I didn’t tell Françoise about any of this. She had enough nightmares ahead of her that day.
We divided up the list of obnoxious death-related details. Françoise went to follow up on the administrative procedures, which included passing by the hospital to pick up Zayyan’s things, while I went to finish up last-minute tasks and check on my flight reservation.
That afternoon I got an unexpected phone call from Françoise.
‘It’s good I found you,’ she said happily. ‘The painting’s been sold! And I managed to get you the money in cash, since you wouldn’t have been able to cash a cheque for several days.’
Before I had a chance to say anything, she added, ‘You can come by to pick up the money right away, since you’ve got no time at all. I won’t be here when you arrive, but Carole will take care of it for you.’
Not knowing whether she was delivering me news of a gain, or a loss, I didn’t reply.
‘Now don’t tell me you regret it!’ she chided me. ‘We’ve been lucky, since we might not have been able to sell it for several days.’
Everything was settled, then, and I didn’t want to get into a debate over what might have happened. Keeping it short, I said, ‘All right. I’m coming.’
On my way to the gallery I was assailed by conflicting emotions. I realised as I went there that I would be seeing the painting for the last time, yet without forgetting that it was in that very place that I’d seen Hayat for the first time after a two-year separation. And I wondered how it was that, in the space of just a few days, a single place could join the most beautiful of memories with the most painful, the former because I thought I’d recovered a lost love, and the latter because I realised that I’d lost a homeland.
I had gone to such extremes trying to make a fool of Love, it had started coming to me disguised in forgetfulness when I least expected it. How can you kill Love once and for all when it isn’t something that existed between you and a single person but, rather, between you and everything that bears any connection to that person?
At the gallery door I was met by the exhibition poster, which featured a reproduction of one of Zayyan’s paintings depicting an old, half-open door. A black ribbon had been placed at the painting’s top left corner to announce the painter’s death. I stopped and stared at it for a few moments as though I wanted to make sure it had really happened.
I was received warmly by Carole, who was affected by Zayyan’s death, having known him ever since he came to France. She invited me into her office, expressing her sadness over the fact that he wouldn’t be there at the close of the exhibition as he usually was. She handed me the same sum I’d paid for the painting, saying, ‘I’m sorry. You didn’t even get to enjoy owning it for a while.’
‘Maybe it’s better this way,’ I said. ‘I might have gotten used to it, or it might have gotten used to me. In any case, it changed its owner without budging from its place, and it changed hands without even noticing!’
I didn’t try to find out who had bought it. As I thanked her and left, I thought about how, by recovering this sum, I was recovering not the value of the painting but, rather, the value of that prize, which I seemed to have won so that, by means of a prize-winning picture of death, I could finance the tragedy of another death. Death had prospered so much among us that it could finance itself now!
As I made the rounds of the exhibition, I wasn’t surprised not to see any other visitors. It wasn’t a time for going to art exhibits, nor a time for dying.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, at the beginning of a week, at the end of a year, and people were busy getting ready for their festivities. So, had he made a point of dying at a time when life was too busy for him, so that he could slip out of its grip unnoticed?
It didn’t sadden me to see the gallery empty. In fact, it made me happy, since I had it all to myself. I felt as though I owned every one of those paintings for a time, albeit in anticipation of losing them all. After all, the wealthy refuse to let someone own a painting through the eyes of the heart.
I was happy because I was there to do the only thing I’d ever hoped to do, but hadn’t been able to: to tour the exhibit with Zayyan himself. I knew he would come, since there was no way he would miss an appointment with paintings that were longing to be taken down off walls of steel and returned to their painter’s arms.
Everyone was too busy for him, and now, at last, he had all the time in the world, so we’d be able to stop and have a long talk in front of every painting. We would have been able to, that is, if it weren’t for the fact that now I was the one who didn’t have the time – although I didn’t know how to justify my busyness to him – and the fact that I would have to leave him before the Air Algérie offices closed.
Then he’d curse the airways and ask me, ‘And what are you going to do in that country? Would anybody be idiotic enough to spend the New Year’s holiday there?’ to which I wouldn’t have any answer. Then, when he couldn’t keep me any longer, he’d bid me farewell in his usual fashion, saying, ‘We’ll continue our conversation tomorrow,’ and, after a pause, ‘that is, if you have time.’
‘ . . . if you have time’ – that phrase was his way of sparing himself the humiliation of begging for a visit.
But the hour of departure draws near, my friend. The time of ‘the greater visit’ has come to an end. There isn’t even enough time for those programmed hospital visits. Ordinary time is dead, my dear. You’re now in ‘frozen time’.
Had he known that?
In his last paintings he seemed withdrawn from life, as though he were painting things that had abandoned him, or that he had abandoned: the corpses of things that were no longer his, but that he continued to treat with the goodwill born of intimate association. He painted them with light strokes of colour as though he were afraid they might be hurt by his brush – the same brush that hadn’t been afraid to hurt him.
He painted the tragedy of things or, rather, their silent betrayal in the face of tragedy. Take, for example, the doors that occupied so many of his paintings: unused doors discoloured by time. Doors closed in our faces. Doors ajar, stalking us. Safe doors with cats napping on their sills. Doors of fabric separating one home from the next, exposing us while claiming to conceal us. Doors with footsteps sounding behind them, or hands knocking on them. Narrow doors through which we flee, only to find that they lead our pursuers to us. Doors we hide behind for protection only to find that they incite aggression against us, and doors unhinged that deliver us to our murderers. We rush away from them in terror, or we die of treachery on their thresholds, leaving a single shoe behind. After all, isn’t a single shoe, in its aloneness, a symbol of death?
When I saw all these paintings for the first time, I asked Françoise what secret lay behind the prolonged conversations Zayyan appeared to have had with doors. She said, ‘When an artist enters into a phase in which he draws nothing but the same subject, it means that this subject is associated with some significant event or suffering.’
I didn’t ask her what suffering lay behind the paintings, nor do I think she would have known the answer. The day Murad and I got into a heated discussion about the door paintings, in which Murad saw nothing but women’s thighs, some spread wide and others ajar, she’d been so impressed with his theory that she seemed to share his opinion, though she said nothing. Only now, as I moved among them, absorbed in their minutest details, did I feel I’d discovered the answer to my question. The answer was based on a conversation I’d had with Françoise some time earlier. The day she told me about Zayyan’s illness, she had said, ‘His nephew’s murder devastated him so completely, I think it’s what caused his cancer. Cancer is nothing but the body’s tears. It’s a known fact that it tends to appear after some sort of tragedy.’
After that I looked for an opportunity to ask Zayyan about the details of his nephew’s death, since I sensed that this event had destroyed him more than even death itself could have.
We’d been talking about
the incredible variety of ways in which people in Algeria were dying when, with a kind of macabre humour, he said, ‘We should issue a catalogue of Arab death, so people can choose from a list of the available ways to die. After all, Arabs have outdone themselves in developing the culture of death. So, instead of dying a Kurdish death, sprayed with chemicals like an insect, you might choose to have the honour of dying by a golden revolver from the god of death himself, or one of his sons. Or, rather than being mangled live by ravenous dogs and your innards paraded around a prison yard as happened in certain Moroccan prisons, you might prefer to dig your own grave and get into it of your own accord so that your murderers can slaughter you while you lie in the final position of your choice.
‘You also have the option of not dying all at once, since there are Arab regimes that offer death by instalment, beginning with having your fingernails pulled out and your fingers burned with acid – if you’re a journalist – and ending with having your eyes gouged out and your belly split open, depending on your butcher-executioner’s mood.’
He spoke with bitter scorn.
Gathering my courage, I said, ‘I was so sorry to hear about your nephew’s assassination. How did it happen?’
‘Salim?’ he said, surprised by the question. After a pause, he continued, ‘He died more than once. The last time he was shot to death.’
It was obvious that I’d placed my hand on a fresh wound. I said nothing more, but left him the freedom to stop there, or go on.
Like a vessel overflowing with grief, he gushed forth, ‘Of all the deaths I’ve lived through, Salim’s was the most painful to me. Even the death of his father, who was my only brother, didn’t hit me as hard. When security forces killed his father in the 1988 demonstrations, Salim was a young man. He started studying night and day so that he could begin supporting his mother and two brothers right away. He was such an outstanding student, he was accepted into the Personnel Training Institute. He was so passionate about learning, the government sent him to study in France for six months so that he could install computer information systems in Constantine’s customs departments.
‘At the time when he started his job, gangsters had begun killing off government employees. After a couple of his colleagues were murdered and he started feeling himself in danger, he asked the government to provide him with a safe house. They ended up giving him a house way out on the outskirts of Djebel al Wahch. He wasn’t comfortable there, of course. Imagine a “safe house” without a telephone, and at the edge of a forest! Then he started saving up out of his salary to buy an armoured door for his house. The amount required was a small fortune, and if he’d chosen to he could have gotten ten times that amount by demanding a commission on all the equipment he’d been assigned to bring back from France. But he was honest and self-respecting by birth, content with what he had. And he loved Algeria. So, in the age of ideologically justified looting and thievery, he was setting aside part of his hard-earned salary for a security door to protect him from murderers.
‘But they came just when he thought he’d secured himself against them. It was eleven at night, just after the curfew had begun, when the death squad stationed itself outside his armoured door. They were confident that nobody would come to help him at that hour of the night. They also stood to gain from the general state of confusion that prevailed, since, if there was a commotion, nobody knew whether it was security forces trying to enter a house where terrorists had barricaded themselves, or terrorists attacking the house of their next victims.
‘Like some American horror flick where the victim stands defenceless behind a door secured from the other side by human beasts, they’d come armed with the equipment of death, and screamed at him to open up. But he didn’t, confident that his armoured door would protect him.
‘Death wasn’t with them. They were Death. Four and a half hours went by with Death outside the door, defying him to the rhythmic clanging of axes and picks and the sound of curses and insults. “Open up, you pimp, you good-for-nothing. We’ve come for you, you infidel, you enemy of God!”
‘His heart responded from behind the door with prayers for protection from the Master of Doors. Neither his wife’s sobbing nor his little boy’s wails did him any good, and none of his neighbours came to help. The police didn’t hear and neither did God, in spite of the deafening noise being made by the instruments they were using to get the door open. Having died more than once before, Salim started preparing for his final death. As the hours passed and death approached, the murderers went into a frenzy, threatening more and more loudly to make an example of him.
‘With everything in him trembling, afraid of everything and afraid for everything, where would he find the courage to open the door and be done with it? Where, at a moment of terror, would he find the wisdom to know how he was supposed to act? And what could he salvage before death opened the door for him?
‘He was shaking so badly, he couldn’t pick up his three-year-old son, so he collapsed onto a chair as his little boy clung to his leg. Every now and then he would think of something to tell his wife to do after he was gone: to kiss his mother for him and ask her to forgive him and pray for his soul, to give me his greetings and ask me to look after his son, or to apologise to a colleague of his that he’d borrowed money from, and to pay it back if she got any compensation from Customs.’
At this point I saw Zayyan tear up for the first time.
‘Imagine a man as needy as he was, instructing his wife in a situation like that to repay a debt for him after he dies while leaders with a steady income of dead bodies are plundering a homeland.’
‘And how was Salim killed?’
‘At three thirty the next morning, Death managed to break down the door. Salim collapsed onto his knees and begged them not to kill him in front of his little boy. They dragged him outside and sprayed him with bullets. That was their way of appeasing Death, which had been insulted by having to wait four and a half hours outside that well-secured door.
‘His body was like a sieve, and in the days that followed, our battle was with the cement that had clung to his blood.’
Now I wonder whether the key to unlocking these paintings might lie in the story of a man who spent his entire savings on an armoured door to ward off Death, only to find that all he had bought was a prolongation of Death’s torment. Perhaps Zayyan had wanted to suggest that behind every door, Death lies in wait.
My heart didn’t have room for any more pain, nor did I have time to start a conversation with each individual painting. So I headed straight for that particular one. I felt as though I were going on a date with a woman who was married to someone else, the way I used to feel with Hayat. So, do paintings also belong to the institution of matrimony? Are they the property of the one who owns them, or of the one who sees them? Do they belong to the person who loves them? Or to the one who can afford to buy them? And what if they belonged to somebody who had lost them precisely because he was the only one who had ever truly wanted them?
Could I have avoided this loss? The most I could have done would have been to postpone it. After all, I’m nothing but a hand in the life of all the things I own. Someone else’s hand preceded me, and someone else’s will follow me, and each of us owns them only for a time.
It would be better if we consulted things the way a judge consults a couple’s children when they divorce, asking them which parent they want to go with. What a violation it is of things’ rights for them not to be entitled to choose their owners! And so many problems might be resolved if, instead of seeking verdicts from people, we sought them from the things people disagree about and go to war over.
I stood there gazing at the painting as though in apology for not having been able to keep her, as though, by looking at her long enough, I might be able to entice her to run away with me, the way a girl about to be married against her will might elope with her true love.
Now that she belonged to someone else, a more pleasant role had fallen to me – the role
of lover. She was Constantine who, nestled for the last twenty-five centuries in history’s arms, would comb her hair and engage in long tête-à-têtes with the stars from atop her throne. Constantine needed a lover to woo her, to henna her feet as they dangled in the ravines, to pamper her, to kiss her to sleep at night. She didn’t need some sadistic husband that would come home every night in a terrible mood to bicker with her and beat her to a pulp!
Hadn’t Abdelhaq once bemoaned Constantine’s fate, saying, ‘She’s too enchanting to belong to anyone, and too much of a legend to have to carry one random foetus after another. So how did they bind her to these mountains? How did they prevent her from slipping out of her rapist’s grip?’
The two of us were engaged in a silent debate. Like the women of Constantine, this painting was too spineless to decide her own fate. At the same time, she was the type that stares right through you until you turn into a painting yourself. At a certain point it seemed to me that she wasn’t a bridge any more, but that I’d been transmuted into a bridge. It made me think of the artist René Magritte, who drew a pipe and called the drawing ‘This is not a pipe’.
Would Zayyan have needed another lifetime to realise that this entity he had drawn more than thirty years earlier wasn’t a bridge, or a woman, or a city, or a homeland, since – according to some people, at least – a homeland isn’t a place on earth, but an idea in the mind? If this is true, then it’s on account of an idea, not a land, that we go to war, die, and lose our limbs and our relatives and our possessions. Does a homeland consist of soil? Or does it consist of what happens to you on that soil?
Are we imprisoned, humiliated, scattered from our homes, assassinated, and forced to die in exile, all for the sake of an idea?
For the sake of this idea, which survives even when we die, we’re willing to sell the most precious things we own just so we can ship our remains back to an illusory homeland which, if it weren’t for this deceptive idea, wouldn’t even exist!
The Dust of Promises Page 22
