The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Like the other things in the house, she concealed half the truth, draped in flowing lines that tempted me to go searching for what lay beneath her robe of stone.

  The only thing I could know about her was that he had acquired her because she was ‘his female’ – the woman he could live with without complexes or complications. She was more damaged than he was. However, this hadn’t prevented her from being the most famous, most alluring female of all.

  I could understand why Rodin said that Venus has the ability to ignite the senses because she represents the joy of life. She’s constantly smiling, and she wakes up in a good mood every morning because, despite being the goddess of love and beauty, she’s never been polluted by a man. She’s a woman with lusts too lofty to be indulged!

  She is definitely happier than women who spend their lives like some rubber plant that decorates the living room, waiting for the owner of the house to do it the honour of watering it once a week.

  I spent a long time – I don’t know how long – in a kind of bodily tangle with her, surveying the geography of her desires, and pondering the beauty of a femininity that shrouded every part of her in mystery.

  In the life of a photographer there’s an abundance of silent time, neglected hours, and that distinctive blank space that precedes a picture. He enjoys a kind of alert, focused monotony that creates time for dreaming, which is why he can spend an hour meditating on a tree, the movement of the wind as it plays with the curtains in a window, or the reflection of a lighthouse – like the one I used to stare at for hours during my nights in Mazafran – on the surface of the sea.

  Yet Venus alone gave me the sense that beauty – like love, and joy, and the graceful flow of her stone robe – was something I might find at my feet if I’d just stop running long enough to reflect on life. Consequently, the morning time I’d spent with her was nicer than the night time I’d spent with someone else.

  I didn’t try to get her to speak after that. Like all the silently gloating objects in that house, she had no intention of saying any more than she’d already said, so what was the use of extracting misleading confessions from her?

  Being as unfamiliar to her as I was proximate, I myself wasn’t going to see anything. My suspicion alone could see.

  During my first time alone with things, I lost my ability to see them. I lost even the intuitive understanding that, as I interrogated them, I’d become part of their memory. They had objectified me – turned me into a thing like themselves – and what should I find but that I, like other human beings, was a mere transient, while they were the abiding, stable entities that bore witness to my short-lived appearance.

  After an hour of helpless stupefaction in Venus’s presence, I left her and went out to the balcony to look at the scenery and to say good morning to Pont Mirabeau. Based on the account given by a certain writer – who only tells the truth in novels – I could be confident, at least, that once upon a rainy day the two of them had stood here and that, after reciting part of a poem by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, he’d given her a long kiss as the bridge looked on.

  Pont Mirabeau may still remember a kiss shared by a couple of Algerians who had left their love in its safekeeping. Yet, beneath its everlasting feet there flows a river that couldn’t be trusted with Algerians’ lives in October 1961, when dozens of their dead bodies floated along its surface after being cast into the water with their arms and legs bound.

  If the River Seine had a memory, grief would have changed its course.

  Sports stadiums and prisons were filled to overflowing with 12,000 detainees, while 600 others either went missing or were drowned, their lives having come to a halt atop bridges that didn’t cast even a passing glance at their corpses as they passed beneath them.

  I could understand Khaled’s inability to establish a friendly relationship with the lovely sight I now found before me.

  I don’t condemn the River Seine, nor am I at odds with it. The waters that, down the ages, have been laden with the corpses of people of all nationalities and races, can’t distinguish between the French citizens who were cast into this river in the name of the revolution in 1789, and the Algerians who, on charges of fomenting a revolution, were cast into it two centuries later. All of them without distinction were washed downstream towards the river’s mouth.

  I’m confident of rivers’ innocence. As for bridges, however, I suspect their intentions. I’m also suspicious of revolutions’ grandiose slogans. When the French Revolution named a bridge after one of its spokesmen, it involved an element of deception. When Mirabeau stood up in the French Parliament to utter his famed declaration, ‘We are here by the will of the people, and we shall depart only at gunpoint,’ did he know that two centuries later he would be witness to a war against the will of another people?

  I closed the window, not knowing where to go with the train carriage of my life, packed as it was with others’ sorrows. Wherever I went, my balcony overlooked some new tragedy. Even in Paris, I was like someone who’s so hungry he doesn’t know how to sit at life’s table of abundance. At times I manufacture my misery out of the memory of loss, and at other times, out of the memory of deprivation.

  I took a bath and went down to explore the neighbourhood where Khaled had lived for a number of years. From the time I’d moved into Zayyan’s house, he had recovered his original name. Like Paul Sartre’s protagonists, who are always picking something up off the streets, I was constantly sniffing out his news, tracking him, gathering up his dust in the streets, investigating, and questioning every place that might have meant something to him. And all the while I was making use of that novel as though it were a guidebook to the tourist attractions he’d visited before me.

  I was experiencing what it’s like to be infatuated with a character in a novel, trying by stealth to capture his charm and identifying with him wherever I passed.

  But was I shadowing a man, or nosing about for the scent of love?

  The distances between the two of us seemed insignificant, and sometimes I would experience situations as though I were him. Following his tracks in beds, streets, exhibitions and coffee shops, I would lie with his woman in a bed that had once been his, make appointments in the coffee shop he used to frequent, gaze at Pont Mirabeau from his balcony, sip coffee I’d prepared in his kitchen, sit with his favourite marble lady and, at night, go to sleep in a bed on which he’d left a trace of his scent, and a load of insomnia. Not only that, but I’d spend hours thinking about the very woman who had robbed him of sleep years before. Now isn’t that bizarre?

  For reasons unbeknownst to me, I was still anxiously awaiting an encounter that I despaired of ever taking place.

  The very woman I’d been trying to track down on the pretext of looking for someone else – today I would be putting my finger on the place where her secret lay hidden. Life’s painful coincidences had arranged a meeting for me with a man who was a patient at the Ville Juive hospital in Paris and who, or so she had claimed, existed nowhere but in her book.

  I was aware that I’d have to prepare for the encounter with a considerable degree of caution, since I didn’t want to spoil it after having spent a whole month working to convince Françoise to let me meet him, if even on his sick bed. My appointment with Zayyan, whatever the nature of the relationship that might develop between us thereafter or the outcomes it might yield, would be a major event in my life.

  Chapter Five

  I bought a bouquet of flowers and headed over to see him.

  I avoided white, since it wouldn’t have been fitting for an artist who had devoted his life to cancelling out this very colour. I also avoided anything so elegant that it would have made me seem insensitive to his illness, or that would have aroused the jealousy of someone who hadn’t discovered love until middle age – the age of uncertainty.

  I hadn’t forgotten to bring him some of my articles so that he’d believe my excuse for visiting him, especially since they bore the signature of Khaled Ben Toubal.

/>   Even though his room didn’t bear the number ‘8’, something about it was reminiscent of Amal Donqol’s last poetry collection, Papers in Room No. 8, since all patients’ rooms are a number in the realm of whiteness. He wrote,

  The doctors’ masks were white

  The colour of their coats was white

  The wise women’s crown was white

  As were the nuns’ habits,

  The sheets,

  The beds,

  The gauze bandages and the cotton,

  The sleeping pills,

  The tube of serum,

  The glass of milk.

  He was as welcoming as empty white space, but with a swarthy smile and a countenance as bright as the colours of a rainbow after an afternoon downpour.

  He rose and greeted me cordially, placing a bit of colour between us.

  ‘Hello, Khaled! Come in.’

  Not knowing how to address him in returning the greeting, I just embraced him, saying, ‘Hello! I’m so glad you’re all right.’ I wondered what Françoise might have told him for him to give me such a warm welcome.

  He sat down across from me. So, here he was at last.

  He wore the cares of a lifetime with elegance.

  He had the kind of Constantinian good looks that had been smuggled into Algeria centuries earlier through the genes of the Andalusians. He had thickish eyebrows, hair that, despite some flecks of grey, was still mostly black, and a smile which – as I would realise later – bespoke a silent derision whose effects had been left in the form of a time-chiseled dimple to the right of his mouth.

  He had profoundly alluring eyes, and the weary look of a man women had loved for his disdain for life.

  How old was he? It didn’t matter. The autumn of his life was speeding to a close, and he was awaited by winter’s chill. It was the superb midpoint of despair, the first half of death, which was why he had a smile on his face. He seemed at the peak of his magnetism, the magnetism of someone who knew a great deal because, as I would come to understand later, he had lost a great deal.

  On the chair across from his high bed, I felt small, but I was learning how to be content with lowly questions.

  How could I knock gently on the door to this man’s memory? How could I extract answers from him when I couldn’t even bring myself to ask the questions that were my reason for coming?

  How do you open the window of words in a sick man’s room without coming across as either stupid or selfish, like some opportunist who’s vying with death for the chance to steal his secrets?

  Apologetically I said, ‘I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, but I’m sorry it had to happen in a hospital! I hope your health is improving.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said lightheartedly. ‘I’m incurably patient!’

  ‘First of all, I love your art, and I feel as though I share a kind of secret understanding with many of your paintings. So when I found out unexpectedly that you were in Paris, I asked Françoise to put me in touch with you. In commemoration of the November Revolution, I’m conducting a number of extended interviews with Algerian figures who contributed to the War of Independence, and I suspect our interview will be a good one.’

  ‘I suspect the same,’ he said, smiling. ‘From what I’ve heard, the two of us have the same interests, and we have a shared love for a lot of the same things.’

  I didn’t know enough about him at the time to realise that, long before, he had acquired an ability to intuit the truth, that he’d trained himself in the art of acting dumb, and that by ‘things’ he may well have meant . . . women.

  I asked his permission to turn on the tape recorder as a way of lending a more official tone to the encounter.

  ‘Your memories are important to me,’ I said. ‘You fought in Algeria’s war of liberation, you lived through its battles, and you witnessed its acts of heroism. So what do you remember of the leaders and heroes of that period?’

  ‘The memory you’re running after is a deceptive one!’ he retorted jokingly. ‘There’s no such thing as great acts of heroism. They’re nothing but myths that we invent after the fact. Your greatest battles are the ones you fight with the courage of conscience, not with a weapon or with muscular strength. These are the battles fought by ordinary, nameless people who manufacture the myth of the great victory. Nobody will mention them, and no journalist will come to interview them on their deathbeds.’

  I was surprised by the reverse perspective with which our conversation had started out. Even so, I tried to go along with the direction he’d established.

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘do you agree with those who say that revolutions are planned by sly old dogs, carried out by heroes, and profited from by cowards?’

  He smiled and shifted position on the bed as though the conversation had just now begun to interest him. After a short silence, he replied, ‘If I were to sum up my experience of this revolution, which I lived through from beginning to end, it would be by correcting the saying you just quoted, since it’s subject to revision by every new generation. From where I stand today, I’d say that revolutions are planned by the Fates, carried out by idiots, and profited from by thieves. This is the way things have happened throughout history. There’s no justice in revolutions, whose spoils are divided up by the Fates over the dead bodies of the freedom fighters who held out until the final hour, and the martyrs who died in the final quarter of an hour. Imagine the absurdity of two warring parties embracing in the presence of the final battle’s final martyr. It’s over the last martyr’s corpse that the first deal is struck.’

  I remained silent. His answers were so categorical that I couldn’t think of anything to add. Even so, I kept looking for some way into his personal life, something that would tell me whether he had a past that matched that of Khaled Ben Toubal in the novel I’d read.

  So I decided to approach the matter in a roundabout way.

  ‘And you,’ I said, ‘what were those beginnings like for you personally? What was your past like?’

  Like an aged warrior who’s begun making light of his victories, he said sarcastically, ‘In honour of old, unfulfilled dreams, I like to talk about the past in the first person plural. In the past, when people were gullible and it was considered improper to say “I”, I forgot to be an “I”. And now, it’s only natural that even thieves and gang leaders would have the audacity to talk about themselves in the plural!’

  As he uttered his last sentence, he laughed.

  He possessed the beauty of a quiet sorrow. It was a sorrow that had imbued him with the eloquence of silence, the expressiveness of an unspoken cynicism, so that if he laughed, you realised he was inviting you to cry with him.

  Hoping to get him to talk about himself again, I said, ‘But your reputation as a leading Algerian artist gives you the right to be an individual, to be unique.’

  ‘Well,’ he rejoined sardonically, ‘That’s a right you win not by virtue of your talent, but by virtue of old age and illness. When you reach this final bed, you go back to being what you were in the beginning: defenceless and alone. You become an “I” again, since everyone has scattered from around you.

  ‘You have to train yourself to speak in the singular, to think in the singular after having spent a lifetime speaking in the plural, not because of your importance, or the importance of some seat you occupied, but rather, because the “I” simply didn’t exist in your generation. It was the generation of collective dreams, and of death for the sake of a single communal aim.

  ‘It’s not that we weren’t selfish sometimes, or concerned about “getting ahead” at others’ expense. We didn’t lack the ability to be treacherous, or even to murder our comrades. Rather, what we lacked was a sense of irony. Therein lies the tragedy of a life of struggle that was doomed to be ruled by discipline and seriousness, and that viewed discernment and clemency as a kind of subversion. For a long time I’ve suffered from a deficiency in “laughing cells”, which is why I ended up here!’

  Not knowing
what to add, I commented, ‘That’s life. We all cope with it the best we can.’

  ‘What you mean is: We all give up our convictions wherever we can. You get off the steam engine of refusal. Then you see your comrades doing the same, stealthily, one after another. That’s when you realise that you’re actually still standing on the train, and that you’ll be the last to get off. But what can you do if you weren’t born in the days of fast trains?’

  The conversation was taking us wherever his words led.

  ‘And life in a foreign country,’ I asked him, ‘which station in your journey does that represent?’

  ‘Life in a foreign country isn’t a station,’ he said. ‘It’s a train that I ride to the very end. The punishment inflicted by life abroad lies in the fact that it takes from you the very thing you’d come to take from it. You find yourself living in a country which, whenever it takes you in its arms, intensifies the chill inside you because, in everything it gives you, it brings you back to your initial deprivation. You go to live in a foreign land in order to discover something, to expose something, only to find that you yourself are exposed by your foreignness.’

  ‘And what about you has been exposed?’

  ‘My handicap. Not the one you see, but something that’s in my limbs, and that you can’t see.’

  Suddenly he stopped talking, but in a way that suggested he was continuing a silent conversation with himself about things he didn’t wish to reveal.

  I didn’t interrupt his silence. I saw him looking thoughtfully at my left arm as if he’d sensed my invisible handicap. Did he have the sixth sense with which so many of the disabled are endowed? Or had he already been told about my handicap?

  ‘But you wouldn’t understand this,’ he went on. ‘It’s something that can only be understood by people who’ve lost a limb. They experience the phenomenon of “phantom limb” – the feeling that a missing limb is still there. In fact, sometimes the feeling spreads to the whole body. It might hurt, or itch. Or they might have the urge to trim their fingernails on a hand that isn’t there any more!