by Kamel Daoud
I knew that, out of false modesty and real spite, he would never come knock on our door except on the day of the end of the world. And even then, he would settle, as he did earlier tonight, for shouting our family name. In the traditional way. So this was my moment! The moment of destiny. “Which is worth a thousand years to a human,” says the Holy Book. The night when a god descends from the sky that is the most accessible to the voice and prayer, the only one we can see before death, and sometimes responds. I had replayed that scene so many times in my head that its imminence made me dizzy, canceled out gravity. Abdel and his brothers must have been in dire straits to ask for me after so many years of jeering laughter and gobs of spit at the mere mention of my name. In my room I was reading an old book about the meaning of the patterns of our ancient rugs when suddenly I felt a weight in the hollow of my chest and then palpitations after I heard my name repeated on the other side of the wall like a bark. It wasn’t the first time I’d been called in the middle of the night (evil has always been nocturnal, the night is an ogress that eats her children and tells them tales), but this time it was the voice of adversity and the moment was so important I had to gather all my strength. I’d been waiting for this for years. Yes. “Write!” thundered the Angel in my pink room.
My aunt Hadjer played ignorant, hidden behind the panel of the door. “Who? Who are you asking for? Why are you here so late at night?” she yelled, perfidious. She had rehearsed the devious rituals of her vengeance: make the client wait, make him think I was not going to answer his solicitations, force him to beg, to promise two sheep, eleven geese, honey, ask forgiveness or flaunt his despair to the point of humiliation. The village is two-faced, they didn’t want her hand but now they ask for my writing. Hadjer never learned to read, but very early on she sided with my gift against my father, my half brothers, and their slander. Out of vengeance, yes, but also out of calculation, which turned to tenderness, then love. I suspect her motivations, but I love her. She decided years ago, wrapping her scarf around her head and rolling up her sleeves, that there was a link between her fate and my slobbering fits, and that bound me to her. I think her loyalty stems from a childish desire, the solidarity of the marginalized, solitude, and, I realized later, a desire for emancipation that she thought could be satisfied through my madness for reading and writing. She could never speak French but she enjoyed learning the few words that she rolled like rocks in her mouth when she wanted to imitate me, mocking, mischievous. Her love for Hindi films had a lot to do with it, because I translated entire scenes of dense and sometimes indecent dialogue for her. The saraband of actors’ bodies was enough for her general comprehension but she wanted details about their conversations, their declarations, their secrets.
Hadjer then opened the door suddenly and stared, with evil eyes, at the beggar in the darkness. She examined him from head to toe before deciding to call for me. I rarely leave my room, and I always lock the door behind me. Hadjer would never let a stranger enter, but it’s safer this way. The end of the world for me would be the day they steal my notebooks and scatter them in the streets, in the wind, as when school lets out for the summer. Names made public, genealogies reduced to pebbles, slow and powerful descriptions of the world turned to sprigs of tea in the fields, clinging to bushes. A dispersed encyclopedia, a universal cataclysm. I dread that potential dislocation of my language, which would reintroduce epidemics of death and threaten the lives of all the villagers. Arrogance? Of course not! It’s a simple fact.
At a certain point in my life, sure of my gift, I almost didn’t read anymore. I reread or I got hung up on collecting the titles of forthcoming books. A register I presided over as secretary and guardian. When I wanted to, I held the entire village like a translucent marble, backlit between my index finger and my thumb. Pen in hand, I could make miracles and heal illness with the titles of books I had never written. (At night, the village is empty and its walls squeeze around the electrical lines as around a cold fire. Everything is yellow, with swarms of impassioned insects and tousled trees that try to flee into the finally open sky, abandoned to intrusions. The air is a little cold despite the season. It must come from behind the hill, from the north, like the storks, the trucks, and the names of other cities and villages. Dogs mark the borders with their barking, to the east, and harass the early risers. It’s the season of swollen, dusty bunches of grapes. To the west, the cemetery cloisters the world with its stones and its verses.)
I left with my death-defying supplies and I walked behind Abdel without saying a word. Hadjer followed me with her eyes, lingering on the doorstep for a long time, immobile. I understood that she was hesitating over whether or not to accompany me: she feared for me, but there was no one to watch over our house and our meager possessions in her absence. Perhaps she thought that her intrusion into the brotherhood risked ruining my chances to finally be admitted. There was bitterness in the air but also agitation, fear. At night, the storefronts of closed shops made the village look as if its eyes were shut. There are no more houses, the storefronts and the windows turn to eyelids. I walked blindly. The sky, hazy and diaphanous, like an open palm over shiny stones. “Then, look again and yet again: your look will come back to you humiliated and weary,” says the Holy Book.
* * *
—
They were all there, in the end, the half brothers. At the top of the narrow street, lying in wait like cattle thieves, mixed together by the shadows of angles. In the night, I smelled the odor of animal skin and the flock. The fragrance of money for our people, a sign of riches and roots. I didn’t greet them, only a nod of the head, for behind me Djemila’s window was open onto the dark interior of an old colonial house. Because of the heat, surely. Or insomnia. My agitating voice has a reputation and I wanted to spare myself the ancient grimace of my tribe. I know each face, I’ve noted their features in my notebooks, their habits and their tics. They followed me, walking behind me as if to signal their wariness, hoping to make it clear that they weren’t involved in my business. Abdel at the head, fiery and nervous, playing the leader as his mother taught him. I guessed his thoughts: this night could be my vengeance, but there’s an even greater possibility that it will be my final humiliation. He doesn’t know how to read or write but has the mean instinct of those who feel deficient because of it.
“How are your children?” he snarled without looking at me as we walked down the last side street toward the hill. He knows I don’t have any. His brothers didn’t react to the jibe. I saved their lives, all of them, one by one, years ago, and they have no idea. (Forgive them, O Lord, for they know not! Their notebook is called History of the Thirteen. Because of their brooding band, like a conspiracy at a medieval inn. It takes place during a cease-fire, a man recounts. Each of the twelve brothers bears the name of a planet that spins around the village.) Idlers who, when they sit in a circle at the end of the day, near the central mosque, give the unfortunate impression that the universe serves no purpose, that it’s nothing but a game of marbles and names.
We had crossed the main street of the village before heading toward the hill, passing behind the central mosque, where the imam and the reciters live. There, the slope becomes abrupt. The red-tiled houses silently followed us. On the sidewalks, empty packs of milk and wrappers. No moon, though the sky was waiting for it like a medallion. At one moment, an ancient breeze tried to stir the branches and the trash but it gave up; it fell back down into the dead, dry leaves. The walls stayed there, accompanying us, leaning against each other. Higher up, colonial houses are rare and the village scatters like a flock. I was running out of breath, halfway up the slope, because I’m frail with small lungs. I started to sweat. We were “like the damned following each other to the precipice,” murmured my inner dog (O faithful companion hated by our religion that doesn’t know what to do with dogs, celebrate them as guardians or banish them because they chase away the angels, inspiration for my writing, my private animal, the first drawing of my
childhood and the invisible toy of my earliest boredom. I’ve devoted three full notebooks to it under the stolen titles of A Many-Splendoured Thing, Tropic of Capricorn, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Nearly all of the Tradition and the Prophet’s Hadiths were written by a single man, Abu Hurairah, the man who raised a kitten. I imagine him sitting, caressing the sweet animal for forty years, using it to stay connected to the world. My own cat is a dog and my tradition is new). Even in these rather inauspicious moments, the dog chatters away in my head, inspired by each detail, reciting entire passages of books I’ve read, proposing various titles and indecent passages. After the last public streetlight, the road transforms into a path, marking the territory of the douar dogs and the pebbles that try to bite with their single canine. I turned around, I saw the houses shrink in the darkness and turn their backs to us, ebbing toward the bottom of the hill. They’re unpainted, unfinished, not like the houses occupied by the colonizers. The brothers behind me could have thrown me into a ravine, no one would have accused them because there were no witnesses at that hour. In the Holy Book, the story of the jealous brothers ends well for their victim, but in life things are different. Sometimes God lacks inspiration…
3
The old man’s sickness had been known for months, but it had taken him an incredible amount of time to bend his knee to the ground. Out of pride, because he couldn’t accept it, he who had survived the colonizers, hunger, and exile. He was a man who told everyone that, in a dream, God had promised him fortune and countless flocks. A man terrorized by the void, who tried to ward it off through abundance. I didn’t want to feel affection or remorse. Especially not now. The ink must be cold and somber to better describe and scribe. The old man’s hour had come knocking and his leaf would soon fall (“for the cosmos is a tree, souls are birds and lives are leaves, fruits are stars and time is a painstaking autumn,” says the dog in my head). Yes.
But it wasn’t easy for me. I had been waiting for this moment for so long that I enriched it with too many details and lines, too many quips and pauses. The most important novel of my life, turned extravagant like false sorrow. And now it was sagging like a trestle stage. Hurrying with the dying man’s sons, I felt nothing more than the physical effort of the climb, and the indecent desire to caress the old walls or sit down to survey the fire coming with the dawn, to the east, behind the French cemetery. The faces of my half brothers were hidden, indecipherable. Rolling tombstones. What did they feel? To whom would the defeated grumbler grant his blessing and his inheritance? The old man had twelve reasons to die before dawn. Thirteen, counting me. What were they? Bitterness, impatience. Perhaps, but not only. I longed for his death so I could finally breathe fully, feel the vertigo of freedom. We walked like a flock, the muffled sound of our boots in the sand. Someone coughed, a smoker, no doubt. There was nothing left of the village except the distant, feeble tree trunks. We were in a rush to eat our father. I started to think of the winds I’ve always hated (the Prophet tells us not to insult the wind, for it’s a sign of the spirit), it’s my first memory of the house where Hadj Brahim abandoned us, me and my mother, far to the south of Aboukir. Behind the imaginary Sahara (I called it Sarah when I was a child, so I’m told by Hadjer, who has invented an intelligent and marvelous childhood for me). With each wind that kicks up, I worry the roofs and the walls will fly off and leave us exposed to the bites and the bushes electrified by hidden snakes. The gusts carry grains of sand and dust into the houses, slip the desert under the door, destroy the thresholds and the border between the vague and the intimate. The sand then covers the tar of the streets, the crockery, the greenery, and forces the inhabitants to hole up. I hate the wind because it’s the symbol of the precarious, of the nomad. I remember now, as the night spreads everywhere, soothing and intact, reversing gravity. I like walls and I’m afraid when there aren’t many around me multiplying the labyrinth against enemies and winds. What did Hadj Brahim think on the way back, when he left us on the doorstep of a nearly empty house, the wind wailing? Did he feel light, at peace with his god? Did he perform ablutions to wash away the crime?
I didn’t want to miss this occasion. I had to prove to him that I could save him, but first I had to find the motivation in me to do it. Hadjer had an explanation for everything about my childhood: the glasses that fell from my hands, the curve of the moon, my sickness, the aging or the return of the storks, the mark on my arm, which made me different from the other children when they stripped me bare; but she kept quiet when I asked why my father had abandoned my mother when I was a newborn. She stayed silent, then acted as though she had suddenly remembered she had something urgent to attend to. The story is nothing spectacular, she diminishes my exceptional destiny to the whim of one of my father’s moods. It’s a banal story of jealousy between spouses, my mother and my stepmother. The patriarch decided on a rapid renouncement, accompanied by thirty sheep offered to my mother’s tribe, and abandoned us, with neither bread nor spring, in the jaws of the Sahara, which I had never seen. How could he? He had slit the throats of thousands of sheep but I was the first sacrifice on his list, the offering in exchange for the blessing of a troubled god, led astray by his fantasies. I was born when I understood that I was an orphan and had to start all over again, alone. Before the whole history of the entire world (“the secret motive of writers,” claims the dog of my inspiration, an immense German shepherd, soft, furry, with wise eyes).
We were still climbing, each of us absorbed in our own calculations. That’s how it is, when a father dies, we share his body and his features, we draw from his cadaver, who will get his possessions, who will get his words, his mannerisms, his shoes. With age, your father invades you like a shadow, inhabits your blood and climbs under your face, as if leaning out a window. Little by little, you take on his voice, his habits, and you find yourself enacting his law on your children. I didn’t want that. I decided not to have children, to break the cycle.
There was no sound except for our muffled footsteps on the ground. We were scaling a whale washed up under the scattered stars. Nothing but our pack’s breathing on our way to the house up top. The village, for my people, was divided in two: the top, the midwife hill of our line, inhabited by a distant ancestor of whom all that remained was a name stuck to a newborn, the Arab douar at the time of the colonizers; and the house down below, recuperated after the War of Liberation, constructed in the heart of the village by a Frenchman who had left behind his furniture and his future when he fled upon Independence. More comfortable, but too big for our trio: my grandfather, until his death, Hadjer turned hard as stone in the hand of a mountain, and me, the Arab Robinson Crusoe of an island with no language, master of the parrot and of the word. Between the two, there was the mosque, the weekly market, and the main street bordered by trees with their dresses hiked up on the single leg of their trunk.
Suddenly, the eucalyptus trees spread out, and, in the night, I could see brightness and lamps behind windows and hear the voices of worried children. Silent dogs ran to meet us, which frightened me. The eldest son chased them off with a murmur and turned toward me: “You have three hours. Be quick and then get out!” No one protested. An owl hooted behind me in the hollow sky which had receded. My heart jumped when, suddenly, I felt a brusque exaltation. A nasty jubilation mixed with fear. As if I were living a waking dream or a sacred moment, weightless. A father’s death is outside of time, like a parallel scene that plays out endlessly, resumed and enriched or ignored. It wanes for a long time in several forms, omens, dreams, or rages, and we spend our lives preparing the details. Like that day when I threw stones and laughed, mockingly, at Hadj Brahim because he couldn’t run as fast as me to catch and spank me. Or when I stole his money after he’d dozed off at our place, in the house down below, and then denied it while matching his prying gaze. Or when I gave myself another family name in his presence, to humiliate him in front of his friends, who were fawning over him because of his butcher’s fortune.