by Kamel Daoud
I kept walking, almost by feel. As though I were living inside another’s story. It was strange. I finally found the entrance to Hadj Brahim’s house and I hesitated, despite my severe and superior demeanor. It smelled like cooking, fatty animals, and promiscuity. He lived there as a patriarch, with women, sheep, great-grandchildren, and hundred-year-old vines. A tribe between walls. I didn’t like this place where, in the dim light, my shadow became a knot or a sock, where people had the angry and nervous silence of an audience that hasn’t found the exit so they can disband. I was surely the most odious recourse for this family. A puny guy who’s afraid of blood but not of the dying, to whom God gave the gift of writing to repel death, whom everyone has always tried to avoid, and who now makes a glorious return. Abdel, still curt, made a brusque gesture with his hand, shoved me aside to precede me, pushed open the panel of the door and yelled for the women to hide and disappear like embarrassments.
I entered, feigning disorientation, but the truth is that I knew the way all too well. My heart was racing as I inhaled the stale air. It had the musty smell of upturned old rocks. There were insects, frozen, naked, surprised, agitated by the new disorder, caught in their intimacy. Under the night lamps, I noticed the different paint, the new whitewash on the prehistoric walls, and the smell of couscous, greasy and heavy. It’s always prepared at the same time as a casket or a wedding. The lack of light had destroyed the night, now in tatters. I felt a pang of regret for the generous opacity of the stars that had stopped behind me, forbidden. An amusing illusion to find oneself on the edge, where geography ends and the tale begins. It was perfect to complete the oneiric illusion, the mean enchantment. My heart was a ball of paper. I imagined a heavy, hairy butterfly, with wings like talismans, crashing into walls. The cold ran through me. I shivered. I pushed open the front door and the night stayed outside, hesitant, while I stepped into the feeble light of the courtyard. A child stared at me, mute like a judge, before an invisible hand pulled him out of the meager brightness. I lowered my head so as not to meet their gazes and thus spare myself the responsibility of their lives. It had been years, after all, since I’d last come here, and I recognized the rocks by their wrinkles, the chipped tiles, the water basin to the right, and the vine, now wild, that wrapped around the walls and then itself, as if desperate. I was walking on the soft ground of a nightmare. Returned but undesirable, rejected. I walked quickly and the feeble stench slowed me before I could touch the handle of the door to the sovereign bedroom opening onto the courtyard. The old man was in his usual room, thrown onto the bed like an old jacket that was no longer useful against the cold, nor fashionable. (Where does this idea come from, one I’ve had for years? Cemeteries have never convinced me. They’re like a coatrack or a wardrobe to my suspicious eyes. How am I to believe in the corpse or the grave when I know that death is nothing but a broken glass? Laughable, the customs of visitors to tombs, those sobs over heaps of marble and bones bound with verses. I have to keep quiet and get to work. Cemeteries are nothing but thrift stores. A storeroom of clothes. Of badly stitched eternity. Anger.)
The old man is there, like an excavation. I still feel hatred and guilt when I’m in the vicinity of his knives. Trembling slightly, like every time I’m too near him. My gift is to preserve life, his was to sow doubt within me. Hadj Brahim the ridiculer, for whom the greatest thrill was answering the bleating of creation by evoking the name of God before slitting the throat of the sacrificial beast and spreading out a large handkerchief of blood, a mournful cloth. I lingered there for a few minutes, but I knew they were waiting for me on the other side, at the end of the test. According to legend, I had already saved dozens of dying people, but legend also said that I was an insidious monster hiding in the body of a eunuch. O Ibrahim, turning into Abraham, it’s my turn to hold the smiling blade to your throat and decide whether to save the sheep or your old age. I felt heavy, as if I was suffocating. (I can leave, flee. But what will become of my gift then, denied at the most critical hour? A verse about the prophet Yunus, whom others call Jonah, drowned in a white whale as big as indecision, comes to my mind, imperfectly. He possessed both the name of a whale and that of the inkwell of the night, according to the commentators of the Holy Book disfigured by a strange laugh: “When he flees for the full boat, he takes part in the random draw that selects him to be thrown [into the sea]. The fish swallowed him and he was to blame.”) The eldest son burst through the scramble of brothers who followed him, comical in their clump, but he remained standing, imperious, and his mouth hung open for a few seconds before he started yelling. I knew what he was going to tell me.
4
I chose to keep my eyes down and probe my true desires. I had three hours of reprieve, three coffees, and no excuse. My first reflex, leave the long narrative of my own life at the door, the monologue opposite the mirror that impedes the story’s flow. Not confuse the hour of destiny with my mental clock. Clear out so that the dog or the god are forced to speak. Necessity has rules: you have to refine the style, force words to be exact. The author? He’s the navel, not the stomach or the pregnancy. The law on the tablet: if you hope to vanquish death, begin by not believing in it, not believing what it whispers.
I told myself then that perhaps I had to kiss the old man’s head, a gesture of ancient and weary respect. But it felt absurd and dishonest on my part. Abdel fixed me one last time with his hateful, cold gaze, then left me with his father, my father. I opened my first notebook slowly and took up my pen. What to do? What end should I grab to strip the cloth and reverse his mummification? I always experience a moment of emptiness and willingness just before inspiration strikes. The beginnings of books I’ve read and loved come back to me. Scraps of phrases. But I wait for something better. I had a hard time not looking at the dying man, his heap. I suppressed a ridiculous sob that became a cough, then a throat clearing, then nothing. I took another minute or two and then gave in: I wanted to scrutinize him from the perspective of his death, alone and shut away, finally vanquished. Without his thousands of sheep raised in the mountains of the south, without his fake-toothed smile, his burnoose, his words that slit my throat at every possible occasion. A long, long story reduced to a cotton thread that I will pull and cut and retie between his breath and my desire. Spinner, carder, and weaver all at once. Three Greek goddesses in the body of an imbecile. With a click of the tongue, I called the dog in my head and sent him to collect the waning stars and the luminous objects from the fields. And I proclaimed. (Writing is the only effective ruse against death. People have tried prayer, medicine, magic, reciting verses on a loop, inactivity, but I think I’m the only one to have found the solution.) And I started to write, resolute and strict, spurred by the firm decision to prove my gift and to leave triumphant, like every time they called me to counter the last page of a life with the first page written by my hand. But it didn’t last long. I had sensed it upon entering: there was a bad equilibrium in the air that night. At a certain point, they broke the silence and the possibility of a miracle. The door was violently rattled by an impatient hand and insults were unleashed…I thought I would have at least two hours of reprieve. I was wrong. Hardly one hour to guarantee my miracle and, suddenly, I felt the hateful wave seep under the door, like a draft. A group of his relatives and descendants were still trying to impose me as a solution, another group was already rearing its head like a devil to stir up outrage, demand an imam or a doctor and chase me out like an ungrateful son, a bad spirit of cemeteries and dead languages. Cries and tussles interrupted my momentum and suddenly the door gave way…
5
(Worshipers come back from the mosque and some stare at me, unsurprised. I’m the village phantom, I haven’t prayed for years, nor fasted, and I don’t recite any invocation when I sneeze or trip. The call of the muezzin doesn’t concern me because I wake the dead, not the sleeping, in my own way. Dawn begins on the skin of my forearms because I left without my jacket, forgotten in the scramble. The day eme
rges with a gentle coldness, a rush of air, starting in the distant foliage before reaching the epidermis. It’s as if someone is burning a large page of a notebook behind the distant mountain. A fine incandescence still consumes the blackened line climbing toward the hand that holds the page. The indirect fire touches the shells of frozen snails, revealing moisture and trails. In the Holy Book, I liked the descriptions of comets, of dawn, of stars and the moon cut in two. No one describes sunrise better than the nomad or the shepherd. I’m sitting here, at the entrance to the village, facing the fields where the douar farmers come with their barrows each morning. I can make out the poplars of the Christian cemetery that shelter the drinkers and the children playing hide-and-seek. To my right, the last big trees seem to return to the ground, restored by darkness, leaning dangerously, giant or indifferent. It’s on this vague terrain, between the side of the hill and the fields, that they normally set up the Friday market. Everything is sold there: nuts and bolts, crops, dangerous sweets, cars, sheep, mats. I used to go sometimes, as a child, to look for coins fallen on the ground after the vendors left.
On the walls of the houses bordering the village, the night’s retreat reveals the wear and tear, the paint regains its age, the inventory is reconstituted before my eyes. The stones return from the shadows and are arranged into ancient houses and facades. Then colors are recomposed and objects take back their exteriors, their names, or their faces. The dogs have lost the moon again, they go quiet, far at the end of the road of eucalyptus trees that runs through the Christian cemetery. In order: first the mountain to the east obscures and turns back into the night itself, in contrast to the sky, already pale. Then the darkness leaves the sky, the grass, the trees, the stones, and my narrow streets. Defeat reaches the main street of the village where I’m sitting, fists tightened around my notebooks, in front of the closed store of Ammi Mahmoud, the former school principal who’s now our milk seller. Everyone is asleep, used to the regular return of the universe. Confident as lambs.
The village is a beach that slowly unfurls under the dry retreating wave. The central square, the orange of the gas station and the mosque, tall, formerly a church, crowned by the nest of three storks. I feel my bleeding gums with the tip of my tongue. Coming back down the hill that chased me away like an evil spirit, I hesitated to wake Hadjer and knock on the door of our house down below. I didn’t want to provoke another incident, she would have reacted recklessly had she seen my bleeding nose and the scratches on my neck. I stayed outside, busy watching the waking day and cataloguing its routine. Attentive as if the sun were an insect under my magnifying glass. I wanted to attempt a sort of report on its nuances. In my mouth, the taste of blood dissolved. My cheek was burning. The east breathed suddenly and I shivered, then the paper of the sky caught fire. There was a moment of equilibrium between the number of stars to the west, a sort of transparent moon in the process of disappearing, and the intense brightness to the east. The temperature finally conquered the infinite. The great curtain took on the color of incandescence, the night turned to cinders, then there were only two or three stars remaining, the last embers to the west.
I turned my head, my neck was hurting. The path snaked under the eucalyptus trees which were becoming more visible, like foam in the night. It blanched under the tall hills to the east. It was over there, at the foot of the first slope, that I fainted three times when I tried to flee to find my mother’s grave years ago. That’s one of the limits imposed on me by my gift. Sometimes I transform my fate into a substantial story and I describe myself living in a palace, limping, forced every night to recount a story before dawn to save a life. Tried and true formula, except that toward the end the palace overflows with hundred-year-olds who slow down time, overpopulate the numerous hallways and the bedrooms, insidiously impede births, and exhaust the possibly of encounters and desire. I really like the hundred-year-olds, and the honeyed, toothless childhood they reincarnate when they sit on the square near the mosque after the siesta. It amuses me to imagine they’re waiting for storks to carry them off somewhere to resuscitate them.
I pace in circles. I have to go back. My cheek is hot and there must still be a trace of the slap on my face, as well as scratches on my neck. The blood in my mouth has the familiar taste of metal. The sound of an engine puts an end to the metaphor. A shopkeeper abruptly draws the curtain of his store, far behind me. Garbage collectors pass and glance at me with a smile. Nearly all of them recognize me. Greet me. Four, plus the tractor driver. I have to save them, too. I have a title in my head. A book I’ve read this time but whose title seemed to surpass the number of pages: Season of Migration to the North.
Images of storks, of course, but also of the awakening of sex, of rituals that serve as an intermediary between eternity and the calendars. “You’ve seen Djemila’s face, but you must find the rest of her body,” whispers my secret animal. Oh, that story has no solution yet. Djemila is an unresolved case stuck between my father who refuses her and my aunt who hesitates. A silent pack of dogs approached me and then opted for sniffing the empty trash cans. Numerous, their leader in a hurry. They turned their heads toward me in unison and yelled, mockingly, “Zabor on larboard, Zabor on starboard!” I was angry, I wanted to cry and yell. At myself and at the absurdity of my situation. The sun rose all at once, leaping, striped with clouds like a pheasant.)
6
(The day turns brutally bright, lays bare every corner, cuts the angles, unveils the barks and stones until they’re vibrating. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. “Except in the heart of prayer,” says my dog.) The Law of Necessity is sometimes obscure, even for me. A woman can be stupid, ugly, mean, or pretty as the proof of paradise, she will never be able to explain pregnancy. (The smell of my aunt’s morning coffee. The kitchen reeks of vegetables that are already rotting. Hadjer has the sharp eyes of a woman on the alert, worried, but she only makes small talk. I want to ask her questions, find out if there’s any news about the request for marriage I made to Djemila’s family now that Brahim is awaiting death and can no longer oppose it or take offense. I feel guilty and pace in circles. What did I do that I shouldn’t have done? I return to my bedroom and touch the books, flip through them rapidly, but I’m not in the mood to read. The Confessions of Saint Augustine? No. I hate the way he moans and betrays his body. He’s the Judas of our flesh. I start to get sleepy. My hours have been reversed for years already, I sleep when the sun rises and wake when it wanes. Maybe I’ll write to her, Djemila, and ask her to be patient. One day I’ll find your entire body and give it back to you, O decapitated neighbor.) The surrogate mother knows the cause, the pain, or the weight, the embrace or the name of the man who moaned over her, but not the mystery that rounds her out like an earth. Becoming pregnant is like listening to music, perhaps, but above all it means being subjected to a major law. That’s my metaphor for explaining my situation, in a way. (Hadjer’s face is sealed. She touches my eyelashes, examines my cheek as if it were her own skin. She turns serious and launches into a harsh, angry grumbling at the ceiling, and the sky above it, and the god that ballasts them. Everything trembles in her, even the walls of the kitchen. A sandstorm seems to dry her out before my eyes. “Why? Why, O my God?” she repeats, taking off my torn shirt stained with blood, calling as witness my grandfather, who’s been dead for years, her imaginary ancestors and her own mother. Wringing the cloth, because she can’t find the right words in her emotional state. I’m ashamed to have provoked this anger that disrupts our routine.) I understood this law intuitively. Years ago.
I was fifteen years old, it was four in the afternoon, a winter without rain, I was standing at the intersection of two narrow streets struck with glacial, creeping winds. They had sent me to buy bread at the bakery, which was accosted by mobs of people anxious about the flour shortages, at the end of the reign of socialism. I was standing there, contemplating two cockroaches that were stirring slowly, immobilized by the cold of the gutter. People were yelling and arg
uing with their empty baskets under the dirty gray sky, at the entrance of the bakery under attack. The pack was ferocious; everyone had a number on their basket but the line had degenerated into a stampede. We had been a free country for two decades already, but the memory of hunger is a fear tattooed inside us. I had just finished reading a novel about a group that found themselves shipwrecked. They had eaten each other, spurred by hunger and the delirium of the saltwater. Then I had daydreamed about the titles of the “forthcoming” books. I particularly liked The Mutineers of the Bounty. It made me think of fire and flames, this brief, united plural, this place that was the “Bounty,” the name of a land, a prison, or a city perhaps, where they were trying to break the locks. I knew, suddenly, that there was a clear and precise purpose behind the apparent futility of the village of Aboukir and its idleness. The village’s vanity was absolute, its inanity was so obvious that it had to be the doing of someone who had wanted to skip the essential, the engine of the fire, the will to create.