The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  There’s nothing more dismal than an act of love from which love is absent. Afterwards you feel a desperate urge to cry. It was my first infidelity to a woman who may have been unfaithful to me repeatedly since our last time together. I wasn’t sad for her sake, but for mine. After enjoyment like this, you feel empty all of a sudden, as though you’re missing something, though you don’t know what it is.

  I used to think that, with that first fling of mine, I’d erase the effects of the pain that still clung to me. Instead, it was like passing a sponge over a chalkboard, only to find that it’s messier than it was before.

  Once, while talking about having relations with her husband against her will, Hayat had said, ‘Bedrooms should have signs saying, “No contamination” like the “No smoking” signs you see in some places, since we’re always being contaminated by people we don’t love.’

  Why had I made love, then? Why had I been in such a hurry? Was it because, after living with my own body for so long, contenting myself with its clandestine enjoyment, I’d lost the ability to relate to the body of someone else?

  After spending sixteen years in an Arab prison on charges of belonging to a banned political party, a friend of mine got married a few years ago to a lawyer who had loved him enough to wait for him all that time. They’d spent years wishing they could have just one special, intimate time together with no guard to listen in on their whispers of ecstasy. Then one day the man was suddenly released, just like that. After deciding one holiday to give him his freedom, prison officials tossed him out on the pavement with a satchel containing his meagre possessions.

  But when at last, with the anguished passion of a former prisoner, he embraced the woman he had dreamed of for so long, he discovered that he’d lost the male potency of his youth. It had happened in the dank underground cells where he had languished, and the effect had been permanent. As he ran his hands lovingly over freedom’s body, he’d come up against the impotence engendered by his slavery, and discovered that the dreams he’d cherished bore no relation to his body.

  Life had failed to repair the damage done by Arab prisons, and I hear they’ve separated.

  If you fritter your lifetime away being faithful, you should expect your body to betray you, and its members to treat you badly. After all, your fidelity to someone else’s body is a betrayal of your own.

  Sunset on the last day of the heart’s autumn ushers you into a long emotional hibernation. Your body feeds off the richness of memories and the store of hope that, like animals of the northern arctic regions, you’d laid up in anticipation of the icy seasons of desolation. But one of these icy winters, it won’t do you any good to go on hiding under the thick fur of hopes. Little by little, your heart, no longer occupied with the business of love, will start to weaken, while your manly potency, no longer engaged in giving and receiving pleasure, will shrink down to nothing. And before you know it, every member you’ve stopped using will have wasted away.

  You know that you’re indebted to love alone for your manly feats of the past. But the days of passion are over. Your past disappointments have taught you to be wary of a love that establishes itself on the word ‘forever’. As one love has given way to another, your illusion of a love as strong as death – a love till death do us part – has breathed its last.

  All your tragedies now revolve around this disillusionment.

  The next day I went to the market for groceries so that I could stock the refrigerator. I couldn’t stay in a house without helping to pay its expenses.

  I was walking around looking at the weekend ‘makeup’ on the face of a shivering Paris when my attention was drawn to a butcher shop whose owner had decorated its iron meat hooks with rose-coloured pigs’ heads, each of which held a red carnation between its teeth.

  I stood pondering them for a moment, wondering whether it was an insult to carnations to be inserted into pigs’ mouths, or for the mouths of living creatures to be turned into flowerpots in a butcher shop.

  The scene took me back to the 1970s. Our Eastern European neighbours always used to make enthusiastic plans for the weekends, when they would go out in droves to hunt wild boars in the forests on the outskirts of the capital.

  Today no one would dare go on a hunting trip. Instead, murderers go out bristling with butcher knives and axes to hunt down unarmed villagers, after which they leave the boars the job of destroying survivors’ livelihoods by ruining their crops. It used to take hunters more time and effort to chase down a wild pig in the forest than it takes today to behead an entire family of villagers, since the murderers know the exact locations of their huts, and can butcher them like sheep with the greatest of ease. How easily, with other people’s lives, do they buy the paper-thin notoriety of a front page story that’s carried by all the news agencies.

  Those European hunters used to be filled with pride over a single boar’s head. As for those who hunt human prey, they need a lot more than one head to guarantee a front page. Thus was born the phenomenon of displaying some human heads as a statement or as an investment, and others as a public spectacle or as a lesson. Once, when the princes of death had some time on their hands, they decorated the trees of a certain village with their victims’ heads. Then they booby-trapped them so that they were set to blow up the first person who tried to ‘pick’ a relative’s skull.

  In the midst of the war of the ‘big heads’ which, when they fall, thrust an entire homeland into the problematics of history, the ‘little heads’, a huge number of which are required to make the headlines, and the ‘nobodies’ heads’, whose harvesting nobody will even hear about, I couldn’t help but run my hands over my own head, even though I was standing in front of a butcher’s display window in the heart of Paris. As I stood there, I grieved for the carnations that used to bloom in my childhood home. They used to make bouquets of little carnations that exuded a perfume you don’t find in flowers any more, and whose lives have been bombarded in honour of the butchers of the civilised world.

  In the city where Henry Miller had once wandered, hungry and horny, through the Tuileries Garden, seeing nothing but female bodies of marble that might leave their stony nakedness behind and accompany him to some vagabond hotel, all I could see were heads hanging everywhere, anywhere, and for any reason.

  Pigalle Street was rife with prostitutes, who populated the pavements of the night in a state of undress whose allure no man could have withstood. Even so, as I walked down their street I couldn’t muster the least bit of curiosity about their fur coat-clad naked bodies. They reminded me of another scene, details of which had been carried by the world press, of the prostitutes of Arab misery. It was a sight that, if Zorba had seen it, would have caused him to burst into agonised dance for the women whose heads had been hung on the doors of their desolate abodes in an Arab city endlessly at war. As the next generation of martyrs was growing up, the houses were being emptied of their men, their furnishings, and their daily bread, to be inhabited by the widows and orphans of armed conflict.

  But don’t worry, Zorba, friend of widows, and don’t grieve. The pretty young ones weren’t widowed. Instead they decorate the mansions of Arab warlords. It’s only the older wretches who died to cleanse the honour of the homeland the way their husbands had died to redeem it, and whose fifty heads, which were cut off with the blessing of certain esteemed, virtuous individuals representing the Women’s Union, who were allowed to go on hanging on the doors for an entire day in affirmation of the purity of the hands that severed them, and as a lesson to the poor souls who had risked submitting to the humiliation of ‘pleasure for food’, daring to hope for something in this world other than having their skulls added to the decorations on top of the leader’s birthday cake.

  Mistaken are they who believe that when we enter a new city we leave our memory elsewhere. Someone who comes to live in a new place does so laden with another. She resides with others in an unfamiliar city without necessarily sharing it with them. Instead, she wanders about in a rui
n that she alone sees.

  A certain poet once said, ‘If you’ve destroyed your home in this little corner of the world, destruction will follow you wherever you go.’ However, you hadn’t heard this line before, nor did you know that your suitcase was packed with skulls. If you had, you wouldn’t have travelled anywhere.

  So write, then. You still don’t know whether writing is an act of concealment, or of exposure, an act of murder, or of resurrection. You wish you could shoot all the tyrants dead with a sentence. But remember, O writer, that all the rivals you battle with a pen are seated on thrones of skulls.

  Before putting pen to paper, you should have chosen your words carefully the way a boxer chooses his punches, and aimed your blows at the murderers with the least possible risk. You should have developed the ability to write inane books that keep their writer safe and protect him from suspicion without his having to worry about the damage a bad novel can do, or about being the sort of cowardly author that no reader would entrust his life to or commission with the charge of avenging his blood.

  Who are you to try to avenge all the Arab blood ever spilled with a book? Ink alone is a basis for suspicion, O you who sit upon a mound of suspicions. So write as a way of cleaning a lifetime’s accumulation of scrap metal out of your garage, the way a warrior cleans an old weapon.

  The murderers still have some measure of prestige left, whereas the only thing you have left is a deceased man’s watch, which ticks on your wrist and gives your hand the strength to write. Even so, you may not find the courage to tell him what happened to that painting!

  Two days after moving into Françoise’s apartment, I phoned Murad. I didn’t want him to have to go looking all over Paris for me because I’d left the hotel without informing him. I suggested that we meet the following day, though of course I avoided giving him any details about my new place of residence.

  It was then that he dropped a bombshell on me. ‘I won’t be able to meet you tomorrow,’ he said apologetically. ‘I’ll be tied up waiting for Nasser Abd al-Mawla. He’s coming from Germany to stay with me for a while. But if you’d like, all of us can get together day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Nasser who?’ I asked, incredulous.

  ‘Nasser, son of the martyr Taher Abd al-Mawla. As you know, he’s been living in Germany for the past couple of years. He was granted political asylum there after being accused of belonging to an armed Islamist group. He can’t go back to Algeria, of course, so he’s coming to Paris to visit his mother, whom he hasn’t seen for the past two years. I spent a lot of time with him in Germany, and we agreed that he’d come to Paris after I’d rented an apartment so that he could stay with me. For security reasons, he prefers not to stay in a hotel.’

  In this way, Murad had conveyed two pieces of news: the news of Nasser’s coming, and, by implication, the news that his sister would be coming, too, since it was unreasonable to assume that her mother would travel to Paris alone.

  The surprise descended on me like a thunderbolt, leaving me in a stupor.

  Was it really true that this woman, with whom I had no more appointments in life’s date book, would be coming?

  She would be coming, after I’d waited so long that I’d finally stopped expecting her to come.

  We’d been separated for two years, in the course of which Time’s corpse had lain between us, while next to it lay something resembling my own dead body. I’d fallen in love with her in a moment of passionate vertigo like someone jumping into a void without opening his parachute. Then . . . just as I’d loved her, I’d left her, the way someone who’s lost all hope flings himself off a bridge without looking down. Wasn’t I a native of Constantine, where bridges are a way of life, of death, and of love?

  The woman no man had ever abandoned, I had abandoned for fear that she would abandon me first. It was as if I were saying, ‘Many an abandonment has occurred for fear of abandonment, and many a silent farewell has been endured for fear of uttering farewell.’

  Unlike lovers who defend their emotional gains to the death, when I’m jealous I withdraw, since I want to allow the one I love the opportunity to choose me all over again.

  I was the man of self-chosen losses par excellence. At the same time, I couldn’t accept the idea of a woman leaving me for another man or of someone else having been with her before me. So how was I to have confidence in a woman who, with every word she spoke, planted fields of suspicion inside of me?

  I remember the first time she asked me if I loved her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What I do know is that I’m afraid of you.’

  As a matter of fact, I was afraid of the trackless desert I was sure to end up in, since, once a man’s loved a woman like her, he can’t love again without her becoming his punishment.

  I thought the only way I could cope with my fear was to deal her the death blow by leaving her. There was also another possibility: to adopt her method of euthanasia inside a beautiful book. She’d given me some things that tempted me to write – things she’d chosen with the care of a mother buying school supplies for her child’s first day at school.

  Two weeks after Abdelhaq’s death, I ran into her at a stationery shop in Constantine, where she was buying envelopes and postage stamps so that she could send a letter to Nasser in Germany. She was holding a black notebook in her hand, and she told me jokingly that she’d bought it because it had picked a fight with her. Then suddenly she asked me, ‘If I give it to you, will you write something nice in it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘You’ll be needing it more than I will.’

  Ignoring my response, she went over to the sales attendant and asked for several fountain pens of a particular kind. Handing them to me, she said, ‘I want a book from you.’ She said it the way she might have said, ‘I want a child by you.’ So had she been trying to keep me around by means of a book, the way some women keep a husband by having his baby? Or was she preparing me for the long separation?

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked her, suspecting some sort of prank.

  ‘We can invent an occasion whenever we want to,’ she said playfully. ‘So I’ll assume that today is your birthday. After all, I can give birth to you as many times as I like.’

  Motherhood was her lovely ruse, like our jokes about my being her father. Handing me the notebook, she said, ‘Bon anniversaire!’

  Unless she switched to formal Arabic, French was the only language she had for making such a wish. In colloquial Algerian there’s no expression or formula for wishing someone a happy birthday, whereas this same dialect is full of terms for expressing one’s condolences!

  I laughed at the idea. It seemed like a good enough launch pad for a book some Algerian might start writing on his birthday. But for a long time I didn’t write anything in the notebook she’d given me. In fact, I forgot all about it when I went to live in Mazafran, and it wasn’t until recently that I came across it, or, rather, that I went looking for it.

  If you’re going to write, it isn’t enough for someone to give you pens and a notebook. Rather, somebody has to hurt you to the point where writing is the only choice you have left. I wouldn’t have been able to write this book if she hadn’t supplied me with the bitterness and resentment I needed to fuel the project. We don’t write books for people, but against them.

  I had her notebook in front of me, his watch on my wrist, and an abundance of time shrouded in blank paper. So I started writing about her with the same ferocity with which I’d once made clandestine love to her. Because I rejected her during my waking hours, my desire for her would erupt violently in my dreams. When the dream-time depravity had come to an end, I would cry out her name, and my body would burst secretly into tears. Then I would be stricken with grief, and hate my hand for hours. I hated all the parts of my body that had done her bidding.

  I wrote with the same hand I’d used to do what I hated myself for and I conjured her on paper with the same violent passion with which I’d made love to her, since I
needed a surge of virility to confront the nakedness of the blank page. Whoever doesn’t succeed in approaching a female will never know how to approach a piece of paper. We write the way we make love. Some people take writing by force, while others believe that writing, like a she-camel that will only yield her milk in response to gentle coaxing, only gives itself to you if you win it over quietly. As a consequence, they spend years wooing their muse to produce a single book.

  But how are you supposed to win over a blank page and humour a reader when you’re writing, to the rhythm of death, to a person who isn’t around any more, but that you insist on telling what has happened? And what’s the use of knowledge that would only make the dead sadder than they already are?

  My life with Françoise had started out peacefully and pleasantly, but without enthusiasm or passion. It proceeded against the backdrop of the silence that follows the body’s loud clamour – an unspoken disappointment, a regret concealed beneath a veneer of words.

  Every morning this bitter-sweet regret would take a bath, smoke a cigarette, and plant a kiss on wan lips. It was a regret which, although it knew that being alone is better than sharing a bed with the wrong partner, was amusing itself by trying out a new bed as if to give itself the lie. Regret has a habit of chattering a lot both before and after lovemaking, as if it wants to persuade itself that it feels no remorse over what isn’t really love.

  When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t find Françoise. Concluding that she must have left early for the Institute, I decided to have my morning coffee with Venus, the only female left in the house. Standing, life-size, in a corner of the living room, she looked like a woman awakening from a pleasant slumber and prepared to flower: awaiting your hands’ fervent touch or a command from your eyes that would cause her wrap to fall to the floor, and her marble frame to turn into a woman.