I didn’t know why he’d chosen that other pair for his final journey. He might have left these here for a nicer occasion, since they were new, and looked as though they had never been worn. Even so, they looked more forlorn than the others, hiding under the dresser like an orphan boy afraid to catch someone’s eye lest he be thrown out . . . or killed.
So, can shoes be orphaned, too?
They looked as though they were clinging together like the legs of that terrified little boy. When I reached over to bring them out of their hiding place, I recalled the small boy whose picture I had taken. He had spent a night hiding under a bed only to discover, when he woke up the next morning, that he’d lost his whole family.
I, who had decided not to cry in the face of death, found myself dissolving in tears before a pair of shoes whose shine was now covered in dust.
Zayyan was a man who had respected the distance between himself and others, who had worn a modest air of feigned inattention. It saddened me to be violating his secrets, to be loitering in a world that hadn’t expected a stranger to enter it after he was gone. It pained me that his possessions hadn’t preserved the sanctity of his absence but, instead, had begun talking behind his back, chattering away to the first passerby.
I remember how, during one of my visits to the hospital, I had to leave the room and wait outside until the nurse finished serving him. When I came back in, he apologised for the wait, and talked about how demeaning it is to be sick, since it makes your body public property and gives others the right to violate your privacy.
He said, ‘This is the first time I’ve been in a hospital since my arm was amputated more than forty years ago. I hate the humiliation of being sick. What’s saved me is that throughout my life I’ve gotten used to coping with the looks that strip my handicap naked by playing dumb. And I’ve just gone on doing the same thing here.’
Then he continued, ‘The ability to play dumb is a skill I acquired from being an orphan. When you live as an orphan, life teaches you different things than it does other children. It teaches you inferiority, since the first thing you realise is that you’re less important than everybody else. You see that there’s nobody to protect you from other children’s blows, or from the blows life deals you later on. Like a willow tree on a wind-swept plain, you’re alone and exposed to whatever fate brings your way, and you have to defend yourself by acting stupid. When other children bully you, you pretend you didn’t hear or understand, since you know they have fathers to stand up for them, and that you don’t.’
After a pause, he said, ‘Everyone who’s inferior learns something from the experience, whether he’s generous or tightfisted, violent or peaceful, trusting or suspicious, single or a family man. Every orphan is afflicted with a kind of presumed inferiority which he treats himself for in whatever ways his psychological aptitudes allow. But the worst sort of orphanhood is orphanhood of the limbs. It’s a kind of naked inferiority that’s on display for everyone to gawk at. And there’s no cure for it. Whenever you see anyone, your eyes are drawn right away to what he has and what you lack, since it takes a hell of a lot of playing dumb to lie to yourself!’
I’m thinking back now to what he said, and to a saying by Mu‘awiya Ibn Abi Sufyan, namely, ‘one-third of wisdom is perspicacity, and the other two-thirds are deliberate inattention.’
I’d only been able to glean the remaining two-thirds of his wisdom when I began gathering up his things after he died, in the course of which I suddenly happened upon a copy of Chaos of the Senses. It looked worn-out from having been passed from hand to hand, and no one had written a dedication on its front page. He’d probably bought it himself, since the price, 140 francs, had been pencilled in on the inside of its front cover. The price’s three digits summed up the woes of a man whose lover had removed him from the heart of a book of which he was the principle character and turned him into a stranger who had no place even in a dedication on its first page. He’d paid 140 francs to learn her news, tracking her infidelity between the lines.
So, then, he knew who I was, and was relating to me with the same feigned ignorance he’d practised all his life!
The discovery descended on me like a thunderbolt, and froze me in place. I began leafing through the book and rereading certain pages at random, in search of what he might have found out about me through it.
In his desire to find out her news, how could he have failed to buy a book she’d published after they parted?
And she, who, like a typical Arab regime, made it her profession to document her crimes and interrogate her victims in a book, how could she have failed to reveal me to him just as he had been revealed to me in The Bridges of Constantine?
So, then, each of us had learned everything about the other, yet without realising that the other knew this.
Like someone trying to unlock a big secret by piecing together a mosaic of little secrets, I set about trying to identify when exactly he had realised who I was, and which particular detail had enabled him to recognise me. Was it the name Françoise had given me when she made an appointment for me to see him?
If I hadn’t introduced myself as Khaled Ben Toubal, would he have recognised me, for example, from the handicap in my left arm? Or would he have recognised me because, as in the novel, I’m a photographer, and from Constantine? Supposing that, when I visited him in the hospital, I hadn’t said anything at all, would he have known who I was by a lover’s intuition, or by the suspicion one man harbours towards another?
Besides, he might have recognised me and found out everything about my relationship with Hayat from that book, which didn’t matter in the end.
But had he known that I was living with his girlfriend in his house, and that I’d met Hayat and brought her there? Had he known that the reason I hadn’t visited him that day was that I’d had an appointment with her, and that she’d been dancing for me as he breathed his last?
Might he have chosen that particular moment to die as a way of taking ‘playing dumb’ to its ultimate extreme?
I still can’t believe that the timing of his death was mere coincidence. I can’t see any reason for his health to have declined so suddenly. When I saw him two days earlier, there had been nothing to indicate that his life was in danger or that he was suffering a relapse.
In fact, I’d never seen him as jocular as he was that day. However, I know how sneaky this particular illness can be. Right before it does you in, it might give you a feeling of amazing well-being, and everyone around you will confirm the feeling by telling you how well you look.
I know this from my father. But from my uncle I also know that a person chooses the timing of his death. Otherwise, how could he have died on 1 November in particular, the anniversary of the outbreak of the Algerian Revolution that he’d helped to lead?
I found confirmation of this in a scientific article I once read. I kept a copy of it since, when I found it, I felt as though I’d happened upon conclusive evidence for a heartfelt belief.
The subject of the article was a series of studies done by Metchnikoff, a scientist who at the turn of the twentieth century proposed a theory having to do with how human cells function. According to his theory, an individual dies only if he or she truly wants to, since organic death is nothing but a response to an urgent psychological demand. If this theory is correct, it means that the Algerian Revolution ended my uncle’s life with a bullet whose lethal effect was delayed by forty years. It also means that I was the one who had persuaded Zayyan to crave death so thoroughly that he summoned its presence, thereby putting himself out of his misery.
This idea only intensified my grief. So as soon as Françoise got back to the house, I asked her whether she had told Zayyan that I was staying with her.
‘Of course not,’ she replied, taken aback. ‘I would never have done that after you begged me not to.’
‘Thank you!’ I murmured.
I heaved a sigh of relief. My God, what a hard thing it is to feel you’ve offended the dea
d!
Surprised at me, Françoise went on, ‘Zayyan knew I had other relationships, and he didn’t interfere in my life. This was clear between us from the beginning. So why are you worried?’
It would have been a long conversation indeed if I’d explained all the reasons for my anxiety. But in situations like this I would see how alien she was to me and what an absurd dimension our talks tended to take on. Even so, when she heard the news of Zayyan’s death, she was so upset that she collapsed on the sofa, saying over and over, ‘It isn’t possible. Oh my God . . . ’
As she listened to the messages on the answering machine, she asked me how I hadn’t been aware that the hospital had called.
Surprised by her question, I told her I’d been out that evening. Then, in a reply that surprised me even more, she said, ‘Oh, that’s right. You must have been having dinner at Murad’s.’
I kept quiet for a few moments, having concluded from her tone of voice that she was in regular contact with him, and that they even called each other every day.
It wasn’t the right time to give too much thought to the fact that a friend had betrayed me while I was busy with the details of another friend’s death. It was good, at least, to have it confirmed to me that death takes a variety of forms. There are the dead we bury under the ground, and there are the living dead that we inter in the mire of their infamies.
I was a man who could understand a wife’s unfaithfulness, but I couldn’t forgive the unfaithfulness of a friend. A wife’s unfaithfulness might be a passing fancy, whereas a friend’s unfaithfulness is premeditated treachery.
Françoise’s last statement had put an icy distance between us. She might have interpreted my coolness towards her after that as a sign of my grief over Zayyan’s death, not realising the size of the cemetery I carried in my heart.
That night I contented myself with holding her in my arms as I thought about some night to come in which Murad would take my place, a transient in this resident bed.
Since I hadn’t slept, I left the house early the next morning to take care of some last-minute tasks that had arisen out of recent developments, and in preparation for my imminent return to Algeria.
When I got back that evening, I told Françoise I’d gone to the Air Algérie office, and that there was a flight to Constantine in three days’ time. I asked her if I could count on her to take care of administrative procedures while I took care of other things. After a pause, I added, ‘It’s going to cost 32,000 francs to transport the body.’
‘Do you have that amount?’ Françoise asked.
I found myself smiling as I replied, ‘No. I used what I had to buy that painting!’
‘Damn!’ she muttered. ‘Half of the proceeds from his paintings went to charitable societies, and the other half, which went to him, we can’t dispose of. Since he’s passed away, all his assets are frozen pending a determination of the heirs.’
She continued as she lit a cigarette, ‘If only you hadn’t bought that painting. It went for the highest price of all. Zayyan usually insisted that his paintings be sold at reasonable prices so that they’d be within everyone’s reach. Maybe he put a higher price on that one because it was the dearest to him.’
‘I’m the one who put a price on it. He didn’t ask anything of me. I wanted to spend all I had left of that prize money on it, and set my mind at rest.’
After a pause she said, ‘Don’t you think it’s remarkable that Zayyan had always wanted to keep that particular painting, and that its price is around the same as the cost of transporting his body to Constantine?’
A shudder went through my body. My God! I thought. Where did she get that idea?
A feeling of terror came over me. It was as if, by buying that painting, I’d stolen his grave from him, or as though I’d bought my own. My thoughts started going in all directions, and I recalled the way Hayat thought of bridges as a bad omen.
Without mentioning my concerns to Françoise, I found myself asking, ‘Do you think we could find a buyer for it in the space of two days?’
With no sign of either dismay or surprise at my decision, she replied, ‘It might be possible as long as it’s on display. All we’d need to do would be take the “sold” off of it. Every gallery keeps a list of prominent clients who are interested in acquiring paintings by this or that artist, and it contacts them in cases like this.’
Selling it would make me as sad as it would to keep it, so I didn’t know any more which was the right thing to do, especially in view of the fact that I’d spent my money on it because I loved it, and because I knew I was the only person who appreciated its sentimental value. In the event that I kept the painting, the question would be: who would I borrow the money from? From Nasser, who was too honest to have an account with that much money in it? Or from Murad, whom I didn’t want any more dealings with, and whom I wouldn’t have expected to offer much help to begin with? The only solution, if I decided to borrow the money, would be to contact Hayat. I figured she’d be able to come up with this kind of sum, and that would have made me happy had it not been for the fact that the only money she had belonged to her husband. So borrowing the money from Hayat would have been an insult to Zayyan, who’d spent a lifetime refusing to be sullied by white collar thieves’ filthy lucre. Alternatively, I could try to borrow the money from the Algerian embassy. However, Zayyan would also have refused to ask help from a state whose only gesture towards the dozens of creative geniuses who had been assassinated at the hands of criminals was to provide national flags to cover their corpses. So how could I even think of asking the embassy for help?
A man of scruples with a sense of dignity, his would-be corrupters had presented him with untold numbers of low doors which, in order to go through them, his pride would have had to stoop and he would have had to relinquish his self-esteem. Now that his stature was spread out lengthwise in a coffin, would he go through a door he’d refused to go through when he was alive?
So the matter didn’t require much thought. Having been entrusted with this man’s remains, I was determined to conduct myself in a way that befit what I knew of him. I couldn’t imagine that he would have been pleased if I had begged for the money I needed to take his body home when he, during his lifetime, had given away in charity enough money to guarantee himself a decent burial. Wouldn’t it be more dignified for the remains of this lofty man of sorrow to travel at the expense of one of his paintings than at the expense of a benefactor, or thanks to the generosity and charity of the pirates of pillaged homelands?
Françoise interrupted my train of thought, saying, ‘If you want to put the painting up for sale I’ll need to inform Carole right away, since time is of the essence. Sometimes things don’t happen quickly, especially since we’re nearing year’s end, and during the holiday season people don’t have money to spend on purchases like this if they’re relatively pricey.’
Lighting a cigarette and heading for the balcony, I said, ‘Call her.’
The next morning I woke up exhausted from a night filled with bad dreams. I must have talked in my sleep or tossed and turned a lot, since Françoise had relocated to the sofa in the living room.
Embarrassed, I planted a kiss on her cheek and apologised.
‘It’s no big deal,’ she said sweetly.
Then she asked me, ‘Why were you so upset?’
‘I was having a nightmare,’ I said as I headed to the kitchen to make the coffee. The painting, my conversation with Françoise, and the whole previous day sorting Zayyan’s things had probably all collected in my subconscious, then come out in the form of a nightmare: as I was about to cross one of Constantine’s bridges, people on both sides started shouting at me to stop. People were rushing to get their things out of their miserable dwellings perched on the heights, screaming at whoever didn’t already know it that a landslide was starting and that all the bridges were going to collapse. Everyone was terrified, not knowing which bridge to take to get out of Constantine.
Being
a logical man, I could also think of another explanation for the dream, namely, an article I’d read when I was in Algeria, then forgotten about, and that seemed to have resurfaced in my consciousness that day.
Handing me a French newspaper, a colleague of mine had said jokingly in the capital’s dialect, ‘Be careful, brother. Constantine’s a goner. One of these days you’re going to wake up and find yourselves at the bottom of a ravine!’
The title of the article, written in bold, announced that Constantine was slipping downward, and was preceded by a line in small print that asked, ‘What is the government waiting for?’
The article, which presented numerous alarming facts, asserted that the city was now sinking at a rate of several centimetres annually, and that at least 100,000 impoverished residents, who had come to the city from all over the country, were living within the danger belt in homes that had been built in haphazard fashion on rocky slopes. This had further endangered the Sidi Rached Bridge, whose situation was already precarious because it rested atop twenty-seven stone arches.
Al Kantara Bridge, which, ever since being built by the Romans, had been toying with danger, promised to fare no better. Despite being considered one of the most remarkable structures in Constantine, Al Kantara Bridge had remained out of use for five centuries until Salah Bey brought in one hundred workers from Europe to restore it under the supervision of a Spanish engineer. Then, in the nineteenth century, the French tore it down and built the bridge that stands today.
Everyone who’s ever invaded or ruled Constantine has established his glory by rebuilding its bridges without even a passing nod of recognition to those who had built them before him! As a consequence, Constantinians’ hopes hung, like their bridges, on what would be decided by the American, Canadian and Japanese experts who, according to the newspaper article, would consult over the best way to rescue a city that had lived for 2,500 years as well-ensconced as an eagle’s nest on a towering cliff: a miracle created by rock, and ruined by human beings.
The Dust of Promises Page 21
