The Homeland

by Hamida Na'na

  “In prison I used to dream of the Ile de la Cité and remember the trees in the parks of Paris. It seemed to me that I knew them all, each and every one… . ”

  Two years have passed since your return to France. You came back wishing to atone and to forget. Four years you spent in prison, under the scorching sun in that far-off land … One of those ‘Third World’ countries, as they say in your language.

  “Why did you go there in the first place, then?”

  “What is this? A newspaper interview?”

  “Frank, if only you knew how curious I am about your past. I’d read all your books by the age of eighteen. It was your books which kindled my enthusiasm and turned me into a defender of your theories of revolution.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that what I wrote back then was an adventure. And I have paid for it dearly. Please, let’s talk about something else. I don’t like talking about myself. Can’t we talk about you?”

  “You know about me already.”

  And I say no more. In fact you know almost nothing about me. You only know about Nadia the student, who showed up one day at the École Normale Supérieure to attend a lecture you gave about the revolutionary movement, whose black hair and gypsy features caught your eye, who had an affair with you. It was your notoriety which drew me to you, and I began an adventure the outcome of which I could never have foreseen.

  Paris. January, 1976. Six o’clock in the evening.

  I entered the lecture hall accompanied by a journalist friend of mine who came from one of the countries which were the scenes of your exploits. We were driven there by a desperate curiosity to see the last throes of this professional revolutionary.

  “Have you heard? He’s going to be speaking at the École Normale tonight. I wonder what he’s got to say for himself?”

  That is what my companion had said to me while he was talking about you. I had followed the wave of vituperation which you were subjected to in the media and among the political parties here and in the country that you had left. Like all decent people, my friend still believed in proletarian revolution in Europe and the rest of the world – well, we can always dream can’t we? All kinds of things had been said about you:

  “A spoiled brat who, when he found he could not keep up the struggle, leapt back into the arms of the bourgeoisie.”

  “Europe has taken back what it spat out onto the stage of World Revolution.”

  “The deaths of many of our comrades can be attributed to his confessions.”

  Such were the latest insults directed at you in the press. At the time I was a bit lost and depressed, trying to patch up my life again after the split with my husband. The man I married had chosen his own well-being and had left me with my inner homeland in flames. He had grown sick of my eternal see-saw from oblivion to memory and back again.

  I come from the East …

  I come from a land which was ablaze the last time I saw it. My comrades were facing the moment of death with no thought of ease or comfort in their heads. But I chose to flee to Europe. I gave in to the over-stuffed bellies, the sense of well-being, the inner woman. That’s what my comrades thought and that’s what I believed myself.

  Why am I doing this to myself? I didn’t choose to come here at all. Iwas forced to come because I needed to get away from them for a while. I needed a rest. But there is an open wound in my side. There are jet fighters overhead in a deep blue sky. There are men’s bodies lying on the ground. I am a prisoner of the past. It takes me back to those towns which have been thrown into the fire to burn.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that our relationship is not on an even footing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know everything about me and I know nothing about you. You can read all my books and you can understand everything I say, but you could be writing about anything for all I know. Do you still write poetry?”

  I laugh:

  “You’d better learn Arabic then, hadn’t you!”

  You stretch out on the sofa and stare up at the ceiling:

  “Do you think I could?”

  “Have a go.”

  “But I’m forty now, and I’m looking for an easy life.”

  It was on cold evenings like this that we used to meet one another. Cold evenings are the best times for the coming together of a man and a woman. Their bodies feel the need for warmth and their souls have had enough of the rain.

  And now?

  September sun has dried up all the rain. I am alone and you are far away. But my soul is awake once more.

  We spent a year of our lives together. It was a year ago that you left your house, your wife, your daughter, and moved in with me in your new lodgings over the road from the Palais de Justice. The experiment of our living together was begun.

  “Frank, I can’t stand it when I think of your wife and what she might be going through.”

  “What makes you think she is going through anything. We were together for fourteen years, you know. We’re just good friends now.”

  I leave you in the gloom of the view of the river and move through to the sitting-room. I glance around at the piles of newspapers and magazines from various parts of the world: Nouvelle Critique, Cars of America, Afrique-Asie. Languages without dates. On the wall are maps of the world, distant continents surrounded by oceans of silence. The painting of an old Spanish sailor sitting on a God-forsaken coastline looks to me like Hemingway’s old man of the sea. I once remarked to you that it reminded me of something done by our painter friend Césire.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! The only things Césire can paint are Chilean sunsets and Mexican girls with big brown eyes!”

  My insistence on it being a Césire made you so irritated that you took the picture down from the wall one day, and gave me a long lecture about the Belgian artist, Delfoe, who had painted it. That day I said to you, quite simply:

  “I don’t care who painted it. That face looks like one of Césire’s, especially with that strange look in his eyes. And the sun, like a brown disc in the sky without any light or warmth.”

  It was the first time I had seen a sun which did not actually shine, not that it matters, I suppose.

  You told me about a country where the sun rises for a long time and goes on shining as it dies. You told me:

  “I used to pray for rain there. In the dungeons of torture, with my body soaked in my own blood, I prayed for my return to France. I prayed for my body to cleave to one of the columns of Paris and for it to stay there for ever. I built the dome of the Panthéon in my mind and I mapped out the streets of Paris around it. My fondest dream was that one day I would once again be able to drink a cup of coffee on the Boulevard Saint Germain.”

  “It seems as though you don’t want to have anything to do with your past. I am surprised by that. If you haven’t already forgotten it, then you are trying hard to forget that once you were the very embodiment of the dreams and hopes of a whole generation.”

  “They made me into a legend! I couldn’t stand that.”

  I turn my head away so you can’t see the tears coming to my eyes. It is hard not to cry at moments like these, when I have to ask myself what I am doing with you.

  I tell myself that the struggle has failed. Even Frank has lost faith. I go to the shower in the hope that the hot water will wash away the memories of my comrades. But within me, behind the layers of deceit, there is a secret which cannot be erased, which never ceases to torture me, which never lets me go. A retired guerrilla fighter, looking to forget in the company of another who has already forgotten.

  I was on the way to being an ordinary woman again before I met you. I would eat, sleep and make love by night, and then I would go off to work in the morning. That way I thought I could live and forget …

  My husband used to say:

  “I don’t think you’ll ever forget. The picture of Huda al-Shafi’i follows you whe
rever you go. Why can’t you just live an ordinary life?”

  When my husband said that, I would stare down at the ground. I can still see their faces when they left me to go to their deaths.

  Frank! You mustn’t forget!

  The evening hangs over the Place Dauphine. You are standing on the corner waiting for me. Darkness creeps out of the night, plunging me into the pits of alienation and oblivion. I go towards you. I put my head on your chest and smell your skin. You stroke my hair then put your arm around me. We walk together under the glow of the streetlights which are scattered about the heart of Paris. We pass along Boulevard Saint Honoré. We stand and look into the shop windows. Then we move on, as though the life of this dyspeptic city does not really concern us.

  “I am leaving for Africa tomorrow. I have been asked to take part in a Revolution Day celebration there.”

  I had forgotten that you were a piece of their history. I had forgotten that it was you who, once upon a time, had set light to their cities. Weren’t you just like any other man, not the great revolutionary. I gave myself up to you because you were trying to forget them, just as Iwas.

  “Will you be away for a long time?”

  “A month at least. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “You must be joking. You know perfectly well that I can’t just leave my job here in Paris. I’ll wait for you.”

  “Yes, do wait for me. Even if you are not faithful, please wait.”

  I look at you with surprise:

  “Frank, I shall be myself.”

  At that moment we were crossing the Place du Châtelet on the way to your flat. At the point where the Boulevard des Orfèvres meets Saint Michel bridge, I saw an Arab friend of mine in the crowd. I ran after him without really seeing where he was going. You followed me with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. You didn’t think that Europe had turned me into a block of ice too, did you?

  The following day saw us standing outside the departure gate at Charles de Gaulle Airport. We were looking at each other and trying to seem closer than we really felt. I heard them call your flight. I don’t know why but I had this strange feeling that this would be the last time we would see each other. I stared at the faces of the other pass-engers bustling along the walk-ways. We remembered that the time for us to part had arrived. I tried to think of something to say to you, before your departure, but the words failed me. First I muttered something incomprehensible and then I managed to say: “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Frank!

  That was a month ago now Frank, and you have not called me. You have not sent me a card with a picture of the local fighters, with you in the middle.

  At this moment, I feel myself drawn towards the lights of PontNeuf and the Ile de la Cité. I see a ghost in one of the shelters by the Place Dauphine where we used to meet. For a moment I think it is your ghost. The wind blows against my heart and the papers which I have clutched to my breast.

  “Why haven’t you come back?”

  My tormented cry is heard by a night-watchman, who turns round and looks at me with desire mingled with suspicion. I quicken my pace across the paving stones of the bridge. I hear your voice calling from far away and whispering within me. It says: “Be yourself, and nothing but yourself.” In moments of weakness, the alienation of people like me, people who are away from home, makes it impossible for them to dream.

  I’ve had enough!

  Do I love you?

  I am not sure. All I can think about now is my wound. I think bitterly that I am living in a time of war, and that peace (your favourite subject) is nothing more than a lie which man has to believe in so that he can go on living. I suddenly remember that I cannot go home – that I have buried my past in the fabric of those old walls. It is a past which torments me and which will not leave me alone whatever I am doing.

  I remember, but I am trying to forget, and there is a present which exists only in my head. I am alone and I have no weapons except the wounds which inhabit my body.

  I told you about it. I told you that there is a dagger within me, that somewhere in my body is a deep and lasting rupture which could kill me at any moment, that I have this open wound which is getting deeper by the day and the deeper it gets, the more important it becomes to forget.

  The wound. The woman and the homeland banished in her head. Abu Mashour. You. The journeys of madness into the lands of silence and exile.

  The wound.

  I can feel the dagger going deeper. I can hear the blood surging through my veins, mixing with the sound of the River Seine. I feel sick. I feel that I cannot go on any longer. I want to give myself a few moments before it is all over to tell you about the wound. I go towards a café beside the shelter where we used to meet. I stroll inside and put my cloak over one of the chairs. I spread my papers out over the table. I breathe in the warm smell. A woman, who always sits at one of the corner tables, looks up at me from the book which she has been reading for months now, a detective story – maybe she reads it over and over again and puts herself in the position of the heroine, or one of the characters who plays a major role in the plot.

  Do you remember that time when you pointed her out to me and said:

  “How sad it is when we finish up reading novels in cafés. We place all the troubles and failures of this life in them, and then we look for words, for things which might bring our relationship with this world back to life.”

  I look at that woman’s face and I see you in thirty years’ time. The controversy surrounding you would have long since died down, and the papers would no longer be publishing stories about you. You will be sitting at a corner table of an old café, one of those on the Ile de la Cité, reading over everything you have written in your life and dreaming of the heroes of your stories. This thought makes me shiver, and I think of all the towns of the Arab World, the sun which does not leave us to be alone, and the wind which does not come to an accord with us.

  I once said to you:

  “Frank! It must be horrible to grow old in this country. Being alone here is unbearable.”

  You replied:

  “It’s worse when you can’t find solitude.”

  Your answer did not convince me. That day I told you about my father and mother, about their long running arguments which surely would have led to their divorce were it not for their nine children whom they had brought into this world in a few fleeting moments of love.

  I think of their faces for a few moments. I try to find a little love in my heart for them. But all that I feel is my banishment from them and from the far-off land where they are living.

  Father, where is your face in this night? Where are your hands, which you withdrew from me for my own protection? And you, my mother, I want to tell you that …

  I told you about the long nights I spent in a town overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I told you about the sea, the hours I spent gazing at the sea. I told you that it is the colour of the night, but you did not believe me.

  “Everyone knows what colour the sea is. It’s blue.”

  I feel like a mischievous child trying to make excuses when she has said something wrong:

  “But listen, the sea can be all kinds of different colours. Sometimes I thought I must be drunk, and that was before I had ever had a drink.”

  You told me the story of the drunks who thought they were supermen and could move mountains as though they were chess pieces.

  “Don’t you know anything about the history of the Gauls?”

  “No not really, and I fail to see why you have such great faith in them.”

  “Don’t be silly. Anyway, its not about faith.”

  I was trying to be completely clear about what I meant when I told you about the sea and about my mother and father. I was trying to replenish the springs of the desire to belong which had dried up inside me. I am standing on a street corner opposite the Café Fleur. My forehead pressed against the wall of an old church. In my mind’s eye you stand beside me on the stone paveme
nt. That is how Paris is now, in the last hour of the night.

  A month has passed since your departure and I am just beginning to wake up again. I began to see that my stay here is only temporary and that I will not be here for ever. I still harbour the dream that one day I shall be returning to the land which I left on that dusty morning with the sun beating down onto my brow.

  A month has passed since your departure, and I am just beginning to realize that the years I have spent here trying to forget have all been in vain. Before I first got to know you, I had built an impregnable strong-hold against my memories.

  But four years, that is my limit. Now it is time to launch myself again into the world outside. Now is the time to reassess my life. That is the survival instinct … I have to risk my life in order to save it … before I met you, Frank, I would look to men and knowledge and the echoes of history, and they would help me. Althussen, Goldman. Shar. Suddenly I realized that my actions were just another part of my fear of death, or rather my fear of life. I said to you before you departed:

  “Why don’t you just turn down this invitation to go there?”

  “I feel I’m getting old here. I need a change of scenery. I thought that I would be just an ordinary person in my own land, not some expert, just an ordinary citizen who wanted to live his life in peace.”

  “But you are what you are, Frank. Even here, you will never just be an ordinary citizen.”

  And that day you asked me: “What about you?”

  “Me? … I am a person who wants to look for her blood over there … and who has forgotten to search for it here … I have retired in the world of a man, and here I am going back again to the world to look for a more just situation.”

  “If you are so keen on democracy, tell me why it never seems to work in the Middle East?”

  I looked down at the pavement and thought about the women of the Arab world carrying the heads of their husbands and sons under their arms. How long will they bide their time before they can have their revenge?