Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  My sickness became notorious, at a certain age, and they interpreted my fate as a sign, even though it was indecipherable. Our people have a strong belief in an equilibrium between gift and sacrifice. I knew I was a prisoner of my gift and of Aboukir, that I couldn’t leave, nor remain there immobile and inactive. A voyager only through imagination, I had to stay there to save my people, the facades of walls, the old houses, the trees and the sick children and the poles and even the storks and various objects. If I didn’t, God would rain down a deluge of fire on its inhabitants, as on Nineveh. I was the navel of the clock, I was walking slowly so nothing would fall, an invisible tightrope walker between the weight of language and the weight of objects, and I was scrutinizing every detail in case I needed long descriptions to fill my notebooks: the paint was flaking like the skin of a century, the pole was solitary like the finger of a believer, the street was paved like the future of a rich family’s son, dirty black bags floated in the wind like orphans, the dusk air embalmed the implausible tenderness of a tree’s shadow, an old neighbor glanced at me rapidly and then greeted me with an apologetic smile, children stopped playing with their ball and looked at me without saying anything, wavering between respect and cheekiness, etc. This feeling of responsibility is painful, sometimes I reject it angrily but I always submit to it in the end: it’s my destiny, I am the necessary table of contents of my people, the only place where they can allow themselves longevity, or eternity in the best of cases. I am the guardian against the wind that could erase them, the storyteller who feeds the fire in the void while the only possible path is a star. (The best stories are the ones that captivate listeners in the darkness of the voyage and that, at the climax, nourish even the fire, which is also fully absorbed in the narrative.) How many died definitively before I was born? How many ancestors have been lost because of the imperfection of a text or a writer?

  I sat on the still-burning grass and tried to summarize my situation: my father is dying or maybe already dead. And when I said that to myself, I was struck by a feeling of immensity, as if my universe were becoming new. My heart skipped a beat, faced with an imaginary cliff. I felt like I needed a new first name. I know the truth: When your father dies, there’s nothing left between you and death. It’s your turn. I have no children, so I don’t have to die. But that idea is a whimper. And now, I know, I have to write even more quickly, even more powerfully, without interruption. Because I’m saving my people but also my own skin (“And the skin of a woman, perhaps,” I say to my starry dog. And he is still hesitant). Isn’t it said that a prophet’s salvation depends on how many people he’s converted? That’s how, at the end of time, of all time, he knows whether he’s going to hell or paradise.

  One of Hadjer’s sisters came to visit us at the end of the day and she told us the rumors. Hadj Brahim hovers between life and death, and his children are already preparing to tear him apart, to divvy up his livestock and his riches. She elbowed Hadjer and tried to mobilize her for the coming war over the inheritance. It will be an ugly battle between the stepmother’s clan and her numerous sons, and the sisters who have survived the patriarch. His possessions are numerous, but so are his descendants. First they will take his name and give it to the newborns. Then his herds, his knives, and his lands. For our people, there is no will, a vestige of nomadism perhaps. The legacy is not the land but the caravan. Hadjer didn’t react but I saw her tense, I watched the dormant embers of her ancient anger flare up. The two women looked at me for a moment and then concluded, silently unanimous, that I would not be much help in the matter. I am the son of the dying man but I am sick, solitary, and afflicted with the evil of inconsistency brought on by books.

  I drank tea in their silence and left. Why had my gift petered out this time, at the top of the hill? Why wasn’t I able to save him when his story was easy, clear, honed? Birds moved through the dusk like twigs, black sparks in the fire of the sky. In the distance, cars came back from the village to the douars. Fathers returned home through the fields, arms loaded with groceries. I can draw the map of the village if I walk around it one more time. The island isn’t huge, it’s not mysterious. (“And its treasure is you,” says Hadjer’s voice.) In the end, I never left Aboukir. Not even to find the tomb of my mother, of whom I have no memory. (My mother is the sound of a body falling and violently colliding with the ground. She has no first name but a sort of long whimper. She was replaced, during the funeral, by dozens of women who passed my child’s body between their arms to cry harder. I remember that I fell asleep and, after I woke, never saw her again.) I watched the sky fade, open (why is everything cyclical when we want to believe that the life of a man is half of a ring? One half in the sun and the other buried underground, rusting?), then I walked through the dry lands, following the slope of the hill that exhausts my chest.

  I headed back down, an hour later, from the Bounouila cemetery. It took me two hours to arrive at our home, the house down below that was waiting for me. I know my brothers will chase me even farther away this time, that their ruse will be ferocious and mean. I am a legal heir and they will need to find the surest way to banish me. All of life is a book. The proof? The Prophet’s Hadith that explains that the quill (the one that records our actions and our words and our thoughts) is suspended, inactive, for the lunatic, the sleeper, and the child until puberty. I am certainly in the first or second category. There was too much blood in the sky to the west. An omen of a bad wind. The entire horizon was a knife sharpened by the contrast with the dark earth. I glanced at Djemila’s window but it was closed, blind. When I returned to our house, I found the spare set of Hadjer’s keys on the ground. She had forgotten them on her way out. The house was empty, abandoned. In the kitchen, dirty dishes awaited.

  34

  Without stopping, electrified by a long surge of writing, I overflow my notebooks, it’s urgent. The line isn’t enough anymore, I almost need a fisherman’s net. In the darkness of meaning, something enormous pulls on my line and hurts my hands. It’s like there are waves in the phrases, sounds of heavy, billowing ink. I’m not exaggerating, I hear a breath. I wrote the whole night and Hadjer wasn’t there. I found mismatched shoes near the entryway, an overturned bag, and her unmade bed. She must have left in a hurry. I hear the yipping of dogs, a muffled sound of things breaking, lowing in the slaughterhouse with zinc metal sheets that move like crumpled wings. The black-and-red sky seems ominous, mocking. There was an electricity outage and a sandstorm invaded the village and the sky, dirtied the windows and the ground during the day. I haven’t had any news of my father. A silence suspends the village, it resembles my grandfather (immobile, head between his knees, arms wrapped around himself, at the entrance of our kitchen, where Hadjer still keeps the sheepskin she used as a flying carpet in her dreams). Nothing moves, despite the wind. Where is death right now? Sometimes I write just in case, as if to preserve an island, a tree, an unknown life, the steps of a man who arrives invigorated by the memory of an animal vanquished in his dreams. I reach a hand into the heart of hell, which has a thousand names in our tradition, and I try to find a burnt hand, to pull on a screaming arm or help someone trying to flee the well of the void, the hasty judgment of a god. I have to write, because there’s always a life to save, at the end of the line, a man or a woman, someone spurned or elderly. I have a sort of faith.

  I also feel a familiar anxiety: If I save lives by writing, who is the writer keeping me alive? The hidden voice that preserves me by telling another story in another palace that will be interrupted before dawn? Writing is speaking without breathing. I hold my breath and fuel my lines. When I write, there are two mismatched breaths: the breath of the dying person and the breath of my inspiration. I have to sync them. My gift is useless against death by falling into a well, or death by car accident, for example. I’ve tried but in vain, because the accident rips the page, the book, and I have nothing left to write with. Writing must stand up to agony, which is its inverse. The story needs page
s and notebooks, not ripped sheets.

  The end, that’s what I have to think about. Because what all stories have in common is the ending: it’s the same for the hero and for the vanquished monster. One dies, slain, the other will die too, through perpetuation, paternity, the hollowing of his appeased world, a slow sinking into idle time. How does the victor die? We don’t know. He gets married, finds happiness, experiences love, but he has no grave, while the monster has an altar, his memory is perpetuated by the tale or by the fear he inspires. So we have to lead the dying person back in time, to the moment when he encountered the monster of his own life (a father, an ogress, a talking animal, a toothache, a river, a memory of a colonizer, hunger, or humiliation), then make him travel backward down the path of his journey, to the moment when he’s faced with the decision to leave, the question of whether or not to embark on his quest. The lives saved and returned are then able to continue for a long time to search, and thus to live, to reach a hundred years old by misleading the ancient order of the quest, sit at the edge of the path, on the stairs of our mosque, take pleasure in slander or in the shadow of a tree, settle for joining the gods with no disputes or feelings of incompleteness, no prayers or rebellion. We have to begin and begin again at the conclusion. Every story has one. In The Thousand and One Nights, it has to be pushed back, postponed. Here, before my eyes, in my notebooks (while the troubling noises travel down the dark side streets and while men’s voices try to reanimate the village), it has to be neutralized: I won’t tell a story that will be interrupted with each dawn, instead I’ll tell several, restarting them each time to overthrow the order of death and the false victory of the hero.

  I have to write a great novel against the current of the Holy Book. I’ve dreamed of this notebook since I started mastering this sensual language. (I’ve alway hated the wind. It’s my first memory. Me, sitting in the house of my maternal grandparents, almost in ruins. I remember the adults crying, their lamentations after the repudiation. No one was paying attention to me, the wind was my father’s back as he left again, the trace of his abandonment, and nothing had an end. I was cold, I remember, but there was no wall to block the breath of the void. I was maybe three years old but I remember, because time always begins with an image and ends with an image.) In sum, to save a person through writing, you have to salvage their story, make them drink it like holy water, gently, tilting back their head so the memory doesn’t choke them. (Like a feeble voice of reason, an idea crosses my mind: Hadjer hasn’t come back, and it’s not like her to run out the door, nor to leave the house in such a state. Nor to leave me alone. But it was just the devil, or his ruse to distract me, because this notebook is definitive, important.)

  Back to my reflection: Writing is the opposite of wind, because it’s the opposite of dispersal. A recording in the manual of salvation. But I can’t manage to maintain the thread of the story. Within me is the furious desire both to get up and to write. To write everywhere, on every surface. Perfect the miracle of my gift in a universal tattoo. It’s summer, but suddenly the temperature drops, as if the world were retreating, fearful, into a hole. Something is afoot. Without me. I feel as if the end of the world has already happened and I simply didn’t notice. Sitting, consumed by my task, while everything was folded and tidied under the Angel’s armpit: the sun, the moon, the horizon, time and the tombs and the trees, all the monuments and roads and all the people who’ve been born and who’ve died.

  35

  (My father is dying. I’ve never done this before: write away from the dying person. Through the crowd and the walls and the trees. The distance that transforms this writing into prayer. It weakens the effect.) Before assuming the role of Hamza/Aïssa the antagonist, his beard dyed with henna, his mouth mid-scream, the devil had another form. I had stopped studying the Holy Book at about thirteen, despite my talent and the improvement in my panic attacks. That surprised quite a few people, and spurred animosity and cries of indignation throughout Aboukir. I lost the esteem of my cousins, and imam Senoussi (who was discreet about his disappointment), and a sort of immunity. Not praying was the worst form of disobedience, and now they saw me walking like an obscenity in the streets during the call while everyone else was praying. I was indecent and Hadj Brahim’s smile, generosity, and fortune had to become all the more compelling to divert their gazes. Ah, my poor father. I was his tragedy, but also a living insult in the shadow of his story of a butcher blessed by God: on top of my thousand birth defects, I added insolent impiety. Only my aunt treated me the same, serious, firm in the face of adversity, eyes full of a stubborn pride against fate. I wondered about her religious beliefs for a time, before concluding that she believed in God but that she also believed he was a rotten intermediary between her and happiness. She respected him but did not forgive him. However, that was when the real adventure of my life began, which is ending now, in this instant, in this room, time held in this hand.

  I left the mosque with half a book in my memory, which spread its voice over half the world, in a language that was half alive, and its writing was able to ward off half my fears. I also felt as naked and trembling as the prophet Yunus whose story I adored: “And when he left irritated…” He’s the only prophet without a community, without a tribe behind him. The only one who battled, left his people, and confronted God, who appeared to him in the form of an old boat, a hateful storm, sailors, then a whale, then a tree that lends its shade to his naked body, a castaway in the end, according to the Holy Book. However, the true story is not the story of the prophet, but the story of the appearances his god assumed.

  I was naked and trembling but proud, insolent. Of course, my panic attacks were back, sometimes difficult, and so were my chaotic reflections on writing. At the Koranic school, I learned to practice my handwriting, the taste of the material (the sansal) in the hollows of words, the smell of wet tablets, and the certitude that there’s a link between pronunciation and health, or, to be precise, between rhythm and life. A secret of power and dependence. I asked myself, a little lost, about the meaning of writing, the letters always lined up from right to left, as though magnetized by a slope. Why did we have to write in this direction and not the other? Why not write as the ox toils, back and forth, or like the bird, low to high then high to low? Or in the chaos of caravan tracks in the sand?

  I was at an age when I loved to play games, I went out often to try to join the other children (“Zabor eddah el babor!” “Zabor was carried off by a boat!”), but I kept an eye on my anxiety and its black ink, shiny as a star. It was a beautiful time, lazy, a vacation free from all constraints. Hadjer hoped for suitors, the Hindi films were rich with blather and my father, Hadj Brahim, had not yet completely ceded to the pressures of my stepmother and her dirty tricks. The only black cloud was my night terrors, my screams, the frequently poor sleep that stunted my growth. I tried playing soccer with the other teenagers in the neighborhood before realizing that I was the object of their mockery. I gathered lost balls and tried smoking cigarettes with Noureddine, who maintained his friendship with me, the friendship of an elder, even though he was younger than me, like a form of protection, because he was muscular and feared.

  I was hyper-aware of the rift between my solitary, unconscious quest for a language capable of appeasing and restoring the world, and my appearance as a common, puny child, tempted by the games of kids his age and their ritual maliciousness. In my head, I had no age; on the outside, I was the age required to join the groups in the neighborhood of our house down below. I tried to make up with others, with smiles and submission, until I understood I would never be accepted (Hadjer said that what kept me from being good at soccer was my wings that no one could see, not my legs). So I told myself that the essential thing was the possibility of a language: if I wrote mine from right to left, that alluded to the existence of another, invisible language, written in the opposite direction, or another still that went around the earth and came back to the phrase written at the st
art. Of course, my time in school left me with the persistent memory and the faltering mastery of a French alphabet, its spikes and its paunches, its uneven slenderness, but I remembered only a few phrases, excerpts from novels and poems. Arabic writing seemed even more fascinating to me but it wore itself out spinning in circles in a single book, between my schoolmaster, the verses, and my reveries about the stories of the prophets and their hardships or wanderings. (I liked the beginning of the prophets’ stories, the birth of the vocation, but the details of their laws bored me. I thought they were flawed: at the end, they died. A perfect prophet doesn’t die, because of his proximity to his god but also because he has to save the people who have not yet been born. Why does each prophet dream of being the last? To perpetuate the belief in his presence for all time.) I desired and sensed another solution to my fear. Sometimes, lying in the courtyard of our house, while the world was eternity and summer, I would contemplate a random object at length, a pebble or an unripe orange. Like a book I could read in two directions, three, turn it around, crisscrossed not with light like a backlit page, but with all possible words, the heavy knot of their encounter, the blind and exposed core of writing. I lost myself in strange depictions, calligraphic monstrosities, veins of ink. Idleness and fear led me to imagine, already, the possibility of an absolute glyph, the prospect of all of history in a single word (“or five,” specifies Poll; “or more,” encourages the dog). I dreamed of a sacred writing: one that would embrace the object, constituting its bark and its vanished essence, half revealed through calligraphy, ink, the smell of the ink, the material of the ink. Something almost alive, a writing like an extended hand.