by Kamel Daoud
After your hero was sentenced to die, a priest visited him in his cell; in my case, there’s a whole pack of religious fanatics hounding me, trying to convince me that the stones of this country don’t only sweat with suffering, and that God is watching over us. I should shout out to them, say I’ve been looking at those unfinished walls for years, there isn’t anything or anyone in the world I know better. Maybe at one time, way back, I was able to catch a glimpse of the divine order. The face I saw was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire — and it belonged to Meriem. I tried to find it again. In vain. Now it’s all over. Can you imagine the scene? Me bawling into the microphone while they scramble to break down the door of the minaret so they can stop my mouth. They try to make me listen to reason, they’re distraught, they tell me there’s another life after death. And I answer them and say, “A life where I can remember this one!” And then I die, maybe stoned to death, but with the mic in my hand, me, Harun, brother of Musa, son of the vanished father. Ah, the martyr’s grand gesture! Crying out his naked truth. You live elsewhere, you can’t imagine what an old man has to put up with when he doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t go to the mosque, has neither wife nor children, and parades his freedom around like a provocation.
One day the imam tried to talk to me about God, telling me I was old and should at least pray like the others, but I went up to him and made an attempt to explain that I had so little time left, I didn’t want to waste it on God. He tried to change the subject by asking me why I was calling him “Monsieur” and not “El-Sheikh.” That got me mad, and I told him he wasn’t my guide, he wasn’t even on my side. “Yes, my son,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “I am on your side. But you have no way of knowing it, because your heart is blind. I shall pray for you.” Then, I don’t know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and said I wouldn’t put up with being prayed for by him. I grabbed him by the collar of his gandoura. I poured out on him everything that was in my heart, joy and anger together. He seemed so sure of himself, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair on the head of the woman I loved. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. I might look as if I was the one who’d come up empty-handed, but I was sure about me, about everything, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I would always be right. It was as if I had always been waiting for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he’ll be condemned too, if the world’s still alive. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral, or if I were accused of having killed a man on July 5, 1962, and not one day sooner? Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Meriem now offered her lips to another man? Couldn’t he, couldn’t this condemned man see that from somewhere deep in my future … All the shouting had me gasping for air. But they were already tearing the imam from my grip and a thousand arms wrapped themselves around me and brought me under control. The imam calmed them, though, and looked at me for a moment without saying anything. His eyes were full of tears. Then he turned and disappeared.
If I believe in God? Don’t make me laugh! After all the hours we’ve spent together … I don’t know why every time someone has a question about the existence of God he turns to man and waits for the answer. Ask him the question, put it directly to him! Sometimes I have the feeling I’m really inside that minaret, and I hear them out there, determined to break down the door I’ve locked so well, howling to wake the dead for my death. There they are, just on the other side, drooling with rage. You hear that door cracking? Tell me, do you hear it? I do. It’s about to give way. And you know what I shout back at them? It’s a single sentence nobody understands: “There’s no one here! There has never been anyone! The mosque is empty, the minaret is empty. It’s emptiness itself!” And for sure, there will be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and they will greet me with cries of hate. Maybe your hero was right from the beginning: There was never any survivor in that story. Everybody died all at once, all at the same time.
Mama’s still alive today, but what’s the point? She says practically nothing. And for my part, I talk too much, I think. It’s the great shortcoming in murderers no one has punished yet, as your writer seems to have known all too well … Ah! Just one last joke, of my own invention. Do you know how “Meursault” is pronounced in Arabic? You don’t? El-Merssoul. “The envoy,” or “the messenger.” Not bad, eh? Well, right, right, this time I really must stop. The bar’s going to close, and everyone’s waiting for us to empty our glasses. To think that the sole witness of our meeting is a deaf-mute whose only pleasures are cutting up newspapers and smoking cigarettes! My God, how you love to make fun of your creatures …
Do you find my story suitable? It’s all I can offer you. It’s my word. I’m Musa’s brother or nobody’s. Just a compulsive liar you met with so you could fill up your notebooks … It’s your choice, my friend. It’s like the biography of God. Ha, ha! No one has ever met him, not even Musa, and no one knows if his story is true or not. The Arab’s the Arab, God’s God. No name, no initials. Blue overalls and blue sky. Two unknown persons on an endless beach. Which is truer? An intimate question. It’s up to you to decide. El-Merssoul! Ha, ha.
I too would wish them to be legion, my spectators, and savage in their hate.
KAMEL DAOUD is an Algerian journalist based in Oran, where he writes for the Quotidien d’Oran — the third largest French-language Algerian newspaper. His articles have appeared in Libération, Le Monde, and Courrier International, and are regularly reprinted around the world. A finalist for the Prix Goncourt, The Meursault Investigation won the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq-Continents de la francophonie. International rights to the novel have been sold in twenty countries. A dramatic adaptation of The Meursault Investigation will be performed at the 2015 Festival d’Avignon, and a feature film is slated for release in 2017.
JOHN CULLEN is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy (The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad), Eduardo Sacheri’s The Secret in Their Eyes, Yasmina Reza’s Happy Are the Happy, and Chantal Thomas’s The Exchange of Princesses. He lives in upstate New York.
