The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  You need a place to put your carry-on, but other people have occupied every space available. Everybody is loaded down with miserable bags stuffed to the gills with precious lifetimes, and they’re more concerned about what they have in their hands than they are about themselves. They don’t seem to realise that human beings are the only commodity that’s quick to go bad.

  I can’t help but wonder where I would have put that painting if I’d brought it with me. Even if I’d spent half the trip convincing a stewardess of its importance, what more could she have done for me than others had been able to do in similar situations? I remember listening to an Algerian writer who appeared on national television and who related how, when she came back to visit Algeria, she’d had a small bag with her that she never let out of her sight, since it contained her writings and the manuscript of her most recent novel. The aeroplane was arriving from Syria filled with a motley crew of sidewalk merchants who didn’t need visas to get into Syria, and they couldn’t find any place to put her bag. However, when he learned from some of the other passengers who recognised her that it belonged to a noted author who hadn’t been home to Algeria for seven years, one of the stewards volunteered to take care of it for her.

  Halfway through the flight, someone came and informed her that her bag had been honoured with a spot in the aeroplane toilet! The steward explained that he personally would take it out when someone needed to go in, and put it back in its place again once the person had left. After all, he said, he’d been instructed to treat it well, and if it weren’t for the high esteem in which he held this particular bag and his respect for literature, he wouldn’t have put it there for safe keeping. Instead, he would have insisted that it be sent down to the cargo hold with the rest of the luggage, and had done with it!

  What do you say to a homeland that insults you with the sincerest intention of honouring you?

  A photograph I wish I could have taken was of that writer’s bag lying on the floor of the aeroplane toilet while petty smugglers’ goods were sitting high and dry in their owners’ overhead luggage compartments.

  If I took a photo like that, somebody would come along and say I was insulting my homeland in front of strangers and would give me a lesson in good citizenship. After all, the homeland alone reserves the right to insult you, the right to silence you, the right to kill you, and the right to love you in its own perverted ways.

  How did this happen?

  How did we reach this bizarre state of affairs?

  Don’t expect anyone here to answer you. You won’t find the answer on the aeroplane but, rather, in the place where it first took off.

  From now on, and as long as you live, you’re going to wonder why you in particular won that prize. Why did you take that photo of that particular little boy and that particular dog? And why did you sell that painting to that particular person as opposed to someone else?

  But these are questions that only others have the answers to. Who are you to change the course of history, or the course of a river in which you’re nothing but a straw being swept inexorably downstream?

  You don’t even know what you’re doing here, or how you ended up responsible for this corpse when you’re already weighed down with responsibilities, weary of intentions guarded by hatchet men.

  You wish you were Mohamed Boudiaf, flying joyfully back home to rescue Algeria without a suitcase to your name, your hands stretched forth to greet your well-wishers, gesticulating threateningly against the powerful, fearsome hired guns and thieves. Yet Boudiaf himself came back wearing his shroud, and no sooner had he opened a file than he’d opened his grave with it.

  So fasten your seatbelt, man, and pay attention to the stewardess as she explains how to use the oxygen mask and life vest.

  I myself chose the elderly lady who would sit next to me. As for the girl who sat down to my left, she’d chosen me. Maybe she thought I looked nicer than the other men there were to choose from.

  It’s important on a long flight like this not to find yourself stuck next to people who’ll make you more worried and distressed than you already are. Otherwise, it’s like being in a broken-down elevator with people you don’t find the least agreeable.

  Once we’d passed through inspection, I offered to help the old lady carry a huge bag she had with her. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would have loaded her down with the thing, which she insisted on carrying herself even though she had to stop frequently to rest.

  I love our old women. I can’t resist the odour of their sweat-drenched cloaks. I can’t resist their prayers and their blessings. I can’t resist their motherly way of talking that, in just a few words, supplies you with enough tender loving care to last you a lifetime, and then some.

  ‘May God give you long life, son. May the Lord protect you and relieve your worries. May the Lord give you happiness!’

  Words like this, and before I knew it I was in a sentimental predicament with this elderly lady. I’d become her porter, her escort, and the one responsible for getting her to Constantine.

  Is it my orphan complex? For as long as I can remember, old ladies have taken me hostage and led me off-course.

  If I saw an older woman struggling under the weight of a basket she was carrying, before I knew it I’d find myself carrying her burden for her, claiming that she was going in my direction. One time it earned me a slap from my father, who didn’t believe my excuse for getting home late from school.

  The woman had been on her way to Rahbet Essouf to sell loaves of home-baked bread. I spent an hour walking alongside her, my book bag on one arm, and her basket on the other.

  That was the only slap I ever received from my father.

  The elderly woman seated next to me was travelling alone for the first time. She’d come to Paris to visit her daughter, who had given birth to her first child, and by the time the plane took off, I knew nearly everything about her life.

  Old women have no secrets, and all they lack is a man bound securely to a chair with the patience to listen to the story of their failures and disappointments.

  Terrified of the aeroplane, she wanted to understand all the stewardess’s instructions on how to use the life vest, the oxygen mask, the seatbelt and the emergency exits. Recovering from her fright, she resigned herself to ‘what’s written’, saying, ‘Lifetimes are in God’s hands.’ Then she went on chattering about her son-in-law, who had bought a butcher’s shop in France, and her son, who was trying to get residency in Paris after having come to hate life in Constantine which, having once been the poor man’s refuge, was now the city of the poor. The needy had once come to Constantine after hearing about its people’s wealth and generosity; now they lived there with thousands of other, equally needy folks who had come from all over and impoverished the city’s residents.

  ‘Where are you from, son? Those hungry hordes have gobbled up everything and driven us out of the country. It’s such a pity that so-and-so’s family and so-and-so’s family are gone. All that’s left are common folks. By the way, do you know whose daughter I am?’

  I wasn’t interested in knowing whose daughter this lady was or what line she was descended from. I hadn’t come to ask for her hand. But there’s nothing you can do to prevent an elderly lady from bragging about her origins, which is all she has left now that she feels she’s lost her dignity.

  Though illiterate, she was from a well-established family in Constantine. A man of great wealth and prestige, her paternal uncle had been famed for establishing the first tobacco company in Algeria. So I could understand her unwillingness to accept the idea of her daughter marrying a man who’d made his fortune abroad rather than inheriting it from his forebears, or of having to share the aeroplane with plebeians and poor people.

  But, as she put it, ‘That’s the world for you, dear. What are you going to do about it?’

  So awed were they by her, the ancients dubbed Constantine ‘the blissful city’.

  Hence, this old woman’s illiteracy had spared her un
told anguish. She would never read what had once been said about Constantine. Rather, all she could see was what the city had become in the end.

  Behold Constantine the Proud, who doesn’t know what to do with a rich past whose streets she tramps down with feet unshod.

  Behold Constantine the Virtuous, guarded about by transgressions, ruled by an ever-deepening ennui and the ravings of feverish back streets that reek of long-suppressed cravings concealed beneath the garb of modesty.

  She hadn’t changed. Her beautiful, miserable women, her delectable, lascivious women, were still gripped by a chronic fear of her goodhearted, spiteful folks’ gossip. And here she was seated on either side of me: to my right, a babbling old lady, and to my left, a taciturn girl. My fate, wherever I go, is to get caught in the jaws of her love.

  When, some time later, the stewardess came down the aisle passing out newspapers, I heard the girl utter her first word as she requested al-Watan (The Nation) and al-Hurriyah (Freedom), which left me nothing but al-Shaab (The People) and al-Mujahid (The Freedom Fighter). So we’d ended up with equal shares of mendacious headlines.

  In situations like this I always think of a wry comment Bernard Shaw once made about the Statue of Liberty. He noted that people erect their biggest statues to the things they lack most – which explains why the largest Arab victory arch is located in the country that’s suffered the biggest losses and the worst destruction.

  So intent are we on magnifying losses that we claim to have been gains, we add what we lack to the names of our countries. Since Algeria came into existence as a ‘people’s democratic republic’, we suppose that we solved the people’s problems and the issue of democracy from the day we won our independence, and with regard to freedoms, we proved our superiority from the very start over any European state with a mere one-word name!

  We’re a nation which celebrates its losses and which, since the days of Andalusia, has passed down the art of whitewashing defeats and crimes by establishing an elegant linguistic coexistence with them. When we assassinate a president, we name an airport after him. When we lose a city, we give its name to a street. When we lose a homeland, we name a hotel after it. And when we stifle the people’s voice and steal their power from under their noses, we give their name to a newspaper.

  We busied ourselves with browsing newspapers, and didn’t exchange a word. The passenger to my left was a mysterious woman, like a house whose windows open towards the inside. I enjoyed sitting next to her unsettling femininity, which stirred up the accumulated residue of emotion inside me.

  Then a crazy thought flashed through my mind: What if love were sitting to my left? I’d never been able to resist the allure of a quiet woman, or the beauty of a femininity that surrounds itself with mystery.

  When they brought dinner, the old lady exhibited an enthusiasm that suddenly dissipated her fear of death and halted the stream of questions she’d been asking me about the wing of the aeroplane, which she thought she’d seen wobbling when she looked at it out of the window. She even made good use of my loss of appetite by asking me if she could have some of what was on my tray.

  Meanwhile, the Constantinian girl to my left was picking at her food as though she were embarrassed to eat with gusto. It made me think of the days when women would go somewhere out of sight to eat as if it weren’t proper for them to exhibit any sort of physical craving or pleasure in public.

  After dinner the cabin lights were dimmed, and the stewardess began passing out blankets to the elderly and young children. I requested a blanket for the old lady in the hope that sleep might numb her ‘chatterbox nerve’ and make her stop predicting a disaster every time we hit a bit of air turbulence.

  Poor lady – she thought an aeroplane in flight was the most dangerous place a person could be. Little did she know that Death might pull some other prank on you. It might be waiting for you at the bottom of the aeroplane stairs the way it had been for Abdelaziz, a pharmacist who’d been known in the capital for his love of life and for the many services he’d performed for people. The pilot, who’d been an acquaintance of his, had moved him into first class and instructed the stewardesses to ply him with booze. Accordingly, they’d poured him one glass of whiskey after another until, by the end of the two-hour flight from Paris to Algiers, he couldn’t stand upright. No sooner had he set foot off the plane than he went rolling to the bottom of the narrow metal staircase, and he died two days later of a brain haemorrhage. Since he’d been flying first class and was the first person to go down the stairs, there hadn’t been anybody ahead of him to prevent him from rolling to his death!

  Do you suppose the pilot realised that, by upgrading him from economy class to first class, he was pampering him so thoroughly that he’d raised him to the rank of first-class ‘martyr’?

  On aeroplanes, as in life, you have to respect the law of ranks. You mustn’t try to skip a rank on your way up the ladder, since this would-be gain might be your ruin. You have to know from the start whether you belong in first class or second class, and that any skullduggery might land you down in the hold!

  You also have to make sure you know where your seat is: to the right of love, or to its left. Tragedy always follows when Fate starts amusing itself scrambling the seat numbers.

  I was constantly aware of the girl sitting next to me, of her faint-smelling perfume, and of those unspoken desires that are born in the dark. All it takes is a bit of dim light for the senses to awaken, and for women to become more beautiful than they are.

  A little darkness awakens pleasant illusions. As for pitch darkness, it makes us equal to the inhabitants of the underworld.

  I couldn’t go to sleep. A high-heeled smile greeted me politely from above her womanly aura. And below me – ah, below me – there lay something that kept me from smiling as I sat in that dreadful space where life and death intersect.

  Suddenly a stewardess turned the lights back on and began passing out landing cards, while another went up and down the aisles collecting passengers’ blankets. I noticed that the elderly lady didn’t surrender her blanket to the stewardess. I glimpsed her folding it up and hiding it inside her bag. Her fear of death hadn’t stopped her from robbing one of life’s trifles.

  She was like people who survive an air disaster or a house fire. Despite their brush with death, no sooner do they resume their lives than they go looking for their earthly belongings and bemoan the damage that’s been done to them.

  She wasn’t taking the blanket because she needed it, but just to ‘rip off’ the airline company. After all, the people who rob the homeland by the millions ‘from on top’ have given simple folks the right to steal or destroy the little things in retaliation against their would-be protectors.

  What use could she possibly have had with that little blanket? The one lying below, in the coldest part of the aeroplane, needed it more than she did.

  Would she have lost her appetite if I’d informed her of his presence? Would she have devoted herself to prayers and supplications and stopped stealing blankets if she’d known that nothing separated her from death, and that at any moment she might go to reside ‘down there’ herself?

  Those who sit ‘upstairs’ generally refuse to think about the fact that wherever they go, there’s a ‘downstairs’ waiting for them.

  The old lady asked me, ‘When will we get to Constantine, son?’

  ‘We’ve got twenty minutes to go, mother,’ I replied.

  I filled out both my landing card and hers. As for him, he had no landing card, perhaps because he enjoyed the luxury of travelling on a ticket that cost several times more than that of any passenger sitting above him.

  This has got to be some kind of joke, I thought. He’s worth ten times more dead than he was alive. So why is he so cold and sad?

  Hadn’t he waited his entire life for a rainy day like this when he would come home to Constantine borne on the clouds?

  And now he’d arrived at last.

  Mama Constantine, I’ve brought
him home to you! Your little boy who’s come back from his frigid place of exile trembling like a sparrow – take him into your arms! He spent a lifetime trying to reach your bosom. This aggrieved son of yours belonged to you so completely, he wasn’t himself any more. He was Khaled for so long, he stopped being Zayyan. Then he became so completely Zayyan, the only place he could find rest was in his brother’s grave.

  We’re sons of the rock – al-sakhrah. But we don’t know any more which of us is Sakhr, and Khansa’ isn’t with us any more to guide us to our grave with her tears. Everyone on this aeroplane is a ‘Sakhr’. But that’s all right, Mama. We’ll go on enlarging the cemeteries.

  Then all of a sudden the girl who had buttressed herself about with silence asked me, ‘May I borrow your pen?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I replied as I handed a pen to her.

  In her voice there were clouds and gentle rain, sadness and a music that seemed to pour from the sky, but I opened my umbrella of silence.

  I’d fortified myself against the unexpected winds of desire, and I intended to avoid a meandering road that might lead me to a woman sitting in an adjacent seat. In Constantine with its many twists and turns, there’s no such thing as a straight path to your goal. The road is always a zigzag one!

  After filling out her form, she gave the pen back to me with a simple, ‘Thank you,’ and retreated into her silence.

  Typically solicitous, our elderly neighbour said to her, ‘Since it’s dark out, dear, I hope somebody’s coming to meet you. If not, you can come along with my son and me, and we’ll get you where you need to go. The situation isn’t good these days.’

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ she replied gratefully. ‘My brother’s coming to meet me,’ from which I concluded that she was single and lived with her family.

  At that moment a stewardess came by with the duty-free trolley. I asked for a carton of cigarettes, which I was about to pay for when I heard the girl ask her if she had a certain perfume. I sat there, astonished. I felt as though life was trying to get a rise out of me, still trying to play tricks on me.