously afterward? Everything in my life seems gratuitous. Even you, with your writing pads and your notes and your books.
Go ahead, go on, I can tell you’re dying to, call him over, invite the ghost to join us. I’ve got nothing more to hide.
XII
I find love inexplicable. The sight of a couple always surprises me, their inevitable slow rhythm, their insistent groping, their indistinguishable food, their way of taking hold of each other with hands and eyes at the same time, their way of blurring at the edges. I can’t understand why one hand has to clasp another and never let it go in order to give someone else’s heart a face. How do people who love each other do it? How can they stand it? What is it that makes them forget they were born alone and will die separate? I’ve read many books, and I’ve concluded that love’s an accommodation, certainly not a mystery. It seems to me that the feelings love elicits in other people are, well, pretty much the same as the ones death elicits in me: the sensation that every life is precarious and absolute, the rapid heartbeat, the distress before an unresponsive body. Death — when I received it, when I gave it — is for me the only mystery. All the rest is nothing but rituals, habits, and dubious bonding.
To tell the truth, love is a heavenly beast that scares the hell out of me. I watch it devour people, two by two; it fascinates them with the lure of eternity, shuts them up in a sort of cocoon, lifts them up to heaven, and then drops their carcasses back to earth like peels. Have you seen what becomes of people when they split up? They’re scratches on a closed door. Would you like some more wine? Oran! We’re in wine country here, it’s the last region in Algiers where you’ll find any. The vineyards have been uprooted everywhere else. Our server doesn’t speak Oranian very well, but he’s used to me. He’s a force of nature who contents himself with grumbling when he serves you. I’ll just signal him …
Meriem. Yes. There was Meriem. It was the summer of 1963. Of course I loved her company, of course I loved to look up from the bottom of my well and see her face suddenly appear in the circle of the sky. I know that if Musa hadn’t killed me — actually, it was Musa, Mama, and your hero, those are my three murderers — I would have had a better life, at peace with my language on a little patch of land somewhere in this country, but that wasn’t my destiny. As for Meriem, she was very much alive. Can you picture us? Me holding her hand, Musa holding my other hand, Mama perched on my back, and your hero, loitering on all the beaches where we might have celebrated our wedding. An entire family, already hanging on Meriem like a cheap suit.
God, how lovely she was, with her bright smile and her short hair! It pained my heart to be only her shadow and not her reflection. You know, Musa’s death and the living grief it imposed on me altered my sense of propriety very early on. A stranger possesses nothing — and I was one. I’ve never held anything in my hands very long, I start to feel revulsion for it, I have the sensation of excessive weight. Meriem. A beautiful name, don’t you think? I wasn’t able to keep her.
Take a good look at this city. Like a sort of tumbledown, inefficient hell. It’s laid out in circles. In the center, the hard core: the Spanish façades, the Ottoman walls, the buildings the colonists put up, the administrative offices and roads that were built right after Independence; then you’ve got the oil wells and their surrounding architecture of wholesale relocation; and finally, the shantytowns. And beyond them? Purgatory, I imagine. Inhabited by the millions of people who have died in this country, for this country, because of it, against it, trying to leave it or enter it. I have a neurotic’s vision, I’ll grant you that … I sometimes think newborn infants are the dead of days gone by, come back like ghosts to reclaim their due.
Is he refusing to answer you or what? Well, you have to find the right formula, I don’t know it myself. Don’t be intimidated by his newspaper clippings and his philosopher’s forehead. Insist. You sure figured out how to go about it with me, didn’t you?
XIII
Well, I would have preferred to tell you all these things in their proper order. It would have been better for your future book, but too bad, you’ll be able to sort it out.
My schooling took place in the 1950s. A bit late, in other words. When I got admitted to school, I was already a head taller than the other kids. It was a priest — along with Monsieur Larquais — who had insisted to Mama that I should go to the school in Hadjout. I’ll never forget the first day, and can you guess why? Because of the shoes. I didn’t have any. For the first days of class, I wore a tarboosh and Arab trousers … and I was barefoot. There were two of us, two Arabs, and we were both barefoot. It still makes me laugh today. The teacher pretended not to notice, and I’ve been grateful to him ever since. He inspected our fingernails, our hands, our notebooks, and our clothes, but he avoided any reference to our feet. I was nicknamed “Sitting Bull” after an Indian chief in a movie that was showing in those days. I spent most of my time sitting around, dreaming of a country where people walked on their hands. I shone in school, I was brilliant. The French language fascinated me like a puzzle, and beyond it lay the solution to the dissonances of my world. I wanted to translate it for Mama, my world, and make it less unjust somehow.
I learned to read, not because I wanted to talk like the others but because I wanted to find a murderer, though I didn’t admit that to myself in the beginning. At first, I could barely decipher the two newspaper clippings Mama kept religiously folded in her bosom, the two reports on the murder of “the Arab.” The more I gained confidence in my reading, the more I formed the ha
bit of transforming the content of the articles and embellishing the narrative of Musa’s death. Mama would regularly hand me the clippings and say, “Here, take another look, see if they don’t say something else, something you didn’t understand before.” That went on for almost ten years, that routine. I know, because those two texts are printed on my brain. Musa appears in them in the form of two slender initials, and then the journalist doles out a few lines on the criminal and the circumstances of the murder. Just try to imagine the level of genius required to take a local news item two paragraphs long and transform it into a tragedy, describing the famous beach and the scene, grain by grain. I’ve always loathed its insulting brevity — how could so little importance be accorded to a dead man? Now what more can I tell you? Your hero entertained himself with a newspaper clipping he found in his cell, while I got a couple of clippings thrust under my nose every time Mama had a crisis.
Oh, what a joke! Do you understand now? Do you understand why I laughed the first time I read your hero’s book? There I was, expecting to find my brother’s last words between those covers, the description of his breathing, his features, his face, his answers to his murderer; instead I read only two lines about an Arab. The word “Arab” appears twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once. The first time Mama saw me printing the first letters of the alphabet in my new school notebook, she handed me the two newspaper articles and commanded me to read them. I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. “It’s your brother!” she shot at me in a tone of reproach, as if I’d failed to recognize a body in a morgue. I remained silent. What could I add to that? All of a sudden, I saw what she expected me to do: to make Musa live after dying in his place. A fine brief, don’t you think? With two paragraphs, I had to find a body, some alibis, and some accusations. It was a way of continuing Mama’s investigations, her search for Zujj, my twin. That led to a strange book — which I perhaps should have written out, as a matter of fact, if I’d had your hero’s gift — a counter-investigation. I crammed everything I could between the lines of those two brief newspaper items, I swelled their volume until I made them a cosmos. And so Mama got a complete imaginary reconstruction of the crime, including the color of the sky, the circumstances, the words exchanged between the victim and his murderer, the atmosphere in the courtroom, the policemen’s theories, the cunning of the pimp and the other witnesses, the lawyers’ pleas … Well, I can talk about it like that now, but at the time it was an incredibly disordered jumble, a kind of Thousand and One Nights of lies and infamy. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, but most often I was proud. I was giving my mother what she’d searched for in vain in the cemeteries and European neighborhoods of Algiers. That production — an imaginary book for an old woman who had no words — lasted a long time. It came in cycles, don’t get me wrong. We wouldn’t talk about it for months, but then, all of a sudden, she’d start fidgeting and mumbling, and she’d end up planting herself in front of me and brandishing the two crumpled scraps of newspaper. Sometimes I felt like a ridiculous medium communicating between Mama and a phantom book; she’d ask it questions, and I was supposed to translate its answers.
So that’s how my language learning was marked by death. Of course, I read other books, history, geography, but everything had to be related to our family history, to my brother’s murder on that blasted beach. That was a mug’s game that stopped only sometime in the last months before Independence; maybe my mother could sense Joseph’s presence — he was still alive then. Maybe she could make out his mad footsteps as he prowled around Hadjout, around his own future grave, in his beach sandals. I had exhausted all the resources of the language and my imagination. We had no other choice than to wait. For something to happen. To wait for the famous night when a terrorized Frenchman would wind up in our dark courtyard. Yes, I killed Joseph because I had to counterbalance the absurdity of our situation. What happened to those two newspaper clippings? God knows. Maybe they crumbled into dust, maybe they were folded and refolded so many times they dissolved. Or maybe Mama eventually threw them away. I would surely have been inspired enough to write out everything I made up back then, but I didn’t have the resources to do it, nor did I realize that the crime could become a book and the victim a simple ricochet of bright light. Is that my fault?
So you can guess the effect it had on us when a young woman with very short, dark brown hair knocked on our door one day and asked a question nobody had ever asked before: “Is this the family home of Musa Uld el-Assas?” It was a Monday in March 1963. The country was in full celebration mode, but a kind of fear underlay the rejoicing, for the beast fattened on seven years of war had become voracious and refused to go back underground. A muted power struggle was raging among the conquering commanders.
“Is this the family home of Musa Uld el-Assas?”
MERIEM
I often repeat that question to myself and try to recapture the cheerful tone she asked it in — very polite and friendly, like a luminous proof of innocence.
It was my mother who opened the door — I wasn’t far away, lounging in a corner of the courtyard, I couldn’t be bothered to get up — and I was surprised to hear the caller’s clear, womanly voice. No one had ever come to pay us a visit. Mama and I constituted a couple that discouraged all forms of sociability, and people avoided me in particular. I was a somber, taciturn bachelor, perceived as a coward. I hadn’t fought in the revolution, and that fact was remembered with rancor and tenacity. The strangest thing, however, was to hear Musa’s name spoken by a person other than my mother — I myself always said “him.” The two newspaper clippings referred to him only with his initials — or maybe not, I don’t remember. So anyway, I heard Mama answer “Who?” and then she listened to a long explanation I missed most of. “Better say that to my son,” Mama declared, and she invited the visitor inside. It was high time for me to get up and see who’d come calling. And so I saw her: a small thin woman with dark green eyes, a guileless, white-hot sun. Her beauty hurt my heart. I felt my chest imploding. Until that moment, I’d never looked at a woman as one of life’s possibilities. I had enough to do, what with extracting myself from Mama’s womb, burying the dead, and killing fugitives. You see what I mean? We lived as recluses, I’d grown used to it, and then all of a sudden this young woman shows up, poised to sweep all before her, everything, my life, the world Mama and I had. I felt ashamed, I got scared. “My name is Meriem,” she said. Mama had her sit on a stool, her skirt hiked up a little, I tried not to look at her legs. She explained to me in French that she was a teacher, and she was working on a book that told my brother’s story, and the book was written by his murderer.
We were there in the courtyard, Mama and I, speechless, trying to understand what it all meant. Musa was rising from the dead, in a way, stirring in his grave and obliging us once again to feel the heavy sorrow that was his legacy. Meriem sensed our confusion and repeated her explanations slowly, kindly, and also a bit cautiously. She addressed Mama and me in turn, murmuring as though we were convalescents. We remained silent, but eventually I came out of my trance and asked some questions that couldn’t hide how flustered I was.
In fact, I think I felt as though a sixth and final bullet had just pierced a new hole in my brother’s skin. And that’s how Musa my brother died three times in a row. The first time was at two o’clock in the afternoon on “the day of the beach”; the second time, when I had to dig him an empty grave; and the third and last time, when Meriem entered our lives.
I vaguely recall the scene: Mama suddenly on the alert, her eyes mad and staring, herself coming and going under the pretext of making more tea or looking for the sugar, the shadows spreading on the walls, Meriem’s discomfort. “I had the impression I’d showed up with my tale and my questions and interrupted a funeral,” she admitted to me later, after we started seeing each other — unbeknownst to Mama, naturally. Before she left, she took the famous little volume out of her bag, the same work you so sensibly keep in your briefcase. In her view, the thin
g was very simple. A celebrated author had told the story of an Arab’s death and made it into an overwhelming book — “like a sun in a box” was the way she put it, I remember that. She’d been intrigued by the mystery of the Arab’s identity, had decided to conduct her own investigation, and by sheer pugnacity had followed the trail back to us. “Months and months of knocking on doors and questioning all kinds of people, just so I could find you,” she told me with a disarming smile. And she made a date with me for the next day, at the train station.
I was in love with her from the first second, and I hated her instantly too, for having come into my world like that, tracking a dead man, upsetting my equilibrium. Good God, what a wretch I was!
XIV
So Meriem came in and explained herself, speaking in a soft, gentle tone that held us in thrall as though we were hypnotized. It had taken her months to locate the beginning of our trail in Bab-el-Oued, where practically no one remembered us. She was preparing a thesis — like you, in fact — on your hero and that strange book of his, wherein he tells a murder story with the genius of a mathematician examining a dead leaf. She’d wanted to find the Arab’s family, that’s what had led her to us after a long investigation on the other side of the mountain, in the country of the living.