The Dust of Promises Read online

  THE DUST

  OF

  PROMISES

  AHLEM MOSTEGHANEMI

  Translated from the Arabic

  by

  Nancy Roberts

  ‘The truth is a wayfarer, in whose way nothing can stand’

  Émile Zola

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Glossary

  A Note on the Author

  A Note on the Translator

  By the Same Author

  Also available by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Translator’s Introduction

  The Dust of Promises is the third part of a trilogy consisting of The Bridges of Constantine (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), and Chaos of the Senses (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). As each of the novels, interspersed with wry commentaries on Algerian history, society and politics and the inanity of sectarian violence, is narrated by a different main character, they serve together to give us three different perspectives on the trilogy’s central themes and events.

  The Bridges of Constantine is narrated by Khaled Ben Toubal, who fought on the side of Algeria in the Algerian war of liberation and who has been in self-exile in Paris for two decades, alienated by the corruption that now riddles the country he once fought for. Despite losing an arm in battle he has become a renowned painter, and at the opening of one of his exhibitions Hayat, the daughter of his revered revolutionary commander, Taher Abd al-Mawla, unexpectedly re-enters his life. Hayat had been just a child when he last saw her, but she is now an alluring young novelist. Khaled falls passionately in love with Hayat, who comes to embody his motherland and the city of Constantine, whose bridges he depicts over and over again in his paintings. However, Hayat proves to be elusive and unattainable. She chooses a path that takes her away from Khaled and, through a traditionally arranged marriage, into a morally dubious alliance with Algeria’s modern-day regime.

  Set in Algeria in the early 1990s as the country’s political conflicts escalate into civil war, Chaos of the Senses is narrated by Hayat who, finding herself in a lifeless marriage to a high-ranking officer in the Algerian military, falls in love with a mysterious, unnamed journalist whose identity overlaps somehow both with a character in a short story Hayat has written and with Khaled Ben Toubal, whom the journalist learned of from reading The Bridges of Constantine, and whose name he has adopted as a pseudonym to protect himself from government hit men and Islamic extremists.

  Although Hayat seems quite autonomous, one soon sees that she is torn between five male figures in her life: her deceased father, who was a great hero and martyr of the Algerian liberation struggle; her husband, who embodies the corruption and cruelty into which the ideals of the Algerian revolution have sunk; her brother Nasser, named after the late Egyptian president and a symbol of Arab nationalism, who has joined the Islamists being targeted by her husband’s forces; her lover who, as a journalist, could be killed by either side; and her former sweetheart Khaled, with whom she broke without explanation and who embodied her truest ideals on some deep level even though she seems unable or unwilling to pursue them. Hayat, after all, is shown to be a symbol of Algeria, the motherland that abuses her children, the fickle seductress who misuses those who desire her.

  Narrated by the elusive journalist who becomes Hayat’s lover in the second novel, The Dust of Promises brings us back to France, where the journalist has come to receive a prize for ‘Best Press Photograph of the Year’. The stage is set in the opening pages for a reunion with Hayat, whom he hasn’t seen for two years. While visiting an art exhibition one day, the narrator finds himself intrigued by an artist whose work is on display and feels impelled to learn more about him. Through a series of chance encounters, he begins to suspect that the artist in question is actually the individual named Khaled Ben Toubal in Hayat’s novel, The Bridges of Constantine. A subsequent web of circumstances then brings Hayat herself to Paris, where Fate and happenstance conspire once more in the lives of the separated lovers . . .

  In closing, a word might be said about the figure of Nedjma, who is mentioned numerous times in the latter part of The Dust of Promises. Nedjma is a novel written by Algerian novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine (1929–1989), who wrote in both French and the Algerian Arabic dialect, and who was known for his nationalism and his advocacy of the Berber cause. Published in 1956, the novel tells the story of four young men – Mustapha, Lakhdar, Rachid and Mourad – who fall in love with Nedjma, the daughter of an Algerian man and a French woman, during the French colonisation of Algeria. The central events of the novel take place during the tumultuous period following the ill-fated nationalist demonstrations of 8 May 1945. The character of Nedjma is based on a real person (an unhappily married cousin of Kateb Yacine’s with whom he had a relationship). However, she herself rarely speaks in the novel and her character remains undeveloped, facts which contribute to the mystique of her persona and lend support to some critics’ symbolic identification of her with Algeria itself.

  Chapter One

  On our first evening together after years of longing, we were lovers being fêted by the rain, lovers for whom happenstance had arranged a rendezvous far from the Arab metropolises of fear.

  We forgot for an evening to be on our guard, thinking that Paris made it its business to keep lovers safe.

  A love that has lived at the mercy of murderers is bound to seek cover behind the first barricade of delight it can find. So, then, were we practising on joy’s dance floor, believing that happiness was an act of resistance? Or is a bit of sadness something lovers can’t do without?

  After two years of absence, love feels like a time-bomb, and after this first evening of passion tinged with sorrow you worry about how to defuse it without being splintered apart by the force of your confession.

  With the ferocity of an embrace after a time apart, you wish you had said, ‘I love you, Hayat!’ and ‘I’m still sick over you.’

  Like emotions too proud to allow themselves to be put into words, or an illness that eludes diagnosis, the words you want to speak can’t be uttered.

  You wish you could weep, not because you’re in his house, not because the two of you are together, not because she’s come at last, not because you’re miserable, and not because you’re happy but, rather, because of the sheer beauty of weeping in the face of something so enchanting that it could never happen again by mere coincidence.

  Nine fifteen in the evening, and cigarette butts.

  You had a smoke. Then you heard her sultry laugh, which put a damper on your sorrow. Before smoking the cigarette, you’d been planning to ask her how her mouth had come of age in your absence.

  And just after a kiss that didn’t happen, you were going to ask what she’d done with her lips while you were apart . . . who her eyes had seen . . . to whom her voice had bared itself . . . to whom she had said things that were meant for you.

  This woman who, to the rhythm of Constantinian tambourines, danced for you as though she were weeping – what had tuned her footsteps to trigger this cosmic disturbance all around you?

  All that rain . . . As you chanted prayers for rain at her feet, you felt as though you belonged to all kinds of clouds, to all ways of weeping, to all the tears that have ever poured down on women’s account.

  She was here. And what were you to do with all that grief – you, the man who doesn’t cry, but only tears up, who doesn’t dance, but only taps his feet, who doesn’t sing, but is only moved by the pathos of the tune?

  In the face o
f all that emotional charge, all you could think about were the details, constantly on the lookout for a storyline.

  Do you look for security in writing? What stupidity!

  Is it because you’re here with neither homeland nor house that you decided to take up residence in a novel, going out to write the way some go out to dance, the way some go out to meet a woman, the way fools go out to meet their deaths?

  Are you wrestling with death in a book? Or are you hiding from it behind a pen?

  We were face to face in the living room, a subterfuge away from the bedroom, unable to defuse jealousy’s bomb under a bed that didn’t belong to us.

  For this rendezvous of ours to have gone as planned, we would have needed special demilitarized zones – zones stripped of their associations with the past, free of objects’ conspiracies against us, and far removed from memory’s ambushes. So why, if you were afraid sadness would seep into her feet, did you bring her to this house, of all places?

  It was a new experience of love. Never before had I developed a passion for a woman’s feet.

  She wasn’t accustomed to taking off her laughter’s high heels when she went walking over a man’s grief. Even so, she leaned down with a womanly leisureliness the way a lily bows its head. Then, without removing her silence, she removed her shoes covered in blood – my blood – and went on dancing barefoot.

  Did she realise what a loss I felt when I saw her bend down so gracefully, and what an allure her feet possessed as she put on a man’s heart, or took it off?

  Something about her reminded me of a scene where, back in a lovely cinematic era of yesteryear, Rita Hayworth took off a pair of long satin gloves, one finger at a time, with such deliberate slowness that she probably had all the men in the world swooning without removing another stitch of her clothing.

  Is this where artists get their passion for the seemingly trivial aspects of women’s beings? Is this why Pushkin died in a senseless duel defending the honour of a wife who didn’t even read what he wrote?

  In her presence, grief seemed pleasant. So pleasant, in fact, that I wanted to keep its details ablaze in my memory. So I looked all the more intently at this woman as, devoid of mercy, she danced to the strains of desire like someone at a victory celebration. And I lay my head at her feet, contemplating all the losses I’d suffered in my lifetime.

  Here she was at last, having come the way life does: full of surprises, shattering all expectations. She seemed to approach every new love with unshod, wet feet, as though she were always either just emerging from the pool of transgression or heading towards it.

  I’d missed her! How I’d missed her! Yet, because I didn’t know any more how to define my relationship with her, I’d started relating to nothing but her feet.

  Here she was, and I was afraid – afraid that if I looked too long at the perspiration glistening on her bare back, her womanhood’s current might strike me down like lightning.

  She was more tantalizing this way – as a woman with her back turned, who gives you the chance to envision her from behind, and leaves you ablaze with her elusiveness.

  I’m a man who likes to go running after a fleeting fragrance, the kind of fragrance that walks by without a passing glance. I like a woman who kills me as my illusions embrace her from behind. This is why I bought her a certain black muslin dress with a yawning, dazzling opening in the back that froze me in my tracks. Or maybe I bought it because of the veiled disdain I detected in the way I was addressed by the sales attendant, who clearly couldn’t quite believe that an Arab who didn’t reek of petroleum could belong to the world of obscene acquisition.

  I’d been walking around town one day on my way home from the opera when my feet happened to lead me into Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I hadn’t counted on going down a street flanked by fancy cars waiting for ladies laden with bags brimming with elegance. Nor did I know enough to beware of shops that put only one or two dresses in their display windows. I knew nothing about the neighbourhood at first.

  It was only later that I found out what the neighbourhood was called, when the sales attendant handed me a card on which she’d written the deposit I’d made on the dress.

  With a pride tainted with madness, with that Algerian logic of ‘excess’, you bought an evening dress that cost the equivalent of several months’ salary back in Algeria. You, who begrudge yourself even the bare minimum, what were you thinking? Did you do it because you wanted to squander that prize money of yours, as if to free yourself from a curse? Or to prove to love that you’re more generous than it is?

  Why would you have bought an evening dress for a woman you never expected to see again, and whose measurements time might have done all sorts of things to in your absence? Were you trying to bribe fate? Or play games with memory? You yourself know that the muslin dress you based a whole story on never even existed.

  It’s just that the colour black serves as a nice excuse for all sorts of things, which is why it’s the basic hue of every subterfuge.

  I remember the day I happened to see her at a café more than two years ago. The only way I could think of to approach her was to make up a story. So I asked her if she was the woman I’d seen wearing a long black muslin dress at a wedding I’d attended once.

  She got flustered. I think she was going to say, ‘No,’ but instead she said, ‘Maybe,’ since it would have been too embarrassing to say yes.

  As a matter of fact, we’d never met before, but when I encounter a woman, I like to invent memories from a past that never was. I love memories that have no logic to them.

  So from that moment on, we started creating a story tailor-made to fit a dress that had never hung in her closet.

  Then, when that dress caught my eye a couple of months ago in a shop window, I felt as though I recognised it. It had a sentimental flow to it that I loved, as though it demanded to be worn by her body in particular, or as though she actually had worn it at some party, and had then hung it on some other woman’s body the way you hang something on a clothes rack until you’re ready to put it on again.

  When I walked into the shop, I felt awkward. Lost in a jungle of women’s apparel, I gave stupid answers to the obvious questions I was being asked by the sales attendant, who was as fashionable as she was suspicious of my intentions.

  ‘What size are you looking for, sir?’ she asked.

  How was I supposed to know the dress size of a woman whose body I’d never measured with anything but the lips of longing? Her shudders I’d gauged on the Richter scale of desire, and I knew her longings down to their deepest layers. I knew in which age her cravings had deposited their sediments, in which geological period her earthquake belt had rotated, and at what depth to find her groundwater. All that, I knew. But now that two years had passed, I didn’t know her dress size any more!

  The sales attendant wasn’t terribly surprised by my ignorance, nor by the fact that I didn’t have enough money with me to pay for the dress. There was nothing in my appearance to suggest that I was well-versed in women’s affairs, or that I would be able to afford to pay such a sum.

  However, she was surprised by the sophistication I exhibited when I made a point of telling her that I was less impressed by the name of the person who’d designed the dress than by the humility he’d displayed in choosing the colour black. In fact, it almost seemed that he’d let this colour sign the dress on his behalf, and that for the price of a dress I was actually buying the light that would be given off by a bare back.

  ‘You have good taste,’ she said, seeming to have had a change of heart towards me.

  I didn’t take her compliment seriously, since I was sure that for people of her ilk, a person’s ‘taste’ or lack thereof was determined by how full or empty his pocketbook happened to be.

  ‘It isn’t a question of taste,’ I told her. ‘It’s a question of light. What matters isn’t the object, but the way light falls on it. Salvador Dalí fell in love with Gala and decided to take her away from her husband, poet Pa
ul Éluard, when he saw her bare back at the seashore in the summer of 1929.’

  ‘Are you an artist?’ asked the sales attendant, surprised, since her usual customers, for whom the purchase of this type of dress would hardly have made a dent in their budgets, would never have engaged her in such a conversation.

  ‘No, I’m a lover,’ I nearly replied. But instead I said, ‘No, I’m a photographer.’

  I could have added that I was a ‘big name’ photographer, since the reason I was in Paris was that I’d won a prize for ‘Best Press Photograph of the Year’. There wasn’t anything in the photo, which I’d more or less plucked from the jaws of death, that would have been of much interest to a woman like her. Nor would she have understood the fact that this black dress was simply an emotional investment I’d decided to spend part of my prize money on.

  After all, who could have known that the Fates would bring her all the way to Paris and that I’d get to see it wearing her?

  And now she was wearing it, blossoming inside it like a fiery rose. She was all the more alluring as she danced, in my presence, with another man, a man who was vividly present between us despite his absence.

  If Borges had seen this woman as she danced for the two of us, for me and for him, he would have realised that the zandali performed by the women of Constantine was as close to Argentinian dance as the tango itself. She was a sorrowful thought dancing to the rhythm of jealousy to break up lovers’ quarrels.

  For a moment she ceased to be a woman and became a Greek goddess dancing barefoot as she was being spirited away.

  After that I was to discover that in reality, she was a goddess who loved the smell of roasting human flesh and who, dancing around lovers’ burnt sacrifices, refused to accept anything but their own bodies as offerings.

  She was Constantine, which, whenever anything stirred within her, brought about some sort of geological disturbance that would make the bridges around her wobble, and who could dance only on top of her men’s dead bodies. At least, when I tried later to understand her Magian caprices, this is the thought that kept coming to mind.