Chaos of the Senses

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

Writing is always scary, because it makes an appointment for us with all the things we’re afraid to face or understand too deeply.

  The day I began writing in that notebook, I hadn’t intended to invest things around me with some profound philosophical significance. Yet now I’d discovered that this man’s death was bigger than me. It transcended the limits of my understanding. It transcended my logic, because it had happened outside of my notebook. Or, rather, it had happened on the margin of the page, along that fine red line that separates life from words.

  The freakish, painful thing about his death was that he’d died because of a fictitious character, a creature of ink. Never before had death been this accessible to either words or imagination!

  This man who hated bridges, who hated questions, it was his love that had brought me up against questions that had no answers.

  And Uncle Ahmad, why had he died? Why today? Why now? Why in that particular place? Why him, and not somebody else?

  I’d worked to get him to choose an address for my fate, and he’d chosen one for his own.

  I’d told him to take me to the place he loved most in this city, but death had abducted my question and escorted it to its final answer.

  Which of us was the prime suspect in a crime like this? Was it Fate, to which I’d turned over the wheel and with which I’d concluded a pact of trust, only to have it betray me? Was it I, who’d gone running after a fictitious man beyond paper’s borders only to find that I’d turned the game of writing into a game of death? Or was it that fictitious man, who’d persuaded me to put my trust in Fate, then abandoned me so as to teach me a lesson in story writing?

  It all boiled down now to two questions: Had this man’s death been a crime of Fate, or of literature? And to what extent had I been responsible for it?

  For my husband, who rushed back the following morning, things couldn’t possibly be viewed from such a simplistic perspective, not only because he wasn’t aware of the story I’d been writing and living and that had caused me to end up on that bridge but, in addition, because he was, first and foremost, a military man for whom what mattered were purely factual questions that left no room for Fate or literary creations. And this was the type of question that, like the ones I’d answered the day before, would rain down on me again, only this time in an irritable tone and with certain additions.

  ‘Why did you go there? Have you lost your mind? Why on earth would you have a government car pull up along the side of the road, get out to look at a bridge and then, as if that weren’t enough, carry on a conversation with the driver where everyone could see you?’

  ‘I just wanted to see the bridge up close, that’s all. I always see it in the painting in the reception room, the one Khaled Ben Toubal gave us on our wedding day. We happened to be passing that way, and since we were taking a tour and had the time, I thought: Why not get out and look at the bridge?’

  ‘Taking a tour, you say? Is this a tourist city? And is this a time for sightseeing? This entire country is in a state of open siege, and you’re out taking a tour? Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you talk to people? Every day they lead policemen away, slaughter them like sheep, and throw their bodies off bridges!’

  ‘But I don’t understand what Uncle Ahmad had to do with any of that. What had he done to deserve such a fate?’

  ‘He was driving a military vehicle, which made him a military official!’

  ‘But he wasn’t in uniform.’

  ‘That makes no difference. He was in the service of the state, and that was enough to make him suspect in some people’s eyes. Unless, of course, they thought he was me, in which case they would have had more than one reason to kill him.’

  He fell silent for a while. Then he asked the most important question of all: ‘Where were you sitting?’

  ‘In the front seat,’ I mumbled, ‘the way I sometimes do.’ (The fact is, I always sat in the front seat.)

  We sank together into an awkward silence as his thoughts and mine went to the same place. In the beginning my husband had objected to my sitting next to the driver. But with Uncle Ahmad in particular, I couldn’t bring myself to sit in the back seat. He’d been like a member of the family. Besides, there was something so loyal and kind-hearted about him that, especially given the fact that he had once served in the military, I would have been ashamed to demote him to the status of a mere chauffeur or porter when we were away from home.

  I respected the patriotic service he’d performed in years past. I respected his seasoned hands. I respected his hoary head. It didn’t matter to me that his towering height made him look younger than he was or the fact that sometimes he even looked as though he might be my husband. Nor did I care about the looks of shocked amazement that I got from other officers’ wives when they happened to see me sitting next to him.

  In fact, my quarrel with my husband might be summed up in this one issue. His ambition was to sit behind a chauffeur in a government car, whereas mine was simply to sit next to a man in a car, any car.

  His dreams and mine had been separated by nothing but the distance between one car seat and another. Even so, it was a distance that turned out to be greater than I’d thought. I’d never realized that our decision to sit in one seat rather than another could expose something as deep as our convictions and aspirations in life. Nor had I realized that such a decision might cause the death of an innocent man because, without changing his place, it had changed the way he was perceived.

  So here I was, confronted with another possible explanation for Uncle Ahmad’s death, and it didn’t relieve me of responsibility any more than the other one had. By sitting beside him I’d transformed him in others’ eyes from a mere driver into a military officer and, as such, into an ideal target for their bullets.

  How amazing, I thought suddenly, that Fate had done such a superb job of writing an end to this man’s life. After living his life as a simple soldier, he’d died at the age of fifty under the guise of a high-ranking officer.

  He’d died under suspicion of being what he’d always dreamed of being, and he may well have been pleased by such a suspicion because, if only at the last moment of his life, his dreams were realized. Hadn’t he died as a high-ranking officer on one of the bridges of Constantine that he’d loved so much?

  The bridge on which he died was the very place where, in all likelihood, he’d fought and risked his life repeatedly thirty years earlier. However, death hadn’t taken him then. It hadn’t wanted him as a soldier disguised in the hooded cloak of a freedom fighter, nor as a martyr in a commando operation. That would have been too ordinary.

  Rather, death chose to take him thirty years later: a soldier sitting in the seat of an Algerian officer who would die by Algerian bullets.

  Only a death like this would be truly extraordinary!

  My thoughts carried me far away, somewhere between irony and pain, as I travelled from one way station of regret to another.

  I’d killed this man, not only with my insanity, but with my kind-heartedness, with an overdone humility that had prompted me to sit next to him in order to give him an illusory sense of being my equal.

  Actually, the word ‘humble’ doesn’t quite fit me. As I understand it, ‘humility’ means believing you’re important for some reason, then relinquishing your status and making yourself other people’s equal for a period of time, yet without entirely forgetting that you’re more important than they are.

  I’ve never felt more important than anybody else. I’ve always been so unpretentious that all the simple folks and nobodies around me thought I was one of them. And there’s no hope of my changing – I’ve looked at things this way for as long as I can remember. I love these people. I learn more from them than I do from anyone else, and I’m more comfortable with them than I am with anybody else. Relationships with folks like these are easy and straightforward. In fact, they’re downright wonderful, whereas relationships with important people – or people who appear to be important, at least –
are tedious and complicated. In other words, they’re pointless!

  So, I’d had a relationship with this man, and only after he was gone did I see how beautiful it had been in its spontaneity.

  * * *

  Uncle Ahmad’s death turned our lives upside down.

  Given his certainty that he’d been the assassin’s intended target, my husband took new security measures. The first of these was to give up his government vehicle and begin using an ordinary car, which he replaced from time to time. The second was to hire a new driver who would accompany me only when necessary, and to insist that I sit in the back seat and not engage him in any conversation.

  My comings and goings were to be restricted that week to a visit to Uncle Ahmad’s house to offer condolences to his family. My husband sent them a sheep and, I believe, also went to visit them one morning.

  My only other outing of the week would be to visit my mother to see her off on the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was her third pilgrimage, or maybe her fourth. I don’t remember exactly. Nobody around here knows any more how many times anybody else has gone on the pilgrimage, since it’s become the fashion to try to outbid others when it comes to pious appearances.

  I was so stressed that week, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I made my way from a dismal household which, after losing the sole provider for a family of seven, was filled with the sound of the chanting of the Qur’an and the wailing of women clad in black, to a house where I found my mother flitting about in a white robe and white shawl and surrounded by women of all ages. After putting on all the jewellery and fashionwear they could find in their wardrobes, the women had come to see her off for the umpteenth time or, rather, to convince her for the umpteenth time that they were no less well-off than she was and that, like her, they had the wherewithal to go on the pilgrimage as many times as they wanted to.

  Some of them, of course, were officers’ wives who’d come out of consideration for me and who were sure to ply me with questions about the incident for fear that some similar ‘surprise’ might await their husbands.

  However, I hadn’t felt like talking for days, and their plush presence only exacerbated my grief.

  They were women of ennui with houses so neat they looked as though nobody lived in them, who cooked only the most complicated dishes, whose words were as insincere as they were polite, whose bedrooms were as frigid as they were luxurious, and whose exorbitant wardrobes concealed bodies that no man had ever set on fire.

  As for me, I was the woman of worry, the woman of blank pages, unmade beds, dreams that simmer over a low flame, and the chaos that engulfs the senses at the moment of creation. I was a woman whose clothes consisted of tight-fitting words and statements barely long enough to cover questions’ knees.

  I’d been a skinny little girl with big questions surrounded by women full of loose answers.

  They were still hens that turned in early, clucked a lot, and fed off men’s crumbs, pecking at the remains of the love meals they were served when they happened to be available, whereas I was still a woman of silence, a woman of sleeplessness.

  So where would I find the words I needed to speak to them of my sorrow?

  Fortunately, I was saved by Nasser’s arrival. Using him as an excuse, I left the women’s gathering and went to sit with him.

  So here he was again, at last.

  During my five years of marriage he hadn’t visited me more than once a year. Our other encounters had taken place either at our house on holidays, at family gatherings, or by mere happenstance (as on this occasion), as though we didn’t live in the same city. The last time I had seen him was on the previous Eid al-Fitr. He would usually kiss me warmly when we saw each other. We’d exchange our latest news, and sometimes we would laugh and reminisce together. But that day he’d seemed withdrawn and anxious. Seeing that he didn’t seem to want to talk, I’d respected his mood and left.

  Nasser was three years my junior, but he’d always been my soulmate. He’d always shared in my joys and sorrows, and in my rebellions, too.

  Then suddenly, when I got married, something was broken between us. What we’d had before was replaced by a kind of unspoken reproach on his part. At first I interpreted it as jealousy, since Nasser had been attached to me: I was his whole family, all his convictions, everything he had to be proud of. He hadn’t excelled in school, and when his peers were still pursuing their educations, he was becoming a businessman. He’d rejected the idea that some strange man could come along and rob him of the one thing he’d had to himself. In fact, he rarely uttered my husband’s name, as though he didn’t want to acknowledge his existence.

  I remember bringing it up with him a couple of years ago. I said, ‘I’ve been married for three years now, and it’s time you accepted it. It had to happen.’

  His response took me by surprise. ‘It had to happen?’ he said ruefully. ‘For them to plunder the country, empty out our bank accounts, commandeer our dreams, then show off their wealth when they can see how miserable we are, maybe that had to happen. But for the bastards to marry our women and trample our martyrs’ names in the dust, that didn’t have to happen. You made that happen yourself !’

  Nasser is twenty-seven years old. He’s three years younger than I am, and a cause older.

  He came into the world bearing a cause the way we bear names that we didn’t choose but that we live up to in the end. During Algeria’s war of liberation, my father had developed a fascination for the figure of Abdel Nasser, and he’d wanted to give his son a name that reflected his pan-Arab aspirations. So, without realizing it, he gave him two names of renown: his own name, as that of one of Algeria’s most celebrated martyrs, and that of pan-Arabism’s greatest leader.

  Nasser had shared with the homeland both its orphanhood and a name that was no longer his. Nasser Abd al-Mawla had been the national memory’s pampered child. However, he hadn’t necessarily been the child of a pampered nation. He’d been born with a name which, bigger than he was, had draped a cloak of distinction over his shoulders.

  And herein lay his tragedy.

  It’s no easy thing to be the son of a national symbol, and you’re bound to feel a chill inside the thick, luxurious coat of fame. What might he have worn under that coat to keep warm in times of disappointment?

  What might he have been hiding beneath the burnoose of silence?

  I kissed him fervently, speaking to him, as usual, in a Constantinian dialect infused with the vocabulary of motherhood. ‘How are you, little mama?’ I gushed. ‘I’ve missed you so much!’

  ‘I’m fine, may God give you life,’ he replied.

  He sat down across from me in his white jubba. I presumed that he’d just come from the mosque or was about to go there, since whenever I saw him he was either between one prayer and another, or between one cause and another.

  Wanting to make conversation, I said, ‘I came to say goodbye to Ma. It looks like she’ll never get tired of making the pilgrimage!’

  ‘I told her she’d get a greater reward for donating the money she would have spent on her pilgrimage to the poor in Iraq, but she didn’t believe me.’

  I didn’t say anything more, not knowing how to continue the conversation with him.

  Nasser still hadn’t recovered from the Gulf War. When Iraq first invaded Kuwait, he’d been divided and unsettled. He’d go to sleep supporting Saddam Hussein, and wake up defending the Kuwaitis.

  When worse came to worst and things moved in the direction of a military confrontation with the international alliance against Iraq, he sided once and for all with Saddam, captivated by the notion of ‘the mother of all battles’. Like so many others, he was betting on the impossible, and dreamed of some huge battle in which we’d liberate Palestine!

  But after the first missiles Iraq dropped on Israel fell in the middle of the desert, he called me one night and said, ‘So is this the Scud missile Saddam’s been threatening the world with? It’s nothing but a suppository that Israel’s stuck in its rear end!
’

  I laughed. I hadn’t expected the war to have such an impact on him.

  Those days were the only period in which Nasser came to see me regularly, maybe just because he needed somebody to vent to. After all, he knew it would be easy enough to infect me with his gloom.

  One day, for example, he dropped in and was surprised to find me sitting at my desk writing. We were in the throes of the Gulf War and the insults that came with it, and he started raking me over the coals as though I were committing some sort of crime.

  He said, ‘I don’t understand how you can go on writing as though none of this were happening! The earth is shaking under your feet and destruction awaits an entire people, and you sit here at your desk. Stop and look at the mess around you. Can’t you see there’s no point in what you’re doing?’

  ‘But this is what I do,’ I said apologetically. ‘I’m a writer!’

  ‘And because you’re a writer you should shut the hell up or go commit suicide!’ he sputtered. ‘Within the space of a few weeks we’ve gone from being a people that had a nuclear arsenal to one that’s been stripped of everything but a few knives. And you sit here writing! We’ve gone from being a people that had the largest financial reserve in the world to being pathetic tribes that go begging for crumbs in international forums. And you sit here writing! The people you’re writing for – do you think they can spare the price of a book? They’re waiting for somebody to come give them medicine and a few loaves of bread. As for the rest of them, they’re dead. Even the ones who are still alive are dead. So you should mourn them by declaring silence!’

  Little did Nasser know that, by saying these things that he may well have changed his mind about since, he would change the course of my writing and force me to keep silence for two whole years.

  During those two years I came to despise all those writers who, blithely publishing piece after piece in newspapers and magazines, shamelessly carried on with business as usual as Arabdom lay dead at their feet.

  I would turn on US television stations to find ‘live’ coverage of Arab soldiers trudging through desert sands on the verge of starvation, falling like flies in trenches of degradation and being sprayed with the shells of meaningless death without knowing why these things were happening to them.