Simultaneously, Haifa began to worry about your father’s mental stability. He carried out expeditions in his sleep, he fantasized forth shadow friends, which he conversed. Once he even clad himself with your grandmother’s veils and tried to mask himself as a woman. The only person who afflicted Haifa with support during this problematic period was Rachid, the povertous neighbor farmer.
Unfortunately, Rachid was absent the night that someone invisible smuggled himself into Haifa’s kitchen, punctured the gas pipe, and lit a cigarette in anticipation of the sedating mass of the hissing. The invisible one transported the cigarette into the house and disappeared without a trace in the shadows of the night, accompanied by the petals of the roar-proliferating fire. The one who, at the last minute, saved your father from the explosion fires was the newly wakened neighbor … Rachid.
“And it was Rachid who transported you here to Jendouba?”
“Yes, I think so. But I actually do not remember,” whispered your father with that sort of dry tone that one gets at dawn when one has been speaking solitarily for several hours. “I remember that I vomited. And I remember that you welcomed me out there in the hall. In between, most of it is blurry and vague. All I have from my home is this photograph and this chestnut …”
The roosters hacked their singing voices in the neighboring yards and my eyes had begun to itch and be sanded by tiredness. Still I didn’t want to sleep. Not yet. I said:
“Strangely enough, our respective histories have certain things in common. My family, too, was erased in an explosive fire as consequence of the colonial time …”
“Mm …”
“Hey, are you listening?”
“Mm.”
But in reality your father sat as though bewitched by the photograph. I wanted neither to distract him nor to leave him. So I waited. What woke his stupor in the end was a pompous passing of gas from Omar’s mattress. We smiled our lips at each other and I said:
“Hey … let us try to catch some sleep before the dawn becomes day.”
I remember the details of the photograph very well. It was granulated and mottled gray, waveringly cut out from an Algerian magazine. The tooth of time had crimped its edges, yellowed its color, and crumbled its corners. Moussa sat, white-smiled and black-suited with visible finger rings, with a thin-mustached Challe on one side and a stiffly water-waved Delouvrier on the other. The photo was actually rather ordinary. Except for the detail that I found comical but that frustrated your father: the background contours of the anonymous lifeguard who was carefully taking inventory of the interior of his nose. His entire index finger was hidden in the black hole, and this, according to your father, threatened the excellence of the picture. “How can such a small defect have such a large consequence?” he would often interpellate, without anticipating a response. Has your father exposed this photo for you? Perhaps we can localize it and inject it into the book? Or else you can inject your memories of the photo below, in a varied font.
And you remember Dads, who many years later change the name of the armoire and start to call it the mémoire. Behind the padlocked door there are Otis Redding albums on cassette tapes, small perfume bottles with scuffed-off labels, and thousands and thousands of photo negatives. Because Dads have explained that a real pro never throws out a negative. And there’s also the old photograph from an Arabic newspaper that shows three smiling men at a restaurant. The paper is so worn that the text is almost transparent. Who’s in the picture? Dads just clear his throat, put the photograph back in the envelope, and hold up his chestnut. A little decrepit chestnut that’s not even very smooth, and you ask Dads: Why did you save a chestnut which looks a little rotten and wrinkled besides? Dads explain: This is no ordinary chestnut, this is a magic lucky chestnut. I have had it in my pocket my entire life, and once I used it to win my first marble on the streets of Jendouba, and in the military I used it as ammunition for a slingshot when I was attacking a general who was trying to rape a woman, and when I met your mother for the first time I threw it at her to get her attention. And you don’t know if Dads are joking or not but he’s laughing so you laugh and he throws the chestnut straight up in the air and has just enough time to clap three times before it lands safely in his hands.
What explication has your father delegated you for his growing up in Cherifa’s home? Perhaps he has not even told you that he was actually born in Algeria? Perhaps you are just now reading these words in a shocked emotion that Cherifa is not your real grandmother? If this is the case I want to remind you of something vital: Whatever version your father has selected, I am the one who forms the reality of truth for you. Memorize that your father always had the truth as an ideal. But sometimes the complications of truth have forced him into lies. Okey-dokey?
Dearest greetings!
Praise the publication of your debut novel! Hail my fourfold congratulations! How does your emotion taste? Like Nutella crêpes of crispiness in a sunny park? Like a kiss of surprise on the nape of one’s neck in the summery smell of lilacs? Like wind in hair when one cycles hands-free down bridges with the laying of the sun in silhouette?
I am still awaiting your reactions to my presiding document. While waiting I have read the reviews on the world net and noticed a certain … ambivalence. Despite your protests you are celebrated because you have written a book in “authentic Rinkeby Swedish.” Apparently you have brought “the immigrant’s story” to life in a language that sounds as though one has “dropped a microphone” into an immigrant area of one’s choice. Did you not write that your book was about a Swedish-born man who breaks his language with intention? What happened to your asserted exploration of “the authenticity theme”?
On Norstedts’s net page I found an extract of your novel. My appraisal is … hmm … let me be honest and hum the eighties hit by Yazz: “The only way is up,” yes? Your novel seems to me perforated with inconsistencies and besmirched by precisely those foul words that your father denounced. “Bitches”? “Fucking”? Why does the book use precisely that language which your father hated the most? No wonder that people “misunderstand.”
Another question involves your interviews. Why this expanded multitude? Did you not write that you would never allow yourself to be interviewed by any “goddamn fucking bourgeois philistine newspaper”? Shouldn’t anonymous transparency à la your idol Thomas Pynchon be your ideal? And now your beardless figure is being exposed in revolutionary magazines like Woman’s World. Have your principles already been abandoned? Admit that it went more quickly than prophetized. Who is “the betrayer” now? Is it still your father? Or are you actually cut from the same crap?
Respond me soon.
Your disquieted friend,
Kadir
PS: A terminating question. What is your principal character actually called? Halim or Hamil? Hamid or Harim? The Swedish journalists seem to be concerningly disagreed.
In the next scene we soar the reader forward to the year 1969. After his military service your father has decided to leave Jendouba.
Write:
“In Jendouba there were imams and figs, mustachioed women and spiny palms, tired oxen and cyclical desert storms. But there was nothing that my father likened as a home …”
With astonishing generosity, Cherifa had promised him finances for studying legal courses in the metropolis of Tunis. We said our farewells but promised a soon reunion.
I sought work at Emir’s cookie factory. With the security of the handshake and my smile wide in both senses, I informed Emir that an expertish cookie sorter stood ready for employment and the smick was sufficient for a salary. Ten minutes later I stood parked at the conveyor belt with a dirty white coat and a paper hat for the premiere of my work. The heat in the factory was hellish; the smoke billowed from the metal discs of the oven, which twisted and thundered and tumbled down new cookies of sporadic sorts approximately every ten seconds. All day long I picked cookies for the cartons, four of each, no more, no less. All while Emir circulated nearby and v
erified the piled cookies of multitudes. My fingertips were soon burned to hardness, like the fingertips of famous players of electric guitars.
It was at the cookie factory where, during the summer of 1970, I reestablished my relation to your father. Still today I memorize how he sullenly invaded the factory, took upon himself a paper hat, and was awarded the position on my right side.
“Abbas!” I cried. “Praise my congratulations for your return to Jendouba! What happened with your legal studies?”
“Who are you?”
Your father’s tongue had now darkened with a certain overacted metropolitan accent.
“It’s me, of course! Kadir, your antique best friend!”
“Yes, of course, now I memorize you.”
“Why so melancholy?”
“Excuse me. But my mood is far from sunshine. Political turbulence has strained Cherifa’s economy. The finances ran out and therefore I have been forced to pause my studies to stand here as an idiotic cookie picker. Trapped in this damned, miserable, ass-holey, depressed, hot-as-an-anus, abominable hell city.” (Here your father continued with even more insultations than I remember.)
“But … there’s one pleasure in any case. Right?”
“What is that?”
“That we have rediscovered our friendship?”
“Sure,” mumbled your father (but I suspect that his happiness didn’t really compare to mine).
Write me … do you carry any photographic evidence of your father’s exterior as a twenty-year-old? His outfitting was … how shall I write it … bravissimo in its excellence. All the other farmer boys at the cookie factory bore a solidarity in short-cropped hairstyles and bath slippers. Your father, home from Tunis, was different. He was the first man in Jendouba who presented a style of such long hair. His black locks curled effeminately, and (never inform him of this) when I saw him again a suspicion germinated in me that he had become infected with homosex. (Isn’t it interesting how his taste for long hair has been inheritaged by you? And that the photos he exposed of you in your pimply teenage years filled me with exactly the same suspicion?)
Your father’s cheeks had two smiling hollows, which he only demonstrated for women who sold casse-croûtes on breaks. His legs bore blue jeans of supermodern European bell-bottomed style and his favorises bore an increasing size that referred to early John Travolta or late Marvin Gaye. His tongue exposed a sudden knowledge of numerous European authors, artists, and poets. Many were impressed by your father’s newfound person. (Even me.)
• • •
Write:
“Let us present my father’s youthful exterior. Home from Tunis, his eyelashes were arches of blackness, his eyelids curtains over brown velvet wells, his corporeality that of a growing Greek god. His mentality was a cosmopolitan artist’s and his face referred at the least to a young Antonio Banderas.”
(Your father’s modesty would of course redden his cheeks and not at all agree with me about this description.)
Our shared words, however, were few in number until the autumnal day when the photographer Papanastasopoulou Chrysovalanti afflicted Jendouba. Do you know this photographer’s work? One thing is my secure certainty—his name MUST be simplified in the book.
The rumor about Papanastasopoulou’s arrival was whispered on streets and squares; his form wandered about the souk and the cultivation fields with his camera like a friendly weapon. The rumor whispered that at night one could see his photographic lightning flash the sky (like lightning) in an attempt to capture Kroumirie Mountain’s moonlit silhouette. The street boys followed his path and played charades in the hope that the clicking sound would immortalize their forms into the exhibition that he had been commissioned by the Institute of Greek Culture to implement. Certain tradition-loving tongues mumbled “Haram” and described how the Greek had tried to photograph hajjis outside the mosque, even though they had tried to hide their faces.
The next scene is a regular workday; the metal trays are turned and they tumble down packable cookies; the sweat runs our faces and the clock ticks slowly; Emir swears in the office and your father is wearing his self-boasting, ever more worn-out gigolo jeans. After lunch he turns to me:
“Do you know whose body has been invited to the Greek photographer’s studio in order to be immortalized for the future?”
I denied and your father beamed:
“Mine!”
I praised my congratulations to your father’s fortunate happiness and inquired about the possibility of escorting your father as company to the Greek’s photo session. Your father conferenced his thoughts before he submitted his positive response.
After the termination of work we companied to the terracelike apartment that the photographer had rented for two weeks from a local clothes tailor for an astronomical price. The door was opened by an oiled Greek man with the age of a forty-year-old, a tight shirt with a flower motif, and sharp cornery teeth which glittered his large smile (and then disappeared quickly when he understood that we were two boys who had arrived for a visit).
My memory smiles when I think of the curious eyes that your father and I exposed in contact with our first photo session. All those things that your father would get to know in detail later were there, but right now they seemed most like spaceshiply equipment: the flash cables, the tripods, inside-out umbrellas, strongly aimed spotlight shine. I counted the number of cameras to be three of varied style and model. In focus for the tripod stood a half sofa on a patterned rug, and as photographic props the Greek had invested fezzes, fake mustaches, gold platters, tea services, djellabas, veils, decorative hookahs, and eight or nine pairs of leather slippers.
The Greek indicated how your father should place his body on the half sofa and convinced him to decorate his head with a very humorous turban. Your father did not find the humor so humorous. While Abbas was flashed by cameras I felt the bodily emotion that most closely resembles cold back winds. Without knowing why, my arm skin was bowled up to small bumps, as though I could feel that this glimpse would have great consequences for the future. All the while the flashes blinded and the Greek pronounced “Fabulous!” and “Magnificent!” and “Perfect!”
The work-related time was expanded and the amount of photo clicks only continued and continued. Sometimes breaks were taken for communication between your father and the Greek, but because my tongue at that time only controlled Arabic and a little French, their English meaning was not understood.
The Greek wanted approximately “Relax” and “Yes yes” and your father wanted “No no.” This was repeated approximately every five minutes while I glided my fingers through black mini-photo squares, negative cards, piled fashion magazines, and glossy photo books. My surprise became great when the Greek suddenly left his camera to show your father how his ultramodern gigolo jeans ought to be unbuttoned and abducted for the sake of the picture. Your father responsed with an exploding aggression and the result was the blood gush of a Greek nose; your father’s foot visited the Greek’s stomach and your father’s mouth added a glob of spit on the Greek’s neck where he lay coughing on the ground. The tumult of turbulence, Greek hands wanted to catch your father, who, with the effectiveness of Van Damme, ducked and hopped aside, served new strikes and kicks combined with a cascade of insultations which noted the Greek’s mother’s resemblance to a prostitute and the Greek’s own resemblance to a stray dog.
A second later your father and I rushed our legs toward the stairs; the Greek did not manage to collect his body and we did not reduce our running tempo until we were on the street, three blocks away. Then I noted that my hands held one of the Greek’s photo books. Observe: This was not my intention. Write:
“Dear reader. Kadir is neither thief nor raven; in the confusion of the tumult his hands had acted solitarily and the consequence was the collection of a book by the photographer Philippe Halsman. This book was delivered by Kadir to my father as proof of his desire to share his future friendship.”
In coming scenes you
r father and I begin to restore our amicable duo. Together we became the only people in Jendouba’s early seventies who presented a rebellious discrepancy against the ideal of tradition. Our nights were passed on the roof of the student housing where we shared our lodging. With stars as our audience we smoked hashish and drank Celtia and listened to your father’s audiotapes from Tunis. In the quiet of the evening we echoed soul at the sky with Otis Redding’s stomp and James Brown’s rasp and Etta James’s blues. For the melodramatic final, the authentic French song was vocalized by not-particularly-authentic Frenchmen like Charles Aznavour, Léo Ferré, or Edith Piaf.
As musical illustration there were Halsman’s magical photos. We let ourselves be shined by eternity in his photographic excellence. There were celebrated actors; a stripe-shirted Brando, a melancholy Bogart, a smoking Hitchcock with a little dickey bird at the end of his cigar. There were assorted Negroes: a yawning Muhammad Ali, a perspiring Louis Armstrong, and a sad Sammy Davis Jr. peeking forth from behind a house corner. There were the levitating hopping photos that were Halsman’s specialty: Marc Chagall and Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Richard Nixon and Robert Oppenheimer. Everyone’s names, which to us were unknown, and everyone’s feet frozen in the freedom of the air.
But mostly we observed the women, of course. Oh, the women, so differentiated from the Jendoubian women’s exteriors! Judy Garland sitting backward on a chair with her gaze turned away … Brigitte Bardot with the bumblebee’s waist, the billowing of her breasts and baring of her shoulders … Audrey Hepburn with arms stretched up in the apple tree and her plaid skirt pleated … there was a smiling Ingrid Bergman and a street-crossing, hat-wearing Zsa Zsa Gabor with dog-filled purse. There was Dorothy Dandridge in the whiteness of underwear and the polish of fingernails presented on a sofa. There were Lucille Ball’s wide open eroticism eyes, Grace Kelly’s mirrored double form, Gina Lollobrigida in that sort of taut dress that most closely resembled a bath tricot. Our nightly dreams were hunted by Sophia Loren as a breezing farmer woman or Elizabeth Taylor with a horizon look, a necklace, and pearlish ear ornaments.
Montecore Page 3