Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  His flood of words and his conversation constituted the background noise of my early childhood, the river that ran through our house up top, then down below, until it dried up for good. In his final years, he lost his speech in entire swaths, the silence inhabited him like gigantic avalanches of muffled snow from the top of a tall mountain. My grandfather could sometimes launch into a conversation with the same verve, like a novel he was leafing through wildly, and then go quiet, cut off, suddenly, staring with his beautiful eyes at a place where the words stopped and came loose. I tried hard, for a while, to grasp the thread of meaning in what he was dredging from the far reaches of his insanity. So I had the opportunity to rediscover former names, road signs from the colonial period, sometimes traces of lucidity that corresponded to recent events with him as the forgotten witness, scraps of dialogue between me and Hadjer and memories of his own childhood. A sort of surge, a swell where I could make out the outline of the former village, from one of its former lives or spectacular events like the flood he mentioned for months and which had nearly carried everything off in its wake, a snowfall at the beginning of the century or the theft of his shoes by nomads during harvest season. He sometimes called for Brahim, sometimes for his dead sons, gave imaginary punches to my uncle living in France, often mythic like a novel, a stream of words and calendars that today I can compare to the madness of a dictionary fighting against erasure.

  So my grandfather spoke for ten years, nearly without interruption, exhausted everyone around him, stayed up at night, provoked insomnia and wore out his daughters who took turns at the top of the hill. That’s Hadjer’s version, at least. In the end, they brought him to our house, the house down below, so my aunt could take care of him. There too, his stream was occasionally fierce, but it was already perforated with stupor. He still recounted his return from France, he who had never left the perimeter of our region’s vineyards, or detailed his encounters with nocturnal spirits seized by sadness or anger. In a final push he identified each object, described its details until he was dizzy, succeeded in the miracle of knotting the threads and links between events and objects by fighting against oblivion, and that struggle was burned into my memory like a heroic act never rivaled by anyone else among my people. It was tremendous to hear and to behold, but his river flowed in only one direction, toward definitive exhaustion, and everyone knew it.

  Hbib lost his words one by one, twisted them, squeezed them, distorted them in an attempt to use them every possible way, then started to stammer, to salivate freely. I saw him, when I was still a child, suffocate like someone drowning, shake angrily against this new impossibility, sitting in our house’s courtyard. And that lasted for a long time, turned my aunt’s hair white as she stood vigil over her youth like a waning fire, then finally surrendered. At one point, his defeat proved undeniable: he had become slow, immobile, then started to stare at a point visible only in his universe and didn’t move again for the rest of his days, head between his knees, hands on the back of his neck. That was the end of his life, difficult for us all. Hadj Brahim refused this fate, he didn’t know how to handle it, then opted for courteous visits. Hadjer saw the ordeal as a sort of counterpart to the prayers she didn’t practice, a way of reconciling herself with her god or paying for a future happiness. For me, it was a chance to learn reflection and silence. My grandfather had a pencil stub in his wallet and I imagined destiny was like that: a pencil held over the madman’s book, as the Prophet said. “Held” meaning “suspended in the air”? Hesitating over the new language to find the words to describe losing one’s mind? Without any words to describe such a state? How many styluses were thus suspended in the air, frozen army of the writer hovering over the heads of the world’s insane, sleepers, and teenagers before their first ejaculation? I imagined that forest of pens in the sky, useless, writing nothing. And I was especially fascinated by the pages of blank lives, those of the sleepers, the teenagers, and the insane, flapping in the wind, immaculate, scattered or neglected notebooks, the swarms of storks on our minarets, with ink stains on the tips of their wings. A naked world, with no words, the first and last at the same time, united.

  And I had a pencil over my head, I said to myself, worried. Which wrote on my skull as I slept. Perhaps my mission was to steal those blank notebooks and fill them. Or to steal the pencil of my own destiny to write what I wanted. Or to take, like a vigilante fighting for equilibrium, the immaculate notebooks from some to add them to the exhausted books of others, the old or the dying. Except at that time, my grandfather losing his mind worried me intensely, like a mute anguish. I had, before my eyes, the proof that disintegration was possible, despite the power of a language or the richness of a life, and the core became an abyss, testifying that nothing was stable, especially not words or their writing. Did that herald the threat of nudity that would floor me months later? Perhaps. The nature of my grandfather’s agony was the most insidious part: it proved that life depends on the story we keep intact as much as on the possibility of telling it or writing it, which is even better. But the link was at once absolute and fragile, dictated by a necessity of correspondences but arbitrary to the point of desperation. The book could be sacred, but its binding was an artifice. Hadj Hbib, my grandfather, revealed to me the potential of madness and the urgency of maintaining a coherence in oneself, a powerful narrative and discipline that doesn’t let any blank space settle or spread. It was a question of life and death under the guise of words and silences. My conclusion, even at that age, was that we might die if we stopped feeding the language inside of us, we might lose our minds. My grandfather came back to us only at the final moment and I was the sole person to witness it, like a swimmer surfacing from under the water for whom everything, all around, was a possible land, the lifeline swaying in the swell, the elusive beach, golden and untouched by any footprint.

  I loved him, yes, but I had come around to the idea of his death a long time ago. Except that Friday, August 8, 1984, he was looking at me with his gray-blue eyes and waiting for something, with a pleading that almost made me angry because I didn’t understand it. As if he were staring at me from behind a bus window, or wanted me to say something. Languages possess this terrifying quality that they reveal at essential moments, faced with fire, with ecstasy, with death or defeat. I was seized by panic, convinced that I was forgetting some specific ritual. Then I rested his head on the pillow and I did something unexpected, even surprising, futile but decisive in the order of the world: I grabbed a novel within reach, turned back toward him, and started to read aloud (with the voice of a goat threatened by the knife) a chapter to mask his death rattles. I wanted to cover up his choking with my voice, confuse it, erase it, or compel it. My act (irreverent, but let me explain) was spurred by the desire to make his agony more bearable, but also by a stupid idea: to make it tolerable through diversion, to prolong his brief attention to the world (to me). In films, at death’s door, we say important and definitive things, we ask forgiveness or express regret. There, that Friday, alone faced with death in the house down below, while the imam was yelling his sermon through the speaker at the hour of the prayer, I chose a secret and sumptuous language to exorcise death, to attach myself to life, to divert my grandfather’s attention or interpret his fate. What took over me? Arrogance, vanity, a whim of teenage panic? Or was I guided by the hand of an angel? My grandfather, crushed by a mountain on his chest, groaning like a sacrificed sheep, eyes watering, blood clots in his mouth, stared at me as I read, suddenly alert, stunned and nearly distraught. I read for a long time, and he came back to life for a moment (I swear, Abdel!), scrutinized each object in the bedroom where he was lying on the floor, with a bowl for his spit, some water, and the stench of rot and urine. He turned his head toward me and tried to smile, to grimace with the upper part of his dentures, then returned to the objects, inventoried them one by one like an accountant or a child in a new home. Outside, the imam’s voice tried to sync up with mine, waned in the ovation of the pr
ayers, then was reabsorbed in a unanimous “amen.” My own voice was powerful and calm like the sea in my imagination (the sea, never glimpsed from up close, is a clock with ships marking the hours, the hands of the sun driving the wind, a sundial in the tropics, and islands that are, in my reader’s dream, synonyms for the word “moment”). I sensed that it might be helping him. Was there a link between the book and his life? A way of delaying the decapitation? I had guessed it from the first pages, when I had read the incomplete story, in French, of that woman who told stories every night. So I read and he followed me with his eyes, like a man saved from the ocean, begging me for a sequel to be forever postponed, with apprehension (but also surprise, because he didn’t recognize me).

  He died ten minutes before they knocked on the door, his head on my knees, listening to an unknown language. I didn’t cry because I don’t like pity, nor showing it to death. Death was there (the animal stares at you, vicious, while it rips apart its prey) and I looked away, full of another sky on the other side of the room’s big window. My uncles entered, Hadjer screamed and collapsed in the hallway. Everything accelerated and they pushed me aside to take care of my grandfather’s body. As for me, cloistered, elbowed out of the way by my tribe, I knew I had stumbled upon an important secret, that a law had been revealed. The first article of the Law of Necessity. There was a link. Either between my reading and death, or between writing and death, or between the book and death. My grandfather’s pupils had stopped moving and lost their shine right as I had lost my breath at the end of a long paragraph describing the fall of the castaways from a hot-air balloon, at the beginning of The Mysterious Island.

  “Are we descending?”

  Which proves that the text is nothing but a pretext. An accident. The miracle is the possibility of the book. The power is in its coherence that stands firm. Its unity that prevails over death. Why? Because it proposes an alternative, resolute ending. It’s a tombstone that we can move backward or forward on our paths as readers and writers.

  40

  (“The summer is beautiful, usually. But, sometimes, around August, the season of burning pebbles and the death of the elders, there’s a war in the sky—the Smaïmes, we call it. A great spectacle of fire and wind. From the south, from the Sahara, reddish sand appears in the sky, it makes the clouds glimmer with a sickly auburn, a wind rises gently like a betrayal, then intensifies, gains power, and sullies the land of Aboukir. The walls can’t do anything about it, and suddenly everyone—all those who know how to say it and those who can only feel it in the obscurity of a weak language—hide, can tell that the gap between their comfort and the desert is very slim, like the arc of an arrow in flight. The Smaïmes season lasts a dozen days around the end of the month. It carries off many sick people, hundred-year-olds, elderly women, it dries out the season’s fruit, especially the bunches of grapes, reduces the water to a murmur and coats our utensils, the groceries in the houses, and the greenery in dust. The sandstorm burns the entire sky for days and then attacks the earth, runs through the streets, extinguishes the streetlights that turn to embers, and abuses the doors, the windows, the hinges as if they were old bones. Even the night disappears: it becomes a long dusk.

  That’s what’s happening tonight. The house moves like a rowboat, the world is its whale, and I am the prophet. I write rapidly. Everything depends on me. There’s a link between the speed of my writing and the speed of the wind. If it moves faster than me, it might rip out all the walls, scatter my notebooks, force me to search for Hadjer or my mother under my eyelids. To moan. If I can outrace it, it will back off like a wolf, whine in its turn through the deserted streets, eat the empty wrappers, the village trash, and tear out its hair by tearing out tree branches. It’s always an epic battle, but it will be even more intense this time. The night is not an anchor but a sort of ember in the sky behind a veil of ash.

  It’s almost five in the morning and dawn will not come. The wind is like an animal, a wolf. “They said to their father: We were racing, we left Yusuf with our things. That’s how the wolf devoured him,” said the Holy Book—half descended from the sky, because we reach the other half through meditation—about this Joseph and his exceptional destiny. It comes back to me. “Everything is in the Holy Book,” Hamza the devil likes to scream. The wolf prowls through the village, the tree trunks droop, the roofs might be carried away tonight, there will be fires, I’m sure of it, in the fields. Strange, the Smaïmes this year: The wind no longer seeks its usual duel that sets the clouds ablaze for days, strips the bones and reminds them of the hierarchy. No. It’s searching for someone in particular, going door to door. It will turn the houses upside down one by one, like shells or cans of food, to find them. It wants to devour. I think of my father and his agony, I write to keep both death and the wind at bay, I probe my desires and attempt the unprecedented by writing far from the dying person. And yet I exult. In my version, the wolf is the wind, I save my father, I foil my brothers, and I marry Djemila.

  Suddenly there’s a knock on the door and I’m snatched from my vision. I hesitate, then I decide not to let anything distract me from my notebook. I want my father to die so I can leave this village, or save a woman and marry her by restoring her body, but I want him to survive to bear witness to my strength and my gift, for him to recognize me. A window shatters, I hear a scream and the sounds of a car braking. Even the dogs, those pillaging kings, the first animals to walk on the moon, are nothing but whines. “Don’t insult the wind, for it is sent from God,” the Prophet advises. The wolf is searching for me and I make myself as small as possible. The Smaïmes have never been so vicious. Many of the elderly will die this week. I have to write, every year this season is my gift’s great battle, but what’s happening now is unprecedented. More hands rattle the door. Someone yells my name but I know it’s a ruse. The wind has a thousand languages in its mouth. It can speak to you in Hindi if you want. It has keys to nearly every place on earth and takes on new faces in the sky when it slips into the bodies of clouds. I hear someone yell “Smaïl! Smaïl!” I don’t answer. “The world is a ruse,” says the Prophet. This name becomes the sound of sheet metal ripped from houses. The wolf rages, tries to charm its way in.)

  The burial of my grandfather, Hadj El Hbib, threw Aboukir into chaos. I saw nothing, or almost nothing, from my spot secluded in the margin, silent, ignored by my half brothers. The Holy Book was everywhere, like a voice-over. I remained still the entire time, fascinated by a single detail: they had covered the mirror in our bedroom with a sheet. My father slaughtered dozens of sheep intended to accompany the dead man into the plains of his grave. I had seen him, I remember: Hadj Brahim seemed upset, but carried out the ritual with a pompous air that distorted his sadness. He tried to speak to me at one point, as if death could reconcile us, but I avoided his gaze. I ate couscous until I felt sick. With no meat.

  41

  (The sand tries to invade from everywhere. I check the windows, the doors, the locks, then I plug up the bottom of my bedroom door with a rolled-up sheet. But grains of sand are already inside: between my teeth and in my notebook. The wolf rasps through a thousand minuscule crystals. I see its grimace when I bite my teeth together or swallow a sip of coffee. The sand represents the great struggle between the desert and the Holy Book. The desert tries to cover the book and the Holy Book tries to push the desert back toward the constellations and the stars. The same pair, if we look from up close: the wolf and me, the sand and the book, the god and the bush, the void and the prayer, the temple and the road, the city and the assault. I write down this idea, a match in the night. I get up just for a moment, rapid and precise, I sweep a bit, make my bed, change my sheets, run a rag over the surfaces. The sand is now piled in a small heap in the corner but I know it will return. Then I get back to writing just as quickly. A brief apnea to gather my strength. I remember, suddenly, that Hadjer has never been away from me for so long. Outside I can hear some of the raging din of the end of the worl
d. Through the window, the sky seems even redder and grayer, twisted into aerial dunes. And still the wind, above all. It doesn’t moan continuously but imitates whisperings. Sometimes it rises like anger, almost falls, and then scrapes the floor. It’s a beast on the hunt, nostrils to the ground, claws out. Trees become distorted and I imagine all the land in our village keeling, pitching. And yet I feel secure, my notebooks are with me or buried in the distance, inaccessible among the roots. It all comes down to the speed of writing, or erasure, between me and the wolf. “The wolf ate him,” the brothers said to the blind, tearful father. My father is dying and the end of the world exalts me, as if the death of one being could mean the liberty of another. What if I were writing to kill him, and not to save him? I stop, worried. The wind comes back with a surprising savagery, the whole house seems ready to give way and deliver me. Noises, still, of people gathered outside, but I know it’s only the sand, the sounds are lost in the whistling and shrieks, the muffled blows of things falling or crashing in the darkness. The electricity is intermittent, goes out then comes back. And with an incredible vigor I write in signs, symbols, mixed alphabets, miniature drawings, tattoos. I know it’s you, the wind, the god that has nowhere to go and who never knew how to write his Holy Book. Suddenly there are voices and I think I hear my first name and then my half brother’s—“It’s Abdel, open up!” But it’s not words. Just a ruse. I’m not going to open the door. I have to write faster because one of us will give in, and the entire village has only me as its mooring. Since I learned to write, alone, in my head, I am its center. A vast canvas of my own creation that binds to me the entire description—meticulous like a miserly inventory—of this village [four notebooks entitled One Arm, filled during my walks with the help of the new names of anonymous trees], the lives saved, the slowness of hundred-year-olds who’ve become clever, the first names of children, nuances about the sweat of the sick, and the precise calculation of all the people I’ve met by accident who now depend on me. And the incomplete notebooks where I tried to describe the newborns, but never fully succeeded. I am a kind of watchman, the lighthouse keeper in the “sea of darkness” of Arab geographers for whom the earth wasn’t round but saddle-shaped. I am responsible for order but also for equilibrium, a guarantor of gravity through the use of language. “Open up! Open up!” cries the wind, using Hadjer’s voice this time, but I am no fool. I write faster. They knock on the door angrily but don’t succeed. Sitting like a stone, I have with me the keys to the house and the spare set that Hadjer forgot when she left this morning. Trees run through the streets to escape the wind, which is now full of hate. There are no more stars, no borders, no cardinal points, the north is a bird with no nest, high and low are vertigoes. If I write faster maybe it will stop.)