Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  18

  I’m lying down. And I feel the old book with the dog-eared pages. The same for years now, every time I need to consider my story from a different angle. On the cover is a man dressed like a bush, holding a long rifle, speaking to a parrot striped with all the colors of the world. The longtime scarcity of books in the village has forced me to cultivate a habit: rereading. Without exhausting myself. I read differently: I start with the first word or I hold the book like a closed box, to force myself to dream it, to imagine it in its enclosure, or I stop right at its title to transform it into a kite. Or I read a part to provoke the mesmerizing digression of the dog that speaks within me. Rereading doesn’t kill the mystery because the book is a body, not a straight line between a beginning and an end. I turn it around or enhance it or caress it or charge in, word by word. I discovered one day that the word for “page” was derived from the word for “country.” Thus, when we open a book, we enter a world. But my link with the word is carnal, and I decipher in an attempt at fulfillment, at stripping a body bare.

  Robinson Crusoe is the most fascinating of my found books. I fell in love with that story a long time ago, and it has since become something of a holy book for me. Ah, the hours I’ve spent following in the footsteps of that man who was in search of the footsteps of another! I went down all the bifurcating paths, all the possible combinations. I remember the encounter with Friday, the discovery of his footprints in the sand, the emotion of the first harvests, and Robinson’s attitude, ceremonious and unnatural, when he speaks to the person kneeling opposite him. Friday’s beautiful response about his religion and the first name of his god: “the country of O,” which he pronounces solemnly, designating the vastness. Indicating through his exaltation that the gods are born of our unanswered interpellation, their names will come later, with books or preachers and wars. Which goes to show that I’m wrong every time I think I’ve exhausted this book.

  My long adolescent years spurred my interest in the third character that is almost never mentioned: the parrot, the symbol of hidden meaning discovered only with time or meditation in this book, as mysterious as a cave. Robinson himself tells of how, for lack of any people to converse with, he tamed a parrot. And I swear that I was a disciple of that bird, whom I consider the pearl of that insular space: a being that was commanded, on an island with no way out, to reinvent the entire language with five words: “Poor Robin, where are you?” It was the bird’s only phrase, its entire dictionary, counted on one hand. During my illness, I felt so close to the bird that I dreamed of telling the world about its martyrdom and its crucifixion on a palm tree. A secret narcissist, Robinson taught it first to say the name he had given it, Poll, as if to stave off menacing oblivion and revive his own shipwrecked name that the island had threatened to engulf, for lack of conversation with anyone else. If the parrot had a name, Robinson must have said to himself, the castaway couldn’t forget his own!

  That was my first discovery, during my illness. The second was the limits of language. The bird soon embodied my terrible fate and that of the entire village. To have to recount, fix, exchange, perpetuate, and speak with only a few words, or even millions! Yes, there were thousands in Hadjer’s language and hundreds of thousands in the language of school, but that didn’t change the fact that those languages had an end, a threshold of powerlessness; sooner or later, we would reach the limit of five words or five million words. Beyond the last shore(line) stretched the void.

  I spent many years meditating on this fate but also on this legendary story written by someone I had never met. And, at each free and uncertain hour, I found myself rereading this story. With delight. Like a Bible that imposes its law on you when you lack even clothing. And today (I remember, I don’t know why, that the old man stirred when I rushed out of his bedroom. His hand hinted at a gesture, which was perhaps only a nervous twitch. His last), I return, fascinated by another mystery that I skimmed years ago: the fate of the island after salvation, which is to say the fate of the parrot after Robinson’s rescue. (Hadjer calls me to have our end-of-day tea. It’s served with cakes. It’s the last sugar I’ll eat for the day and, ever since my childhood, the taste of sugar has been associated with dusk.) I think it’s the most enigmatic passage, the most metaphysical, the confession of the castaway turned educator. I reread it endlessly and sink into it imagining the blare of what comes next, the cosmic uproar around a god who’s left the place forevermore. Oh, the great mystery! The man raised a parrot and lived with him no less than twenty-six years. “How many years did the parrot live after that? I don’t know,” he recounts. He would have heard that in Brazil those animals could live to be a hundred. As a teenager, I reread the same passage: “Perhaps some of my parrots still exist and are still calling for poor Robin Crusoe right now.” I was obsessed with imagining that island populated with hundreds of parrots repeating the same phrase, deafening the other kingdoms, jabbering endlessly and crashing, in the insular enclosure, into the intransigent glass limits of their fate. Perhaps in the village, we were no better than these birds. Perhaps our languages, in the eyes of the deserter god, possessed nothing but the meaning of a single phrase, reiterated endlessly for millennia, infinitely recomposed. Perhaps the village where I lived was nothing but a contained, deaf island that I had to liberate through long stories and through learning a vaster and more vigorous language, closer to that of the castaway than that of those parrots that spun in circles, obliged to invent a grammar, religions, books, meals and fruits, names and passions with only five words and a mysterious, deserted name.

  I was Poll. And faced with a rare reflection of our house down below, I didn’t see a young puny man, exhausted by masturbation and writing, already a widower and cursed with a goat’s voice, but a bird, incapable of flying for very long, of course, but skilled in inventorying, in labeling, in language, in writing, and in dueling with death. I was the bird that perpetuates a phrase, reproduces it until the arrival of rich language. Guardian of the island that would have sunken into the silence of a tomb if I hadn’t kept it above the waves through my conjugations. There you have it. Vibrant colors in the mirror, red, green, or yellow, blazing with plumed fire, effusive blood, and the twitching of a neck searching for the source of a noise. The eye kept its harshness despite the fantasies of fashion and the nose had a certain noblesse in its profile. There was nothing left of the sheep that my father had sacrificed to save his fortune. Writing gave me wings, islands to name and prestige that I wouldn’t have obtained by walking through the streets of Aboukir. So I kept returning to that excerpt, which sent me dreaming for hours and hours: “POOR ROBIN CRUSOE. I wish no Englishman the ill luck to come there and hear them; but if he did, he would certainly believe it was the devil.” Or God.

  19

  The rest of the day was calm. I didn’t see anyone except for my aunt. A recluse in Hadjer’s universe with her brief monologues. I almost didn’t come out of my room. I examined the plate that Hadjer had served me, in case she had forgotten a piece of meat. Our house is still preserved, an enclosed space beyond the false sorrow of the hill. My aunt had procured me a second opportunity for grace at my father’s bedside. Is it because she believes in my gift? Age-old question. I hear her busying herself behind the door. She is my living clock, eternal hour, endless hair. Now all I’ll find out about the old man will depend on her and her informants. Even to her I can’t promise that with three more hours I would have been able to bring Brahim back from the sky to his shoes. Half of what we live sometimes cannot be expressed in language and, for the other half, you’d need millions of books. (Or a body against your own. A woman we save with our hand. My affair with Djemila is thus hanging by my father’s breath. The very idea that I could marry a spurned woman with two children scandalized him. Even Hadjer didn’t know how to defend me when he found out.) I wake up with an obsessive idea: What is the world of Brahim like, struck by the imminence of his death? The sound of a book leafed through too rapidly by th
e wind? A dry page that’s dissolving? An uproar in the voice of a cosmic crier? What thought came to mind, as he suddenly understood that the void would move through him? When I started all this, I often asked myself a question with no answer: Why did that person have to die and not someone else? And, if there was no reason or order to death, why should we search for reason or order in life? The truth is that I felt a sort of sorrow, a doubt about my gift, a suspicion that it might be an illusion, that I always kept outside of my notebooks. But the books were there, around me, serious and light, chaotic, conquerors of my bedroom. They are the proof of a perpetuation, of a possible salvation. Leaning against each other, on the shelves, secretly attentive to each other’s universes. They surrounded me, preserved me, I knew it. I had no reason to doubt it. No one in our tribe knew how to read or write, and so if this gift had fallen to me, I had to bestow meaning, perpetuate, consecrate my family and save them from complete, idiotic death. Hadj Brahim could mock me, I had saved dozens and dozens of dying people over the years. Not to mention the lives I was maintaining on a razor’s edge, the people I was responsible for solely because my gaze had met theirs, all connected, united by my care, protected from the wolf and secluded ravines. He could doubt me, but he had never been responsible for anything other than his sheep.

  I wrote a lot today: hopeless letters to Djemila who doesn’t know how to read, or write, or revive (excerpts from poetry about stone, suggestions of imaginary encounters at the exit of the bath or in a cemetery); the fabulous, meticulous description, spanning a notebook and a half, of a window; or the account—in multiple synonyms—of the sounds of the village behind the curtain and the surrounding wall. Poll exploits an unprecedented, rapacious language that reduces distances through metaphor or allusions to other books. “Every metaphor contains a folded page,” says the bird, perched on the coconut tree, testing out his unique role as savior after the departure of his hairy instructor. The notebook and a half will be added to the collection of this gigantic book that I’ve been writing for years, Zabor. A life-saving story, slid under the armpit of the world, bearing the sacred mission of keeping alive as many of the people I meet as possible. When did this torrent start? To be exact, you would have to reverse the image: speak not of the flood, but of the ark. The flood is the swept-away debris of the world, the frayed floorboards and animals in children’s books, the trees uprooted by the rain, pushed toward the sea, the screaming nonbelievers, carved-up sidewalks, twisted tree trunks, empty oil cans, mismatched shoes and bushes. And the ark is my writing, the order facing off against the deluge. Yes, my God, every day I postpone the end of the world. When did this story begin? When did I start erecting my ark? I spent years searching for the traces of the first scream. It goes back to the day of Eid, when my father slaughtered a sheep before my eyes, happy and proud, as though standing on the peak of a holy mountain. There were droplets of blood on my shoes and a red river in the courtyard, and everyone was laughing crudely like ogres. Yes, yes, creation is a book, and it’s mine. Always the inverse: the book is the world, entirely, it is what will remain when the sun rises in the west, at the Last Judgment. Oh yes, eternity is a “forthcoming” book and mine is the only possibility before the end. I write. I write.

  Although the date shifts by twelve days each year, the end of the world has an exact hour and a wretched voice. Its bleating started to spread through the village the night before, an echo, like a rumble of displaced lands. It grows louder as I try to block my ears. At first the night is the deaf trampling of beasts, the anger of truck engines, men panting with effort, then it settles in, reaches the summer moon, wards off the dogs in the fields, erases the friction of the tree branches or the clinking of dishes. It’s not the sun that rises to the west or the cry of the Angel with gigantic lungs, armed with deafening instruments, but the bleating beasts, shut in their enclosures, who speak to each other through the partitions before the moment of their slaughter, just before the Eid prayer.

  My grandfather was still alive but had already blended into our objects and didn’t speak to anyone, for lack of words. Hadjer took care of him as best she could and sometimes I sat near him, with my notebooks, to keep watch. In the beginning, I showed him my alphabet, then I understood that his world was reducing to a single infinite syllable. At the time, my father Brahim was already playing the tightrope walker between the surveillance of his wife, my stepmother, who bore him as many children as he had sheep, and the guilt about his sister the spinster, his father who was now a tree, and me, the son brought here in a red balaclava, accused of attempting to murder his half brother. Two times per week, he would bring or send a basket full of vegetables, meat, and bread. And, at each celebration of Eid al-Adha, he would bring a sheep to our house. It was all of the captured sheep, promised for the sacrifice, that I could hear bleating in every house the whole night before the feast of the slaughter. That wildly excited my father, accelerated his gait, threw him into a quasi frenzy: he had to be everywhere at once to carry out the sacrificial kill. Hidden under my covers, I tried all night to decipher the desperate language of those about to be sacrificed, tied up or shackled in each house. A chorus that seemed ancient, magnificent in its sadness, and which continued, softly, between beast and God. What encouragements or memories were these sheep unleashing? Why should they be sacrificed to save the very people who were about to eat them? Proof that the feast of Eid al-Adha was the end of the world replayed on a large scale in our village, in a sort of redemptive repetition. Each family had bought its sheep the day before and, after the morning prayer, every sheep would have its throat slit to save a man, a child, someone among us. That extermination thrilled the children and flattered the elderly. An odor of hay, manure, and sharpened blades replaced that of mint and eucalyptus. Aboukir sullied itself in a crude celebration of devouring.

  That day, out of fear of my father and his murderous mockery, I witnessed the terrible agony in our courtyard. Brahim had decided to slit the throat of the sheep offered to his sister himself. The beast, which arrived that very morning, on an empty stomach “so as not to affect the taste of its meat,” as my father said, thrashed its horns in the other direction, writhing like a child. My father’s helper knocked it onto the ground and bound one of its hind legs to the leg in front. On its back, the beast then offered its bare, white neck, my father recited a prayer, turned the sacrifice toward the east, the direction of all our prayers, and examined his favorite knife a final time. Death uttered a hoarse and foamy word that no one understood. The blood splattered on the cement in clots, it reached my pants and shoes even though I was several yards away, sitting paralyzed at the doorway of our kitchen that opened onto the courtyard with the lemon tree. The same raspy bleating rang out from every house, the same beast writhed on the floor, staining its wool with pink, trying to pick up its twisted neck, its eye addled beneath the sun. The entire village had gone insane, in my imagination, echoing the cries of the dying, already stirring the charcoal and embers, while the children rushed to hang the slain beast on a tree and skin it over basins to collect the blood, the offal. In the red pool, I saw my father’s wet boots and realized he was speaking to me, barricaded behind his vanity and his throat-slitter know-how. They explain to the youngest how to preserve the meat by making a clean cut through the gallbladder. The sun gives the force and breadth of a season to the stench. I wasn’t sad, I was wretched, my entire body on the alert. The blood turned into a dryness in my mouth and I saw the large courtyard rock gently like a tray. As if they wanted to throw the lemon tree and the surrounding walls overboard. The bleating rang out from everywhere, chaotic, loud, sometimes muffled by hands, dissonant but unanimous in their calls, and the end of the world was a beautiful day, with a blue light, bright like a revelation. The universal indifference struck me as a disdainful betrayal. I understood that no language in my village, not that of the Holy Book, nor that of Hadjer, nor the others to come, could translate the essential. Everything remained forbidden, short of th
e limit marked by the knife and the blood. The jubilation around the sacrificial animal didn’t conceal the most important thing from my eyes: it was a suspended sentence for us all, a way of making our procession forget death. I saw an abyss, barely concealed by the ritual. Everyone threw themselves on the beast to carve it up, sharing the task as they did in ancient tribes.

  Even Hadjer was smiling again and enjoying the company. She served coffee for the throat-slitter and his helper. My grandfather had been brought into the sun but he was still contemplating us as if we were a flock of birds on the horizon. No one paid me any attention. Except for a fixed, bulging, glassy eye. Dyed with henna, placed in a basin, hanging over the hooves arranged haphazardly, the head of the sheep was grimacing, and its giant horns were curled up in shadows twisting toward the sky, in a perfect capital letter. The slaughtered animal seemed to be the guardian of a new secret. It was staring at us all with compassion. It loved me with an affection that almost made me cry over my fate and the fate of my whole family in Aboukir. I became aware of the silence of the village, suddenly deserted like an altar, without the bleating of the day before and the morning prayers. The head of the sheep, crooked in the green basin, became the smiling and perilous disguise of another presence, so tender, that taunted the knives, the ropes, the display of blood and the barbaric gestures of the butchers. As though it had been placed on the threshold of something. I stood up too abruptly and lost consciousness. But not only that.