The Homeland

by Hamida Na'na

  He ran down the stairs and waited in front of the flight information board. He waited for half an hour. An hour. Finally he gave up hope and went out and hailed a waiting taxi. He threw himself down on the seat and told the driver to take him to her address.

  “Before you left, Nadia was living a tragedy which she did not talk about and no one knew anything of it. Each time that her head teemed with questions, she would fold her arms over her breast and wait for you in the Place Dauphine, by a shelter between the Palais de Justice and the Pont Saint Michel. She had something to say to you, but she would always let her thoughts be dispersed in the darkness and she would remain silent.”

  The car was approaching the outskirts of Paris. He told the driver to take the route past Passage du Genty and Boulevard Jourdan. The driver carried on going as though he had not heard the directions which Frank gave. Then he started grumbling over his shoulder:

  “You know life in Europe’s pretty miserable, Monsieur. Look at the traffic … at this time of day! It drives you up the wall sometimes.”

  You think about the fact that you have just come from a land where people are driven by hunger. “And you are fighting for people’s rights to have a second steak for dinner and two deserts,” as Nadia had said when he told her why he was back in France. “We are fighting to stay alive. Your problems in Europe are different to those of the country that you have come from. Find a solution for the problem of the eight million cars in Paris, if you like.”

  The car stopped in front of Nadia’s building and Frank got out. He paid the fare and ran quickly up to the second floor. He stopped for a moment at her door to get his breath back. He knocked but there was no answer. It was Saturday and Nadia was not at work. He knew her well enough to be sure that she ought to be at home. Was she ill? He knocked again a little harder this time and waited. Nadia’s neighbour came out of the room opposite and when she saw who it was she smiled and said to him:

  “I shouldn’t bother, Monsieur Frank. Nadia left yesterday. She asked us to leave the key with the landlord. I’ve still got it if you want it. She’s probably left some books for you. Do you want to have a look?”

  He put his head against the wall. Then he turned on his heels and went down the stairs without speaking to the neighbour. He found himself in the daylight again, which was bathing the street. He ran over to the taxi rank and got a cab home.

  He climbed the stairs to his flat, stopping on the third-floor landing which overlooked the Seine. That was where she would stop to look at the river and smile. She would look up at him, brush the strands of hair away from her face, and say:

  “I can’t understand you. I admit that I’m helpless.”

  He opened the door and a damp smell greeted him. The smell of a house where no foot had trodden since his departure. His eyes looked around the sitting-room and studied its contents. His clothes on the sofa, her nightdress hanging in the passage, the blue bathrobe which she used to wrap around her body … her smell mixed in with the other smells of the flat … his study where she used to spend hours scribbling words which he couldn’t read. He threw his bag down and went to his desk where the cleaner had put all the correspondence which had arrived for him during his absence. He was leafing through the letters when his eyes fell on a large envelope on which was written in her handwriting:

  “To Frank.”

  He ripped open the envelope and his eyes fell on the opening phrase:

  “I know that it is wartime … ”

  He pulled up his chair and began reading. He became lost in the words. Cold sweat dripped down his forehead. After a while night fell and darkness covered everything. Frank turned on the light and carried on reading. Past days were illuminated in his head and he found himself once again in the worlds of total contradiction which he inhabited during his days in prison. What had she wanted from him? Why had she made this stop-over in his life? To what extent had she been struggling during her days here and how was it that he had not been able to understand?

  He had always had grave doubts about her being just an ordinary woman. A student. That is what she had told him, but he had never really believed her. He had thought of her as one of those young women who could not manage in the Third World because the borders of their awareness went beyond their reality. That made them come to Europe in search of knowledge, experience and culture.

  But she was gone now and he was still shackled to the limitations of his humanity. The conditions under which he had lived since his return from Africa were still in place. The bonds with his reality in France were not broken. His reputation was still here, his homeland, and, above all else, his daughter, Laurice, the love of his life from whom he would never be parted.

  The wound on her shoulder. A bullet wound.

  That day she smiled when she told him that it was a scar from an operation that she had had when she was a girl. He did not believe what she said but he had never imagined that she could be the woman on the front pages of a newspaper that he had seen when he was in gaol, the woman who had been involved in three hijacks before being captured in Germany.

  How had she been able to hide that from him?

  Was it all an attempt to forget, as she had said? Had she really forgotten?

  “Ayntab is burning, Frank. It will go on burning for ever unless I return. I shall find my comrades there somehow. Our differences are behind us now that the battle has commenced. I must be reunited with them, for better or worse. I must join them in battle. We know that there will be nothing else for us in this world. We have made up our minds.”

  He went back to reading the words, his breathing coming with difficulty. He felt as though his feet were chained to the ground and his arms were tied to the sky. He felt his head was ready to explode.

  “I was afraid that you would turn me into just another piece of material for your novels. I was afraid that you might write about me. ‘She lived here, far from where the battle was raging.’ You refuse to come to us. Your country needs you. This is what you said to me one day. Well, you can stay if you want. My country needs me as well and its too terrifying for me to cut my ties with it.

  “These questions which dogged you, Frank, in a country where a revolution was as essential as water to drink and air to breathe … in a country whose goals became open guest houses and where blood washes the streets. I tell you I do not believe any more that there will be total revolution which will eliminate all iniquities. Every example which you have given us so far has ended up as a model of tyranny and dictatorship. I’m not trying to bring happiness to human beings but I am going to defend their lives. I am not fighting in order to change how they live. I am fighting to get them back their land.”

  He put the papers down on the desk and stood up. He began to pace around the room, looking for a release.

  “You were far from our world, Frank. We needed your approval to make it easier for those who entered the Occupied Land and who never came back. But your approval was denied us, Frank, just as your doors were closed to us. I can’t be with you, because I am washing my face, eating, sleeping, waking, working and taking care of my body in expectation of my return to him.”

  “I was just a stopping-off point, no doubt.”

  He said this to himself as he was going into the bedroom, where Nadia had torn up the canvas of the mariner and the picture of him in court. She had destroyed his present. She had executed him in the present and was determined to live with his past. She searched his face for the traces of revolution which she assumed would be there, but she had not found anything. Who had told her that there was a revolution? Who had told her that he had gone searching for that and not for himself?

  He lay down on the bed and stared for a long time at the shafts of light which pierced through the door separating the study and the bedroom. He tried to speak. He wanted to shout out that he was not a prophet, that he was as cowardly and as weak as the next man, and that he had been afraid.

  The moments burned and the mist of re
ality enveloped everything. He had set light to his dreams once in the heart of silence. The woman coming out of the fire … The woman coming out of the East, where she burned her boats and whence she came looking for her own silence.

  But silence refused to be her ally, although it stopped her cries penetrating the walls.

  He carried on staring at the ceiling of the room, remembering her face, remembering her eyes which were fiery with hope, her face which used to carry in its features her profound sense of alienation. Oh Nadia, we are both in exile, but where did you get the idea that I am still looking for revolution?

  He is in his prison cell once again. The hot country. The prison where he spent those long days. The priest comes in to him moments before his execution. they have shaved his head and given him a loose white robe to wear. His ten crimes are written down the front of the garment.

  1. Stealing the sky to blind their eyes

  2. Stealing the rain to wash away the tombs.

  3. Stealing the snow to make a river.

  4. Stealing the distances to make an ocean.

  5. Stealing the wombs of women to procreate.

  6. Stealing the blood to tint the rain.

  7. Talking of guns and of men who wished for death and life.

  8. His passion for this world.

  9. His love for Laurice.

  10.

  The place for the tenth crime remained empty. They had not worked out what it was yet. He told the priest that, while the latter was robing himself in artificial compassion. He almost told him what it was: his crime of loving a woman who bore a star on her forehead and carried her homeland in her eyes. She came out of the East, searching in our cemeteries for the answer to her problems and the problems of her homeland. The West slammed its doors in her face and her homeland had also locked her out. His crime was to be yearning for her at that moment, for her head which had taken him back to his past.

  He was unnerved by the face of the priest before him. He wanted to give him a hearty slap on the back and tell him that he did not need to make his confession because his crimes were already written there on his chest, but the crime which had been left out was the most serious of them all, and the one which had condemned him to death.

  The priest said:

  “May your sins be pardoned, and may you take refuge in your Saviour. There is none but Him. After a short time you will be received by Him and you must therefore accept your death with courage. Confess to what you have committed. I am a father to you. I am the go-between ’twixt you and your Saviour.”

  Frank shouted fiercely in his face:

  “I don’t need you! Leave me alone! I don’t have a saviour or a father. It is for me to accept death or to fight against it.”

  The priest went slowly out of the room and walked down the long dark corridor. Walking. No other sound. Not even from the chains which bind Frank’s hands. The chains are silent as though they have been turned into transparent tears. The dungeon walls closed in on him once again, almost covering him. He remembered the vast sky surrounding the leafy city. He remembered the banana trees outside which throw their arms to the neighbouring forests. The sounds of the animals screeching and barking with joy. He tried to break the chains but they were too strong. There was nothing he could do to free himself. He heard a light knock on the door of his cell. It opened and the cell was filled with the smell of wild leaves and grasses.

  Nadia entered. Her head was crowned in a halo of fire. Her eyes were like two seas of the night. Her black hair was like the night which seeped into the cell from a hole in the top corner of the wall. Nights in prison do not have stars. She was dressed in white like a bride of the sea. Beautiful and alluring, she waited for him to approach her and to place a kiss on her forehead, the greeting of those who meet in places of exile far from home.

  The tenth crime had come to him there in the dungeon. Joy and sadness. What had brought her there? Why was she in white? A garment to wed her to his blood. A garment of birth and procreation. There she is, the trace of sadness, which she always wore, now but a memory. What a turbulent woman you are! He tries to approach her but the chains on his legs hold him back and keep him shackled to the wall. He wants to spread his arms and embrace her. He wants to shout for joy. The storm outside is laying waste to the cities. The shame of our humanity. The fear of our rotting insides.

  “Nadia, I didn’t confess this time. I did not tell the priest about my tenth crime, about you. I waited for you in the nights between the dungeon walls, and when my hands were not chained I drew your face on the wall, on my clothes, on the ground, on the rain, on the night coming in through the hole. The guards found your face everywhere and they took it away to ensure they killed love more effectively. They stole it just as they had stolen truth and they turned it into dust. They stole it like they stole the birds of winter in order to wake the trees. They stole it to entertain the night, in order to live their deaths more effectively.

  “Oh, Nadia, you made death wait but your fate was predetermined.”

  He tried to tell her that he was hungry and that he felt the need to be nursed at his mother’s breast, that he was yearning for the trees of death. But his voice let him down. He was angry, tormented, agonized. Terror … Revolution … But there was no way that he could express these violent emotions which were surging through his body. And Nadia was still standing there at the entrance of the cell with the storm raging behind her. Her face was unblemished, without a trace of pain, touched by the Eastern sun.

  “Let her who comes to me speak.”

  Her lips did not move. Her head remained still. An enigmatic smile was all that could be seen on her lips. The smile washed over the icy cell. Set free, it erased the traces of torture from his body. She made him want to howl with the wolves in the distant forest.

  He gathered his strength and shouted at the top of his voice. He heard his cries echoing around the room and he opened his eyes. He was lying in bed. He looked up at the ceiling and at the room around him. Everything was in its place. His flat in Paris. His books were lying in the corner, sobbing in the silence. The dumb insolence of his typewriter. His daughter’s photograph. The torn canvas on the floor. He moved his arms and legs, lifting them off the bed one by one. No chains. No shackles. He explored his body. His hand stopped at his chest and stomach. There was no white robe and no list of crimes.

  He watched the rays of sun streaming across the beams of the room. He heard his deep voice, a voice from those far-off days, ring out:

  Do you really want to leave again. Four years waiting for the moment of your execution. Every time the door opened you thought that they were coming to take you away. One day a priest came in to ask you to confess your sins. You wanted to tell him that it was all a mistake but instead you hit out at him and turned your face to the wall. For a long time you did not eat, you did not speak to anyone, you didn’t even turn around. You kept your eyes fixed to the wall in expectation of the moment of death.

  Three years before prison, while you were carrying papers from one city to another, in different places on the continent, the sun burning your skin, Paris would come to you across your dreams. Your room in the big house waiting for your return. Your friends asking you where you are.

  And Miraille. She was a comrade you were in love with. She used to meet you outside the city. Her brown face. The long tresses of her hair. She brought you the latest publications thrown up by the hopeless intellectuals in your country in their attempts to eliminate their ineffectiveness and impotence.

  You ended up by yourself. When you faced your enemies, you found that you had no friends in the world other than yourself. You bore a lot. There were some attempts from abroad to get you released. A succession of faces coming to you until you were finally free. They took you in the dark night through the streets which were full of poverty and hunger and they threw you, like a contraband suitcase, onto the first plane going to your mother country. When you set foot on French soil, you swore that you w
ould never leave her again.

  You arrived home. You climbed onto the vehicle of time and ease. You married Miraille with her long tresses and she bore you a baby daughter. You looked into her blue eyes and saw the sky. You were living in the lap of luxury now. But every time you heard a door slam or a window closing you jumped out of your skin. You went down like ashot bird when the sun struck your head, even though you knew that it was not as strong here as the sun in that country. Your comrades have died, you idiot, or they have been scattered to the four winds. You were astranger in that distant continent. They made you a legend, and the victims of that legend were people like Nadia and her comrades. How do you escape from your past? Where do you go? You swore that you would never put yourself in dangerous situations again. You promised yourself a life of ease. A life breathing the air of freedom in Europe, reading the poetry of Louis Aragon, writing books and short stories.

  But … she came to you like a cloud, like a tempest, sharp and clear. She tore up your silence and cleared away your oblivion. She reminded you of a burning place on this earth, while you had been luxuriating in the peace of Europe.

  You were afraid of telling her that it was all over and that now it was the face of Laurice that you were bound to … the Place de la Concorde … your house … the Quais on the banks of the Seine. You were afraid to tell her that you were not what she imagined you to be. Her voice would wash away the layers that you had put around yourself for protection. You loved her as a woman and as a woman she rejected you, as a woman rejects a man. She left you in the lethargy of your ease and she escaped. She went off like a tigress, searching for the spot of blood on the forehead of her land. But she had sent you back to your past.