Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  In the next scene it’s the winter of 1964. The peaks of Kroumirie Mountain glitter snow and your father has lived at Cherifa’s house for two years. Two years of total muteness. Two years without the tiniest whisper.

  On that wintry day everyone sat shivering in the dining hall; we intook our food and blew warm air in our hands. I remember how your father suddenly levitated and marched toward Cherifa’s kitchen, even though this was very illegal. I saw from a distance how he hacked his fourteen-year-old throat, unstuck his tongue, and … spoke!

  “Um … may I have seconds, please? I am not full.”

  His voice was perfectly normal, with the exception of a very wide hoarseness. Cherifa’s mouth circled itself and flapped up and down like a disbeliefed fish.

  “Excuse me. May I have a little more food?” your father repeated, with his voice’s volume turned up even more.

  “If you do not give me seconds I might relate certain rumors … No one hears more stories than the one people think are mute, if you understand what I mean. You probably do not want Faizal to find out about …”

  At this point your father’s voice was reduced to an inaudible whisper. Cherifa’s confusion was so great that she actually (for the first time in the history of the world) granted a foodwise refill. After that day, your father was even more favorited by Cherifa (and even more despised by Faizal).

  Why did your father’s tonguely effectiveness suddenly return? No idea. Sometimes life persists in not following those patterns that are bookishly adequate. In the book we will do our best to formulate an obvious motive for your father’s cured tongue in order to avoid confusing the reader. What do you say we have your father march into a forest, pass under a chestnut tree, take a chestnut to the head, and then cry, “OW!” Then you can have him say: “Oh, a chestnut, how symbolic that this should cure my muteness.” Or you could have him be afflicted by a magical dream sequence in which his future is depicted in a modern Joyce-esque stream of consciousness: “Ow-ow-there-I-am-going-to-have-to-court-a-Swedish-stewardess-and-there-I-am-going-to-dine-with-Jurgen-Habermas-and-there-I-will-give-an-acceptance-speech-for-a-photography-prize-at-the-Canadian-embassy-in-Egypt! I-should-probably-force-my-tongue-to-be-cured!” Choose the direction of the path yourself.

  With the gift of speech, your father’s and my friendship grew to an unshakeable foundation. I never asked about his motive for muteness; instead I wanted to know everything about his parents and his history. And your father shaped it for me with a voice that was his and words that suddenly came flooding out like the blood from the elevator in The Shining. He spoke about his father, Moussa, and described him as a wealthy Algerian who lived his life in international airspace and wore sumptuous silk pajamas at night.

  “My father, oh, my father!” he cried, until he had attracted everyone’s attention (except for half-deaf Amine’s). With our ears listening eagerly, he told about his father’s career as a chemical water purifier. Soon your grandfather’s picture was mirrored throughout the whole world and he had sufficient finances to invest in frequent candy factories and jukebox stores.

  “Then he met my mother at a symphonic concert in Monaco. She is one of the world’s most beautiful models, born with Algerian parents in Miami Beach in America. Now she’s an actress and good friends with Grace Kelly and Humphrey Bogart. By the way, have you seen this?”

  With his pride shining, your father presented the worn photograph he always carried with him. He said that the man who sat, black-suited, at the table in fine European company was his father, Moussa. On his right side sat the celebrated film star Paul Newman, and on his left was the water-waved rock singer Elvis.

  “And by the way …,” he added after having examined the photo in detail. “Do not be upset by the nose-investigating bodyguard in the background.”

  We were all very impressed by your father’s stories. Our eyes shone in stereo when we cried, “Tell more! More!”

  The consequence was an expanded stimulus of the buzzing dragon we call imagination. Your father continued:

  “My father, Moussa, also has frequent golds in the world weight-lifting championships and has worked as a tamer of tigers. He has four Pontiac V8s; two black, the rest red. Now he lives in a luxurious district of Paris where the lawn mowers look like small cars and weekends are spent on golf or at the racetrack. All colors of women swim his swimming pool topless and oil their shoulders with costly coconut-smelling cream. Why was I relocated here? After my mother’s unlucky death in a car accident, my father’s intention to teach me the hard school of poverty grew. But soon … anytime, maybe tomorrow or next week, his body will arrive to fetch me to the abundance of freedom in France. In the harmony of commonality we will afflict cinemas and meet film stars and practice windsurfing and test his large collection of luxury cruisers. If you want you can come along …”

  I observed your father and asked (with a certain newly wakened suspiciousness):

  “And how has he arrived at this success?”

  Your father folded the picture carefully, returned it to his pocket, and said:

  “My father is a triplicate of talent: water purifier, Casanova, and cosmopolitan!”

  Why did his tongue cultivate such a great many glissades of truth? I don’t know. However, we can see two interesting tendencies:

  1. Everything in your father’s life that had political blackness was filtered out. Politics were, for him, a swamp that had already drowned too many in his vicinity. Not until late in life would your father change his relationship with politics. Perhaps too late.

  2. Certainly we all realized that your father’s words were not totally correct. But still we were hypnotized and stimulated. Is it not bizarre how the words of imagination can rumble forth a certain comfort? And is that not reality’s reason for the existence of superfluousities like horoscopes, psychologists, and authors?

  Before I terminate this collection of data about your father’s childhood, I want to detail something important: If you are still hesitating about the geniality of this project, I want to emphasize that NO economy is vital for my assistance. Do not let your Swedish stinginess limit our book’s future! All I ask in exchange for corresponding you my collected data about your father is that our book’s honesty should be maximally spiced. This guarantee is vital to me, because false rumors swarm your father’s life. THE TRUTH and nothing but THE TRUTH must be our lighthouse in the shaping of a literary master opus. Can this promise be cast me in steel? In that case I promise to correspond you the reality of truth about your father’s background. It will shock and horrify, not to mention stimulate and erect, both you and our future readers.

  Dearest greetings!

  Thank your effectively delivered answer! To read your positive response to my bookly idea warmed my humor (despite your sloppy grammar and the lack of capital letters after periods). Is “wzup dawg” a frequently used greeting in today’s Sweden? In any case, I am extremely happy about our found relationship. To be messaged by you feels almost like being messaged by your father, and this anesthetizes the anxiety that constantly pounds my soul. You still have not obtained any sign of life from him? Last night I dreamed that he had been put to death by a stray machete in a Brazilian smack town. I awoke bathing in perspiration and I devoutly hope that the dream was only a dream …

  I present great understanding that you “can’t guarantee anything” and that at the moment you are “sooooo not pumped” (sic!) about thinking about the writing of book number two. That is exactly why it is fortunate that I can assist you. More difficult to understand is your volcanic hate toward your publishing house. Why so angry that Norstedts presented your novel as “the first novel written in authentic Rinkeby Swedish?” Isn’t that probably just their method for increasing interest before reviews? Terminate immediately your naming of them as “Whorestedts.” And no, “bourgeois Swedelow idiots” is not an adequate name, either. Return your youthful rage to the deposit box that we call self-control! Is this the avalanchesque wr
ath that your poor father was subjected to during your adolescence? It cannot have been mild to be your father.

  To read now, eight years later, how you describe him as a “damn unforgiveable betrayer” makes me more than sorrowful. Fathers and sons must share their time, not separate it! I have great understanding for the magnitude of your conflict. But will your relationship never be renovated? Your father is still your father; he may have constructed occasional mistakes in life. But who hasn’t? Unfortunately, I recognize the character of your father’s pride—it makes certain things impossible (and to contact a son with an apology is one of those things).

  You wonder suspiciously what I will get out of helping you (“like what’s in it for you”). Let me respond by describing my usual day: I authorize a small hotel in Tabarka. I am fifty-four years old. I have a saved economy that will securitize my pension. I have no family. I do, on the other hand, have a passport that is not welcomed without a visa in particularly many tempting countries. Thus my workday follows the patterns of tradition: I awake, I place my body at the reception desk, I take keys, I direct some tourists to viewpoints, I point the cleaning lady to newly left rooms. But mostly I sit still and surf the global world net. I download humorous Japanese commercials, read about J-Lo and Paris Hilton in American sensation journals, watch The Worst of Jerry Springer, localize gratuitous facts. (Incidentally, do you know the global record in banana eating? Only twenty-three.) So I have great quantities of superfluous time, which I will gladly sacrify in order to reafflict the sphere of Swedish and correspond you your father’s history. I owe him that. At least.

  Your directive about the book’s need for “a super-obvious dramatic curve” has influenced me in the preparation of the attached document. I propose that the chestnut theme can be the common thread with which the episodes in your father’s life are woven together. I also agree that certain people’s need for anonymity could be damaged if we employ their real names. So let us call the book “fiction” and modify certain names. What shall we name your father? In order to prophesy his future relocation to Sweden, I propose the symbolic name “Abbas.” Then we can write: “Thus my father’s name bore similarity to the Swedish pop group that would heap the dance floors of the seventies with hits like ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘Bang-a-Boomerang.’ Was this a coincidence, or a sign of fate? We’ll tend toward that later …” We could also call him Hammah. Or Bilal. Or maybe Robert, after his idols Robert Frank and Robert Capa?

  Attached you will find the truth about your father. Do not be shocked by the surprise.

  Your stable friend,

  Kadir

  PS: I radiate you positive thoughts and intersect my fingers in anticipation of the coming day of publication. Good luck!

  PS2: I assume that we will continuize our relationship in Swedish? Your naïvely crooked Arabic is probably not serviceable to us in the forming of a book …?

  During the spring of 1965, your father’s nightly wakings continued. The difference was that he could now scream both himself and the rest of us to awakeness. Some nights I spied on his body where it lay wet from perspiration with wide-open eyes. When dawn approached, he located himself by the window and gazed out over the yard. One night I padded my steps toward your father where he sat curled up in the window with his shoulders vibrating up and down. His crying sounds had a low volume and in his hand he cradled his beloved chestnut.

  “How is your health feeling, honestly?” I whispered with a brother’s caring. Abbas quickly dried his tears and tried to return to normalcy.

  “Very well. Thank you for asking.”

  “But then why are you pursued by such repeated nightmares?”

  Your father looked down at his chestnut and said:

  “Can you guard a secret that you may not describe to anyone?”

  “I promise.”

  “On all your existing honor for all time?”

  “I promise.”

  “I have not been entirely honest about my history …”

  “How so?” (And I must admit that here I felt that type of pleasure that can be stirred when suspicions are verified.) “Isn’t it your father in that photograph?”

  “Yes, it’s him. And he is Algerian. But … he doesn’t share his company with Elvis and Paul Newman. Do you know who is sitting beside him?”

  “No.”

  “It is Maurice Challe and Paul Delouvrier.”

  “Wow!”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “Uh … no. Who are they?”

  Your father explained that Challe and Delouvrier were the two French governors who were responsible for the Algerian colony before the liberation.

  “Do you want to know why my father is sitting in their company? Because he was a harki. A béni-oui-oui. A collaborator. Imagine what Cherifa would do if she knew … Or Sofiane …”

  During the following hours, your father whispered his entire true story for my ears. He said that he had been born in an Algerian mountain village near the Tunisian border. His mother’s name (your real grandmother!) bore the name Haifa. She was a powerfully strong woman who grappled with her context like the wrestler and actor Hulk Hogan. Haifa’s ideal was never that of tradition or religion. Haifa had Western habits and spiced her exclamations with French phrases, and this increased the village’s irritation. But Haifa did not let herself be quieted.

  One day she proclaimed proudly for Abbas that the name of the man who had signed her pregnancy was Moussa. They had rencountered by chance when she visitized Alger. Moussa had promised her a mutual future with matrimony and a sumptuous life. After their erotic rendezvous, Haifa returned to her home village with rainbow-colored dreams of the future. Unfortunately, it turned out that Moussa’s words were promises of that special character we call lies. Haifa was isolated by her family, and the only person in the village who did not refuse her company was a young, povertous neighbor farmer by the name of Rachid.

  Simultaneously, Moussa’s exterior began to be recognized as the Algerian who preferred the politics of the Frenchmen. Moussa eagerly defended France’s civilization task and denied its label as a torture-cultivating occupying power. He rented his tongue to the Frenchmen and in this way padded his wallet.

  I interrupted Abbas’s story:

  “Have you ever met your father?”

  “Yes. One time he afflicted our village. But my age was reduced and I do not remember much of that day. I believe we ate at a restaurant. I remember that he had a substantial gray beard on his chest. I remember that two lifeguards escorted his steps. And I remember that he delegated me this chestnut. That’s about it.”

  “Why a chestnut?”

  “Because … no idea. I wish my memory presented a greater clarity.”

  It was mostly your grandmother’s stories about Moussa that influenced your father’s soul. The insight that he had a father with an international reputation lifted him to a rocketesque pride (rather than shame). Your father was heaped with a cosmopolitan euphoria, which maximized his emotion of not being like everyone else. Many in the village skirmished and demonstrated, they formed their tongues into discussions about the horridness of the Frenchmen and voiced demands for freedom from colonialism. But your father visualized everything political as a virus. He promised himself as a child that he would NEVER anoint his wings in the spilled oil of politics. Instead he fantasized dreams of the international world.

  (A whisper from the parentheses: Can you relate to the emotion of never partaking in the generality of your surroundings? In that case, cultivate this emotion in your writing! To form something that is totally separate from your experience is an impracticable task, a little like not laughing when you observe Kramer’s alert hairstyle in Seinfeld.)

  Your father continued his story with the turbulent years that terminated the fifties in Algeria. It was political chaos; demonstrations bled the streets and terror shook people’s daily lives. In your father’s village, people’s irritation was reflected against the Frenchmen unti
l it involved your father and grandmother. But Haifa refused to conform; she continued to salute the Frenchmen, she sprinkled her language with French phrases and proudly auctioned that her genetics were certainly more global than Algerian and more cosmopolitan than Arabic.

  In 1962, when your father’s age was that of a twelve-year-old, the Évian agreements were terminated. The Frenchmen promised to leave power. The liberation was a fact of Algeria. The consequence was a chaos that we can call typically Arabic. The blood of the power struggle. More protests. More terror. Fifteen thousand dead in FLN attacks in the summer of ’62. Up until Ben Bella took power, initiated his one-party state, and unlawfulized all parties except the FLN. (Write me … without becoming unnerved and without retarding us to the disrupting discussions you had with your father: What people is more creaky at democracy than Arabs? That you don’t concur with your father about this is to me a mystery.)

  Many French collaborators, or béni-oui-ouis, were forgiven and forgotten to the success of continued bureaucratic careers. Only a few were painted in the colors of shame by the magazines. One of them was your grandfather Moussa. His body had apparently fled the country and now he was depicted in articles and caricatures as a France-controlled dog. The consequence of this campaign? In typical Arab manner, the people let themselves be led like dumb sheep. They began to protest outside your grandmother’s house. They insulted your grandmother; nightly cries echoed the district’s street. Once, her door was colored with malodorous substances which do not deserve descriptions.