The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers

by Fouad Laroui

  What would it be like, he asked himself, walking slowly…

  …more and more slowly; he ended up stopping right at the corner of Transvaalstraat…

  …as if he weren’t in any hurry to arrive—in the direction of his house (their house)…

  …what is a house? “House” or “home”? Just a cube, a big cube, a cut-out space that the Land Registry had given to him…He watched television there, slept there, watched out of the corner of his eye a beautiful young blonde woman sitting on the sofa, next to him, sometimes forgetting who she was…

  …ah yes, it’s my wife…(my wife? What does the possessive signify? What, exactly, do I possess? Am I not rather the thing that is possessed, the domesticated animal—there must be a tiger or a lion at the zoo in Amsterdam who believes he possesses something, who thinks he’s wandering around in his home and that the little piece of wood in the form of a tree is his own, beware of the one who comes to rub himself there—it’s the conspiracy of the Tall-Blonde-Bach-amateurs that possesses me in the most subtle of manners—I am in their trap—their chains—so be it, I will end up in the cellar, in the hold of a ship beaten by the waves, heading toward the plantation, the zoo…)

  …where his wife Anna was waiting—sweet, kind Anna—but sweet and kind because he never annoyed her…

  …he had become someone who gives up, a sâdhu…“Are you two sure you’re married? (It was their neighbor who had said this, loquacious, knowing…) You never fight.” Exactly, he could have responded: I have renounced—in a world of discord—I have abstracted myself from the world, I am an abstraction—indeed, they talk about me that way. Maati? What a curious name…What are you? (What.) Ah, Moroccan…then comes the succession of adjectives, the abstraction clarifies: Muslim, probably macho, lover of complicated things, tom-tom, and isn’t there a big desert in your country? (In my country? I live on Transvaalstraat, in Utrecht.) No, I mean: in your country.

  …having decided once and for all that he would move to the Netherlands, that they had accepted him (they had even given him a passport)…

  Who had given him a passport? The State, “the coldest of the cold monsters”…Not the neighbor: she probably would have hesitated. You, my compatriot? But do you have, as I do, thirty lifeless bodies in a vault? They are my ancestors, lying down, stiff, they stand guard, in a perpetual procession, where the squirrels run. I go there to decorate their tombs with flowers, you seem to me more like someone who comes to spit on the graves—I have never seen people like you on All Saints’ Day, at the cemetery with its pleasant alignment of marble statues…

  …and that it was out of the question, consequently, to import anything of his own customs, habits, behaviors from his native Morocco…

  …what did he know of them, anyway?

  …into this country where he was rebuilding his life—no: where he was continuing his life—Anna whom he had ended up marrying in order to settle down (isn’t that what it was called, in times past, in the world of Parisian courtesans? (Doesn’t Proust use this expression somewhere? Concerning Odette, perhaps?)…

  …it had been years since he had last read Proust. He no longer had the opportunity to use him. Or to share him. Simenon, sometimes, not even… the newspaper…the sports pages…the television…

  —Oh Maati, you and your French references…and sometimes she would add, with a smile: You aren’t even French, you’re Moroccan!

  That sounds like a reproach. At the corner of Transvaalstraat, where a hundred absolutely identical houses trace converging lines toward the void, everything seems like an accusation that the court clerk, one foresees, will end up summarizing with the following question asked in a glacial tone: “What are you doing here?”

  (It wasn’t mean, just a bit teasing—Anna didn’t establish any hierarchy between Moroccans and the French…)

  …nor between the Chinese and the Peruvians, nor between anyone and anybody, like a good little Protestant…

  …which stunned him, and for which he was extremely grateful to her—

  …up until this instant, this dislocation, Transvaalstraat; he didn’t recognize gratitude for anything anymore, he didn’t recognize anything anymore; he would have preferred that she treat him like a Chinese person rather than say to him: “You are other, but that’s okay, we forgive you, and you’re equal to all the others”—just as at the zoo, the tiger seems to be the equal of the porcupine, they are fed in the same way, they are loved the same and the placard in front of the enclosure, which designates them very scientifically, which situates them (there is a map of the world and a red spot to mark the territory where they toil away), so, what about the placard? It’s the same for all: tiger, porcupine, or bonobo—but Anna, you’re outside of the enclosure, it’s your father, younger, beard less white, who points at the bonobo and reads aloud for you the description provided on the placard…

  …it was so new, a country where he was just as well regarded, or just as poorly regarded [depending on the person], as the French. At least there’s that in exile.) He had tried one day to explain to her that he was Moroccan by birth, in body, but “French in the head.”…

  …what does that mean, exactly? It’s absurd…it’s tiresome…my God, everything is escaping me…It’s my mind, fittingly, that’s liquefying—“France, your coffee is escaping!”—and what will remain, what remains of our loves, if our mind goes to the dogs, nothing but a body, a big sick body, on its back, bigger dead than alive…

  (Suddenly he remembered the title of the novel-essay by Günter Grass, Headbirths or, the Germans are Dying Out. Today he could read it in German: Kopfgeburten oder die Deutschen sterben aus…

  …a lot of good it does you! A lot of good it does me! Who is speaking? Who is shouting at me? Who are these snakes…

  While learning Dutch, he had incidentally also learned German. At least there’s that, in exile (bis). I’m cold, he said to himself sometimes with bitter irony, I’m cold and I eat tasteless things, but at least I’ve learned German, the language of the philosophers, and now I know the exact meaning of aufheben. We were really impressed by them, the Althussers and the consorts, the Derridas, the Glucksmanns, in Paris, when they threw out words like that one, without translating them, as if they were using an abracadabra only they could access.)

  If they were here, on this street, I would throw a big stone at their heads, a rock I would first need to lift up, aufheben—but then who, but then what is it in me that enjoys making such bad bilingual puns? Who-then-what-then forces my mouth into a sneer—come on, it’s not that funny! —when I’m in the middle of dislocating myself, on the corner of this street…

  She had laughed in his face, and even he wasn’t very convinced by his pro domo plea. (He got angry when Anna contradicted him, and even more so when he knew that she was right, at least partially—but he never let it show, true to his credo: “I am not at home here, I am a sort of guest in this country.”)

  …as if one were never at home… a little speck of dust in an unlimited universe. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me… Or is it “the infinite silence of these eternal spaces frightens me”? And if some people believe they are at home, in this tiny particle of dust, in a tiny corner of a speck, and others are invited here…

  But here, for God’s sake! Here, in Utrecht, wasn’t he ten times more of a foreigner than he would have been if he had moved to Nantes or Montpellier? Over there, the trees would have had familiar names, the trees and the animals and the household items at the supermarket; over there, he wouldn’t have needed to consult a dictionary to buy a mop—a mop, goddamnit! It had come to this, he who had dreamed of “changing the world”—what was it again, that Marx quotation he had repeated with elation (in his youth, for now opportunities for citing Marx were rare—at university, he had seen people defend a thesis in economics, in sociology, without being able to define surplus value or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall)…

  …but s…! All that’s finished, it’
s history…What use is it to you now, here? All of Marx in the Pléaide…One day, someone will throw it in a dumpster, not understanding anything (“It’s French”)…Very distinctly, he sees the scene and is submerged in a wave of infinite sadness. Young men, grinning, talking about soccer, throwing his Pléaides one by one into a dumpster full of trash and these millions of words, these millions of dead birds, will rot in a corner of polder.

  … with a sort of pride by anticipation—like a program, like a project…ah yes: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it!”

  He mutters, tears in his eyes: Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern. It finishes as a sob: verändern! Take note, Deus absconditus: one winter night, Transvaalstraat, in a little town in Holland, a Moroccan in complete dislocation, quoted out loud, in German, the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Not a blade of grass trembled, not a mouse stirred. (When an oak tree falls in the middle of the forest, does it make a sound? He finally has the answer, but it’s too late.)

  He added long ago, a bit of a pedant, but a winning pedant: “the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach,” yes, yes: “the point is to change it!” But today? Life’s vicissitudes…

  Let’s accuse life, it won’t defend itself. Life’s a bitch, but at least it shuts up. (Oh…but you’re not really going to reproach sweet, kind Anna for her babbling—isn’t that what you used to find the most charming about her—that incessant chirping—when she had nothing to say, she hummed…Yes, what charms in the first days, the first months, can perfectly well become a reason to murder ten years later…)

  Here he is, an immigrant in a world where he doesn’t know the codes, or only very vaguely, a world where each day he must discover the codes—a discreet nudge from Anna, the nudge in his side…

  He touches his side, there, on Transvaalstraat, as if feeling the blow again, several months after the incident. To the eyes of the world still intact / It feels grow and weep, unspoken, / Its sharp, underlying crack / Do not touch, it is broken.

  …that night when he had enthusiastically plunged his spoon into the soup bowl, the night when her parents were visiting—hey, we have to wait for the short prayer giving thanks to God for the food on the table—wasn’t her father a pastor of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands? Hadn’t he accepted, this strict father (but not overly), bearded like Jehovah (but not overly), Bach amateur (without moderation)…

  All along that horizon line toward the void, at that exact instant, perhaps in one or the other of these absolutely identical houses, a Bach cantata plays…It was here, in this country, in this city, that he discovered the Great Consolation—if he could emerge from this dislocation, start back on his route, drag himself to the living room and slide the Passion into the CD player…But what kind of passion? (“Here we go, he thinks he’s Jesus.” And again this phrase steeped in irony clearly formed in his head, boiling over. But who is speaking, after all? He turns around brusquely—but no, he’s alone in the embalmed twilight.) Continuing on. “Passion.” Wasn’t he the one suffering from the great translation that brought him to these shores? Wasn’t he persevering in this irrational disorder? Why does man distance himself from his home? Why does he make himself into a foreigner?

  …that his daughter marry a foreigner?

  And isn’t she a foreigner, too? Vis-à-vis the rest of the world? The vast world? The infinite spaces?

  Shouldn’t he be grateful to him? Even if it was possible to read this entire story differently, and view him, the foreigner, as the loser in the affair; and paint a picture, passing from one German to another, from Marx to Nietzsche:

  Didn’t he, one day in Turin, disintegrate, as I here decompose? He collapses…he passes a carriage whose coach driver is whipping the horse violently…wrings his neck and bursts into tears…Nothing here on Transvaalstraat betrays an animal presence—except for me—tiger, porcupine, bonobo—who becomes an animal again as soon as everything loses its meaning—perhaps a cat will appear—cats, the other consolation—and I would take it under my wing, the wing of the animal that I am, I would forbid anyone from approaching it…Yes, I would be rather insane to cry with an animal next to me. My fellow creature, my brother.

  “This one went forth in quest of truth as a hero, and at last got for himself a small decked-up lie: his marriage he calleth it.” A decked-up lie (so sweet, so kind) that nudged him in the ribs… Hastily putting the spoon back down next to the bowl, he had clasped his hands (he who had never done so in his country, who had never prayed, nor even entered a mosque)…

  …too late now: The die is cast. He wouldn’t enter anything anymore. Enter here, with your cortege of métèques, the workforce of immigrants… Listen, I am an immigrant. A good war, a good Occupation, and I could choose ignominy, or indifference, or heroism—and I would end up on a red poster, and I would scare passersby with how difficult it is to pronounce my name…

  …and lowered his head—they didn’t expect him to do the short prayer (what was it called? “Doing grace?”) but at least he had given the impression of reflecting with them, so that he would be slightly of their world)—a world where everything was foreign?

  He leaned his entire body against a tree whose name he probably didn’t know—but do trees have names? He closed his eyes. His shirt stuck to his body, he was bathed in a cold sweat that made him shiver. He closed his eyes and saw the unwinding of the rest of Time, without him, without the man who had abstracted himself from a world where everything had become foreign. He saw an excerpt from the next day’s paper, a few lines delivering the news about him: Tragedy on Transvaalstraat. Maati S. hung himself last night. Wife in tears, neighbors in shock (“such a quiet, courteous man, etc.”).

  No. In the ferocious struggle against the world, never take the side of the world. He took out a tissue from his pocket and wiped his face. Then he picked up his book bag and slowly turned to face the day…to find himself on the exact street where he had lived for years now, with his wife Anna. I am Maati S., engineer, employee of City Hall in Utrecht, rank 11, full time, thirty-eight hours per week. I have just experienced a feeling that drowns me, regularly, at a fixed date. (Maybe it has something to do with the moon.) I call it, lacking a better name, “dislocation.” How can I explain it…The falcon remains deaf, we don’t know why, to the calls of the falconer. It turns and turns and turns in a delirious sky that exacerbates its gyrating. A thousand images of me multiply my terror. Welts, epiphanies, tongues on fire…Everything collapses, there is no more center, in the middle of a night suddenly fallen. There is no more reason. There is no more anything. Who is speaking about what? Who is speaking? Nothing. Nothing. Then, it’s incomprehensible, it’s a sort of new dawn, it’s a small note of the clarinet in the distance, a drum roll, heavy, heady, and the dislocation fades away. These few noises foreshadow a gesture that my wife will make, in a moment, a gesture so banal but containing all the importance I wouldn’t be able to give to the world. It’s curious, the world coagulates, I come up to the surface. I can even start to walk again. It’s enough to put one foot in front of the other. Let’s go! To his great surprise, his left leg obeys. It’s an exhausted automaton that walks, book bag in hand, in the direction of his house. It’s a trembling hand that rises toward the doorbell, a hesitant finger that grazes it. Sounds of footsteps…Who’s there? Is it you, Anna?

  “My poor Maati, you look exhausted.”

  Here he is seated on the sofa (collapsed, rather). He doesn’t know how he wound up there, he only just this moment rang the doorbell. She leans in while humming, kneels down, carefully removes the slippers martyring his feet. He closes his eyes and lets himself slide down a bit on the sofa. He experiences feelings he cannot define. Relief? Gratitude? Affection? Love? This young woman who carefully removes his slippers, humming…