The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Later I would realise that Algeria had arrived in Paris before I did, and that the bullet which those thugs put through her head had sent her blood gushing all the way to France in the form of writers, cinematographers, painters, playwrights, doctors and researchers. I also came to know that the newest wave of Algerians in diaspora had established several organisations to support the intellectuals who were still in Algeria, living in the grip of death and terror.

  A few days after my arrival, I headed for the Algerian community centre in Paris in the hope of scouting out news from home and acquainting myself with the Algerian press, some of whose titles didn’t reach France.

  Beautiful though it was, the building was desolate, like a mausoleum that had been constructed in opulent commemoration of culture on the pretext of celebrating its ongoing life. Or maybe it had just been built to give people whose merchandise was selling badly back home a chance to make a living in hard currency.

  It was so cold, I didn’t feel inclined to linger long enough to leaf through the pages of the country’s troubles, and the only thing that distracted me from the chill was some flyers announcing various cultural activities in Paris. I got out my notebook and jotted down the date of a theatrical performance, and the address of the gallery where a joint exhibition was being held for some Algerian artists.

  Never would I have imagined that forty-eight hours later, when I went to the exhibition on its opening day, all the bizarre Fates in the universe would start joining forces and, using this exhibition as their springboard, turn my life upside down.

  The exhibition hall was invitingly warm. It made me think of standing in the cold on a Paris street in front of carts of roasted chestnuts. It was a warmth that had a smell, a colour, and even words. The words bore a message from the artists themselves, who put me in an emotional tight spot by interspersing their paintings with pictures of innovative figures who had been assassinated, by placing a small Algerian flag next to the gold leaf guest book, and by appending a statement to the exhibition guide book pleading with visitors not to assassinate such people all over again by forgetting them and neglecting the orphans and bereaved loved ones they had left behind.

  It made me feel like crying, and I almost regretted visiting the exhibit. I thought to myself: Did you come all this way just to find all these photos waiting for you?

  Some of the exhibition goers were engaged in a heated discussion over who had been killing whom in Algeria. It was as though they’d been waiting to meet only to disagree. I didn’t feel up to joining the debate. But even though I wasn’t in the mood to take on any more grief, I could feel the intense provocation being hurled back and forth between statements, so I left early.

  I remember several days going by. Then, one early afternoon, I found myself at a Metro station not far from the gallery and decided to go back.

  Everything there seemed calm and peaceful this time. Nothing remained of the hubbub of opening day apart from the silent racket being made by the paintings themselves as they conspired against me.

  As I wandered around the exhibition, my eye was drawn to several groups of three or four paintings. Each group depicted the same bridge at different hours of the day, with each depiction so similar to every other that, taken together, they were charged with an unsettling magnetism.

  There was the Bab El Kantara (‘Gate of the Arch’) Bridge, the oldest bridge in Constantine, the Sidi Rached Bridge set atop towering stone arches of varying widths and heights, and Jisr El Shallalat (‘Bridge of the Falls’), nestled among the valleys like a sleeping child. The one bridge that was set apart from the others was the Sidi M’Cid Bridge, Constantine’s highest, to which the artist had devoted a single, unique painting of a hanging bridge suspended between steel ropes at such a dizzying height that it resembled a swing dangling from the sky.

  I stood for a long time in front of those paintings. I felt as though I’d seen them at some previous time, or as though I’d shared with the artist in painting them. Simple though they were, they had an emotional charge to them that brought me back to myself, as though they’d penetrated me or split me in two.

  As I stood there gazing at the paintings, I thought about how there are some bridges that we cross, and other bridges that cross us, just as, as Khaled Ben Toubal comments in The Bridges of Constantine, there are some cities that we live in, and others that live in us.

  I don’t know what got me to thinking about that creature of ink whose name I’d borrowed as a journalist for several years. There was a time when I had signed my newspaper articles with his name, seeking protection in it from the murderers who lay in wait for anyone who had the temerity to be a writer, and confident that, as the writer of that novel claimed, this man had never existed in real life.

  The idea of taking on his identity had come to me because I was so enamoured of his personality, and because of all the similarities we shared. In fact, we were identical in every respect with two exceptions: first, he was a generation older than I was, and second, he’d become a painter after losing his left arm in a battle for Algeria’s liberation, whereas I, although I hadn’t lost my left arm, had lost the use of it on the day I was shot while photographing those demonstrations.

  I thought ironically about how someone else might have read that novel, and then taken to stealing the man’s canvases and painting the bridges that Khaled Ben Toubal had been so fond of based on the book’s descriptions of them. The paintings didn’t appear to be a mere exercise in drawing. Rather, they appeared to be an attempt to heal a wound, with the painter touching the locus of the pain over and over with his brush as though he wanted to show you where it is.

  He must be one of those devoted ‘children of the rock’ – the rock on which Constantine was built – who are haunted by her sufferings.

  The paintings aroused in me a sudden, urgent curiosity. I went over to the woman overseeing the exhibition and started up a conversation with her, hoping she might supply me with information about the artist. Pointing to a shapely woman who looked to be around forty years old and whose auburn hair cascaded wavelike over her shoulders, she said, ‘That’s the lady assigned to the paintings you’re interested in. She can give you the information you need.’

  The woman introduced herself cordially, with the peculiar warmth that the French exhibit towards each other at gatherings occasioned by human solidarity.

  ‘Hello! I’m Françoise. What can I . . . for you?’

  Not knowing yet ‘what she could . . . for me’, I replied, ‘I’m interested in these paintings. I’d like to know something about the person who did them.’

  ‘They were done by Zayyan,’ she responded enthusiastically. ‘He’s a leading Algerian painter.’

  ‘I’ve heard the name,’ I said apologetically, ‘but unfortunately I’ve never seen any of his works before.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ she replied. ‘He rarely exhibits his work, and he doesn’t paint a great deal, so his paintings run out quickly. As you can see, most of them have been sold.’

  Standing before the collection of paintings, I said, ‘Strange, the effect the use of colours here has on one’s psyche. The gradation of light between one painting and the next makes you feel as though you’re accompanying the bridge through the course of its day. But the colours don’t change. They’re the same in every painting.’

  She said, ‘He learned the art of chromatic reductionism during a time of destitution. At the start of his artistic career he didn’t have any money, so he economized on materials. He could just barely afford three or four colours, and with the colours he had on hand, he painted a bridge.’

  ‘All artists have had rough beginnings,’ she continued. ‘When he first emigrated to France, Picasso did paintings dominated by the colour blue. Critics could see only one reason to explain this ‘blue period’ of Picasso’s, namely, that being an impoverished new immigrant prevented him from buying other colours, and determined his choice. Van Gogh did more than one painting of wheat f
ields for the simple reason that yellow was almost the only colour he had at the time.’

  I would have expressed my admiration for this woman’s cultural knowledge if it weren’t for the fact that my mind was so taken up with the artist himself. I’d begun to sympathise with the man and, as I tended to do in such situations, I began trying to think of some way to help him.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said to her. ‘Wouldn’t somebody have thought of helping a gifted artist like this who couldn’t afford to buy the paints he needed?’

  With a laugh she said, ‘That isn’t exactly the way things were. I’ve been talking to you about his early beginnings. Zayyan did this painting forty years ago, when he was being treated in Tunisia during Algeria’s war of independence.’ As she spoke, she pointed to a painting entitled, ‘The Hanging Bridge’.

  I took a close look at the painting. At the bottom of it was written: Tunis, 1956.

  Something was beginning to confuse me. A crazy thought passed through my mind, but I dismissed it for fear that it might cause me to doubt my sanity.

  ‘I thought he was a young man,’ I said. ‘How old is he, then?’

  ‘He’s around sixty.’

  ‘And what led him to paint these bridges?’

  ‘His obsession with Constantine, of course! He did most of these paintings ten years ago. He went through a period during which bridges were the only thing he painted. This collection is part of what remains of that madness, but most of the paintings from that period have been sold.’

  I was afraid that if I went on asking questions, I would make a frightening discovery. As if to run away from a surprise whose consequences I couldn’t predict, I asked her, ‘What has he put on display other than these paintings of bridges?’

  Pointing to a painting of fishing nets filled with old-looking shoes of various sizes and shapes that were dripping wet and bloated, she said, ‘This painting is one of my favourites. I’m amazed it hasn’t sold yet.’

  Seeing that I was unimpressed by this painting that I didn’t understand, she explained, ‘This is a painting Zayyan did in memory of the victims of the 17 October 1961 demonstrations. A number of Algerians had taken to the streets of Paris with their families in a peaceful demonstration to demand an end to the curfew that had been imposed on them, and the French police threw dozens of them into the River Seine with their arms and legs bound. Many of them drowned, and their bodies and some of their shoes floated for several days on the river’s surface.’

  ‘I know,’ I broke in, not wanting to appear less knowledgeable of my own history than she was. ‘Since Papon, Paris’s chief of police at the time, couldn’t send them off to gas chambers the way the Germans had done to the Jews before them, he dispatched twenty thousand of his men to throw the demonstrators into the Seine. A police officer would ask a demonstrator, “Muhammad, do you know how to swim?” to which the unfortunate being interrogated would generally reply, “No,” as though he were denying an accusation. Once the police officer had gotten his answer, he would push the demonstrator off the bridge, since the only reason for the question was to save himself the trouble of tying up his victim’s arms and legs with his necktie!’

  Continuing her narrative in a more lighthearted tone, the woman added, ‘A certain anti-racism group was inspired by this painting to memorialise the crime in a new way. During the last commemoration of the 17 October massacre, they loaded fishing nets with as many pairs of tattered shoes as the estimated number of those killed in the massacre, and lowered them into the River Seine. Once the shoes were saturated with water, they pulled them out and displayed them on the river bank for people to see as a reminder of those who had drowned.’

  I suddenly lost my voice in the face of this painting, which had ceased to be a mere display of conflicting colours, and had become, instead, an articulation of conflicting histories.

  I felt an urge to embrace this woman, who was half Françoise, and half France. I wanted to kiss one part of her, and to slap another. I wanted to cause her pain, to make her cry, and then go back to my miserable hotel to cry alone.

  So, was that the moment when I began to want her?

  Interrupting my train of thought, Françoise surprised me by telling me apologetically that she had an appointment to keep. Then she left me standing in front of the painting, my thoughts scattered as I watched her exit the exhibition hall.

  That evening I felt an insistent, growing curiosity about this artist, and I couldn’t rid my mind of the sight of that painting, which had given rise to some strange thoughts and ruined the cordial relationship I’d established with the Seine.

  The artist must have made a point of painting what the dead leave behind, since our torment lies not in a loved one’s lifeless body, but in the objects that bring him or her to mind.

  He had deliberately presented his viewers with shoes even more miserable than their owners had been: shoes as neglected as our fates, shoes weighed down by life’s filth, shoes that decompose in the water the way a corpse does. Here was the life story of objects which, through their tattered remains, told the life stories of the people they’d belonged to.

  I spent the evening pondering the fates of those demonstrators and their shoes. They’d put them on one day not knowing they were putting them on for their final journey. They hadn’t expected their shoes to let them down at the moment they drowned. They weren’t life boats, of course. Even so, they had clung to them as though they were: a pair of shoes here, a single shoe there, shoes that had walked distances whose ending point no one knew, only to breathe their last when they parted with their owners’ feet. There had been 30,000 demonstrators (60,000 shoes), of whom 12,000 were led away to detention centres and sports stadiums. As for how many of them drowned that day, the River Seine, which has always had a bad memory, couldn’t say exactly.

  I began picturing the river banks on the morning after all those miserable creatures had drowned, leaving passersby to interrogate their shoes. One shoe had lime on it, another mud, and a third . . . What do you suppose their owners did for a living? Were they painters? Construction workers? Rubbish collectors? Assembly line workers in a Peugeot factory? These, after all, were the only professions an Algerian could have practised in France in those days.

  Each two shoes had belonged to someone with simple dreams that had evaporated with the loss of one of the pair. A single shoe, no longer a pair, embodies a hope emptied of all hope. It’s like a hollow shell cast onto the beach, since oysters only become lifeless seashells when they’ve been split in two and scattered in pieces along the shore.

  What I finally arrived at, after a sleepless night that took my thoughts in all directions, was a decision to go back to the gallery the next day to buy the shoe painting. It would be a way of winning Françoise’s friendship, and of contributing to the charitable exhibition by buying a painting I’d fallen in love with.

  This, at least, was my stated intention. As for my other intention, it was to meet Françoise again and to get her to talk more about the artist who had so captured my fascination.

  Thinking that Françoise worked at the gallery, I went there the next day at noon expecting to find her. However, the gallery supervisor informed me that she worked at the Institute of Fine Arts, and that she wouldn’t be at the gallery until four in the afternoon.

  So I decided to take care of some personal concerns and come back later.

  When I returned, I found her. She was wearing a black winter coat as though she had just arrived. She seemed happy to see me again. In fact, she seemed to have been waiting for me, or at least anticipating my visit. She welcomed me warmly, apologizing for having had to rush off the day before.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I reassured her. ‘I looked around the gallery for a while after you left. By the way, I’ve decided to buy the shoe painting. I know it won’t be easy to find a place to hang it given its subject matter. But that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘My God!’ she replied, ‘If only you’d told m
e yesterday! This morning I got a call from the anti-racism organisation I told you about, and they’ve reserved it.’

  ‘So be it,’ I said. ‘Maybe it should go to them instead of me. As a matter of fact, I’ve been wishing I’d bought the “Hanging Bridge” that you told me Zayyan had painted forty years ago. But I suppose it’s been sold, too.’

  ‘Unfortunately, it has,’ she replied.

  ‘Which painting would you advise me to buy, then?’

  ‘Let your own taste be your guide,’ she replied. ‘The important thing is to hang whatever you buy on the walls of your heart before you drive a nail into a wall in your house.’

  ‘Are you a painter yourself? Or a professor of fine arts?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ she replied, laughing. ‘Is it because I talk like an artist? I’m a subject for painters, but not a painter! I work as a model at the Institute of Fine Arts.’

  Her words hit me like a thunderbolt, and for a few moments I was in shock. I felt as though life had begun taunting me, or trying to drive me mad by placing me in scenes fresh out of a novel.

  ‘You work as a model at the Institute of Fine Arts?’ I asked, repeating what she’d just said.

  ‘Is there something wrong with that?’

  She’d apparently misunderstood my reaction.

  ‘Not at all,’ I assured her. ‘I was thinking about something else.’

  Then, sensing that I was about to lose her goodwill, I added in explanation, ‘Actually, I was thinking about how lucky you are. It’s a profession that gives you a chance to have lovely encounters with lots of different artists.’

  ‘True,’ she said, taking the bait. ‘I met most of my friends at the Institute. In fact, I met Zayyan there ten years ago during a painting session.’