The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Over supper we sat opposite a painting of a bridge. Wanting to make good of the situation, I tried to lure her into a conversation about Khaled.

  I said, ‘There’s always been a bridge nearby whenever we’ve been together. Do you like this painting?’

  Seemingly surprised by my question, she replied, ‘I don’t like bridges any more. Ever since Uncle Ahmed was assassinated on my account when we were on a bridge, I’ve hated them, especially since I have a grandfather who committed suicide by throwing himself off the Sidi Rached Bridge. Even though his death didn’t have anything to do with me, I still think of it now and then. Yesterday, for example, as I was walking past the Eiffel Tower, I thought about how we never hear of anybody committing suicide by throwing himself off a tower. When somebody wants to kill himself, he doesn’t look for the highest place to jump from. Instead, he looks for a place that’s full of life’s hustle and bustle. That’s why a person might throw himself off a bridge, since he wants us to witness his death. He wants to use the life force around him to destroy life. He thinks life might commit suicide with him since, in spite of everything, he doesn’t believe it will go on after he’s dead.’

  She seemed more beautiful when she was talking about something serious. So I tried to draw her into a conversation on another serious topic.

  ‘If you hate bridges,’ I said, ‘then why are all your novels full of them? Can you explain this riddle to me?’

  Resorting again to her usual sarcastic equivocation, she said, ‘Proust once said something to the effect that explaining the details of a novel is like leaving the price tag on a gift. Like him, I don’t offer explanations for anything I’ve written!’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said jokingly. ‘I can see you’re a woman who abides by the etiquette of gift-giving!’

  ‘By the way,’ I went on, ‘the reason I asked the question was that I’ve bought a painting of a bridge by Zayyan, and I was intending to give it to you.’

  ‘Please,’ she broke in, ‘don’t do that. I might never hang it in my house.’

  Sounding to myself like Françoise, I argued, ‘I was going to give it to you so that you could hang it on the walls of your heart.’

  ‘There’s no room to hang anything on the walls of my heart any more.’

  That was my last attempt to get her to talk about him, and afterwards I started to feel depressed.

  Had I really loved her? Or had I loved the pain I felt in her presence? Here was a woman I didn’t want, but that I didn’t want to recover from. The bouts of suffering I experienced because of her had a cleansing effect that seemed almost to elevate me to the stature of a prophet.

  Noticing the sadness that had come over me, she said, ‘Don’t be so down. This dress from you is present enough. So, since you like the painting, keep it for yourself. Forgive me. It’s just that I’ve started to feel as though bridges are bad luck.’

  I was thinking at that moment about how, after every time of pleasure, love would count up all the children I hadn’t had by her. But after every deprivation, literature would rub its palms together in delight over a novelistic creation to come. This woman, who had shirked her literary duty and been content instead to ‘be written’, was, by virtue of being deprived of me on this day, going to give birth to her most beautiful piece of writing ever. I’d made up my mind that her pen wouldn’t emerge from this house – his house – unscathed.

  After supper I set out a basket of fruit and a bowl of strawberries, which I’d bought because I knew she liked them. As I put them on the table, I said teasingly, ‘Beware of strawberries. Even though they’re unarmed, they might spark a world war. I read somewhere that on the evening of June 5 1944, the radio station of the French resistance in London overseen by De Gaulle during the German occupation broadcast an encoded message that said, “Arcine loves strawberry jam.” This was an announcement that the Allies had landed their armies on the shores of France!’

  ‘Really?’ she said, amazed.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ I said, ‘Their formidability doesn’t lie in their strength but in their seductive red colour. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to resist them when you look at them. Unlike other fruits, strawberries don’t worry about protecting themselves with a rind or a peel. They’re a fruit without a veil, so to speak, which is also why they go bad so fast.’

  Her eyes followed my hand as it dipped a strawberry into the sugar bowl. Feeding it to her with a deliberate slowness, I said, ‘I wonder who it was that first associated apples with sin. Sin isn’t something that’s munched on. It’s something you’re fed, bite by bite, and pleasure comes in the grey area between the two acts.’

  By the second strawberry I’d stopped talking. I wanted to teach her the virtues of silence in the presence of this splendid fruit.

  I left it to her mouth to go on thinking about a pleasure that can’t last. Otherwise, I feared that, like Zorba, we might have to vomit it up in order to recover from it, since overindulgence in pleasures is a kind of Greek tragedy.

  But had she realised that I was preparing her for a suspended pleasure, and that I was feeding her the fruit of farewell?

  I hadn’t thought love would dare abandon us here where it had led us. On the other hand, could it really have caused something to happen between us in a house teeming with the ghosts of lovers who hadn’t had the time to change their sheets and gather up their things?

  She wasn’t herself, and I wasn’t myself. We spoke a language that wasn’t ours, and we were trying so hard to seem intelligent that we said stupid things. We would speak, then fall silent all of a sudden for fear of saying more than half the truth, reserving the other half of it for our pain.

  We spent the whole evening resisting the weariness of questions, fighting off the drowsiness of replies. But wasn’t our patient endurance entitled to a bed on which to rest our deferred desires?

  A woman whose scent and nightgown I once couldn’t go to sleep without, I now couldn’t go to sleep with, nor did I know what I’d do when she was gone.

  There’d been a time when I would have tried to get her to stay, saying, ‘Don’t leave! Every member of my body feels like an orphan when you’re gone.’ And now I was an orphan in her presence. Everything in me wept over her, and she couldn’t see.

  As I lavished her with breathtaking pleasure, I used to say, ‘I’m going to spoil you with pleasure until you’re no use to any man but me!’ And when the two of us parted, I didn’t think I’d be any use to any other woman. But now I’d discovered that I was of no use even to her any more. So, had I lured her here so that I could issue a death certificate for a love that had been alive when we were apart?

  She lay down next to me, a woman defused. As I drew her into my arms like a meek little girl who’d come to me for protection, I thought back to the time she used to ask, terrified, ‘Will you live with me?’

  ‘I’ll nest in you,’ I would reassure her as my head fidgeted in search of the warmest place on her chest.

  With a lover’s terror she would press me, ‘Will we really always be together?’ to which I would reply with a lover’s naiveté, ‘Of course we will.’

  A sudden fear of losing her came over me as I mutely repeated the same movement in search of a place for my head on her chest. My head came up against her black muslin dress, which she hadn’t taken off. I sensed that Death would steal one of us away from the other, and that we would never see each other again.

  Something Nasser had once said came back to me: ‘What if her husband arranges a “clean” death for her, or what if she’s assassinated by henchmen, for example?’

  What worried me wasn’t the thought that I might die, but the punishment of living after she was gone.

  The thought of her actual death was a revealing test of my love for her. You can’t realise how much you love someone unless you envision the ordeal of her absence.

  An idea I’d benefited from during the days of assassinations and friends’ deaths was that in order to love tho
se around me in a better way, I should imagine that every time I saw them, I was seeing them for the last time.

  The day I tested out the effect her actual death would have on me, I nearly died myself. My heart started racing, I became short of breath, and I thought I was done for. I dialled her number, then hung up as soon as she answered, since I’d just wanted to make sure she was alive. We hadn’t spoken for a long time, but when I got my breath back I felt hostile towards her, since I saw that Death might snatch me away without her knowing, and she would go on squandering words that she’d deprived me of when I was alive to build a monument over my tomb in a novel.

  We lay with our clothes on in Françoise’s room, surrounded by paintings of her.

  As if she were about to cry, Hayat clung to me and asked, ‘Don’t you love me any more? Are you thinking about her?’

  I didn’t reply.

  In situations like this, words don’t make it to their destination alive. It’s only the ones you don’t say that escape the stray bullets of divulgence.

  I held her close, kissed her and said, ‘Go to sleep, sweetheart. And may you wake to the writing of a book!’

  We woke the next morning to the disaster of light.

  As when you’re developing film in a darkroom, light was a disaster.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked in a panic.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I bantered. ‘On orders from you, I decided not to look at the clock!’

  She glanced over at a clock on the bedside table. ‘Oh, my God!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s eight fifteen!’

  She jumped up and headed for the bathroom, straightening her dress as she went.

  Just like that, the time had run out: with a cunning day lying in wait for a happiness that, still yawning, had yet to wash its face, an unmade bed after a night of love that wasn’t, and her scent’s fleeting passage through the bedchamber of another woman.

  She put her clothes on. Then, as she put the black dress back in its bag, she said, ‘Could you call for a taxi for me?’

  ‘Stay to have morning coffee with me. Then go.’

  ‘I can’t. I prefer to get back now. It’s safer that way.’

  It made me really sad to hear her say this, I’d waited so long for a morning that I could begin with her.

  As I escorted her out to wait for the taxi with her, I complained, ‘What’s the use of modern technology if we still haven’t been able to devise a machine that stops time? How I wish we could have had breakfast together some morning!’

  ‘And what’s the use of inventing a machine to stop time if we’re going to spend the time we gained on nothing but having supper and breakfast?’ she rejoined in a tone that betrayed the bitterness of her disappointment.

  I liked her astute riposte, which I received with a silent smile. She was right.

  I put my hand in my jacket pocket to warm it from the cold, only to find the chocolates Zayyan had given me when I visited him in the hospital.

  Just then I had a sneaky idea that gave me a feeling of smug satisfaction. I was still thinking about the best way to carry it out when I saw a taxi coming down the street in our direction. All I had time left to do was kiss her goodbye and give her a couple of them with the words, ‘Here are some chocolates that were given to me by a friend I visited at the hospital. They’ll tide you over.’

  She stood there for a moment staring at the two pieces of chocolate. She was sure to recognise them from their distinctive brand, but she didn’t say anything.

  She got in the taxi in stunned surprise, yet without understanding how I’d ended up in Zayyan’s hospital room, or how the chocolates I’d given her had ended up in my pocket.

  As I walked back to the house, I felt the elation of someone who’s won a gruelling chess match at the last moment. However, it was an elation tinged with a painful bitterness, the kind you feel when you realise something beautiful in you has died.

  Don’t be sad, I told myself. She hadn’t come to stay, but just to make you aware of the enormity of her departure. What can you do against a woman who approaches love with a magician’s paraphernalia, who contrives deceptive arts especially for you, who turns things upside down in front of you, concealing some things, causing others to appear, and turning everything around you into a big illusion? She puts you in a glass box and, in a dazzling magical display, splits you in two, one half being you, and the other half being a copy of another man. Then she puts you back together again in a book.

  Sorceress that she is, you don’t know whether you’ve emerged from her hands rich or poor, happy or unhappy. Are you you, or somebody else? Have you come out of her magic hat a white dove, a frightened rabbit, or tear-stained coloured scarves?

  As I put my watch back on, it occurred to me that Love is a magician who begins his show with the illusion of stripping his victims of their wristwatches. Is it only when the falsehoods of magic and conjurers’ tricks vanish that we can look at the clock?

  It was nine thirty on Sunday morning. Drinking bitter black coffee alone at Love’s funeral, I was confronted with a temporal vacuum I didn’t know how to fill on such a rainy day.

  I put on some music, then began covering the tracks of what hadn’t happened now that my visitor had left, slamming dream’s door behind her. I began by inspecting the bedroom. I’d always hated odourless beds, and women who are obsessed with hanging out their laundry for everyone to see. This time, however, I would have to take precautions against women’s ability to sniff out betrayal, since Françoise would be back the next day.

  When we review our lives, we find that the nicest events were the ones that happened by chance, and that big disappointments always come on the lush carpets we’ve rolled out to receive happiness.

  I decided sorrowfully not to plan for anything any more, with the exception, of course, of moving out of the apartment before Zayyan’s discharge from the hospital the following Wednesday. I would have to be sure not to leave any telltale signs of my having passed this way. While I was thinking about it, I went to get the tapes of Constantinian songs so that he wouldn’t find them in the recorder.

  While I was thinking about all these details, I remembered that I hadn’t visited him for a couple of days. I also recalled how, as he handed me the chocolates, he’d said he would have preferred that they’d brought him some zalabia or qalb al-lawz.

  ‘But Ramadan’s still a long way off!’ I teased him.

  ‘True. But being sick is like fasting. When you’re sick, you spend your time craving all sorts of food, especially the ones you associate with childhood or nostalgic memories.’

  I decided to go to one of the Moroccan neighbourhoods that don’t recognise French holidays and buy him some Algerian sweets before going to the hospital. It seemed the best possible way to spend a Sunday, especially since I was feeling increasingly guilty towards him.

  I bought him a small box of dates and a loaf of Algerian flatbread. Then, when the vendor told me that a certain lady made these loaves every day and that they ran out fast, I bought one for myself.

  I was astounded at this world I’d known nothing about: another Algeria that had been transported whole, complete with its products and customs, to a neighbourhood in Paris occupied by brown-skinned faces. It made me think of a sarcastic remark Murad had once made, that, ‘Apart from your mother and father, you can find anything in this country!’

  After that I stopped at a humble-looking café that claimed to serve ‘Royal Couscous’, and since I was so hungry I managed to convince myself that it was so. In actuality, I’d also stopped there because I wanted to kill some time while I waited for visiting hours to start.

  I got to the hospital at around two o’clock, and it was unusually busy because of all the visitors that come on holidays.

  I was happy to have come, since this way, Zayyan wouldn’t feel even lonelier on this day in particular. I was also happy about my ‘homemade cargo’. It was the first time I’d brought him food instead of newspapers, which only made him f
eel more careworn.

  I knocked on the door, excited at the prospect of surprising him. Then I opened it as usual and took a step inside the room. But to my surprise, I found his bed occupied by an elderly woman hooked up to an IV. Emaciated and wan, she cast me a vacant stare which, when she caught sight of me, turned to a pleading expression as though she were asking for something that she couldn’t put words to, and which I couldn’t identify.

  For a moment I stood there looking at her in a daze. Then I apologised and quickly left the room.

  I went to the nurses’ station on the floor to ask about the patient in Room 11. I tried to calm down, reminding myself that they might have taken him to do some tests or X-rays. Or they might just have moved him to another room. I remembered him telling me more than two weeks earlier, ‘You might not find me in this room, since I may be moved to another ward,’ to which he’d added jokingly, ‘I’m a bed-hopper around here!’

  I expected the nurse to tell me his new room number. Instead, though, she asked me if I was a relative of his. ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘We called the telephone number we have yesterday evening to inform you that there had been a sudden deterioration in his condition. We left a voice message asking his relatives to come, but no one contacted us. We called the number again this morning, but there was still no answer.’

  Between terror and haste, I asked her, ‘When was that?’

  ‘At around ten thirty this morning.’

  That was the time when I’d been out shopping for food.

  Referring to a large notebook in front of her, she said, ‘The first call was made at nine fifteen last night.’

  ‘And would it be possible for me to see him now?’ I asked her anxiously.

  With the tone of someone who’s had years of training in consoling strangers, she said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. He’s deceased.’

  I felt as though she’d uttered the news in Arabic. My heart had translated it instantaneously into the language of tragedy, reducing the entire sentence and the dutiful words of condolence that followed it to a single, five-letter word – death – that descended upon me like a thunderbolt. I couldn’t understand how five letters strung together in that context could be so painful. It was as though the ‘h’ at the end was nothing but a hearse.