Montecore

by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

  Only periodically was your father’s mood clouded with that sort of cyclical darkness that would disturb his later life. I noted how his eyes began to look inward instead of outward. He rediscovered the silence of his childhood and shared the company of hours with Halsman’s photographs. He studied them with centimetric distance, browsed the pages discreetly, and refused to respond me or share his thoughts. These periods usually continued for several days.

  Then your father’s presence returned; he woke from his thoughts and saluted Halsman’s photographic talent. One day he auctioned:

  “I have discovered my life’s mission, Kadir: To hell with law! I am going to become Tunisia’s first world-celebrated photographer. With the camera I will modify the future of photography. From now on all of my life shall be sacrified this ambition. We must leave this rat hole of a city as soon as possible! Do you want to follow in my footsteps?”

  I bobbed my head and served him a classic thumbs-up. With Halsman’s photos and modern soul music we projected future plans of how we would soon meet the tourist town Tabarka on the Mediterranean coast.

  Write:

  “In the soft fog of intoxication, the friends visualized their futures. My father’s ambition was to become an international photographer. Kadir’s ambition was to become a tourist guide or a professor of samba dancing or a billiard instructor or why not a future master of hotels. My father’s way was Art’s; Kadir’s way was Economy’s. The duo’s goals had been pronounced and the starting shot had …”

  (How does one write correctly here? Been discharged? Banged? Shod? Inject correctly, please!)

  What do you say about the drama in this section? Not so limited, certainly? Have some of these anecdotes been depicted by your father? Do you know why not? Me neither. I wish I knew …

  Dearest greetings!

  Thank your extensive message! Delightedly I read about your newfound daily life as an author.

  What an atmospheric honor it must be to pass time at book fairs in Gothenburg and be invited to literary festivals for rendezvouses with intellectual giants like Unni Drougge, Katarina Mazetti, and Björn Ranelid! Because you’re being ironic when you describe yourself as a “mass-media whore,” right?

  No excuses are vital to you for your served silence. I bear great understanding for the ticking unease that one can experience in the rendezvous with one’s memories. The same emotion can sometimes infect me. But we must not let the fear of memory handicap our book! Let us instead seek the response to the mysterious riddle that you identify as “like, the book’s theme.” I, too, have long heaped my soul with the question of how a father can leave his children.

  My fictive hat is put off to bend and bow for your flattering words about my data. My cheeks are pleased to redness when you hail my texts as “vivid,” “fanciful,” and “extremely over-romantic.”

  Here follow my responses to your questions:

  1. Yes.

  2. This is no surprise. Your father has undergone frequent reformations on the way to his late career’s success. He has wandered from a mute boy to a jeans-draped smile-dimpler to an amorous metro driver to a stressed studio owner to a world-celebrated photographer heroically fighting for the weak. That you do not continually recognize your father in my text is therefore to be expected. That you did not even recognize the background of his photographic interest is to me a tragic surprise.

  3. No, definitely not!

  4. Certainly you are correct that your father was also nicknamed by some in Jendouba as “the one with the elephant ears” and “the cookie lover.” I forgot to inform this. Has he said this himself, or was it one of his gabbing friends during your vacations in Tunisia? Was it Amine? If I had not been bound to serious work I could have been present with your family and nuanced their flapping tongues. And you—let us not exaggerate your father’s ear size or excess weight in the book. Soon the hairdresser hid his ears and the fatness was transformed with the years into supple biceps and a squared washboard.

  5. Yes, certain things perhaps indicated the wordy interest that your father would inherit you. He had, for example, already when young, a tendency to inventory his own names for things. To his gray T-shirt he gave the name “the Silver Arrow.” His student room became “the Burrow.” His future touristic mademoiselles he called “Vanilla” (if they bore whiteness of skin) or “Chocochoc” (if they bore brownness of skin). The wit of words has, as you know, always attracted his boisterous humor. Presumably it is this specialty that has infected you with the ambition of an author.

  6. No, neither “social services” nor “student aid” existed to support your father’s legal studies. But you are a very funny Swede who asks. However, we had much assistance from our friends from the orphanage. Not financial help but muscley. With their soon-scarred faces and broad muscles, Sofiane and Dhib protected us to safety—even if your father happened to swipe some dates or I happened to be accused of cheaterly card games.

  7. He had many favorites; here are some examples:

  The Fafafafafa song by Otis Redding

  “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding

  “Super Bad” by James Brown

  “Love Man” by Otis Redding

  8. Yes, your father has always had an expanded difficulty with people’s whispering tongues. The rumors of his love affair with Emir’s daughter gave broad frustration. “People’s curiosity is entirely too expanded” was a citation that he often pronounced. A recipe certain to cloud his mood was to say something of the character “My ear perceived that you were at the souk on Wednesday and invested this and this from him and him …” Then your father always denied and said, “Who has related this?” The emotion of being observed has always borne a great complication for your father. (According to your father this seems to have infected you too? Or what do you respond yourself, Monsieur Paranoid with Permanent Blinds? Señor Brown Velvet Curtain in the Room in Stockholm? [These words bear the tone of the humorist; do not let yourself be unnerved!])

  9. Audrey Hepburn in front of the birdhouse. Or perhaps the photo of Ingrid Bergman. I’m not entirely sure.

  10. “Smick” is of course the word that denotes our Tunisian minimum wage, didn’t you know that? And do you really not know the word “favorises”? In English it is given the name “sideburners.” It consists of the protruding beard that is localized in front of the ear, below the hair, extra common in disco dancers, motorcycle chauffeurs, and wolves. Do I have your understanding? An enlarged vocabulary is vital for your future career as an author.

  11. Yes, your father’s pride has ALWAYS borne a prestige that we can hardly name adequately. One disappointment against your father, and its forgiveness is far away for years to come. This is your father’s character and he would gladly modify himself. But how difficult is it not to teach an antique dog new techniques?

  Affixed you will find the describing of our rendezvous with Tabarka (and your father’s rendezvous with his first working camera).

  Your refound friend,

  Kadir

  PS: Your suggestion to start our book in Sweden is interesting. But not correct. Recall your father citing the Baudelaire photographer Félix Nadar: “The best portrait is made by the person one knows best.” This rule also applies to authors. How can you (and the reader) know your father’s contours and understand his later actions without the forming of his historical history? Hopefully you recognize certain patterns in your father’s life as reflections of your own. Furthermore: To form what you call “prehistory” in Proustish flashbacks requires an author of monstrous talent. Do you really bear this? You who barely manage to formulate a single e-mail free from English words or spelling errors? No, to guard chronology is my directive.

  The year was 1972 when your father and I dismissed our bodies from Jendouba’s cookie factory, packed our cardboard-like suitcases, and entered a collective louage with Tabarka as its destination. Our collection of finances had borne that particular industriousness that refers to
the Japanese. With the economy’s status secured for a few weeks, we were on our way toward our new lives!!!

  In the next scene we have stabilized our mutual lodging in a white paillote, a minimal one-room house with a straw roof, which at that time was localized on the beaches of Tabarka and hired out for scanty economy. At nighttime, small lizards zoomed over the interior of the roof without ever falling down. Perhaps you can consult these lizards as symbols for our existence? (“Like lizards our duo zoomed through life under the roof without ever felling their backs against that ruin which we call the floor.”)

  Your father sought a position at Tabarka’s photographic laboratory while I obtained work as a dishwasher in the kitchen at Hôtel Majestique. While I rinsed silverware and glistened glasses, your father learned the foundations of film development. The friendly (but extremely cross-eyed) master, Achraf, received Abbas as an assistant and taught him how one temperature-verifies and agitates, stops and fixes, rinses and dries. How the development is followed by the printing, the stop bath by the fix bath, and how vital it is to carefully rinse away the fixer remains so that the photos will not yellow prematurely. The utensils that were found in Achraf’s laboratory were very simple: Achraf had painted the backdrops himself and named them titles like “Modern Love,” “Classic Love,” “Love in Venice,” as well as the comic “Asterix and Obelix.” The fix bath, which professional photographers usually only employ one time, was used by Achraf until the liquid was transformed into thick porridge. Instead of light meters, Achraf relied on his ticking intuition, and instead of gloves there were hands to dip the negatives in the developing bath.

  The true creation in the process was initiated when Abbas had produced the negative and Achraf presented his paint box. Here was a pointed pencil with which he darkened the negative until the portrait’s face colors became exactly light enough that the customers looked like their ideals. Here were the Japanese paper colors that Achraf cultivated in order to carefully colorize the customers’ clothes to a perfect shade. Your father drank in all this knowledge with the thirst of a dry sponge.

  Your father’s time was mostly occupied by passport portraits, but sometimes touristic customers, whose negatives always mirrored one another, arrived too. The same red-scorched, smiling tourist bodies in airy linens in front of the artist district of Sidi Bou Saïd, in the souk in Tunis, outside of the ruins of Carthage. In this historical time, tourism in Tabarka was growing weakly. Only two big hotels had opened their doors and the amount of European tourists was still limited. All of today’s deluxe options like parasailing, riding banana boats, or European daily journals lay far forward in time. No boutiques yet sold stuffed camels or humoristic T-shirts with texts like “I Love Tunisia” or “My Parents Went to Tunisia and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.”

  Still, Tabarka’s daily life was night and day in Jendouba’s comparison. Instead of cookie packeting, our first summer in youthful freedom was a rosy time of beach parties, hashish, disco dancing, and repeated nightly visits in unfamiliar hotel rooms. Mark my words—the touristettes hung about like grape bunches with longing for our one-eyes.

  Here you can inject an erotic scene where your father and I limbo oiled Belgian girls, disco-dance horny Brits, afflict French girls’ backsides, and encounter German twins in hot tubs. You can expose well-filled Portuguese girls on their knees on hotelesque balconies, perfumy mouths wide open, sucking the friends’ ecstasy while the duo toasts coconut drinks.

  Does this erotic diversity sound bizarre? Perhaps you interpellate how we could attract the touristettes’ interest? Let me explain—this epoch was widely differentiated from now. At this time “Arab” was not a denotation that was used as provocation or virus. Rather the opposite. At this time, Arabicness attracted sexual frequency! The nationality of Arab was at least as positive as … a crank organ. (Do you understand the metaphor?) Frequent were the touristettes who invited me to their nightly hotel rooms after I had praised their golden skins. Numberous were the touristettes who sighed erotic moans when your father wrote their first names with Arabic letters in the beach sand or hailed them with made-up Arabic poetry translated into French. (He usually employed Arabic nonsense phrases like “gravel is good” or “take your towel” or “your nose is very ugly” and then with a serious mouth transformed the words to amorous French translations.)

  Still, our courting routines were rather separated. Where your father did his “quiet wounded striving poet who glances his sad eyes to the starry sky” with habit, I did my “enthusiastic compliment-sharing dishwasher with a great interest in poker and a wide portion of humor.”

  The youthful intoxication of luxury lent its character to this fantastic time. When I remember all the erotic nights now, all the shadows of limbs, all the melting moans, and all the head-banging remorse-awakings in strange hotel rooms, I am filled with that particular joy that we can call nostalgia (or sorrow).

  In the fall came the day when your father’s collected economy bought its first functioning camera: a shining black Kodak Instamatic with the form compact, the material metal, and the loading system extra-modern. How much technical information does our book require? Do you think the reader is interested in photographic data like shutter speed and aperture and genre of lens? Perhaps we should just write:

  “My father invested a camera and initiated documentation of the Tabarka of the past. The picture rather than the technique was his focus. He was in the habit of formulating himself poetically like this: What is the picture other than the bath plug of truth in the sandy sieving that we call the hourglass of life?”

  Or we can write:

  “My father’s camera bore, of course, the deluxe brand that still today is associated with the grandiosest quality: [X].”

  (Here you can inject the name of the camera producter who will furnish you the biggest economic advancement.)

  Suddenly your father bore the camera in his constant nearness. He began to form his fingers to the negative of fantasy, made thumbs and index fingers into a box, pretend-flashed scenes, and mumbled, “Parfait, parfait,” to himself. He began to present himself as “photographe artistique” and invested a beret in French black style. In the small hours of intoxication he testified with a front of suffering about how the craft of photography had modified his soul:

  “I mean … the reality of life is, like, too … I mean since I discovered photography much more has … how should I put it … life has, like, a new shine … I mean … (hic) every sight gets like a

  a

  a

  (hic)

  sort of dimension of eternity … you know, Kadir? Hey … are you listening, or are you letting yourself be hypnotized by that Dutch cow’s breasts?” (I must confess—the breasts had me hypnotized.)

  I remember that your father returned to this subject in 2001 in an e-mail he wrote me from a Palestinian family in the Ramallah of occupation. He wrote: “Oh, Kadir. What modifies life more than the magical insight about the potential freezing of everything?” This is a very beautiful phrase, which should be injected later in the book. (But exclude your father’s continuation: “Wait, there is one thing … fifty-three years of permanent oppression by a bloodthirsty occupying power! Fuck the potential freezing of everything!”) Do you understand your father’s words, or are they on the side of fuzziness? Perhaps this emotion refers to your discovery of writing? If so, inject a section where you write, “As usual, the genial Kadir is entirely correct …”

  And Kadir actually has a point, and when you read his letters you remember that day when you had just learned to read, and it has to be the year before Kadir comes to visit. You take the commuter train south with Dads to help with cleaning the stockroom in Grandpa’s sign store. The stairs up from the platform, pass the place where the shopping center is being built, cross the ghostlike empty square, and open the door to the sign store, where Grandpa is sitting hidden behind the gigantic huge cash register with stand-up buttons and listening to P1. You greet Grandpa and G
randpa clears his throat back and scratches his stump arm and you go right into the stockroom, where you pick up rags and start to polish the old metal signs with a special liquid that stings your nose. You wander around in Grandpa’s crammed stockroom, where one corner is taken up by old yellowed refrigerators with round corners and bags filled with bottle caps from the time of Gustav Vasa. You finger a few signs and pretend to polish but you’re really mostly just imitating Dads’s motions. And then suddenly your eyes land on a sign and you finally understand that Grandpa’s collection isn’t just a weird old man hobby but an ultimate time-travel portal for messages from the past. Because not just one but every single one of the old signs are full of letters that look just like the ones you practiced before school started. Slowly you start to spell your way forward. Th-th-thaa- maaa- … weeen … k-ke-ee-pth your body lean! Thun-light Thoap, Thtomatol, Philipth wadio, known fow ith good thound. At first you do it mostly to show off, to show Dads that you’re really quite a pro at reading. But Dads don’t seem to care, no matter how loudly you read. Dwink Champith. Fithkeby papew thold hew. Mathetti’th Ögon Cacao, deliciouth, thtwong, healthy. The only thing that’s hard is the s and r sounds. But you continue because the signs are chock-full of secret messages, codes that only you understand about mysterious historical things like Okthan Wood or natuwally alkaline Wamlötha minewal watew. And your strongest memory is the sign with the pipe-smoking man who’s standing in a brown floppy hat in front of a watery horizon, and you have always thought of him a little like an old ancestor because his skin is brown like yours and his crossed hands are almost hairier than Dads’. But now, on this day, you realize that he is actually an ad man for something called Tiedemann’th Tobacco and you’re just about to brag to Dads about your unparalleled reading abilities when Grandpa’s voice roars from the register: Tiedemann’s, for God’s sake. “S!” Not Tiedemann’th! When are you going to learn to talk properly? And Dads asks: What did he say? And you say: That I have a great talent for reading. And Grandpa yells: What did he say? And you say: That your sign collection is very impressive.