The Homeland

by Hamida Na'na

  That is how I came to Paris, to search for the woman who inhabits my blood. But it was all in vain. I never really left home. Every night I found myself back among them. The body of my husband was the vessel which took me back… .

  It was as though Harran was mapped out for me on the streets of Paris. It sprang out at me at every street corner. Every time I crossed the road, every time I looked over my shoulder to see whether someone was following me, to arrest me and take me to prison … Paris became Harran. Every time I saw a traffic policeman, the German prison vaults exploded inside me and a shiver convulsed my whole body.

  In the first days of my life in Paris, I remained indoors. Khalid would go off to the hospital in the morning and leave me in bed, trying to conquer the first hours of lethargy which overtook me at dawn. I spent every night staring at the ceiling. My husband would say to me:

  “Sleep. Your health can’t stand this for very much longer.”

  I would try to sleep. I would pretend to sleep. But my eyes would keep searching for those forgotten islands which I had deserted. The search would go on until morning.

  In the home I tried to play the housewife. I tried to look after Khalid’s and my little affairs. I tried to read, and to write. But I failed, and my life became like a platform at the station, waiting for a traveller who was coming to me, but how, when and why, I did not know. The lie of settling down seemed like a tragedy to me. My bags remain unpacked and closed. I go to them every time I need something. I open the case, take out what I need, and then close it again as quickly as possible, waiting for the hour to come when I decide to go back.

  Despite the noise of Paris, I could hear my comrades’ voices raised in anger, their arguments, their tone of voice, reminding me of my own voice. I try methodically to train myself to forget.

  Two months after my arrival in Europe, I wrote a long letter to Mary-Rose, asking her how she was and what was happening in Ayntab. I got a brief note back saying that they were under siege and that the battle was looming in front of them. She finished off by telling me to look after my health and to try again to have a baby. I could not understand why Mary-Rose should be going on about babies and my health. It was possible that the leadership of the Organization had made everyone believe that I had chosen family life before my life as a fighter in their ranks. They would not have mentioned the differences we had had. Certainly, Mary-Rose’s letter contained nothing that indicated she knew what had happened between us. So I wrote her a lengthy letter explaining the circumstances of my departure and my current convictions about the best way for the Organization to proceed. I did not receive a reply.

  Ayntab was on the verge of being burned to the ground and I was sitting here trying to forget. I just want to lead an ordinary life. I go shopping and I buy lots of things and I bring them back home with me. When I lay them all out in front of me, I am struck by the triviality and stupidity of what I have done so I take all the various articles and smash them or tear them up, then I throw the pieces away.

  I tried to bring the house back to life. I tried to be a wife and to forget that I had been forsaken in the field of combat of the Arab cause. I live my new life … my new reality. I forget. But the picture of Abu Mashour remains with me. I see him everywhere. Sometimes I would see Ali Carlo or Farhan. I could see their eyes in the shadows as I walked around the Gare d’Orsay where we were living. The roads and windows all seemed to be blocking my path. My comrades were inside my body and they turned me into a moveable battleground, which is more dangerous than a fixed one. Silence inhabits us, or rather, each of us is inhabited by our own silence. Khalid started to stay away from the flat for longer periods. His daily walks became longer. Was he too looking for something which he had lost? One day he came to me with his composure destroyed. He was tired and drunk. He fell into the bed and tried to penetrate the wall which I had built around me. Then, in a moment of lethal silence, he said to me:

  “Don’t you want to try to have another baby?”

  It was a question and a desire that I had completely forgotten about.

  “Can’t we talk about it some other time?”

  This made him so angry that he shouted in my face:

  “It was you that killed the baby! You and your bizarre lifestyle. That’s what killed it. And now, when at last you have the chance to settle down and live a normal, natural life, you refuse. Aren’t you sick of all the suffering and this endless journey? Your only view of Europe is of the airports stained with blood and haunted by death. You found death in Harran. You abandoned everything to go with your comrades. And now look at you. What have you achieved?”

  I could feel Khalid’s words opening the gates of sorrow and the past. I got out of bed shaken. I threw my coat over my nightgown and went out on the street to find some relief for my body and my feelings of alienation. Their memory still drove me to the furthest extent. That night I roamed the streets of Paris as if I were crazed. I passed nightwatchmen and the darkened windows of cafés. I put my back to the wall and screamed. The echo of my voice tore through the night and the walls, and it pierced the sleep of the dyspeptic gentlefolk. When I got home, I did not find my husband. There was a letter which said that he had decided to settle down in Europe, and that it was up to me to think about my own life and where it was going. Finally, he reminded me that, if I so wished, I could get a divorce from him through our embassy in Paris.

  I laughed out loud at his letter. What I found particularly funny was the laws which still govern our defeated people, with our embassies and ambassadors, the tiny details and the clichés which everyone attends to and respects. What embassy? What divorce? I don’t belong to any country. None of my three passports – or is it four, I can’t remember any more – have the name of my birth-place in them. It wasn’t even my name, the name of the woman he had married. The current one was given to me by one of the progressive Arab countries just before I travelled to Europe, to give me a better chance of avoiding the police dossiers and intelligence registers, all of which would have contained my real name. The day they issued the passport, their consul in Ayntab told me to try not to move around too much between countries. He also requested that I did not get involved in any political activity while Iwas here. I agreed because I was desperate to get as far away from Ayntab as possible to be set free, after my comrades had destroyed all the bridges which connected me with them.

  I sat in the flat alone. I thought about what I had to do now that Khalid had made up his mind to flee to the realms of his own personal peace, far away from anything which might remind him of our homeland, the homeland we had left behind at boiling point.

  Should I go back to Ayntab? Should I perhaps settle down somewhere in a corner of Europe for a while and try to forget and to get used to a life of exile. My comrades, my brothers, my only real family, have cut off all contacts with me. For some time I had not received any communication from Mary-Rose. I knew that Naif had travelled through Paris and had done nothing to get in touch with me. I had written a long letter to Issam, asking him to reconsider their position towards me, but stressing that I was not going to relinquish my view on external operations. I waited for a reply for a long time. Nothing came.

  I had to decide quickly what I was going to do with myself. Certainly, the comrades were not interested. It seemed I was alone; no one to decide my future for me; no one to tell me which road to take; no one to pay the rent for my flat and buy food; visits to the doctor alone; the petty realities of solitude in Paris.

  I ended up working in one of the Arab embassies in Paris, (there are so many of them!) I hid my past from them, as well as my present. I rented a small room in the Fourteenth Arondissement and began writing countless letters to my comrades which I never finished. Daily life. The Metro. University corridors. The ladies next door. My bed, which was full of ice and alienation. I made up my mind to forget. I used to practise methodically. In the morning I would wake up and resolve to live my day. I leave my flat and drink a cup of coffe
e at a pavement café. I go to the office and dole out entry visas to tourists who want to go and gloat over our miseries. Occasionally I will tell them about qat and date-palms and, if I see them becoming more interested, I will try to sting them with a few of the shocking facts:

  “You may not find proper toilet facilities to purge your overstuffed bellies out there … No, you can’t bring your doggie into the country… Of course, you might easily get malaria or smallpox… . ”

  At the end of the day I pack up my sentences and contradictions and I go back home. There I pick over the corpses of books, and when the silence of solitude becomes too much to bear I may phone al-Bahi, and he will come over and perform his usual burial ceremony. We hold hands and walk along the boulevards, reviling everybody we can think of: rulers, leaders, writers, the political parties. Then we call our old friend Muhammad, the Ambassador of Hate, and we ask him out to a cheap supper in the Barbès Quarter, which is quite out of keeping with the country he represents, floating on oil, its fortunes being spent on indigestion and women.

  I try to forget.

  There are times when I come face-to-face with myself. My face is a face I have forgotten. I try to get close to it. I try to know the meaning of the days which I have lived and which I have yet to live. The wound inside me bursts again as soon as it heals, and oozes sorrow. I go back to poetry. On the pages I see my own face. It is old and grey-haired. I see the homeland in al-Bahi’s voice. It turns into a glass of araq, a plate of tabouleh and the songs of Fairuz.

  The only man … the just man, Muhammad, pulled me by the hand and led me back on crazy journeys into the desert. He talked about Umar bin al-Khattab and al-Mutanabbi and Ibn Damina. After that, he told me how he was happy to live by priorities which did not affect one another. He had discovered that we are all in need of priorities like that. It doesn’t make any difference, because I live in expectation of oblivion.

  Frank!

  Tomorrow I leave Paris. I am waiting to return like the lover who waits for her beloved, the snow falling on her hair and in her eyes. The snow is here yet my body burns with the fire that tears through the silence of Ayntab. Gunfire pierces the flames, killing joy and dreams and expectation. The foundations of a savage kingdom are laid.

  Before you and I met, like two bodies pulsating with blood and warmth – how odd that corpses should have pulses! – I was just about to land on the shores of surrender, living a daily reality in which I began to discover that it is hard to live without pain but that it is worse to live without joy.

  The narcotic journey of forgetting ends up in a glass of brandy, the pages of a book, reincarnation of the soul, promised joy, the romantic poetry of Heraclitus … Nietzsche jabbering in the background … Afriend calling me to ask how I am, just to make sure that I will still be around to bear their contempt.

  Before you, I was addicted to my exile. I was addicted to oblivion. I was addicted to al-Bahi’s funerals.

  A burial accompanied by slogans in Arabic, the poetry of Labid, alShanfara, Urwa bin al-Ward. Before you, I was reassured by my friend Muhammad, the Ambassador of Hate. I would talk to him about faith and al-Sahrudi and Rabi‘a. In short, I was addicted to a life without love and I roamed around until the pavements had become weary of my feet.

  Not long ago, Muhammad said to me, while he was stroking my hair:

  “What do you want out of life?”

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I replied:

  “To be safe from the rain. To be safe from people on the street, from passing cars.”

  He put his head on my lap. He kissed me on the knee. Then he lifted his face to look at me and said:

  “I love you, Madame!”

  I tried in vain to explain to him that love is a device of possession whose whole vocabulary is based on a tissue of lies. He did not believe me and started declaiming verses from Urwa bin al-Ward, and Tarafa, and Muhiyy al-Din Ibn Arabi.

  Frank … You came to me through the groves of ice … through the nights of fire and vagrancy in the airports of the continents. You made the misery of memory explode inside me. How hard it is for those who have history and memory to bear the pain.

  That is how we meet each other … how we met.

  Do I love you? I don’t know. You are like a great wave rolling towards the shores of oblivion. You carry the foliage of the jungle with you.

  I become one with you. (I wasn’t even at one with myself!) Together we talk about Nietzsche, Gide, Marlow, Althusser and Michaux. I used to try to integrate with people other than them – the comrades whom I loved. But what kind of integration was that? My inheritance is made up of blood and olive-groves and palm trees. Have you ever seen a palm tree in the middle of the ocean?

  I tried to get your help. But it was hopeless. Many were the times that I sought the protection of your arms to try to keep the comrades out of my world. But death is death. My homeland is my homeland. And a civil war is not just an ordinary war.

  They have woken up. Maybe they are waiting.

  I am going back to Ayntab, even though I know that it is in flames … I shall join with them and we shall search together. We shall search through perils and dangers. We shall search through fire and death. We shall search for new horizons.

  All my love, Nadia.

  3

  Nadia collected her things and headed towards the door of the café. She left the drinkers and the warmth and Le Temps des Cerises, and she opened her heart to the night and the cold autumnal wind. She went round a corner in Boulevard Jourdan, passing through the Porte d’Orléans Metro station. She stopped at the corner of the street and listened to the noise of the night, a monotone at that hour. One of the vagabonds of the quarter passed her, leaning unsteadily, with a bottle of wine in his hand, spilling what was left of it over his head. She was afraid and quickened her pace. She lifted her eyes and surveyed the high windows, their curtains hanging down and the lights switched off behind them. There was hardly a soul left on the streets at that time. There was no more light to illuminate the world. With something resembling sorrow, she thought of Ayntab, which was ablaze and had not known sleep for a year. All the while the towns and cities of Europe slept without even being tired. Without that exhaustion … She turned into Rue Beaunier opposite the café where she habitually took her morning coffee. She went past Lenin’s house, number twenty-four. For a while she remained fixed to the spot outside the pink stones which must have felt the fingers of the great man. She put her forehead against the wall and did not move. She thought of how she had stood transfixed for minutes on that spot when Frank told her about Lenin’s first arrival in Paris. Nocturnal grief assailed her, as though she had only just finished burying a man whom she had loved. But Lenin had been dead a long time. He had died without coming to Ayntab and she was compelled to come here instead. She spoke another language. It was other faces she cradled in her arms. She lived other days in order to get to know him well.

  She tried to collect her voice inside her, to launch it into the human desolation which surrounded her. To repeat everything she heard with her ears to make certain that it had been said, and to be sure that she was still alive and that the blood was still coursing through her veins. But she found that her voice had escaped her, betrayed her. She remembered that her house was in the other street and she had to pick her body up and hurry to her bed to sleep, so that she could awaken tomorrow to run after the Metro of death and live through the tiring day.

  Suddenly she remembered her insect. The moment she thought of it she became fixed in front of Lenin’s house. She stretched out her hand and pressed it against the wall to stop herself from falling over. She will return home, and there she will confront the insect and listen to it and she will warm to the familiarity of its voice until the daylight comes. She might find that the wall has already collapsed. Maybe the insect will have reached the pictures of her parents, the map of her homeland. With any luck it will not have managed to get the whole of the homeland down its throat and she will
find that it has choked to death.

  Nadia felt a little ease when this thought occurred to her.

  A man passes her on the other side of the road, through the last hours of the tiring night. He thinks that she is one of those women:

  “Come with me baby. I’ll pay whatever you want. My house isn’t far from here.”

  He grabs her arm forcefully. She screams. She frees herself from his grasp and runs in the direction of Rue Henri-Regnault. She stops in front of the door of number six. She is alone and out of breath. She looks over her shoulder. The man has not followed her. The only trace he has left is the echo of his laughter piercing the shadows of the night.

  She climbed the old wooden steps hurriedly. She stopped in front of her door for a moment. She searched in the darkness of the stair well for the light. The monotonous noise of the insect reaches her from inside the room. She panics. She turns to run away. But where can she go? The town was asleep. All the café doors were closed. Frank was far away … in another continent. Muhammad would be deep in the embrace of his beautiful wife, bathing in the warmth of petrol. AlBahi had been out of her life for months, having stopped performing his funerals for her. He’d had enough and one day had said to her:

  “I’m looking for another role. I don’t want to be a grave-digger all my life. There aren’t many decent corpses around these days, anyway, and you were one of the best.”

  She appealed to her courage which had lived with her in the days of the secret, undeclared war that she fought against a thousand phantoms and masked figures. It was no good. She thought back to the sun of the East, and the threshing-floors of her town beside the sea. Piles of silvery straw, hundreds of snakes mating together in peace. It was no good. The insect was of another order entirely. Gathering up all her cowardice and anxiety, she kicked open the door and went inside. She undressed and got into bed. Tomorrow was going to be a big day. She began counting … one … two … three … no sleep … Her eyes stared at the radiator and her insides quivered with sorrow and despondency.