Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  Everyone in the entire world has betrayed me. Except you two.

  And you remember that Dads even specify “you two,” and you don’t crumple the postcards into balls and you don’t swear out loud but Homan notices and he understands without questions because his dad is a betrayer too because his dad has started hitting his wife in fear of her new colleagues and in frustration about never getting to go on job interviews and now he’s working as a popcorn seller at the Röda Kvarn theater and Homan understands exactly why sometimes you can get tear eyes and back shivers just from seeing other dads with their sons in the subway or why you always get goose-bump skin when Treach in Naughty by Nature raps: I was one who never had and always mad, never knew my dad muthafuck the fag. Homan gets the rage that you can feel for a country that’s stolen your dad.

  The years passed, the tourism expanded, your father lived very isolated with his business and his Sweden memories. In 1998 we made the relation of an American tourist by the name of Alex Baldwin (that was actually his name, almost like the famous Hollywood actor). Together we partook the majority of drinks in hotel bars before Alex said that he had many relations in the erotic branch in the U.S.A. He said that pornography was always looking for new markets and the only thing not represented was the Arab world.

  “Do you want to assist me in the creation of local Arab erotic photos? It would collect you serious finances.”

  Alex paused to see how your father received his idea.

  “Or perhaps you have religious protests against—”

  “No worries,” I interrupted. “No traditional backpacks weight our backs. Right, Abbas? But you must be able to find Arab women in the U.S.A. who are ready to eroticize themselves before the camera? Why not just use props and actors and photograph women in veils in Los Angeles or Beverly Hills? Why take the roundabout way in doing it here?”

  Alex smiled my naïveté.

  “Of course we can use actors, of course we can maximize our attempts to falsify an Arab atmosphere in a studio in L.A. And even now there are many such photo series. But our customers are not the crowd of routine. Our customers are the creamy crops, very particular with a great hunger for authenticity. Our customer will detect a false fez or an American studio immediately. But this, things like this can’t be simulated!”

  Alex aimed his index finger at the cracked plastic globe of the button that controlled the hotel bar’s ceiling light.

  “Do you understand? Besides, erotica is a branch that sways in rhythm with politics. Soon after the Gulf War we noticed how the demand for Arab pornography grew among our customers. The future looks very positive.”

  “Just one thing,” said your father. “It is very important to me that our photos do not violate anyone. I only want to photograph erotically and not pornographically. I still have a broad talent that must not be abused. We must carry on the torch from photographers like Weston, Kertész, and Bill Brandt!”

  “Of course,” responsed Alex. “Who are these three?”

  “This trio made the naked photograph respectable.”

  “Trust me,” Alex calmed, and delegated us his business card.

  I must admit that Abbas collaborated with Alex for a few following years. I assisted him. Together we contracted Tunisian studentettes and prostitutes, who, in exchange for expanded finances, sexualized themselves before the camera. Initially he photographed only solitary sexy women who, clad in veils, widened their legs, pouted their lips, and tempted the camera with hints of the delight. But in connection with the expansion of the global world net I convinced your father to expand into photographing women who also sexualized themselves with men in front of the camera.

  I had an obvious motive: The conflicts between the Western world and the Arab world increased the demand for our photos exponentially. Every oil conflict, terror attack, or Gulf invasion fed the hunger for photos where veiled women were sexualized. Your father finally gave in and the public success was total. Our first success was the humoristically erotic Aladdin and His Magic Tramp. Then Lawrence of Hoe-rabia and Casablanca the XXX Version arrived. A very popular series, particularly in France, presented principals who had their one-eyes sucked to ecstasy by veiled students who wanted to levitate their grades (Principal’s Office, Fail in Veil, Parts 1–6). Another combined the soldier format with Muslim food erotica (Dessert Storm—Feeding the Soldiers).

  Our photos found a well-built success in both the U.S.A. and Europe. Almost all of our series found their specific customers and only a few made fiascos (the unfortunately named photo series Saddam and Gonorrhea, for example, only had a very limited distribution, except in an extremely selective circle of customers). Soon we created our own photo heroes who returned in repeated series. Our first female heroine was called Miss Honey Milk Sheik—the female nympho. She was a Muslim oil-well proprietress who happily let herself be bound and sexualized in triangular holes at the same time by white men she found at abandoned gas stations. The American success became rocketish and the woman we collaborated with was soon invited to Miami for solo scenes with erotic giants like Peter North. We replaced her with a male hero where we borrowed the format from the comic Rowan Atkinson. Instead of Mr. Bean we created Mr. Bedouin, a very humoristic man who constantly happens to localize himself in hilariously sexual situations. He rents a hotel room and is welcomed extra generously by the proprietress’s twin daughters (Too Cool for School). He gets lost and is welcomed extra generously in an oasis by seven sex-starved Saudi aerobics instructors (1,000 and One Tights).

  Soon we noticed that particularly popular were the photo series where we let men penetrate veiled women in an acted situation of coercion. The man was preferably as white as possible. The woman was preferably forced to sexualization, the veil preferably ripped in two, and the penetration preferably happened according to the pattern: orally, vaginally, anally, and then back to orally. The man could, for example, play a soldier who invaded an erotically steaming hamam or a business director who called in a veiled employee to his office room. The scenario did not seem central; the vital thing was that the woman’s veil would be ripped off, that her hair would be exposed, and that the white portion of the man would be planted in the woman’s face.

  I was responsible for all the practicalities while your father photographed our series with that sort of creeping indifference that had colored him since his Sweden move. His finances flowered, but still he was so far from happy. It was NOT the ambiguity of morals that disturbed him. Memorize that all women who acted in our photos chose this entirely solitarily. For every slurped spunk and penetrated anus they were compensated very generously. And what does one have for legitimacy to question a woman’s right to her own body? Your father is an enlightened Western man who would never fall into the trap of naïveté-declaring those models with whom he collaborated.

  Consequently it was not morals that darkened his humor. Instead it was his bizarre position. His whole life he had fought to get an excess of economy to delight his family. He had washed dishes and picked up dog poop and driven metros and photographed pets. And now when his economy had finally flowered, he had no family to portion it with. He regretted much in his life and soon started to be disgusted with wasting his photographic talent on unessential things.

  In the year 2000 came the magic day when your father could repay me my loan with expanded interest. Even though he was now free, his humor seemed far from sunshine. I said:

  “Praise my congratulations, now we are finally square! What will you do now?”

  “I do not know. But I am going to stop photographing erotica. I have economy enough.”

  While I prepared the final dedication of my own hotel, your father wanted to collection his memories into a summarizing biography. Just like his idols Capa and Frank, Cartier-Bresson and Avedon, your father longed to have his life and work documented. In the book, his favorite photos were to be blended with texts that explained his actions to his lost family. For frequent hours he sat in his room with the penc
il frenetically bitten to splinters between his teeth.

  “How is your biography going?” I sometimes interpellated.

  “Very badly,” responsed your father. “It is very difficult to bring order to my life. All of my memories are mixed helter-skelter and I cannot even sense how I should initiate my history.”

  “Perhaps we can help each other? Perhaps you can tell your life to me in order to cure your writer’s cramp?”

  And your father began to tell. And he told and told and told. The words filled the morning office and the afternoon casse-croûte stand and the beach walk at dusk. He talked and talked with an openheartedness that I had NEVER seen in your father either before or after. In the company of the night we transported our bodies up on my brand-new hotel roof. Just as in our youth we shared the enjoyment of hashish, we stared the starry sky’s pulsating nearness while your father distributed word cascades. Words about his Algerian home village, chestnuts, the TV star Magnus Härenstam, and the sunshine in the Stockholm archipelago were blended in bizarre disorder. His words never wanted to stop; they followed me into my bedroom despite my demonstrative yawns, they followed me through the bathroom door when I brushed my teeth, they could even be heard when I turned off the lamp for falling asleep. It was as though everything your father had not told to anyone finally must be emptied out.

  The next day at breakfast he continued to repeat about his disappeared father blah blah blah and his kind mother blah blah blah and the art of photography blah blah blah. Monstrously full of his constant, self-centered word waves, I cut him off.

  “Just one thing … How can you know that your mother was telling the truth about that Moussa? Couldn’t she have made it up?”

  Your father was frustrated:

  “That is the most idiotic thing I have ever heard, why would she …”

  “Perhaps because she … had happened to sexualize herself with someone else? Someone improper? Like for example a neighbor farmer?”

  “What do you mean … That Rachid would have … But he would probably have said when we met in …”

  Your father opened his mouth, again and again, but just like when he was little no sound was heard. He disappeared and returned a few minutes later with the photograph where he had captured Rachid’s exterior.

  “Express honestly—certainly our likeness does not bear likeness?”

  Your father held Rachid’s photo before him. And I must admit. The likeness was not large. It was identical. It was the same person holding a turkey in the photo from the souk of 1984 in Jendouba who sat across from me in the year 2000 in Tabarka. The same heavy eye bags, the same sorrowful gaze, the same silvery hair with a blank patch, each hidden by an accouterment. Your father with a beret. Your grandfather with a keffiyeh. It was as though the common experience of losing a relationship with one’s son for political motives had left exactly equivalent marks in their faces.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow,” said your father. “But then who is that Moussa?”

  “Perhaps a result of your mother’s imagination?”

  Your father nervously rubbed his forehead and found no response. Later that same night he knocked my door. As usual, I sat connected to the global world net, searching for new comedy series.

  “This is going to sound like a bad joke, Kadir. But I need to borrow a little economy. I promise that you will get it back soon. I must take my last chance to not make the same mistake as my father. I will NOT LET FEAR OF POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES SEPARATE ME FROM MY SON!!!”

  I smiled him and delegated him my economy. The next day he had disappeared. Again. His tradition true, he had made his leaving into a surprise. He had collected his photo equipment, closed his studio, and left Tunisia.

  Can you guess where your father traveled? In the autumn of his age, he journeyed out in the world to dedicate his life to the defense of the weak. Since that day he has not squandered a single frame to pets, touristic humor motifs, or veil-inspired erotica. Instead, his constantly changing aliases present photos of American war crimes in Afghanistan, African war tragedies, and negative environment effects of multinational companies. Under the name Paul Vreeker he has photographed Iranian asylum seekers who sewed up their mouths with needle and thread in protest against Holland’s strict immigrant rules. In Hong Kong he has photographed South Vietnamese child prisoners, in the U.S.A. he has photographed steel barriers that have been erected to shut out Mexican immigrants. He has also documented Chinese slave factories and Palestinian children’s scars from “rubber bullets” (constructed from pointy steel).

  Via the global world net I have followed your father’s goldish success. When he is not photographing, he is establishing close relations to political intellectuals all over the world. He drinks righteously pressed juice with Sting, he brunches with writers like Arundhati Roy, and once a month he plays traditional Scrabble with Noam Chomsky. And do you know that song by Bono and U2 called “Even Better Than the Real Thing”? Guess to whom it is dedicated! It is a song of homage to your father! (Verify the CD’s interior in the American version yourself.)

  But despite all this, he is a very solitary man. He always misses his family. He mourns his nonexistent relation to his sons. But he does not know how he should seek their excuse. On the other hand, he knows with magnificent certainty that he will NEVER let himself be trampled upon again. Never again will your father let himself be duped into integrating. Never again will you see him compromise himself in the hunt for finances. It is not worth it. And perhaps this is a discovery your father made too late in his life …

  Do you want to know how the book should be terminated? With a magnificent final scene where the now-published author (= you) reencounters his disappeared father as the result of chance.

  Let us first show how you leave your apartment on a nightly walk. You wander your sorrowful steps around Stockholm, you are tired after yet another night of fruitlessly writing, you are taxed by the gazes of passersby, you hope no one recognizes you, you regret all the words you have ever written. You miss your father. Stuff the scene with severe depression, tragic strings, dark rain clouds, stormy winds, bending rain forests, shot-down small birds. Everything is sorrowful like in Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song).”

  Then … as you cross the bridge from Gamla Stan in toward Kungsträdgården, your eyes are captured by the gigantically large chestnut tree that stretches its embrace toward heaven. You stop, you look at the tree, you squeeze the old chestnut that your father gave you without you remembering why. You are just about to wander on when you discover another person standing at exactly the same angle on the other side of the park. He has a newly transplanted virile ponytail, his shoes are Gucci, his exterior signals a very rich and successful man. You reflect each other’s eyes and you suddenly realize that it is your sunburned father!

  Without thoughts of historic conflicts you both roar your happiness, rush your steps toward each other, hug each other’s bodies, sprinkle phrases of greeting in French, Arabic, Swedish. Change the scene to euphoric happiness! Let the sun begin to wake in the east, let taxicabs make cheering honkings, let the paperboys, the homeless, and nocturnal fishermen start a gradually growing American film applause, one by one, with tear-filled cheeks, they start to applaud a son’s and a father’s rediscovered relation. Everything is jubilation like in Otis Redding’s “Dum-Dum-Dum (Happy Song).” Chestnuts rain from the tree, your eyes smile, and with exactly mirror-image mouths you both say the phrase:

  “All I have wanted in my entire life is for your pride in me to be as eternal and universal as my pride in you.”

  Then you stop short, sharing first surprised looks and then laughs of relief.

  Then let the reader see how you and your father, in the accompaniment of happiness, wander away toward Gamla Stan, you nostalgize the Dynamic Duo, you point at some light blue traces of paint, laughing. The last thing the reader hears is your father, who says:

  “My isolation from my family became too seve
re. I was depressed so heavily that I was ready to do anything to rediscover my relation to my family. I was even ready to let an antique friend correspond you e-letters that perhaps exaggerated the success of my current status. All so that you would understand the choices I have made in life.”

  The reader sees how you smile at your father and promise him your eternal friendship and forgiveness. Your silhouettes disappear in a carefully awaking haze of heat while the reader remains standing teary-eyed under the chestnut tree. The reader bends to the ground, transports a chestnut into their pocket, and then wanders toward home in time with the waking sun. The reader smiles and thinks: This was truly a brilliant book about a brilliant man!

  EPILOGUE

  FURIOUSEST GREETINGS!!!

  Your document has been delivered me. I have read it. Carefully. Every phrase. Let me try to control my burning fingers in an attempt to find at least ONE positive surprise about your text.

  Pff.

  Calm …

  Calm.

  The idea of initiating the book with my prologue and my authentic e-letter to you is not so stupid, not to say rather intelligent. My phrases become the first tones in what will become your father’s symphony. Unfortunately it will soon turn out that the symphony is sooner a total FIASCO! Let me dissect your flat-fall point by point.

  My premier disappointment was the title of the book. Why have you named the book Montecore—The Silence of the Tiger despite my opposition? Google indicates that Montecore was a white tiger that was trained by the celebrated tamer duo Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas. But where is the reference between this tiger and your father? Why not a more adequate title like My Father: The Man, the Myth, the Legend? Or My Father: The World-Internationally Celebrated Photographer? Or a Proustish name in order to butter up the critics: In Pursuit of the Dad (and the Time) That Was Lost? Even if you persist in guarding your ridiculous title, you still MUST suppress all the scenes in the book with Siegfried & Roy. Why do you let their white-draped sequin bodies escort your father from Algeria to Jendouba to Stockholm to New York? Why do they whip in the air, why do they speak German-Swedish about their notorious tiger control, and why, write me why, is poor Roy covered in blood with his stomach half scooped out in the final scene of the book? Is this in order to motivate the title of the book? Suppress ALL of this!