A Country for Dying

by Abdellah Taïa

  Cover

  a country for dying

  abdellah taïa

  translated by Emma Ramadan

  a novel

  seven stories press

  new york • oakland • liverpool

  Copyright © 2015 by Abellah Taïa

  English translation © 2020 by Emma Ramadan

  This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Taïa, Abdellah, 1973- author. | Ramadan, Emma, translator.

  Title: A country for dying / Abdellah Taia ; translated from the French by

  Emma Ramadan.

  Other titles: Pays pour mourir. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019027770 | ISBN 9781609809904 (paperback) | ISBN

  9781609809911 (ebk)

  Classification: LCC PQ3989.2.T27 P3913 2020 | DDC 843/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027770

  For my sisters, all my sisters

  PART I

  Paris, June 2010

  1. Apart

  He died young.

  Fifty-six years old, that’s young. Right?

  It’s the average age in Morocco, I know. The life expectancy. That’s what they call it.

  But he, my little father, gentle and furious, he didn’t have time for anything. Not to live well, not to die well. It happened quickly. Barely two years.

  One day, he fell. A collapse. A faint. Tremors. What’s happening in his body?

  We brought him to the public hospital in Rabat. He stayed there for four months. And then we brought him back to his house. Our house. Our little place. Our can of sardines with red chilies. A first floor that was relatively clean thanks to our mother, who was both messy and super manic. And a second floor that was well constructed but still unfinished. Rooms without doors, without paint. A cement-colored decor for a life to come, a future to build once money started falling from a permanently bright blue sky.

  That’s where we put him, our father, where we slowly forgot him, ignored him.

  It was my mother, of course, who made all the decisions. She’ll never admit it.

  The doctors said that she had to protect the children, distance them from possible contagion. Separate them from the father’s sick body.

  It was because they didn’t know what was going on, those heartless quacks. The order had to be executed, end of story.

  My mother doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. What happened in the past is in the past. Those are her words, about her own past. Not ours. Not mine.

  I said nothing. The idea of protesting didn’t even cross my mind. I saw everything, followed everything. A living father, still young, whom they decided to exile in his own house one day, and I keep on breathing, sleeping, dreaming each night of Allal and his big cock, imagining it in great detail. Just above the room where I slept, amidst the bodies of my many sisters who hadn’t yet married, there was my father. Alone. A room that was too big, with no bed. Three Le Tigre blankets, placed on top of each other, served as his living space, where he could continue to be sick. Hope for recovery. The final rest.

  Why didn’t I say anything? Why was I so indifferent, so callous?

  I didn’t think my father was going to die. But I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again.

  That defeated father with his vanishing virility, I too participated in his murder. And yet no one brought charges against me. Not yesterday, not today.

  I am free. In Paris and free.

  No one can force me back into my former state as a submissive woman. I am far from them. Far from Morocco. And I’m talking to myself. I search for my father in my memories.

  The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ears.

  I would listen to my frantic heart. I would try to calm it, soothe it so that it would stop pounding like a volcano in my chest. I would speak to it without opening my mouth. I would sing to it in Arabic and, sometimes, in French. Nothing helped. At night the heart revolts, it relives the day and its events without us, without our permission. Without me. More than a panic, it was a catastrophe, for I knew that if it stopped, I would die.

  I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t sleep. Drift off. Give in to slumber. I resisted in fear.

  My father’s footsteps, separated from us, on the second floor, in a different darkness, sometimes saved me. My father didn’t walk. He struck the ground. His heels went boom-boom, boom-boom. Boom-boom. Below, on our side, his reverberating footsteps made everything vibrate: furniture, windows, tables, television.

  My father, no doubt also incapable of falling asleep, would wander around the unfinished second floor.

  His footsteps communicated something else, too. Anger? Yes, of course. Fear? Perhaps. Dry tears? Certainly, but no one saw them.

  A circus lion suddenly old, in a cage suspended in midair. Within his body, his breath fizzles out, little by little, night after night, one footstep followed by another.

  I find them again, those footsteps. I listen to them.

  My father paces in the back room. He crosses the patio. He turns around. He goes in circles. He touches the walls. He looks at the sky above the sinister ceiling. He goes far, all the way to the other room, the one off the street. I don’t hear him anymore. No one hears him.

  Sleep approaches. It will deliver me. Communion, at last. I leave. I travel. I forget my father. I don’t even tell him goodbye.

  But that man, familiar and foreign, I see him open his mouth, he’s going to say something, a word, a name, a first name. One time. Two times. Three times.

  Zahira. Zahira. Zahira.

  Why me?

  From Paris, years later, I answer him.

  What do you want, my papa? What do you need? Are you hurting? Hurting terribly? Where? Where? Speak. Tell me, now. I’m all grown up now. I can handle things, even incomprehensible things. Show me where you hurt. Your stomach? Where in your stomach? Your guts? Your guts again? Those horrible spasms you inherited from your own father? Is that it?

  Take my hand. I’m coming to the second floor. Here it is, my right hand. Guide it. It will see better than me what torments you, breaks you into pieces, makes you lose your mind, your way, your breath. Take it, take it. It’s yours and it comes from you, this hand. Hold it. Caress it. Do with it what you like, whatever your heart and skin tells you.

  Speak, if that’s what you want. Die. Come back to life. Wander with me, with my hand, my unconscious. Stride across this second floor like a blind man, a desperate man, the madman you are despite yourself. Go. Go. Don’t hold back. Love doesn’t end. I’m not the one who says so. I’m not the one who knows so. Somewhere, in my shadowy body, lives make decisions for me and for you.

  Think of your sister Zineb. When you were little, you adored her. You were still living at the foot of the Atlas Mountains when she disappeared. She was your second mother, wasn’t she? Your sweetheart. Your only sweetheart. One night, she left with your father to look for a myst
erious treasure hidden in a distant forest. One week later, your father came back without her. He never wanted to say what happened. From one day to the next, Zineb was lost forever. You would never see her again. Was she kidnapped? Sold to some rich lord in the countryside? She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead. That’s what you told yourself in order not to lose all hope. That’s what you still tell yourself today. Think of her, Papa. Think hard. Zineb. Zineb. Zineb. I think of her, too. I whisper her name. I envy her even. Her destiny must have been free. I don’t see it like that. And you, my papa? How do you imagine Zineb’s life? Long, happy, fulfilled? You want to join her, find her there, wherever she is now? Is that it? Am I wrong? Do I understand nothing of Zineb and her disappearance?

  I was naïve. I am unhappy. And alone. So alone in Paris. In the center and yet as though at the edge of the world.

  I hear your footsteps, my father. They come back. They exist. You walk. You go back and forth. You count, you play, you trace regions, countries, dark zones where we can see everything.

  You are sick up there.

  We are below, almost underground.

  In our home, no one has changed, moved. We look at each other as before. We brush past each other. We are sick of being together. We have to leave, it’s urgent. But we have nowhere to go to dream up something different. So: We blind ourselves. We don’t sing anymore. We eat, we piss, we shit, we sleep. No one enjoys themselves anymore. Especially not our mother.

  Your sister Daouiya doesn’t visit anymore. Your older brother keeps her from leaving the house. She tells him that she misses you. He replies that sooner or later she will see you again. But not here. Not on this earth. Not in this world. Not for as long as she lives.

  Within you, my father, there is fear. I imagined it frigid. I was wrong. That fear kept you moving. Death spread rapidly through your body, but it wasn’t death that made you tremble.

  Even after, in the tomb, in the sky, there is nothing. There will be nothing.

  That’s what you used to say sometimes, on certain dark days. Isn’t that right?

  You would get up. You would walk. Again. Again. And every night, on that unfinished second floor, that certitude became an absolute truth, indisputable.

  The setting of your final months, you wanted to breathe it in inch by inch. Leave a little breath there. A secret. Better than a memory. A cry.

  My papa, to somewhat reassure you in your tomb, I want to believe that there is something else. Like you, I didn’t believe anymore. I am changing my mind, here, now. Life doesn’t end. Death cannot exist everywhere. The body doesn’t end. It speaks with another tongue. It reinvents itself, endlessly. Up above, it transforms.

  Today, my hand says this to you. Listen to it. Entrust it with a message, a role, a glance for me. And walk. Walk. Walk, on your second floor. You don’t disturb me anymore. I have become what I am. It’s my nature. A prostitute. They come to quench their thirst with me, in me. Everyone. Men and, sometimes, women. I no longer resist this destiny. The time for struggle is over.

  You smoked all my life, my father. Except the last two years. You enveloped us in smoke at the house each day. No one ever complained.

  There are people who smoke with arrogance, distance, selfishness. Not you. Not with your cheap cigarettes. I have the taste of them in me, in my nostrils, my tongue, my throat. You smoked three brands. Poor-people brands, of course. You started with Dakhlas. Ten years. Before I was born. In the mid-eighties, you switched to Favorites. And in 1990, just after the month of Ramadan that caused you so much suffering and that you didn’t care for, you switched to Casas. From Casablanca. You had no love for that city, too noisy, too busy. But you adored its cigarettes.

  You fell ill in a strange way. I didn’t see it happen, but the image of that moment was evoked so many times in our home. Our mother recounted each detail of your decline to serve as a warning to us.

  “Don’t smoke! Don’t smoke! Always remember what happened to him, his terrible illness!”

  I’m forty years old. I’ve never smoked. I followed her advice. Her story.

  You were still living among us, on the first floor. One Thursday morning, you didn’t want to go to the hammam. Probably because you were sick of seeing the neighbors there, always nasty, jealous, and mean. You walked towards the patio and you yelled:

  “Run me some hot water!”

  It wasn’t a yell as in former days. Your voice suddenly needed to exert a superhuman effort to give an order and at the same time hide your weakness. It betrayed you. It displayed the final traces of a virility that was already disappearing, for all of us to see. Did you know?

  Then, in a vague way, I understood that something bad was happening to you.

  My papa will collapse. I have to do something to stop it.

  I was alone in our bedroom. I replied with a weak word, monotone, emotionless:

  “Okay!”

  When the water in the large boiler was hot enough, I put it in the room with the toilet. We didn’t have a shower or bathtub. The Turkish toilet was where we washed ourselves when we were in a state of impurity and urgently needed to purify ourselves.

  Were you in a state of impurity, or were you just dirty?

  I didn’t ask myself the question that day.

  When did you step into the Turkish toilet?

  Like a cat in the middle of the night, you crossed the patio sneakily and sought out privacy in that narrow space.

  I suddenly heard your zipper and belt unfastening. Your pants fell.

  You carried out the rest in silence. You turned on the tap. You approached the boiler. You cooled down the hot water a bit. Then you poured everything into the little red tub.

  With your hands clasped, you started to splash yourself. I hear that water, its path: from your hands it moves towards your body, your torso, your chest, your neck, your chin. The rest of your face.

  The hot water, delicious, arrives, it strikes you. You say:

  “Allaaaaahhhh!”

  I smile.

  You begin again.

  The water. Your body. Your nudity. Your cries of pleasure.

  “Allaaaahhh!”

  Again and again.

  You are well, very well. You are no longer weak and you never will be again. That brief moment with the hot water convinces you that solitude can be joyous. You are a child. You play. You forget yourself. You forget that we can hear you, can follow from a distance and imagine in detail what you are doing.

  I’m supposed to be peeling the vegetables. I’ve stopped. I’m listening to you.

  “Allaaaahhh! Allaaaahhh! Allaaaahhh!”

  You weren’t ashamed to express your joy. I wasn’t ashamed to spy on you.

  Two yards separated the children’s room, where I was, from the bathroom. Your pleasure made the distance disappear. I was with you.

  But I left too early. Someone knocked on the door.

  And I didn’t save you.

  My mother told us what came next. You had told her, a week later.

  This is what she said. It’s all in my ears. It’s short, and precise. Very precise.

  “After washing up, he wanted to do his ablutions, as is customary. He realized he didn’t have much hot water left. He stared at the bottom of the red tub. Five seconds. He decides that it should be enough. He will be very careful.

  “He begins the ablutions. His private parts. In front. Behind. The mouth three times. The nose three times. The face three times. Each arm three times. Each foot, too. Then the ears. The scalp.

  “He’s succeeded. He’s relieved.

  “He gets up. He notices he still has soap under his armpits. But there’s no more hot water. So he rinses them with cold water from the tap. Big mistake, and immediately he feels the consequences. He says to himself: My body was in summer and now it’s in winter. I will surely fall ill. He guessed
right. He thought he would catch a cold. He caught worse than that.

  “It’s his own fault. He smoked almost all his life. Cold and hot mixed together so closely in a fragile chest, riddled with holes, like his, as if he wanted . . . As if he wanted . . . to . . . to . . . As if everything was decided that day, in that moment . . .”

  Our mother didn’t dare pronounce the word. It scared her. It scared us, too.

  Suicide.

  She finished her story each time with these words:

  “So now you’ve been warned. Pay attention when you wash your armpits. Cold and hot together, or one after the other, under your armpits—never! Understand? Never!”

  How could that woman, that mother, forget that she wasn’t talking about a stranger, a neighbor, an enemy, but about her husband, our father? His body is our body. Even ill, he is ours, of us.

  Why protect us from him? What he has, what he will have, we will end up catching it, too. What’s the point of keeping our distance from him? What’s the use of such pitiful warnings?

  “Stay away, stay away . . .”

  Very soon after, they brought you to the big hospital in the capital, Rabat.

  I was in high school. I didn’t come home for lunch. A man who had been hanging around me for some time had managed to lure me to his apartment. He entered me. And he said: “I see that I’m not the first. I’m disappointed. Very disappointed.” He wasn’t kidding. Afterwards, he tossed me fifty dirhams. “So you can buy yourself something. Lipstick, for example.” He wasn’t kidding then, either.

  That night, as soon as I stepped foot in our house, I felt that something was different.

  “They took him to . . .”

  I went to the bathroom. I took a deep breath. Papa is still here. You are here . . . You are here . . .

  With my school uniform still on, I went out for a walk. My footsteps led me to the soccer field, deserted. The fifty dirhams were in the left pocket of my pants. Three bills: two twenties and a ten. I tore them up into a thousand pieces. I crouched down. I dug a small hole. I buried the pieces inside.