by Kamel Daoud
I noted everything in my first notebooks, refining the details and the still unanswered questions. I don’t know how, by intuition perhaps, or because of the buzzing in my head and my alimentary discipline, I knew I was putting my finger on the crux of the matter, and with patience I could resolve the enigma of death or postpone the end of the world that the Holy Book declared was imminent. People tolerated me for a while, then the eldest protested to my father who explained that he had no authority over a crazy person he hadn’t raised himself. One night, after the prayer, they knocked on our door, and Hadjer solved the problem by screaming, scratching her cheeks, and slapping her thighs to make me feel guilty. It was the first manifestation of the devil. Or the angel. Or of death, who had accomplices. What could I say? I had already, by the time I reached my magical and tormented teenage years, discovered that ritual is a line of protection people draw between themselves and the abyss. For lack of a powerful, defiant language, they rack up customs, tattoos, talismans to protect themselves, they dig deep into the earth to bury proof of the end. Ritual is the antecedent of language, a cadence against anguish. And the people of the village, normally peaceful, didn’t want to upset the equilibrium and attract a dreaded anger. The country was new, finally free after more than twenty years, though buttressed on its new certitudes, wary and paranoid. Dissent was regarded with an evil eye.
They negotiated my status for a long time with my father, who succeeded, I have to admit, in calming the believers and quieting the hysteria. They agreed that I wouldn’t go into the village during the day, that I wouldn’t attend any burials, and that, if I wanted to continue to describe the village, its walls, its deaths, and its trees, I had to do it alone, in my house, without involving anyone else. They parleyed for days before reaching something like a pact that left an opening for my gift: they would not speak of my madness anymore, and would simply ignore me. That judgment gave me a sort of aura and authorized me to live without school, without work, and without accountability. Secluded in my aunt’s house, sleeping during the day and visible in the streets only at night, I gained an unprecedented status: neither man (I didn’t work, I didn’t pray, I didn’t visit my family) nor woman (obviously). My body was invisible like women’s bodies, I didn’t walk in the street, I didn’t go to cafés, I didn’t leave the house and its walls except to visit the ill; all my information about the world came from Hadjer and her visitors—slander, murmurs, metaphors about sex, the sounds of weddings and sorcery, conversations about fabrics and baths. But, unlike women, I could go out at night, visit the cemeteries, speak out loud, walk without hiding under a haik, pray alone, or sit facing the café, to the east, near the main road, next to the gas station at dawn. Before I discovered my gift, in those years of learning, I felt like a third gender, a wandering, a cautious grazing of things. I rejected my body and it showed in how I dressed with scandalously bad taste, but, until I had the perfect language, I could only live in chaos.
25
My bedroom is like a cave. They forced it on me as a teenager, when it became unseemly to nestle against my aunt’s brown breasts. I pile up books haphazardly, sometimes half read, suspended like conversations, faces turned toward the wall. Some don’t even have covers, like ancient tombs or voyagers with impossible languages. My library wasn’t big but it was implausible and incoherent, which bestowed it with a richness to my eyes. It was made up of old books people had given me, what I could gather myself by knocking on doors, and works that my relatives brought me back from their trips. A few years ago, after my time in the Koranic school, I heightened the chaos by ungluing the covers of some and sticking them to others, creating an inaudible racket, an amalgam that increases the possible combination of texts and, as a result, their meanings. A sort of unprecedented auto-da-fé, acting like a demiurge. As if I were throwing the novels in the air and they were falling back down rich with new plots from chance encounters and collusions between virgin titles and orphan stories. The tale became a thousand tales and the night a thousand and one nights. It was madness, I know, but what else could I do to combat the finitude of a meager library and the double threat of boredom and the last page? Fortunately, I also had hundreds of notebooks. Of all kinds: plain notebooks made in factories and others that were more delicate or more robust, that emigrants to France or their families gave to me as thanks for my secret aid. I also had many elsewhere, in the fields, under the carob trees and old gigantic trunks with enormous roots that people feared because they are said to house spirits and snakes. That’s where I buried them. There you have it, it’s been said. For when we aspire to save an entire village, describing it with the asperity of the stone down to the genealogy of first and last names creates a forest between the walls.
The archiving of all those notebooks became problematic when I was about twenty years old, forcing me to find a solution. I could have simply destroyed them, torn them up or burned them, but it proved imprudent to light fires in the house for fear it might bring on one of my fits. I could have thrown them in the trash, but our neighbors and their children were too curious, and I didn’t want to find the pages of my works scattered, thrown to the winds, examined by everyone, used to clean windows or bottoms. Goodness no! Later, I found a solution that allowed me to camouflage my gift and avoid the mounting questions. For I was watched (the devil had ninety-nine forms and God ninety-nine names), and those notebooks could be used against me: they would accuse me of madness or heresy, they would set fire to our house or drag me to the gendarmes whose boredom makes them receptive to trivial suspicions.
The work of a sorcerer, healer, or miracle maker was risky, I should note. From time to time they would arrest a witch doctor or sorcerer, accused of manipulating the sacred verses, of writing the Holy Book in the wrong direction, or of making nefarious alliances with the spirits. Orthodoxy suffered from fits of jealousy and monopolized the invisible like its own property. I found these various facts fascinating, not because of the courage of charlatans, often tricksters, astute and manipulative men, but because of the law that allowed them to be arrested. How could one arrest a man in the name of a god and a book? I sunk into meditating on the destiny of this book that I knew almost by heart, that ate its own, the earth, that could kill men or heal them, that spoke in their place or claimed to know the weight of stars and the detailed account of the end of the world. A unique Book that had slowly hatched in the desert, devoured the other books, forbidden them entire swaths of the universe, then spread as the legendary catalogue of all things. Those charlatans seemed to me like heroes who didn’t realize the profound impact of their actions and whose greed obscured their admirable rebellion. I told myself that the line between heresy and gift was fine and fragile, and that I had to be prudent, disappear after the success of a resurrection. (I change position because my back is hurting. My body has always been painful and awkward, as if I had been born on a slant: face turned, desperate, toward the sky, legs agitated by the fear and chaos of whom to cling to so as not to fall. Hadjer is no longer here and her absence provokes worry, but also hope. Perhaps she’s at our neighbors’ house? Is she speaking to Djemila? Did she leave to negotiate now that death might have cleared the path? I hope to save that woman buried alive, this time with my entire flesh and not only my notebooks. Djemila doesn’t need a story, but a man who can rediscover her body.) Oh yes! I have to be discreet with the dog in my head, be humble, not move when he speaks and I write, let the starry animal approach, place his head in my hands and recount the oldest stories of the world, the stories that heal and transport us, that give us several lives and reverse our age, that heal sickness, sadness, help us to understand bad harvests and decipher dreams. The beautiful stories that live like eucalyptus trees. (Tonight, I’ll go out to bury a stack of notebooks. The night will be clear and will show the way to the best trees. I’ve made my decision.)
26
At night, I’m free, there’s no body or shadow hunting me. There’s generally no one in the
village streets. The streetlights keep watch, silent and absorbed. I like to look around the property. To the right, leaving our house, is the main road. It leads to the east exit, near the French cemetery, and to the west, to Bounouila, the Arab cemetery. It’s bordered with trees whose names I don’t know. In the center is the mosque, like a navel. A resting place for the storks, formerly a church but no one wants to talk about that. That’s where the old men I’ve saved come to sit and speak about their bones or Mecca. The town installed benches, but most people prefer to sit on the steps. Some recognize me, but they never speak to me in public. Embarrassed, they smile at me, lower their heads, or look away. At night, the area seems more vast, hollow. It’s my turn to sit down, chin in my hands, facing the street that leads to the south, down to the fig tree forest.
Sometimes, depending on the season, I cross paths with the wine enthusiasts on their way back from drinking in the fields, discreetly, a bit shamefully, stumbling but rigid in their effort to appear sober. I feel tenderness for them: it’s not easy to drink in this country without being lambasted by eyes or stones. So they hide. The tavern of the fields was an amusing discovery: to avoid the gendarme raids, the dealers bury their merchandise under the trees, circulate among the groups of clients scattered in the countryside, and come back to unearth them after taking the orders. I’m precise in my inventory when I walk at those hours. Time is also precise in its cadence: the night is often inaugurated by the dogs, in packs, trash lovers in heat, it settles in with the arrival of the moon in summer or the looming dark clouds in winter, becomes infinite when cars pass in the distance and hollow it, then fades into sounds. It begins with coughs behind certain windows, the first people awake who drive their cars to the city, the priors, then those who work in bakeries, and the owners of the village cafés, automatons with the same gestures, cleaning the terraces, rearranging the chairs, drawing the blinds. Then the garbage collectors come last to bring the night to a close and herald the day.
So I walked aimlessly, serene, calm, confident. Walking at night is exalting because we’re absolved of our bodies, indistinct and thus free. Gravity comes from the sun, from the harsh light. My bag under my armpit, heavy, secret. At dawn, I went east. This time I chose a carob tree larger than the others, distant, twisted toward the sun like a hand trying to grab a big fistful of earth. I crossed through fields, happy as though I were caressing a desired body. I was crazed but I liked to move this way, like a pilgrim, light as if I had just accomplished a task. Because that’s how I see it. Burying notebooks means that I’ve saved people from dying, maintained the equilibrium of the village, and postponed the end of our world. The notebooks are proof and there they were, in my bag, and this splendid secret would not be hidden but entrusted to its source, the loose soil, where the roots find their purpose. In the beginning I feared dogs or snakes but I soon gained confidence. The night is an illusion, a mirage protected by the desert of our head. When we confront it, it reverses and turns to brightness, luminescence, pearly and fragrant. It’s a Milky Way for pedestrians; I swim through its haze. I arrived at the foot of the black tree and sat down, short of breath but full of a rare happiness, as if I were reuniting with a relative or a foundation.
* * *
—
I invented this ritual years ago, when Hadjer told me to find a solution for my overflowing papers. And still today, on this night, I consider the meanings of my gesture, its amplitude, as if I were entrusting my lineage to my ancestors. Oh yes! I make slow progress. Silently removing the earth with a tiny shovel, mumbling, mindful of the barking dogs that might approach, the sounds of cars, or the footsteps of farmers surveilling their crops because they’re wary, those insomniacs, but also cowardly when it comes to rumors of jinns. I tear out the weeds, I grope along the roots, then I dig farther down until I reach the right depth and there I place my inventory, my notebooks. I feel no pain burying them for I know I’m not muffling a secret: I’m giving it breadth. I’m restoring a gift to its source. I protect myself from questions by entrusting myself to the earth, which is silent. Those fields that spread to the east are not very interesting, with their few almond trees, their tall grass and their carob trees around whose trunks sterile women used to tie ribbons and leave sugar to attract the spirits’ goodwill. That’s where I first began to dig the holes to bury my notebooks. And that’s where I return. I operate at night, alone of course, once a month. To declutter the shelves and floor of my room. I keep a secret map of the burials, but that doesn’t stop monstrous dreams from visiting me in my sleep: ground soaked with words, roots mixed with writing, bad fruit amalgamated with alphabets. I dream of a forest where each tree—the carob tree, the olive tree, or even those fig trees knotted in former times and the eucalyptus trees taciturn without the winds—served as my witness and guardian. It’s amusing, to restore paper to the tree, which it dissolves to nourish the vast project of fighting against the end of our world. The fields in the east have become gigantic margins, a sort of extension of my own body or of the image I make of it. Thus spreading the deciphering to those immobile beings, sending me farther and farther to the east, toward the apparition of the sun itself. The exact location of its hatching. Madness of my magnitude.
* * *
—
The truth is that these burials preserved me. My notebooks didn’t question the simple cosmogony of my family and the hierarchy of their crude beliefs: God, his Prophet sent for the world, us, then the rest of the world of nonbelievers. The hierarchy has been strictly established for centuries: Allah at the very top, then his favorite Prophet and the Prophet’s companions, then the great believers, the imams and the reciters, and finally us, the mortals. Centuries ago, God dictated a book for twenty years straight to his Prophet Mohammed. The book is as important as a final word, a gravestone, or a verdict. Everything is said in it, according to Tradition.
The most fervent believers in the village didn’t really like me but struggled to interpret my strange compassion: it helped others to live, a sign that it was granted by a god, I didn’t earn a living from it, or very little, which spoke to my innocence, and finally, I didn’t murmur any forbidden prayer, proof that the devil played no part in it. The imam, who had been asked for his opinion, had opted to cite a verse: “To Daoud we gave the Psalms.” He was clever: he knew that I might be useful one day, and he’d spent too much time around men to believe in certitudes. Imam Senoussi had a beautiful smile, he called me “the soldier of God,” I don’t know why, and he knew my father, his harshness, and my true story perhaps even better than me. That was probably the reason for his distant but cheery affection. Hadj Senoussi was cunning, almost mischievous, a bon vivant but prudent: he was careful with his sermons in the mosque. I think he liked me deep down, because I embodied the proof that the mystery of life was more complex than the recitations, prayers, and verses he lived through. His peasant ruse had kept jealous metaphysics at a distance.
I was between two worlds: on one side the pious who suspected me of devilry, on the other the people of the village who realized I could prolong lives. They approached me, but on tiptoe, at night, secretively, not knowing if it was licit from a religious or black magic point of view. I benefited perhaps from the distant memory of numerous saints of the region, who shared their blessings with sterile women, crops, and feasts. More modestly, the green-and-white mausoleums served as meeting places for the women who, according to a tired rule, shouldn’t, for all their lives, leave the hearth except for the baths, their wedding, and their own burial. My visits to the mausoleums were included in the catalogue of my childhood perfumes. I liked their shade, the chiaroscuro—I remember the murmur, the sudden sobs or choked laughter of visitors distressed by their stomachs or by the future. There was one at the top of the village, not far from Hadj Brahim’s house, and another right at the entrance of the village from the road to town, Sidi Bend’hiba, veiled guardian of our houses, a white dome that the passing drivers would throw coins a
t, turning down their car music out of respectful fear. There were many of those saints, their names were still given to newborns and scattered throughout the region on their decorated tombs. A lasting impact of their blessing, the villagers tolerated my gift but preferred it to be discreet: it wasn’t mentioned unless every other recourse had been exhausted.
I too dreamed of living under a sort of dome, instead of in my bedroom with its high ceiling and flaking paint. Our house already seemed like a strange mausoleum because of the stench of cold tobacco, candles, and stacks of notebooks piling up on collapsing staircases. Hadjer often bought them for me, and some black pens, when she sensed I was agitated or caught me rocking like a reciter when I sat with a sad look in my eyes under our lemon tree. The sounds of others—schoolchildren let out of classes, scattering and yelling, merchants, teenagers talking about a match—was sometimes painful for me. An unfathomable sadness ripped through my gut, contorted me, and I suffocated under the weight of my destiny, caught between the desire to write an exhaustive inventory of creation, my goatlike voice that made a fool of me, and the profound compassion I had for our people, every one of them, despite their pettiness. Sometimes I refused the notebooks, imagining I was healed or stripped of my mission, and I would sink back, like my cousins, into that absurd bodily sluggishness, settling for a beautiful armoire for my wedding, sipping a coffee at dusk, and going to see Indian films in the big city every Friday.
* * *
—
The night still resists but there’s already a breeze hinting at its retreat. I walk to the village with my bag empty, light, happy as if I’d just visited a friend and unloaded a secret. No one saw me (I’ve been startled one or two times, long ago, by night owls who preferred not to see or conclude anything). The village, at first distant, reduced to shadows and silhouettes, reassembles its houses behind the black trees, and when I reach it, through detours, I find it intact and firmly planted in our soil. It’s almost dawn, the sky concentrates for the fire. The call to prayer rings out, slow, subdued, and sleepy. Old neighbors cross my path but settle for nodding their heads. I do the same. When I get back, I try to make as little noise as possible, but my aunt is already awake. She comes out of her bedroom, her long mane undone, searches my face for traces of violence (or stolen and secret kisses?). “Go sleep,” she says, categorical. It’s the inverse hour of my nap. When I sleep, God keeps watch. A total of 5,436 notebooks. That’s my count since the beginning. That’s dozens, hundreds of trees, figs, carobs, eucalyptuses, and giant vines.