Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  This undertaking humiliated my tribe even more, and my aunt cried as she did the day when the family that was supposed to ask for her hand hadn’t come. Busy with condolences, they ignored me at the beginning, they tried to reason with me, my cousins tried to shut me in the house down below. But it was in vain, I knew what I had to do and I accomplished it with joy, gravity, seriousness, and happiness. To free Djemila, I needed a greater freedom to share with her, to offer her. Creation is a book, rendered page by page. My psalms had to be read everywhere, exposed. My father now nothing more than a stone, I was the transparent river that he lay in and quietly ballasted.

  49

  The wind on the night when they snatched me from my writing caused horrible damages: burned vineyards, destroyed houses, toppled streetlights. Three people died, buried under collapsed walls, and two people were electrocuted. Aboukir emerged with a lacerated face, wrinkled and gray. Everything is simultaneously familiar and as though suffering from an extreme drought. People still feel a species solidarity in the face of cataclysms, but gradually return to their routines. These have been the most violent and persistent Smaïmes for decades, blowing away their share of the elderly and the fruit. But this is not a dead place, it has merely been reduced. I feel unbalanced, as if on the verge of a birth. The sky is luminous again like joy, high and blue enough to fill your lungs, new. But it contrasts with the trace of everything else. The red sand still dulls the colors of things, but is starting to wane like a dying ember. They’ve piled it up everywhere with their constant sweeping, but we know that it’ll just be blown somewhere else in a few days, little by little. It will come back from the south, over the clouds.

  I don’t know whether to recount what happened in detail. It’s no longer important that I write now, in fact. I’m no longer responsible, neither witness nor guardian of any secret. I was delivered from my fate nonchalantly, almost negligently. My father is dead. I’m not responsible for anyone. Language won, it is everywhere, bark and ivy, nuance and condensation. It doesn’t need me anymore. I wanted writing to embody a form of speech, which is to say a face, faces, of living beings standing together around a fire.

  When they smashed my door, the wind rushed in, raging, and scattered everything with its teeth. Hadjer came in with it, face obliterated, along with a few of my half brothers and neighbors. They found me with numerous notebooks that the whirlwind started to mix into its current. They snatched me from my task and I found myself lost in a sort of red haze made of sand and cold, pushed from behind toward the hill, the house up top. They were yelling, Hadjer was crying. I don’t know how, as in a bad dream, I found myself crashing into dogs sick with fear, tree trunks, then suddenly I was in my father’s bedroom. I learned he had been asking for me for a long time before he passed away. They had sent family looking for me, cousins, then Abdel and my aunt, but I had refused to open the door. They had yelled, tried keys, then decided to break down the door.

  The house up top was full of cries and plates and the smells of cooking meat. They grabbed hold of me to look me in the eye and hurl insults at me, women crying as though warning all of creation. Abdel was standing there, withdrawn, his eyes full of hate, like the day I pushed him into the well (no, I never pushed him, he slipped and fell). There was a yellowish light, the body had shrunk, now a heap under the sheets. They were all pushing me to embrace him. He had asked to see me all night during his death throes, had wanted to say something to me up until the last moment. Everyone yelled the same thing at me, the same reproach. I fled trampling over bodies and shoes. The wind was still going and warped the funeral tent they had set up despite the inclement weather, in the small clearing between the eucalyptus trees. They tried to limit the sand’s intrusions but it was everywhere. In my mouth, my lungs, my pockets, under my skin. When they had forced me out of our house, leaving the wind there, I had managed to grab my last notebook, the one that had delayed me, that had made me forget time and led me astray, perhaps.

  * * *

  —

  I decided to scatter everything on my way down the hill, to repopulate the island with my pages, to make this the final revelation and transform the very flesh of Aboukir into a manuscript. Creation is a book? My village and its people are notebooks, talismans, prescriptions against oblivion. I made my decision as I left the funeral. Unshakable, letting loose a torrent within me. I felt my shoulders straighten and unknot. Then I ran through the streets and the fields to make my writings public, read by every possible wind. I went back to our house down below, I reflected, and then, at the end of the third day, while they were commemorating his death, I took the first bag and walked toward the entrances of the village and set down the few pages I had left, my talismans. Then toward the south. The west, the mosque, the schools. Everywhere, I scattered my secret. Unveiling my gift in the nakedness of daylight, revealing my entire story. Sometimes, children would follow me, yelling my name, “Zabor eddah el babor!” Other times curious people would bend down to collect the pages and try to read the dialect, at once so familiar and so foreign, free and like ivy, present but quiet. It contained drawings, alphabets distorted by two temptations of language, attempts to create masses of writing, whirlings of wind sculpted into capital letters. Memories of the Holy Book, warped by the interrogation of mediation and possible variations. Names of the dead, dates and numbers returned to their essence as gestures, fingers, and hands.

  They had given me a book—“We made the mountains and birds his accomplices, who sing hymns with him,” the Holy Book says—and now I’m returning it. Little by little I feel delivered, acquitted, free to keep quiet and shed the weight of my responsibility. Maybe I’m wrong. Like Yunus under the tree, body naked and trembling, I understand that Nineveh is saved without me, far from me. I don’t know. The devil tried one last, feeble assault: Hamza (or Abdel?) alerted the gendarmerie about my blasphemous texts, my insane writings, and they arrested me to interrogate me. They let me leave the next day, at the hour of the Friday prayer, after imam Senoussi had seen to my fate. All the charges against me were dropped, but it will be enough, I think, for my half brothers to allege insanity and disinherit me. I had guessed their plan from the start. They forbade me to attend discussions about the inheritance. Hadjer is on her own this time, as when faced with her wrinkles. I went back home and, under my footsteps, in our neighborhood, pages dragged in my wake for days.

  I’m not responsible for the village. But perhaps for something vaster. Will I still read and write? I don’t know. I’m certain I’ve found the most effective ruse against death. The most efficient. But I have no more desire to save others, at least not everyone. I feel light, delivered from an immense responsibility. That language liberated me, but liberty doesn’t mean anything in solitude.

  Children still followed me to the entrance of our house with the smashed door. In the street, vigilant or compassionate, numerous women leaned out of their windows to watch me. Some in scarves, others, younger, hair in the wind and eyes squinting in the bright light unfamiliar to their pupils. I thought I could smell their perfumes. The majority didn’t know what to do, how to express their condolences, they remained forbidden and mute. Others were there, curious to see the young man who had provoked the scandal with his scribblings and who had just been released by the gendarmes. Beautiful decapitated heads, bodies dislocated by the laws forcing them to be invisible, lands where language is still a murmur. That’s where I have to find new stories. I picked up my pace, felt another gaze. Djemila was there, too, on the other side of the wall, watching me from her window. She signaled to me and her daughter Nebbia came out to find me, a basket in her hand. They knew I had nothing to eat in my aunt’s absence. Djemila’s face was beautiful, calm, and it was as though I recognized someone absent. The little girl handed me the basket and then stood there staring at me for a long time before running off. I thanked her mother with a smile: her gesture will not escape the rumors, because it was dared in front of other wome
n. Like a sign. Suddenly I had an idiotic idea: I would no longer be afraid to sleep at night, if I could just sleep next to her! Her body that I had almost never seen would be my parapet above the void.

  The door to our house down below was wobbly, broken. The sand was everywhere, like the cadaver of a monster, dead and vanquished. I wandered through the dirty rooms and my bedroom now empty of notebooks. In the courtyard, everything seemed buried and dried up except the lemon tree. A green-and-yellow bundle resembling a bud. I went out and sat on the doorstep, my body aching.

  50

  I wanted to show my father my perfect notebook, the final one, in which I achieved the equilibrium of blood and senses, the site of my revelation, my body finally repaired by a precise and sovereign language. I wanted to tell him that I was ready to heal death itself. I wanted to swear to him that I had encountered nearly everyone in my writing who cursed night: his father, his mother, his great-grandmother, but also the first ancestor who was a midwife and a rug weaver, all those who had preceded us. That I had reconstituted the history of our tribe, that evil had been vanquished, and famine too, that I could repair the hollows, the blanks, the absences in our story, and that everything is linked, dependent on me, on each person, on each word in my language, in my writing. I had imagined running to the top of the hill, but it was too late when they brought me, pushed me from behind.

  They told me that he died asking for me, while I was sinking deeper into the abyss of my salvation, while I was trying to hold his hand in that nocturnal hell, while the wind separated us, erasing his footsteps and my words. They watched me enter, insults and lamentations already flying. Hadjer herself was cold as a lapidary stone, eyes red. My half brothers were there, lined up like tombstones, and I looked at his cadaver. I noted the droop of his jaw, the traces in his skin of the cold emptiness of the sky. They had closed his eyes, he seemed to be sleeping, but the way objects do, refusing all conversation. I kissed his forehead and was surprised by the cold of his skin. I cried, later. Out of anger. Because there was something unjust about it, someone cheated behind my back by speeding up the hands of the clock. It should have ended differently. Never ended. He should have at least read the notebook, had the opportunity. It’s my best notebook, elegant, short, sober in style, refined until it looked like a dune. It tells some of my mother’s story, and an even older story that was poorly written, formerly incomplete. I wrote the most important parts of what I know and of the art that this language has given to me: the necessary equilibrium between evocation and life, the bond, so hard to break, between my writing and reparation. I don’t understand how my apotheosis missed its date.

  What error did I commit? Is it that I wasn’t able to write fast enough at the crucial moment? I would have needed him to hold out just another two or three days, another few hours within the yellow, mocking wind, and I would have vanquished death, I swear. The wind would have stopped howling, pushed aside like an old wolf limping in the valley of the west, I would have succeeded and my father would have been able to read a beautiful story, well written, balanced and dense like verses. I should have written faster. He should have believed me, believed in my gift.

  It’s a nearly perfect story, especially because the goal of the quest and its final fulfillment are precise and glorious. A story in which my brother is my brother, my mother is still alive, my father returns after a lengthy absence and welcomes me with a rare smile that is not a blade. It’s all written on the first page of the notebook.

  “Good God, my brother!” my half brother says, “your tale is marvelous!”

  “What comes next is even more surprising,” I respond, “and you’ll agree if death decides to let me live another day so I can tell you about the following night.” Death, who had listened to Zabor with pleasure, thinks: “I’ll wait until tomorrow; I’ll kill him as soon as I’ve heard the end of his tale.”

  Oran, Perugia, Tunis

  My thanks to Nedra and Karim Ben Smail, who’ve proved that Tunisia is the vastest country in Africa and their house the vastest in Tunisia.

  To the people of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for the interlude in paradise.