A Palace in the Old Village

by Tahar Ben Jelloun

  17

  MOHAMMED WAS AWAKENED in the morning by the sobbing of the shepherd, who must have been thinking that none of us has the right to forsake our parents, to refuse their invitation. In his grief the deaf-mute saw France as a devourer of children and decided that all in all, he was fortunate never to have left the country. He was weeping alone, leaning on Mohammed’s shoulder, and as he wept, he sensed that Mohammed would soon succumb to sorrow. The shepherd looked at the house, which seemed to him like a mountain, a heap of useless stones. He had never seen so grand a dwelling, not even in the city. Marvelling that it was as big as Mohammed’s heart, he left, wiping away his tears.

  Mohammed, however, did not move, despite the appeals of his wife, who had rejoined him. He was there, sitting in the old leather armchair bought at the flea market in Marrakech, immobile, eternal, in front of an immense, empty house, surrounded by a desert landscape swept by a cunning wind, immersed in a heavy silence. Late that evening, his wife tried to convince him to come home with her to their old house, but he wouldn’t budge: Mohammed had not given up hope of seeing his children arrive, even in the dark of night. His wife draped over his shoulders a woollen blanket woven by the village women and left a loaf of bread, some olives, and a bottle of water by his chair. Mohammed said nothing; his expression was fixed, his features drawn, his mood unfathomable. His wife thought he would grow tired and come home to the old house in the end.

  The air was cool, the night mild, and there was no one on the main road. Mohammed dozed off. He dreamed he saw the black shadow holding the hand of the white shadow—the shadow of the tall and slender reader of the Koran—as the two were dancing around a tomb, and the tomb was his. He saw himself in that hole, buried while he was still breathing: he struggled, trying to free himself from the shroud, but in vain. Earth was tossed onto his face, then great stones that were bound together with concrete. It all happened very quickly. Silence; then his heart stopped.

  Mohammed started awake and drank a swallow of water. The night was vast. Dark, and deep. He would have liked to stand up to go pee, but something or someone was holding him back. He didn’t feel like calling for his wife. So he pissed in his pants. Mortified, he tried again to rise but felt nailed to that accursed armchair, which had once belonged to an old French colonial family. A few springs had pierced the leather and were hurting him. His movements were sluggish, his limbs heavy; his respiration grew slow and halting. He felt the weight of the stones and concrete on his shoulders, and remembered that it is at such a moment that God sends two angels to gather in the last words of those who are dying. While he waited for these envoys, Mohammed decided to tell them everything, get it all off his chest, and emphasise the fact that something had murdered him, that his death was unnatural, for someone had pushed him into this hole, kicking him and mocking both him and his house. But the angels did not come.

  Mohammed was crushed. Why should he be the only Muslim to be denied the visit of the angels? Unless it was a sign that all this meant nothing, that he’d been tricked, made a fool of. His rigid arms would no longer move. His head, same thing. Again he felt the hot flow of urine along his legs. He could no longer stop peeing; it was like a fountain of lukewarm water, and he wasn’t even ashamed anymore. What point was there in rising to clean himself up, shave, dab on some scent, and clothe himself in white? No one would come. No one would ever remember him.

  An abandoned man will begin to smell bad. Mohammed stank, and not just from the night’s urine: he stank everywhere, like rancid butter. His entire body weighed him down, but he finally managed to raise one arm and felt movement return, freeing him from imprisonment in that chair he’d used as a toilet. He called out for his wife, who hurried to help him rise and visit the village barber, then entrusted him to one of his brothers, who went with him to the hammam, where Mohammed washed himself clean of that horrible night, one of those nights to laugh about with the man who will dig your grave. Alone in the dim light, the two men sat without speaking, and Mohammed scrubbed hard at his skin to rid himself of that episode, which had left the taste of ashes in his mouth. When he thought he glimpsed the black shadow passing by, he sought reassurance by calling on God. If I were in France, he thought, I would be in a hospital, where doctors and specialists would confer over my case and give me medicine to help me sleep without nightmares. Perhaps they would even summon my family to my bedside. LaFrance is a wonderful country because it takes good care of its sick. Here you’re better off never setting foot in a hospital; I’m telling you for your own good! Better the hammam than the hospital.

  Mohammed left the hammam a new man. No longer impatient or anxious, he made peace with time, giving it free rein, but most of all he kept faith with his obsession. He spent the day at the mosque, renewing old ties with people who had never left the village and thought the world stopped at the end of their dirt road. They prayed like robots, babbling things only God could understand. Mohammed wasn’t surprised and reflected that he too might have wound up like them.

  That evening he took up his place in the colonial armchair, which his wife had been careful to clean, and despite the irritating springs he found it comfortable. His wife brought him food and a small transistor on which he could listen to music, but the radio station played the raucous favorites of young people, so he turned it off. He remembered the flute he’d played as a boy tending sheep, and smiled. Those days were long gone. And yet he thought he heard a flute playing somewhere on the other side of the hill. He had given his deaf-mute cousin some money to go buy a pair of binoculars from the man who’d sold him the armchair, and now he settled himself into that chair, placed the binoculars on his lap, and, eager to use them, awaited the slightest noise or movement, even though he couldn’t see a thing in the darkness. He closed his eyes and rested his hands on the binoculars, reassured by their presence.

  The moon was full, and he slept fitfully. He had a dream he’d had several times before and knew quite well: standing alone and unable to move in the middle of a vast, white space, he catches sight in the distance of shadows that advance toward him without ever reaching him. The weight of a dead donkey on his back traps him in his furious immobility, and this burden on his body, this impression of being hamstrung by an outside force, frightens him to the core. Trying to call for help, Mohammed cannot make a sound. This bad dream is called the “night donkey.” And donkeys are such gentle animals during the day! he thought. Mohammed had lost all memory of the white woman and her oasis. To reach it again, he would have had to cross a dream that opens onto another dream, but his imagination was weakening, and his dreams were turning into simplified sketches of what he was hoping and waiting for, night and day.

  At sunrise, when Mohammed tried to get to his feet for the dawn prayer, he again found himself paralysed, but he quickly ceased struggling and prayed with his eyes, as if he’d been prostrate in bed with a grave illness. I’m sick, yes, but with what? This malady has no name, striking without warning and from all sides. No one here can diagnose it. If I had the strength—and above all, if I hadn’t summoned my children here—I would willingly have gone to the Piti, the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital right next to the Austerlitz railroad station in Paris; yes, I’m sure they would know what I have, but, well … I can’t miss my children’s arrival; they must be on the way. They’re the ones coming toward me in the night donkey dream: I see them, I think I even hear them, but they never arrive. It’s strange. They must be held up at the border by one of those corrupt customs officials, who’s probably suggesting things they don’t understand. How could anyone expect my children to know that dwar ma’ana, “turn our way,” means “grease my palm”! They’re not familiar with those expressions I’ve heard so many times in my life. A small bribe or two, and they would already be here. But my children were not brought up around such petty schemes.

  When the first rays of the sun fell upon him, Mohammed realised that he smelled bad again, and thought, How much a man stinks when he’s left on his
own! An invisible wound, difficult to track down, was tormenting him. Even though he hadn’t eaten anything, the pain he felt was not around his stomach but in his liver. As he stared at the horizon, his vision became blurred. It was only when Mohammed tried to shift his position slightly that he noticed how the armchair was slowly sinking into the earth. Untouched by human hands, the old chair had rooted itself into the ground like a solidly anchored stake. Like an old boat cast up on a deserted beach, like some now useless piece of junk. Each day, the armchair was slowly sinking a little more. Its leather had greatly aged, and through new gashes, the springs now appeared as keen blades that cut him when he moved. Drops of his blood mingled with his urine and tears. Mohammed wept like a child and could not stop. At her wit’s end, his wife left for Marrakech to phone their children.

  18

  THE ODOUR MOHAMMED GAVE OFF was suffocating. Was he refusing to leave his armchair or was something—or someone—holding him back? The fat flies buzzing around him made an unnerving noise, some of them zeroing in on him as if he were a butchered carcass. Even though wasps had joined the attack, Mohammed would not budge.

  Everyone in his tribe filed past, begging him to relent, to leave that accursed armchair, wash himself, and wait for his children at home. Stubborn and determined, Mohammed would neither eat nor speak. Starving cats, lost dogs, and a jackal were circling the house, and some beggars from another village even arrived to prowl around. Black birds of prey hovered overhead. Taking fright, the villagers went away, calling upon God for mercy and deliverance. The wisest man among them lingered to recite the six verses of the last sura, “Mankind”: “Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind, so that he may deliver me from the seductions of Satan, who breathes evil into the human heart. May he defend me against the working of jinns and men.” The man returned later to recite the last verses of the ninth sura, “Repentance”: “Now has come unto you a distinguished messenger. It grieves him that you should suffer; he watches zealously over you, and to believers he is most kind and merciful. But if they turn him away, let him say, ‘Allah suffices me: there is no god but he. In him is my trust, and he is lord and master of the sublime throne.’”

  These prayers soothed Mohammed: his face grew serene as lines of pain and worry vanished one by one. It was perhaps then that he plumbed the depths of his soul, a descent that allowed him to rise and to embrace absolute peace.

  A cousin managed to gather the tribe together to pray for the soul of Mohammed, a man mistreated by exile and France: Mohammed is a lost man, a suffering man, for France has taken his children from him; France gave him work, and then took everything he had. This we say for all those who dream of seeking work abroad: over there our values are worth nothing; over there our language is worth nothing; over there our traditions are not respected. Look at poor Mohammed! He was a wise man, a good Muslim, and here he is today, abandoned, miserable, at the edge of a madness that has already begun to claim him. We will say a few prayers so that God will come to his rescue: we will begin the prayer for deliverance.

  Although he could hear the sound of the chanting, Mohammed was already far away, far from the house, the village, and the world. His wife, who had left for France to try to convince the children to visit him, kept saying to herself, We belong to God; nothing belongs to us; we are God’s creatures; we have no choice; he is the one who has chosen our path, and it is to him that we return; we are only passing through.

  After thirty days Mohammed was unrecognisable, he had grown so thin. He smelled worse and worse, and no one went near him. The armchair was practically underground, and Mohammed as well: only his head and part of his shoulders were still visible. No human hands had buried the chair, which had sunk of its own accord, slowly, day after day. Mohammed had felt this gradual descent, but done nothing. Perhaps he desired it deeply and was allowing his body to become entangled in the chair springs, letting his weight accelerate the collapse. He was anxious to be done with it, to leave without openly disobeying God, without defying him by taking his own life. As a good Muslim, he would not commit suicide. He let himself progress toward the end, making no effort to free himself and recover his taste for life. But his life was over, its meaning held hostage by the egotism or thoughtlessness of his children. His eyes were closed. He no longer wished to see the spectacle of the world. He had renounced the example of the mystic who abandons the envelope of the body to journey into the soul’s heart. He had turned out the lights, closing his eyes and his heart, delivering himself up to his soul, which he had charged with guiding him on toward the sublime silence.

  The flies came seeking their nourishment, for Mohammed had set down his life and was no longer waiting for his children but for release, the death he silently demanded from the mercy of heaven. His wife had returned with Nabile; his other children wished neither to believe her nor to leave their work to go comfort a man in the throes of delirium. Crazed with grief, Nabile began to speak clearly, urging the man he considered his father to rise and give him his hand so they could go together to the hammam. Nabile went around and around the chair, of which only the tattered arms could still be seen, waiting for Mohammed to awaken from his long slumber. Nabile washed the dying man’s head with a bucket of warm water, but Mohammed was breathing ever more slowly: he was going. Without a word, as a faint smile played about his lips, he drifted into a deep sleep. He asked nothing of the sky or the passing clouds. All became simple, limpid: whatever or whomever he was dying for had fallen down the well of his childhood; he no longer saw them, could no longer distinguish their faces, no longer heard the sound of their voices.

  By the fortieth day, the earth had swallowed up his head. Someone cried out, Gone! Mohammed has gone to God! The village has its saint! We have our saint! God has not forgotten us! The house has not been built for nothing; it will be his tomb, his marabout! God is great! God is great! An old woman sitting on a stone spoke up: Wonderful! We haven’t any water, we haven’t any wheat, we haven’t any electricity, but we have a saint! That’s just fine! I’m leaving, off to find some water and a scrap of shade. If I ever pray at a marabout, it will be a spring, a pool of water—that’s what life is! The others replied, You madwoman, we know you: we’ve seen you smoking and even drinking fermented grape juice, so you—you’ve no right to speak, and you had better bow before our saint, who has gone far away to return by the grace of God.

  Foul odours no longer seeped from the tomb Mohammed’s body had dug for weeks, and people wondered how they could pull him out of that hole to wash his body and wrap it in a shroud. When the grave diggers reached him, they were shocked: Mohammed was enveloped in a white shroud perfumed with incense that smelled like paradise. His body had been perfectly prepared for burial. The grave diggers drew back, shouldered their picks, and left.

  There was Mohammed’s tomb, before the front door of the house. The next morning people found it freshly whitewashed, and a stele had appeared, inscribed with these words:

  IN THE NAME OF GOD THE GRACIOUS AND MERCIFUL:

  HERE LIES A MAN, A FAITHFUL BELIEVER;

  HIS SUFFERING IS OVER;

  MAY THE GRACE AND MERCY OF GOD BE UPON HIM;

  WE BELONG TO GOD, AND TO GOD WE SHALL RETURN.

  No one ever found out who had constructed this monument. People came from all around to pray, and some of them left offerings at the front door to the big house. The wasps and flies went away, as did the cats and dogs. A heavenly fragrance issued from the grave, which in a few days became thickly carpeted with lush green grass and dotted with wildflowers. A stranger planted a tree he’d brought from afar. Now there was cool shade, and peace. And that was how Mohammed Thimmigrant, the man slain by his retirement, vanished from this earth.

  Paris, Tangier

  April 2005–July 2008

  Notes

  1 Islam’s most sacred site is a shrine in Mecca, al-Kaaba; Muslims everywhere face it during prayers. One of the Five Pillars of Islam is the hajj
, the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, which all Muslims should perform at least once, after which he or she uses the honorific title Hajji or Hajja. One ritual of both the hajj and the umrah (a lesser pilgrimage) is the circumambulation of the Kaaba, performed by as many as two million pilgrims at a time. The hajj ends with the celebration of Eid al-Kebir, during which animals are slaughtered to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command.

  2 The Koran contains 114 suras, traditionally arranged in order of decreasing length. Each sura is named for a word or name mentioned in one of its sections.

  3 During the European heat wave of 2003, an estimated 11,435 people died in France in August, when much of the population went on vacation. The authorities had no disaster plans for heat waves, and some officials even denied there was a health crisis until the heat had claimed hundreds of victims, many of them elderly people living alone or left behind at home. Some bodies remained unclaimed for weeks because family members were still on holiday.

  4 On October 17, 1961, a year before the end of the Algerian War (1954–62), thirty thousand Algerians demonstrated peacefully in Paris in support of the pro-independence Algerian FLN. Maurice Papon, the Paris police chief (and infamous war criminal), promised his twenty thousand officers protection from prosecution—and demonstrators were shot, clubbed, thrown into the Seine to drown, murdered in the very courtyard of the Préfecture de Police, or simply “disappeared.” Only after thirty-seven years of denial did the French government admit responsibility, in 1998, for this atrocity, which claimed an estimated two hundred victims.