The Homeland

by Hamida Na'na

  “I will sleep tonight. What do I care about this insect? What if it does eat through the wall? Let it chew up my parents’ pictures, Frank’s face, my homeland, if it wants. It can bring the whole wall down, for all I care. It wasn’t me who built it. So what if they kick me out of the flat. I’ll find another place which doesn’t have an insect. I might even leave Paris… . ”

  She turned on the light and her eyes looked around the room once again. The coldness of a single woman’s bedroom. Cold, empty, nothing there. Colder still are the rooms of women who only sleep with their husbands as a duty. The flowers are dead in the flower-pots. Her bed is like a sea whose waters have been drained away.

  Just as sleep was about to come, she remembered that she had got into bed without taking off her shoes. She turned the light on again. She saw the cigarette ends and the pipe lying in the corner. She could smell him in the room. She looked in the mirror and saw a woman’s face, a woman she had met by chance by the wall of a cemetery. The woman was weeping silently. When she asked her why, the woman replied that she was crying for the town which had died from neglect. She breathed with joy. Why didn’t she try to weep for the whole world? That had also died from neglect. The woman’s eyes became narrower with the tears and the sobs. They became narrower and narrower until they were no longer visible in her face. She touched the place they had been and she felt a shiver sweeping over her whole body. At that moment the noise of the insect faded. She turned the lights out again and tried to sleep.

  Sleep was a peevish partner which did not come to her easily. It remained aloof like her distant homeland, requiring forbearance and begging for revolution. She put her hand on her forehead. It was as cold as ice. The noise of the insect. The noise of a storm outside. The noise of windows shutting. Abu Mashour’s face appeared to her, the sad face of a traveller who had gone without saying goodbye. He came up to her. He seized her hand. Harsh looks lingered in his eyes. She heard his voice coming to her.

  “Where is your salvation, Nadia? Here you are, the leftovers of a woman … of a homeland … of a fighter.”

  She looked for excuses:

  “At night, I shiver with the cold… . ”

  He asked the same question again, turning it around.

  “Where do you think it is that you are escaping to? You go from one land to the next, one port to the next, looking for the struggle in other people. The struggle is within you. It is your responsibility to bring it out.”

  Nadia hesitated. She did not want to listen.

  “At night I sit and dream of revolution, but in the day I find myself being drawn into the rat race.”

  No reply came from Abu Mashour and in a moment he was gone. Those sad eyes had gone off again to other horizons. Nadia found herself breathing a deep sigh of relief.

  She tried in vain to sleep. The noise was still there. Now the sound of the insect was intermingled with Abu Mashour’s voice, and her mother’s distant prayers. She felt as though the life was being drained from her body.

  “That’s quite enough delirium for one night,” she said to herself and she closed her eyes.

  Nadia woke up the following day to the noise of the telephone. She was still immersed in the dreams of the previous night, the horror, the sudden lucidity, her realization that things were finished with Frank. She had lost him at the same time that she had lost her awful serenity, the moment she had ceased surrendering to life. Her search for oblivion and her desire to run away had lost their edge.

  She lifted the phone and Frank’s voice came on the line from far away. It was torn by the distance. It was torn by the heat of the continent which he was on at that moment. He said to her:

  “The sun is very hot here … your image is with me here … I’ll come back very brown… . ”

  She did not answer. He went on speaking:

  “I waited for you to come. Couldn’t you get any time off … ?”

  Again she said nothing.

  “I met some old comrades … I saw faces that I haven’t seen for a long time … It really took me back… . ”

  She wanted to shout at him that his memory was dead inside her, that the funeral was carried out the day before. But the longing enthusiasm in his voice stopped her.

  “Talk to me, Nadia. Say anything. What have you been up to? How have you been feeling?”

  Finally, she spoke:

  “I miss you, Frank, but I don’t want you back.”

  He knew that these words meant that it was the end. She could hear the disappointment in his voice and she wished she had not spoken those words.

  “Frank. After you left, I went to see a psychiatrist. He told me that I was like a wounded homeland which wanders through this world … He said to me… . ”

  “Wait for me … I’m coming back tomorrow.”

  Nadia put down the receiver and hurried to get dressed. She was late for work. She ran to the Metro station. She went past the café at the end of the street where she used to meet Frank during the cold evenings. She recalled that he had abandoned her. When she reached Place de Bercy, she looked up at the statue of Joan of Arc and she gazed upon the pure and clear face of the saint. She went into her office and started to organize her papers. She had made up her mind, that day she would end all her relationships in Paris. She would go to her boss and tell him that she was leaving. She would go back to Ayntab, back to her comrades. There she would either create her own revolution or die in the attempt. She wrote her letter of resignation and felt calmer. For the first time since she went into exile, she felt that she had finally found a port-of-call, a harbour in which she could weigh anchor. She walked into her boss’s office and without a word she handed in her resignation. He stared at her without seeming to understand what she was doing.

  She walked straight out of the building. She crossed the Place du Trocadéro stopping for a while to look at the many statues which were around her. She had been like a statue herself. She had been dead and now she was coming back to life.

  In a turning leading to Avenue Henri Martin, where most of the Arab embassies were, waiting with their characteristic air of casual, unconcerned idleness, she saw al-Bahi crossing the street. He signalled to her with his hand, and then he raised his voice and asked her whether she was still alive. She nodded and crossed the Quai de la Seine without stopping to talk to him. There she was in Place Dauphine, once again, trying to sniff its aroma, just as all prisoners do when they leave their prison cells. All Paris is prisons and cells … How can we talk about leaving then? She calmly took refuge by an old oak tree. She tenderly stroked its bark. She let the cold living wood caress her cheek. She tried to remove the dead leaves from around its base. Alone, like a stray cat, she runs, sticking closely to the trunks of trees, from one tree to the next. How was it that she had not in the past discovered how tender trees were. She hurries to the entrance of his building. She climbs the few stairs. She listens to the rippling of the Seine and the famous bitch of a film star yapping in her rooms. She thinks back to her face in one of the films, when she kisses her lover before stabbing him with a poisoned blade that she has been honing for days in the silence of her loneliness. The smell of decay pervades everything and it reminds her that she will be leaving.

  The waters of oblivion were flowing from her body and washing against the walls and the floor which had witnessed the union of their two bodies. The torn canvas of the mariner, the picture of Frank in court, now cast on the ground like a dead body, all his things … his desk … his tobacco … his clothes cupboard … the manuscript of his latest novel. He was probably going to talk about her at the end of it. At least she’d provided him with some new material.

  It is strange how things lose their significance … the things we love and the things which we think define our world.

  She takes the papers on which she has been writing all through the previous night, puts them into an envelope and seals them up. Then she throws the package onto the desk on top of the manuscript of his novel. She is
on the point of going out of the door when she stops for a while and stares at the clock. It says ten minutes to six. For as long as she had been going to the flat that clock had shown ten minutes to six. She picks it up and moves the hands to the correct time. But time was not watching her foolishness on this occasion.

  In the past, time had frozen in her veins. Now the days had come to move on. It was time to strike the camp she had pitched in the shadow of his blue eyes, on the border between his body and her consciousness, she had killed off what was left of her life.

  The flat was silent. The were no insects triggering in her head a desire to wage war or give up on life. No faces visited her in the night. In the flat there were all the signs that the owner had made peace with himself and with all the disappointments and frustrations of this world.

  She goes down the stairs to the square once again. She sees the face of the owner of the Algerian restaurant at the entrance to the building. She acknowledges him with a nod of the head and then she hurries off to the Palais de Justice. She goes up the steps to the imposing entrance of the building. She touches the wall. The building was still in its place, but anyone who wanted to find some justice there would have to search for a long, long time.

  Where to now?

  For the first time she asks herself that question. In the past she would go to work without thinking, or to Frank’s flat, or to her own flat. But now she is left wondering where to go. She discovers that she has a capacity for questioning which she had forgotten in the past.

  She stops for a minute or two in front of one of the riverside shelters and stares at the waters which are swollen by the recent rains. To her right she can see Notre Dame cathedral, impermeable to surprise, an eternal witness to the continuity of life.

  Why does Paris seem bigger now than she was accustomed to seeing it. Why does Saint Michel look at her with the face of a child. There is a strange and unfamiliar feeling to this morning.

  “I haven’t arrived.”

  She hears her raised voice in the brutal, polished depths. She smells the aroma of the city and the river and she studies the faces of the people walking past her. She thinks about calling one of her friends in the city and telling them that she is going to Ayntab. But what was the point? Al-Bahi would miss her because he had no one to bury any more. Muhammad would say she made an excellent lunatic. Ahmad would raise his glass to the journey. In a day or two they would be steeped in the bodies of their wives and girlfriends again and her bed would still be empty. She hurries off to the nearest travel agent and asks to be booked on the first flight to Ayntab. A European man, who knows his job very well, stares at her like an idiot.

  “Madame, didn’t you know that there aren’t any flights to that destination?”

  “No flights to that destination.” She repeats his words with a strange look of astonishment in her eyes. How could she have forgotten that there had been no flights to Ayntab since the war began? Where had she been? Could it be that she had forgotten the massacres which wash the streets and the blood which covers everything? Where had she been? She turned away from the face of the travel agent, who wasn’t bothered by these issues and went out onto the street. She walked around aimlessly. When she found herself opposite the Café Cluny, she crossed the street and went to sit at a corner table.

  She tried to pull herself together. It was essential that she find a way of travelling to Ayntab. Why not go to another Arab country on the borders of Ayntab and transfer from there to her destination? And if the authorities there didn’t want her passing through their country… ? If they arrested her for her past political affiliations? Well she’d deal with that when it happened. She picked up her papers from the table and went out quickly in the direction of the travel agency that she had been at an hour before. She sat in front of the ‘neutral’ travel agent and asked him to book her on a flight to the capital of the neighbouring country. It did not take long and soon he was giving her a ticket for a flight that evening. She took it out of the man’s hand and went quickly back to her building. At the entrance she came face-toface with the neighbour who lived on the first floor. She nodded her head to him in greeting and went on up the stairs. She was determined to kill the insect and rid herself of it once and for all. Why not throw it out of the window? Whatever happened, she was definitely going to kill it… .

  Returning to her comrades. She would start all over again with them. She had never felt at ease from the moment she left them. She had never stopped having to fight for her life.

  When she opened the door, she found that silence prevailed in her room. No noise. No insect. No questions on the walls. She went up to the wall-homeland and took a look behind the radiator. She could not see her insect. It had packed its bags and had left without leaving a forwarding address. Perhaps it had already left for Ayntab and would be waiting for her there.

  She looked for her genuine passport and when she found it she thumbed through the pages and then threw it into her bag. She looked around at the room. There was still a picture of Frank on the wall next to her bed and the smell of his body on her clothes and on her skin. But this time she was leaving the land which had brought them together, the land which had borne the weight of their bodies and had seen their joy. She was going to leave Paris and when she arrived at her destination she would remember it with a tinge of sadness.

  “There’s nothing for you here. Here there are dark corners while Ayntab is a burning coal upon the Mediterranean coastline. Going there is like going back to your mother’s womb. Going there is like returning to the first revolution of your dreams.”

  She closed the door and went back down the stairs. Her footsteps on the old wooden steps brought her back to the sadness of the nights of solitude when she had searched for someone like herself, for Frank. For her marriage. For her real name. She said farewell to Rue HenriRegnault, looking back at the old building where she lived. She remembered that she had forgotten to tell Anita and Miraille that she was leaving. But why should she tell them? Anita would ask tomorrow and Miraille would miss someone shutting the door at four o’clock in the morning. They would gossip about her for a few minutes, and then everything would turn to dust.

  To the airport, by herself.

  “No-one to see you off. Not to worry – your comrades are all waiting for you there.”

  4

  His plane landed at Orly Airport. The plane which had travelled for many miles. The plane which had come from a hot country laughing in the face of the cold air of Paris.

  Here you are, coming back to Europe, Frank. In your head you carry those images which have never really left you, although they have become distant and it is no longer possible to re-organize them in your imagination. They said to you as they were waving goodbye at the airport: “This country is your country. We will never forget what you have done for us and the days that you spent in prison on our behalf.”

  They had of course forgotten how different you were and how much you had changed. Now you are back in good old Paris. No more politics. You can shelter behind that Frenchness of yours, that great Frenchness which once drove you to the other side of the globe so keen were you to escape it. They waved you off and you waved back. But her voice had been with you all the time. It haunted you during the final days of your stay, her voice and her tired face which had seen so many unknown cares. Her eyes were traced on the water, changing their colour as they went back to the womb of bygone days. She approaches in a small ship carrying men who had come to change the face of history.

  In the last days her eyes followed you everywhere. You saw her at the door of the guest house which they prepared for you. You saw her crossing the streets leading to the palace of the former dictator. You saw her in the square that had witnessed the revolution you helped to create. It vexed you that she was not by your side. When you called her to say you loved her, you heard the ice in her voice and your blood shivered as you tried to get a little warmth from the tropical sun.

  “I miss yo
u, Frank, but I do not want you back.”

  When a woman misses a man, it is because she has got used to having him around. When she yearns for him, it is because she is in love. She called out to him, that woman coming out of the East. The migratory bird did not come to roost in Paris by accident, nor was it attracted by the ancient stones of the Tuileries Palace. You spent much time wondering, without mentioning it, what a woman like her was doing here. She had talked a lot. She would talk to you about her mother and father, about the sea, about her husband, but she always kept a secret inside her which she was never able to divulge. She will be there at the barrier in the arrivals lounge, no doubt, waiting for you. No doubt she will be happy to have you back. No doubt she will bury herself in your embrace and say to you:

  “I have missed you… . ”

  That would be enough. After that, the passing of the days will be sufficient to guarantee that things change.

  He crossed the tarmac. There was a biting wind and he started to button up his coat. He put his bag down and fastened his woollen cardigan. Then he picked up his bag again and walked into the terminal building. He approached the airport security men and held out his passport. The official looked at the passport and let him through. He studied the faces of those waiting outside. He searched for her head among all the other heads, for the long night of her hair. For the fleeting daylight in her eyes. But there was no trace of her. She must have been held up a bit, or maybe she had got his arrival time wrong. He had sent a telegram two days beforehand and it should have arrived by now. He went forward a little, still looking for her face among the crowds of passengers and the people meeting them. But Nadia was not there. She had not arrived. She had not arrived yet. He felt a lump in his throat and a thought flashed through his mind: Had she decided not to meet him? But why would she do that? Sure, she had been a bit strange on the phone, but that did not mean she had decided to split up with him. He went to the café on the second floor where they usually went when they were at the airport. He looked at all the customers. He stared at the faces of men and women. Nadia was not there.