The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

How I wished I didn’t identify with him in this final, absurd scene. I’d come to France to receive a prize. But had Fate brought me here simply to be the hand that surrendered a painting and received a dead body?

  I put on Zorba’s music and sat down to drink a toast to him.

  Good evening, Khaled.

  Now that you’ve become part of this beautiful ruin that’s like nothing you’ve ever known before, you’ll need to do a lot of dancing, friend. So dance, and don’t worry about disturbing the dead.

  Don’t say it’s too late, since you’re living in a ‘detemporalized zone’ – a zone stripped bare of Time. And there’s no point in looking at your watch, since it isn’t here to tell you what time it is, but to place Time’s remains between us. Everything’s over now, and Time is of no concern to you any more, since eternity is the flipside of nothingness.

  And now that you’ve come to see things clearly, you can’t paint them any more. You’ve entered the no-colour zone, headed for the soil.

  The soil you used to long for, and which you called your homeland (your homeland?), you can go to now at your own expense without sprucing yourself up the way you would normally do before an appointment. There’s no point in being stylish, since all bodies are alike as far as maggots are concerned. And there won’t be anybody to notice your injury – the stub that, whenever you got undressed, you hid from sight.

  This soil that welcomes you and the maggots that feast on you will poke fun at the women who loved you and whom you were too proud to satisfy. You refused to seduce a harlot by the name of Life, and you’ve come today to give your ageing body to the worms.

  You fool, from now on whatever depravity others are accused of, you’ll be the one who committed it. Whatever sin someone else is taken to task for, you’ll be the one who’s guilty of it. Whatever wisdom comes out of a man’s mouth, you’ll be the one who uttered it, and whatever woman conceives, you’ll be the one who snuck into her bedroom.

  Now that it’s all behind you, you’re wiser than ever. So get up and dance.

  Dance, because a woman you once loved betrayed you with me, and will betray both of us with others.

  Because a house that was once yours now belongs to someone else.

  Because paintings that you once made have passed into unexpected hands.

  Because bridges that you glorified have shut you out, and a homeland that you loved with a passion has abandoned you.

  Because silly things that you once despised have outlived you.

  Because your brother Hassan will be close to you from now on.

  Because his children whom you raised have fallen into the trench of hatred and won’t be at your funeral.

  Because Constantine, the city so dear to you, has averted her gaze the way the Greek gods turn away from the sight of a dead body.

  Françoise got up, cleared the table, and started towards the kitchen with the plates. Turning up the volume of the Zorba music, I called her, saying, ‘Please, Catherine, come sit next to me. Before long we’re going to be having some severe air turbulence.’

  ‘But I’m not Catherine,’ she objected.

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ I rejoined lightheartedly, ‘you didn’t read that novel. If you had, you would have realised that I’m not Khaled, either.’

  After coming back and sitting down beside me, she said, ‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’

  ‘Is that what you think? Because I told you the truth? The truth, my dear, is taken from the raving of drunkards. Did you know that the Tuaregs choose their names by casting lots? And I became “Khaled” by coincidence.’

  Undeterred by her skepticism, I went on, ‘At a time when heads and pens have gone flying, we journalists haven’t done well at finding pseudonyms to hide behind from our would-be murderers. We just choose whatever new name we happen across. I, for example, took the name of a character from a novel I liked.’

  After a brief pause, I continued, ‘If you want to know the truth, I’m not Khaled Ben Toubal. Zayyan is. But that’s another story. Khaled Ben Toubal was his name in the novel I mentioned, and then it became my name in real life. In novels, too, we need to borrow names that don’t belong to us. So, as we move back and forth between fiction and reality, we often don’t know who we are any more. It’s the game of masks in the carnival of life.’

  ‘So what is your name?’

  ‘What difference does it make what my name is as long as you know who I am from the things I say and do? Whenever a part of me affects you, it leaves its signature on you, so to speak.’

  ‘Fine. But what’s the name written on your birth certificate and your passport?’

  ‘I don’t want you to be like a detective who wants to investigate the identity of some passerby. Suppose we’d met at one of those seaside resorts where, for the sake of creating the illusion of happiness, visitors are required to give up their real names for the duration of their stay and be called by the names of oysters, Greek gods, or even just numbers. After all, it’s a cruel punishment to have to carry your real name around like a ball and chain all your life!’

  I envy people in Arab countries who live without names, like football players who go by numbers instead of names, members of parliament who go by the names of their districts, government officials who are known by their titles, singers who only perform as part of a band or a choir, and the dead who lie in mass graves where official visitors lay a single wreath for them all. They’re in history’s ‘seaside resort’, where they’ve all been reduced to anonymity. Governing is a process of reduction. There’s a blessing in being ‘nobody’ that you realize only when a ruler comes along and nationalises all names, or when death comes and scatters you in all directions.

  Zorba had begun trembling as he danced, and I thought about Borges when, at the end of his book A History of Eternity, he talks about how, when you die, you become nobody. I decided to put my arm on Zayyan’s shoulder and begin dancing with him. Zorba’s dance is more beautiful when it’s performed by two men with the vigour of those who’ve lost all, opening their arms wide to embrace nothingness.

  Come on, Zayyan. Everything’s finished, so dance. When you dance, as when you die, you become the master of the world. Dance so that you can mock the grave.

  Hadn’t you wanted to write a book for her? Dance so that I can write it in your stead. Get yourself a pair of legs for your last dance, and come barefoot. When we dance, as when we die, we don’t need shoes!

  Chapter Eight

  Death establishes an order to human relationships.

  In spite of the time we’d lived together, Françoise went back to being a stranger. She drove me to the airport and bade me farewell with a bonhomie that had never been love. Then she drove away, leaving me – who’d come into Zayyan’s life by mere happenstance – to be his only family.

  She offered to stay for the ceremony that would accompany the body’s placement on the aircraft, but on a sham religious pretext I persuaded her not to. The fact was, I expected Hayat to come with Nasser, and I didn’t want anyone to ruin the aesthetic of this tragic scene.

  I finished checking my small bag after a long wait in lines of the living. Jostling to and fro, they were laden with cargo of the most peculiar sorts – their booty from life abroad – from blankets, ironing boards and flower pots to cooking pots, prayer rugs and miserable-looking bags of every shape and size. From here I went to where there were no lines crowding me from all sides, and where people themselves were the cargo, sealed and numbered, in the underbelly of the plane.

  I stood in the room where everything that was ready for shipping was deposited in preparation for being sent in one direction or another. On one side of the room lay stacks of huge boxes ready to be conveyed out to the aeroplanes. Airport employees with their blue uniforms and yellow caps rushed to drag the boxes onto trolleys, which periodically produced a loud racket and brought in ice-cold drafts of air.

  Somebody directed me to the other side, where I went to wait for him.


  Then he appeared.

  Strangers came carrying him on their shoulders, a dream in a wooden casket. Crowned with a loser’s pride, he approached in a funeral procession perfectly suited to his derisive wit. I nearly shouted at them, ‘Don’t go too fast! You might trip over his laugh!’ Slow, deliberate man that he was, beware of rushing him. Self-possessed like one deep in meditation, listen to his mockery as he passes across his last painting. He traverses his fate from one shore to another the way he would traverse a bridge, borne by people who have no idea how often he had drawn this very pathway.

  When an engineer designs a bridge, his sole concern is that it provide safe passage. As for the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the passage, it’s determined by a Greater Engineer, who alone possesses the right to plan out the steps of Fate.

  O God of bridges, O God of the final passage, do not wake him! Those who lived their lives as wayfarers are entitled to rest.

  O Goddess of beds, a bedfarer he was, wherever he alighted. So grant him respite in his final resting place, constricted though it be.

  And you, O God of doors, no safe grave awaits him. So do not let them unhinge the door to his slumber!

  In his presence I discovered that I’d lost the ability to cry. All I could do in the face of grief was to give a mute moan, like the call of a whale in the darkness of the ocean.

  In the face of death he was doing what he’d always done in the face of life: scoffing! And since I found no tears in my eyes properly suited to his mockery, I began sharing in his smiles.

  Suddenly I glimpsed her with Nasser. She’d come, then. But was it really her? Clad in a long fur coat, the woman approached with measured steps, her head wrapped in a black muslin scarf. Even though it was bitterly cold, I didn’t like her luxurious mourning garb.

  As she came nearer, I thought about how her coat must have cost more than that painting had, and how, if she’d been willing to give it up, it would have been enough to make Khaled feel a little less cold.

  All she lacked was a dark coat and a red rose and she would have become Nedjma. Didn’t she have a simple coat in her closet that would have been appropriate to such a heartrending occasion?

  I convinced myself that the woman wasn’t Hayat. She must be Nedjma, that beautiful, fugitive stranger who’d gone fleeing from poems and fallen into the clutches of history. A woman like her would have had the face of every woman, and every name in the world. Nevertheless, today she’d taken off the black malaya she’d worn in mourning for Salah Bey, and had put on a fur coat that had been acquired for her by one of history’s highway robbers.

  After all, who’s going to call a pirate’s wife to account if she wears some of his booty?

  She was walking with an unaccustomed slowness. Had her hennaed feet grown weary? Ever since her wedding day she’d been walking towards this lifeless body.

  Nasser introduced me to his sister, though it would have made more sense for me to introduce her to him. The woman in the fur coat said nothing, perhaps as a way of concealing her hesitation and the awkwardness she felt when it came time to shake hands.

  Not for Nasser’s sake, but for Zayyan’s, we avoided looking too long at each other, as we wouldn’t have wanted him to witness, after death, what he had known to be true when he was alive.

  In his presence we washed our hands of our romantic memories as though we underestimated the intelligence of the dead.

  As Nasser held me in a long embrace, one of his tears clung to my cheek. He mumbled something bleak-sounding, and burst into tears. It seemed as though he’d grown old, as though he, too, was no longer himself, as though he’d become Taher Abd al-Mawla. In him I saw his father’s features as they’d been immortalised in pictures of the revolution.

  What peculiar fate had brought Nasser, who’d refused to attend her wedding when he was in Constantine, all the way from Germany to attend Khaled’s funeral here in Paris? Was our gathering around his body a last wish he’d wanted to snatch from the scornful jaws of death?

  It had been a death so rigorous in its precision, so unexpected in its timing, so astute in its choice of witnesses, that our meeting seemed to have taken place on command.

  There’s no misnumbering or mismanagement in this unjust world. Rather, there is what René Charles refers to in one of his poems as ‘the chaos of precision’. It’s the kind of monumental, turbulent death that you find in a Greek tragedy.

  What a tragedy it is to leave behind something this traumatic! And what a comedy to witness it!

  We were standing before the legend of an ordinary man with epic-sized dreams – a man by the name of Khaled Ben Toubal who, from the time we gathered around him, had reclaimed his original name and who with this name was returning to Constantine. His death had changed his name, and revealed ours.

  I remember him asking me one day with a kind of shrewd cynicism, ‘Khaled . . . are you still Khaled?’

  Like him, I nearly asked the woman in the fur coat, ‘Hayat . . . are you still Hayat?’ And the reason was that since she entered this place, she had become ‘Nedjma’: Nedjma, the object of passionate love, the desired, the revered, the woundress, the causer of sorrow, the wronged wronger, the ravished, the savage, the loyal traitoress, the virgin after every rape, the daughter of the black and white eagle over whom everyone fights, and around whom alone they come together.

  She is the wife that bears the name of your enemy, the daughter you didn’t conceive, the mother who abandoned you. She is the woman whose love was born intermeshed with the homeland, synchronous with its tragedies. She is none other than Algeria.

  The story of Nedjma is one of Algeria’s most famous love stories, and in its legendary dimension it was born following the 8 May 1945 marches – the first ever to demand Algerian independence – for which Constantine and the surrounding cities paid with the deaths of more than 30,000 demonstrators.

  Kateb Yacine, sixteen years old at the time, was led away to prison with thousands of others. While on his way to his first detention, he saw young men in handcuffs being dragged by trucks to unknown destinations, and others being shot to death on the road.

  He was placed in a huge, overcrowded cell to which military officers would come periodically to collect men that no one would ever see again. When, some months later, Kateb Yacine left prison, he found no home to receive him. Thinking he’d been killed, his mother had lost her mind and been committed to a mental institution. The young man sought refuge in the house of his two maternal uncles, both of them teachers, only to find that they had been killed. He then went to the house of his grandfather, a judge, only to learn that he’d been assassinated. But the greatest shock of all was his discovery that in his absence, the paternal cousin he was in love with had been married off to someone else.

  Nedjma, the girl whose love would never lose its grip on him, had been taken forcibly away, and he’d been doomed to a lifetime of mad raving in which ‘Nedjma’ became all women. So whenever a woman in one of Kateb Yacine’s plays dropped her veil, ‘Nedjma’ would appear.

  On his last birthday, and following the death of his mother after thirty-six years of silent madness, he said, ‘I was born on 8 May 1945. I was also murdered on that day alongside the people whose bodies lay dead in the streets, and alongside my mother, who ended up in an insane asylum. Then I was born anew with “Nedjma”. She was my first love, my painfully impossible love. But I’m happy in my sadness over her. She’s the one I write about, and, like one gone mad, I’ve never written about anyone else.’

  He, the playwright, would never have expected the woman he had loved for fifty years, and whom he wouldn’t have recognised in her old age, to attend the final scene of a real-life theatrical production that had begun when he first saw her half a century earlier.

  He would never have believed that a playwright’s final text could be improvised by Fate, and that Death would be the one to assign the roles of actors and spectators alike. There are no three sounds of a gong to announce the rise of the
curtain, since Fate doesn’t tell you when it’s your turn to go on stage. Nor does it tell you which side of the stage you’ll be on, or who will be in the audience that evening.

  She was weeping diffidently now, seeking refuge from memory in her fur coat. But when she visited Zayyan in the hospital and gave him that book, had she known that she was handing him his fate, revealing it to him as one would a prophecy?

  On its first page she had written, ‘I loved this book, and I’m sure you will, too.’ What was it in Nedjma’s Twins that she’d wanted him to see if not the uncanny death of his friend Yacine? Had she, the novelist, not expected that, like Nedjma, she would find herself by happenstance attending the final scene of the death of a man who had loved her passionately and drawn her like a madman only to have her abandon him to old age and illness in a foreign land?

  I couldn’t get over the similarity between the two situations. Like Nedjma, Hayat couldn’t have attended Khaled’s funeral if her brother hadn’t been with her, the difference being that Nasser was standing among the funeral goers, whereas Nedjma’s brother lay shrouded next to her sweetheart in a transit lounge for the dead, just like this one!

  In the strange, ‘theatricised’ death of Kateb Yacine and his cousin, Mustapha Kateb, there was something that surpassed theatrical imagination itself. What made it even stranger was that both brothers had been men of the theatre. Mustapha Kateb, whom I’d known personally, had been director of the National Theatre during the 1970s before illness destroyed him, while Kateb Yacine had headed the opposition theatre and staged his works at workers’ gatherings in colloquial Arabic and Amazigh.

  And whereas Yacine had been a wiry, testy fellow who’d come to know the inner geography of prisons and detention camps followed by mental institutions and pubs, Mustapha Kateb had been a god-fearing, sombre writer. He’d also been endowed with an aristocratic Constantinian handsomeness, his silver hair and quiet smile making him look all the more distinguished.

  Given their differences in belief and temperament, the two men had lived cut off from each other nearly to the point of estrangement, each of them orbiting his own sun, until the day when death brought them together and placed them side by side in a lounge like this one at the Marseilles Airport before their final voyage to Algeria.