Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  * * *

  —

  In those years, the fear came back at night, but also after naps. I remember I would always wake up late, slightly emptied, with the panic of the traveler who opens his eyes in an unknown place, feels his pockets, tries to find his horse and his own name. I feel my world, I try to overcome the brusque worry provoked by foreignness, very quickly I grant things their names again, like a ritual. I say “curtain,” “window,” “door,” “lemon tree,” my own name (Zabor, not Ishmael), the details of my body, the birthmark on my arm or the name of the headache medication placed next to me. I say Hadjer, Hadjer, Hadjer. The inventory is necessary to imbue order into the chaos of the world. I mumble my verses every time I wake up, I recite my mantras so the objects come back down to earth like sprigs of tea, settle in and resume their fluttering familiarity. The roughness of objects, that whistling of foliage in the courtyard, the footsteps of the invisible, and especially the apprehension provoked by domestic animals with their sly slowness, all that chaos boring into my flesh.

  At that time, during my adolescence, despite my gentle happiness, waking up from a nap was nearly always followed by silent screams or the whimpers of the vanquished. My aunt, who kept her vigorous affection for me, would take me in her arms, invoke the names of saints, and have me sniff incense or pieces of onion. The truth is that I was terrified by the horror of unnamed objects, but I was also using my attacks as vengeance against my father. I knew in some way that it was his fault. (I see him now, as yesterday and for so many years, the dangling arms, a yard from the doorway of our house, incapable of advancing or fleeing. Poor man, who thought he was running faster than time, whom time has caught with the consequence of his own acts and secret fears. “Ishmael’s doing well?” he would yell. No one would answer and then, as always, he would turn back toward the street, look for any witnesses, then lower his head and leave) You need a father to give things names, without one they scatter, surge, and overflow belligerently, suffocate you and make you lose weight and then your sense of direction. I recited verses but they had less and less of an effect on the devil’s face, which stuck its red tongue out at me through its tattoos. The truth is that this second language, the language of the schoolmaster and the verses, after the language of Hadjer and her painful powerlessness, was also exhausted in my mouth. I could have learned more of it, revived it or imbued it with strength, but the motivation was gone: I didn’t desire it anymore. It had the face of the master, the imam, my father’s adult friends, my father when he bowed for the prayer, Friday and its shouted sermons. Studying the Holy Book had allowed me to sense possibilities, but there were no other books to feed my curiosity.

  That’s when the world tried to speak to me in a different way.

  36

  It was the revelation, the click, the whirling angel whose wings created a squall of 250 to 400 pages, the fierce possibility of a solution. It was a banal, accidental discovery, but I think they called out to me, in the secret order of my universe. I was thirteen years old when other writings emerged, foreign, with dog-eared pages, numbered and faded. Novels written in French that I found piled up in the house down below, in a random room off the back courtyard (“When they are not read, books travel slowly, from one house to another, from one basement to another, from one box to another. When they are read, it’s the reader who travels,” says the dog, serious). An accident? A coincidence? I think not. My whole universe was crying out for a new language, an instrument for the essential secret of my people, for me. The devil could be successfully thwarted if I could stand up to him, but I was missing a book, an instrument. On top of my irrepressible fears, there was a vacuum, an emptiness where things, the balancing of the village land, the trees, everything was suspended, at the end of another language, hovering and fragile without the consolidation of ink. I felt my body buzz, it was changing with puberty, and all around me was a new silence sensitive as skin. My entire universe was like a bush electrified by the movement of an animal hidden within it, passing through it, unknown. Nothing precise in the house down below, but a coming melody. An unprecedented bliss promised by the third part of my life: ecstasy.

  It was quite an adventure to learn, alone, surreptitiously, the angel’s third language, the missing piece of the Law of Necessity that would save so many lives, add a thousand and one days to every encounter, in secret, humbly, through the art of writing. No, the books of that language did not come to me by coincidence, they were sent. Perhaps by my dead ancestors without memories, without books or names, who wanted to learn through me, speak and take back their stories which had been interrupted for lack of language and sheets of paper. Every book title I read from that moment on had in fact appeared at exactly the right moment in my life, like a wave of the hand. An immense bookstore was already conversing through me at that time and took me under its protection, as I would have to protect my people years later. (My father is going to die and I am unmoved. As if incapable of feeling any sentiment at all. Pernicious, my vanity has already imagined the condolences of kin and villagers. Because, yes, his death will consecrate me as his son, forevermore! I don’t need an inheritance, I need recognition from everyone, a vengeance that will prove he didn’t win, he didn’t crush me—he is the one who will be crushed by all that earth on his chest. The island will be mine, my language will be proclaimed victorious and richer than the flocks of his land. But it will also provoke vertigo that will twist my heart like a rag. He abandoned me in the desert, slit my throat with his eyes and his long story on the hill of his betrayal, and I’m the one who feels guilty, distraught. Hadjer didn’t run out for no reason. I think she’s gone to watch over him, or to have her say in the inheritance. The house is empty and resists the persistent assaults of the wind, still quiet. The image of a wolf pounding on the door. It bangs with a steel snout. This notebook will serve as proof, the great surah of my life. It’s August, I had forgotten, a month that likes to play with fire.) I will perhaps never be able to recount with precision and talent the curious nature of that time, the meaning of the wait that came to a brusque end with new verbs. The appearance of exactly twelve books, in a language with no guardian, was the critical event of my life. A thousand and one days, each time.

  37

  At that moment, that language, this one, was definitively marked by my body, my penis, the birth of my desire. It bears the trace, the weight, the marks of wakefulness and sleepiness, the shameful fold of the crotch and the erection of the first drop cap. It taught me lucidity, like an exercise in acuity, of trial and error, too. “Squaring off” is the fitting phrase. At thirteen, I left the closed universe of studying the Holy Book and wound up on a vague terrain scattered with new stones. That phase of availability concluded with a major vice that turned me into a chronicler of my people. That’s how I describe that chaotic time, shameful and splendid like the nocturnal embrace of infidelity. I don’t know how it happened but I remember the event itself, the anecdote.

  On a rainy and mild Monday, while Hadjer was still in the bath, I wandered around the empty house, secretly spurred by the need to touch something new, a tactile curiosity that had been obsessing me for days. My voice was broken and so was my entire body. My grandfather was there, sitting with his head between his knees, as though in a personal winter, he wasn’t moving (never has a cadaver been left in the sun for such a long time) and I was tired of speaking about the rain and the harvests, as old people do. I had spoon-fed him his meal, with difficulty, nearly forcing his lips open. He swallowed in the end, but always with his eyes staring at a final word that was perhaps on the tip of his tongue, the black hole of his memory that was turning its back on him. This was my part of the care we provided for our elder. Hadjer handled his hygiene, washed him, lovingly shaved his head, dressed him, and spoke to him about everything under the sun as if he could still answer. I watched over him often, when she wasn’t there, and gave him food and drink (almost always couscous with milk because he refus
ed all other food).

  There were no engine noises in the village and no cries because the children were at school. It was the most beautiful hour of autumn, the oldest book in the world. I was walking around alone, opening cabinet doors, touching objects, and then, suddenly, I remembered the storage room in the back courtyard piled up with old things, the winter bedding, empty crates and provisions. I entered with a feeling that something was waiting for me there (burning bush, white stones, crumbs), and I scoured the darkness of the little room. I saw a stack of yellowed books, dog-eared and tied like criminals with their hands behind their backs. I advanced, curious, I opened the bundle, sitting on the ground, and started to leaf through one of the books, not expecting much, merely curious, as when we glimpse the faces of unknown visitors. An army of characters spilled out, an anthill, organized and strict, tiny feet in procession, indented paragraphs and quotation marks animated by exclamations. A dead butterfly fell out from another book, as well as a small braid of hair that frightened me when I mistook it for a spider. I diligently deciphered just a few words, remembering my persistent schoolchild’s alphabet, and was about to shut the book.

  But, dwelling in my slight disappointment, the images on the covers enticed me like windows. I leaned through them and sank, abandoning myself to the heat provoked in my body by what I’d seen. I suddenly felt a sort of link of cause and effect between my unexpected shiver and the image of the woman with the perky breasts, pointing out from behind a striped T-shirt, smiling with her whole face tilted toward mine, so close, within reach of the old paper’s dry breath, happy because she was staring at me but she was also staring at something beyond me. Someone else that I could be? For once, the prescience of desire had a body to behold, a tangible release, and I seized it ardently, by intuition. Time stopped and the woman wasn’t moving, allowing me to remain near her. She was not reabsorbed into a stream like the images on the television, but persisted, constant, full, complete in her immobile gift, waiting for me to come take her body, to come touch her, now that she’d offered herself. I caressed her skin that was both eternally young and already cracked because of the paper’s age, lips of red ice, slightly open onto a fire, laughing eyes deciding the reality of the person they provoked. Breasts with hard nipples whose shape I couldn’t fully determine, as sensitive as I was to their sadness sharpened in me, to their skilled evasion under the fabric of the striped T-shirt she was wearing behind the paper pane. I understood suddenly, instantly, that the thousands of characters, from the first page, were in a way the sound of her own life, her flesh, the explanation of her smile and the promise of her secret, her revelation, the frightening possibility of her nudity. I made a direct link between the story and the body both exposed and hidden, toying with my desire and my ignorance. The way to wrest the clothes from this woman wasn’t to tear the pages but to read them. That coincided, shamefully, with a heat in my groin, an accelerated pulse, and the desire to touch my uncircumcised penis.

  I knew, secretly, that I was on a life-changing threshold that would establish a new order, a hierarchy in which the bottom of the ladder was the pebble and the top that woman’s lips, the enigma of a bite. Hadjer never spoke about sex and all the films we had seen together on television cut off at the embrace and the kiss. I remember the bodies of two lovers approaching each other, desiring each other, staring at each other, lips extending, then, brusquely, a messy separation, a sort of mechanical rejection that cheated passion. The censored sex was implicit, assumed, left to the imagination, crude in its absence. A rift, a blank that rendered inexplicable the next part of the story, the birth of children and the driving force of so many actions for the heroes and the women. The carnal side of the world was a confused silence and an embarrassment between me and my aunt. But with this book I could dream of the final revelation, indistinct, exalting and reserved for my use in the darkness of the storage room.

  I guessed, I think, from the first glance, the solitude of sex, but it took me years to understand it. The promised desire was from the start clandestine, hidden, even shameful, it was condemned to be a contradiction: a cold body in the throes of an inner fire that never left me. I could only approach with closed eyes, only embrace through the implausible angle of absence. I deciphered the title, laboriously: The Flesh of the Orchid. That was the woman’s name, or the name of a part of her body, or a sweltering heat, a lip, or something murkier. Forever. Both shaft and vulva, thorn and peat. Evasion and expansion. These words didn’t have any immediate meaning in my mind or in my universe but were already shining like stars under my finger. My studies had taught me the essential, the alphabet, the possibility of writing, but also phrases, compositions, songs, poems from the end of the textbook and excerpts from books. But this was the first time I had encountered a liberated, wild text that was not meant to teach a moral or a lesson, but existed as an infraction of order, free and radical. It showed a way, a new path that my people hadn’t seen. My body could have a hidden side, be the site of a doubling that would spare me from being exposed to questions or ridicule. Zabor and Ishmael. They could slit the throat of one but never catch the other because he was invisible, unknown. I had two bodies, as I waited to have dozens and dozens of lives. The Flesh of the Orchid, when I was about thirteen, was an object in itself, a carnal thickness that was half illuminated, a secret, a shadow tattooed on a body. Or the inverse: a body that was slowly emerging through the interlacing of a tattoo, as if it were pushing aside the branches of the first tree. I grazed it, touching the frozen paper, leaning toward the proffered lip, I kissed its dust, I tried to lift the T-shirt to understand why the angle of the nipple threw me into a panic, and with the other hand, I touched myself. Clumsy, violent with my private flesh, I searched pleadingly, rumpling the cover, the word of the title that refused to give me its language when I kissed it, the eyes that lit up with a sort of mockery, then there was the wet fire, an electricity that made me moan, struck by a delicious disarticulation. I felt dirty, ashamed, but I also sensed the beginning of a magnificent vice. I knew that now I could go further if the words yielded or were illuminated, I could enter the hidden realm of sex, that perpetual room of encounter.

  For days I contemplated the photo of the woman, suddenly reassured in the panic of desire by the certainty of deciphering, and already fabricating the ruse that allowed me to conceal this new debauchery from my family (Hadj Brahim and his mocking eyes) by hiding the image on the cover with paper. My aunt walked in on me once when I was holding a book between my hands, the sign of a gift or a vocation or, at worst, the desire to go back to school, which I angrily refuted. I conceived and compelled my disgrace and my liberty starting in that moment. I was obsessed with that woman. The old book was a dress, but devoid of contents because I didn’t know how to read.

  What can I say? I set about reading the book starting that first week. It was difficult, laborious, but motivated by the shameful, sublime desire to discover nudity, skin, the body that the letters written from left to right, tenuous and magnetized by a slope, designated unanimously and rigorously, in the veiled precision of the symbol. Straight lines of ants headed for a delicious spring, a revelation, an undressing. Memories of chaos and rage, because I didn’t often succeed. The words, sometimes half of them, were illuminated within the line, but very quickly fell back into a twisting conjugation I couldn’t fully grasp. Time was my hell in a way, back then, I was sliding without a handrail, without direction, deciphering a permanent present, deformed and impossible because it impeded the unfurling of the story. In the Holy Book, time was an illusion, God spoke in the present even in the future of the Last Judgment or before creation. He was prisoner of his eternity and that extended to his verses. Here, the hero traveled when he spoke. Conjugating tense was my first challenge. Without the right grammar, I was spinning in circles, lost in a gridlock, a simultaneity that made no sense except in the order of religion. Time was not the same in Arabic and in French, it was divided differently according to t
he way the future was understood and the present was possessed.