The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  The reason he was happy was that the doctor had given him permission to leave the hospital the coming Wednesday, since he’d been planning to do a lot of things, the first of which was to visit his exhibition and gather up what remained of his paintings.

  As for his bitterness, the most likely, albeit undeclared, reason for it was that after he’d recovered from her, the woman he loved had come to visit him and seen him in the ugliness of his final illness. He himself had told me once that when he felt he’d become ugly in a relationship he would end it and run away, even when the other party was a homeland. But where could he run away to when he was trapped in a sick bed?

  He seemed to have had his ‘emotional appendix’ removed, and to be testing his ability to beautify ugliness by the use of sarcasm. One day, for example, he apologised jokingly for not being able to get out of bed and sit with me the way he usually did since he was flat on his back with an IV needle in his remaining arm.

  He commented in bitter jest, ‘It was in this position that Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He lay naked on the scaffolding for several months with his right hand raised towards the ceiling. Determined to finish the work by himself, he refused help from assistants. He was in such physical pain that he once said, “I’m in hell as I do a painting.” The pope used to climb the wooden ladder to watch him and give him his blessing!

  ‘Sometimes a person is honoured in a humiliating situation. It reminds me of a memorable statement made by a certain freedom fighter who was led away to be hanged. When, before his execution, he was asked whether he had any last words, he replied, “I have sufficient reason to be proud, since I’ll die with my feet above your heads!” But the humiliating thing isn’t for me to be in this situation. What’s humiliating is to be here sharing a bed with death, when all my life I’ve gone to bed to do battle with love!’

  On my way back to the apartment, I stopped in a bookstore to look for the book Nedjma’s Twins by Benamar Médiène. I wanted to know why she’d given it to him.

  As soon as I’d gotten home and finished the light supper Françoise had surprised me with, I excused myself and went to the bedroom, in a hurry to start reading it. Even though she was busy watching a television programme, Françoise didn’t seem pleased to see me leave her and go off by myself to read. It’s really strange – I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t consider books her number one rival in the house. She’ll try with all the womanly powers at her disposal to steal me away from reading and hatch plots against my books, even if it means borrowing them from me on the pretext of reading them herself, as though my preoccupation with them were an insult to her femininity.

  To make matters worse, I was in the habit of reading in bed, a fact that made books into veritable co-wives. I was always inviting the books I loved into my bedroom in my belief that a beautiful book is like a beautiful woman: you can’t be content to sit with her in a living room, and you’re bound to feel the urge to be alone with her in a bedchamber. Living rooms were made for the venerable, sedate sorts of books that line a bookcase, that measure their reputations by how much they weigh and compensate for having reached literary menopause with their fancy bindings and the gold lettering on their covers.

  I unintentionally think of books in the feminine, and categorize them as such. There are the ‘easy’ ones that slip into your pocket, the books of waiting and boredom that, like women with whom you have chance encounters, are only good for a single reading. There are others that are good company. They go to bed with you, then end their night exhausted on the floor, sprawled on their stomachs like a woman after a night of love. Then there are the fancy ones, printed in glossy paper, that skulk behind display windows tempting you to buy them but which, like the prostitutes in Amsterdam, might infect you with the contagion of their poor quality.

  I think that for many years, the only happy relationships I formed were with books. In their passion and their rituals, some of these relationships were almost comparable to marital infidelity, which is why I would sometimes indulge in them secretly to clear myself of suspicion. Sometimes I’d spend hours in bed oblivious to the wife sleeping next to me, so engrossed was I in reading a book that provided me with more enjoyment and suspense than her body which, married folks that we were, I knew like the back of my hand.

  In the house where, being the eldest son, I spent my early years of marriage with my stepmother and my divorced sister, I enjoyed sneaking books into a bedroom that had originally been meant as a boudoir where my wife could hide her things from others, or – more precisely, from other women.

  While smuggling a book into the marital chamber on the pretext that I needed to read it for professional reasons, I would often think of my father who, during Algeria’s War of Independence, had discovered a fail-safe way to bring his paramours into the house undetected. Given his status as a leading freedom fighter and the fact that we lived alone in a huge, Arab-style house, he would sometimes lock me, my grandmother, and his new bride into one of the house’s large rooms, claiming that he needed to receive fellow fighters who occasionally spent the night at our house engaged in ‘consultations’ before going back up into the mountains.

  I was only six years old at the time. Even so, I noticed that my father had started locking us into the room, whereas his custom before had been just to cough loudly whenever he brought a strange man into the house and, walking several steps ahead of his guest, say, ‘Make way! Make way!’, at which point the women would rush into the nearest room and shut the door until the men had passed.

  One night I looked through the keyhole, which was just slightly below eye level at the time, and saw him coming in with a woman in a black malaya. When I told my stepmother about it she seemed shocked. My grandmother intervened, scolding me roundly and, so as to contain the scandal, claiming that it was the custom for freedom fighters to disguise themselves as women.

  From that day on, my stepmother, who hadn’t bought my grandmother’s story about freedom fighters dressing up as women, started spying through the keyhole herself, and would see women of various shapes and sizes passing through the house.

  However, this discovery of hers didn’t change her behaviour in the least. She wouldn’t have dared tell my father that she knew he was lying to her. She was afraid he’d get angry and send her back to her family, in which case she would have exchanged the honour of being married to one of Constantine’s leading men for the ignominy of being one more number in the divorce court’s files.

  So it was that she went on preparing the most delectable repasts for the fighters (both the ‘brothers’ and the ‘sisters’) who’d come down ‘from the lofty, breathtaking mountains’, using the most beautiful embroidered sheets in her trousseau, and sleeping in the guest room next to her baby girl while my father fought his battles of liberation in her marriage bed just metres away. As she tossed and turned, she may have been searching for faces and names for the shameless women who came into her house under cover of the modesty of the malaya and the righteousness of jihad to copulate with her husband in her very presence.

  I had to reach the age of contemplation to realise that on the day when I put my eye to that keyhole, I’d been discovering none other than Constantine herself, and that that old house was simply a reflection of her hypocritical traditions.

  All at once I’d come to see that fathers lie, that freedom fighters aren’t sinless, that the women who wear the malaya aren’t above suspicion, that the women who cower in the abodes of marital injustice aren’t as deceived as I’d thought they were and that, accordingly, the victim isn’t innocent of its own blood!

  As I grew older, I began to see that my father’s behaviour at that time had a ‘Zorban’ aspect to it that had contributed to his legend as freedom fighter and lover.

  By virtue of his education and upbringing, he was a man for all fronts. He’d gone to battle not only against colonialism but also against the institution of marriage, which he’d never believed in but had assoc
iated himself with at my grandmother’s insistence. He’d needed a wife to raise me after my mother’s death, so his mother had presented him with a relative of his who’d been trained to be a good housewife and mother.

  In reality, his passion for freedom had given him a penchant for liberated women, and he had an abiding weakness for foreigners due to the fact that they were educated. His good looks, which he’d inherited from Constantine’s first Andalusian inhabitants, enabled him to win the hearts of the fair-skinned and dark-skinned alike. He wrote his first poetry serenading a certain French teacher. And then there was the Jewish widow whose husband worked as a guard in Kidya Prison, where my father had been held. My grandmother would go to the man’s house whenever she wanted to send something to my father behind bars and when, two years later, famine struck and my father was assigned by the French Administration to distribute food vouchers to Constantine’s Muslim residents, he would make surreptitious visits to her and some of her Jewish neighbours and give them some of the vouchers. In those days people of different religions and nationalities lived side by side, and my father had been accustomed to helping any acquaintance or neighbour who requested his aid.

  Being his own version of Zorba, he was accustomed to surrounding himself with widows and spinsters: with women whose roses were about to wither and for whom he was their only gardener.

  He was responsible for all the women on earth without distinction as to age, religion or beauty. He was responsible for their bodies and their dreams. He was concerned with educating them and managing their futures even to the point of finding them husbands. Indeed, he was responsible for all the hungry on earth, wherever they sought sustenance, and for all the oppressed and colonised, wherever their land or their cause. So, as the saying goes, ‘he lived without a fortune, he died without a bequest.’ It didn’t matter to him to possess as much as it did simply to live.

  After independence he rented a spacious apartment. We occupied the larger part of it, while he lived in just two rooms: his lavish golden sitting room where he received politicians and old comrades whose numbers dwindled every year, and a sumptuous bedroom whose furniture he’d bought from some French colonists who had left Algeria after independence. Dating back possibly to the end of the nineteenth century, it included an enormous, hand-carved wardrobe covered with large mirrors and decorated with tiny waterwheels. Next to it was a high bed whose headboard, bearing the same engravings, was topped by two three-dimensional copper angels that looked as though they were flying towards each other. The bed was flanked by a pair of small marble-topped bedside tables, while across from it sat a four-tiered chest of drawers with handsome copper handles, on top of which was mounted another mirror with a similarly engraved frame.

  The sitting room was my father’s punishment. A little-used room prepared for guests that never came, its door, which was opened only on special occasions, reminded him that the comrades of yesteryear had scattered from around him.

  As for the bedroom, which had been his kingly realm and what remained of his former glory, it came to be my punishment after he was gone. For sentimental reasons, selling its furniture was out of the question. Consequently, I found myself commencing my married life there just the way it was. The room had a smell which conjured up the time of the dead, and which spoiled my own time. It’s a difficult thing to start your married life on a bed that your father occupied alone. He’d slept continuously on its left side to the point where time, colluding with his body, dug a grave in the wool mattress so that you couldn’t share it with anybody without one of you rolling onto the other.

  With its high bed and its wardrobes’ heavy doors, it was a room that would have served better as an antique shop than as a love nest. But maybe my father had wanted it to be that luxurious in order to compensate for the absence of love in his life. My father wasn’t wealthy, and he hadn’t bought the furnishings for that room in particular to be seen by anyone but himself. Even so, it reminded me of bedrooms that have been furnished with such sinful extravagance, it’s as though their owners want to convince whoever sees them that rich people aren’t bad lovers!

  Imagine starting out your married life in an elderly person’s bed haunted with nightmares born of troubled sleep, and being obliged, for silly sentimental reasons, to learn how to dispose of a life that your father lived before you. His scent is here, clinging to the wood, the curtains, the wallpaper, the crystal in the chandelier. You’re at a loss, not knowing how long his scent will go on seeping into you. And you wonder to yourself: is this entire room nothing but a resting place for his scent?

  I’d thought in the beginning that I’d only be staying there temporarily, that it was just a wayside inn and I a mere bedfarer. Then one day, in the place where I slept, and at the moment I least expected it, I was overwhelmed with the scent of absence. It was the scent that, from the very start, had spoiled my relationship with my wife’s body, so thoroughly that I insisted she take birth control pills lest we become parents to a little one afflicted with hereditary, bed-borne malformations!

  After that I found my happiness in escaping to Abdelhaq’s house, where my desires found an illicit bed for themselves with Hayat. You have to constantly invent your counterfeit other life in order to rescue your lacklustre actual life.

  I’d married a woman I thought could do the housecleaning inside me, who could sweep up the destruction other women had left in my life. I’d used marriage as a kind of prophylactic measure, thinking it would set up barricades that would protect me from life’s slips and slides, only to find that it had snuffed life out. The reason is that someone might blackmail you without saying a word. It’s the silent blackmail of the weak individual that gives her the right to dispose of your life however she pleases once you’ve fallen into her grip by virtue of a legal document.

  She might do you harm not because she means to but, rather, by possessing you to a hurtful degree. She may pin her happiness on her right to make you miserable by virtue of the fact that she’s your life partner. As for you, you start to feel that life with her has become your death, and that there has to be an unpleasant confrontation with this person who hasn’t knowingly hurt you or betrayed you but who, nevertheless, is slowly destroying you.

  You want to resign from the role of the good, happy husband that you’ve played for years as a way of avoiding arguments and disagreements. You want to give up the Oscar you might have won for your lead role in the film Married Life, not for lack of ingenuity – since you’d still be capable of telling more of the types of lies that a woman will swallow without the least effort – but because you’re weary, because life is too short to spend it spinning lies, and because the terror you go through every day is too awful to add to it the fear of your wife.

  It may have been for all these reasons that I chose to go live in Mazafran. It provided a way of postponing the decision to separate from my wife since, in spite of everything, it pained me to hurt her.

  In any case, I succeeded that evening in reading the little book I’d bought before Françoise slipped under the covers beside me. As I drew her to me, I thought about how there are women you live with without being truly intimate with and how, unlike all the rest, there’s one woman whose phantom you need to be intimate with when you doze off, and to think about in your moments of deepest isolation. In order to survive, you need to know that you still live in her memory, and that she’s certain to come.

  That night as I shared a bed with Françoise, I embraced someone else, and went to sleep with my head pillowed on the arm of a rendezvous.

  Chapter Six

  Then she came.

  The doors of anticipation were unhinged as her light came suddenly streaming in.

  In she came, and for a moment the world stopped turning, while the heart skipped a beat.

  A hurricane approached in a fur coat.

  O Divine Providence, be merciful to me!

  So at last we had met.

  Mistaken are those who say that mountains
can never meet, and those who build bridges between them so that they can shake hands without bowing or curtseying understand nothing about the laws of nature. Mountains do meet, albeit only during earthquakes and major seismic tremors, and when this happens they don’t just shake hands – they’re transformed into a single mound of dirt.

  Could we have avoided the disaster? We’d come together where happenstance had arranged an encounter for us in the last strongholds of sorrow.

  A good morning to you, o beautiful lady bearing a curse!

  So here she was. How could I disengage from her eyes when all I wanted to do after that long absence was to look at her? When she saw me, she made me think of a lemon tree whose blossoms had fallen off out of sheer surprise. The last place she would have expected to see me was an art gallery in Paris, at the exhibition of an artist whose existence – outside of a book, that is – she had always denied.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a life we owe to chance encounters.’

  In a pleasant astonishment not without a tinge of alarm, she blurted out, ‘O my God, I never would have expected to see you here!’

  ‘What can I do if everything brings you back to me?’ I asked with a twinkle in my eye. I was alluding to something she’d once said, namely, ‘Everything brings me back to you,’ which I’d corrected at the time, saying, ‘And everything keeps me in you!’

  She commented shrewdly, ‘I thought you’d moved addresses since that time!’

  ‘As you can see,’ I quipped, dusting off my jacket, ‘whenever I’m about to leave you, I stumble across you again!’

  Then I continued, ‘By the way, the nicest things that happen to us aren’t things that we find, but that we stumble across.’