Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  20

  I started to scream when I woke up, around dawn. My eye revolted at the sight of a monster that had taken the shape of all the objects in the darkness around me, which had turned hard, horned, piercing my skin, screaming their strangeness. Squeezed against Hadjer’s breasts, I was sweating and trembling, invaded by a pillaging spirit. “Struck by the evil eye!” Hadjer concluded, before giving up on any explanation for my fits, which became more serious and kept me from pursuing my studies. For her the performance must have seemed like a possession, I would salivate with my odious bleating voice, point at things with a trembling finger, mangle the words, mix the language from school with her own deformed language. Ah, such a beautiful spectacle! She must have cried with disappointment and rage over the rumors that spread, recalling the fate of her father Hbib.

  Mr. Safi, my schoolmaster, came to see me after a week but declared that the situation was beyond him. He advised my father, who accompanied him, to consult the imam, who was more equipped for this kind of problem. They washed me, covered me, and courteously invited Hadj Senoussi to come see me at our house. Young at the time but already amused by the spectacle of the world, he kindly answered the request and came to have tea in the very room where I was lying. He caressed my hair, recited entire verses, and concluded, without saying so, that I was more likely suffering from being abandoned than from being possessed. My family history was as well known in the village as a film. He examined me with affinity and intelligence, smiled at me, then whispered that the Prophet, before receiving the revelation, had experienced something very similar, and thus I must have been chosen by God. With a wink he slid some sweets under my pillow. I was reassured, to be honest, and I might have had the motivation to overcome my fears, but I understood instinctively that my fits guaranteed me an audience and affection. Cunning in the way intelligent children can be, I resolved to take advantage of the show and the cycles. Suddenly, the fragility that emptied my arms and gave me an awkward gait in the street took on meaning, a dreaded meaning.

  I was seven at the time, I was in my third year of school and my unusual childhood, my defects, and my disorders had become an unfortunate legend that led to me being quarantined, sometimes happily. Suddenly, I was the center of the world, and a groan was enough to attract the attention of the neighbors, the relatives of my tribe, and distant aunts who came both out of compassion and to savor their poorly concealed vengeance. The house was filled for a short time with incense, gifted eggs, honey, names of marabouts, and the coins they stacked under my pillows. Of course, I enjoyed that fake convalescence, even if I was ashamed of it, as when I found my bed wet in the morning. Except that, when night came, I went to sleep and always woke up faced with the snickering of countless angular objects. I had always spoken very little, and only Hadjer understood that I was suffering when I started to mix my words, relapsing into ancient gibberish.

  Oh, of course I lied about my condition a little, but my panic attacks were real even if I often exaggerated their effect! Deep down, I didn’t want to go back to school, I preferred to withdraw to the shadow of my aunt’s brown body and never move again, wrapped under my red cosmonaut hat that had become too small for my head but that I kept anyway. I could no longer tolerate the order of the letters in the alphabet, nor that of the rows of tables in our classroom, nor the battles in the playground and the prolonged mockery, nor the law of our village. The other children didn’t play with me and were content to yell my name, “Zabor!” as they mimicked convulsions, lying on the sidewalk, encouraged by the enormous laughter of the other schoolchildren. I experienced that period of my childhood as a waste, it slowed me down when I think I had already sensed my obscure gift. I secretly hoped to punish my father, push him into his entrenchments and force him to abandon his poses, stock phrases, and bawdy bragging. I renounced him in my own way, with my entire body.

  What was I suffering from, really? From worry—objects were becoming threatening—from fear—the darkness was spreading and hollowing my bedroom until it was a vague, nocturnal terrain. I had no more confidence in myself or in daily life. I had vertigo, headaches, and hallucinations: I heard unknown words, but above all, things had begun whispering names, acting as the accomplices of a threat that was hovering behind them, at once mother and ogress. I tried to describe my fear but no one paid attention to my notebook at that age. Scribbles piled up next to calligraphic letters like jaws. I felt isolated and disconnected from my family, despite their concern. That affected my solidity, erosion became a permanent sensation. I felt in my bones that I was wandering in a sort of weightlessness. I lost my appetite, of course, but also the desire to leave my bed, to cut my hair or speak to my cousins who had been brought to distract me and who remained there, torn between the fear of being contaminated and suppressing their hysterical laughter. My secret occupation was to search for rhymes with my first name, Zabor, and to turn them into the meager rebuses of my days. There you have it. (I’m getting a bit lost in description, but fear has no image, in my memory it is above all oppression, breathlessness, and panic, as above a well. In my chronology, it’s when I was crawling on the sand, just after the shipwreck, when the island was still nameless. Swallows fly through the sky in the window. They are the sign that dusk is complete and that the night is now possible.)

  The path of the gift is old as the world and always sows disorder before revealing its flower. That helps to explain my first attack. Sometimes, in the past, they confused the Prophet’s ecstatic trembling with the fevers that, according to Tradition, afflicted him during his business in Syria. For me, astonishingly, fear wasn’t caused by an angel ordering me to read in a cave, but by my incapacity to bear the sight of indecent things, the flaky paint on the walls, the stone distorted by the invisible, without the serene and orderly mediation of a rich language, capable of outlining the contours and keeping the distance between me and surfaces. All tongues are mother tongues, and mine was dead before the awakening of my memory, turning me into a panicked orphan. Oh yes! That’s it, my first sickness: the death of a mother and the desertion of an Angel with a book. (I was bleating every morning like a badly slaughtered sheep, at the sight of the invisible blood of my universe.) This lasted months.

  At a certain point, tired, Hadj Brahim settled for sending money and asking Hadjer about me, awkwardly, on the doorstep of the house he no longer entered. The entire tribe and my cousins concluded it was the evil eye or, more discreetly, God’s vengeance on my father, guilty of abandoning my mother in a desert. I remember his gloomy, extinguished voice in front of the door (my stepmother had forbidden him from entering our home), asking how I was doing, while my ears were ringing and my head was wrapped in a scarf soaked in orange flower water. I had an irrepressible desire to groan, to cry or throw stones at him. It was impossible for me to explain my fears. The words were on the ground, powerless like empty gloves. The language of Hadjer, my aunt who had never gone to school, was old and half blind, impoverished for centuries, it didn’t have nuance except for hunger, jealousy, or the fabrics of the Aboukir seamstresses.

  Those around me didn’t give in right away, although they kept their distance. The second phase resulted in a wave of advice and the addresses of powerful occult places. My “crying sickness” meant long treks with my aunt, sometimes accompanied by an old, idle relative, to seek healing: I visited all the green-and-white mausoleums of the saints of our region, I was asphyxiated with eau de cologne, my forehead was tattooed with juniper oil drawings supposed to ward off the evil eye, wrapped in veils and surrounded by the dismayed murmurs of curious women with no compassion. That went on for a long time. I also remember that one day, they made me eat, unbeknownst to me, bread drenched with the blood of meat cooked in bitter herbs, they made me drink tasteless liquids, and we searched for the root of my illness by interrogating wrinkled women and throwing lead on embers. Which didn’t reveal anything more than the routines of my universe: jealousies, jinxes, or curses from ima
ginary neighbors. Useless diagnostics for my word sickness.

  Suddenly babbling with worry, Hadjer showed signs of an inner fever. She started to speak without stopping, as if to fill the void or distance the beast that had devoured her father’s mind, she was rambling, she who normally kept a distance from the village women, she squeezed me in her arms ten thousand times for no reason and stopped watching television. Her low voice stumbled over the reasons for my illness and, this time, she couldn’t come up with a nice story to tell me, she was incapable of interpreting the universe in my favor as she had always done up to that point. If I screamed at night, it was because I was an only child, she said, not quite convinced. She reminded me that I was born with a mark on my arm, like a prophet, that she had seen our house inundated with white feathers falling from the sky while I was sitting in the middle of it all, smiling. She cried. I knew that I was suffering from not possessing a language that was vibrant, powerful, and rich.

  At exactly eight years old, I discovered the horror of the inexpressible. God had ninety-nine names but my world had none. A name is a talisman, a clause, which is to say an enclosure in the former sense of the word. Something that separates property from the wild forest. Everyone needs enclosures to keep from going insane, colliding with others and dying in the scramble. My childhood fits stemmed from a serious and ancient affair: language. I had a duty to discover a language that was cutting as a judgment, with the precision of a claw but also the patience of condensation. An intelligent language with the ambition of spreading from east to west and filling the tiniest hole, the tiniest bump, the tiniest cracks and crevices in my village, invisible to the naked eye. A language that would be my flock, multiplying with the blessing of a god, which I would watch over with tenderness, vigilance, and love while searching for rhythms like a shepherd in former times. I dreamed of it, with panic and without understanding, of course, but that gave rise to a quest that would lead me to my gift. There you have it, but the path was not easy, because I had no guide.

  I had been placed in a public school but was profoundly bored. It’s not that I wanted to retreat or was afraid of others, it was the slowness of their minds and their mouselike memories that the teachers tried to rectify by rapping sticks on their palms and buttocks. That’s what astonished me most about my classmates: their incapacity to remember. How could they, when their universe was nothing but trepidation? I could memorize a text by reading it a single time, an entire surah just by glancing at it. I’m not even talking about the names of the Prophet, or of his companions, dead male children, wives, adversaries. I remembered everything, as if caught in a spiderweb, and as soon as I moved even a little bit, my movement rattled all the rest. In class, I recited my lessons with disinterest, brilliant but switched off, as if sleepwalking. I didn’t think my memory was anything exceptional; it was their childish amnesia that appeared to be a handicap. How could they forget? I was surprised to see them hesitate over the names of the Prophet’s companions, which had been imposed on us like constellations, the names of the rivers, or the total sum of equations tall as minarets. How could I forget, when everything I heard, understood, or deciphered in French or Arabic was so incredible and new that I couldn’t imagine ridding myself of any of it?

  It wasn’t a question of trying to remember, I was in fact in the immediate presence of all the things I learned, at the very moment of their spawning, and writing was like a swarm of bees multiplying vigorously and settling on the surface of things like vibrant fur. Today my memory, trampled by my comings and goings and falsifications, does not have the same loyalty. My present language is rich and comes to me from the sea, preserved by the dog in my mind and a savage dictionary, but I suffer somewhat from the repercussions of good harvests: my words are more numerous than the objects, the metaphor has become an ivy plant, a devouring, and I find myself weaving a thousand stories just from looking at the back of a chair, for example. This accentuates my mutism in the eyes of others, while on the inside I experience an ear-splitting racket that will never cease, and pauses only when I sleep.

  I experienced many troubling and stifling years. Sometimes I went back to school, slightly better, mocked by others, saddled with new jeering names. It was hell when school let out. I ran toward the house inhaling the smells of coffee from the roasters on the main street with delight and anguish. The fragrance meant that school was over but also evoked the memory of the schoolchildren waiting for me outside to mock or chase me as they screamed. I can still see myself running until I was out of breath to escape the others, wishing I had wings or magical invisibility. Every day, or nearly, my stomach was in knots by the end of the day, troubling numbers and the letters of alphabets, plunging me into the distress of an orphan without a big and strong older brother. My only moment of happiness was when I saw the shadow of the house where my grandfather was growing old and where Hadjer with her brown skin was waiting for me with an explanation of the world that centered me as its pearl. My aunt’s ferocity and strong voice could distance the aggressors, the cockroaches, the night, and the nameless objects. Hadjer didn’t read the future, she wrote it: she told me about her gift that allowed her to see omens everywhere, describing for me one of her favorite dreams in which she saw the entire house invaded by flag bearers searching for me to carry me on their shoulders. I particularly liked this dream because it sounded like an anonymous benediction. I was a sick child, suffocated as though in an egg, in love with Hadjer’s breasts that I sized up by leaning against them, her body coated with healing and fragrant substances, smeared with juniper oil. I was surrounded by a land of various signs and rituals: I was forbidden to approach standing water, extinguished candles, salt on thresholds, keys, and scissors, or to go alone to the bathroom or to be naked at the baths without having first recited the names of God or a few prayers. Hadjer explained to me that the body is God’s window, but also the devil’s door. She examined my body carefully each night, like a notebook that had to stay blank. I wasn’t skinny because I was sick or malnourished, but because I hadn’t yet fully descended from the sky, she claimed. The stakes were immense, and I felt guilty when I skinned my knees as if I had torn pants that cost months of savings. I was treated like a jewelry box, and Hadjer presided over my temple, confusing her bitterness toward the hesitant men of the village and my fate as a child rejected by his father and left in the wild with the name of a sheep. After Ishmael, my first name, I chose Zabor, then there was a third, Sidna Daoud, which my teacher at the Koranic school gave me, after the prophet of Israel.

  * * *

  —

  At that time, I lived in the company of a series of miniature books, troubling, powerful, inviolable: hanging from my neck, they fascinated the schoolchildren and neighbors who touched them with respect. There were seven, fastened with threads and knots to my neck, under my armpits, in my schoolbag, in the pocket of my black apron, and under my pillow. I think they are what instilled in me the certitude that writing is not merely transcription but also the inauguration of power. In the village, it was well known that writing could cast spells, stop marriages, or heal illnesses. An implicit law, in the degraded religious beliefs of my family, decreed that if the world was a book, the body was its ink. And that idea echoed strangely within me, made it possible to redeem my story, and then, eventually, to save everyone. If writing passed through me, it could vanquish fever, sterility, the evil eye, and the passage of time. (“But then why not death itself, the ultimate battle?” my dog asks me one day. “Remember the Hadith of the Prophet, which says that life is the writing of a pencil in a notebook, except for children, sleepers, and the insane.”)

  According to our village’s reciters of the Holy Book, the very composition of the ink contributed to the creation of meaning, as did the paper pulp, the writing style, the choice of words, and the state of mind of the expert talib. The Holy Book spoke of itself as a text written on a celestial tablet, protected by the sky, the perfect version that pilgrims and wri
tings were striving for. (Where am I? The sound of a truck engine. My palms go rigid in the contortion of writing. I think of Djemila. I feel guilty, as if I’d forgotten to finish something essential, every time she creeps into my memory. What are the days like for a decapitated woman? I can’t imagine. A kind of darkness, with no language or writing. Something of what I feel for her escapes me. For months now, I’ve been sending her letters that she keeps, and I write others that I don’t send, intended to preserve her, to save her from old age, from wear and tear or suicide. Her daughter Nebbia acts as courier with a discretion and gravity that clashes with her impish age. Between the two of them, I think I glimpse the solidarity of a woman with her equal, not a daughter with her mother. I address Djemila as though through glass. “Love at the window does lead to meetings,” they say in our country. I speak to her as if my head were an empty street where I might cross her, in the middle of a summer day, with no worry or slander. In a floral dress, shoulders bare to make the sky shine, hair in the wind like a memory. On the street, there’s a benevolent dog, trees that keep watch to gently calculate the weather and the shadows, and signs all over the walls, tattoos intended to preserve this world from crumbling when I wake up. The only way to save the decapitated women of The Thousand and One Nights is to give them back their own bodies.)

  21

  The first time Hadjer brought me to a talib, we took the morning bus, between the eucalyptus trees and the fields, which led us to a small hamlet on the southern border, near the forest of Barbary figs. “Your mother’s village is on the other side of the thorns,” Hadjer explained before plunging back into silence. I had stared at the countryside for a while before I slept, head on my aunt’s thighs, face covered by a swath of her haik. A spring sky, luminous and cool, lifted up the crops and foliage. From time to time, I looked for my aunt’s eyes, barely visible, which gaze valiantly harsh and steady, as if to shun curiosity and keep men at a distance. It was her way of imposing respect through a mask of false anger, deliberately expressed through her features. No one dared speak to her. The truth is that such things weren’t done in our country. She had carefully calculated the duration of our wait on the side of the highway, at the exit of the village, asking what time the bus came. And when the door of the old coach contorted itself open in front of us, she dragged me like a bag, pulling my arm firmly down the aisle between the seats, then sat and didn’t move again. It was an ordeal for a woman, a spinster, to go out in the streets alone and take the bus to the rest of the world, I understood that even then. Hadjer was an old maid but she wasn’t old. She could be easily coveted or slandered and she knew it. But we traveled rapidly toward the Seven Mausoleums, without incident or murmurs as we descended in silence.