Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  16

  Hadjer didn’t understand my sulking in the days that followed, nor why I was striving more and more to imitate my grandfather, staring, seated at his side against the same wall. I remember the disappointment provoked by that betrayal: the words that my aunt had given me were somehow, inexplicably, the last echo of my mother’s voice, whose face had been erased in my memory. In the end, the storm culminated in shame and I renounced, after two or three tries, writing the words of Hadjer and the village in the Arabic alphabet they had taught me at school. The words were stiff like the peasants who arrive in the city, stammering and clumsy, hesitating in front of stores. I was sad and irritated, but also stubbornly in love, attentive to the interruption of the other language, the Arabic of school, which was slowly taking possession of the walls, enriching itself with each new term, tattooing and snatching the various objects of my universe. Oh, not an infinite language, but already sovereign! I found it strange that the village language didn’t have a name, while the school language had books, poems, songs. Hadjer’s language was experienced and concealed like the body of a woman, or like genitalia; as for the school language, we had to attach it forcefully or carefully—like a protective cover—to each pebble, tree, stork, or minaret. A difficult but fascinating language, treating the village like a wild horse. With my years of schooling, it started to speak in place of God and the heroes of the War of Liberation, and I started to notice the weakness of that powerless, deaf, and loquacious language: it had a lot of words for the dead, the past, duties, and the forbidden, but few precise words for our everyday life. Even though I was very young, I had the feeling that it spoke only of the dead and not of my village, which for me was big as the earth at that time, nor of my body or my universe. Its way of describing the world seemed to conceal a sickness, a secret shame, scorn. To tell the truth, it closely resembled my father when he approached me stinking of his burnoose and his sheep, repeating his prayers at the mosque and his invocations, giving me grand lessons to flatter his own vanity. I mean to say that the language was missing the ability to tell nice stories for people my age. (My back starts to hurt and I can’t feel my right shoulder anymore. I pause to search for the best word, consider a few, then opt for the most vigorous. The old man sleeps as though he’s been wrestling. The sugar at the bottom of my coffee cup induces a cold shiver.)

  In my first school notebooks, the alphabet was tempted by calligraphy, the pictogram, the strikeouts imitating fleeing animals. Letters reached for their supposed roots and revealed their ancient births. Ba’, derived from beit, meaning house, the place we return to, where we take off our shoes. Or the inaugural Alif, the vulture with the sharp eye, the first gaze, perched on a tree in the form of the hamza, the domestic animal, the ox. Or Jîm, drawn like a rippling snake in the clay of a river, with its one eye. The series was long and made me think: Ta’, meaning bread, the hearth with the fire, the cooking pot, ettannour. Kâf, derived from kaff, meaning palm, or Ya’, come to the world to evoke the hand, el yadd. And especially Noun, which I repeated tirelessly, evoking water, the inkwell, the horizon, dusk or dawn, the whale, the immense and slow fish that swallows the earth to turn it into a holy book. I was lost in reconstituting this dictionary, an inventory of animals or utensils of primitive times: the hearth, the fire, the house, the dusk, the ox, the grain. Each letter indicated an object at the end of its imprint, caressing an ancient presence. And I immobilized it like a hunter to catch the meaning in my notebook. I told myself that there had to be a meaning to the order of the alphabet. Perhaps Nuh had saved the animals in that order, which gave birth to the order of writing after the water ebbed. I wrote more and more quickly and marvelously well, the shepherd of my flock of wild animals, a happy and triumphant parrot (Poll, who became sovereign by multiplying words). It gave me a sort of aura that spared me from elbows and kicks during recess. The other schoolchildren also sometimes needed me to transcribe their lessons for them. Intrigued, Mr. Safi figured out, I think, this pathological pleasure, and sometimes worried about it as though it were a form of possession. His evidence was that my voracity didn’t stem from intelligence alone, but also from panic. “Haste will cost you!” he repeated to me, powerless, before picking up his chalk. He must have been astonished by this chaotic gift that had emerged in the puny body of the butcher’s son.

  That happiness lasted a long time, intoxicated me for a while before petering out, faced with a physical boundary: the few books capable of making an inventory of all the things I could see and sense. The village didn’t have collections, bookstores, old books, or a library. The Arabic language was omnipresent on the radio, at school, at the mosque, but seemed to possess, to my eyes, only two books: the schoolbook and the book of God. At the start of my second year, I grew tired of the textbooks and verses. (What time is it? I have to be precise: my art is not a matter of simply sitting near a dying person to make them a centenarian or to spare a sick person from suffering and oblivion. Of course not! The world is saved thanks to my long writing sessions, similar to prayer or census, that I impose on myself in my room every day. My notebooks are swollen by the torrent of a single narrative, with neither head nor tail, which carries within its violent lessons walls, porticoes, odors of ground coffee or mysteries of female armpits, colors of dresses, gleaming almond trees in spurts of petrified water, it mixes birthdates, names, and hands in a total and devastating flood. The story is essential to lift up a dying person, but rescuing the village from futility requires a Herculean narrative. It’s a vast enterprise: a meticulous description of the place, of the sign announcing Aboukir on the road which leads to the city all the way to the first Barbary fig trees in the south. The world owes its perpetuity only to the necessity of its description by someone, somewhere—that’s a fact. Sometimes my stomach is in knots at the idea of forgetting a detail and thus participating in a death, or accelerating it. When I forget, death remembers. This important mission has changed my body, hunched my shoulders, cultivated discipline. Yes, the lack of a library in Aboukir forced me to transform every possible notebook into solid, full books. Whom can I explain this to? Hadjer? The imam of the village, my former schoolmaster whom I still see, now old but still sharp and skipping? Whom can I tell about my Zabor? The ancient sigh of my ancestors turned into a proverb that asks, “Who will believe you when you speak as a prophet?,” a proverb that the young hardly know. I’m reminded of the story of Daoud, David in the other Book, the prophet to whom God gave a single voice and the ability to sing a song for which the mountains would serve as a choir. Why did the mountains answer and not the men, the singers and the believers? Did God choose that metaphor in an attempt at gratuitous elegance? No. It was to say that language is a transcendent order. When it’s perfect and precise, it provokes the response of mountains, of the mute. The Zabor, the psalms as the others say, are a song and a book, a writing of all kingdoms at once, and that’s why even stone has a language within it.

  I shout, “Yes, I’ll be quick!” God had six days and I have only three hours. I don’t know what Hadjer is saying, sitting in front of the bedroom door, to keep the tribe at a distance, but she is succeeding as a storyteller. “She postpones your decapitation,” says my dog, with his improvised Thousand and One Nights, his eloquence, and his craftiness.) I was missing the dream, the mystery of the tale, I realized later. We were a country recently liberated from colonization and words acted as soldiers, imitating the uniform through their rigor and striving to sing the earth, the blood of martyrs, the water. In the courtyard, they were chanting hymns of the revolution; during the hours of drawing, they drew the flag or the severe face of our president. I found the same words on the banners of national festivals, on coins, on the classroom chalkboard, in the repetitive prayers. A prodigy, I was soon bored, exhausting one of the most beautiful languages of the world that had been offered to me without its arousing, bushy genitalia.

  When I was around eight years old, I lost hope, with no playmates or possibi
lity of naming things precisely. Even more strangely, I lost the last features of my father’s face, which Hadjer’s story had once patiently helped me to reconstruct. There was nothing left of it. No pain, no precision. During the weekend siestas, I observed my aunt’s brown body, which she still took great care to bring to the baths at the time, her armpits accouncing her breasts, I inhaled the wood in the fire of the hearth, I placed my cheek against the cold tiles of our house, but all of it escaped the language of school. Written on paper, it stayed there without moving, powerless, when I returned home, to live once more among the objects of the house or to name things, paralyzed like my grandfather Hbib. It would die like a fish out of water when outside of books and school because, in our home, no one used it to control the scattering and the invisible. I discovered much later that it was eminently rich, capable of designating the nuances of water and sand impossible to find anywhere else, but I believe that its sickness, to my eyes, came from its incapacity to provoke mystery and pleasure. I never succeeded in turning it into a rite; it’s not the language’s fault, or mine, but the fault of those who presented it to me like a baton and not like a voyage, like a language of God barely permitted to men, which deterred me from a young age. The truth is that the language was poorly taught by frustrated people with harsh stares. Nothing that might open the path to desire.

  I liked calligraphy, which contorted itself around objects to envelop them in ancestry, surrounded them like a wise old serpent and then flowed like a dress, like women’s hair, ivy, or trails. I loved writing in Arabic, but my words sometimes looked like heresy to Mr. Safi, who didn’t understand this extravagance in my notebook, next to writing that was quite diligent and obedient.

  Today (Steps scrape the ground. A chair. A child whines until his demand is met. In the distance, a eucalyptus tree being sawed?), I sum up this evil from my childhood but I believe that I experienced it in disorder and confusion. As a child experiences his parents’ divorce. But learning to write in school gave me a glimpse of the gap that exists between the object and the sound. Before Indian films. The texture of my universe was not yet the ink of my writing, it didn’t correspond, and remained unruly, distant, as if on the other bank of a river I couldn’t cross, not knowing how to swim. Suddenly, because they could be named in two languages (including the language of Hadjer, who is still unleashing her stream of words on the other side of the door), the trees of the house, the walls, the vineyard, the spoons, and even fire take on a strange face.

  That was the beginning of my sickness and my first screams.

  17

  I like to go down the hill as quickly as possible. I feel—and have since childhood—like I’m taking giant footsteps, seven-league leaps. The village below spreads its roofs, its TV antennae, and will peter out in the south, at the first fields. Where I faint, always, when I try to get away from Aboukir. I glimpse the giant eucalyptus trees, below, which turn their back to the village and leave in pairs, at the edge of the road. The whole valley is green and yellow because of the harvests and the inevitable summer droughts. Hadjer follows me, speaking again to imaginary crowds. (When did I start recounting a story that will lead me to the end of the world? Where does this verbiage in my head come from, that nothing can stop? Anger and clenched teeth. Behind the verbose gift, a sober certitude, sometimes masked, sometimes tenacious, that repeats to me what my father has always said: I am a freak.) It’s like the flight of mother and son through the desert. I have my notebooks in my bag and I walk quickly. I have to evade Hadj Brahim’s son, but also the disappointment that weighs in my stomach. Did I save the old man or did I condemn him? I don’t know. Hadjer pitted herself against everyone for several hours and I wrote without stopping. In the end, she opened the door and told me to make a run for it—“The dogs are coming!” Harsh words, as always. The story ended with a strategic retreat. His own was a long delirium about our history, the debts, the money, the number of sheep. My aunt deployed the talents of a lawyer or a storyteller, or both at once. Like an excerpt from The Thousand and One Nights meant to distance the inhabitants of the palace from Scheherazade, immobilize them before they could alert the evil king. As for my story, it was also long, torrential.

  The old man was perceptive to it and his story resumed in his head, I think. He didn’t awaken entirely but his body changed color, the noise around him was that of sleep, not of insects. I don’t know what came over me, I almost broke my golden rule never to touch the dying person. I gently arranged the sheet that covered him and felt the urge to speak. With the cold voice that I have always used to speak to him. Why? I don’t know. As if his agony signaled a truce. I was struck by a sort of lucidity, beyond my writing, and I thought of grazing his face, feeling his body (“The father’s body doesn’t exist, we feel nothing but the weight and the hollow, in turn,” my dog tells me, mindful of my unprecedented gestures). We had never had physical contact, a caress or squeeze of the hand, an embrace of protection and tenderness. I had always kept the same distance from him, one and a half yards, ever since I was four years old. In fact, I had never seem him touch anyone, only his sheep, which he groped before purchasing and when he slit their throats—eyes closed, concentrating on his art, feeling the tendon or the fat to deduce the price or the origin, to imagine the taste of the meat. I brought my hand to his forehead and remained there, like an idiot, with no language able to describe my sentiment. I was afraid he would wake up and smile at me, victorious. So I sat back down. Another two or three hours of vigorous writing and he could open his eyes and get back to counting his flock.

  I had a title for the notebook of his salvation: To the Lighthouse. I plunged in and that was the beginning of the miracle. The blood was ink black, the body was a calligraphy that I could wind and unwind to set a rhythm according to the mysterious art of correspondence: each time I found a good formula, its blessing spread to the dying man and restored a cadence to him, the breathing of a slow awakening. My father came back to life, I knew it without even lifting my head, because of my power, because of this mystery within me that comes from far away: when we tell a story around a fire, the night recedes and grows attentive. Why do we write and read books? To amuse ourselves, responds the crowd, uncritically. Wrong: the need is more ancient, more vital. Because there is death, there is an end, and thus a beginning that it is up to us to restore in ourselves, a first and final explanation. To write or recount is the only way to turn back time, counter it, restore it, or control it. There’s a link between conjugation and metaphysics, I’m sure of it. It’s the first law to decipher. As soon as I lift my head, I suffer from fragmentation, guilt knots my heart when I stop and everything flees from me like sand through my fingers. So I come back and feel close to discovering, at the end of each lovely phrase, a sort of ultimate explanation. It gives me courage, grandeur, self-confidence. That’s when the breath returns to the other’s body, as if I had managed to plug an invisible leak. There you have it. My life would have had a simple beauty if the old man had kept me instead of swapping me for sheep fallen from the sky of his superstitions. He was there, dying, and I was at his bedside, diligent. Another two or three hours and he would have emerged, thanks to the details in my notebook. But Hadjer opened the door to shout at me to leave. Her ranting couldn’t hold back time any longer, already my stepmother was slapping her thighs, crying that I was a demon that had to be chased away. “Before he kills his father like he tried to kill his brother!” she yelled, forcing her indignation.

  The sun sets and the sky leans to the west. Gravity, perhaps, or the dimmed brightness will elevate the stars to the east. The end of the day is always fragrant because of the numerous shrubs. The island of desolation is desolate no longer. I know its outline, I bred words there, a language of order and inventory, I pushed back the savage world through work and tillage, in a way. A title: The Sleep of the Just. Because of the image of a giant sleeping under a tree so big that it requires the wild race of a horse launched at a gallop for
one hundred days to cross it. I like this title as the expression of the right to sleep, the possibility of deep sleep after acquittal, a possible return to innocence. I lower my eyes so as not to meet the stares of others. I already have enough lives to save. We hurry back home, like foreigners (but my writing slows down, my hand lifts, and I search. The house seems like a calm island, the moment between day and night when every kingdom goes quiet. I allow myself a moment of laziness. I lie on the back of the whale).