by Kamel Daoud
One last memory: the visits to the hereafter, on Fridays, at the summit of Bab-el-Oued. I’m talking about El-Kettar cemetery, otherwise known as “the Perfumer” because of the former jasmine distillery located nearby. Every other Friday, we’d go to the cemetery to visit Musa’s empty grave. Mama would whimper, which I found uncalled-for and ridiculous, because there wasn’t anything in that hole. I remember the mint that grew in the cemetery, the trees, the winding aisles, Mama’s white haik against the overly blue sky. Everybody in the neighborhood knew the hole was empty, knew Mama filled it with her prayers and an invented biography. That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life, believe me. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world — yes, I had a right to it! — despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted in pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly. Those days, the cemetery days, were the first days when I turned to pray, not toward Mecca but toward the world. Nowadays I’m still working on better versions of those prayers. But back then I had discovered, in some obscure way, a form of sensuality. How can I explain it to you? The angle of the light, the vigorous blue of the sky, and the wind awakened me to something more disturbing than the simple satisfaction you feel after a need is met. Remember I wasn’t quite ten years old, and therefore still clinging to my mother’s breast. That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me. My mother never guessed it was there that I definitively buried Musa one day, mutely shouting at him to leave me alone. Precisely there, in El-Kettar, an Arab cemetery. Today it’s a dirty place, inhabited by fugitives and drunks. I’m told that marble is stolen from the tombs each and every night. You want to go and see it? It’ll be a waste of time, you won’t find anyone there, and you especially won’t find a trace of that grave, which was dug like the Prophet Yusuf’s well. If the body’s not in it, you can’t prove anything. Mama wasn’t entitled to anything. Not to apologies before Independence, not to a pension afterward.
Actually, we would have had to start all over from the beginning and go a different way — the way of books, for example, and more specifically of one book, the one you bring with you every day to this bar. I read it twenty years after it came out, and it overwhelmed me with its sublime lying and its magical accord with my life. A strange story, isn’t it? Let’s summarize: We have a confession, written in the first person, but we have no other evidence to prove Meursault’s guilt; his mother never existed, for him least of all; Musa was an Arab replaceable by a thousand others of his kind, or by a crow, even, or a reed, or whatever else; the beach has disappeared, erased by footprints or agglomerations of concrete; the only witness was a star, namely the sun; the plaintiffs were illiterate, and they moved out of town; and finally, the trial was a wicked travesty put on by idle colonials. What can you do with a man who meets you on a desert island and tells you that yesterday he killed a certain Friday? Nothing.
In this movie I saw one day, a man was mounting some long flights of stairs to reach an altar where he was supposed to have his throat cut by way of soothing some god or other. The man was climbing with his head down, moving slowly, heavily, as if exhausted, undone, subdued, but most of all as if already dispossessed of his own body. I was struck by his fatalism, by his incredible passivity. I’m sure some people thought he was defeated, but I knew he was quite simply elsewhere. I could tell from his way of carrying his own body on his own back, like a porter with a burden. Well then, I was like that man, I felt the porter’s weariness more than the victim’s fear.
Night has fallen. Look at this incredible city, doesn’t it present a magnificent counterpoint? I think something immense, something infinite is required to balance out our human condition. I love Oran at night, despite the proliferation of rats and of all these dirty, unhealthy buildings that are constantly getting repainted; at this hour, it seems that people are entitled to something more than their routine.
Will you come tomorrow?
V
I admire your patience, cunning pilgrim that you are — I think I’m really starting to like you! For once, I have a chance to talk about this story … Picture an old whore dazed by an excess of men; she and this story of mine share some features. It’s like a text written on parchment and scattered all over the world; it’s brittle, patched up, no longer recognizable, infinitely rehashed — and yet look at you, sitting beside me and hoping for something new, something never heard before. This story doesn’t suit your quest for purity, I swear to you. If you want to light your way, you should look for a woman, not a dead man.
Shall we order the same wine as yesterday? I love its rough edges, its freshness. The other day, a wine producer was telling me his troubles. It’s impossible to find workers, because the activity is considered haram, illicit. Even the country’s banks are piling on and refusing him credit! Ha, ha! I’ve always wondered, what’s the reason for this complicated relationship with wine? Why is it treated as though it’s of the devil, when it’s supposed to be flowing profusely in Paradise? Why is it forbidden down here and promised up there? Drunken driving. Maybe God doesn’t want humanity to drink while it’s driving the universe to its place, holding on to the steering wheel of heaven … Yes, yes, I agree, the argument’s a bit muddled. As you’re starting to realize, I like to ramble.
You’re here to find a corpse and write your book. But you should be aware that even though I know the story — all too well — I know virtually nothing about its geography. Algiers is only a shadow in my mind. I almost never go there. Sometimes I see it on television, looking like an outdated actress left over from the days of revolutionary theater. So there’s no geography in this story. Generally speaking, it takes place in three settings of national importance: the city, whether that one or another one; the mountains, where you take refuge when you’re attacked or you want to make war; and the village, which is for each and every one of us the ancestral home. Everybody wants a village wife and a big-city whore. Just by looking out the windows of this bar, I can sort the local humans for you according to one of those three addresses. And so when Musa went away into the mountains to speak to God about eternity, Mama and I left the city and went back to the village. That’s all. There was nothing more until I learned to read and the little scrap of newspaper Mama kept between her breasts for so long — the one that reported the murder of Musa/Zujj — suddenly became a book with a name. Just think, we’re talking about one of the most-read books in the world. My brother might have been famous if your author had merely deigned to give him a name. H’med or Kaddour or Hammou, just a name, damn it! Mama could have had a martyr’s widow’s pension, and I could have had a known, recognized brother, a brother I could have prided myself on. But no, he didn’t name him, because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.
Let’s go back. It’s always a good thing to go back and review the basics. A Frenchman kills an Arab who’s lying on a deserted beach. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon on a summer day in 1942. Five gunshots, followed by a trial. The killer’s condemned to death for having buried his mother badly and spoken of her with too much indifference. Technically, the killing itself is due either to the sun or to pure idleness. A pimp named Raymond is angry with a whore and asks your hero to write her a threatening letter, which he does. Things go downhill, and then the story seems to resolve itself in a murder. The Arab is killed because the murderer thinks he wants to avenge the prostitute, or maybe because he has the insolence to take a siesta. You find my summary of your book unsettling, eh? But it’s the naked truth. All the rest is nothing but embellishments, the products of your writer’s genius. Afterward, nobody bothers about the Arab, his family, or his people. When the murderer leaves prison, he writes a book that becomes famous, in which he recounts how he stood up to God, a priest, and the absurd. You can turn that story in all directions, it doesn’t hold up. It’s the story of a crime, but the Ar
ab isn’t even killed in it — well, he is killed, but barely, delicately, with the fingertips, as it were. He’s the second most important character in the book, but he has no name, no face, no words. Does that make any sense to you, educated man that you are? The story’s absurd! It’s a blatant lie. Have another glass, it’s on me. Your Meursault doesn’t describe a world in his book, he describes the end of a world. A world where property is useless, marriage practically unnecessary, and weddings halfhearted, where it’s as though people are already sitting on their luggage, empty, superficial, holding on to their sick and fetid dogs, incapable of forming more than two sentences or pronouncing four words in a row. Robots! Yes, that’s the word, it wasn’t coming to me. I remember that little woman, a Frenchwoman, the one the writer-killer describes so well. He observes her one day in a restaurant. Jerky movements, shining eyes, tics, anxiety about the bill, robot gestures. I also remember the pendulum clock that was right in the middle of Hadjout, and I think it’s that Frenchwoman’s twin. The thing stopped for good a few years before Independence, it seems to me.
So the mystery struck me as more and more unfathomable. See, I’ve got a mother and a murder on my back too. Me too. It’s fate. I too have killed, in accordance with the desires of this earth, one day when I had nothing to do. Ah! I swore to myself so many times I’d never revisit that episode, but every move I make either dramatizes it or evokes it involuntarily. I was waiting for a little nosy-nose like yourself to come along, someone I could finally tell this tale to …
Inside my head, the map of the world is a triangle. At the top, in Bab-el-Oued, there’s the house where Musa was born. Lower down, overlooking the Algiers coast, there’s the place with no address where the murderer never came into the world. And finally, even lower, there’s the beach. The beach, yes indeed! These days it doesn’t exist anymore, or it’s slowly shifted itself elsewhere. According to witnesses, there was a time when you could still spot the little wooden bungalow at the far end of the beach. The back of the house rested against the rocks, and the pilings that held it up in front went straight down into the water. The commonness of the place struck me when I went there with Mama that autumn, the autumn after the crime. I’ve already described that scene to you, right? Me and Mama on the seashore, me ordered to stay back, and Mama facing the waves and cursing them? I have that feeling every time I get close to the sea. A bit of terror at first, an accelerated heartbeat, followed rather quickly by disappointment. It was as if the place was simply too confined! It seemed like trying to squeeze the Iliad into a narrow space on the street, between a grocery store and a barber shop. Yes, the scene of the crime was in fact a terrible letdown. In my view, my brother Musa’s story needs the entire earth! Ever since that day, I’ve cultivated a wild hypothesis: Musa wasn’t killed on that famous Algiers beach! There must be another, hidden place, a setting that was disappeared. That would explain everything, all at once! Why the murderer was so relaxed after being sentenced to death and even after his execution, why my brother was never found, and why the court preferred judging a man who didn’t weep over his mother’s death to judging a man who killed an Arab.
I sometimes thought about poking around that beach at the exact hour of the crime. That is, during the summer, when the sun’s so close to earth it can make you crazy or drive you to shed blood, but that would be a futile exercise. Besides, the sea bothers me. I’m definitively afraid of the water. I don’t like to go swimming — the waves swallow me up too fast. “Malou khouya, malou majache. El b’har eddah âliyah rah ou ma wellache.” (Where is he, my brother, why didn’t he come back? The sea took him from me, he never came back.) I love that old song. It’s a local tune. A man sings about his brother, who was swept out to sea. I’ve got several images in my head, but I think I’ve been drinking a bit too fast. The truth is, I’ve actually done it. Six times … Yes, I went there six times, there to that beach. But I never found anything, no empty cartridges, no footsteps, no witnesses, no dried blood on the rock. Nothing. I looked for years. Until one Friday, ten years ago, more or less, the day when I saw him. Under a rock, a few meters from the water, I suddenly saw a silhouette that merged with a dark wedge of shadow. I’d walked on the beach for a long time, as I recall. I intended to get knocked out by the sun, to suffer sunstroke or a fainting spell and thus relive to some degree what your author describes. And I admit it, I’d also had a lot to drink. The sun was overwhelming, like a heavenly accusation. It shattered into needles on the sand and on the sea but never ever flagged. At one point, I had the impression of knowing where I was going, but that impression was surely mistaken. And then, down at the end of the beach, I spotted a tiny spring flowing in a trickle over the sand behind the rock. And I saw a man, dressed in overalls and nonchalantly lying there. I looked at him with fear and fascination; he seemed to barely notice me. One of us two was an insistent ghost, and the shadow — very deep, very black — had the coolness of a threshold. Then … then it seemed that the scene veered off into some sort of amusing delirium. When I raised my hand, the shadow did the same. And when I took a step to the side, it turned and changed its resting point. Then I stopped, with my heart pounding, and I realized I had my mouth hanging open, like an idiot, and no weapon, not even a knife. I was sweating profusely, the big drops burning my eyes. No one was around, and the sea was mute. I knew for sure I was looking at a reflection, but I had no idea of what! I groaned out loud, and the shadow flickered. I took a backward step, and the shadow did the same, in a kind of weird contraction. I found myself stretched out on my back, shivering with cold, bludgeoned by bad wine. I’d walked backward about ten meters before collapsing in tears. Yes, I assure you, I wept for Musa years after his death. My efforts to reconstruct the crime at the scene where it had been committed were leading me to an impasse, to a ghost, to madness. All of which is to tell you there’s no point in your going to the cemetery, or to Bab-el-Oued, or to the beach. You won’t find anything. I’ve already tried, my friend. I told you right from the start: This story takes place somewhere in someone’s head, in mine and in yours and in the heads of people like you. In a sort of beyond.
Don’t do any geographical searching — that’s the point I’m trying to make.
You’ll get a better grasp on my version of the facts if you accept the idea that this story is like an origin myth: Cain comes here to build cities and roads, and to domesticate people and soil and plants. Zujj is the poor relative, loafing in the sunshine, his whole attitude so lazy it’s evident he owns nothing, not even a flock of sheep, that could arouse envy or motivate murder. In a certain way, your Cain killed my brother for … nothing! Not even for his livestock.
We should stop here. You’ve got enough material to write a good book, no? The story of the Arab’s brother. Another Arab story. You’re hooked …
Ah, the ghost, my double … see him there, behind you, holding his beer? I’ve been taking note of his maneuvers. He’s getting progressively closer to us, ever so casually. A real crab, that one. The ritual is always the same. He spreads out his newspaper and reads it diligently during the first hour. Then he cuts out articles and news items — relating to murders, I think, because I once took a look at what he’d left on the table. Next he looks out the window and drinks. Then the contours of his silhouette get blurry and he himself becomes diaphanous and almost fades away. Like a reflection. You forget he’s there, you hardly step around him when the bar’s crowded. No one’s ever heard him speak. The waiter seems to guess what he wants to order. He’s always wearing that same old jacket, worn at the elbows, and the same bangs on his big forehead, and his look is always the same, intelligent and cold. And let’s not forget the cigarette. His eternal cigarette, connecting him to heaven by the fine coil of smoke twisting and rising above him. He’s hardly ever looked at me, despite the years we’ve been neighbors in here. Ha, ha, I’m his Arab. Or maybe he’s mine.
Good night, my friend.
VI
I used to love stealing the bread Mam
a hid on top of the armoire and then watching her look all over for it, muttering curses the whole time. One night a few months after Musa’s death, when we were still living in Algiers, I waited until she fell asleep, swiped the key to the trunk where she kept supplies, and ate almost all the sugar. The next morning she panicked, she was grumbling to herself, and then she started scratching her face with her fingernails and wailing about her plight: a husband vanished, a son killed, and another son observing her with an almost cruel joy in his eyes. Well, yes! I remember that, I remember feeling a strange jubilation at seeing her really suffering for once. To prove my existence, I had to disappoint her. It was like fate. That tie bound us together, deeper than death.
One day Mama wanted me to go to the neighborhood mosque, which served more or less as a day-care center, supervised by a young imam. It was summer, and the sun was so harsh Mama had to drag me into the street by my hair. I struggled like a maniac and managed to get free of her. Then I shouted an insult and, still holding the bunch of grapes she’d tried to coax me with just a minute or two before, I ran away. I ran until I tripped and fell and the grapes got completely crushed in the dust. I cried my eyes out and ended up going to the mosque, all contrite. I don’t know what came over me, but when the imam asked what was causing me such grief, I accused another kid of hitting me. I think that was my first lie. My own personal version of eating the forbidden fruit. Because from then on, I became wily and deceitful, I started to grow up. Now, that first lie of mine, I told it on a summer day. Just like your hero the murderer — bored, solitary, examining his own tracks, spinning his wheels, trying to make sense of the world by trampling the bodies of Arabs.
