The Dust of Promises Page 4

  It was a death which, in its absurdity, was a carbon copy of the monotonous lives these people had led: a life in which everyone in the family had eaten one meal a day out of the same pot, frequented a single café where young and old alike smoked the same bad, locally made juniper cigarettes, and when they got sick, went to the clinic in Dashrah, where a single doctor prescribed a single medicine for whatever ailed them.

  Every Friday they would gather in the only mosque they had to pray in and make supplication to the one God – that is, until the murderers came and killed them in the name of some other deity.

  It’s as though for generations on end they’d been repeating the same lifetime over and over, dying, war after war, on others’ behalf for the simple reason that, as they always had been, they were in the same wrong place. It’s as if they had fought against France and paid the heftiest possible tax – martyrdom itself – simply in order to have a municipality that sported a sign saying, ‘From the people, to the people,’ with an Algerian flag waving overhead, and that provided graves for the dead bodies mutilated at the hands of other Algerians.

  These people to whom I bore so little resemblance had no pictures of ancestors on the walls of their huts as I had on the walls of my house, since they were descended from the line of the soil. I wished I could hold the scent of their sweat close to my heart. I wished I could approach them warmly and shake their rough, cracked hands. However, they extended no hand to me. Instead, Death lolled its tongue at me wherever I turned.

  So I left them behind, patiently enduring until the next death, in their miserable stone hovels with their scrawny farm animals.

  As I left the village, an unbounded grief came over me. I caught a sudden, painful glimpse of what had once been a forest on the outskirts of the town. Some time since my last visit there, the authorities had burned the forest to the ground on the pretext of protecting the villagers from the murderers who had been hiding there.

  In every war, as one generation of human beings settles scores with another, an entire generation of trees loses its life in battles whose logic defies the trees’ understanding.

  ‘Who’s killing who?’ they ask, bewildered. But no one has time to answer a mountain that’s gone bald, once because France set fire to its trees in order to rob freedom fighters of their hideouts, and once because the Algerian government launched sweeping air strikes on them for the same purpose.

  So not even trees get to die standing up any more! What recourse do they have against a country that sets fire to anyone who calls it home?

  So we cry, and the sea laughs bitterly, saying, ‘Enemies don’t approach us in barges any more. They’re born among us in the jungles of hatred!’

  I don’t know why, but the sight of those burned trees spreading out towards the horizon hit me with the kind of despondency you feel when you’re kissing your dreams goodbye. It was as if, with the assassination of those trees, part of me had died, too. Their charred remains took me back to a happy time when thousands of young people around my age had completed their military service by building what we called the Green Dam. We spent two years of our lives planting trees to protect Algeria from desertification. The slogan you heard everywhere you went back then was, ‘Algerians advance, the desert retreats!’

  So had that all been just a joke?

  That was when oil had just been discovered, and we were fired up with enthusiasm. But the golden sands we had dreamed of ended up slipping through our fingers into the pockets of people who were swallowing up the country, and who were advancing more quickly than the encroaching desert.

  What a mirage slogans are! They do about as much good as leading people into dunes of quicksand, where there’s no place to drive a tent peg, and no oasis on the horizon!

  The Arabian Peninsula may have an Empty Quarter, but now we’re in the Empty Half! So how did we get here? Or rather, how did the sand get inside us, infiltrating our every cell? We’re no longer on the desert’s edge. We are the desert. (This must be what they call emotional desertification.)

  It started in December 1978, when Boumédiène flashed us that mysterious smile of his on the television screen, and then left. His features were less stern than usual, and his penetrating glance less sharp, while the hand with which he usually stroked his moustache as he delivered a speech was motionless, weary from its repeated attempts to help Algeria rise above the vicissitudes of history.

  He said nothing, since he had nothing to say that day. During his stay in Moscow, where he’d gone to be treated for a rare disease, he’d been told that his death was inevitable and imminent. So, like a wounded race horse, he’d come home to die. He’d come back to test our love for him, having been received coolly in the beginning by a people who still preferred Ben Bella’s eloquence and spontaneous kindness.

  Boumédiène’s rustic origins had bequeathed to him a sense of decorum, while his life of struggle had smoothed down his self-important rough edges. Accordingly, he’d insisted on treating death with the reverence it deserved, and he died a great man. He died a death suited to his mysterious, private, complex character.

  On December 27 1978, as the world was celebrating the Christmas season, we were bidding farewell to the man who had personally attended the birth of Algeria’s institutions and grandest dreams. He was a man of such integrity that he hadn’t owned so much as a house. We knew virtually nothing about his family or relatives. However, he had left us the political and financial institutions that had grown up under his wing and which, following his death, would undertake to suppress our dreams, plunge us into penury, and hold our future in escrow for several generations to come. He took leave of us amid streams of tears which, unbeknownst to him, would turn after his death into rivers of blood.

  People mourned his loss as a tragedy that concealed a conspiracy. It was as though his death were a mere rumour, and his illness an evil plot. After all, Algerians had learned from Boumédiène’s rule itself to believe that there was no such thing as a death from natural causes, at least when it had to do with politicians. Consequently, like all the men of Algeria for whom transcontinental deaths, fabricated suicides, and retaliatory murders had been masterminded, Boumédiène died shrouded in questions.

  Actually, there were two things no Algerian believed in any more: death of natural causes, and wealth through legitimate gain. Having witnessed the wonders of one-party rule, Algerians had arrived at the conclusion that whoever died had been murdered, and that whoever became wealthy was a thief. Thanks to this collective skepticism, the ‘green dam’ of confidence had collapsed, and we’d been swallowed up by the dunes of disillusionment.

  Sometimes I feel nostalgic for the Algeria of the 1970s. I was twenty years old, and I’d never been beyond the boundaries of my own neighbourhood. Even so, I was sure Algeria must be the envy of the rest of the world. After all, we were exporting revolutions and dreams to people who were still in awe of a defenceless people who had brought France to its knees.

  The world was brought to us by a black-and-white television set that we gathered around every evening, incredulous at the miracles this extraordinary contraption could perform. Because we were the first family in the neighbourhood to get one, the neighbour ladies would send their children over to our house in the late afternoon with plates of cookies and other sweets in the hope that we’d let them watch it with us.

  The joy and excitement we shared over our independence brought us together in a new way, causing our lives to intertwine and overlap to an unprecedented degree. We learned to live together, though without necessarily feeling tranquil, in a building that, until just a few years earlier, had been the sole province of high-ranking French employees. Some enjoyed it as the ‘spoils of independence’, whereas my father, in his foolish integrity, denied himself this pleasure. In his capacity as an official charged with distributing the vacant real estate that had been abandoned by the French after Algeria’s independence, he insisted on living in an apartment for rent. Little did he know
that he would stay there until, thirty years later, he left it for his grave. In the meantime, his health deteriorated as fast as the building did. After Algeria’s first few years of independence, the wheel of fortune broke down, and he spent his later years trudging breathlessly up and down the building’s five flights of stairs.

  During those early days of independence, while the neighbours were busy watching television – or us – I was waiting with the patience of an adolescent for the window of a certain Polish lady to open. Her husband was one of the hundreds of technical engineers who had come from Socialist countries to promote Algeria’s ‘industrial revolution’, but who had no inkling of the other, small-scale revolutions they were sparking in the lives of young men and women.

  Algeria, which had just emerged from a time of war, was a teenage girl who fell all too easily in love with the glamorous foreign visitors who arrived to compliment her and to manage her affairs. This paved the way for her to experience her first transcontinental, transnational, trans-linguistic romances. Thousands of love stories were born between her and Palestinians, Iraqis, Egyptians and Lebanese who came to work as professors, teachers, engineers and consultants, and who had fallen under the spell of her name. They had come to share in some of the distinction and nobility of her history, and to share with her some of the Arabness she had lost.

  For me, love came in a Polish wrapping. It happened this way by virtue of the geography that had placed a certain fair-skinned woman within my range of vision. The building she lived in overlooked our apartment, though at a distance that demonstrated due respect for the elegance of the street on which it was located, and which the French had designed with a stateliness that befit the government buildings nearby.

  One morning I saw her drying her hair in front of the mirror. She was wearing a white bathrobe, and nothing private was showing, maybe because she knew somebody was spying on her. Even so, she looked delectable with her wet hair and her unintentionally seductive movements. As time went on, her image was transformed in my youthful memory into a symbol of female magnetism, one in which a woman was never actually naked, but only potentially so.

  Like all female ‘comrades’ of the Socialist Bloc, she was ablaze with the causes that were being spewed forth all over the world by the volcanoes of the 1970s. And I, being at the age of first discoveries, was ablaze with her, and with global causes that were far too big to be shouldered by a human ant like me.

  When I married several years later, I found myself living in a bedroom that looked out on the one that had once been hers. I often reflected on that apartment which, for two years of my life, had been my first laboratory, fertile ground for my madness. Fate had placed that room directly across from what would later become the site of my highly prudent, and frigid, conjugal life.

  There’s always a first woman to whom you come as a timid boy and at whose hands you learn to be a man. Then, some years later, there’s another. You dazzle her with what you learned from the first, and with her you test out your manly powers. It’s only with your wife that your body has to be both dull and stupid. If you gained your sexual experience before her, you have to avoid showing it off out of modesty. If, on the other hand, you’ve acquired it since you married her, you have to avoid showing it off out of shrewdness. Consequently, passion’s elixir slowly seeps away, and your bodies fall into the torpor of platonic affection.

  Olga was the first ‘womanhole’ I fell into. I don’t recall who it was that said, ‘A man will fall into the first “womanhole” he comes to. In fact, the story of a man’s life is nothing but a record of the holes he’s fallen into.’

  I laugh when I remember something my grandmother said about my father, who had a habit of squandering his money on women because of the ‘traps’ they were so good at setting for him. What she said was, ‘Take hold of a cow’s tail and it’ll throw you into a hole!’

  Before Olga, I hadn’t been as interested in women as I was in animals and objects. However, it isn’t lust that makes a young man fling himself into the first womanhole he comes to but, rather, a feeling of orphanhood. He’s looking for a womb to hold him in the hope that it might give birth to him all over again.

  The one person who, for me, embodies all the women of the world is my paternal grandmother. It was she who embraced me from the time I was taken from my mother’s bed as an infant. It was her bed that I slept in for several years of my childhood. And it was on the pallet on the floor that she and I shared that I began my journey as a wayfarer who would be received by many a bed.

  There’s some event in your childhood which, without your being aware of it, becomes the pivot around which everything else in your life revolves. If you’ve never called any woman ‘Mother’, it does harm not only to your relationship with language but to your relationships with everything around you. I could sum up my entire life in a statement similar to one that Rousseau makes in his autobiographical Confessions: ‘I cost my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.’

  From the time I was orphaned at such a young age, I established mother–son relationships with everything around me. During each successive phase of my life I would choose something or someone to be my ‘mother’, until reality caught up with me and reminded me that I wasn’t their child.

  I discovered motherhood the way Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy: in the bathtub. This big white vessel, which held me in a watery space like an unborn child, gave me the strange feeling that it was my mother. I would spend all my time there, refusing to get out for any reason, for fear that the water would empty out of it the way I imagined the blood emptying out of my mother’s body as she gave birth to me.

  Sometimes motherhood causes me pain even when it has nothing directly to do with me. When I was a little boy, I had a cat that I fed and doted on. I would let her sit on my lap while I did my homework. Then suddenly she turned bad-tempered, and refused to let me pick her up or even stroke her fur. One day after she’d left scratches on my hand, my grandmother scolded me roundly and ordered me to leave the cat alone, since she was pregnant and didn’t like anyone to come near her. I cried, since I realised that the day was coming when she would have children of her own, and would abandon me. Once she’d had her litter, I saw her nursing and grooming her kittens and checking on them one by one. Even though it was a large litter, she didn’t neglect a single one, and if any of them wandered off, she went looking for it and brought it back, clutching its tiny neck between her teeth.

  Orphanhood, like barrenness, will make you jealous even of an animal – so jealous that you cry out to God, demanding the right to be treated as well as your fellow creatures.

  My existential questions began with that cat: How can a mother cat carry her young between her teeth without hurting them? Does she really hide them from their father, who might eat them if he gets hungry? Are all fathers cruel and uncaring? Are there cats that are more motherly than women, whose breasts produce milk but who withhold mercy and compassion?

  Later, when I’d grown up and experienced the loss of a homeland, my ‘cat questions’ got bigger and more painful. I wondered: Is it possible for a country to inflict harm on its people that an animal wouldn’t inflict on its young? Are revolutions more brutal than father cats that devour their offspring? After all, don’t they devour their advocates without even being hungry? How is it that a mother cat, no matter how many kittens she has, won’t let any of them stray from her, and won’t rest until she has them gathered around her, whereas a homeland will cast its sons and daughters into exile and diaspora, indifferent to their fates? And isn’t a cat, by burying its wastes in the dirt, more civilised than men who shamelessly display bellies bloated with stolen wealth?

  But I haven’t looked for answers to these questions. After all, answers are blind. Only questions see.

  Chapter Three

  Once upon a September in Paris…

  It was autumn, but it felt more like winter.

  I decided to start
squandering life with the indolence of someone who, having stopped running for the first time, finds the troubles of a lifetime catching up with him.

  I was forty, and I couldn’t help but think about all that had gone to waste, the brokenness and the losses, the friendships that hadn’t been friendships, the victories that hadn’t been victories, and those lustful passions that had cooked over the low fire of patience.

  Wishing I could experience what it was like to exercise the indiscretion of a complete outsider, I’d dream in the late mornings of women whose names I didn’t know. Passing strangers of a passing tedium, they would invite me wordlessly to take them by storm. But how can you revel in the realms of pleasure when the terror you’re running from has robbed you of your manhood, and when you have to live with the guilt of harbouring unfulfilled cravings?

  Wherever I went, I’d pack my bags for a make-believe journey into her arms. Restless with grief, I had gone in search of a woman whose grief would offer me a womb in which I could nestle.

  Even though I was happy to be making the trip, the grief around me sabotaged everything that, to others, appeared to be cause for rejoicing. I realised, for example, that I’d have to endure weeks of demeaning red tape in order to be able to travel to Paris to receive a prize for a picture that could reach the entire world over the Internet in a single moment. The Visa Pour l’Image had granted a visa to the photograph, not to the person who had taken it. It turns out that the free movement of photographs doesn’t extend to people!

  I didn’t stop to ask myself, ‘Which is more important, then – you, or a picture you took?’

  I was busy, but there was a city of clamouring desires waiting for me. Metal staircases grabbed me and flung me towards Metro cars, where I mixed with people on the move, people in a hurry, people without homes. Amidst the waves of humanity, I happened to collide with my native land – not the one that sweeps the streets of alienation, not the hopeless loiterer who invites caution and suspicion, but, rather, another native land that had once been my pride and joy, and whose dreams had been dealt the death blow by hired assassins.