Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  I loved inhaling the smell of the clay we used to coat and whiten the wood to better accommodate new verses. And, above all, I liked to watch the elders make the ink by burning sheep’s wool and mixing the residue with water and pouring it carefully into the douaya to make the smagh, the holy ink. This task was the privilege of the elders but I was very quickly authorized to perform it alone. The moldy odor of the sansal, the clay, and the smell of burnt wool were, for me, the perfume of a mystery. And although the Holy Book had sometimes been boring for me as a child, with incomprehensible words, shouting, and narratives too scattered to hook my imagination, I enjoyed meditating for a long time on the first mysteries. Man had been created from clay, proclaimed the surah of The Heifer, the longest in the Book, just like the writing before my eyes, and that had to mean something.

  Little by little, as the master watched with great interest, I surpassed my colleagues, memorizing chapters at wild speed, discovering the rhythm that engraved the verses in my head, transforming my plaintive sheep’s voice into a gentle melody, agreeable to the ear of the mosque’s imam. We learned the Book starting with the last chapter, the shortest surahs, progressing toward those that awaited us like tall mute mountains, the chapter names revealing an unsolved mystery: The Cave, The Heifer, The Poets, etc. Strangely, the surah titles evoked powerful images for me and I daydreamed about their shape, as when we try to glimpse the footprints of a mythical animal in the scattering of the stars. I liked the Book’s descriptions of the night sky, its fascination for celestial bodies and shooting stars, and its cadences as strong as clashes around a watering hole. And I hated the long laws, the threats to quell any disobedience or rebellion with fire. But I especially loved the obscure chapter heads that sometimes started the recitation with strange onomatopoeias. Alif/Lâm/Mîm. ALM. Or Noun, whose Arabic outline looked like a pot of ink, a moon above a valley, or a black sea with a fisherman coming back from the horizon. I loved God’s habit of selecting only certain objects from the bag of the world to turn into fetishes of his vows: broken moon, shooting or immobile star, pilgrim sandals, bunches, bracelets, eyelids and raids, burning bush and tunic. In the surah titles, I found a soothing alphabet.

  I came back at night slightly reassured, armed with new verses capable of stopping the unfurling of the unsayable and maintaining the strange breath behind the wall of the words of God himself. I didn’t really have a religious conscience, to tell the truth, and the rite of the prayers, the various invocations of God’s generosity, his magnanimity and his anger, irritated me as much as sweet talk, but I appreciated that universe of rituals and routines, the dawn prayers, the clock of rites. After the second year, I think the master of the madrassa was already starting to suspect my impiety, or my half-heartedness, but he never alluded to it around Hadj Brahim, who inundated him with generosity. I have an untainted memory of those fabulous seasons of recitations, the sound of cypresses in the mosque courtyard, the moldy odor of the rugs I buried my nose in during prayers, the stridence of insects or the tender rain, while we shouted our heads off, naughty children or young men anxious to grow a beard, to honor this sonorous Book that was trying to sum up the world.

  At home, the change was very visible for my aunt Hadjer, who smiled at me more often as if I were finally healed. At night, I lay awake thinking of God and the mystery of his Book, I repeated verses in different tones to gauge the effect of each, then I fell asleep dreaming of paradise and its idle greenery, waiting for the end of the world. This period lasted about three years: I learned nearly all of the Holy Book and already the elder reciters showed me off in the surrounding douars like a miracle, despite my bleating voice. I read the Holy Book with them around the dead or the couscous, during a circumcision or to celebrate the return of a pilgrim who was exhausted but delighted to have been at the center of the world and to be a part of it from then on for his people in the village. Memories of rising temperatures and fig trees, dark and gnarled, standing up to heat waves, meat heavy with fat that I discreetly avoided, and long, tiring discussions about God, his names, and his generosity toward men. That could have led me to lasting virtue and the glory of a religious life devoted to the Book of God. Except that everything came to an end one day, in the most comical way. It was inexplicably banal.

  31

  One Wednesday (I was born on a Wednesday), I woke up late, Hadjer was already on her way to the hammam, a monthly ritual after her period, I believe. The abrupt and perfect silence of the house made me uneasy. My grandfather was sleeping and I made sure the burners, the sinks, the doors and windows were off or closed before I dressed in a hurry. On my way out, I grabbed a fat bunch of white grapes for breakfast. On my way to the madrassa, my world split in two: tripping over a pebble, I sprawled over the dusty ground and arrived at school with skinned knees, the bunch of grapes reduced to a memory. The schoolmaster, Sidi Khloufi, examined me, slightly surprised, and asked me what had happened. I don’t know what came over me but I pointed at the other latecomer who had just arrived quietly behind me and I accused him of pushing me from behind. He was then taken, whipped, and banished to the corner of the room. In protest, he stared at me with big teary eyes, without understanding why I, the most respected and inoffensive kid in school, would have committed such an abomination. That night, at the end of the recitations, he spat on me and took off running. Why had I lied? Perhaps out of fear of being ridiculed. Or a desire to break my own image in the eyes of others. Or a deeper sickness. Today, I think that my Koranic studies, deaf and mute to meaning, would have been the death of my gift, and so my gift, trapped in the basement, had simply harnessed ferocity to push me toward shame and, as a result, flight. The truth is that I had grown tired, without realizing it, of those recitations that certainly kept the devils on the other side of the wall of verses and allowed me to believe in something more powerful than terror, but didn’t feed my desire for another body, cracks, and mysteries bigger than descriptions of hell, of paradise, and of a god that seemed more verbose than the world he had created.

  One week earlier, I had gone with my elders to close a burial ceremony. We had been invited to sit at the back of an immense tent. The night was dark, dusty because of the paths leading to this douar and dirtied by the gas lamps that had been scattered everywhere. We smelled the heavy odor of couscous even before we’d arrived. Cars were parked haphazardly and half-naked children were running under patient trees. A sort of muffled conversation filled the silence and I struggled to find a spot under the rug to hide my shoes, because I didn’t want to lose them in the scramble to leave after the meal was over. It was a funeral for an old man who had been repatriated from France that very night; we would wait for daybreak to bury him in the earth. I was dozing off and one of my neighbors pinched my thigh to wake me.

  Immediately, we began the long surah of The Most Merciful, Ar-Rahman, a favorite among the people because of its rhythm and its detailed descriptions of paradise and its treasures. Distracted and a little tired, I stared at the coffin covered with a green sheet that was embellished with verses stitched in gold, knotted like chicken wire. The dead man was inside, useless, almost forgotten. I didn’t know his name, only that of his tribe. Suddenly, in the middle of the recitations that were starting to heat things up, I fell into a sort of air pocket, a slow silence. I saw myself as though through a window, mouth open over the syllables, in concert with my people while the dead man was there, heavy, futile, and indifferent, in the obtuse gravitas of the cadaver. We were merely a band of public criers, invited to shake our pots and distance death and fill the silence it provokes with the rumors of a god. The verses did nothing and the deceased was deaf as a stone to the prayers. I felt ridiculous: something was missing, the words weren’t powerful enough to rouse the cadaver or even to invest it with meaning. A guest had dared to hide his shoes under the coffin and children approached it, curious and insolent. I was struck by the uselessness of the box, which would soon be double-locked so that the hostage woul
dn’t escape. Realizing the deception, I suddenly felt the urge to vomit. Were my thoughts really that clear? I don’t think so, but I still remember the unprecedented emotion I felt at thirteen years old, the feeling of being cheated and my resulting anger. Death had the same moves and the same ruses as Brahim. It used crude artifice to hide the essential. Were we the touters of faith? That evening, deep in the night, they led me back to our house, arms loaded with couscous and meat that I threw out and scattered before entering. Hadjer had fallen asleep waiting for me but didn’t say a word when she saw me enter with that sinister look on my face. The sickness was back, like smoke, and she knew it. She called that night “the night of destiny” in my calendar: behind the Holy Book, I had come upon this stark territory.

  The truth is that my first hairs were already growing on my lip and between my thighs; something deaf and blind was crawling through my body, provoking delicious frictions and troubling insomnia. Its opposite was this cadaver, mitigated death, and my unresolved anguish. I explained, simply, that I would not return to the Koranic school, thus initiating my reputation as a renegade and plunging my father—who, for a time, had believed his god had forgiven him—into even greater shame. They attempted every subterfuge to make me renounce my decision, but it was all in vain. I had lost that original faith, and never again would I manage to restore it within me. I hadn’t turned into a nonbeliever, but I saw my religion as a worn-out textbook. The mystery was more honest when it wasn’t explained by ablutions and prayers.

  32

  I often looked at my penis in the morning. Pointed straight at the sky like a finger, long and skinny, aimed at the virgins of paradise, perhaps, or the lactation of the night. I was different, and only my father and aunt knew it. I hadn’t been circumcised when I was little. At first because of my childhood trek, tossed between two or three homes, then because of my delirious fits at the sight of blood. All my half brothers, cousins, and other relatives had been grabbed one Friday morning by an adult who forced them to spread their legs in front of a barber who cut off their foreskins, except me. Hadj Brahim had been insisting sternly for a long time, but my aunt had dissuaded him, gaining time year after year until it became indecent to mention in public. But I couldn’t fight the idea that my father thought about it every time he saw me. During my childhood and teenage years, Hadj Brahim and Hadjer’s debates on the subject could get heated, provoking an anger in him that evoked God and tradition, but he could never make my aunt back down, she refused the sacrifice and argued with surprising theological reasons: nothing in the Holy Book required this mutilation, especially not for a sick and sensitive child. The power struggle turned violent but my aunt remained inflexible, using the force of her anger against fate, stubborn as though it were a question of slitting my throat. So I grew up with the impression that my penis was a battlefield whose stakes were the pride of my aunt and the pernicious desire of my father to exact revenge on me or my mother. Of course, with time, I understood that I shouldn’t get naked in front of the other children, go to the baths after a certain age, or speak about my anatomy.

  I only thought of that rejected pact of flesh when it came to the question of my marriage. What will Djemila think if one day I give her my body to restore her own? If we marry and she discovers that excess in me, that peculiarity worse than impiety? It might shock her. Or not. When we locked eyes for the first time, six months ago, I saw a pleading in her gaze, surprise but also subtle complicity. The body of a spurned woman is the proof of her impurity. Perhaps that will solder us. She knows, because of the rumor, that I am feared and mocked. Perhaps she understands that that leaves scars. What will I say to my wife and what will she say about me to her mother, which is to say to the whole tribe and the whole village? The public mystery of love collides with a story of locks and keys, in a way. Sex is a big deal for my people. We’ve devoted ninety-nine allusions to it in our language, long years of rumors and slander, and we see it as the final reason for creation. It’s the real fruit of the fall and the ascension. It serves to measure habit, the force of the voice, the number, but also the honor, the reputation, and the savings for the costs of marriage, but it’s invisible, unlike death: sex hides bodies, while the gravedigger exhibits them in mounds, hips, hillocks, and curves. Amusing, isn’t it? We celebrate weddings or funerals with the same fury, the same verses sometimes. I digress, while the hour is critical and my father is at risk of dying, of being killed by my clumsy and incomplete tale.

  I was writing that, in the village, my refusal to pursue the apprenticeship at the Koranic school caused a scandal. All the more so because there my voice had finally attained a promising dignity and my father a kind of reparation. No one understood my defection, especially not my friends at the madrassa, tricked by my serious demeanor, oblivious to what was taking place inside me. Above all, it was my disobedience to God and the interruption of my work that shocked people: I was the bearer of half of the Holy Book. Which was an anomaly in itself. I didn’t care. For once, I felt free, I had an insolence stemming from both puberty and intelligence. That lasted a few weeks, my spirit mobilized to hold its own, to argue my dissidence or respond to Hadj Brahim’s threats. But suddenly, one night, the horrible attack returned and I fell back into the mystery as I contorted, unconscious, on the floor of our house, biting my tongue and drooling as if I was possessed. I decided then and there to stop praying, doing my ablutions, and forcing myself to perform the rites. The bird was not an angel, but a parrot. That was my verdict. In sum, Zabor gained the upper hand over Ishmael, a rival twinship.

  How did I discover the language of my gift? How did I liberate myself from the fate of my kin when I was abandoning their path, their formula for salvation? By accident, out of laziness perhaps. On the island of desolation, I found a bottle on the shore and, inside, my first French phrase: “Elle s’avança vers moi nue.” But before mastering that language, I had to decipher it in ecstasy. It was the language of sex and travel, those two sides that stretch the body to another, force it to be reborn. (The old man isn’t doing very well, according to my aunt. He’s barely breathing anymore. Despite years of hatred, I feel his pain, a slight panic at the idea that his death and his illness might be real, irreversible. He’s lied to me so much that the truth of what he now endures vanishes behind his life of artifice. Even his cadaver will not be authentic. A sheepskin will replace it at the burial, as in another legendary and odious tale, to replace that of his sheep fallen from the sky. Can he die even though I’ve been writing for such a long time? Why doesn’t the miracle seem to be working this time, why does it refute me when this should have been the climax of my performance? I don’t know what to do with my day, reduced to waiting. Write again to Djemila, or speak about her with Hadjer, this time without innuendos, without digressions? She doesn’t like when I talk about her, I think, but that woman’s story is clumsily linked to my father’s, who scoffed at the idea that I speak about it to my neighbors. “Over my dead body!” he declared in front of a cup of coffee. Hadjer couldn’t contradict him that time. It threw me into a terrible, ancient anger that encompassed all the quieted, underground anger like a storm. I was especially furious at myself for having gone through him, for having awaited his blessing and his action as custom requires. He restrains me with laws and I restrain him with my rebellion. As a reaction or a contradiction, I decided to make my story with Djemila the very core of my definitive liberation. Because, with the exception of two chance encounters, I had never been able to meet her or speak to her. The young banished woman cannot make frequent visits to the Moorish bath, meet me at a wedding or on the street, or write to me. I don’t know how lovers do it, or if they ever existed before marriage. The obsession with sex and the fixation on honor make such meetings impossible. Normally, we can call on mediators, vendors of new fabrics and jewels, or we station ourselves on the lookout at our windows. In our case, the only possible way, which we would have to plan, would be for me to see her at the cemetery. A str
ange place to profess vows, sealing the kiss with a tombstone.

  I decided to go out, walk to the edge of the village, where I always faint when I try to go any farther. The walls of my world are in my head and sometimes I go there to test my role as sentinel. The book begins there where I stop.)

  33

  (My father will die or is already half dead. This night is trampled by sounds on the roof, like scraping soles. Sometimes pebbles fall on the tiles, as if the house were a woman being stoned or a dog being kept at a distance.) As a general rule, I move slowly. As if I didn’t want to collapse the pieces of my universe, pieces of porcelain from the height of the sky. I’m responsible for my people, the village, its possible end, its cycles of birth and death. I keep it balanced on my shoulders. That’s how I walked east, once again, through the fields that were still warm because of the summer. It was that gentle hour before dusk. The sky was distant, intense, with hues of benevolent burns. “If the Sahara were an angel, that’s what it would look like,” whispered my animal. I reached the French cemetery—ravaged, disorderly tombstones, as if that religion’s resurrection had already taken place and its dead were between judgment and resettlement—and I passed it heading for the last carob trees and the fields of vineyards. Then to the most distant trees, the last ones identified on my map, which grow half in secret. I stopped there to keep from fainting. That’s my law. I’ve tried so many times to go farther, in every direction, and I’m finally convinced. As a teenager, when I tried to escape to the city to see a movie or buy shoes, I fainted on the bus as soon as it started the descent down the hill. They brought me back home after calling my father. I also passed out in the south, as soon as I reached the first Barbary fig trees. And to the west, after the forest, in the high grass where they found me with my pants soiled, drooling and shaking with spasms. It happened every time, like a curse or a sign of the village’s attachment to my footsteps. I’m sort of like Yunus, trapped by God this time to spare him from the flight from Nineveh, the whale, the sea, the shipwreck, and instead drown him in his own drool, in his village. I always feel the earth move like a rug that’s been pulled out from under my shoes, nausea, then a swift night floods my eyelids and I spin. Then I wake up at Hadjer’s house, sprinkled with orange flower water, squeezed in her arms, brought back by a murmur telling me that my exceptional life attracts the evil eye, and that a magnificent future awaits me, because she dreamed of a deluge of white feathers and I was there too, happy, in the middle of that snow of angels shaking their feathers.