by Kamel Daoud
It was like two sharp raps on the door of deliverance. That, at least, is what I thought I felt. Afterward? I dragged his body into the courtyard, and then we buried him. It’s not as easy to bury a dead man as books and movies would have you believe. The corpse always weighs twice as much as the living person did, refuses the hand you offer it, and adheres with all its blind weight to the surface of the earth, clutching whatever last bit it can reach. The Frenchman weighed a lot, and we had no time. I dragged him about a meter before his reddened, bloody shirt tore. Part of it remained in my hand. I exchanged two or three murmurs with Mama, who seemed already to be elsewhere, not much interested anymore in the universe she bequeathed me like an antique stage set. I used a pick and a shovel and dug a deep hole very close to the lemon tree, the sole witness to the scene. Oddly enough, I felt cold, even though we were in the heart of summer, even though the night was hot and as sensuous as a woman who’d waited too long for love, and I wanted to dig and dig and never stop or raise my head. My mother suddenly snatched up the torn piece of shirt lying on the ground and sniffed at it for a long time. That seemed to give her back her sight at last. Her eyes fell on me, practically surprised.
And after that? Nothing happened. And whereas the night — its trees plunged into the stars for hours, its moon, the last pallid trace of the vanished sun, the door of our little house, which forbade time to enter it, and the blind darkness, our only witness — whereas the night was gently beginning to withdraw its confusion and give things back their angles, my body was able to recognize the arrival of the denouement at last. It made me shiver with an almost animal delight. Lying on my back in the courtyard, I made an even denser night for myself by closing my eyes. When I opened them, I remember seeing yet more stars in the sky, and I knew I was trapped in a bigger dream, a more gigantic denial, that of another being who always kept his eyes closed and didn’t want to see anything, like me.
IX
I’m not telling you this story to be absolved a posteriori or to get rid of a bad conscience. At the time when I did that killing, God wasn’t as alive and heavy in this country as he is today, and in any case, I’m not afraid of hell. I just feel a kind of weariness, a frequent urge to sleep, and sometimes severe vertigo.
The day after the murder, everything was intact. The insects were chirring as deafeningly as always, and the sun was beating down strong and straight, planted in the heart of the earth. Maybe the only thing that had changed for me was the sensation I’ve already described to you: At the moment when I committed my crime, I felt a door somewhere was definitively closing on me. I concluded that I had been condemned — and for that, I’d needed neither judge nor God nor the charade of a trial. Only myself.
I’d love to have a trial! And I assure you: Unlike your hero, I’d go on trial with the enthusiasm of a liberated man. I dream about that courtroom full of people. A big room, and Mama there, struck dumb at last, incapable of defending me for lack of a precise language, sitting on a bench in a daze, hardly recognizing her belly or my body. A few idle journalists in the back rows, as well as Larbi, my brother Musa’s friend, and especially Meriem, with her thousands of books hovering above her head like butterflies. And then your hero, playing the role of the prosecutor in this unique remake, asking me my family name, my given name, and my ancestry. Joseph, the man I killed, is also present, and my neighbor, the horrible Koran reciter, who comes to my cell to explain to me about how forgiving God is. A grotesque scene, because the background’s missing. What could I be accused of, me, who served my mother even after my death, and who buried myself alive before her eyes so she could live in hope? What will my accusers say? That I didn’t weep when I killed Joseph? That I went to the movies after firing two shots into his body? No, there were no movies in those days, and the dead were so numerous that nobody wept for them, they were just given a number and two witnesses. I searched vainly for a court and a judge, but I never found them.
All things considered, my life has been more tragic than your hero’s. I’ve interpreted all those roles in turn. Sometimes Musa, sometimes the stranger, sometimes the judge, sometimes the man with the sick dog, the treacherous Raymond, and even the insolent flute player who mocked the murderer. It’s essentially a private performance, with me as the sole protagonist. A splendid one-man show. Everywhere in this country, there are cemeteries for foreigners, places where the calm grass is only a façade. All the fine people in there are chattering and jostling one another, intent on resurrection, inserted between the end of the world and the beginning of a trial. There are too many of them! Far too many! No, I’m not drunk, I’m dreaming about a trial, but they’re all dead already, and I was the last to kill. The story of Cain and Abel, but at the end of mankind, not at the start. You understand better now, don’t you? This isn’t a trite story of forgiveness or revenge, it’s a curse, it’s a trap.
What I want is to remember. I want it so much and so badly, maybe I could go back in time and get to that summer day in 1962 and make that beach off-limits, for two hours, to every possible Arab in this country. Or I could finally stand trial, yes, and watch the courtroom get crushed by the heat as I do so. Hallucinating, caught between the infinite and the panting of my own body in its cell, striving with muscle and thought against walls and imprisonment. I blame my mother, I lay the blame on her. The truth is, she committed that crime. She held my arm steady while Musa held hers and so on back to Abel or his brother. I’m philosophizing? Yes, yes I am. Your hero had a good understanding of that sort of thing; whether or not to commit murder is the only proper question for a philosopher, the only one he ought to ask. All the rest is chitchat. However, I’m only a man sitting in a bar. It’s the end of the day, the stars are coming out one by one, and the night has already given the sky a positively exhilarating depth. I love this regular denouement; the night calls the earth back to the sky and gives it a portion of infinity almost equal to its own. I killed at night, and ever since I’ve had night’s immensity for an accomplice.
Ah! You look surprised by my language. How and where did I learn it? At school. On my own. With Meriem. She helped me more than anyone to perfect my knowledge of your hero’s tongue, and she was the cause of my discovering and reading and rereading the book you carry around in your bag like a fetish. That was how French became the main tool of a meticulous, maniacal investigation. The two of us used the language like a magnifying glass as we went over the scene of the crime together. And with my tongue and Meriem’s mouth, I devoured hundreds of books! It seemed to me I was approaching the places where the murderer had lived, I was holding him by the jacket while he was embarking for nothingness, I was forcing him to turn around, look at me, recognize me, speak to me, respond to me, take me seriously: He trembled with fear at my resurrection, after he’d told the whole world I’d died on a beach in Algiers!
I figure the only trial I’m going to be put on is one I make up for myself right here in this crummy bar, so let me go back to the murder. You’re young, but you can serve as judge, prosecutor, public, and journalist … Well, after I’d killed a man, it wasn’t my innocence I missed the most, it was the border that had existed until then between my life and crime. That’s a line that’s hard to redraw later. The Other is a unit of measurement you lose when you kill. Afterward, I often felt an incredible, almost divine giddiness at the thought of somehow resolving everything — at least in my daydreams — by committing murder. The list of my victims was long. I’d start with one of our neighbors, a self-proclaimed “veteran mujahid,” whereas everyone knows he’s a crook and a con man who has taken money from the contributions of real mujahideen and diverted it to his own profit; then comes an insomniac dog, a brown, scrawny, wild-eyed creature that drags its carcass through the streets of my city; next up, a maternal uncle who for years came to see us every Eid, at the end of Ramadan, and promised to repay an old debt, without ever actually doing it; and finally, the first mayor of Hadjout, who treated me like a weakling because I hadn’t left to j
oin the resistance like the others. Such thoughts became commonplace with me after I killed Joseph and threw his body down a well — a figure of speech, of course, because, as I’ve said, I buried him. What’s the point of putting up with adversity, suffering, or even an enemy’s hatred if you can resolve everything with a few simple gunshots? The unpunished murderer develops a certain inclination to laziness. But there’s something irreparable as well: The crime forever compromises both love and the possibility of loving. I killed a man, and since then, life is no longer sacred in my eyes. After what I did, the body of every woman I met quickly lost its sensuality, its possibility of giving me an illusion of the absolute. Every surge of desire was accompanied by the knowledge that life reposes on nothing solid. I could suppress it so easily that I couldn’t adore it — I would have been deceiving myself. I’d chilled all human bodies by killing only one. Indeed, my dear friend, the only verse in the Koran that resonates with me is this: “If you kill a single person, it is as if you have killed the whole of mankind.”
Say, this morning I read a fascinating article in an old, out-of-date newspaper. It told the story of a certain Sadhu Amar Bharati. I’m sure you’ve never heard of this gentleman. He’s an Indian who claims to have kept his right hand raised toward the sky for thirty-eight years. As a result, his arm’s nothing more than a bone covered with skin. It will remain fixed in its position until he dies. Maybe that’s how it goes for all of us, basically. For some, it’s both arms, embracing the void left behind by a beloved body; for others, it’s a hand holding back a child already grown, or a leg raised above a threshold never crossed, or teeth clenched on a word never uttered, et cetera. The idea’s been amusing me all day. Why hasn’t this Indian ever lowered his arm? According to the article, he’s a man of middle-class background, he had a job, a house, a wife, and three children, and he led a normal, peaceful life. One day he received a revelation; his God spoke to him and commanded him to tramp tirelessly through the country and preach world peace, always holding up his right arm. Thirty-eight years later, his arm is petrified. I like this strange anecdote, it resembles the story I’m telling you. More than half a century since the gunshots were fired on the beach, my arm’s still raised, impossible to lower, wrinkled, eaten away by time — dry skin on dead bones. Except that’s the way I feel about my entire being: All the muscles are gone, but it’s stretched out and painful. Because holding this posture doesn’t involve merely depriving yourself of a limb, it likewise entails atrocious, piercing pains — although they’ve disappeared nowadays. Listen to this: “It used to be painful, but I’ve become used to it now,” the Indian declares. The journalist describes his martyr in great detail. The man’s arm has lost all feeling. Fixed in a semi-vertical position, it’s become atrophied, and the fingernails of his right hand curl around upon themselves. At first, the story made me smile, but now I’m considering it seriously. It’s a true story, for I’ve lived it myself. I’ve seen Mama’s body stiffen into the same strenuous, irreversible pose. I’ve seen it dry up like that man’s useless arm, raised against the force of gravity. Mama is, in fact, a statue. I remember that when she wasn’t doing anything, she’d just stay there, sitting on the ground, unmoving, as though devoid of all reason for existence. Oh, yes! Years later, I discovered how much patience she’d had and how she’d hoisted the Arab — that is, me — into that scene, where he was able to take hold of a revolver, execute the roumi Joseph, and bury him.
Let’s go home, young man. As a general rule, one sleeps better after a confession.
X
The day after my crime, everything was very peaceful. I’d fallen asleep in the courtyard, worn out by gravedigging, and it was the smell of coffee that woke me up. Mama was singing! I remember that very well, because it was the first time she’d allowed herself to sing, even if only sotto voce. You never forget the first day in the world. The lemon tree practically pretended not to have seen anything. I decided I wouldn’t go out that day. My mother’s nearness, her kindness, her consideration were of the sort reserved for a child prodigy, or a traveler who’s finally come home, or a relative given back by the sea, dripping and smiling. She was celebrating Musa’s return. So I turned aside when she handed me a cup, and I nearly pushed away her hand, which for an instant had grazed my hair. However, I knew at the very instant when I was rejecting her that I’d never be able to bear having any other body close to mine. I’m exaggerating? Committing a real murder gives one some new, clear-cut certitudes. Read what your hero wrote about his stay in a prison cell. I often reread that passage myself, it’s the most interesting part of his whole hodgepodge of sun and salt. When your hero’s in his cell, that’s when he’s best at asking the big questions.
The color of the sky was no concern of mine, so I went back to my room and slept for a few more hours. Around midday, a hand pulled me out of my sleep. Mama, of course, who else? “They came looking for you,” she told me. She wasn’t panicked or worried; she figured they couldn’t kill her son twice, and I understood that. Some secondary rites still needed to be performed before Musa’s story could really end. It was a few minutes after two in the afternoon, I think. I went out into the little courtyard and noticed two empty cups, some cigarette butts, and traces of footsteps in the dirt. Mama explained that the two gunshots in the night had alarmed the djounoud. Some people in the neighborhood had pointed to our house, so two soldiers had come to hear our version. My mother said they’d eyed the courtyard vaguely, accepted the cups of coffee, and asked questions about her life and her household. Well, I guessed the rest right away: Mama had put on her show. She told the djounoud about Musa and made such an impression on them that they ended up kissing her forehead and assuring her that her son was well and properly avenged, as were millions of others killed by the French every summer afternoon at two o’clock sharp. “A Frenchman disappeared last night,” they told her before leaving. “Tell your son to come down to the town hall, the colonel wants to talk to him. You’ll get him back. We just have a few questions to ask him.” At this point, Mama interrupted her account and examined me. Her little eyes seemed to be asking, “What are you going to do?” Then she lowered her voice and added that she’d made everything vanish, from blood traces to murder weapon. Not far from the lemon tree were a couple of extra-large cowpats … Nothing of the previous night remained, neither sweat nor dust nor echo. The Frenchman had been erased with the same meticulousness applied to the Arab on the beach twenty years earlier. Joseph was a Frenchman, and Frenchmen were dying more or less everywhere in the country at the time, and Arabs likewise, for that matter. Seven years of the national War of Liberation had transformed your guy Meursault’s beach into a battlefield.
For my part, I perceived what the new lords of the land really wanted from me. Even if I showed up with the Frenchman’s body on my back, my crime wouldn’t be the one the eye could see, but that other crime, the one the intuition could guess: my strangeness. Already. I decided not to go down to the town hall that same day. Why not? Not out of bravery, and not by calculation, but only because of the general torpor I found myself in. In the afternoon, the sky looked fabulously rejuvenated, the sight is committed to my memory like a date. I felt light, in balance with the other weights on my heart, and relaxed, and fit for idleness. Equidistant between Musa’s grave and Joseph’s. You must understand why. An ant ran over my hand. I was nearly stunned by the idea of my own life, the proof of it, its temperature, in contrast with the proof of death, just two meters away from me, there, under the lemon tree. Mama knew the reason why she’d killed, and she was the only one who knew it! Neither Musa nor Joseph nor I was affected by her certitude. I raised my eyes and saw her sweeping the courtyard, bending toward the ground, discussing things with dead relatives or with some ladies, former neighbors who now resided in her head. For one moment, I felt sorry for her. The numbness in my arms became a poignant delight, and I watched the shadows slowly sliding over the walls of our courtyard. Then I fell asleep again.
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sp; In fact, I slept for nearly three days straight, a heavy sleep with waking moments that barely revealed to me my own name. I stayed there in my bed, unmoving, without ideas or projects, my body new and amazed. Mama, playing the game of patience, let me alone. Every time I think about those long days of sleep, I find them strange, because outside that courtyard the country was still being torn apart by the celebrations of its freedom. Thousands of Meursaults were running in every direction, and so were Arabs. That meant nothing to me. It was only later, weeks and months afterward, that I started gradually discovering the immensity of both the destruction and the joy.
Ah, you know, I never bothered myself to write a book, and yet I dream of committing one. Just one! No, don’t be so sure, it wouldn’t be a new investigation into your man Meursault’s case. It would be something else, something more intimate. A great treatise on digestion. There it is! A kind of culinary book, combining aromas and metaphysics, spoons and divinities, the people and their bellies. The raw and the cooked. Someone told me recently that the best-selling books in this country are cookbooks. Well, I know why. While Mama and I were waking up from our drama, staggering but maybe, finally, appeased, the rest of the country was devouring everything, gobbling up the land and the rest of the sky and the houses and the power poles and the species that couldn’t defend themselves. As I see it, my countrymen don’t eat exclusively with their hands but with everything else too: with their eyes, feet, tongue, and skin. Everything gets devoured: bread, sweets of all sorts, meats from afar, fowl, all kinds of herbs. But in the end, apparently, that’s no longer sufficient. The way I see it, these people need something bigger as a counterweight to the abyss. My mother used to call that “the endless serpent,” and I think it’ll lead us all to premature death, or to someplace on the edges of the earth where we can topple over into the void. You see? Take a good look at this city and the people here, all around us, and you’ll understand. They’ve been devouring everything in sight for years. Plaster, the well-polished round stones you find on the seashore, the remains of all sorts of posts. As the years have passed, the beast has become less picky and even eats whatever pieces of sidewalk are available. Sometimes it advances right up to the threshold of the desert — which owes its survival only to its blandness, I believe. It’s been years now since the animals ceased to exist, reduced to images in books. There are no more forests in this country, none at all. The big, bulky swans’ nests have disappeared as well. As a teenager, I never got tired of admiring those nests, perched on the tops of minarets and the last churches. Have you seen the landings in the apartment blocks, the empty living quarters, the walls, the colonists’ old wine cellars, all those ruined buildings? They make a meal. I’m rambling again. I wanted to tell you about the first day in the world and here I am, talking about the last one …
