Zabor, or the Psalms

by Kamel Daoud

  42

  When I was about sixteen years old, two years after my grandfather’s death, when my mastery of the French language was admirable and vigorous, I came upon another book. At least a part of it. It was one of the rare books to clearly describe the Law of Necessity. It was The Thousand and One Nights. I read it patiently (volume one—I didn’t have the others until years later—it had beautiful illustrations but was slow to unfurl, with lengthy preambles, stiff as an Egyptian saga), like a prolegomenon to my gift, an entryway, a possible explanation of secret laws at last. At the time, I had read dozens of novels, books written directly in French or that had come from other worlds, but it was the first time I had read a major work, written by one of my people, translated into the language of my gender. A retired teacher had given me the book, slightly worn but voluminous, promising. The story left me wanting more at the beginning, I was fascinated by its technique but also by its ruse. Already at that age I liked to discover the reasons behind books, their source. The Holy Book hid its own, concealed the evidence through threat or promise, but I knew that it was a cry of solitude, a need. (“God is a treasure who likes to be sought and found,” say the sufis. The mystic quest is a crime novel where the dead person comes back to life at the end, or the murderer is time that will become eternity and the woman is paradise.)

  In The Thousand and One Nights (cut off without the two remaining volumes), the plot was troubling: a woman tells a story, keeping an idiotic and loathsome king like Hadj Brahim in suspense by the power of the tale she invents over time. Perhaps that was the clue. I don’t know how I inferred from this that it was possible to reverse the equation and use it to save the greatest number of people. In the palace, Scheherazade tells stories to save her life. It makes no sense. Or has another, more irreparable meaning: she couldn’t save the other women. I told myself, even happy, married at the end to a monster, she would have to live with the memory of the dead in the walls, the wives murdered before she found her salvation. So, what I imagined as a teenager was a woman who managed to save her own life through her long story, but also revived the decapitated, immortalized her contemporaries and those who had not yet been born. No story as Herculean had ever been written. Especially if we imagined a tale that was even more absolute: a version where the power of the narrative, written or merely recounted, could keep people alive, but also solder the stones of the palace, the surrounding city, the houses cultivated by this reign, the country and its creases. All of it kept intact, during the ascent, by a single hand, one narrator who would save her own skin, bring the dying back to life, and guarantee old age to those who listened. That was impossible, but I liked to imagine that kind of story, a holy book whose visible world was the back cover, the binding. (I know that I’m the storyteller who was able to save the dying, the sick, the expired old men, the storyteller who maintains the equilibrium of the village like a stork with the parapet of my writing, but I also have my limits.) My vocation was inspired by meditating on the act of storytelling, which is to say writing with one’s mouth and not yet by hand. The necessary link between the book and the lives. A few years later, I understood the great wisdom of this book: The Thousand and One Nights weren’t told, but written! It’s writing concealed by oral diversion. In the first detective novel I read, there was this essential phrase: “She walked toward me, naked.” In the second, the woman spoke while stripping her clothes off and stripping the monster to vanquish it.

  I wasn’t only a child of wonderment, I was also a child of fear and worry. My discovery of the French language was a major event because it came with a power over the objects and subjects around me. The possibility of a parapet right at the edge of the cliff. So I started to read furiously, populating the island, bumping up against a rare and unique language that, in my dreams, could be read from left to right, from right to left, and from bottom to top, in every direction, boustrophedon, as they used to say, strong and capable of grasping the essence. Hours walking in the streets, alone and subjected to their stares, silently listing in my head the names of trees, the nuances of stones, the angles and features of faces. Hours of trying new words on Aboukir’s bodies and fauna. To enrich the imperfect conjugations through my voice: describe the future, the past, but also the gradations of the past, more distant, consummate, and closed than the still-ajar past of the perfect tense, and that present tense which was impossible (how can you chew and have the verb chew in your mouth? How can you look and not be blinded by the verb?). It was madness: Hadjer understood what was going on and tried to keep tabs on me, but I was already cheating.

  I think my aunt suspected that I was in love with a girl. But the only available woman in the area would be, years later, a young divorced neighbor whom everyone regarded with suspicion and worry, like fruit fallen from a basket, tempting everyone. (Djemila never looks at the world through her window. A head like Scheherazade’s posed on a sill; we are forbidden from seeing the rest of her body.) So Hadjer searched our surroundings, didn’t find anyone, and concluded that it was a sign of the end of puberty or a consequence of my recovery, already in the past. And yet there I was, absolutely ashamed of my dissidence. Capable of fleeing, like a prisoner who still shares the fate of his fellows but who has already dug his hole in the wall around him. I could circumvent Aboukir inconspicuously. Work through digressions in the story of my people. I could, above all, see the women naked under their clothes, at fifteen years old, the age when my cousins and neighbors were describing women’s genitals as realms of madness and ivy.

  The new language was fighting the unsayable, imposing order but also undressing bodies. My creation was walking toward me, naked. Nudity was both that language and its impossibility. Sex led me to solitude, and so at twenty-eight years old, the child of a rich village butcher, possible inheritor of thousands of sheep, guided by the strength of my gift and by chance, I am neither circumcised nor married. Chaste and sensual at the same time. I searched the old houses in Aboukir for novels, every possible novel. Detective novels were my favorite, I skipped over the corpse, the mystery, the investigator, and the scene of the crime to get to the most important part: the widow with the wet lip, the lover with the warm shoulder under her coat, the temptress on the path to revelation, the lazy and lascivious woman, the hair whose exact weight I felt in my hand, the kiss, above all, described from the inside, from the point of view of the tongue, the sucking sound of saliva in the starry darkness. Imagine that freedom in the heart of a narrow-minded village, with no other revelation beyond a woman’s knee or the story of the wedding night of a newly married imbecile. Imagine the explosion of senses inspired by this secret language, my interrogation of recalcitrant words, the violation of meaning through uncertain definitions. I could write simple, accessible words, scattered on a sheet of paper, and watch them assemble and describe the invisible and the hidden. Seen this way, they meant nothing, or almost nothing, but in my head, through my feverish dictionary, sometimes they turned into scenes of intense orgies, embraces or affairs resulting in orgasms, in new territories or triumphant returns.

  A reader radicalized by potential nakedness, I became a voyeur, because that was the ultimate goal of language and books. I slept, an intruder, with the names of women from practically inconceivable geographies, in bed in situations where I mixed the cloak and dagger as deeply as possible in matters of the flesh, clumsy but posturing, confusing my body with the ink in monstrous, venomous curves. I gained an undetectable maturity even though I was barely an adult.

  But, just after my wet return to the world (pants soiled, hands clammy), I came back to the stories and their ability to lend coherence. I became overwhelmed with a powerful feeling of guilt. I could only absolve myself by seeking a way to reduce the metaphysical misery of my people. Their absolute futility. I read, but already I felt myself hollowing with the need to do more. Solitary sex had to result, sooner or later, in either a book or a deranged paternity. I looked at my cousins, my aunts, and my father as
though through a screen, at once compassionate to the point of tears and indifferent, for they were empty and prisoners of their fate, wandering in a world with no language or way out. I offered my arms and my new language to all my people, outside, in the douar, and one day I even tried, at the door of the butcher’s, to shake my half brother’s hand, who looked at me, suspicious, and then burst out laughing. Compassion had led to sentimentality, and I understood that this wasn’t a real solution. I shouldn’t be dreaming of love, but of secret self-sacrifice.

  43

  Oh, I swear I read everything in the village. Every single word. Every little paragraph. All the new or ripped books I could find: the manuals, the old journals, the notices, other people’s letters, the old posters and signs, the schoolbooks with their magnificent “selected excerpts,” the peanut wrappers or the newspapers that reached the village. Everything that transported this language, and that the language brought me in its proliferation. I even reread the few novels I had until I was dizzy, vaguely gauging their volume, their exhaustion, the dreaded intrusion of the last page. I dreamed of an infinity spent flipping through pages and not praying. Rereading was still enjoyable: stories returned to the stage for my pleasure alone, took on new forms, emphasized a line or a detail that had escaped me the first or third time. The island was never the same under my feet, and Poll the parrot knew that infinity was a way of seeing or reading.

  I read everything, reread everything, reread it all again, and one day I wore myself out, exhausted by redundancy. As if the horrible emptiness, the face of the mute devil, would catch up to me if I didn’t read enough new things, even faster and more broadly. I found myself once again threatened with solitude and reclusion if I couldn’t find anything new. My language had become richer than the books and texts, it was overflowing the walls, my universe, demanding other bodies, a more immediate and more unpredictable incarnation than what I had gleaned from rereading. I paced in circles for days, worrying my aunt, before making up my mind.

  44

  (A sip of cold coffee. Sweetness on my tongue. My right shoulder like stone. My neck like a decapitated man’s. I’m not sleepy or hungry. Like the first day, when I deciphered the first words. I use asterisks by the fistful when a phrase is obscure, I thicken the stroke, the calligraphy. No margin is possible on the blank page, for it would open a crack onto the void, the possibility of an interruption. I would have liked to reread all the words, like a sea, a series of waves harnessed to each other by the water and the swell, but the notebook was unreadable, a murmuring, like the ocean. No, I just have to hold my breath between words, leave no blanks or almost none, bring the stroke to the edge of the page, in every direction, all the cardinal points of my inventory. The writing must be small, dense, tied in knots and strict in its geometry. How can I simultaneously draw, murmur, describe, specify, and traverse the material of skins and objects with a universal writing? The wandering surface of an expanse of water, traversed by a single fish, can exhaust a dictionary on its own. I needed a greater and more powerful writing, a sonorous amalgamation of signs, letters, characters, periods, and indentations. The capital letter had to hoist itself to the height of a tree and the ellipses encapsulated a night horizon when a fire is lit to tell a story. I had hoped the word would be absolute, capable of recounting as well as a face, with a single surface, but that was impossible, distant, it would take me more than one lifetime. So I invented a way of writing and enriching the calligraphy of that language with no master. I compose novelties on the ostracon with an iron stylus. And when there isn’t enough momentum, I add drawings, sketches, figures, or codes so that no detail of the dying person’s life escapes. Everything plays a part in the resurrection, even erasure. The period is a pebble or a star, the grain is the indication of the distance.

  My father will not die and I will prove it to him with twelve notebooks, returning to the house up top, proud, victorious, haloed. To the people in this village who treated me like a madman, with pity or scorn, I will finally reveal my law, the inexplicable miracle that links their survival to my skill. I’ll liberate them and overturn their beliefs. Show them that there’s another “sacred writing,” the possibility of a gigantic final talisman hanging from the hill, around each person’s neck, to protect them, even if they don’t understand it. The Zabor will be folded, covered with a stitched cloth, mixed with the water of Aboukir, offered as a morning drink [facing east, a padlock under the sole of my foot, seven times in a row, with oil, honey, and thyme]. Everything outside must be mixed: livestock, verses, stars, people, half brothers, and facades. The Smaïmes will take lives, I’m sure of it.

  I jump when they knock on the door again, the voices of several people this time. I hear Hamza, his treason. Oh, it’s a clever move by the eraser, the enemy of writing, the adversary of my law, the wind. It uses everything, even the voices of my family, to drive me out of my cave. I know the devil is clever, but sometimes his malice makes me smile. It’s almost predictable. Sand enters through a few cracks, but feebly, mere grains. There’s a total electricity outage this time, and I light candles that make the shadows look immense, the ceiling recedes, suddenly twisted with wicks, the walls retreat or move closer, noiselessly. I am the guardian of the flock, the brother of my brothers. I’ve saved dozens of lives.)

  There was a time when I was walking with something like a smile on my lips to offer my services to the distant neighbors: Would you like me to read a difficult letter for you? To speak to a sick elder? To keep them company? Can I be useful to you? Where is Hadj Mohammed’s bedroom? How is Hadja Ghania? They opened their doors to me because I was the son of Hadj Brahim, they gave me coffee and let me write at the bedside of the sick because they thought I was fulfilling a duty (prescribed by the Prophet) to visit the suffering. This was in the early days, before mistrust devastated my reputation. I had left the Koranic school, but my mastery of French had given me an aura, not as brilliant, but still commanding respect. French was the language of death, for those who remembered the war, but not a dead language. For others, those who watch movies, the families of immigrants, or the ambitious who dreamed of leaving the village or earning money without sweating under the sun, that language represented prestige, it was the proof that they had completed a grand voyage even if they had never left Aboukir.

  I also visited cemeteries, already suspicious of their purpose, sitting near tombs and trying to meditate. It became more and more obvious to me that these places were false paths, a sort of ruse to disorient the crowd and their compassion. But I liked those falsely deserted surroundings, their trees, their roots, their stones, and their fragrant grasses. This was the essential decor of eternity: the cycle, the disrupted mineral, the plowed earth, and the sky, especially, overflowing the hill. Sometimes women came to cry over someone deceased, or men hurried to bury a family member in the scramble. The tombstones interested me almost mathematically: I calculated ages, played with birth and death dates, and was fascinated by the blank space of the hyphen between the two, that ravine of breath, irreducible because it was a life, but absolutely empty, because between birth and death the narrative of a story was missing. I dreamed about the possibility of a stone on which an entire life would be written, every detail, from the grain to the grandiose, the breath and the skin, every encounter and conversation with others or even in one’s own head. But that wasn’t enough. I had to dream of a tombstone that would be annotated in its entirety, surrounded, invaded, crisscrossed with the writing in its dry heart, which would be writing itself, the image composed of a thousand images in cells, hives, even the body. Of all the metaphors of the Holy Book, I most liked those in the surah titles, which gave each chapter the heading of a bestiary or a specific cosmos. The ark in the Book didn’t carry away all the animals, only the bees, the elephant, the spider, the cow, the fig tree, the table, the loot, and the cavern and a few names of prophets. I dreamed for a long time about this table of contents, to be read all at once like a hidden text
chosen by a god who, in his solitude, was especially fond of shepherds and stars.

  I possessed a language that was now rich, nimble, almost obedient, slightly savage in the confines of the island, exciting in its blur of bodies and distances, usable. I had learned this language alone, granting it liberties that would have been denied by schools and teachers, and here it was, waning for lack of recurrence in the texts I knew by heart. The tombstone was my Rosetta Stone to imagine what revelation would come next.

  When I was about eighteen years old, I knew the world was a book, that language was consumed in a kind of fire, that I could define every possible word, that writing traversed the body and objects, that time was a conjugation, that Hadjer was right in her dreams about me (a man carried on a sea of shoulders), that I could break my father’s rules and extend my reign beyond his fortune, and that there was a link between the narration, the wind, and sovereignty in the village. I knew I was predestined to save lives because I had a language that knew how to reconcile precision, secret desire, and purity. It could bring about resurrection, because it was already a reconstitution. I just had to be clear and precise. Daring.